Promise

by Minrose Gwin

  NOW THE train’s whistle cried out in the distance. It was getting late. Would she ever sleep a wink with this itch? No no no no no, moaned the train. The M&O ran north-south, the Frisco northwest-southeast, the track lines at Crosstown going catty-cornered by the compass. At 9:03 every night, including apparently Palm Sunday, the Frisco Accommodation with its fancy passenger cars came in. You could set your watch by it. A few travelers, usually Memphis businessmen with the cotton mill or garment factory or fertilizer plant or government officials with the fishery, would get off. Charlie, the porter from the Kinney Hotel, would meet them at the depot with his double cart for their luggage and then he’d walk them over to the hotel for the night. Once, one of the train conductors had let her peek inside the Accommodation. Its velvet seats and tables for eating hot food were nothing short of splendid; she imagined herself going to Memphis on it, and maybe beyond Memphis, out into the real world. Chicago or St. Louis. She imagined herself on a bunk in a sleeping car, knees tucked to chest, listening to the shellac shellac shellac of the wheels hitting the tracks.

  Train tracks: how firm and straight they were, how purposeful. That’s when the idea of the coat hanger popped into her head. A coat hanger! Why hadn’t she thought of it? The day before, she’d stuck a bread knife part of the way down the cast, but, long as it was, it was too wide to go far and only made matters worse by tickling the area right above the ants, causing them to dig in with even more zeal and determination. Her mother had suggested talcum powder, but she couldn’t get it to go down far enough.

  As she struggled to open the coat hanger, bruising her fingertips as she unwound it, she thought this must be what hell was like: flaming flesh, tormenting itches (she imagined her arm now, at this very moment, covered in little red blisters like the ones real fire ants leave), hot as Hades. She’d been pouring sweat all day. She should have taken another bath before putting on her nightgown. The air hadn’t cooled as evening had come on; it had, in fact, gotten worse, murky and motionless as a swamp. When she stood up from her chair, her gown stuck to the seat. Now, as she worked to open the coat hanger, it occurred to her that God might be punishing her for something. She’d not been altogether good. Last week, she’d snubbed Doris Grissom, who’d snubbed her the week before but, to Doris’s credit, had said she was sorry and wanted to make up. Forgiveness was not one of Jo’s strong points. The horse that threw her she still wished dead, though it was just a poor dumb creature. She must be a better girl, try harder not to think mean thoughts or do mean things. She must resist her natural inclination toward impatience (this she got from her father). She must be kinder to little Tommy, help her mother with him (if she could ever get this miserable cast off) when he screamed to high heaven for no good reason. She must try to rise above (but never to forgive) Son.

  Another twist and the coat hanger swung free. She headed outside and took up a brick from the border of one of the flower beds. She lay the hanger on the ground and began to beat it straight, holding the thick wire in place with her foot as she banged away.

  Something—was it a rumbling?—caused her to look up and pause. In the near dark, everything seemed suddenly luminous, pulsing with possibility. The world, it seemed to her in that moment, had stopped in mid-rotation and said, Get aboard, it’s your time, your time is now. Her life, she knew suddenly, in that instant, was too small. She would need to leave this place. Now, as the sky gathered itself, she was afraid of this awful knowledge. The house, the town, her parents, her friends: was she anything without them? Was there a she who stood apart from history and place? Or was what she thought of as herself just a reflection of what other people thought of her? A mirror of a mirrored image.

  She looked around at the house behind her. It seemed to look back. She and the house had come into the world together, in 1921. Before the furniture was even in, she’d scooted on her baby bottom across its newly varnished oak floors; her first memory was of their shine, their slickness. The sense of possibility and wide open space. The house sat at the corner of Church and Walnut; soon after they moved, her mother had spent hours planting crepe myrtle bushes along the L-shaped perimeter between the sidewalk and the street, singing, under her breath, little snatches of “Look for the Silver Lining.” By the time Jo was five, she’d ridden the curving banister, whipping around the two landings, from top floor to bottom. On the long front porch, Son had pushed her down when she was just learning to walk, breaking open her forehead on the tile, leaving a jagged scar descending her forehead from the scalp to the top of her left eyebrow, which she hid by scalloping her hair to that side and fastening it with a barrette. The house was a four-square, and everything about it was solid, every exterior—brick, trim, roof—the color of the red clay dirt it sat on. The front porch, with its square brick columns, now covered in ivy, ran the length of the house. There was clover in the front yard and a concrete and brick ledge around the top of the porch. One warm autumn day, she’d jumped from the ledge onto the lawn and had the misfortune of getting stung by four honeybees, one under each hand and one under each knee she landed on. On the farthest corner of the ledge, on the uncovered part of the porch, was a giant concrete pot with small succulents growing inside, never quite reaching the top of the pot. Jo would sit beside it and peer into the massive pot, imagining that the tiny plants were trees and the ants (tiny black ones, not the red monsters now running amuck on her arm) were lost souls trying to make their way through the Amazon jungle.

  In the yard, spring had come early. The jonquils had turned to paper; the iris had already set buds. After Tommy’s birth, the only thing Alice seemed to enjoy was her garden. The spade work had been done by the yardman, Lamar, who shoveled dirt and weeded and put in the bulbs and petunias and fall mums and pansies. Alice said Lamar Henry had as much of a green thumb as she did. When she won the Kiwanis Most Beautiful Garden prize the first time, she sent him home with a batch of molasses and a bushel of pecans. The second time it was some pickled peaches from the previous year’s batch and a sack of Mort’s old clothes.

  This spring, though, the yard had gone to seed. Lamar Henry had been let go over the winter. Crabgrass dotted the flower beds, elm seedlings had set down roots in the hedges, the yarrow was suffocating the tender new iris shoots. Now, when the baby cried, Alice cried too. When Jo broke her arm and her mother sobbed by her bedside at the hospital, Jo knew it wasn’t for her she was crying, but for the loss of her help with little Tommy, who, if truth be told, Jo was beginning to detest: his unpleasant cabbage face, his bloody-murder shrieks that made her mother bite her lip until it bled. He had been a great big surprise to everybody. Jo had heard her mother upchucking in the early mornings before school; she’d heard Alice tell Mort it was all his fault. His big you-know-what again. She’d seen her father’s countenance turn to stone. Then, after little Tommy was born, Mort’s eyes brightened with some other feeling: had it been joy? Relief? Second chances seldom came along, but here one was, red-faced and furious and colicky. Another (thank God!) son. This one surely a gem.

  NOW, ALICE’S forsythia had burst into bloom. The bushes clustered in one corner of the yard; the weight of the blossoms bent the branches to the ground. Over everything, a yellowish cast, the sun low and intense. Yellow on yellow. Beautiful really. Jo wanted to call to her mother to come and see. Beauty was the only thing these days that brought even a half-smile to her mother’s face; now Alice spent most of her waking hours, when she wasn’t caring for the baby or clanging about glumly in the kitchen, staring out the front window of her bedroom, watching the street as if someone important was expected.

  But the room upstairs was still dark.

  What Jo missed most since Tommy had been born were her Words to Keep. When she was five, Alice had given her the first one, which was articulation. Alice had pointed to her own mouth and said the word, then touched Jo’s throat. Alice had pulled out a thick, lined notebook, on the front of which was written Jo’s Words to Keep, and had written the word articulation in it,
along with the date. Since then, Alice would call Jo to her several times a week, and Jo would bring the notebook. Sometimes, when she was doing something else, she would groan inwardly—the words had grown increasingly more difficult, well beyond the limits of her own vocabulary—but she always went to her room and opened the top drawer to her dresser and pulled out the notebook. Alice would be waiting. She would say the word once and then a second time, and then spell it. Jo would write it into the notebook. Later, it would be her job to look it up in the four-inch-thick unabridged Webster’s her mother had given her for her seventh birthday. As this interchange had developed over the years, Jo had come to notice that, more often than not, her mother’s chosen Word to Keep would reflect some event or predicament of the moment. One blistering day in July when the water tower ran dry and water out of the faucet made a red-clay stain in the kitchen sink, it was petrifaction. The December morning after some of Alice’s students had come by with a platter of Christmas cookies, it was plenitude.

  USUALLY, IN spring, swallows and bats came out this time of the evening to swoop and feed. Now, all Jo saw were moving clouds of small gray birds silently circling, so high they looked like pepper, darkening the sky. Jo imagined herself taking flight, in one of those planes from the airshows, landing far away, over the ocean.

  Where would her golden life take root in this large, large world?

  The itch called her back. She began to fit the coat hanger wire at the point the cast began, where her arm met the shoulder. It didn’t go down easily; in fact, she worried a bit about it getting stuck, but then she pushed and the ants scattered before it, giving way to something else, a tearing of flesh. Exquisite, delicious, heavenly pain.

  Maybe, before the crucifixion, God gave Jesus an itch that couldn’t be scratched so the pain came as a blessed relief.

  Looking down at her arm, relishing the pain, she barely noticed the lightning. She didn’t see the sky crack open like a giant egg.

  Now someone called to her from the screen porch, her father. She hoped he hadn’t found Snowball and her brood on the porch. The sky had grown suddenly dark. Half hidden by the pecan tree, she squeezed her eyes shut and ignored her father, scraping the skin under the cast even harder; maybe if she cut the skin of her arm to ribbons it would stop itching and just hurt, just burn and sting and smart. That would be delicious, a crown of thorns she’d gladly wear.

  Mort burst through the screen door. “Jo! Didn’t you hear me? Get inside. There’s a storm coming.” Then he spotted her across the yard. “What’s that you’re doing to your arm?”

  But he wasn’t interested in her arm. He came on down the back steps and looked up at the sky. “Get in the house right now. Get your mother up, tell her to get the baby down to the cellar. Now. Move!”

  Jo jerked the hanger wire up. It stuck about halfway.

  “What’s wrong with you, girl? Get in there. Tell your mother to get the baby to the basement! Where the hell is Son?”

  He searched the sky again and then turned back toward her. In that moment the lightning flashed again, and Jo saw the look on her father’s face and began to run.

  As she ran toward the screen porch, toward her father, the lights went off in the house. She stopped in her tracks, peered out down the street. No lights anywhere.

  Her father hollered again. “Somebody downtown’s cut the electricity! Means it’s going to be bad!”

  Jo took off running toward the house, the coat hanger still under the cast, half in and half out. In mid-stride she gave it a final jerk. It came, tearing the flesh, a white-hot pain. It came out dark, with a bit of something (was it bloody skin?) dangling from the tip. She held on to the coat hanger and ran toward the house. As she ran she felt as though she were swimming through the sloshing air, the hideously warm wet air: that what was supposed to be air had liquefied and grown strains of ivy that clutched at her, that pulled her back into the deep dark, the just-fallen dark. The house rose up before her like a large animal. Square and tall and not at all pretty. Nor, even before the electricity was cut, had it been lit up like a regular house should be this time of night, little Tommy upstairs in his crib in the still-dark back bedroom facing west, her mother probably in bed across the hall. Was her mother still asleep? She’d been in bed since early afternoon. Was she having one of her cries? And Tommy? She must have dosed him up good. He never slept this long.

  Her father shouted again from the backyard, his voice in an upper register she’d never heard. “Jo, get inside!” Then a deafening crash, the sound of a tree falling, then a roar, getting louder. Now a train was coming, coming fast, shrieking, flying through the air at them. No no no no. How could a train fly?

  She burst into the house. “May-May! May-May!” Her childish name for her mother, the one she’d given up years ago.

  Alice called back to her from upstairs, but the roaring was so loud Jo couldn’t hear what her mother was saying. Then there was the sickening sound of glass shattering upstairs, then another crash. A bang. Her mother called out to her again. Where was her mother? Why wasn’t she running downstairs?

  “Basement!” Jo screamed. “Get down to the basement!” She turned around and looked behind her. Her father! Why wasn’t he coming inside? And Snowball and her poor little kittens! She turned to run back onto the porch to snatch them up.

  In that moment, though, the train was upon her. It came at her as if she were a car stalled on the tracks, pushing her back into the house. There it turned her around one full rotation and took her up like a piece of cotton fluff and blew her from the back door, where she had been standing, down the hall toward the front of the house and into the living room.

  Through it all she held on to the straightened coat hanger with her one good arm. As the storm pushed her forward, the hanger extended before her like a saber. And then, and how impossible this was in retrospect, that at that very moment she was half-running, half-flying down the hall, into the living room, right up to the front door, Son, her brother, would push open that very door and rush into the house shouting something (What had he been shouting? Was he coming home to save the day? What a joke.) and that, in that same instant, the coat hanger she held out before her, as though she were Joan of Arc leading her army into battle, would drive straight through his shirt and then his lower chest and even come out his back, even as Jo’s fist remained closed around it so that she looked, as he fell, as if she were knocking on the closed door of his breastbone.

  Before her brother went down, there was a ball of fire that lit up the whole world, or so it seemed to Jo, and their eyes locked in that moment of illumination and the something that should have been in her brother’s eyes all along suddenly, for just a second or two, flared and burned, and, before the wind blew her onward, she saw him in a way she’d never seen him before: a little boy, lost and alone. “It’s all right,” she shouted as she slammed into him and then deflected toward the back of the room. “Don’t worry.”

  She landed up against the fireplace. Then a piece of something sharp flew toward her and lodged in her forehead. She felt around and crawled inside the hearth and crouched there, her hands over her head. The wind shrieked through the house, knocking a china cabinet on its side, dishes clattering and breaking. It slammed the dining room table up against the wall, shattering the plaster. It tore the front door off its hinges and sent it flying onto the front porch and out into the darkness beyond. There was a popping noise as the nails from the boards in the woodwork shot across the room like bullets. Overhead, Jo heard the crash of something large, then something else that sounded like a gunshot.

  The last thing she heard before everything went black was a woman (her mother?) wailing, but that too might have been the sound of the train.

  3

  9:32 P.M.

  No up, no down.

  Nothing but black-as-coal water. No air nowhere. Something alive, in a tearing hurry, scratchy little feet, brushing her cheek. Got to be a rat.

  It was the first time Do
vey had been in water over her head.

  She banged into something hard and big and slick. Under the slime it was rough and round. What? Felt like a tree, but what was a tree doing in water? She dug in her nails and climbed it, trying not to breathe, knowing that any second now she would have to draw in the breath that would kill her, trying to reach the top. If she breathed in water, that’d be it, she’d be dead sure enough, if she wasn’t already. Maybe she had already passed and this was hell. Maybe hell was being almost dead.

  Old storm, you ain’t got me yet.

  No air. All of a sudden she understood somewhere deep in her body that she wasn’t moving up or down but sideways. How could a tree grow sideways, and in the water? Then she figured it out. The storm had blown her from up on the ridge clear down into Gum Pond. This old tree, she’d seen it a hundred times, sitting jay-wonky, dead as a doornail, in the middle of the pond. Gum Pond was shallow. All she had to do was grab hold of it, steady herself, put her feet down.

  She did it, let herself sink. Hit bottom. Pushed. Came up, took in air. Gasped, coughed, spit. The bottom was slimy and muddy. She slipped and down she went again. Something sharp sliced her bare foot. It stung, the skin flapped as she moved it in the water. But, oh my, she wasn’t drowning no more. She pushed a few more times, moving along with the tree trunk. Then, as the tree rose from the water toward the pond’s edge, she was able to stand on her own two feet and make her way to the side, the water first at chin level, then shoulder high.