by LOTT, BRET
She gave her arms one last shake, and stopped. The room was choked with the smells of food now, and I realized I hadn’t eaten since the day before.
Then Cathe ral spoke, and for an instant I didn’t know where the voice came from, or whose it was, my mind on chicken and collards and sitting down to eat.
She said, “Missy Cook, she say bring this here to you.”
I hadn’t seen her mouth move, her eyes still on the floor. She put her hands together in front of her, held her fingers.
“Cathe ral? ” I said.
She looked up. “Yes’m? ” she said, her eyes on my chin, then on my chest, my shoulder.
I said nothing, only felt my stomach moving, hungry for what lay in the pot. But I was thinking about her, and about this look between us, and about the full sentence that’d come from her lips.
“I sorry about yo’ papa, ” she said, and finally let down her eyes.
I heard myself say, “Thank you, ” though I hadn’t felt the words form.
She looked up at me again. “Missy Cook, she say tell you one more thing.
She say tell you she the one be paying me to work for y’all. And she say she want you come live with her now yo’ papa gone.” She paused, looked back to the floor. “I mean, now yo’ papa pass on.”
Missy Cook. My mother’s mother, and suddenly I recognized the line in my mother’s chin, and how she’d held it high, and why, perhaps, Pastor had cowered in whatever small way he had last night, the three times I’d met Missy Cook she’d held her chin the same way, up and above us all, her mouth in a frown that let me know no matter what happened that she was here and would always be here. She was here to stay. She was the woman of standing, of bearing. And my mother was her daughter.
She lived in Purvis proper, on Willow Street in a big house with windows and drapes and fine china plates we actually ate off of, my momma and me. The last time we were there was just before Daddy’d left, the other two times I’d been too small to recognize an occasion.
But I’d seen the furniture, and’d been told to stay off of it by the woman who now wanted me to come live with her.
I said nothing, kept my head as level as I could make it, my eyes cold and steady and focused on Cathe ral, her twisted knots of hair, her thin, cotton dress and bare, black feet.
“And be one more thing, ” she whispered. She glanced toward the door into the front room, where my momma and Benjamin and three other men were, none of them making a sound. “She say she going raise you up right, ” she whispered, her eyes on the floor again, her voice so quiet I wasn’t even certain she’d spoken. “She not be making the same mistakes she make with yo’ mama. She say you her last chance in this world.”
She stood with her hands still at her sides, glanced up at me.
I whispered, “She told you to tell me that? ” She shrugged. “Yes’m.
Except the last part. The part about raising you up right, and about the mistakes and all.”
Though my stomach felt as though it might die on me right then, the smell of cornbread and milk gravy now making its way into me, I held on, thinking instead of my momma marrying some halfbreed Choctaw who couldn’t read or write, me being born to the two of them, so that in Missy Cook’s eyes I was the biggest mistake her daughter could ever make. And now I was her personal mission, what she wanted to save from the horrors of low-living in this world.
I looked at the photograph in my hand, wondered at the man there, my grandpa, and what it took to hold your head just that way, who you had to be.
I looked at Cathe ral. I said, “Why did you tell me? ” She shrugged again. “Don’t need no reason.” She paused. “Just figured to warn you.”
Then I wasn’t hungry anymore, and I turned, went into the front room and past them all, nothing any different than when I had left, my daddy’s belongings still spread on the floor. I went to my room, got from under my bed one of my tablets, a pencil. I took one more look at the photograph, then slipped it between pages in the back of the tablet.
When I came back into the kitchen, Cathe ral had already pulled out the food from the pot, heaps of chicken and cornbread, bowls of collards and gravy, a sweet potato pie, all of it in serving dishes from the same fine china we’d eaten from in a three-story house in downtown Purvis.
She turned from the food, glanced at me. I said, “Cathe ral, you know how to write? ” She gave her head a quick shake, put her hands behind her.
I said, “Come with me, ” and I moved to the screen door, pushed it open.
She glanced up again, then looked to the doorway into the front room, as though we were betraying those in there by abandoning this food and who it came from, the woman Cathe ral worked for the woman who wanted my life.
She stood still a moment, then said, “Yes’m, ” and moved toward me.
CHAPTER 3.
I TAUGHT HER TO READ, AND SHE TAUGHT THE MANSHEENDED UP MARRYING, then taught her own children as well, so that the four niggers outside our back door, all of them employed by my Leston, could read and write, and as I stood at the stove and carved off pieces of bone bacon into the skillet, I held some small piece of pride in me, thought that maybe I’d been a good teacher after all.
The four of them nelson, her husband, and their three boys, Sepulcher, Temple and Crecheworked for Leston cutting down pines, then blasting up the stumps and hauling them down to Pascagoula where they’d be turned to turpentine for the war effort. It was my part to feed them all.
Each morning I awoke to fry up eggs and bacon, boil grits and bake biscuits for my family, Cathe ral’s boys, and the rest of Leston’s crew, Garland and JE, cousins of Leston’s, and Toxie, Leston’s nephew, the three of them the supervisors over the crew, then six more niggers, boys and old men from up and down the woods. We had four trucks in all, plus the Caterpillar, none of it in anywheres near good shape, Toxie and Sepulcher working on one or another of them from the time they put their breakfast plates down until they disappeared up the road, headed home.
But we had vehicles, Leston’d say time and again, ones that gave us this roof over our heads, let our children wear clothes, and gave us food to eat.
Food, I’d decided three years ago when he’d started in with but one lonesome truck and Nelson only, would be part of their pay. We were comfortable in this house, the second one Leston had built for us since we’d married eighteen years ago, and we had the steady work this World War provided, a twisted sort of blessing, I knew. We could give them food.
Burton banged in to the room, behind him Wilman, the two of them in their bib overalls and still fighting. But rather than holler at them to quiet down this first morning new life was in me, I took a second to look at them, at how they’d grown, Wilman with the sprinkle of Leston’s freckles across his nose, Burton’s skin taking my complexion, the tan and my black hair. Wilman’s front teeth were out, and when he gave a sneer to whatever it was they were arguing over, I could see all the way into his mouth, the childred gums, the perfect white teeth. Then he shoved Burton’s shoulder, knocked him into the table. One of the chairs fell over.
“Momma? ” Burton cried out, turned to me. “You saw that, Momma? ” “Yes, I did, ” I said, and sliced the last two pieces of bacon into the skillet, the fragrant steam off the meat already making its way up and into our morning. I wiped my hands on the towel hung on the oven door, then put both hands on my hips. I said, “Wilman, pick up the chair before your daddy gets in here, and straighten up, the two of you.”
“Yes ma’am, ” Wilman whispered, and looked at Burton, in his eyes the hate brothers can only have for each other. Burton, of course, stood with his arms crossed, his head tilted just the same way his great-grandpa’s had in the photograph framed and hung in the front room of this house.
It wasn’t the first time I saw Burton in that pose, a stance I knew he’d picked up studying that picture, and each time he struck it I wondered if there weren’t some danger to it, some invitation buried deep to lead the wronghea
ded life Jacob Chandler had led. My momma’d been the one who’d finally told me what I wanted to know about him, and told me, too, what I shouldn’t have heard.
On the last day she was alive, my momma about to die in the luxury of a house in downtown Purvis, the two of us dressed up like china dolls in a store window, she told me of the man in the photograph, though I hadn’t asked her straight about him. Instead, I’d been spending days beside her bed trying best to avoid Missy Cook and the books she’d already laid out for me to read Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, all of them books I just as soon would read on my own. But Missy Cook’s view of me and the world was angled so that the only thing I could do with her was be what she wanted me to be, read what she wanted me to read, answer the questions she wanted answered.
And I had done so the first week because there had been nothing else for me to do.
I simply came home from school, a new one where most of the children wore the same frills I did, frills given to me and my mother the evening we moved in, just the day after Daddy’d been buried.
Missy Cook that’s all any of us were ever allowed to call her was a tall woman, her hair coiled up in a huge gray bun that sat atop her head. She wore eyeglasses with silver rims, behind the glass brown eyes like bits of broken glass sunk deep into her sockets. Many’s the night I have had dreams of those eyes and how, after my momma was dead, she bore into me with them like a red-hot poker, an old woman aware of her powers.
That first evening we’d arrived a little after sunset, and’d climbed down off Pastor’s wagon, the three of us having sat together on the seat, behind us only Momma’s rocking chair, our clothes wrapped in bedsheets. A frail nigger woman met us at the door, her hips not much wider than Cathe ral’s, and I knew right off this was her momma.
Once inside and the door closed behind us another nigger had appeared from around the side of the house and’d started untying the rocking chair, Pastor all the while still seated up at the reins, his eyes straight ahead Momma turned to the nigger woman, said, “Molly, how are you? ” Molly paused a moment, as if this pleasantry might be some test, her answer either right or wrong. She tried to smile, gave a small curtsy, and said, “I fine, Miss Patricia.” She swallowed, glanced up to me, said, “It be nice having you back to home here. The two of you, ” and curtsied again.
“This is true, ” came a voice from behind us, and we all three turned to it. Then Molly was gone.
Missy Cook was coming down the stairs, one hand on the polished banister, the other at her chest. The frown I’d always seen her with was still there, chin held high, her deep and frightening eyes shrouded even more so by the thin light from the gas-lit chandelier above us.
She had on a beige dress with a high, stiff collar that encircled her throat, and I remember touching my own throat, wondering how she might breathe.
Her waist was pinched down near to nothing, and I tried to imagine, too, the corset she wore, and how that might cut out breath altogether.
She seemed to float down the staircase, the hem of her dress simply dancing about her hidden feet, so that for a moment I thought maybe she had died, was in fact a ghost before me.
I looked down at myself, at what I had on, a pale yellow cotton dress with a row of buttons up the front, my school shoes with no socks, and suddenly I felt I looked no different than Cathe ral of a summer morning, peering in at the screen door.
I looked at my momma, who wore a dress much like my own, but long enough so that her ankles didn’t show, the dress waist pinched in some.
I knew she wore no corset, her shape a young woman’s, not the filled and forced shape of the woman who now moved off the stairs and toward us, her hands low and open in front of her, coming to take ours. My momma’s chin was high, too, and I saw the muscles in her jaw begin to work, her teeth clenched.
Momma put out a hand first, and I followed. Missy Cook hadn’t yet looked at Momma, but at me, her hand warm in mine, softer than I had imagined it would be. She said, “I am deeply saddened at your daddy’s passing, ” and I let myself believe her for an instant.
Then Momma said, “No, you are not.” She let go Missy Cook’s hand, moved past her and to the staircase. She put a hand on the banister, placed one foot on the first step, and stopped. She looked up the staircase, and said, “Jewel.”
I was still holding Missy Cook’s hand, felt her fingers going tight around mine. Her eyes had never left my face.
I looked at the polished wood floor, the gleam of the chandelier there.
I said, “Yes ma’am, ” and she let go my hand. I walked-around her and toward Momma, who held out her own hand to me, and the two of us started up the stairs.
At the landing I looked back downstairs, saw Missy Cook hadn’t moved.
My momma didn’t even look.
Later, after we’d gone through the boxes of new dresses stacked in the room we were to sleep in, all of them made of lace and fine linen and pearl buttons, and after we’d eaten the pork chops and cheese grits and okra and biscuits Molly’d brought up to us on that same fine china, Momma and I climbed into bed together, the two of us wearing matching white nightgowns with thin, pink ribbons at the wrists and neck. Then Momma climbed back out, went to the gas key at the doorjamb.
But as she reached for it, Missy Cook opened the door, held her hand over the key. Momma and I both jumped, me taking in a breath, Momma bringing a hand to her face as though Missy Cook might hit her.
“No one in this house, ” Missy Cook said, smiling at me, though nowhere in her face was there any bit of joy, any piece of happiness, “touches the gas. This is my responsibility, and no one else’s. Please remember this.” She twisted the key, the room slowly going dark until the gas gave a small pop. She pulled the door closed behind her. She hadn’t even glanced at Momma.
Momma stood in the darkness a few moments, then came back to bed. Once she was settled, I could hear nothing, the absence of sound deafening somehow after living where we had. I wanted words from my momma in the room, wanted night sounds, something familiar to help put me to sleep, and for a moment I even wished I might hear the sounds Momma and Daddy made Saturday nights, anything to fill the dead air in here.
As though she’d felt what I wanted, she whispered, “This is a dangerous place. We have to be careful, or we’ll be swallowed alive here.”
I knew what she meant, had seen already the power in her momma, in her hands and eyes, in the warm food, the fine clothes, but some part of me, even after seeing whatever darkness lay in Missy Cook’s brown eyes, wanted to give over to it, to nestle down into the warm bed we were in, to get up tomorrow morning and find a meal already cooked for us, put on crisp, clean dresses and live this way.
“But ” Momma started again, and there was a soft knock at the door. A crack of light pierced the room, then filled it as the door opened just wide enough to let in Molly.
She whispered, “It’s just Molly, Miss Patricia, Miss Jewel. Come to get yo’ old clothes, take care of them for you.”
“In the corner, ” Momma said, and we watched as Molly made her way to the end of the dresser and leaned over, took the pile of clothing up in her arms.
“We see you in the morning, ” she whispered.
I said, “Good night, ” Momma silent beside me. Molly pulled the door closed, and here was the silence again, the dark. I whispered, “What were you going to say? ” But then I saw the color at the window, the faint dance of orange and red across the black glass.
Momma was out of the bed before me, made it to the window first, her black silhouette there against the growing color, her hands to the window. Each finger was outlined in an orange that grew brighter even in the seconds it took me to get to the window, stand next to her, place my hands against the cool glass too.
I looked down at the yard behind the house, where a fire burned some twenty yards back into the rows of pecan trees. The nigger who’d unloaded Pastor’s wagon for us stood next to it, a hoe in one hand
, the other on his hip. He was just looking into the fire, his head down.
Molly appeared beneath us, coming from inside the house and down the back steps to the yard. She was carrying something, and I knew before she was halfway to the fire that it was our clothes, the clothes she’d just gathered up in our room.
The nigger at the fire looked up, stood taller, his hoe at the ready while Molly came toward him. She stopped at the edge of the fire, her back to us, and started in to peeling off piece by piece our clothes, tossing each garment into the fire. I watched, silent, as she peeled off what I knew was my dress, the one with the buttons up the front.
Molly held it up, looked at it a moment, the material illuminated, and dropped it on the fire. Thin wisps of flame shot out beneath it, then swallowed it up.
“That nigger, ” I said out loud.
But Momma said, “She’s a good nigger. She’s only doing what she’s been told.”
I turned to my momma, saw her face flicker with the movement of the fire, the color almost lost on her. I said, “Why? ” She nodded at the fire, and I turned back to it. Molly held up Momma’s dress now, then dropped it on the fire, this time the flames out from beneath it bigger, thicker. The nigger reached in his hoe to the fire, stirred it up. Sparks lifted into the air, bits of light that melted before they even cleared the trees.
Momma said, “She’s doing what she’s been told. You watch this, because this is for you and me. You and me are supposed to be seeing this, supposed to be standing right here and watching it all.” She paused, and Molly dropped in the last piece, one of Momma’s old, thin petticoats.
“Somewhere in this house Missy Cook’s watching this, too. There’s not anybody in this house, maybe not on the whole street, who’s not watching this. But it’s for you and me.”
Then the nigger dropped the hoe and headed away from the fire, disappeared somewhere near the house and to our left. I glanced up at Momma. She hadn’t moved, but when I turned back to the fire, I heard her swallow hard, say, “I know what Marcus has gone for.”