“This is your stop, Miss. Don’t dally. I’ll get your bags but you got to get off. I promised your mama.”
Cecily turned her head and managed to clear the fog in her brain just a little. The porter wore his hat tipped back so far on his head she could see the gray curls shining in his nest of black hair. His glasses made his light brown eyes twice the size and four times as disconcerting. But once he saw Cecily was awake he turned from her and disappeared around a corner and out the door. She rose and took hold of the black handbag she had kept carefully tucked between her body and the wall of the car. She fumbled with the wax paper left from her sandwich before finally folding it and putting it in the bag. She had eaten somewhere between Philadelphia and Washington. Cecily figured she must have dozed right afterward because there had been remnants of city outside the window—line upon line of squat wooden town houses with dirt patch backyards and rickety picket fences separating them—before she closed her eyes.
The train idled along wooden planks that marked where the tracks ended and the country road began. As she stepped off the car it seemed sunlight bounced off every surface. She shielded her eyes with her hands over her forehead. There didn’t seem to be a bit of shade anywhere, not even under the trees. Cecily saw a cloud of dust swirling toward her and ahead there seemed to be a pickup truck and that truck’s horn honked as it came to a stop near the platform.
“Over here!” called the woman behind the wheel. She waved through her open window at the porter, who was just about to drop Cecily’s suitcases next to her. “Just throw ’em right in the back there!” The woman, Aunt Pearl, jumped down from the truck and covered the ground between her and her grandniece in four loping strides. Her joints jutted forward and back, finger-snapping quick, and seemed to make light of the fact that the load they carried was anything but light. She wore denim coveralls and underneath a green short-sleeved collared shirt, unbuttoned just to the top of her ample bosom.
“Sessssily!” she cried, letting her tongue slide over the “S” sound for too long. She wrapped her thick bare arms around Cecily, engulfing her in a heady mix of smells: grass, fresh earth, flowers, and one other thing Cecily couldn’t name but was certain was something like sugar mixed with cinnamon. “I haven’t seen you since you were a little bit of a thing! And now look at ya. So tall! I bet you ain’t even done growing yet.” And just when Cecily couldn’t tell whether she was being hugged or crushed, Aunt Pearl released her and opened the truck door.
“Well, come on, come on. I’m glad you’re here, but we got to get going. Your uncle Menard will be wanting his supper before you know it.”
“Thank you for having me,” Cecily stammered as Aunt Pearl pressed some coins into the porter’s hand. Cecily turned toward the open door.
The growl came first, rumbling dark and low from the front seat. Then the dog, which had been lying down, sat up on its haunches and barked sharply twice. Cecily jumped back and nearly fell over the porter behind her.
“Oh, hush up, Rex!”
Aunt Pearl reached into the truck and grasped the collar of the dog, a German shepherd, and pulled it out of the cab. “You’ve had it too good long enough. You got to ride in the back now where you belong. Get up there!”
The dog put up its huge paws and leapt into the back of the truck. Its fur was a mass of black and brown with patches of silver hair that caught the light when the dog flew up past Aunt Pearl and into the bed of the pickup.
“Don’t be scared of Rex,” Aunt Pearl said, taking Cecily’s hand and pulling her toward the seat. “He’s had us to himself forever, but he’s just gonna have to get used to having company.”
Cecily stepped up into the truck, her eyes still on the German shepherd. But it had lain down in the truck bed, away from her suitcases, and seemed to pay her no further mind. Suddenly Aunt Pearl was back behind the wheel, shifting gears, and kicking up more dust as she spun the truck back onto the road. Cecily coughed and rolled up her window.
“How’s your mama?” Aunt Pearl asked and laughed. “Is she still as fat as me?”
Cecily smiled carefully but didn’t know how to answer. True, her mother was big like Aunt Pearl. But where Mama was large, soft, and slow, Aunt Pearl seemed solid and spring-loaded, like a girl who could still jump rope. And Cecily was sure her great aunt had to be at least twenty years older than Mama, maybe more.
“She’s all right,” Cecily finally said. “I think she’s mighty grateful for you taking me.”
“Oh, we’re happy for the company. My children are long grown. Then I met Menard and it’s just me and him.”
Cecily stared. “But I thought Uncle Menard was Daddy’s uncle?”
“Yeah, your daddy knew Menard as his uncle, but Menard is my second husband. Left the first one when we got sick of looking at each other.”
She laughed, but Cecily didn’t understand why that should be so funny.
“The gals around here look at me cross-eyed like you’re doing now, but I say get you a second husband if you can manage it. You mark my words! You don’t know what I’m talking about now but you’ll see when you’ve got that first one and you’re done with him.”
Aunt Pearl let loose with another gleeful laugh and leaned back in her seat in a way that caused her to smash down on the gas pedal. The engine roared and the truck leapt forward. Cecily found herself laughing a little too.
“I thought Menard and I might have our own babies. I hoped the Good Lord would bless us again—thought I’d be like Sarah in the Bible and have a baby in my old age. But that’s all right.”
She slowed the truck and began to turn into a long, dusty driveway next to a bright yellow farmhouse. Two oak trees on the lawn in front of the structure stood tall and strong like sentinels. A wooden porch, painted cherry red, stretched the length of the house and on it sat two rockers angled toward each other in an almost conspiratorial manner. Simple flowers filled the bed around the porch: black-eyed Susans, coneflower, daisies. Later Aunt Pearl would tell Cecily how she didn’t have time for roses. “Can’t have no fussy flowers around here,” she would say. “Got so much else to do, my flowers have to be able to take care of themselves.” Cecily would wonder if the same went for her.
A big red barn sat squat in the back and beyond it woods that seemed to go on and on. In front of the house, on the other side of the street, large patches of potatoes, squash, and cucumbers stretched out toward more woods that eventually rose up into a mountain ridge that ran down as far as Cecily could see and formed a kind of wall hugging the whole countryside. Aunt Pearl stopped the truck and Cecily heard the dog jump from the truck bed and land on the ground just behind her.
“Come on, let’s get dinner started. Menard will bring your bags when he comes in from the fields.”
Cecily felt like she had entered a different time frame where, no matter how hard she tried to catch up, she seemed to be always five seconds behind. She was still processing Aunt Pearl’s words but Aunt Pearl was already on the porch steps. Cecily followed her. They entered a kitchen decorated with pink wallpaper with tiny pink rosebuds and green leaves running down in strips like ribbons. In the middle was a long wooden table and Aunt Pearl proceeded to set on top of it a large bowl, a sack of flour, and dishcloths.
“You can put your things down over there.” She pointed to a bench just inside the door under a row of hooks on the wall. “You know how to make biscuits?”
Cecily shook her head.
“No? What about corn bread?”
Cecily shook her head again. She wasn’t sure whether or not to tell Aunt Pearl that Mama always had Mrs. Jenkins make all their food.
“Well, that’s all right, honey. Sit down here and watch me. I’ve got to hurry now, but tomorrow I can show you properly.”
Aunt Pearl had kicked off her shoes and moved around on the shiny floor with broad bare feet. She seemed to be even faster than she was before. The flour went into the bowl, then chunks of butter, then a little milk. The next thing Cecily k
new Aunt Pearl had a perfect white mound of dough under her hands, like she’d seized a piece of cloud from the sky. She pressed into it with the heel of her hands, pulled it back over with her fingers, then rolled it up until it was rounded again. She took a wooden rolling pin and worked it back and forth over the white mound until it was flat but not thin. She took a small jar, dipped the top of it in the sack of flour, then shook it off and handed it to Cecily.
“Here, you can cut out the biscuits. Like this.” She held Cecily by the wrist with one hand and took Cecily’s hand with her other and pressed the mouth of the jar into the dough. Cecily could feel just how much to push down and then turn back and forth until it released a perfect circle.
“Keep doing that.” Aunt Pearl turned away and pulled a long flat pan from behind a curtain covering the area under the sink. She dipped the corner of a dishrag into a tub of lard on the counter near the sink and rubbed it all over the surface of the pan. “Put them on there when you’re done. Line them up nice, that’s it.”
Aunt Pearl turned away again and busied herself with the stove and washing vegetables in the sink. Cecily focused on her task. After she had cut the third biscuit the dough began to stick to the rim of the jar. She looked at Aunt Pearl but decided on her own to dip the jar into the sack of flour. When she shook the jar off, though, she realized too late she had gotten flour in the jar. She dumped a small pile on the table. But since Aunt Pearl had strewn flour across the surface of the table before rolling out the dough she figured that was all right. She kept cutting out the biscuits. Just as she was about to tell Aunt Pearl she was done, her aunt was there, next to her, gathering up the leftover pieces of dough and magically putting them back together again into a new ball. Once again she rolled it out and Cecily had a new flat piece to cut from. When Cecily had filled the pan Aunt Pearl whisked it into the oven.
The kitchen filled with warm, comforting smells: pork simmered in a pot of pinto beans, the biscuits rose in the oven, coffee percolated on the stove. Cecily’s stomach rumbled.
When Uncle Menard came in he had both of Cecily’s suitcases under his arms, just like Aunt Pearl said he would. He dropped them, and Aunt Pearl jogged across the kitchen to him and caught him up in the same kind of bear hug she had given Cecily. He laughed and smacked her on her backside in a way that made Cecily want to look away. But he was laughing as he came over and offered his hand.
“How do you do? I am so happy you have the opportunity to meet me!”
Cecily shook his hand and smiled, uncertain. “Yes. Thank you.”
Uncle Menard laughed again and went to the sink to wash his hands. He was bald except for a fringe of short white curls running behind his ears and circling the lower back of his head. He had small dark eyes he made even smaller when he spread a wide gentle smile across his face. The air around him smelled of tobacco.
That evening they ate and talked loudly and laughed more than Cecily had ever seen people laugh her whole life. It felt like a party. She asked about the farm and Uncle Menard explained how they grew tobacco and cotton, the most profitable cash crops in the South. On smaller plots they planted greens—both turnip and collard—winter squash, spinach, and sweet potatoes. The size of the property had grown over the years, starting with an ancestor of Pearl’s who bought land and made the right white friends who allowed him to hold on to it and even acquire more in tough times. During the Depression Aunt Pearl and her brothers had scoffed at the New Deal programs that had been terrible for other black families. But even owning so much land, they knew nothing was safe and they took nothing for granted. Men with rifles patrolled the fields day and night at harvest time and even then they still had to put out fires set by white people who didn’t think it right that blacks should have what Pearl’s family had. Cecily wondered aloud why they stayed.
Aunt Pearl shook her head and looked at her as though Cecily should already know the answer. “If we left, Cecily, then the better place would always be somewhere else.”
The rest of the evening they listened to Uncle Menard tell stories about the men he worked with and how they nagged and teased one another. Cecily put her plate, sopped clean of gravy, aside and put her elbows on the table—something Mama would never allow.
“And that Odom was always asking me about my comb,” Uncle Menard said. “‘Menard, can I borrow your comb?’ Always asking me like that.” Menard rubbed his shiny pate. “One day I got tired of it and I went down to the dime store and bought me a comb. When Odom asked for it I pulled it out of my pocket, just as nice as you please, and handed it to him.”
Cecily smiled and nodded. A good end to the story, she thought. Uncle Menard had shown him.
“He took that comb and started running it through that nappy head of his.” Menard mimed the actions of a man turning his head this way and that, grooming a full head of hair.
Cecily laughed and looked at Aunt Pearl. She was perched on the edge of her seat. She had her elbows on the table, her hands under her chin, and her eyes twinkled as she watched Uncle Menard.
“Then he handed the comb back to me and said, ‘Thank you, Menard!’ and I said, ‘Thank goodness, I need that back bad!’ and I took off my shoes and started scratching that comb into my toes! I said, ‘This is the only way I can reach down there when my feet start itching!’”
Cecily stared in wonder as Aunt Pearl laughed and Uncle Menard’s shoulders shook from holding back his own glee.
“You should’ve seen that Odom’s face! He went running over there and dunked his whole head into the water barrel! He was rubbing at his head like a dog with fleas!”
Uncle Menard gave in to the waves of laughter overtaking him and pounded his fist on the table. Cecily laughed so hard her stomach muscles felt weak. But Aunt Pearl outdid them all. Her whole body laughed—she swung her bare feet up into the air in front of her like a V and clapped her hands and bent over sideways as the laughter rolled out of her. Cecily had never seen anyone laugh like that before. She didn’t know if her own body even knew how to do that. But she didn’t care because the moment seemed to shine. Cecily didn’t think about Mama or missing Harlem or the fact she really didn’t know the people sitting there laughing with her. She just felt good.
“That was so funny,” Cecily said later as she dried the wet plates Aunt Pearl handed her from the sink.
“Oh, that story? Menard has told that one about a hundred times!”
“To you?”
“Yeah, to me. Who else is he going to tell it to? Sometimes we have guests like you, but he tells it to me all the time.”
“And you still laugh like that?”
“It’s still a funny story! And he likes telling it to me. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a way we have of enjoying each other’s company. Isn’t that a good thing?”
Cecily nodded. She began to realize how little she knew of how men and women could be with each other. When her own father passed she had been old enough to feel the loss, but not old enough to remember noticing whether or not her parents had been affectionate, or how they had looked at or spoken to each other. If you were going to be with the same person, day in and day out, for years and years Cecily supposed you couldn’t help but hear the same stories from each other. Aunt Pearl was showing her how a person could choose how they took it all in. Cecily didn’t know why, but it seemed another thing for her to feel good about.
THE ROOM WHERE Cecily would sleep looked out over the backyard. By the time she had changed into her nightgown and stood by the window it was too dark for her to see anything out there. She twisted her fingers in the fabric of the light green curtains. Cecily didn’t like the dark and this dark outside her window was beyond what she thought possible. It was black like the darkness of a hole that wasn’t satisfied with just being a hole so it had to suck you in and make you part of the darkness. She was glad of the glass between her and that blackness but still she put her other hand on the window just to see. Would she feel it pulling her out?
Then she heard the scratching at the door.
It sounded like a heavy scraping, like something wanted to take the paint off the wood. Cecily opened the door and gasped when Rex loped into the room, like it had been his room first. The dog looked up at Cecily, like he was expecting her to do something, but she couldn’t move. She wanted to call Aunt Pearl, but that seemed a babyish thing to do. But Cecily did want to cry. She wanted to cry for her mama and to be in her own room and to take a hot bath. She realized she was even afraid to move her pinky toe to shift her weight as she stood.
Finally, when she felt so weary she thought she would fall over, Cecily reached out and put her hand on the bed. She found the softness of the coverlet. The dog looked at the bed and then at Cecily and panted. Slowly she raised the covers, lifted her knee, and began to inch herself underneath them.
Rex jumped.
Cecily yelped and dove under the blankets, hoping they would protect her by keeping the dog from biting all the way through to her skin. But instead she felt a heaviness at her feet, near the bottom of the bed. She looked out. Rex had settled himself there, his body curled into a neat roundness and his head on the covers. Cecily fell back on the pillows and pulled the covers up all around her. And that’s how she went to sleep, staring into the eyes of a German shepherd who only gazed back until they both lost consciousness.
In the morning Cecily woke up to the sound of singing. She realized it was Aunt Pearl. She went to the window and saw the darkness had gone and light was dancing all over the backyard. Aunt Pearl was hanging laundry out on a clothesline.
Cecily unpacked but she could have left most of her things in the bags. The night before, Aunt Pearl deemed the clothing too fancy for the farm and handed Cecily a folded stack of cotton dresses, a stiff shirt like the one Aunt Pearl had worn the day before, and a large pair of denim coveralls.
“Those were Danny’s,” she said of the coveralls. “You’re taller than any of my girls were so his will fit you better than theirs.”
Unforgivable Love Page 7