by Janis Owens
‘And you know, Gabe, he just fell over, just like I’d shot him. It was the strangest thing. Said for me to kill him, that he deserved it, but I told him the only person I wanted to kill was already dead, and the only thing I could do now was hope and pray and try to keep her home because there’s just no way to protect her and there’s that thing about her. Sam calls it the shark thing. He had a cousin like it. Some uncle messed with her when she was little, and he says it’s like they’re wounded fish, bleeding in the water the rest of their lives, and there’s a certain type of man who’s drawn to them. Who smells their blood like a shark, that’ll circle them and circle them, and when they get the chance, they’ll hit, they’ll hit, till there’s nothing left.”
Every time he said hit, he slammed his fist against the window frame, rattling the glass, and when the vibration finally stilled, his voice was quiet. “That’s why, that’s why I never thought of you, Gabe, as a threat.”
I’d taken so much that day without any possible defense that now I was angry I was more than angry. I was furious, coming off the bed, shouting, “Why the hell didn’t you say something, you fool? You left us here, knowing—”
“I lived with Daddy a year. I never had to tell him to keep off my wife—”
“Not the same! I love her. I always loved her. You knew it, you knew—” But when I tried to stand, the weight of my body on the cracked ribs came up from the floor like electricity on a white-hot wire, making me slump back on the bed with clenched teeth, too proud to cry aloud. For a moment, the hot room dissolved into a kinder darkness; then I heard Michael, across the room, his voice quiet.
“Sit back,” he said, his voice coming to me low and distant, as if he were standing across a field. “Lay back down. I’m not gonna fight you, Gabe, whip your ass and say we’re even. Don’t even try. Anyway,” he turned back to the window, “you’re right. I knew”
I just looked at him, not understanding, his back to me as he spoke.
“See, she just started on this new medicine. Lithium. It’s what they maintain manic-depressives on. Dr. Williams has been wanting to give it a try. But between the old stuff and the new, there had to be a few days when she couldn’t take nothing at all, till her system cleared, a drug holiday, he calls it, and I been dreading it so bad. He told me straight it was risky, said she could go catatonic like she did tonight, or manic and fry her brain a little more, or something we’d never even heard of. Could take a razor to herself, or Sim, or Missy, or all three of us, wouldn’t be unheard of.
“So I been putting him off since Christmas. Then you showed up at Mama’s and I figured you’d be around to keep an eye on the children, so I called him up, said it was now or never, and it was so strange. I mean, instead of getting worse, she started getting better. Sleeping six, seven hours a night, and sometimes I thought I could see tiny bits of Myra. Like when she’d talk about Ira’s baby, she’d get this excited look on her face, like something was finally connecting. It was so sweet. It was like a light at the end of a tunnel, like this lithium was going to do a miracle here.
“That’s why I let her go to Jacksonville, even though I had begun to suspect, shit, I began to know, that you were—” he paused. “Then Ira called the day you left over there, and you know Ira, he set things pretty straight. Told me you were, how did he put it? Ponking her. Ast me what I was planning to do about it, and when I said nothing, old Ira, poor old crazy Ira, he shamed me, Gabe, he really did. Because he got so damn mad, he called me names and you names and said he’d kill us both and you know, Gabe, till I heard all that damn screaming mad, I just forgot to get mad myself. Till then, everything with you and your little games was fine ‘cause it fit my plans, but after I talked to Ira, I knew it wasn’t all right at all. That shit, this was Myra we were talking about, not some knothole on the assembly line, that who the hell did I think I was, treating her this way?”
He sat down again, back at the table with the books and the legal pads and the box of reference cards, his face in his hands, meditatively rubbing his eyes. ‘And that’s when I messed up. When I didn’t meet you at the door and send you on your way. But see, she’d just been on lithium two weeks, so I figured, what the hell, what’s done was done. If I could buy a little more time, maybe I’d reclaim a little more of her, a few more good days. So I gave you another week. One week with my wife. Right in my own house. Knowing you were with her, knowing you were making plans, ‘cause I started getting these phone calls from people up north, telling me you were getting married and looking for a job. Then Myra told me herself. Said you’d asked her to marry you and wasn’t that funny, you knew she was married already.”
Without warning, the long torrent of words came to an end, and after their relentless pound, the lamplit room seemed dim and vacant as he finished, his voice quiet, his face in his hands. “So I was the one who played the whore with her in the end. Knew it wasn’t right, but thought I could get away with it, right up till about an hour ago, when I was sitting there on a couch in the waiting room in the ER, when Dr. Williams came in and about bit my head off. Asked why I’d went and got her pregnant, that she couldn’t take lithium, pregnant—”
I closed my eyes again. This had blindsided me, but he didn’t pause, his voice still quiet, a little wry, as he sat back in his chair and looked at me. “And I guess congratulations are in order here because we been real careful, what with the drugs and all. Only thing is, when you pitched all her other stuff, you also pitched the pills, but really it’s not that bad. I mean, I ain’t planning to kill you or nothing. I mean, if there’s one thing we’re fixed up to do here, it’s raise children—”
“No, Michael.”
“Yes, Gabe,” he answered just as evenly, standing suddenly, but keeping his voice even. “Yes, yes, indeed—See, I have this plan, this good plan, that may be my last chance. See, I’m gone hire this woman, this aunt of Sam’s. She’s the mother of this cousin of his. She’s seen this kind a thing before, and she’ll be able to deal with Myra and keep an eye on the children while she’s pregnant. Then, just before the baby’s born, Dr. Williams’ll put her in the hospital and take it cesarean because he don’t know what labor’ll do to her. Then he’ll keep her twilight-zoned till the baby’s a few weeks old. Then,” he finally paused for a breath— “then we’ll bring her back home, have her back on lithium, see if it works out. I hope so, God in heaven, I hope so, ‘cause if I lose her this time, I don’t think I’ll ever get her back.”
“No, Michael” I repeated, knowing what was coming next, and he turned, suddenly furious again, shouting.
“Yes, Gabriel! And you’ll go back where you come from—”
“No, Michael!” I shouted back, ignoring the pain to stand and meet him, “It’s my baby. You can’t tell me to leave, to run away. I didn’t do anything that wasn’t in love—”
“Love?” he cried. “Was it love that made you pitch her medicine? Her lithium level was nothing, nothing. She could have done anything, gone into a convulsion, getting cut off like that. You ain’t talking about love, you’re talking about how much you want her, and wanting ain’t love. Screwing ain’t love; if you loved her you’d leave right now. I wouldn’t have to ask you twict—”
“—don’t know nothing about our love—” I was yelling in his face, but he was as relentless as Ira.
“—but all you want to do is hang around, crying and showing your ass, biding your time till she’s well enough to hit again, and hit and hit till she’s gone, packed off to Chattahoochee just as sure as if that bastard’d taken her that night on the Hill—” His face was so close I could see the blood beating in his temples. “And he’s the one who’ll win, Gabe, cain’t you see that? Myra’d never let you touch her, not Myra—all those nights at Mama’s—did you ever touch her then?”
Her face in the kitchen that night, desperate, struggling to pull away (don’t touch me, Gabriel, don’t touch me—) was very close, very clear, but he didn’t give me a chance to answer, speaking quickl
y, in a light, persuasive voice. “And this plan, I got this feeling, this good feeling, this lithium’ll make her right—”
“Right?” I whispered, shaking with fury, “Right for what? To wait on you, to tell you stories in bed at night ‘cause you work too hard to have a life of your own?”
The words were not out of my mouth before his hands were on me, gripping my shirtfront in much the way he’d described Myra’s frenzied grasp, his eyes a bare inch from my nose as he murmured in deadly earnest, “Don’t you try that shit with me, Gabe. Don’t you talk to me that way. I had to work. I never had nobody telling me I’se smart, telling me I could get out. I never had a chance, but I believed in you. I spent money on you, I explained it to Daddy, but you never believed in me.” He brushed a tear with an impatient hand. “Never.”
“I did,” I offered quietly, but he only laughed, dropping my shirt and turning to the window.
“Oh hell, Gabe, cut the bull. You know you didn’t. Said I’d rot at Sanger. Ast me why I married Myra, asked if she was pregnant. Couldn’t believe I’d busted a stupid, peckerwood union—hell, you used to look at me like you could smell how ignorant I was, like you laughed behind my back—yo poor hick brother, what a hard life he had. He just didn’t know no better.”
For a moment, the party jibes, the hilarious anecdotes came back to me (—and my brother, my brother Michael, he turned down a contract with the Reds because he was afraid there wasn’t any money in it—) and I was no longer angry, just ashamed.
“I’m sorry, Michael—” I began, but he would have none of it.
“Sorry don’t feed the cat,” he said, pacing around again, his voice brisk. “Now what you’re gone do is pack your stuff and take Myra’s car to the airport in Tallahassee and leave it there and go on to one of these schools that keeps calling, wanting you to teach this war.” He paused to look at Gettysburg again, then turned. “And what I’m gone do is work at a factory and take care of my wife and children. It’s what you decided a long time ago, first time you took that bus out of town, and it’s too late to change now.”
“How can you be so sure?” I whispered, and he wouldn’t look at me when he finished.
“Well, Gabe, two things make me so sure: One is the shotgun under my bed that I’m going upstairs and loading and coming back to kill you with if you ain’t gone in an hour and kill Mama with the same bullet, ‘cause she’ll lose us both, and leave Myra and the children to the Sims, I guess. And two is, that despite what Ira and everybody else who knows what’s going on and’ll pull me to the side next week and tell me ways to kill you and get away with it, says—I do truly and honestly believe you love Myra. I always have. That’s why I married her before you came back.” He finally looked at me. ‘And you’ll do it for her. Not for me. You don’t give a damn about me. For her.”
He went to the door then, but stopped with the knob in his hand. “I never meant to hurt you, Gabriel. If I have to shoot you, I’ll do it clean, one to the heart. I’ll hold your head while you die. I’ll die too, but see—” he wiped another tear—“I cain’t let you do this thing. Ira was right: it’s wrong, it’s wrong.”
Then he was gone, his feet popping the old wood stairs, leaving me alone with my sixty-minute ultimatum, and I never doubted, never for a second, that he wouldn’t do it, one clean shot to the heart, for his face had been that of Daddy’s when he stood at the supper table the night Mr. Sims beat him. It was the face of a man with a clear choice before him, and as the minutes passed, I wished to God things were as simple to me. But they weren’t. They never had been. I was too interested in maybe and might-have-been. Also, my fever was higher, filling my head with a pounding pressure that made it hard to remember everything that had happened since morning, when I’d strapped on my Rolex and went to conquer the Sims.
I lay on the bed, I paced, I beat my fist on the table and screamed aloud, for it was so damn wrong, leaving Myra to the hands of lithium and housekeepers while she carried our baby, maybe a red-headed boy, or a little girl who would look like me. It was so unthinkable, so unbearable that I paced faster and faster, reaching out to rip maps from the wall, scattering pins and paper at my feet, sometimes stopping to jerk the windows up on their water-swollen joints and scream at Michael across the darkness. Hard, unremembered obscenities that invited his anger, begged him to come and relieve me of the horror of the choice he’d laid before me. But nothing stirred the tropic malaise: the moss dripped motionless from the trees, the pool lay flat and blank against the pitch of the night, and with perhaps four minutes to spare, I left. Down the dark stairwell and across the yard to the highway, where I disdained Michael’s careful plans and hitchhiked to Atlanta with nothing but the shirt on my back, leaving the books on the table and the maps on the wall for him to dispose of in whatever manner he pleased, for he was the victor, and the spoils belonged to him.
Now, I did not leave out of fear. Indeed, the shotgun and the one clean shot to the heart sounded pretty peaceful at that point, and I didn’t leave out of any great faith in Michael’s master plan. I left, simply and succinctly, because I didn’t want me dead and Michael imprisoned, leaving Myra and Simon and Missy in the hands of those red-headed pagan Sims. It would forfeit the stand Daddy made and let Old Man Sims laugh in his face again as he kicked the life out of him in front of us all.
And I did it for Myra. The very word, schizophrenia, had a nasty, inhuman feel, and I had no walls to protect her, nothing but my love, and with Sam’s shark theory in mind, I was beginning to question even that. Who knew what drove a man beyond the borders of his own morality? Who could say if it was love or the smell of blood in the water? I couldn’t, I couldn’t; I could never see things as clearly as Daddy and Michael. But I knew I couldn’t hurt Simon or Missy or Myra, not even if it killed me, so I did the only thing that occurred to my pounding, grieving heart. I left, even as I had come. And I can assure you, it was in love.
Chapter
10
For many years there was a phenomenon in the recording of Southern history in general and the Civil War in particular that I call the Great Gaps, where the major actions—the floor fights in Congress, the battles and maneuvers and strategic retreats—were dissected with such meticulous precision that no stone was left unturned, no possibility not painstakingly thought out, usually with that particular Southern knack for creating myth. Then, with no explanation, the books and studies would zoom on to the next major confrontation, covering the intervening days and hours and weeks with nothing more than a summary sentence or token generalization to bridge the gap. Hence, the Great Gaps.
It’s an easily explained phenomenon, for historians are like all performers; they play to their audience, and while the scream of the rebel yell, the clash of the sword was exciting, hair-raising, slow death by dysentery and the relentless surge of pellagra was boring and easily forgotten. There was simply no reader, no ground-swell of interest for statistics like post-war infant mortality rates, no redeeming grace in an illiterate father, no tantalizing near-victory in land so poor, the old folks say, you couldn’t raise a fuss on it.
The Gaps misplaced the history of the South for decades and perpetrated a false sense of grievance that I’d like to avoid by relating with all honesty and precision the years between my departure from my brother’s house on foot to (eventually, three days and an overdrawn MasterCharge later) Washington, D.C., and the day of his funeral, when I stood beside his coffin and cried like a woman, out of regret, grief, and a tormenting guilt that I had somehow brought it about by my very persistence.
Ten years, it was. Ten birthdays and anniversaries, one-hundred twenty months of going about the routine of life, making phone calls, grading papers, getting out of bed on Monday and facing another week with no, absolutely no, interest beyond getting by. Living off memories. Living from week to week for Thursday night phone calls from Mama, who was outside the Sanger gossip circle and still believed Michael and Myra to be the picture-perfect couple, bragging on them sha
melessly in a fast, breathless rush, for it was long-distance, and she, still, the eternal pragmatist.
“—a maid, some kin of Sam’s, name’s Louisa. I been a-teasing Michael, telling him he’s got to be rich folk, hiring a mammy, but I’m just kidding. Poor Myra’s about worked her fool self to death on thet old house, having a little hep won’t do her a bit a harm—”
“How is she?” I’d ask lightly, lying on the couch with the phone on my chest, my eyes closed because it was so necessary, so painful, but so necessary, a needle in a vein, and Mama would answer easily:
“Fine. Fine. Getting big. I told her it’s a good thing it’ll come in March, there ain’t nothing so miserable as being pregnant in June. But she don’t care. Thet Myra’d stay pregnant all the day long. I never met no woman what loves babies more. Candace’s giving her a shower. They’ve got real close, you know. They never were when they’se little, too much age difference. But they spend a right smart a time together now, I think it’s good for them. Oh, and Lori’s got her a boyfriend, and I tell you, son, he looks like an ape, an ape. Ed cain’t stand him—”
On and on she went, hitting all the bases without pausing for a breath, and when she hung up, I had a few more pieces of documentation to ponder. So Candace and Myra were friends now. Good friends. Probably ate out together, went shopping in Dothan. Candace smiling, Myra, what? Distant? Blank? Mama never gave a clue, and I’d have to wait till the next Thursday at eight o’clock sharp, right after The Waltons, which never failed to put Mama in a sentimental mood, when the phone in my apartment would begin to ring. Not wanting to sound too eager, I’d let it go once or twice, then say hello casually and lay on the couch for my weekly hit.