Unforgivable Love

by Sophfronia Scott

  Cecily put on one of the cotton dresses, pale blue with a little pocket just over her left breast. After breakfast when she was filled with coffee and eggs and biscuits smothered in sausage gravy, the lessons began.

  AUNT PEARL’S DAYS were full of cooking and driving and cleaning and, on some days, working in the fields alongside the hired hands. But Cecily soon learned there was an easy rhythm about everything she did. It just made plain sense how they would bake bread for the week’s sandwiches on Monday, drive out the lunches on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, and wash clothing on Thursday. And even though Aunt Pearl had to show her how to do everything, she took Cecily into her work routine as though the girl already knew it—as if she only needed reminding. This settled Cecily and made her not so afraid of making mistakes. In time she even grew confident—she liked feeling she could be useful, that she could be a part of a known result like a dinner on the table or a truckload of sack lunches.

  Cecily learned how to spin food in her hands. Apples went round under her knife and the peel came off bit by bit until it fell to the kitchen table in a heavy spiral. Collards, bunched up in her fist, spun through her knife producing perfect strips of greens that filled up the sink, where she rinsed them in water and stuffed them into a pot for the stove. She learned food tasted different when you had worked it with your own hands. It tasted good, deep-down good. Sometimes Cecily felt a hunger so keen it seemed like a void had scraped her stomach raw like she had never properly filled it—didn’t even know what it was to be filled.

  Soon, like Aunt Pearl, Cecily stopped wearing shoes around the house and in the yard. At first she didn’t like the way the morning dew made the grass slick and slimy under her feet, but she came to appreciate how cool it felt as summer came on and the days grew hotter. There seemed to be a kind of freedom to her and Aunt Pearl standing in the sun, wearing what they wanted, laughing like they were both young girls as they picked tomatoes in the garden or hung the laundry in the yard. Aunt Pearl taught Cecily how to use the washing machine, how to crank the clothing through the rollers to squeeze the water out of it so it could better dry on the clothesline. She talked about her children, about Uncle Menard’s appetite, whether he’d remember to get that shoulder of pork ready for her to get on the stove Saturday so it could cook down all day and be done for Sunday dinner.

  On certain days Aunt Pearl took the lunches without Cecily. On those days she stayed and helped in the fields, but this was work she would not be teaching the girl.

  “Your mama would have my hide,” she told Cecily. “She don’t want your hands hard or your skin blackened in the sun from doing this kind of work. You’re better off staying here and taking care of yourself.”

  And Cecily didn’t mind because when she did go out to the fields with Aunt Pearl she felt a strangeness she didn’t like. The first time she was stunned to see so many men. They were already anticipating the truck’s arrival and were putting down tools or shedding sacks, and claiming shady spots under nearby trees. The truck pulled up, and Cecily watched them moving about—men tall and short, slim and stout, men as old as Uncle Menard and boys surely no older than herself.

  When she would step out of the truck it seemed her skin burned from a flash of light—light that came, she was certain, from the eyes of every single one of those men as they focused on her for one hot moment, then quickly turned away. Cecily saw them talking to each other, continuing their motions as though they had done nothing more than notice a robin perched on a fence rail. But she could sense she had their acute attention, and she moved with feet of clay as though they had caught her in the heaviness of their collective gaze. Her breasts tingled against the rough fabric of her shirt, and this feeling told her she had entered a different place—had arrived here just as surely as when she stepped off the train in Anselm. But she was even more of a stranger in this place—and the thought bewildered her because her body seemed to be telling her she was supposed to be here, that there was something familiar about it even though the landmarks were foreign and the language unknown.

  Cecily put a hand on the side of the truck and steadied herself, then shuffled toward Aunt Pearl, who was grabbing the first crate of lunch sacks.

  “Don’t you pay these men no mind,” Aunt Pearl said. “Some of them act like they’d never seen a girl your age before.” She yelled out to a man who wore a red bandana peeping out from under his straw hat and who seemed frozen in his spot. “Cole! Get over here and help me with this food if you all expect to get anything to eat before the sun goes down.”

  He came forward and took the crate from Aunt Pearl and she took another and moved toward the men under the tree. Cecily went to the rear of the truck and tried to pull a crate to her but it was heavy. The man Aunt Pearl called Cole came back, reached his long ropy arms past her, and slid the crate to himself. He lifted it liked it weighed no more than a dozen eggs. As he turned and whisked the crate away from her, Cecily smelled his sweat in the air where he had stood.

  Her instinct seemed to awaken. She heard Jump! in her mind and she turned, placed her hands on the open door of the truck bed, and hoisted herself up into it. She began sliding crates to the end of the bed so Aunt Pearl and Cole could grab them. She felt better—she was higher up and out of reach. The eyes, she knew, were still on her and somehow that seemed okay. As long as they didn’t get close enough for her to sense their power, she would be fine.

  CECILY HAD AN ache for thinking space, somewhere to go where she could sort through all the changes happening to her. The change she noticed most of all, the one she appreciated most but understood the least, was how here in Anselm she had come to recognize when her blood flow was about to come. She didn’t have to mark her calendar like her mama had shown her. She realized she felt her body moving through stages, month after month, like it had been talking to her all this time, and she was finally in a place quiet enough where she could hear it. One week her body would feel like it was gathering up in preparation for something. She wanted to eat more biscuits or an extra helping of pancakes. She felt the softness near the bottom of her belly like everything wanted to focus on this one essential spot of her being. In a few days the gentle ache, right at the bottom of her abdomen, would come and Cecily knew to get ready then, to put protection in her underwear, because her body was about to let it all go—the blood, the food, everything it had been holding on to. When it was over she felt light again.

  Cecily had no answer for what was happening, and in the months to come she found she didn’t have words for a lot of things. But she discovered she did have more words than before—words for how the sky made her feel, words for the changing quality of the light from season to season. But she had no one to give these words to.

  She would sit on the porch in one of the rocking chairs and consider her changes and her longing to know more. One day in late August as she looked across the road and toward the woods it occurred to her there might be some quiet over there, somewhere far off between the trees—in fact she was sure a quiet might even be calling to her. It was like an emptiness beckoning her, pulling her toward it so she might be the one to fill it. Cecily stepped off the porch and started walking. Rex got up from where he lay near her feet and accompanied her. They crossed the road and went in the direction of the woods. Her shoes sank into the soft ground and her nose filled with the smell of ripening vegetation. Birdsong, calm and cheerful, seemed to affirm the way.

  She walked until she made her way into the woods. The leaves, grown thick in the summer heat, seemed to close behind her like a curtain. As she walked the ground dropped down toward the banks of a river that flowed across the back part of the county and formed the border between Anselm and Portage, the next town over. She came to a stand of evergreens with long red trunks that stood like toy soldiers just up from the river’s edge. The foliage was higher there and the light bright. Cecily sat herself down on the roots of a tree. It was quiet there aside from the sound of the water flowing past her. Aunt Pearl ha
d said no one was ever down there because the good fishing spots were all miles farther downstream. Cecily felt the silence and soon she thought about all the new things settling into her. She kept coming back to a simple word: “good.” Everything around her just felt good: her aunt’s singing, the food they ate, the trees all around her, the smell of the earth as they tilled the fields.

  She thought about all of this as the days wore on and her walks to the water became frequent. When she sat by the river Cecily didn’t think about where she had been before—about Harlem or her mama or their life there. She didn’t think about where she would be the next day. She liked knowing she was fine just where she was. And she did feel fine, especially once she found a good place to sit and Rex would walk himself around in a circle three or four times then settle down next to Cecily. She stroked the short wiry hairs of the dog’s shiny coat and felt the rapid heartbeat that seemed to work in rhythm with his panting.

  There was a part of Cecily completely aware of not being afraid in this place—that it was inevitable, and she had come all these miles to be in this sweet spot, her toes curving into the moss as present and necessary as any of the trees around her.

  She learned that if she sat long enough and still enough the birds and animals around her would go about their business like she wasn’t there. The squirrels chattered in the branches above her head. Once in the early evening a deer walked along the riverbank across from her and stared. Birds landed just out of arm’s reach.

  And then, one day she saw a man—a white man.

  She had been sitting as usual when she heard the unmistakable rustling of bush and leaves that told of an animal of some sort making its way to the riverside. She knew to hold still and wait, that whatever came, if it did see her, would pay her no mind and keep doing what it needed to do.

  But when she saw the thing had two legs she pulled her knees into her chest and tried to make herself small. To Cecily he was as wild and rare as an animal might be because he was so pale, pale like the belly of a fish from the river. He was short legged, and he moved quickly along the mossy banks. His hair, light brown, was too long and uncombed. At first he seemed hurried, the way he had come bashing through the branches. But he sat down on the bank, almost in the water. He was quiet, much like Cecily was when she was doing her own thinking, except it seemed he was talking to someone. In fact she was quite sure he was talking to someone even though his lips didn’t move and all his limbs were still. He was too far down from Cecily to get a good look at his face.

  She thought about going closer but then, quite suddenly, he stood, tore off his shirt, and threw himself into the water with such force Cecily feared he’d hit his head and drown and his body would come floating down to rest at her feet. He thrashed around in the water, loud and hard and mad, like he’d dropped something in there and had to find it right away. Whether he ever found it or not Cecily didn’t know, but he kept on going for what seemed like forever. When he stopped all Cecily heard was the sound of him breathing hard. He pulled himself out of the water, scrambled back up the bank, and disappeared. At first she thought she should run, but he was on the other bank, going in the opposite direction. He wasn’t coming after her. So she kept sitting and thinking until it was her usual time to go back to the house.

  The next time the white man appeared, Cecily did pull herself to the other side of a tree trunk to conceal herself better. She saw him execute the same odd ritual, as he would again and again in the days to come. He didn’t come every day. Cecily thought he seemed far from where he should be, as though he didn’t live nearby. But he must belong somewhere, she figured, because other than his long hair nothing about him seemed overgrown or filthy. He didn’t have a beard.

  Cecily got used to his presence much as she did with any other presence in the woods. On a sunny day the thrashing made it look like he was tossing rainbows as the water all around him caught the light. Sometimes he’d float on his back and stare into the sky. Cecily knew she should be afraid of him—and she kept herself far enough away behind bushes or trees so he couldn’t see her. But there were times she heard his splash much farther down from where she was, and instead of staying safely in her place she followed the sound to find him—to watch him. She knew she should be frightened of the man, not only because of his whiteness, but also because his behavior proved him to be beyond the boundaries everyone else stayed within to make sense of the world. Yet it seemed to Cecily whatever the man thrashed against and mumbled to had nothing to do with her. It was something inside him, something that couldn’t be described with words but still felt strangely familiar to her. So she watched him, thinking maybe it would be possible to see inside a person—thinking maybe she could learn something from him about what was going on inside herself.

  One unseasonably hot day in early October Cecily went into the woods. Thunderstorms the night before had drenched the ground but water still hung thick and heavy in the air as though it were draped over clotheslines. In the woods the branches bent down with their overgrown foliage and the earth underneath her felt old and alive. She went all the way down to the river, took off her shoes, and stepped in to soak her feet in the cool water. When she heard the manic rustling sound, at first she thought nothing of it. It wasn’t the usual sound of the white man or that of anyone else coming. Maybe squirrels were quarreling as they often did in the leaves just before they chased each other back up into the trees. But the sound didn’t stop and it seemed larger, more rhythmic—intentional.

  Her feet still in the water, Cecily peered through the canopy of wet leaves on the opposite bank, and when she found the place where the motion was she also found the brightness of skin. It was the white man but he was naked and lying face-down in the dirt. He was writhing as though he were having a fit and trying to burrow himself into the ground. Cecily took a step closer then stopped. She didn’t move, didn’t dare make a sound, but she couldn’t take her eyes from his skin.

  She saw the places where it was brown, the places where, moving up his limbs, the skin was blinding white. She wondered if he would die there if she didn’t call for help. She wondered what they would say to her if she did. Cecily opened her mouth to speak but the voice she heard wasn’t her own. It was his, releasing a soft, wordless cry. Then he turned over and seemed exhausted. He had dirt all over him but Cecily saw something on him, white and glistening, spread all across his belly. She couldn’t leave. His head fell back and his eyes seemed to roll up into the trees and toward the sky.

  Rex barked.

  Rex never barked in these woods, not even when chasing squirrels, but the sound came out sharp and clear like he wanted to call to the man and scold him. The man sat up fast and for the first time Cecily saw his eyes, though glazed, were a shocking shade of blue mixed of sky and water and cornflower. She’d never seen eyes like that before and they held her rooted in the muddy water. She wasn’t sure if he could see her. He seemed still in the thrall of his dream, his vision turned inward. But the light in his eyes, in the red glowing of his face, made Cecily believe he saw through the curtain of leaves just as well as she could. Suddenly she became painfully aware of her bare feet and bare legs under her dress. She ran.

  Cecily ran all the way back to the house and it wasn’t until she reached the porch that she realized she had left her shoes on the riverbank. She went back the next day to look for them, but they were gone.

  In the nights afterward when she was safely in bed, in the blackness, Cecily thought about what she had witnessed. If she had been able to tell her mama about it, she would have heard the words—“nasty,” “dirty”—that surely this man was crazy. Cecily would have taken these words into herself and believed them. But with no one to give her these words she was left to her own thoughts. And though she didn’t fully understand what she had seen, her body told her more when her right hand would drift downward under the covers and settle in the soft moistness between her thighs.

  CECILY DIDN’T SEE the man again. She still w
alked to the river with Rex, only she tried to do so more quietly. And when she sat she did so longer and with expectation, but he didn’t return. It could have been because he knew she’d seen him but more likely, she thought, the coming cold had driven him away. The late season heat had finally released its hold on the countryside and one morning, about a month later, Cecily awoke to the sight of the lawn glazed white with frost.

  “It’s time to get you some boots,” Aunt Pearl said after breakfast. “We’ll have to go to Portage, but that’s all right. I wouldn’t buy boots from any store but Ames’s anyhow.”

  They drove into the town on a Saturday afternoon. Aunt Pearl liked the Ames shoe store because the owner sold to blacks in a comfortable back storage room that was fixed up nice, just like the front. Cecily liked it because it was warm and there was a cushioned bench for them to sit and wait on. She heard customers talking in the other part of the store. A salesman finally came through the door and stepped from behind a rack of shoes. He wore dark brown pants with a leather belt and a white shirt with pens in the chest pocket and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Cecily lowered her gaze shyly as he approached, but when Aunt Pearl began to introduce Cecily she looked up enough to see his face. The light of his shocking blue eyes welded Cecily to her seat.

  It was the man from the banks of the river.

  Cecily dug her fingers into the fabric of the cushion beneath her. She saw no sign of recognition. His right hand moved up slowly to tug at his ear and scratch the skin just behind it. She listened to Aunt Pearl call him Mr. Travis and introduce Cecily as her grandniece from the city and explain how she would need boots, nothing fancy, for the winter. He nodded and sighed as though he’d just heard this request for the fifth time that day.

  “I’ll see what we have.”

  His voice was higher than Cecily had expected it to be, like some part of the sigh never left his body but was left singing there in the upper register of his throat. He sounded calm, gentle—none of the power she had felt whenever his body had thrashed about in the river.