JEWEL

by LOTT, BRET

  The children’d barely woken up, were already on their way back asleep as we backed away from the house, the front of it suddenly lit up brighter than any day I’d ever known by the headlights of our new car.

  The house seemed almost to call out to me, to want me back in it, back in the comfort of knowing what the life we were leaving was all about, no money, Brenda Kay and healing her up and taking her to the bathroom and washing her and wiping up after her, Wilman and Annie to school, Leston and his uniform and cigarettes. Then came Cathe ral and all the children I’d served at the cafeteria, then all our days before, the niggers out in the dark eating food I’d cooked, Leston and JE and Toxie and Garland and the tips of their cigarettes waving round in the dark mornings, the smell of pine tar and engine oil thick in the air all day long.

  I looked to Leston, his arm across the top of the seat, his head turned as he backed out.

  I looked again to the house, watched it go dark as we turned, the headlights poking out at first the heavy green forest, then the road before us, and I could feel my heart picking up, the fear in it and the clear hope, and I looked at Leston again.

  He stopped, shifted gears. Before he gave it the gas, he turned to me, smiled, though I could barely make out his face in the dark, could see beneath the brim of his hat only the hint of his mouth, the corners up.

  He said, “Miss Jewel Hilburn.” I smiled, said, “Yes? ” He said, “Miss Jewel Hilburn, we’re taking care.”

  “Yes, ” I said, and swallowed, my heart still going away. “I guess we are, ” I said.

  He nodded, gave the pedal a push, and we were off, headed for California in our brand new 52 Plymouth, new clothes in old suitcases in the trunk, my retarded daughter settled between my last two children in the back seat. I turned, saw all of them with their heads back, mouths open in sleep.

  And I saw beyond them, out the rear window and fast disappearing in the distance we were putting behind us, the house. No dust whirled up behind us for the quiet rain we’d gotten, and I kept my eye on our old home until I lost it for the trees and bushes and all else green there in Mississippi. i BOOK TWO CHAPTER 22.

  THIS WAS A HEAT I D NEVER KNOWN. THE SUN WASN’T EVEN UP YET, AND already the small of my back was wet, my hair and eyes and hands hot.

  But it was a dry heat, and as I watched the sun come up above the jagged mountains to the east, mountains we’d cut through late yesterday afternoon, mountains that let out into the miles and miles of sand hills we’d passed through before finally hitting this town, Indio, I took in that heat, decided I would want it with me the rest of my days.

  I stood in the motel parking lot, the rising sun turning mountains that’d been gray in the twilight before sunrise suddenly black as it rose above them. I started in on my first day in California, and wondered if that sun could possibly be the same one that’d seen over every day of my life so far.

  The sun was different, yes, and the air, and the light, and the shadows cast once it’d gone down last night. The mountain to the west what the waitress at the diner last night had called Mount San Jacinto, spelled with ainstead of a Y, like it sounded, her mouth working a piece of gum all the while, her too-black hair whipped high up atop her head, her makeup so thick I couldn’t be certain how old she might’ve been that mountain swallowed up the sun early, yet still the sunset oranges and purples and reds all around lit up the desert so that it stayed light and hot and dry long into the night, and made this an even stranger and more beautiful place than I could have imagined. This was California, and last night had been our first night here.

  “Momma, ” Wilman said from behind me, and I turned, saw him loading one of the suitcases into the trunk of our brand-new car. Here we were, in California, in summer heat and desert, Mount San Jacinto purple in the light from the new sun.

  “Momma, get Annie out here to give me a hand, hey? ” Wilman said, and lifted the suitcase in, a beat old cardboard thing tied with ropes, and I was glad it’d be hidden away in the trunk when we finally arrived in Los Angeles today. The car was what I wanted seen of us, our brand-new car.

  We’d spent the first night in Natchitoches, the second just outside Ft.

  Worth, Leston letting Wilman take over the wheel for a half hour every hundred miles or so, so he could nap. The next night we spent in Big Spring, where we met up with James and Eudine and Judy, who’d driven down from Plainfield where James’d set up a-practice taking care of livestock.

  I’d called them from Ft. Worth the night before, asked where we could meet them, as Eudine had family down there to Big Spring. We ended up having to meet at the parking lot of the grocery store in the middle of town, then following them to Eudine’s Aunt Charity’s trailer just west of there.

  I’d figured on the reunion in the parking lot being just as loud as any meeting with Eudine could be, but when she stepped from their car, her blonde hair stringy and wet, her face sweating at the heat, and’d stood up to show she was wearing a maternity smock, her belly poking out near to finished, I cried out even louder than she did, went to her, held her.

  Then baby Judy came out from the back seat, her eyes heavy with sleep, perfect bangs cut across her forehead and plastered there with sweat, her red pigtails dark and wet. I leaned down, picked her up, though she made to push me away for a moment or two before settling herself on my hip, this feel of a baby in my arms as much a part of me as how I made biscuits, as lacing my shoes.

  “She’s a sweet three-and-a-half-year-old, ” Eudine said, holding her hand as Judy yawned. Eudine looked from Judy to me to Annie, half whispered in the way she had so that everyone in attendance could hear, “They say the worst is terrible twos, but I think this age ought to be called throttle-‘em threes, ” and she laughed, showed she was chewing a big piece of pink gum. She hugged Annie, started in on how grown-up she looked.

  Meantime, James and Leston and Wilman were all shaking hands, eyes meeting only a moment or so before darting out to the flat desert prairie at the far end of town, to the horizon that might as well have been a million miles away.

  “Where’s Billie Jean? ” I heard James ask, even though Eudine’d already started in about the sheer hell of diapers, and how she and James weren’t willingly walking into having this next baby, if we knew what she meant.

  Leston smiled, shook his head at James’ question. He took off his hat, swiped at his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “Damndest thing, ” I heard him say. He looked at the oiled dirt of the parking lot, rubbed a toe of his boot in it. “Got married day before we took out. Man named Gower Cross.” He looked up at James, who still had his hands on his hips. Hot wind picked at all their hair, lifted it and settled it again and again. “You don’t mean it, ” James said.

  “Don’t mean what? ” Eudine cut in. “What y’all keeping to yourselves over there, huh? ” But she wasn’t really interested, I could see, she reached into the back seat of our car, took hold of Brenda Kay’s hand.

  “Come on out here, baby-doll, ” she said, and slowly Brenda Kay moved toward her, a smile starting to come.

  “How’s them legs of yours? ” Eudine said, and knelt as best she could, hugged Brenda Kay still sitting on the seat, her legs dangling out the door. “How you doing, baby? ” she said.

  “You fat! ” she hollered, and Eudine laughed that loud laugh of hers.

  “You’re telling me, sweetheart! ” Eudine laughed, then climbed into the car next to Brenda Kay, pulling Annie on in with her, the three of them taking up the back seat of the Plymouth. “And y’all got yourselves a brand-new car to boot, ” she said, ran her hand along the top of the seat in front of her.

  I kept an eye on Brenda Kay to see how she’d be around Eudine. But instead her eyes were on me, and on the child in my arms, and I realized it was Judy and me she was most interested in, my attention and love suddenly given, she must’ve thought, to someone else. Not to her.

  “Daddy! ” Judy cried out, and started to fidgeting in my arms, and I let her go, watch
ed as she ran to her daddy, my son James, who picked her up and swung her round like a sack of flour, set her on top of his shoulders.

  I turned back to the car, saw Brenda Kay looking at me. She eased back in the seat, comforted, I was certain, by Judy being gone, and started watching Eudine talk on and on at her about how much food was going to be over to her Aunt Charity’s, how she was barbequing up Texas steaks and roast corn and cutting up fresh cantaloupe from down by the Pecos.

  Brenda Kay just kept blinking, not certain who this was, why she was here.

  Finally, the men came to the car, and James said, “Now y’all just follow me. Wilman and Judy’ll go with me, and then we can visit for real.”

  Judy, still on his shoulders, had hold a hank of his hair, pulled at it like it was a set of reins in her hands.

  Leston nodded, and James pulled Judy from her perch up there, set her on the ground. Then he put out his hand, held it for his father to take.

  Leston took it, and the two shook, but it was what happened after that that made me swell and smile, made the dirt and travel and sweat so far worthwhile, they finished shaking hands, but for a moment or two they only stood there, looking at each other, holding hands firm and hard, but holding hands.

  A heavy gust of prairie wind barreled through the parking lot, shook the car, the sound of grit against the side of the car the only sound around us, even Eudine quiet for a second.

  But then she broke it, yelled, “Now let’s get on out of here. There’s steaks the size of this car to be eaten, ” and we were gone, headed for a trailer somewhere in the town of Big Spring, Texas.

  We ate too much, then spent the night in Aunt Charity’s trailer, all nine of us covering every bit of floor space she had and using up every blanket and sheet and towel before we were out of there. Our leaving the next morning was filled with kisses and crying and fussing over when we might see each other again, filled, too, with the deep and shiny ache I carried in my heart when I’d had to surrender baby Judy back to her own momma. There was a certain wonder in the fact of a normal child, I came to see with the weight of one back in my arms, a wonder in all they could prove out to be, the world set before each and every one of them like a fine table set for a feast. And here was baby Judy, ready and raring to go out into the world as she squirmed to get free from her momma’s arms once we were in our car and backing away from the trailer.

  Eudine finally let my first grandchild down, and no sooner than Judy’s feet touched dirt did she tear off around the side of the trailer, and disappear.

  Eudine shrugged and made a face at me, and I smiled, waved again, that ache grown even bigger in just that moment, when I’d not been able to wave good-bye to Judy.

  Leston put the car in gear, and we were gone.

  Before we were out of Big Spring and back on the desert, I made Leston stop at a hardware store, had Wilman go in and buy a galvanized bucket, then fill it with ice cubes at the service station we gassed up at. I sat with the bucket on the floorboard between my legs, passing out cubes to whoever wanted one and soaking down one of Wilman’s Tshirts the last clean one he had and passing that around, too, each of us given five minutes with it wrapped round our necks until I had to soak it down again, pass it on to the next person.

  The next night we’d stayed in El Paso, Wilman pestering us to head over to Juarez for a bullfight, but James having warned us off that for fear we’d end up knifed and robbed, the next night we’d spent in Demming, New Mexico. We hadn’t got near as far as we’d intended for the car overheating once we were up into the mountains and off the flat of Texas. But we’d managed to limp into Demming, Leston knowing even before the Plymouth dealer in town did it was the thermostat needed replacing.

  We bought cowboy boots for Leston and Wilman and even Annie while we waited, then found a motel and spent the night, got up early the next morning and started across Arizona, made it to Phoenix by dark. By that time the hot, dry air had been with us for a few days, and I could feel my lips going chapped, kept us all salved up with a tube of Chapstick I’,‘d bought back in El Paso.

  Then had come the next to last leg, us crossing over the green Colorado at midday, stopped at the California side for a fruit inspection, then sent on to Blythe where we filled up the tank and the bucket both.

  Then a hundred miles of nothing, only desert, then those mountains, the sand hills, and the Desert Moon Inn.

  Wilman settled the suitcase into the trunk, pushed it back aways to make room for the other four, all the worldly goods we had left, but there was joy I took in traveling this light, everything shucked for now.

  Wilman went back inside, the Plymouth parked right in front of our room of the low, flat motel. The sign for the place script letters way up high spelling out Desert Moon Inn in flashing blue neon, a lit white bulb the size of a basketball dotting the I was what brought us in from Highway 10 yesterday evening, hot and tired and so worked up about finally being in California we didn’t notice how close the place was to the train tracks. After a supper that cost us twice what the same in Mississippi would have, we drove back and forth on the main street, a four-lane road lined with huge date palm trees that swayed in the late evening breeze beneath a sky that seemed impossibly huge and littered with brand-new stars, then pulled around to the back of a Texaco station so that Wilman could throw up the date milkshake he’d finished off his meal with Indio was the date capital of the world, our waitress had told us. Then we spent the night listening to freight trains, the whole room trembling with the slow weight of the cars as they edged through town, the whole room lit on and off with blue neon coming in through the thin curtains. None of us slept, except for Brenda Kay, no bandages on her legs now, no wraps. Only the red and scarred skin that would always be red and scarred. She was the only one to sleep, the four of us Leston, me, Wilman and Annie only turning and turning.

  Inside the room Leston was shaving at the sink. Annie, in the seersucker skirt, leaned at the mirror above the dresser, penciling at her eyebrows, her hair still in the rag-curls she’d put in last night, her cheeks rouged up, her eyelids a pale blue. Brenda Kay was still asleep on the bed, wrapped in the sheet and curled up tight.

  “Annie, don’t you think you’re overdoing this a bit? ” I said, and stood behind her, looked in the mirror at her.

  She stopped with the pencil, glared up at me.

  She said, “I guess you don’t realize what we’re doing today, do you? ” She looked at me a moment longer, started up with the pencil again.

  “I know, ” I said, “that you’re my daughter, always will be, and I know that fact won’t ever give you the right to talk to me that way, young girl.” I tried to force my eyes to go hard on her, tried to grit my teeth in a way she might fear and respect. But that didn’t happen, I couldn’t do anything other than smile at her, here in a cheap motel in Indio, California, date capital of the world, my daughter getting dolled up in the hopes some Hollywood director would spot her as we rolled into town.

  “Yes, Momma, ” she sighed out, then put down the pencil, started taking out the rags. “I’m sorry, Momma, ” she said in her teenage way, the words only enough to get me off her back. She wouldn’t look at me, only at the mirror, and suddenly she stopped, leaned even closer to the glass. “Look at the bags under my eyes! ” she yelled.

  Leston said, “The last two suitcases are for you to put in the car, Anne, ” and tapped his razor.

  We ate breakfast at the same diner we’d eaten at the night before, served by a waitress might as well have been the same one we’d had last night except for her too-blonde hair, then we gassed up at the Texaco station Wilman’d thrown up at last night. Before we headed out, Leston asked the attendant if we could borrow the hose Lying next to the restroom doors at the side of the place, and the man’d shrugged, said okay. Wilman got out, showered the car with water to wash off as much road dirt as possible. Brenda Kay clapped in the back seat as Wilman sprayed the rear window, while Annie, her chin in hand, sat shaking he
r head at all us white crackers. By eightfifteen we were out on Highway 10, headed for Los Angeles in our clean and brand-new car.

  Mountains surrounded us for a long while, rocky mountains that jutted up on either side of the flat desert floor, nothing but brush and rock leading away from the road and toward those peaks. We drove past a sign that said Palm Springs, and Annie near-pitched a fit in the back seat, screaming on and on about how that town was Hollywood’s desert playground, where everybody came to sit in the sun after working hard on their movies. We passed through a couple Jr’ WL of towns, Beaumont and Banning, the reasons they even existed there in the desert I couldn’t see, after a while we started coming into farm country, on either side of the road green rows of lettuce and tomatoes and summer squash skimming past like spokes on a wheel as we drove.

  Finally the mountains beside us seemed to part, those on our left peeling back and south, those to the right retreating aways, and we came to a rise in the road.

  Leston slowed down on the highway, pulled to the shoulder, and we stopped.

  I leaned forward, a hand to the dashboard, and looked out the windshield.

  It was a flat valley we were heading into, huge and wide, but green as far as you could see, a flat green with few trees. This was California, as much like glory land as anything I’d ever hope to see.

  California.

  Leston had a hand on the steering wheel, with the other took the cigarette from his lips, hung it out the window.

  “She’s pretty, ” he said, his eyes squinted at the light, at all the light the sun above us gave off. Though it was still in the nineties, and though the bucket of ice on the floorboard was half-melted, sloshed back and forth with each bump in the road, somehow the heat didn’t matter, and the struggle it was to keep my eyes from squinting closed at the light didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, because here we were.

  Cars shot past us, and I looked to the back seat, saw the faces of my three children staring at the view, even Brenda Kay looking, taking it in and making of it whatever her mind made of things brand-new and foreign to her, her having no way to know she was gazing down on a place where she’d be helped beyond measure, where we’d come closer, God willing or not, to fixing this life.