It was Mable who heard everything, the trivial and triumphant. So when Cookie wanted to know what Poo-Poo was doing with his spare time, she went to Mable and asked. Instead of telling Cookie that Poo-Poo was working off a debt to Mr. Carthers on account of Mr. Carthers got Poo-Poo’s cousin out of jail, Mable just said, It’s not what you think, and left it at that. When Banky told her he and his woman were thinking about having another baby, even though the first child, Banky Two, lived with Banky One’s mother, Mable had the sense to tell everyone she could get her hands on and shame him into thinking of someone else besides himself.
“Yeah, well, not everybody got time to think about holding and telling gossip,” Liberty said.
“Girl, don’t tell me.”
“Mable, what am I gone do?” They sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee.
“I heard the sawmill quarters need somebody to launder.”
Liberty sipped her coffee and thought for a moment. “What I’m gone do with Queen Ester?”
“Cookie take in kids sometimes.”
Liberty wrinkled her nose. “She can’t be under nobody’s care but mine, Mable.”
You and that girl, Mable thought. Queen Ester napped upstairs while they had their afternoon coffee. Though her daughter was fourteen years old, Liberty still made the girl take a nap during the day.
“Maybe when Sweets get back—”
“Sweets ain’t coming back,” Mable said, cutting her off. She settled herself in her chair. “What we need to do is figure out what you good at.”
“Cooking, cleaning, keeping house. Just like everybody else.”
“Yeah…” Mable trailed off. Suddenly she smiled. “Cept you got this house.”
“So?”
“So? So we can start an eating place. Folks can stop in for pie and such.”
“Listen to you. Ain’t nobody gone come way out here.”
“Look who you talking to.”
* * *
As good as her word, Mable somehow got tables, chairs, and customers within the first six months. And the work made Liberty practical. With cooking and cleaning up for as many as twenty people, who had time to kiss some child under the chin? No longer did she go through the effort of putting Queen Ester to bed only to wake her again with a good-night song. Now rhubarb and lemon pies were made for the flow of paying customers and extra money bought more supplies, not church shoes. To Queen Ester, Liberty’s new responsibilities felt like negligence, so she spent more time than she should have thinking of ways to remind Liberty of their blissful years together. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother called to her, “Down to eat, child,” for her dinner. Too scared to throw a tantrum, she turned sullen, secretive, waiting to emerge out of dark corners, wanting her mother to wear again her eager playful smile. Liberty, strict, sometimes even mean, didn’t help. “Girl, you come out of that dark. Hear me?”
“Just looking, Mama.”
“Looking at what?”
“You.”
“You ain’t got to be in the dark to see me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Queen Ester said nothing more, watching her mother through lowered lashes. But she continued to watch her mother from the crook of the hallways.
Except for Queen Ester’s queer ways, which Liberty was too busy to think about, things at the house had turned around. When she went to buy supplies, people said hello as if they meant it. Over the next four years she made friends: Monroe, Wilde, and Mable. She spent nights now smoking cigarettes and playing cards on her porch. Thursdays, Monroe always managed to hustle up a pint of whiskey to pass around while they choked on adult laughter. Except for Queen Ester, and me and mine not being three, things are good now, Liberty would think. Too good.
* * *
Maybe they were, since soon after that, Monroe killed Wilde over a game of dominoes with a knife or a razor or something sharp enough to take a life. Mable made her way over to Liberty’s to tell her. It was Thursday, and Liberty was expecting them all. Mable approached the path that Liberty’s customers had worn from the road to the café. Mable smiled, thinking about that path, because of the worrying she and Liberty had done while they planned the café over how folks would find a house a wilderness away. She trotted down the footpath until she stood in the swept yard that enclosed the house, her feet marking and breaking the intricate pattern of circles made in the dust before dawn by Queen Ester. Mable set her hand on the doorknob and pushed open the door. “We don’t have no eggs,” Liberty said, and before Mable could remember what she came for she took up her part in a conversation they had had every week since the café opened.
“You say that every Thursday. How you expect somebody to eat hash without some eggs stirred up in them? Liberty, sometime you don’t make no sense.”
“Mable, I would still have some eggs left over if you wouldn’t come in every day asking for eggs to go with your hash. You need to be thankful for what you receive the rest of the week.”
“I be thankful if you get me some eggs on Thursday.”
“Lord as my witness, you getting as bad as Wilde, coming in here asking for roast turkey like it’s Thanksgiving every day.”
Then Mable remembered and the light talk, which because of its Thursday-after-Thursday litany didn’t even take up space in the mind, stopped. Breaking into Liberty’s smile, Mable said, “Monroe done killed Wilde.”
It was midday; she had been on her feet all morning, and Liberty was tired. But before she could think how to mourn and run the café at the same time, her customers flared up with the news of Wilde and Monroe, pressing her for information.
“What that Mable just say?”
“Mable say Monroe killed Wilde,” Liberty said quietly.
“Probably over some woman. Ain’t that the way it always is?” Porch said to Banky.
“Me myself, I make it my business never to get tied up with women and dominoes. Lord knows you die quick that way.”
Liberty watched her customers weave together a tale. Their voices rose and grew sharp until, finally having a story that made sense, they smiled, nodded, and said Monroe had killed Wilde over a woman, more than likely that Annabelle who lived in Bradley, the one Wilde went to see every now and again. And somehow Monroe found out about it. Then he got jealous of Wilde or the other way around, but it didn’t matter because the outcome was the same.
“Wilde’s poor mama. She got to be in a bad way. Wilde was young.”
“Wilde’s mama? What about Wilde? You get a little piece of tail and see what happens, what I say,” Banky said.
“I say shut it. All of you.” Mable came through the door, food on a plate, steaming. She sat down in an empty chair, the plate balancing on her knee. Liberty pushed away from the bar, calmly lifted the plate from Mable’s knee, and placed the hash in front of Porch. “So what the story on Monroe and Wilde?”
“Monroe, Monroe just up and killed him. They was off a ways from Josephine’s house, just playing dominoes like always. Betting and all the money heaping up on Wilde side, and Monroe just losing worse and worse as the game run on—”
Mable stopped. “Liberty, ain’t see none of this firsthand.” Any answer that Liberty gave was swallowed up by the cacophony. The death of Wilde was now in the mouths and ears of the café, and because of the strangeness of death and dominoes, the men and women tore at its pieces, making it manageable and commonplace. Snatches of words—the problem with gambling between friends, Joe Louis’s recent heavyweight title, and the price of catalog dresses—floated in the air.
* * *
They didn’t see him because he didn’t look like a long journey but rather a hard day’s work. He had been in Lafayette for three days. Three days of searching for work at the sawmills, the stores, or as an extra hand for picking cotton, corn, or tobacco, and nothing came to fruition. The sawmills and stores had enough workers, and cotton and corn were out of season. From a casual stroll—the lazy bend and thrust of knee and foot that the newly arrived affect to look as
if they’ve always been in town—to the hurried desperate pace of a traveler running out of what he brought with him, the man walked up and down Main Street, frightened of his idleness. He followed the slow trickle of people that entered the woods and came upon Liberty’s café, beckoned by the house whose wings opened in a gesture of welcome.
He walked in mid-story, and it took him time to find the source. Opening the front door, he was faced with stairs, so he looked to the left and caught sight of five pine tables in a loose circle covered with what seemed like large dresses split open to protect the naked wood. Unnoticed, he heard the young woman tell a tale, sitting with her legs open and relaxed like a man drinking, but her mouth hasty and snarled as she spoke.
He took a chair at an empty table and waited, rubbing his palms against his knees. A woman who was taller than anything stood braced against a bar counter—there were no bottles, just clean empty glasses—and he wondered how she pulled off being that big without looking fat. He stared at them all, one by one, assuming that the men were there because they had no work and the women for the free talk.
The man needed food, a cup of coffee with sugar and no milk, maybe a piece of hoecake if there was any to be had. But he didn’t realize Liberty ran the café as she would a dinner party; her customers were guests and like the best of hostesses she sensed their hunger without being told. It was not good that the man walked in not bothering with a hello and waited for a moment to catch her eye. It would never come, as there was no need for Liberty to look up and survey what there was.
While he waited, the conversation curled around back to the death; it couldn’t help itself. The talk had started out innocent, a soft complaint from Carol Lee about a dress and her man.
“I told him I needs a new dress and he say, ‘You needs a new job.’ ‘I tell you what,’ I tell him. ‘I gets a new dress or you get a new girl.’”
“I done seen you three times since Sunday, ain’t a once in the same dress. That’s all a man got to say,” Porch offered his view.
“You cheap, Porch. Shit, you ain’t got no woman now.”
“Don’t need no woman—cost too much.”
“Man need his drink,” Banky joined in.
“You look at that Wilde. He drink all day, put all his money down gambling and see?” Poo-Poo said. “God didn’t even let his eyes close at the end.”
“God good to make a man open his eyes at the end,” Porch said. “Need to see all that ain’t no more. God have me see a last bit of tail at the end, bless Him.”
“Now see, Porch, I knowed you ain’t had no tail in a year or more.” Poo-Poo laughed.
“Get out my drawers, man.”
“Shit, somebody got to get in them. They lonely.”
“That’s not what your mama was moaning last night,” Porch said.
“Damn, man, how you pull that off? My mama dead.” The room filled with the spill of laughter. Porch, doubled over in his chair, held his hands to his chest.
Unceasing, coasting, the laughter rode on, until the echo stopped and tears came unchecked and spread until everyone in the café was crying over pointless anguish. Even Queen Ester’s eyes brimmed—she was listening behind the door to the kitchen. There was no shame, no reason for the women not to lift their dresses and hide their faces or for the men not to bury their heads in the crooks of their arms.
On it went until the man whom they had not seen, or maybe saw in a flicker but forgot, coughed. “I think I’m with the Porch man. Can’t hate a man for wanting to see the last bit of tail.” Although he spoke softly, his round Mississippi tones restful and quiet in the café, they thought they heard arrogance. With tears still damp on their faces, their hands limp and half open in surprise, they turned on him.
“Ain’t nobody asked you. You think, just cause you got a bit of dirt on your pants, you one of us?” said Other. The café awoke as Other strung together more words than they ever heard him say before. It was common knowledge that if anyone was short a hand and needed a strong arm or a pair of legs to walk a mile, Other was the official stand-and-deliver man. What’s next? they all thought, watching Other come out of the corner to stand in the middle of the room.
“Chester. From Clarksdale, Mississippi. Call me Chess.”
“So? So? Like we—”
“Other, hush! Since when you start talking that way?” Liberty placed her words in the space Other meant to speak. “Ain’t nobody brand new gone get cut up like that in my café. Nobody.”
She grabbed a glass and filled it from the pitcher of water, revealing her teeth as she drank. “Well … I have to say that they make them fine in Clarksdale.” Small teeth. He noticed that as she made a full smile. Small teeth for a big woman like that, Chess thought. As if the teeth of her childhood had stayed in her mouth for safety, just to be contrary, while the rest of her grew and grew. He looked at her teeth, at her mouth that wanted to be still a child’s, and then at her breasts.
He wasn’t the only one who noticed her smile and the slight swing of her high breasts beneath her workman’s shirt. Her words carried weight; the women in the room looked again. But this time they conjured what ought to be there, so now his skin was not brown, it was light chocolate; his lips were wide and pink at the center. Under the spell of sudden charm, they gave him muscles hidden beneath his shirt; they imagined love resting in the crook of his arms.
Shifting in their seats, they leaned forward, uncomfortable and ready. They coiled their questions around him, anchoring him to the floor. “Now, where you from?”
“Mable, didn’t you hear him the first time round? Clarksdale.”
“Where bout in Clarksdale?”
“Near Moon Lake.”
“Maybe we all need to hitch a ride to Clarksdale.”
“I think I be satisfied with what we got right here.” Each woman had nabbed a line, picking up where the other had left off, but suddenly they formed a choir; their mouths made one voice.
“What’s your name?”
“Chess.”
“What you doing away from home?”
“Where you gone go after here?”
“Sugar, tell me, where you going?”
“All right now.” Liberty broke in. Again, she reached for the pitcher behind the bar and splashed water into another glass. She held it out to him. “Where you headed to?” said Liberty.
“Right here.”
“Got kin in town?”
“Naw, ma’am.”
“Then what you doing here?”
“Didn’t know folks couldn’t come and go as they please.” He showed surprise when she took a cigarette and matches from her pocket. She tucked in her chin as she put the cigarette in her mouth, her lips soft as she mumbled through the strike of the match.
“Generally speaking, folks move around for a reason, and I just wondering bout yours.”
“Too many good-looking men where I come from; needed to get out so I could be special.” He tried to look casual as he leaned back in his chair, forcing himself to unclench his hands.
“Well, now that you special, where you gone live?”
“Ain’t thought bout it.”
“Better think.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He thought of where his feet could take him. He had no family here, no mother. Hard and sweet he longed for a mama with thick thighs, soft breasts, a high swollen stomach that would always look as if she carried a child, a mama to hold his head between her worn hands and murmur with mother love. All right, all right now. He dropped his head into his hands as he thought of being lost in a mother’s soft apron.
“What you do that for?”
Chess jumped. “What?”
She was small and lean, dressed or rather strangled in a thin cotton dress, as if someone (and not the girl—no girl would willingly wear a dress meant for a child), as if someone could not resign themselves to the obvious: the small high breasts, the touch of expanded hips. Least seventeen, he thought, rega
rdless of the dress, and she needed a brassiere.
“What you do that for?” she said again.
“Needs to think.”
“Bout what?”
“Bout where I gone stay.” His words dismissed her question because of its simpleness with an apparent answer that stood between them like another person. Staring as she was staring, he looked at her smooth skin, envying the softness that hadn’t yet flared to black on the elbows and knees. But about her eyes, in her hands he spied concern and knowing; the sort of burdened anxiety printed on the faces of grandmothers and dying uncles who push themselves up on their stale pillows and point their wizened fingers, as they take account of what they are leaving behind. He could have taken one or the other, but both—worry and wisdom—trapped inside this little girl who didn’t even have the decency to wear wrinkles, was just much too much. She stared at him as if she knew about the whistling of his feet as he ran away from home, his journey so fast he didn’t think of a jacket until shivering and drinking root beer in Jackson, Mississippi. Chess saw knowing and loving on this young thing, who had woman-ness thrown on her like a coat. But despite his fear, he remembered her age and answered, “You sure nosy.”
“Ain’t nosy. Just wondering. You not staying here.”
“Like I told you, I’m thinking.” His voice went high as he leaned in, tilting his chair toward her small figure, and thought now that she could maybe even be eighteen. She had fooled him because he had not seen her hands. What girl who should be licking the taste of flirtation could stand before a grown man and trick him into thinking she was six years old?
Liberty came over. “That’s my girl, Queen Ester.”
“Now how a girl get a name like that?”
“Like everybody else do, at birth. Don’t she look like royalty to you?” Liberty put her hand on Queen Ester’s head.
“Face too quiet.”
“What?” Queen Ester and Liberty said at the same time.
Knee-Deep in Wonder Page 9