The Salt Eaters

by Toni Cade Bambara

  “I want you to have it, Mai.”

  Mai tucked her chin in to examine what had been familiar for nearly a year, but was now somehow a brand-new thing. She pulled Chezia to her and kissed her on the forehead just as the mothers had that last night, weaving flowers and glowworms into Chezia’s hair, dropping garlands upon garlands around her neck and then kissing each youth between the brows before sending them down the mountain to go off to school.

  “Raining in Barnwell, I suspect,” Iris said quietly. And they were all quiet, contemplating the distance traveled—rain. Years ago rain meant splashing in puddles, mud pies, rain barrels, watering the stock, the crops, rain water for shampoos. At the very worst, rain had meant colds. And then the lens widened to incorporate mud slides and floods. Now that contaminated soil that had provoked the local folk of Barnwell to join with hundreds of safe-earth activists was uppermost in their minds, each rain meant contamination leaching inches ever closer to the water table, spelling the ruin of the Savannah River and all who lived in it, on it, by it, from it.

  Velma was under the quilts with eucalyptus, Tiger balm, honey and lemon, apple cider vinegar and hot salt. Her mother was hugging her. Palma and Smitty, perched at the foot of the bed were playing with her toes through the covers. Her father in the doorway, the stuffed kangaroo under his arm for the asking. And she’d never been more cared for.

  Her wet clothes were on a hanger by the heater. The pink taffeta dress with the white dotted-swiss pinafore, the crinolines with three layers of ruffles, the hair ribbon, the white stockings; the Mary Janes were on M’Dear’s cedar chest, stuffed with newspaper. On the nightstand was the program, the yellow tassel dangling over the edge of the table. And M’Dear came in with white gloves running up and down an imaginary keyboard in the air then on her chest, tickling her. No one fussed about her running off after her recital. No one asked her where she’d gone and why she’d stayed out in the rain. M’Dear was being Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and Mama Mae was hugging her. And she’d never been more cared for. And she’d never been closer to whatever it was she’d been hunting for in drainpipes and closets and mirrors and in the woods, listening for through floorboards and doors and heat ducts.

  Her legs were moving under the covers as if she’d been riding a bike all day and rode still. She was discovering that peddling the bass notes can do that to your legs too, the bass vibrating through the feet, up the legs, settling in the thighs, the behind, the legs riding the keyboard down under all through the night. She had been surrounded, the giant pipes curved round the choir stall and she at center. And they had kissed her then and let her go off, and they kissed her now and she scooted down under the quilt and promised not to catch the pee-new-monia and die and never play organ again and make them proud. And she had never been more cared for and talked at and fussed over but not fussed at about ruining her hair when Mama Mae’d stood up all morning with the curling irons.

  She was ice-skating now, her legs moving under the quilts, snow flat against the window like kindergarten paper lace. And the music rumbled in her hands, her feet, against her behind on the bench, all around her. She was surrounded by music and had never been more at home in the world than through the organ. Not at the merry-go-round cause those tunes were old-timey, not at the roller rink cause they played the same songs as the baseball games on TV on boring, got-to-be-quiet Sunday afternoons, and not at the skating rink cause that organist was so corny the music was enough to make your blades tuck in and lose you your balance. In her skating rink under the quilts in the dark the music was her own. And she was on the ice now cutting the figure eight on its side with ease.

  Someone was talking to her but the organ music was drowning it out. Someone was saying something to her, giving her instructions to guard against colds. Confusion in the head causes colds, something like that. But murmuring so low. And she reached for it, reached down into the music for it but dipped too deep. Like waking with a thought you want to get around, want to scoot down past to catch the dream by the tail before it sinks, not knowing the thought was the tail right there at the surface, the thought the key to the elusive dream. And it swings overhead where you’re not awake yet and flies away and leaves before you surface, is gone and leaves you bobbing on the surface without a clue. But throughout the day, a shift of the leg on the bus and the leg remembers a bit of the story as it lay tangled in the sheets. A color in a dress passing by and the eye releases what it stored the night before; an aroma, an overheard and by midafternoon the dream’s reassembled itself and the message washes clear again: “She’s talking behind your back and is not your friend. It was Sylvia who wrote those nasty things about you on the wall of the handball court.” Or later, “That one is an agent, a plant, a provocateur. Watch your mouth.” Or, “See about that tooth. Abscess, poisoning your system.” Or, “It’s a faulty analysis that’s causing paralysis and not fear of monsters.” And lately: “When you go in the office, sit in the light and make them squint to see you. Choose a chair of an innocent color. Act as though it is understood you are above suspicion and are being interviewed not interrogated, being considered as a possible member of the investigating team to solve the mystery of the emptied storage centers, blank terminals.”

  But she’d had that dream long before she’d even taken the job at the plant, before the headhunter called her to set up appointments, before she’d put her résumé together. It had begun the night of the recital, that long ago, and continued for years as a recurring motif. She’d awaken rubbing her knees that had pressed against a walnut and chrome desk rather like the one in Jay Patterson’s office, definitely the one in the vice-manager’s office of Transchemical. Eighteen years ago she was on her knees in the spare room that had been Smitty’s playroom before he’d left for boarding school, twisting from the waist to take in the handiwork that marked the room as M’Dear’s own—the quilts, the stripped rocker, the open-work dresser runners, the curtains with the glyphs and veves designed by a woman friend called Minnie. She was leaning out the window of the old place, where M’Dear had taken her five years before that the first time, rescuing her from an angry peach switch. The old place on the water where the walls sweat and the floor looked wavy and green when you looked across it from the pillow, but blue and bulgy when you sat on your knees by the window.

  M’Dear Sophie and Daddy Dolphy in twin red and white polo shirts tied at the bottom, midriff out, in twin white sailor pants, a thousand buttons on one side of the belly button, a thousand buttons on the other, rolled to the knees. You could see they’d been at it awhile, the salt line on their shins like a hem Mama Mae might puff with chalk, jerking you round and round by the arm while she squeezed the red rubber ball on the yardstick and fussed if you fidgeted.

  They had been dragging the bush tubs along, doing it together, dropping the handles with a clank every now and then when a favorite record dropped down. They’d tango across the sand and gravel, cheek to cheek, cracking up. Then bending again to scoop up the oysters with their hands, the shovel abandoned by the old boat hull where the Victrola was. The shovel lying on its side, a salt line across its broad middle. They bent and scooped and dumped, filling the tubs, singing along with Nat King Cole doing “Nature Boy.” And when they couldn’t stand it, leaving the tubs to dance again, then putting the record back on the pile cause it was a favorite.

  Velma leaning out the window and learning how it was supposed to be when it would be for her and wondering why Smitty would want to go away when he had such wonderful parents. M’Dear and Daddy Dolphy filling up the tubs. There’d be a crowd over later to dance and eat and play pinochle and coon can. Laughing couples who kidded each other in front of friends about dopey things caught out at, couples having arguments but for show only, for fun. And there’d be kids for her to play with, reasons to not come to the phone when her daddy called her to find out when to pick her up and take her home. And it was good to be a godchild learning all these things.

  And when “Nature Boy” d
ropped down again, Daddy Dolphy wiped his hands on his pants and led M’Dear to the dance floor, the flat packed sand area just beyond the pit dug for cooking and the corn piled like firewood. And no chance of them backing into the hole by mistake, they danced close up, thigh to thigh, dancing on a dime like the teenagers at the Douglass Center when the grownups would leave and whoever had had the job of getting the bulb now screwed in the twenty-five-watt blue bulb, dancing on a dime. And when the song ended, Daddy Dolphy sang it again, “ ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn’ ”—them holding on to each other, parting slightly to look into each other’s face, and then hugging again, maybe patting the other gently on the shoulder, back, behind—“ ‘is just to love and be loo-oved in re-turrrn.’ ” The early morning cold wisps curling from their mouths like messages in the love comics her mama strictly forbid. And then he would drag both tubs along and M’Dear would bend just like the gym teacher teaching how to shoot from the foul line, only Miss Watson did it like an outhouse squat, M’Dear like a wonderful demi-plié.

  Tomorrow it would be her job to gather up the empty shells in two tubs. One for crushing into the front walkway. The other to put back into the oyster beds, cause the babies needed something to snuggle up to, attach themselves to. Seemed sad. Empty shells. A mean trick even. But M’Dear Sophie and Daddy Dolphy said to do it, always give back, always take care. So it had to be all right.

  “The house’s an empty place, baby.”

  They were not dancing, they were not working together. They were barely walking together, Obie on the outside turning every now and then to make sure Lil James wasn’t goofing off with friends along the way, Velma walking briskly, her elbows crushing the pocketbook to the ribs on one side, the New York Times on the other. It was getting to be like a play, this walk from church. Neither took what was being played out as any kind of real truth but knew that in order to get the quality of even stage realism, one had to believe a bit to be considered believable.

  “What would it take to be true to one another, Obie?” To be true. To be trued to. To come true for herself. She felt betrayed. She slowed down because he did and he did because the boy did, leaning into a car parked at the curb. School friends. She looked over the items in Hall’s Variety Shop wondering where all the window stuff of recent years had gone—the Africa-shaped earrings, pick combs, fist tikis, posters, maps, dashikis, geles. Everything happened so quickly, too quickly.

  “What brought all this on?” he was asking, coming up to the window as she was pulling out again, picking up her pace. “All I said was you’re giving the best of yourself away and come home so drained.”

  “You said ‘throwing away’ the best of myself, as if the community—”

  “I work hard too, Vee,” pressing his hands against his chest. “I respect your commitment, your work. I love the folks. But I care about you and the boy too. And now you’ve taken this job.”

  “What brought this on actually is that I said—all I said was Lil James is sure getting independent, growing up fast. Got a paper route, buying his own clothes, thinking about renaming himself.” She looked back over her shoulder at their son in his three-piece suit.

  “But the way you said it, resentful, as if trying to talk yourself out of pain, the pain of loss. But you haven’t lost him, Vee. You push him away and then act betrayed, but you haven’t lost him.”

  “Are we talking about the boy or about us?”

  “All right. Let’s talk about us. Of all the times to be taking on out-of-town jobs.”

  “You’re sleeping around,” she said, stopping abruptly to say it, to watch how it caught him at the back of the neck, the back of the knees, feeling how it caught her at the pit of the stomach. “That’s what this conversation is about,” she said when he turned and took a few steps back toward her. “And you’re using the boy as an alibi or a rehearsal or dry run or subtext or something not straight. It’s not like you, Obie, to be … deceptive.”

  “Velma.” He’d thrown his hands up and she’d thought it meant surrender, then realized he was just asking for time out. Lil James walked around them on the curb side, then cut back in between them to relieve her of the newspaper and to take from his father the hat he refused to wear anytime and anywhere but on the way to church. Lil James was openly smiling a sad smile. He felt sorry for his parents. He gave them privacy, walking on ahead.

  “We’ve known each other too long, Obie, been through too much, been too much to each other. Why lie about such simple shit. And you been lying for months now, complaining about my aloofness, my fatigue, my job, willing to totally mess with my sense of what’s real in order to throw up this smoke screen. You are sleeping around, Obie, and not very discreetly. And it sets one lousy example for your brother Bobby and all the little brothers. You are,” she said stonily when he opened his mouth to answer. “And that’s all there is to that.” She followed her son’s lead now, glad to not have to figure out what route to take to M’Dear’s for breakfast.

  “And you don’t care?”

  “Testing my tolerance before you come clean?”

  They walked in silence to the corner and Velma noted how different things looked and felt now that it had been said. A subtle rearrangement of the world. For a while she had begun to doubt her perception of everything. There were trying enough shifts in her perceptions as it was. She needed all the clarity she could get. And she would have it.

  “I’ve always taken you at your word, Obie.” And now there was no trust. Not like before. Things would never be the same. She marveled at how profoundly disturbing “simple shit” can be, an accumulation of fissures in the fabric of what was her sense of things, how things were, what statements meant, how they stood.

  “And I’ve always taken you at your word,” he said quietly, reaching for her hand. “Why didn’t you tell me, tell us, about the new job? You just sprang it on us.”

  “Can we settle on one theme for this dialogue before the variations get too cumbersome?”

  “We’re talking about trust, the loss of trust, breakdowns on the afrophone, misleadings and misreadings. Baby. I’m sorry.”

  He kissed her before the light changed but it didn’t help any. It was too late for anything but war. And then retreat. And then a stupid affair with a man she wasn’t certain she even liked, certainly didn’t trust. She called it “interesting for the moment,” and avoided the word “revenge.” That tampered too much with the image she held of herself.

  “Train,” someone said. The word was being passed around the café the way news of food, fuel, medical supplies might be relayed in the days of change-over ahead. Diners on the side street facing the avenue could peer between the pots of Swedish ivy, peer between the cars and trucks, between the post office and the motel and see the gray, rust, orange, smudged and sooty cars of the train rumbling by.

  “I thought it was thunder for sure that time,” Piltdown Pete said, and several of his colleagues nodded or murmured in agreement. Rising Sun ran a finger back and forth from the base of his throat to his chin and smiled knowingly.

  “A lie,” he said quite distinctly. Piltdown Pete did not ask the Asian for an explanation; he was staring across at the vacant lot where he still half expected an army of savages with their thumping drums to come swarming up over the mounds of bottles and cans to engulf the whole street. Grim Reaper was quietly measuring the pace, intensity and color of the smoke streams that poured from the Transchemical stacks in the distance and simply did not hear the remark, the challenge. Krupp’s Kreep had snapped his plastic stirrer in half and, satisfied the rumble was not a sneak attack, looked directly at Rising Sun as if about to challenge him, his memory of ’41 so evident on his face, it drew a smile from the man in the bronze shirt. But only momentarily. For Krupp’s face now registered Hiroshima, and, Rising Sun put out his cigarette and swung his gaze again across the aisle at the woman—Eurasian, Cambodian, Nisei, Sansei?

  Now that the “thunder” had been identified as the train it so
unded like nothing else but. Locals at the café laughed at themselves, that they had failed to recognize so familiar, so ordinary a sound. And yet, several locals did use the rest rooms as an excuse to check the side street and be sure. It had sounded so loud, so ominous.

  “This place so ramjam with people, how can I work out without an elbow in my neighbor’s ribs?” Cecile was studying the menu, wondering whether the oysters could be trusted.

  “Speaking of trains,” Iris said, eager to assist Cecile in breaking the mood, “is the John Henry-Kwan Cheong piece pulled together?”

  Nilda was waiting for someone to answer; no one did. She was caught up in the animated pictures in her mind. Jackrabbits. A speaker at the Barnwell rally had explained that the rabbits, having built their warrens in the contaminated soil, were spreading danger. Luminescent jackrabbits lighting up the night. Railroad trains traveling across the prairie, tourists shooting glowing rabbits from the window. The carcasses piled high at the trading posts. Pelts shipped east for coats, rugs, handbags. Phosphorescent corruption. Nilda changed position, dug her hands in the pockets of her denim skirt, dissatisfied with the pictures. She had been aiming for something else, something to reconnect her to that moment on the bus. She reached toward her feather and found her hands instead on straw and remembered she was wearing Cecile’s hat. She dug in her hair for the thunderbird barrette and held it tight.

  “What do you think, Nilda?” Iris was asking her something.

  The buffalo treaties should be part of the railroad piece, no doubt. But it was peaceful with her eyes closed, her hand in her hair clutching the turquoise, the tiny figurines of Cecile’s hat creating little breezes, tinkling tunes, helping her to reconnect.

  Down the street, noisy but harmonious, strolled three of Jan’s former students, the one in the middle in a lime-green suit, the two flanking him in blue jeans and 7 Arts satin jackets. The one singing bass was bent over, popping his fingers as he snapped his knees in a modified cakewalk, laying down the baroomph dit dit diir bottom. The tenor, his head thrown back, was stabbing the air in front of him with a crooked finger as though testing the resiliency of cellophane. The baritone was in the middle, one minute his arms wide so that the lining of his lime jacket revealed itself as cut from the same bolt as his tie, the next squinching his whole body together to cup the invisible mike to his mouth. It was clear to all who turned their way that the trio was doing one of his originals; he was the only one who knew the lyrics. They were drowning out the musicians onstage inside the café who had just started up again.