Up at the house, the day seemed to go from morning to evening with one step. His heartbeat slowed a little; he was most comfortable in darkness.
“I sure do like it up here,” she threw over her shoulder.
* * *
Lovey, now seated on a tree trunk, legs crossed, dandelion stuck behind one ear, lips wet, said, “Nice and cool, don’t you think?” Hands rubbing her knees, down between her legs, up where breasts were just starting to bloom.
Vonnie’s mouth went dry.
“Don’t you think?” she said again.
“You were told not to come up here,” he whispered, legs weak.
“But,” Lovey said, and undid the first button of her gray blouse, “it’s so much cooler here.” Second button now. “And quiet.” Third button. “And private.”
No T-shirt, just skin and brown freckles that looked like eyes. And the blue eagle dangling from the leather strap on her wrist. He raised his hand, pointed a steady finger, and opened his mouth to ask, “How you get ahold of that?” But what came out was:
“What you trying to do to me?”
“What you want me to do?”
___________________
By the time Lovey smirked and slung, “You mean gorgeous ass,” at them and then sauntered out of the room, leaving behind gaping mouths and climbing eyebrows, Helen knew that Vonnie had gotten to her.
Who knew gorgeous could be made to sound so foul. But Lovey had a way with words, she could take sweet and make it sound like shit with the flick of her tongue.
And now her reply to Suce’s, “Get your ass on outta here wit dem red whore gloves on,” was bouncing between them and off the walls and ringing louder than the town hall bell.
“What she say?” Suce asked, her head cocked to one side, hand floating in midair, the pinch of chewing tobacco forgotten between her index finger and thumb.
“She said gorgeous ass,” Wella repeated, and tossed a pecan shell into the crackling flames of the fireplace.
The night shifted outside the window, then the front door pushed open and Vonnie stepped through, bringing the cool evening air with him. His face was drawn, looked ragged beneath the flaxen light that came off the kerosene lamps. He’d lost some weight too—his clothes hung on him—and he shuffled instead of walked.
“Evenin’,” he muttered as he removed his hat from his head and hung it on the nail by the door.
The women just stared back at him.
“What?” Vonnie said as he started toward them.
“Did you tell Lovey she had a gorgeous ass?” Beka snapped suddenly.
Surprised at Beka’s forcefulness, Helen found herself quickly ingesting air and wincing at the bite in her sister’s words.
Suce’s face was still working at recovering from Lovey’s slur, and now she turned her astonished gaze on Beka. “What you say, gal?”
Had she actually said it out loud?
“She must have heard it from somewhere.” Beka’s recovery was weak; Helen’s expression told her so.
“And that somewhere is Vonnie?” Suce blinked and finally stuffed the tobacco into the corner of her mouth. “Why in the world would your brother, my son, say something like that to his niece?” she sputtered, and her lips glistened brown. “His own flesh and blood?” Her head shook in disbelief.
He wouldn’t say something like that. Wouldn’t say anything at all, Helen thought to herself, not unless the game had changed.
Vonnie pressed the tip of his tongue against the bottom row of his teeth, but his face remained stagnant.
* * *
The game had changed indeed. There was no flint and flame, no shameful eyes that looked away from him in moonlit bedrooms.
Lovey had changed the game. She had become the stalker and he had become the prey.
Enticing him, teasing him, sprawled out on that swinging porch chair with one leg thrown up over the wooden back, the other leg dangling over the edge, dress hiked damn near up to her waist.
And those fucking red gloves.
He would try to pretend not to see her, but she wanted him to. Well, she practically handed herself over to him the day he tried to walk past her and she snatched at his pants leg and sang, “Hey, Vonnie,” sounding everything like her mama.
He had turned to her and said, “You forgetting something, ain’t you?” And his voice, the one that never rose or dipped, stalled and then cracked when he said it.
Lovey in that chair just a-swinging and the air lifting the light material of her dress so that he could see the insides of her thighs, and Lovey smiling at how easily she’d unnerved him. Her eyes laughing at the power she had over him.
“Uncle Vonnie.” The words slithered from her mouth and something cold wrapped itself around his spine.
He hadn’t touched her the first time he followed her up to the big house. He’d only stared at the brown dots on her chest, watched the spinning dandelion. And when she’d stopped talking and opened her legs wide and started humming, he’d listened, but he didn’t touch her.
Two days later, same thing: brown dots, spinning dandelion, humming that now sounded like flapping wings, her laughter like a roar.
Lions roar, don’t they?
He’d read it someplace, read about roaring lions, but had never heard it until then.
How could that be? How could the sound of a lion be coming out of Lovey’s mouth?
Didn’t matter; she stripped down naked and extended her hand to him.
He asked again, “What you trying to do to me?”
And her response had been a hard kiss, her hands everywhere on him, ripping at his shirt, cutting through his skin. Her fingers like claws, like talons . . .
And she’d sprouted wings, yes she did! They popped right out of her back. Broad, black wings that flapped and then curled and enclosed them both.
Yes, he’d said it, Lord help him, God save him—even though the devil had already laid claim to him—he’d said it over and over again while his bare ass rubbed against the top of that stump, Lovey up on his lap, his hands gripping her small round behind and her riding him until his eyes rolled back into his head.
He didn’t get any pleasure from it. If he could tell them that, he would.
Not one bit.
In fact, he’d hated every hellified moment of it.
She felt like fire up inside of her, hot boiling lava. It was like sticking his dick into a boiling pot of beans, and he’d screamed—hadn’t they heard him?
Screamed and tried to throw her off of him, but she’d held fast and those wings pressed tight and she told him to say it. She said, “Say I’ve got a gorgeous ass!”
All he could do was cry and beg and pray and tell her how much it hurt.
“Say it! Say it!” she ordered, and dug those talons into his neck.
And finally he did.
* * *
“What’s this you saying?” Vonnie finally asked, feigning ignorance.
Suce waved her hand and dismissed the whole sordid situation. “That child just acting the fool as usual,” she said as she leaned back into her rocking chair and began working the tobacco in her mouth. “Go on, baby girl, and get my can from off the back porch,” Suce called to Wella.
What Beka had said sounded ridiculous to Suce, and she’d turned a crooked eye on Beka, but Vonnie hadn’t missed it swinging back his way.
___________________
Like taking a wife could fix any of it.
Like it could change what he’d done to them, bring Lillie back, and erase the crooked look Suce had slung his way three months earlier.
Well, he had to do something. Suce’s eyes had swung his way and asked, Well, did you? even though her mouth hadn’t said a word.
So he had to do something, because Lovey was fucking him dry. Killing him slowly from the inside out.
It was all he could do to get up in the morning. Legs weak, eyes swollen, back hurting, and his dick refusing to stiffen for anything—not even his morning piss. Not
hing except Lovey-Lillie-Lovey—he didn’t know who or what or which.
So he had to do something.
Black feathers stuck in his hair, tucked in his pockets, and Suce watching him sideways, asking, “Where these feathers coming from all of a sudden?”
He wanted to say, Lovey got wings, got claws, and roar like a lion. The horses get skittish and run when she around; ain’t you seen that, haven’t you noticed? She ain’t human, she something from hell. I want to kill her, but it look like she gonna kill me first. Help.
But he didn’t, so he just said, “Blackbirds.”
“Blackbirds?” Suce didn’t say any more than that.
* * *
The nylon-clad leg stepped out of the passenger side of the pickup.
District trash, Beka mused as she watched Sawyer’s heel sink into the damp Georgia soil.
“Won’t need those ’cept on Sunday.” Suce snuffed, and pointed down at Sawyer’s black pumps.
* * *
“Can’t offer you much, but I got a house and you won’t have to lay up under anyone but me.”
That was his proposal.
Sawyer considered his words as she watched him pull up his pants, sit, and then bend over to put on his boots. He was getting thin and the whites of his eyes had taken on a yellowish-brown tint.
Not eating right, not sleeping well, working too hard, she thought.
But she could find no justification for the angry welts on his back, no matter how hard she searched.
“Okay,” she said, and packed up the few things that she owned.
No fanfare. He didn’t want any of that. Just the minister in the sitting room, Beka, Suce, Helen, and the children looking on. There was a moment when he thought Lovey was going to shout out some obscenity or sprout wings and roar, but she’d just sneezed and then yawned loudly.
He’d agreed to a honeymoon—one night in the back room of a friend’s house, on the outskirts of Myanmar.
Now back home, his new wife smiling sweetly as she hobbled her way across the moist earth. Vonnie thought by taking a wife, he could make everything that had been wrong, right again. But no wife or the children that would follow could ever fix what he’d broken.
___________________
Things changed outside of that saltbox, but few things changed within it until Helen came home one evening from a day of scrubbing toilets and tile, chastising white children, and preparing and stewing meat, and announced, “I’m headed north in two weeks.”
Suce, bent now, shuffling and completely gray, talking out loud to the spirits that haunted her and laughing at inappropriate times, blinked at her girl child and said, “Sure ’nuff?”
“Yes, Mama,” Helen said and pulled the quilt up a bit so she could tuck it beneath Suce’s fat chin.
“Well, I s’pose it was coming. Mama told me so.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Didn’t you, Mama?” Suce said, and looked off to the empty space to her left. “Sure did.”
The house was crowded, even with the three new rooms Vonnie had built on to accommodate the babies that Sawyer pushed out one year after another.
“Seeds need to scatter.” Suce laughed and scratched hard at her scalp.
“They sure do,” Helen said, and reached for the comb on the bureau. “Let me get that for you, Mama.”
___________________
Beka cried buckets and begged Helen to stay.
“Can’t,” Helen said matter-of-factly, “but you can come along.”
“I’m scared to leave,” Beka sputtered through her tears.
“You should be scared to stay,” Helen said, and folded a skirt in half and set it gently down into her suitcase.
“He ain’t touched me—us—in years,” Beka countered, and wiped at her wet face.
“Maybe not, but that don’t change what he done. And what about Lovey?”
Beka went quiet.
Lovey—at school selling pussy look-sees for a penny. A touch cost five cents. She had the poor sharecropper boys stealing dimes to push into it. In a minute, she’d either be pregnant or working full-time in the District.
“That ain’t true.” Beka sniffled. “What they sayin’ ’bout her ain’t true.”
“Uh-huh,” Helen said as she examined a worn black skirt and then tossed it to the side. “Too crowded here,” she went on in a dreamy voice. “Harlem calling me.”
“Harlem ain’t never called a soul in its life!”
“Calling me, though.” Helen laughed. “Calling you too, but you just too stubborn to hear it.”
___________________
By the time Sawyer looked up and saw Vonnie gawking at the neighbor’s daughter, she was big with her fourth child and had none of the beauty that came with it. All that glamour had been replaced with Sandersville dust and the hard lines of disappointment that came along with being black and Southern in America.
Her body flinched, and her heart flickered with jealousy inside her chest as she eyed the pretty young girl with the begging eyes and large ass.
“Why you eyeballing her like that?” Sawyer asked one day when she couldn’t hold her tongue anymore.
What made it nasty was the fact that he was cradling their young son in his arms.
“Ain’t nobody eyeballing that little girl.” Vonnie’s eyes didn’t break away immediately, but they slid down Cora’s ass, traveled along the dirt ground some, and then climbed up to his son’s sleeping face.
“I ain’t blind. I know what I saw.”
“Woman, don’t get up under my skin today, hear?”
Sawyer watched him for a moment. Thought about what she could have and what she did have. Both sides held nothing, and so she sucked her teeth, held her tongue, and wobbled back into the house.
___________________
Then Suce died.
In her sleep.
Smiling.
Buried her ’longside Papa.
’Longside the babies who didn’t make it.
And the one who didn’t make it all the way.
Not too far from her mother.
And brothers.
After Mama died, we felt all alone in the world.
Crying for them every now and again, even though we were mamas and papas ourselves.
Don’t matter; we was their children first.
And last.
Always.
Amen.
___________________
Dumpling sat in the front pew, hands folded neatly in her lap. New dress straight from Harlem, straight from Aunt Helen with a note that just said, Soon.
“What that mean, Aunt Beka?” Dumpling had inquired.
“Don’t know,” Beka said, folding the paper into quarters and tucking it deep into the cup of her brassiere.
Soon didn’t mean much to Beka. Getting older by the minute. Gray hair crowding her head like weeds. The only man in her life was the memory of a long-ago Phila-del-phia man who had held her hand and patiently guided her across a ballroom floor.
Soon? What the hell could she connect that to? Nothing more than an answer to myriad questions:
When dinner gonna be done?
When the kids coming home?
When this lye gonna come outta my hair?
Soon didn’t mean shit. But she kept the notes anyway, just in case one day it could.
Now Dumpling was sitting there in her new blue dress with the crinoline slip that she couldn’t keep her fingers from fiddling with, even though Beka kept nudging her with her elbow and then using her chin to indicate that it was the Bible Dumpling should be focused on.
* * *
Twelve years old and short. The baby fat finally slipping away from some places but still hanging on to others. Breasts coming in, behind too, but her face is all baby and she’s still a tomboy, even though her interest in the crinoline is a sign that all of that is about to change.
Many things are about to change.
Vonnie is white-haired with sullen red eyes and has fa
thered six children by the time he decides to swap planting cotton for peanuts. He spends more and more time away from home, afraid to be around Lovey, even around his own daughters—hard on the boys though, ’specially after a jar of corn liquor and a cheap cigar.
Sawyer doesn’t know how it is she keeps coming up pregnant. He barely touches her anymore, except maybe to knock her down or up against a wall.
___________________
Easter Sunday.
Eggs dyed every color of the rainbow and hidden everywhere—rabbit holes, beneath the porch steps, up in abandoned robins’ nests. The children rip, run, search, and squeal while the adults sit quietly on the porch, fanning themselves, sipping sweet tea, and cradling the one who is too young to walk.
A ham baking in the oven. Sweet-potato pies cooling on windowsills, and the slow build of the crickets’ serenade all around them as the sun beams down hot and searing.
First Beka rises to go in to check on the ham. Sawyer follows, the sleeping small one in her arm.
Just Vonnie is left, corn liquor jar in one hand, stinking cheap cigar in the other.
“Uncle Vonnie, Uncle Vonnie!” Dumpling bounds up the steps from the yard. She stands before him, hem of her dress turned up and gathered in her hands, something cradled in the material.
“What you got there?” he asks, and leans forward.
“Eggs,” Dumpling spouts proudly and moves closer so that he can see.
“Sure ’nuff. A hell of a lot too.” He laughs.
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