Obi dropped into the swirling waters. He let go of his rifle and plunged deep beneath the surface. The water was strong. He struggled at first and the current pulled him deeper. He remembered to trust the water, to let it carry him. His head bobbed above the surface and he relaxed. There was no way to tell which direction the water flowed. All the familiar landmarks were gone. There was no sun in the sky to point the way or tell the time. He became part of something vast, infinite. A woman waved to him from her second-story balcony. He waved back and smiled. In the distance, he heard the roar of motorboats and sirens, but it had nothing to do with him. He was no longer a mere man. He was transformed, a creature of the water and the earth and the sky. His instincts would take him home.
Chapter Twenty-four
The water sucked and pulled at Geneva. It turned her end over end, until she wasn’t sure which direction was up. Foul water entered her nose and mouth. She thrashed against the current, gasped greedy gulps of wet air when her head broke the surface. She swam. For the second time that day, she gave herself over to Mother Nature and swam as hard as she could. When she was in the boat arguing with Chandra, the house had seemed close enough. Now it seemed miles away. As soon as Boggs left them bobbing on the end of that long rope, Chandra went mad. She pointed the flare gun at Geneva and made all sorts of nasty accusations. Geneva was a whore, a witch, an evil shrew. The girl ranted on and on. Geneva tried to calm her, and when that didn’t work, she struck back. She called Chandra a liar, a coward, a stupid girl. It was ugly and childish, and Geneva wasn’t proud of herself, but the day hadn’t led to many proud moments and she didn’t intend to dwell on it. If she’d stayed in the boat, Chandra would have set off that flare gun. Geneva didn’t figure a shot from a flare would kill her, but it would burn hot enough. Jumping into the flood seemed a safer option. It also seemed the quickest way to reach her family. Boggs had no right to keep her away. She struggled to stay afloat, her arms and legs numb with exhaustion. She couldn’t see a foot in front of her. Was the house that way? Or this way? Geneva knew the violence Pisa had warned her about wasn’t Atul turning on her, wasn’t Atul’s death, wasn’t her argument with Chandra; it was this moment when the wide world turned against her and took her to task for all the damage she’d done. It was too late to be sorry, but she was sorry. She was sorry for leaving Bruce when he needed her most, sorry for pushing her daughter away to set her free, sorry for everything that had led to Bobby being less than he should be, sorry for the whole mess with her mother and, most of all, she was sorry she hadn’t listened to Pisa. She was mighty sorry about that.
The water tossed her under and around, up and down, side to side until Geneva stopped struggling and gave herself over to the currents. Time stopped. There was no way to tell how long she’d been in the water. She didn’t know where she was, or if she was anywhere at all. It occurred to her that she might be dead and this might be hell. This endless waterlogged nightmare seemed far worse than any fiery afterlife she could imagine. It was right about the point she’d consigned herself to an everlasting watery grave that she felt something solid. She reached out and realized that she was being tossed against her own porch, her own beloved house now half-submerged in the hellish flood. She grabbed hold and pulled herself forward, pulled her battered body onto the porch. It was the longest journey she’d ever taken, but she’d made it. She’d made it home.
She coughed up dark streams of toxic water and dragged herself into the house, past the submerged stairs, everything slick with mud and filth. “Hello?” Geneva didn’t want to surprise anyone. She climbed to the second floor; her bare feet slipped beneath her and she came down hard on one knee. Hot pain shot through her leg, but it didn’t slow her down. She crawled forward. The small hallway between the bedrooms was streaked with footprints and blood. Geneva pulled herself up, leaned against the wall to take the pressure off her throbbing knee. Her skirt wrapped itself around her waist and legs like shackles. She tugged at the stubborn zipper, and the fabric tore away from her body like paper. She peeled off her blouse and stood panting, wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of silk panties. She hopped forward. “Bruce? Are you here?”
In her bedroom, the contents of her memory box were strewn across the bed, old newspaper clippings and photo albums and dried corsages from dances she’d long forgotten. The dried bouquet from her wedding lay on the floor, its daisy petals long gone and only the prickly stems of baby’s breath still discernible in the faded, rotting, lilac-colored ribbon. She bent to pick up the bouquet and had to steady herself against the antique cedar dresser, the one her great-granddaddy made. The drawers of her dresser were open, everything spilled out onto the floor. It was a mess, and there was no sign of her husband. She clutched the bouquet to her chest and limped slowly across the hall to Bobby’s room, where nothing had changed.
She thought she heard her husband call her name, but maybe it was just the howling wind. She clutched the bouquet against her bare stomach and moved painfully toward Melody’s bedroom, where she found Bruce. Her husband stared at the ceiling, his mouth wide open like he was about to speak. He wore a faded pair of filthy cotton pajamas. Rain poured through an open window. Geneva lurched toward the bed. “Let me help you.” Geneva shivered. “Let me keep you warm.” With one hand, she shimmied her torn and dirty underwear down around her ankles. She unhooked her bra and let it fall onto the floor. The bouquet in her hand fell apart, but she held tight to the coil of ribbon. A bit of rusted wire poked through and scratched her palm. She wiped the blood on the quilt, lay the bouquet beside her husband. She undressed him, moving aside a strand of something that looked like one of Pisa’s creations. She removed his humiliating diaper last, tossing it as hard as she could toward the open window, but she was too weak. The filthy diaper hit the wall and slid onto the floor. Geneva picked up her wedding bouquet and laid the strand of herbs across her husband’s chest. She curled up next to him and closed her eyes. She was so very tired.
Snippets of her life floated past and she snatched at memories. She was ten years old. Her mother called her into the dark room. “Sing to me,” she said. Her mother closed her eyes and hummed along. Genie thought it was a good sign. Her mother would get well. She would bake cookies and take Genie to school. She would sew Genie a new dress for church. Genie sang louder. Her mother’s eyes flew open. “Who is this?”
“It’s me, Mama.”
“You are filthy. Everything is filthy and disgusting.”
It was true. Her mother wouldn’t allow her to open the windows when she was feeling dark. The sheets hadn’t been changed in weeks. There was a sticky bit of liquid spilled across her mother’s bedside table. Bourbon, most likely. Pill bottles were piled on the table. The doctor kept prescribing the pills to help her mother sleep. She slept too much. It didn’t matter.
“Bring me your father’s razor.”
Genie refused. Her father was in the fields, bossing around a hundred men. He was making cotton for the whole world. It would be late before he got home, and Genie was afraid of what her mother would do with the razor.
“Now!” Her mother yelled. She picked up a glass from the bedside table and hurled it.
Genie ducked. Shards of glass skittered across the wood floor. Genie got the razor. It was long and straight and very sharp. She loved to watch her father shave, loved the scraping sound of blade against skin. Her father took good care of things like razors and farm equipment. He did not have time to care for his wife.
Her mother’s hair was glorious, black and shiny and thick with natural waves. Genie watched as she chopped through it. Ragged hunks gathered in the bed. She was a bird in a nest. She cut the hair shorter and closer to her head. She scraped the blade along her scalp. Blood appeared, bubbling up and dripping down her nearly bald head. It pooled and coagulated in the bits of scraggly hair she left behind. Genie kept her voice gentle, soothing. “Mama, don’t hurt yourself.”
She brought a damp washcloth from the bathroom and crawled into
bed with her mother. She stroked the cloth across her mother’s bloody scalp, tenderly blotting the nicks and scrapes. That’s all it was, nicks and scrapes. Her mother reached up with her left hand and grabbed a hunk of Genie’s hair. She sliced through it with the blade, and Genie stared, horrified, at the mass of her own hair floating down to mingle with her mother’s hair on the bed. Genie leapt away. She fled, running down the stairs so fast that she pitched forward and fell hard. She felt her right wrist twist beneath the weight of her body, and a sharp pain shot up her arm to her shoulder. She ran out the back door, where miles of cotton stretched out like strands of pearls in the searing late afternoon sunshine. She ran across the backyard to her father’s shed. She pulled and pulled on the door, but it was locked tight. She touched the mangled edge of her freshly chopped hair and sobbed. Her wrist throbbed. She looked toward the house and saw her mother in the window, staring at her. Genie realized that her mother’s illness was confined to that room and that she would never leave as long as she was in the dark place. Genie’s heartbeat slowed and she stared back at her mother, a bird trapped in a cage, trapped in a nest made from her own feathers. Not me, Genie thought.
* * *
She was sixteen. Her mother took her to see Pisa. Genie saw that Pisa was powerful, and she could be powerful, too. She tried to explain it to her mother, but her mother was weak. She went along for as long as she could, but she kept slipping back into the darkness.
* * *
She was twenty, beautiful and strong and surrounded by girls who wanted to look like her, boys who wanted to be with her. Powerful, she was powerful. She was the queen of Delta State and everyone thought she had a shot at Miss Mississippi. Her fingers were long and graceful and practically melted into the ivory of the piano as she played classical music, pop tunes, ragtime, gospel. She loved the cool feel of the keys and the way they gently warmed at her touch.
Her father was proud of her, but also impatient. “Come home,” he said. “Your mother needs you.”
“No,” she told him. “I want to stay.”
“You’ll go back. When your mother is well.”
She went. What choice did she have? Her mother was in bed, in the dark room. She stared at Genie with her stone-dead eyes, though Genie thought she saw a glint of satisfaction beneath her mother’s cold glare. She was jealous. Jealous of her daughter’s beauty, her daughter’s life. She’d once been the beautiful one, but her beauty faded with each bout of darkness. She was nothing but a husk.
* * *
She was twenty-three. It was the longest dark period yet. College was like a dream from some other life. Some girl from Clinton, a tap dancer of all things, was crowned Miss Mississippi. Genie cooked dinner for her father. She cleaned the house and shopped for groceries. She tried to convince her father to hire some help. It was 1963, and her father ran one of the most prosperous farms in three states. He employed an army of black men to care for his fields, but he refused to hire even one of their wives or daughters to help Genie in his house. “I won’t have every nigger in White Forest gossiping about your mother,” he said. “We take care of our own.”
Genie brought her mother tall glasses of bourbon. She read to her from the local paper. There were race riots in Alabama. Myrlie Evers wanted her husband’s killer brought to justice, but it wasn’t going to happen for another thirty years. Three men were lynched in Neshoba County, two of them white. “That’ll teach those Yankees to mess around down here,” her mother said.
“They just want to vote, Mama. Black people want to vote.”
“This place is too dangerous for ordinary people,” her mother said. “It’s crawling with things that will eat them alive. It’s eating me alive. It will eat you, too.” Her mother looked like something devoured and spit up. She was so thin Genie could see the bones underneath her paper skin. Her mother was never going to get better. Every day, she slipped further into the darkness. “Why am I still here?” she asked Genie. “I thought I’d be gone by now.” Genie tried to make her feel better, offered to brush her hair, to bathe her, to dress her in nice clothes, but her mother wouldn’t have it. “Why?” She asked the question again and again. “What’s the point?” Genie couldn’t provide an answer. “You’ll be better off when I’m gone,” her mother said, but then she cackled and turned wild-eyed. “Or maybe not. Maybe you’ll just take my place.”
Never, Genie thought.
Every day, Genie woke up and put on a dress, applied some makeup, brushed her hair. She did it to remind herself she was worth the attention, even if the only admirer she had was the one in the mirror. She did it to keep from sinking into filth and sadness like her mother. Her college classmates had moved on. They got married, got pregnant, not always in that order. Some were working in town. A handful headed off to California, searching for something they didn’t even know they needed. Genie was locked in place. She couldn’t move forward and she couldn’t move away. She met Bruce that summer. He drove a truck for Grantham Feed & Supply, and he delivered pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer to her father’s farm. He showed up every two weeks in the summer months, rolled barrels of poison from the back of his truck into her father’s shed. She brought him sweet tea and he lingered longer than necessary. Her father did not approve, but Genie cared less and less about her father’s approval. As long as her mother was sick, her father would not let Genie go.
Genie’s father was leaving for two days. The members of the Delta Council called an emergency meeting to discuss the uprisings taking place across the region. Workers were demanding breaks and asking for better wages. He had to go. He gave Genie the keys to the shed and told her Bruce would be by with supplies. “Just lock everything up,” he told her. “Don’t stand around talking to that redneck. Just lock it up and get back inside. Take care of your mother.”
Genie took the key. She put on her best sundress, crisp cotton printed with golden sunflowers. She brushed mascara on her lashes until her eyelids felt heavy, painted her lips bright red. She brushed her hair until her scalp felt charged with electricity. Then she went into the dark room. Sometimes her mother was more alert in the mornings, but today she was drowsy and despondent, glancing up at Genie with hooded eyes. “Why are you all whored up?” That voice, muffled and sharp at once, eliminated any doubt she might have.
“Here’s your drink.” Genie pressed a glass of watered-down bourbon to her mother’s lips.
Her mother slurped and some of the liquid dribbled down her chin. “Weak,” she said.
“Well, it’s early. We’ll save the strong stuff for later.”
She waited. Bruce pulled up at ten o’clock in the morning and Genie greeted him with a smile. She jingled the keys at him and explained that her father was attending a meeting in Cleveland. She hopped into the passenger seat of the truck and rode with Bruce to the shed around back, watched him unload the barrels from the bed of the truck, and asked him questions about each one. He explained which powder killed which weed and what to use for rodents. He asked her to stand back and he donned a pair of gloves, snapped a paper mask over his nose and mouth, and rolled out the last barrel. It was marked with a skull and crossbones on all sides and stamped with warnings about inhalation, ingestion, and dermal exposure. Genie locked the door to the shed and took Bruce inside. He was nervous, and when he was nervous, he stuttered. She served him a piece of lemon meringue pie and a cup of coffee. She let her hand rest on his forearm and told him someday the farm would be hers. “All of it,” she said. “All of this land will belong to me and to my husband.” She looked him right in the eye when she said the word “husband.” His face flushed red and she smiled.
She let him kiss her, tasted the sweet tangy lemon and bitter coffee on his tongue. He pressed himself against her, and his desire chased away any darkness that threatened her. She needed to be needed. He groped at her, grabbing at various parts of her as if clutching for a life preserver. She reached down and unbuckled his belt, unzipped his blue jeans. He sprang from th
em as if freed from prison. She lifted her skirt, pushed her panties down around her knees, and gasped as he thrust into her. It was over before it began. He convulsed and pulled away, leaving behind a sticky trail on her thigh. She knew nothing of sex and assumed that was it. They lay side by side on the cold tile floor of her parents’ kitchen. Genie felt restless, dissatisfied. Bruce looked at her. “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”
Genie shrugged. She knew she was pretty.
“I’m not rich,” Bruce said.
“I don’t care.”
“I’m not handsome.”
“I’m sick of handsome people.”
He rolled on top of her, supporting most of his weight on his elbows. “I’m not good.”
“Neither am I.” She guided him into her and pressed herself hard against him until she felt something like pleasure.
She sent him off with another piece of pie and a thermos full of coffee. He promised to return in better clothes and with a good shave to talk to her father.
Genie waited until the dust from his truck settled before heading back out to the shed. She put on a pair of yellow kitchen gloves, pleased with the way they matched her dress. She tied one of her father’s bandannas around her nose and mouth, and used a crowbar to pry open the barrel, the one with the skull and crossbones. She dipped a tablespoonful of the white powder into a clean glass. It looked like laundry detergent, nothing more. She closed the barrel, tamped the lid down all around with a hammer. Inside the house, she crushed a dozen of her mother’s sleeping pills into a fine powder with a wooden rolling pin, the same pin she’d used to roll out the piecrust early that morning. She filled the glass half-full with bourbon and stirred until most of the cloudiness disappeared, packed in some ice and fresh mint leaves, and topped it off with sweet tea. She carried it upstairs right away, afraid that if she hesitated, she would lose her nerve.
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