by Wiley Cash
“How did you come to live here?” Kate asked.
“You mean how’d I come to live with colored folks?”
“Well, I didn’t mean—”
“Because I’m poor,” Ella said. “And they’re poor too.” She turned around, faced Kate, and walked backward for a moment. She lifted her arms as if showcasing everything around her. “And here we all are.”
Lilly had an oil lamp burning inside the cabin, and she and Rose were sitting on the floor, playing a game. Their fingers were threaded with yarn, and they moved their hands in a way that weaved some kind of pattern. Wink was asleep on one of the skids, his face turned away from the light.
“Otis is still out somewhere,” Lilly said. “I told him to be home before it got dark, but he don’t care a lick about nothing I tell him.”
“I’ll get after him,” Ella said. She smoothed down Lilly’s hair, bent and kissed Rose. She saw that Lilly stared up at Kate. Rose noted her sister’s interest in something, and she lifted her face and looked up at Kate too.
“This is my friend,” Ella said. “This is Miss Kate.”
Kate held her hands behind her back, but she lifted one of them and gave the girls a small wave. She looked over to where the baby slept.
“Hello,” she whispered.
Lilly raised her hand and waved back, but neither she nor Rose said anything.
“These are my babies,” Ella said. She put her hand back on Lilly’s head. “This here’s Lilly, my oldest. And this is Rose, and that’s Joseph over there. We all call him Wink.”
“It’s ’cause he winks instead of blinks,” Rose said. She pointed to her eyes and did her best to wink one and then the other at Kate.
“That’s right,” Ella said. “He winks when he blinks.”
Rose laughed, looked back at her sister. The girls returned to their game.
“Did you eat?” Ella asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Lilly said. “We ate what you left out.”
“Good,” Ella said.
“Did Otis eat?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lilly said.
Ella walked to the stove, found a biscuit that Lilly had left behind for her. A small cut of salt meat had hardened in the pan. Ella looked up at Kate, who was standing just inside the door. She hadn’t moved.
“You hungry?” Ella asked.
“No,” Kate said. “I’m fine. Really. I couldn’t eat a thing.”
Otis had come in a few minutes after Ella and Kate had arrived. Ella had made him introduce himself to Kate, made him take her hand “like a grown man should do when he meets a lady.” Otis was shy; he always had been. He stood barefoot, the bottoms of his pant legs damp.
“I don’t like you being out there after it gets dark,” Ella had said. “What would you do if some booger came along and tried to snatch you up and run off with you?”
“I’d punch him right in his nose,” Otis said.
“Some boogers don’t got noses,” Ella said. “So you’d be in real trouble if you met up with one of them, wouldn’t you.”
Kate had stood by while Ella put each of the children to bed, Rose first, then Otis, and Lilly last. She kissed each one of them, pulled a thin sheet up around each of their shoulders even though the night was warm. Lilly curled up beside the baby like she always did. He’d begun to snore.
“Y’all want a song?” Ella had asked.
Lilly and Rose had nodded their heads yes, but Otis hadn’t responded. He always wanted Ella to sing them to sleep whenever she was home for their bedtime, but Ella knew that now he was trying to look tough in front of Kate.
“What do y’all want to hear?” Ella asked.
Lilly turned and looked toward Kate, who’d taken off her jacket and sat down on the floor. Her legs were curled beneath her. She propped herself up with her right hand.
“Do you know any songs?” Lilly asked her.
Kate seemed surprised. She picked up her hand, dusted her palms against one another, and leaned toward Lilly, readjusting herself so she could get closer.
“I do,” she said. “I know some songs. My daughter used to be your age, and I used to sing to her just like your mother sings to you. But my little girl’s old now. She’s getting married soon.”
“What’s her name?” Lilly asked.
“Claire,” Kate said. “Her name’s Claire. And she’s marrying a nice man named Paul.”
“What songs do you know?” Lilly asked.
“‘Two Little Blackbirds’ is my favorite,” Rose said.
“That’s a good one,” Kate said. “Does everybody like that one?” Ella watched as Kate looked toward Otis. He nodded his head yes. Kate looked over at Ella, smiled. “I’d be embarrassed to sing in front of you,” she said.
“You shouldn’t be,” Ella said. “I bet you’ve got a fine singing voice.”
Kate cleared her throat, took a moment as if she were trying to recall the words. Then she began:
Two little blackbirds sitting on a hill.
One named Jack, one named Jill.
Her voice was soft and high, much higher-pitched than Ella knew her own to be. Ella joined in after the first stanza, listened as her deep tone merged with Kate’s.
Fly away, Jack. Fly away, Jill.
Come back, Jack. Come back, Jill.
A few more stanzas and, one by one, the children had all closed their eyes.
Now Ella and Kate sat in silence side by side on the cabin’s steps. They both stared into the darkness of the road that led up out of Stumptown. Ella hadn’t known what to do with her new friend after she’d put the children to bed. But then she’d remembered a near-empty Mason jar of whiskey that Charlie had hidden beneath the house. She’d found the jar and poured what was left of the liquor, which was barely enough to cover the bottoms of two jars, and she’d given one of them to Kate. She suggested they sit on the steps while the children settled themselves into sleep.
“It turned out to be a beautiful night, didn’t it,” Kate said.
It was true. Once the rain stopped for good and the clouds drifted away, a quarter moon had revealed itself. The night was full of night sounds: the chirps of crickets, the occasional frog, the gurgle of the creek off in the woods where it was fed by the spring. Ella could hear a woman’s voice somewhere up the road, but it was too far away to know who it was or what she was saying. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted past Ella’s nose before vanishing. Ella cupped her free hand around her stomach, fixed her mind on the small life that stirred there.
“You said your daughter’s about to get married,” she said. “How old is she?”
“She’s twenty-two,” Kate said. “And she’s home for the summer. It’s nice to have a child in the house again, no matter how old she is.”
The question burst from Ella’s chest before she fully understood that she had spent all night preparing to ask it.
“Why’d you want to meet me?” She looked down at the jar in her hand, turned it back and forth. “Why would somebody like you want to meet somebody like me? Let me drive your car? Follow me home? Meet my children?” She looked over at Kate. “Why?”
Kate tipped her jar up, drank what was left. She set it on the steps beside her.
“Tonight, before you sang, you told the story of how your little boy died. Isn’t it difficult to tell people something so private?”
“It’s hard for me to say why I tell that story,” Ella said. “I didn’t used to talk about it. It used to be that I didn’t want to think about it. But I think about it now. I think about it all the time: his face, how his body felt when I held him, how his breath smelled sweet after he nursed.” Something caught in her throat, and she feared that she might find herself in tears, something that hadn’t happened in a long time.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Kate said. Ella felt Kate’s hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” Ella said, “I don’t mind talking about it. I just hadn’t thought of that sweet breath in a while.�
�� She looked at Claire. “You know what I’m talking about? The way a baby’s breath smells sweet and sugary after it nurses, after it’s fallen asleep with your nipple in its mouth, and you take it off and hold its face up against yours, and you can smell its lips, smell its breath when it breathes?”
“Yes,” Kate said. Her eyes glistened. “I know. I remember it.”
Ella turned away from Kate, looked out into the darkness before her.
“I don’t know if you were raised in the church,” she said, “but I was. I was raised Baptist. We always hopped around from church to church depending on where my daddy was working, but my mother was a fiery believer. My daddy wanted to stay on her good side.” She smiled, allowed herself a small laugh that cut through her sadness; with it came a quick memory of her mother and father’s faces, and then they were gone. “So that meant Daddy was a fiery one too.
“In a church like the ones I was raised in, it was normal for folks to get up and talk about how the Lord had moved in their lives. When you’re holy, when you’re filled up with the spirit, you want people to know you’ve earned it, and you want to tell about it. People want to know that you’ve earned it too. Speaking at these rallies is something like that for me. Being poor, losing my baby, fighting for what I’m fighting for: it’s the same thing as getting up in front of that church and telling those people how the Lord’s moved in your life. You’ve earned that story. I’ve earned mine. I’ve earned this being sad, this loss, this being angry. I want to tell it to people so they’ll know what it means to earn it. Plenty of the women who’ve heard me, probably a good bit of the men too, have lived the same kind of life I’ve lived. They need to know they’re not alone.”
She stopped speaking, considered saying nothing else, but she couldn’t help it. She had to know.
“But you didn’t answer what I asked you,” Ella said. “Why’d you want to meet me?”
Kate dropped her hands into her lap, parted her knees, looked down at her feet. “I was seventeen when I married Richard,” she said. “Not much older than you were when you married your husband. After he finished school we were married in my parents’ church in Hickory, and then we moved to McAdamville so he could start working for his father.” She sighed, laughed quietly just once. “I was young. I didn’t know anything about my body, I certainly didn’t know anything about his. I was probably three months pregnant before I realized it.”
Kate raised her head, folded her arms over her knees.
“Richard was overjoyed. We both were, really. I thought that’s what it meant to be a wife, to support your husband. You saw him off to work in the morning and saw him home in the evening and you gave him a baby as soon as you could.
“Richard took me to the doctor, and the doctor felt around on my belly. Oh, you know how they poke at you. And he put something to my stomach and tried to hear the baby. He said if I was right about how long I’d been pregnant, then the baby should be big enough to hear it inside there. But he didn’t hear anything, and I couldn’t feel anything either, and it made me wonder if I’d been mistaken. I was afraid that I’d made the whole thing up.
“And then my belly got bigger and bigger, and I knew a baby was growing inside me, and I could feel it inside there too. And when I went back to the doctor he felt around and poked at me some more and said the baby was too small. He listened and said the baby’s heart was too small. He said things might not be okay, but I didn’t believe him. At least I didn’t want to. I thought, Here you were thinking you might not be pregnant, but you are. Anything’s possible. Things could turn out fine.
“But they didn’t. When he was born he was so small, Ella.” She cupped her hands before her. “I remember him fitting right in the palm of one of my hands, but I know that can’t be true. Surely he wasn’t that small, but that’s how I remember him. He was beautiful, but he was so little. And he wouldn’t nurse, wouldn’t hardly open his eyes. The doctor said he was sick. He didn’t know what with, but he never got better. And then we lost him a few days later.”
She held her hands to her mouth as if trying to keep the words inside. She sighed, looked over at Ella.
“I’m sorry to come all the way out here and tell you a story like this,” Kate said. “I’ve just never told anyone before. Richard won’t talk about it. I got pregnant with Claire a few years later, and I was scared to death. When she was born it was such a relief. I was so afraid to let go of her, terrified of her not being at my breast where I could see her, see all of her, and make sure she was okay. I wondered if I worried over her so much because I was trying to forget what happened. We never talked about it. We never told Claire, we still haven’t. But now I know that I worried over her because I still worried over our son. I still thought of his face every time I saw hers, still felt his body in my hands each time I lifted her to me. I still think of him every day.”
She put her hands to her eyes and held them there for a moment, and then she wiped at her nose and folded her arms back across her knees. She looked at Ella. Ella saw that her eyes had grown wet again.
“It’s like what you said earlier,” Kate said. “What you said after I told you about my brother. You said it doesn’t get easier when you lose someone you love.”
“It doesn’t,” Ella said. She lifted her right hand and put it on Kate’s shoulder, and then she put her arm all the way around her. Kate scooted closer. Ella felt her lean toward her.
“It’s brave of you to tell your story,” Kate said. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Living through it is the brave part,” Ella said. “You don’t know it when it’s happening, but living through it’s the hardest. After that the telling about it’s easy.”
The two women sat that way a little while longer, Ella with her arm around Kate, Kate with her head on Ella’s shoulder. Ella had a sense of the night growing darker, quieter. She no longer heard people’s voices. She didn’t see light from any cabins coming through the trees. She wondered if Kate had fallen asleep, but then Kate sighed, spoke.
“It’s getting late,” Kate said. She stirred. Ella lifted her arm, and Kate sat up, moved away from her. She looked at Ella as if she were embarrassed by something she’d said or done. She took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then released a long sigh. “I’m sorry to have put all this on you,” she said. “I didn’t plan to tell you that story.”
“No,” Ella said. “I’m glad you told it to me.”
“It’s just that I don’t have very many friends,” Kate said. “It’s hard. It’s hard to find friends sometimes.”
“I’ll be your friend,” Ella said.
“Okay,” Kate said. She smiled. “I’ll be your friend too.”
Movement in the road in front of her cabin caught Ella’s eye. Both women looked up at the same time. A figure came toward them in the darkness. As it grew closer Ella could tell that it was a man, and by the time he reached her yard she could tell that it was Charlie. He held a rifle. He smiled. Ella could tell he was drunk.
“There you are,” he said.
“Here I am,” she said.
He looked at the jars sitting on the steps beside Ella and Kate. “Y’all having a party?”
“No,” Ella said.
“It sure looks like a party,” he said. He reached toward Ella and picked up her glass. He downed the whiskey in one swallow. He stumbled, dropped the rifle at his feet, bent to pick it up. Kate moved up one step so that she sat on the porch. Ella could feel her new friend’s fear.
“What do you want, Charlie?” Ella asked.
He looked at Kate. “Who are you?”
“She’s my friend,” Ella said. “What do you want?”
He laughed. “No, all your friends are niggers,” he said. Kate gasped at the word.
“Go home, Charlie,” Ella said. “Sleep it off.”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” he said. “Not when you say you got my baby inside you. You can’t tell me nothing.” He lifted the rifle, held it wi
th two hands, kept it pointed toward the woods alongside the cabin. “And I don’t believe you anyway,” Charlie said. “That ain’t my baby. It’s probably some nigger baby.”
“It won’t be your baby,” Ella said. “It’ll be mine.”
Charlie turned the rifle so that it pointed at Ella’s chest. She could hear him breathing, could hear the gurgle of the spring behind the cabin, could hear Kate’s struggle to keep from crying.
“Charlie, if you’re going to shoot me, then at least let me go inside and make sure my babies got something for breakfast,” she said. “Ain’t no use in them finding me dead and being hungry too.”
Kate scooted away from them toward the cabin’s door, and when Charlie looked toward the sound, Ella reached out and snatched the rifle from his hands. She turned it on him, pointed it at his chest exactly where he’d just pointed it at hers.
“Go home, Charlie,” she said. “I ain’t got no use for this rifle, so you can have it back tomorrow, but I can’t let you keep it tonight.”
“You bitch,” he said. He looked at Kate. “That’s what y’all are: a couple of bitches.”
“Don’t talk nasty, Charlie,” Ella said. “Like you said, she’s my only white friend. Don’t go and run her off.”
Charlie spit at the ground by the porch steps. “I’m coming back for my gun,” he said.
“Not tonight you ain’t,” Ella said. She held the gun on him as he backed out of the yard and turned and walked up the road toward the Kings Mountain Highway. Ella watched him until he disappeared, and then she lowered the butt of the rifle to the ground and leaned it against the porch steps. She looked back at Kate where she sat, saw that her eyes were closed, her hand covering her heart.
“He’s gone,” Ella said.
Kate opened her eyes; a tear slid down her cheek. “Who was that?” she asked.
“That was nobody,” Ella said, “but damn it if he don’t want to be somebody.”
“Is he really—” She stopped, as if trying to find the right words. “Are you—”