Promise

by Minrose Gwin

  The boxcars were only five blocks from the Lyric, on a set of side tracks, but Dovey was panting by the time they approached them. The umbrella had tended to stick in the mud, making it more trouble than it was worth. Dreama had had to support her for the last half block, fussing at her every inch of the way for throwing away the crutches.

  They’d gotten a late start on the day. After Dovey’s fall the afternoon before (tripping over that bedpan like an old fool), she’d crawled gratefully back onto her cot and collapsed, not waking until midmorning. Now, as they stood before their boxcar, Number 4, Dreama was chomping at the bit. “I’m going to get you settled, then go look for Promise and Papa,” she told Dovey.

  “How am I supposed to get up them steps?” Dovey asked.

  Dreama shook her head wearily. She brought her hand up as if to make some bold gesture then dropped it to her side.

  Dovey saw despair in the girl’s twig of an arm. How come everything bad seemed bound and determined to happen to one little girl? That monkey had jumped on Dreama’s back the second she poked her head out into the cold world and saw a dead-as-a-doornail mama, and it hadn’t let up on her since, coming in the form of that McNabb Devil, then the pregnancy. She’d borne it all, right down to the boy the color of mayonnaise. She’d given the monkey a kick, the baby boy her heart.

  Now the monkey was back. It rankled Dovey like nothing else. “Don’t worry, I can do it. I can get up them steps,” she quickly told her granddaughter (miracle of all miracles that the girl was there by her side instead of dead in a ditch!).

  Dovey sat down on the next-to-bottom step of the boxcar and began to push her way up with her arms and one good foot, first one step, then another. She muttered, “Hope they got something I can lay down on in them boxcars.”

  Dreama stepped around Dovey and started up the steps. “Let me see what they’ve got in there. No point in you climbing all the way up if there’s no place to sit down.”

  Dovey stopped on the step and waited. Other families had arrived, weary and tattered and bandaged. She didn’t recognize any of them and thought they might have come from Shake Rag, not from up on the Hill where she knew almost everyone. Or maybe they’d dragged themselves into town from out in the county. They smelled like fish and looked disheveled and less than respectable, though Dovey suspected she looked the same. They whispered among themselves, jostling one another to peer inside the boxcars, trying to figure out which one had been assigned to which family. One little boy ran up the makeshift steps to the third car down from Dovey and stuck his head back out the door, hollering that there was some sure-enough store-bought white bread sitting on a table inside. His mother, right behind him, carried inside a yellowed pillowcase a baby whose wizened face stopped Dovey’s heart (thankfully Dreama was still inside the boxcar). “Don’t you go getting into that bread,” the mother said. “That bread got to go round.”

  The boy stuck his head out. “Daddy ain’t here no more,” he said. “I’ll eat his.”

  His mother was on him then. She slapped his face once and then twice, the second time backhanded. “Your daddy not cold in the ground and here you go talking about eating his bread.” The baby in her arms began to scream and the little boy too. Then the mother folded up like a fan on the steps to the boxcar and began to cry.

  The little boy went up to her. “I sorry, Mama,” he said. “Don’t be mad.”

  Dovey sighed. She would have gone over to the mother and taken the baby and quietened it down, turning away to give the woman’s grief its privacy. She would have, but her foot throbbed and, between the crutches and the umbrella-turned-cane, her shoulder, the bad one from years turning the wringer at the laundry tub, was talking back.

  So she sat still and put her head on her knees, waiting for Dreama. The mother cried on, and so did the baby and little boy, the three of them an out-of-key chorus.

  At least Virgil weren’t dead. But where in this far-flung world had he wandered off to? What ailed him so bad he couldn’t track down his own wife who’d heated the water for his bath and scrubbed his back twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays since the beginning of time? Old fox better be flat on his back somewhere far away, Memphis or Holly Springs at least. She pictured him on a hospital bed wrapped in white, broken bones from head to toe, looking the way he looked when he came home from the gin covered in cotton, sneezing and coughing and carrying on about scrawny, pasty-faced children climbing up to change the bobbins, raveling and unraveling the thread, cutting their bare feet on the machinery.

  “Them white children getting higher wages than you, old man,” she would counter.

  He’d frown at her then. “Girl, what they doing to them babies a crime. At least none of ours climbing around on machines like monkeys. I see those little children’s feet. They got to wrap them up to keep the blood from getting on the thread.”

  Virgil. How she missed his good heart!

  The man loved children, wanted a houseful. When Dovey had woken up in the colored ward at the hospital with Charlesetta by her side but without her vital woman parts (she never got a full explanation of why they’d been taken), Virgil had said it was all right, they had their baby girl now. But it wasn’t all right, something had been taken from him just as something had been given. After Dovey, Charlesetta was his sun, moon, and stars all rolled into one. Dovey’s too. Maybe that’s why Charlesetta needed to put so many miles between her and home, to get some breathing room from all that love. When she left, she took a chunk of her daddy’s heart with her.

  He’d gone after her, Dovey would give him that. Early the Saturday morning after Charlesetta had disappeared on Friday night, Virgil had gone down to Crosstown to ask after her. The Saturday Curb Market was in high season, and there were the usual colored families from out in the county who had come into town the afternoon before, hauling in rickety wagons their field peas, sweet corn, cantaloupe, and oozing peaches covered in yellow jackets. On Friday nights they parked their wagons in a cluster in the dirt lot behind the train depot and sat around on fruit crates, the men smoking pipes and the women shelling peas. Then, a few sips of bootleg liquor and they rolled out their pallets and hit the dirt so as to be ready for the early morning market the next day. Virgil had talked to them that Saturday morning as they sat beside the wagons displaying their produce. He came home with the news that Charlesetta or her dead-ringer had boarded the M&O around ten the night before, heading for New Orleans.

  That’s when they knew they’d lost her, though at the time Dovey thought it was temporary.

  If Dreama had to lose Promise, better to lose him at three months than eighteen years. The longer you have children the more they crawl up under your skin. They are heart-hungry and they won’t stop until they nibble their way into the heart’s innermost secret chambers, until, before you know it, they are coursing through you, head to toe. They are the hair of your head, the nail on your little finger.

  It was the first time Dovey had seen Virgil cry. It wasn’t a pretty sound, or even sad. A bit of a wail, high-pitched and nasal: a foghorn, resembling a snore.

  “Lord,” she said to him. “You’d think she gone and died.”

  “That girl ain’t never coming back,” he said. “Not in this life. Mark my word, woman.”

  She didn’t like it. What kind of man carried on so? Back then, she’d expected a letter in the coming week. It would say Charlesetta had gotten a steady job waiting tables, not at a juke joint but in a fancy restaurant where she wore a nice uniform (well starched, Dovey hoped) and took orders for gumbo and oysters and barbecued shrimp. She’d write back and tell Charlesetta where Virgil’s people lived so she could drop by. Dovey pictured Charlesetta’s return visit, a few years later, with a neatly dressed Creole man and two or three bright children in Sunday outfits. Dovey would worry about how to fit them all under one roof for the visit. She would have to borrow some cots from the neighbors. She would cook for days on end, pickling beets and peaches, frying okra (she hoped they would
come in midsummer when her garden had come in), and stewing a hen in brown gravy the way Charlesetta liked it. Charlesetta would draw her mother aside and say she was sorry she’d run off the way she had; her eyes would tear up when she said it. She would invite Virgil and Dovey to come down and visit her little family. They would have a picnic on the levee by the river and watch the steamboats go by, they would eat whole crabs, hot and peppered, on a table covered in newspaper. They would visit Virgil’s family.

  But Virgil had been right. And when Charlesetta came back in that M&O boxcar, that was the second time she saw him cry.

  That’s when Dovey’s heart had turned into a block of ice. What right had he to cry? If he hadn’t shoved their one and only daughter, fueling the fire that burned in Charlesetta, none of this would have happened. Charlesetta would have been alive and kicking, herself a mother several times over more than likely. She would have found a nice man, maybe lived right down Green Street and Dovey’s grandbabies would be popping in and out of the house, making mischief, playing their games in the dirt yard.

  But Charlesetta wasn’t made for Tupelo, she would have left no matter who did what, Dovey knew now; and her own block-of-ice heart had been the curse her good man had had to shoulder along with everything else. It had covered him like the cotton from the mill, her coldness. The storm had melted it. Where was he now that she could explain herself? She needed to tell him she’d been wrong to fault him, she needed to make some nice flat biscuits the way he liked them and sit him down and tell him she was sorry as sorry could be. Was she wrong about him being alive? Was she wrong about that too?

  The thought that Virgil could be gone like Charlesetta stopped her breath. She put her head in her hands, blocking the early afternoon sun, which had suddenly gotten hotter.

  She sat like that for a good long time. She didn’t cry but she sweated through her head rag and now the sweat rolled down into her eyes, burning and stinging. She could hear people walking past, talking softly, but she didn’t raise her head.

  She felt a bump on her calf, then quickly another bump. Then you, you, you. She looked up and saw the cat. It had climbed the one step and was butting as hard as it could against Dovey’s leg. She reached out and touched its head. The fur, a dirty white, was splotched and oily. It pushed harder on her leg, crying now. Hungry.

  She let the cat come onto her lap. A little mama from the loose feel of her underside. The cat settled, purring and kneading Dovey’s little pouch of a stomach with her needle claws. The claws pierced Dovey’s skin, but the hurt, it came as a blessed relief. The pain of the foot and her head had taken all her attention, as though she were nothing but a pair of feet and a floating head, a great chasm of emptiness in between. She stroked the cat, encouraging it.

  She called for Dreama to come see, but there was no answer. She called again. What was that girl doing in there?

  She began to push herself up the rest of the steps with her good foot, the cat riding her lap, hanging on to Dovey’s dress with her claws. When Dovey got to the top, she turned herself to see inside the boxcar, but there was a curtain made of sewn-together burlap sacks blocking her view. She saw a rail on the side of the door and grabbed hold of the cat and took the rail and pulled herself up. She pushed aside the curtain and peered inside, trying to adjust her eyes to the dark.

  She heard Dreama before she saw her. She was crying, a soft mewling sound not unlike the mewling of the cat, and she had the hiccups. She sat in the dark on one of two cots in the corner.

  When Dreama saw her grandmother, she got up and came over and took Dovey’s hand. “What you doing with that dirty old thing, Granny? Put it down. You’re going to fall and break something.”

  Dovey looked at her. “No.”

  “What you mean, no?”

  “No, I ain’t letting go this cat.”

  “Well, sit down then. What are we going to do with a mangy old cat?”

  “Feed her,” said Dovey.

  The boxcar was divided down the middle by a makeshift wall from the same rough pine as the steps. The nails were uneven and the wall didn’t quite reach the ceiling, but the scent of pine was refreshing. “We only get half,” Dreama said. “There’ll be another family on the other side.”

  Dovey breathed a sigh of relief to be somewhere private. In the center of their side was a small table piled with canned goods; sacks of cornmeal, beans, coffee, and some sugar; a glass jar of congealed bacon fat; some powdered milk and a jug of water; and a loaf of store-bought white bread. There was a fat candle in the center of the table. In one corner, on a crate, lay a skillet, a large cooking pot with a big spoon in it, and a percolator. In the opposite corner a chamber pot and a stack of newspapers beside it. Directly inside the door were a stack of wood, some newspaper, and a large box of matches.

  Dovey hobbled over to the table and found two plates and two spoons and a can opener. Two folding chairs had been pushed neatly under the table, the two cots covered with one blanket and one pillow each.

  It was the twoness of everything that broke her concentration. No third cot.

  No bassinet either. She sat down at the table, rocking back and forth, moaning more than crying. The sound she made shocked and embarrassed her. Worse than Virgil’s caterwauling. The cat jumped down and ran into the dark back corner of the boxcar, crouching there warily, a splash of white against the creosoted wood.

  Dreama walked around behind Dovey and held down her shaking shoulders as if Dovey were going to fly away. She put her chin on Dovey’s head.

  The two of them stayed that way a good while. The only light in the boxcar filtered weakly through the burlap curtain at the opening. Then the cat leapt up on the table and started pawing at the bread, tearing open the paper it was wrapped in.

  Dreama shooed the cat away from the bread. The cat retreated to the corner of the table. “How we supposed to wash these dishes?” she asked angrily. “How we supposed to keep clean?”

  Dovey raised her head. Cleaning interested her. “Expect we take them outside and pour water over them. Don’t know about us getting clean though.” Despite their sponge baths, both she and Dreama stank. They’d sweated through their clothes on the walk to the boxcars, she because she could walk only with a struggle and Dreama because she was walking for two. She could smell Dreama’s young-girl vinegary stink as she stood over her, and she was dead sure Dreama was picking up the odor of her old woman’s flesh, the odor of school: chalk and dust and schoolteacher talcum-powdered sweat; under it all, a hint of mold.

  The cat had returned to the bread. Dreama swatted her off the table. She opened the bread and took out a piece and stuffed half of it in her mouth. “Tastes like air. Nothing to it.” She pulled out a chair and went to get the bowls and spoon. “I’ve got to go, Granny. I’ve got to keep looking. You going to be all right in here? You want some water?”

  A sliver of light caught her as she stood before Dovey. The girl was a mess. It wasn’t just the hair. Her face was as puckered and drawn as Dovey’s. She’d swallowed her lips and her eyes were so bloodshot they looked like they were bleeding. She looked three times her age and mental to boot.

  “Wait up a minute.” Dovey hobbled over to the table and looked over the cans and settled for potted meat. She fumbled around for the can opener. “Before you go, eat some of this.”

  Dreama backed away. “Granny, I got to go.”

  “Not getting far eating air.” Dovey opened the can, took the spoon, and smeared the potted meat on a piece of bread. The cat jumped back on the table. “Here,” she said, handing the bread off to Dreama, “sit down a minute.”

  Such a relief it was to cajole the girl to eat, such a dear return to everyday life. From the word go, she had been always after Dreama to eat. When the girl was a baby, cow’s milk made her sick, so Dovey had had to borrow a neighbor’s goat until she got the child weaned. Then, the moment her two feet hit ground, Dreama never could find the time to eat. She was too busy, she would announce, downing a few bit
es and running out the door to play with her girlfriends, who circled the house like earthbound buzzards waiting for her to come back out. In those days, Dreama was full of plans and schemes, making a party wherever she went.

  Then she discovered books, and it was studying or reading stories, they were her bread and butter. When that Devil went and did what he did, after he dumped her like garbage in the dirt in the front of the house, after they brought her inside, the first thing she did was look at the food Dovey had set out on the supper table earlier that night and vomit. After that, they couldn’t get her to eat. The Heroines of Jericho brought everything from a ham with pineapples and cloves in a pretty star pattern on top (the prettiest ham Dovey ever saw) to jars of bread-and-butter sweet pickles and pickled peaches and raspberry sherbet from Nesbitt’s Grocery, the latter dripping so by the time they got there with it that, when Dreama turned up her nose at it, Dovey and the Heroines had to sit down and eat the whole carton in the space of a few minutes. The girl barely drank tea, the only thing keeping her alive the sugar in it. Dovey shoveled it in, making a dark sludge.

  Dovey tried everything. All the old favorites, then all the foods the three of them ate when they were sick: chicken-neck soup and mashed sweet potatoes, applesauce that Dovey had put up in the fall. But no, nothing would do. Dreama wouldn’t lift her head from the pillow unless she went outside to use the bathroom. When Dovey would approach the bed with something new, even the plate of fudge Etherene Johnson brought over, Dreama would take one look and turn her stony face to the wall.

  Seven days passed, a whole week, and still the girl hadn’t touched a bite of solid food. Her hair looked burnt. The Choctaw in her face had risen to the surface, the chiseled cheekbones, the hollowed eyes. She and Charlesetta had Virgil’s Choctaw bones. They came from his grandfather, whose mother been the daughter of a runaway slave who’d been sheltered by a remnant of the tribe down on the coast and had taken up with a Choctaw man and borne him three children, or so the story went.