Promise

by Minrose Gwin

  On the night of the seventh day, Virgil had descended into a serious silence and borrowed a rifle from Joshua Walker down the road. When Dovey found the gun, loaded, propped up out in the shed behind the house, she stormed back into the house and woke Virgil from a dead sleep to ask if he could tolerate being strung up on a tree for shooting the Devil, if he thought that might improve Dreama’s mood. Virgil considered both ifs and returned the gun.

  The next morning Dovey remembered the dessert she’d put together by accident one rainy Sunday afternoon when Dreama had the mumps, sick as a dog and burning with fever, her cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk’s full of nuts. She could barely swallow. She’d named it Angel Dreama: a concoction of homemade angel food cake covered over with boiled custard and, in a flare of Dovey’s imagination, meringue on top. Over the course of two days, the girl ate the whole thing, the cake by then soppy from the custard, grateful tears running down her face.

  On that eighth day of Dreama’s hunger strike, Dovey gathered the eggs and spent one long afternoon making the dish, first the cake, then the custard, which required two solid hours of stirring, and finally the meringue. Each of the three components had its pitfalls: the angel food cake, with its dozen egg whites, could fall flat as a pancake; the boiled custard, with all the egg yellows, treacherous for scorching if she turned her back on it for one measly minute, or, if provoked by weather or outright orneriness, refusing to thicken the least bit; the meringue, in wet weather, could end up a gummy mess. As if aware of the urgency of the situation, the whole thing turned out perfectly. She set it on the table to cool and allow time for the custard to soften the cake, and did the dishes.

  Instead of taking a small bowl of it to Dreama, she carried in the whole casserole dish, along with two spoons. She’d taken off her apron and tucked her hair into its pins. She’d gone to the bathroom and splashed water on her face. It was midnight on the dot. Dreama was officially into day nine of her plan to starve herself.

  Dovey bore the dish as if she were approaching a testy queen, not pausing at the bed as she’d come to do and touching Dreama’s shoulder to let her know she’d entered the room. She walked right in and pulled up a chair. Dreama opened one eye, then the other. Dovey slid the dish onto the bed beside the girl, letting her smell the nutmeg that had taken Dovey three days of laundry to buy. Dreama lifted her stick arm from the cover and tried to push the dish away. But Dovey held it in place with one hand and pulled up her chair with the other. She took up a spoon and dipped it in, making sure to get some cake. She brought the spoon up to Dreama’s lips and let a dab of custard and meringue linger. Then she pulled the spoon back and out came, glory, a tip of tongue. When she brought it up a second time, the lips twitched and then parted for the first bite.

  NOW, DOVEY dipped the spoon back into the potted meat and tore another slice of bread and smeared it again and put it on the floor. The cat jumped down and began to devour the bread.

  Dreama, meanwhile, had eaten her bread and meat and licked her fingers. “Can I have another one?”

  “Sure you can, honey, sure you can. And when you get back tonight, I’ll have some good corn bread for us.”

  “I’ll have my baby back by then,” said Dreama, straightening her shoulders.

  Dovey hobbled over behind Dreama and began to smooth down her hair. Pieces stood out from the sides of her head. Dovey took some pins from her own hair and pinned them down. “Course you will, honey. And you look for Papa too. Go over to Crosstown and ask around if anybody put him on the train.”

  “I already did that.”

  “Do it again. Maybe they have a list by now.”

  “Granny. They’re not counting us. You know that.”

  Then Dreama was gone, brushing aside the curtain and disappearing into the brightness outside, gone to find Promise. Had the girl stashed away a piece of herself, because that’s what mothers must do—hold something back just in case—but of course the answer was no, of course she hadn’t because, and Dovey knew this for a fact, it’s not possible to hold anything back with a baby; everything has already been opened up, everything yawns toward hunger and need, everything says, Take me, use me, this is my body and my blood and no one else’s will do. Dreama was just a piece of water going to the sea.

  She didn’t for one minute expect Dreama to return with that baby.

  Over the years Dovey had tried not to let herself linger on Charlesetta, that cowlick on the left temple, the mole on the top of her head that grew big as a dime one summer and had to be cut away, the surprisingly large flat feet that wouldn’t stop growing the year she turned fifteen. Dovey tried not to let herself knock on that door, knowing that if it opened, a tiger would leap out and take her by the throat. She sniffed at the door like a wary dog from time to time; behind it the white coffin with cornflowers around the edge, that good potato salad—not too much onion—that Etherene Johnson had brought over, the headstone she and Virgil had bought on time that read “Charlesetta Grand’homme. Daughter. Mother.” But that was as far as she let herself go, and honestly, even it was too close to the mark.

  Behind that door too was Virgil’s sadness. And her own block-of-ice heart that had turned his sadness into something else, something beyond sad, something that howled in the night.

  THE CAT had settled back in her lap and gone to sleep. She carried it over to one of the cots, hobbling only a little now. Her foot was better, the needles had been replaced by a general tenderness. She lay down, not pulling up the blanket though she was chilly. She didn’t want to get too comfortable. She just needed to rest her head for a minute, just a minute. Then she’d make that corn bread for Dreama. The cat crawled onto her chest, turned once, then twice, then settled.

  When she woke up, a thin shaft of late day sun had come in under the burlap and sliced across the wall of the boxcar. Bright, too bright. It made her squint, and when she turned away, she saw spots. She pulled up the blanket and lay still until it faded and a sunset red took its place.

  SHE OPENED her eyes to pitch-black. Dreama wasn’t back and the cat was gone from her chest. She got up and used the chamber pot and went over to the table. She felt around for the box of matches and lit the candle. She smelled food cooking outside. It made her mouth water, but it was too late to mix up corn bread now. There was a can of pintos on the table. It would have to do.

  She sat and waited. Then she peeked out the door. Twilight now. Lightning bugs flared here and there, strangely early this spring, against the rusted gray of the boxcar across from hers. The stench of muck and decay, a rottenness, lay heavy on the night air.

  The little boy down the way was jumping around aimlessly outside his boxcar. Then he started singing. “You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, you put your right foot in and you turn yourself about. You do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around, that’s what it’s all about.”

  The song took her back. Charlesetta and her little friends had danced to it endlessly, as if in a trance. Bent over her washtub, she had grown sick to death of the dreary repetitiveness of it, sometimes hollering at them to go play something else, jump some rope, play Holy Ghost, which was louder but not so monotonous. When they got to screeching and chasing each other and screaming that this one or that one was the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost was going to put a fix on the others, Dovey had to laugh, though generally she frowned on folks talking about fixing somebody. You never could tell when that kind of talk was going to circle back around. How the children thought up the Holy Ghost game Dovey didn’t know, but she preferred it to pattyroller. She had encouraged it by providing the child who had the good fortune to play the Holy Ghost instead of being chased by Him a torn piece of sheet to wear in the role, despite her misgivings about encouraging the wearing of a sheet. Enough of that already.

  The game died with Charlesetta, and by the time Dreama came along, the Holy Ghost had become the Boogey Man, which of course he was all along.

  The boy played alone. No sign of his mot
her, no one had lit that family’s stove either.

  “You hungry, boy?” she called out to him. “You want some beans?” She wondered how Promise might have looked at that age. Would he have been a beanpole like this one?

  The boy stopped in his tracks.

  “Come on then,” she said.

  He hesitated. “Not going to bite you,” she said, moving back into the boxcar. Either he’d come or he wouldn’t. Either way she had to eat. She opened the can of beans.

  He appeared at the door. “Well, I’m hungry,” she announced and began to eat out of the can. No point in dirtying up dishes with water so hard to come by. The jug they’d been given would scarcely make it through the night.

  He came closer. “Here,” she said, offering him a spoon and the can. “Dig in.”

  He took the spoon and the can and began to wolf down the beans.

  “Save some for me,” Dovey said, taking back the can.

  The boy grinned suddenly, then ducked his head.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Ray Jackson,” he said, “same name’s my daddy.” His face changed and he put the spoon down on the table, his eyes filling.

  “What happened to your daddy?”

  “He stuck up in a tree.”

  What popped into Dovey’s head was the merman. “How’d he get there?”

  “The storm took him, the storm got him.”

  “Same thing happened to me. I flew.”

  “But you here, you drawing breath.”

  “I didn’t get blowed up a tree, I got blowed into Gum Pond.”

  “How come you didn’t drown?”

  “Beats me,” said Dovey. “Luck.” She reached across the table and took his two hands between hers. “It’s a shame about your daddy.”

  The boy ducked his head again. “He hung upside down all night long. All by hisself, in the rain. My mama sat under the tree all night long.”

  No words for that. No wonder the poor woman wasn’t fixing supper. Dovey shook her head and looked down at his hands. They were baby-round, brown on top, pink underneath. In the candlelight he looked like he was wearing mittens. The boy had started to cry. She pulled out the handkerchief Glendola Harris had tucked in her pocket. “Blow your nose.”

  He blew and they passed the can of beans back and forth until it was empty. They didn’t see or hear the white woman until she poked her head around the curtain covering the door.

  “Yoohoo,” she said. “Would y’all like some bananas?” She took a few steps into the boxcar carrying a bunch under each arm. “The Dole folks sent a whole boxcar-full up from Gulfport. They just came into the station. Take as many as you like. Watch out for spiders.”

  Bananas. Of all things. Dovey loved bananas. A dozen for twelve cents, seven for a penny each. Once, for Virgil’s birthday, she had splurged and made a banana pudding. When was the last time she’d made a special dish for him?

  “Much obliged,” she said to the woman, taking one bunch. Then she added, “This boy has a family of his own next door.” She hoped the woman would give him the other bunch.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll drop these off over there,” said the woman. Her eyes were moist, resting on the two of them, full of something Dovey didn’t much care for. She didn’t like anybody, much less white folks, looking at her like she’d grown a tail, like she was some kind of stray dog.

  When she left, Dovey peeled a banana and gave it to the boy. Then she took one for herself. It was bruised and overripe, the way she liked them, and tasted like melted sugar.

  When he finished, she told him to go on back to his mother. “You the little man,” she said. “You got to take care of your mama. Help her with the baby. Behave. You hear me?”

  He toyed with the banana peel. “She didn’t hold on to my daddy. She ought to held on to him.”

  Oh Virgil, what a heavy load.

  Dovey took the boy’s hand. “Baby, the wind was too strong.”

  He didn’t want to go, that much she could tell, but now the block of ice in her chest had suddenly melted and it flooded her eyes. “Get on now. Get home to your mama.”

  When he was gone, she took the banana peels and empty cans and walked to the door and tossed them in the oil can outside.

  She pulled the burlap curtain back from the doorway to get some air. Then she settled herself at the kitchen table to wait for Dreama. This was the time of evening when she and Virgil would sit down and listen to their shows on WREC: Lum and Abner, Amos and Andy, and, if she could stay awake, The Voice of Firestone. Tonight nothing to listen to but a mix of bullfrogs and crickets and even they sounded muted. Virgil was out there, resting on the long cold arms of the world, but where? Tomorrow, foot willing, she would begin to look. She put her head in her arms on the table.

  When she woke, she knew it was dawn by the gray tone of the sky coming through the curtain, which remained pulled back over the doorway. The candle was out and she was stone-cold, despite a blanket that had been draped around her shoulders. Her shoulders ached and there was a crick in her neck from sleeping at the table. In the half-light she turned and saw Dreama asleep on one of the cots, a patch of white tucked into her side. The girl looked worse than she had when she’d left, her face swollen and filthy, her hands and forearms scratched and bleeding. The cat opened its eyes once, then closed them.

  Dovey went and lay down on the second cot, dragging her blanket behind. As soon as she put her head on the pillow, the cat leapt silently from Dreama’s cot to hers and curled up in her arms.

  She woke for the second time to someone calling her name. Bellowing was more like it. The bellow had authority. It ricocheted off the boxcars outside, growing louder as it approached.

  She felt around for the cat, but it was gone. When she heard her name being called in that commanding voice, the voice of a man or a man-angel, she figured she’d passed in her sleep. St. Peter was calling her home. She wasn’t happy about this. She’d always seen St. Peter as an ancient white man in a white robe loosely tied with a gold cord like the gold cords on the shoulders of the Carver High School band uniforms that shimmered and shook. She liked the shoulder cords on the band uniforms, but in St. Peter’s case, it seemed rude to have a single, loosely tied cord the only thing hanging between a man (especially a white man!) being covered and being uncovered. It was careless. Nor did she cotton to the idea of a white man in sandals and no underwear tallying up her sins in a big book, meddling in her own personal business, which was, in her view, between her and God, and while she was on that subject, she couldn’t think of a whole lot of things she’d done that she’d count as actionable sins. There was the Shake Rag man, but she was young then, and it was well before Virgil. It was true she’d looked at Jim Salter, who delivered ice for Bryant Ice House, but what married lady with eyes in her head, colored or white, hadn’t? Those undershirts of his, wet from sweat, smelling of Clorox and man salt, those little curls of hair poking out from under his arms. Those arms! What harm in looking, even if there was a child in your belly, even if, later on, that child was wrapped around your legs? You’d tell that child to go play and offer Jim Salter a cool glass of tea, make him sit for a spell, take a load off, watch those lips talk, not caring what they said, not caring if they were saying kiss my foot. Maybe it was a little sin, she’d give St. Peter that, but not of the variety that should get you kicked out of heaven and no need to stick his nose into it.

  The big sin, the sin that might send her to hell, was that block-of-ice heart of hers. But it was Virgil she’d sinned against and Virgil who’d have to do the forgiving.

  “DOVEY GRAND’HOMME.” Her name again. So loud she could see it writ against the sky.

  “If you so bound and determined to kill me,” she whispered to God, “why didn’t you just drown me in the pond? Why didn’t you just hang me in a tree?”

  “Dovey!”

  Dreama hadn’t stirred, which only confirmed Dovey’s sense that it was she alone who heard her name being ca
lled. She sat up on the cot. When Old Pete came, she’d meet him nose to nose. She slipped on the one shoe and patted her hair, her hands shaking. She wished she had her hairpins back from Dreama, she wished she could have taken a real tub bath. She was flooded with embarrassment at the thought of J. W. Porter (she hoped it would be J.W., not one of those out-of-town undertakers they’d called in to help) having to turn his face away when he prepared her, though surely he’d seen worse in the past few days and who could blame her for being unable to take a real tub bath when her whole house had been blown away?

  Would J.W. wash her poor foot or leave it bandaged? Would he attend to her private place, now hairless as a baby’s?

  That bellow again, right there outside the burlap curtain, which now trembled. Someone was climbing the steps to the boxcar.

  But it wasn’t a white man’s voice, and in that moment just before the curtain opened, she thought she recognized it, which is when the man—trailed by someone small, huffing and puffing, a Red Cross lady, judging from the jaunty angle of her hat—groped his way through the burlap curtain.

  He burst into the boxcar then stopped short, peering through the dark. The light was behind him, and it was too dark to see his face, but that silhouette Dovey would have known anywhere. Those arms, longer than an ordinary man’s, reaching almost to his knees. The neck long too and straight, the face narrow with those Choctaw cheekbones up around the outer corners of the eyes. The lips she knew though she couldn’t see them, thin and straight as a ruler.

  Dreama, on the cot beside her, sat up suddenly.

  In that moment Dovey and Dreama rose in one motion and looked at the man and he looked at them, the only sound in the boxcar the Red Cross lady’s wheeze.