Perfect Peace

by Daniel Black

  But this was no ordinary day. Henrietta wondered, in fact, if she’d even recognize her own reflection in a mirror. She felt her facial features shifting, as if Emma Jean’s proposal sought to distort her very flesh. Tenderly and frightfully, she touched her cheeks, nose, forehead, mouth, just to make sure they were still there, and pressed her way home. Everything stable enough to bear her weight she grabbed along the way—saplings, fence posts, road signs—until she was sure Mother Nature marveled at the strangeness of her behavior. At one point, she wilted against a young maple tree and wailed as though giving birth again. Yet fearful that someone might come along and inquire as to her state, she quickly composed herself, lifted her dress tail, and fumbled the rest of the way home.

  The worst part about it, she thought, flinging open her front door and tossing her bag onto the sofa, was that Emma Jean really didn’t know the truth. Not the full truth. She certainly knew too much, but she didn’t know everything, and for that Henrietta was grateful. Emma Jean knew that Henrietta and Louise were pregnant at the same time—everyone knew that—but no one knew that Henrietta’s baby was stillborn. No one except her husband and Louise, who helped her deliver. Too devastated to face reality, she asked them not to say anything. Not right away. So they didn’t. She lay in bed for two days, with the dead baby pressed against her bosom, sulking and asking God why, knowing in her heart that, at her age, she’d never conceive again. Then when Louise went into labor on the third day, she rose and helped her deliver a beautiful, healthy baby girl. But there were complications that Henrietta hadn’t expected. When Louise died, Henrietta knew exactly what to do. She laid her own dead daughter next to her dead sister on the cooling board behind Preacher Man’s house and told him that his wife and baby had both died. She had done all she could do. Preacher Man was sad, but he wasn’t devastated, and that’s what confirmed for Henrietta the rightness of her decision. Her strength returned and, overnight, she was back to her old self again. No one knew anything. Or so she thought. Henrietta saw the hand of God orchestrating things, and she gave thanks. There was a problem, however. Her husband wouldn’t sanction the plan—not at first—so Henrietta convinced him to let her breast-feed the child for a while, just to make sure it survived, then promised to give it back without a fight. Feeling sorry for Henrietta’s loss, her husband reluctantly agreed. Someone needed to care for the child, he thought, and Preacher Man certainly couldn’t do it alone. He didn’t even have a wife anymore! So maybe Henrietta was right. She should keep the baby for a spell, just to make sure the child survived. I bet Emma Jean don’t know that! Henrietta smirked.

  After two weeks, Tom told Henrietta that enough was enough. The child couldn’t stay any longer. So Henrietta bundled the baby, and together they went to return the child to its rightful home. But Preacher Man wasn’t there. Tom looked in the front window and noticed that everything was gone. Everything. They scoured the community for information as to his whereabouts, but no one knew anything. There were no relatives to approach or to hand the child to, since Preacher Man had migrated from somewhere out West, so Tom and Henrietta took the baby back home and decided to raise her as their own, at least until Preacher Man returned.

  And he did return—with a bride—five years later. By then, Tom had died from a heart attack and Henrietta had become far too attached to Trish to let her go. She contemplated telling Preacher Man, having promised Tom she would, but after losing everyone she’d ever loved, she simply couldn’t. Whenever she saw him and Georgia, who returned to Swamp Creek to take care of her mother, Henrietta smiled apologetically. Too much time had transpired to fix things. She simply couldn’t undo what she’d done, so she left things as they were. Once she learned the woman was barren, she fell to her knees and begged God for forgiveness. That was the difference, as she saw it, between herself and Emma Jean. She’d wanted to fix what she’d done, had even gone to Preacher Man’s house to do so, but he’d disappeared. Once he returned, it was too late. That wasn’t her fault, right? She wasn’t evil like Emma Jean. She had saved a life. Emma Jean was destroying one.

  And even this wasn’t the worst of it, Henrietta thought, collapsing into the rocker and rocking wildly. The worst of it was that Preacher Man’s longing for children increased as he grew older, causing Henrietta immeasurable distress whenever she saw him. He stopped her one Sunday after church and revealed that, now, he’d give anything for a child. The gender didn’t matter anymore. Henrietta smiled and said she’d pray for him and his wife to have the favor of Abraham and Sarah. It never happened. Henrietta saw the longing in his eyes whenever he beheld Trish, the spitting image of Louise, so she knew she couldn’t tell him. Preacher Man would kill her if he found out the truth.

  The rocker slowed as she heard her mother’s voice say, Lies never work out the way you think they will. Henrietta chuckled sadly. What else could she do but yield to Emma Jean’s scheme?

  Well, there was one thing she could do, she thought. Lifting herself from the chair, she took her medicine bag out behind the house and set it ablaze. She didn’t want to deliver babies anymore. Somehow, doing so had left her entwined in the intricacies of their lives, and this thing with Perfect—Henrietta shook her head repeatedly—was more than any human should ever be asked to bear. There were other ways she could make a living. She felt sure of it. But she didn’t have the slightest idea what she’d say to Perfect if the child lived long enough to ask her, very simply, “Why?” The more Henrietta thought of it, the more she hated Emma Jean. Her only prayer now was that God would grant her the years to watch Him make Emma Jean pay.

  Chapter 4

  Once Henrietta left, Gus told the boys to be patient while he checked on Emma Jean and the baby.

  “Can we see her?” Authorly shouted.

  “Be quiet, boy, and wait a minute.” Gus raised his hands like one under arrest. “Li’l girls gotta be handled real gentle. You can’t be rough with ’em like y’all is with one another.”

  “We’ll be gentle, Daddy,” Mister promised. “I bet she look jes’ like Momma.”

  Gus tried to imagine a toddler version of Emma Jean, complete with double-D breasts, a rotund behind, and a scar on the side of her face, but he couldn’t conceive it. His greatest concern, though, was not whether the child looked like Emma Jean, but whether she’d act like her.

  Gus tiptoed into the bedroom, searching for something nice to say. “Hey.”

  “Hey?” Emma Jean squealed. “Is that the best you can say to yo’ wife and daughter?”

  “Yeah,” Gus mumbled. Had he said what he was thinking, he was sure Emma Jean’s feelings would’ve been hurt. “The boys is waitin’ to see they new sista.”

  Emma Jean paused. “All right. But don’t unwrap her. Babies gotta stay warm.”

  Gus nodded and received the child cautiously.

  “Make sure you bring her right back. She gon’ be hongry in a minute.”

  “I’ll bring her back.”

  “And make them boys wash they hands. ’Specially Mister. You know how nasty—”

  “I know what to do, woman.” Gus chewed dead skin from his parched lips, but didn’t move.

  Emma Jean waited.

  “You finally got what you been wantin’, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Well, good, ’cause ain’t gon’ be no mo’ babies ’round here. We barely eatin’ as it is.”

  “We’ll make it. We always do.”

  “Like I said,” Gus huffed, “ain’t gon’ be no mo’ babies. I’ma love this one ’cause she mine, but you didn’t have no right to lie.”

  “I ain’t lied to you ’bout nothin’, Gustavus Peace!” Emma Jean lifted her head. “I thought I couldn’t have no mo’ babies, but de Lawd saw otherwise.”

  “De Lawd ain’t saw nothin’, Emma Jean. I ain’t neva been smart, but I ain’t no fool, neither. You wanted a girl soooooo bad—”

  “That I made you get me pregnant? Is that what you tryin’ to say?”

&n
bsp; It didn’t make sense now that Emma Jean had said it. “I ain’t sayin’ that, woman. What I’m sayin’ is that you tricked me.”

  Emma Jean gasped. “Tricked you? I tricked you? You gotta be kidding. How the hell did I trick you, man? You know how womenfolk get pregnant.”

  “Yeah, but you said you couldn’t get pregnant no mo’ and I believed you. If I hada knowed you could, I wouldn’t a eva touched you.”

  Gus saw the hurt in Emma Jean’s eyes. He hadn’t imagined she cared one way or another about his desire for her.

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that I woulda been . . . you know . . . mo’ careful. You knowed I didn’t want no mo’ chillen. I told you that.”

  Emma Jean feigned indifference. “Well, that’s all behind us now. God done blessed us with a beautiful little girl, so let’s jes’ be thankful and do the best we can.”

  Gus turned as the scent of rain filled his nostrils. He began to shiver. “I’ma let the boys hold her and Authorly’ll bring her back. I gotta go.”

  “Tell him to bring her right back!”

  Gus dropped Perfect in Authorly’s lap and sprinted through the front door. At almost six, Bartimaeus stood at the screen, longing to accompany his father to the Great Cleansing. That’s what Authorly called it. Lurking in the overgrown wheatgrass the previous year, he had followed Gus when the rains came, hoping not to violate his father’s privacy but to understand exactly what the rains did for him. After watching Gus remove his shirt and stand at the Jordan with outstretched arms like Moses must have stood at the Red Sea, Authorly’s confusion only multiplied. The torrential downpour blurred his view, causing Gus to look gigantic one moment and miniature the next. When his father fell upon his knees and moaned like a sick bull, Authorly abandoned the search for clarity and, instead, wept on his father’s behalf. Gus’s soulful lamentation reminded the boy of churchwomen who hummed and cried simultaneously as they begged God to do the impossible. A man purging that way, however, overwhelmed Authorly. Having never witnessed his father’s—or any man’s—absolute vulnerability, he had no context in which to understand how Gus surrendered to the universe so completely. Had he not known better, he could’ve convinced himself that the figure in the distance was some monstrous creature—not his father at all—then, maybe, his conventional notions of men and masculinity wouldn’t have been disrupted. As it was, Authorly was forced to admit, against his understanding, that men could be as emotional as women, and that one of those men was his own father.

  Upon his return, he told his brothers that Gus paced the riverbank, thinking and praying.

  “Was that all he did?” Bartimaeus inquired later.

  Authorly sighed. “I can’t really explain it.”

  “Can you try?”

  “All right,” Authorly began. “He was bent over cryin’ like somethin’ was painin’ him so bad it was ’bout to kill him. It scared me at first. Then he stood up and raised his hands in the air and started screamin’.”

  Authorly paused, but Bartimaeus wanted more.

  “Then he hugged hisself and started moanin’ like he had a bellyache.”

  “Ummmmmmmm. Yes.” Bartimaeus smiled.

  “Yes what?”

  “He was cleanin’ out his soul.”

  Authorly didn’t understand and now he didn’t want to. Whatever Gus was doing at the Jordan was his own business, Authorly decided, and he left it at that. The day Perfect came, he distracted his brothers away from their father’s sudden escape by inviting each of them to hold the baby, giving Gus time and space to do whatever his soul needed.

  “Don’t you wanna hold her?” Authorly asked Bartimaeus.

  “No. I wanna go to the river.”

  Authorly passed Perfect to Mister instead. “Be careful, boy. Don’t drop her.”

  “I ain’t gon’ drop her. But why she so little?”

  “All babies is little when they first born,” Sol explained. “But they grow fast. This time next year, she’ll be walkin’.”

  James Earl, Woody, and Sol huddled around Mister while Authorly motioned for Bartimaeus to follow him. Standing on the porch, talking above the hum of the rain, Authorly said, “I’ma walk you to the fence, then you’ll have to follow it the rest of the way. It’ll lead you straight to the river.”

  “I can get there.”

  “When you get close to the water, just listen for Daddy’s voice and follow it.”

  Gus’s screaming filled the surrounding woods with an unmistakable echo. As Bartimaeus walked, he, too, began to wail—an octave higher than his father. Feeling his way to the Jordan, he anticipated a purging that would leave him emotionally transformed. Authorly watched his blind brother shuffle alongside the fence until his form fused with the rain.

  Back in the living room, Authorly said, “Perfect look kinda like Daddy, huh? All that hair!”

  Mister handed Perfect to Woody, who then rubbed her forehead softly. “I think she look like me!”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Give her to James Earl,” Authorly said.

  “No!” he whimpered.

  “Why not? You can’t hurt her,” Mister said.

  “No,” James Earl repeated.

  “Oh stop, boy!” Authorly demanded. “It ain’t nothin’ but a baby.”

  “I don’t want to!” he cried.

  “Fine. Forget it. Give her here.”

  Just then, Emma Jean called for Authorly to return Perfect for feeding.

  “How come her eyes ain’t opened?” Mister asked.

  “ ’Cause she a baby and babies ain’t got enough strength to hold they eyes open when they first born,” Sol explained.

  “Give her time,” Woody said. “She’ll get stronger in a little while, then you can look her in the eyes long as you want to.”

  “I’ll be glad when she’s old enough to play with us.”

  “She ain’t gon’ play with us, fool!” Authorly said as he reentered. “She’s a girl, and girls is real delicate. They not tough like boys, so they have to play with other girls.”

  “But ain’t none o’ us girls, so who she gon’ play wit?”

  Woody roared.

  “She’ll find some other girls around,” Sol assured him.

  “Ah, man! I wanted to play with her myself.”

  “You might get to play with her a little bit, but not too much. You too rough. Girls don’t like to play rough,” Sol said.

  “Well, how do girls like to play?”

  “They play soft,” Woody teased, rubbing Mister’s head sensually. “They comb baby dolls’ hair and play house and cookin’ and stuff like that.”

  “I don’t wanna play none o’ that.”

  “That’s ’cause you a boy,” Authorly said. “Girls like girl stuff and boys like boy stuff.”

  “So what’s the good o’ havin’ a sista?”

  “ ’Cause she’ll help Momma with the house chores,” Authorly explained, “and then she’ll cook for us and stuff.”

  Mister’s demeanor brightened. “I hope she can cook good!”

  Woody chuckled.

  Bartimaeus heard the roar of the Jordan. Walking cautiously, like one approaching the edge of a flat world, he tiptoed toward Gus’s voice—mingled with his own—and sensed that he was precisely where he needed to be. Where the fence met the water, he turned left and kept his right foot in the river and his left on dry ground. He and Gus created an alto-bass duet, which, louder now, confirmed to Authorly that Bartimaeus had arrived. The father greeted his son with the right hand of fellowship, and instinctively the boy unbuckled his overalls, removed his shirt, and took his place on the banks of the Jordan.

  When the rains intensified, the two joined hands and waded knee deep into the river. Bartimaeus shivered from the initial shock of the cool, rushing waters, but Gus’s strong hand allowed his son to relax and feel safe in the midst of the Jordan’s healing powers.

  Time watched Gus and Bartimaeus cleanse their souls. Conversing in moans and h
ollers, both appreciated having someone with whom to share the experience. Gus further appreciated his son’s blindness now, for it allowed him to usher Bartimaeus through the cleansing without fear that the boy was gawking at him. With no physical limitations, they spent the afternoon exposing their hearts to one another, unconcerned about what others thought and glad that at least one person in the world knew they weren’t crazy.

  Father and son returned to the riverbank hours later when the rains subsided. Still humming away vestiges of hurt each had found difficult to release, they sat on the banks of the Jordan until Gus believed he could tolerate Emma Jean again and Bartimaeus forgave God for denying him the gift of sight.

  By dusk, they were renewed. The soft drizzle confirmed the conclusion of the ritual, and, like his father, Bartimaeus sighed heavily and said, “Thank you,” both to the heavens and to a merciful, ever-flowing Jordan. Father and son then embraced, buckled their wet overalls, and walked home with their shirts slung across their shoulders.

  And they were not ashamed.

  Chapter 5

  Gus said good night to the boys and entered Emma Jean’s bedroom. After unrolling the sleeping pallet, he closed the door, reclined, and sighed heavily. He had never seen the rains come and go so quickly. It was as though they had come only for his sake, and now he felt confident that he could love his daughter as much as he loved his sons. Emma Jean was simply grateful the rains had come at all. Now, maybe, Gus would stop fussing about having another mouth to feed.