The Solace of Water

by Elizabeth Byler Younts

  I grabbed a buggy and put all four things on Granny’s list inside and, like a lady, walked up and paid for them. The cashier never even looked at me. I was hoping he would so’s I could show what a nice girl I was.

  “Sparrow girl.” Daddy’s voice came up from behind me. I’d been so wrapped up with acting grown that I’d forgotten to look for him. “Well, lookie here, my girl is just like her mama.”

  He smiled and I tried to smile back but felt embarrassed for acting like Mama when he was watching and I didn’t know it.

  He reminded me where Granny lived and how to hold the paper bag so it wouldn’t rip open. He watched me all the way down the sidewalk ’til I had to turn the corner toward Granny’s neighborhood. Then we waved at each other.

  The houses got smaller and a little run-down the closer I got to Granny’s. Long and narrow type of houses—a lot like Montgomery. Like all us folks had to live the same way. But still, they was nothing like the run-down houses in Montgomery but sure wasn’t as nice as the white ones. There was the railroad tracks that cut between the neighborhoods, and that seemed to be the way towns and white folks liked things. But it all don’t mean much to me. Saw worse in Montgomery.

  Granny’s house was a chipped-up yellow. She called for me to come inside before I even knocked.

  She was sitting on the couch and looked smaller than ever. Her skin was saggy and reminded me of a rubber band that had stretched too far for too long. The house was clean and smelled nice and the furniture was nice—even though it was old.

  Granny told me to put the food away and pointed to the fridge. I found another four heads of cabbage and four bunches of carrots and celery inside. She had all the stuff in there. Why did she need more? I opened the bread box and there wasn’t no room for the bread I bought.

  “Granny, you got lots of—”

  “Money’s on the counter, Miss Sparrow.” I saw right away that it was the exact amount I’d spent. Down to the penny. I put the money in my little pouch, then back into my pocket.

  “What do you think about being called Sparrow?” The old woman’s voice was almost breathless.

  “Don’t know.” Of course I hated it.

  “You know the Bible talks about sparrows.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s like the most measly little scrimpy offering someone can bring to the Lord.”

  I just looked at the old lady, and when she patted the spot next to her for me to sit, I did.

  “Only the poor people offered sparrows. You understand.”

  I nodded.

  “But you know what’s so nice about that?” She smiled.

  I shrugged.

  “It just showed how God cares big for even the littlest, tiniest, scant thing like a sparrow.” She patted my hand and leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I’m going to take a nap now. Would you wait here with me for a few minutes and then you can go on home?”

  “All right.”

  “Straight home, mind you.” She opened an eye to look at me.

  I smiled. “Straight home, yes, ma’am.”

  “Home,” she whispered and fell asleep.

  By the next Sunday Granny Winnie was just ’bout dead. While she was lying in her bed with family around her, I was waiting for Johnny to meet me in the woods. Just like every week I didn’t know if he would come, but he always did. Anytime he might realize who he was meeting. A colored girl. A liar. A killer. Wasn’t that who I was? But he knew all of it and still came.

  But I couldn’t stop thinking about him with that red-haired girl. She got that kind of look to her that would make just about any boy’s head turn. Maybe even colored boys. I was sure that Johnny would kiss a girl like that too. I was jealous.

  “Didn’t think you’d come today,” I said.

  He furrowed his brow at me and sat down real close. He put his hat on my head.

  “Why? I always come.” He hung his arms over his knees, and when he turned to me his face was close to mine. So close that I could smell his soap.

  I looked over at him and then looked back at the stream and threw another little rock. It made me nervous to have him so close even though I liked it.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked while he made another tally mark on the tree.

  This sort of stuff was too hard to figure out. I didn’t have my friend Mira with me to ask her what you was supposed to say to a boy. But even Mira wouldn’t know because Johnny was white and none of us talked to white boys in Montgomery.

  When he was done making the mark on the tree, he sat even closer than usual—and pushed me a little with his shoulder, teasing.

  “What happened with your hand?”

  “Didn’t your mama tell you?”

  “Why would she?”

  “I hurt it on your washer. You know, she wasn’t feeling so good on Monday. She was retching and—” I shouldn’t have said nothing to him. Ms. Emma wouldn’t want her husband and son to know that we were the ones who found her. And I didn’t have to be told that it was because she had been drunk and was sleeping off her stupor.

  “You were doing our laundry?”

  “I was just helping your mama.” I couldn’t think of how not to answer him now. “She wasn’t well.”

  “Did she say that?” His voice got a little louder.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did she tell you she was sick, or how did you know?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “It does.” He was so insistent.

  “I came over like I do on Mondays to help with the laundry and saw she had got sick all over her bed.” Why had I opened my big mouth?

  “Why did you come into my house?” He stood and was almost yelling.

  “I got worried when she wasn’t doing the laundry.” My voice was getting high and squeaky and I couldn’t control it. Hot tears felt ready to burst out of my eyes. I stood and faced him. “I was just fixin’ to help her but she weren’t there.”

  “You shouldn’t just walk into someone’s house.” The leaves just about rustled from his yell.

  “And you shouldn’t lie to people,” I yelled back, then took his hat off and tossed it on the ground.

  “Lie?” His brow furrowed up.

  “I saw you with that girl.” I started crying. “I came back. I wanted to see what a Singing was. Looks like all it means is that you get to go tell another girl about how pretty she is.”

  I tried to control my tears but couldn’t. When I cried everything hurt. I didn’t have any fresh wounds because I’d had a good week with Mama. But the cut hadn’t healed on my leg and it just burned like a cigarette sizzling on it. It was like I could feel the skin on my fingers being pulled off little by little. Why do tears hurt so bad?

  “Dinah?”

  I didn’t want to know her name because hating someone you didn’t know was easier. Now that I knew her name it made her real. Dinah. That was prettier than Sparrow. She was prettier. She was white like him.

  “What do you expect? I can’t date anyone outside my church.” He spat the words at me. “Can you?”

  I hadn’t thought about it that way. I shook my head.

  There was a heavy silence for what seemed like half the morning, but it was probably for just half a minute. Then he came closer to me by one step.

  “You gonna see her today?” My voice sounded like one of them gnats that would wheeze in your ear. I hated my voice.

  He shook his head. “We don’t have church today—just every other week.” He paused for a moment. “I didn’t mean to yell about coming to the house.” He looked at me and then looked up over the trees. “It’s because of my dad though. Not because of you.”

  “Your dad? Ain’t he nice?” My regular little voice had returned.

  He shook his head. “Just don’t come around if he’s home, okay?”

  He touched my face and it surprised me. I looked up at him. “I promise.”

  His eyes told me that he got pieces of words in his mouth
he was trying to sew together.

  “You got something more to say?”

  He looked at me and it was clear he was wading through something in his mind.

  “Sometimes I just think how nice it would be to have a fresh start like you got when you moved here.”

  “It ain’t all you think it is though.” Because it came at a price. It was a consequence and not a reward. “But you’re my only friend. You got to stay.”

  He looked over at me and didn’t take his eyes off of me for a long while.

  Then he kissed me.

  I didn’t think a whole lot more about anything but that kiss. Would he kiss me again if I stopped hurting myself? But every time I walked past some nettles or I tapped the healing scab on my leg or my hand ached from the wringer washer, I thought of that relief and was tempted. But the kiss was so nice. And I wanted him to do it again. Over and over I replayed how his hands held me close and how strong his chest was against my soft one. And how I could tell he had kissed a lot already because he wasn’t sloppy.

  Was it just a kiss to keep me from talking about Dinah, or was it because he wanted to kiss me? I didn’t care though. Not now anyway. Maybe it was because he wanted to see if colored girls kissed differently than white girls?

  Was it a dare from his friends?

  What would Ms. Emma think?

  That last thought halted me right where I was. Would Ms. Emma hate me for it? Would she send the police on me? If she didn’t, would his daddy? He told me not to go near him. Didn’t know why. But after I had snuck to hear a little of what Ms. Emma told Mama about why she was sick that day, I figured that Johnny’s dad wasn’t so nice a man.

  When there was a lot I didn’t know, I would go back to the one thing I knew for certain.

  I liked the kiss.

  It was soft and sweet, like he wanted to give the kiss to me and not just take one from me. That was different from any other kiss I ever got. Was that how white boys kissed, or was that just how Johnny kissed? Why did it matter what color he was anyhow? My eyes was shut when he put his lips on mine and I reckoned his were too. Maybe everybody else’s eyes should be shut also. It weren’t their kiss. It was mine. Nobody could take it away from me and besides, kisses ain’t got color—they were just kisses.

  DELILAH

  Marlene was too broke up to sew Granny’s white burial dress so I did it—it was the right thing to do. Sparrow was one of the last to see her before she put herself to bed and said it was time. In a week she went from all her sass to shallow breathing. I couldn’t think of nothing but the funeral. It was tomorrow. I was afraid Malachi would make me go. We had a day still to argue over it. I didn’t like to argue on the Lord’s day, but I would if I had to.

  It was July and the church was hot, sweaty. Even in everybody’s grief the songs got more energy than ever. Every so often someone called out Granny’s name, like they telling her to celebrate in heaven. I didn’t feel the same way about things.

  “When I got over to Granny’s house to pray with her, Sister Marlene told me that in Granny’s kitchen there was six cabbages, six bunches of carrots and celery, and more than six loaves of bread.” Malachi winked and everyone chuckled. It also set a few to tears. “Brothers and sisters, there was more than enough to feed everybody as we stood around the clock with Granny for all those days. Granny was always taking care of everybody.”

  The laughing and the crying came together like a choir. Marlene said that they knew she was hoarding food, but they couldn’t make sense of it so they let it go.

  Malachi went on to say some of the old wise words that Granny used to say and how nothing got past her. He said how even when he was a little slippery boy of six he knew that Granny always gave hugs, hard candy, and, now and again, some swats. How sometimes that love came in the form of some harsh words. There were quite a few “mm-hmms” that joined together, creating a bit of a hum in the small crowd.

  Hearing these words made me sure I wouldn’t be going to no grave site. It was too soon to go to a place like that where I’d buried my heart. I looked over at Sparrow. She looked just about as dead as I felt inside.

  In the last few weeks spending some time with Emma and knowing that when Sparrow wandered off she was with Emma also, it brought back something I knew I’d lost. I had a whole herd of friends in Montgomery I all but shunned after Carver. But in this new place there was one woman who saw me as a friend and I felt it deep. Like I didn’t want to let her down. I’d let Granny Winnie down though. She’d tried to be my friend and I didn’t want to hear nothing she had to say.

  Sparrow had let me down. She done more than that.

  I ’spect she could feel my eyes and mind on her and she looked up at me from her seat in the pew; the rest of us was standing. I turned away. I just couldn’t linger in her eyes. Maybe she was thinking on that last conversation she had with Granny or maybe she was thinking about the funeral tomorrow. I don’t know. But whatever it was, I couldn’t try to figure it out. I didn’t want to see her. I wanted to get away.

  I pushed out of the crowd and passed Brother Titus and his kids, passed all them folks who wanted me to be a good preacher’s wife, and passed Marlene who cried pretty and made me want to run faster.

  When I got outside it didn’t help. The humidity was thick, even though I could still feel the breeze that almost always came through the valley. But it was still too thick for my lungs. I stepped down from the church steps and kept trying to breathe in thinner air and came up with nothing. To my right I saw the makings of a town that don’t feel like my own yet.

  Past the house were the woods and without willing it, my feet started moving. Maybe it was that I desired the coolness of the woods or maybe it was because the woods were becoming like a passage to another place. Or maybe they just took me somewhere else inside myself.

  Maybe it was nothing like that and I just wanted to be where nobody could see me.

  Even though I didn’t plan it, I knew where I was walking. I was walking to Emma’s house. It was Sunday. I knew she wouldn’t be there. She would be at church herself. But I walked that way anyhow.

  I’d walked in the woods a bunch now so it didn’t just seem like the place where I nearly lost two of my kids. I liked the sound of the stream. The valley breeze swirled around me and brought me a measure of relief. The hum of the trees blowing around took away thoughts about Granny’s funeral. These woods was good to me today.

  I kept walking and when I got to Emma’s pond, I saw what I didn’t expect. A whole bunch of people was there. Them black buggies were all lined up at the side of the barn and through the whole yard. A voice wafted through the distance, like a whisper. I didn’t dare move closer to hear what the voice was saying. A few minutes passed before singing rang out. Loud voices that almost made the pond ripple. It wasn’t that it wasn’t pretty, but it was just different from other singing I’d heard. I kept listening.

  And when everybody came out of the house in nice, neat rows, they all looked like they belonged to the same family. Their dresses were like uniforms made up of about five or six colors. Some wore black bonnets and some wore the white ones. The young men gathered in a huddle and I recognized Johnny.

  I imagined myself in the middle of a swarm of Amish ladies getting a meal together. Not so unlike my church, but we didn’t all wear the same clothes. But wasn’t it similar? Weren’t we alike in many ways?

  Malachi was probably done preaching and I was missing the lunch at my own house. They would all be wondering where I was and I didn’t have a good excuse. But here I was running through the woods again. By the time I got back to the house, I was huffing and puffing. Our yard ain’t filled with buggies, but we got a bunch of cars lined up in the churchyard.

  Like at Emma’s, my house was full with my church family. Malachi saw me walking up and he didn’t look happy.

  “Where you been?”

  “I just took a walk.”

  “In the middle of my sermon?”

 
“All that talk about heaven and death.” I kept walking because I wasn’t about to have this argument with him. “I just needed to get outta there. I don’t need to explain that to you, do I?”

  He grabbed my arm and stopped me in my tracks. What was he doing? I looked at his hand around my arm and then up at him. I hadn’t seen those sharp eyes in a long time.

  “Let go of me.” I pulled my arm away.

  “You got to stop this, Dee.” He planted himself between the house and me.

  “You want everybody see this?” I said this since my husband didn’t like scenes any more than I did and as the preacher he had to be a good example.

  “Stop it, Dee. It’s not just about leaving church—but that does upset me—it’s about all of this. You agreed to come here. We agreed that this move would be good for our family, but I don’t see you trying. All I see is your anger and bitterness about our boy.”

  “Somebody’s got to grieve him, Mal. You ain’t, so I got to for the both of us. You already moved on and forgot all about him.” I used my mean whisper when I spoke because I didn’t want nobody to hear me.

  He laughed. It was that laugh that made me want to smack his face.

  “You losing your mind, woman. What you mean I forgot my son?” His diction was slipping so I knew he was passing frustration and had gotten to angry fast. “Then you go off and start making friends with that Amish woman and don’t pay no mind to our flock here.”

  “You have a problem with the Amish now?”

  He rolled his eyes and took a step back and let out a quiet groan of annoyance. Then he inhaled and turned back to me. “Of course I don’t have a problem with the Amish. They seem like nice people. But why you making friends with this woman but none of the women from our church?”

  Nothing I could’ve said to him would’ve made sense. Maybe it was ’cause Emma was like me. All broken and busted up inside because her life didn’t go like she thought it would. I thought she was pretty brave and stupid to try to lie to me—but it made me see her like she a real person and not some perfect Christian who never sinned. I was pretty sure she knew I’d lied to her too. But she didn’t push me to tell her the truth—not about Sparrow or Carver—and I was glad for that.