by Cynthia Bond
So she began whispering her daddy’s favorite, Psalm 23, into the quiet night while tears slid down her face.
It seemed to Celia like something made her daddy hand off each child to men she had never seen, picking up a tiny wrist and laying it in a grown man’s hand.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.”
Celia felt a fist of anger and sorrow ball up in her throat.
“He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.”
It seemed—it seemed to Celia like he was giving those girls away, like you would if somebody won a raffle at a Fair.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me …”
What would make him do such a thing? What force? What—then Celia looked at Ruby Bell, who seemed to be just smiling through it all. Other girls crying, being led off like they had gotten a new master. Ruby Bell hadn’t been passed to anybody. Who hadn’t shed not one tear.
Then Celia watched in the smoke and black night, as Ruby turned to her daddy, and seemed to will him to her. He marched towards her like a puppet, and when he reached her, seemed to hug her near, hug her close, closer than he had ever held his own daughter. Then something happened that Celia did not understand—how they stayed that way too long, too close. How they seemed to be swaying with the beat of the evil drums … and how her papa never danced, but now, somehow, Ruby’s head rocking, her daddy’s hips shifting, he was doing just that. A kind of dancing. Were his pants brown? She had been sure that they were black when he walked in there, but now, were they the same color of his skin? What—what had happened to his pants?
Celia let out a scream that began in her belly as she turned crashing through the branches. She pounded the earth all the way home and slammed the door to her room. She shook in bed until morning, knowing, knowing, knowing that her father was a good man—that God had singled him out early to do his work, to rattle the Devil’s cage. She knew that old Satan had to work hard. Very hard. Very hard with such a good man. Must have hammered his spike long and hard to find the key to his undoing. It had to be hidden where her papa would never think to look. Inside of a child.
From that day onward, Celia never, ever followed her daddy again. Instead, Celia watched Ruby. Watched her coming back from that White lady in Neches, acting better than everybody. Watched her sparking that Wilkins girl like she would have a man, with nobody saying a thing about it. Watched her move on up to New York City where her kind of evil banded together, and later she’d watched her slide across town filled with demons, begging bread and sympathy from Miss P, and drawing good men from their wives’ beds. Now she was trying to steal her Ephram, as she had her father. She saw Ruby as a red beacon washing over Liberty. For some reason Celia had seen fit to let that live untampered. She regretted that now. First, she would try to cleanse Ruby’s soul. If that did not work, Celia would get ahold of the Sheriff and put that girl somewhere she could only tempt lunatics and those who minded them, down in Dearing.
Chapter 20
The pines had been watching men and their fire circles since they were saplings. For nearly two hundred years they had seen upside down crosses glowing red in the dark, long before men in white sheets ever rode the horizon.
Dark cloaks donned, secret chants and the pealing screams that followed. The slaves of these men had hidden in the shadows and witnessed the unthinkable. When morning came, the tall trees watched the men, brown and black, scrubbing blood from the knives of their masters in the cool river and kicking dirt over stiff maroon soil, cleaning quartered animals missing hearts and heads. The great pines had stooped in sorrow when they saw these slaves learning in the thick brush, the source of the White man’s might, then mingling their own ancient homeland rites, magic and shadow secrets with the new, until they began gathering about their own fires and driving their desires into the roots of the world.
The Dyboù had been walking through the same piney woods for the past thirty-seven years. He was earthbound. His soul had been stitched to the land with a curse made moments before his destruction. It had been spit over his body as he lay bleeding, and then cemented as the bones in his neck snapped one at a time like dry twigs. Then the circle had gathered around him, crying, some wailing, just as the Apostles and the whore Mary had wept over Jesus.
But those were the thoughts he’d had while breathing. In death it had become much simpler. Jesus was a fluff of tobacco smoke. God was a figment of distilled whiskey. The name his mother had given him, Omar Jennings, and the name he had forged, the Reverend Jennings, both were dust in the crack of his shoes.
He had gathered at the pit fires since he was thirteen, nearly seventy-five years before. Then later, as a man, leading the circle, fear and awe freshly painted on every man as they looked upon him.
But first he had been a boy and the whole of his life had been spent sleeping in the corner of a one-room dirt cabin. His daddy had been too useless to feed all twelve of them so Omar had taken to stealing chickens before he turned six. He brought them home to his mama, beaming, and she would slap him to the ground for thieving. But when she served that chicken plucked, cleaned and fried, her eyes would land soft over his features. It was the one moment of joy he remembered in all of his young life.
His daddy drunk up any two pennies his mama found to rub together, then got mean and limp, eyes blood red with raw hate piercing through. He was too lazy to stand up and beat a boy, but if one happened to be wandering too close to his spider hands he would snatch arm, leg, hand and start beating with whatever was handy—broom, stick, frying pan, hammer. He would say his son’s name with heat and spit, “Omar, Omar … you a low-down piece of donkey shit.” Or “Omar, you the asshole of a maggot.”
If it bothered Omar Jennings as a boy, he had no recollection of that fact. Certainly he could recall the physical pain of the beatings. The hiding his face from his friends. His arm in a sling. He even remembered getting on his knees in church, with a hollow nothing for his efforts.
So when the old man was killed after passing out near Master Gibbs’s cotton fields with his pipe burning too close to the twenty-pound gas tank, Omar wasn’t particularly troubled. Even later, when he heard how they found his father, writhing on the earth, every stitch of clothes and skin seared right off his muscle, Omar took the news in stride.
A week after his daddy died Omar Jennings, feeling far older than his twelve years, put the other children to work. The girls to Miss Sybil the laundress, the boys collecting scraps at the mill. He organized and planned and collected all the money from his siblings and put it in his mama’s apron come every Friday night. Now she didn’t slap him. Instead, with the children out playing where she had sent them, she took his hand and guided it under her skirt. Told him when he held it back that he had grown plenty big, that he was the man of the house now and had to perform certain duties. How the first time they rutted, she ate him whole in the dim of that shack, on the pallet where she and his daddy had slept, on top of the dirt he had watched her sweep. How his mama worked against Omar’s fear for the first ten minutes and then, to his young shame, in spite of it for the next hour. Availing herself of his embarrassed reflexes like a bear waits for salmon. Until, exhausted and spent, she nudged him from her mat as the girls stumbled in, complaining about the dark.
That whole next week Omar kept his eyes tight on the floor whenever his mama was near, pulling up a root, specializing on a pebble. But by the time Friday found its way back to his doorstep, the steel his papa had beat into him held Omar in good stead. When she spread her apron out for his collections, he slapped her hard across the face and took her by force instead, pushing and beating until they were the two of them beasts in the night, thrashing like hooked fish on the dry, hot floor.
Things went on like that for another two years, Friday nights coming and going like swallowing a briar patch dipped in chocolate. Unt
il his mama came up pregnant. When he asked about sin, she threw back her head, mouth wide, teeth white. She laughed until she choked on her spit, then coughed and laughed some more. She rolled from him and a chuckle burped from her throat. What she told him next was worse than all the rest put together. Her eyes glazed, she leveled them at him. “You a worse halfwit than your daddy. He weren’t much, but at least he was a man. You ain’t nothing but a woman’s whore, and give her money besides. You leaving come morning and Ernest Meagers moving in. He think it’s his and you ain’t standing around moon-eyed to tell him no different.”
Face wooden, Omar said, “But I looks after things round here.”
She was lying down limp when she grinned. “You ain’t nothing but a tadpole wriggling in the mud, ’s time fo’ a bullfrog.”
Some people said it was the chain gang that had escaped from Tallahassee that had done it. Most thought it was Gibbs’s poor relations or the Klux, but the way they found Sofia Jennings cut up like a prize hog was the shame of Jessup County. Both White and Black talked about it for years. White women from the Ladies Sugar Beet Society brought Omar and his siblings cake and round bread for weeks, mashed potatoes over cauliflower and beets with crinkly onions. He took it and pained his face according to their needs. He took their money too when it was offered and still set his sisters to work. He took their money come Friday and from the middle girl, Betty, who’d just turned ten, he took more than that in the outhouse while the rest of his siblings slept.
When he left Jessup three years later he had $400.45 rolled tight in his knapsack, every nickel in the family bank.
Omar also left with his mama’s pallet folded in his knapsack, brown with years of sweat, and a few remaining bloodstains his able sister had not been able to wash clean. He left with the ax handle he’d buried in the thick of the forest the night his mama had forced him to kill her. And the same pack of matches that had proved so useful some two years before, when Omar had found his daddy passed out from drink, tied him to a mule and dragged him two whole miles to the Gibbs plantation, and set his past aflame.
As he walked away he could almost hear them screaming just under the loom, their souls blocked from rising by the lodestone he placed over each of their graves and the cold ice terror he’d frozen in their eyes at the moment of their death. Omar learned one thing for certain. Not all souls rose.
Chapter 21
An entire week had passed after Junie Rankin was laid to rest, but the porch at P & K still chewed on the fat of the funeral. How Sister Celia had taken the high road and how Ephram Jennings had vomited all over Chauncy Rankin’s new suit.
Plenty had made their way out to Bell land to inspect the sinful goings on. Each acting as if they were wandering that way on some errand or another, after which most had come knocking on Celia’s door reporting, as she had requested, on the things they had seen.
Verde Rankin came to Ruby’s door for her mother’s dishes and had seen Ephram breaking the hard sod in the yard with a hoe, seeds at the ready, while Ruby was sitting next to that chinaberry tree talking to the wind.
Cleary had seen Ruby and Ephram walking around hand in hand down by Marion Lake while Moss Renfolk had caught sight of Ephram nailing fresh lumber from the mill onto Ruby’s roof.
Minnie Hardy, K.O.’s cousin visiting from Beaumont, got in on the act and said while she was taking the bus from Newton she had spied Ephram holding red roses, no less, tucked under his arm with a big white bow. She had also peeked and seen that he was carrying two bags full of groceries with things that looked like Vienna sausages and two big rib-eye steaks.
Righteous Polk and her cousin Grace reported that Ruby’s clothes, even her drawers, were out on the clothesline when they stopped by to drop off pound cake and, Lord, if they hadn’t seen Ruby walking around in clean clothes, with her hair braided and put up, looking for the life of her like a normal girl.
The worst of it, Supra gave over with a snide grin, was how they were keeping house like a Christian married couple, but how her son Percy had told her he’d gone by late one night and still seen Ruby cooing and petting little piles of dirt by the chinaberry tree.
Tressie Renfolk concluded that Ruby Bell looked good enough, but crazy still hung around her eyelashes.
IN SPITE of all of this, Ruby and Ephram kept right on living. While Ruby hid the sweet ache Ephram’s presence gave her, she would turn over a small smile or a gentle look now and again.
That first night in the rain, with the door fresh and scrubbed, with her standing, confused, not knowing what to do, Ephram had told her, “Ruby you got to know I’m marriage bound, and I aim to treat you like the lady you is until that day offer up its glory.”
She had to give a bored shrug to keep him from seeing the gratitude in her eyes.
Mornings gave way to afternoons with Ruby drinking coffee and eating the scrambled eggs and toast with raspberry jam Ephram cooked for her, then watching him as he walked off to the Red Bus to go to the Piggly Wiggly in Newton. Each day Ruby stopped to look at the world the man had made for her. Fruit sat in a bowl on the table. There were clean plates with tiny blue flowers on them, and matching blue placemats, napkins and true-life silverware.
He brought her the Beaumont Bugle and she stepped back into time and learned about: the new speed limit, Nixon and a hotel called Watergate. He brought a transistor radio and she heard a woman named Roberta Flack sing “Killing Me Softly” on an FM station. She had cried hard into her sleeve and was grateful that Ephram had not been nearby to see it.
Every morning Ruby did the unthinkable, made up her own bed, then walked into the spinning day to tend to her children. They glowed, the sun gleaming on their faces, their bodies waving in the light, making rainbows that flashed on the earth. They often hopped upon her and followed her into the pristine house, tugging with hundreds of hands on her clothing. They hid under the bed and under her skirt; in the beams of the ceiling and inside the sink. They drifted and skipped and jumped Mary Mack with an invisible rope. They loved the home almost as much as the chinaberry and Ruby played ring-around-a-rosy with them late into the afternoon.
While they napped Ruby would wander into the thick of the piney woods and let nature rush through her. Tuesday she washed against the sand of Marion Lake and felt silver fish swimming in her belly. Wednesday and Thursday she waved as a field of bluebells, letting the bees tickle her fingers and toes. Friday through Sunday were for the earth—the black gumbo clay with its pill bugs and wriggling worms.
When she made it home she would wait for Ephram. When he arrived she would quickly lean down like she was wiping away something on the stair, or picking at the hem on her dress, then she would step into the house with only a tired look.
Each day he brought her gifts. She barely nodded thanks when he brought her roses on Tuesday. On Wednesday, she took the small bottle of perfume from Avon but accidentally knocked it into the woodbin, where it cracked—the smell filling the house with sickly gardenia sweet. She drank his chicory coffee with rich cream because she loved it so, and held his smiles because they tickled something in her chest. On Thursday he brought her glazed doughnut twists for Friday breakfast. She felt saliva arc from her mouth before she could devour five of them.
Still, if he had so much as lifted her shirt, stroked her leg, she would have settled into herself, but night after night he lay next to her like a deacon. Friday he brought her maple syrup for Saturday pancakes; Saturday he planted sweet peas in her front yard. As she watched him sweating, something perched upon her like a dove. She shook it off, but on Sunday as he hammered her roof it came back and decided to nest.
Monday evening it rained as he toted home a bag of fresh apples from Jordon’s Orchard in Jasper. He laid them at her feet and against her better judgment she circled his neck with her arms. They stood together like that. The woody scent of him entered her lungs. She pulled him tight until they pushed into one another, kissing, with the smell of wet earth rolling over their toes fr
om the open doorway, the scent lining the floor and playing in the folds of their clothes. The bag of apples resting just inside the house.
When their breath came in hot gusts, Ephram bent his head down and held her like she was a cloud he couldn’t squeeze lest it disappear. He stepped back and looked at her grinning. Her beauty shook him: the smooth tan of her skin, her collarbone and shoulders, her neck as graceful as a queen’s, and her eyes—her eyes were where her heart lived.
“What chu got there, gal?” He let his fingers linger on her cheek.
“Just a mole,” she answered.
“Naw, it ain’t. That there’s a beauty spot.”
“It’s just a mole.”
“Yes, Ruby, it sure is.” He held her face, as soft as a peach, and turned it up to the single light. “It sure is. Looka there. Somebody round here got them a beauty spot where anybody can see it.”
“Do not.” He saw a chuckle rising from her chest.
“So do. Miss Beauty Spot.”
“You better stop it.”
“Cain’t stop it when it be right there staring at me.”
She mock-slapped him against his chest and began to turn. “Now that’s enough.”
Ephram wouldn’t let her leave. He spun her softly in a bitty two-step. “All right then, Miss Beauty—”
He kissed her again and Ruby felt the rock inside of her begin to crumble.
He held her so firm and so long her chest ached and a pinch in her throat came out in soft sobs. She cried into his open mouth. Now inches away but still crying, she pulled him down to the floor with her and she let her salt mix with his old sweaty collar.
She sniffed in deeply. “See? I open up for one drop of good and out come all this.”
He softly joked, “All a’ what? That ain’t but a little faucet … Miss Beauty Spot.”
And she began laughing.
“I don’t know what happens now,” Ruby whispered.