“Should we swim down and try to loosen it?” I asked him.
“Not yet,” Mustard said, but his voice sounded like pleading even though he didn’t mean for it to.
So we jerked and tugged and fought more with the rope, and leaned backwards until we fell, both of us, off the tree and into the water, knocking the lantern in too. And I sunk like a cinder block. I squinted my eyes shut and rose back up and met Mustard dripping and clutching the tree. To my right, the lantern floated away, and the light was dim from just the flashlight because there was no moon to speak of.
But when we climbed back on and pulled again, the rope wasn’t caught anymore. I passed it back to Mustard, grabbing handful after handful of wet rope, and it wasn’t as slippery as I thought rope should be, or as light.
Finally we pulled a massive piece of tree out of the water, and as it surfaced, I could see a body tied to it.
“Get the flashlight,” I told Mustard. “It might not be him.”
But it was James. James and a big chunk of tree tied together like twins joined at the side. The rope was wrapped and knotted around his waist, and then knotted around the middle of the waterlogged tree. They were so twisted together that it looked like they’d grown that way, and a branch thinned narrow in four or five directions over his head.
I stood on the trunk looking down at James, his mouth gaping, and the water captured in my dress dripped down on him. I was suddenly cold and suddenly still, and I didn’t hear Mustard say, “Give me the rope,” until he’d already pulled it from my hands.
We towed him to the edge of the pond, and then Mustard heaved him onto the grass. I stayed on the bank with James while Mustard rode back to get help. I didn’t untie him from the thick piece of tree, or wipe away the algae draped over his ear and neck. I didn’t touch him. I held the flashlight on him and studied the way he’d wrapped himself in rope and wood. I wondered if he’d known he would smell like a plant, so fibery, when he was pulled from the pond. I wondered what the rope was for—if he’d worried that no one would find him and he’d sink to the bottom, or if he’d worried that without it, he might change his mind. I imagined him fastening that knot around his waist, so tight it looked elastic around his thin middle. I imagined him swimming down, feeling for the thickest branch. I wondered if he’d died tying knots. I wondered how long it took his lungs to fill.
I held the rope in my hands and watched him, framed with cattails and reeds. And later when I heard voices shouting, voices screaming out as they came towards the pond, the sounds seemed so far away, like how voices from Hell must sound to God, so forgettable.
I’m not sure who cut the rope from his body or who cut the rope from the tree. But when Daddy led me home, I still had it in my hands, twisted around and around.
Some people say you can’t change history, but that isn’t en
tirely true. We did it at Fire and Brimstone, and it was easy.
James didn’t take his own life. He drowned on a hot night, caught on a root in the bottom of the pond. Nobody ever mentioned that he was tethered to that sunken tree with thick, deliberate knots.
And that was that. At his funeral, with everybody crying and howling so, nobody even blinked when Grandpa Herman said his death was accidental. Nobody minded that he praised James and talked about what a good companion he’d make for the angels. That’s what we wanted to hear.
Pammy couldn’t stop shaking. She shook for the rest of that summer, and the only thing that made her stop was sitting between my legs and letting me practice on her hair. I learned French braiding after James died. I worked on Pammy’s red hair until it looked like something out of a magazine, and even though in the past the adults wouldn’t have let us wear our hair in fancy braids, nobody seemed to notice or to care.
Mustard and Barley had a fight and didn’t talk to each other for nearly a month. Even though Grandpa Herman made them pray together and hug, they went their separate ways afterwards. Barley stayed in the woods as much as he could, and Mustard just stomped around, his head hung down to hide his strange eyes.
I didn’t do much of anything except keep watch over everybody else and study their mouths, the way they dropped down a little more than before. I listened to the quiet. It was quiet all the time. And sometimes when I’d think that things had gotten too quiet, I’d strain my ears and hear sounds that must have been there all along, voices whispering, sewing machines buzzing, tractors thumping across the holes in dirt roads.
Every time I went into Bethany and Olin’s house, Bethany grabbed hold of me and cried. But I didn’t have any tears to share. I’d just stand there like a post, being something for Bethany to cling to.
I went into James’ bedroom right afterwards and sifted through his drawers without asking. I took one of his flannel shirts and wore it all the time, even though it was still summer. When I buttoned it over my dress, it bagged down like my heart, and I liked the way it looked and wouldn’t take it off. It had a little bit of smell left in it, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t forget that smell.
It was only a couple of weeks after James died that school started again, and even though Mamma tried to get me to take off James’ shirt, I wouldn’t. I wore it every day, and if anybody made fun of me, I don’t remember it.
“Get that thing off and let me wash it,” Nanna tried.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t want to be without it.”
“You can put it right back on.”
“It’s not that dirty,” I claimed.
“But it was dirty. It was stained with food I’d spilled, though I hardly ever spilled food before, and it had grease all along one arm from helping Daddy work on a tiller.
“How about if you put on another one of James’ shirts. Will you do that? Just until I get this one washed? It’s starting to carry an odor, Ninah.”
So I agreed. Nanna walked over to Bethany and Olin’s to get the clean shirt. I stayed on her couch. And when she handed it to me, I took it to the bathroom to change, even though I had on a perfectly good dress beneath it.
I was too big to sit in Nanna’s lap. Way too big. But when she settled in her rocking chair, I went and sat with her, slinging my long legs over the side so it wouldn’t put too much weight on her brittle bones.
“My old girl,” Nanna said, and patted my back.
“Tell me a story,” I begged her.
“I’m tired,” Nanna said. “I been working all day, and all you been doing since you got home from school is moping around. You tell
me
a story.”
I laughed. “What story do you want to hear?”
“How about the story of the day before James died?” she whispered.
“Why do you want to hear about
that?”
I said, trying to sound normal but hearing my voice scratching up towards despair.
“Because it’s a story I believe you need to tell,” she answered.
And I almost told her. I wanted to tell her. But there was so much that came before the words, so much sadness, and it was like my breath was racing down a big flight of stairs, letting itself out one step at a time. Then just when I’d get to the bottom and think I was going to be okay, I’d steal my breath back in one big gulp, and start leaping down again until it was all out of me.
“I’ll tell you a story,” Nanna said while I cried. “I’ll tell you about Liston and Maree Huff. You ever heard of them? They’re good people, live out in the country with their family. God-fearing, soul-searching people. The kind of people you’d want to be with except when something goes bad. Because when things go bad, Liston and Maree turn into measuring cups. You know what I mean?”
“No,” I wheezed.
“Measuring-cup people always think about quantity. Half a pound of this or a whole cup of that. And for grief, you only get so much—just like you only get so much happiness or so much sickness. They ain’t particularly stingy with it, but they just figure half a cup ought to be enough for everybody. So when they’re mixing up their cake, they put in just the right amount, and if it comes out not tasting sweet enough for you, then the problem ain’t their lack of honey, it’s your sweet tooth. But the truth is that that cake might not be sweet enough for them either. And if that’s the case, they shovel in forkfuls of bad cake and think about candy while they’re eating it, and pretend.
“Everybody’s worried about you, Baby,” Nanna said. “They just don’t know what to do for you. Your mamma and daddy think that if they ignore it, it will go away, all the pain you got in your little heart. They figure that if they don’t mention it, then you won’t have to feel it. And they don’t want to remind you of the thing that makes you hurt.”
“I loved him, Nanna,” I told her.
“I know, dear.”
“No, it was special,” I tried.
“Of course it was. And he loved you too.”
“Do you know what we did? We let Jesus speak through us. We prayed that Jesus would show us his love through the other person, and it worked.”
Nanna rocked me, on and on, patting me almost too hard and letting me stay there even though I must have been hurting her with my weight. I was so tall by then.
“Do you have any idea what made that boy want to leave this world?” she asked me finally.
“No,” I lied, and started whimpering again.
“That’s okay,” Nanna consoled. “You can tell me about it later if you feel like it.”
She was just at home with lies as she was with the truth. For that, I was grateful.
But the shirt didn’t smell the same after Nanna washed it, so I kept the other one on.
I
’m sorry about your friend
—
James,” Ajita Patel told me one
day when we were supposed to be dressing out for gym. “Raj told me that he died this summer,” she added awkwardly. “That must have been really hard.”
“Yeah,” I said, privately cursing my eyes for trying to betray me again.
“Is that his shirt?” Ajita asked.
I nodded.
Ajita had dropped her skirt and was working her shorts up over her hips, over her too-white underpants that came all the way up to her waist, the way mine did. She was the only person I knew who wasn’t Fire and Brimstone and still wore underpants that came all the way to her waist.
The year before when I’d dressed out, I’d always pulled my shorts up before I took my dress off.
“Are you going to do gym today?”
“No,” I told her. “Mr. Groves, he won’t let me wear it in there.” I held onto the tail of James’ shirt and stood there.
“Can you leave it in your locker for just a little while?” she coaxed.
I shook my head and walked away.
I knew I would fail gym. Nothing concerned me less. I spent the hour sitting in the bleachers with a heavy girl who didn’t want to take off her clothes for other reasons.
I watched Ajita doing her stretches, her jumping jacks, her sit-ups. I watched the class break into teams and then begin a game of volleyball, the teams rotating so that everybody got to serve.
I wanted to serve. I could have hit that ball so hard it went through the basketball goal at the far end of the gym.
I didn’t think about anything important, sitting there. Just the stale air and the hardness of the bleachers beneath me, like a church pew.
When it was Ajita’s turn, she held the ball in her left hand, smacked it with her right fist, and sent it soaring over the net, where somebody else missed and she got to serve again.
If I could have held that ball, I would have put it under my shirt, James’ shirt, to see what it would feel like to carry something beneath my clothes besides nettles.
I
t wasn’t long before I knew. Nights, I’d lay flat on my back,
wearing just my thin nightgown and James’ shirt. I’d lift my neck and peek down to the place where the bones of my pelvis reared up, and I’d look at the place between them, where nothing had ever been but flatness, like the plains, and I could see the beginning of a mountain.
But it wasn’t a mountain. It was hardly even a hill. My clothes still fit in the mornings, but by afternoon, I could tell that they were getting too tight.
I tried not to think about James. I figured if everybody else could pretend he’d never existed until the pain let go, I should be able to do that too.
I’d never been able to sleep on my back. I’d always slept on my stomach, like a normal person, but I couldn’t do that anymore, not with the breasts that grew and grew and ached with it.
I wanted to talk with Nanna, but I could never get her alone. After school in the pack house, I untied tobacco with the other women, ripping away the string, tossing the cured leaves onto burlap sheets, and hurling the sticks onto the pile to be collected and used again. Even the smell of tobacco, the smell I loved, made me sick, and every motion of my arms irritated my sore chest.
I wanted to talk with Ajita Patel, but then I remembered her little-girl underpants and knew that I couldn’t.
There was nobody to talk to, nowhere, without James around.
But Corinthian Lovell was in my classes that year. She’d failed again. I couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t dropped out of school. She had to be almost seventeen, and she couldn’t have been learning much because she only showed up half the time.
She sat at the back during home economics. I decided one day to talk to her. Not to tell her about me or James, but to find out about Ben Harback, to ask if she’d seen him. Or at least that’s what I told myself I was doing.
We were on the sewing machines that day. Corinthian, who hadn’t brought in a project to work on, was sitting at the back, filing her nails, waiting for the bell to ring so she could leave. I folded up the big skirt I was making before it was time and told the teacher I needed to use the restroom.
Corinthian didn’t look at me at all. She never looked at me. But that day, needing somebody to talk to more than ever, I stood in the doorway, whispered “Corinthian,” and motioned her to come out.