But Nola never got a chance to hear what it was she didn’t know, for at that moment, the blaring horn of the Spence’s truck rang from the bottom of the hill. Her anxious glance in its direction did not go unnoticed by Delroy, and he backed away, for even without knowing about the incident on Della Way, the danger of Mrs. Spence’s tongue was legendary. Nola shook her head to indicate that it didn’t matter anymore, the damage had already been done and the Spence’s truck already carried her fate in its bright cab.
“It’s okay,” she assured him, “You can talk. It don’t matter if them see us now.”
But he’d already started down the hill. “Next week, when Merlene cook for us, we talk then, okay? I follow you home afterwards, and we talk.”
He walked backwards, not taking his eyes off her face, then he did something which knocked the breath right out of her. He picked a blade of grass from the roadside, then rolled it around his finger, touched it to his lips and placed it inside his shirt pocket beside his heart. And, whoosh, her breath left her chest just like that.
Then he was gone, turning to skitter around the bend just as another blare from the truck rang over the hill.
CHAPTER
20
Thirty-eight minutes. That was how long it took for the Spences to finish their business on Della Way and arrive at the Chambers’s gate. Thirty-eight minutes to deliver its news. The vehicle had not come to a complete halt before the driver’s door was flung open and the white loafers descended from the cab. They almost tripped over the mongrel as they hurried through the gate, followed by Lydia’s pretty yellow flip-flops skipping excitedly over the animal.
Nola had just made it through the gate when the truck belched its arrival. She did not go inside. Instead, she stooped by the zinc sheet of drying pimento, beside Papa’s new car, and began scraping the sun-crisped balls into the folds of her skirt. The smell of the spice forced itself within the cracks of the still air and was somewhat comforting to her raw nerves. She did not look up as Mrs. Spence lumbered by, but she heard the woman sniff angrily, and the sweet headiness of her perfume brushed the pimento scent aside.
Mrs. Spence’s voice shook with anticipation at the kitchen door. “Sadieee! Sadieee!”
There was answering confusion in Mama’s. “Mrs. Spence? I forget to give you something? I thought I filled the whole order on Tuesday. Camille need more already?”
“Nooo, Sadie, I don’t need nooo more chutneys. I had tooo coome here because sooomething come tooo my attention that I think yooo need tooo deal with right now! Right now, Sadie! This is a matter that can’t wait. I knooow if it was Lydioo, yooou would dooo the same thing for me!”
Mrs. Spence was ushered concernedly into the kitchen.
“Sadie, yooou know I love yooou like my own daughter, and I would never want anything bad tooo happen tooo your family, but sooomething very bad, sooomething very evil is going ooon, Sadie. Sooomething yooo have to deal with before the devil get his evil claws any deeper in yooour family!”
Mama was confused. The devil’s claws? In her family? Surely Mrs. Spence was mistaken.
“Ooooh, Sadie, nooo, nooo, nooo! Not the rest of yooou! Not the whole family. Just that chile. Frooom the moment I saw her as a baby, Sadie, frooom the moment I saw her look sooo different from the rest of yooou, I knew the devil had something to dooo with that chile.” Mrs. Spence’s voice fell to a harsh whisper. “She born with the evil in her, Sadie.”
Nola heard Papa’s voice asking what the commotion was all about. She stood and allowed the pimento balls to clatter back onto the zinc, then walked slowly towards Ellie’s pen. She emptied a bag of grain into the dirty trough. Ellie spread her lips greedily over the grain and immediately began to chew, her frayed rope dragging in the dung like a sawed-off noose.
Papa’s voice bellowed from the kitchen, “NOLA! NOLA!”
Nola sat on the rotting stump and stared into Mama’s scallion plot. The stalks were that deep green that promised a spicy shock of flavour, a result of Mama’s home-made fertilizer – Ellie’s dried dung mixed with the discarded rotted peel of her vegetables and fruits. Her gaze traveled to the field of wild guinea grass beside it, the same field where she and Dahlia and Delroy had gone for her birthday. That morning when they’d raced through it, the angelic dew had made the grass lush and straight, but now the blades hung low, their tips bowed as if pining for the cool relief of the absent breeze.
“Where’s that damn pickney?! She think she can hide from me? Sadie, you always beggin’ for that child. You see what I tell you, though? No damn good! She come to no good just like I tell you!”
Mrs. Spence stepped from the kitchen, her eyes going straight to the zinc where the pimento seeds lay scattered. Her shoulders shook in an annoyed huff and she said something over her shoulder, then ushered Lydia towards the gate.
Mama didn’t see them out. Nola could see her head by the kitchen window, bent over the sink. But this time her hands weren’t moving.
“I want her out this house! If she can’t behave like a decent person, then she can go live somewhere else! Spending time with whores?! Not in my house! Not in my house, Sadie! What you think she was doing there? You think she never took part in all the nastiness goin’ on in that place?” Papa was almost screaming.
Mama’s head jerked sharply as his finger rammed into her temple. She remained rooted in the spot, though, and when Papa stopped poking her head, she bowed it again.
“It’s your damn fault, Sadie! You raise a sinner, and then mek me have to deal with the shame!”
Louisa came to the door and looked out, straight at the spot where Nola sat. Funny how well Louisa knew her. Funny how well she knew her even though they’d barely had much to say to each other for the last couple years. Truth be told, they hadn’t had the opportunity to speak much, ever since Louisa had been moved out of their room, yet her sister always seemed to know exactly where she was. Nola recognized the quick flick of the hand, giving her the signal to run, telling her to go quickly as she closed the kitchen door.
Nola sighed. Run to where, Louisa? Tell me, and I’ll go.
But Papa flung the door open again. His eyes flashed across the lawn. Grey flames licked up her spine and sent her body into a shivering fit.
Nola heard her sister’s voice, in that calm of calm, the calm that had always worked like magic on Papa’s rage, tell him that she thought she saw Nola heading out the gate, maybe to the river.
But Papa’s rage was too much for Louisa’s voice to temper that evening, and even as he stormed from the kitchen towards Ellie’s pen, he was already hauling the belt from his waist. It chafed the loops of his pants, twisting the zipper across his hip. He seemed to glide, graceful despite his twisted pants. Mama had told her that he used to play cricket, and when he ran for the pitch, he’d looked as if he were dancing. That’s where Mama had first seen Papa, and had instantly fallen in love.
He reached Nola in one second, arm raised for the pitch. The belt glided with the same liquid grace as its carrier, the silver buckle glimmering in the evening light.
Nola didn’t move. Papa’s lips drew back from his teeth in the hiss that announced the commencement of her beating, but she did not put her arms over her face. She needed to look into those eyes once again. Those eyes that held the mystery of the man who’d fathered her, yet hated her.
The ripples of his pupils finally pulled her to her feet. She stood right beneath the harsh breeze of his nostrils. He stared back, and once again, his hand faltered. Slowly, he lowered the belt and pointed a finger in her face. “You turn whore, now?” His voice was like a thin thread through the blanket of dulling light.
She could smell lemonade on his breath, bittersweet on stale saliva. She could see Louisa, now behind him, eyes flashing wildly from Nola’s face, to the back of Papa’s neck. Her eyes begged Nola not to say anything, just to take the licks so that it would be over soon.
So Nola explained nothing of Slugga’s experiment. It was the least s
he could do for her sister for the times that she’d saved her. Instead, she lifted her hand and touched Papa’s face.
He flinched. The breath wedged in Louisa’s throat. But Nola cared about nothing but the feel of that skin beneath her fingers. So different while he was awake. The jaw bone which had been slack in sleep was now tight beneath ropy muscle.
Suddenly, a loud phwapp ripped through the air.
Nola pulled again at his cheek, smiling at the sound it made as the lips plucked sharply from the teeth. The sound ripped the air again and Louisa gasped louder this time. Nola could not stop. She had to see the expression in Papa’s eyes when she touched him the way her sister had done. She’d watched them play this game so many times, the one where Louisa pulled at his lips till they lay pink and taut against his teeth, and commanded him to say words from the distorted mouth. Say ‘hit’, she would say, and Papa would say, ‘Shit’, and they would both crack up. Nola would laugh too, but the truth was, watching them play that game had always left her with a gaping hole in her chest.
Papa’s head suddenly jerked, and she had to bring her other hand up to hold it still.
That was when Louisa screamed.
This time, the sound cracked the air right open. Nola looked curiously at Louisa’s frantic face, at the mouth, wide open, at the tears streaming beneath her chin like the ribbons of a church hat.
Mama was running from the kitchen now, her arms flailing above her head. She was shouting, words that sounded like Hop, hop, hop! Dab it, Louisa! Dab, dab, dab!
But as Mama got closer, her words became clear. She was not telling Nola to ‘hop’, but to ‘stop’, and she was not telling Louisa to ‘dab it’, but to ‘grab it’. So Nola looked at her hand, the one she’d raised to hold Papa’s face, the one that had been resting by her side. In that hand was Grampy’s machete.
She looked confusedly at the rusty blade against Papa’s cheek. How it get from the rafters of Ellie’s pen and into my hand? She’d used it yesterday, to cut a fresh bundle of grass for Ellie, but she’d put it back, standing on Grampy’s milking stool to cotch the blade on the rafter where it was kept.
Louisa screamed again. She and Mama stood with extended arms, pleading with her to drop the machete. But she couldn’t do that. That would mean letting go of Papa’s face, and she couldn’t do that now. Not when she’d finally gotten a taste of something she’d wanted all her life. Not with him looking like that at her, waiting for her next move.
She shook her head, knowing that Mama would understand. Mama knew they were the same, the blade and Papa’s eyes—the same cold steel.
For years to come, in Nola’s memories of the events that followed, everything seemed to have happened in slow motion. She would remember Louisa’s screams as the long, drawn-out sound of time being stretched like a stiffened piece of old gum. She would remember Papa’s hand sailing in its graceful dance through the air, sailing for an eternity before it struck.
The fist was closed. She knew that because of how it struck, with a concentrated force below her jawbone. It sent her chin cracking up so far that her head felt as if it had separated from her neck. Her first thought as she sailed through the air was that she would look up from where her head had landed and be able to see her body still standing there beside Papa, with the belt at its feet. Her second thought was of Dahlia’s lip-nose, the features joined forever by her own papa’s fist, and she knew that from now on, she and Dahlia would forever be kindred spirits in their deformities.
She flew a good distance, rolling until she stopped on her side, right beside Ellie’s stomping hooves. Her face slapped so hard into a pile of wet dung that it packed the cavity of her ear. It was hot, like steaming cocoa tea. She was able to register that. It seemed to be flowing from her head down to her shoulders. The warmth covered her like a blanket. If it weren’t for the dull screams that continued around her, she would have pulled her legs up to her belly and gone to sleep in the warm cocoon.
But the screaming wouldn’t stop, so she opened her eyes. The dung was around her like a river of syrup, but it was doing something strange to her hearing. It was reversing sound. Louisa’s hysterical screams were coming from far away, from way down the bottom of Macca Hill, while Mama’s barely audible ‘Dear Heavenly Father’ rang through Nola’s head as if the words had been bellowed straight into her ear.
She tried to sit up, but her head dropped heavily back into the manure. It splattered into her mouth. It was the taste that eventually told her that she was not lying in manure. She was lying in a lake of blood!
Dear Jesus! The machete! Papa! She tried to rock herself up unto her hands and knees, her movements slushing in the pool. She wobbled to her feet, using the tree trunk as support. She wanted to scream for Papa, to bellow his name, but she was frozen, all except the wild searching of her eyes.
She found him by the door of the pen, his head bowed and resting on one arm on the door jamb. There wasn’t any blood on his body. The relief of seeing him there almost sent her fainting back to the ground, if it weren’t for Louisa’s screaming.
It hit her then. The blood had to have been coming from somewhere, from someone! Mama and Louisa were okay, huddled together on the lawn, Louisa screaming into Mama’s neck. Mama was crying too, staring with wild eyes at a spot behind Nola.
Nola turned then, to the spot where she’d landed after Papa’s blow, the spot beside Ellie’s hooves. There she was. Ellie. Dear Ellie, lying on her side with her hoof twitching as if desperately trying to get someone’s attention.
Nola didn’t see the machete till she was standing over Ellie. It was as precisely placed into the cow’s neck as if it had been a deliberate chop by a butcher. Even now, it pulsed a fountain of black syrup. The eyes were open, looking up at her for help, and her mouth … her mouth gasped, the grain from the trough still on her tongue.
Nola sank to her knees, flinging her arms over Ellie’s sopping chest. “No God! … Please Jesus, don’t make her die”.
The cow’s last breath left her in a mixture of a gurgle and a sigh. Nola only knew that the sound vibrated through her own chest. She stared into the shimmering pool around them and gave a relieved sigh of her own. Grampy was there! Right there in the blood. She could see him taking Ellie’s rope and leading her away, his half-smile waffling in the ripples.
“Take me too, Grampy, don’t leave me again.”
Someone tugged at her shoulder. “I want to go with him!” Her voice was louder now. “I goin’ with them! I goin’ with Grampy and Ellie. Them can’t leave me here!”
The hands were determined. She began to fight, was about to kick them away, until the arms grabbed her, and the smell rendered her immobile. Grampy! He’d come! He’d really come! She could smell him—old clothes, old skin, old sweat, old breath, old love.
“Grampy, why you took so long? You know how long I been waitin’ for you! I ready to go with you,” she sobbed, resting her head in the brittle cavity of the chest, eroded now by both life and death. Another perfect fit.
Then he spoke, and Nola wondered at how much death had changed his voice. So much deeper now. “Come child,” he said, “Get yourself outta this mess. Come make we wash. Ellie gone, child. Nuttin’ you or me can do ‘bout that now.”
“Grampy, … I ready to go,” she whispered impatiently into the furry ear.
It was not Grampy who whispered back. “Not Grampy, child. Tackie. Just ole Tackie.”
Nola looked up at the creased face then. Mas Tackie tried to smile, but his lips quivered, then gave up as he looked back at her bloody face.
Mama and Louisa took her from him at the pipe. Silent Mama, her lips blue, like she’d just walked out of the icy river, and Louisa, stifling her sobs with hiccups. They stripped off her clothes and scrubbed her with ash. They rubbed the soot into her skin with the laundry brush, softening the crust of blood and dung and tears. The bristles tore her skin, but she didn’t complain, for the friction was bringing life back into her numb limbs.
/> Over by the coolie plum tree a crowd had grown. They’d heard the screams. That was the thing with the hill. It was generous with its noise. They mulled over Ellie’s body, passing the story around till it was clearer to them than it was to the people who’d witnessed it.
For the second time in her life, Nola stood by the outside pipe and turned the clear water into rust. Nola Chambers had turned clear water into blood when she tried to kill her papa. What would the dew angels have made of that? Nola giggled.
Mama and Louisa looked up, startled. They wouldn’t have understood the joke, about the tale of the angels, about how Dahlia had told her to believe in miracles, and how she’d believed, so much so that she’d thought that Grampy had come to take her away. She laughed again, this time so loudly that it was a shock to her own throbbing head. There was a stunned silence from the crowd by the pen, and Louisa gave Mama a frightened glance. It all made Nola laugh more.
The laughter bubbled out till she had to bend over and hold her belly. It brought tears streaming down her cheeks, and when Mama tried to cover her head with a towel, she flung it off. She stood there before them all, in her soaking bra and panties, the scars on her back and upper arms shining like purple snakes in the dim light.
CHAPTER
21
Nola was bound tightly in red cloth, fetched from the back room of the Open Bible Church for occasions such as this. It had been sent for with such urgency that poor Sister Norma had broken the key in the lock in her hurry to get it. The cloth had been rushed up to the Chambers’s home in the cab of the Spence’s truck, dutifully delivering the antidote to the news it had earlier deposited. The cloth was sprinkled with white rum. Both the colour and strong smell were the perfect combination to keep the evil at bay.
Most of the residents of the hill had left their half-eaten dinners to witness the results of the evil rampage for themselves. God-fearing people that they were, they’d immediately set about the task of saving Nola Chambers’ soul. The prayers had been unceasing.
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