Even on these bad days, when Josey would turn up paralyzed by the edge of the woods ’cause a tree got too close, he would show her enough love to woo her back, to calm her anxious thoughts. And when she would recover, she’d show him love more than Sissy ever could. And two weeks after Sissy treated him bad for making that path out back, Jackson rewarded Josey’s love by starting to build an outhouse inside.
It took him a month of hammering all day and not letting anyone in the house, near the cupboard, where it was going. He made ’em enjoy the sunshine outside during the day and kept the cupboard door closed at night. “A surprise,” he told ’em every day when they asked what he was building.
On the day he finished it, he guided ’em back inside the house with their eyes closed. Then he pulled open the cupboard doors and walked inside, stood next to a wooden bucket tipped upside down on the floor. “Ta-da!” he said.
The space inside was wide enough to fit hisself plus two or three more people. He put his hands on his hips and smiled.
“Where’s all my food gone?” Sissy said. “What you do to my cupboard?”
“Don’t worry, Momma. Your food’s safe. What you think?”
He turned in the space, smiling hard, shook a shelf that hung on the wall where his two hammers and nails were, and said, “See, you can put your girly thangs up here. Or clean rags.”
From the doorway, Josey leaned into the room but wouldn’t go in.
“This is the real surprise,” he said, lifting the lid of the upside-down bucket on the floor. Sissy took a step inside and peered over the lid. Josey finally went in, too.
The bucket covered a hole in the wood floor and the hole went clear through to the dirt four feet underneath the house.
Jackson lowered his backside on the seat and covered the whole of it with his skinny butt. “See,” he said. “It’s a outhouse, inside.”
“Oh,” Josey said. She forced a smile. Sissy didn’t bother.
“You got all the privacy in the world,” Jackson said. “Ain’t gotta go outside in the middle of the night with a bad stomach or pull out the pot. Just sit right here and let go.” He wiggled himself on the seat. “It won’t move, see. I bolted it down. Comfy, too.”
“Ain’t the smell gon’ come up in the house?” Josey said.
He hopped up. “Just close the lid like this when you done and that’s it. No smell. We just got to make sure to shovel under the house every day, thas all.”
“And who gon’ crawl under there and do all the shovelin, you?” Sissy said.
“Well . . . Josey or me.”
Josey laughed, “I’d rather use the one outside.”
“Come on, Josey.” Jackson said. “People do it all the time. When I was off to the war, I seen books about these people a long time ago. They made holes like this . . .”
“I ain’t gon’ use it,” Josey said. “Clean it, neither.”
“Well, you cain’t clean it now ’cause you pregnant, of course.”
“Pregnant?” Sissy said. She rolled her neck, slow and long, like it was on wheels. “You wasn’t gon’ tell me, Jackson? I don’t deserve to know?”
“Aw, Momma. We was just waiting for the right time. Make it special.”
“When Jackson? How far ’long?”
Josey whispered, “Just two cycles I missed is all, Miss Sissy.”
Sissy wouldn’t look at Josey.
“Two months of knowing and you couldn’t tell me?” she say and limps out of his cupboard and back into the room.
“Momma, I’m sorry. I . . .”
“That’s your problem, Jackson. You waste all your time on shit. I coulda had my windows. Only a fool shits where he eats and sleeps.” Jackson clears the shelf with his forearm, grabs the bucket and rips it from its hinges. He heaves it out of the cupboard and across the room, past Sissy. He scoops his hammer from the floor and storms out the front door.
“Jackson?” Josey calls, following him. “Jackson?” But he kept on out.
“Jackson Allen!” Sissy say.
He stops directly on the porch steps and was breathing hard and tearful when he spins around to his momma, whimpering like a boy told he couldn’t go out and play.
Sissy limps past Josey to stand on the steps next to him. When she get there, she and Jackson turn their backs on Josey. Josey tries to join ’em but they take two steps down the porch.
“Jackson?” Josey say. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.” But Jackson don’t turn around.
Sissy rubs his shoulders and the back of his neck with her thumbs. She whispers in his ear. He hangs his head low and listens. Josey backs away. She picks up his tools from the corner of the front room and the broken bucket. A shard of wood stabs her hand making her drop the hammer. Just missed her toe.
She rips off the extra shards still stuck on the bucket and carries it back through the cupboard door and sets it over the hole in the floor again. She closes the lid. “I miss you, Daddy,” she whispers.
Josey snaps off another piece of splintered wood from the bucket, then another, then all around the lid ’til the bucket is smooth again. She sits down on it and drops the fractured pieces of wood into a short pile there. But the biggest shard she keeps. She rolls it in her hand before sliding it back and forth across her thigh on purpose, grunting as it reddens, then bleeds. Her eyes roll back in pain. Or feel-good.
35 / MAY 1866
Tallassee, Alabama
BIRTH IS NOT the work of a conscious mind any more than a heartbeat is. It just happens. In its own animal way, it do. Through God. Its own magic. And in its own time.
Josey crawled her way into Jackson’s cupboard—the outhouse, inside—alone and in the dark, then squatted over his broken toilet seat and started pushing.
Jackson never meant for the bucket to be used as a birthing chair but nobody had the nerve to use it in any other way.
The lid’s been kept closed all the time to stop things from crawling up and into the house.
Except right now.
There’s a hole in the floor ’cause Josey dragged the bucket across the room. She’s softened the bottom with the clean sheets and linens, wadded and stuffed inside the bucket—a safe landing for the baby. Now, she hovers over the bucket, pushing alone. Pushing because she is alone.
JACKSON LEFT TWO months ago for the new war, the Indian War west. Wasn’t the same man he was when they married. Everything got to be too much for him—Josey’s sickness, the work needing doing, and most of all, he missed war. Most of the able-bodied men did, black or white. The ones who weren’t flinching at every loud sound and sinking into madness, seemed like they needed guns and to be afraid and needed somebody else to pay with their lives for new anger.
And this condition became a dependency of men.
The same way trousers needed suspenders, instead of finding harmony in a pair that fits. We’re not the same, they tell us. We’re different, they say. We don’t fit together.
The world is too big and too strange now, they believe, and without a conflict or war holding us up, leaders are uneasy. They have the weight of the world on their shoulders and they need straps. Without them, they feel something is wrong. They could be exposed as naked at any time. Vulnerable. They need to feel secure in something familiar and taut. The strain of one thing pulling against another. This is what the new America needs to feel normal, with the wrong question being asked over and over again, “How can we have peace without suspenders?” Not, “How can we have harmony and not need suspenders?” A silly question to too many, so we get more suspenders. And now, our men and their strain are inseparable.
JACKSON NEVER DID finish Josey’s path out back and never started Sissy’s windows.
He told Josey, “You ask, but I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t wake up in the morning saying to myself, ‘I’m not gon’ do nothing today.’ I think I have time to, or I don’t think about time ’til night falls and it’s too late and all I want to do is go back to sleep. So I don’
t know what’s wrong.”
But he knew.
In part, he did.
In the first months of Josey’s pregnancy, Jackson was strong. Even when she went in and out of good health—made worser by her morning sickness—Jackson was still eager to love his wife.
Jackson found her more than once naked and standing on that mound squawking like a hawk, or just plain lost. He got good at not staying too far from her. He liked how much she needed him. The same way she had needed Charles. “You can count on me,” he’d tell her. “You don’t need to do nothing. Just sit here and rest your feet.”
By the third month, he was doing more than his fair share of work, the hunting and skinning, the cooking and some cleaning, while able-bodied Sissy did nothing but moan about not having her windows.
By the fifth month, Jackson spent all his time praying for Josey. Twice a day, every day, for healing. That started after he’d snuck up on her in the kitchen, went to hug her, and felt the wet red lines she’d sliced across her forearms. It broke his heart that his love stopped helping her, stopped being the healing kind.
He prayed straight through a week. If his lips weren’t moving to talk, they were moving to say, “Thank you, God, and amen.” Then one day, he stopped.
It was the day he found Josey sprawled out at the edge of the woods, not moving. He didn’t even check to see if she was dead. He just stood there in place, staring at her.
Then he collapsed.
From the ground he cried an ugly cry. Full-bodied, up in the shoulders, cry.
And it made me sorry. Sorry for Josey. Sorry for him. Sorry when I knew he couldn’t care for her. Sorry for his broke heart when he knew it, too. He was ashamed of hisself for wanting to give up. Then devastated by his own fleeting thought: that if Josey were dead, it would be a relief.
I wish Charles were here.
She’ll always have me, but right now she need a Charles.
Charles had spent almost five months living between Sissy’s house and his old slaves’ quarters. In secret, he’d walk the shortcut that Jackson had partly finished so he could see Josey most days, waiting to overhear her tell Jackson she missed her daddy but that never came.
But mostly, Charles wanted to be sure that Josey was safe and properly cared for. That Jackson could be the man to do it. That he could be trusted. Charles needed to know how Jackson would be when he thought no one was watching. Needed to see the character of the man he called friend. And Charles missed Josey.
For weeks he cried every night. Had decided that lonely was the disease that Josey left him with. Incurable. A leprosy of the soul. And that first day, Josey’s wedding day, he was falling apart inside. When Josey and Jackson would come to visit him on Sundays, it was the only day he’d dressed hisself all week. And when they’d come, the house was full again with her laughter and the deep ocean of joy in her smile, only ebbing when she saw in him something like sadness and asked, “Daddy? Are you all right?”
He didn’t want to be the reason for her to stop smiling.
“I’m going west,” he finally told her. “Join the preacher and his family. If they won’t have me, I could join the fighting against the Lakota Indians. The west is wild. I won’t die a useless old man.”
But Josey couldn’t let him go.
She told him so.
The first time he left, he walked fifteen miles back home because of his second thoughts and her voice is his head. But when he got back and saw again how well Jackson cared for Josey, it hurt him some. He thought maybe Jackson could do it better than he could. And he didn’t want to be a burden. So he left. He held the healing vision of Josey in his mind ahead of him so he wouldn’t turn back.
BY THE SIXTH month, Jackson stopped believing Josey could be better. Her sickness wore on him like thighs on inseams. But maybe it wasn’t just her. Maybe it’s the nature of things. How men cain’t stay at home and do the work of women. How he was stuck at home, instead of the war. Some women are bred to be trapped in a house. Caged animals in their housework who feel free.
Not Jackson.
Not for long.
Not since he heard from Charles about the new war against the Indians out west. So when them “negro representatives” came down our path recruiting new federal troops to help re-occupy Texas, Jackson said, “I will . . . but I gotta talk to my wife.”
JOSEY SITS ON the ledge of the bucket with her leg bent up on the seat. Her pink-white toes are stretching long and bulby, double creased at the knuckle as the pain of her labor rises.
It hits her hard and she grips the bucket’s seat with all her toes and fingers, bearing down, chin in chest, grunting and groaning. But not like she’s about to have a baby, though.
Quieter. Lot quieter.
Like she’s straining out some solid block of the bowel in private. Guarded.
All of this quiet is to keep Sissy unaware and asleep in the other room. Josey don’t want this moment spoiled by her.
“You a whore,” Sissy told Josey the day after the wedding. “Brides s’posed to bleed on their wedding night,” she said. “These sheets stayed clean. And if you try’na pass off your cycle blood as something different . . . know that new blood don’t smell the same.”
WHEN THE PAIN lets go of Josey again, she leans back and lets her legs gap open, waiting for the next wave to come. She’s calling for Jackson. Not for me. It wouldn’t be me. Why would it ever be? Even now?
“Nobody’s going nowhere,” Sissy told Jackson the day he announced his leaving. “There’s a lot here that needs doing, a baby coming . . . you ain’t leaving me. You promised the last war was the last time. What about these windows, Jackson? What about the sowing that needs doing? What about what I need?”
JOSEY SCOOTS BACK on the bucket and undoes the top buttons of her dress, tugging the material away from her neck like it’s too hot even though there’s snow outside.
Her panting hot breaths push smoke through her thin lips, drying the soft skin there to clear flakes.
I hover next to her, pacing back and forth, wish I could go get somebody, wake Sissy. “Jackson,” she whispers.
“WE ALL DESERVE freedom,” Josey told him when he said he wanted to go back to war. “We’ll be all right. It’s your turn.”
“Don’t listen to this fool,” Sissy said. “She’s trying to get rid of you. Probably got somebody waiting down that nice path you cleared for her.”
JOSEY BRINGS HER foot back to the toilet ledge, biting into her lip, shutting her eyes and rolling her head to one side. For the first time, she screams. And again. Pushing.
Screams!
The cupboard door bursts open, “What the hell you screaming for!” Sissy say coming in. “All this damn screaming!” Sissy drops a bucket of warm water on the cupboard floor. “Two hours you been in here grunting. This ain’t no proper place to have a baby. Get up!”
Josey staggers to her feet and lets herself get pulled along. Every step she takes looks painful.
Sissy sets her down in the corner of the room on a birthing mat that she’s readied for this. She take the cup and pours water in Josey’s dry mouth but Josey coughs it up.
“You need to drink something or get this over wit.”
Josey closes her eyes. “I just need to sleep,” she say. “I’m so tired now.”
“No woman’s posed to sleep for birthing.” But Josey don’t open her eyes again. Only her parched sticky lips peel open and her head rolls. Sissy shakes her awake.
“My heart feels like it’s running away from me,” Josey say. “Scattering in my chest.” Josey slides back down on the mat. Sissy nudges her again.
“You quitting on my grandbaby? Come on and get up. Drink your water.” Sissy holds the cup out but Josey don’t move.
She wakens sudden, grinding her teeth and balling the sheets in her fists from the coming pain. When it releases her again she slides back down, grimacing with closed eyes.
“What’s the matter wit’cha?” Sissy say. “You ain’t
the first one ever birthed a baby. And you ain’t gon’ be . . .”
“Shut up!” Josey say. “Just shut up! I’m sick and tired of hearing you flap your lips! Get away from me, woman!”
Josey hollers from new pain and pushes at the same time. Her body twists in a strange position, her hips one way, her torso the other, wrung out from the pain. When it ends, her eyes are red like each socket is its own tiny pool of blood, the colored part a blue marble dropped in.
Josey forces her way to a stand. Walks wide-legged across the room, holding her belly. Sissy’s voice trembles behind her. “I . . . I just wanted you to drink your water.”
Josey stops at the farthest wall next to the cupboard, too tired to open the door. She leans back against it instead, takes a deep breath before sliding down the door into a squat. She undoes the middle buttons of her dress, tugs at the material, finally rips it off and over her head, leaving her buck naked and pearly white.
“Good Lawd!” Sissy say, blocking her eyes. “You fixin to go to hell.”
Josey’s breaths quicken and her teeth grind again. She rolls onto her hands and knees, meeting the coming pain on all fours this time. Her face reddens and the muscles on the sides of her belly lurch forward and center. Tears run down her cheeks. Breathless now, she tell Sissy, “Throw me my sheets.”
Sissy gathers ’em quickly from the mat and tries to stand with ’em. “No!” Josey say. “Just throw ’em over. You don’t need to come.”
Josey catches ’em one-handed and tangles the sheet into a ball and places it on the floor beneath her. A new nest. She squats down over it, her back flat against the wall and grunts and waits for the next push to come. Her eyes draw closed.
A drip of blood dots the sheet. Then another. A steady stream of red patters from between her legs, wetting the path where the baby’ll come. But blood like this ain’t supposed to happen.
Josey’s head flops forward, her neck sinks into her shoulders, her upper body droops between her legs but she don’t fall.
Grace Page 24