The Arms of God: A Novel

by Lynne Hinton

  But she was also aware that this request was weighty and too challenging to meet. She knew that sisters were hard to come by and completely unavailable when the skins were different. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the naïveté of seven-year-old girls, the sincerity, the innocence.

  It was sweet, she admitted to herself, best friends playing like time was just another child who rolled down the grassy hills and fell into their arms like each other or swam near them in the cool spaces in rock quarries, jumping hand in hand into blue lake water high from a stony ledge.

  It was uncomplicated to children. Always had been. Always would be. But it was not children who made the rules or enforced the boundaries. And even though it seemed impossible to two small girls in love with the world and each other, one day it would change. And one would be white and one would be black and no potion or cream, no poultice or filtered tea, would stop the hating that took on a pale complexion and separated them like a steep angry wall.

  Witchhazel quit believing a long time ago that there would ever be a change; and the only reason she let a white person step through her door was the fear of what might happen. Not to her, she was starting to believe what people said about her, that nothing could kill her. No, it was the others she opened her door for. Only one thing worse than a white man; and that’s a white man riddled with disease or pain.

  That’s why she went to the mayor’s house. Not because of money or promise of food or evil. It wasn’t even those six dark red horses or the tall black carriage that persuaded her to go. It was because of the savage desperation that she saw in Johnnie Mays’s eyes on that fourth time at her door. She knew Mrs. Emily Murphy would start ripping backs or demanding bricks from straw if the mayor was not healed. So she went and nursed him back to life to save the salaries and the loose dignity of a white man’s servants.

  And now these two little girls were coming to her talking about being sisters. One white, who would one day choose her whiteness over her best friend, and one black, who would be forced to forget anything other than her dark reflection that stared back at her from mirrors and clear water, unforgiving faces, and closed doors.

  There was something else, though. Something in the black girl’s eyes. Something of urgency and the need to protect. There was some secret that heightened the need for a blessing. Some guarded knowledge that separated them and yet drew them again into each other. It was deep and pressing; and just like the plea of Johnnie Mays it wrestled beneath the eyelids of a black person and begged for the old woman’s touch.

  She surprised herself at even entertaining such a notion.

  “Sisters?” She had moved to a chair at the table. “Where’d you get such a curious idea?”

  Tree spoke for the two of them. “It was mine.”

  “Your’n? Well it’s sweet, but I ain’t got nothing for such a thing. Go on home now and get your mama these herbs.”

  Tree and Olivia stayed where they were. Witchhazel placed the little bags into one larger bag and handed it out to Tree. The little girl did not move toward the old woman or her outstretched arm.

  “Ain’t you got nothing?”

  “It’s silliness, girls. Pure silliness. You friends enough, you don’t need no magic.”

  Tree slipped her hand into Olivia’s. “We just want something to make it so.”

  Witchhazel sighed and turned in the chair until she was facing the window.

  The flowers grew in bunches and crept along the ground from shade to shade, overgrown in kudzu and pigweed. It was ugly then; the flowers puny from unsplit bulbs that lay beneath the earth. Mites and spiders making homes in the unkempt garden while snakes drew comfort in the tall grass and thick ivy that wound around itself in poison.

  There was no order or delineation. Tawny weeds toppled herb and crushed the roominess that used to welcome long florid displays and wide tongues of vegetation. Sticks hammered the soil and brown stole away the brightness that used to reach into her window.

  It had been a long time since the windflowers, blue with black centers, melted into the lavender-pink glory of the snowflower. It seemed forever since the lips of her yard were traced in the dark orange-red of Apeldoorn tulips that lifted her garden into a smile. Years and lives had passed since Witchhazel’s backyard had been a showplace of brilliance. Streaming in rows like a rainbow. And she looked out across the dull and weakened brown, the spiky callused green, and could not dismiss the dreams of little girls.

  “This is very serious what you asking.” The old woman did not turn from the window. “It means you vowing your love to each other, trusting and believing in each other, letting nothing nor nobody come between you. I ’spect it’s more than you know.” And she watched a butterfly spin across the spotted patches of grass, a burst of brilliance in a track of lazy boredom.

  “Yes, mam.” Tree and Olivia answered together.

  “It ain’t likely to work being the wrong time of the year and all. This is a harvest thing you asking. Meant to bind two people together before the heavy storms; ain’t likely to work now.” Witchhazel was speaking to the loose spaces in her heart.

  The two girls stayed there, ready, faithful, waiting for instruction.

  “Well, go on to the yard and draw a circle around the both of you with room enough for me to step in. Then stand in the circle with your foreheads pressed together, your hands to your sides. And this is the most important part.” Witchhazel turned to face them, dead-eyed and tight-lipped.

  “You must try as hard as you can till you can feel the other girl inside you. Knowing her breath for your own, her voice, her seeing, everything that’s hers is yours. That’s what you have to do for this ceremony to work.”

  There was a hushed silence as the two girls thought about their assignment. A moment of suspicion or doubt as to whether it was even necessary since they thought they already knew everything about the other. Now this woman was suggesting that there might be more.

  Tree turned her eyes away from Witchhazel, who was now staring at her. If such a thing was possible, how could she keep the secret of Mattie from spilling out into the searching mind of Olivia? It was something she had not planned and now struggled with whether to stop the process before it ever began. But there was Olivia who was even more intrigued now that mystery was added to the ritual.

  “You still interested?” Witchhazel saw the hesitation.

  Olivia was the one to speak, “Yes, mam.”

  And she pulled Tree by the arm, through the door, and out into the backyard. She was also the one who drew the circle with her bare heel while Tree stood in the center and watched. Then she stepped inside.

  “Well, you ready?” Olivia was red and glowing. She stood directly in front of her best friend and leaned into Tree. Tree pushed forward as well until the resistance was evened and they were steadied by the leverage. They closed their eyes and began.

  It seemed forever before Witchhazel made her way to the backyard with Gabriel following closely behind her, dropping to the ground with only a limited amount of interest. The old woman examined the circle and the two girls and listened to the hums and buzzes of insects searching for a new leaf or petal.

  Olivia and Tree stood eye to eye, their brows knitted tightly showing a great amount of determination. A light wind stirred in the pine tops; and there was an air of expectation as the afternoon deepened into low sticky skies that entertained no thought of rain.

  She walked around the two girls, first left then right, and back again. Then she sprinkled them with rosewater that freshened and surprised them but did not bring them out of their stance. Witchhazel stepped outside the circle and began changing the direction which she faced, first to the east and then to the west, spouting out words that neither girl would later recall.

  And then she danced.

  Not in a fit of ecstasy or drunkenness but rather in a slight and methodical manner that was remembered in the muscles of the old woman’s legs and in the arches of her feet. Her fingers sam
pled the air while her shoulders swayed and shrank. Her back, broken and healed, broken and healed, raised and lowered in an easy dip, her body, one black, graceful sail.

  It was an ancient dance of women, celebrated when the men held council beyond the ears of wives and sisters. The domineering rite of exclusiveness turned into a ritual of joy. She touched her own face and the corners of her mouth, laughing to herself. Laughing at the power. Laughing at the magic. Both of which shivered between her legs and spread up inside her lungs in a warm spray of sunlight.

  The music was clear and lovely; and Witchhazel straddled the tribal melody and set out across the sky.

  Tree and Olivia, webbed inside the memories of slaves and healers, mothers and daughters, African and American, swallowed the past and waited for the present.

  Olivia felt the shower of roses splash her face and the back of her neck, and she summoned the spirit of her friend as it rested upon her skull. She reached out for it, wanted it, welcomed it. And that’s why when it fell down into her chest, she was stunned but did not gasp at its weightiness.

  Before that moment, Olivia had never thought much about her best friend being black. It was never something that seemed to tie Tree down or keep her from doing anything that she wanted to do. Of course, they had both seen the places that were for whites only, but it didn’t occur to her that it was unfair or oppressive. They had both merely considered it an inconvenience like all the other rules that adults had for youth.

  Olivia was a child, a white girl allowed to go into places that her best friend could not; but she did not feel any luckier or more special than Tree appeared to have felt about herself.

  But now she felt her friend’s blackness. Rooted, sure, and intimate with the night, folding into dusk like the gray side of a mountain. Strong and viscous, there was depth to this insight. And yet there was something more.

  Quick as a flash, Olivia was suddenly in touch with the sideways glances and quick head-up nods that indicated trouble in the advancing form of a light-skinned person. The heaviness of chained feet and the coldness of steel. The caged-up determination and broken-down sassiness. The crushed willingness that stifled anything except the career of survival.

  Olivia felt suddenly old and cumbersome, like the weight of a secret much too heavy to keep; and it stunned her to find that this feeling came from the soul of her best friend. It was quick as lightning, come and gone; a powerful blow that might not be named and remembered but certainly would never be lost.

  Tree tried hard to feel Olivia, now confident in the magic of the whirling Witchhazel and secure in the potency of sisterhood. She waited for something, anything; but it seemed forever until she heard it.

  Her best friend came in a whisper, a sigh that marks the end of a day, a small edge of a thing, hardly noticeable to anyone. Olivia’s spirit flew across her best friend’s eardrum and down into her throat, light as air. She circled across the heart muscles, twirled within the tight spaces of her mind; and in the blink of an eye the little girl became the hush that follows after a door closes behind you.

  Olivia blew in and blew away, disappearing as quickly as she had arrived. Loose and escaped, Tree’s friend was merely a breath slipping through fingers.

  Witchhazel pulled their heads apart and made a small nick in both of their brows. When blood was drawn she locked their foreheads together and flicked her tongue in a high, shrill voice. Sorrow and freedom mingled and flowed across the minds of the two girls and into and out of the dancing heart of an old woman. Joy and despair began in one thought and ended in another.

  Forever, donned in the wrappings of a split second, carried all three of them late into the afternoon. And when Witchhazel, the dancer of dreams, finally opened her eyes, she was alone, standing inside an unbroken circle with the sun lowering into a bow.

  A late breeze rustled in the pine needles that lined her yard and brushed across her head bathed in perspiration. She glanced up just beyond her house far from where her tired eyes could take her vision and saw something exceeding her dreams.

  The breeze, the needles, the stirring of the dust around her feet, everything in sight moved in rhythm. A perfect cadence of nature playing to the singsong game of two little girls who skipped hand in hand up the path and out of the woods.

  Witchhazel turned around to face the setting sun and lifted her chin in defiance to the approaching night.

  “Through thick and thin, we more than friends, we sisters!”

  The old woman lifted her hands above her head, clapped three times, and laughed.

  All living things have names. To be without one is to be lost in a world without definition. What else but a name satisfies forgotten memories, softens the indured layers of a broken heart, brings life to still pictures?

  Nothing shall speak too much about a man, save the sound of his name.

  —THE COLOR MAN

  Five

  Olivia didn’t know that her brother wanted to fly. She didn’t know that he ached to sleep or that at thirteen years of age Roy had given up on childhood. She didn’t know that the innocence had been stripped in lean watery layers, year after year, because of the things he had learned from their mother’s longing and his grandfather’s unfisted hand, poverty, and perhaps the consequences of suffering too many regrets.

  She knew that he had abandoned his friendship with E. Saul and his Sunday afternoons next door at Ruth’s; but she didn’t know it was because of what the white boys said about them living in Smoketown. She didn’t know that he was ashamed of things he couldn’t name and that his heart had closed upon itself.

  She didn’t know that her brother dreamed of a night woman who untied the red string from around his neck and danced him across the sky, that in that dark place of rest Roy nestled himself in the wings of goodness, that the folding of a day was the only time and place he felt safe.

  What she did know about Roy was that he was violent and cruel and that late on a summer afternoon he was christened with a name that handed him the declaration of the man he was destined to be. That if there had ever been a time when he thought of or spoke to her, gently, because of their kinship, a memory she could keep of when he had been kind to her, it was, on that hot August day, like infested wheat in a field, snatched up and burned. That anything good that she would eventually learn of family would come only from what she would be taught from next door.

  Just before the day shifted, in the hottest part of the afternoon, the name fell hard on the boy. Harder than the lessons from school that severed his friendship with E. Saul. Harder than staying away from Ruth’s porch and not bending toward the laughter and the singing that drifted through his window. Harder than knowing that his mother didn’t love him. Harder than stone.

  It fell during a game of basketball when the boys had gotten through with chores and farmwork at just about the same time. They gathered at the dirt field behind the old school since they were too young to be over at the blacktop one at the park. The older boys played there and it was a whole different kind of ball game on that court.

  Roy and some of the younger kids went sometimes just to watch and dream of the day when they could spit out obscenities and smoke Camels at the same time that they held the ball that fit so snugly in their hands. They longed for their bodies to lengthen, their voices to thicken, and to achieve the grace that the older boys had when they ran from end to end.

  Olivia noticed but never commented on how Roy and his friends imitated the older boys, how they laughed, how they pulled and dropped the cigarette from their mouths at the same time, the way they twisted a foot in the dirt to crush out the butt, how they watched and studied the way the older girls looked at the mature boys, all buttery and timid, a far cry from how the younger ones were treated.

  Roy had only played a couple of games that summer since Kay Martha had given him work cleaning out the shop and washing out towels. He straightened all the magazines and swept the floor and had kept the job for three summers. He left for good t
hough that summer when he was thirteen and she asked him to hold the curlers while she permed Goldie Creech’s hair.

  “I ain’t no goddam sissy,” Olivia had heard him yell when their mother asked him why he quit.

  Since he no longer had a place to be or responsibilities to fulfill, Roy got to the playground early that day and threw shots up with Frog Lewis, the boy who always sat next to him in school. Billy Ray and Jake Miller and Tommy Owen came up together an hour or so later, jumping off the back of Mr. Miller’s pickup; and before too long they had enough players for two teams. Frog and Billy Ray were the captains and it soon evened out to be the seventh grade versus the eighth.

  Like everybody else in town, Olivia already knew how Frog got his name. He was only six when it happened. His older brother gave it to him because he had a bad habit of sticking out his tongue. So when his mother told him he’d swallow a fly, Thomas called him Frog. The boy didn’t seem to mind, however, because at least it granted him attention, something that the name Clayton Henry Lewis never did.

  Since Frog wasn’t wearing a shirt, his team was the skins and the other three boys wiggled free from their cotton tees to be in correct uniform. Roy took the ball out; and the game that Olivia and Tree watched from the swing set just behind the basketball court started like all the other playground games.

  “That’s Billy Ray,” Olivia told her neighbor as they skipped and pulled themselves up in the air. “He’s the meanest boy at the school.”

  It was a family tradition for the Ray boys to be troublemakers; and Billy, being the youngest, apparently did not want to tarnish what his brothers had made for themselves. He always hung around with Jake Miller and Tommy Owen; and they walked through the halls at school just waiting for a girl to mock or a smaller classmate to bully. Everyone avoided them. The three boys were pimply and angry and spent more time in detention or in the principal’s office than they did in class.

  Roy thought they were his ticket to the little bit of happiness that he could not seem to find on his own. He believed that if he could just get into that threesome everything would be better for him. So he became their informant, cleverly releasing the names and the paths that were taken home of anyone who spoke ill of them.