by Lee Lynch
She sat on the bed with her books and pushed to lean her back on the wall. “I take my breaks with a few of the other nursing students. We’ve been talking about religion and feminism.”
“Bra burners?”
“Bra burning stories are made up, Jaudon. To make feminists look bad.”
Jaudon made a snarky face. “Who needs to make up stories to make feminists look bad?”
She swatted at Jaudon with a book. “You’re impossible. But I love you anyway. See this book? It talks about the harm men do to women. How they beat up their wives and girlfriends, how husbands and boyfriends rape and wound women. I pictured nasty Eddie Dill when I read it.” Berry shivered remembering his white-stubbled face, his stringy arms reaching out of the sinkhole for life, Gran’s life and her own.
“Pops doesn’t harm anyone. Bat neither.”
“The writer is talking about the rotten apples, the greedy pigs who can’t help themselves because their biology drives them to reproduce.”
“How does reproduction explain Rigo?”
“Nobody told his biology he’s not trying to make babies.”
“But—” Jaudon tried to puzzle it out. Her momma hurt her, not Pops. The girls at school ridiculed her as much as the boys. Didn’t Rigo go after guys like other men went after women?
“You can’t say every one of them is bad, Berry.”
She handed a book to Jaudon. “This is about women’s spirituality, goddess worship. I’m starting to understand religion came about for humans to explain life to ourselves.”
Jaudon shied away. “What’s wrong with just living life?”
“Not a thing, angel. It’s a shame religion became about power, about dominating everything and everyone, especially women. Control our bodies and you control the present and the future. Reproduction is the biological reason for being male.”
Jaudon scrunched up her face to show this was over her head.
“Judy, one of the nursing students, loaned me this.” She handed an oversized amateurish-looking book to Jaudon. The title was Our Bodies, Ourselves. Jaudon leafed through it with suspicion.
Berry put an arm across Jaudon’s shoulders. “A group of women in Boston wrote it. According to them, men control medical research, treatments, availability of care. This tells us how to take care of ourselves. The medical profession limits itself to teaching what men think. We lost a lot when men took medicine out of women’s hands. Women were the early healers.”
Jaudon was shocked by the drawings in the book, recognizing what resembled Berry’s private parts or her own.
“My nursing coursework doesn’t cover anywhere near this much about women. We’re working with the department head to add the book to our curriculum.”
Jaudon made the mistrustful face again. “You’re getting involved in this feminist stuff for real?”
“It makes sense to me, Jaudon. Did you ever think about why being like us gets everyone so angry?”
“’Cause we’re different.”
“Yes and no. Men want women for themselves. They always kept their power and land by having sons to carry on the family name and keep the property. Women were possessions, the same as cows or horses. Fathers once paid other men dowries to take daughters off their hands. The daughters were used for breeding. It’s still going on in some parts of the world.”
“The Vickers are upside down, aren’t we? Momma runs things and I’m the one studying to take over the business.”
“And you’re the one with big plans to expand.”
Jaudon was glad about the change of subject. “Can’t you see it?” She sat up and used her arms to embrace a gigantic make-believe empire. “Look at the hordes of people moving to Florida. I think we can go beyond the idea of drive-thrus. Put in a pump or two and while the cars are being gassed up, customers talk into some sort of two-way radio to order a quart of milk, a six-pack of beer, Holsom white bread and a bottle of RC Cola. It’s better than the convenience store trend.”
“Does your momma know what you’re thinking?”
“I haven’t brought it up. She’ll tell me it’s silly or would never work. But I know we have to start moving in the direction of convenience stores or lose business.”
Berry imagined a glowing trail of light emanating from the heat of Jaudon’s animation. She said, “I want to stay here with you until tomorrow morning, but I need to get into the garden before the heat of the day.” She drew on the one-piece blue playsuit she wore for working outdoors. “I’m determined to grow a vegetable garden this spring and use all that compost we saved through the winter to fertilize it.”
Jaudon said, “I better hit the books. I’ll vacuum the house first.” Gran did a lot of their housekeeping, but vacuuming gave her a headache so Jaudon did it.
Cleaning allowed their earlier conversation to whistle around her brain. Jaudon suspected those feminists wanted to convert Berry to their man-hating ways of thinking; she’d see to it they never got the chance.
Berry tackled the purple and green crabgrass and spiny bull thistle, worrying about Jaudon’s plans. If the Vickers expanded to convenience stores, pushing their way into the competitive world of men’s big business, would every bit of honesty, principle, and fun be smothered out of Jaudon? She resolved not to allow that to happen.
Chapter Thirteen
Berry never talked about the sinkhole experience with anyone but Jaudon. It preyed on her mind. Were sinkholes everywhere? Would the earth swallow them up someday? She continued to believe the evil in Eddie Dill brought him disaster, but wasn’t she evil at times, with her secret rages and hateful thoughts? She combated them, but was concerned they didn’t make her any better than Eddie.
The group of nurses she spent time with didn’t believe in evil; they weren’t religious. Instead, they called themselves spiritual and used the term goddess, which didn’t fit her vision of a universal spirit. Why would it have to be female or male? A mini Vietnam continued to wage in her soul, between what she was taught growing up and what she learned and saw as an adult.
Starting with love. The churches got themselves in a tizzy about her and Jaudon, but, she thought, reviling us? What good did it do to throw mud at anyone? Religions seemed to need someone to pick on, to look down on, like Jaudon’s school bullies did. The church’s punches and insults were directed at souls and minds and hearts rather than bodies. She knew how deep Jaudon’s scars went and respected her ability to live with the amount of pain she must have. It made her sick to think of it.
Berry’s idea of evil, aside from her own, was much closer to what her friends called social problems. It was plain to her that greed was very evil: the rich had more than enough money and others went hungry. The other deadly sins were obvious too; she tried to be aware of them in her life. The Ten Commandments—she was thinking on those, starting with the first one. God was made more in man’s image, not the other way around, and she kept coming back to one question: Who said, if a deity had a gender, God was male? Our understanding is so limited, she thought. We can’t imagine anything outside our own experience.
The summer after high school she had been determined to get through a book her senior English teacher challenged the class to read, Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau wrote about living in nature, but, Lord, she thought it would never end. Berry read it aloud to Jaudon in the long afternoons of days off. Jaudon whittled. The book tended to lull them into naps. She never finished the book, but almost hidden in the tedious detail, one of Thoreau’s thoughts resonated. “What the Powers had made here,” was one of them. The Powers—another way of saying God. She reasoned that the Powers made the world and the Great Spirit took care of it.
She told no one, not Jaudon, not her friends, about the Great Spirit. She was still sheepish in her certainty, and not certain enough to declare it. There must be truth to some greater presence because, when she reached out, it soaked up her sickening anger and left her limp with relief at the departure of her upset feelings. She wan
ted the Powers, the Great Spirit, both of which were Good/God, to help her find her own goodness.
To remind herself, she placed fat little Buddha statues around the house. She was most fond of the grinning figures and collected them at thrift stores and rummage sales. One sat on each side of her dresser.
Her new friends believed in civil disobedience. In between memorizing for pharmacology, human nutrition, sociology, and history classes, she read about Mahatma Gandhi, draft resisters, and the civil rights movement from abolition on. This was new to her, not history she learned in any school, including Sunday schools where moral responsibility should be taught. Come to think of it, she never saw a non-white person in her church. Why had it taken her this long to realize their absence?
The group took turns meeting in one another’s homes. They came to the house in Rainbow Gap for the first time in the middle of a thunderstorm. Three small cars splashed through the sudden sandy mud and stopped short of the front porch. One after the other, five women rushed the front door. Berry gave them all hugs.
“Rain wasn’t in the forecast,” said Judy Fish, crowding onto the couch between Mercie Lewis and Samantha O’Connell. Donna Skaggs sat on Jaudon’s recliner, while Berry and Perfecta Maldonado took the wicker chairs. Mercie was a dark-skinned, sumptuous woman who was always changing her hairstyle and, along with Judy, was the smartest of the group. She tended to wear women’s dashiki shirts in bright colors. Judy, Samantha, and Donna were white. Perfecta was Puerto Rican, compact and sprightly with pinkish-tan skin.
“I love all the plants in colored pots on the porch,” said Judy Fish. “And everywhere in the house.”
“My gran does that,” Berry explained, looking around at the greenery. Trailing small-leaf ivies and white streaked philodendrons, tiny green cacti, some flowering, and swollen succulents, hanging plants—all thriving. “She believes it brings a place to life.”
The rain came to a sudden stop. As they chit-chatted, a tall, robust non-nursing student, Cullie Culpepper, arrived, dry as dry could be, tanned to a color somewhere between Mercie and Perfecta, her thin arms as gnarled as Jaudon’s by muscles and veins. Judy introduced her.
“I met Cullie at Publix. You know me, klutz that I am. I knocked over a display of—canned refried beans, wasn’t it, Cullie?”
Cullie laughed. “They were everywhere. Half a dozen of us were on our knees chasing the things along the aisles.”
“I was flustered and kept dropping the cans I picked up. Cullie was so gallant. She helped me to my feet and said something hysterical.”
“We met again in the parking lot and started talking.”
“Such a feminist. I had to invite her.”
A pool cleaner by profession, Cullie wore big smudged glasses. She’d carried her oversized West Highland terrier in with her. They sat on Grandma Vicker’s hand-braided rag rug. The dog squatted and left a widening dab on it.
“Dog pee washes out in a jiff,” Cullie said. She jumped up and lifted the drippy rug. “This is my little coconut, Kirby. She’s sorry she made her mistake and wants to know where your set tub is.”
“Out back,” said Berry, pointing to the screen door as she set down a cooler of ice and cola by the plates of dishpan cookies she’d baked last night. The women, she observed, went for the sweets as if they hadn’t eaten in a month of Sundays.
Donna Skaggs announced they wanted to ask Berry a favor. Donna was a big soft-looking woman, until you saw her face, which was long and narrow with a fringe of bangs at the top. She scrunched up her eyes and pursed her lips like an earnest fish. “What do you say, girls, wouldn’t this place be perfect?”
In unison, Judy and Mercie said, “Women!”
Donna slapped her own wrist and repeated, “Women.”
Berry was puzzled. “Perfect for what?”
“We have a favor to ask of you, Berry.” Perfecta’s Spanish accent was thick and smooth as the best salt water taffy.
Judy wriggled on her chair as if unable to contain herself. “A woman came and talked to us about what’s happening in Puerto Rico.”
“Forced sterilization,” said Perfecta. “US doctors going in and trying to secretly keep the population down. Big greedy companies are behind it, though I don’t know why. Allison can tell you more.”
“The woman’s running around exposing a government program and you’re bringing her here?”
“Not exposing, educating,” said Donna.
“Who is she?”
Perfecta said, “Her name is Allison Millar. She’s about twenty-five and already she’s an experienced public health nurse from Atlanta. Very passionate about, well, everything, but on fire about this issue. And Florida—she’s loco about Florida.”
“What’s she got to do with me?”
“She must have an out-of-the-way place to stay for a while.” Donna was domineering to the point that Berry was hesitant to protest.
Cullie came back with her dog. “I hung the rug on your clothesline. It should dry by—”
Samantha interrupted. “Do you live alone here?” Samantha had a husband and was expecting a fourth child. Berry assumed they lived in an apartment too short on space for a guest.
Cullie tilted her head, her eyes on Berry.
“No. There’s Gran and my…housemate. Sometimes her brother too.”
Cullie was grinning across the room and nodding.
Donna’s voice was deep and demanding. “Reliable people?”
She tried not to, but she got sharp with them. “Why are you quizzing me? Are you looking for a rental for this woman? Because I’m happy to talk with Gran about the possibility of renting out her travel trailer. How much trouble is she in?”
No one replied.
Cullie was grooming Kirby with her fingers and raised her head. “Don’t be looking at me for a place to stash the woman, I’m nothing but a poor little pool boy.”
Berry chuckled, thinking Cullie, unfolded, must be at least five foot ten inches and agile for her weight.
Donna looked annoyed. “Allison has no money for rent. She’s an incredibly brave woman and deserves our support.”
“No money? Needs an out-of-the-way place to live? You’re not bringing trouble into our home.”
Mercie Lewis wasn’t a big talker, but everyone paid attention when she spoke. “Allison’s a fugitive. And she’s trying to get support to sue the US government.”
Perfecta said, “She was in PR, passing out flyers to warn women who went to the hospital for childbirth that the doctors had a history of tying tubes after delivery. People were simultaneously protesting at every public hospital, but Allison was the only one arrested and charged with conspiracy to incite and other bogus accusations.”
“She is showy,” said Samantha. “You’d think she’s a Southern Belle at first. Making a speech, though, she waves her arms around, not a bit ladylike, and prances in front of her audience like a preacher at collection time.”
“Or Mick Jagger.” Cullie played Kirby on her lap as if the dog was a guitar.
Berry suspected Cullie’s sense of humor could keep the group—and the world—from taking itself too seriously.
Judy Fish sank deeper into the couch, arms folded. “Jagger is such a pig.”
Cullie threw her head back and laughed from someplace so deep it had to start in her heart. Rigo would say she was fabulously butch.
“I’ve got nothing against men except they’re men, and nothing against straights except they’re straights,” said Cullie. “They both think the world was invented for no one but them and the rest of us are interlopers.”
“Allison has Jagger’s energy. I wish I did.” Judy, who was a tiny, thin fireball, waved her arms over her head, barely avoiding Mercie and Samantha. Her hair was dark and springy. She’d told Berry she kept it straightened and constantly fought the rain and humidity.
“She made bail, thanks to the PR nationalists who agreed the sterilization program was genocide. Which it was,” added Donna. “By making
it public and suing, Allison’s group is trying to ensure it won’t happen again in any third world country. Our government wants to shut them up, of course, and they’re trying to make an example of Allison.”
“She flew into Tampa. It was the first flight the poor woman found,” Mercie said, her compassion overriding her shyness. “Now she’s in hiding, moving from place to place.”
“She can’t hide forever,” said Berry. She fought off the sympathy that crept into her heart.
“Your help would give her time to clear her legal troubles.”
“What about any of you?”
“You’re the most secluded,” said Perfecta.
Cullie’s face was serious for once. “Like I said, I can offer, but my cabin just about fits Kirby and me. The woman would have to share my bed and you know, gay or straight, she wouldn’t be able to resist my body once under the covers. If that’s the case, thanky, thanky, I’ll take the mystery woman.”
Samantha shushed her.
Berry stared. Cullie was like them? But Jaudon would explode if Berry brought an antigovernment person home. Gran might be perturbed and want to move out. She needed one person in her blood family to stick around. She looked at the women. “I will not hide the truth from my family.”
“Isn’t there any way they might not know?” Samantha said. “How about saying she’s a school friend?”
“Now you’re asking me to lie for some stranger?” She was annoyed. “Would you lie to your kin?”
Samantha circled her pregnant belly with one hand. “When I think it’s better for them, I might.”
“I won’t put mine in danger. I won’t go to jail for harboring a fugitive in a cause that isn’t mine.”