Sugar

by Bernice McFadden

  She wanted him to say her name one more time, not that it would have made a difference in the life she’d chosen to keep when she swung that door open for Lappy, but so she could feel something, for the last time.

  Seth stood in the yard and watched as Lappy Clayton stepped into Sugar’s home and closed the door behind him. Seth couldn’t stop shaking his head. He couldn’t stop clenching and unclenching his fists.

  What had just happened?

  “Lying bitch! If she had a man, why didn’t she come out and say so?! Why!”

  His parents stood behind him, saying nothing, not even breathing. Pearl’s mouth hung open, and disbelief spread quickly across her face as she watched the scenario unfold before her. What the hell was Sugar doing?

  Seth stormed past them and slammed into the house. By the time Pearl and Joe got up to the door of his room, half his clothes were already in his suitcase. His face was filled with anger.

  “Seth.” Pearl wouldn’t cross the threshold. She felt that Seth’s anger would surely blind him and possibly cause him to mistake her for someone else. “Seth?” she called again, above the slamming dresser drawers.

  “Mamma.” He answered between clenched teeth, then held up one hand and looked at her like she was the enemy.

  Joe placed his hands firmly on her shoulders and backed her away from the room. She turned questioning, concerned eyes on her husband. “He a man, let him deal with this as a man,” Joe said. His words usually made sense to Pearl, but now they were meaningless bunches of letters.

  “Seth, baby, please. What you doing? You ain’t planning on leaving right now, tonight?”

  Seth moved past them like the wind. Joe and Pearl followed. He was halfway out the door before his father’s voice stopped him. “Boy!”

  Seth’s face was wet with angry hot tears. What he wanted was to just keep moving, let the cool air dry his face and maybe settle his soul. He wanted out of that house, away from Sugar, Bigelow, and all of the bad things that always seemed to happen there.

  “You ain’t gonna disrespect me and your mamma by just slamming out of this house and not saying good-bye, I don’t care what’s paining you.” Joe knew his son was hurting, he felt the pain his son was experiencing. It spilled from Seth, infecting both of them.

  He wiped at his tears, and turned to face his parents. His face was a pot of emotion, swirling and bubbling, threatening to boil over. He brushed his trembling lips against his mother’s cheek, moving quickly away from her so as not to get caught in her embrace. He shook his father’s hand. Pearl wept as Seth sat in his car, engine running, staring at the shadows that moved behind the thin curtains of Sugar’s bedroom. He heard Lappy’s laughter and then the lights went out. Seth’s tires screamed against the black tarmac, and then he was gone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  PAIN was an unwanted friend of Sugar’s. She couldn’t seem to get away from it, no matter where she went. Sugar looked behind her and pain was there. Looked beside her and pain was there, looked ahead and pain was beckoning her to hurry and catch up.

  From the moment Lappy entered her house, she knew he had been drinking and drugging for most of the day. His face was haggard and his eyes bloodshot. He smelled of booze and reefer. When Lappy lay down on top of Sugar, pain came and lay down on top of him, making Sugar’s burden and misery greater. Sugar just pulled in as much air as her lungs would hold and let them both get on with what they had been destined to do.

  She didn’t ask where his friend was, or if she was gonna get the same amount of money for just doing him. She didn’t want to speak because she was still hearing Seth’s voice calling to her in the corner of her mind. It was a light echo that was quickly fading into the darkness that surrounded her and she strained to hear it over the creaking of the bedsprings and the howl of wind outside her window.

  She looked up and over the shoulder of Lappy and caught sight of the dry leaves flying by like wingless birds. The cold that followed the morning gale was seeping in fast and all she could think of was, she should have lit the fireplace. But then she remembered she didn’t have any firewood. And then she remembered she didn’t have no Seth either.

  “Who you think you are, huh? Who you!” He yelled and raised his hand as if to strike her. Sugar cringed and waited for the impact. “You bitch. I set you up at the Memphis Roll, I get you your customers and you treat me like some junkyard dog! Nah, baby, it don’t work that way. You hear me, Sugar? I’m the man and you the bitch!” His words were hot and angry.

  Lappy lowered his hand and turned Sugar roughly over, taking her from behind. She didn’t even stop him when he began to get rough and scream obscenities at her. “You gonna learn your place. You hear me, you whoring bitch!”

  She felt his hands on the back of her thighs and the only thing Sugar could think of were clusters of blackberries. She felt his tongue on her back and she saw the smooth stones that sat in the shallow part of Hodges Lake. With each of Lappy’s thrusts Sugar could hear Seth calling her a lying bitch.

  “Look up at me, gal,” he says. “You embarrassed me. Made me look like a piece of shit. Everybody saw it. You and your friends.” “Friends” came out wet and obscene. “Sitting up in the Roll like they own it. Like they had something to do with you being there.” Lappy was breathing heavy like he needed air, sweating like the temperature just rose forty degrees instead of dropping twenty. He clutched his stomach as if in pain, but the smile that spread across his face said something different.

  Sugar looked up past that mouth and into his eyes and there she saw what Jude saw fifteen years earlier, and she wasn’t even scared.

  Poor Sugar lay beneath Lappy waiting for the end, but realizing, after he began to speak, that she was just at the beginning. His words would have left her emotionally handicapped had it not been for the faith she did not know she possessed.

  Lappy laughed with glee and began his tale where he should have climaxed. His voice was thick and he dribbled hot spit into the folds of Sugar’s ear. His breath was like fire on her cheek and she could feel his heart beating so hard against her chest that she thought he would drop dead on top of her. But the more he spoke, the faster he slammed into her. It was as if the words alone motivated him, but Sugar was no more than a hole in the mattress by then. Her body had gone numb a lifetime ago.

  He spoke of a car trip. A ride through the Arkansas countryside. Drunk and speeding down a lonely country road in an almost new 1936 Ford. He remembered the heat of the day and the sound of the car’s engine as it suddenly shut down. Not knowing much about cars except how to drive them, he cussed most of the two miles he walked up the road in the hot sun toward Bigelow. He was just rounding a bend in the dirt road when he saw the ribbons, yellow and light, appearing for brief instances above the tall colorful wildflowers. Had the girl stopped jumping, the flowers would have hidden her completely from sight, but he saw the ribbons and evil propelled him toward her.

  The girl smiled when she saw him coming, pushing the flowers aside and down, crushing them beneath his fine leather shoes. She wouldn’t have been there, but she was supposed to meet a friend. A boy from Sunday school who’d passed her a note that said she was pretty and that he liked her. Liked her very much. She liked him too and had liked him for a good many years of her youth. She thought it was funny how they’d been in the same Sunday school class for years, and only this year had he finally noticed her.

  Can’t tell Mamma and Daddy, she’d thought as she stuffed the note into her brand-new white laced brassiere. She liked the way the paper felt against her budding breasts. “Knobs” her mother called them.

  No, they would forbid it. “You don’t meet no boy no wherever. A well-raised young man would come to your house, sit down with your family.” She’d heard it a million times from her mamma’s mouth and had never defied her, but today, today was different.

  The girl wouldn’t have been jumping up and down either, but she couldn’t see the road over the flowers, couldn’t see if he w
as coming along. She was too scared to stand too close to the road, too far out in the open, someone would see and tell her parents. So she stayed hidden in the thick field of flowers and jumped up every once in a while, snatching peeks at the road.

  She smiled at Lappy because she was young and innocent. Nevertheless, her heart had jumped a bit at Lappy’s approach and the smell of liquor that preceded him. The path through the flowers was a popular shortcut among the locals, but the girl did not find his face familiar. And if he was not familiar to her, then she was not familiar to him and he couldn’t tell on her. And if he could, who would he tell? He didn’t know whose child she was.

  The thought of running like the wind did not even cross her mind until Lappy’s heavy hand was crushing her windpipe.

  Lappy’s hands were closing hard around Sugar’s own windpipe as he told her how Jude’s scared eyes pleaded, how her knees buckled under his strength.

  “She didn’t die quick, you know,” he said quietly, his eyes turned up, remembering his deed. His hand went slack around Sugar’s throat; just enough to let a piece of air through. She gagged and felt her stomach turn over.

  It was true, the girl’s life stubbornly left her body in spastic jerks and twitches that rustled the long fragile stems of the flowers and drove her body deeper into the soft earth, soiling her white and yellow dress.

  Lappy watched until death had replaced life and then he raised the child’s dress above her waist and stared down at the clean white cotton panties that seemed to glow against her smooth brown skin. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled from it the switchblade he carried for protection and slowly cut the material away from her body. She was still a child and only barely a woman. Hair as light and sparse as the coat of a newborn cat covered the flesh that sheltered her womanhood.

  Lappy lowered his face and inhaled her scent. He hurridly unzipped his pants and removed his penis. He tried to enter her, but her flesh was young and did not give enough to allow him inside. He cussed in frustration and spat in her face. His hand was up now, up over the girl, the blade glimmering in the high afternoon sun and then it was down, slicing through her skin, splintering her pelvis bone. Over and over again, until he’d separated her life-producing organs from her body.

  Then he looked at her, lying there, her dress rolled up to her neck, a pool of blood covering her lower section, and he saw the eyes, wide open and staring. He saw himself in those eyes. He looked down at his life-taking hands and tried to shake away the murderous qualities they now possessed.

  Lappy threw the young girl’s vagina beside her, and walked away, looking back once only to see if anyone was witness to his crime before continuing down the road toward Bigelow.

  He’d found out the girl’s name a day later when the news of the murder spread like wildfire through ten towns.

  Jude.

  His hand tightened around Sugar’s throat again and then loosened. He did not want to choke the life from her, he wanted to beat it out of her.

  “I’ma do you just like I did her. This time though, it’s gonna be sweeter ’cause you done gone and given me a reason to kill your ass!” He slapped her hard across her face and laughed.

  It seemed as though the laughter went on for days. Sugar’s ears were filled with it and then suddenly he stopped. His face changed and he leaned in close to her until their noses touched. “You know,” he said with a slight look of wonder in his face,

  “you kinda look like her.” They remained like that for some time. Noses touching. And then he laughed again and yelled, “Jude’s waiting for you!”

  Heavy-fisted blows rained down on Sugar’s face until her nose spouted blood and her eyes swelled shut. His hands wrapped around her throat for the third time, stopping the passage of air, causing her chest to swell hot and the darkness behind her eyes to come forward and pull her in.

  The howl of a wild animal is what yanked her back from death’s grip and into the swirling gray room. Sugar could not open her mouth and she believed it must have been cut away from her face, because she felt nothingness there. The howling increased and held on until the pitch became unbearable and then it faded, only to gain momentum seconds later. She realized, after some time, that the howling was not that of a wild animal, but the combination of wind and wild man.

  Fire gauged itself through her navel, long flaming fingers reached out and ignited her womb so that no life would ever live there. The pain was a hurricane raging through her body seeking release in a scream that would never come.

  She saw Jude’s eyes. Those young wet eyes. Like buckets of water, looking down on her. Looking sad for her. She wanted death and asked for it out loud, “God please let me die!”

  Pearl saw Lappy leave beneath a black and mournful sky. The moon was hidden and not a star lent light. He left from the front door, same door he came through, except this time he didn’t close it. He left it open, swinging hopelessly in the wind.

  Pearl huffed and shook her head in disgust. She’d not slept. Not even one wink. First sadness kept her awake, then anger, then concern and finally dread. Joe would not leave her, and so he settled himself in the living room on the couch.

  Pearl looked out the window again. Lappy’s skin was glowing dim in the vast dark purple of the departing night. Red splattered his back, neck and hands, giving the illusion that he was wounded. Pearl watched, wondering if the lack of sleep was playing tricks on her eyes.

  Lappy was whistling, his shirt thrown over one bare shoulder as he walked slowly toward his car. He stopped short of the driver’s side door and bent over and puked. Pearl’s hands came quickly to her mouth and her eyes widened. He turned around, feeling her presence, her watching eyes, and stared directly at the curtain that hid her. Puke dripped from the sides of his mouth and clung to his lower lip. His eyes seemed to glow, and the sight of them sent icy shivers up and down her spine. He smiled and then waved gaily at her.

  Pearl’s heart was beating so loud and fast, she thought she would faint right then and there. He looked up toward the silent second floor of Sugar’s house and then climbed into his car and drove off.

  Fear should have kept her welded to the spot behind the curtain. Fear should have sent her running to Joe’s sleeping side, but instead fear sent her running from the safety of her home and straight through that open front door up to Sugar’s room.

  Pearl stood at the threshold of Sugar’s bedroom as the pre-dawn light melted away the gray of the room. There was a smell like wet steel lingering in the air. Her heart began to sink, sink deep into her chest, trying to hide from the sight it was sure awaited. She stepped in, and a feeling so familiar and horrible took her by the hand and led her to a place she had been fifteen years earlier.

  Among the crumpled, blood-soaked sheets lay Sugar. Pearl reached down to touch the purple, swollen face of her friend and it was 1940 all over again.

  This time, however, Pearl’s sanity was saved, by the grace of God, her sanity was saved. Sugar’s eyes fluttered and then opened.

  Her voice found her, after fifteen years her voice came and Pearl screamed until her throat closed up and Joe stood beside her, shotgun in hand.

  Hours later, Sugar heard voices around her. “She needs to be in a hospital.”

  The voice came from above her. It was a stern disinfected voice. The sharp snap of rubber gloves followed the stringent words and then she heard Joe. “Well this here is the way we want it. No hospital, just home.”

  “She could set up an infection in any number of places on her body. Was the police notified?”

  “Dr. Williams, maybe you’ve forgotten where you are. This here is Bigelow. The law don’t care none about us and what we do to one another. It just don’t make no sense getting them involved in something they could only make worse, now do it?” Joe’s voice was calm, but his annoyance at the doctor’s ignorance was evident.

  Sugar could hear footsteps and the voices of Joe and Dr. Williams fading as they traveled down the stairs and out the fr
ont door. She felt a cool wet cloth move slowly across her forehead, a hand constantly brushing against her own and the sound of rapid prayers.

  She was alive. For some reason God had spared her. But Sugar would never look at it that way. She had asked God for only one thing in her entire life, and he had not granted it.

  God had sent Sugar to the brink of death, dangled it before her and then snatched it away, hurling her back to Joe and Pearl Taylor. Three weeks and four days passed before Sugar was able to stand. Lappy had done a job on her. Cutting deep into her stomach, but somehow missing her vital organs. Bruised purple fingerprints remained wrapped around Sugar’s throat, broken skin around her cheekbones and the soft underside of her eyes would heal and scar blacker than her midnight skin.

  She dropped down in weight, unwilling or unable to eat. She did not speak or let her eyes wander across the soft faces of her saviors. Joe’s strong arms lifted her from her bed and carried her gently from the room and into the bathroom. He sat her on the toilet, holding her body erect as Pearl undressed her, before he placed her into the warm soapy water of the bathtub. They washed her together. Husband and wife. Father and mother. They washed her as if she belonged to them.

  They took turns feeding her or speaking small words of hope, faith and encouragement. The hugs came often accompanied by quiet easy kisses on the slope of her cheek and the brim of her head lulling her to sleep or waking her to the breaking day.

  Time’s seamlessness enwrapped her and when the blue haze of hopelessness finally faded away into the morning mist of the twentieth day, Sugar decided that her time in Bigelow had come to an end.

  “Miss Pearl.” Sugar’s words were not spoken, but seemed to be a part of a weary breath taken years earlier. Pearl turned slowly toward the dark living room and her heart stopped and started again with the first step she managed into the room.