It startled me, this forgetting. But it wasn’t a real forgetting, not with this ache fixed in my chest. It was like I was between two places: what used to be and how it was now. Maybe this was because I never thought it would end like this, me packing my apron and turning this house over to another woman. Not after all that had happened, not after all I had seen.
Nearly a year ago, on the first day of October, Sister Camillus and Sister Vincent from St. Mary’s washed Bernadette in the bedroom while Mama tried to talk Oscar out of burying her in her wedding dress. ‘Oscar honey,’ she’d said, ‘Bernadette wouldn’t want you seeing her in it, not this way.’ Neighbor women from all directions were here and had gathered on the veranda. They’d brought platters of ham, cakes, and pies, and I’d laid the food out on the kitchen table. ‘It’s a mighty grievous thing,’ I heard Aunt Mattie say. I was inside, and her words came to me through the windows. ‘Especially when there was a baby on the way. And Mr Williams, well, that man carries a shine for Bernadette, marriage hasn’t dulled that one bit.’ They all agreed and said how it broke their hearts to think of it. That wasn’t the only thing that broke their hearts. There was Andre, motherless at four years old. All that sadness, and in the hallway, I heard Oscar say to Mama, ‘If I have to do it myself, I want Bernadette in her wedding dress.’
Leastways, Andre didn’t hear none of them, him staying at St. Mary’s. But them words of Oscar’s stuck in my mind as I polished the cookstove from top to bottom. When I finished that, I washed down the walls and then the windows.
Without Oscar coming right out and asking, the morning after Bernadette was laid to rest, I rode with my brothers to this house and at the foot of the veranda steps, I climbed down from the wagon and let myself in. I cooked and cleaned, and saw to Andre. After two weeks, I found an envelope on the kitchen table. There were ten dollar bills in it. That money surprised me; I’d been helping out, not working for pay. But the big surprise was what was printed on the envelope. I didn’t care nothing about reading but I knew what the letters spelled. Miss Ogden. Until then, I was Nan. I put the envelope in my pocket and that night I showed it to Mama. ‘Bernadette’s gone and won’t be coming back,’ she said when she opened it and saw all the bills. ‘But Oscar can’t say them words, not yet. But he knows it, knows he needs you. This is his way of saying it.’ Mama pointed to the printing on the envelope. ‘And this here is his way of setting the terms. You understand what he’s saying, don’t you, you being a young woman and him a widower. He don’t want no gossip. That’s why you’re Miss Ogden and honey, he’s Mr Williams now.’
Oscar was hollow-eyed and unshaven during the first three months. He didn’t sleep good. I made up the bed in the mornings and them scratchy-new sheets were a tangled mess. I figured he sat up most nights, because every morning I found an old coffee can on the back veranda with the burned-down ends of cigarettes in it. Every day I threw out the cigarettes and put back the can. Oscar had Frank T. and Wiley bring home bottles of beer along with the usual supplies, but I never found the empty bottles. Likely, Oscar buried them somewhere. At noon, him, me, and Andre ate dinner with nobody saying much. But when it was just me and Andre, I kept up a chatter. That little boy needed to hear a lively voice. Me, too. Without Bernadette, this house had lost its heart.
I guessed it was the nuns at St. Mary’s that reminded Oscar he had a child to see to. I didn’t know what happened but on the second Sunday in January, he came home from church and it was like he started to try again. Somebody at St. Mary’s had trimmed his brown hair so that it didn’t hang over the back of his collar no more. He had a smile for Andre and one for me. He told the three orphan boys he’d brought back with him that he’d see them in the barn; he had something he had to do first. Oscar went into the washroom and shaved his face and neck clear down to bare skin. He even shaved off his mustache that he’d had for as long as I’d known him. Without it, he was a different man, younger somehow. When it was time to load Andre in the wagon for their trip to the cemetery, Oscar swung that little boy so high that it set Andre laughing. It was such a pleasing sound that Oscar laughed too, a rusty sound at first. I was on the veranda and he glanced my way. There was a lightness in his eyes but when he saw it was me, that light dimmed. I wasn’t Bernadette. I thought he’d fall back into his sorrowfulness but Andre, sitting on the buckboard, wouldn’t let him. ‘Daddy!’ he said, and that word was a bubble of shiny happiness. It lifted Oscar, I saw that. He gathered himself a lopsided smile and got up on the wagon.
Now, outside the window, the gulf was riled and the dark clouds moved fast. Things could get bad. But this time tomorrow, it’d be over. Storms did that; they moved on and went someplace else. Like I had to do.
I shook off my low feeling and put the corn pone into the oven. I gritted my teeth against the squeak in the pump, filled pots with water, and hauled the pots to the stove. Andre was still outside having himself a high time in the rain. Noon dinner wasn’t too far off and he was going to need a bath whether he liked it or not. And he wasn’t having it in the washroom; he’d track mud all over this house if I allowed that. No, sir, he was going to have his bath right here in the kitchen and he’d take it in the laundry washtub. I had just emptied the first pot of hot water into the tub when Mrs Williams came in from the veranda.
She got herself a cup from the shelf and poured some tea from the teakettle, my brother finally bringing her some from the city. She’d made this pot earlier but likely it was lukewarm. I’d set it off the stove a good while ago. She didn’t say nothing about it, though. Neither was there the first question about all the water simmering on the stove, she didn’t ask about the laundry washtub on the floor by the table. Her mind looked to be elsewhere; her plucked-thin eyebrows were all knotted up. It was like she didn’t even know I was there. A tight feeling started up in my belly.
Mrs Williams put the teakettle back on the counter, and got the milk pitcher out of the icebox. She gussied up her tea with the milk, then added a teaspoon of sugar from the sugar bowl on the table, some of the sugar spilling around the cup. She didn’t look to notice that circle of splattered sugar. Her gaze was fixed on the front windows.
Something told me I should look out the window too. Something bad was happening out there. But I couldn’t get myself to look.
Mrs Williams didn’t sit down. She kept standing, stirring the tea, her spoon clinking from side to side. ‘From what I understand,’ she said after a while, ‘the house is on stilts as a precaution.’ Her voice was flat; it gave me the shivers. She said, ‘The ridge has never flooded.’
‘Other than the time it did,’ I said.
She gave me a sharp look.
‘It came up in the storm of ’71.’ My mouth had gone as dry as a rock. I swallowed. ‘Mama and Daddy, they saw it.’
‘But you never have?’
‘No.’ I needed to look out the windows but I couldn’t get my head to turn. My neck was froze up.
Mrs Williams kept stirring her tea. She said, ‘I just saw a rather unusual thing. Or at least it is for me. It happened while I was on the veranda. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks; I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But it wasn’t a trick.’ She tapped her spoon two times on the lip of the cup. She said, ‘Streams of rushing water are coming through the sand hills. Through the passes, I mean. From the beach.’ She put her spoon on the counter. ‘Miss Ogden? Should we be concerned?’
My neck came unstuck. Out the window, through the rain and past Andre stomping in mud puddles, I saw water from the gulf fan out on our side of the sand hills. It mashed down the grass, coming this way.
‘Miss Ogden?’
I opened my mouth but nothing came out.
‘I see,’ Mrs Williams said. ‘I’ll let Oscar know.’
All that water streaming through the sand hill passes made my heart gallop right up into my throat. Wiley’s big blow, it was closing in. Didn’t matter that the wind still came from the mainland. Didn’t matter that the wind sho
uld push the gulf back and that the tide should be low. Big blows did what they wanted; we weren’t nothing to them. On a map, we weren’t but a sliver of land.
Wiley said it would hit tonight. Hours and hours from now. There was time to get home; there was time to get ready. I smothered the racing in my chest, and if Mrs Williams’ heart was knocking hard, it didn’t show. She went off to the barn wearing a fancy pearl-colored raincoat with three shiny black buttons. That coat didn’t even come close to covering the bottom part of her skirt. She had on a rain hat, too, or what I took to be her idea of one since it didn’t have feathers on it. Mrs Williams wore my boots too, them already being muddy. That had been my idea. I’d figured she’d turn down my offer, my boots not being pretty, but she took right to it. Probably she wanted to spare her shoes.
She’d laced my boots tight, them being too big for her. That done, she held up her skirt and turned her feet from side to side. She studied my square-toed boots with clumps of mud stuck on the sides and laughed. It was a raggedy laugh. Then she sobered up and thumped down the veranda steps with her white umbrella held to shield her backside. Andre, still in the yard playing, started to go with her but she stopped and told him something. He stood in the rain, splattered with mud and his little shoulders slumped. Mrs Williams pointed to a big puddle and off he went, kicking his way through the water. She turned and headed for the barn, her skirt blowing sideways.
I had taken her for the kind of woman that got all lathered up and scared silly. Instead she went the other way and pulled a tight rein in on her feelings. As for me, I was pinned down with nerves. I stood on the veranda and everything I knew or had heard about big blows rushed through my mind. I was eight when the storm of ’86 struck. It could have happened yesterday, it was that fresh in my mind. The gulf came through the passes at the sand hills but them hills slowed the water and kept it off the ridge. Things were different, though, for us close to the bayou. That water came out of its banks and marched its way to our house. When it got to the middle veranda step, Mama said it was time to clear out and go the mile down the island to my uncle Bumps’ house. He lived on the ridge then. ‘It ain’t safe here,’ she told Daddy. ‘Three children, Frank. Even if they ain’t babies, we have to think of them.’ Daddy said the horses couldn’t pull the wagon since the water was too deep and the ground was too mushy. ‘We’ll walk,’ Mama said.
The water came to my waist. The day had turned dark, the wind fought us, the rain was needle sharp, and the current was so strong that Daddy had to carry me.
We nearly lost Wiley, I ain’t never going to forget that. He was eleven and bean-pole thin. He stumbled; the current knocked him off his feet and carried him away. Mama screamed, and Daddy gave me to her. I wrapped my arms around her waist, both of us staggering, the water trying to take us, too. The stinging rain in my eyes, Wiley was nothing but a dark shape in the water. He kept trying to stop himself in the current, his arms going every which way, but the water was strong. Daddy and Frank T. went after him and the only thing that saved him was he caught hold of a branch on a salt cedar. Daddy got to him, and when we finally made our way to Uncle Bumps’, Wiley fell down on the floor and went to sleep, he was that worn out. He didn’t care that his hands were cut and bleeding, his arms and legs, too. He slept so hard that he didn’t hear it when the wind lifted a corner of the roof and ripped part of it off. The next morning, the sun came out like nothing had happened. We went home, and the storm had taken some of our roof, too. Inside, the mud and sand were ankle deep on the floor. ‘Would have been better off staying,’ Daddy said, pointing to the brown line on the walls. ‘Water didn’t come but a foot inside the house.’
It happened different in the city. Hundreds of houses close to the beach were washed away. Folks were killed; roofs fell in and crushed them flat. Others were swept out into the gulf and never seen again.
Then there was the story that Mama’s middle brother told. Before he married a woman from North Carolina and settled there, Uncle Ned was a sailor. When I was little, he stayed with us when he had shore leave. ‘It’s a wall of wind,’ he said about hurricanes. ‘A wall you can see coming from far off. The black clouds get to swirling and the air turns green. That wall pushes the waves and turns them the size of mountains.’ I’d never seen a mountain but the way he said it made me clutch my elbows. ‘And our schooner feeling like nothing but a scrap of wood,’ he said.
I knew how to swim, and that was a comfort. Daddy had taught me. He believed anybody, even girls, that lived on an island should know something about how to save themselves if they ended up in the water. When I was seven, Mama skimmed me down to my underclothes and Daddy took me to the gulf. ‘Paddle with your arms and kick your feet,’ he said, and showed me how. ‘Keep your head up and look over your shoulder. Watch for the wave coming up. If you get caught in a riptide, don’t fight it. Let it carry you on down the beach. It’ll run itself out; you’ll be just fine.’
That wasn’t always so. Oakley Hill, the first man I was to marry, drowned on a clear day, not a storm in sight. All it took was for him to get his feet tangled in rope while he trawled for shrimp. The rope was still wrapped around his ankles when he washed ashore. Nobody can say for sure but it was figured he lost his balance, hit his head, and fell overboard. The gulf didn’t care one little bit that Oakley was a good man. Or that he was only nineteen. It took him like he didn’t mean nothing to nobody.
Mrs Williams wouldn’t know none of that, her not being here and thinking that an Ohio storm was as bad as it could get. But I knew better. Big blows didn’t have laid-out plans; each one had a mind of its own. They came from the gulf and didn’t stop until they hit land and killed people. And here we sat on a narrow bar of dirt and sand, water on all sides.
The corn pone was burning. I smelled it from the veranda; I’d forgotten all about it. That was what came from watching Mrs Williams as she made her way to the barn to tell Oscar about the water at the sand hills. I hurried inside. Smoke billowed out when I opened the oven door. I grabbed a pot holder and got them pans out quick as could be. But it was too late: the pones were black on the top. I tipped them onto cooling racks and covered them up with a towel. I’d feed them to the dogs when they’d cooled, nobody needed to see what I’d done. I stuck the pans into the wash basin to soak and went back out onto the veranda.
A little ways from the house, Andre poked at something in a puddle with a stick. As for Mrs Williams, she was at the barnyard gate, her closed umbrella under her arm so she could work the latch with both hands. The bottom part of her skirt was so wet it had stretched long and dragged around her feet. She opened the gate, then closed it behind her. She’d no sooner got the umbrella back up when it turned inside out and flew off, a white bowl-shaped thing with a long wood handle. It tumbled in the air, cleared the barn fence, bounced down, then flipped its way toward the sand hills where it landed in a pool of water. The wind to Mrs Williams’ back, she nearly skipped across the barnyard. She took the plank walkway that sloped up to the barn door and I couldn’t see her no more.
My mind was a jumble. There were things to do but I couldn’t think what. I walked from one end of the veranda to the other, the rain splattering me and the bottoms of my stockings getting wet again. Inside the house, I peeled off my stockings and went from window to window and closed the ones where the rain blew in. I got a dish towel and mopped up water from the sills and floor. In Andre’s room, the wind had blown his spare shirt and pants off the wall peg and onto the floor. I hung them up and they fell down again. This time it wasn’t the wind; I’d closed the windows. It was the shake in my hands.
I should boil rice for noon dinner. I should call Andre in for his bath. I should bring in more firewood to keep it dry. I should fill the lamps with kerosene. I went out onto the veranda. Andre was squatted close to the ground, peering at something. Overhead, there were them fast-moving black clouds. At the sand hills, water kept coming through the passes, the thin pools of it spreading out and pushing in
land, maybe a hundred feet from us.
Mrs Williams was on her way back to the house from the barn. Her hat was gone and her hair whipped around her face. I could tell she tried to hurry but them boots of mine slowed her down. She stumbled some, and one time she slipped, her feet churning on the muddy path, but she held on and kept going. And here I was, a tangled web of nerves.
‘Miss Nan,’ Andre hollered. He was wet down to the skin. His clothes were mashed flat, but he didn’t care. He grinned as he pointed at something on the ground, then he hollered again. I shook my head: I couldn’t hear him over the rain. With both hands, he picked up a turtle the size of a dinner plate and held it high.
‘I see it,’ I yelled back, but that mud turtle gave me a quivery feeling. It wasn’t right. It belonged in the bayou, not in front of the house. The bayou was a mile from here and turtles, they weren’t big walkers, not unless they were laying eggs and even then they didn’t walk a mile. Not mud turtles.
‘Look!’ Andre hollered. He put it down, jumped to a nearby puddle and got himself another turtle, him grinning in the rain and me feeling slippery like the floor was tilted. Something bad was happening at the bayou, something more than it coming a little ways out of its banks.
The dogs were gone. That notion hit like a rock to the chest. I didn’t know when I’d last seen them. They weren’t playing with Andre; they’d run off. Critters knew: they sniffed the air, they felt things folks didn’t. Dogs hid, and turtles showed up where they didn’t belong.
I went inside and everything came at me: the gloom, the puny glow from the lamps, the closed windows, the heat, the laundry washtub and how the water in it sloshed from side to side, the floor that jittery from the wind.
The Promise Page 20