“ ’Naitha,” Miss Aileen says with her hymn-warmed voice, though the stare she gives Mother is frozen. Anybody with half a nose can smell the Sambuca cloud.
“I want to talk to you about my girl,” Mother says, unlinking her arm to push me forward as she wobbles from the sudden lack of support. The youngest reverend’s wife walks the front of the church with her white patent leather purse draped over the crook of one arm. She fingers the dirt in the pots to see whether the lilies flanking the pulpit need watering, shakes her head to herself when she finds that they don’t. “How much you charge for lessons?” Mother asks Miss Aileen.
Miss Aileen gives me a doubtful look that involves her eyelids almost closing, and I’m reminded of Griffin, and my stomach burns with the thought of him escaping if Grandpap opens the door to my room. “Audrey’s old for lessons,” Miss Aileen says.
“But she’s played for years.” Mother’s voice rises and strains over a hard place in her throat. “Her daddy taught her.” Though Mother doesn’t care about my carrying on where Daddy left off. She doesn’t think of me as special, or talented; she doesn’t even know whether I can really play. But she knows that Grandpap started asking me to sit down and look at songs last year, and she knows that he kept asking me, even when I rolled my eyes at him. He stopped asking me when he didn’t have to anymore, when hours outside Mr. Barnett’s store turned into hours sitting at my daddy’s old piano, when the music became a math problem that I’d solve by playing in a different key and with different permutations of my fingers on the black keys so that every song sounded like the bebop that Guy Jones pipes in our radio from Lexington on Saturday nights. Mother has always been a person of spring planting and fall preserving, and though she understands that circle, she knows nothing of the satisfaction of grace notes. But she knows that if Miss Aileen will pass her torch to me one Sunday a month, she’ll pass along a portion of respectability that I might use as I grow. And in twenty years, when Miss Aileen gets too old and feeble to learn the new songs, I can take her place on Sundays and Wednesdays and there’ll be thirty dollars a month I don’t have to scrape up from the White part of town.
“Here, then.” Miss Aileen pats her bench. “Sit down and play for me.”
I shake my head no. Silently, I’ve passed gas, and all three of us can smell it. I can feel the glacier of unlove my mother blows onto the back of my neck.
“I always did teach her modesty,” Mother lies. At home, she calls me an alley cat.
“Play for me,” Miss Aileen asks again, her voice warmer now, and something does come to my ear and ask to be let out, the one song my daddy never taught me, a three-quarter mountain tune he played sometimes to get me to sleep when Mother wouldn’t let me into their bed. He’d tack it to the end of a boogie-woogie, after he’d buttoned my gown and braided my hair.
“Play for her,” Mother says, closing her hand around my wrist, and the three quarters for twenty-four bars leaves me and I’m thinking instead about four quarters for eighteen bars and Griffin trying to claw his way out of my closet, and the way Daddy brushed my back teeth last thing at night until I was eleven years old and Mother screamed that he was turning me into an invalid, the way he used to clip the very ends of my braids the night of a full moon to make sure the hair grew. I lower my head and raise my eyes and pass Miss Aileen the look that will let her know—I will never, ever do anything Mother asks. And I will never let Mother hear my father’s songs again.
“I’m too old,” I say.
“Well.” Miss Aileen frowns at my belligerence, or maybe at my flatulence. She speaks to my mother in a confidential tone, as if I’m either deaf or an idiot. “She is a league older than the girls I teach. But she can come over to the house. Thursday after school, and I’ll see if there’s anything I can still do with her.”
“You won’t be disappointed,” says Mother. She’s left nail marks on my forearm.
“I’m not promising, mind you, that I’ll take her as a student.”
“It’s all right. When you hear her, you’ll want to,” Mother lies, as if she has any idea.
Finally we strike an exit, but we’ve taken so long fooling with Miss Aileen that Caroline and the other girls are already long ahead of us on the road, too far ahead for me to catch up without running, which Mother would no doubt cuss me for doing in good shoes. As we navigate the upward slope of a rocky hill, this sun passes over the trees a perfect ball, and I can see how the Indians thought the sun itself was God.
“I don’t know what—” Mother begins, the anger cutting sap from her voice. “Who you think you are to sass me in front of people like that.”
“I didn’t sass.”
“Oh, you just stood there and made me into a liar without you even saying nothing. Made yourself into an idiot.”
“I’m not your trained seal; there’s one thing I’ll never make myself into.”
“Shut up,” Mother says. Her strides grow longer and faster, even as she wobbles on the gravel, until she’s a few yards ahead of me. “Your old daddy died trying to give you some kind of a life, and here you just want to sit on the porch and play checkers with yourself. Terrible little bitch.”
I run then, good shoes be damned, all the way home, past Mother—Set that dinner table when you get there, past Caroline and Sylvia—Hey! Come back here, Flash!, past a knot of five- and six-year-old girls, stopped in the middle of the road to see how far their skirts float when they twirl. I run all the way home, where Grandpap sits on the front porch fanning himself with the Sunday paper from Owingsville. “Whoa!” he says, when he sees me cross through the yard. He smiles and waves his sheaf, full of the world’s whispers, but I charge past him, into the house and down the hall. In my room it’s quiet, too quiet, and I’m afraid for a second that Grandpap has heard Griffin’s yowling and tossed him outdoors. But there, in the closet, is Griffin, on his side with his paws stretched ahead of him, his one eye open to the ceiling in a way that can only be Death’s. His front leg, when I stroke it, is already stiff, and just in front of his hind leg, just where he should be the softest, is a hard, diseased knot. Caroline was better to him in her neglect than I’ve been in my caring, and now he’s been sacrificed, this small gift of grief from across the street. I’m incapable, perfectly incapable.
The old Panama rice bag from under the sink is just the thing, then: holds his body shapeless without letting fur show through the holes, and who’s to say I’m not carrying rice to the Deimers and their eight pissy-smelling children? Who would Mother be to question Grandpap over such a trifle as an empty rice bag gone missing? It’s perfect, except that Griffin is heavier over my shoulder than he was when he was alive, so the twine drawstring cuts my palms as I run across Second Street and then Third and then down to the Fourth Street bridge. It’s an empty Sunday, with no people or even cars, and the only sound is the churning Hinkston, still narrow enough at Fourth Street to swim across, still rocky and deep enough to kill a man if he jumped. The black patent leather of my shoe is gone dusty; my good satin dress is pasted to my back. Death has been there, pressing against my clothes. A tree, uprooted by winter, groans in the distance, and instead of watching what I’m tossing over, I shield my eyes from the sun to watch it sway. When I hear Griffin crack the river’s surface and sink into the current, I dip into my pocket for the butterscotch I stole from Grandpap’s coat. Mauris is in heaven and knows it all, down to how many hairs I had on my head when I locked Griffin in the closet with the tomato pie.
JUPITER
In May comes a blizzard. A freak snow, a covering of inches such that the strongest tulips find themselves peeking out of ice. Excitement in town, and trouble up on the mountain—seeds frozen as they are planted, a power line that collapses under the weight of ice, a stove fire that kills three. We girls have to wear our ugly snow boots for the school picture. Caroline and I walk the cold in ours, tramping past the riverbank that has grown itself over the years into a muddy bog. The surprise of cold has frozen the Hinkston i
nto a second sheet of trees and sun, a reflection so crisp that we can see the thin needles of minor branches and the hawks’ nests they hold.
Imagene trails a few feet behind us, kicking a squared stone. When it doesn’t roll where she wants, she follows it out into the road and kicks it back, or she wanders into the high grass and stops to search through frost. Pookie almost didn’t come. She’s begun imagining things that aren’t happening. She hears castle doors closing and summer frogs growling, hallucinations she knows will become bigger as time passes, until she’s seeing purple stars and Negro presidents. Some days she sleeps during the daytime, while Miss Myrtle is in the White part of town cleaning houses and Imagene is up the road at school and she can be certain, perfectly certain, that none of the sounds she hears are true.
“Ain’t you cold?” Caroline asks me.
“Warm and cold’s all in your head—t’ain’t real.” I wore a summer dress just to spite my mother, who says I’ll be the only girl wearing one in all this snow. It’s blue cotton with white flowers, and my menstruation will stop for months because of it, she says. All the better, I say. “I got a coat on, Caroline, and a sweater you can’t see under that. It ain’t the material, anyway—it’s how many layers.”
“Yeah, and your mama probably hit you with a shot of devil water so you’d stay warm.”
She herself is wearing a shawl soaked in all the colors of the dinner table. There’s a green stripe like asparagus knitted across, and a purple one like a rutabaga, and a piss-colored one like a bell pepper rotting. There’s even a little pumpkin orange, knitted into a border around the collar. Against the bloodless snow all that color, all the life it implies, actually hurts my eyes, and I can see why she never wore it when her mother was alive, even though Mauris spent the better part of a summer knitting it. Miss Myrtle has marcelled the ends of Caroline’s hair so that each curl finishes in a straight edge, and in the winter cold her skin has gone clear, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so pretty. We pass Henry Robert Sells, checking the ice in bottles at the edge of his yard, and Caroline gives him that particular look of mistrust she saves for the elderly.
“Your Cousin Harrel coming home this summer?” I ask. Her Cousin Harrel is short and skillet-headed, not so good-looking, but he always drives home from Chicago in a long black Cadillac and throws quarters around and takes us girls to the drug store in Lexington, where he orders in a cool steady voice that makes the White people hurry to get our sodas. Last summer, he showed me and Caroline which gears go with which sound of the motor, and for two whole weeks we drove around and honked at boys and didn’t have to worry about what to do for fun.
“He ain’t coming this year. Grandmama told him to save his money and send it down instead. She say we hurting.”
“So what’re we supposed to do all summer?”
“What we always do. Nothing.”
“But it’s summer. We got to do something.”
“You go on, Huckleberry. My summer’ll never be over.”
“What you mean?”
“No more school for me, sister. Miss Wofford going to get me on over to that slip factory in Camargo. Grandmama say we need the money.”
“How she going to get you on at any slip factory?”
Caroline shrugs. “I saw her coming out the dime store. She poked me in the jaw with a finger and said light as I am, Mr. Robideau might think I’m a White girl anyway. She said kinfolk got to stick together. She crazy as a pineapple sandwich.”
Miss Wofford’s genes are, in fact, tangled with madness, descended as they are from the touchy Scotch Irish sheep farmers up the mountain. Sam Wofford, Caroline’s granddaddy, is one of the meanest men in the county, an auctioneer who swindles illiterate farmers and shot his daughter’s puppy on a Sunday before church, not because the puppy was sick or worrisome, but just for the hell of it. With Sonnyboy on one side of Caroline’s blood and Sam Wofford on the other, she doesn’t stand a chance.
“I make enough money,” she says, “I’ma hop my ass on a northbound bus.” She sings it into the air but it doesn’t ring like it should: the odd weather has frozen even waves of sound.
“You can’t just skip out of school,” I tell her. Without her, I’ll be alone with my thick glasses and my chewed-off hair and the countdown in my head. “Why can’t you just work in Camargo for the summer?” I ask her now.
“Need money to eat on all year.”
Imagene kicks her stone from the salted road into the shoveled school drive, and Caroline picks it up and puts it into the front pocket of her mother’s dress. “I’ll save it for you all day,” she says to Imagene, “promise,” and Imagene runs away in her own thick white shawl, off through the snow to the iced-over tire swing hanging from the school’s shortest tree.
“See you later,” Caroline says, as she heads for the base of the front steps, where the boys in our grade sit smoking Kents and shooting dice and trading playing cards with naked White ladies on their backs. We girls bind our breasts under adjustable elastic and cover our scent with deodorant while the boys celebrate their puberty, stroking the beginnings of mustaches and checking their own widening shoulders in mirrors. A high yellow boy named Ralph Cundiff takes it upon himself to practice the roll of snuff in Caroline’s mouth: he turns out the pink rim of her bottom lip, packs the leaves into her gum with the same grimy finger he’s used in his own mouth. They both work their jaws as Ralph taps his foot to count to ten: he spits, she spits, he spits, she spits, his juice arched gracefully by a magic of tongue and palate, hers at her feet, in little brown inkblots on the freshly salted walk.
“Aim for that piece a ice,” he says, and though she misses when she spits again, they both laugh. Ralph’s mother is president of the Second Baptist Ladies’ Missionary and would have a fit if she heard it, but Ralph laughs a gurgle like water down a drain. Caroline’s laughing so hard she can barely get her shawl off, but she does—she wads it up in a little woolen ball with all the colors of the planet Jupiter, and she throws it toward the steps, where it unfurls itself into one big sheet of color and floats to the ground. Her dress is wool too, brown and black houndsteeth that belonged to her mother. Caroline’s thinner than the dress, and her neck pokes out of the Peter Pan collar like a dish soap doll’s, and the hem should fall below the knee but instead splits her long legs in half. Still, she laughs. She’s still laughing when William Travis comes and takes her by the arm with such force that the Peter Pan collar slides over to one side and shows her collarbone. “Stay away from those silly boys,” Mr. Travis tells her, “whose very names spell trouble.”
I’m sitting on the top step pretending to read Giovanni’s Room and after hearing what Mr. Travis says, I start to go down the list of them—one is named Tyrone, there’s Ralph, and another named Otis, but just as I’m realizing no boy’s name starts with “U,” I see Mr. Travis dragging Caroline up the steps by her elbow. I raise my book even farther toward my nose and count the lines on page 92 to make my face look purposeful, but they’re soon up the steps and on me. Even with his heavy winter coat and gloves, Mr. Travis looks desperate: the effort of shoveling all morning has broken a sweat on his neck and forehead. “Lookit Audrey here,” he says. “Smart. Ladylike. You should be ’ssociating with her.”
“Smart?” Caroline raises her head to a queenly angle and smiles disdain with the chapped apples of her cheeks. “Smart?” she repeats, sizing me through the slits of her eyes as she works snuff between her front teeth. “Before I even get here in the morning, I done combed Imagene’s nappy head and massaged my grandmama’s corns. I can add up how much money I’ma make down to Camargo while Audrey sets here in school figuring up how much she’d weigh on the moon. Audrey ain’t got no more sense’n I do, maybe not even as much. She just lucky.”
Mr. Travis frowns at me, doubting himself. He’s confused into giving Caroline and me both quarters.
“Thank you, Mr. Travis.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Buddy.”
Rocking forward
on the balls of his feet, he pushes his gloves to tightness in the crevices between his fingers. “Candy money,” he says. “Money for hair ribbon. It ain’t for snuff.” He strides away on the juggernaut of his salt-bejeweled work boots, and Caroline and I both put our hands in our pockets and hunch our shoulders against all kinds of cold.
We both finger the stray threads in our dress pockets and we both close our eyes in seconds-long blinks of hurt, parallel movements we can feel through the quiet cold even if we’re unable to look at each other. The silence hurts Caroline more, I suppose, because she’s the first to speak. “Picture man’s here,” she says, though I too have seen the photographer wander into the yard of playing children. He’s the same man who came over from Hope last year and the year before that. Each spring his temples are grayer under his derby, his cinnamon skin always slightly more paled by the preceding winter. He tips awkwardly through a second-grade snowball fight, holding his tripod aloft so the frost won’t cling to its metal legs and make rust. He dodges a little girl running with her hat in her hands and makes for the steps, where he’ll set up his equipment.
“Good morning, Audrey. Morning, Imagene,” he calls, because like everyone else, Mr. Rollins has confused the celebrities from Mauris’s funeral. Pookie, who barely cried, was given an iced cake by Mr. Pennington the Monday after, while little Imagene, who went through an usher’s entire box of Kleenex, was ignored at recess by the girls in her grade. The upper school boys talked about how ba-a-ad Reverend Graves’s new Ford Fairlane looked parked in front of the church, but no one mentioned Miss Myrtle’s performance of shouting and fainting and low blood sugar. Caroline, whose stony funeral face lives in my mind like a gorgon’s, got wolf-whistled at that Monday on her way into school. The only person who tried to comfort her was Mrs. Dickerson, who turns doorknobs with her handkerchief and has a page turner near her desk because she refuses to handle our schoolbooks. The Monday after Mauris’s burial, she hugged Caroline from a miracle of distance, an enclosure of limbs held slightly aloft that let only her hair touch Caroline’s face. “Caroline Wallace,” she says now. “You’ll be in the back row of girls because you’re tallest. And Audrey! Didn’t you carry a change of shoes?”
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