Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  On the way home, I crunch acorn caps under my shoes with each step and wonder where, now, I’ll get my Capezios. We pass Mrs. Dickerson’s meditating scarecrow; Mr. Eblen’s scorched rosebush—­trying to die, trying to bloom. Melton and Tyrone have left Mr. Nettles’s yard, and the smoke has risen to hang over his slanted roof. A plane passes overhead and I think how Grandpap says it’s an abomination, metal wings that far above the earth, higher than any bird, mocking God. Caroline hasn’t said one word. On her long legs she’s walked too fast for me, and my blouse, under my sweater, sticks to my back. Beneath all that I’m wearing a bone-colored bra, a new B-cup Mother bought me for Easter. It’s satin, and the cups are glossy under a certain light, and I wonder how Mother found the meekness to go to Taylor’s and buy it.

  CINDERELLA

  Now finally, now that the trees have filled green and the last day of school has come round, and we pupils are stacking chairs and dusting erasers, the boys have to break their recess from cruelty, because Caroline is, despite my worries, irresistibly ugly. I hear them laughing from across the room and feel it, familiar and dreadful as the hotcomb come too close to my neck: they’re laughing at us. Mr. Pennington has turned his radio’s full power down the hall to propel our cleaning, and as the Clovers sing “Fool, Fool, Fool,” the little boys from the lower grades pile atop each other like puppies sliding around the hardwood floor. A new boy slams his full weight down on the others with each new verse of song, and Evelyn Ferguson coughs, under attack from the dirt she’s kicked up shelving spellers in the coat closet. Ralph comes to us like a war veteran, favoring his good leg, limping to spare the kneecap that will never heal to wholeness. “Ah-buh-buh-buh-buh beanpole Betty,” he says into the silent space of the disc jockey’s switch, when everyone can hear him. “What’s this for?” he asks, snapping Caroline’s bra strap. “To remind your chest that you’re a girl?”

  Everyone laughs. Even Mrs. Dickerson smiles—I catch her before she catches herself—and it’s a relief when the tears come to Caroline’s eyes, when we take leave of Ralph, his laughing friends, the entire school. Clouds hang low and dark but it’s not yet raining, so she leads me out to the schoolyard, to the edge where it meets the forest in a stand of honeysuckle. As she leans down and picks a bloom, I can see that the palms of her hands are peeling, as they always do when her nerves get the best of her.

  “Forget him,” I say.

  “It ain’t him. It ain’t none of them.” She pulls the stigma and breaks the stem, sucks the wee bit of nectar and closes her eyes until the tears come. She rocks herself into crying, and I spread my hand across her shoulder. Not to rub it, because she’s not a baby, and not to pat it, because I’m sincere. Just to touch her. To absorb, through her clothes, some small ounce of her pain. To feel, in the tightness there, everything she needs to say.

  Some of what she tells me I already know, because after Pinchback & Sons Mortuary buried the baby-sized casket with her mother’s head and hands, she momentarily came back to happiness. She dug two yards of squares for hopscotch and hid from the boy who was It. On Hiram Loving’s handlebars she hitched rides into town, smiling all the way, as if she were realizing that the world itself wasn’t broken but just her murderous father. On that first 90-degree day, when she got home from school and slammed the storm door back against the wall, she unwrapped herself from her sweater, set her pink parasol abloom, and wandered into the alley behind the Tin Cup, whose owner summoned her with a whistle. Oval Murden, who’d been walking down the alley on his way to collect Laura, one of his mama’s chickens who’d stopped laying, told us that the owner of the Tin Cup coughed before he spoke.

  “Hey there!” he yelled.

  “Sir?”

  “How’d you like fifty cents?”

  Of course Pookie was fourteen years old, on the edge of something big—the Rest of Life. She stood in the alley, Oval said, appraising the owner’s polished shoes and his pearline false teeth, turning up her little bean nose to sniff the air for the Duke the owner used to slick his conk. You couldn’t get Duke in Mt. Sterling—Pookie knew that much.

  “I’d like fifty cents, sir. I’d like it a bunch.”

  Oval Murden, too, had been appraising. He told us he’d watched Pookie’s face as she’d spoken and seen how it was set in smooth skin that hadn’t yet erupted in hormones and worry. He’d looked at her plumb little legs and her child’s way of standing with them spread far enough to make her woman’s dress look wrong, and decided she was still so young that if she fell, it wouldn’t hurt. When the owner said, “Get in here, then,” Oval Murden didn’t give one thought toward warning her not to. He just kept walking for his mama’s house, with the smell of a frying hen already up his nose.

  Pookie tells me now about the particulars, how the owner told her she’d make her daily fifty cents off of exactly one person—Percy Greer. When he sank down to the bar and into unconsciousness, the owner dragged him by his feet back behind the blue storeroom door and Pookie left her place behind the counter. There, in the box-strangled closet, where moth wings floated down like confetti around the lone fluorescent bulb, the owner showed her how to soak a rag in water and wring small drops onto Percy Greer’s chapped lips until he woke up in a paroxysm of startled blinks, and could be sent home to his wife, his woman, or his devoted auntie. Despite Percy’s jaundiced liver, his eyes, and only his eyes, were beautiful, for he’d managed to carry through the fifty years of his life the long, thick lashes he’d had at birth, and when the owner went back to tending the bar, Pookie sat in the storeroom and watched Percy’s beautiful lashes as he attempted to blink off his liquor. She listened to Percy lick his lips as she noted how the owner had stacked the boxes of cherry syrup so neatly, in the staggered pattern of bricks in a wall. She cupped Percy’s forehead in the palm of her hand and picked dust from the floor out of his hair, until, in the confusion that remained within him, Percy called her by his wife’s name. “You, sweet Lucy, are the most precious thing in my world,” he said. He frowned in embarrassment, but still he put a hand on the little bump of her left breast. “Thank you, my Lucy,” he said, pinching the rosebud of her nipple.

  Pookie screamed. She ran back through the door and into the bar. “Mr. Percy’s touching on me!” she said.

  Oval Murden had beheaded Laura by then and returned to the bar while her feathers boiled off, and he told us that when Pookie accused Percy, the men laughed until they cried. “What you think some drunk old man going to do?” asked one. “Sail you a paper airplane?”

  She looked to the owner of the Tin Cup for justice, but his mouth stayed flat and even over his false teeth. Between mixing drinks he was keeping his accounts, and now he lifted his pen to his mouth and tapped his lip. “He touch you?” he asked her.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you don’t want him to touch you?”

  “No, sir!”

  The owner sighed. Dropped his pen on the lined paper and its many figures. “Listen here, gal. What you going to do with that fifty cents?”

  “Buy white bread for my sister. And some cornmeal and fish from Burtis.”

  “You’re going to like that fifty cents, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re going to like that fifty cents, and I’m going to like Mr. Percy not trying to touch on me.” The men around the bar issued another movement of laughter. “You think on that, little bit. Ain’t nothing I can do about Percy Greer touching you.” He reached under the counter and brought out two quarters. “Here’s for today. Mr. Percy probably in there right now tying his shoes together.” He rang the money down on the table. “Now get. This ain’t no place for children.”

  Pookie took the quarters, gathered her parasol from the other end of the bar, and skipped out into the bright sunlight. From her mind vanished thoughts of buying chalk for hopscotch in the school’s drive: the whole world might not be broken, but the right way in it was. She’d always had a hard time putting words in paper dolls’ mouths and could ne
ver make out a shape you suggested in a cloud, but now, the dog recited poetry if she got too close, and the lamp on Miss Myrtle’s dresser did a ballerina’s pirouette each morning when she awakened. The day Percy Greer touched her, she ran home from the Tin Cup and fixed herself a saltine and cracker dinner, stripped off her pants, and went to the lemon yellow room the girls shared.

  While she sat before the mirrored table, brushing her hair, Imagene sat in the corner playing with the cat. Pookie didn’t wish her good night. She simply went to bed, turned her face into the wrinkled sheet, and lost herself in sweaty, frantic dreams. Soon an itch in the crook of her knee woke her. Through the worrying of skin it spoke, commanding her outside, where she discovered that the moon was broken exactly in two. It wasn’t passing through clouds or behind a tree—it was simply broken, floating in the sky in its two pieces. The itch worried her until the tactile became the auditory: she had to repair the moon somehow, the itch told her. She had to reach the moon and fix it.

  She didn’t know how she would fix it, but she did know that Imagene needed five minutes’ worth of help tying her shoes in the morning, and Griffin jumped to the bed and crawled over her heart in the night. She knew that Imagene had smashed Miss Myrtle’s papier-mâché angel that morning without explanation, and that Miss Myrtle’d had to buy the groceries on credit that week. She wasn’t sure whether the woman on Your Show of Shows had spent the spring of her fourteenth year washing piss out of bedsheets, but there were dogs who’d live better lives than hers, she knew that. There were just so many orphaned problems in that house now. So much need.

  Earlier in the day, while Caroline and I dragged down the school lawn, laughing and trying to decide what was that running down the leg of James Whitfield’s pants, Imagene had walked straight past us and all the way home from school for the lunch recess. She’d tell Caroline the whole story later, out on the back stoop, where she wiped the girl’s swollen red eyes with a washcloth, how she’d been at Miss Myrtle’s house alone when Mrs. Caldwell came across the street knocking, and how the door, in need of Sonnyboy’s oil can, screamed as Imagene pulled it back on its hinges.

  “Why hello,” Mrs. Caldwell said, but Imagene didn’t smile and didn’t speak. Mrs. Caldwell told it over at the Ladies’ Missionary Meeting, said Imagene just stood in the door staring at her with those little owl’s eyes, boring a hole so deep into the old woman’s soul that discomfort forced her to ask, “Ain’t your grandmama taught you no manners? Ain’t you going to say how do?”

  Imagene nodded.

  “Well, then, say it.”

  “Yes ma’am. Hello.”

  Mrs. Caldwell wrapped her bony hand around Imagene’s and pulled the child out the door and off the porch. They walked the length of the house next door until they reached the back of an asphalt-sided bungalow, one of many that faced the alley behind Queen Street. Mrs. Caldwell pointed to an open window seven feet from the ground. “I’ma lift you up in that itsy-bitty window. Then you crawl in and unlock Mr. Anderson’s front door. You hear?”

  Imagene nodded. She’d tell Caroline later that she did feel something wrong with Mrs. Caldwell’s directions, but she hadn’t believed, after all, that the woman would be able to lift her—Mrs. Caldwell was wrinkled and thin and looked as if at any moment she might fold over into pieces. Well, she must have been built on some core of strength—must have—because she grabbed Imagene by the waist and swung her right over her head. She grunted only once, then said, “Now get yourself on over in there.”

  Imagene used her little arms to swing the fifty pounds of herself into the windowsill, and ducked her head in to see how far she’d have to jump. A braided oval rug covered the floor of Mr. Anderson’s bedroom, and a small green dresser sat in the corner with coins arranged atop in stacks according to their denominations. Just beneath the window, as if waiting for her, was a bed: someone had taken enough care in making it to turn the sheet under the pillows. She swung her other leg in the window and dropped onto her back. Bounced halfway to the ceiling, making it to her feet on the way down so she could bounce again. She jumped creases into the bedspread. This was fun. Like being in a circus. Pookie would be sorry to have missed it. The house breathed a quiet perfection, a still so solid that the only noise she heard was that of a small child crying somewhere in the alley. She walked to Mr. Anderson’s dresser and took the stack of pennies in her hand and as she was counting 1-2-6-4-8 it struck her—this house smelled of something magnificently frightening. A smell familiar and not at all familiar. A smell big as the inside of a whale. The odor made her tiptoe, though she couldn’t have said why.

  She crept through the kitchen and down the shotgun hallway and then she saw him, Mr. Anderson, his hand on his chest, eyes lifted to heaven, the rest of him dead as forever. A fly landed on the corner of his mouth, and his glasses lay in a gym of twisted wire, their left lens smashed beneath the paws of his Doberman. The dog lay with its chin on the ground, and its belly didn’t fill or empty with breath, but when Imagene looked into the dog’s amber eye, she saw it move, saw the dog actually blink, and then it was the discovery of life rather than the discovery of death that finally made her move: cursed with knowledge, she threw down the pennies and ran to the front door. Turned the deadbolt and threw it open. She didn’t even see Mrs. Caldwell standing on the porch, and so she ran right into her, butting her shoulder into the hardness of the woman’s thin thighs. “Must have been dead three days,” Mrs. Caldwell was saying to a woman standing in the yard. “We ain’t seen him since prayer meeting. Strange, the dog ain’t barked.”

  Gertie Loving had to run halfway to school to find us to come save Imagene, who wouldn’t stop crying no matter how many Mary Janes they gave her.

  “You sent her in there knowing he was dead?” Caroline screamed at Mrs. Caldwell, when she got there. I’d run all the way to Queen Street with her, fear just as sharp on the back of my tongue as it was on hers, but when we got there, I knew she was the rightful owner of the outrage. I hung back with the growing crowd, and flinched with everyone else when Caroline yelled, “Not a one a y’all had sense enough to stop this bitch?”

  After she said it, no one could keep eye contact, and Mrs. Caldwell’s ladyfriends looked down to their shoes. “Low-down dirty old bitches,” she kept on. “That dog could of killed her. Come on here,” she said, grabbing Imagene by the wrist, which made her wail even louder. As the two of them disappeared across Mr. Anderson’s backyard together, I did hear some of the ladies chiding Mrs. Caldwell for sending a little girl to discover a thing so gruesome, while others wondered aloud who else but a child could have gotten through Mr. Anderson’s window. Here in the schoolyard, Caroline tells me, breathing into her honeysuckle. She’s beginning to understand the very final way her mother is gone, and she knows now that she’ll never again hear Mauris singing Helen Forrest’s part in “Comes Love,” garbling the words loud and high over the running water before she spits toothpaste. She’ll never peek around her mother’s bedroom door and catch her knotting her stockings at the top. She’s already forgotten the shape of her mother’s hands, she says, and I know because it’s already happening to me that many years later, whenever anyone says the word “mother,” she won’t think first of her own. Screaming at those stupid old women, none of whom cried at her mother’s funeral, did make her feel better, she says. But that afternoon had suddenly seemed like an opening, through which more outrageous things would come.

  GRIFFIN

  The woman sitting in front of me, the one with her hat ribbon turned three full quarters past its right place on her head? That’s Delia Alice Loving Wilson, with cheeks smooth as an olive’s and a voice hoarse with cigarettes and snuff and yelling her two boys into submission. Delia, who got up in church three Sundays ago and testified that the Lord and not any fool doctor saved her from dying of the walking pneumonia? That Delia has four children, and each of these four has two feet and two hands: sixteen. Count the two arms and two legs apiece and you get sixteen agai
n. But think down to the five fingers on each child’s hand and the five toes on each little foot, the uneven sinews of muscle and the ragged bunches of veins and the tiny capillaries you couldn’t see to count even if you skinned the brats alive, and there’s no way you can honestly get to 256, which is the only perfect number.

  I’ve been calling Caroline by her right name for two years now. She’s moved every single teaspoon and every last houseshoe from her house to Miss Myrtle’s, six homes and one weedy lot east of No. 211, almost at the corner where Queen meets Fifth and social graces disappear. That block of Fifth sees naked children running in yards and plaid couches rotting on front porches; that intersection marks the line our mothers forbade us to cross when we were little, lest we stumble into the drunken path of leathery old Mr. Fleenor, who liked to grab small children and squeeze their shoulders until they cried. Now Caroline can stand right in her bedroom and watch Mr. Fleenor spitting on his own porch. Small changes seem to have happened in her, shifts like the panels of a three-dimension comic, reconstructions of unhappiness that leave her face stern and her mouth closed over her rabbit teeth. Life has sanded her down and left her with sharper corners, oppressed her with its omissions. I can never get to 256 thinking about Caroline now, so I stop remembering her so much.