Getting Mother's Body

by Suzan-Lori Parks

  “It ain’t good for the baby you not eating and just laying there all day,” I says. She don’t say nothing to that, but she gives me a look that woulda cut my throat from end to end if her eyes was knives. Her Mother taught her to give looks like that, she sure didn’t learn it from Teddy or me.

  A car comes up. A Ford, by the sound of it. Billy hears its sound and lifts herself up to the level of the window to see what kind of Ford, maybe it’s her Snipes or Snopes—we never did meet him—come to get her. It ain’t. It’s a dusty brown station wagon with the wooden sides and Roosevelt gives the fella full service, pumping the gas, cleaning the windows and checking the oil.

  The pearl earring she had around her neck is gone.

  “Where’s yr pretty pearl?” I ask.

  “I lost it,” she says.

  She lays back down on her pallet looking at the underside of the counter. When she was little and first come to live with us Willa Mae had taught her reading but not writing. If we’d put her in school right away she woulda been held back so I kept her at home for a year or so and taught her writing myself. First thing she did when she learnt to write her own name good was to cut it in the underside of the counter. She’s laying on her pallet looking up at her name.

  “What’s sixty-three plus five plus ten?” she asks.

  I’m not as quick with numbers as I am with words, so I take a minute. “Seventy-eight,” I says at last.

  “He’ll do it for seventy-eight,” she says.

  “Do what?” I ask her.

  She don’t say.

  She sits up and opens my grip, taking out that wedding dress she just bought. It’s all balled up. She tucks it underneath her arm and walks straight out the office. Teddy, checking the Ford man’s oil, stops to watch. When she pult the dress out it smelt funny. Like it was burnt.

  MR. ISRAEL JACKSON

  We got a strick policy regarding the return or refund of any merchandise we sell or rent out. Jackson’s Formal and Jackson’s Funeral both got strick policies. To get your money back or to get an ex-change, the merchandise in question has got to have our store tags still on it. Plus the merchandise in question can’t have no signs of wear. We got policies as strick as stores in Dallas. Just because we’re a business based in Lincoln, don’t mean we ain’t strick.

  Billy Beede comes up in here and wants her money for her dress back. When the dress walked out it was a show dress, you know, one Mrs. Jackson had made for the express purpose of putting in the window and attracting business. We got all sorts of people passing through here and there’s been a couple of times when Mrs. Jackson has gotten business off her show dress. Two years ago the Junior League of Amarillo was passing through on their way to Austin. They just happened to pass down Main and when one of them gals seen Mrs. Jackson’s show dress, don’t you know she stopped the bus and ordered herself a party gown from us. So the dress Billy Beede purchased weren’t just no ordinary dress, it was a show dress and so its true value was worth much more than the price on the ticket.

  I’m in the back doing the books when she comes in. She got the dress so balled up that I think she’s carrying a rag or something with her. She plops it down on the counter like it was nothing. Mrs. Jackson is pressing Gloria North’s baptismal outfit, so while she’s surprised to see Billy, she don’t think nothing of it at first.

  “I need my money back,” Billy go.

  Mrs. Jackson comes over and spreads the dress out along the counter as best she can. Like I said, Billy’d balled it up pretty good.

  “I got the shoes too,” Billy says, plopping both of them down on top of the dress.

  Mrs. Jackson takes the shoes off the dress, turning them upside down to look at the soles. “Shoes ain’t been worn,” she says softly.

  “Course they ain’t been worn,” Billy says.

  Mrs. Jackson keeps smoothing the dress out. It’s a copy of the one she was wearing when her and me exchanged our vows. I peek out from the office. My younger son Laz says there is a lot of good in Billy Beede but I haven’t ever seen much. He says she’s got good deep down. Subterranean he calls it. Subterranean my foot. It’s one of the few things Laz and me don’t see eye to eye on. I got some evidence to support my point of view of her right now: Billy Beede’s standing there with her arms crossed and there’s a funny smell coming from the showroom, maybe it’s her.

  “The dress don’t fit,” Billy says.

  Mrs. Jackson turns to look back at me, to see if I’m watching. I look down at the books. The money she logged in for the sale of that dress doesn’t match what she’s got in the cash register. I have to count up the figures again.

  “You look so pretty in it,” Mrs. Jackson says.

  “I ain’t gonna be needing the dress, Mrs. Jackson. I need—I need other things now,” Billy says. She’s talking so soft I have to listen hard to hear. She’s telling my wife how that no-good Snipes didn’t come through. And right then, I see a glimpse of what Laz is talking about. Billy’s got that Beede luck, bless her heart. She worked for Ruthie Montgomery but they fell out and Ruthie let her go. Now she fell out with her no-good banana-coffin maker. Billy’s got that Beede luck but, while I got sympathy for her, I ain’t no softie like my wife.

  Mrs. Jackson is looking at the sign Laz wrote out, stating our returns policy in big black lettering. The sign hangs behind the shop counter, so when she cranes her head around to reread it, she sees me watching her. I make a fist and sort of punch the air in front of me, hoping to punch the softness out of my wife.

  Billy reads the sign aloud, a strong loud voice, proud of every word she reads. Then, “I ain’t worn it and it’s still got the tags on,” she says.

  “The dress looks like someone took a match to it,” Mrs. Jackson mutters.

  “I couldn’t help it,” Billy says. “You wondering what happened, ain’tcha? I’ma tell you,” she says, raising her voice so I can hear without straining. “Snipes got a woman, not a wife, just some trashy thing that’s crazy for him. She comed into the hotel where Snipes had got me a room and she tried to burn me up. All she got was the dress.”

  “Lord today,” Mrs. Jackson says. I know my wife. When the good Lord comes into the conversation, my wife is seeing herself as a soldier of Jesus. She is thinking, in her mind, that if Jesus himself had run a dress shop, would he or would he not accept back into his flock the burned dress offering, which is to say that my wife is about to go soft.

  I step through the doorway.

  “We got a strick policy concerning returns,” I says.

  “I need my money back,” Billy says.

  “The dress is burnt,” I says, standing behind Mrs. Jackson.

  “I’ll take half of what I paid,” Billy says. She looks Mrs. Jackson in the eye and Mrs. Jackson looks down at the dress.

  “I did you a good turn,” Mrs. Jackson says to Billy. The two of them are quiet for a moment together. Now I know why the books aren’t balancing right.

  “His woman almost kilt me,” Billy says softly. “Snipes wanted to marry me and his woman wanted me dead.”

  I look at Billy. She don’t look away. She is telling a kind of truth. She is probably lying but in a crazy way she’s telling a kind of truth. The crazy it-can-only-happen-to-a-Beede kind of truth. If such a thing had happened to me I woulda slunk home and not spoken about it, but here Billy is, blabbing a hard-to-believe version of her business, trying to get her money back so she can go on with her life. She needs money for the child, I guess. Still, our books ain’t balancing out.

  “We gotta draw the line somewheres, girl,” I says.

  And then, right on time, Mrs. Jackson chimes in. “We can’t take back the dress, much as I want to, we can’t,” she says, pushing the dress towards Billy, who pushes it right back at her. My wife covers her mouth with her hands. I shove the dress at Billy who grabs it and wads it up tight, looking at us both as she’s wadding it. The dress with all that lace and trim and train will only get so small. Billy stands there cramming i
t together with her hands, looking from me to my wife.

  “Oh, goddamnit it to hell,” Billy yells. Then she goes and throws the dress on the floor and walks out the store.

  “I tried to help her out, “ my wife says.

  “She’s a Beede and it can’t be helped,” I says.

  DILL SMILES

  I’m at Little Walter Little’s barbershop. He can give me a good cut with his eyes closed and both hands behind his back. The kid he got working for him, Spider, gotta be watched out for.

  “I don’t want you cutting my hair, Spider,” I says.

  “I got my degree,” Spider says. He yanks his neck back like it’s on a rubberband, pointing the tip of his bullet head toward his diploma. “I got it framed and hanging on the wall,” he says.

  “And that’s from The Negro Barber School of Midland, too,” Little Walter says.

  “It ain’t like he wrote off and got it through the mail,” Joe North adds.

  “Whatchu know about nothing?” I says to North. North sells ladies underpants door to door. He’s been this close to getting lynched more than once but he says he enjoys the work.

  “You too particular wicha hair,” North says.

  “That’s cause I got hair. If you had hair you’d be particular,” I says and we all laugh.

  Spider is still standing there with his towel opened out ready to swathe me up in it. He wiggles the towel, like him wiggling it at me is gonna make me get in his chair.

  “I was near the head of my class,” he says.

  “First?” I ask.

  “Three from the head,” he says.

  “He coulda stayed in Midland,” Little Walter says. “He didn’t have to come back home.”

  “I coulda wrote my own ticket,” Spider says.

  “He coulda gone to Dallas,” Joe North says. Spider glances at North. Hearing his name mentioned in tandem with the city of Dallas, he stands a little straighter.

  “Oh, hell,” I says, going to sit in his chair and letting him swathe me.

  He gets right to work and, watching him in the mirror, I’m impressed. He got the scissors snapping and the comb moving almost as good as Little Walter do.

  Pastor Peoples comes in and sits in Little Walter’s chair. “You going up to Warshington with us?” Little asks him but the Pastor don’t say nothing. Washington, D.C., is a sore subject for Peoples.

  “You got a good grade of hair, Dill,” Spider says. “Sometimes good hair can trick ya.”

  I eye him in the mirror and he grins.

  “In Midland we had all sorts of hair types to work with. All kinds of Negro hair. Mexican and white hair too,” Spider says reassuring me.

  “White folks sure is funny,” Joe North says outa nowheres. Sometimes someone’ll take him up on his favorite subject, but not today.

  Little has covered the Pastor’s face with a hot towel, and Pastor talks out from underneath it. “How many weeks it take you to get that diploma?” he asks.

  “Weren’t measured in weeks, it were measured in hours,” Spider says. “Class hours, tests passed, heads trimmed, konks, plus shaving and manicures too. One hundred and fifty class hours.”

  “Sounds like they covered all the bases,” Peoples says. His voice coming through the towel is thick with steam.

  “Ain’t that Billy Beede?” Little Walter says.

  We all look. Billy’s standing across the street, looking in the window of Ruthie Montgomery’s place. “House of Style” Ruthie calls it, but it’s just a beauty shop.

  “Weren’t she getting married?” Joe North asks me.

  “Far as I know,” I says.

  “She don’t look married to me,” North says. “I can see a wedding ring at fifty yards and I don’t see none on Billy Beede.” The fellas all shake their heads and go quiet. Just the snapping of Spider’s scissors.

  Willa Mae Beede came to town on a Friday afternoon. I remember cause I was having me a particularly bad week and I was gonna celebrate by coming down here to Little Walter’s and sitting in the back room with North and Walter and getting as drunk as I could on the thirty-eight cents I had. I wanted to get drunk and I wanted to look good doing it. I was gonna strut down Main Bully and then crawl back home. That was my plan anyhow. I only had one suit but I had me two ties. One was red with golden spots, the other one was a dark blue with sort of like a razzle-dazzle black strip running through it. I stood on my porch holding them both to the light. I couldn’t decide which one would go best.

  And there came Willa Mae Beede. No, not Willa Mae Beede yet, just a good-looking woman walking down the road. White woman, looked like. Wearing a red dress that showed off her shape. She was walking but she weren’t walking like she was headed down an almost-dirt road that runs through a town that ain’t on most maps, no, this woman was walking, more like what they call sashaying. Red dress, with her red purse to match just swinging on her arm, and red shoes to match all that, walking like she was walking down one of them fancy streets in the big city. Like she had someplace to go, or like she just came from someplace good, that’s how she was walking. The way she was moving was something to see but what was following behind her was something else.

  It wasn’t just a car. It was a brand-new 1946 Bel Air. A bone-white with red, two-tone convertible, just crawling behind her. Two boys, Siam-Israel Jackson and Jimmy Montgomery, was pushing it. They had their shoulders behind the weight and they looked pleased to be straining. The woman looked like she was gonna walk all day. The boys looked like so long as she kept walking they’d keep pushing. I told myself I didn’t know which I liked looking at more. All I had to my name was thirty-eight cents, but I was gonna get me that gal and her car both.

  I walked through my front yard, not hurrying, choosing the red tie with the golden spots and getting it around my neck good by the time I reached the road. I let the other tie just fall in the dirt. They was like a parade and woulda passed me without stopping if I hadn’t of spoke.

  “Ain’t nothing down that way,” I says to the woman.

  “There’s a filling station that my brother runs,” she says, smiling, turning, looking me up and down, liking what she’s looking at, but not stopping her walking.

  I was ready to push her car straight up into the air, all the way to the moon.

  “I’ll take it from here, boys,” I said. And that was pretty much how we started.

  Little Walter talks to the Pastor as his face steams. “You oughta go to Warshington with us, Pastor Peoples,” he says. Next month there’s supposed to be an organizing of some kind up there. Negroes and other Civil Rights folks will march around Washington and demand justice from President Kennedy. A few folks from here is going. Last time I heard Peoples talk about it he was sitting on the fence.

  “I won’t be going,” Peoples says, his voice muffled by the towel.

  “Dr. King’s gonna be speaking,” North says, but North ain’t going neither.

  “I done heard Dr. King speak,” Peoples says.

  “You just sour cause you ain’t been asked to speak,” Little says. Pastor says something to Little, something that sounds like “fuck you” but I can’t be sure with the towel on his face.

  “Suit yrself,” Little says.

  “I’ma head up there,” Spider says.

  “I’m not,” I says. “Jez just had her piglets.”

  Little Walter takes the towel from Peoples’ face and holds the mirror close. Everything about Peoples is thick. He got a thick chest and thick arms, he got a thick neck and pebbly skin from shaving. “We gotta find a way to cure me of these bumps,” Peoples says, looking at his skin.

  North is watching Billy out the window. “She ain’t a bad girl,” North says. “And Teddy and June’s good people. They deserve better than what they got.”

  “I let Roosevelt in my pulpit once,” Pastor says, pushing away the barber mirror. “Remember? I gave that Beede a chance to preach and he weren’t nothing but tongue-tied.”

  “If you was Sanderson�
�s grease monkey, you’d be tongue-tied too,” Spider says.

  “Teddy’s through with preaching anyhow,” I says.

  “Still, Billy deserves better,” North presses.

  “Why don’t you marry her?” Spider says.

  “My ass is engaged,” North says. “You marry her.”

  “Naw,” Spider says, squinting his eyes and leaning in close as he clips around the right side of my head. “Billy Beede ain’t my type.”

  “Teddy should take his gun and go visit that fool, Snoops,” Little Walter tells me.

  “Snipes,” Spider says, correcting.

  “Teddy don’t got no gun,” I says.

  “You got a gun, Smiles,” Peoples says.

  “You gonna take a gun up to Warshington?” North asks Little.

  “I’m putting my .32 under the seat,” Little says.

  “I could lend my gun to Teddy and he could go up there and visit Snoops,” I says.

  “Snipes,” Spider says.

  “You could go up there and visit that no-count yrself,” North says.

  “I ain’t getting mixed up in no Beede business,” I says. Then I say my next words before they can think them. “I’ve been mixed up with enough Beedes to last me my lifetime,” I says.

  Pastor Peoples thicks up his face. He will stand for me living in his town and sitting in this barbershop but that’s about it.

  “Willa Mae weren’t constant in no kind of way,” North says quietly.

  “Except for being constantly wild,” Little adds.

  “If Willa Mae was my woman—” Spider starts to say, but Joe North looks at him and he shuts up.

  We go quiet. Just the sounds of the scissors going around our heads.

  Willa Mae went and visited Blackwell County where most of the Beede family stays at. There was wall-to-wall Beedes down there, she said. Not like up here where mentioning Beede will quickly turn into a conversation about Teddy or Willa Mae or Billy. There just ain’t more Beedes to mention so the conversation don’t got but so many places to go. And if the talk turns to Willa Mae and men are present then, if theys like Little or Peoples or North and actually heard Willa tell my business, or if they was like Spider, too young to be in on such things yet, they all know what was said. They all remember or remember being told how Willa Mae went and bellowed through the streets that I weren’t no man. Probably because Dill Smiles didn’t make enough money quick enough. Probably because Willa Mae was good-looking and hard to satisfy and Dill Smiles raised pigs. At first, it just came down to a woman’s word against a man’s word. Her word against mine. All the men in the world have been called non-men at some time or another by their woman. But, as time went on, I did get the looks and there were whispers. When I’d come into Little’s for a haircut, men would notice that I never asked for a shave. They noticed I never went whoring with them and, even in the summer heat, I keep on my shirt. Over the years they all put two and two together. But it remains unspoken. North and me hunt together. I am the better shot. When two of Little’s heifers got the hoof rot, it was me who cured them from it. For most of the people in Lincoln, the way I carry myself and the work I do and the clothes I got and the money I earn keeps their respect. I don’t ask more from them than that.