Solemn

by Kalisha Buckhanon

  With his experience over there, Landon finally getting to work in surveillance for the Army. He like that. We may be moving to Virginia. I might hate that. It means I wouldn’t be able to see my family. At least not easy. We’ll get back there, I’m sure. I really like sitting at home, reading books, doing crossword puzzles, watching game shows. He wants me out organizing and bowling with the other Army wives. It’s a lot of other black women here. So, that’s good. I never had a job besides the motel. I been thinking it’s time for one. But he won’t be having it. He want me home with the kids. I guess I’ll obey.

  I wonder how you doing in there. I hope the other kids aren’t too much of a negative influence. I don’t know if you remember when we went to Vicksburg few years ago. Together. I lied to you. I told you we was going to look at apartments. Well, I really was looking into something I found out about. You remember the woman you helped move, gone missing from Singer’s. I heard things from her that I thought mattered. I tried to use it to help you, and the situation. Ain’t seem to matter much. I guess what matters is we tried. She seemed like she could have been you or me or better than me. Like she had a future. She been found Solemn, dead. None of what happened to you make sense to me. Only what you can do after it make any sense now. I would enjoy for you to come live with us when you get out of Fanny O. Barnes. Maybe you could enlist in the Army too. It pays for your college, far away if you want. I would like having you around. You’re good company always.

  Love, Akila

  Solemn folded and unfolded the letter, her first—as her mama preferred brief and blunt cards to say the words for her. Finally, she pasted it on their wall. Majority had had her eyes on the bare space, prepared with many ideas to archive her own gallery of tomorrows. For in Chicago the money and phone calls and pictures of all who were growing up and going on without her seemed to be the extent of it. And a good one at that. Solemn had been granted permission to use the bathtub without a staff member to watch outside the door, since they were short. She returned blushed and moist, to find Majority in a brood that had not been present since her first few months there. She did not probe. Instead, she sat down to braid her hair, or at least learn how to.

  “Parents coming up dropping you off gifts, brother in the army, sister ain’t got to work. I read the letter she sent.” Damn. Majority just refused to be forgotten or ignored.

  “Why that make me important?” Solemn sighed.

  “I bet you come from a big house,” Majority told her.

  A big house? A big house? Hmmm … away from Bledsoe, around the even lesser fortunate or perhaps the more. She was a blank slate. She could be who she wanted to be.

  “I may not know nothing about the projects or Good Times or Cooley High, or all that, but I been through some shit too, Majority,” Solemn challenged, measuring up.

  “Whatever. Bitches in big houses with daddies and big brothers don’t know shit.”

  “Bet you police never shined up your house in the middle of the night when you was ’sleep and told you to come out or else.”

  “Huh! Please. They don’t even shine the lights where I’m from.”

  “Bet you never seen somebody kill somebody else.”

  “Please … I seen it damn near every day.”

  “Bet you nobody ever tried to kill you after you saw it.”

  “Bet you folks tried to kill me before I saw shit.”

  “Bet you never talked to swole-up baby ghosts roll in the grass long after they got dropped in the same well you had to drink from and man ghosts from the trees with no face who chased you ’cause you saw it and girl ghosts with burned-out heads and eyes ’cause you held her hand when lightning struck and the stabbed-up girls could have been your sister come along sit on your pillow right there.”

  “Bitch, you got me.”

  In regard for Majority’s feelings, Solemn removed Akila’s letter from the wall. The detritus of hope for a normal life would later be packed into a pillowcase as an essential matter, a survivalist tool for the day when her worse judgment got the better of her. Majority filled the space Solemn left on the wall, with a portrait of her roommate, in a bed of clouds supported by the hoods of trees she had never bothered to sketch before.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Fog spoke to Fanny O. Barnes on that particular Thursday on to its night.

  “It’s our cover,” Majority giggled.

  “It’s a bad sign,” Solemn prevised.

  Miss Bernadine would not have considered missing work due to a little fog. Dr. Givens did. All the other workers only braved the day because the next was payday; they would have a hard time explaining where their illnesses had run off to in just twenty-four hours. Near the weekends proved to be the best chance of overtime in the kitchen, when primarily younger kids who kept it going had already begun to party. Miss Ruth saw the mist as a reason to call off for the day and night. There was choir practice; it carried on even in the rare event of hail. But it was more fulfilling for her to work than to sing.

  The fog crept in that morning, to stretch her Rottweiler’s run through her generations-grown nursery of Bradford pear trees. She called and whistled and shouted in the misty dawn. The full-grown puppy finally forced Miss Ruth to trudge, nimble as ever, through the damp back lawn. Then she caught his shadow against the chopping block her husband used to make good use of. The fog was no match for her familiarity with her off-the-way ranch home. She even avoided the ditch before the main backyard started, tugging on her Rottweiler’s neck; he had busted out the door without his choke chain. Then, he slipped away from her again, eager to play. She caught him. He struggled. He disappeared. She caught him again. He loosened. She mystified him with another wrangle. This went on for ten minutes at least. Of course, she would be present in the kitchen. She always was. Due to the dog, Ruth Golden wondered if she should even go in on time or at all that day. She settled upon reputation: reliable, come hell or high water. Her uniform was pressed night before, as usual. In fact, she had built up several over the years. Her life, caretaking before widowed, now creating menus for Fanny’s, where the souls appreciated her much more than they showed. She knew this for sure.

  For the last week, those two girls Solemn and Majority both asked for extras at supper: more saltines, an extra roll, another apple (or two), seconds at a sandwich. Miss Ruth did not see: they slipped stuff in their pockets or bras or backsides. They finished chores early. They communicated in group. Majority cleaned up her mouth. Solemn said, “Yes.” If the Staff cared, someone would have noted the changes. The communal equation simply shifted to a bit more peace, easy time, and energy to tackle the others.

  Those two girls’ last supper at Fanny’s would be spaghetti, meatballs, garlic bread, an iceberg lettuce salad, and a chocolate pudding. It ended around 7:00 p.m.

  The first break in plans came. Night Worker 2 switched places with Night Worker 1. Majority lingered. Solemn was chicken.

  They watched the high school kids who worked cafeteria at night leave their elder supervisor, Miss Ruth, pulling hot trays from the burners all by herself.

  Night Worker 1, the big Negro they called him, was there to corral them out of the cafeteria and into the study or game room. There was little to no time. Solemn was stuck in her seat with her hands in her pockets and Majority before her. She had conceived their plans as play. No. She was going to Virginia with Akila. In about fifty weeks. Or was it sixty?

  “Come on, hurry it on up,” bellowed Night Worker 1.

  “My stomach hurt,” Majority said. “And I’m sick of Sol. Dawg, I gotta see this bitch every single day.”

  “Majority, not tonight. Come on.”

  Night Worker 1 turned his attention to a few girls whose tempest in a corner seemed more urgent and pressing. There were just never enough eyes, hands, feet.

  “Go ahead,” Majority said to Solemn, sitting across from her.

  In Solemn’s pocket was a steel wool pad fashioned into some sort of short rod. Majority had done her best
. Solemn didn’t think it was sharp enough to break skin. They practiced on the slit in her knee Solemn already had. Sure enough, it bled—quickly, as Majority assured her it would. Majority wore a crew-neck T-shirt and had marked the spot of the offense with a piece of Scotch tape.

  “We didn’t practice,” she whispered to Majority.

  “We didn’t what…?” Night Worker 2 had diffused the situation and handed out his threats. He returned to the two girls left.

  “Let’s go, Miss Redvine and Miss Simmons. Now!”

  “I just told you I’m tired of seeing this bitch and you don’t even care…”

  “You ain’t got to go home, but you got to get the hell out of here,” he sang.

  “No,” Solemn said. “Why I wanna go with somebody who don’t wanna go with me? Maybe we should…”

  “You know what,” Night Worker 1 said, emboldened by his heft and breadth in a way few staff could muster, “why don’t you both go on in that kitchen, get to work? It’s been a long time since y’all done the cafeteria rotation. I know.”

  “Work!?”

  “You heard what I said. Got thirty minutes. Miss Ruth need some help. They left her there all by herself. And y’all bet not give her no problems. I ain’t playing.”

  And he walked out to leave them. Just like that.

  The pair stood in the kitchen, banging through pots and pans. Miss Ruth offered them soft baby-blue bonnets and sticky yellow gloves for their hands. Knives were locked up in a drawer. The bright steel freezer, source of the meats and milk and frozen goods, looked much smaller than Solemn had remembered it. Miss Ruth’s white work coat hung on the first exposed nail Solemn had ever noticed at Fanny’s.

  Miss Ruth stood buried in a waist-high tub of pots and pans. She broke down the potato and flour churn. She was a worker bee, foundry wife, barren mother to all the children who got dropped off with her precisely because she had the room. They too hard on these kids anyway, the stability thought. And these girls were not the worst offenders. They had shown no real violent streaks, only foul mouths. As a matter of fact, in the staff meeting that month Solemn was discussed as two of the few rehabilitative epitomes.

  Solemn watched the clock. Miss Ruth would be finished soon. But the kitchen aide held back. Canned tomato sauce stained mercilessly. Tonight was unusual—and longer. And, Miss Ruth retained the perfectionism that earned her the job. One girl was experienced in battle. The other had only had them by surprise. And Solemn now thought of Virginia and a uniform and maybe a dorm room next. A real one. She needed boredom. It helped her imagine. Here there was none. The rage and hostility against her parents who orchestrated her fate boiled to the surface. She could be a dutiful daughter, relied upon and obedient. Or she could “show them.”

  How will they feel, and what will they dream, if I am gone? What do I do now, if nobody’s watching?

  Plop plop plop ploppity plop plop goes the little baby down the well … plop.

  Where the keys?

  Ordinarily, Majority told her, somebody had to check the freezer temperature before they left the kitchen at night. Perhaps Miss Ruth had the keys in her pocket. Or in the kitchen office. She was mystified of the next steps. Majority chatted with Miss Ruth. She looked to say something to Solemn one moment and whisper curses the next. Solemn could not discern. The snaggletoothed white boy who usually mopped came in the room.

  “I’m gone Miss Ruth,” he stuttered.

  “Gone?” Miss Ruth turned.

  “Yes’m. I’m gone.”

  “Thank ya. See ya tomorrow.”

  “All right now.”

  Miss Ruth started to ask the girls to go check if he got all dangerous puddles off the floor or made sure to turn every pot over on its head so dank pools of water wouldn’t sit overnight to poison her tastes for the next day. Least he had come in, more than most of them on a day when news trucks came to show the people there was truth to the fog.

  Solemn went back to the crook of the kitchen where the pots and pans stayed. She ran water in the stained industrial-steel sink and put the stopper in bottom as scalding-hot water tumbled down. She played in the water.

  “I shole appreciate you girls’ help,” Miss Ruth told Majority.

  “We help more often, they let us do something different,” Majority answered. Solemn stood, limp. She would wash everything all over again, with the pots and pants dripping soap in a huge tub to be ready for oatmeal and grits and farina in the morning.

  “Whew,” Miss Ruth sighed. “Lemme just sit down a minute.”

  Miss Ruth sat in a chair underneath the eight-by-ten framed portraits of Clinton and Bushes and King and Kennedys and Fanny O. Barnes herself. She splayed her legs, wiped off her sweaty coal-colored face with a towel, before she fanned herself with it.

  * * *

  Any old-timer could have told those two girls Fanny’s only landed where it did due to depletion of acres of surrounding timber fields, now naked and blank, infested with untamed nutsedge and sticker weeds and cattails and tree stumps before a cypress swamp, ignored and undiscussed, so as to not detract from the glamour of golf courses the county was most famous for. Five hundred yards from the back door, with the forgotten kitchen lights still on and the doorstop stuck in the cafeteria doors as if it were open for the morning, Majority and Solemn came upon the first leg of the elder timber fields, in another direction from the south from which they had first come. Solemn ran through without stopping, misinterpreting the leftover stumps for headstones and fossils. She took a jackrabbit for Dandy, back in Bledsoe and Singer’s she was. Now. Then. For a minute. Maybe more. Majority hollered the entire way—begged Solemn to slow down for her, let her keep tail, understand her citified fear, stop the guesswork.

  “Don’t leave me. Wait! I can’t see!”

  Solemn jutted her face forward and cut the spring night, stuck her nose out like a plane’s, dependent upon gravity and lift at once. Whether she flew straight, left, right, or back, she was unsure. The fog canceled out the light. Once, two miles out, Majority caught her from behind. She reached for her roommate’s collar, to force Solemn into a paired sprint. She clutched the clasp of her cross necklace instead. It snapped off, but not before it cinched Solemn in her bottom lip and cut her up there.

  Why my feet fit these shoes? Why this bra hold my breasts? Why I got jewelry? Why I see so clear now without my glasses? Did I ever need them? Is …

  On the floor in the kitchen of Fanny O. Barnes, Miss Ruth did not know how to succumb. Strangled by her work coat strings, she knew how to breathe. But not how to not. First Solemn had not watched. She listened. Choked. Swallowed the smell and taste of it. Once the fascination passed there was shame in herself for being there. She thought herself back to the trailer park bedroom, hopes to hear her mama flush the toilet in middle of the night, or feel the cat-pat paws at her tender breasts, or see her daddy come in later than he should have to fill the living room with calm of a man. She withered into a wish for a walk to the well to scare herself for the hell of it and then go right on back home to watch a movie. She sank down to a craving for the hard seat and cramped writing top of a school desk, where she had always paid attention even when it appeared she did not.

  Majority surprised herself even. It was as silent as either one of them could have hoped for. Night Worker 2 forgot them. No formal count until time for meds. Maybe Night Worker 1 would look for them. The hope wasn’t high. The highest danger of discovery for their absence was another charge who questioned where they were. Put them out. But Solemn was not that popular to be missed. The majority were relieved when Majority was gone. How long did they have to get away? Two hours? Three?

  How long I been running? Solemn thought she had sixty-seven weeks to go. It was sixty-four.

  She saw a second of two of it: bleached white orthopedic shoes, kicking. Then, the shoes scooted along against pots and pans clanging. And Majority danced around the kitchen, back and forth, side to side, pulling and pushing; a jiggly aura she made.
No weapons. No kicks. No punches. No fists. No stomps. Two white apron strings were enough. Then, from Miss Ruth, Solemn sensed a last breath unshackled to hurl itself through a tunnel of life disregarded without it. In the inside where everything is bigger and louder but feels like it isn’t even there—better than a queasy ride at a carnival, more wild than she imagined Disney World, easier than a stage—an energy rumbled in Solemn.

  She recovered at least one part of the secret: to give Majority a fight, to twist and writhe with an unfortunate soul squat and inert in unawareness, a cynocephalus and rogue. The hooks and hangers on the ceiling stilled to form watch over the moment, just another. In the glimmer of long, flat stainless-steel counters was the glare of a sweat river washed up from the floor onto their backs. With the girls fighting now, Miss Ruth took aim at her own throat, to release the little strings. But she kept her eyes on those two girls.

  Those two girls…, was mostly all she thought.

  Solemn heard “No!”—more before it and after it. She stopped and backed off. Majority’s nose was smashed red. Then, Solemn saw her for who she really was. The girl tore down a set of keys from the hook and tussled with the wooden door’s fancy knob. Then, she ran through the torn screen door to the open back door. Solemn looked at Miss Ruth thrash and extended between her steel cauldrons.

  … breathe aye aye oh awa iwa owwa ow ahhhh ohhhhhh breathe.…

  Once outside, those two girls hesitated and turned in a circle of disorientation. Solemn stood in the garden, assaulted by gaze of moonflowers. They charged into the flowers. The stems with thorns made it through the tough pants the girls wore, lashed out, and scratched both their legs up the minute they stepped into the garden outside the door, no amount of fabric capable of blocking the jabs. Solemn saw herself walk through the back door to join others in the game room and stay mute. Now, acres and then miles away from the possibility, she simply shouted it as she ran. No choice now.