Up on the mourner’s bench with Miss Myrtle for Mauris’s birthday, Caroline jerks in waking as Miss Aileen pounds out the opening of “Great is Thy Faithfulness” and the three gray-headed reverends push from the arms of their chairs to standing. The rest of the church rises to sing; jackets are pulled over healthy stomachs and long skirts fall into place, but Caroline sits with her hymnal open and her eyes closed, and Miss Myrtle won’t dare touch her disrespect, since Caroline, last hog-killing season, brought more money into the house than she did. Only one pew back from them, I watch Caroline’s hair drape over the set of her shoulders, and I can see her take a breath of grief and tilt her head to an angle I’ve seen at school a thousand times in the last two years. What are you thinking of? I’ve passed her in notes, but I always get the same answer written back. She’s imagining herself in Louisville. Chicago. Anywhere that isn’t Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. Hollywood. Broadway. The moon.
William Travis, who comes down the mountain from his stone-pocked, bountiless farm to be our school janitor on Tuesdays, looks out from the choir stand and throws Caroline a frown so hard it’s meant to compel her to stand, but she ignores him, so he goes back to singing, in a voice so loud and a hill accent so thick that no one need see him to know it. Grandpap calls William Travis “the Indian,” because he has not one or two but six feathers sprouting out of his favorite Homburg, but most adults call him Buddy, because that’s the sort of man he is. He cleans our school on Tuesdays, and because he’s an adult, no matter what his job, no matter how much moonshine he’s spilled down the bib of his overalls, no matter how brown and thick and cracked are his fingernails, we children greet him as Mr. Travis. Caroline’s the only one of us with gall enough to call him Buddy. “Thanks, Buddy,” she’s forever saying, because he’s a distant cousin on Sonnyboy’s side and forever dishing her quarters. She never looks at him when she thanks him; I think he embarrasses her.
By the second verse, everyone else in the congregation is busy pretending not to watch Miss Beulah Pike up in the choir stand fan herself and cry, and even if they weren’t, I’m the only one close enough to see Caroline drop her chin and smile. I would wonder, except that Reverend Wyatt, half-deaf Reverend Wyatt who moved up from Alabama five years ago and has been living in Miss Lila’s row house ever since, is shifting in his seat, smiling just a little, too.
“She’s in a better place,” he’d told Caroline at Mauris’s funeral, though he hadn’t sounded that sure about it. He’d put his hand on Caroline’s back and lingered there, regurgitating scripture in a consistency that a teenaged girl was supposed to chew on and redigest. I’d been standing right next to them but he hadn’t once looked at me. Occasionally he’d lifted his hand from her back, letting it hover an inch away from her sweater while he emphasized one of God’s truths. He’d replaced the hand, like a broken gate fastener, further down each time, until he put it in the small of her back and I coughed. He didn’t notice me at all, and it salted up the difference between us. Tortoise-shell glasses, shit-colored wool stockings, a head full of high-flown literature, and hair that never grows longer than two marcels on a bumper, is what I’ve got. Two different bloods don’t meet up in my face and explode there: I’m not capable of riling up some minister enough that he starts quoting scripture at me.
“Bad breath,” Caroline had said of him when he finally walked away. “Too bad they ain’t passing out mints with the communion crackers.”
One thing I’ve learned in the distance between me and Caroline: she’s nobody’s mother. Imagene spent the whole of May to August last year scratching bug bites on her face, and came to school wearing dirty fingernails and no slip. Asleep in Dr. French’s hammock one day, Pookie menstruated right through the back of a white dress, bleeding a stain in the shape of Argentina. From Grandpap’s porch I watched her limp home unembarrassed, and though she did wash it, she mustn’t have used cold water, because here she is in church with that same skirt on and it’s still there—light beige and even brown in places: Argentina. A mother would bleach it; a mother would burn it. Caroline’s too distracted by youth to even notice.
She spent the last half of our fourteenth year watching television at Sylvia French’s house. Most days they didn’t even invite me, but when Dr. and Mrs. weren’t home, and Sylvia turned the show up to full volume, I’d hear them both through the open window, laughing. Evenings, I’d see the flicker of the television through the lace curtains of the Frenches’ living room, whose side window faced mine. They’d watch television until Imagene came telling Caroline she was hungry, for emphasis putting a long “o” where the “u” should have been. The Frenches’ front door would slam shut and Caroline would yell something unintelligible at Imagene and then the television volume would go low, way low, and in the relative quiet, I could more easily hear Sylvia’s laugh. Alone, she didn’t laugh quite as much.
At Thanksgiving, Mrs. French hauled Sylvia down South for what Sylvia called her annual gentility lessons, so it was just an accident of unavailability that put me there when Caroline burned her arm. Mr. O’Neill up on the mountain had let her have a bucket of hog fat after she scraped more rind in a working day than anybody else, and Imagene had walked up and down Queen Street, knocking on front doors, telling everyone how her sister was going to have soap to sell. I’d never seen it made, so curiosity sent me over to her house, where she was already waving her arm in the air, crying and retching over the edge of the porch where the bucket sat, full of bloody fat, next to the lye can. “Tell me what to do,” I yelled at her, but she couldn’t speak for the pain.
Mr. Nettles came over with a bottle of vinegar and poured it over her arm, which he held aloft while she doubled over in a fit of moaning. “Damn fools,” he called us, and he hustled Caroline away from me and over to Dr. French’s house. The scab on her arm puckered up like something alive. It dried up and fell away after a couple of weeks, but the lye had already eaten a nasty scar into her left arm, right on the forearm’s most defining part of loveliness, the part visible when she was walking or even sitting, the part she herself would look at while she sewed or washed dishes. The scar has changed color over the last year, from an angry pink to a soft brown, and sometimes it seems it’s shrunken from the size of a palm print to the size of an ink spill, and then I get anxious, but it turns out she’s just handing me a note and has her arm turned out the wrong way; she goes to flip a page of her speller and the scar is terrible once again. My disappointment is that it doesn’t make her uglier. Rather, she wears it like an extra mark of grace.
Caroline turned fifteen in February, on the sixth day of a persistent snow, a snow so light that the wind wouldn’t let it settle, and it blew impossibly upward, and then straight across the horizon, and finally in semicircles that mocked Caroline through her window and drove her crazy. It was moist enough that it didn’t stick; it simply turned dirty on everyone’s front steps and puddled in the mud of the street. The mailman tramped through Miss Myrtle’s soggy front yard the morning of her birthday, turning black bootprints up out of whitened grass. He was bringing a letter from Sonnyboy, who by then had already written Caroline exactly three times from Eddyville. The first time, she’d come and got me and we sat out on my stoop crouched over the letter, which relayed his daily schedule. We hadn’t exactly been wondering, but there it was: 6 am MORNING COUNT; 6:30 am CHOW; 7 am LAUNDRY DUTY; 11 am chow. On it went, in script so small and cramped it hurt to look at, until it ended with 10 pm COUNT; 10:30 pm LOCKDOWN.
“He killed my mama and left us scrambling around for money and that’s all he got to say,” Caroline told me, as she crumpled the page, and the letter had ended there, with LOCKDOWN, not even offering a complimentary closing of the type we were taught in school. But he’d been a good father, I wanted to tell her, and you could see it in the way he’d included punctuation. Whatever he really had to say was there, between those semicolons, trapped under all the cowardice in that cubic space of air stretching from the paper up to the universe. Caroli
ne tossed his second letter into the fire without reading it. She read the third as soon as she got it, but she hadn’t shared it with me. She told me only one thing Sonnyboy’d written—that he had a seventy-year-old cellmate who’d been in prison for thirty years, getting regular meals and regular hours. Because of this, Sonnyboy had written, the man still looked to be forty. That fourth installment, the birthday letter, Caroline claimed to have tossed immediately. But I’d been outside upending Mother’s flowerpots to keep the snow out, and I’d seen Caroline run in the house and slam the door when the mailman handed it to her. She said she burned it, but I didn’t believe her.
She spent that whole fifteenth year at the Colored store, staring at the nail on the wall behind the soda jerk, listening to the gossip of senior class girls who wouldn’t, in a million years, have actually spoken to her. She said they spoke of how three of Michelle Turk’s girdle hooks had come unsnapped during the Pledge of Allegiance and they spoke of boys who’d asked to touch their breasts, and, listening from three feet away, noting who interrupted whom and which voice’s desirous tone most betrayed its owner, Caroline said she felt like the girls were telling her more about themselves than they were telling one another. When Caroline’s Great-Aunt Patty walked by Miss Myrtle’s house one day and found Imagene standing ankle-deep in mud, bawling her eyes out over a lost cicada shell, she asked Miss Myrtle if she might take the girls for a spell. She told Miss Myrtle it looked like they needed more taking care of, but it turned out she needed considerable help around her own house, and when I visited, I had to talk to Caroline over the scrape of the Brillo pad she was using to clean eleven years’ worth of grease off the dimmed black face of the stove.
Then too, Mrs. Patty’s neighbor kept thinking Caroline was White, kept waving to her when he rounded the corner in his truck and came upon her walking the road. He’d always drop his hand and turn his eyes straight ahead under his engineer’s cap when he saw her swollen lips and realized she was just some nigger girl from down the way, but he couldn’t stand the gaps of reason the mistake would leave in his mind. He made sure to mention the new tenants to Dr. Mayer, who owned the house and was letting it to Mrs. Patty on a discount. Caroline and Imagene were back at Miss Myrtle’s before the week was out, Caroline sitting on the front porch, knitting potholders to sell in the White downtown, and Imagene rebicycling the deep ruts into Miss Myrtle’s lawn so Jesus could find her when he came back in disguise.
Yesterday, when Caroline popped out onto Miss Myrtle’s front porch in her black boots and mackintosh, there was only a slight drizzle, and you might have forgiven her not shooing Griffin back in the door when he strutted out after her with his long tail thrown out like a question mark. But she couldn’t have been five minutes gone when thunder opened the clouds, and everybody on Queen Street knows that Mauris never let Griffin know weather. He rolled on his back for some time, his four feet crossing each other in the air, the lone white paw bent with the effort of trying to find a dry patch. A little sister who’d play with her always; hair that made her an angel; and a cat who saw her hard days, climbed in her lap, and purred—Caroline didn’t deserve all she had, and if she couldn’t show kindness to the least of His creatures, I’d have to. When I rose from my swing and yelled for Griffin, he shot down the street like a spark. Stood on our top step and purred, his rain-slicked tail ticking back and forth. Mother was out getting a side of beef from the Maynards, and Grandpap lay in his easy chair snoring chains. “Come on in, cat,” I whispered. “Let’s have a bite.”
The milkman had come Friday, so I tipped the bottle and let Griffin lick the bit of cream left at the top; since Grandpap had eaten the cold cuts down to nothing, I gave Griffin the tip of casing that the icebox had dried to crisp. Griffin moved his entire head with the effort of mashing it between his teeth, and every time it crunched, he raised his pointed ears in surprise. Finished, he sniffed the greasy spot on the floor and meowed. Mother’d left a green tomato pie in some tinfoil atop the icebox, and I cut a slice onto a plate and set it on the floor, but Griffin just ran his whiskers round the edge of the plate.
“Choosy beggar,” I called him. He sniffed the toe of my sock, then stretched, letting his little black feet skid across the floor to rejoin the rest of him. I wrestled his front paws and let him play at putting his teeth around my finger until he drew a bead of blood, though when I kicked him across the floor, he cocked his head in innocent confusion. He trotted into my room to look out my window, meowing as he curled his tail into his body: what he’d brought into our house was a small portion of the sadness that had been filling up the girls who’d used to live at 211. Mother complained of smelling onions in my room when she got home, but Griffin wasn’t going back. Caroline didn’t deserve him.
When the rain cleared to an icy sunset, Imagene started calling. “Griffin!” she yelled, walking the street, her head turning so hard in the search that the crocheted lilac ribbons in her hair shook. She got keys and entered 211 looking for him. A few boys from Seventh Street had climbed in the back window of the house that first winter looking for Mauris’s ghost, coming back out only to tell us that the pipes had burst, leaving the floor flooded and buckling in places. A family of opossums had taken over 211’s front porch—I saw them at night, curling around the wrought iron columns—and none of us could even begin to imagine what had decided to live inside the house, with all that mold: when she’d decided she wouldn’t find Griffin inside, Imagene couldn’t get out and bolt the door back fast enough. As she walked back to Miss Myrtle’s house, I saw her absently tap the side of her head, as though trying to shake what she’d seen from her memory. Miss Myrtle had never been one to leave the house on leisure—never had, even when Mauris was alive—but in the evening, when I went out on the porch to swing, I saw her walking the lengths of houses, peering under porches, pulling back vines and looking into rosebushes as if divining the future. Griffin stayed in my closet all night, not once purring or scratching to get out, and at daybreak, when I went to take out my good satin dress for church, there he lay, on his side, blinking, blinking. Sick, I thought, and then I thought again, maybe just homesick. He’d have to adjust to a life within the four walls of my room. “You stay put,” I told him. He’d eaten all the tomato pie save one last sliver of onion, and I took the plate for bleaching. “You’ll have more cream after church,” I said. Now, as I look down at my oxfords and notice that despite the four perfect eyeholes, the laces cross only once, I wonder where I’ll find cream on a Sunday.
The arched ceiling of this church was designed to evoke eternity, as were the three concentric circles that make up each chrome light fixture. A wood balustrade separates the pulpit from the pews so that the ministers look, to the congregation below, as though they are floating on divine air. Jesus is pressed flat to the wall by oil paint, his reed-colored hand held out to a background of green pasture that stretches beyond the corners of the ceiling into infinity. The walls are so plain of ornamentation that in summer, when beetles fly in church and light, you can look over and count whether they’ve kept all six of their legs. But whoever bricked Queen Street Second Baptist into being built it all wrong. Jesus is painted a little off, his forehead unnaturally bloated. The balustrade walls off the ministers like they’re a museum exhibit. And even if it means I might reune with my daddy, the thought of eternity scares me. Eternity isn’t 256. It doesn’t finish in fours.
The reddest of cardinals is visiting the yew tree outside the open window. Thunder scrapes heaven. A chill spring wind plows the grass and darkens the earth. Mother stands next to me, squeezing my hand. She exhales whiskey and a single tear winds down the curve of her high cheekbones to settle at the corner of her mouth. In her haste to get us here early, to get a seat up front near Miss Aileen and her Howard upright, she forgot the pearl earrings that go with her two-strand necklace, and Mother could just as well be crying over that as anything, since she always says a woman with holes in her earlobes is not, by a long shot, a lady. You’d th
ink she’s an emotional drunk, but she’s not—we’re just singing benediction. She didn’t cry at Mauris’s funeral just like she didn’t cry at my daddy’s, which is a shame, because my mother, with her flawless skin and keen nose, is a beautiful crier.
“Amen,” she says, tapping her foot in time to Miss Aileen’s playing. Praying down into her purse while people stand and leave with the Holy Ghost gathered into purses and pockets, until we’re the only people left sitting. Caroline’s already out on the church lawn trading lemon drops, or maybe even on the road back to Queen Street, and I hate Mother for making us stay after, listening to Miss Aileen’s tedious chords, watching the folds in the velvet curtains that hide the baptismal pool and missing Grandpap’s pork chops with black-eyed peas and all the other beautiful things of this world. Mother smiles her lopsided lipstick and bobs her head, because we’re sitting close enough for Miss Aileen to feel the waves of admiration.
“Amen,” Mother says for the last time, after Miss Aileen tinkles the high register and closes her hymnal into the case of her piano bench. She links my arm to drag me out of the pew and toward the piano. “Aileen,” she says. “How do.”
Two deacons in short summer sleeves chat in a corner, one with his arm resting on a windowsill and the other caressing his tie. Mrs. June Webb bumps clumsily down the aisle with her son, Lester, who has wrapped the top half of her ninety-year-old body in his arms. Wind has cooled the earth, but in the after-service quiet, the church feels warm and close, as if the Holy Ghost is enfolding us in one of His sun-dried bedsheets. I’ve never been in church this late. The Spirit has finished His performance. It’s a feeling like watching your father’s train pull out of the station without you, or going to bed with your mother having forgotten it was your birthday.
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