by Maxine Clair
Irene Wilson. Crackerjack smart. As October moved among the children, wiping up spilled paint, sprinkling compliments, she watched Irene working. It had been two weeks since James Wilson had broken the seal on his real life and left October to pick apart the details.
When she got to Irene’s desk she said, “This looks very nice, Irene. You may make another one, since this one came out so well.” The round face. The mouth. Why had James Wilson done that? What had made him start up with her in the first place? If he had seen her as easy pickings, he never would have confessed when he did. She wasn’t easy pickings.
She hadn’t had all that much to do with men. Probably she and Vergie were the only two women she knew who had gotten to age eighteen with their hymens intact, thanks to the fact that they were raised in Chillicothe by two women who were death on men. October had been reckless one time, vowing not to graduate college wearing a chastity belt. But she wasn’t easy.
James Wilson did actually resort to honesty. Give him that.
“Miss Brown,” Irene was asking, “can we paint them on both sides?”
“Yes, of course,” October Brown said. “Class, let’s let your leaves dry and after recess, we’ll paint the other side.”
After school, as she cleaned up the classroom, October came upon an assortment of extra leaves. What stood out was the softest buckeye leaf, yellow center, radiating to tangerine at the edges. She sat at her desk twirling the leaf by its stem.
Remembering. Her mother giving her a bath. She cannot see Momma’s face because water pours over her head, and she can hear Momma laugh. Her eyes catch fire. Momma snatches her out of the big oval tub and douses the sting with more water. Another memory: She remembers being at the Free Show, sitting on large boulders in a field, watching people dance on the outdoor screen. Momma gives her and Vergie handfuls of peanuts to eat.
When a person remembers an event, what she recalls is not the actual event but her most recent memory of it. Over time, details shift and change. To October this explanation made sense of why, after nearly twenty years, terror had no place in her memory of her mother’s murder. Sometimes she reasoned that she had been young when it happened—too young, perhaps, to take it all in. Other times she thought that her mind had merely found a clever way to cope. At any rate, the scene remained improbable:
They sit at the dinner table at their house in Cleveland—Poppa, Momma, Vergie, and she. Their kitchen chairs are painted blue, with a creamy stenciled-leaf design on the chair backs. Outside, autumn light fades. Poppa is erect in his Sunday-white shirt, and he wears a stocking cap to slick down his hair. He says something. Momma—silent; angry?—does not answer him. Creamed potatoes overrun candied carrots on pale green plates. She can see Momma in the dim hallway, walking away, hair in an upsweep with a pompadour in front, skirt swirling around her ankles. When Momma catches hold of the banister and turns to go upstairs, she can’t see her face, but she knows it is set, stone, and Momma does not look back through the hallway at them in the kitchen. The swirling skirt disappears up the stairs. Poppa’s chair is pushed back, empty. Somehow he has disappeared, too. Alone at the table, she and Vergie make potato sandwiches. They take turns on the step stool, washing and drying dishes. They sing, “Look who’s here, Punchinella, Punchinella, Look who’s here, Punchinella, little girl”—twirling until they are dizzy. A stark, black cricket springs from under the icebox and goes berserk over the kitchen. Vergie smashes it with the broom. “Who do you choose, Punchinella, Punchinella? Who do you choose ...”
Then, for some reason, she and Vergie rush up the stairs. Suddenly Vergie’s whole face opens in a bawl. Their mother seems to be kneeling at the side of the bed, then laying her head down gently, both hands over her heart, as if she were falling asleep praying. Poppa is gone. Vergie won’t let her lie on the bed with Momma.
Then there is the blur of the woman next door—Miss Cordelia Butler is her name, and she cradles the girls, sets them down in a strange house with an overstuffed chair. They cannot go home. The woman’s dimples and gold tooth say that their mother is dead. Their father has killed her. That someone is taking Poppa away and that they cannot go back home. This is where they will stay until their aunties get things straightened out. The woman talks about heaven, golden streets, life everlasting.
On what seems like the same day, Vergie is going up the stairs again, and she follows. When Vergie opens the door, October can see that the room is very big. The bed is gone. Their mother is gone. Poppa is gone. No one is there. They can never come back again.
Aunt Frances and Aunt Maude are coming all the way to Cleveland to collect them, take them back to Chillicothe, where they will live. They go for a long ride in the hearse to Chillicothe and the cemetery, where she is too young to get out of the car. The house in Chillicothe has a great stone porch and a varnished swing. With fallen leaves and snow flurries, the yard is like cornflakes with a fine sprinkling of sugar. Inside the front door sits a great chair with hooks for umbrellas and hats. In the mirror to the side of it she glimpses herself wearing her blue snowsuit. It is then, in the mirror of that dim entranceway, that she sees the first white freckle appear on her cheek, the new-birth mark of vitiligo, odd and mysterious. Her name is Lillian Brown. She is five.
At Pemberton House on the evening of the twenty-sixth, October convinced Mrs. Pemberton to give her a small block of paraffin, the kind her aunts used for sealing their homemade jelly in jars. Up in her kitchenette, October melted the wax in a saucepan. For the briefest second, she dipped the leaf and held it in midair by the stem to dry. Obscured by the wax, some of the vibrancy was gone, but the veins and perfect shape remained.
I will not spell out the details of my death here; they will come soon enough. But I will say that on that October day I did what was mine to do. I stood by and held for both my daughters. Vergie was married and settled, but this one—my younger—was on her own in the world, waiting for her life to blossom. As I watched her with her precious leaf, I marveled that for my sake, she had named herself October.
chapter 4
Early in November, Ed Haskins accepted the job in St. Louis—he would be replacing a teacher who had been unable to finish out the semester. Whether Cora had been clever enough to play her cards right, or Ed was simply wise enough to hold on to his best chance, they decided to get married. Secretly.
And so, early in November, since Cora’s sister couldn’t come, the four of them—October, Cora, Ed, and Ed’s brother, Leon—drove to St. Louis for the ceremony. October worried that they might all look back on this little trip as reckless. Once again, she got out her contract. It would behoove Cora to be well-informed.
Mr. Arledge, the superintendent, was a small, gray man who mistook his position for genuine superiority. A force to reckon with if anything went wrong. October remembered his expression when he told her to be sure to read such-and-such points. Now she looked at the contract again.
You agree to reside in the school district of Wyandotte County, Kansas, during the term of this contract unless excused in writing by the Superintendent of Schools.
Contracts for the employ of women teachers are subject to cancellation at the discretion of the Superintendent on the marriage of such teachers. In case a woman teacher marries, she agrees to give immediate notification in writing to the Superintendent of Schools.
It is understood and agreed upon that no teacher will play society to the detriment of the school or engage or indulge in activities of questionable morality. The Superintendent shall be judge in these matters and violations shall be deemed sufficient cause for dismissal.
In the best of the possible circumstances, Cora and Ed would marry and live in some clandestine arrangement until they decided to have children or until enough of the women teachers reached the end of what they could stand and decided to change the game. At some point those who made these unspoken sacrifices—the women w
ho owned houses with one “roomer,” the husband, upstairs; women who lived next door, across the street, around the comer from their dear and legal mates—at some point they had to say no.
But Cora and Ed’s was not the best possible circumstance. They would live two hundred miles apart, spend Fridays and Sundays on the road, steal holidays, develop a telephone relationship, and sneak around like they were pulling a creep.
Short of car rides and greetings here and there, October had spent little time with them as a couple. What she knew of Ed came from Cora’s gushing stories or bitter complaints—Ed was five years older, had held jobs since he was fourteen, pinched a penny until Lincoln winked. But anyone watching knew that Cora was important to Ed. October saw how attentive he could be. Riding with them to St. Louis, she wondered if she would ever be that important to anyone.
Ed drove and Leon rode in the front seat while Cora and October settled in the back. Leon talked about music; Ed listened. For all his style as a jazz musician, October thought Leon would be a better down-home blues-man: he was tall and slight, like he had missed a few meals. He sported a mustache and goatee and what was supposed to be part of the hipster uniform—a black beret.
She didn’t like his clothes. So far they all looked too flashy, and he chewed on an eternal toothpick. She wondered if he just didn’t believe in haircuts or if this, too, was part of the look. Around his neck he wore a sling affair for his horn, though he wore it like anyone else would wear a tie.
He went on to Ed about “the scene,” and how famous he would be, once he got his break. Judging from what October had heard at Maurice’s, he might do all right but she couldn’t imagine him being the star he seemed so convinced he would be.
At one point on the trip, when Cora half joked that the night before her wedding was not the time to plan out Leon’s career, he told her, “Don’t worry, sis-in-law, I got you covered. Tell me what you want to hear.” And he patted the case on the floor. “I’m your musician-best man rolled up in one.”
“We’ll stick to the Mendelssohn,” Cora said, and Ed put in that it was the only song the minister’s wife could play, the Wedding March, and he went into “Dum, dum, da-dum.” “You can do the trumpet part on your sax, huh?”
“It’s y’all’s party,” Leon said. Then he looked back over the seat at October and asked, “What do you think, Miss October Brown?”
“I think the Wedding March is fine,” she said.
“Would you have it at your wedding?” he asked.
She said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
Cora gave him the eye.
“Just making conversation,” he said.
“Man, you’ll learn,” Ed said. “Women don’t play around when it comes to wedding stuff. It’s as serious as a mother-in-law at the door. Oops.” He laughed.
Leon said, “I can dig it. Hooking up for life is serious business, all right. You two are the only people in the world who I think are ready for it.”
“Well, thank you,” Cora said.
“Six years,” Ed said, and he flung his arm across the back of the seat and gave Cora’s hand a squeeze. He slowed the car and pulled over to the shoulder.
“This is the night before the wedding,” he said. “I want my sweetie to ride up front with me.”
For the rest of the trip October sat in the back with Leon and observed the possibility of two becoming one.
The wedding took place in a small chapel of a Lutheran church in St. Louis with the minister, his wife, October, and Leon making it a ceremony. How easily an atmosphere can be created when a woman drapes herself in white lace. October observed the difference between looking at and beholding somebody you love. She observed the worlds words can convey when they are vowed.
After the wedding, the four of them had a spectacular dinner including trout amandine and baked Alaska, all at the Vincent Downtown Hotel, where Leon knew the manager. Later that night Leon invited her to come to his jam session in the hotel lounge, but she went to bed instead. She had had enough for one day.
They had agreed to leave at one o’clock on Sunday, but instead of the luggage-laden newlyweds October expected, Cora and Ed trotted down the stairs into the lobby and announced that they were staying. Because Leon had been so generously entertaining in the lounge, the manager had given them a second night’s stay on the house. Ed had already quit his construction company job. Cora could call in sick at school. Leon could take the car and pick them up at Union Station the next night.
On the drive home, October tolerated Leon’s nonstop catalogue of his career again—the story of his perfect pitch, how he had gotten started, who had heard him play, his story of meeting Charlie Parker in the middle of the street one day, his plan to make it in New York, who had said what about his playing, and on and on. Mostly he talked to hear himself think, and October mostly kept her thoughts to herself. All in all, James Wilson had been an honest man. At least that.
On Monday, October knew things had gone well: a substitute teacher appeared in Cora’s place. On Monday evening, Cora phoned from St. Louis to say that they were staying one more night. And again on Tuesday evening, Cora telephoned to say that they were staying yet another night. October worried.
“Spare me the details,” Miss Olfield, the principal, told Miss October Brown. “If you talk to her, remind her that there is no such thing as a private life if you’re teaching in Wyandotte County.”
When Cora called again, October relayed the message. “Maybe you-all ought to come on back now,” she said.
Cora laughed. “I know, I know. But we’ve never had so much fun doing nothing,” she said.
They came back late Wednesday night. All day Thursday October watched Cora mope through her lessons and stand in the doorway as if the classroom were the snake pit that separated her from Ed. On Friday Mr. Connors, the black Assistant Superintendent for Negro Schools, visited the classes. At the end of the day Cora told October that he had told her there were questions downtown about her absence, where she had been, why she hadn’t made three-day plans ahead of time.
“What did you tell him?” October asked.
“I told him I had a sick friend in St. Louis,” she said. “Miss Olfield was happy not to know the difference.”
But Mr. Assistant Superintendent said that Cora could expect that this wouldn’t be the end of it.
October would have been fit to be tied over such a threat. But not Cora. Over the weekend October watched her phone an old friend in East St. Louis to concoct a possible cover story. And on Monday the Board of Education called to give her a Wednesday afternoon appointment with the superintendent himself, Mr. Arledge. Obviously he had smelled something more titillating than the sick-friend story.
As Cora described it to October, Mr. Arledge asked for the “sick friend’s” telephone number and right then he picked up his phone dialed zero, and asked for the long-distance operator.
It just so happened that this woman, Cora’s friend Betty Rae Keith, had been fighting the fight for a long time in East St Louis. When it came to administrators, she had a kiss-my-butt attitude. According to Cora, the small, gray Mr. Arledge turned purple as Betty Rae reamed him about the arrogance he must possess to so freely disturb her, about prying into her personal business just because a friend—who had held her hand through a difficult time—was one of his employees, about creating friction between friends, about intimidating and interrogating women at his slightest whim because nobody in the Wyandotte School District would confront him. And she advised him that he was fortunate that she worked in St. Louis, that days for overseers like him were numbered.
“Well,” Cora said, “when I left his office I’m sure he had a seizure.”
If ever October were to find herself in a mess, she would choose Cora to bail her out.
chapter 5
When forces of nature are inv
olved, fate gets all the blame.
A hundred million years ago, when Earth had one solid landmass, the land began breaking into pieces—continents—which drifted north, south, east, and west. Forces were released, creating gaps, ridges, bucklings—mountain-building forces that, in North America, created the uplift known as the Rockies. That drastic tilt drained the ancient sea that had once occupied the land to the east leaving the whole interior of a continent a monotonous swamp. Another million years and the swamp became the vast indomitable sweep of prairie grasses, the Great Plains. Now that the sea was gone, every living thing on these plains understood what it was to be landlocked.
No large bodies of water to hold coolness to temper summer, or warmth to forestall winter. Seasons arrive unrefined, delivering harsh edges. The sun crosses the plane of the equator, and somewhere way north a coalescence of frost gathers, spreads itself in a heavy mantle of air that drops southward. Somewhere far south a balm blows northward. Mid-continent, with no mountains and scarce hills, their tempestuous union spreads havoc.
A silver morning turns leaden, wind comes to be terror-song. Snow—in the span of an hour—goes from dust mote to whiteout.
It was mid-November. At ten o’clock in the morning, when October looked out the classroom window, she could still see the fence where the playground ended and the street began. Miss Olfield had announced the school’s noon closing, and parents had already begun to arrive. Cars crept by, chains jingling. Fifteen or twenty of October’s forty-odd pupils had already gone.
By ten-thirty, she could see only the top of the fence. There was still a tire path in the middle of the street, and she could still see headlights as cars stole eerily by, muted in the atmosphere of heavy snow.
By eleven o’clock the howling had started. As the remaining children did arithmetic at the blackboard, October glanced out to see whorls of white and an occasional headlight peering like a candle in dense fog. She could make out wrapped figures—ghouls—coming out of nowhere, stealing toward the school building then stealing away, hand in looping hand, with their little ghouls. The fence had disappeared.