Chance on Lovin' You

by Eboni Snoe

  “What?”

  “The things I told you about my mother and the Ellises, most of them were lies.”

  “What do you mean?” She looked surprised.

  “They never happened. I made them up.”

  “But you told me she put a curse on them. You had me bring a lock of Wally’s hair, some of his fingernails…the things you said she used to curse Mr. Ellis.”

  “I know what I did and said, but in the end my mother never used them. She wouldn’t do it because she said you were no good for me.”

  “So you lied to me?”

  “No more than you lied to me.”

  Sherry’s face puffed up with indignation. “What did she do with the things I gave you?”

  “She kept them. They’re probably in the trunk with the rest of the tools of her trade. After she died I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. Obeah woman or not, she was the only family I’ve ever known.”

  Sherry’s mind was turning. “I wouldn’t mind seeing her things.”

  “What for?” Jason looked stunned.

  “I’m curious. That’s all.”

  “Curious?” Jason studied Sherry’s face. “I think this goes beyond curiosity. I think you’re still seeking power. You’d try to use that stuff yourself, wouldn’t you?” He squinted his eyes. “You planning to put a fix on somebody, Sherry? Let me guess. Is it Cay, to make him want you? Or is it Mr. Ellis and Sasha Townsend, so they can get out of your way?”

  “I haven’t said I was going to do anything. I simply—”

  “You simply don’t know what in the world you’re fooling with. You’ve lived in these parts for a while, but you really have never accepted the culture of people like myself. You think it’s something like a faucet that you can turn on and off. It’s not like that, Sherry. It can backfire on you. The obeah…it’s real.”

  “That’s crap. Anybody can mumble a few words and throw some bones on the floor.”

  “That’s not all.” Jason shook his head. “There’s a lot more. This is powerful stuff, Sherry.”

  “Are you worried about little ol’ me, Jason?” Sherry stood so close to him he could see the glittery sheen of the expensive, scented powder on the tops of her breasts.

  “I think you need to go home and throw those silly ideas out of your head. That’s what I think.”

  Sherry slowly wet her bottom lip with the tip of her tongue. She put her arms around Jason’s neck and brought his mouth down to hers. It was a kiss meant to tantalize. “It’s been a long time since I had a man, Jason.” She rubbed her body against his. “Is what I’m doing now another silly idea of mine?” she crooned. “Do you think so, huh?”

  Jason’s eyes were hungry when he looked down into her face. “Don’t start with me, Sherry, unless you plan to end up with me.”

  “Anything’s possible,” she encouraged him. “A lot of things have changed. You’re no longer a young man striving to go to law school. You’re a powerful attorney now, and I can see myself as the wife of a powerful attorney.”

  Jason gazed into Sherry’s eyes. They were misty with desire. He could feel his need for her swelling, and it didn’t take long before he devoured her mouth as he leaned her against the desk.

  Chapter 22

  “Baltron, have you ever wanted to change the past?” Mr. Ellis asked.

  Baltron thought about it for a second. “Right now I can’t think of a time when I wanted to, but I’m sure there had to be times.”

  “I guess my old age is showing,” Mr. Ellis replied. “Seems like I’m constantly thinking of how I might have done things differently.”

  “Well, you’re not dead yet, so it seems to me you still have plenty of time.”

  “Maybe.” Mr. Ellis leaned back and put his feet on a footstool. “Through the years I earned myself quite a reputation, didn’t I?”

  “I would say you did.”

  “Did you ever wonder what drove me to do the things that I was doing? Things that were making the people I claimed I loved unhappy.”

  “It wasn’t my place to question you, Mr. Ellis,” Baltron replied.

  “I’m so sick of—” He smacked his fist against the palm of his hand. “We’re not talking about places now. I need you to talk to me, Baltron.” He made a face. “I know during the early years I made you feel more like a servant than a friend. But as time goes by, when I look around, you’re the only friend I have.” He went silent. “Although at one time I did have someone else.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.” Mr. Ellis paused. “Hazel.”

  Baltron was surprised by Mr. Ellis’s candidness. “To be honest, Olive and I kind of figured that,” he replied.

  “Yes?” Mr. Ellis wound his thumbs slowly around one another.

  “Yeah. We’d see you coming from the Bethel House late at night. Only visiting when Amos wasn’t there. So we figured it was something you and Hazel wanted to keep quiet about.”

  “Ye-es, there was something.” He smiled to himself. “And we had our reasons for wanting to keep it quiet. Amos and I didn’t get along at all. We still had our own private feud going. He would have pitched a fit if he had known I was coming to the Bethel House. He would have thought I was simply trying to take advantage of his sister.”

  “Yes, he would have,” Baltron said.

  “You know…I’d never had a female friend like Hazel before,” Mr. Ellis confessed.

  “She was an extraordinary woman.”

  Mr. Ellis puffed up his jowls. “Yes, she was extraordinary. But that’s not what I mean. I mean we were just friends. Nothing else.”

  “You mean to tell me you and she never…”

  Mr. Ellis shook his head. “Not once.”

  “I’ve got to tell you” —Baltron leaned forward in his seat— “I’m surprised. You know, Hazel was a very attractive woman in her younger days.”

  “And I was very aware of that. But maybe it was the way our friendship began that kept our relationship strictly platonic.”

  Baltron’s brow furrowed. “And how was that?”

  “Believe it or not, I ended up going to her for help.”

  “Is that right?” Baltron looked truly surprised. “Was Mother Ellis still alive then?”

  Mr. Ellis rubbed his chin. “Yes, she was. This was back when I was a young man. And you know my mother was something else. She was the other reason Hazel and I decided we should keep our friendship a secret.”

  “No disrespect to Mother Ellis, but I can’t imagine what she would have said or done had she known. That was one tough woman. I don’t think I’ve known anyone who had their lines drawn and their boxes closed as tightly as Mother Ellis.”

  “She was strict about certain things. Being paper bag brown wasn’t good enough for her. You had to be at least a shade lighter. If you didn’t have as much money as we had, your family had to have ‘old respectable’ money in its history. You know, my mother was a major influence on my claiming Cay and Wally as mine.” He looked peevish. “My oats had been sown in many a field. The reason Mother Ellis said I should claim them was their mamas were light-skinned women. Nothing more. And at the time, women and children weren’t important to me anyway, so I let her direct that part of my life. It probably wasn’t the smartest or the best thing to do, but I let her do it.”

  Baltron grunted. “So what made you go to Hazel?”

  Mr. Ellis leaned on the chair arm. “I’d gotten drunk one night, hanging out with some men on Big Pine Key, and we started talking about obeah. I told them it was an issue of mind over matter. Because that’s what I believed. You know Mother wouldn’t allow talk of it in our house. Later I came to understand it was the one thing she was afraid of.”

  “I know,” Baltron said. “It was more than once that I had to hush Olive up when we first started working here. She would be telling stories about things that happened on Cat Island when her grandmother was still alive, and Mother Ellis would come walking through. One time she overheard Olive and t
hreatened to fire her if it ever happened again. She didn’t like that stuff one bit. Not one bit,” Baltron concurred.

  “Yes, I know. And because she didn’t talk about it while I was growing up, it worked just the opposite on me. I didn’t believe a word of it. And I made a bet with those men that night that I could get with any obeah woman, lay with her and leave her high and dry, and nothing would come of it.”

  “No, you didn’t?”

  “Yes, I did. I guess it was the alcohol talking,” Mr. Ellis surmised.

  “Did they take you up on the bet?”

  “Yes, they took me up on it. And after I realized what I had said, you know I couldn’t back down. So I told them I needed two weeks to carry it out. They gave me one.”

  “The ways of the young,” Baltron contemplated. “As young men we can be foolish and heartless, can’t we?”

  “Yes, we can, and I was one of the worst,” Mr. Ellis confessed. “I thought I knew everything, and I knew no more than what I could stick in my pocket.”

  Baltron nodded his head in agreement.

  “I had gone to bed with many women around here, but I had never bedded a so-called obeah woman, and I thought it was high time I did. So the men chose the woman who lived on the east side of Big Pine Key. She dealt in white and black obeah.”

  “Yes. I had heard of her,” Baltron told him.

  “I got with her all right, on the deadline day of the deal. It was probably the biggest mistake I ever made in my life,” Mr. Ellis said.

  “Sure enough?”

  “Yes.” Mr. Ellis took a deep breath. “I laid with Mabel, and I never went back to see her, not one time, after that. But one day I bumped into her when I was out. At least at the time I thought I had bumped into her. But I’ve thought about it over the years, and I now believe she might have planned it. She had given me just enough time where the memory of the bet and that night I spent with her had almost faded. That woman looked me in the eye and told me she didn’t need to put a curse on me because I was already cursed. That all the Ellises were. That I would never want more out of life than to satisfy my body, and that true satisfaction would be the one thing I would never find.” He paused. “She said I wouldn’t find it with a woman or a friend.” Mr. Ellis looked Baltron directly in the eyes. “She told me my life was living proof of the curse.”

  “Well, I’ll be.” Baltron hung his head.

  “It’s the truth,” Mr. Ellis declared. “It’s the God truth.”

  “So you believed her?”

  “I didn’t know what to believe in the beginning, but after that I started thinking. I went with a few women, and I never seemed to reach what I was reaching for. And that made me wonder, because it had always been that way. But I decided to bide my time. And after a few months I was certain something wasn’t right.”

  Baltron listened, slowly shaking his head.

  “I tried to talk to Mother about it, but she threw a hissy fit that day like I’d never seen. Do you remember?”

  “I sure do. Her health started going downhill after that. I don’t think she ever recovered.”

  “No, she didn’t.” Mr. Ellis closed his eyes. “And I knew she knew something she wasn’t telling me, so I decided to get some help. I remember one of the men, a fellow named Bob, talked about a woman named Hazel. He said she was a bush woman and that she helped a lot of folks around here. When I realized he was talking about Hazel Bethel, I thought it was a strange kind of justice indeed. Out of all the people who could possibly help me, the one who had a reputation of doing good was an enemy of my family.”

  “I guess that would have been a tough call,” Baltron confirmed.

  “I felt it was, but I was a young man back then. Thirty years old. That’s young. And there hadn’t been any children that I knew of. Up to then my mother had been happy being the only woman of Guana Manor, but after she got sick she began to complain about getting old and wanting grandchildren who would live at Guana Estate. She didn’t necessarily want their mothers here, but she wanted the children.”

  “So you started to fear there weren’t going to be any children?” Baltron approached the matter delicately.

  “To be honest, I wasn’t worried about children. I started to fear for my manhood. That word would get around that I was inadequate and that I wasn’t able to satisfy a woman. That was my biggest fear.”

  “I can imagine that would be pretty scary for any man,” Baltron verified.

  “Goddamn frightening,” Mr. Ellis assured him. “So I went to see Hazel. I remember it just as if it were yesterday. Back then Amos was living with his wife and child, the one that died when he was a teenager—” Mr. Ellis paused to see if Baltron was with him. Baltron nodded, so Mr. Ellis continued. “They were living in Homestead, Florida. Amos made regular visits to the Bethel House, saying he was checking on his sister, but through the years I heard a couple of rumors that he had another woman on Big Pine Key who eventually had a child that he never claimed. I believe that other woman was Sasha Townsend’s mother.”

  “Sure enough?”

  “Don’t pin me on it. But that’s what I think.”

  “What makes you remember your first visit with Hazel so well?” Baltron leaned his elbow on the table.

  “It was the way she looked. There was a special air about her, Baltron. Although she was a slight woman back then, she seemed to dominate the doorway. I remember she had on a white dress. It was made out of an eyelet material. You know what I’m talking about? Eyelet?”

  “I think so.” Baltron’s brows furrowed. “That’s that material where the edges of the little holes are kind of crocheted and the patterns form flowers and things.”

  “That’s about right,” Mr. Ellis agreed. “Well…she had on a free-flowing dress made from that, and it had big bell sleeves. The sleeves and the hem of the dress were trimmed in eyelet.” Mr. Ellis’s eyes turned cloudy. “And when I first saw her I thought she had a neat afro crowning her head, but that wasn’t what it was. She was wearing her hair off of her face and it tumbled down her back in locks.”

  “Is that right?” Baltron looked puzzled. “Come to think of it, I never saw Hazel’s hair. She always wore it covered when she was out.”

  “I know. That’s why I was so surprised. And these locks were fluid and shiny. They were beautiful, and so was she,” Mr. Ellis proclaimed. “She recognized me right away and immediately became suspicious as to why I had come to her house. She asked me what I wanted. And I tell you, I was so dumbfounded by the sight and presence of her that I didn’t know what to say.” His mouth turned a slight smile.

  “I never really paid attention to her before. It’s amazing when you think about it, as close as the Bethel House is to Guana Manor. We’re sitting on the same land. But for generations the barrier between the Ellises and the Bethels remained so strong that I, for one, had practically dehumanized them.” His eyes softened into the past. “Then Hazel had the nerve to show compassion for me. She said in the most soothing voice, ‘What is it, Mr. Ellis?’ She sounded so kind,” he said, struck by the irony of the situation, “so what else could come out of me but the truth. I told her, ‘I’m afraid, and I thought you might be able to help me.’ And you know what she said?”

  Baltron shook his head.

  “She said, ‘I’ll do my best.’”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. As if the Ellises and the Bethels had never known a fight.”

  “That’s something,” Baltron declared. “And was she able to help you?”

  “Being around Hazel started me on a road to finding some peace and worth within myself. Mind you, I said some peace. But even to get that far meant telling her my story, and that was most difficult to do because I felt as if I was talking to someone who wouldn’t think about doing anybody harm. And for me to confess that I hadn’t cared how my actions hurt others…it was a hard thing to do.”

  “Ye-es, I can imagine,” Baltron agreed again.

  “E
ven then, with all that, the value of family still didn’t dawn on me for years. Cay and Wally were here growing up under my nose, and I just didn’t realize what I had.”

  “It’s kind of interesting how things worked out the way Mother Ellis wanted. With Cay’s mother dying in childbirth and all,” Baltron said hesitantly.”

  “I’ll say.” The thought of the curse hung in silence between them. “And Wally’s mother didn’t want to be tied down with a child. She wasn’t from these parts and got hooked up with me while she was traveling the country. I would have married her, just because of Wally. But I could sense a restlessness about her. And sure enough, after she had the baby she told me Guana Estate would be nothing but a beautiful prison for her. She needed the big-city life, and that was something I wasn’t able to give her, but I was able to give her enough money to go and leave us in peace.”

  “I thought something like that had happened. But you know, she never really seemed to fit in around here,” Baltron said.

  “No, she didn’t.” Mr. Ellis tapped his fingers on an end table. “And I guess I’m no different from anybody else who starts getting old and sick, and thinks the end may be near. I just want to right some of the wrongs I’ve done. Encouraging Wally to marry Sherry was one of them.”

  “Don’t be taking on things that you can’t change,” Baltron advised him.

  “I can’t change it now, but I knew from the very beginning she really wanted Cay. Even though we know that’s not true, either. She really wanted the power of the Ellis name and Guana Estate. But like my mother, I decided to exert my will about what kind of blood my grandchildren would have.” Mr. Ellis sat back again. “I knew there was no real fire between Cay and Precious, and there wasn’t much going on in the bedroom. So I never thought there would be grandchildren out of their union. What a sacrifice. I believe Cay was trying to escape his fate with that marriage.”

  “Perhaps,” Baltron replied.

  Mr. Ellis sighed. “So I figured with Sherry being the hot-blooded creature that she was, I’d get grandsons through her. But that woman had her own plans. The more ill Precious became the more she turned her sights on Cay again.”