by Amy Sorrells
“Comfort, darlin’, won’t you please open the door?” Solly begged.
“Just keep fillin’ dat basket up is what we’ll do!” Ernestine shouted at the door in her singsong, Haitian accent. Then she shook her head and lumbered down the steps. “She’ll have to come out sometime.”
I wasn’t so sure. For the second time this week, we’d left a basket of food, cards, and flowers for her. And for the second time, she’d taken the basket after we left, returning it empty to the front porch.
Empty except for a yellow-edged note card tucked into the folds of the basket’s weave.
Nobody else noticed it.
I quick stuck it in my pocket and kept the message a secret.
Sak vid pa kanp.
“An empty sack can’t stand up.”
CHAPTER 5
Comfort
You do that, Ernestine! I want to holler back at the four of them, out there waiting for me to open the door, but I have no voice.
No face.
No body anymore.
Familiar lumps of my bleached, duck-canvas-covered couch embrace me, and I pull my legs up closer to my heart. The footsteps of the people closest to me—Solly; my niece, Anniston; my sister-in-law, Oralee; and Ernestine—creak down and away from the sun-worn, wood porch steps. Tears threaten to spill from my eyes, but I won’t cry. Can’t cry. If I do, I might never stop.
I pull the leather-bound scrapbook off the whitewashed, antique coffee table beside me and open the cover to a full-page photo of Solly and me. In the photo, he holds me close and our legs crisscross as we sit, tucked safe in the corner of a sugar-soft sand dune, surrounded by sea grass that is bordered by rickety sand-trap fencing. Waves of azure ocean play behind us in the background.
I blow a strand of hair away from my face.
“Your hair’s pretty enough to weave angel wings,” Solly always says. He always did like my hair, even when he pulled it when he sat behind me in second grade. I’d come home that day and cried to Princella about it, but she’d only said, without looking at me, that it was probably because the boy liked me.
Some things never change. Mama still doesn’t look at me. And Solly still likes me. Loves me. So much he asked me to marry him next summer. I hold the diamond ring against my lips as I turn page after page of happy vacation pictures that seem impossible, though they were taken only a few months earlier on the beach. Before Hurricane Frederic. Before this past week.
I run my fingers over a photo Solly took of me kneeling to pick up shells. Every time we go to the beach, I bring home a bucketful of them. Whole shells, half shells, broken shells. I never throw broken shells back in the ocean. Each fractured angle eventually finds a place alongside another in the mosaic furniture and frames I make and use to fill this cottage home in which Solly and I are supposed to live together.
Neither Solly nor I have much, but Daddy had the house built for me when I finished beauty school last spring. Shortly after, Qarla, owner of the Curly Q Hair and Nail Salon, hired me full-time.
Daddy. If ever a man’s heart was too big, it was his. He’d made a commitment to Mama when he’d brought her home with him from college one day, and he would not break that commitment. She’d arrived on the Harlan plantation all those years ago pregnant with Cole, an illegitimate child, and with nowhere else to go. People in these parts—especially society people—don’t get divorced. Problem is, all that devotion eats away at the soul’s ability to see evil creeping in. And once a person’s blind to evil, nothing can stop it, leaving generation after generation to stumble around in its darkness.
Lucky for Mama, Daddy always wore blinders when it came to her.
If she was any bit alive before Cole and Rey died, six feet of clay and silt covered it now. Everyone knew she grieved for Cole, not Rey. And certainly she did not grieve for what I’d been through. Who could say for sure what makes a mother choose one child over another, or even over two? And yet, it is difficult to remember a day when Mama acted happy for anything having to do with me and Rey.
Rey came along only two years after Cole, and I came along a lonesome eleven years after that, both of us unexpected children—if not unwanted—who shot pains of childbirth through Mama like cannonballs announcing the mistake of our arrivals. Ernestine said Vaughn wanted to celebrate, but Mama would not entertain even the notion of showers for either of us. No tables covered with petit fours. No bowls of pastel, melt-in-your-mouth mints to greet guests. No birth announcements. No lace-covered bassinets. No room in her world, already established and centered around Cole, for either of us. She’d hired Ernestine as soon as she could to raise us.
Princella had her reasons.
At least that’s what Ernestine always says. We still don’t know what they are exactly, just accept them like the inevitable yearly growth and harvest of our pecan-laden hills.
And so Rey learned to go to Ernestine instead of Mama for all his needs. By the time I came along, it went without saying that I should do the same. Daddy helped when he could, setting us on his knee in the evenings, telling us stories from the Bible, taking us to church. But every other minute of the day, he wandered and worked the rolling hills of pecan trees, straight lines of them, like soldiers at arms, surrounding and guarding the secrets within our great, white house. The orchards were the only place he could escape from the choice he’d made to save Mama from ruin by whisking her off to the safety of the Harlan plantation like a refugee escaping a dark desert of sin.
I flip to another page in the album and focus on the way Solly’s hand rests on the small of my back. Even in photos, his hand sends hot chills up my spine. I’ve never wanted a man so.
Another photo captures him kissing the top of my head. Anyone who doesn’t know us would have thought we were on our honeymoon, the way we interlaced our fingers, how he brushed wisps of hair away from my face and tucked loose strands up under my floppy hat, how his eyes searched mine in a way that gave away his feverish longing for all of me, too.
Now we have nothing.
Cole stole all of that and more.
Stole Rey, too.
I shut the album, knowing part of me is to blame.
But then again, how could any of us have known such fast-moving thunderclouds loomed beyond our carefully pruned lives? That the darkness I felt in my heart whenever Cole came around would swallow us like a storm surge?
Were each of us so blinded by pious allegiance to our family that we overlooked such impending wickedness? We’d basked in the sunny eye of our own hurricane too long, and when the waves came, billows of pain and pride careened over the top of me, breaking me and slamming me to the gritty ocean floor, somersaulting me like a weightless piece of driftwood and leaving me in a filthy, foamy mess.
Sin settled in the boughs of the Harlan family years ago, and now the boughs were breaking.
In the bathroom, I tack an empty, old pecan sack over the mirror to cover every glimpse of my reflection.
I do the same with the mirror above the dresser in my bedroom.
I always did hate mirrors.
A salty breeze from Mobile Bay brushes a lace curtain into the room at the same time the phone rings, and fear seizes through me. Happens all the time now, the way I startle at every sound, every shadow, every out-of-the-ordinary smell.
I don’t want to answer the phone. I know it is Solly. It hurts too much to hear his voice, his assurances, his pleas to help.
I pick up the receiver and hold it to my ear, but I don’t speak.
“Comfort. Honey. Say something.” Solly sounds exhausted.
A single, scalding tear runs down my face.
“Tell me how I can help. I’ll do anything. Take you away from here. Take care of you, like I’ve always promised. Like we’re still going to promise each other before the entire world next summer at our wedding. For better or for worse. I’m yours, eve
n now.”
“There isn’t going to be a wedding.”
“Comfort—”
I hang up before I can hear his pleas. They tear my heart into slivers of burlap, splitting at the edges, impossible to sew back together without unraveling even more.
He is asking me for things Cole destroyed.
Parts no longer mine to give.
Knock all you want to, Ernestine.
I couldn’t ever come out again.
Kay piti, ou prann nat ou anba bra ou.
“[When] the house is small, you hold your bedding under your arm.”
CHAPTER 6
Anniston
I sat on my bare mattress and traced the outline of Comfort’s handwriting on the note card she’d left us the day of the funeral.
Behold and see
What a great heap of grief lay hid in me.…
Stand further off then! Go.
~E. B. Browning
Mrs. Nowlan, my English teacher, taught us how Elizabeth Barrett Browning never came out of her house. How she never saw the places she wrote about but managed to paint pictures of green hills and dark valleys as if she roamed them every day. She even managed to knock the socks off Robert Browning before they ever met in person.
Maybe Comfort wanted me to understand the poem meant she wouldn’t come out again, either. Or maybe people felt too prickly to her now. Maybe she needed a rest, like the pecan trees all around us, dormant and naked.
I folded the note card and tucked it in the secret compartment at the bottom of my musical ballerina jewelry box, which I put, along with a few last stray stuffed animals and a purple-and-gold Bay Spring High School felt banner, into the moving box. Molly’s coal-black eyes seemed to sadden as she watched me tape the box shut. She curled herself into a ball on my floor and sighed.
Mama and Ernestine’s voices carried from where they packed in the kitchen.
“It’ll only be for a little while, until I can get my feet back under me,” said Mama.
I wondered if she was trying to convince herself or the rest of us of the wisdom of this move as I joined them in the room where we had eaten so many family dinners—Daddy, all but his fresh-washed hands filthy with dirt from the orchards, and Mama, the blue of her nursing scrubs matching the blue of her eyes, laughing as we talked about our days. Now, the avocado-green stove and refrigerator looked sad against the empty white cupboards and faded yellow linoleum floor.
“Vaughn said he’d help us find another place in town soon. And Princella won’t bother us much. She has all her social obligations. Ernestine will be there and you can stay in Comfort’s old room. She’d like knowing you’re in there.”
“Oui, child. It’ll be good to have you awhile.” Ernestine handed me a plate from Mama and Daddy’s set of wedding china to wrap in packing paper.
I supposed this day counted as special an occasion as any worthy enough to bring out the fancy dishes, which were etched with delicate, pink flowers and rimmed in gold. Just a week after the funeral, the movers were coming that afternoon to put most of our things in storage and move the rest into Princella and Vaughn’s. Always the practical one, Vaughn offered for us to live there, knowing how hard it would be to stay another night in the house where Daddy and Cole shot each other to death. Blood doesn’t come out of carpet that easy.
I didn’t argue with Mama about the move. Sadness made my chest feel too heavy to make a fuss, and I didn’t want to burden Mama with any sass. Besides, I didn’t want to stay any longer in the place where Daddy and Cole had died, either. Ernestine, she had a way of making things better, so living with her might help us for a while. And most of the time, Princella really did leave us alone. Still, if I was wary of anything, it was about living under the same roof as her.
The only other thing that might be good about living there was the beauty of the orchards. Those hills held plenty of work to keep us busy.
“Maybe it’ll be nice staying there,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm. You might find it to be.” Ernestine grabbed a couple more cups out of the cabinet and started singing as she wrapped.
There is a balm in Gilead
to make the wounded whole
there is a balm in Gilead
to heal the sin-sick soul.
Tears spilled down Mama’s face as Ernestine sang, and I wondered if there could be a balm this side of heaven strong enough to heal this big of a mess. What part of this could ever be whole again? What part of Mama? What part of Comfort? What part of me?
And what about Princella? She was already broke up in pieces before. Surely there wasn’t anything in creation balmy enough to heal her.
Before long, all the breakables were wrapped and stacked in moving boxes. I pulled an old, fleece-lined, flannel shirt of Daddy’s tighter around me, bones chilling at the thought of him buried deep in the dark, winter ground. Mama wore one of his shirts, too, still woody-smelling from the pecan harvest. Together, we turned and took one last look at the house where I’d grown up. Reminded me of a house straight out of the pages of Anne of Green Gables. Painted the color of beach sand with shutters as blue as the deepest part of a wisteria petal, its window boxes bulged with pansies in the spring, but they were empty now. Ivy grew nonstop, hugging the sides of the house and climbing across roof corners. One of the prettiest homes in Bay Spring proper, Daddy always said.
Molly and I sat next to Mama as she drove our maroon station wagon behind the moving truck, which bumped along in front of us as we followed it toward the highway running alongside Mobile Bay. Ernestine, her light blue El Camino piled full of overstuffed boxes and the flailing legs of upturned chairs, drove in front of us.
Soon, we would turn east, away from town and into the heart of Alabama, where silt and clay roads crisscrossed green fields. And soon it would be Christmas, when farmers of most every crop worried about the possibility of a deep freeze ruining the hope of summer fruit and cotton. Daddy never worried so much about the cold. He said pecans hibernated more deeply than other trees. Said the trees know better than to let their leaves unfurl until late spring.
Mama turned into the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, stuck front and center amidst a gaggle of other stores. I imagined that smiling pig waving good-bye to anyone leaving town and greeting those coming to visit.
“Let’s get something good for dinner. And a few more things for Comfort.”
Toddlers stuffed into the seats of grocery carts—and some hanging over the sides of them—reached for low-hanging candy, sugary cereals, and cookies as their mamas struggled to stick to the items on their lists. School was in session, though Mama let me miss again since we were all grieving, so it felt strange that no kids my age were around. The Piggly Wiggly served as the prime hangout spot for those of us old enough to make and spend a dime or two on candy, teen magazines, or soda.
Mama placed an order at the meat counter, and I turned the corner into the snack aisle as the chatter of a couple of women caught my ear.
“Heard she asked for it. That’s what Trina said.”
“She must’ve. I can’t imagine Cole doing something as awful as that.”
“And that Rey, he always was a hothead. Shoulda been teaching his whore of a sister to keep her legs shut, is what he shoulda been doing.”
I backed up, nearly knocking over an entire display of Little Debbie Snacks. I’d always thought Cole was a good-for-nothin’, and Mama said as much, but I never knew folks thought Comfort was that way, even if Princella and Cole had said those things about her at the Thanksgiving table.
Whore.
Cole had used that word for her that night. But she’d been steady with Solly since junior high. They went to all the dances together. They were engaged. How could anyone think Comfort brought this on herself?
“Anything you need while we’re here, hon?” Mama’s fingers barely stuck out th
e bottom of the sleeves of Daddy’s shirt as she put her arm around me, and I jumped at her unexpected voice.
“Flowers? Can we get Comfort some flowers?”
“That’s a wonderful idea. Why don’t you go pick out something from next door?”
By next door, Mama meant the Proper Petal, the florist and landscaping business where Solly worked. A cedar arch entwined with purple wisteria haloed the entrance to Bay Spring’s most popular florist and nursery, which provided everything from landscaping supplies to bouquets and boutonnieres for the town’s life-and-death events.
A big display of azalea and jade, roots sticking through the slats of their green plastic pots, surrounded the entrance. I nudged the door open, and my eyes adjusted to the dark. Spades, hand rakes, glass gazing balls, and wooden stakes with names of fancy herbs painted on them filled wooden crates fashioned into display shelves. The air smelled like unsweetened chocolate, heavy and rich with a hint of magnolia sweet. Wind chimes of all shapes and colors hung from the ceiling. An orange, striped cat hopped over my foot and slinked around the cash register table. I ran my fingers across the top of a purple, glass gazing ball.
“Best not touch the fragile things, unless you have enough in your pocket to buy something if it drops and breaks.”
The raspy voice startled me, and I almost knocked the ball off its stand. I turned toward the voice to see the man, hands pushed down tight in the bottoms of the pockets of his green apron.
“Sorry I scared you, Anni. Wouldn’t want you to break somethin’.”
“Solly!” I scolded him. “Scaring a person like that’s one way to make sure something gets dropped.”
“What brings you here, sweetie?” He scribbled something on a notepad behind the register. Sadness hung from his face like a tired old coat on a hook.
“We’re following the moving trucks out of town, and Mama stopped next door to get some groceries for dinner. I asked if I could get Comfort some flowers to drop off with another basketful of food and things for her. Any ideas?”