Tending to Virginia (28 page)

“It’s the nigger that stole the car!” Lena gasps when Hannah goes to the door. “I’d know him anywhere. Come back to finish poisoning me with that gum.”

“I’m looking for Miss Emily Roberts,” he says when Hannah opens the door. He takes off his hat. “I’m Buddy Sharpey from Little Swamp Baptist Church. I’m the preacher there and Mag Sykes asked me to come.” He nods his head with each word.

“Mag?” Emily calls, leaning forward in her chair. “Did you bring Mag?”

“Mama speaks of Mag often,” Hannah says and shows him in. “Mama, this is Buddy Sharpey. He knows Mag Sykes.”

“Tell him I’ll chew it,” Lena says and Hannah shakes her head, shushes her.

“Hope I’m not interrupting,” he takes Emily’s hand. “Mag Sykes asked that I come by.” Emily nods with every word. “She told me to tell you that she has missed you. Said to say that Curie loved you, too.”

“I knew Curie,” Lena says like a left-out child. “He loved me, too. I’m the one that found him that time.” The man turns and smiles at Lena, nods. He looks just like that one that stole the car; oh boy, you can tell when they’re up to something.

“I miss Mag,” Emily says, tears coming to her eyes, her voice trembling while she squeezes his hand. “Tell her to come sit a spell.”

“Miss Mag has passed on,” he says. “Miss Mag has gone home to the Lord.” Emily takes a Kleenex from her pocket and holds it against her cheek. “She asked me a good month ago to come find you but she couldn’t remember your last name.”

“I’m a Pearson,” she says. “I’m Emily Pearson.”

“And I’m a Pearson,” Lena says. “I married a Carter and Emily married a Roberts.” Lena pulls away from Hannah and that comb as long as she can. “Have you ever stolen a car?”

“Of course he hasn’t,” Hannah says and pulls Lena back, looks over at her mama who is staring down at her hands and sniffing. “He’s a preacher.”

“I didn’t know Roberts,” he says. “Mag just called you Miss Emily and I had to ask around until one of Mag’s children remembered your married name.” Emily just nods without looking at him, smiles when she thinks of that Mag with her hair all braided up under that scarf while she stirred the washtub; Emily would be there beside her adding twigs to the fire and clothes to the water. “I guess I should go,” the man says now. “Got a wedding today. I just couldn’t rest till I had done as Mag asked.”

“Mag is a good fine soul,” Emily says and watches Hannah lead the man back to the front door. “Curie worked for my daddy,” Emily whispers, ignoring Lena when Lena says it was her daddy, too. “He’d stay there with us sometimes at night. He’d tell mama, he’d say, ‘Miss Virginia, I can’t sleep with your children. They likes to sleep with they feets covered and they heads out and I’m just the different. I likes to sleep with my head covered and my feets out in the air.’” Emily laughs, shakes her head and laughs.

“I’ve never even heard that one,” Hannah says and clamps the last curler on Lena’s head.

“I have,” Lena says. “I’m the one that found him there dead.”

“Bad men.” Emily shakes her head. “My daddy said they were nothing but bad trashy men that done that.”

“What happened?” Madge asks. She’s tired of playing solitaire, tired.

“The Klan,” Hannah says. “I guess they were called the Klan then, were they Mama?”

“Trash,” Emily says and shakes her head. “It was close to dark. My daddy said he was worried. ‘It ain’t like Curie to be so late,’ he said and so he decided he’d ride a piece down the road to look for him.”

“I went,” Lena says and lights a cigarette. “Me and Roy went in the Lincoln.”

“You went because nobody could leave that house without you,” Emily says. “Daddy said, ‘I’ll be right back. Curie might have forgot he was supposed to help me put up that meat tonight.’ And when my daddy come back, he looked like he had seen a ghost and he sent me and Lena to the kitchen while he told my mama of how he’d found Curie not but about a half a mile from his own house, tied to a tree and dead, murdered.”

“Whoever did it, should have been hung,” Hannah says and Madge goes to the kitchen to put up her glass, turns on the faucet and listens to the water while she rinses and rinses that glass. “It’s still going on,” Hannah is saying. “I saw the president of that mess on TV.” Madge takes a deep breath and goes back in. “My daddy never even told me that story,” she says.

“Harv was too busy tending to Messy,” Lena says and is about to say more but Emily interrupts.

“Nobody knew who done that to Curie,” she whispers, “and years later when I come to meet up with Mag Sykes, I learned that she was Curie’s baby girl and I hadn’t even known it, hadn’t even remembered Curie’s last name. I mentioned him one day and Mag’s face lit into a smile, said her daddy talked of some children he knew, clean white children that had doll babies like what he wanted Mag to have. Mag even remembered that doll baby that Mama asked me to give to Curie; I didn’t want to give up that baby, didn’t have but two and they weren’t nothing but rags.” She stops and laughs. “Lena
cried and said she couldn’t have just one doll because who would that other doll sleep with if she was scared at night.”

“It was the truth,” Lena says and nods, though now she is as calm and quiet as Emily.

“My mama said, ‘Emily, you are the oldest and I don’t ask much of you’ and she sent me out to the edge of the road where Curie was waiting and I said, ‘this is for you, Curie,’ and he bent down and kissed my face. He said, ‘my baby girl is going to take good care of your baby, now. You a good child.’”

“Mag Sykes remembered. ‘I loved that baby, Lord yes I did,’ she said to me that day we remembered it all. Mag could work circles around anybody. She said, ‘Miss Emily, them people had they faces covered up, and my whole life I have stared at white faces, wondering, just wondering if they a part of such bastards.’ I said, ‘Mag, you got every right to say what you say. Filthy, my daddy said they were nothing but filth’ and I told Mag she ought to be afraid, there was reason. I said she ought to be afraid of those that show their faces, too. I said, ‘They are everywhere, Mag, they are everywhere and they will always be there.’ I said, ‘Them that cover their faces and ignorance is bad and the Lord will not have them, but them that show their faces and act proud of their ignorance is worse.’”

“They murdered him,” Virginia says, the story that Gram has only mentioned in the past becoming so clear and sharp in her mind. “Did your daddy know who any of the men were?”

“He did,” she nods and wipes the edges of her mouth. “He said he felt sorry for their wives and sorry for their children. He said if we knew that we’d act different to those children at the school and at church, and that their lives was already so bent to misery and ignorance.”

“Didn’t you have any ideas who?” Hannah asks. “Ever?”

“I was not a questioning child,” she says. “I did as I was told. I was told that children should be seen and not heard, shouldn’t speak unless spoken to.”

“I have always hated that saying,” Cindy says. “Everytime I come over here, y’all start on those old depressing stories. This family is full of death.”

“Just hush,” Madge says suddenly. “You should follow that rule.”

“Amen, tell it, sister,” Lena says and Hannah can’t help but laugh; she knows that’s a rule that Lena never followed.

“You know Buzz Biggers went to some of those meetings,” Cindy says to Ginny Sue and shakes her head. “I wasn’t ever going to tell it but I can say whatever I please about him now that we’re divorced.”

“Well I wouldn’t say it too loud,” Madge says. “You might say it to the wrong person.” Good God, that sends a chill through Cindy.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Ginny Sue says. “He made me sick with all of his ‘nigger’ talk. He was such a redneck.”

“It made me mad, too, okay?” Cindy says. “I left him, okay? I didn’t know he was such a piece of shit until I had him, okay?”

“All right. All right,” Hannah says and it is like God has spoken.

“Cindy, why didn’t you ever tell me Buzz Biggers was that way?” Madge asks, staring down at that diamond on her hand.

“You? Why would I have told you? You’re the one that snatched Catherine right out of public school when we integrated.”

“Your daddy did that.” Madge says, twists a strand of her hair. “He wanted you to go there, too, when you were high school age but I talked him out of it.”

“Yeah sure,” Cindy says. “You can say anything you want since he’s dead.”

“It’s the truth,” Madge says and looks around but nobody knows, nobody knows about those years consumed in baggies and King Tut. Madge takes a deep breath and sits forward in her chair. “He said, ‘If Cindy marries a nigger, it’s your fault.’” She pauses while Cindy smirks, stares down at her toes and shakes her head back and forth. “He said, ‘Hannah and Ben can raise their children like niggers if they want to.’”

“What?” Hannah faces Madge, her mouth open and face red.

“She’s lying,” Cindy says. “You know that’s a lie!”

“Messy was a liar,” Lena says.

“Get off my grandma, okay?” Cindy beats her hand on the floor with every word. “I’m real goddamned tired of it.”

“She didn’t mean . . .”

“And you take up for her.” Cindy stares at Ginny Sue and toxemia
or epilepsy, right this minute, she doesn’t give a damn, and nobody in this room is even thinking to defend her daddy. Blessed are the sick she wants to tell them but she doesn’t because Ginny Sue and Emily and Lena and probably even her mama and St. Peter standing there with her face still red would take it to mean them.

“It’s true,” Madge says. “I feel like most of my life is buried with him, all the things I never told.”

“Like what, Madge?” Hannah goes over now and touches Madge on the shoulder and though Madge tries to keep herself from shaking and letting it all out, she can’t control herself and just sits there and cries while the sky gets darker outside and the trees blow back and forth with the wind.

“The weatherman was right,” Emily says. “Showers by afternoon. Thunderstorms today and tomorrow.”

“Well, I need to get Chuckie before it starts. He’s supposed to spend the night at a friend’s and I’ll just see if he can go on over there.” Cindy stands and speaks only to Ginny Sue. “I’ll come back later when it’s cooled off,” and she walks out of the duplex without once looking back.

“Is it going to cool off?” Lena asks.

“Weatherman says not.” Emily cannot understand why Madge doesn’t go on home if she’s to behave this way. A person ought not to show herself to others. Mag Sykes has passed on. “I believe the Lord will see me through,” Mag had said. “This life is nothing but a pathway.” Yes, Emily knows that; this life is nothing but a pathway.

Emily was in the kitchen when James died. She was standing at that sink washing dishes and looking out the window at all the leaves blowing from her trees. She had just finished making a little clown doll for Ginny Sue and had him propped up in a chair at the kitchen table so that Ginny Sue would be surprised when Emily called the two of them in to lunch. They were in the bedroom, the big stuffed chair over near the window where James liked to sit and read to Ginny Sue. He didn’t know how to read too well, but he didn’t need to; he knew those Brer Rabbit stories by heart and she
loved to hear him making his voice go different for each character, loved to hear Ginny Sue squeal with laughter and beg him for more stories.

She thought so often then that she didn’t know what the two of them would have done without Ginny Sue and Robert to fill up their days. James had given up his farming not long after David died, had men that moved onto all that farmland down where James came from, and he gave them most of the profit when the tobacco was sold. He’d walk down to the warehouses every now and then or get Hannah and Ben to drive him out past his land, but that was all. They didn’t talk about David too much because it didn’t even seem real that he was dead; there was no body to bury down where she and James had a plot not far from where his parents were buried. There was just a piece of paper signed by the president and she didn’t even have that anymore because James tore it up and threw it in the fire. It was always on the tip of her tongue to say, “David would have done this” or “David would have said that” but she’d see Ginny Sue sitting there on his lap, making him laugh and there was no cause to upset him, no cause for a child to hear of such sad things that young.

For years James had gotten up early and crept behind her where she was building a fire in the living room, or washing up breakfast dishes, wrapped his arms around her waist and squeezed; she would squeal out in alarm and then press her face into his dark neck, the thick black hair, the oils of his face carrying the faint trace of the cigars that he smoked. For years now, she has felt that bare emptiness of her shoulder and waist, as she sat on the porch or when she pressed her face into her pillow pretending that it was the tight weathered skin of his neck and face, the sparse gray hair of his old age.

“If anything ever happened to me,” he had asked, the first time when they were so young, when it was a cold winter morning and she had not even gotten up to light the fire, David just a little baby in a cradle, Hannah barely walking and talking. “Would you marry someone else?”

“Never,” she told him that morning and all the other times over the years,
the last being the day before he died, his face as weathered as that pecan tree, hit by lightning and split in two.

“I will never marry again,” she told him. “I will never love anybody like I love you.” And she had hugged him so close, not wanting to think of anything happening. She had already lost David and she couldn’t stand to think of losing him. She would tell herself that she would still have Hannah and Hannah’s children.

She looks over at Hannah, now, sitting there holding Madge’s hand just like they did when they were children out skipping rope. Lena’s got her head back and her mouth dropped open like she might be dead and she might as well be. Lena wants to die and the Lord is making her wait until he feels she’s ready. And the Lord is sending rain; the rain is falling and the river’s gonna rise, gonna rise, gonna rise, and she feels so excited when she thinks of standing out in that yard, Curie telling her to dance a jig, dance yourself a rain dance, and she had felt so free right that second with her skirt lifted and her feet turning her around and around in a circle, slow at first and then faster, with Curie just a dark blur off to the side as she spun around. “Just let go and dance, Miss Emily,” he called out, and she did; she danced herself a rain dance and she felt like nobody had ever felt so free, just a child letting go, her hair falling out of the neatly pinned bun, her white apron dusty from the dirt she was kicking up, pantaloons showing, and sweat trickling down her neck, until she finally got tired and sprawled out flat of her back on a grassy spot and laughed until her stomach ached, laughed until she heard her mama come out that front door. The river’s gonna rise now and Ginny Sue is lying there with her eyes closed. “Sweet dreams,” she has always said to Ginny Sue and James would say, “don’t let the bed bugs bite.”