by Ninie Hammon
“It doesn’t matter how the words are spelled,” he said. “Just write this down: ‘Please’ …”
She wrote “Plees.”
He gave the rest of the words to her one at a time: “give Reverend McIntosh my body to take home. He’s got a good place to bury it. Emily Prentiss.” That construction provided eight words—please, place, give, to, home, a, got and good—that were also in the original note. He spelled “Reverend McIntosh” for her, but let her struggle with the other words. When she finally finished, she shoved the pen and notepad back across the table at him with an exhausted sigh.
“Whew! I’d forgot how hard writin’ is. Will that do?”
Mac stared down at what she had written. Then he handed it wordlessly to Jonas. The old man didn’t even bother to take out his glasses to examine it. He didn’t need to.
Though the pen strokes were awkward from lack of practice, the backward-slanted letters were unmistakable. The misspellings were identical. You didn’t have to be a handwriting analyst to see that the same person had written both the note Jonas was holding and the one in Mac’s pocket.
He took the pad of paper back from Jonas and sat looking at Princess. He didn’t know where to begin, how to tell her the good news that her sister was alive! And she wasn’t going to die.
“You got the funniest look on your face,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. In fact, everything’s …”
His voice trailed off. Then, because he didn’t know what else to do, he just reached into his pocket and pulled out the sealed-in-plastic visitor’s card. He placed it on the table beside what Princess had just written and scooted them both back across the table toward her.
“Princess, this is going to be really hard to explain. But please, just hear me out.” He tapped the visitor’s card and then the page she had written in his notebook. “You can see for yourself. It’s obvious. The same person wrote both of these. And the person who wrote this one,” he pointed to the visitor’s card, “left her fingerprints on it, too. And they’re still there.”
She gawked at the plastic-wrapped card with wide, shocked eyes. Her gaze leapt to his face, then back down to the card. She suddenly sucked in a gasp, buried her head in her hands, and started to cry.
Mac looked a question at Jonas, who shrugged. This wasn’t how either one expected the discussion to begin.
“Princess, stop crying and listen to me. I know you don’t understand, you don’t know—”
“I understand all right!” she gasped, her voice thick and tear-clotted. “It’s you don’t understand.”
She cried hard, wrenching, heaving sobs. Mac tried repeatedly to get through to her, but she was too caught up in emotion to respond. Finally, he shouted at her.
“Princess!”
She stopped in mid-sob.
“Princess, look at me.”
She lifted her head; tears streamed down her scarred face and dripped off her chin.
“I know you think you killed your little sister. But you didn’t. She’s alive. She’s—“
“Of course she’s alive! I know that. But please don’t tell nobody!”
Mac stopped breathing, looked up and saw Jonas was as stunned and slack-jawed as he was.
“What did you say?”
“Why’d you do this? Why’d you but in now, when it’s almost—”
“Princess, I’m trying to save your life! You confessed to a murder you didn’t commit. And you’re about to be executed.”
“I didn’t ask you to save my life. You got to leave this be. You can’t tell nobody!”
“Of course, I’m going to tell—”
“No! “ she wailed. “You can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll ruin everything! I worked so hard for all these years ...” She shook her head and started to cry again, sobbing out, “You don’t understand.”
Mac sat back, stupefied. His ears were ringing, the way they’d buzzed deep inside when mortar shells had been exploding all around him in Pong Min Jong. He could barely hear Jonas’ voice when he spoke.
“Miss Prentiss, you keep on sayin’ we don’t understand and you’re da-gone right about that! You got to help us out here. You got to tell us what in the Sam Hill is goin’ on.”
Princess struggled to stop crying. She dragged in a sniffling breath and let it out in a slow, hiccupping stream. She took another breath and another.
“Okay,” she finally whispered. “I’ll tell. But the two of you—” She looked pointedly at Mac and then Jonas. “You’re the onliest people on earth I ever told. And you got to promise me—”
“I’m not going to promise anything,” Mac said. “Just tell me!” He realized he was practically shouting again. “I’m sorry. Look, I … just start at the beginning, when you ran away, and tell us what happened.”
Princess reached up and wiped the tears off her cheeks, but her eyes still brimmed with unshed ones threatening to spill down her face.
Then she spoke, her husky voice ragged.
“It was the night I give Angel a bath, the time I told you and Mr. Cunningham about—and that was it, wasn’t it?” She looked at Jonas. “Soon’s I told about that birthmark, you wrinkled up your brow and I wanted to cut my tongue out. It’s just I ain’t used to doing that, having a conversation and knowing what not to say.”
“You didn’t do nothing wrong,” Jonas said.
“Talk to us,” Mac said.
Her lip quivered and when she pressed her lips tight together she blinked and splashed more tears onto her cheeks. She ignored them and took a deep, shaky breath. “All right. It was the night I got soap in Angel’s eyes and she cried and cried.”
Chapter 22
Princess rinses away the soap as Angel screams. She pours glass after glass of well water into her squeezed-shut eyes and tries to soothe her.
Jackson is furious.
“Shut her up, dang it!” he demands. “Make her stop that squallin’!” But even drunk as he already is, he understands there’s no way to do that.
Muttering curses under his breath, he stumbles over to the icebox, takes out a beer bottle, opens it with his teeth, spits the bottle cap onto the floor and chugs the beer all the way down. He lets out a monstrous burp, gathers up two more cold ones, staggers to his chair, and plops down in it. He pops the top off one of them, sets the other on the floor beside his chair, and picks up the newspaper he brought home from the sawmill. Then he leans back and tries to read as he guzzles the beer.
Princess rinses and rinses Angel’s eyes. Slowly the child stops sobbing. She has cried so hard for so long that she’s worn out and her poor little eyes are blood-red from the lye in the soap.
Whispering comforting words, Princess dries Angel’s hair with a ratty old towel and dresses her in the ragged t-shirt she sleeps in. Jackson’s newspaper has fallen to the floor and his chin is resting on his chest, but he rouses up every now and then and takes a swig of his beer.
Easing open the back door, Princess takes Angel to the outhouse to do her business. She makes sure there’s a fresh beer on the floor beside Jackson in case he reaches out his hand for one, then climbs up the ladder into the sleeping loft where she has made a flour-sack mattress stuffed with corn husks for Angel to sleep on. She rocks the child in her arms, singing nonsense songs to her softly. And after she goes to sleep, Princess stays there, holding her, kissing her forehead.
Her heart is pounding because she has formed a plan, a desperate plan.
Jackson is either asleep or has passed out in the chair. She waits until she has listened to him snore solidly for an hour before she makes her move. She gathers up a few belongings and puts them into a knapsack she’d sewed from flour sacks, like Angel’s mattress. She packs a sundress she made for Angel, the white, store-bought dress Jackson got the child for Christmas, and a dress for herself, the only one she owns besides the one she’s wearing. She slips quietly down the ladder and gathers up what little
food is in the house—cold cornbread, a couple of apples, cheese, tomatoes and carrots from her little garden out back. Then she tiptoes over to Jackson. She’s so scared she fears she’s going to throw up, but she manages to pull Jackson’s wallet out of his front overalls pocket, her hand trembling so violently she can barely hold onto it. She opens it and removes the only money inside—a twenty-dollar bill. She puts the bill snug into her zippered coin purse and drops it into the knapsack.
Back in the loft, she lifts Angel out of her bed and carries the sleeping child down the ladder. With Angel in one arm and the sack in the other, she has to scoot the back door of the shack open with her foot. As soon as she’s outside, she wakes the child, because she can’t carry her. They have to hurry.
Taking the sleepy child by the hand, Princess heads down the hill, the full moon casting a ghostly sheen on the dirt in the road. Angel whines, but Princess shushes her.
“We have to hurry! Shhhhh.”
Past the collection of houses at the bottom of the hill where the colored people are fast asleep. Across the little stream, the water ice cold on their bare feet. Eventually, she leaves the road and travels through the woods. Angel is getting so tired she falls and Princess has to pick her up time and again. The little girl begins to cry softly but Princess presses on.
Finally, they break out of the trees and across a meadow she sees it. The water stop on the train line. Every night for years she has listened to the train whistle as it pulls into the stop. She knows what time it comes and has rushed through the night to get there while it is still filling up.
In the darkness, she steals along the side of the train, down from the engine at the water tank. Three cars from the caboose, she finds what she’s been looking for: an empty cattle car with the door slightly ajar. She’s able to push it open just a little farther, far enough for her to slip Angel inside and then follow her.
The air reeks of manure. But it’s warm and dry in the dark cattle car and there’s hay scattered on the floor. With the sliver of light shining through the open doorway, Princes gathers up hay and makes a pile against the far wall. She sits down there and cradles Angel in her arms.
Princess’s feet hurt from walking barefoot through the fields and woods. Her heart is still pounding and her arms ache from carrying the heavy sack and often the child, too.
Then the cattle car suddenly lurches forward and stops. It lurches again and continues this time, moving slowly but gathering speed, going faster and faster. The train whistle wails and joins the song of triumph in Princess’s heart. She’s done it. She’s escaped. She’s free!
“We stayed hid in that cattle car for two days,” Princess said. “Just goin’ wherever the train was a-goin’. But we ran out of food on the third day, so when the train stopped for water, we hopped down out of it and walked into town.”
Princess described the little Arkansas town, how she purchased the things she needed there—bread, lunch meat, a pair of scissors, an ax, and a quart of milk—in a small grocery store, and how the manager looked at her funny, “somebody like me havin’ a whole twenty dollars an’ all.”
They walked along the road all that day, slept in a barn that night.
“Where were you going?” Mac asked. “Did you have some place special in mind or were you just wandering?” He wanted to ask about the ax, too, why she’d bought it, what she needed it for. But he’d hold that question for later.
“A little bit of both. I knew that train was headed west, and that’s the way I wanted to go. West, across the state line into Oklahoma.”
She smiled. “And part of it was just wanderin’ ’cause we was free. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t hunkered down, scared I’s gonna get beat for sayin’ somethin’ wrong or not talkin’ when I was s’posed to. Shoot, I was a kid on a holiday, and I sucked the juice out of every second of every day ’til it was bone dry.”
She described eating in a diner one day at lunch, sitting right down with the paying customers and buying two bowls of soup and two sodas.
“And the next day …” she looked down at her hands and spoke sheepishly. “The next day, I stole a car.”
“You what?”
“Jackson, he had himself a motorcar when we first moved to Arkansas, ’fore it broke down and he couldn’t ’ford to get it fixed. He’d go off now and again with one of the elders to preach somewhere and I’d get in that car and drive it ’round and ’round the yard.”
She looked up and must have thought she saw disapproval in Mac’s eyes.
“I’m ashamed and powerful sorry I done that, Rev, stole a car and all, and that’s the honest truth,” she said in a rush. “I never planned to do something sinful as that. The car was closed up in a shed I sneaked into to spend the night, wasn’t nobody at home in the house next to the shed. Had an extra can of gasoline sittin’ right there, so I just loaded up that can and drove away, kept moving all through the night. But I had to do it; I couldn’t walk far enough ’fore all the money run out.”
Princess talked about bumping along rutted back roads, waving at farmers not used to seeing a car where they lived. She followed the setting sun, hid the car in the woods and slept in the back seat at night.
“Then, we crossed a bridge over the Three Forks River and on the other side was this little town with a sign that said we was finally in Oklahoma. So I turned around and went back a ways and hid the car in the bushes.”
She looked at Mac and her eyes shone.
“And the circus had come to that town! We didn’t go into the big tent ’cause it was twenty-five cents more apiece to do that, but we walked around and seen the booths. That’s where we had that picture took, the one I stared at so long I looked the faces clean off it!”
She smiled at the memory.
“They had lights there, blinkin’ lights. And I had to be careful not to look at ’em, or I’d have a fit. I knew I’d found the place to come back to, where I knowed for sure I’d have one—because of the lights.”
Mac wasn’t sure what she was getting at, but he didn’t interrupt, just let her talk.
“I took Angel back to the car, and we drove, going fast with all the windows down, through the night. Back east into Arkansas.” She looked earnestly into Mac’s eyes. “And it was Angel told me where to go. She was asleep on the front seat beside me, but she told me where to turn, how to get there. She led me to the proper place and we parked way back deep in the woods.”
Princess leads Angel by the hand away from the hidden car down a steep slope to the bank of a slow-moving river. She sets the knapsack on the ground.
“I need you to sit right here on this rock and be real still, okay?”
Angel nods her head and sits. Princess pulls the little girl’s t-shirt off over her head and lays it aside, then reaches into the knapsack and takes out the pair of scissors.
“I’m ’bout to give you a haircut!”
It’s all she can do to force herself to lift up one of Angel’s long, curly tresses and snip it off. A little half-sob escapes her lips, but when Angel looks up at her, she fastens a smile tight on her face.
“You’re gonna look real pretty with short hair. It won’t be all the time gettin’ in your face, neither.”
Princess carefully places the curl she has snipped off into the knapsack. Then she cuts off another lock, and another and another. When she is finished, the red curls that once hung all the way down the child’s back are now lying on the ground all around her.
Princess picks them up, every one, and holds the mass of curls in her hand. She buries her face in them and feels their softness, inhales their sweet aroma. Then she resolutely walks to the bank of the river and tosses the hair into the water. She stands and watches it wash downstream until it is out of sight. Then she tosses the scissors into the water with a soft plunk sound.
She steps back to where Angel is waiting patiently on the rock and her heart catches in her throat at the sight of the child with her hair shorn off as short as a
little boy’s. Pulling Angel to her feet, she dusts all the stray hairs off her body before she puts the t-shirt back on her. With the knapsack in hand, she and Angel climb the steep grade back to the car. After she puts the knapsack in the backseat through the open window, she sets out with Angel toward the little building across the road from where she has hidden the car in the bushes. The building is a church.
She counts the steps as she walks, the last steps she will ever take with Angel at her side. She memorizes the warm feel of the child’s plump hand in hers. The front door of the church is unlocked and they slip inside. There is a house behind the church and Princess “knows” the pastor and his wife live there, and that they’ll be coming to the building in a few minutes to get it ready for Sunday services.
It’s cool inside the building, the floor feels cold on Princess’s bare feet. The sanctuary is darkened because the stained glass windows only allow a little of the early morning light to filter through. Princess leads Angel all the way down the center aisle to the front pew, lifts her up, and sets her on it.
She reaches into the rack on the back of the pew and pulls out the stub of a pencil and a lone visitor’s card from the stack of them there. Sitting down beside Angel, she turns the visitor’s card over and places it on a hymnal so she can write. It doesn’t take long to inscribe the two sentences on the card. She puts the hymnal on the pew with the note and pencil on top of it and looks down at Angel.
She knows she must hurry now, that the pastor and his wife will be here any minute. She gets down on one knee in front of the little girl and says in a firm, cheerful voice.
“Okay now, sweetie pie. You said you was thirsty, right?”
Angel nods her head vigorously up and down. “Thirssy!”
“Well, I need you to wait right here for me while I go get you a drink of water. Can you do that?”
The child’s brow wrinkles. “Go wid jew, Printhess!” she says, and tunes up to cry. Princess’s heart stops. She looks around frantically, picks up the hymnal and opens it on Angel’s lap. She hands the child the pencil. “Draw me a pretty picture while I’m gone,” she says. “Okay?”