“So you don’t want her no more.” Eddie crossed his arms and turned to me. “How’s that feel?”
“It’s true?” I asked, using the wall behind me to rise to my feet. “Are you really my …”
“Yes. Only because I gave birth to you.” She shook her head. “But I never was your ma like Mary’s been. She’s been good to you.”
Winnie didn’t reach for me the way Mama would have. She didn’t wonder about my swollen eye or cracked lips. The way she looked at me was the way somebody would look at a wounded cat she was too afraid to touch.
It was just as well. I didn’t want her hands on me, anyway.
If it was true, that she’d left me when I was too little to do anything for myself, then I’d been unwanted from the beginning.
She hadn’t wanted me.
She was nothing but a stranger to me. I couldn’t figure out why that made my heart ache so deep.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Eddie had finally fallen asleep, sitting upright against the wall across the room from Winnie and me. He’d put a padlock on the doors, and the key was tightly held in his hand. In his other hand, he had a pistol loaded and cocked. His head tilted back, and his mouth hung open.
I hoped a whole cup of dust would fall past his lips and that he’d choke on it.
The lantern sat on the floor between Winnie and me. The flickering light played on her soft skin. I couldn’t make a guess at how old she was. In that gentle light, she seemed younger than I would have thought before.
She’d promised to look after me while Eddie slept. He told her to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid. When he’d said that, I thought of about half-a-dozen things to sass at him, but decided to keep my mouth shut instead.
“I’m hungry,” I said after Eddie’d been asleep for a bit. “He didn’t bring any food.”
The way she looked at me, her eyebrows lowering, I figured she didn’t know I was asking for something to eat. Mama would have understood. Mama would have found something for me to eat. I asked Winnie if she had anything in her purse. Rummaging through her handbag, she found a few pieces of chewing gum.
“Sorry I don’t got no food,” she said, watching me chew on the gum. “I wish I’d have put a couple crackers in my purse.”
“This is fine.” I had to keep swallowing, but the spit cut the edge off my thirst.
“I’m sorry for a lot of things.” She nodded and turned her eyes to her fingers. “I am.”
Her nails were chewed and ragged. Mama’d told me that ladies didn’t bite their nails, and I wondered what she would have said to know that Winnie did. When she realized I was looking at them, she curled her fingers into her palms.
“Why didn’t anybody tell me? About you?” I asked.
“It wasn’t all that easy, Pearl.”
She reached into her purse again and pulled out a small picture. It had the same black paper scraps glued to the backside as the one I’d found in Eddie’s box.
“Tom—your father—he gave this to me.” She held it in the palm of her hand. “He took a couple out of an album in his office. Said he felt bad that I didn’t have any photos of you.”
She handed it to me. It was of me sitting on our front steps, smiling as wide as I could, a big hair bow on the top of my head. I remembered that day. I’d lost my tooth during Sunday dinner. The sight of my own blood had frightened me. I feared that the flow wouldn’t stop. But it had and quick.
“Did you ever get them birthday cards?” she asked. “I got you one every year.”
I nodded, thinking about them all sitting in the pages of my fairy-tale book. “You never signed them,” I said.
“Your father didn’t think I oughta.”
“Did you and my daddy …” I left off, not knowing how to ask how a man and woman would be together to make a baby.
Winnie leaned closer to me. “What are you asking?”
“Did you fornicate with him?”
“I never was with Tom like that. He never would’ve did that.” She took the picture from me and put it back in her purse. “He’s a real good man. He’d never stray from Mary.”
“Who is my father?” I asked, glancing at Eddie sleeping with his mouth so wide and his teeth all rotting. I prayed it wasn’t him.
“You got Tom Spence. He’s good to you,” she said.
“But who’s my real father?”
“I don’t think you got to know that.” She lifted one of her hands to her mouth and worked at chewing a nail. “I hate myself for letting the man be anything to you.”
“Was it …” I stopped myself, needed to swallow. “Was it Eddie?”
“No.” She shook her head. “No. I never knew him back then.”
“I’m glad it’s not him,” I whispered.
Her eyelids only lifted halfway up when she looked right at me. “I’m afraid it’s worse than that.”
My heart sunk. “Who?”
“You gotta understand. I was young when I met him. He was good to me. He’d pick flowers for me and took me out to dinner every once in a while.” She blinked fast. “He wasn’t bad to me then. Nobody’d ever been so nice to me.”
“Who was it?” I asked. “Who is my father?”
“Jimmy DuPre.” She squinted at me. “I hate that it was him, but it’s the truth.”
The whole world might as well have dropped out from under me. I would have been happy to sink into nothing and never feel another thing again.
The sweet gum in my mouth turned to tasting like poison. The blood that moved through my body was from a bad and evil man. A person who would have killed the man I had called “Daddy” since I could babble words.
Rat-faced Jimmy DuPre was part of me, and I was part of him.
I got sick all over the front of my nightie.
Winnie didn’t help me clean myself up. What she did do was pull back, disgusted by me. Mama would have moved heaven and earth to get me into a fresh dress and feeling better.
Real mothers were the ones who cleaned up the sick and pushed away the tears and hugged a child tight around the neck. Blood or no, that was what they did.
Winnie watched me push the mess off myself and into the dirt.
“I never was meant to be a mother.” She frowned at me when I spit. “I wasn’t planning on keeping you. Back then there was a doctor who’d take care of girls in trouble.”
“How’d he do that?” I asked, wiping my mouth against the sleeve of my sweater.
“If a girl got in a, well, family way before she was married, this one doctor would kill the baby for her.”
The idea about tore me in two. If I’d had anything left in my stomach, I would have gotten sick again.
“Jimmy told me not to get rid of it,” she said. “He said we’d get married. He said he wanted to keep the baby. Said he’d always wanted to be a daddy.”
“Did my daddy know Jimmy was my …”
“No. I never told him,” Winnie said. “Didn’t tell your mama, either. Only Eddie and me knows.”
My body ached, but not near as bad as my heart did. I wanted to give up, quit the fight to stay awake. My eyes closed, and for a minute or so, I kept them shut tight. It eased the pain in my head a bit.
“Was Jimmy bad as they say?” I asked, forcing my eyes open again.
She shook her head. “Not all the time.”
I swallowed down another wave of bile, remembering Eddie’s story of Jimmy shooting his father in the head. How somebody who did a thing like that wasn’t bad all the way through, I didn’t know.
“Jimmy’d get into these moods,” she said. “They was real dark. Real scary. He’d be mean and look at me like I wasn’t there. Like I was see-through.”
Turning my head, I rested my cheek against the wall.
“When I told him I was going to have you, he was real happy at first.” She smiled at the memory. “He told me he’d never wanted nothing so much as to be a father. He told me his bad days were behind him. He was gonna do better. He wa
sn’t gonna drink no more, and he wasn’t gonna break the law no more, either. I thought things was fixing to change for us. But then he got in the dark mood again.”
“What did he do?”
“So many bad things.” She closed her eyes. “Some days I just wished he’d kill me and get it over with.”
“Why didn’t you get away from him?” I wanted so bad to touch her hand, but I didn’t do it. I thought she’d just pull away from me. “If he was mean, why did you stay?”
“I loved him.” A few tears caught on her top lip and she licked them away. “It’s stupid.”
“It’s not.” I thought of Mrs. Jones never getting away from Mr. Jones.
“I reckon I’m the only one in the world who ever loved Jimmy, you know.”
I didn’t disagree with her.
“He got all bothered one night. Said he didn’t believe the baby was his child. He said all kinds of things about me tramping around on him. Back then I wasn’t working in the cat house. Still, he didn’t believe it was his baby.” She put both hands on her stomach. “He beat me. He hit me in the stomach, trying to make the baby die.”
“He tried to kill me.” I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see the world spinning anymore.
“I bled so much I thought the baby was dead.” She cleared her throat. “I was so scared. That baby was the only thing I had to make Jimmy stick around. All I could think to do was go to Mary Spence …”
“You did?” I looked at her.
“Yes.” She lit a cigarette, narrowing her eyes when she pulled air through it. “She said she could still feel the baby moving in there. She said it was going to be okay.”
Winnie was beautiful when she smiled.
“I was so happy, I cried for three days,” she said. “I’d feel the baby—you—bubble around inside me, and I’d tell you that I loved you.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“You loved me?”
“I know it don’t seem like I did. I sure never acted like it.” She sighed. “What kind of mother leaves the baby she loves?”
A terrible one, I thought. I didn’t say it, though. To speak of it would have been to really believe it.
“I never could have been a mother to you, Pearl. I knew that. I couldn’t have kept you clean or fed or in a safe place.” She finished her cigarette and put it out in the dirt. “A baby can’t have a good life if it’s raised by a woman like me. It was either give you up or let Jimmy be your pa.”
She rubbed both hands on her stomach again. Flat as it was, I could imagine it being big and round with me inside.
“I couldn’t let your life turn out like mine.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have been,” I said.
She swallowed, going on as if she hadn’t heard me.
“When you was born, I was all alone. I didn’t know how it was supposed to be. I was sure I was dying it hurt so bad.” She stared off into nothing. “But then you was there, crying stronger than I ever heard a baby cry. I hadn’t heard anything so pretty in all my life.”
She put out her hand and touched my cheek, just enough so I could feel it. Then she pulled it back.
“I washed you up as best I could and wrapped you in a bed sheet. I held you as long as I could stand it.” She shook her head. “I knew if I held you a minute longer I would never be able to let you go. Oh lord, but you felt good in my arms. You felt the way life should be.”
She grabbed around herself, hugging tight. I was glad she wasn’t reaching for me again.
“Why didn’t you just try to live a different life?” I asked. “You could have at least tried to change.”
“It was too late for me.” Winnie’s eyebrows moved together. “So I took you to the church steps. I knew Mary would hear you, as strong as you cried.”
“Then you left me there.”
“No.” She pushed at a tear with her hand. “I stood across the street and waited. When I seen the sheriff coming, I knew you was going to be all right.”
And I was all right. My life had been about as good a fairy tale as Red River could afford.
“I went back to where I was staying and found out that Jimmy was dead.” Winnie’s makeup smudged when she rubbed at her eyes. “It was too late for me to go back and get you, so I bought myself a ticket out of Red River, and I was never going to look back.”
“But you didn’t leave.”
“No. I couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“I wanted to watch you grow.” Her voice faltered. “I wanted to see that you were okay. And you are. You’re more than okay.”
Face-to-face with her was like looking into a mirror.
“Winnie?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think I’ll end up just like him?” I asked. “Like Jimmy?”
Her face hardened. She looked stern. “No. You’re nothing like him.”
I didn’t flinch when she touched my knee. “I’m not?”
“You ain’t even like me.”
I exhaled, relieved.
“You know who you’re like?”
“Who?”
“Tom and Mary. Your mama and daddy.” She tried at a smile that ended up being more of a frown. “You’re a Spence through and through, and you always will be. I wouldn’t never want you to be anything else.”
Rustling and groaning came from where Eddie slept. We turned, both of us did. The lantern light caught a glimmer in his open hand.
In the palm of that hand, Eddie held my freedom from the cellar.
The key.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Winnie moved slow and on tiptoe to where Eddie slept. He never stirred, not even when she plucked the tiny key from the palm of his hand.
I obeyed when she motioned for me to come near.
“We’re getting out of here,” she whispered. “Once I get this door open, I want you to run. Don’t even think about me. Just run. Hear?”
“I don’t know if I can get home,” I said, voice shaking.
“When you get out, run to the left.” She pointed. “And keep going. Don’t stop. Crawl if you gotta.”
I nodded, hoping my trembling and weak legs would get me up the ten steps and across the field.
Winnie went up ahead of me. I stood on the fifth step, waiting, praying, begging God to save us.
The key scraped into the lock, turning with a gritty, crunching sound. It clicked open, and she eased the lock off and pushed the door up.
Strong wind whipped around, grabbing the door from her hand and slamming it open with a loud bang against the hard ground.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Eddie yelled. He aimed the gun at Winnie. “You get back down here.”
Winnie dropped the lock and put her open hands up next to her ears. She stepped down, pushing against me so I would move, too.
“Just let her go, Eddie,” she said. “Please.”
“I can’t do that, can I?” He nodded his head toward the back of the cellar. “Get.”
We did as he said. I feared that any fast move would make him shoot one or the other of us. I kept my mouth shut.
“Let Pearl go home,” Winnie said. “You can keep me. Do whatever you want to me. If you need money, I can get some for you.”
“Why would I need money?” he asked.
“You could get out of town. Go to California. Get a good job. You could start all over.” She licked her lips. “Just let her go, would ya?”
“Now you wanna be like a mother to her?” He glared at her.
“She ain’t done nothing to harm you. She’s the only one innocent in this whole mess.”
“I need her, don’t you see? Without her, I got no revenge against Tom Spence. Long as I got her, he’s gonna come right to me.” His face pinched up and turned bright red. “I got to get him back for what he done to Jimmy.”
“Eddie …”
“I would’ve thought you wanted that, too, Winnie. Weren’t you the one blubbering over ho
w much you loved Jimmy?”
“I just want this all to be over with. I been living under the weight of Jimmy too long.”
“The sheriff’s gonna come for her.” He pointed the gun at me. “And when he does, I’m gonna make him pay for what he done to my brother.”
“If you do that, you won’t be any better than Jimmy,” Winnie said, her voice soft. “And I do believe you’re still good somewhere in there.”
“It’s too late.”
“Eddie, please.”
Winnie took a step toward Eddie with hands reaching for him. The gunshot tore through the air, making me fall to the floor. Then I couldn’t move. Not an inch.
All I could do was scream.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Winnie’s body had fallen on top of me, and I couldn’t hardly breathe. Pushing at her, I tried to get her to sit up and let me go. But she wouldn’t move.
“Winnie?” I screamed. “Get off me.”
Then the blood gushed from her body. It pooled around her. Around us. Spilling all over me, making me warm.
Her eyes had turned toward me, but they weren’t bright like before. They were dry and dull looking. Like marbles.
She couldn’t see me. Couldn’t hear me, either. Still, I screamed, not realizing I had the strength and not knowing how long my voice would keep on. But I didn’t quit.
“Oh God,” Eddie screamed, falling on his knees beside us. “What have I done?”
He threw his hands over the wound on Winnie’s chest, making his fingers turn red with her. He pushed down, tried to gather the blood to put back inside her. He only made the spurting worse.
“Don’t you touch her,” I screamed, pushing Eddie away as hard as I could. “You killed her. Don’t you touch her!”
Eddie didn’t move away, so I used my nails and scratched him across the face. His skin shoved up under my fingernails. He put one of his blood-stained hands on his cheek, his blood and Winnie’s blood touching.
He lifted the gun that was still in his other hand. I drew in a final breath and clenched my eyes shut, just knowing that I was next.
Instead of shooting me, he got up and made his way to the steps. He sat down and lit a cigarette, gulping down the smoke. After he’d gone through all he had left, he dug in Winnie’s purse for more.
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