by Ka Newborrn
Clyde Briberis was milking the moment for everything it was worth. The audience was gasping with the shock and thrill of it all. Ester appeared painfully distracted. Despite the uncomfortable looking studio chair, she pulled her legs close to her body and sat with her hand over her heart.
“Leave, Ester!” Lilith grumbled to the image on the screen. “Come on, kid! Can’t you see it’s going to kill you? Do you really want to go back to some Earth mother who isn't ready for you? Do you really want to get involved with her creepy friends and their degenerate offspring?"
“That’s our go getter!” Clyde crooned. “The experiences that you ladies endure may seem hurtful, dangerous even, but think of all the good you’re doing for our planet. You're helping Hjulder advance, and why should you complain? I mean, something had to pay for those boots! Great boots, Lilith! May I? Nice! Money well spent! Look at how sturdy these heels are. So solidly made.” He moved his jaw a strategic centimeter to the left. “What was the lesson of the Joseph Case, Lilith?”
“Wanna know the truth about the Joseph Case?” Lilith spoke loudly over the sound of the television, snorting more cocaine from the vial and indulging a two-dimensional Clyde in an obscene hand gesture. “I’d be glad to share! For starters, cocaine is a much better choice than crystal meth.” She rubbed her puffy red eyelids and paused to light a cigarette. “And second, when spilling blood, be very, very particular about the animal you choose!”
She watched the television until the end credits rolled. It was useless to wait any longer. The note on the counter said the Mylings were out of town. It was unlikely that she would stop by to see them again. Sceptrelind was a one-horse town, and she had things to do.
“Sorry, Ester,” Lilith mumbled. “I tried. I really did.” She walked over to the coat rack and slipped into her soggy coat and boots. She extended a shaky hand, closed the door of the cozy house behind her and set out lopsidedly, heel in hand, into the violence of the night.
NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI
1954
Jana
"Daughter, I’d like to have a word with you at this very moment. Where are you now? Where do I really come from?"
When she overheard Jana’s musings for the first time, Gladys Montgomery stood right where she was and dropped her Pyrex bowl. Eggs and glass shattered across her shiny kitchen tiles like fireworks.
“Who did it?” she demanded. Her circle skirt swirled around her calves as she fled to the kitchen table, buried her head in her hands and wept.
“I never said I had her yet,” Jana explained. "But it doesn’t mean she can’t answer me.”
Gladys continued to cry. Her daughter’s clarification was of little consolation. She couldn't digest the words completely, but one thing was perfectly clear: her hopes of becoming Audrey Hepburn someday were forever out of reach.
Her new powder blue cardigan with the rhinestone buttons and contrasting yellow ribbon trim was powerless against the likes of this blast. This alone was more than enough of an excuse to flee the kitchen and retrieve the nerve pills on her bedroom dresser. She stood up with a flourish, brushed off her skirt and dramatically crunched an eggshell with the sole of her yellow kitten heel. “Pick that up, will you?” she drawled. Then she bounded up the stairs and angrily slammed her bedroom door behind her, leaving her twelve-year-old daughter to clean up the mess.
A few hours later, Harlan Montgomery’s car engine clattered up to the driveway. Refreshed by her nerve pills, Gladys floated down the staircase to greet him at the door.
“How was it?” she asked.
He kissed his wife and hung his hat on the coat rack.
“My meeting, my business.”
Emptying his pockets, he placed his keys and a silver dollar onto the coffee table before collapsing on the sofa and picking up a copy of The Citizens’ Council. He glanced at the headline.
“You hear the news about Brown versus Topeka? Them boys in Arkansas better get on back if they know what’s good for them. That’s all I can say.”
Gladys put a hand to the back of her hair. With a low voice, she told her husband what had transpired in the kitchen earlier that day.
✽✽✽
Jana had no understanding of how to relate to her father because he was a caricature.
Living under his roof had left her more than familiar with his halitosis, his flatulence and the dusty smell of his clothing, but when it came to his personality, one note and one note alone was accessible to his family and community, like a trilobite stuck nosediving in limestone. A conscionable human being would have long revealed his inner workings to his family, but it never happened with him. Not even by default or accident. He was a perfect stranger. An enigma. And not a good one, either.
Relating to a caricature was stressful enough; being the daughter of one was worse. It was a loaded responsibility that required consistent foresight and strategy on her part, which was a lot more than she had signed up for at birth.
Sometimes she let her guard down and wasn’t as careful as she needed to be. It was a slippery slope because she didn’t know who she was facing. To her eyes, his puffing on the church stage was an attempt at deflecting from a state of inner weakness. Was he dangerous? The weak ones always were.
Existing within his domicile was like living hand to mouth in the purest sense. She always had to think ahead and protect herself. The collective majority of her twelve years had been spent in a pattern of self-government. It was exhausting. It was like being a lifelong orphan but worse. Orphans knew exactly where they stood. She envied them.
“There’ll be no immaculate conception under my roof," Harlan told his daughter as the family sat down to a dinner of leftover ham. "God’s got his sights set higher than you. Just eat.”
Jana glared. It came as no surprise that her mother had, in her usual manner of cowardice and deference, redacted the story to make her words more palatable. A daughter with a Madonna complex, however misguided and delusional, was noble. A heretic daughter? Not so much.
“I never said I was carrying the Messiah, but my daughter’s a star, too. A different kind, though.” She spit a clove into her napkin.
Harlan was unnerved. It was downright unsettling to dissect the logic of having to make a child before it existed. Any six-year-old would understand it, and his daughter was twice that age. But he would sooner die than admit she scared him. The world was spinning out of control as it was. The way things were heading these days she could disgrace him. Ruin him. Grow up and steal his followers, even. There was no room for interpretation; he had to protect his legacy. God would understand. He was the reverend, after all.
Miles away from the confrontation, Gladys was enjoying a pleasant buzz brought on by her last two nerve pills. Her eyes wandered to a patch of congealed yolk that Jana had missed on the tiles.
“Satan!” Harlan challenged. “You can’t have my daughter. She’s mine.”
At least she was as skinny as Audrey Hepburn. She stared at her uneaten portion of ham and smiled. Perking up, she glanced at the liquor cabinet in the adjoining room and wondered if there was any vermouth left. Her rhinestone buttons sparkled. It was going to be okay.
“What does the devil have to do with it, Dad? He can’t make souls. I’m pretty sure he didn’t make the stars, either.”
He was losing, and that called for putting on a show. He seized Jana’s glass of milk and poured it into her plate for effect. Then he gnashed his teeth and pounded on the table, upsetting a sauceboat of gravy in the process.
“You can’t have my daughter, Satan! She's mine! She’s my property. She belongs to me!”
Harlan stood up from the table. Fingering a corner of the white linen tablecloth, he pulled menacingly, Ham, peas, gravy, and plates flew in the air before landing onto the black and white tiles in an explosive heap. Gladys flinched momentarily and shielded her clothing from harm's way.
He turned to his wife. “We can’t send her away to get help. People will blame us. I’m the reve
rend!” He turned his back and looked to the sky for an answer.
A stray wedge of ham and a single pea landed next to the patch of yolk. Ham and eggs. The laugh track inside Gladys' head roared ferociously. Her mouth twitched.
“Harlan.” The syllables of her husband’s name felt like an alien grade of velvet in her mouth and nothing like the compact, rigid-minded man had she married.
“She’s not allowed to talk or leave. Ever again. You hear me?”
“Harlan,” Gladys willed her face to appear concerned and smiled at her success. “She has to go to church. She has to go to school. She has to buy dresses. Ribbons!”
“You can make her dresses, Gladys.”
“Do you expect me to make her ribbons, Harlan?”
“Dad?”
“Shut it! Both of you. I said, not one more word!”
✽✽✽
She was mostly silent after that, but her beet-faced father continued to strut and preen inside the chapel that marked the cornerstone for the town’s spiritual activities. She did, however clear her throat audibly when she witnessed her father staggering out from behind an abandoned building with a meticulously painted woman. As plain as day, she had watched her father remove his hand from the woman’s behind. Harlan, however, chose to overlook this particular expression of his daughter’s mutiny. Throat clearing didn’t count, really. Especially where whores were concerned.
Gladys’ patience with her daughter's gestational theatrics was waning. She dug a fingernail into Jana’s ribcage whenever she caught her caressing her stomach and vowed to draw blood if absolutely necessary. In truth, her mother had little reason to be concerned; any amateur talent that Jana possessed was eclipsed by the spectacles that unfolded on the church stage.
Every outburst that occurred during the Sunday services competed to outdo the next. The milkman spouted glossolalia. The occasional snake sought freedom from the wire cages on the altar. The latter incited even the most sullen of children to attention, but Jana remained unmoved. She kept her head bowed and tuned out her surroundings. Little by little, her hands crept back to her stomach.
One day, a water moccasin snake escaped from the cage and slithered down the aisle. Jana glanced at the snake nervously and shifted in her seat. Gladys felt her fidgeting and poked. The crowd brought its hands together in a burst of gratuitous clapping.
“Brimstone! Fire!”
Harlan’s words sprayed the front row of the congregation as the snake crawled on its belly towards the back of the church at an alarming speed. Alarmed parents grabbed their children and clustered towards the middle of the pews for safety, but Harlan spread his arms in triumph and ran into the aisles.
Touched by the Holy Spirit, the audience fainted and slumped to their seats. Gladys eyed her daughter’s traveling hand and jabbed her in the ribs again.
“Ow! Mom, stop it!”
The room fell silent. Everyone turned to stare in Jana’s direction. The snake found its way to the entrance of the church and wriggled out the open front door.
“Chokehold of desire!” Harlan spat. He locked eyes with his daughter. A baby in the back row wailed in discontent.
After the service, the family shared a picnic lunch under a maple tree on the marshy bank bordering the river. Jana watched her father wave to a young couple he had married earlier that year. The woman was about eight months pregnant. She breathed heavily and knelt down with great difficulty as her husband spread a tablecloth onto the grass a few yards away.
She unfastened the basket of chicken, parted a nest of napkins and helped herself to a drumstick. “Is desire really meant to be a chokehold?” she asked, frowning.
He snatched the drumstick out of her hand and closed his eyes before turning to his wife. “Must I,” he began in a controlled voice, “be subjected to her blasphemy every single day of my life? Why can’t you do something?”
Overpowered by the cloud of acrid breath, Gladys breathed into her napkin discreetly.
An elderly man leaned against a cane and nodded in their direction. “Great sermon, Reverend!”
Harlan tipped his hat. “Thank you, Mr. Percy!”
Jana took advantage of the diversion by reclaiming her chicken. “I don’t experience desire that way.” She bit into the drumstick hungrily.
Harlan grabbed a wing from the picnic basket and pointed it at his daughter. “Stop it.” His breath was metered.
“It's because I'm a girl, isn't it? Nothing I ever say or do matters so long as you can blame me for it, right?”
“Actions have consequences. For instance, if you painted your face and ran around town naked it might be difficult for you to find a respectable husband and provide a first born son.”
“Because that would be wrong?”
“Yes.”
She held her father’s gaze and cleared her throat emphatically. She glanced at her mother. Gladys stared at the maple tree and sipped from a thermos of lemonade.
Harlan shrugged and bit into the chicken wing. “Yet you speak to the devil and pass him off as your bastard child. That, daughter, is worse. A whole lot worse.”
✽✽✽
The rest of the town looked forward to the sound and spectacle of Reverend Montgomery’s weekly sermons, but Jana was only in it for ice cream.
After the picnic dinner, Gladys packed up the basket and spread the blue cotton picnic blanket across the front seat of the Montgomery’s Ford sedan. Jana crawled into the back seat and waited for her parents without speaking to anyone. Harlan basked in the attention of the townsfolk with the swollen pride of a blowfish.
The transmission clattered as the Ford crawled away from the church. Jana watched the clusters of antebellum homes lining the sage-colored river pass by like pages in a storybook and wondered why she had been born into the life she lived.
They passed through the bluff, under the hill and into an outlying area of swampland. Shotgun houses rested among the willowy grass blades turning cool with the promise of sunset.
A small bonfire smoked to the side of a house where a sinewy black woman hung wet laundry from a tree branch. Her flowing skirt and matching headdress were made of moss-colored linen.
Her regal neck curved demurely into graceful, sculpted shoulders. She gathered her skirt off the ground with one hand and selected a sheet from a wicker basket. The fluidity of her motions transformed her arms into wings. Jana was transfixed.
A boy and a girl, about four and five with reddish brown complexions that reminded Jana of her mother’s homemade gingerbread, ran from the direction of the neighboring house, shrieking with peals of laughter. They sobered when they saw the Ford and retreated to the folds of the woman’s skirts.
The woman stopped what she was doing and stood tall and serene. She put her arm around the girl and held her hand out to the boy. The girl hid her face. The boy stared at the Ford through unbelievably long eyelashes and sucked his fingers.
Gladys put a hand to the back of her hair and pretended not to notice. Harlan focused on the steering wheel. Jana waited until the boy made eye contact with her. She leaned against the window and waved gently. The boy continued to hold onto the woman’s hand, but Jana thought that she could see the slightest tinge of raspberry flushing through his cheeks and nose. His lips curved ever so slightly as he raised a trembling hand in response.
The car lurched forward abruptly.
“Watch it, Dad!”
“You’re the one who needs to watch it." His knuckles were white as they gripped the steering wheel.
“Watch what?” Jana prodded.
Holding the steering wheel in one hand, Harlan turned around in his seat and squarely grasped Jana’s throat with the other. She gasped for breath and clutched both hands around her father’s wrist in an attempt to free herself.
“Satan!” he spat. “What demon possessed you, Gladys? I’ve told you before she didn’t come from me! I know she didn’t come from me!”
“Harlan, stop it!” Gladys slapped the back
of her husband’s head as he veered into the path of an oncoming tree and wrenched his hand from her daughter’s throat. Jana collapsed against the back of the seat, coughing.
“What demon possessed you, Gladys?” He mumbled to himself before gazing at his wife. “Was it that flower man who stayed at Ledford’s Inn during my retreat coming up on thirteen years ago? What was his name again, Linden Woods?”
“What?”
“That horticulture fellow named Linden Woods said he wanted the town to take their hard earned money away from the church and start a flower society and an aviary. He was staying here at the time of my Tennessee retreat. Widow Ledford said you made him a peach pie.”
“What exactly are you accusing me of?” Gladys' tone was terrible.
“Calling birds and planting flowers and sprouting the seeds of Satan himself.” Laughing aloud, he narrowed his eyes at Jana in the rear view mirror. “She ain't one of us! Our hair’s brown and hers is blonde! That flower man had blond hair too!” Gladys shook her head furiously.
Jana placed her hands gently across her belly. “It's okay if you don’t look like me. I don't mind.”
Exasperated by the onset of yet another gestational ranting, Gladys prayed. “Sweet Jesus,” she began. “Mary, full of grace.”
“Because your hair is illuminated by pearls and crystals and styled by a mermaid who lives underwater. Your dresses are made from moss and vines. And when you turn in profile to face the magical moons that always surround you, the birds cannot fly. They can only stumble beneath the weight of their hearts because your radiant beauty intoxicates them. All the boys want to dance with you. Sometimes you waltz, sometimes you move to a drumbeat, but you don’t have to stay with them if you’re unhappy. You can always leave.”