by Ka Newborrn
“A telegram?”
“That’ll take a couple a days, Stevie. By the time he gets it he’ll have already delivered the napkins by tomorrow evening.”
“Then I’ll walk over there and tell him to carry them back.”
“It doesn’t take two men to carry back a stack of napkins, and you have to walk back any way.”
“Well, why don’t you pick me up at Lonnie’s in your car and then he can carry them back by himself?” Stevie felt triumphant.
“Interesting idea, Stevie. So who’s going to watch the shop?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I’m driving to pick you up from Lonnie’s, I can’t be minding the store at the same time, can I?”
Stevie reflected. “No,” he finally answered, crestfallen.
“So, I’ll ask you again. Who’s going to watch the shop, Stevie?”
Stevie knit his brow in concentration. “Can’t you just drive out to Lonnie’s, get the napkins and drive back here again? I can watch the store by myself.”
“And leave you in charge of the register?” Arnold laughed. “That’s the dumbest thing you’ve said all day!”
Arnold continued to laugh as a glaring Stevie pulled his apron off and threw it in a crumpled ball onto the counter. “Don’t be too long!” he called after his son. Stevie bounded out the door and stalked off in search of Lonnie’s house.
Lonnie’s house stood in a clearing of red clay a few yards from the edge of the thicket. Stevie wiped his feet on the front doorstep, leaving bloodied trails of mud behind. He knocked on the front door. “Lonnie?” he called. There was no answer. He knocked harder and tried to peek through the curtain at the window. “Are you in there, Lonnie? It’s me, Stevie Stack. I came for the napkins. Hello?” Stevie tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. The door swung open. “Hello?” He stepped into the doorway and looked around.
The small living space was neatly swept and sparsely furnished with a worn easy chair, an ancient sewing machine, a record player, a crate of records and a purple braided rug. A wicker basket heaping with scraps of material rested to the side of the sewing table. To the right of the main room was a kitchen area furnished with a large wooden table and a coal pipe stove. Magazines and sketches of dresses and books were casually strewn about.
A neatly tied bundle of napkins and tablecloths rested on the chair. Stevie scooped it up in his arms and started to leave. Suddenly remembering the silver dollar, he set the bundle down on the table. He fumbled through his pockets, found the coin and placed it on the table. He started to pick up the linens again when two books lying on the table caught his eye. He picked one up and brought it closer to his face.
“The Bhagavad Gita,” he stumbled. “What in the world?” He glanced at the second. “The Prophet. Kahlil Gibran? I don’t remember any preaching about that prophet in Sunday school.” He opened the copy of The Bhagavad Gita.
“Jana Montgomery?” he cried out, reading the inscription. “What’s her book doing here?” He opened the copy of The Prophet and found the same signature. Bewildered, he tucked the books under his arm, scooped up the linens, closed Lonnie’s front door behind him and headed back to the shop.
Sleigh bells jingled as a frowning Stevie walked back inside. He set the bundle of linens down onto the counter. His apron lay in a ball where he had left it earlier. Arnold stopped sponging the counter and walked over to the bundle of linen to inspect it.
“If your face freezes that way, you’re out of a job. Did you remember to pay him?”
“Yeah,” Stevie fingered the books and hesitated.
“Well, what is it then?” Arnold continued. “You need to take a break or something?”
“Jana Montgomery,” Stevie began.
“What?” Arnold undid the twine around the stack of napkins. One by one, he began to fold them. “You see her today?”
“Did the reverend ever talk to you about his family visiting Lonnie’s house?”
“Not that I recall. Why do you ask?”
“Are you sure about that?” Stevie persisted.
“The reverend’s a fine man. Why would he need to visit Lonnie’s house? I reckon he stays away from Shack Row.”
“Well like you said, Pop, the thicket road to Lonnie’s house goes around Shack Row, not through it."
“Polly wanna cracker?” Arnold Stack mocked. “I don’t even think he knows Lonnie. Lonnie can’t attend our services.”
“I did what you told me and got the napkins,” Stevie began. "Lonnie wasn’t home, but the door was unlocked so I went right on in.” He handed his father the books. “I found these lying on the table next to the napkins. They got Jana Montgomery’s name inside.”
Arnold opened the covers and stared at Jana’s signature. Stevie drawled on.
“Even if he could read a little bit, and I don’t think he reads, does he? Anyway, he probably can’t write either, so I know he didn’t put her name in the books, so they must be hers. But how would he know Jana Montgomery? Do you think he stole them?”
Arnold fumbled for an explanation. He laughed and started sponging the counter again. “C’mon, Stevie,” he said. “I wouldn’t put it past the reverend to collect a few family items for charity. Charity is what being a preacher is all about.”
“I don’t think he’d be preaching this, though.” Stevie squinted at the cover of The Bhagavad Gita and tried to repeat the title. “Sounds like voodoo to me.”
“Focus on the counter, Stevie.” Arnold’s voice was dismissive. “I’ll ask the reverend about it tonight.” He put the books in his apron pocket and turned towards the stockroom.
“What do ya’ll do in those meetings, anyway?”
Arnold snatched a cloth from the pile and regarded his son impatiently. “Fold those napkins and put them away.” His voice was steely. “Go on!” Stevie glared.
Arnold walked into the stockroom and closed the door behind him. He picked up the telephone resting on the metal desk and began to dial. “Reverend?” he whispered into the mouthpiece. “Arnold Stack, here. Yes, we’re still on for tonight. I was just wondering if you could make it a bit early, before the rest of the fellows get there. No, there’s nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all.” He traced Jana’s signature with his fingers. “There’s just something I’d like to share with you, is all.”
✽✽✽
Afternoon passed into evening, and there was no sign of the reverend. Gladys clicked her lilac fingernails against the dinner table and watched the chuck roast gravy congeal around islands of carrot and potato. Jana sat across from her with a book sprawled in her lap. She strained to read the print as the evening grew darker.
Gladys sighed and unfolded her napkin. “Go on ahead and start. I don’t know why your father is running so late. I hope there wasn’t an accident.”
They looked up from their plates a few moments later when they heard him at the front door. He walked into the kitchen tracking red mud onto the floor. He was flushed, and he smelled bad. He sat down at the head of the table and placed a parcel at the side of his plate. His eyes glowed.
“What do you men talk about so late that you can barely make it home for dinner?” Gladys asked. “And why were you walking off the paved road and tracking mud all over my floor?” She straightened her spine and tried to appear self-righteous.
He heaped his plate with food. “God forbid I track up the floor on the first day you bother to mop it in a year,” he said. He looked at his daughter. Jana braced herself for diatribe. He said nothing. An odd smile crept over his face.
“I work hard, too.” Gladys was tense.
A tinge of panic settled into the base of her spine as her father continued to stare at her. The odd smile deepened. She buttoned her sweater and hugged her shoulders. The chuck roast felt heavy in her stomach.
Gladys cleared her throat. “What were you doing so late at the meeting?”
He buttered a biscuit and addressed his daughter. “Stevie Stack asked about you, Jana. Wants
to know when you’ll be done with school so he can marry the reverend’s daughter. He sure is impressed with you. So is his father.”
Jana put her fork down and willed her chair to stop swaying.
“What’s gotten into you, Harlan?” Gladys squeaked. Something had snapped inside her husband, and she could almost see a viscous substance oozing from the gash. She slid a hairpin from her tidy updo and held it firmly between her thumb and forefinger.
He glanced at the hairpin in his wife’s fingers and smiled. “And you brought her into this world, Gladys.” His eyes were cold. “Tell me again, how is it that such an angel came to grace your womb? Our hair and eyes are brown.”
He turned his attention back to his daughter. “You know who else admires you, Jana? Lonnie. Would you even think that Lonnie would have an appreciation for a fine young woman like you? Times are changing. Isn’t that right, daughter?”
He dabbed his lips with his napkin and turned towards his wife. "This roast is delicious, Gladys. You really put your foot into it this time.”
Gladys turned to her daughter. “What’s this about?"
Tears rolled freely. This was too much. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t understand.
“No.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Christ wasn’t there, daughter. But some other gods were. What were they called again?”
Jana stood.
Harlan motioned to the white parcel. “Don’t you want your present?”
Jana sat. Her fingers shook as she untied the string and unfolded a Klansman hood. Her blood splattered books were inside.
His laughter was low-pitched and subtle at first, but it steadily filled the room with its poison until Jana was unable to breathe.
Gladys rolled her head around noiselessly like a useless pendulum. When the tears finally came, she held her palms over her ears to drown out the sound of her husband and transported herself back to the day she was in labor with Jana.
There had been flowers, and she had arrived at the hospital with a bottle of perfume. Then Jana pushed her way into the world. After one whiff of her daughter’s body, she couldn’t get enough of the smell. Consequently, the atomizer bottle had remained forgotten at the bottom of her purse. It was funny what the mind chose to remember.
The laughter gradually increased in volume, and the pitch rose steadily until the house was flooded with the emasculated shrieking of a cornered hyena.
Gladys held her arms out towards her baby, but Jana pushed them away. She bolted through the living room towards the front door. Gladys stood up to follow.
Harlan grabbed his wife’s arm and twisted it behind her back. “Where in the hell do you think you’re going, Gladys?” He slapped her and pushed her to the floor. “We're going to have a martini.”
Of course her husband could never truly understand her daughter. He didn’t recognize her scent. That was why he was so ugly. That was why he rejected her. She held her cheek in her hand and remained on the floor. He was reprehensible, but there was no rush to meet him at his level. It didn’t get much better up there.
Outside, the sidewalk tottered like a see saw, and the humidity made it nearly impossible to breathe. Jana fell and hit her head on the pavement. She got up again but stopped to vomit as she ran through the thicket beyond Shack Row.
Her eyes were swollen shut by the time she reached the doorknob.
“Moose?”
She rattled it blindly. It was locked.
“Moose?”
Gutted by a feeling of loss beyond her comprehension, she sank to her knees at the doorstep.
“Moose!”
When the vomiting stopped, she was paralyzed by a raging fit of dry heaves. She continued to cry out for Moose until her voice cracked into broken, bloodied whispers. The whispers eventually stopped, but she continued to spit blood throughout the night. As she sat on the ground outside the front door, she thought she could hear the sound of muffled sobs on the other side. But she couldn’t be sure. Curling up into fetal position, she fell asleep in the doorframe with her cheek to the pavement.
He never answered.
HARLAN, KENTUCKY
1948
Russell
Eight-year-old Russell North woke up every morning to the aroma of sausages frying, biscuits baking and coffee brewing on top of his mother’s potbelly coal stove. Inspired by the sunbeams outside his window and the scope of his imagination, he captured a wealth of images with the paper and crayons that his parents left next to his feather stuffed, feed-bag mattress.
He liked drawing himself best of all: a smiling, chocolate brown face with exaggerated shoulders and legs dressed in multicolored garments and holding oversized red and blue gemstones. Sometimes the gemstones rested in patches of bluegrass. At other times, they winked from the summit of Black Mountain, outlined in a flintlike edge of green. Sometimes his mother had knee-length hair, an O-shaped ruby mouth, and mittenlike hands that rested at the end of short, bedazzled arms pointing to gemstones in the mountains. At other times, her mouth was a toothy wedge of crescent moon.
When he stumbled out of the outhouse and into the kitchen, his parents greeted him with kisses and asked him to recall his dreams. After breakfast, his mother plastered the walls with his drawings while his father started his walk to the coal mine in Lynch, where he would cheerfully remain until dark. They enjoyed this peaceful, simple routine until the morning the potbelly coal stove exploded and his mother was killed in the fire.
The casket was a pine box that his father sanded down and left him in charge of decorating. Russell started by painting a background of mountains and an expanse of bluegrass. Then he painted his mother with hair down to her knees and an O-shaped ruby mouth. It occurred to him at that moment that the painting was silly, disproportionate, and unbefitting of her beauty, so he hastily covered the entire casket with a coat of scarlet paint, which effectively reduced the images beneath the surface to painful looking bruises. He left the casket and wept. When he returned and it was quite dry, he dipped a paintbrush into a yellow pigment and spelled out, UNFAIR in sprawling letters that covered the entire length.
The handful of people who came to pay their respects ignored the charred smell emanating from the casket and focused on the letters instead. Aunt Alice rolled herself to Russell’s side and firmly grasped his hand as his mother’s body was lowered into the ground.
Later on that afternoon when family and friends had gathered at her home for the repast, she called him into the kitchen. “Sit down here while I fix you a plate,” she said, motioning to the table. He did as he was told and settled into an ancient chair made out of splintered green wood. She heaped a plate with greens and smothered pork. She cut a piece of freshly baked cornbread from a cast iron pan. She set the plate down in front of Russell and poured him a glass of milk. Her eyes filled with compassionate tears. “You bet I’ll make sure that baby has enough to eat.” She adjusted the cushion of her wheelchair to fit more comfortably and hoisted the weight of her body upwards. Her face contorted with pain.
Russell and his father moved into her house the following morning, having extracted the meager belongings that had not been destroyed from the smoldering foundation where their kitchen once stood. His father resumed his work at the coal mine the following day. Aunt Alice sent Russell off to school with the remaining smothered pork and greens packed into his lunch pail and a fresh cornbread for his teacher, Miss Hornbeam.
His father sank into a deep depression and got into the habit of asking him to bring him glasses of corn liquor from the Mason jar supply at the side of the house. Russell poured as carefully as he could, but a bit of the liquor spilled down his fingers. He instinctively raised them to his lips to taste. Aunt Alice laughed at the sour face that he made but proceeded proactively. “You’d best remember that taste for the rest of your life,” she advised the grieving boy as he watched his father heading to work in a visible state of intoxication. “You do
n’t wanna turn into a drunk like Ronald.”
The following morning, Aunt Alice sent Russell to school with a basket of biscuits, a jar of pork gravy and a note asking Miss Hornbeam to give the boy extra homework to divert his attention from problems at home. That same afternoon, two local authorities showed up to the schoolhouse barn while the students were taking a vocabulary test. The class looked up in alarm as the men removed their hats and spoke in hushed whispers to Miss Hornbeam, who silently clasped her left hand to her mouth and turned in Russell’s direction. She closed her eyes and calmly informed the class that school was dismissed, and the tests would be completed the following day. She took Russell by the hand and walked him home, where Aunt Alice was thanking a coal miner for returning her brother-in-law’s belongings.
Miss Hornbeam stayed at the house that night to console Russell. Aunt Alice busied herself making dinner. She scooped grease into a large cast iron skillet and dipped pieces of chicken into egg and flour. She stirred milk into the leftover egg and flour mixture and rolled it into biscuits. Miss Hornbeam swept the wood floors, covered the table with a yellow cloth, and placed a centerpiece of freshly picked field flowers into an empty Crisco can.
The two women quietly discussed the funeral arrangements in the kitchen while Russell attempted to study his vocabulary lesson in the back bedroom. The scent of chicken frying and biscuits baking lured him into the kitchen. He unleashed his rage at the sight of the yellow tablecloth, and smacked the centerpiece to the floor with his fist.
Miss Hornbeam hung back hesitantly, but Aunt Alice rolled right up to his side and held out her arms. “It’s all right, baby,” she reassured gently. Russell gave way to a torrential outpouring of tears. “Unfair,” he sobbed, his shoulders shaking violently,” Unfair! Unfair! Unfair! Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!”
“Come and have some chicken and biscuits, baby,” Aunt Alice pleaded.
“I want it to be fair!” Russell howled. Miss Hornbeam offered a handkerchief.