Peyton did this almost every night. It was as immutable a part of the ritual of sleep as brushing her teeth, washing her face, and the hasty whispered recitation of “Now I Lay Me,” which had been the first prayer she had ever heard, taught her by Clothilde.
“If you don’t say your prayers, ain’t no telling what gon’ come git you in the night,” Clothilde said, mixing theology and pantheism with a fine and careless hand. For a long time the prayer had made Peyton feel safe, but by now she knew that the Lord was no more apt to keep her soul than to take it. Nevertheless, she always parroted the nursery prayer. It was a part of the shapeless thing that kept her sleeping in her old nursery, that kept her clinging to her long braids when every other girl in her class had opted for flips or the Lytton Locksmith Shop’s version of the Jackie Kennedy bouffant. It was this, rather than a budding and secret eroticism, that moved her hands robotically over her body in the quiet nights. As long as the nubs of her breasts remained just that, as long as her hipbones were sharp and bird-fine under her fingers, as long as the small, secret smear of silky hair down there remained thin and sere, it was all right. Afterward Peyton could relax her stiffened muscles and slide gratefully into sleep. But on this night sleep would not come. The scanty topography of her body had not changed, but she could feel the new green force rising and rising. She clung fiercely to wakefulness. Whatever transmutation she underwent, she did not want to be surprised by it in the morning.
What if I turn out to be beautiful and all the boys want to do it with me, even the seniors? she thought, and she smiled in the dark, a sort of smile that her lips had never made before. But then she shuddered. No matter how many boys wanted to do it to her, she would never do it. Never. Not ever. One of the farm girls had told the softball group at recess one day that when a boy did it to you you wanted to do it back so much that your underpants got all wet and you yelled out dirty words. Standing on the sidelines, Peyton heard and turned away, nausea rising in her throat. If she lived to be a hundred, she knew that she would never dampen her chaste cotton Rich’s basement pants, never shout out dirty words in the back of a parked Roadmaster. If she had to do that she would kill herself, or become a nun.
But what if I wanted to do it? What if that’s part of this? she thought. The green tide probed restlessly between her thighs. She stiffened, and then leapt out of her bed and padded in the dark to the bathroom down the hall. After she had urinated she looked into the mirror, seeing a greenish, underwater image in the thin radiance from the streetlight on the corner. No woman, beautiful or otherwise, wanting to do it or having done it, looked back, only tall, unfinished Peyton, aching for transformation, terrified of the loss of her self. When she got back into bed, she pulled the covers entirely over her head. She was surprised and alarmed to find that she was shaking all over, a fine trembling that ran in her veins the length and breadth of her.
Now, for the first time in her life, Peyton did not run, either metaphorically or physically, from fear. She felt as if her back at last pressed hard against rock; she must face the fear or be consumed by it. What? she thought, feeling perspiration start at her hairline and on her neck. What am I so afraid of?
But nothing and no one answered. She felt anger bloom in her face and chest. It was, for once, clean and cold and untempered by the need of a child to disown its rage. It was an entirely adult anger, perhaps the first that she had ever felt.
So you can be afraid when there’s nothing to be afraid of, she thought. There can’t be any God, then. Of all the unfair things in the world this is the worst, and if He’s there I hate Him, and if He isn’t I’m glad.
Once, long before, swinging alone in the rope swing her father had put up for her in the branches of one of the two great water oaks on either side of the front walk, Peyton had felt a flash of fear so profound and debilitating that she could not slow the swing and had to hang on until it stopped itself. She ran into the house, blind with terror. Her father was sitting at the downstairs desk in the cubbyhole behind the stairs, where Clothilde had said her mother had had a little household office. He was searching through the desk drawers and did not notice Peyton at first, and then the very intensity of her silence drew his eyes up and around to her.
“What are you crying for, punkin?” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. Her father did not hug and kiss her, but he did, on occasion, touch her gently, and Peyton knew that he did so out of his thin but real affection.
It was only then that she realized she had been crying soundlessly. She gave up and wailed, and he patted her awkwardly on the back.
“Did you fall out of the swing?” Frazier McKenzie said.
She shook her head and then blurted it out.
“Daddy, I don’t believe in God,” she sobbed. “Do you think He minds?”
“Not too much,” her father said equably. “He knows you’re only eight. Eight is hard. I suspect He’ll make allowances.”
She had been soothed then, but she never quite forgot the scope of the fear. This new fear felt like that, only she could not blame it on God or being eight. Under the smothering covers she began to cry. It had been a very long time since she last cried.
I’ve almost forgotten how, she thought.
Her father’s sister-in-law, Augusta Tatum McKenzie, had come for supper earlier, bringing white rolls from the A&P. Peyton knew this made Clothilde furious; she prided herself on her light, melting biscuits and rolls. But Augusta had pronounced that they were made from lard, and that that was very unhealthy, as well as being common. “Common” was an important part of Aunt Augusta’s lexicon.
“Where’s Charles?” Frazier McKenzie asked, taking the box of rolls from her. “Thanks, Augusta. These look very good.”
“Charles has gone fox hunting with that lowlife Floyd Fletcher,” Augusta snapped. “It’s the second time this week. No matter that it’s out of season. If Floyd weren’t chief of police Charles could have been in jail long since. Sorry, that’s all Floyd is. Sorry as a yard dog.”
Augusta Tatum had been born in the mill village down the highway in Franklin, and when, in her candy-box prettiness, she had captured and married one of the McKenzies, from the only distinguished family in Lytton, she had set about shedding the stigma of the mill village. Every now and then, though, it put its red dirt fingers into her mouth and drew out a plum.
“Charlie always did like to hunt,” Frazier said. “It’s good for a man to get out in the woods sometimes. I ought to do it more often.”
“I know you’re too busy, Frazier,” Aunt Augusta said. She used a different voice with Peyton’s father than with anyone else. “It’s been a long time since you’ve had time to fool around in the woods with Floyd Fletcher and that poolroom crowd. You’ve given up a lot for the law and your family. At least one of us knows it.”
Her father said nothing. Peyton stared at her aunt. In all her memory she could not recall a single time when her father had picked up his rifle and donned his boots and gone off into the woods with Floyd Fletcher to slay foxes.
“I don’t see how you can give up something you never did anyway,” she said. Her aunt brought out the mulish worst in Peyton. In her presence, Peyton turned into just what Augusta thought she was: a tall, shrinking, sulking, ungrateful preadolescent badly in need of a firm womanly hand.
“There are a lot of things about your father you don’t see,” Augusta said. “I do believe it’s deliberate. You’re old enough now to think about some of the sacrifices he’s made for you. You’re old enough now to say thank you once in a blue moon.”
Peyton got up and slammed rudely out of the breakfast room and into the kitchen, where Clothilde was whipping cream for strawberry shortcake. Chloe only looked up at her, but Peyton could feel the warm surge of her sympathy. Clothilde fared little better at Augusta’s hands than Peyton did. In the breakfast room Peyton heard her father say, “She says thank you often enough, Augusta. She’s not an adult, after all. All that will come later.”
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p; “You think?” Augusta replied relentlessly. “Have you really looked at her lately? She’s taller than her mother already, taller than me. She’s getting dark hair on her arms and legs. It’s time she shaved her legs, but who is there to teach her how? And that hair. I’d get that hair cut and curled in a jiffy. You remember Lila Lee’s hair, so lovely.…I wish you’d let me take her in hand, Frazier. She’ll never have any friends, boys or girls, unless we do something about that attitude. The only people she sees are that awful Ernie Longworth and that poor little Negro boy.”
Her father did not reply. Peyton stood silently, looking at Chloe. She could not get her breath.
I will not grow up, she thought. I will not. Not with her on my neck. I’ll run away first.
But she knew that she wouldn’t. Peyton had never even taken a Greyhound bus into Atlanta alone. She didn’t know where any public toilets were.
She knew, too, that in a terrible way her aunt was right. She would never be part of the twittering, lipsticked girls around the Kotex machine in the girls’ bathroom at Lytton High, would never join the crowd of jostling, large-handed boys at the soda fountain after school. Yet each new inch of height brought her closer to a forced exit from the Losers Club. Augusta would see to that. Peyton would be isolated from the only confidants she had in her world, the only living souls to whom she could say anything peevish and perverse that she pleased.
So if not Peyton the woman or Peyton the child, then who?
Peyton stood on a frail bridge between two worlds and stared into an abyss.
“Tell me about my mother,” she said to Chloe the next morning at breakfast. It was Saturday, but Frazier McKenzie had already gone out to the office above the garage, and Peyton was heavy with the shapeless hours ahead of her. There was no Losers Club on Saturday.
“I done told you about your mama a million times,” Chloe said, but she said it softly. She had long sensed that the private mythology Peyton had spun around her mother was as necessary to her as air and food.
“Well, tell me again. Tell me what she looked like. Tell me what made her laugh. Tell me if she and Daddy went to parties. Tell me if she could cook. Tell me what she and Daddy and Buddy did on weekends.”
This last was said with an averted head. Her older brother had been gruffly gentle with her, and even teased her absently sometimes, but he had not spent time with her. All his time, after school, had been spent on the playing fields of Lytton High and in the company of their father. Their hard, bright male laughter rang even now in Peyton’s ears. She had always known she was not a part of the laughter or the communion, and would not be. But she had loved hearing it. It had meant, to her, that everything was all right. “Everything is going to be all right” were words that still had the power to soothe her, no matter who said them or how patently inapplicable to the situation they might be.
Chloe took away the uneaten toast and marmalade and slipped eggs and bacon in front of her.
“Eat that,” she said. “Eggs give you breasts. Everybody knows that.”
“I’d rather eat dog food,” Peyton said, near tears.
“Well, that’s easy enough to get,” Chloe said. She did not push the eggs. She sensed, though she could not have articulated it, that Peyton was going to need her childhood for a long time yet.
“So, she looked like…what?”
“You know what she looked like. You’ve seen her pictures. You’ve seen that picture Miss Augusta painted of her.”
“If she looked like that, her mother and father must have had inferior genes and chromosomes,” said Peyton, who was stumbling woozily through what passed at Lytton Grammar School for Preparatory Sex Education.
“What you mean by that?”
“I mean her folks must have looked like idiots, if she looked like that picture Aunt Augusta painted. It’s awful. Mother looks stuffed. No wonder Daddy keeps it out in the garage. He keeps all her pictures out there. It’s like she was never my mother, only his wife.”
“Well, she was real pretty,” Chloe said, considering. “She was little and slim, light as milkweed silk on her feet. She had hair that kind of spun around her head, real fine and blondlike, and curly. She never had to go to no beauty shop. She used to sing and dance around the house even when she by herself, and she and your daddy and Buddy used to act silly all the time, and put on plays and things, and play games. It always seemed to me that she was more one of your daddy’s chirrun than his wife. She was real popular; she went out all the time, to lunch at the country club, or to Atlanta to shop, or to play tennis at the club. And she volunteered to do a lot of work for poor folks. She was gone ’most every afternoon.”
“I’m not like her at all, am I?” Peyton said in a small voice. She knew that she was not, but it was as if she had to hear it regularly lest she start to imagine a relationship that could not have been, and then feel the loss of it in her deepest heart.
Peyton had not known her grandparents George and Priscilla Peyton, from College Park just up the Roosevelt Highway. But she knew about them. Aristocrats, they were, people upon whom the sun shone sweetly, people who got for themselves a dazzling dryad of a daughter, people who gave her to Peyton’s father, along with the gift of this great old house in Lytton, with thinly disguised apprehension.
Peyton could imagine why. Her father’s family were Scots who had backed the wrong horse at the Battle of Culloden and then departed hastily for the Americas in the middle of the night. They had nothing then but their flinty reserve and the fireshot passions just beneath it that smoldered like burning peat, and the only legacy they brought with them from their wild homeland was their own private mythologies, dark with stunted gods of water and mountains, pierced occasionally by a glinting flash of the Sight. Time had mellowed the passions out of the McKenzies and smoothed the gods into mere amorphous nubs, so that by now they were respectably Presbyterian, not given to singings and revival shouting. Peyton would not have known the dark Hebridean side of her family if it had not been for her paternal grandmother, Agnes MacLaren McKenzie.
Nana McKenzie was a throwback, a genetic sport, a raven among the pale, fluttering female birds of Lytton. She lived alone now, since Peyton’s grandfather had died ten years before, in the farmhouse at the edge of town that once had gleamed smartly with paint, its yard and fields wildfires of color and bounty. Nana walked into town when she wanted something, spurning her son’s offer to drive her and his invitation for her to come and live with them in the big house.
“Surely you know that wouldn’t do,” Aunt Augusta had said to Frazier when he first proposed it. “It would be a terrible influence on Peyton. Your mother’s half crazy, and the whole town knows it. She makes a commotion every time she comes to town. She makes prophecies. We all know it’s just hokum, but she scares the Negroes. Ed Carruthers at the hardware store said his Negro boys have started carrying charms around in their pockets, to ward off the evil eye or some such nonsense. She stood in the middle of Monument Square the other day yelling ‘Go tell the Devil!’ at a flock of crows. Floyd Fletcher won’t do anything because she’s your mother, but believe me, he’d like to.”
“It would not be advisable for him to try it,” Frazier had said tightly. “She’s not crazy, you know, Augusta. The things she says and does have come down a thousand years in the Highlands. They make sense to her and to me, too, though I wish she wouldn’t do them in the middle of town. When I was little I thought she had the Sight. She still says she does.”
He looked levelly at Augusta, who fell silent, dropping her eyes. Then he turned to Peyton, who was elaborately doing her homework at the breakfast table nearby, and winked. Peyton’s heart soared. She loved her Nana McKenzie without boundary or condition, knew her wildness in every drop of her own blood, believed with her whole heart that the old woman had the Sight, and was so warmed and energized by the wink that she said, “Everybody knows that crows watch all week to see what sins we’ve committed, and on Friday they go down to hell and tell the
Devil. Jaybirds do it, too. Haven’t you ever heard of Jaybird Friday?”
“I have not, except among the Negroes,” Aunt Augusta said. “It’s a Negro superstition, Peyton, not a Scottish one.”
“They’ve got crows in Scotland, too,” Peyton said rudely, and she knew at once that she had cranked it one ratchet too far.
“If I hear of Mama McKenzie creating one more scene in public I am going to speak to Floyd,” her aunt said. “There are ways he could discourage her without embarrassing her or us. This can’t continue, Frazier.”
“I don’t want to hear of your doing that, Augusta,” her father said, in a voice as still and austere as his profile. “It is not your place. I can’t believe you’ve stooped to tale-telling around town about my mother. She is your mother-in-law, you know. She is Charlie’s mother.”
“And he has not invited her into his home for more than a year now. Did you ever wonder why?”
Frazier McKenzie turned his head slowly and looked at his sister-in-law. It was not a glower, and he did not speak, but it struck Peyton that she hoped he never looked at her that way. The sea-gray of his eyes turned to ice, and his thin mouth thinned even further. Suddenly she could see her wild peregrine of a grandmother in him, the floating smoke hair, the strange light eyes, the narrow head and long, bladelike features.
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