by Amy Sorrells
He didn’t argue with me one way or the other, just picked another dandelion and tickled my chin with it, which started us in on popping heads off at each other all over again.
I reached down to pick up another one and jumped back.
“What is it?” said Jed.
“Look there—I thought it was a dandelion. I only saw the edge of it. Almost picked it up.” I pointed to a bright yellow lump on the ground.
Jed picked it up. “It’s a canary. Still breathin’, too.”
“What’s a canary doing out here?”
“Someone let it loose.” He shook his head. “I see ’em every once in a while. Folks buy themselves a pretty bird but get tired of ’em singing all the time, so they let ’em loose. Think they’ll live out here like any other bird. But they don’t. Poor things don’t know what to do, free to fly after spending their lives in a cage. They’re used to someone feeding them all the time. Someone filling their water dish. They don’t know nothin’ about living on their own. And their color ain’t much good for hiding from predators.”
He cradled the tiny bird in his rough hands, stroking and smoothing its feathers. The bird, too tired to fight, lay there and closed its eyes.
“What should we do?”
“I’ll take it home. Nurse it back. Maybe give it to that pet store on Main Street. They’re nice folks in there. Maybe they’ll know someone who’ll take it once it’s well. Someone who cares.”
Bay ak kè a nan kou an bliye; jenn gason an nan mak la sonje.
“The giver of the blow forgets; the bearer of the scar remembers.”
CHAPTER 16
Comfort
When we danced, the world danced with us, Solly and I. The disco ball, squares of mirror reflecting joy, spun over us. Every glimmer, every note, every beat of the drum a symphony playing within his heart and mine. When he held me, I felt safe. Treasured. Chosen. New.
We danced a lot over the years. School events; church events; even in the quiet of his parents’ ranch home when they gave us the living room to ourselves on date nights, when Solly’d put on Foreigner or James Taylor LPs.
Sometimes we sang. He’d bring out his guitar and play the songs himself, sing them to me as he rested his guitar on one knee, and let me rest my head on his other. We had an easiness about us. You could say it was like Sunday morning. Sure. Nothing was hidden between us.
At least nothing that needed remembering.
Folks think I don’t show my face around town because of the rape. And part of that’s true. Mostly, it’s because of the monster the rape let out of the closet, an ebony shadow looming and lurking on the outskirts of my brain. The beast was chained up, contained, controlled by denial, forgetting, wealth, and lies. For years I prayed for God to make Cole stop, and one day, round about my tenth birthday, he did. I waited night after night for him to come back, barely breathing, pretending I was paralyzed by sleep as I strained to hear the creak of my bedroom door in the hours of the night the whole world slept. But Abba, He finally heard me. After that, forgetting it ever happened was easier than admitting it ever did. So I never told Solly. Never wanted to tell him. Never wanted to ruin the beauty of the safe place he’d always been for me.
Now the memories flooded over me, released like a swollen river by Cole’s violent, and now public, jealousy over a ring placed with love around the fourth finger of my left hand, a ring smooth and unblemished by the sickness in Cole’s head making him think love was sex, and sex was power, and power meant he owned me. Or maybe he thought what he did to me meant he owned himself—even if he bought it with my blood.
Way back before I knew better, I tried to tell someone about what Cole did to me, back when I still wore footie pajamas to bed in the winter and Holly Hobbie nightgowns in the spring. Back then, Cole’s games were only beginning to grow in power, promising me adoration, which was all I could understand—adoration ultimately threatening and mocking me with doubts.
“It’s all in your mind,” my kindergarten teacher said one day when I’d tried to confess what Cole did to me. I’d been finger painting, and the bright red lines of my design, thick and wet, hung on a line to dry next to classmates’ pictures of houses and sunshine and flowers.
“You always have been a dreamer,” Mama said, though I knew she’d seen. She just kept pouring hot bath water over my suds-covered hair.
“Don’t tell,” Cole said as he held a toy gun against the side of my head. I couldn’t have been more than three or four that time. And who, when they’re three years old, can tell the difference between plastic and metal? What child can tell the difference between an older brother who holds her—the one she thinks put the moon and stars and all of her tiny, shiny little world of Bay Spring in motion—and the beast that lives within him? Fleshy, tender lips—the same as yours and mine—cover gnarled teeth. Fancy clothes cover bony fingers. Mouths sweet as sugar one day, hissed and blamed and caused guilt to develop deep into my soul the next if I ventured too close to the door of truth.
And yet truth begged me to come closer, to open up, to tell.
“Stranger danger,” the programs on public television warned.
“Good touch, bad touch,” the special convocations taught us at school.
And even if someone had listened, how could I have found words to describe what I myself wondered was real? My mind, each time he hurt me, became a keyhole-shaped chasm through which I escaped and watched, numb.
Don’t leave me, I would wish as Daddy read to me, the sun falling over the boats rocking against their moorings all along the bay.
Keep reading, please.
Don’t turn out the light.
But he did turn out the light. Flipped the switch the quarter inch downward that darkness needed to act. And before daybreak, cords of fear came and bound me, plastic gun silencing me.
What words could I ever use to tell Solly? We are soul mates, but even soul mates keep secrets from each other—secrets they’re afraid might doom them. Secrets I am sure would doom us. So now I am bound worse than ever, caught in the clutches of those secrets even as they lie dead in the grave. Evil got away with far too much this time, and I am the only one who can keep myself safe now. No one else did.
I watch Anni and her new friend walking in the orchards, laughing, unknowing, dancing like Solly and I once did beneath the arms of the pecan trees. Her friend sits on the stump of a pecan tree cut down to make room for the others around it. The boy is one of the new seasonal helpers. I saw him helping Daddy cut that tree down last week. Daddy showed him how to soak the stump and the base with stump killer, trickling down to the end of the farthest, deepest roots. I helped a lot with the orchards growing up, but thinning the trees … I couldn’t do it. I knew the reasons behind the thinning, that the other trees couldn’t grow and produce as much otherwise, but seeing the giants I helped raise from saplings chopped off … I couldn’t stand it. Daddy always cut them down in the late winter. Before March. Before the new leaves felt the warmth rising up out of the Gulf of Mexico and felt safe enough to finally unfurl.
Anni and her friend laugh beyond my window, chasing each other through the rows. How I wish I could join them. I wish to breathe in air and life. I ache for the childhood I never truly had. I ache to touch the mourning doves crying outside my windows, without a plate of glass, hard and sharp, between us. But Cole is everywhere. If I switch beds or sleep on the couch in the middle of the night, he and the dreams follow me there. If I walk beyond the front porch, even the front door, I feel fear like lightning in all my limbs, striking all courage, all hope, dead.
And so I cannot escape.
And I am nothing.
Oh, I could have been something to Solly. To others, too. I could’ve been good. I could’ve been right. But I fell, the knees of my soul forever skinned, before I ever had a chance. Even before Solly pulled my hair because he liked me back i
n second grade.
… He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds …
I hear the scripture, sudden and clear, and laced with the hearty sureness of Ernestine’s accent. I hear it, and though I know Abba saved me once, I wonder if He can—if He will—save me again.
If you make your bed in the depths, I am there.
Even in this, Lord?
Even if you settle on the far side of the sea.
Even this far, Abba?
The dark is not dark to Me, child.
Surely this darkness, this evil this time, hides me from You.
Not even this, My dear one. Not even this.
I argue with Abba, and yet, the sharp edges of isolation cut into places of my heart that need healing. The sting of the rending pulls me, overwhelms my fainthearted fear.
And so, I go.
And I go with you.
For the first time in weeks, I pull on my sneakers, wrap around my wary shoulders a shawl that Ernestine had knit, and I go. Into the angled glare of a sunken sun, kissing the horizon like a lover longing to touch more, I go.
My hand, it cradles you.
My fury, it shields you.
My angels encircle your every step.
And in sunlight, I find solace. Unexpected and smiting the unbridgeable solstice between hurt and healing, peace shows up like a waltzing curl of winter air on stretching beams of light. The Light.
His Light.
Binding up one bruise, and one is good for now, the raw edges of my wound warming, even if only slightly, as I walk with Him in the sunlight.
Pa gen okenn lapriyè ki pa gen Amen.
“There is no prayer which does not have an Amen.”
CHAPTER 17
Anniston
“Kote nou te?” Ernestine stirred her steaming pot of jambalaya as I walked into the kitchen. “Where have you been?”
“I was down at the docks. Talking to Larry. The Jubilee looks real good.”
“Saw you met a new friend,” she said.
“You did?”
“Oui, child. Can’t hide much around these orchards.”
“Oh.” I studied my fingernails and picked at a dead piece of cuticle on my thumb until it bled. I wrapped my finger tight in the corner of my purple T-shirt.
“Pa enkyete. Don’t worry, Anni. I’m glad you found a friend.”
“You are?”
“Your mama, too. Been worried about you not having someone your own age. Tell me more about him?”
I sat at the kitchen table and watched her sample the soup. “I don’t know … He’s real nice. He likes rocks. Fossils. He’s got hundreds of ’em.”
Ernestine smiled at me, the sort of smile that took the weight of worry off, like it flew away on the wings of that blackbird.
“He’s nice, but … well, he’s kinda mixed-up.”
“Mmm-hmm.” She stirred the stew a moment. “So’s I, Anni. Like this jambalaya. But sometimes mixed-up is the best. Like the holy trinity. Sen trinite a.”
She wasn’t referring to the Trinity we learned about in church, exactly. She meant the holy trinity of Creole cooking: bell peppers, onion, and celery. I’d chopped up enough of those three with her to know. She grabbed one of each and held them toward me. “The three of these, they inseparable. But by themselves, well, one wouldn’t be much good without the other.”
“I feel awful mixed-up myself.”
I pulled the heads and tails off crawdaddies while Ernestine set some rice to boiling. She wiped her raven-colored, weathered hands on a dishcloth before walking to her room off the side of the kitchen and returning with a worn photo book.
“Sit with me, child.”
I pulled up a stool to the kitchen counter, and she turned the album to a page of me, wrinkly and new, fresh home from the hospital in Daddy’s arms.
“With him gone, the rest of life don’t taste too good.”
We turned page after page of me growing bigger, and Daddy’s smile shining down on me. Me playing in the plastic swimming pool, diapers hanging down to my knees. Me pedaling a two-wheeler away from him as he stood behind and cheered. Me stepping onto the school bus and he and Mama waving good-bye.
If anyone knew about good-byes, Ernestine did. Lost her daddy, who was fighting against a dictator for Haiti’s freedom, before she was born. Lost her husband in an airplane crash right after they married. Chose to stay here in Bay Spring so she could raise Comfort and Daddy.
“How do you do it, Ernestine? How do you go on?”
“You don’t go on as much as you change direction. And which direction you take, that part’s up to you. One way leads to forgiveness and peace. The other leads down a road of bitterness. Can’t turn back from bitterness. Not very often, anyway.”
“You chose the right way, didn’t you?”
“Oui, child. I think I have. But sometimes I wake up in the morning, and I have to make the right choice again. The shadow of bitterness comes that fast on a heart. And each time I choose, I learn again—nan tout bagay, Bondye ap travay pou byen pou moun ki renmen l. God works for good. Romans 8:28.”
“But not all bad can turn to good, can it?” How in the world was Daddy dying good? How could it ever be?
Ernestine took a minute to reply. “You’re right.” She put her ebony hand on top of my pale and small one. “Not everything bad can be good. The Bible don’t stop at verse twenty-eight. The one after says God uses the bad fè nou plis tankou Jezi—to make us more like Jesus. But we have to let Him use it. I still wonder why I lost my father before I knew him. I wonder why I lost my husband before we had a chance to have children. But now I know. You. Comfort. Your daddy. God heard my pain and gave me all of you.”
I thought about Jed, how I met him soon after Daddy died. “Today, I asked Jed to the dance.”
“Asked who to the dance?”
I jumped at Princella’s voice. She’d come into the kitchen without me noticing.
“A new friend from school.” Officially, he did go to my school, since the junior and senior high were all in one building. But if I’d said he worked for us, she might’ve let me have it right then and there.
“What’s his last name?”
“Manon, ma’am.”
“Hmmm. Haven’t heard of them.” She lifted the lid off the pot of jambalaya and inhaled the steam rising off the top. “No matter, I suppose. I look forward to meeting this boy.”
Later, when we sat down to dinner, strips of bell pepper and onion and chunks of celery fell over mounds of white rice, with crawdaddy meat and shrimp tumbling after. We sopped up the mirepoix with Ernestine’s homemade sourdough bread soaked in butter.
The day was a holy trinity.
Joy, pain, and a pinch of something I wasn’t so sure was going to add anything good to the mix.
Yon do-kay koule ka moun fou solèy move tan, men li pa tronpe lapli.
“A leaking roof may fool sunny weather, but cannot fool the rain.”
CHAPTER 18
Comfort
Qarla’s relentless pleading for me to come back and do nails at the Curly Q finally drives me crazy enough to take her up on it. She’s grateful for the help with the craziness of the upcoming cotillion. As long as she is there, I feel safe enough. Besides, so focused on telling me about their husbands’ law office parties, their charity luncheons, their mothers-in-law, or their not-so-secret affairs, rarely, if ever, do any of my nail clients ask after me. To tell the truth, most avoid eye contact with me. They know, of course, what happened. Some even wait in line for Tiffany, the other nail artist, when my table opens up, afraid to be touched by my hands, contagions of rape.
Not that I care about avoidance. I relish it, really, saving my words for Oralee. Ernestine. Poems for Anni. And sometimes I give my words—but words only—to Solly.
I look at the appointment book to see who my next nail client is. Wynn Culpepper. I remember that last name, which is too strange to forget. But I know it better in Coach Culpepper, head coach of the Bay Spring High School football team.
“Wynn?” I call to the waiting room full of teenage girls and their mothers.
A lady showing more cleavage than hiding it, chewing gum, and reading the latest issue of Cosmopolitan must be Mrs. Culpepper, whom the whole town knows is Coach’s third wife. She nearly shoves the girl I assume to be Wynn off her place on the pink velvet footstool.
Wynn is a wilted girl who does not look at me, most of her face behind a chiseled chunk of bluish-black hair and hiding the rest of herself in black leather and denim. She might’ve been trying to look like Joan Jett, but she doesn’t fool me. I know all about being alone, and I know that’s what Wynn is. Alone.
I put her hands in the bowl of warm soapsuds, not entirely surprised at the strong smell of smoke coming off of them. As I smooth the ends of her nails and avoid making her already-bleeding cuticles sorer, I study her face, still splotchy, either from me calling her name or her mama shoving her or both. When I push the sleeve up on her left arm, I see the cuts, which I realize spell out “STOP IT” in crisscrossed, awkward lines. The scars are raised, indicating she must’ve picked and cut at them for a long, long time.
Wynn notices what I see and quick pulls her sleeve down over the scars. Our eyes meet, and for a moment I think she might talk to me, say something, say anything. Instead, she turns her head down, focusing on some unseen pain resting in her lap.