Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

by Alice Anderson

  I smiled, pulled my handbag with the pistol inside closer in my lap.

  PART TWO

  OBLIVION

  LET THE POT BOIL

  Jack Calhoun’s office was a little row house on Convent Avenue in downtown Pascagoula, with overgrown saw grass sticking up in tufts out of the broken concrete steps out front. Mama looked skeptical. By that time, she’d been in California thirty years, and Mississippi seemed like a very foreign land, even before the storm. I reminded the kids of their manners, explained that a nice man wanted to talk to them a little bit, and we all went in.

  We stepped into a little waiting room with a few mismatched folding chairs, a couple of pitiful-looking artificial houseplants in faded baskets, and hundreds of dog-eared hunting magazines. The secretary came out to meet us and told us Mr. Calhoun would be right out.

  As we sat down, I took in the office. The floors were stripped down to the sub, with bits of the former hardwood broken off here and there at the corners of the room. The walls were literally still wet, with a watermark about three feet below the raised ceilings. The whole place reeked of mold.

  “How y’all doing out here? You boys like them gun magazines?” boomed a voice from the hall suddenly.

  I was afraid to look. Head down, I noticed first his polished dress shoes, then a very long expanse of dark dress slacks, then a well-worn brown belt, then a crisp white shirt with sharp Republican tie. And then finally, raising my head to meet his eye, I saw the most handsome black Irish Southern gentleman I’d had the good fortune to lay eyes on in some time. He had wild, curly black hair, the palest shade of oceanic-green eyes, deeply tanned skin, and a perfect white smile.

  I felt myself blush a bit at my ridiculous response.

  “Y’all wanna come back here in my office for a while?” he asked the kids, who sat in a silent row of chairs, magazines falling from their laps.

  “Y’all go ahead now with Mr. Jack. He’s going to chat with you. And be sweet,” I reminded.

  I watched them follow behind him down the narrow hall. Mama took my hand and gave me one of her “It’s gonna be okay” squeezes.

  “Mama?” I said, starting to cry.

  “It’s going to be fine. They’re going to tell him, don’t worry.”

  And Mama and I sat there and listened.

  The place was so small, the walls so destroyed, that we could hear every word. He asked them how much their daddy drank.

  “Ten beers!”

  And if Daddy was nice to their mama.

  “Only sometimes.”

  And if Daddy liked to drive his car after he drank.

  “All the time, yes, sir!”

  Eventually, we heard Jack Calhoun say to the children, “Now, y’all like candy, don’t y’all? ’Cause I got this big ol’ hunk of chocolate to share. But I have to divide it up for you, right? Now, let me see. Y’all ever seen one of these?”

  “Daddy has one of those!” said Grayson.

  Mama and I exchanged confused glances.

  “It’s a butcher knife,” said Grayson in his wisest three-year-old voice.

  “It is, in’nit? Your daddy got one of these?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, he does,” Grayson said in a serious little voice. Almost a hush. I knew what he was thinking—I was thinking of it, too.

  I wished they’d remember to say, “Yes, sir.” But by that time, I was crying too hard to care.

  “Daddy cut Mama with a knife like that,” Grayson said.

  “Really?” Jack Calhoun asked.

  “Really,” the kids all said in unison. A hush fell then, and I wondered what was happening, until I realized they were all just sitting in there eating hunks of chocolate. Mama and I didn’t say a word.

  Eventually, he brought the kids out to the waiting room to stay with their grandma, saying, “I need to talk to your mama a little bit alone. Y’all mind your granny now, ya hear?”

  I went back to his office and listened as he told me he’d be recommending regular visitation for Liam with the kids. He’d have them every other weekend and one day during the week.

  I nearly fell off my chair.

  “What? But you heard the kids—he tried to kill me! He came after me with a knife—he cut me!” I shrieked, trying in desperation to keep my voice down.

  “He didn’t do nothin’ to them, though.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Come again?”

  “Double negative. You’re right, what he did to them wasn’t nothing. They saw it all; they spent that night locked in the room with him.”

  “Aw, they fine.”

  “They’re not fine.”

  “Between you and me, Mrs. Rivers, you might want to reconsider how you speak of kids you want to keep custody of.”

  “Okay, well, they’re technically fine. But they’ve been through their drunk daddy attacking their mama for hours on end, and they’re scared of him.”

  “But he didn’t lay a hand on them.”

  “He tried to grab Aidan Lake and take him in the car and drive drunk with him! That’s what started the whole thing! He had marks on his legs from Liam grabbing him.”

  “The baby ain’t got no marks on his legs now, does he?”

  “No, but—”

  “Listen, you got three fine, healthy, well-dressed kids. You know what keeps a father from having visitation with his own flesh and blood? I can tell you, a nasty fight with his wife ain’t it.”

  “It wasn’t a fight, it was an attack.”

  “That might be, but you don’t get it.”

  “Don’t get what? If he hurt me, he’ll hurt them.”

  It was a sentence I would repeat for years to come.

  “But he didn’t hurt them.”

  “Yet.”

  “Exactly, and you can’t punish a man for something you think he may or may not do at some time in the near or distant future.”

  “So I’m just supposed to take my chances with my children’s safety?”

  “Your children are safe. They’re out there with their grandma.”

  “They won’t be safe if they have to see their dad.”

  “You don’t know that, Mrs. Rivers.”

  “I do. I know it with everything I have.” My voice broke, the tears falling again.

  “Look, you gotta give him the pot of water and set it to boil.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Enough rope to hang himself, enough heat to let the pot boil over—that’s what you gotta give him. Because I’m telling you now the judge ain’t gonna keep a man from his own children according to the fact that he beat the shit out of his wife.”

  “But won’t the judge want to err on the side of caution?” I asked.

  “Maybe later, after the pot boils over, he will,” Jack countered.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “So I’m just supposed to gamble with my children’s safety until then? What if he drives drunk with them?”

  “He hasn’t been arrested for that, right? And he hasn’t touched them. He’s going to see them; you might as well just let it happen and watch the pot.”

  “My mama says a watched pot never boils,” I whispered, starting to feel defeated.

  “Oh, it boils, all right. I see it boil all the time. You wanna know what it looks like when the pot boils?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Your kids ain’t got belt scabs on their asses or cigarette burns in the heels of their feet. That’s the kids whose daddies can’t see them. You’re not there yet.”

  “So I’m supposed to wait to get there?”

  “You don’t give up, do you?” Jack asked, smiling.

  “Not usually, sir.”

  “Best I can give you is a little extra step to buy time. But it’s going to happen. You got to set his pot on the fire.”

  “You’re basically asking me to hope that I set the pot to boil so that, what, something terrible will happen?”

  “Well, t
hat’s the only way he’s not getting visitation, hon.”

  We argued for half an hour more, and finally, Jack Calhoun, the gaurdian ad litem appointed by Judge Taylor to represent the children, agreed to not recommend any visitation, but writing in his letter to the judge instead asked that we would be interviewed by a social worker, who would then give her informed opinion.

  Two days later we were in the cramped office of one Ethel Kahn, social worker, balancing on the edge of dusty couches surrounded by shelves chock-full of Russian nesting dolls. She was a sickly-looking woman, the kind of person that, though young, had a deathly pall to her, skin devoid of any life. Her eyes were dark as the Russian dolls that lined the shelves of her office—black and round. Her hair, oily stripes scraped by a comb parted right down the middle, was somewhere between mouse gray and dish brown, and her ill-fitted sweater matched it exactly. I noticed that her shoes were caked with dirt. She’d met with Liam the day before and started by telling me—in a kind of heightened, too-excited whisper that suggested we were in this together—that he admitted to drinking to excess and admitted to the violence between us, but that he’d sworn it was “mutual.”

  She asked the kids a few questions about their daddy, but nothing about the night of the attack. Mostly, she let them play with her endless sets of dusty nesting dolls and questioned me quite extensively about my book. I asked her how she knew about my book. “Your husband told me. He’s very proud of your literary accomplishments,” she said, a small smile passing her damp face.

  My literary accomplishments?

  This is a man who’d for the last two years had forbidden me from writing poems.

  “I like poetry myself,” Ethel said.

  She didn’t ask me a single thing about Liam.

  After the forty-minute session, I left with a sick feeling in my stomach. I called Addison.

  “Something’s off,” I said. “Is she working for their side?”

  “Don’t be paranoid!” Addison laughed and told me not to worry.

  The next day, Ethel Kahn sent letters to Jack Calhoun, the Honorable Judge Hank “Bubba” Taylor, Liam’s new attorney Buford Cooter Garland, and—of course—Addison, recommending extremely limited visitation for Liam: eight daylight hours every Saturday, with a strict provision for no drinking. Relieved, I steeled myself for those Saturday exchanges, and Mama went back home to California.

  TIMBER

  We exchanged the kids every Saturday in front of the Ocean Springs Police Department downtown. At Addison’s urging, I carried a small tape recorder with me at our exchanges, and I had half a tape filled already with bizarre rants from Liam. Two weeks before, he accused me of giving out plentiful blow jobs to various acquaintances the last time I’d gone to California (almost two years before). This last week, I hadn’t given him much chance to talk. My only goal was to inform him of a little injury Avery had suffered a few days before, seeing ahead of time that it could easily become just the fuel Liam longed for in his attempt to smear me in court.

  Liam had broken the protective order half a dozen times already, following me around town, driving by the house and using his fingers to motion shooting a gun at me. In Mississippi, when someone breaks a protective order, they take a report.

  They don’t arrest.

  There is no consequence.

  That is to say, a protective order in Mississippi is goddamned meaningless: nothing but a piece of paper. I was so on edge, I needed Mama’s gentle presence and her sweetness by my side. Without her, I felt lost, vulnerable. Mama had just come back, thank heavens. When we picked her up from the airport in Gulfport the Thursday before, I could see the horror in her eyes at the state of things.

  Six months after the storm, and nothing was better. By now, I was used to the post-Katrina landscape—it seemed almost right to me, equal in devastation to my personal life, my family blown to bits. But as we stood in the baggage area, I could see the sadness on Mama’s face. Besides, the news was covering New Orleans for the most part, forgetting almost entirely that the Mississippi Gulf Coast had been ground zero of the storm.

  The terminal floor was stripped to concrete and had slick black mold growing everywhere in patches, with pure white concrete paths worn clean where the steady stream of relatives and government contractors passed each day. Great swaths of dirty plastic hung where automatic doors once slid open between the heat outside and the piped cold air of the terminal. Now everything was (by default) outside. There was a ceiling, but not much of one. The heat was stultifying.

  On the car ride home, Mama sat in silence. Grayson barely spoke still. From his ocean-blue eyes stared a soul that was more thirty than three—cautious, sad, knowing too much. He didn’t let me out of his sight these days, and when he did speak asked me if Daddy was going to come back and “try to kill you some more.”

  Aidan, still a baby, had bad dreams, wailing in his sleep, “No, Dada! No, Dada! No, Dada!” I was trying to get the kids to sleep in their own beds, but every time I’d hear that cry from Aidan, I’d rush down the hall to get him, often finding Mama standing outside his door already, tears streaming down her lined, pretty face.

  My heart broke over and over, but I did what I could to make them feel safe, to let them know that we were out of harm’s way now and nothing bad was going to happen. At night, after they’d fall asleep, I’d cry myself to sleep, rocking like a child. I needed Mama, and she came.

  Her first night back, they all clamored for Mama’s attention, climbing onto her lap and dragging her up and down the halls to each of their rooms. At bedtime, Avery and Grayson decided to take a shower together, as they often did.

  After the storm, not only was the ground outside our home contaminated, the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory had discovered that, post-Katrina, there were more biting insects on the coast than in any one designated place on the entire planet. We had run out of ways to entertain ourselves months before. That big shower in the master was like a playground for them, alternative sprinklers to play in.

  They had a new game they liked to play: Ice Cream Shop. In Ice Cream Shop, they filled the baby’s plastic stacking cups with water and suds and soap bar “scoops” and sold them back and forth to one another. The shower was spacious, the inside tiled entirely—including the floor—with cobalt ceramic I’d chosen those many months before.

  That night, I was changing Aidan on the Jenny Lind changing table in his room, looking out the window onto the quiet street, the exact same place I’d been a few months before, the night of the attack. Every time I changed Aidan, I thought not of that night but of another morning, of seeing the garbageman hop off a truck and grab our can, my entire collection of journals—probably fifty in all, kept since I was eight years old—dropping in.

  The pages lifted in the damp salt air like egret wings, lifting at once in a panic in the marshes. The truck pulled away.

  Liam had hassled me about the contents of those journals for years—every girl I’d kissed, every person I’d fucked, every place I’d been without him or crush I held in my secret heart, every poem I wrote that wasn’t about him (all of them) was held against me.

  He’d read them all: twice.

  At least once a month, drunk, Liam would start in about something from the journals, his rage growing sharper with each beer, ranting sometimes for hours on end, sometimes until morning light. He was meticulous in his outrage—every book I owned written by a former lover had to be destroyed, every piece of jewelry accepted as a gift thrown out, every article of clothing mentioned in a reminiscence burned. The crudely produced student literary journal from grad school, where my poem sat side by side with one by Christina—a butch Latina from San Antonio, my girlfriend while I was at Sarah Lawrence—was torn to shreds and thrown into the fire. In Liam’s mind, swirling with obsession, I had no right to a past.

  “You’re a whore,” he insisted, “and no one thinks you can write.”

  I would lower my head and stay quiet, still.

  “
You don’t exist without me.”

  His goal was to erase me.

  Every time I changed Aidan’s diaper on that table, I thought of my journals falling into the acrid back of the truck like so much trash, my loopy handwriting across the pages smudged with filth.

  A high-pitched wail snapped me out of it. I shut the diaper quick and ran toward the master bath, meeting Mama at the top of the stairs. We got to the bathroom at the same time. Avery had fallen, slipped on the slick soapy floor, and hit her back on a plastic Tupperware pitcher I kept in the shower, which I used to help rinse her long, thick, often tangled hair.

  A scrape about three inches wide by five inches long appeared on the right side of her back, breaking the skin where the rim of the pitcher had scraped her ribs from behind, bruises rising like rust on a tiny cage.

  She cried and cried.

  “It’s okay, shuggie. It’ll feel better in the morning,” I reassured her. I’d been calling her shuggie since she was born. Liam and I had agreed to name her Hazel, but—as was his way—he revoked his “permission” when she was born. He rejected all my other suggestions, too. When he had gone home to take a shower, I filled out the birth certificate without him, naming her after Shug Avery in The Color Purple.

  Fierce, loyal, a songbird, a girl who would know how to sing.

  “It hurts, Mama!” she wailed.

  “I know, baby.”

  I cleaned her up, put her in the new nightie Mama’d brought, and we all went to bed. In the bayou dark, all the streetlights having been washed away with the storm, her big blue eyes, set deep in her little Kewpie doll face, gazed at me, solemn.

  “Do I have to go with Daddy?” she asked.

  “Yes, shuggie, you do,” I said, wishing already it wasn’t so, a fierce dread rising.

  In the morning, the bruise was purple edging into green, scabbed over in spots where the skin had broken. It was a bad scrape, and I spent the day worrying not about how my baby felt but about what her father might do if he saw it. His Saturday visitation started the next morning at nine.

  “There ain’t no chance in helicopter that bruise’ll heal before then!” I cried to Mama. Mama didn’t truck with swear words.