The Past Is Never

by Tiffany Quay Tyson

  When I came into Mama’s room, Willet was already there. He crouched next to Mama’s bed and stroked her thin, colorless hair. His lips pressed together so hard they looked white. Mama’s gray lips hung open. Her eyes were wide like she’d seen something terrifying. Maybe she had. I realized why I’d slept so well. It was the first time in years I hadn’t been kept awake by Mama’s hacking cough and wheezing. I touched her shoulder; she felt hollow.

  “The bastard killed her,” Willet said. He meant Daddy.

  “She killed herself,” I said. “She gave up.”

  He took a long breath and held it. When he exhaled, the room grew warmer. “I have to know,” Willet said. “I can’t live with all this mystery.”

  At first I thought he’d said “misery,” which made as much sense. I leaned my head against his shoulder. Of course he wanted answers, but Granny Clem always said questions were more abundant than answers and some mysteries were better left unsolved. Willet didn’t see it that way.

  After we buried Mama, Willet said there was nothing to keep us in White Forest. I wished it were true, but we were tied to the town no matter where we wandered. Willet couldn’t see it like I could. Probably it was because he traveled around for work and felt more at ease on the road. My trip to see Bubba was the farthest I’d ever ventured from our home, the farthest I’d ever let myself travel from Mama and Granny Clem and the old quarry where we’d last seen our sister. Leaving seemed reckless. Suppose Mama was right and Pansy was out there somewhere trying to find her way home. What would happen when she showed up and discovered an empty house? Willet said I was a damn fool. I argued it might not be wise to leave behind everything we knew and rush blindly into a strange land.

  “We’re not heading to the moon,” he said. “It’s just Florida. And I’m going whether you come along or not.” Leaving scared me, but I couldn’t stay alone. I’d spent all those years fetching Mama’s smokes and bringing her food she wouldn’t eat. For weeks after she died, I woke up and wandered around the house, looking for something to do. I made a big pitcher of sweet tea and had to pour it out. Willet and I couldn’t stomach so much sugar.

  I asked how long we’d be gone. “As long as it takes,” was all he’d say.

  Willet shuttered the house and sold Mama’s old Ford for a couple hundred dollars in cash. I tossed my T-shirts and blue jeans into a duffel bag and, on a whim, tossed in the book of fairy tales. I knew Willet would give me a hard time for bringing the heavy book; he’d told me to pack light, but my belongings barely filled the small bag and I wanted to carry something with me that felt like a connection to home and to Pansy.

  I said goodbye to Granny Clem. “Don’t go borrowing trouble,” she told me.

  The day before we drove away, I went out to the old quarry and walked through the haunted woods. I stood on what used to be the lip of the quarry, the same spot where I’d stood and yelled Pansy’s name over and over again, and I looked at the mess of trash people tossed there—used condoms and crumpled cigarette packs, liquor bottles and beer cans, shotgun shells and loose razor blades, syringes with broken needles. It made me feel ashamed, to see the waste from people’s sinful secrets strewn across the dirt. At least when the quarry was filled with water, these things could be swallowed up.

  In the woods I looked for the clearing where I’d seen the creature, but I couldn’t find the right spot. It was a cold, cloudy day and the woods seemed like a different place than where we’d eaten berries on that summer day nearly five years earlier. It smelled different, not as fertile or ripe as I remembered. Whatever I hoped to find, it wasn’t there beneath the trees. I circled back. It came to me that I ought to walk across that dirt-filled hole. It was like someone whispered the suggestion in my ear. It scared me. There were all sorts of bottles and books and piles of scrap wood scattered across the dirt. A ten-speed bicycle with no tires lay right in the center. Plenty of folks had walked across it. The evidence was everywhere. So why was I afraid?

  Even all those years later, it was easy to tell where the quarry began. The fill dirt was a shade darker than the ground around it and not quite level. It seemed to slope like a shallow bowl. I held my breath and put one foot onto the darker soil. The ground felt colder there, even through the soles of my tennis shoes. I shivered, took another step. The dirt seemed springy and thick and alive, like it might reach up and pull me underground. It was my imagination, and I knew it. I’d gone out there alone looking to get spooked. It was like when I used to read those fairy tales to Pansy and the two of us would shiver while imagining ogres and shape-shifting animals and the dark fog of a magic spell cast under the moon. It was like Granny Clem’s hypochondriac patient who broke out in actual hives from her imaginary ailments. The mind could conjure up all sorts of things if you let it. I told myself the ground beneath my feet was no different than the ground where Granny Clem planted her garden or the ground in our front yard. No sense letting my mind go wild. I took a deep breath and sprinted the length of the quarry, jumping over the abandoned bicycle like it was a hurdle on a track. As I did, a gust of wind came through and lifted my hair. For a moment, I thought I might fly. It was no ordinary wind. It was the collective sigh of the quarry ghosts. They couldn’t believe I was being so reckless. By the time I made it to the far side of the quarry, I was panting like I’d run a hard mile.

  Willet thought we could leave this place behind by driving away. I knew better. The quarry was part of our lives, an important part. We couldn’t run away from it. Someone had stacked a pyramid of gray rocks between a matched set of wooden crosses, an altar of some sort. We weren’t the only ones who’d left a piece of ourselves at the quarry. I took one of the flat, smooth rocks from the top of the pyramid and slipped it in my pocket. The quarry could be evil, or maybe just dangerous, but it was familiar. I wanted to keep a piece of it with me.

  FERN SAID SHE AND Melvin were in love and she was going to have his child. She announced the news to Ora and Clementine as if she were telling them about the weather. But Junior could see she was nervous. She twisted her hands behind her back like gnarled tree roots. Clementine sent the boys from the room.

  “We need to talk to your sister alone,” she said.

  Junior and Chester sat on the floor of their shared bedroom and eavesdropped. Junior felt strange, like he couldn’t get enough oxygen. He was grateful to the women for taking over. He wouldn’t have known how to talk to his sister about such a thing. He leaned his head against the wall and listened to the conversation.

  “What does Melvin say about this?” Ora asked.

  “I can’t bring myself to tell him.”

  The women talked with Fern into the night. Chester was furious. “I’ll kill him,” he said of Melvin.

  Junior knew his sister had no business carrying a baby. She was only sixteen. Melvin was smart and he knew better, or he ought to.

  Fern said to Clementine and Ora, “My skin gets dark anyhow. Maybe it won’t matter.”

  “The world doesn’t work that way,” Ora said.

  “You treat Negro women. You know they’re no different than we are. You said it yourself. ‘Blood runs red no matter the skin.’”

  “It’s not so simple,” Clementine said. “It’s one thing to have a colored person as a customer, but it’s quite another to do what you’ve done.”

  “What have I done?” Fern’s voice cracked.

  “Honey,” Ora said. “Don’t get me wrong, I like Melvin. He seems like a decent boy, but this could get him killed. It could get you killed. People won’t stand for it, particularly the people of White Forest. Don’t you remember what happened to Bernice Jackson?”

  Everyone knew what happened to Bernice Jackson. Bernice worked as a kitchen maid for a banker and his wife. They had a son a year older than Bernice. The son took a shine to the maid and forced himself on her, or else she took a shine to the son and seduced him—it depended on who was telling the story. What happened next was not in dispute. Bernice was walking home when a
group of white men, the banker among them, pulled her off the side of the road and hog-tied her. They dragged her behind their truck for five miles or more before stringing her up from the branches of a live oak near the old quarry, a burlap sack over her head. Her mother begged the sheriff to arrest the men, who didn’t even have the good sense to shut up about what they’d done. Everyone in town heard the story from at least one of the braggarts involved. But the sheriff said there wasn’t enough evidence and he couldn’t ruin the reputation of these good men on one Negro woman’s outlandish claims.

  Did Ora believe they would do something terrible to Fern? Or did she mean they would lynch Melvin? Either way, it was a terrible mess.

  “Let me make you some of my womb-clearing tea. You’ll drink it for the next week and it’ll make you sick. You’ll have terrible cramps, but it’ll bring on your blood.”

  Fern refused. “I want this baby. I hope you’ll help me, but I’ll have it even if you won’t.”

  The women argued with her. She had plenty of time for babies. A baby born now, out of wedlock and from a black father, would bring nothing but trouble for her and for Melvin.

  “Well, I won’t put Melvin in danger,” she said. “If you think claiming this baby will get him killed, I’ll keep him out of it.”

  “How do you intend to keep him out of it?” Clementine sounded bitter. “He’s in it up to his neck. Everyone sees how you go over to his house and hang around those children. If I’d had any thought you were behaving so poorly, I’d have forbid you leaving the house.”

  Fern laughed. “Don’t be silly. You can’t stop me from anything.”

  Clementine made a noise deep in her throat. It sounded like she might be choking.

  “Maybe I’ll head home to the island,” Fern said. “Won’t nobody there care about my baby. Maybe Melvin will come along with me.”

  “You can’t think Melvin is going to be happy about this,” Clementine said. “You surely are not that stupid.”

  Ora tried to defuse the situation. “Let’s be practical, shall we? This is not the end of the world. We’ve seen plenty of girls in the same predicament.”

  “But those girls weren’t silly enough to keep their babies!” Clementine said.

  Junior couldn’t stand it anymore. Fern was his sister and he had a right to weigh in on this discussion. He stepped out of the room where he and Chester stood listening.

  “I’ll take her away,” he said. “We can leave right now, before anyone knows a thing about a baby. We’ll ride the train south a ways and figure it out. I can find work cutting sugarcane or fishing. I can take care of us. I reckon we’ve overstayed our welcome anyhow.”

  “No!” Clementine said. “You know I think of you as my own children. Chester looks to you as his own brother and sister. You belong here.” But Junior wasn’t sure they belonged in White Forest. Maybe he and Fern would be better off if they’d never left Florida. Maybe Fern wouldn’t have gotten herself into so much trouble back in the Everglades. There was no way to know.

  Fern continued her daily trips to see Melvin and she helped Clementine and Ora with the babies, but her swelling stomach began to attract notice. Melvin’s father must have noticed it, because he packed up and moved his entire family in the middle of the night. No one knew where they went.

  Fern was distraught when she discovered Melvin was gone. “He didn’t even say goodbye.”

  Ora and Clementine told Fern it was time for her to stop running all over town and flaunting her pregnant belly.

  “I’m not ashamed,” Fern said.

  “I’m not asking you to be ashamed,” Clementine told her. “I’m asking you to be careful.”

  At night, when Junior and Chester and Fern were supposed to be sleeping, Clementine and Ora discussed what to do with the baby when it was born. Junior listened to their soft voices and knew it wouldn’t matter what they decided. Fern would keep the baby and raise it. She wouldn’t consider another option.

  Junior got a job at the lumber mill in Jones City. Clementine said it wasn’t necessary. She’d prefer it if he finished school. “There’s plenty of work to be done in the garden,” she said. She offered to pay him. He refused. It didn’t seem right.

  “Fern’s going to need things,” he said. “For the baby.”

  Clementine said she and Ora were prepared to provide for a baby. “It’s what we do.”

  The women had already given them so much. They shouldn’t be expected to do more. Fern told him to stop worrying. She said women had been having and raising babies since the Garden of Eden and she figured she could handle it.

  Junior did not doubt Fern could handle a baby. He’d seen her with the babies Ora and Clementine delivered. What worried him was the baby’s skin. Fern barely passed for white and with Melvin as the father, her baby was bound to be even darker.

  By the week before Christmas, Fern looked like she was smuggling a melon beneath her dress. Fern told Junior she wanted him to take her into town to do some shopping. She wanted to get a little something for Clementine and Ora and Chester. “They’ve been awful good to me,” she said. “Especially considering everything.” She gestured at her stomach.

  Junior told her he’d be happy to pick up anything she wanted from town, but Fern wanted the pleasure of shopping.

  “I don’t think it’s such a good idea, what with you being so far along.”

  She told him she was fine. He worried about so many people seeing her swollen belly. They knew she wasn’t married. But Fern couldn’t be talked out of it. She told Junior she’d get Chester to take her if he wouldn’t do it. Finally, he agreed to take her to Murray’s Department Store on Saturday morning. He’d rather have gone on a weekday, when it would be less crowded, but his work schedule wouldn’t allow it. Chester came with them.

  The shopping was uneventful. Fern bought a box of stationery for Ora and a brass picture frame for Clementine. She made Chester and Junior turn away as she selected something for each of them. It was Junior’s money she spent, and he refrained from making jokes about buying his own present. Junior and Chester bought a stuffed bear for Fern’s unborn baby.

  When they finished shopping, they walked down the block and settled into a booth at the diner. Fern ordered a chocolate milkshake. “This baby loves ice cream,” she said. They ordered ham sandwiches and vegetable soup.

  They’d just received the bill when a group of men burst through the doors of the diner, shouting and frenzied. One of the men pointed at Chester and told him to come along with them. The man wore a flannel jacket with a watch plaid pattern and a red wool hunting cap. All the men were dressed in clothes more suited for farm work than for a day in town. Junior recognized the men, but he didn’t know their names. Junior tended to keep to himself.

  He turned to Chester. “Who are they?”

  “Farmers, most of ’em.”

  “What do they want?” Fern asked.

  Chester shook his head.

  The men talked over one another, but Junior finally got the gist of their agitation. One of their wives told her husband a young black boy had winked at her on the street. Brazen, was how she described it. The men planned to find the black child and make him answer for his sins. “We can’t give ’em an inch,” one of the men said. “They’ll take all we got.”

  Fern clutched Junior’s arm. He put his hand over hers. They needed to wait it out. These men would move on soon enough. But Fern had other ideas. She pushed herself up from the booth, her stomach leading the way.

  “Stop it,” she said, her voice calm and quiet against the raised anger of the men. Junior caught Chester’s eye. They both grabbed for Fern, intending to pull her back into the booth and shield her, but Fern pushed forward. “Cut it out right now.”

  The man in the hunting cap gave her an up-and-down stare. He took in her swollen belly and her wild hair. “Ma’am,” he said. “You ought not be out in your condition. Your husband ought to take you home.”

  Fern put her hands
on her hips and laughed. “Well, I don’t have a husband,” she said. “And I’m not in any kind of condition.”

  “Fern …” Junior said.

  “Who’s responsible for this girl?” The man looked from Junior to Chester. The pack of men stood behind him. They waited for an answer. Junior wondered if they did everything in a group or if any one of them ever had an independent thought.

  “I’m responsible for myself,” Fern said.

  “We’re leaving,” Chester announced.

  The man stepped forward and blocked Chester’s exit from the booth.

  “We’re not looking for trouble,” Junior said.

  “It ain’t decent,” the man said. “This is a family establishment.”

  Chester stood, despite the man’s effort to block him. His nose practically touched the man’s mouth. “What ain’t decent,” Chester said, “is your bad manners.” Chester plucked the man’s cap from his head. The man’s face turned purple, and Junior knew there would be no avoiding trouble now.

  The men surged forward as Chester threw a hard punch into the man’s gut. The man doubled over and Junior saw the bald spot on the top of his head. He probably wore the hat to hide it. Fern covered her mouth with her hands. Junior pulled her away from the group of men.

  The man with the bald spot stepped back and punched Chester in the nose. Chester’s mouth and chin flooded with blood. It only made him madder. He came at the man with his fists flying, hitting him along the side of his head and under his jaw. Junior got between them and told Chester it was enough already. One of the other men, Junior never knew which one, socked Junior right in his kidney. The pain washed through him, spreading from his legs to his teeth. Fern yelled for them to stop, but no one listened. It was six men against two and it ought to have been over before it started, but Chester and Junior were better fighters than any of the other men. They ducked quicker and punched harder, and they were still standing long after they should have fallen.