Stranger Here Below

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Stranger Here Below Page 6

by Joyce Hinnefeld


  Then, as they walked to the parking lot, a voice behind her, one she heard this time—Maze calling out to her.

  “M. E.!”

  She turned. Maze was hurrying toward them, her father getting her mother into the car quickly, closing her door, hurrying around to open his own. Maze had the tall man with her still; he walked fast to keep up with her.

  “Mary Elizabeth, Reverend Cox,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling. She was out of breath. “This is Harris Whitman. I wanted you to meet him.”

  He held out his hand. Mary Elizabeth could see her father at her side, slowly closing his own door, nodding nervously, smiling. “How d’you do,” he said, and shook the man’s hand, then looked at his daughter.

  She shook Harris Whitman’s hand next. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. Who are you? she thought.

  “That was beautiful,” he said. He still held on to her hand.

  Her father cleared his throat. “We should get going, Mary Elizabeth,” he said. “Your mother’s tired.”

  The air was growing thick again, everyone’s voice weirdly muted, the cotton back in Mary Elizabeth’s ears. She pulled her hand back and opened the car’s back door.

  “I didn’t get to say hello to your mama,” Maze said as Mary Elizabeth climbed in. “M. E.?” She put her head in next to Mary Elizabeth’s. “Couldn’t I just—”

  Then Mary Elizabeth pushed Maze, gently, back out of the car. Quickly, so no one else might have seen, she thought. Hoped. “Not now, Maze,” she said as she did it. She tried to smile, like it was a kind of joke. But it hurt to smile, she realized; she was so tired of smiling. “I’ll call you soon, Maze. We have to go now.”

  The engine of their old Ford roared as her daddy started it, and Mary Elizabeth rolled down her window. Maze was frowning at her, the gleam in her eyes gone. Mary Elizabeth waved, trying to make it light and funny, trying to make it better. Gotta go! Maybe another concert! My public awaits me! But she didn’t say any of it.

  “I’m sorry, Maze,” she said, waving, as her father put the car in gear.

  Then Maze reached for her hand. “I was thinkin’ I might come visit you over the vacation,” she yelled through the window, over the engine’s noise. She looked toward the front seat. “Reverend Cox, Miz Cox, would that be all right with you?”

  Mary Elizabeth watched her daddy look back at Maze and try to smile. He licked his lips and coughed, then waved as if he hadn’t heard her. His wife had sunk deep into her seat, had made herself impossibly small somehow. Was she even there? Mary Elizabeth wondered.

  They had to go, she knew, so she began rolling up the window. “I’ll call you, Maze, okay?” she said again. “After Christmas. I promise I’ll give you a call.”

  “But M. E., you know I don’t …” was all she heard before she closed the window completely and her father pulled away.

  Have a telephone. She doesn’t have a telephone, Mary Elizabeth remembered then. But she couldn’t bring herself even to turn around and wave out the rear window one more time.

  Because already it had started up in the front seat. Ah bay. Esss, sisss. Isss. Ah bay, oh.

  Mary Elizabeth wished for a long, hard rain to drown out the sound. For that cotton in her head, her ears, again. She stared at her fingers as her daddy reached for her mama’s hand, trying to soothe her. She tried not to notice her mother pulling her hand away and turning to stare out her own window. Esss. Isss. Ah bay, oh.

  Mary Elizabeth closed her eyes. She was asleep before they’d even left the campus. She didn’t remember walking into her house and getting into her bed when she woke up a day and a half later, on Christmas Eve.

  Sarah

  1935

  When she was a child, Mary Elizabeth’s mother, Sarah Henry, loved the shade of the pawpaw tree, a cool drink from the running stream. She was slight and quiet, and other children from up and down the road thought her standoffish, she knew. Until she lost her older brother, Robert, and everyone said of course she turned strange. But Sarah had always been strange, and so had he, and she knew she would one day have to join him.

  They said Aunt Paulie brought the music, up from the islands and all the way to Paris, then back to their little Kentucky road, to the row of shacks where she had been born. Her lover from the West Indies, his hands scarred from slips of a scythe when she met him in Louisville after the war, had left her in a cold, dirty Paris room, penniless and pregnant. Friends helped her stow away on a boat bound for New Orleans, and she must have vomited enough on that slow passage to vomit out whatever there was of a baby inside there. That spring when Sarah was eight, Aunt Paulie blew in and out of their row of sharecroppers’ houses outside Stanford, Kentucky, like a breath of French perfume; she bought her ticket back to Paris with a roll of Sarah’s daddy’s hard-earned money—her mama never let anyone forget that. And in her wake she left the music, the start of all the trouble, people said.

  But Robert had had his guitar for a year already before Aunt Paulie had landed on their doorstep. Sarah had seen him carry it out in the evenings since he was twelve. Her father had helped him string the thing. No one had to bring the music to them. It was already there.

  But already, at eight, nine, ten, she was like her mother: alarmed by it. And hadn’t her mother been right? This would be Sarah’s husband’s view eventually. Don’t ask questions. Don’t play that music. Avoid that kind of trouble, no matter what.

  She had been frightened, too, by the smooth muscles appearing along Robert’s arms, the way the sleeves of his shirt pulled tight on his arms that summer after Aunt Paulie left and Robert started walking out in the evenings with his guitar.

  “Y’all and your music,” her mother would say, sighing and rolling her eyes, and her voice might have been laughing, but her eyes weren’t. Sarah saw that.

  “Aw, let him go, girl,” her daddy would say. He saw her eyes, too.

  Her mother might click her tongue, but then she’d go back to taking down the wash or rinsing a bucket of poke. And down Robert would step, barely making a sound, off the porch and on down the road, never looking back, the sun setting around him, his guitar in one hand.

  He was not tall, but to Sarah, lying on the porch and watching him through squinted eyes one summer evening as he left, he grew as large as the setting sun. He’d come back from a day of cutting and baling hay, his eyes red, his arms pocked with scratches and bumps. He washed and changed and put something on his hair that made it gleam like the scrubbed skin of his face. He smiled at her and reached down to pull at her hair. When he stood up and turned to go, the wideness of his back was so sudden and unexpected, it made her suck in her breath. Something stirred inside her, and she felt her mama’s fear. She was ten, and he was sixteen.

  She remembered because she slept on the porch that night, waiting for him. He didn’t come home until dawn.

  She never heard him play. How could that be? But he never played at home; her mother saw to that.

  “You can play here at home when you learn to sing songs about Jesus.” Then their father started to say something, but she gave him a look that suggested something more, and he lit his pipe and left for the porch.

  When Sarah was a baby, they said, there was something wrong. She didn’t walk until late, and then not quite right, with a slow, funny gait. She grew older but stayed small. At the creek, by herself, she could watch the little minnows for hours, dreaming of being able to move like that, to dart from place to place that suddenly, nothing hindering her.

  But other children liked the creek, too, for wading and splashing, chasing crawdads. “Why you walk so funny?” a boy said one day and then pushed her down on the damp leaves and mud of the creekbed.

  Instantly Robert was there, yanking the boy up by a loop of his too-short pants. “Leave her be.” And after that the children did leave her alone, though they watched her like you might watch a circus freak. She’d seen pictures from the circus at school; what interested her was the look on the faces of the people in the
audience. Curious and a little scared. She grew used to people watching her that way.

  Reading came easily to her, and she did well at school, another thing that made her strange. She felt happy at school until Robert stopped coming, a few months after she began, as if now that he’d eased the way for her, he could be done with the thing.

  “Your brother’s a rounder,” an older girl said to Sarah a few years later, when she was nearly twelve. The sound of the girl’s breath and the shine in her eyes when she said it made Sarah feel her mama’s fear again. She thought but didn’t say, I bet you don’t even know what that word means. She’d seen how older girls watched her brother and admired his ready smile, his slow, dreamy walk.

  Sarah walked with a limp and didn’t grow to look or talk like other girls her age. She kept to herself. But despite what other children or their parents, up and down the dirt road, might have said, she was not all that strange. Not yet. She didn’t grow strange until Robert died.

  “Your brother’s a rounder.”

  He played the blues, they said, sometimes as far away as Lexington. But he’d come home by dawn and sleep a few hours, then work a full day alongside their father.

  It was something to do with the music, then, and also the tall, smooth-muscled, near man he’d grown into. Perfect smile, a little shy, lighting up his fine-featured face.

  “White girls go to those gin joints just to make their boyfriends jealous.” That same older girl at school again, another time. “Your brother better watch hisself.”

  Black Pool Road, where they lived, ended at the creek. The last stretch ran alongside some farm fields and then a patch of woods. A few big old trees right alongside the road. She would walk there early on a Saturday morning, before the other children arrived, to listen to the quiet, watch the minnows, sit below the pawpaw tree. Maybe she was too old to be doing this, still, that spring when she was twelve. Dogwoods about to flower. Crows crowding out the sweeter-sounding birds already, only a little past dawn. Maybe if she hadn’t been so small and quiet, in truth maybe already a little strange, she wouldn’t have been walking to the creek when the sun was barely up, on a Saturday morning. And maybe then someone else might have found what was left of her brother, Robert, hanging from a rope tied to the biggest branch of a budding maple tree.

  What in the world’s hangin’ there? That was her only thought. The only thing she ever remembered thinking. Still a source of shame. What in the world’s growin’ from that big old maple tree?

  And then Aunt Paulie was back again, there to stay this time, she said. “I’m gonna take care of you,” she whispered, but Sarah assumed she was talking to someone else, as she felt that she herself was already dead, already on her way to be with Robert.

  Paulie handed her a notebook. “You can write in here, child,” she said. “Write about anything you want. Or draw pictures. Anything. Anything at all is fine.”

  She looked down at the thing, barely bigger than her hand, bound with thin brown leather, then set it down on the table. Maybe, she thought, they were giving her this notebook because she’d refused to go back to school.

  She also was no longer speaking. She had tried, but when she opened her mouth, after that morning, nothing emerged but a faint trickle of air. It happened when she found him. She opened her mouth to scream, but instead she gagged. Her voice flew from her. She assumed he’d taken it with him.

  Other children crossed the road when she approached, as they had before. But now their eyes were cast down instead of shining with laughter. Everyone whispered around her, touched her like she was a china doll. Except Aunt Paulie, who was angry. Sometimes, Sarah thought, at her.

  “Just let her be,” she’d hiss when Sarah’s daddy tried to get her to talk.

  “You’re gonna forget how, girl,” he’d say in the evenings, pulling her onto his lap. She was still small for her age through those years, at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and she fit comfortably there. She wanted to please him, but she couldn’t. Instead of talking, she buried her face in his sweet-smelling neck.

  Before long, Aunt Paulie, who’d returned from Paris this time with a mysterious roll of money of her own, one far larger than Sarah’s daddy had ever had, bought a house on Jefferson Street over in Lexington. With some more of that seemingly endless of roll of bills, she put lace curtains in the windows and a piano in the front parlor.

  “How you reckon she came by all that money?” Sarah’s mama asked when they went to visit her that first Sunday and Paulie stepped out of the front parlor to go make a pitcher of lemonade. “She never married, so where she’s gettin’ any so-called in-her-itance?” Her daddy only looked away and stared out the window at the quiet, shaded street. By now even Sarah knew this wasn’t a question meant to be answered.

  But they kept going to Aunt Paulie’s house, taking the bus on Sundays after church. She played the piano for them—a lustrous sound, like water rushing, then trickling.

  “No honky-tonk music, none of that in that child’s ears,” her mother insisted, as if Sarah wasn’t standing there in the same room. It was as if they thought she’d stopped hearing as well as speaking. “We’ve seen clear enough what comes of that.”

  So on Sundays Aunt Paulie played what she called “the classics”—Chopin, Ravel, the music she’d learned to play in Paris. Claude, she said, had known musicians of every kind; he’d tuned and repaired their instruments for a living. On other days of the week, her parlor filled with musicians who lived in Louisville, and they played late into the night. Other music then—jazz, blues. Honky-tonk music. Some Fridays her father rode over to Aunt Paulie’s with his friend Carl. He’d sneak home as day was breaking Saturday, smelling of whiskey and cigarettes, and for several days both he and Sarah would have to endure her mother’s angry, tight-lipped silence.

  But her mother needn’t have worried about Aunt Paulie’s influence, even when Sarah started spending occasional weekends at her house. The truth was, Sarah was afraid of her. Everything about Aunt Paulie was too large. Too large, too loud, too full of something dangerous. Like a mountain, like the giant, menacing bridge over the Kentucky River they had to cross to get to her house. Sarah had to close her eyes for that part of the trip, waiting for the crossing to end. That bridge was too high, the water of the river too far away.

  Paulie was a large woman—tall and broad-shouldered, with a long neck and a broad forehead. Her mouth was wide and always moving—talking, smiling, smirking, laughing—her voice throaty and deep. Sarah loved the music, all of it—including, eventually, the honky-tonk tunes that wafted up to her bedroom when she stayed for a weekend. As she listened, she could almost forget her fear. But if she revealed her pleasure, the fear returned. They’d all look at her so eagerly! As if she was about to bring them news from Robert. That was all that would make it better after all, she knew. But she had no news to bring them. Her throat was dry, its passage empty. When Aunt Paulie finished playing, turned on the piano stool, and set her relentless gaze on her, Sarah only wanted to flee.

  “One day you’re gonna talk to me, child,” she’d say in a harsh whisper. “One day you’re gonna tell me all of it.” And Sarah would back away, looking down at the floor but nodding, too—nodding just to get her aunt to turn her ruthless gaze on someone, or something, else.

  What no one seemed to understand was that so far Robert had sent no messages. And as for what she had seen that day: There were no words for that. And what she’d seen was all there was, all there would be, for her, forevermore.

  Alone at night in the loft where she slept, her parents still rustling below, she would try out whispered sounds for a new way to speak, to say it. A new language with room for what she knew.

  Ahhh. Bay. Ah bay. Ah bay been.

  See seen sin. Seen sin ah.

  Bay, ah bay, oh.

  Seen. Ssss. Sssst. Sttt.

  I been, I seen.

  Seen, ssst. Step stop sttt.

  Row row row. Light like thissss. Sssss.

&n
bsp; Ah bay. Oh. Stt. Stttst.

  This was how she could bear, at least, to close her eyes and go to sleep. By repeating the sounds of a different language. Words for what no one else in the living world knew.

  Three years after Robert’s death, when she did finally decide to speak again, to use their words, their useless sounds, it wasn’t Aunt Paulie who persuaded her. It was George Cox, eighteen years old to her fifteen, back from his first year at the Lincoln Institute in Louisville; he planned to be a minister, and his voice had grown deep enough, that year away studying, for everyone along Black Pool Road to believe he might.

  As a boy he’d been Georgie, a sullen, stocky loner who spent many weekends and much of the summer at the home of his grandparents, the oldest cabin along Black Pool Road. Samuel and Naomi Cox had been born slaves in Virginia before they had settled in that cabin and begun to farm one of the first patches of bottomland parceled out to black farmers, after the war. They’d sent every one of their six children to college, and some had moved north. Georgie’s father was a teacher in the colored school in Lexington, and Georgie was his parents’ only child, quiet and religious, everyone said, but when his cousins and aunts and uncles gathered on Naomi and Samuel’s porch in the summertime, swapping stories and jokes, he’d been known to stand along the edges and smile.

  Unlike the other children, George Cox had never laughed at Sarah, at her small size or her awkward walk or her silence. He was mostly silent, too. When another child laughed and called her an odd bird or something worse, and then the others joined in laughing, his soft face stayed somber and he looked at her, watching, as if waiting to see what she would do.

  That summer when he was eighteen he’d grown a mustache, and though he hadn’t become lean, he seemed to have grown into his weight somehow; he looked taller when he arrived, and strong. One Saturday, Sarah walked by the church and heard him singing inside: “Precious Lord, take my hand.” When he saw her standing in the doorway watching, he looked momentarily embarrassed. “I’m gonna lead the service tomorrow,” he said, looking at the floor. “I was just gettin’ ready to lead the first hymn.”

 

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