Promise

by Minrose Gwin

  She looked down at her father’s wingtips, scuffed and filthy. How far would they take her? To the ends of the earth, if necessary, to the moon. She squared her shoulders, shifted the baby from her good but exhausted arm to her broken one, just for a quick respite. But that hurt too much, so much she almost dropped him, so she shifted him back to her right side, jutting out her hip to take more of his weight. How heavy he’d become!

  Her eye ran in circles, nipping at her heels. She would need formula and bottles and diapers. She would need time to plan their getaway. She would need someone to take her in and shelter them both. She would need someone to take care of Tommy while she went out into the world and scavenged for all the things a baby needs.

  As she made her way up Jefferson, she thought suddenly of the little colored washwoman, whose name still eluded Jo but who, after all, hadn’t forgotten Jo and her mother and little Tommy. Who had sent help when help was needed.

  15

  8 P.M.

  Raining cats and dogs outside when those shoes sashayed in. Dovey would have known them anywhere. The Judge’s wingtips. Big as life and twice as ugly, scuffed and dusty and shit-colored, in the wet pool of moonlight at the bottom of the door to the boxcar. The bile rose in her throat and she felt the urge to hawk and spit.

  They’d been shiny as glass the day after that Devil had bothered Dreama, she could see her face in them. She’d wanted to spit that day too, dirty those shoes. Her and Virgil standing there in the blazing noonday sun, Virgil thirsty for blood, the Judge presiding over the two of them like some old plantation master talking down to the field hands at the back door, a white napkin hanging from his collar, a crumb of something flaky (corn bread? a biscuit?) on his lip. Those wingtips of his had faced straight out, at the level of her belly, like bird dogs on the point. Shoot to kill. And what difference would it have made if somebody had shot her through the heart, her already half dead with what had happened to Dreama? By then the hawk already had her by the cords of her neck; soon it would settle in, clawing through flesh and gristle.

  He hadn’t even invited them to come up onto the porch, out of the sun. After what his own son had done, he hadn’t even offered them that courtesy. The sun overhead had pecked at her scalp. Briny sweat inched down her forehead, breaching her eyebrows, stinging her eyes, bringing on the tears she’d been set on not shedding.

  NOW, THOUGH, the shoes were just shoes, filthy and beat-up. Her eyes followed them upward and ran into bare ankles, and then not the pants she’d expected but a dress, torn and dusty too, a too-long dress, and then, Lord, what? Something alive, wrapped in a shawl against the soft rain outside, and that white girl with hair that hung in filthy clumps around her shoulders. The girl’s left arm wrapped in white, a cast, white against the girl’s dress. That McNabb girl and something in the shawl.

  When the girl came in, Dovey had been in the middle of a knot of a worry so tangled and vexing it taxed even her. Dreama and Virgil had set out at dawn, Dreama proclaiming that she wasn’t coming back till she found her boy, Virgil intent on checking to see how the mill had made out in the storm, saying the last thing they needed was for him to lose his job now that they hardly had a pot to piss in. After that, he planned to head out to look for Promise too. Him and Dreama had planned it out. He’d go looking around Milltown, she’d head back up to the Hill, combing Glenwood Cemetery on the way. Now here it was dark again and growing darker still. Had one or both of them fallen into one of those treacherous water holes? Had they run into trouble with white folks? She’d heard about gangs of white boys running wild. She pictured Dreama cornered, splayed, and bloodied, left for dead. She pictured Virgil trying to fight off those white boys, now hanging from a tree for his trouble. She saw it all in her head, clear as day, and when the McNabb girl came through the door and stood there in the moonlight wearing those wingtips of her daddy’s, Dovey was sitting at the little table in the boxcar quaking like a leaf.

  There was something else too, a commotion in her chest that hadn’t been there. It felt like a baby bird learning to fly, reminding her of the first time she’d felt Charlesetta move in her belly. Now it left her chest and fluttered down into her arms and fingers, making them twitch and shudder. That morning the flutter had taken up residence in her upper thigh; she had watched the skin jump with it. Was she becoming a bird? Since the storm, she flew through her dreams. She flew without fear, with a steady heedless curiosity; nothing could hold her down, not the sweet dear earth, not the people who had held her life in place. She wondered if she were getting ready to die.

  THE GIRL stood there not moving, just panting a little. She seemed proud of herself. “I asked the Salvation Army people and they said to look here. I went up and down the row, asking.” She took one step in Dovey’s direction, moving into the candlelight. There were smudges on her cheeks, the place where the horn had been now a train track of stitches running above and between her brows. She loomed: a big girl, tall and broad-shouldered. She’d make two of Dreama. She took another step, toward the chair on the other side of the table from Dovey and slid into it without asking. She seemed relieved, moving toward Dovey with confidence, as though she were a long-lost friend, as though Dovey would be happy to see her.

  The girl leaned across the table. “Thank you for sending help. We’re much obliged.”

  Was Dovey never going to be free of these infernal McNabbs? Would they insist on plaguing her to the end of the earth, trailing their secret filth, their never-ending mountain of wash? The thought of the Judge with Etherene made her sick, him with a wife and three children. All those years them two carrying on like dogs in heat. Small wonder that son of his went and did what he did. The apple doesn’t fall far.

  The bundle in the girl’s arms began to cough a syrupy cough. So she’d found her little brother. No justice in the world.

  And poor Dreama still out there. Full dark now. How long would she keep looking? How long before you call calf rope and quit? A month or six? A year? Two? Already there were stories moving up and down the row of boxcars. A little colored girl, eight years old, blown down from the Hill over into Whitetown, through an attic window of V. H. McCoy’s house, not a scratch on her. A nine-month-old baby found alive and kicking down on the M&O track. Another of the town’s laundresses, name of Marcella, who, Dovey thought privately, was a bit much, carrying her laundry on her head like some African with a bone in her nose, spun in circles ten feet up in the air like a flying Jenny (or so she claimed), then put down on Jamie Settle’s roof, not a scratch on her either. Mrs. Fred Price, holed up with her daughter in the icebox with their pet canary, coming out to find their whole house blown to kingdom come around them.

  Dovey didn’t like these stories. They illustrated the fickleness of Luck with a capital L. The flip side of the coin: the man stuck to the bottom of Gum Pond, Etherene’s mistaken step in the dark. For every baby found, there were, she expected, a dozen lost.

  THE KITTEN they’d found dead that morning on the washcloth they’d laid down for it in the corner of the boxcar. The mother cat had vanished.

  EVEN IN good times, even as a girl, Dovey had been a worrier. She saw fate and circumstance as ruthless predators ready to pounce when least expected. Who could have imagined her whole family gone in the space of two weeks, felled by the typhoid, leaving her with the sour-faced aunt? Who could have thought up this devil of a storm? (There was talk that the tornado was God’s punishment of Tupelo for getting too big for its breeches, seduced by the sin of pride. First TVA City, cheap electricity for all and not even a city, just a dusty little town that had had the good fortune of having the Frisco and M&O make a big bull’s-eye in its center.) Even before the tornado, Dovey had stewed about the weather, whether the jigsaw of rusty tin that served as the roof of their house would keep the water out when it rained, whether the clothes on the line would be dry enough to iron. She read the newspaper and therefore worried about that little man with the mustache across the ocean who said things that didn
’t seem good or right. She worried about the miles-long lines of his uniformed men who held up their right arms and hollered those two foreign words, one of which sounded like Hell. They reminded her of peckerwoods in sheets, whom she also worried about, along with the way Dreama held Promise up in the air over her head, him screaming (with delight? with fear? she could never tell), his neck gone slack. She worried about Virgil’s cough, how he had trouble catching his breath when he slept on his back, gasping off and on all night, his nails digging into her arm like talons. She worried about stains in the laundry, whether they would come out, whether she’d get paid if they didn’t.

  All of these worries mere grains of sand beside the boulder that was Promise. Was she being greedy, asking for too much good luck with Virgil and Dreama safe? She’d been holding her breath all day for news. The Salvation Army lady had taken down their names and the number of their boxcar, which was the number they should be as a family, and Dovey had waited all day in the dark in case somebody found Promise and brought him back.

  None of them had slept the previous night, the boxcar an oven. Nothing stirred. Inches apart, the three of them lay there in the dark breathing softly but there was no ease to their breath. Dreama tossed and turned, her stomach growling from lack of food. After the CCC boys brought the extra cot for Virgil, Dovey pushed her cot up to his. During the night she reached out and touched his chest and he gripped her hand until it grew sticky with sweat. When Dreama rose the next morning, her face was the color of old ashes.

  Dovey had dozed off and on the whole day, exhausted but also sick to death of staring at the same four creosoted walls, no food to prepare, no laundry to wash and hang out and iron, no house to clean. Nothing to do but wait.

  AND NOW this McNabb girl. Plopping herself down like she owned the place.

  The girl put the baby on her shoulder (how she maneuvered him with just one good arm Dovey didn’t know but admired) and began to pat him on the back with her cast, which was no way to take care of a baby with the croup. Any fool knew to make a mustard plaster to put on the child’s chest and then to put a hot wet cloth on top of the plaster to make it penetrate. Promise had been a croupy baby. Sometimes, if he couldn’t breathe, she would put some of the mustard plaster on his upper lip. You had to take care to rub the chest with lard first, so the plaster didn’t burn, especially with babies.

  The hair on the back of the baby’s head was soaked. Did he have a fever?

  Of course, there was no mustard powder to be had, and the girl looked like she was in no condition to attend to what she had in her arms. Her eyes had a strange milky cast to them. There was a hangdog look about her. Dovey chastised herself for being uncharitable. The girl was doing the best she could. Where were her mama and daddy? What was she doing wandering around like a lost dog toting a sick pup?

  Dovey held up a can of potted meat. “You hungry?”

  The girl leaned over to look at the can. She licked her lips. “I hate to eat up your food.”

  “There’s more where that come from.” Dovey picked up the can opener.

  “I wouldn’t mind if you can spare it,” said the girl. Something—not a smile but close to it—splashed across her face, the flick of a fish tail. She settled in the chair, put the baby back down on her lap. Dovey leaned over to look, but he was in a deep shadow. He’d settled down, making little scuffles of sound. Every now and again a little fist emerged, opened and closed.

  The little fist rocked her. Until now Dovey hadn’t allowed herself to think about Promise’s whereabouts, where he might now be lying, dead or alive. Secretly, she thought he was dead. But, seeing that little fist, she had a sudden vision of him, cold and wet and trembling in the wind, waiting in George Walton’s cornfield south of town, half buried by mud, two little fists and two little bare feet pushing up toward the sky in those odd jerky motions babies make. Waiting and waiting. Waiting for someone to come along and look down and say oh. The corn not more than knee high, a tender translucent green, rustling in the breeze.

  Sometimes, and she’d never told a soul this, not even Virgil, for fear of being thought dotty, Dovey saw things. These sightings, if you could call them that, happened just once in a long while. Years would go by when she’d forget about them, but then one would tiptoe in, strange but strangely accurate, not a dream but dreamlike: quicksilver. The first time was when she was a girl and she had a vision of Erlene Phillips from across the street being bitten by a snake. The next day the copperhead sunning itself on Mrs. P’s back stoop found her ankle. Another time, she saw Lyle Smith, a boy she knew, choke on a chicken bone, and choke he did the following Sunday night at a church supper, requiring Dr. Juber, who luckily happened to be sitting nearby, to cut a hole in his throat with the very knife he’d just used to cut the piece of rump roast on his plate.

  Was it possible their baby was buried in mud, half dead in George Walton’s cornfield? Possible that he was still alive?

  She dropped the can of potted meat back onto the table, forgetting she’d offered it to the girl, forgetting the girl was even there, and held on to the table’s edge. Should she hightail it over to George Walton’s field and see for herself? Problem was it was black as pitch outside, and still raining. Not to speak of how she’d manage to get there.

  THE GIRL eyed the can, dog-like. She’d settled herself into the chair and the baby, now asleep, onto her lap, his head on her knees, half under the table.

  Dovey wanted to ask how long she intended on staying. Instead she asked, “You got a bottle for that baby when he wake up?”

  “I’ve got some powdered formula and a bottle and nipple in that sack there. You got some water?”

  Food was one thing, water another. There was precious little, and Virgil and Dreama would be coming in thirsty. But this was a baby. Dovey got up and went over to the corner of the room and got the jug the Red Cross lady had brought that morning. “Don’t spill it. It’s all we got.” A week ago, she would never have dreamed of speaking to a white girl in that tone.

  The girl didn’t seem to take offense. She rooted around in her knapsack and handed Dovey the baby’s bottle. “It’s just for him. I don’t need any.”

  Dovey took the jug to the table and poured the water into the bottle until it was three-quarters full. She pulled up a corner of her dress to cover her fingers, then squeezed the nipple shut and shook the bottle. She handed it back to the girl. The baby slept on, his breathing raspy but regular.

  “I’m going to wait until he wakes up,” the girl murmured, setting the bottle back on the table. “I’m sorry to have to use your water.” She looked at the jug, now half empty.

  Dovey poured her a small glass and she gulped it down. “Thank you. That’s all I’ll be needing,” she said apologetically.

  “Where’d you end up finding him?” asked Dovey.

  “You’ll never believe it,” said the girl and then proceeded to tell her about pulling him out of the crepe myrtle bush like Moses in the bulrushes and taking care of him through thick and thin and their mother losing not only her leg but her good sense and denying her own child and the daddy taking off at the blink of an eye (probably looking for Etherene, Dovey inserted), leaving the girl, whose name was Jo, to take care of her baby brother, whose name, Jo informed her, was Tommy. A silly name.

  Almost as an afterthought, the girl added, “And now I’m on the lam because I’m scared they’re going to take him.” Her eyes returned to the can of potted meat on the table.

  Dovey reached for the can opener and opened the can. She gave it to the girl, along with a spoon, and the girl began to eat, holding the can with the hand on her bad arm, eating with the hand on the good, the baby balanced on her knees. She finished within seconds, scraping the sides of the can, then handed it back. “Much obliged.”

  Dovey took it outside to the oil can. Then she stood on the top step of the stairs leading to the boxcar and peered out into the dark. Up and down the row of boxcars, slivers of candlelight filtered through th
e sackcloth that covered the doors. Where were Dreama and Virgil? Tomorrow she would insist on going out with them, tomorrow she wasn’t going to be stuck in a gloomy old boxcar all day. She needed to use the outhouse, but didn’t cotton to the idea of Virgil and Dreama stumbling in dead tired to find the white girl sitting there, taking up the whole place with her big old self. She especially didn’t like the thought of Dreama being confronted with that baby. The girl was sad enough. That morning she’d refused to eat before heading out. Dovey had quickly stashed a few pieces of that useless bread in the pocket of her dress.

  But Dovey had to go. She wasn’t about to squat over the chamber pot with a white girl watching, and the older she got the less wise it was to wait. She sat and scooted down the steps, then moved through the dark, down the row between the cars favoring her good foot only slightly now. She should have taken the lantern, but then she’d have to go back inside and explain to the girl that she had to do her private business. Better to do it quickly and get back before Virgil and Dreama came in.