by Minrose Gwin
Until now.
The baby stirred again. Soon, Jo knew, he would begin to whimper and then rev up to scream bloody murder. She pulled him to her with her good arm, held him against her breast. He began to flail about, twisting his head this way and that to get his breath. She loosened her grip and stuck her forefinger in his mouth. He sucked hard for a few seconds, then, outraged at the lack of nourishment, gathered himself into a tight ball to scream.
“What the hell’s that?” one of them whispered.
There was a pause and then she could hear them coming, tiptoeing across the living room floor. One stepped on something that clattered.
They were in the hall now, and the lighter flicked again.
“Holy shit,” one said.
She tightened her grip on the baby. The light hurt her eyes. The three of them were in a semicircle. They peered down at her.
She saw herself reflected in their pupils. A mother rabbit with her young, frozen in the tall grass, except there was no grass.
“Look what we got here,” one said. “If it ain’t the little sis and the baby brother.”
Alice stirred and moaned then and the men shifted the light. One found the flashlight on the floor beside Jo and pointed it at Alice, moving up and down until it found the leg.
“Look like you folks in a mess here all by your lonesome,” another one said, bending closer to Jo. “What’s that thing sticking out of your head, girl. You look like a billy goat, little sis.”
Jo patted little Tommy, trying to calm him. He screamed louder, his legs and arms thrust out, trembling with rage.
One of them snickered. “If it ain’t the little mama.”
Jo felt hot, then cold. In his fury, Tommy was about to leap out of her one good arm. “We need help here,” she stammered. Why couldn’t she sound firmer? Now her face was wet, wetter than her lap. She wanted to slap her own face. She struggled to sit straighter without dropping the baby. “My mother’s leg is broken bad, and I’ve got my arm and this thing in my head . . .” She trailed off, uncertainly. Now there were two of them in the front, looking down at her, one in the shadows behind them. She looked back and forth at the three of them in the dim glow of the flashlight. Their mouths were what shocked her, the half-smile they shared.
“Where’s the big-man daddy now?” one said.
“Maybe out catting around up in nigger town?” another one said.
The smiles became grins. They moved closer, their faces serious now, intent.
They were taller than she remembered. She gathered the baby around the middle, pushed down with her bad arm and scrambled to her feet. The pain made her gasp, but she righted herself and backed up into the living room, holding the baby on her hip, his back against her rib cage, his arms and legs circling air. She backed up some more, feeling her way to the front doorway. The night was clear and the moon and stars cast a light. Back, back. She stumbled over something, then realized it was Son’s outflung arm. Were it not for the hand, she would have thought she was looking at a tree limb. Was the old Son back, blocking her way, tricking her?
She could feel Tommy’s shallow little breaths under her arm, next to her own lung. She panted along with him, willing him to become part of her own body, an outcropping of her rib cage, Eve to her Adam. She would lay down her life for him. No one would harm a hair on his head.
In the moonlight she saw her shadow, the bulk of the baby at her side, her dangling, useless arm extended but drooping and curled under like a spider’s leg, her wild hair and horned head. She looked monstrous, dangerous.
“You bother me, and my daddy will shoot you with his gun. He’s coming back any minute now. He just went next door.” Her own voice echoed in her one good ear as if it were coming from far away.
From the hall her mother groaned and cried out for water, somebody please get her some water, she was dying of thirst.
One of them came toward Jo, panting a little.
At that moment a streak of white shot out from under the debris in the dining room and skittered across the living room floor in front of the one who was coming. The one coming toward her tripped and fell then, cursing the cat, who’d run behind the upturned sofa, waking the kittens she’d moved there, then swatting at them when they pounced on her to nurse. The other two laughed. One said, “You a clumsy fool, lover boy.”
Jo saw her chance then and turned to run, but the one on the floor reached up and caught her on the ankle.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We ain’t going to hurt you none. You just put the baby down in the corner and lay down for us and then we’ll leave you be. Won’t bother you for nothing else.”
He spoke softly, and with her bad ear she wasn’t sure she heard him right. Was he telling her to rest herself, not to worry? But then he reached up and touched the inside of her thigh. She kicked out at him, making contact. He laughed and jumped to his feet like a monkey. She thought to pull the coat hanger from Son’s chest, but she had to hold on to the baby with her one good hand.
He rubbed his shin. “Now that weren’t nice. That weren’t nice one little bitty bit. And here I was saying we’d be nice and friendly. What you being such a fool about it for? Think you’re better than us like your stuck-up daddy?”
They had managed to back her into the corner of the dining room where the buffet had once stood. How had she let that happen? Jo wondered what Nancy Drew would do. Nancy had never been bothered. Bad men wanted to lock her up or choke her or push her down the stairs, but nobody had tried to bother her. Plus Nancy had a father and a brother, unlike Jo, whose big brother was not only dead but also wouldn’t have been of help anyway, and whose father was on the lam.
Tommy gathered himself and began to shriek, his head bobbing up and down like a turtle’s. He kicked at Jo’s side. She tightened her grip on him, causing him to scream louder.
Then from the hall, Alice McNabb started singing tonelessly. The song was a hymn Jo couldn’t place, dirge-like and slow and otherworldly. The baby stopped crying and it was just Alice singing.
The hymn, Jo realized, contained snatches of several hymns. The tune seemed Alice’s own. Something about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and a fiery furnace, Christian soldiers, guilty stains. Plunging behind the flood.
There was a horrible scraping from the hall and Alice rounded the corner in a sitting position, pushing herself along the floor, her raw leg stretched out before her in the moonlight, impossibly twisted. She pointed one trembling finger, casting a stick-like shadow against the wall: “You. Leave my daughter alone. Leave her alone. Get out of here.”
The three of them froze in their tracks; the one that had Jo loosened his grip.
The one back in the shadows stepped around the other two. He was shorter than they were and lankier. Jo thought he was coming for her and edged along the wall toward the doorway. She wanted to make a run for it but was afraid she’d trip in the dark and drop the baby on his head. And her mother. How could she abandon her mother?
Then the shorter one turned to the other two and said, “Nothing here. Not a damn thing here. Move on and leave Son here in peace. Son, old man, you starting to stink like a dead fish.” He walked around Jo to the doorway and motioned to the other two.
Jo shrank against the wall as they passed and then walked out into the night, their white undershirts bobbing against the dark like clothes on the line.
She put the baby on the floor and ran to see about her mother. “Get your notebook,” Alice said. She had ended up in the doorway from the hall to the living room and now she slid back to the floor.
Jo went over to her mother and touched her cheek. Hot, blazing hot.
“Predation,” her mother whispered. “Write it down.”
Jo opened her mouth to tell her mother there was no getting to her notebook of Words to Keep; there was a solid wall of furniture between her and it, if indeed it too hadn’t blown away. At that moment, little Tommy began to cry from the far corner of the living room.
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nbsp; Jo groped her way back toward the baby. The men had taken the flashlight and the house was black as pitch. The rain had started up again. Jo could feel it on her face.
“You can’t leave a baby on the cold floor,” Alice said. “He needs his bottle. Go get his bottle.”
“It’s the last one,” Jo said.
“Well, he’s got to eat. Bring it to me. Smell it first. Make sure it’s not spoiled.”
Jo tried to push her mother into a sitting position but couldn’t. She laid Tommy in the crook of her mother’s arm and went back into the kitchen and got out the last bottle. When she brought it back, her mother had pushed herself up and had the baby on her shoulder. He sobbed on and she patted his back.
“He’s wet,” her mother said. “Bring me something to put on him. He’s messed his diaper too. He needs changing. No wonder he’s crying. I wish I could see him. It’s so dark, I can’t make out a thing.”
Jo groped her way back into the kitchen and got a clean cup and towel and brought it to her mother, who put the baby on her lap and began to change him. “Bring me a wet cloth,” her mother said. “I need to clean him. He smells to high heaven. How’d he get so filthy?”
Jo laughed and the horn in her head said, Hello, I’m still here.
Alice finished changing the baby, who was screaming bloody murder, and handed Jo the towel. “Throw it outside,” she said. “Get it out of here. What’s that other smell?”
Jo didn’t answer.
Her mother’s eyes gleamed out of the dark. “How’d that coat hanger get into him?”
“I don’t know,” Jo said, and strictly speaking, that was the truth; she had no earthly idea how she’d gotten blown from one end of the house to the other, why she’d held on to the coat hanger. Her hand had simply frozen around it; it could just as easily have plunged into her, both ends equally lethal.
Alice turned up the bottle and Tommy began to gulp. Then she started in: Why had no one come to see about them? Why hadn’t Jo’s father returned home? Where was he?
After awhile Alice stopped talking and there was only the sound of the baby gulping at the bottle. Then, out of the dark, she said, “Jo, honey, you’ve got to go out on the street. There’s nobody but you. You’ve got to find us some help.” She coughed once, then again. There was a whistle to her breath, a sour smell when she exhaled. Then she moved a little and moaned under her breath. “Just go straight on down the street. Go on till you get to Jefferson, then walk on over to the square. Now you listen to me: You need to be smart about it. If you see those men, run in the other direction, no matter what.” Alice reached over and touched her daughter’s chin, felt around her face and tucked her hair behind her ears. “And get somebody to pull that thing out of your head.”
Jo felt leaden, unable to move. She was almost asleep. Why wouldn’t her mother be quiet? Let her alone? She opened one eye.
Alice’s head had slipped down the wall. “Here, put him down beside me. He’ll be all right for a while, but you need to go. Hurry, we don’t have much time. He’s all right now, but he’ll be awake in a few hours.”
JO PICKED her way across the front porch, down the steps, and headed for what she calculated was the street. When she looked to the north, she saw a bonfire lighting up the colored side of town, up on the Hill near Gum Pond, and there was the smell of flesh burning. Her first thought was that they were burning people, but then she realized it must be animals. It would have been barbaric to burn people, no matter how many had died. She had a picture in her mind of rows and rows of coffins lined up, the single line disappearing across the horizon like a train track.
Something needed to be done about Son.
It was quiet now, deep shadows, no one in sight. Down the way, though, she could see lights. The electricity must be back on downtown. She pushed her way through the dark. A few slivers of moonlight bobbed up against tree trunks and the deep ponds of water where the enormous tree roots had come up. Debris everywhere, lurking in the shadows like strangely shaped predators. It was impossible to tell where the street was. Had the old washwoman made it into town? At least she’d gone in daylight. Jo tried to move quickly and carefully, giving wide berth to large indiscernible objects and the pools of water. She put each foot down lightly at first until she was sure of her footing.
She came to where she thought the aunts’ house should have been. A strange hulking shape in the front yard, no sign of the pretty white house where the two old ladies had sipped tea and gossiped and played gin rummy and told stories of the days when they were young and pretty and had handsome beaux lined up and down Church Street begging for their hands in matrimony. Then the moon emerged from behind the clouds and Jo saw that the shape was an overturned magnolia, the aunts’ house now obscured from view by the massive root ball.
The aunts and blind Miss Edwina were gone now, but whenever Jo let herself go back to that time, she mixed up the old ladies, innocent as they were, with the trick. Old Major too, crippled and half blind himself, though he was the only one who had had any inkling of what had happened to her; he was the only one who was troubled even in the slightest way, pacing and whining behind the fence when the boys had her down on the ground. Why couldn’t he have jumped that fence and charged like lightning, teeth bared, torn those boys apart, made them pay? And the aunts, didn’t they wonder why a lively girl would stop every single afternoon and visit for hours on her way home from school? Did it cross their minds that it was not their company but their protection she craved?
Jo had just turned onto Jefferson when a small lone figure approached out of the shadows. A girl. Smaller than Jo but about her age. The girl was shaking and crying. Jo stopped several feet from her. Jo didn’t recognize the girl, which was odd since Jo knew most of the students in her school. There was something about her that was strangely familiar, yet at the same time foreign. Almond eyes set wide and a full mouth that looked bruised; her hair stood out around her face, dark and wavy and wild in the moonlight. The shirtsleeve on her right arm had been ripped away. There was long gash down the side of the arm and a scrape on her chin.
The girl was crying. “Have you seen a little baby anywhere around? You heard a little baby crying? Or an old woman and old man? I’m looking for my boy. He’s lost.” She wrung her hands. “I was right there on top of him in the street, and the wind just blew him right out from under me. I’ve been looking high and low for him. And my granny and papa too. I’ve been to town and now I’m going back home.”
So that was it. Jo could tell by her soft vowels the girl was colored, though she didn’t look it. Jo didn’t know any colored girls, though she’d seen them walking to school and around town, cutting her looks and then giggling among themselves. She often wondered what they talked about. Did they play Chinese checkers and ride horses and go to parties? Did they read Nancy Drew?
There was still something about the girl that reminded Jo of someone she knew, the smallness, the set of even white teeth, the delicate forearms.
Then it hit her. “Is your grandmother the washwoman?” Jo asked. “She does our wash.”
The girl’s eyes flashed. “My granny is a laundress. Her name is Mrs. Dovey Grand’homme and my papa is named Mr. Virgil Grand’homme, and my baby, he’s named Promise. I came down here to find them, but they aren’t here.” She came closer. “What’s that you got sticking out of your head, girl?”
Now Jo knew who the girl was. How tiny she was! A child herself. How could her brother have done what he did? She was glad she’d killed him, he didn’t deserve to live. “What’s your name?” she asked the girl.
“Dreama.”
“Then I have news for you.”
“What? You found my people?”
“Your grandmother was at my house yesterday. She came up to our house to get some help and I gave her some shoes and a raincoat and something to eat and then she headed out for downtown to find the rest of you.”
Dreama’s eyes filled. “Oh thank goodness! I thought I’d
lost them all. I’d about given up. Did she say anything about the baby?”
“She was looking for him too, looking for all of you. Last I saw she was heading into town, the way I’m headed now. I walked out to the street with her. She was supposed to get help. Right after she left, I found my little brother in a crepe myrtle bush outside my house.”
“In a bush? Was he dead?”
“He’s scratched up but all right.”
“Maybe my Promise will be too. What house? Where do you live?”
Jo hesitated. If the girl knew who she was, Son’s sister, she would hate her.
“Tell me where you live so I can go up there and look around.”
“Babies don’t go flying all the way across town. You ought to go look in bushes around your own house, not mine.”
Dreama shook her head. “No bushes left up there on the Hill. Nothing left but piles of stuff and dead folks and people walking around like they don’t have a brain in their head. If you find my granny, tell her I’m alive and looking for Promise.” She turned to go.
“Wait,” Jo said. “I have something to tell you.”
The girl turned, her face carved ivory in the moonlight.
That was the moment Jo should have said it, that she’d killed her brother Son, that he was gone forever, that he’d never bother Dreama again. Dreama’s face, hopeful, desperate, stopped her. In it was that story older than either of them, the story Alice used to tell Jo but then one day stopped telling. That long trip a century ago of Jo’s mother’s family, the wealthy Longs and Langstroms of South Carolina united in a pair of newlyweds, she the daughter of a wealthy planter, he the nephew of Michael Langstrom, who owned land up and down the eastern seaboard, Alice’s great-grandparents, striking out with wedding presents, hand-carved walnut and marble chests, beds and silver, the missing buffet. They stopped in Alabama and stayed for one growing season but the soil was poor so they loaded the wagons again and bought more slaves to replace the ones who’d died on the journey and headed west. Their people’s people had little ones by then, and their mothers wrapped them in swaths of cloth they tied in complicated knots around their waists and shoulders. The young couple, frayed by the bad year, looked at the babies and calculated their worth.