“How do you stand it?” asks Sarah. “I can’t see what there is to do all day.”
“Don’t know nothing different,” says Pookie.
Pookie won’t say in front of the White people in town that she’s going to Hollywood, because she thinks it’d be disrespecting their own small lives. So to cover for what looks like lack of ambition, I tell Sarah, “We got to finish high school.”
“After that, you ought to come to Cincinnati. That’s where I’m from—Daddy and me are just down here staying with Mamaw while she gets her gallbladder took out—but if I was home, why, on a nice cool day like today I’d be down to the river with my boyfriend. Watching the boats load up over on the Kentucky side while we eat us a hamburger. We got museums and things in Cincinnati. Fairs, come summer, right when it gets so steamy and disagreeable you’d want to die otherwise. And boys—lots of right-nice-looking boys. Nice-looking Nigra boys, even. You like to never get sad or bored up in Cincinnati.”
She twists around to the box to lift another sandwich, and her waist is so tiny that I don’t believe she’s ever eaten a hamburger in her life. I want to tell her Pookie’s thinking way bigger than Cincinnati or wharves or boys.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Eighteen. Ain’t finished high school, though. Quit almost soon as I got there. Drawing isophocles triangles and memorizing caveman books. Boring.”
Pookie’s on her last table, plunging her dishrag into the white soap bucket, and I’m thinking it’s already damn dark outside—probably colder even than it was when the sun was still out—when the first player arrives for bingo. It’s Elizabeth Worden, a mess of red blouse unbuttoned in the middle exactly where it shouldn’t be, necklace full of fake rubies turned off center, so the biggest jewel sits on the side of her neck like a wound. She lives with her grown son in a decrepit brick house on Harrison, and this is the first I’ve seen her off her front porch. Generally, she sits there, rocking in her chair with a shotgun in her lap, waiting for the skunks to come out from under the porch. Generally they don’t, and curious as skunks are, I wonder if the threat of Mrs. Worden’s shotgun has stunted their intellectual growth. One day, I think, they’ll figure it all out, or maybe Mrs. Worden will.
“Well, how do, Elizabeth,” Miss Wofford says as she bustles out of the kitchen. “Almost finished?” she asks Sarah, and before Sarah can even answer, she’s on Pookie. “Looks like you’re finished,” she says. “Which would be mighty fine, but your friend over there ain’t done one drop of work. And I can’t give you a dollar for nothing.”
Pookie bats her eyelashes, but she knows she’d better not upset some White lady. Instead, she puts her hands in her dress pockets, smiles beatifically at her own great-aunt, and says, “So just give me the fifty cents.”
“Girl, you ain’t even cleaned the dishes. Just dropped ’em all in the sink.”
“I can warsh ’em right quick—”
“You could, and to do right by me you probably should, but you still ain’t getting that fifty cents. Deal was, a dollar for both you gals if you both helped clean, and I ain’t giving you the dollar to share if you ain’t shared the work. Your people got to learn to keep each other in check. As the Good Book saith, ‘Wherefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another.’ So next time you got a Nigra friend thinks she’s too good to warsh some table, you best leave her behind.”
“But Miss Wofford. I worked two hours!”
“Are we done talking?” Miss Wofford asks. “I’m of the mind that we’re done talking.”
Pookie shoots her dishrag across the room, but it misses the pail and lands on the table with an angry thop. Soapy drops splatter everywhere.
“Have this,” Miss Wofford says, and though Pookie’s crossed over to me by then and I’m linking her arm, edifying her just like Miss Wofford said, Pookie breaks free of me when she sees Miss Wofford reach into her pocket. She pulls out a broken chain of necklace, dull silver, not real anything. “This was my Aunt Letitia’s,” she says, as Pookie takes the chain from her and holds it up to the light, inspecting it as though it might have some value that’s invisible to the rest of us.
“Thank you,” Pookie says.
She crosses back to me, but when she gives me her arm back, I snatch the chain from her and throw it underhand, so it skitters across the floor and wraps itself around a table leg. “She ain’t a dog and don’t need your collar,” I say. Elizabeth Worden clucks her tongue. Sarah giggles, though as we go up the back steps and out the door her giggle goes silent, as though she’s plugged it again with a cigarette.
After the church hall’s stale breath, the cold air should feel like a gift, but its sharpness turns me nauseous. Pookie and I walk back up High Street behind a hatless man whose face we cannot see. He lists slightly into his shorter left leg, and one thick lush curl has blown, impossibly, over his bald spot. As we pass the bakery, I notice for the first time a tricycle someone’s tired of and left. My eyes feel frozen, as marbles might, and I blink warmth back into my tears. It is damn dark, though the moon rises fertile over the horizon. It’s the biggest moon I’ve seen in all my life, a moon glowing with lambent encouragement, a moon bigger than the earth itself. It’s so large and so bright you can actually see the eyes and the nose and all the craters around them—it’s a moon you could hunt anything under. Deer, or your own destiny. It’s pregnant with triplet moons, or stuffed with icing, or perhaps dead and bloated with tiny feeding moon flies.
“C’mon,” I tell Pookie, and we turn right at Rickles Pharmacy and head down the narrow alley between it and the hardware store, beating back the dead vines with our legs. On the back face of the pharmacy, iron stairs climb a fire escape, and Pookie and I run up the steps, our feet clanging thurk thurk thurk against the hollow metal until we’re on the roof, out of breath, rapping our knuckles against the tin heating cone. Out in the county, a trash fire has caught its energy, and a dark plume of smoke pushes into the moon’s outer edges before dispersing. Pookie walks to the edge of the roof and looks down to the street, and the danger of it makes the soles of my feet tingle, but I go over and sit next to her anyway. Our legs dangle clear over the edge of the roof, but no one will ever look up and see us; it’s not in most people’s natures to look beyond what they think they should see.
“Who told you you could talk to some White lady like that?” Pookie asks.
“Who told you you couldn’t?”
She laughs. But I mean it. If she’s ever going to get to Hollywood, she’s going to have to stop believing what’s real and start believing what isn’t. There are people on far-off continents who must be told the earth isn’t flat, and prisoners of war who don’t trust that they are free, even when soldiers come to open the gates. They go right back to work, those captives, back to their miserable lives forever. I need Pookie to know: if no one told her, when she was born, that she was going to die, then maybe she wouldn’t.
SAINT MONKEY
Finally, come April, the wind blows down from the mountain and starts to wear warm again on people’s bare arms, and Grandpap and I sit out on the porch in the punched iron chairs and play checkers. Grandpap is a master—a wizard, who can beat anyone in the county—and when I come near winning, he upsets the checkerboard. Afterwards, he doesn’t apologize or even speak: he steps off the porch, bends over the grass, and picks up three black pieces that have landed there, a constellation spelling his anger. He scrapes the remaining twenty-one off the porch and into his carpeted box while I wiggle myself into my swing and finger a bit of rust already growing on the chain. “Right nice breeze a sailing,” is all he says when he comes up and sits next to me. He pushes us back and forth with his feet while we watch the sun sink like a tangerine behind the trees. The forest around Mt. Sterling is thick in late summer—a forest for trolls, for knights. “Two kinds of people, and some die on their feet,” Grandpap says. He says it all the time since my daddy died, and I haven’t asked him what it means. I’d rather it stayed a riddle
.
Across the street, in 211, two little girls are sitting quietly inside staring at one another: Pookie biting her cuticles, Imagene bringing her wrist to her nose to smell some leftover fragrance; and both of them wondering at, without remarking on, the scratchiness of their father’s couch. There they’ve been sitting while we’ve skipped past their front window, or not so accidentally hit a baseball onto their front porch. There they will continue to sit, for the unclockable days until Miss Myrtle decides otherwise, because Sonnyboy has killed Mauris and now the girls are expected to stay in the house and calmly mourn their mother. To kill his wife, Sonnyboy chose the most beautiful day we’ve had yet: April Fool’s. The heat had at last tinged the sky the haze yellow of spring, and the day so swelled with the promise of the summer to come that it was heartbreaking for the people of Queen Street, who knew better. He killed her that first honest day of spring but no one heard him do it, and Mauris was such a quiet woman that at first, only the neighborhood men noticed her absence. Treasurer of the Second Baptist Ladies’ Missionary, who hid aching shyness under the guise of Christian modesty, Mauris had never greeted the men as she walked home from work. But the men missed, those first couple of days, the tap tap of her high heels on the packed dirt of the street, the tight fabric of her skirt giving with her behind, the slight switch in her walk that brought clandestine grins and nods of approval from neighboring porches.
The girls’ first motherless weekend, before any of us knew she was dead, Sylvia French and I wandered over to 211 to listen to Honest Harold. Miss Myrtle had come to make her annual inspection of the girls’ Easter dresses, because Mauris had never been as good a seamstress as her mother, and her work tended to hang off small shoulders or clench too tightly around waists still domed with baby fat. Mauris had always been happy for the help: she knew her limits. So, in her daughter’s house on Good Friday, while Honest Harold wrecked Mrs. O’Day’s Warbleware dinner party and all we girls on the sofa laughed, Miss Myrtle bent over her youngest grandbaby and narrowed her eyes at Sonnyboy.
“Where’s Mauris gone off to? Ought to be home now, shain’t she?”
Miss Myrtle had straight pins in her mouth, so what she said came out muffled. But I know now that Sonnyboy had probably spent so many hours waiting for the question that he knew instantly what had been asked.
“Been going off like that right often,” he said, looking out the parlor’s large window. He rubbed the top of his head, stroked the tight place above his belt. “Matter fact, she ain’t been home in two days.”
Miss Myrtle held her head over and let the pins fall from her mouth down the unhemmed edge of Imagene’s dress. “You ain’t told me that, Sonnyboy. Why ain’t you tell me?”
Sonnyboy shrugged his shoulders. “She just been doing like that come lately,” he said, leaving Miss Myrtle running her tongue over her front teeth, wondering at how poorly she knew her only child.
Pookie’s cheeks burned red beneath her freckles and she folded her fingers over their opposing knuckles and I knew she didn’t want me there. “Excuse me,” I told them all, rising from the couch, “but Grandpap’s probably wondering where I’m at. I bet your mama is too,” I told Sylvia French, and off we ran, out the door and into the spring sun, still so shockingly bright that late in the day.
Sonnyboy held on to his lie for some weeks, until every Negro in Bath and Montgomery counties was certain that he’d been winked at behind his back, that silent, blank-faced Mauris, a child of rape who’d been shielded from men all her life, had run off with some bent rake or another. “Probably in Lexington,” people said. “You know how still cricks run deep.”
It didn’t help that Mauris’s one and only friend, Hattie Lee Grainger, had in fact left her husband to go off with a curly-headed insurance salesman from Lexington. Sonnyboy and Mauris had been the first people to know, that opening day of spring, the same April morning the birds set up again in their eaves. Bit by bit the guilt in Sonnyboy kicked its way out, and as he talked, in the by and by, I heard the old people retelling it like a generation of bards, saying Sonnyboy’d gotten an air of something that morning after the girls left for school, a peaty smell of sweat and blood, and he supposed he was going to have to get after Mauris to talk to Pookie about womanly hygiene. But the backroom at Taylor’s Department Store was thick with fine holiday clothes in need of alteration, and Mauris was leaving early, so Sonnyboy had to run to the porch if he wanted to catch a word with her. They say he found her bent over the railing, talking in low tones to Hattie Lee, who was so excited she was digging divots out of Sonnyboy’s grass with the heel of her shoe.
“Don’t tell a soul,” Hattie Lee was saying, her bony finger pressed against the big, pouty lips Sonnyboy had been dreaming of since puberty. “Lyman’ll be here any minute to get me.” At her feet was a lime green American Tourister.
“Clyde been running around?” Mauris asked. “He done laid hands on you?”
“Nothing like that, child. I just heard him put that housekey down on the new sideboy again this morning, and you know I have asked him a hundred times.” She patted her curly wig, put a hand on her hip. “I just said to myself, ‘Hattie Lee, that’s it. You ain’t never got to hear that housekey again.’ ”
It came out that during the conversation, little Evelyn Ferguson—one of those gorgeous, obsidian-eyed Fergusons at No. 213—was standing in the artery between Sonnyboy’s house and her own. At ten, Evelyn had already bloomed too beautiful for our memories to hold on to what she looked like if we weren’t looking right at her. She was standing there, trying not to pry, trying to sneak a cigarette outside her mama’s seeing. Little Evelyn it was who saw, from where she was standing, just behind the porches of both houses, Hattie Lee. She said Hattie Lee patted her wig once more, as though the wig itself could be trusted to hold her secret. She said Sonnyboy leaned back in his doorway, seeming to enjoy the rear view of a wife dressed in polka dot pink and shaped finely as a fiddle. She said he was smiling to himself, rubbing his paunch, probably thinking how fickle Hattie Lee was to leave someone over housekeys scratched against good furniture, probably thinking what a good woman he himself had found, when Mauris giggled.
Just one hushed giggle, according to little Evelyn, who repeated it again and again when her mama cuffed her on her perfect little ear and made her say what Sonnyboy either wouldn’t tell or didn’t quite remember. A giggle hushed yet throaty enough to make Sonnyboy know that Mauris was laughing not just at Clyde but at the clumsiness of all men. The giggle slipped out of her and stepped on all the ideas he had about women, and according to what he told Reverend Graves through the bars of his jail cell, that giggle kept him from speaking to Mauris about their girls. Instead, he moved quietly off the porch and back into his home that had been his parents’ home before his, he retreated to the bathroom, he later confessed, and stood in front of the mirror that had watched him since he was ten. He cut himself four times while shaving and had to press his toes hard against the tile to keep back tears. When he thought back on his life, he remembered not wild craps games behind the Tin Cup or entire Sundays spent swinging on river vines, but a first date in Mauris’s parlor within range of Miss Myrtle’s keen ears. He remembered Mauris’s delicate bare feet drumming the pier while he fished with her at Hikes’ Point, and Reverend Owington’s proud wedding day smile upon the both of them. Diapers pinned and little girls nursed and bounced on knees. All that he held dear in his life, erased by one giggle. He was in the kitchen slicing ham for his breakfast when Mauris came back in to tell him she was leaving for work.
“Let me kiss you goodbye, baby,” he said, with a catch in his voice that said lost, because according to what he told Reverend Graves, he’d always been his mama’s son first and foremost and now, somehow, that was gone too. Mauris opened a smile and went to him, her lips immaculately rouged, her dress’s pink polka dots split in half by the fold of her collar. She stretched her arms up around his neck, and he stuck the knife right through skin and mea
t, into the place just under her breastbone. Her biscuit-colored skin wasn’t as soft as it had looked in the pink cotton, or maybe, he thought, it was the tough, sweet flesh beneath, but he said he’d had to twist the knife a little, and he’d expected screams but was relieved to find that Mauris died as silently as she had lived. Griffin, the black cat under the table, arched his back, yawned, and moved through the doorway into the living room. The grandfather clock rang out eight times. Sonnyboy said Mauris widened her eyes as though he were telling her about the milk bill, as though she weren’t surprised but merely prepared.
He told it all to Reverend Graves, how he rocked her a little before he let her to the floor. He scratched a worrisome patch of skin on his chest and took himself back to the living room, where he crushed his boot into the sleeping cat’s tail and felt relief to hear the animal screech. The cat escaped, a flash of black fur darting under the French Provincial sofa, and Sonnyboy went to the front porch and called out to Hiram Loving, who was hitching up his bicycle. “Hey, boss!” Sonnyboy said.
It was only Roger Carr who heard him holler the first time, because Hiram’s baby girl’s nighttime crying was still ringing in his ears. But when Sonnyboy called out louder—“Boss!”—Hiram kicked his leg over his bicycle seat and looked up. “Ride by the ice plant on your way,” Sonnyboy yelled, “and tell ’em I’m sick.” Hiram nodded across the street and pedaled off into the risen sun.
Nine days passed, and Sonnyboy’s children had their beauty shop appointments, their Palm Sunday church play, their night-before-Easter oranges. Come Easter morning, Pookie, after the last joke ever told about her flat chest, punched Melton Boyd square in his moth-shaped mouth. “Damn midget,” she said, and he fell to the ground crying, searching on his hands and knees for his front tooth. Grandpap and I were on the porch playing Three Men’s Morris, and we saw him get to his feet with his new white suit stained green on the knees and elbows. One side of his bow tie bulged out larger than the other, a sloppy, two-humped camel. Griffin tipped to the edge of Sonnyboy’s porch and meowed.
Saint Monkey Page 2