“Because what?” He turned toward me.
I couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked into my face so fully. His brown eyes squinted at me. I took in his appearance. His dark hair still without a single gray strand—unlike mine that mixed evenly with my dark blonde, making me seem older than my thirty-seven years. He’d been so handsome when we first married almost twenty years earlier, and remnants remained, but in the last few years his cheeks had become unnaturally red against the edge of his beard. The strong features in his face had hardened and I knew why. His tall body had become softer, but it wasn’t because of age—he wasn’t even forty yet.
His jaw tightened and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Because what?” His voice was thin and his face twitched when he repeated his words.
I could smell the peppermint leaves he chewed for his breath and as a comfort. He always had some handy, even if pressed between the pages of his Bible. His question hung unanswered. Because the answer would bring pain to us both. I avoided all pain. And I loved my husband and I didn’t want him in pain. I wanted to be what brought him solace even when he was lost in sin. It was what drove me.
But as I walked away the answer still plagued me. Johnny knew he could get away with anything because the aumah deanah, his own father, was a drunk and no one but me was the wiser.
DELILAH
We drove so long I thought I would always feel the hum of the Ford on my backside and feel the green vinyl embedded there too. And driving so long put all these thoughts in my mind— like how I ain’t never been so far north. Malachi had. He got his growing up in the north, in Sinking Creek, Pennsylvania, where we were going. In these fourteen years married, middle of nowhere was about all I heard when he talked about Sinking Creek. He always said they weren’t miners who had their own way of living up in the mountains to the west, but they weren’t in the valley neither, where everything was pretty and green. Sinking Creek had a bunch of creeks and streams that came from the mountains and fed the valley. But the water was just passing through; it didn’t stay.
The sun was just about falling asleep when we drove into town. It wasn’t sweltering hot like Alabama neither. The four near the doors had their arms hanging out the windows. Mallie was cupping the breeze in his hand real carefree like. I wanted to do that also, but I was stuck in the middle of the front seat.
We drove in and Malachi started tripping us down memory lane. He got as fidgety as my boy Carver does—did. I just about gave him a pinch under his arm to make him sit still, but instead I hugged my dirt-filled purse closer.
He started pointing out this place and that place and he was smiling. I couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed by how he was acting. Where were his cares? They just gone like the Pennsylvania wind moving past us, I guessed. All I could think about was how far away I was from home. Montgomery was home. The South. My people were there and I wanted to be there. Carver was there.
Sinking Creek, though, was a place to start over. None of Malachi’s family was there no more. His parents had moved to Montgomery when Malachi took on our church, but they was both gone now and his brothers and sisters was all over—Montgomery, Atlanta, and even New York City. We never gave moving away from Montgomery a thought until he got a letter from an old friend who heard about our loss. She told him to come back home and take up the church. It was all Malachi could think about from then on.
Mallie looked at everything we passed with such hungry eyes and asked about everything he could. He thought the motel just on the edge of town was fancy and the streets were so clean and how all the stacked-up wood at the lumberyard looked like a playground to him.
Main Street was just like Malachi described. Small storefronts and diners with them cloth awnings hanging over most of them. I heard him explain everything but tried to take it in for myself too. I took a special notice of the women milling around and a handful of them looked so different from home. All the white ladies back home wore them nice wide skirts that fluffed so far I wondered how they could sit. But these ladies looked like poor folk from before the war even. Drab brown dresses that hung on their bones. Their hair wasn’t done up but just hung down their backs or in a small twisted bun at the nape of their necks. Everything was neat but just not like the modern women I was used to. It was almost like we went back in time. Malachi said those was the mountain folks who came down for supplies.
Of course there were those that looked like the kind of lady who hired up us colored women to clean for them. I did see those ladies too. They walked past the plain women almost like they’d walk past me.
There were some friendly looking folks—talking on the sidewalks. When we drove past a few buggies—that’s what Malachi said they was called—the kids just about wet themselves with excitement. They were unusual enough to me too. I looked hard at the black carriages. The people looked like they was wearing a costume.
I saw a grocery, a butcher’s, and even a barber with the spinning red-and-white pole in the front. I’d only ever heard of those poles. There was a beauty parlor next door called Pretty’d Up. Then Miller’s Diner and Stolzfuss Restaurant and The Beiler Bakery. Malachi said the Amish had the corner on all the restaurants in town.
A few people waved at us until they got a closer look, then their hands would still and retreat down to their sides. I knew why. They kept staring though. This was the same for both the white and the colored folks who were out.
“Everybody knows everybody in town,” Malachi said, and while those might’ve been some nice words to put together, I wasn’t sure that knowing everybody was a good thing. “They’ll warm to us once they know I’m a local.”
My eyebrow went up and my mouth said, “Mm-hmm,” quietly. I knew they saw what color we were and the white folks didn’t want more of us and the colored folks probably wondered who we were and didn’t want no trouble. Maybe we were too different from the colored community up here. Didn’t even know as I cared about all that. Didn’t know as I cared so much about making friends. Even with all my decades of friends in Montgomery, when I lost Carver I didn’t fit in with nobody. Just myself.
“Notice anything different here, Dee?”
What did Malachi want me to say? There was a whole lot of different. Where did he want me to start? Mallie said he wondered if they played the same yard games for recess and all Harriet was worried about was eating dinner. That girl’s mind didn’t stray far from food.
“Look around, kids. No signs.” The man fairly jumped out of his brown skin like he been keeping this as a gift to us. Even though we knew it was different from the South, that things weren’t segregated the same way. But I don’t know that the kids understood that meant no signs that said Whites Only or Colored Only.
He got a whole chorus of talk from Mallie and Harriet about walking through the same door as the white folks, using the same bathrooms, and eating at any table in a restaurant—that last one was Harriet, of course, and she said it like we ever go to restaurants.
Malachi told us how the men that run most of the shops were the ones he came up with. They were boys together. And I think he must be fibbing. All the shopkeepers I saw were white but for a few, and colored boys and white boys didn’t come up together.
“What you mean come up with?” I asked. “You make it sound like you went to school together.”
He shook his head. “No. It was better than that.” His eyes twinkled. “We played together.”
I didn’t pay it no mind because it don’t make much sense to me. My childhood in the South was just too different to understand that.
I could tell right away when the white neighborhood ended and the colored one started. No signs were needed, not even for a blind-as-a-bat granny. As we left town the rows of pretty houses where the white folks lived went for a few blocks on either side of us. The lawns were nice and most of the houses looked the same. In the distance you could see the farmhouses and their big barns poking up out of the fields. The few who were out in their yards didn’t w
ave when we passed but just looked at us like we was something to be looked at.
Then we drove on a little bridge that crossed over one of the many creeks around here, that’s when the colored part of town started. The houses were smaller, shotgun style, with small yards. I thought that maybe it would be different because we was up north now. But it wasn’t.
We drove through Malachi’s old neighborhood. He said lots was the same—just older. But he didn’t stop to talk to nobody. We all just wanted to get to the new house.
Then we drove just out of town to where our house and the church sat. All I could think about was how I didn’t trust none of this. Didn’t trust that these northern white folks was any different from the ones I knew in the South. That the colored folks up here ain’t coming out greeting us neither. And all this talk about no signs for whites and coloreds—it don’t sit well with me and I just laid another row of bricks along my wall.
EMMA
Just half a spoonful of my dried herb in cold water each week— that was all it took. It seemed so simple to say it like that, but there was nothing simple about secrets.
I tapped the jar on the dresser so the herbal powder settled. I replaced the lid and buried the jar in a drawer and covered it with my clothes. Over the next few months I would do what I’d done for over a decade. I’d gather more wild turnip—or Jack-in-the-Pulpit root—to dry, grind, and offer me the miracle I needed.
The drawer caught and when I pushed harder the dresser hit the wall. A flap of wings sounded through the screen window to my right. I left the drawer ajar and investigated. In the eaves near my bedroom window was a small bird’s nest. Beyond the nest on the porch roof was a brown-and-gray bird. It hopped around before flying off, leaving me alone again. It flew over the smooth-as-glass pond and into the woods.
As I walked downstairs John came in from outside. He sat with a loud huff and grabbed his Bible. He needed to prepare for an evening visit with a neighboring couple. It was church business. This made him more restless than normal. I wanted to help him because he was doing important work. Handling it sober, however, was the problem. And unless we had Communion he did his best not to drink on Sundays.
An hour before the meeting I handed him a steaming cup of coffee. When he looked up from his first sip, I pretended not to notice. I had put in it several hearty swallows of wine. For many years I had kept a small dark-amber bottle in the back of my cabinet once I’d caught on to his need for help when we had company. It was how we kept his secret. Our secret.
It was John’s oldest brew and overly fermented. Just enough of it to help calm him. Every time I did this I was guilty for helping him sin and keep a secret, helping him not be the man I’d married. I was helping him continuously hurt our family in order to hide the truth. But even knowing this was wrong, I couldn’t see him in pain without fixing it.
A short time later I watched him leave and was glad that it was not my place to attend these meetings with him. Sins against the church were private though still well known in the community— this couple had had a double-tiered wedding cake. Only single-tiered cakes were allowed. They’d followed this up with being found with a radio. I could not have sat across from this couple to tell them that they were in sin because of a cake and radio when I knew what we kept behind our closed doors.
How John was able to do this, I could not understand. How many other head deacons, who had the responsibility to manage the Communion wine, had had John’s dependency?
We had both been surprised when the lot had fallen upon John to be the aumah deanah when he was not yet thirty. This person was in charge of addressing the discipline issues that arose throughout the community—and to brew and store the church wine. He didn’t answer to anyone regarding the wine. He’d also found other ways to get more alcohol than his own brew. I could smell the difference now.
We had each once given a confession in front of the church— him for having left the church for several months after his baptism but before we were married, and myself after dressing Johnny entirely in white. Though I hadn’t meant my confession—knowing nothing purer than a baby.
But being in such an honorable role helped keep the deacon’s family in good order, to be humbler than necessary and to exceed even the Ordnung standards. We were taught that the Ordnung was for our protection—to keep us safe. But my efforts to keep our secrets hidden were to keep us safe—like the bird in my window with her head curled under the protection of her wing. She had only herself to depend upon.
DELILAH
The white siding got crack lines like an old lady’s face. It had age spots around the porch and windows and that floor sagged like the skin on a granny’s arms. But it was our new home. A white family had lived in it for years and I wondered, since now it was all used up, if that made it okay for us to use. If I said that out loud Malachi would tell me I needed to stop speaking like that.
Truthfully I was thankful. The house was about a quarter mile outside of town and out here there was more green grass and trees than the entire colored neighborhood back home. When Malachi just cracked open the car door, Mallie pushed it wide and all the children tumbled out of the old Ford like they never seen the sun and they started running. Even little George laughed. Malachi climbed out next. I took an extra few moments before I stepped out.
When I got out I saw where the garden used to grow. Could I revive it when I ain’t never had a garden? Couldn’t even keep houseplants alive. The back of our new yard was lined with woods instead of a bunch of other houses. My babies never did have no land like this where they could run and play. They were cooped up in my old granddad’s place before. We had the upstairs and my older sister, Deborah, had the downstairs—we shared the kitchen. That upstairs boiled me up like a crawdad, but right now a good breeze came up from the valley like it was rolling up here just for me. Not sure if it wanted to cool me down or blow me away. Didn’t know where I’d go if it did. Didn’t know if I cared.
Before I saw my children I heard them. When I saw them running in circles, I tried not to be slighted by their happiness. My eyes stung like they was trying to find that joy they needed. My arm clutched my handbag of dirt close and I leaned on the open car door in front of me. It hurt. It hurt so bad.
My poor boy Carver ain’t never going to know this new place. I ain’t never going to hear his giggle fly up to those cotton-candy clouds. He ain’t never going to know life without the signs.
“Deedee? You all right?” Malachi set his hand on my shoulder.
Sometimes I just wanted to smack that man. He was a good husband, but it was a dumb man to ask if I was all right. ’Course not. I gave him the stink eye and then sighed when he raised his eyebrows at me. I knew what he meant. He didn’t mean no harm. He just wanted me to be back to my old self.
“Don’t know how this is gonna give us a fresh start. It just don’t seem right,” I said.
A heavy sigh fell out of his mouth and stacked onto my shoulders.
“Let’s go on inside. I think the house will do nicely.” Malachi was always so positive about everything. He never did like to talk about all that was wrong about his life.
“Think it might fall over if I walk in?” I meant this twofold. I had gained lots of weight after the twins were born and never did lose it. Then when my baby died every church lady in Montgomery brought over biscuits, beans with pork fat, and pound cake. We liked to fill our bellies when our hearts were empty with grief. But more than that, I had this burden on my shoulders that I couldn’t put down. I would carry it with me to the grave. It got heavier every day.
Malachi tilted his head at me, chastising me with a smile.
“Come on.” He winked at me and I gave him a smile in return even though I thought it would break my face in two. “Where did those children run off to?”
“What?” I looked around and I didn’t hear them. My heart started jumping and I pushed past Malachi to find my babies. “George? Mallie? Harriet?”
I yelled
their names a few times while I ran my heavy legs ’round the side of the yard.
“Mama.” Sparrow’s voice sounded as light as birdsong. I used to like that sound. “We’re right here. We found some peas over there.” She held up a handful of pea pods. A little early, but when they’re wild they get to do what they want.
The two youngest ones came running with pea pods in their mouths and smiling while they chewed. Harriet and George were like a salve to each other. They was four years apart in age, but they clung to each other still.
“Where’s Mallie?”
Harriet looked behind her. “He was with us.”
Did she lose another of my sons? I wanted to pinch that don’t care expression off her face. But then it shifted and her gaze went to the ground, like she knew what I was thinking about her.
“Mallie?” I yelled but kept my eyes on Sparrow when she walked away. “Answer me, son.”
He didn’t say nothing but instead came skulking around the corner, chewing on the long stem of a green onion. He walked right by me without a word. If it ain’t that we just buried a son, I would’ve smacked the back of his head. But he was hurting. Little man said he wanted to be all “growed up” and be like his daddy, but he was a child.
It was time for me to gather my babies ’round like they chicks in my henhouse and cluck around them like I used to.
Like when Carver was still with us.
I took a deep breath and tried to act like the mother hen I was before all this hurt.
“Mallie, don’t you walk by me without a ‘yes, ma’am.’” I stepped in stride with him and he recognized my old ornery voice and looked over. The whites of his eyes caught mine and I gave him my special smile. He knew it and that it meant “I love you even when you think you too big for them britches.”
“Harriet, you and your sister go pick your room.” I waved toward the house and smiles crossed over their faces.
The Solace of Water Page 2