Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  “That girl is a monkey,” Grandpap said, skipping one of my red pieces.

  “She’s not a monkey,” I told him. “She’s a saint.”

  Melton hiccupped on home without his emancipated tooth, and Pookie went into the house and came back with an early piece of pie for the cat. Miss Myrtle’s key lime would go to the dinner table as a fraction, but no matter—Griffin was her mother’s baby, more beloved than any girl in the house. The cat’s aura was such that he garnered no resentments even: everyone in the family simply loved Griffin most of all, and when Mauris got down on the hardwood floor and put his cloth mouse in her own mouth to play with him the way she never played with her own children, the girls didn’t so much as blink. That Miss Myrtle had admitted an animal of any kind into her own home on occasion was testament to the cat’s charm.

  “I told you, Grandpap. That girl is a saint, no less than Patrick.”

  “Saint Monkey,” Grandpap sniffed. He’d already gotten two of his pieces lined up, and we were both just going through the motions until he won.

  Easter left us, church thinned out again, and folks began to notice that Sonnyboy didn’t seem mad at his cheating wife or even worried about her disappearance. People talked. His closest friends were chatted up. But what happened first was that the house at No. 211 started to stink. Imagene commented on it first. “I think a squirrel got underneath the house,” she told Pookie.

  “It’s everything under the house. ’Sides, it ain’t a squirrel. Smells like a damn polecat.” But the smell situated itself, until one evening that week Miss Myrtle came back with Junebug, who disassembled the dead stove and found one of Mauris’s small hands, bloated and almost skinless, but recognizable because of the braided gold wedding band that had cut into its flesh. When a piece of the hand’s skin slid off, Miss Myrtle fainted and had to be taken to Dr. French’s house overnight. Mrs. French put Imagene to bed at her house and Sylvia took Pookie to the show. Whistle Stop, I believe they saw, which made the rest of us girls jealous. The law came and got Sonnyboy, who went just as silently as had his wife. Downtown at the jail, he sat across the table from the White men twisting their hands and mouths in disgust as he confessed with all the calm of a choirboy. He told them about putting her hands in the furnace, which she had tended so well; her legs beneath the floorboard of his bedroom, where he had most enjoyed them. Her head (he’d suspected it would stink before any other part) he’d taken to the roof in the night and placed just above the closed chimney flue, so she could look down on her children for always. The rest of her body, heart lungs liver intestine pelvis and windpipe, chopped up with the wood ax, sprinkled with lime, and buried before dawn, just below the porch so he could keep her near him.

  That was Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon, the news had grown legs that ran through the Black part of town. Children were told to leave backrooms while parents discussed Sonnyboy’s strange crime; older women sat on porches and shook their heads, commenting to no one but themselves. “We are surely in the end times,” more than one preacher told his congregation that morning.

  I sat in my porch swing and watched a steady line of people go in and out of the house at 211—first ministers and deacons with their Bibles, then church mothers with covered dishes. Then the rest of the Negro community, our fathers and mothers, even the ones who’d looked down on Mauris for hanging her wash on Sundays and going without a camisole under her blouse in the summertime. Mother took potato salad and stayed all night visiting, but Grandpap would not let me go ask to see Pookie: I had to wait until she came outside, just before dusk, with her two sisters trailing out the door behind her. I had to make myself be slow about getting off the swing, since part of me wanted to run over and tell Pookie that my own sweet daddy was dead and I knew how it felt and what to do.

  “Pookie,” I called out softly, as I got to her yard. The big blue anchor down the front of Imagene’s white dress heaved with her shuddering breaths, the aftershocks of her long bout of crying. As I got closer, I saw that the tears had worn lines of salt down her cheeks like nails through candle wax. It had always been her habit to tag along with me and Pookie, gnatlike, but now she ignored me, dipping her head over her knees and biting her lips into her own private coldest midnight. Pookie hadn’t been crying. She, alone, saw that she could still breathe air. “Pookie,” I said again, hugging her. She felt so soft, but already she smelled like the inside of a grandmother’s house—Vicks salve in the morning to fight off sore throats and boiled potatoes for dinner because they aren’t dear and the windows shut at night to keep the chill out and the house stale. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She pushed me away. “What you sorry for? You ain’t killed her.”

  I stepped back for balance and ended up taking some distance. “I’m sorry for your feelings,” I said.

  “Don’t think you know anything about what I’m feeling, just because your daddy died in some war. Your daddy died, but you wasn’t living every day in the same house with the person what killed him. The man what kilt your daddy ain’t your own flesh and blood who you sprung from and who you’ll probably end up just like. Your daddy’s fingers wasn’t up in no stovepipe. And nobody thought your daddy was a damn polecat.” She looked at Imagene, who kneaded her stomach.

  “I don’t know how you feel, Pookie. But if you want someone to tell it to—”

  “I’ll never want to talk about this with you nor nobody else. Not ever.” She sat down on Miss Myrtle’s stoop a fourteen-year-old already defeated. “And my name ain’t Pookie. My mama named me Caroline.”

  CAPEZIOS

  Because both murderer and murdered were Negro, the court of Montgomery County never deigned to convene, and Sonnyboy was in the pen before the week was out. Mauris had only what could be called “remains,” so Miss Myrtle had nothing to sit in her house until the funeral, no dressed-up body for people to eat and play cards over until it was wheeled out of its house for the last time, no steel casket for the girls to view through the hearse’s back window as their mother took her final ride in an automobile.

  “No visitation,” Grandpap said, when he read about the services in the church bulletin. “No body,” he added, shaking his head because he knew what it meant to have a child vanish whole and come back in pieces. No visitation and no body, but still it took Miss Myrtle a couple of weeks to quilt her wits back together and arrange the burial, which turned out to be the biggest—Negro or White—that Bath and Montgomery counties had ever seen. All the Negroes of twelve different towns were there, tottering around headstones and perforating the fresh spring mud with the treads and the heels of their good shoes; even Hattie Lee, returned to Mt. Sterling in black stockings and clumped mascara, without her new man, who maybe had to stay in Lexington selling his assurances, who maybe had quit her already. The old men of the town, dressed in the tar black suits they saved for Easter and their daughters’ weddings, my own granddaddy in the Botany that had cost him forty dollars on credit at Taylor’s. At my daddy’s funeral, it had still given a good fit. Now it puffed like sails where the hanger had built a frame his shoulders couldn’t fill.

  Since the funeral, kids at school have stopped telling Pookie jokes—no skin pebbly as a pegboard, no legs bowed out like a wishbone. No meanness at all since Mauris was buried and Caroline came to school and cried all day into a burgundy napkin, not even when her pimples jumped out of their hiding places for the summer and turned her face stucco. Clemons Greene imitates my pigeon-toed walk; Wink Loving asks me if I haven’t inflated my lips with a bicycle pump. “Fatmouth,” they call me. “Boatnose.” “Turnipbutt.” And all the while, Caroline keeps an untouchable aura about herself, a certain poise she’s found now that the Montgomery County Colored School has forgotten she’s not beautiful. She holds her shoulders back as we walk through the high school hall, and makes eye contact with Mr. Pennington, our six-and-a-half-foot principal, and then one night I dream it even, that her fairy godmother has come to her in the night with glass slippers and
mice for footmen. It’s as though other people are on the edge of seeing her shine, and it makes the shine, for me, all the more precious. When she touches my neck in class so I’ll turn around and see Ralph Cundiff sleeping on his math lessons, I push back into her touch, slightly enough so she won’t notice me lingering. When we’re alone, flipping through the faded, waterlogged issue of True Confessions she’s taken from her mama’s belongings, or painting each other’s fingernails crimson in her grandmama’s backyard, I study her as one would a frost-covered leaf, looking for the long veins of familiarity under her crust. But I can no longer see my own plainness reflected in hers, and I begin to dread that it might actually be true, that Caroline’s leaving me behind.

  All the fireworks are exploding this day I’ve chosen to test her on it, all the bottle rockets and cherry bombs and ground spinners, shooting orange and green sparks from Mr. Nettles’s grass. He’s cleaning out what he brought down from Ohio last summer, offering his dusty excitement to Melton and Tyrone Boyd so that they might land, for one afternoon, on the right side of boredom. The gunpowder proves itself in a constant attack of sound, from every canister the boys light, and they end up choking the neighborhood with thick smoke that stings my eyes and hurts my throat. When Daddy died, Mr. Nettles sent a flowering plant to the funeral, and now, through the green, mercury-laced haze of a Pharaoh’s Serpent, he waves at me as I walk up Miss Myrtle’s yard. He sent a plant because he couldn’t attend—while Mr. Pinchback was laying my father to rest, Mr. Nettles was over in Lexington, seeing a man about a billiards table. He was back that afternoon: when I went out to Mr. Barnett’s store for Mother’s aspirin powders I found Mr. Nettles’s truck out front, the billiard table leaning against its cab, sinking diagonally into its bed like a wrecked ship. In the store, Mr. Nettles was leaning over the counter at eye level with Mrs. Barnett, so he didn’t see me when I walked in the door and tripped the bell: he kept talking. “Young man goes off full of adventure, comes back to his kid in a box,” he was telling her, but he didn’t have it quite right. My father had never meant to come back, to me or to anyone else in this petty little town, and it’s why I still can’t decide whether I’m angry with him for dying. “Leave.” It’s a word you might say two million times in a lifetime. If you’re where you’re supposed to be, you won’t need it as much. I wave back at Mr. Nettles; he smiles and crosses his arms, but seems, behind the smoke, to be already fading to something I won’t one day remember.

  Miss Myrtle sits on her porch, winding a yard of blue cloth around and around her left hand with her right. “Caroline here?” I ask her. She looks at me for a second, then refocuses on her self-­mummification. She points to the door with her free hand, and I let myself in.

  A pissy smell of cabbage fills her living room, and from somewhere in the back of the house Dinah Washington sings, swelling the afternoon with romance. Caroline lies asleep on the sofa, with Imagene wrapped around her body like a vine. Their knees touch, and the corner of Imagene’s cloud-gray skirt is tucked under Caroline’s mint green one. Imagene’s thin legs fold alongside her sister’s thicker ones, and she’s nestled one of her braids under Caroline’s chin, and like this, tangled in each other like possums, they remind me so much of the way I used to fall asleep in Daddy’s lap that I have to turn my eyes to Miss Myrtle’s cabinet. The house’s large front window faces north, so sunlight never shines directly enough through for me to catalog all the knickknacks on the cabinet, but every time I come, I do find something different, and this time what I notice is a gray ceramic rabbit on the top shelf. Standing on his hind legs, with his paws bent and his one glazed ear folded over, he looks not at me but past me, as though he’s already made up his mind.

  “Whatcha know?” Caroline whispers.

  “Want to go to Taylor’s with me?”

  “Sure,” she says, and with a ginger lifting of Imagene’s arms from her own neck, rolls the little girl off her. Bamp goes Imagene’s head on the couch, but she doesn’t wake: she turns her face away from the cushion and lets out a deep sigh of sleeping. Her eyelids aren’t fully shut, and I catch a slice of her deep brown pupils involuntarily rolling back under her eyelids. Caroline leaves her dreaming, and I follow her out Miss Myrtle’s door.

  We’ve gone to Taylor’s a hundred times before, with and without spending money, looking good and looking bad, with gorgeous lifted hairstyles and with curls flattened by rain, with freshly ironed clothes and with runs in our stockings, but we haven’t been anywhere besides school since Pookie’s become Caroline, and her coming with me now proves that she still knows we live in the same orbit. As early as fifth grade, other girls had seen our handicaps—mine my intelligence and Pookie’s her ugliness—and sensed the tragedy, that we’d forever be unused rungs on the social ladder. They expected the two of us together, and I wanted to disappoint them. When the dodgeball captain picked us for the same team at recess, I sat the game out. When Miss Taylor assigned me to a desk behind Pookie’s, I complained that the light from the window hurt my eyes. Eventually, I got excited by the staccato way she struck the words “tectonic plate,” and the way she was always the first kid to laugh when something was funny, and now, walking behind her into Taylor’s, I know that none of that will ever quite leave me.

  We climb the polished stairs to the second floor, because Mother’s given me money for school shoes. “Or else,” she said this morning, “we’ll have to saw your toes off.” I was still in my gown, in the hallway, my bare feet leaving condensation on the cold hardwood floor. Mother was already in her nurse’s uniform, and the sun ricocheted off the wall mirror and struck the grain of her white nylons, making them look ghastly against her dark legs. She kissed me on the forehead, then licked her thumb and pretended to wipe away the kiss. She smiled while her eyebrows frowned, as if she’d suddenly recalled something profane. The last couple of evenings she’d been in a good mood, breaking her favorite blue teacup only to whistle as she swept up the porcelain, saying, “Oh well,” when she forgot a casserole that burned to crisp in the oven. Grandpap joked, outside her hearing, that she must have found a bottle of Early Times in Miss Ora Ray’s liquor cabinet. She’s given me fifteen dollars, enough for a pair of Weejuns or even Capezios, and Caroline and I circle the table, picking pairs up to look at the price tags on their undersides.

  We’ve gone almost through the whole table before the clerk walks over, tucks the blond hair of her bob angrily behind her ear, and says, “You done picked up ever single one of them shoes. What are you looking for?”

  “Shoes,” Caroline deadpans, and the blood comes to my face as I laugh silently into my own throat.

  “Shoes,” the clerk repeats, making herself miss the joke. She has a stub nose that reminds me of pork, and a cut in her right eyebrow that reminds me of butchering. Her name tag reads WENDY, and though I’ve never known her name I’ve known her: she was one of the six filthy children of the coal washer who used to live right across Fifth Street, in the part of Shake Rag that’s White but just barely so. There was one summer when we were all seven years old, she’d run across the street to play jacks. Now she pretends she doesn’t recognize us, doesn’t remember having touched our hands, looked into our eyes, and wanted what small piece of metal we held.

  Caroline hands her a pair of pumps, smart brown ones with straps. “I’ll try these on.”

  “No you won’t,” Wendy tells her, mashing the three words down to one syllable. She points to Caroline’s sandals. “You ain’t got no socks. The Health Department got regulations.”

  “You got footies, don’t you?”

  “I only give ’em out to paying customers.”

  “Who says we ain’t paying?” Caroline asks.

  Caroline’s voice has taken on sad water; it sinks me with everything that’s wrong in her world. “Take my socks,” I tell her, and we both lower ourselves into the shoe department’s soft leather chairs. I slip off my loafers, peel off my socks. I feel my bladder getting full, and I think about how Glor
ia Fugate said she snuck into the Whites-only bathroom here. Clean as a whistle, she told us, with a towel machine so you could wipe your hands after washing. “What size will you need?” I ask Pookie.

  “Seven and a half,” she says, looking to Wendy, who still stares at us, still angrily. Eight years have elevated her Whiteness, and she wants us to notice. Caroline must read her mind too: halfway through pulling one of my socks up her calf, she straightens up and says, “Please, ma’am,” creating a gulf where before there was none.

  “Well, all right, then,” Wendy says. She saunters to the cash register like a queen through a garden. “But I got to count these bills before I wait on y’all.” She punches the register open and the bell echoes through the empty second floor, punching the downbeat of the waltz being piped in through the ceiling. Off the tiles of the furniture department the bell echoes, and against the metal racks in girls’ clothing, over the curvature of the fine china in housewares.

  “We got all day,” Caroline says. “We really do.”

  Wendy counts bills, licking her finger for help when the corners stick together, glancing at us out of the corner of her eye before she recounts the same stack. We’re sitting there, Caroline tapping her heel against the chair leg, me fighting the urge to go home and pee, both of us watching Wendy count, when a White woman comes up the stairs with her little girl trailing behind her. “Can I help you?” Wendy asks, dropping her stack of bills back into the drawer.

  “Just looking,” the woman sings back. She’s large, shuffling, perfectly waistless in her housedress. Her daughter grabs her behind in a hug, making her amble.

  “Well, we got cute little girl shoes,” Wendy tells her. “We got ’em with bows right across the toe.” And suddenly, it seems, the number of pairs on the table grows. When she describes them, there become so many that, were I offered a pair for free, I’d have to say, “No thank you,” because I would have lost myself in the choosing. She picks up a black patent leather pair, turning them so that the overhead light drifts across the shine of the toe. “Perfect for church,” she says, covering her speech with a veneer designed to distinguish herself from Shake Rag. While she talks on—we got leather we got heels we got buckles—Caroline pats me on the arm and we rise from our chairs. We pass behind the clerk, so pointedly close to her that I can smell the cheap toilet water she’s dabbed on the back of her neck, and then we run down the stairs and out into the summer heat.