by Ninie Hammon
T.J. spoke into the darkness, words tacked onto the thought that had been chasing around in his mind ever since he seen the woman on the porch of the Watford House that afternoon.
“Can I do anything about it?” He was surprised at how ragged his voice sounded. “You and me done had this conversation once, you remember?”
Dobbs stopped breathing. “I remember.” His voice sounded near as ragged as T.J.’s. Then it dropped to a whisper. “I was scared spitless.”
Chapter Three
Raymond Dobson was scared now, too, though the ragged edges of his fear didn’t cut deep, swathed as it still was in a generous slathering of denial. Even so, grown-man scared was worse than little-kid scared and little-kid scared had been bad enough.
Dobbs looks up anxiously at the break in the trees. T.J. is late and Dobbs can’t stay long. When he left the house, his mama’d called after him, “Don’t you be late for supper again, Ray-Ray.” He hates it when his mama calls him Ray-Ray even worse than he hates it when the other kids call him Ray-mun. When he grows up, he’s gonna be Dobbs, the name T.J. gave him. Just Dobbs.
He hears a scuffle on the rocks and T.J. appears out of the woods. One look at his face and Dobbs knows they’re not going to go to the pond and skip rocks across the water, or strip down naked and use the grapevine to swing out and drop. They’re not going to do anything fun. Not after whatever has happened to T.J.; Dobbs has seen that look before.
“What’s wrong?” But he knows the answer before he asks the question. Ever since T.J.’s mama fell off that ladder and hit her head, T.J. has worn that scared, confused look almost all the time. Dobbs would have done just about anything to make it go away.
“You … best come see.” T.J. turns around and slips back through the trees. Dobbs doesn’t want to go with him. Oh, how he doesn’t want to go! T.J. has shown him what his mama paints in the shed out back of their house, paints there even in the dark sometimes … with both hands, at least, that’s what T.J. says and there’s no reason not to believe him. T.J. never lies. Still … with both hands?
But he goes along because he can’t not go. T.J. Hamilton is the best friend he has ever had, the only real one. The kids his mama makes him play with because their mamas go to church with her, or the ones in Charleston, when they drag him there to see the fancy school his older brother attends, the one they’re packing him off to for high school. They’re all white, but they’re only pretending to be his friend. When the grownups aren’t around, they tease him, call him fat and stupid. Even with the grownups in the room, they call him PDB. If one of the adults asks what the letters stand for, the kids reply innocently that they don’t stand for anything, just letters put together that rhyme and sound funny, that’s all. But what PDB stands for is Pillsbury Dough Boy.
T.J. has never been like that. What Dobbs knows that his mother and father would never believe is that T.J. is a finer human being than any of the white people he has ever known. T.J. is kind and … and good. And brave. Very brave. Everybody knows what T.J.’s father does to his mama, they’ve seen her, what he does to T.J. too, sometimes, though he always says he fell down or he ran into a door. But T.J. isn’t cowed by his father. And — for reasons Dobbs is too young to understand — he even more admires the fact that T.J. isn’t eaten up with a rabid desire for revenge, either.
When they come out of the woods behind the shed, T.J. fishes in his pocket for the key to the padlock on the door. His mama tells his daddy that she keeps it locked because all her art supplies are stored in there and they’re expensive and she doesn’t want anybody to steal them. And the family wouldn’t survive without the money she brings in from selling her caricatures to tourists down at the dock. But that’s not the real reason she keeps it locked. It’s so T.J.’s daddy doesn’t see the paintings she produces there.
His mama has taken his little brothers, Luke and Jacob, to Vacation Bible School at Highview Baptist Church in town and T.J. sneaked the key out of the bottom of the quilt box his grandmother gave her that Dobbs thinks looks like a coffin.
T.J. opens the door and there’s a painting still on the easel, not yet hidden under the piece of canvas tarp in the chicken house. The paint glistens in the fall of light from the open doorway, so it’s still wet. Dobbs has to come all the way into the room so the light isn’t glaring on the shiny paint before he can see the image on the canvas.
He blinks when he sees it.
There’s a man lying on his back with lumber piled on top of him and … his guts are hanging out, squashed out of him.
Dobbs turns and bolts out of the room, runs across the meadow behind the shed and into the woods. Runs and runs and runs until he is out of breath and has to stop, put his hands on his knees and gasp for air. It’s only then that he sees T.J. has come with him.
“I’m sorry, T.J., I just—”
“I know. Me neither. I seen it and I puked up my breakfast.”
That’s another thing Dobbs loves about T.J. He never pretends he’s not weak, never acts like he is tougher than he really is, and doesn’t even know that not pretending to be strong is what makes him so.
The two boys collapse, panting, in the soft, fragrant needles beneath a big juniper pine.
“You know where that is.” It’s a statement, not a question, but Dobbs nods anyway. It’s the lumber mill where T.J.’s daddy works.
“Do you know who it is?”
Dobbs shakes his head.
“That’s Lloyd Green, Robby’s daddy. Did you see the others, in the background?”
Dobbs shakes his head again.
“There was other men, too, got crushed. A stack of lumber must have tipped over on top of them.”
The boys sit together in silence.
“Do you think…?” T.J. stops, then starts over. “Should we … tell somebody? Tell Robby, maybe?”
T.J. has never suggested such a thing before. After the picture of the dead white child that Dobbs never saw because T.J.’s father destroyed it, T.J.’s mother has painted other pictures of what T.J. calls “what hasn’t happened yet.” They were all dead people. But they were strangers, people Dobbs and T.J. didn’t know. This time is different.
Dobbs looks at his friend as an unreasoning terror rises up in his chest that so grips him he can’t speak. To tell somebody, to get involved in what was going on, to insert themselves into … It was bad enough being a spectator, but if they told and then it happened anyway…?
“We can’t.” He pauses, then rushes on, “Your daddy would…”
That’s just an excuse, though. Dobbs doesn’t fear T.J.’s daddy. He’s a black man and Dobbs is a white kid. He wouldn’t dare. He isn’t even afraid for T.J. and his mama and the littles. He should be, but in his own cowardice they’re not his primary concern. He, Raymond Dobson, doesn’t dare defy this magic. Something … something unthinkable will happen to him if he crosses whatever force it is that is able to see through the canvas into the days stacked up out there on the other side of it. That is able to make things happen there in that future place.
“T.J. … if your mama painted it, it wouldn’t do any good to try to change it. You know that. If she painted it … then it is. We can’t change what’s … supposed to be. It’s … destiny.” It’s a big word he’s never used before, but it’s the right word. “We can’t change destiny.”
T.J. watched Dobbs look out into nowhere, seeing nothing, a thousand-yard stare. He spoke without turning back toward T.J.
“We were kids. We were scared. I was scared. Just because two little boys decide that there’s no changing destiny, that doesn’t make it so.”
As happened so often, Dobbs had spoken T.J.’s thoughts, had tacked words onto the question that had been prowling around in T.J.’s mind since the moment he looked at the picture, confirmed for himself what he already knew. This was a painting of Jessie Cunningham … dead.
“So you’re saying you think it’s possible to stop it?”
“I’m saying we have
to find out.”
The streetlight flickered back on briefly and then went out again.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re the cop, not me. But it seems pretty obvious to me that—” T.J. knew Dobbs was pointing to the bullet hole painted in excruciating detail in the picture leaned against the wall. “That’s a self-inflicted wound. You’re not trying to prevent a murder. She shot herself in the head.”
“So you want me to go knocking on her door and … and what? Tell her I know she’s planning on killing herself? I know because my mama painted a picture of it half a century ago … but I don’t think it’s a good idea, maybe she ought to give it more consideration.”
The irritation drained out of him when Dobbs didn’t answer. “People kill themselves for a reason. They’s a lot of roads in that woman’s life that led her to this point. When a body has come to the end of themselves, when they don’t see no way out short of dying, it likely ain’t no easy thing to talk them out of it.”
“You’ve got to try.”
“Why? Why do I got to try? I ain’t involved in this. I didn’t paint no picture of a dead woman. My mama did and she’s been dead herself for half a century. I don’t see I got no obligation to stick my nose in somebody else’s business.”
“Yeah, you do, T.J.” Dobbs spoke in his reasonable, made-for-radio voice. “Your mama never did anything about the things she painted. All those years, all those paintings. It ate her up. You know as well as I do that’s why she hung herself after the fire. Now, you have a chance to change that. Your mama’s last painting … don’t you think you owe it to her memory to try to stop what she painted on that canvas from becoming reality, a real dead woman? Don’t you think you have to try?”
T.J. didn’t have an answer.
Chapter Four
Jessie sat at the kitchen table in the light of a flickering candle, wondering how she had come to this. Oh, not how she had come to be here, ready to end her life, cash in her chips and call game over. She knew how she got there!
But how had she come to the gun part?
She’d considered other means, of course. She’d briefly considered hanging herself, but she wasn’t up to that. It seemed a little too iffy. What if it didn’t work? What if all she did was drop off a chair without breaking her neck, so she dangled there, choking slowly to death? No, not hanging, absolutely not hanging.
Slicing her wrists? Not a chance. That would hurt!
How about carbon monoxide? An appealing alternative, perhaps, but this house didn’t have a garage. No, it had to be a gun. It was the most fitting choice. It made a statement Jessie wanted to make, expressed an emotion too huge and ugly for a wimpy passing.
She’d wanted music as an accompaniment, too. Though she wasn’t a fan of country music, it had seemed fitting. Appropriate. Some crying-in-your-beer song about trains and dogs and unfaithful sweethearts. That was what she wanted to hear when she put the barrel of the revolver to her temple and pulled the trigger. She had searched the radio dial and found the right station. Then the electricity went out and the world filled back up with silence.
A gunshot wound was an ugly, messy way to die. That’s why most women opted to summon a reaper dressed in white chiffon and lace, a reaper who soothed you to the other side — not that Jessie believed for an instant there was another side — with pills that allowed you to drift off and never wake up.
Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is.
Peaceful.
Jessica Cunningham wasn’t looking for peaceful. She wanted violence! She wanted somebody to have to clean her blood and brains off a wall after it’d soaked into the wallpaper so the image of it was always there, forever after, no matter what you did. When she exited the world — no more sunrises or Christmas mornings — there should be some vile sound to mark her passing.
Oh, sure, that was anger talking. Or fear. And she shouldn’t be listening to the voices of either anger or fear now, at the end. She should be listening to the voice of the Essential Jessie. And the Essential Jessie, sitting here in the very back row of herself, only wanted it to be over. Just wanted her world to end. And she wanted it to end on her terms. Blood and gore and the roar of a gunshot. Too much in this life was quiet and timid. She had no intention of leaving it with any less a sendoff than a bang that made those who heard it uneasy, wondering … an explosive force that would embody all her pent-up emotion, vent all her confined fury, scream out her anguish and defiance to a world that wouldn’t hear it. Had never heard it. Couldn’t hear it. She would only be crying out in rage at silence, as she had been doing every day for a year and a half. Eighteen months, one week and two days to be exact.
But that was how it had to be. For Bethany to live, to have a normal, happy, safe life, Jessie could have no part in it.
Oh, but it’ll all be over soon, they’d said. She’d get her life and baby back … soon. Soon. Soon.
When Jessie got to the end of hoping it would soon end, she’d begun to spiral downward, faster and faster. She could almost hear her descent, the rushing sound of water carrying hope and love and wonder and joy out of the world, rushing with it in a roaring rumble to the open maw of a giant drain where all light ended and all darkness began. Jessie had fallen into that darkness. She didn’t know you could feel darkness as well as see it. Darkness was cold. Not so cold it burned your touch, but a kind of chill that passed slowly through your skin and organs until it settled in your bones, in the very marrow of your being. And then it began to freeze there.
As that darkness settled into her being, Jessie came to the inescapable conclusion that if she couldn’t be a part of Bethany’s life, she didn’t want to have one of her own.
She looked at the clock on the stove that said 5:15. But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t 5:15. The clock had stopped when the storm knocked out the electricity. All the clocks in the house were wrong and that seemed fitting somehow, the recording of time in the universe turned off as she prepared to step out of time into infinity.
A mosquito that had been buzzing around her face landed on her forehead above her right eye and she swatted it. Bugs were getting into the house through a hole in the backdoor screen … but that was not her problem. Nothing in this world was her problem anymore.
She picked up the revolver again and looked at it, grateful that cleaning up the mess she’d be leaving behind wasn’t her problem, either.
Which begged the essential question, of course … whose would it be? Who was going to find her body? Who would miss her? She didn’t know a soul in Shadow Rock. And not only who would find her body, but when? Would she lie here on the floor until…?
Nope, couldn’t think about that now. It didn’t matter. That was for after and she wasn’t going to be here for after.
She looked carefully at the revolver in her hand. It was hard to see the details in the flickering candlelight and she wished she’d paid more attention to what the man in the gun store had said about it after he’d stopped trying to talk her out of buying it.
“Ma’am, the Smith & Wesson Model 63 revolver is useless for self-protection. It’s a .22.”
When she’d looked blank, he’d continued. “Say somebody comes after you, you could shoot the guy three times before he grabbed the pistol out of your hand and beat you to death with it. Then he’d walk away and die from blood loss two hours later. But you’d still be dead.”
Apparently, you had to hit some vital organ with a small pistol. She’d figured the brain was a vital organ.
And all the talk about how to reload that Jessie didn’t listen to at all because she only needed one pre-shot. Still, she did have to know how to get that lone round in front of the firing pin.
She turned the gun over, examining it. The barrel was short, only about three inches, with a big, hunking sight on the end of it she wouldn’t be using. She fit her finger inside the trigger guard and looked at her own hand with the gun in it. It looked like somebody else’s hand entirely. She
lifted the revolver and put the end of the barrel to her right temple. It felt cold. Then she glanced at her watch. She still had time, a little time. She had gone into labor with Bethany at exactly 8:31 p.m.
She and Aaron had been watching a special showing of Napoleon Dynamite on FOX. It was the part where Napoleon and his brother go to the bus station to meet his brother’s girlfriend. Jessie’s explosion of laughter at the sight of LaShonda stepping off that bus had started it.
At that moment, she’d felt a pang, a tightening around her whole belly, like she was wearing spandex that had suddenly gotten a size smaller. That was the moment when her life with Bethany had begun. Though the actual birth wasn’t until six grueling days later, after her labor started and stopped and started again. After they went to the hospital and were sent back home — twice. After she dilated halfway and then stopped. After they gave her Pitocin, which slammed her into active labor — zero to sixty in seconds, followed by ten more agonizing hours. Aaron never left her side, wiped her brow, held her hand, panted through every contraction with her.
Jessie had always in her heart of hearts considered June 19 Bethany’s real “birthday,” not June 25. She had missed the whole event last year, had sat on the floor in the bathroom of that stupid tri-level condo in Peoria, not daring to move away from the toilet because her grief hurt so bad, was such a dagger in her belly, that she had vomited up everything in her stomach, and then dry-heaved for hour after hour. At some point, she had staggered, crawled to the kitchen, and forced down a beer. Then another. After that, it had been drink and vomit. Drink and vomit. June 25, Bethany’s actual birthday, had passed by in a blur. And when she had come to on June 26, her skull splitting open from a gigantic fissure in the middle of her forehead, she had actually sighed in relief. She had made it through. She had survived. And soon…