I swallowed a bite too early and it stuck in my throat. I drank some water and tried to think about what Johnny was saying. She’d been cutting—hurting—herself and I didn’t have to be told why. Hadn’t I been hurting myself with herbs, forcing barrenness out of bitterness and fear? Hadn’t I attempted to hurt myself when I drank alcohol that night? The pain of sadness had been too great and I did what I despised most. Had I not seen myself in Sparrow from the first moment I saw her in the woods? Only I’d lied to myself, saying I saw my long-deceased daughter instead.
“Why her?” I asked.
The silence seemed to last for an hour.
“From the moment I saw her I knew I needed to know her.” He smiled a little. “Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”
I couldn’t trust my voice and nodded my response.
“She was so different from the girls I knew.” He paused a moment. “And I think I was supposed to know her so I could help her. She helped me too.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “She taught me things I didn’t know before. Maybe because she’s different from me. Maybe because she needed me. I don’t know.”
What I heard between his words, in pauses and stutters, was love. And I found I was proud of my son even in my nervousness and fear of our family’s circumstances.
“Someone’s here.” Johnny pushed his chair back and his hands shook as they ran through his hair.
I hadn’t checked on John in hours. The morning hours up until lunch had been a back-and-forth of peace and chaos with him. Once he’d been asleep for longer than an hour, I took to the woods, going the opposite direction of the Evanses’ home. I’d followed the creek all the way to the Detweiler farm and its perfect order of things and then walked back.
“Should I go get Dat?” Panic laced Johnny’s expression. “Can he even get dressed?”
“Try.”
He took long strides toward the stairs as he glanced through the living room windows to his left. Then I stood and went to the door, hoping it would slow down the progression of them entering the house before John was ready. If he could even get out of bed.
When the front door clicked behind me, a wash of nerves spread throughout my body. I stood there with my hands still on the knob behind me as Mervin Mast and Simon Detweiler stepped out of the first buggy. Mervin looked at me for a brief moment before turning back to Simon. They spoke to each other, but I could not hear. Simon’s gaze darted around and his jaw clenched and unclenched.
“Hello there.” I moved toward the porch steps only to stop in confusion at the appearance of another buggy. I looked at it and then at the barn door, which had been opened though I had not realized it. Our buggy was missing.
“Dat’s not in bed,” Johnny said as he opened the door and then noticed our buggy in the driveway instead of the barn.
Our ancient bishop, Atlee Hostetler, exited our buggy on the driver’s side, then walked around to the other side and helped John out as if he were a woman in labor. He had an arm around John’s hunched shoulders as he walked toward us.
John looked up at me. His pale, sick complexion made his eyes stand out, and though weary, they didn’t waver from me. He was barely dressed. He wore pants and a shirt, half untucked, his suspenders were down around his knees, and he wore no shoes or hat.
“You didn’t notice the buggy or the horse missing when you came home from work?” I asked Johnny, breathless, as John continued to stumble with Atlee up to the porch. Mervin and Simon walked behind them.
“I was too distracted,” he whispered back. “What do you think he told them?”
“Ich vehs neht.” This was true. I didn’t know what John had said to these men or why he chose to do this. I considered that he came up with a plan to find a way to cover what Johnny had confessed. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d gone on this mission without so much as telling me. Had he told them about the herbs?
“John? Voh hosh due gah?” I asked what he’d done and tried to keep my voice steady.
I explained that he’d been sick for days and I was worried that he’d left the house at all. He needed to get back to bed. He was too weak to be out.
John looked at me but didn’t say a word. Atlee had John up on the porch now and all I could do was stare at my husband’s feet. They were bare and dirty.
“Er hoht mich allies saht,” Atlee said in his plain, monotone voice.
John had told him everything. Johnny and I exchanged a pained expression.
Everything? My ears rang and I couldn’t hear what Atlee said to Mervin and Simon. But they moved from the side of the house to the basement. My heart pounded like the rhythm of a hammer striking a nail. Everything was trapped inside. I was trapped inside.
“Hoch annah, Emma.” Atlee’s tone telling me to sit was nicer than I deserved.
When I didn’t move, Johnny guided me to the rocking chair and helped me sit. John sat on the porch swing with sweat dripping from him. He rested his elbows on his knees and looked up at me through strips of hair. Our eyes were fixed on each other and for the first time in years I found comfort in them. The edge and stubbornness in his forehead had been replaced with regret and age and the wisdom that tortured you when in sin. I knew it well.
“I’m sorry, Em,” John said and began to weep.
He hadn’t called me Em since we’d first been married, but no tears came. I dropped his gaze and looked to Atlee.
“John came to me today. He has told me everything,” Atlee’s thin, old voice said.
He paused when Mervin and Simon walked up to the side of the porch.
“He told us the truth, that he smashed the bottles,” Mervin said.
Atlee looked back at me. “John will be schtill schtella.”
John would be silenced in church—as a member and as a deacon.
“After some time John will need to make a confession,” Atlee continued.
“And me?” I straightened my back—awaiting my sentence. “What about me?”
Had my life not been a forest filled with weaknesses and secret hurts and judgment? Had I not worked against God Himself with my efforts to remain barren, with hiding sin, with my hate? My secrets were well folded inside John’s sin.
Atlee looked at me with confusion.
“Emma has done nothing to harm the church.” John’s weak voice broke and caught achingly. “This is my sin.”
He was wrong and he was right. I had done nothing to harm the church in the way he had, but I had done much to be ashamed of before God and my husband.
I had hurt my marriage and couldn’t see it until now. Suddenly I saw the years I’d kept a babe from my womb. How many children had I said no to? Children I had desired but was afraid to bear—for the possibility of loss. How many women had I blamed for my own loneliness? What joys had I missed over the years because spiting my husband was more important?
It was like lamenting over thirst while the solace of water was close at hand. But I’d remained empty, and instead of taking a long drink of healing and offering forgiveness, I’d poured the water onto the earth to satisfy the bitter roots I harvested daily. Could water even satisfy my thirst anymore?
SPARROW
Mama washed me up. I don’t know which day she done it, but I could feel the wet washcloth against my back. She lifted my arms and washed under my arms and even washed my feet. That tough expression in her face wasn’t there though. She cried a lot but I couldn’t talk even when she begged me. She just got mad at me when I didn’t.
How long would it be until one day I woke up dead? Would Mama wash me before she buried me?
After a bit I did start getting out of bed. I even went to church. Nobody there knew the difference in me though. I never talked anyhow. I didn’t sing the songs with them. I just sat there and waited until Daddy was through preaching and then I’d go home.
But today was different.
The Carters told everybody they were moving, now that Granny was gone and they’d se
nt Kenny away. They was gonna go far away to Mississippi where they got kin and nobody knew what happened up here in Sinking Creek with Kenny. Belinda cried all the way through the service. They were gonna leave after the baptism service. And when I think about that, I think about too many things. None of them were the good things that Daddy always said about baptism neither.
Daddy said we were baptizing everybody at Emma’s pond. Mama ain’t let me see her since that one Sunday. By then it’ll be a few weeks—I think. I missed her but I knew she didn’t want nothing to do with me because of what she knew now about me and Johnny.
I think about Johnny, who I ain’t seen since that day neither. He was the one who helped me that day, and when he undressed me he stood behind me and kept saying out loud how he wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t care if he did because I was just skin over top of nothing. But I couldn’t tell him that because I couldn’t talk no more. He was so careful when he put the salve on my cuts.
The baptism was what I kept thinking on though. Would I see Carver there somewhere floating around in the water? Wasn’t that how the police found him? George was holding on to branches at the side of the Alabama River’s current, but Carver wasn’t there. The snaky fingers of the river took him away all because of my sin.
All Carver wanted to do was baptize George like he seen Daddy do with the church folks. That’s all. But the current didn’t know the boys was playing. It just did what currents do and washed them away. Water just did what it did and got in all the cracks and went in all the emptiness it could find. It didn’t even have to try hard. It was just how water worked. Sometimes it was giving and sometimes it was taking. Because water can do both.
I heard Mama and Daddy fighting about the baptism late at night when they thought I was asleep. Mama said she ain’t going. Daddy said she was and that she can’t miss Mallie’s big day. When they stopped fighting and I figured they were asleep, I got up and walked around the woods.
The next morning when Mama came up and got me out of bed, like she got to do now, she saw the dirt my feet tracked in. My white sheets ain’t white down by my feet. But at least it ain’t blood. At least I’m not marking myself no more. It doesn’t work no more anyhow. It doesn’t give me the relief I need because it doesn’t go deep enough.
“You walking around in them dark woods?” she asked, but she knew the answer. She just sat there and cried but I couldn’t do nothing.
Then Daddy started sleeping in the kitchen so he would hear me if I got up. But I still got out because I stepped over the squeaky step and could open the door real quiet. Before I left, though, I grabbed Mama’s purse—the one with Carver’s dirt in it—and took it with me. It was Sunday and Johnny would meet me at daybreak. I was sure of it this time.
But when I got there I was alone. He wasn’t there. He was in a whole heap of trouble with his folks, his church, and even with the town. But I was still hoping he’d come.
I traced my fingers against the marks on the tree that told me we’d met eight times. Then I sat and listened to the water moving over the rocks. Then I walked to Emma’s pond. Nobody saw me. I dumped Carver’s dirt out of the purse and into the pond. It would make Mama hate me even more.
Then I walked home. Daddy was still asleep in the chair and I put Mama’s handbag back on her nightstand. But when I went up the stairs the creaky step whined and Mama woke up. She yelled at him and then got me to sit down in a chair and washed my feet again.
DELILAH
I don’t know what to do when on Sunday morning my washrag gets brown and red from Sparrow’s dirty, bloody feet. She don’t seem to feel nothing. Her feet were getting cut and scraped and she didn’t even care. I didn’t know how to keep her in her bed besides tie her down and I couldn’t do that. She made me think about that hospital for crazy folks I saw once and I started to wonder if there’s one around here because I don’t know what to do.
I’d lost the battle with Sparrow when I decided I wouldn’t forgive her for losing my baby boy and I lost the argument with Malachi about Mallie’s baptism also. And after I got myself dressed and ready, I got Sparrow ready. Poor Harriet was acting like she was Sparrow’s age and she fed the boys their breakfast and straightened George’s little tie for him and told him how handsome he looked. She asked Mallie if he had his clothes ready to change into after he was done getting baptized. He said yes, but she still had to bring him the towel he’d forgotten.
Before we left I grabbed my handbag—had to take Carver along. But it weren’t heavy.
I opened my bag up in a real hurry and found only a few tiny grains of dirt around the cracks and corners. The dirt was gone. I didn’t even question who took Carver’s dirt from me, and when I looked over at Sparrow I didn’t see my daughter no more. I didn’t know this girl who I gave birth to. I set the open purse down on my bedroom floor and left it there—I was emptier than the purse now.
I touched Carver’s grave photo that was on my nightstand too. It sat next to a picture of the twins when they were about two. He was smiling at the camera but George was looking down and away—he didn’t like looking in people’s faces. I clenched my jaw so hard my teeth ’bout broke.
My grief scared me now. It scared me so bad I just about don’t know what to do with myself. It don’t taunt me like somebody laughing, but it felt like something just crawled on my back and, besides how heavy it was, squeezed me so darn tight I couldn’t breathe no more.
And it was more than just a feeling. It was a thing with flesh on it. It lived and walked with me. It slept with me in my bed and shared my pillow. It ate with me and fed me more than I needed. It was a living, breathing, heart-beating kind of grief. It was more alive than me.
When we came into Emma’s yard their driveway was filled with the cars from our church folk. They were standing at the pond near the shore, swatting flies. The children stood reverently with their parents, but when that dumb young mother ain’t watching her little boy near the water’s edge, I just about want to push her in myself.
“The water is still, Dee,” Malachi had said earlier. He said how there wasn’t no current to drag nobody away. It would not take Mallie to his death. This wasn’t the great Alabama River that got a mind of its own. But then I’d reminded him that it was still water— and water was alive. It just did what it did and ain’t nobody could tame it.
Malachi asked me to get Mallie ready for the baptism. I put Sparrow in the back of the crowd. The sun shined on her and gave her such a pretty complexion, but I looked away.
“Birdie pretty, ain’t she?” Harriet said.
“Harriet, you hold her hand.” She tightened her grip on the limp hand of her big sister.
I pulled Mallie back toward the house. I slipped a robe over his head and with a shaky hand patted his head and shoulders.
“It’ll be all right, Mama. Besides, I know how to swim.” He gave me his best smile before he ran off to the pond. I had taught the kids to swim because of the river, but the twins were so little and the river was so big.
I stood there for a long minute. The sun had come out, but the dryness made my skin feel funny. It hadn’t rained since that awful Sunday morning two weeks ago and my heart was like a brown paper bag that was used too many times. All dried up. Even the grass was turning yellow. Malachi started talking about the meaning of baptism and about Jesus’ baptism in the Bible. When he started talking about how it was a symbol of the resurrection, I just couldn’t listen no more. It weren’t no rebirth or resurrection for my boy. It was his death.
“How’s Sparrow?” Emma’s feathery voice, as light as it was, broke into my thoughts.
I turned to find her standing in the shade of her porch. She looked tired and thinner than usual. Her hair didn’t just turn gray in two weeks but it was almost colorless.
I pursed my lips and shook my head and took in the sight of my daughter’s back and Harriet holding on to her hand. I thought about my handbag sitting on my floor at home. And how I was waiting to find out w
hen my sister’s husband could come up and get the little ones and me to take us back home to Montgomery. Then I could kneel in Carver’s dirt and that damp earth as long as I wanted.
“She bad.” It was a relief to tell her. Like some weight had just lifted and with that came the well of grief to the surface and I started swallowing hard to keep it down. Her voice sounded like forgiveness and kindness. I didn’t deserve it. But it wasn’t grief over Carver, I knew. It was grief over Sparrow. My dead, living daughter.
“I found footsteps.” Emma’s voice was so quiet and sad sounding, it just about broke my heart if it wasn’t already so crushed up. “I think she’s been coming onto my porch and on our dock.”
I didn’t know what to say. At least I knew where she was going when she slipped out at night. I took a breath and kept my gaze fixed on the pond. “How’s your husband?”
She said nothing for a long pause. “He’s been silenced.”
I turned to look at her and by the expression on my face she knew to explain.
“He’s not allowed to speak in church or to other members during this time while they decide what to do.” She sighed. “John will be put in the ban for at least six months, maybe a year, but eventually he’ll be restored to the church.”
“He still dry?”
“It’s the longest he’s ever gone.”
“What about your boy?” I asked it but it wasn’t easy.
“He and the other boys have to pay for the damages—and help with the repairs.” Her mouth quivered and she swallowed real hard. It’s a hard thing to have grief from our children, I knew.
We both paused for a few moments and listened to Malachi, who stood at the edge of the pond.
“Water can do many things, can’t it? There are no doubts as to what water gives to us. It’s indisputable. To some of you it brings enjoyment but to others it brings fear. To some in our history it brought freedom when they crossed over rivers into free land and even further back through the sea away from enemies. To some it brings restriction because it can’t be crossed easily or at all. When it’s still it is peaceful. When there’s a storm it can be downright destructive.”
The Solace of Water Page 29