In the afternoon, the sun peeked out from beneath clouds as big as my thoughts, and we stepped outside into a cool breeze that trailed the rain. Low-slung roofs framed the sky, and the blue of it was so sweet it looked like hope. Even the alleys appeared washed clean and shiny in that emerging sunlight. Ira and I made our rounds. This time we had bolts of fabric to give out to the women and bags of clothes for the children, all of it donated.
On that day I first saw the girl, during that tiny flicker in time everything changed.
I was in the yard of an old colored man named Madu. I’d already heard about the man, a practitioner of so-called black magic. Short, slumped, and wrinkled, he looked exactly as he had been described. Ira told me that he was quite harmless, that he kept to himself for the most part, and that he concocted all manner of potions and cast spells that few people believed in anymore. He inspired no fear in me whatsoever.
Joseph, who had apparently taken a liking to me, and another boy had led me into the voodoo man’s yard. They had taunted me onward with promises of something funny, and I had let them. They took my hand, and the three of us sneaked under the man’s window. Joseph’s eyes were wide and gleaming. Fighting laughter, he put a dusty finger up to his lips and whispered, “Just listen.”
Soon I heard what they found so amusing. The voodoo man was snoring. It began with deep breathing, which became louder and louder, building in volume and depth, and then finally those sounds stopped, replaced by a few loud coughs and snorts, then some indiscernible mumblings, and finally a brief silence. Then the whole process began again.
What we were doing was really the most absurd thing, truly a ridiculous activity, but not all that unusual when one considers the lengths boys will go to in order to create nonsense. Joseph was doubled over, laughing silently to keep from awakening the old man. As we walked away, he whispered to me, “It always go that way. Every time.”
I returned to Ira’s side, as we had much work to do, but when I looked up, there she was, in the yard we had just exited, a striking young white girl, about thirteen or fourteen, I guessed, dressed in ragged clothes that appeared to be castoffs from boys. But what struck me most were her pale-bluish eyes, perhaps the palest eyes I’d ever seen. She had coppery-red hair that appeared uncombed and windswept. Together the eyes and hair lent her the appearance of a wild creature. But I had to wonder why a white girl, no matter how poor, was here in the worst part of the District, which housed the poorest of the poor, where even water and sewer services had still not arrived, where outhouse content was stored in barrels and then collected overnight in horse-drawn carts and later dumped into the gulf.
I peered at her, and she stared back with eyes that were intense and piercing, her body tense as if she were ready to flee in an instant. I couldn’t shake the image of an animal, something untamed and feline.
I turned to ask Ira a question. “Who is the girl?”
“Beg your pardon?” he replied.
But when I turned back to point her out, she was no longer there. I saw only the rutted shell road she must have followed, though the dust did not appear disturbed, and on either side of the road the shacks and sheds were so tightly spaced they left room for only some odd shapes of blue sky above and patches of grass and woodpiles.
I was dizzy with the feeling that I’d lost something. As though something I’d wanted badly had slipped through my outstretched hands. I went on to describe the girl to Ira, and he answered, “I know the one. They tell me she’s an imbecile. She can’t speak.”
“What is her name?”
Ira stroked his bearded chin. “I don’t know. I’ve only heard her called ‘the girl’; nothing else, I’m afraid.”
“That’s abominable.”
“Yes. I’ve asked, but everyone denies knowing her name. Even those I’m sure are aware.”
“I wonder why?”
“They seem to be protecting her.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know. There’s an air of secrecy about it all.”
“Do you know where she came from? How she happens to be here?”
“No. I’m sorry. I’m not in the habit of asking a great deal of questions.”
“Do you think she’s an imbecile?”
“I’ve no idea. I tried to speak to her once. She ran away from me. But in that instant, while I had her attention, I saw something in her eyes. Intelligence, something sharp beneath the fear.”
I looked back to where I’d seen the girl in hopes she might reappear. “I wonder . . .”
“Go on.”
“I wonder if I might be able to help her.”
Ira gazed over at me. “I suppose there could be no harm in trying. But for the most part I think we should focus our efforts on those who want help. God knows there are enough of them who welcome our charity, and I’ve been told she shuns any offers of help.”
So she was elusive. That made her even more intriguing. I’d always lived my life under such scrutiny, and I imagined that her life could not have been more the opposite. What would it be like to live in the shadows, in the places where few eyes could see? But there was something else inside me besides curiosity and intrigue, something compassionate. I did want to help her.
I still tell myself that.
I said, “Perhaps she’s simply frightened.”
He paused. “Your mother wants you to work with needy whites. We would not be violating her directions.”
I didn’t say that I no longer cared about my mother’s directions.
He paused again. “I’ll relent,” he said. “Go ahead. See what you can do with her.”
That evening, Jonathan and I met after dinner on the portico. He told me he’d been forced to dine with his aunt, uncle, and parents to celebrate his uncle’s birthday, which made his humor sour. Jonathan was even more displeased with his work at the seawall, and he also voiced his unhappiness over my punishment, which left me too exhausted to do much beyond share a glass of iced tea and a half hour or so of conversation at the end of the day.
“How awful is it down in the alleys?” he asked me when all was quiet. Mother and Etta had left us alone.
“The living conditions are awful.”
“How are you coping?”
I shrugged. “It’s not as bad as I had thought.”
“Tell me about it,” he said, pulling my chair closer to his.
But I found myself as mute as the girl I’d seen that day was purported to be. How to describe so many people, smells, sights, and sensations? It was too much, and I ended up shaking my head, while those annoying tears threatened again.
Jonathan took my hand and searched deeply into my eyes. “That bad?”
I had to glance away.
And he said, “I’m so sorry, Grace.”
Later I slipped into bed to find the linens unusually cool from the rain of the day. I let them warm against my body, my eyes still open, exhaustion taking me under its grip. But sleep wouldn’t come, despite my fatigue. The walls creaked and moaned. I turned and found another section of bed that remained cool. The sights and sounds of the day tumbled through my mind, then more questions and finally sleep. But my last thought was Who is she?
Chapter Eleven
ETTA
The most interesting things in Nacogdoches were under the ground. Even as a child, the Caddo burial mounds had intrigued Etta. She had imagined treasures and riches hidden in the earth and was painfully disappointed when a site was excavated and nothing but old tools and dirt-encrusted bones were found. The Caddo had been a poor transient tribe, and thereafter Etta’s belief in hidden wealth and surprises virtually vanished, and her belief in herself, in the value of making her own way, soared even higher.
Her parents shook their heads and worried over her. When she was about thirteen, she took a walk in the woods one warm, humid day. Overhead the trees were green and lustrous under the heat, and the vegetation below her was soft and inviting. She had intended to lie down for only a few m
inutes but instead fell into a deep sleep as if under a spell. She ended up staying for hours, stretched out faceup in the tangle of greenery, alone but for the company of insects and birds.
They found her well after dusk. Her parents had organized a search party with neighbors and friends, and when they came upon her in the depths of the woods, asleep, caring not at all for whom she had worried, she explained, “I took a nap.”
She had never understood what all the fuss had been about. After the incident, people looked at her with a sort of confounded wariness, as if they found her difficult to take seriously, and in her parents’ eyes she saw disappointment, and even a fair amount of embarrassment. There had always been something in her—an unconventionality—that evoked their glances of disapproval. She saw it from teachers, ministers, and classmates, too.
She came away from that event with a profound sense of being misunderstood, underestimated, and it didn’t take long for a desire for some kind of reckoning, even revenge, to follow. How glorious it would be to succeed in her own way and prove them all wrong. After that there was a wildness in her actions, a lack of appropriateness, an impulsivity, and other parents found her worrisome, a child to be avoided, a less-than-desirable playmate.
Despite disapproving parents, she had always had a fair number of friends, and when she reached courting age, her looks triumphed over any doubts in the minds of young men. By the age of twenty-one, she had been turning away suitors for years, all to the distress of her mother, who, although she wanted her daughter to marry well, didn’t want her to wait so long that she ended up without a husband at all. It was clear that her mother wanted her off and married, often saying, “You can’t live here forever.”
At the time, Etta disliked the idea of marriage—it was too much like being owned, like becoming another piece of property belonging to a man. Etta had observed her mother’s constant unhappiness with having to do menial but hard work and having to be subservient to her husband, her frustration often taken out on Etta. A strong woman who’d once worked for suffrage had turned silent and cold, distant from everyone. Etta could not end up like that.
She had thought about applying to the teachers college in Nacogdoches but never got around to doing so. After years of “lolling around,” as her mother put it, she was finally attempting to do something, to secure a post as a bank teller’s assistant.
She met the circus man a few days later. A long line of ancient-looking wagons pulled by shaggy-coated beasts had passed through town and then stopped in a cleared cotton field on the outskirts of the city. There, strangely dressed men set up tents, pens, and stands.
Etta had heard the nightly show they were putting on was worthwhile, so she and a friend decided to take in the performance one Friday night. They were early to arrive and found seats in the front row.
After the animal acts, clowns, cannons, stunts, and men on stilts, Philo was the last act of the evening. He strutted out under the lights, and Etta sat back in her seat. This was the first time she’d seen a man so scantily clad, in form-fitting clothing that was thinner than any undergarments she’d ever seen before. They showed off every muscle in stark outline. He strode around the ring, arms outstretched, basking in admiration before he’d even done a thing, and as he scanned the audience, Etta could have sworn that his eyes landed on her. She could also have sworn that a knowing smile played on his lips, also directed at her.
He had deep-set eyes, dark features, well-shaped lips, and blue-black hair that curled like filigree. He was statuesque but fluid, his body like a dancer’s. As Etta watched the way he triumphed over the room, something inside her did a cartwheel.
The announcer introduced Philo as the Flying Greek and went on to say that the Flying Greek normally did his act with a net underneath him for safety, but sometimes he would do the act without one. The announcer, with much dramatic flair, then turned to Philo for a decision about that night’s performance.
Philo waited for a pregnant pause to go by, the audience hushed and expectant, and then, Etta could swear, he looked at her again. He turned, walked back toward the announcer, and nodded yes, he would do the act tonight without a net. Only later did Etta learn that this was a part of the act; he always performed without a net as a “matter of honor.”
The tension built while the circus workers disassembled the net and Philo climbed what appeared to be hundreds of steps straight up the tall center pole and then perched on a platform no bigger than the stoop behind a poor farmhouse. The other trapeze artist, the man who would catch Philo, was already swinging on the opposite trapeze, his arms dangling in loose arcs, his muscles flexing. Etta waited, each breath like a bullet lodged in her chest.
Philo’s act included swinging gracefully and flipping and completing somersaults in the air before being caught by the other man. Etta and the rest of the audience sat in a state of hushed trepidation, and the moments when Philo flew loose in the air were the longest moments of her life. When it was done, he descended the hundreds of steps again, all to a roar of applause and the crowd’s shouts of approval.
While the cheers and clapping went on, Etta sat in shocked stillness. To do such a thing, to take such a chance with his life, he had to be the most fully alive person she’d ever seen. How did it feel to touch death and then fool it? How did it feel to be free and flying out in the treacherous open air, nothing beneath you, and then turn in a split second’s time and grab on to life again?
After the show, she and her friend parted, and Etta asked around for him and was eventually led to his wagon. Hoisting her skirts, she went up the steps and knocked. He said for her to enter, and when she opened the door, his back was turned to her, his shoulders huge, round and shiny like overturned polished bowls. Then he swiveled her way. He was wiping his face with a small towel, and the sight of his bare arms, ridged with veins, gave her a pleasing jolt. He smiled and gestured her closer.
“The lovely girl in the front row,” he said with an amused expression on his face.
“Thank you.”
“And what brings you here?”
She found his voice softer than she had expected. He hadn’t the booming baritone of the circus announcer, and his demeanor was softer than she had expected, too. But he was even lovelier up close. His hair was black satin, and his dark eyes were rimmed with lashes like tightly woven nests. He was still scantily dressed, and Etta couldn’t help herself; her eyes drifted downward.
He noticed. “But you are a good girl,” he said.
Etta lifted her chin. “I am not.”
And then he laughed.
He amazed her with stories about the Greek gods that his parents had told him, about sailors captured by mermaids, and sunken treasure in the straits between the Greek isles. Then he told her his life story, how he had learned his stunts as a child from his father, then was orphaned in his teens, and how he later joined the fighting in the Philippines, where he ran gunboats up the Rio Grande and survived being ambushed by the Filipinos in the bush.
He had traveled first by jumping trains and then with the circus. He’d seen automobile races run on the Merrick road from Springfield, Illinois, to Babylon, twenty-five miles out and back. He’d seen New York’s Central Park, where rich boys sailed miniature yachts on the lakes and girls sat with sketch pads on their laps at Lily Pond. He’d seen the razor-stubble deserts and mountains of Arizona, where the Apaches were still fighting for their freedom. He described Washington, DC, as the cleanest city he’d ever seen, most of its electric-light wires, telegraph, and telephone lines underground. And he’d sat on the balcony at the famous Cliff House, in San Francisco, which hung out over the ocean on a cliff at Point Lobos, where sea lions played below.
He moved his hands as he spoke, shaping and sizing and directing his stories. He was the only person she knew who was perfectly content with his life, who didn’t constantly try to rewrite his history and better his part in it.
He told stories about far-distant places, and she could almost
hear the click-clack of the trains, the roar of steamships, the horse’s hooves padding along roads.
They met in secret, and being in the bunk of his small wagon, closed away from the outside world, was not unlike being in the berth of a ship bound for other lands. Until he had finished the evening show and she could see him again, Etta could do little else except busy herself with trivialities. The smell of a man’s hair oil similar to his was enough to make her heady and anxious beyond reason. She drifted through her days and waited, just waited, until she could unfold against his pliable body under the candlelight again.
When the circus left town two weeks later, she and Philo corresponded with letters. Etta found his penmanship almost unreadable; he was nearly illiterate, his English grammar and punctuation indicating he’d had little schooling, but she cared not a whit. As soon as he’d made his way back to a nearby town, Etta took the train to meet him.
Neither of them mentioned plans for the future, which told Etta more than she wanted to know. Of course there could be no future; the circus was poor, and she couldn’t go with him, but in the moment she swam in powerful feelings she didn’t know she was capable of. Once she’d thought of herself as too mature and wise to let anything so overwhelmingly sweep her away. Once she’d thought of love as a mere decision to make along the way, but every time she remembered him back then she experienced a simplemindedness that knocked everything else away, a clutching feeling in the pit of her stomach, and a warm weakness that spread from neck to knees against her will.
Throughout her day, the huge swelling passion it had come to be overwhelmed her, and finally she saw love as the power behind all human movement and decisions, and she was stunned by this loving, this loving Philo.
Her mother discovered them. Etta never knew how her mother learned that she was seeing Philo in secret, and it no longer mattered. Once the plans for her banishment to Galveston were announced, Etta put up only a weak fight. Philo had mentioned nothing about the future, and despite her dreamy tendencies, Etta was a realist. Circus life was hard, and hardship might ruin her looks and thus the love they had. Besides, Philo didn’t even ask her, perhaps aware that he had little to offer. So she packed her best belongings, said good-bye to friends, and stepped off the edge of the world as she knew it. No one knew that she was taking a newly fractured heart along with her. No one knew that she had left behind a love that had meant everything to her.
The Uncertain Season Page 10