They're all looking at Grace. There is some secret here. "Well, I can't place him," she says. "I'm sorry."
"You couldn't have forgot Nestor," says Rita. "Nobody could forget Nestor. His daddy was Colonel Beltrain, remember, that was on the school board and had his own parking place down at the courthouse? Nestor had asthma or something. He was a little skinny old boy with ears that stuck out of his head like tree funguses. The teachers used to grab them like handles. He was so bad."
The men are practically laughing out loud. "You men hush up," Rita says. "It isn't that funny."
Clarence says, "You ought to remember him, Gracie. He liked to have hung you."
Rita interrupts him. "David, stop making such a big show out of it and chew what's in your mouth," she says, and Grace is uncertain of what Clarence has just said.
"I can't stand this stuff," says David, Rita's youngest. "It's stringy and's got too much salt."
"Well, it's Kentucky-cured ham, honey, that's just how it tastes. You liked it fine last year."
"I remember the name," Grace says. "Nestor Beltrain. But I can't picture him. Clarence, what did you say he did?"
Rita gives Clarence an odd, warning look, but he answers anyway. "I said he liked to have hung you from a tree."
Grace's hand rests on her throat. She looks at Jacob and Matt, who seem intent on their food. "What do you mean, hung me?"
"From that old mulberry tree out there," he says, pointing toward the window as if it were still there. But this is a different house.
"I do remember the tree," Grace says.
"You was just little," Clarence says. "He stood you up on a chair and put a rope around your neck and said to jump any time you was ready."
"You talking about that time he tried to string her up from the tree?" asks Naomi. "You two wasn't living here yet, I'm the one seen it. Grace, your mother and me was setting in the kitchen doing up a mess of break beans and she looked out the window and all the sudden commenced to whooping and hollering." Naomi pauses for breath. "She grabbed up one of her new Revere Ware pots and throwed it at him, right out the back door. I never heard the like of language come out of her mouth."
Apparently this is the story Rita wanted to put a stop to, but now she laughs. "She must have scared him good. I don't think he ever did come back in your-all's yard."
"Law, he used to come over pestering you a awful lot, Grace, and trying to get you to look at dirty magazines under the lilac bushes," says Naomi. "Your mother would get mad, but not like that time."
"Well, he did so come back, Rita," says Clarence. "Me and you and him used to..."
"Clarence, I think you'd just better shut up and clean your plate," Rita says.
"Used to what?" Grace asks. She does know that Rita and Clarence were often put in charge of her for whole afternoons, when her mother had to take in ironing. Sometimes Grace thinks Rita hasn't quite given up the job of being boss.
"You wasn't but about three or four," says Naomi. "When he tried to string you up. I don't expect you'd remember it."
Grace doesn't, but she thinks she should. Or that it should have been talked about before now.
"Them magazines don't hurt nobody, Rita, so you can just get down off your high horse," says Clarence.
Grace wishes she knew what they were talking about. She has a sudden, narrow recollection of something else: the smell of poultry feed. A cardboard box of ducklings in the corner of her classroom. Finding them dead. Nestor was not in her grade, he was older, but he had come into the room somehow and painted the ducklings with thick poster paints. They were dead by morning, their gaudy feathers sticking out like dry quills and their mouths gaping.
She says, "I remember who you mean. His daddy was the Scout leader."
"Boot-camp leader was what he was," says Donnie, helping himself to more ham. "We all quit the Scouts. Nestor was the only one put up with all that nonsense." He takes a bite, and then says, "I guess he didn't have much choice about it. Colonel'd roust him out of bed and make him take a cold shower and go out barefooted in the snow."
"I think some of that was hearsay." Rita says, "the bare feet in the snow. But he drove him hard, that's for sure. We seen it, didn't we, Clarence? Lord, they'd be out there on the sidewalk in their overcoats at the crack of dawn, doing jumping jacks and running around the block. We'd sit over by the front window pretending like we were looking for our galoshes or something so we could watch them out there, before school."
"Hut-two, hut-two," barks Clarence in a forced imitation of the Colonel, and he and Rita laugh.
Rita smooths her hair back from her forehead with her palm. "It was before this jogging craze hit; we'd never seen such a thing. They'd run around the block eight or nine times and we'd hear Nestor wheezing out there, he'd be breathing so hard. About to drop over dead it sounded like. And old Colonel right behind him, cracking the whip."
Clarence screws up his face and imitates the Colonel again: "You-will-keep-up-with-me-or-you-will-die-trying!"
Grace remembers a warm kitchen, cocoa and buttered toast, and looking through the house to the fogged front window. Seeing through to the lean gray shapes of them out on the sidewalk. There were things that weren't told. Her mother stood near the window with crossed arms and a mouth pinched down at the corners by pity or anger. Mrs. Beltrain had a bone disease, people said, that was why her skin looked bruised, and why she was always laid up in one or another combination of plaster casts. "Just like that," they would say, applying a gentle pressure to your forearm. "No more than that, and hers would have snapped like a straw." For weeks at a time she wouldn't appear outside the house.
The younger children are whining. "Mom, can we have turkey next year?" David wants to know. "I hate ham."
"I do too," agrees Caren. "It takes too long to chew."
"Turkey is for Thanksgiving," Rita says. "For Easter we have ham. If you don't like it, move to another house. Go live with your cousins."
Grace feels uneasy. "Matt, Rita told me Donnie Junior has a computer game about dinosaurs. Why don't you all go take a look at it?" The children look happy to leave the table.
"Now the Colonel," says Naomi. "There was a man made out of something."
"The Colonel passed on, you knew about that, Grace. I wrote you about that. They said he cut up his whole steak one night and then put down his knife and died. Seemed like Mrs. Beltrain got a new lease on life; she put the house up for sale and moved to one of those army retirement homes, I forget where."
"It cut Nestor loose from his tether, though," says Clarence. "He went and joined a commune."
"Clarence, I swear," Rita says. "It wasn't a commune, it was that monk place down in Georgia. He was there, oh, I don't know, the longest time, and then next thing we heard he'd finished up at a Baptist seminary and they'd hired him up here at Woods Baptist."
"I don't think they took a good look at him first," Clarence says. "He's got a beard, and speaks in tongues."
"It's true," Rita says. "I think people are going up there for reasons other than to serve Our Lord. It's a show, I'll tell you. He talks Hebrew or something. I went the other Sunday with Sue Carey and we couldn't believe our ears. There's hardly nobody left of the congregation but the old folks, poor things. They just keep on turning up their hearing aids thinking they'll understand him. I swear I think he's still got a mean streak."
The table grows very quiet. From the other room Grace hears the children's voices, quiet with concentration, and the steady beep of the video game. She has the odd sensation of watching this scene--her own family around the dinner table--from a great distance, like one of those people who've watched their own bodies on the operating table before coming back from death.
"The trouble with the boy," says Naomi, "is that he got corrupted blood. They didn't boil it."
"I can't imagine what you mean," Rita shouts at Naomi in an encouraging way.
"When he was just born. His mother liked to of died in labor and the boy was born anemiat
ed. They had to give him blood, in the hospital. And you know very well where they get that blood from." She looks around at her subdued grown grandchildren. "Criminals, that's where. They sell their blood on the streets in Lexington and Louisville when they're on the down and out. They think they're getting away with something, but the people here know about this."
There is a long pause. "What did you mean about boiling it?" Rita asks.
"Boil it," says Naomi. "That's what they do, to get the criminal element out of it. But they got busy that day, and they forgot."
In her dream, Grace sees the elderly people of Clement sitting patiently on folding chairs under the mulberry tree. He ties nooses around their necks, one at a time, and explains in careful, smiling Hebrew that they're about to be murdered.
She sits up with the memory clear in her head, more real than this strange bed in Rita's guest room. She must have been very young, too little to understand even the basics of gravity. He told her it would be fun. When she jumped off the chair, he said, she would swing to and fro in the breeze. She stood for a while anticipating that pleasure, staring up into the wide mulberry canopy that shaded their yard and the Beltrains' next door, watching while a breeze moved against the leaves. She can feel the knot against her jaw and his eyes on her, alive and quiet, as she prepares to end her life. The memory comes down on her like an ice storm, stiffening her to the center with cold rage. If her mother hadn't looked out the window, Grace thinks. Or if she hadn't survived whatever it was that came later, when Rita and Clarence were in charge. She would have spent these decades as a photograph, smiling its dead child's smile on her parent's mantelpiece, or just put away in a box somewhere. Even tragedies get forgotten. Grace puts her hands on the wall and finds her way to the room where the boys are sleeping.
From the doorway, in the dim light, she can make out which sleeping bags on the floor hold Matthew and Jacob. Matt's has dinosaurs and Jacob's has airplanes. They couldn't find one with endangered species. For a while you saw pictures of whales and wolves and bald eagles everywhere you looked, even bumper stickers about the baby seals, but then endangered species went out of style. Randall is right, somebody knows when things start to get poisoned. What he says might be true. That you should get mad. She stands still with her eyes on the heavy printed fabric until she finds the slow rhythm of their breathing. Her hands are trembling. She's never even known to count, like sheep or blessings, the days of her life that almost didn't happen.
In the morning Rita talks loudly while she and Naomi work around each other in the kitchen. "It turns out it was cancer," she says, breaking eggs into the skillet. "A cancer of the right ovary as big as a mushmelon. Sue said they just sewed her back up and told her to go on back home and get right with God. That poor woman. After all she's been through with Standford."
"What about Standford?" Naomi asks. "Besides just the drinking, I know about that."
"Well, you know about the other too. Him and that lady basketball coach from Campbell. She's not one-half his age if she's a day."
Grace is sitting at the kitchen table with her third or fourth cup of coffee. The easiest thing, she thinks, is if this rage she feels could just be drowned, like an orphaned cat.
"Grace honey, if you don't stop drinking coffee you're going to have to pee before your old buddy Nestor gets through the invocation," Rita says. "He does it in Latin or something, don't say I didn't warn you. Are the kids up? I swear they'd sleep right through church if we let them. Now why is that? Remember when they were babies? They wouldn't sleep late on a weekend if you paid them a hundred dollars."
"You better go roust them out," says Naomi. "Sunday school starts at nine."
"The boys and I aren't going," Grace says without looking up. She can feel the change in the air of the kitchen.
"Not going to church on Easter Sunday?" Naomi asks.
"I better go listen to the early weather and see if this storm's breaking up. I want to know what I'm in for as long as we're driving back this morning." Rita is still staring at her, but Naomi has had the good manners to turn back around and tend to her sausages. Grace gets up, runs scalding water in her coffee cup, and plunks it down hard in the rack. Memories have been coming to her all morning--Nestor's and Clarence's magazines, for one thing. The ugliness that every one of them knew about. She knows there will be more to remember. She could forgive the act, she thinks, but not the attitude. Because an attitude doesn't ask and it doesn't end.
"The boys didn't bring the right clothes for church," she tells Rita and Naomi as she walks out of the room.
The TV weatherman is jokey and annoying, not taking seriously the fact that bad weather can affect people's lives. He tucks his thumbs in the armpits of his tight gray suit and flaps his elbows, saying, "It's a nice day for ducks out there."
But as they turn out onto the interstate she can see for herself that the sky is lighter far to the west, toward Louisville, on the other side of the low thunderheads. Randall would just now be getting the Sunday paper, walking out barefoot on the sidewalk, on dry ground. She braces herself for the road and drives for the light.
Jump-up Day
JERICHA BELIEVED herself already an orphan--her mother was in the ground by the time she could walk on it--so the loss of her father when it came was not an exceptional thing. This was the nuns' theory, anyway, used to explain her indifference to their sympathy. Also, they reasoned, the father was not actually dead but only gone home to convalesce in England, where the hospitals were superior. (They called it "the mainland," though surely aware that England, too, is an island.) The good doctor had come here in the first place across two seas, Atlantic and Caribbean, to coax the disease out of the reluctant St. Lucians, and for his trouble he fell down trembling with it himself. In the opinion of informed observers, it was the cruel irony of God's will.
Bilharzia is a disease carried by snails. He could not have made this more clear, even going so far as to draw diagrams of the life cycle of the schistosome--an endless circle leading from water to human liver and back again--in an effort to impress upon his young daughter the importance of avoiding the seductive rivers full of cool, frog-naked children and women slapping their slick laundry on the rocks. It was dangerous even to walk without shoes in the back garden where invisible infections were drawn up like cricket songs along the wet grass. But secretly Jericha dug her toes into the cool dirt like earthworms going home, and lay in the vines at the water's edge watching little fish and the birds that hunted them, and it wasn't she but her God-fearing and educated father who had to be bundled up in blankets and flown back to London, leaving Jericha, with nominal instructions, in the care of the Sisters of St. Anthony.
The convent was a centuries-old thing eaten with vines, not right in the town of Soufriere but near enough so that Jericha did not care for the way it smelled. Frankly, she held her nose and said it stank like the henhouse when a mongoose has spoiled the eggs. Sister Armande, who considered this difficult child her special duty, took her into town and marched with her up the slope of the volcano itself in an effort to convince her that it wasn't St. Anthony's or even Soufriere but something deep inside the earth and enormously important that was the source of the odor. Sister Armande put her heart into the trip, drawing out of her black sleeve the twelve cents apiece for entry to the sulfur baths built by Louis XVI for his army. The woman and child stood by the crusted pots of rock, not holding hands but clutching their paper tickets and watching the black water boil up, and Jericha could not see how Louis XVI's men could have thought it a privilege to bathe at all, much less in water that smelled like rotten eggs.
Sister Armande and her sisters of the veil were from France and Ireland but a long time in St. Lucia, accustomed to uplifting the supremely unfortunate. But even the most generous or nearsighted souls in the convent could not fail to notice it: Jericha was trouble. She threw screeching fits when forced into proper clothes, and by virtue of superior stamina spent most of her life running where she pleased
in a pair of ragged trousers snatched from the sisters' remnants-and-pieces bin. Her hair presented itself as a defiant, white-blond haystack, until the inventive Sister Josepha tamed it into eight tight braids that had to be renewed only once a week, an honor for which the sisters drew straws. The other orphans called her Anansi the Spider and Jericha did not care. She seemed as greedy for insults as a beggar for bread.
She wanted only one thing, a bicycle. She had been unimpressed by the sulfurous volcano, but the city of Soufriere itself, just a short way from the convent, seemed to promise her something. And, since she asked for little and seemed to need so much, the nuns were persuaded. With a prayer that puberty, when it came, would domesticate her, they looked heavenward and gave her the bicycle, leaving her at first stunned, then grimly preoccupied, as if she'd had it all her life and it required a great deal of attention. While the other orphans in the convent school wrestled with English lessons, the sisters overlooked Jericha's absences. The English language was not what Jericha lacked, and nothing short of lock and key, anyway, could have improved her attendance.
So nearly every afternoon she was left free to pedal the steep brick streets of town. There were shantytowns, and there were villas nested in scarlet clouds of bougainvillaea. At any time, without expecting it, she might round a bend and come onto the view of a pair of pointed mountains, the Pitons, plunging straight down like suicides into the aquamarine bay. And when this happened Jericha stood on the low wall meant to prevent children from falling to their deaths, and she spread her arms and let herself fill with the belief that she could fly.
Jericha was no more aware of loneliness than of her bizarre appearance. She didn't remember having been other than solitary: a peculiarly but unquestionably privileged child, without peers. During the seven years she lived with her father in Vieux Fort she knew only Mr. Ledmond, her British tutor; Sebastian, the gardener who raised spotted rabbits (and whom her father called an insufferably superstitious black); and a handful of children half Jericha's age who swam like sea birds and ran along high tree branches without fear. She coexisted with these remarkable children in a companionship of mutual scorn. Having spent her life as a foreigner, she knew how to behave.
Homeland and Other Stories Page 17