JEWEL

by LOTT, BRET

  He followed me, and I wondered how old he really was. It seemed at some time I’d known he was five or six years older than Cathe ral, who was a year or so older than me. Maybe sixty-five, sixty-six, I figured, then wondered what I’d look like, how I’d walk in that not so distant future.

  He leaned over, peered in the window, watched her in silence a few moments. Then he stood straight, smiled at me, his eyes growing even larger with the smile. He said, “Bless her heart.”

  I was tired of the pleasantries then, tired of the slow movement all this was carrying with it. All of life here in Mississippi carried with it this small dance around the matters at hand rather than talk on the matters, and I smiled back at him, cut my eyes to Leston just behind him, gave a sharp nod he would know.

  But before Leston could say or do anything, in only enough time for him to blink at my silent demand that he tell Nelson what it was we were really here for, Nelson said, “She be in the house. She waiting for you.”

  I looked at him, saw he’d lost the smile in just that moment. He turned, his feet moving in the slow way they had on his long march from the porch to the car, and now I was behind him, had no choice but to look at the black pants he had on, at how the cuffs were frayed through all the way round, the elastic in the suspenders stretched out and ragged so that they had nothing to do with holding up his pants. It was his old man’s paunch that held them up, and as he walked in front of me, I thought of how this was the man who’d leaned into the light cast from my kitchen doorway to touch his wife’s elbow, tell her it was time to go on home while she prophesied my life, gave me God’s will whether I wanted to hear it or not. This was the man who’d led her on home after that, out into a moonless night, me left outside my kitchen with only the knowledge of what my life would hold, the baby you be carrying be yo’ hardship, yo’ test in the world.

  I walked behind him, moved closer and closer to his porch and toward the woman I still wasn’t certain I knew what to say to, what to ask.

  But she was the woman, I knew then, I’d been heading toward every day since we’d moved here, and maybe every day since I’d thrown her out of my house, forcing fault on her, blame for the fire that’d scarred my baby’s legs.

  Scars that, in a twisted blessing all its own, had finally gotten us away from here, and to California, as much the Promised Land as any place could ever be.

  We finally made it to the porch, and I looked up.

  I do not know what I expected to see, did not know if I’d wanted her to be older than I remembered, or younger, heavier or thinner or grayer, stooped or standing tall. She’d worn an old quilt over her shoulders the night she prophesied my life, had on a shapeless cotton dress when she showed up at our back door toting food the morning after my daddy’d been killed, had on my own yellow sweater the day I’d slapped her in my own stab at delivering myself of the guilt I bore for being no more than the selfish granddaughter of a selfish grandmother, me a woman who Cathe ral’d already known was for I saking the heart of her husband to further the good of my retarded daughter. She was the one to lead me, I finally saw, from life into life into life, had seen me move from the shack in the woods to my grandmother’s house, had seen me carted away to the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls, had delivered my first five children into this world and’d warned me of the smile of God on the sixth. So many lives she’d marshaled me into, only to wind down to this, the porch of her own home.

  She stood in the doorway of the shanty, a hand to one doorjamb, the other buried in the pocket of the brown plaid dress she had on. I couldn’t see a single hair on her head for the blue kerchief she wore, so I couldn’t say whether she’d gone gray or white or salt and pepper.

  She was still tall, still thin, still only and always the same woman, Cathe ral.

  But the piece of sorrow she’d worn in her eyes the morning I’d slapped her, the morning she’d taken that slap and then offered me her other cheek, was huge now, exploded in her eyes so that there seemed no touching on what misery she’d known. This seemed the only difference in her, her eyes, the whites of them brilliant and cold against her black skin, filled with a brilliant and cutting sorrow.

  Cathe ral said, “You come here looking for comfort, then go on home.”

  Nelson stopped, leaned back and saw his wife. He whispered, “Don’t go to carrying on now. These Mr. Hilburn, Miss Jewel.”

  Cathe ral didn’t move, only let her eyes slice into mine, those same eyes that’d seen God once she’d surfaced from the Pearl River, baptized in the same river as I’d been. Her God was and always would be, I could see, some different face, some different voice and angle, one I’d never know.

  I said, “Didn’t come for comfort.”

  “Then you came for Hell, ” she shot back at me, though her face hadn’t changed, the crisp wrinkles across her forehead and down her cheeks giving away nothing.

  “Cathe ral, ” Nelson whispered. He made it to the rocker, just touched one arm of it, then turned, slowly lowered himself down to the seat.

  He didn’t start up the rocking again, only sat with both feet firm on the ground, hands on his knees. He was looking past us all, and for a moment I thought he might be looking at Leston, still just behind me.

  But then he blinked, lifted his chin a little higher, and I could see he was looking someplace altogether different, some place I hadn’t yet been.

  He said, “We lost a boy year and five month ago. It been hard on us.”

  He paused, and I felt myself swallow, looked to Cathe ral for her reaction to his words.

  Her eyes were right on mine, and I had to break her gaze, look down at something, anything, and found I was staring at Nelson’s knees, at those black pants again and how thin the material was, skin straining to break through, it seemed, though it was only an old man’s knees, an old man’s pair of pants.

  “Sepulcher, ” he whispered, and the name hung there in the air like it was a ghost itself, taken on form and motion, life of its own.

  “We got no comfort to give, ” Cathe ral said out clear and simple.

  I looked at her. I said, “I am sorry to hear this, ” and found I couldn’t picture Sepulcher himself, only knew him to be one of the two boys who’d carried me downstairs, loaded me into Leston’s pickup for the bumpy ride into town and the hospital. And he’d been the one to fiddle with the cars out to the repair shed.

  She looked away from me, brought a hand up in front of her, looked at it instead. She said, “Dead in a ditch. Eyes open.”

  “Cathe ral, ” Nelson whispered.

  “No accident, ” she said.

  The whole world was silent a moment, and then she looked at me. “You say you don’t want no comfort, ” she said. “But I know the truth. You want me to give you the words of Jesus, give something to you like Luke nine sixty-nine, And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” She stopped, looked to the hand again. Her face still told me nothing, only her words falling down to me here on the ground, this time her the one up on the porch.

  “I am truly sorry, ” I said, swallowed again at the idea of a dead child, a grief I couldn’t touch. “I am sorry, ” I said, and heard from behind me Leston’s words, “Nelson, we’re sorry.”

  I felt my husband’s hand at my elbow, heard him say, “Come on now, ” and tried to remember if those weren’t the same exact words Nelson’d used on his own wife, him coaxing her away from giving the truth to me.

  “Prophesy ain’t worth the widow’s mite, ” she said. “Nor tongues. No God gifts worth anything but the grace of a child.”

  She still stared at the hand, looked at the palm. She turned it over, looked at the back as if it might speak.

  She said, “You want me to give you words to help you make yo’ way in this world, but I ain’t here to give them.” She paused. “But I give you words anyhow. Not the ones you come for, but words down from God all the same. Words more the truth than any
prophesy of yo’ life I ever give.”

  The sun was fast going down now, sat just above the tops of trees at the far end of the sweet potato field across the road, the gray porch and the gray clapboards and Nelson and Cathe ral all going a pale red, all changing color before my eyes. She said, “I give unto you words from the Eighty-eight Psalm.”

  Finally, she shot her eyes at me, and I nearly flinched with the weight of them, the heat and storm there. She whispered, “The wicked are estranged from the womb, they go astray as soon they be born, speaking lies. Their poison is like the poison of a serpent, they is like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.” She paused, made a quick fist of her hand, eyes still on me. “Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth, break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord.”

  The color of all things went deeper red, the sky above us near scarlet now, the sun touching the trees. I backed away from the porch, backed away until I felt my shoulders touch Leston’s chest, and stopped.

  She let the hand drop to her side, made it disappear into her pocket again. She nodded, the sky’s color gone to her eyes, so that the brilliant, cold white of them was now blood red, the color, I figured, of a sorrow I hadn’t yet touched, the color of a place I’d never been.

  “If they a prophesy here, ” she said, “it that yo’ life going to end up this way some day. Will for all of us. We going to see death, and not know what to make of it. Even Jesus, ” she said, her voice going back to the whisper now, “even Jesus say upon the cross, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Even Jesus not know what to make of it.”

  “Let’s go now, ” Leston said, and I felt his arm move round my shoulder, felt him start to pull me back toward the car.

  “Miss Jewel, ” Cathe ral said, and I turned to her, stopped moving.

  I looked at her there on the porch, the brown plaid dress soaking up blood from the sky. She smiled, said, “Don’t a day go by I don’t dream on slapping you with this hand of mine.” She brought the hand from the pocket again, held it up firm and high in front of her, fingers spread.

  “Don’t a day. Yo’ children, all of them, they alive. I got one dead in a ditch, eyes open, killed for trying to teach burrhead niggers how to read in a town a hundred miles north of here don’t want no niggers knowing how to read.”

  She nodded again, and I felt my heart lurch again, not in the way it had when that bigbosomed girl’d surprised me at the kitchen window, but in a way I knew I’d never recover from. I felt it shudder under a sudden and permanent weight, set there like a stone on my chest. “It you who taught me, ” she said. “That yo’ legacy.” She nodded again.

  “Even yo’ baby daughter, yo’ hardship and test in this world, she only asleep in a back seat of yo’ shiny car. She only asleep.”

  I looked down, away from her eyes. I whispered, “I’m sorry, ” those two words too small and insignificant to mean anything.

  I closed my eyes a moment, then opened them, looked up at her what I was certain would be the final time.

  But she was already gone, disappeared into the black hole her front doorway’d become in the gathering dark.

  There was only Nelson, slowly rocking in his chair, hands still on his knees, the creak the chair made the smallest sliver of sound. The coming dark’d erased all detail to him, though he sat not fifteen feet away, and I couldn’t see if his eyes were open or closed behind those thick glasses. And with that loss of detail his black pants’d turned clean, brand-new, the suspenders down his chest taut and crisp against his fine white shirt.

  “You take care now, ” his voice came to us.

  CHAPTER 38.

  WHILE I RINSED BRENDA KAY IN THE TUB, SQUEEZED COOL WATER OVER her back and shoulders and face, I heard Leston turn Toxie back, heard low talk out on the porch, then the sound his pickup made starting up, backing out. I took Brenda Kay’s hand, helped her out the tub. Her eyes closed, me drying her off with the towel, she half whispered, half-sang, “Ah ahh stop, love you.”

  Once I’d gotten her to bed she’d slept all the way home I went to the front room, saw Leston at the screen door staring out at nothing, a beer in one hand, the other in his pocket.

  I said nothing, only went to the kitchen, then out the back door, down the steps to the yard. Treefrogs started up.

  It was dark now, and I headed for the sheets on the line, knew that if I didn’t get them in soon they’d be drenched in dew by tomorrow morning.

  Above me, above the bayou and the cypress and oak and pine, above everything, hung a half-moon, perched out over the water at the end of the dock like some lost and dying star, trying to find a place to rest.

  I stopped in the yard, looked to the trees around me. To my left were the clotheslines, the two T-bars at either end, hanging between them rows of white sheets a bright gray out here. They hung straight down from the lines, no breeze anywhere, and I went to one end, touched the sheet. It was still damp, hadn’t been out long enough to dry in the humid heat of the day.

  I pulled back that sheet, ducked beneath the line so that I stood between the two rows. Slowly I moved down them from one end to the other, a hand out to either side, my fingertips trailing along each damp sheet, and for a moment I imagined I was surrounded by gentle ghosts, ghosts who meant nothing, who carried no weight of death or grief or sorrow, ghosts making no demands.

  I reached the far end, and turned, planned to head back down the gray corridor, touch each sheet, send each empty ghost shivering one last time.

  There at the opposite end stood Leston, him with no detail at all, just a huge and looming shadow. The tip of a cigarette glowed at his side.

  He lifted it up, and I saw the tip go bright red as he drew on…

  He said, “You asked me today if something happened out at the shed.”

  He paused. “It did.”

  I let one hand touch the sheet next to me. I caught a corner of it, fingered it between my thumb and first finger, and remembered a moment on a porch when a man with wet and stringy black hair did the same with the corner of a black wool blanket he and three other men had carried my dead father in.

  I let go the sheet, said, “What’s that? ” He took in a breath, the cigarette still at his side. He said, “We was back to the shed, looking around, and Brenda Kay near stepped on a copperhead.”

  “What? ” I said. My voice was too loud out here, carried across the water, shot up and into darkness. I started toward him, my hands suddenly at my chest, clutching each other, holding on. “She what? ” “She didn’t step on it, just walked right over it, ” he said, and as I came near him I saw his head drop, saw he was looking at the ground.

  I stopped in front of him, searched the shadow of him for more of what’d happened, more words about how she’d been safe after all.

  He said to the ground, “She didn’t even see it. And I wasn’t paying attention.” He paused, said, “I was looking up at the rafters, thinking on how fine she’d held up, the shed.”

  “And? ” I said. Now my hands let go each other, and one went to him, touched a shoulder.

  “I hear this shift in the leaves at my feet, and there he was, just slithering right between us.” He paused again, brought up the cigarette, held it at his mouth, though the tip didn’t brighten any.

  He just held it there.

  “I didn’t even grab for it, like I’d of done ten years ago, ” he said.

  “Ten years ago I’d of just bent down, picked him up by the tail and swung him, snapped him.”

  Finally he drew in, and I could see in the light from the ember just the barest face, the shine of his eyes, the bones beneath his cheeks.

  He whispered, “I was scared.”

  I touched him with both hands now, and through his shirt a yellow shirt only a shade of gray out here beneath that piecemeal moon I could feel his arms, the bones of them, the thin flesh.

  I said, “I’m scared, too.”

  “Of
what? ” he said. The cigarette had died down now, and I could only make out the shadow of his eyes, the idea of his mouth. But I knew he was looking at me, and I hoped he might find my answer in whatever of my eyes he could see in this darkness, Scared I was losing my baby daughter to the nothing this place had to give, scared of Cathe ral’s words and the death of all of us I felt this night. Scared my own life was out of my hands.

  But I said nothing, no words forming in me, and suddenly I heard waves again, felt fog on my skin, saw the bones of a pier.

  I let go his arms, turned to the sheet nearest me, reached up and took off the first clothespin.

  He didn’t move, and out the corner of my eye I could see his own pale fog again, smoke breath easing out his lungs and into the night.

  Then he was next to me, flicked the cigarette away, took from my hand the sheet corner I held. He ducked beneath the line, moved out into the yard as I took off the next pin, and the next, until I stood with the other end of the sheet, three clothespins in my apron pocket.

  Without a word we moved away from the clotheslines, both of us with a sheet corner to a hand. Gently we popped the sheet, shook out any bugs may have been there.

  Then we came toward each other, and when our hands touched, the sheet folded in half, he said, “Don’t even put these back up tomorrow. Just go ahead, pack them up.”

  I nodded, took one end of the folded sheet, took a few steps back. I said, “I’ll bleach them once we get home, get out any mildew.”

  We came toward each other again, and our hands touched again.

  He said, “I didn’t mean it to be this way, Sugar.”

  I stopped with the sheet, stared up at him. We were turned a different way now, the rising moon full in his face, a gray man looking down to his wife, him giving up.

  I said, “What do you mean? ” though I knew. I knew and knew.

  He whispered, “I didn’t mean for it to end like this, Sug.”

  I tried to smile up at him, hoped in the dark he’d think this smile came easy to me, came from down in me and needed no prompting at all.