JEWEL

by LOTT, BRET

  Then three months ago I’d pulled the surprise on him, had Brenda Kay make an entire row in one afternoon. When Leston walked in the door, there stood Brenda Kay, all smiles, a hand behind her back. I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and front room, a dishtowel in my hands, behind me the kitchen filled with the smells of fried ham and mashed potatoes and biscuits, and I said, “Go ahead, Brenda Kay. Show your daddy what you did.”

  She quick brought the hand from behind her back, held out the sheet of lined paper straight out of a tablet just like the ones I’d filled my whole childhood. There was a look on my Brenda Kay’s face, one I’d never seen before, a sort of startled surprise and pride, her eyebrows as high up as they’d go, her mouth in a big open smile. And there was a look much the same on my husband, who took the paper from her hand, looked at the row of gnarled letter B’s there, then bent over and kissed her cheek.

  It was then he uttered the words it’d be months before I’d realize meant more than they did, “We did it! ” he hollered out, and hugged his baby daughter tight, an eighteen-year-old girl just completed her first line of letters, all of them capital B’s.

  We did it. I thought nothing of those words, only went to him and kissed his cheek, then kissed Brenda Kay, her already laughing. “B, Daddy! ” she shouted, and Leston’d said, “B, Brenda Kay, ” and laughed more.

  But suddenly, this evening in April, Leston’s tie already loosened, supper almost ready, I felt all these clues fall suddenly into a big and intricate shape I couldn’t quite recognize. Still, I knew what he meant when he said, “We’re moving back.”

  “Moving where? ” I said to him, though no name had to be uttered.

  He put the cigarette to his lips again, took one last drag, then stubbed it out in the tray. “Home, ” he said, his eyes on the wisps of smoke up from the dead cigarette.

  I was at the counter, slicing up a green tomato I’d picked from the small strip of vines that grew along the back of the house. Leston liked the green ones sliced up and fried, then spread with mayonnaise and sprinkled with pepper, and I looked from him to the tomato on the cutting board, the knife in my hand. I closed my eyes a moment, opened them, sliced right down and through the tomato, and again.

  I said, “So we can run our lives right back into the ground. Run right back to that cracker life we had before.” I paused, though I kept cutting away. I said, “And this isn’t home? ” I nodded at Brenda Kay.

  I said, “You see what she’s doing there? You think we’d be able to get this far back where you call home? ” “We got this far, ” he said.

  I wouldn’t let my eyes meet his, instead stared hard at Brenda Kay wrestling those letters in her head to the paper, fighting hard for them, the crayon nearly snapped in two for how hard she gripped it.

  But still I saw him out the corner of my eye, saw him looking at me as he pulled the tie on through his collar, slowly folded it up in his hands.

  “We got this far, ” he said again. I That night we lay in bed, me on my side and facing him, but as far away from him as I could get.

  Leston, I could make out in the dark, lay on his back, eyes open, his hands behind his head on the pillow.

  I whispered, “But she’s writing. She’s got the first letter of her name down so well she don’t have to look at the letter B anymore to write it.” I paused. “I heard they’ll all be starting up to Lawndale High School soon. Part of the day. It’s in the works.” I paused, whispered, “We can’t leave.”

  He whispered, “You taught her what she knows. You taught her to write that first letter to her name. Just like you taught who knows who all back home how to read and write. You’re a teacher. That’s you.” I was quiet, then whispered, “Your job.”

  “My job, ” he said, and in the light from the small shard of moon through the window I thought I could see the shine of his eyes, wide open and unblinking, him staring at the dark ceiling above us.

  Then I saw him smile. He whispered, “The reason I got my job is because it’s nigger work. That’s all.” He paused. “I got the position I do because it’s a nigger job, and I was the only white boy willing to do it. I never told you that.”

  He rolled onto his side, faced me, and I lost his eyes, saw only his silhouette, the shape of his head and shoulders, then the folds and lines where the blanket and sheet took over. There was that word, right here in our bedroom, the two-syllable one that brought on the specter of our old lives, that shadow never far from us at any given moment, only one word away. I’d always just said the word colored to him each time he used the word nigger, nothing more. But enough from me to let him know I didn’t approve of its usage around our home. This time, though, I was silent in a darkness that suddenly seemed thick and full.

  He said, “The man I replaced was a nigger, and he never gat to wear a tie and wing tips the whole time he was with the college. I l l l llt ll it Gray uniforms every day. Moses on his shirt. Every day.” He stopped again, and now I felt myself slowly move over toward him, felt my body go from the comfort of sheets I’d already warmed up to a new place in our bed, new terrain, the sheets cold but forgiving, warming up quick enough to where the cold couldn’t seep into me, chill me to the bone like the fog did early mornings. Then Leston’s hand was on my shoulder, just resting there.

  He whispered, “But it don’t matter, because I did it. I did the job.”

  He took a breath, held my shoulder a little tighter, then eased up. “I won, ” he said, “and you won. We beat this place. Brenda Kay’s near on to writing her name, I wear a shirt and tie to work. We’re sitting in a house worth enough money to buy a palace back home.”

  I closed my eyes, had seen enough, even though the room was dark.

  I whispered, “What will we do there? ” “Live, ” he said straightaway.

  “Eat. Sleep.” He paused. “Fish, ” he said, and I could see him smile, even through my closed eyes, even through the dark. He whispered, “I been in touch with Toxie. He tells me there’s a place’d be perfect for us, down near to ” “Toxie, ” I cut in, “you been talking to Toxie.”

  That was when I sat up in bed, started in on the hard fight I was ready for. Toxie. Mississippi. Fishing and smoking cigarettes. I said out loud, loud enough, I wanted to make sure, for Brenda Kay to wake up, “You sure got the nerve to go on ahead and start making big plans for this family. You sure got the nerve.”

  He still lay on his side, the room silent a few moments, moments dark and full and empty at once. I hadn’t lived here ten years just to see all hell break loose. I said, “Just who you think you are? Just who you think took care of Brenda Kay every day of her life? Just who you think took care, too, of your daughter, of Billie Jean and Matthe and Elaine while they got set up here? Who you think’s got a job to do at a school for retarded children? You think you’re going to lead me by the nose down the primrose path you think moving back to Mississippi is going to be? ” I stopped, breathe hard in and out, felt my face hot and flushed in the dark, my hands in fists, palms sweating. I listened for the struggle of sheets that would be Brenda Kay waking up in the next room, waited for her to cry out in the dark for me to come save her. But nothing happened. She slept.

  “Talk to me of nerve, ” Leston said then, his words heavy and sharp and black in the room, some huge ax through the darkness. “Talk to me of making big plans for a family, about going right ahead and doing what you want for your family.” His voice was as solid as I’d ever heard it, and I knew then it wasn’t only me with resolve in this family, wasn’t only in my children, too. It was here in bed next to me. I knew what was going on in his head, knew how he was leading me.

  “Talk to me of nerve, Miss Jewel Hilburn, ” he said, “and selling off a house bit by bit, sending to magazines for brochures. Selling a clock off a wall with nobody’s blessing but your own.” He paused, and the words still hung in the air around me, shiny, black words just hanging there. He’d brought me and what I’d done back to fight me, slapped me cold with my o
wn history, with the tight ball of nerves and flesh that made me me and nobody else.

  Leston rolled onto his back again, put his hands behind his head again, looked at the ceiling again. He whispered just loud enough for only me to hear, his voice total control, “I been here ten years for you. You railroaded me into this place, and I stayed. I stayed, and now we beat this place.” He stopped, and still I was breathing hard in and out, because I could see the future already, . saw in the dark hollow where his eyes ought to be a place two thousand miles east of here, where the air was thick and wet and hot, where things moved slowly and carefully right on to their deaths.

  He whispered, “It took you three years to get me out here. Now I been here ten, ” his words even more quiet now, each of them almost a ghost of its own in this room, a room not a half mile from the Pacific, where waves beat against the shore every day, this world spinning round to reveal what that day could bring, things as strange and full as rows and rows of the letter B, as strange and empty as the idea of Mississippi.

  “And, ” he whispered again, his voice now down to nothing, only a dream of real words, “you are my wife.”

  The only sound then was me, breathing in and in and in. Only me, and then I swallowed, took one last huge and hard, deep breath, because I understood him.

  CHAPTER 32.

  I NEVER KNEW MY HUSBAND TO BE HAPPIER.

  We sold the house nine days after we listed it, made more money than it seemed we would know to do with. Three days later Leston went right out, bought another new car, and when he came home driving a beige four-door with wide whitewall tires, I wondered if he weren’t just and always the child, joyful at things he could drive, a life he could control the way he’d controlled his voice in the dark of our bedroom, and the way he’d controlled the lives of his children these long years, James the only one to escape early enough on, and the way he controlled the colored men who worked for him at El Camino, and the niggers back in Mississippi, all of them controlled by him.

  Except Brenda Kay, of course, me part and parcel of her. Now we were moving to where he called home, and now, I’d seen as he pulled into our driveway that night with the new car, this would be his return in triumph, and his last stand at controlling me. You are my wife.

  Hilburn and Wife Lumber Company, trooping off into the dark deep woods of Mississippi.

  He cut the engine, leaned his head out the open window. “Well, ” he said, then opened the door, climbed out. He slammed the door closed, slapped the roof, smiled at me. “What do you think? Studebaker Lark Regal.”

  Behind him the early evening fog’d begun to bank up, the sky to the east a brutal, deep blue, the gray out over the ocean suddenly soft and obliging.

  I said nothing, only turned, went back into the house. He knew what I thought. No need for words.

  “Momma, ” Anne said, little Laura in her lap, a pacifier plugged into her mouth now there were twelve grandchildren, an even dozen, and my Annie already expecting another one, too. “Momma, there’s just no sense in this, ” she said.

  We were in the kitchen, Annie, Billie Jean, me and Brenda Kay, her at the table with her paper and crayons and making swirls and lines and jagged circles. Annie sat across from her in Leston’s chair. Laura held a saltine in one hand, banged on the tabletop with the other, her eyes moving from me to Brenda Kay to her momma and back again.

  Billie Jean had on her white uniform, the nurse’s hat she wore all day long now off her head and on the counter, her hair down. Most afternoons she dropped by on her way home from the hospital, Annie coming by two or three afternoons a week, too, and stayed for a cup of coffee. Matthe and Elaine were taken care of by a lady with two children of her own two doors down from Billie Jean’s apartment, Annie always on her way running an errand or three, and so it always seemed a rush of time, that cup of coffee. But at least my daughters came to see me and Brenda Kay, and for that I was thankful.

  But today the rush was gone, and when the two of them’d shown up to the door at precisely the same moment, the looks on their faces the same somber look, eyebrows knotted up, mouths closed tight, I knew right away they were here on business.

  “Can’t Daddy see what this’ll lead to? ” Billie Jean said, and pushed herself off the counter, set her cup down. “It’s not a place people want to move to, but from. Annie’s right, there’s no sense in this at all.”

  “So you tell me, ” I said, and finished rinsing the beans in the sink, wiped my hands with the dishtowel hung from the refrigerator handle.

  “You two tell me what makes sense here. Your daddy knows what I feel about this. There’s been words passed. It’s not that I’m stumbling through this with no regard for my Brenda Kay or me.” I took a breath, put my hands together, as though that might turn my words into sensible ones themselves, not just ones telling of my surrender. I said, “He is my husband, and he has let me know in no uncertain terms that we’re going back.” I paused, took another breath. “I am his wife.”

  “Dammit, ” Billie Jean said, and crossed her arms.

  “Watch your mouth, ” I said, and glanced at Brenda Kay, transistor to her ear, her crayon still at work. She hadn’t heard a thing, had no idea how her world would soon tumble back what felt like a hundred years, a thousand. Mississippi.

  I looked at Billie Jean, saw the anger play across her face like I’d seen it play too many times before. She’d lived with us for three months when she moved back, months too filled with the bickering of her and her kids, too filled with Brenda Kay whining out Momma please! all afternoon and night long.

  I knew the look on her face, knew it told of the blame and anger and sorrow she put on that whole idea of marriage, of love.

  Before she could say anything if she’d even thought to I said, “You just drop that thought. You best understand even entertaining the idea of the word Divorce in this kitchen will get you booted right out into the street. Understand that.”

  She shot her eyes at me, as did Anne. Laura still slapped at the table, quiet music still came from Brenda Kay’s radio.

  “Momma, ” Billie Jean started, “it’s just that ” “Don’t, ” I cut in.

  “There’s more that’s passed between your daddy and me than you’ll ever know. And there’s more to just me than you’ll ever know, too. There isn’t any escaping this, that ” “Divorce don’t always mean escape, Momma, ” she said, and her hands were on her hips, her teeth clenched.

  “Don’t you put that on me, Momma.”

  I was quiet. We’d had this fight enough times, the two of us scrapping our way around the house some days, me with the notion she was trying to hide from the whole idea of marriage, that commitment, her with the knowledge of what she’d left, so that she was always right, the one to win. I always had to remember the real truth, she was the only one could know whether she’d done the right thing by getting divorced, just as I was always the only one could know my own history, know why I wasn’t one to give up.

  But here I was, my willingness to move as good a sign as any I was giving up.

  “I’m sorry, ” I said, and I looked in her eyes, tried to smile. I said, “I just know from the life I’ve lived that what God hands down to me has to be found before I can lay any plans. Before I can see what I can do.”

  I paused, still tried to smile. “I don’t know what’s going to happen out there. You both know I don’t want to go back there. You know that, ” and I moved my eyes from Billie Jean’s to Anne’s, saw hers were brimmed up, tears ready to fall.

  “Annie, ” I said, and I went past Billie Jean to her, touched her shoulder. Laura reached up, touched the front of my blouse. “Don’t cry, ” I said, though it seemed this was the only thing left for any of us to do.

  “Momma, ” she said, her eyes never leaving mine, and now a single tear slipped down her cheek. “I don’t want you to go.”

  Then I felt Billie Jean’s hand on my shoulder. She said, “I don’t want you to go, either, Momma.” She paused. “That
’s all there is to say.

  We don’t want you to go.”

  “Then don’t say another word, ” I whispered, felt tears on my own cheeks now.

  I leaned to Annie, kissed her cheek, then turned to Billie Jean, and held her. My two daughters, st. ill and always my children.

  Yet still my children came by each night, spoke to me in the kitchen in low voices of how we ought not to move, while Leston sat in the living room reading over contracts on the house, the owner’s manual for the car, and studying hard the three photographs of the place Toxie’d lined up for us. It was a rental house on a bayou near Mchenry, a gray wooden house six feet off the ground with a porch across the front, two windows like empty eyes. Behind the house was the bayou, sawgrass and water. In the third picture was Toxie himself, standing at the top of the steps up to the porch, one hand resting on a support post for the porch roof, the other hand the hand with only two fingers there on his hip. He had on overalls and a shortsleeve shirt. He was smiling.

  The pictures came the day after Leston’d informed me we were moving, and I never got a straight answer out of him as to when he and Toxie’d worked all this out. What I wanted to know didn’t matter to him, I could tell, all he needed were those photographs, the ones he brought with him to work each day, that he’d shown to every one of his underlings there, that he’d shown to every one of his grandchildren, right on down to baby Laura, him laughing and smiling all the while with the joke of that “Start em thinking about heaven when they’re young, ” he’d laughed to Gene though all I could see in those pictures was heat, and sawgrass, and no single thing for my Brenda Kay nor me to do there.

  On the last few Saturdays and Sundays before we moved, the children were at the house with us, packing up what we had into boxes. The grandkids had no idea, so far as I could tell, of what was going on, simply danced around the cardboard boxes and laughed, ran out in the yard or were at the beach with Barbara and Sarah and Gene, and I envied them that. I wanted to know again what it felt like to be a child, the life you planned for yourself lined up and ready to be played out in whatever way you wanted, perfect joy in the belief your life was in your own hands.