by Gin Phillips
At least paychecks were every two weeks by then, which made things easier. Used to be once a month when I started, ’fore I married Leta. That kept most fellas borrowing from the company during that last week or two before payday, and they’d all but hand over that check when it finally came on account of all the interest. Striking hadn’t gotten us much—not any more money—but it got us that same money split in half and paid separate.
“Ain’t no hurry,” I said. Would have been an insult if I’d said he didn’t have to pay me.
“I wasn’t drinkin’ none. Thought you should know.”
“Didn’t think you was.”
“My wife got busy with the two sick ones today. She didn’t get no chance to bring wood in, and wasn’t until we headed to bed I realized the fire was about out. Thought I’d just get some limbs out in the woods to tide us over—didn’t want the children to get cold, ’specially them bein’ poorly an’ all.”
We rode on, both of us looking straight ahead.
“He give you trouble before?” I asked.
“Nah. Never ran across him ’fore tonight.”
“He sees mostly the good-for-nothin’ colored, I s’pose. Don’t know the difference between you and them.”
“You see a difference?” He didn’t say it like he was trying to be smart, I didn’t think. I gave him the first answer that popped into my head.
“There’s a difference. I know you walk the chalk. Not like some.”
He didn’t answer, staring out his window. I figured he was pleased. Then he said more in one chunk than I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.
“I got a cousin in Birmingham, always talkin’ ’bout uplift. ’Bout how we Negroes oughta do what the boss tells us, work real hard, not gamble or drink up our pay, and then we’d have somethin’ worth havin’. Well, I ain’t had a drink since I got married nine year ago. Wife don’t like it no more than your’n does. And not drinkin’ or playin’ cards still don’t make money magic itself into my pocket when there ain’t none. Boss pays you seven dollars a week, and food and rent and clothes for the children cost seven dollars and fifty cents a week, ain’t no use blamin’ sin for bein’ at rock bottom. Plenty of fellas at rock bottom who didn’t have no fun gettin’ there.”
I could see him look at me, but I kept on looking at the road. I didn’t have much of an answer.
“You ownin’ land, don’t s’pose you’d know much about it,” he said. “Ain’t complainin’, but it sits different with us.”
I was still as a stump, thinking. He fidgeted for the first time that night. “You ain’t mad that I spoke my mind? Didn’t mean no offense.”
“Didn’t take none,” I said. The street lamps hardly lit the road worth anything. “I figure I know somethin’. I know Ted Taylor wouldn’t cart me off to jail for walkin’ down the street. Know I get to be ‘Mr. Moore’ and you never get no kind of handle in front of your name. I know no shack rouster gets sent to a white man’s house to see if he’s really sick. No supervisor would so much as look wrong at Leta. Know I’ve worked next to you long as Tess has been alive and I ain’t never seen you lazy or drunk.”
We rode on, both resting from all those words, shucking the meaning out of them and sorting it.
“You’re sort of an odd egg, Albert,” Jonah said. “A good’un, mind you. But an odd one.”
We’d pulled up even with where his street hit Main, but before he pulled the door handle, I called his name. He looked back.
“You heard what Ted said about that dead baby,” I said. “You heard anybody say somethin’ worth repeatin’ about it? About its mama?”
He moved his hand off the door. “Can’t say I have.”
“Seems to me that a woman who’d do that would stand out. That it would pain her somethin’ awful. You ain’t noticed any, well, you might say, disturbed women?”
“Ain’t they all disturbed?”
I chuckled. “Any woman that seemed troubled by something? Negro women? Or white women, too, if you noticed any.”
“Now, Albert, you know durn well I ain’t spendin’ time around no white women. And if I am, they’s gone be troubled for sure. As for Negro women…” His tone changed, sounded harsher than I was used to. “They got their own reasons for bein’ troubled.”
“You don’t have a notion of who did it?”
He shook his head, and I believed him. I didn’t have any notions worth an Indian nickel myself.
“I got some thoughts on it,” he said, surprising me.
“Yeah?”
“It’s a sad woman that would do that, Albert. Not a mean one. Take your own dead child and toss it in a well belonging to good people—that says somethin’ to me. That she’s, you might say, a little crazy, but that’s nothin’ next to the size of the sadness.”
He stopped talking and didn’t start back again. Finally I asked, “Why you say that?”
“I figure she gave up on this life, and if this life don’t matter, that little body didn’t matter a whit. She’d already moved on to thinkin’ about the next life. One where the baby didn’t care about that body so neither did she.”
I understood that. It didn’t answer none of my questions about who and where—it being my well—but he’d done a better job getting inside her head than I’d come close to. I hadn’t expected that of him; I admitted that to myself right then and there. It didn’t make me proud. I couldn’t figure just what it made me. “There’s good sense in that, Jonah.”
And somehow I opened my mouth yet again before his hand got to the door.
“You knew Jesse Bridgeman killed hisself?”
Jonah nodded.
“Been on my mind. I passed that man on the street at least once a week, always saw him on the way to church on Sunday. I never saw that in him. Feel like I just looked at some shell of him not meant for nothin’ but to be throwed away. But I never knew it for a shell, never knew to peel it back or crack it to see what was underneath.”
He smiled, a flash of white I rarely saw in the mines, and I looked straight at him and met his eyes. They were deep and dark almost like Leta’s and the children’s, I thought, and it gave me a start to see them looking back at me. What shook me most was how clear they were at nearly three in the morning, no red in them, and I felt a shiver inside like I did when Leta would explain something in a simple way that made me know her eyes took in whole worlds mine never blinked at.
Jonah’s smile made him look older, not happier. “Shoot, I wouldn’t know nothin’ ’bout that,” he said.
I thought about that on the way home. And about how we’d used up a year’s worth of words.
Tess SO THERE WAS NO WATER IN THAT BABY’S LUNGS. THE doctors cut him open because Chief Taylor needed to see for sure how he was killed before he started carting women off to jail. And he didn’t have a bit of water in his lungs. Not any. Meaning that baby wasn’t breathing when he got thrown in. He was dead before he hit the water. And that set us to rethinking our list.
“What does it mean, Virgie?” I swung my book satchel from two fingers; she carried hers over her shoulder like a handbag. We’d gotten good and warm by the fire before we left, and the walk to school would just give us time to lose all the heat and be ready for the warm stove.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “It means she wasn’t a murderer, for one thing. I’d been thinking we were looking for someone wanting to get rid of her baby, somebody pushed into it by meanness or tiredness or misery. But maybe she wasn’t desperate at all. Maybe she was something else.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure.”
“So she threw a dead baby in our well.” Crunch, crunch—leaves fell apart under my feet. “That don’t seem any more sensible than throwing in a live baby.”
“But it’s different,” she insisted.
“How?” I answered back just as stubborn. I didn’t understand why she wanted to divide up crazy into different sections. We’d been looking for a crazy wo
man and we still were.
“I don’t know.” She caught my arm and looked down the road to school. The boys usually played around until the bell rang, and sometimes the little kids’ parents would stand around the road talking. “I hope nobody’s out this morning.” She chewed her lip while she started down the road and then pulled me in the opposite direction. “Oh, let’s just go the long way. I don’t feel like saying hello to everybody.”
It beat all how Virgie thought it was a chore to wave and answer back to people. But I followed her into the trees toward the creek, where nobody’d call out to us but the squirrels. Virgie loved the woods, liked being around trees more than she did people. I didn’t care much for being in the middle of all them branches and trunks and briars. I wouldn’t have set foot in the woods by myself. They seemed darker than they used to, and anything could be hiding. Jack had gotten me thinking about why we didn’t ever see fairies in the woods. I figured something ate them. Some sort of lizard, maybe, or one of those sharp-toothed possums. I leaned toward possums with their red eyes and rat tails. They could hang upside down and snatch those fairies right out of the air, ripping their wings off and chomping them like popped corn. The wings would be the tastiest part. If you were evil.
It was a big thing for me to realize about all the bad magic creatures that must be out there to fight against the good ones, and before long I had a head full of them.
“Maybe we never knew she was pregnant,” said Virgie as I kept an eye out for red eyes. “Maybe she hid it.”
“Hid carryin’ a baby?” That got my attention. Soon the solution dawned on me. “So we’re lookin’ for a big, fat woman?”
She frowned and stepped over a rotten log. “She could’ve worn a corset.”
“But it’d be easier to hide it if you were big. We should think about a list of big women.”
She didn’t stop frowning, just started chewing her lip again. “I was thinkin’ our list was too simple. Maybe we shouldn’t be accountin’ for babies. And maybe we shouldn’t be thinkin’ of who’s big as a house. We should be figurin’ what kind of woman would throw a dead baby in a well.”
“A crazy one,” I said.
She ignored me. “Not one that did wrong by her baby. She prob’bly loved him.”
“She could’ve killed him ahead of time. Clubbed him on the head.”
I’d dreamed of bruises the night before. Not my own. Just pale, pale skin and purple blotches. Water dripping from everything, making the bruises shine. I couldn’t remember more than that.
Virgie shook her head. “Papa said the chief said there was no sign of that. Not bruises or nothin’. Just as likely he died from bein’ sickly.”
It’d rained enough to fill up the creek to the edge of the bank, and the planks we walked across were wet. The water nearly touched them, splashing over them from time to time. We both hiked up our skirts.
“I’d rather hop across the rocks,” I said. “It’s more fun.”
“All we need’s for you to fall in,” she said, halfway across. I think it was looking around to give me a scowl she borrowed from Papa that upset her balance. Or maybe she stepped on a leaf or something. At any rate, Virgie toppled over into the creek with the same slowness a glassful of milk has when you knock it off the table.
The creek was no more than waist-deep at its highest, but she got soaked good. She managed to keep her head above water, so her curls didn’t get wet, and her right hand held her satchel in the air. But every inch below her neck was sopping. She didn’t sit there long; before I could even say anything, she was standing and wading to shore. More like stomping.
“Ohhhhh,” was all I could say. “Oh, Virgie.” But then I got a good look at her, water streaming from the bottom of her dress, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“This isn’t funny,” she said. “I’m gone be late—I’ll have to run home and change my clothes.” But she was fighting a smile herself. She almost laughed, then it turned to a spluttery cough, and I saw she had goose bumps.
“You’ll catch cold,” I said, worried then. “Run on home. I’ll tell your teacher.”
“Not in front of the whole class!”
“Okay, I’ll tell her real quiet.” She decided to believe me and took off running back toward the house. She got almost to the road when I yelled her name. “You should’ve went across the rocks,” I told her; she didn’t even look back.
I tiptoed on across the planks without any trouble—it was faster than going across the rocks, and I didn’t have extra time if I had to go to Virgie’s classroom first. I started running on the other side of the creek, thinking I’d slow down when I got back in view of people. (I moved better in water than I did on land. My legs were a little too long for me and my knees were always bloodied from tripping over nothing more than my feet. It seemed like I had more than just two of them.)
So Virgie thought the Well Woman wasn’t evil. But if she wasn’t evil, she had to be crazy. I couldn’t see no other reason to it—no mama like ours could do such a thing. I could hear Virgie’s voice in my head, though. If it’s so plain, why doesn’t she stick out? Evil or crazy must look different than we thought.
Virgie I WAS ONLY HALF AN HOUR LATE. MAMA HELPED ME pull off my wet dress and underthings. That was after I burst open the back door—still standing on the porch so I wouldn’t drip on the floors—and announced I fell in the creek.
Mama looked up from the breakfast dishes and blinked at me, then she was right beside me with a towel before I could say another word.
“Take off your shoes and leave them here,” she said first. Second she said, “How come you fell in and not Tess?”
Back in the bedroom, towel wrapped around me and not wearing a stitch, I stood while Mama hunted for bloomers and stockings for me. “I don’t believe you’ve ever fell in the creek before,” she said. “Hardly ever even scraped your knees.”
I just stood there.
She seemed more puzzled than anything, not the least bit mad. She held my hands in hers and then held the back of her hand to my forehead to be sure I was warm enough…but not so warm as to have a temperature. Then she kissed my forehead and whacked me lightly on the rear end as I turned to the door.
I did not enjoy being wet or mussed or late, and I sank into my seat as quietly as possible. Tess must’ve said something to Miss Etheridge because she didn’t say a word to me, and normally you’d be called to the front of the room for being late. Being tardy twice would get your knuckles rapped with the ruler. Well, Miss Etheridge never used the ruler, but Jack’s teacher had left welts the year before when Jack lost track of time digging for crawdads before school.
Three seats away from the potbellied stove, I could feel its heat already. Too close to it and you’d be too warm, turning groggy and stupid with the coziness of it. Three seats away was perfect.
Miss Etheridge’s eyes flickered to mine, and she smiled enough to let me know I wasn’t in trouble. I wondered how old she was. She only had a few lines around her eyes. She was pretty enough, slender and neat, with penny-colored hair. Ella and Lois thought she was a bit standoffish, but I didn’t mind that. She was friendly in her quiet way, always glad to stay after school to go over an assignment. And when she read aloud, she was beautiful, her eyes bright and her cheeks pink. Her voice turned into something new and strong and fascinating when she had somebody else’s words to read instead of her own.
I asked her once if she enjoyed being a teacher, and she said, “I do, Virgie. I enjoy it quite a bit.” Then she asked me if I thought I might want to be a teacher myself someday, and I answered something about thinking I might enjoy it. I really meant that I knew I’d have to do some sort of work, and I thought teaching would be better than nursing. She said I was well able and smart and a few other things I appreciated being called, but all the while I was thinking about how she looked when she read Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson. My cousin Naomi read all the time, but it had never caught fire with me. I wondered if it might
if I was a teacher, if it was something in the training.
“Quite a bit.” Really, she loved it in a way that lit a bulb in her face. Loved it in some deep, unfamiliar way that was worlds apart from drawing water and washing floors and sewing until your head ached from the bad light.
Of course, she’d have to quit if she decided to get married. And if she kept teaching for too long, she might never marry because she’d be an old maid and nobody would want her. An educated old maid was the worst of all, bottom of the list. Aunt Celia said no man wanted a woman who cared more about books than she did about him. When I was learning long division, the numbers all swam together and I hated it. Aunt Celia said then that it didn’t pay to be too smart, that it wouldn’t serve me well anyhow. I figured out long division anyway, partly because that made me mad, and partly because when I repeated it to Papa, he said, “It don’t pay to be too stupid, neither.”
I wondered about Miss Etheridge and how she filled the rest of her day after school was over. What did she do at home with no one to look after? Could you fix a pone of cornbread or fry a chicken for just one person? Or maybe she ate every night in a restaurant, a napkin in her lap and her handbag beside her, and the only thing she had in her kitchen was a pitcher of tea. Sometimes teachers lived with older women who rented them a room. I wondered if she slept in an attic with no windows and the sound of mice running across the floor or if her bedroom window let in the sun and she woke up looking at dogwoods every morning.
Leta WHEN I STRAIGHTENED FROM STIRRING THE CLOTHES, I saw a woman’s boots with the soles coming off. Turned out Lola Lowe was attached to them. She’d never been by the house before, so it took me aback. But before I could even wish her a good morning, she said, “Your girls come by to see me.”
That jolted me. “Virgie and Tess?”
“Ain’t got no other girls do you?” She didn’t smile when she said it, but I didn’t take offense. It was her way. If I had such a mess of children, I wouldn’t bother too much with politeness, either.