Paradise

by Toni Morrison

  Inside the truck they look at one another for a long time, seriously, carefully, and then they smile.

  He drives to a burned-out farmhouse that sits on a rise of fallow land. Negotiating bluestem and chickweed, he parks behind the black teeth of a broken chimney. Hand in hand, they fight shrub and bramble until they reach a shallow gully. Consolata spots at once what he wants her to see: two fig trees growing into each other. When they are able to speak full sentences, he gazes at her, saying:

  “Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t.”

  “Nothing to explain.”

  “I’m trying to get on in my life. A lot of people depend on me.”

  “I know you’re married.”

  “I aim to stay so.”

  “I know.”

  “What else you know?” He puts his forefinger in her navel.

  “That I’m way older than you.”

  He looks up, away from her navel to her eyes, and smiles. “Nobody’s older than me.”

  Consolata laughs.

  “Certainly not you,” he says. “When’s the last time?”

  “Before you were born.”

  “Then you’re all mine.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  He kisses her lightly, then leans on his elbow. “I’ve traveled. All over. I’ve never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?”

  “I’m looking now.”

  No figs ever appeared on those trees during all the time they met there, but they were grateful for the shade of dusty leaves and the protection of the agonized trunks. The blankets he brought they lay on as much as possible. Later each saw the nicks and bruises the dry creek caused.

  Consolata was questioned. She refused to answer; diverted the inquiries into lament. “What’s going to happen to me when all this is closed? Nobody has said what’s going to happen to me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You know we’ll take care of you. Always.”

  Consolata pouted, pretending to be wild with worry and therefore unreliable. The more assurance she got, the more she insisted upon wandering off, to “be by myself,” she said. An urge that struck her mostly on Fridays. Around noon.

  When Mary Magna and Sister Roberta left on business in September, Sister Mary Elizabeth and three, now, feckless students continued to pack, clean, study and maintain prayer. Two of the students, Clarissa and Penny, began to grin when they saw Consolata. They were fourteen years old; small-boned girls with beautiful knowing eyes that could go suddenly blank. They lived to get out of that place, and were in fairly good spirits now that the end was coming. Recently they had begun to regard Consolata as a confederate rather than one of the enemy out to ruin their lives. And whispering to each other in a language the sisters had forbidden them to use, they covered for her, did the egg gathering that was Consolata’s responsibility. The weeding and washing up too. Sometimes they watched from the schoolroom windows, heads touching, eyes aglow, as the woman they believed old enough to be their grandmother stood in all weather waiting for the Chevrolet truck.

  “Does anyone know?” Consolata runs her thumbnail around the living man’s nipple.

  “Wouldn’t be surprised,” he answers.

  “Your wife?”

  “No.”

  “You told somebody?”

  “No.”

  “Someone saw us?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Then how could anybody know?”

  “I have a twin.”

  Consolata sits up. “There are two of you?”

  “No.” He closes his eyes. When he opens them he is looking away. “There’s just one of me.”

  September marched through smearing everything with oil paint: acres of cardamom yellow, burnt orange, miles of sienna, blue ravines both cerulean and midnight, along with heartbreakingly violet skies. When October arrived and gourds were swelling in the places where radishes had been, Mary Magna and Sister Roberta returned, severely irritated by priests, lawyers, clerks and clerics. Their news was no news at all. Everyone’s fate was being resolved in Saint Pere, except her own. That decision would come later. Mary Magna’s age, seventy-two, was a consideration, but she refused placement in a quiet home. Also there was the upkeep of the property. The title was in the hands of the benefactress’ foundation (which was down to its principal now), so the house and land were not exactly church owned; the argument, therefore, was whether it was subject to current and back taxes. But the real question for the assessor was why in a Protestant state a bevy of strange Catholic women with no male mission to control them was entitled to special treatment. Fortunately or unfortunately, no natural resources had so far been discovered on the land, making it impossible for the foundation to unburden it. They could not simply walk off, could they? Mary Magna called everyone together to explain. Another girl had run away, but the last two, Penny and Clarissa, listened in rapt attention as their future—the next four years of it anyway—which had taken shape in some old man in a suit’s hands, was presented to them. They bowed their beautiful heads in solemn acquiescence, certain that the help they needed to get out of the clutch of nuns was on the way.

  Consolata, however, paid scant attention to Mary Magna’s words. She wasn’t going anywhere. She would live in the field if she had to, or, better, in the fire-ruined house that had become her mind’s home. Three times now she had followed him through it, balancing on buckled floorboards and smelling twelve-year-old smoke. Out there with not even a tree line in view, like a house built on the sand waves of the lonely Sahara, with no one or thing to hinder it, the house had burned freely in the play of wind and its own preen. Had it begun at night, with children asleep? Or was it unoccupied when the flames first seethed? Was the husband sixty acres away, bundling, branding, clearing, sowing? The wife stooped over a washtub in the yard, wisps of hair irritating her forehead? She would have thrown a bucket or two, then, yelling to the children, rushed to collect what she could. Piling everything she could reach, snatch, into the yard. Surely they had a bell, a rusty triangle—something to ring or bang to warn the other of advancing danger. When the husband got there, the smoke would have forced him to cry. But only the smoke, for they were not crying people. He would have worried first about the stock and guided them to safety or set them free, remembering that he had no property insurance. Other than what lay in the yard, all was lost. Even the sunflowers at the northwest corner of the house, near the kitchen, where the wife could see them while stirring hominy.

  Consolata ferreted in drawers where field mice had nibbled propane gas receipts. Saw how the wind had smoothed charred furniture to silk. Nether shapes had taken over the space from which humans had fled. A kind of statuary of ash people. A man, eight feet tall, hovered near the fireplace. His legs, sturdy cowboy legs, and the set of his jaw as he faced them answered immediate questions of domain. The finger at the tip of his long black arm pointed left toward sky where a wall had crumbled, demanding quick exit from his premises. Near the pointing man, faintly etched on the ocher wall, was a girl with butterfly wings three feet long. The opposite wall was inhabited by what Consolata thought were fishmen, but the living man said, No, more like Eskimo eyes.

  “Eskimo?” she asked, bunching her hair away from her neck. “What’s an Eskimo?”

  He laughed and, obeying the cowboy’s order, pulled her away, over the rubble of the collapsed wall, back to the gully, where they competed with the fig trees for holding on to one another.

  Mid-October he skipped a week. A Friday came and Consolata waited for two and a half hours where the dirt road met the tarmac. She would have waited longer, but Penny and Clarissa came and led her away.

  He must be dead, she thought, and no one to tell her so. All night she fretted—on her pallet in the pantry or hunched in darkness at the kitchen table. Morning found her watching the world of living things dribbling away with his absence. Her heart, clogged with awfulness, weakened. Her ve
ins seemed to have turned into crinkly cellophane tubes. The heaviness in her chest was gaining weight so fast she was unable to breathe properly. Finally she decided to find out or find him.

  Saturday was a busy day in those parts. The once-a-week bus honked her out of the way as she strode down the middle of the county road. Consolata skittered to the shoulder and kept on, her unbraided hair lifting in the breeze of the tailpipe. A few minutes later an oil truck passed her, its driver yelling something through the window. Half an hour later there was a glistening in the distance. A car? A truck? Him? Her heart gurgled and began to seep blood back into her cellophane veins. She dared not let the smile growing in her mouth spread to her face. Nor did she dare stop walking while the vehicle came slowly into view. Yes, dear God, a truck. And one person at the wheel, my Jesus. And now it slowed. Consolata turned to watch it come full stop and to feast on the living man’s face.

  He leaned out of the window, smiling.

  “Want a lift?”

  Consolata ran across the road and darted around to the passenger door. By the time she got there it was open. She climbed in, and for some reason—a feminine desire to scold or annihilate twenty-four hours of desperation; to pretend, at least, that the suffering he had caused her required an apology, an explanation to win her forgiveness—some instinct like that preserved her and she did not let her hand slip into his crotch as it wanted to.

  He was silent, of course. But it was not the silence of the Friday noon pickups. Then the unspeaking was lush with promise. Easy. Vocal. This silence was barren, a muteness lined with acid. And then she noticed the smell. Not unpleasant, not at all, but not his. Consolata froze; then, not daring to look at his face, she glanced sideways at his feet. He was wearing not the black high-tops but cowboy boots, convincing her that a stranger sat behind the steering wheel, inhabiting the body of him, but not him.

  She thought to scream, to throw herself out onto the road. She would fight him if he touched her. She had no time to imagine other options, because they were approaching the dirt road that led to the Convent. She was just about to fling open the door, when the stranger braked and slowed to a standstill. He leaned over, brushing her breasts with his arm, and lifted the door handle. She stepped down quickly and turned to see.

  He touched the brim of his Stetson, smiling. “Anytime,” he said. “Anytime at all.”

  She backed away, staring at the exact face of him, repelled by but locked into his eyes, chaste and wide with hatred.

  The incident does not halt the fig tree meetings. He comes the next Friday wearing the right shoes and exuding the right smell, and they argue a little.

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. He didn’t even ask me where I was going. Just drove me back.”

  “Good thing he did.”

  “Why?”

  “Did us both a favor.”

  “No, he didn’t. He was…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’d he say to you?”

  “He said, ‘Want a lift?’ and then he said, ‘Anytime.’ Like he’d do it again. I could tell he doesn’t like me.”

  “Probably not. Why should he? You want him to? Like you?”

  “No. Oh, no, but.”

  “But what?”

  Consolata sits up straight and looks steadily toward the back of the fire-ruined house. Something brown and furry scurries into what is left of a charred rain barrel.

  “You talk to him about me?” she asks.

  “Never told him a thing about you.”

  “Then how did he know I was coming to find you?”

  “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just didn’t think you should be walking to town like that.”

  “He didn’t turn the truck around. He was driving north. That’s why I thought it was you.”

  “Look,” he says. He squats on his haunches, tossing pebbles. “We have to have a signal. I can’t always show up on Fridays. Let’s think of something, so you’ll know.”

  They thought of nothing that would work. In the end she told him she would wait the Fridays, but only for an hour. He said, If I’m not on time, I’m not coming at all.

  The regularity of their meetings, before his twin showed up, had smoothed her hunger to a blunt blade. Now irregularity knifed it. Even so, twice more he carried her off to the place where fig trees insisted on life. She did not know it then, but the second time was the last.

  It is the end of October. He walls a portion of the fire-ruined house with a horse blanket, and they lie on an army-issue bedroll. The pale sky above them is ringed with a darkness coming, which they could not have seen had they looked. So the falling snow that lights her hair and cools his wet back surprises them. Later they speak of their situation. Blocked by weather and circumstance, they talk, mostly, about Where. He mentions a town ninety miles north but corrects himself quickly, because no motel or hotel would take them. She suggests the Convent because of the hiding places in it everywhere. He snorts his displeasure.

  “Listen,” she whispers. “There is a small room in the cellar. No. Wait, just listen. I will fix it, make it beautiful. With candles. It’s cool and dark in the summer, warm as coffee in winter. We’ll have a lamp to see each other with, but nobody can see us. We can shout as loud as we want and nobody can hear. Pears are down there and walls of wine. The bottles sleep on their sides, and each one has a name, like Veuve Clicquot or Médoc, and a number: 1-9-1-5 or 1-9-2-6, like prisoners waiting to be freed. Do it,” she urges him. “Please do it. Come to my house.”

  While he considers, her mind races ahead with plans. Plans to cram rosemary into the pillow slips; rinse linen sheets in hot water steeped in cinnamon. They will slake their thirst with the prisoner wine, she tells him. He laughs a low, satisfied laugh and she bites his lip which, in retrospect, was her big mistake.

  Consolata did all of it and more. The cellar room sparkled in the light of an eight-holder candelabra from Holland and reeked of ancient herbs. Seckel pears crowded a white bowl. None of which pleased him for he never arrived. Never felt the slide of old linen on his skin, or picked flakes of stick cinnamon from her hair. The two wineglasses she rescued from straw-filled crates and polished to abnormal clarity collected dust particles, then, by November, just before Thanksgiving, an industrious spider moved in.

  Penny and Clarissa had washed their hair and sat by the stove, finger-combing it dry. Every now and then one of them would lean and shake a shiny black panel of it closer to the heat. Softly singing forbidden Algonquian lullabies, they watched Consolata just as they always did: her days of excitement, of manic energy; her slow change to nail-biting distraction. They liked her because she was stolen, as they had been, and felt sorry for her too. They regarded her behavior as serious instruction about the limits and possibilities of love and imprisonment, and took the lesson with them for the balance of their lives. Now, however, their instant future claimed priority. Bags packed, plans set, they needed only money.

  “Where do you keep the money, Consolata? Please, Consolata. Wednesday they take us to the Correctional. Just a little, Consolata. In the pantry, yes? Well, where? There was one dollar and twenty cents from Monday alone.”

  Consolata ignored them. “Stop pestering me.”

  “We helped you, Consolata. Now you must help us. It’s not stealing—we worked hard here. Please? Think how hard we worked.”

  Their voices chanting, soothing, they swayed their hair and looked at her with the glorious eyes of maidens in peril.

  The knock on the kitchen door was not loud, but its confidence was unmistakable. Three taps. No more. The girls stilled their hair in their hands. Consolata rose from her chair as if summoned by the sheriff or an angel. In a way it was both, in the shape of a young woman, exhausted, breathing hard but ramrod straight.

  “That’s some walk,” she said. “Please. Let me sit.”

  Penny and Clarissa disappeared like smoke.

  The young woman took the chair Pe
nny had vacated.

  “Can I get you something?” asked Consolata.

  “Water, would you?”

  “Not tea? You look froze.”

  “Yes. But water first. Then some tea.”

  Consolata poured water from a pitcher and bent to check the stove fire.

  “What’s that smell?” asked the visitor. “Sage?”

  Consolata nodded. The woman covered her lips with her fingers.

  “Does it bother you?”

  “It’ll pass. Thank you.” She drank the water slowly until the glass was empty.

  Consolata knew, or thought she did, but asked anyway. “What is it you want?”

  “Your help.” Her voice was soft, noncommittal. No judgment, no pleading.

  “I can’t help you.”

  “You can if you want to.”

  “What kind of help are you looking for?”

  “I can’t have this child.”

  Hot water splashed from the spout to the saucer. Consolata put down the kettle and sopped the water with a towel. She had never seen the woman—girl really, not out of her twenties—but there was no confusion from the moment she stepped inside about who she was. His scent was all over her, or hers was all over him. They had lived together close enough long enough to breathe phlox and Camay soap and tobacco and to exhale it in their wake. That and some other thing: the scent of small children, the lovely aroma of sweet oil, baby powder and a meatless diet. This was a mother here, saying a brute unmotherly thing that rushed at Consolata like a forked tongue. She dodged the tongue, but the toxin behind it shocked her with what she had known but never imagined: she was sharing him with his wife. Now she saw the pictures that represented exactly what that word—sharing—meant.