Solemn

by Kalisha Buckhanon

  “How’s the school lessons?”

  “Easy.”

  Redvine excused himself to walk among the flowers. Some years had passed, possibly a decade or more, since he brought home bouquets for his wife. He had relaxed at bringing home a paycheck, a guard, security, necessities, “things.” And still, with his shortcomings and oversights and setbacks, he was loved. For now, he was saving for an attorney for Solemn. When he could afford to … which was not yet. But it would be soon. He came back and spoke his first words with Solemn since Akila yanked her from his house to bring her to report here. He was unrehearsed, low, gaunt.

  “I really have missed you, Solemn.”

  She did not respond.

  “And things are going to be better for us when you get out of here. It won’t be long. You’re gonna be living in a house, after this. And go to college.”

  “I don’t want to go to college,” Solemn told him. “I want to go to the city. Nashville. Chicago. Then, maybe I’ll go to college there.”

  “City’s a rough place, Solemn,” Bev said. “And we don’t know nobody there. I think you should think about coming back home. Life will be better.”

  “I’m gonna go to work,” she told them, pushing her glasses up against her nose with her arms crossed. “And make a lot of money, so we won’t ever have to steal and lie again.” Here, she said what she wanted.

  “I haven’t been a perfect man,” Redvine explained. “We all make mistakes. But I do love you. I’m sorry. I know you’ve been put through a lot.”

  Talk turned to mutual grounds of television, Dandy, the books. Solemn would report what she needed them to know. Bev spied on her limbs, saw no bruises or welts. She had every tooth still in her mouth. No plugs in her hair, unbraided, to Bev’s chagrin.

  “I really don’t know if I’m ever gonna know what all happened in Bledsoe,” she said. “No matter what it was in particular, it was a lot in general.”

  “Solemn, what happened in Bledsoe is we love you and we still do,” one of them said, united front going home to be alone and probably enjoy it.

  Fine. It didn’t mean she didn’t love them. However, in her eyes they diminished and cooled off, adjusted down to the regard of siblings. Their promises lost the potential of Christmas presents and surprise riddles to delight her, even the one that she would see them again—soon and much more often, now.

  * * *

  Solemn stared down into the washbowl, at the cloth in it, mostly playing in the water more than washing up, buying herself time by herself. The residue of gray suds formed chalky pictures in the bowl. The fizz and scum convoluted into people waving their hellos and good-byes, so many people. Solemn stared down. She broke up the shimmery portraits with her washrag, put it over her face and ’round her body. Then a new portrait came back the minute she soaped up the rag again. She had mind to throw the soap against the medicine cabinet. The mirror was removed to prevent fights with broken glass. Or she could wet it just enough to slick over the floor so the girl behind her could slip. But then she might lose points. She added those like coins, too.

  She paid no mind to the line probably behind her. The rest of the girls really didn’t care about the solo time they could earn in a private bathroom. The privilege was just a power trip and to practice manipulation over the staff, to make sure they still had the same charms they thought they did that got them there to begin with. But Solemn wondered when she was going to have her space. She hadn’t grown up with it.

  “One day,” said the girl standing behind her, just the height of her neck.

  I know I locked this door …

  “You gotta be patient,” said another girl, towered over her at least a head.

  They were not so much startling as annoying. These faces were a distillation of women on dirt roads and little girls who sucked candy with her on Easters. These voices were a mockery of all her mama and Akila and teachers had spoken to her. Their postures were akin to Majority’s when she stammered to be taken seriously or just taken, period. Their attitudes were just as cocky as the Weathers woman who swooped down on her in dreams.

  “Work hard,” they said.

  “I do. I always have!” she yelled. To all of them, none in particular, but in an outburst that sent the deformities behind her to the exit she herself could not find.

  Day Worker 1, 2, or 3 banged on the door. Banged and banged and banged.

  “Miss Redvine, ya time up,” a woman said. “What you doin’ in there?”

  What if she was sick? What if she was messy? What if she was sore? Even in Bledsoe, she had owned the toilet when she was on it. She had slept in a room with nothing but her cat to maybe sit up there, too. Here, she had nothing. What could she do?

  Solemn stormed out of the bathroom to sink into the group room. Majority gaggled around in the corner with some of the Mississippi tomboys who talked too slow and roundabout to turn her on, though they tried. The unspoken rule was in real life and outside the secrets they shared at night, she stood off from Majority. Self-imposed solitary confinement teamed up with the good manners she had been taught to earn her a respect among peers and staff who noticed.

  “Got somebody come see you,” Dr. Givens appeared behind her to say.

  “Who?” The woman just wouldn’t let up on her, treated her special, and Solemn wasn’t buying it until she knew how much it really cost.

  “Well, come with me and see,” Dr. Givens said.

  “I’m not gonna come see somebody I don’t know who,” Solemn said.

  “Miss Redvine, since you insist on being difficult—”

  “I’m one of the best ones here,” Solemn argued.

  “Since I can’t even dispute that, I’ll just tell you then. It’s Detective Justin Bolden from Kosciusko, where you from.”

  “My parents fine?”

  “Come on here, gal…”

  None of them knew when the State would come in to inspect, and it was best they all stayed on cordial toes for anything looked like it. Bernadine was off to the cafeteria to get him coffee when Solemn came up to the front. Bolden stood immediately. Already, in just the short time since he had seen her last, she almost met him nose to nose. She saw her distorted face in the silver of the badge overtaking his breast.

  “Hi Solemn,” he said.

  “What I do now?”

  Caught off guard, charmed even, Bolden smiled.

  “He was up here in the area. He come to check on you,” Dr. Givens told Solemn.

  “I know I just popped up. I don’t want to intrude,” Bolden told her.

  “No intrusion, Detective. My office okay? Any excuse I have to—”

  “I noticed a garden on the grounds.”

  “Most of the flowers dead now. Won’t bloom for another couple of months.”

  “Dr. Givens, it’ll be just fine. No special accommodations required. I was in the area and decided to stop. I’ll only be a minute.”

  “That okay with you, Solemn?” Dr. Givens asked.

  “Do I gotta choice?” Solemn said.

  “Hell no.” Miss Bernadine had coffee for Bolden and a cold cola can for Solemn.

  “Well, since he came all the way here, I guess,” Solemn agreed. She had heard a little bit of it, the special favors the brown cop created for her. The rule of favors was one she planned to use to work both ways for herself, whenever she could.

  In the garden, Solemn couldn’t exactly be excited. She knew the brown cop had not come to take her home. They would have told her by now so she could get her stuff.

  “I been looking over your case a lot Solemn,” Bolden said.

  “For what?”

  “Just because. Well, because it’s my job.”

  They came to a small path meant to mark the exit through the clearing the property sat upon, the way out and forward, or back. It was pink and gray and teal spread by state prisoners’ uncompensated, sunburnt hands. On it, Solemn wondered how to kill someone. But she saw Bolden had no pistol at his hip the way he alw
ays had before. She couldn’t take it and blow his brains out, as she imagined back in Bledsoe. Home. With her up thumb on one hand and a gun in the other, it would take just one slow driver to stop for her in order to get up to Nashville. Or back to Singer’s, to click shut the door of her trailer and never come out again. To sleep all day and maybe die stuck to the couch like redone upholstery. To hump and shiver into a cat like Dandy. Maybe go live down in the well. A wild well woman she could be. Plenty of water, frogs, and spiders to munch.

  “I take care of things in the immediate time but sometimes beyond it,” he said. More and more he was putting days off on his parents and his child, like today.

  “I never talked to a grown man by myself,” Solemn warned him. “’Cept for my teachers. And the principal, I guess.”

  “I tell my own daughter to keep it that way,” Bolden said.

  “You seen my mama and daddy around town?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. I thought they’d be the only ones come visit me here. Maybe my brother and his wife.”

  “Yes, Landon and Akila. I remember them.”

  “Why? That’s your job, too?”

  Her hostility made more sense than a warm welcome. His order of business had once been to make a change, yet he was part of a system where all he did was change what lies he accepted or told. Rarely was there justice or peace. Only the next day and maybe a moment of conversation where the truth was at least thought, if not said.

  “Coming here ain’t my job,” he said. “But I could go see about your parents, if that’s what you want.”

  “Okay. They comin’ to see me soon.”

  “That’s good to know. It seem like they like you around here,” Bolden told her.

  “How you figure that?”

  “I have ways of reading people. That is my job.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m gonna think about being a police officer.”

  “Well”—Bolden laughed—“I think that would be good. You know, sometimes, the women don’t want to talk to men. The whites don’t want to talk to blacks. So, you could really make some sense to more people. I could see you in uniform.”

  “But I really want to be a singer, in the big city,” Solemn admitted as they sat on the bench. “The police job just would be to make sure I stay on my feet and have a lot of money before I get big.”

  “That would be smart. Make my job your day job, happier one at night.”

  “Well, if I get on Oprah I’m gonna have to perform in the day. I’m gonna be flexible.”

  “You young enough to make it happen.”

  “But I should go to college, too.”

  “That’s a way to make much more money than I do,” Bolden said. “For the work I have to do. It’s not a lot to make up for it.”

  “You ain’t got to wait for nobody to call you to work, or tell you no.”

  “I see things I don’t like. A lot of things.”

  “I do too. You have to learn to like them.”

  “I can’t.” Bolden smiled.

  “That’s not your job?”

  “No ma’am. When and if I start liking any of the shit I see, it’s time to quit.”

  Fanny’s stuffy décor and air sat behind Solemn to remind her she was only having a free pass for a while. Best not to get too comfortable. While she drank her cola and Bolden slurped his coffee, she knew he had never thought she was a witch. The window of opportunity passed for him to even think of asking the girl to stand up to her father, go against him in any way. He didn’t like it, but the Redvines were family. And a black girl in Mississippi would go back to that family for all her life, always a refuge from stiff minds and dead-end roads and gas station clerking and top-floor corner apartment dalliances for pay. She had a family, at least, and that always meant one last chance to start over from the bottom of any rock.

  * * *

  Solemn broke that one sin again. She took just a few pages of sketchbook paper to start jotting down the secrets she could have told the brown cop. Words were boring, though. Trite to write. She wondered if Bolden was married. Fancy-doodled his name down a few times, to think of him. Oh yes, he said he had a wife. Married. She’d never thought about it. But she thought and thought about dark girls on mattresses with no sheets. Big pretty beds and hair and stone jewelry even. She wasn’t much of an artist, no. But there was the attempt on the pages stolen to record what was hidden, to always keep it so she could spotlight it all once more, when she needed it. And she fell asleep in the room this way. Not even Majority huffing like a dragon could pull her out of it.

  And after breakfast, with Jamiqua and Henrietta and Concepción and Tina who couldn’t read fighting over the channels and the gals braiding hair and the staff talking among themselves until they spotted an offense to correct, Solemn zombied in the group room. Channel 7 was always safest in turmoil. She curled on the uncomfortable couch with the pillows from the end, a shield to her gut, in wonder as to why the brown cop came all the way to see her. No questions. No guns. Just talk.

  Majority came near.

  “You got you some fine man coming up here for you, honey,” the girl said, hazed about before Solemn, with her eyes barely open.

  “I saw him. Who was he? Don’t be shy.”

  “Nobody,” Solemn told Majority.

  Majority twisted her face until Solemn had no choice.

  “He a police officer from where I come from.”

  “Yas look like y’all was tweaking.”

  “We were not.”

  “That’s what you say … He was old, honey. Like your daddy or something.”

  The trumpets blared to announce the newscast. Majority didn’t stop.

  “Solemn like old men, y’all.” She held crinkled brown paper in her hands. She had been in Solemn’s stuff, snooped through the mindless jibberish to find the name: “Officer Bolden.” In one of the three pairs of jeans she had and a flower shirt, too small, Majority waved the papers in front of Solemn. When Solemn reached, Majority ran.

  It was just enough to get the rest started. A ruckus to concern the girls, with Day Staff off joking. A reason to get Dr. Givens out her office or off her smoke break. The snickering and laughing and chanting spread, until a dozen or more pointed at Solemn.

  “Solemn like old men, y’all.” A few of them said it, laughing at her with squiggly funhouse faces. “No wonder we can’t get her,” some of the boys said. “She probably oochie-coochie in the bathroom with the staff, y’all, ha-ha!!!”

  Solemn balled herself up. Majority continued, jiggling Solemn’s shoulders. Solemn ran to the TV, to stare at it and block them out. Over the noise she listened to the television, heard, watched, listened more, and heard again.

  Of her very own Yockanookany River, just past Ethel, in her county: Attala. And the woman from the television back on now, seated on a couch in front of a cream wall this time. In “Jackson,” it said. And the “victim” bound and gagged and here now and naked and unseen for two years, the woman was. Or had been.

  Her barefoot and poor Pearletta. It was.

  Then, Solemn knew, with the jerking and juking clowns taking the joke too far, and her guts blown away like chalk, there was really no such thing as magic after all.

  It was nothing even to cry about. It was much more for her to scream about.

  * * *

  Then, Solemn was back home in Bledsoe, Bev keeping watch. Or maybe Red. Could have been Akila. Mrs. Longwood too. She spoke all their names at points.

  Such thinking was normal. “Rest and time away from the rest of the hopeless is what she need,” Miss Bernadine said. They already knew the rule about this one, to go easy on her, privilege and special and good home and all the rest they never heard. Dr. Givens was spare with the meds. Fanny O’Barnes was no psychiatric facility. Not at all. But sometimes, in sagacious caution and care, she made that call. It really wasn’t too good at all for Solemn Redvine to fit it too right in her mind where she was and what surrounded her, or how she got there a
nd why. Because she really didn’t belong there.

  “Hey, baby,” Redvine said, duffel bag at his shoulder and good hair smelling like bergamot and The Man at the Well too afraid to come past him. “I never knew that woman. I ain’t put no babies in no well. Your mind just playing tricks. Go to sleep.”

  Ativan on hand with Vicodin.

  Orange juice with ice. Swallow swallow swallow.

  THIRTY-ONE

  There had to be a way to wash memory like silk: best done quick, under a cold tap, soft rub, hung high to let untampered air take control. Not a wrinkle or crease should make it through that way; good as new and almost never worn it can be. The ones who had met Pearletta Hassle with him—Nichols and Hanson—were gone. He called first, to the Attala County Coroner’s Office, where he took over a bathroom so water from the cold faucet could wash him up first. For just a few minutes, some mouthfuls in his hands and splashes to his face. When he came out, in uniform and steadiness, he got right to it.

  “Oh, Justin! How you?” the cupcake at the desk asked him. He wasn’t sure why. Then she reminded him they had gone to high school together, a few years apart.

  “Forgive me,” Bolden said. “Right. Rita. Good seeing you.”

  “No apologies necessary.” Past the jacket and makeup he knew the smile more than the face. He soon recalled she had been a friend of his daughter’s mother, one of the faces around her in the lunch room. “Up in here, we don’t expect too-right minds. Glad to see you still doing the police thing. What is you, a detective now?”

  He could have filled out the form she passed with his mind wandering.

  “Something like that,” he told her, grabbing the pen affixed to the counter.

  “Gotsta be better than chasing these fools. These drugs got so bad round here.”

  “It’s working out,” he told her. “Never saw you here before. How long…?”

  “I was in the incinerator,” Rita said. “Ten years. You wouldn’t have seen me.”

  “Oh,” Bolden said. On the line by “Decedent,” he wrote: “Pearletta Hassle.”

  “First opening on front came up, I went for it,” Rita told him.