JEWEL (17 page)

I didn’t look at her, and turned, went down the hall into the front room, headed for the door.

“Mr. Hilburn, ” the doctor said, “we will need to meet again. We will need to talk together.” His words were calm, smooth. There was care in them, I knew. But I didn’t want his care right now. I didn’t want him to be in on this, whatever it was. I reached the door, pulled it open to sunlight outside flooding the courtyard, no shadows anywhere.

The bricks, the mold, the dirty water in the trough and those dead geraniums were washed out in white light, and I couldn’t wait to get past them and through that gate and into another taxi and out of this place and home, where I might be able to make sense of how this world was crashing to its end, me unable even to imagine there might be another to come.

I heard Leston say, “Sir, ” imagined him just touching the brim of his hat, giving the smallest nod to the doctor, then turning, following me out onto the street, where I was already waiting for a taxi.

Lake Pontchartrain was nothing, only a dull green body of water we passed over, the bridge low and flat and gray. Picayune was just another town, and I didn’t give a care as to whether I’d ever lived there or not. The soldiers and whores in New Orleans were long behind us. The only thing that mattered was the baby in my arms.

We passed through those towns again, the ones we passed through this morning, no difference in them at all. I’d expected something different, expected people to walk slower, their faces to wear some cold and clouded look after the news from New Orleans. But there was nothing different, people still smiled, talked, held their hats against the afternoon breeze, bent down to tie shoes, double-parked outside the drugstore. The same pine and crepe myrtle and high thick roadside weeds swallowed us up each time we left a town, broke up each time we entered a new one.

But on that ride, certain things came to me, most clearly me and that blanket and how I’d pulled it back to show my dead daddy. I thought of New Orleans, the city that’d existed in my head before this day, the place my parents’d had their honeymoon, and I wondered, too, whatever happened to the postcard of Jackson Square my momma had taken out of the pillowcase the morning Benjamin brought over my daddy’s belongings.

I thought of my momma telling me her last stories so I’d know what I could of who I was, and there was the picture in my head, too, of Molly and Cathe ral and that chapter in Ezekiel. These pictures came to me, stories of my own life, and how I’d taken hold of it by the throat, made it come around to what I could make it, how I’d fixed things on my own.

I still had the picture of my grandfather, Jacob Chandler, Jacob Chetauga, framed and in the front room of the house, Burton still taking his leads on how to stand, how to act, how to take care of himself from how his great-grandpa stood in that picture.

What all those pictures told me, what all the stories in my life said to me there in the cab of a truck, my baby in my arms, was that I could fix things, though the world was falling down on itself, crumbling beneath us.

I could fix things. I knew I could. All the child in my arms, all Brenda Kay I decided then, there, that no one would ever use those two words, use Mongolian Idiot, to describe her in my presence, unless they wanted my full wrath down on them needed was my love, not my abandonment. I had lived that loss myself, no matter my baby wasn’t normal as I’d been, was sick in some way I couldn’t understand, no matter, too, she was what the doctor figured on being only a burden.

No matter he was already figuring on her dying. He didn’t know me, didn’t know what I could live through.

I could do it. I could fix things, my life, my children’s lives, my husband’s life. Brenda Kay’s.

And so on that drive home, me losing track of what town was which as we moved along the old road, Leston not having lit up a cigarette yet, both hands tight on the steering wheel, his knuckles white as the skin my dead daddy’s’d been, I tried out my words, said to the cab, “We’ll keep her.” I said, “She’ll be loved, no matter how long she lives.” I said, “God will fix her, ” though I knew I was putting faith into a god I hadn’t yet been able to count on for anything other than what I didn’t want. But the words sounded right, seemed full of some promise I was ready to grab hold of. I said, “We can fix this, if everyone in this household gives her the love they’ve got, and all of it.” I said, “We can fix this. We can.”

Leston finally turned to me. I hadn’t been looking at him, but out the front window to the blacktop cutting through the green.

I looked at him. His eyes were wet, red, his mouth open, the hair on this man, this man even older now, tousled by the wind from his open window. Fear was on him now, fear like an open wound, fresh and raw.

He swallowed, said, “Can we, Jewel? ” I nodded, quick and sharp, and thought of the same move the old nurse had made before we’d entered the doctor’s office, only a few minutes before my last life ended, and this new one’d begun.

I turned from him, my eyes back on the road. I said, “You just get us on home.” Il CHAPTER 11.

THE DAYS AFTER NEW ORLEANS WERE DAYS clouded OVER WITH GRIEF, the house empty save for Brenda Kay and me, Annie out back and digging at sweet potatoes, the chore I gave her so that I could sit in an empty house with only my baby. Each and every day I sat in my rocker before the fireplace, holding tight to Brenda Kay, letting her nurse whenever she wanted to, my breast about the only gift I could give her, the curtains pulled closed since the afternoon we made it back from New Orleans. I wanted no light in here, wanted nothing, only the dark. They were terrible days, days filled with nothing other than the weight of the baby in my arms, me waiting for her to die.

Not one of those days went by without the idea in me of putting her away, of giving up whatever gift from God she was. That thought was with me every day, even after the resolve to face this new and ugly world had come to me in the cab of the truck on the way home. I thought of giving her up each day, that word institation a curse and a means of escape at once, so that those two notions the chains of a blessing from God, and the means to escape that blessing were like two huge and awful birds circling me, just waiting for my baby either to live or to die.

And more times than I wanted during those days filled with the idea of escape there came to me the memory of the one time I tried to leave the world God’d deemed the just and correct one for me. Too many times, the house closed up around me, Brenda Kay asleep in my arms, there came to me the one night in late fall, only a few months after Bessy Swansea’d stolen away from me Cleopatra Sinclair, a night like any other, me wide awake in my bed, wondering exactly what I was doing there, which God Missy Cook’s or my own whose plan for my life I was wandering through.

We were in our courses then, taking arithmetic, Latin, grammar, music, all of us in our uniforms and in our assigned chairs and calling out “Present” to each teacher no matter if our minds were there or not. So far the only class I’d really cared for was Latin, in the maze of conjugations and forms and history of the language some deep comfort, refuge from what kept going on every day here, me not being in charge of who I was and where I was going. Suddenly I started in to missing Missy Cook and how it’d really been me in charge there, and in charge of Cathe ral, and in charge of Molly, too. Now look where I was, at any given moment a hall mistress could come in here and lift my nightshirt up and beat whatever Hell out of me she felt certain was there.

At that moment Cleopatra touched my shoulder, whispered close in my ear, “Take what you want with you in your pillowcase, ” and neither her touch nor her words surprised me, all of it only the next logical thing could happen in my life. Here’d come another chance to take charge of it, fix it, the notion big in me that I could grab my life and mend it in ways unimaginable in other people’s heads.

I sat straight up, quietly slipped off my pillowcase, pulled from between the mattress and the springs my tablet and pencil and my photograph, put them into the pillowcase, then reached under the bed and, without thinking of it, picked up my Bible. I hadn’t cracked it open in months, had given up reading every day along about the early part of Daniel, when at Belshazzar’s feast the handwriting appears on the wall. Last April that’d seemed as right a spot to stop as any, the handwriting on the walls before me here at the school indicating that, like King Belshazzar, I’d been weighed and balanced and’d been found by God to be wanting. Still, I didn’t hesitate, only picked up the Bible, dropped it in. I eased out of bed and over to the pine dresser, pulled out the dress I’d worn in here that day in March, put it in the pillowcase, put on my jumper, then my coat. I slipped on the shoes I kept beneath the dresser, and a moment later stood at the door, just behind the two of them.

Bessy was first, and opened the door, which gave a small creak that seemed big as a boulder in the empty hall. We tippy-toed out, and I pulled the door to behind me without letting it click shut. None of us looked at each other, but instead at the darkened leaded glass window at the end of the hall, where Mrs. Archibald and Mrs. Winthrop roomed together.

We turned, headed off down the hall, and I saw that the girls didn’t have shoes on, and I worried a moment at what they knew and I didn’t, them having planned down to accounting for the sounds shoes made in an empty hall, their shoes, I figured, hidden away in their pillowcases.

I stopped, leaned against the wall and, the pillowcase in one hand, reached down with the other and worked off my shoes.

Cleopatra and Bessy were already at the end of the hall, stood at the doorway into the stairwell. Not five feet from them was another door with a glass window, this the small anteroom, more a large . closet, where Tory slept, and as I pushed myself away from the wall, my shoes in hand, a light came on inside.

Cleopatra saw it first, and turned to me. Bessy shouldered into the stairwell, left Cleopatra there and staring at me, but then she, too, disappeared inside, and I was left running toward the stairwell door, hoping to get there before it fell shut, and before Tory opened his door to whatever he’d heard to set him off in the first place.

And I made it, planted my bare foot inside the doorjamb just as the door came to. If I hadn’t been out of breath and scared and angry all at the same time I would have hollered at the pain of the heavy door on my foot, but I only leaned into it, pushed it open.

I turned. Tory stood in his doorway, watching me. His eyes were full and wet, no white to be seen, and he reeked of whiskey. He had on the same clothes he wore every day, the overalls and red workshirt, the workboots scuffed and muddy.

I froze, remembered him handing back and forth the belt, back and forth, back and forth.

He did nothing, only met my eyes with his, slowly shook his head. We looked at each other that way for what seemed an hour, him and his face and the gray flecks in the nappy hair. And for a moment I pictured what he must have seen, a scared white girl with her shoes in one hand, everything she owned in a pillowcase in the other, in her eyes the stunned fear every girl in here must have carried in her eyes, fear he’d seen every day he’d worked here.

Then that moment was gone, and he stopped shaking his head, pushed closed his door. A few seconds later the light inside went out.

I breathe again, slipped into the stairwell, eased the door closed.

Bessy and Cleopatra were at the small service door at the bottom of the stairs, Bessy working something in the keyhole.

Cleopatra turned to me, whispered, “What happened? ” “Nothing, ” I said, and found the lie easy, something in how Tory’d shook his head and in how quick that light’d gone out that made me say it. “Nothing at all, ” I said, and knew, too, that I wasn’t a part of them, they’d asked me along for pity’s sake, perhaps, or because I could offer them something they couldn’t get on their own.

Bessy got the door unlocked, pulled it open, and October night air filled the stairwell. I shivered, pulled the coat closer to my neck, and followed them out.

By daylight we were a few miles from Picayune, the two of them together a few steps ahead of me, the sun coming up behind us. Already my shins’d started to hurting, the step onto hard ties awkward, every tie too close together, ever other tie too far apart.

I was hungry, and my arm hurt from carrying the pillowcase, and my heart hurt, too, for not being in the midst of the two of them up there, in on whatever secrets they knew about the world and about each other, until, finally, I just stopped, moved off to the gravel beside the tracks, and sat down.

They kept on walking, kept on talking and giggling, the sun shining brighter on us as it hit the tops of trees, spilled out over everything.

I caught on the air the smell of bacon frying up somewhere, and my stomach seemed to catch fire.

I hollered, “Hey, ” waited for them to turn.

They didn’t.

Then I hollered, “Why’d we escape in the first place? ” just loud enough for them to be afraid I’d said it too loud.

Bessy was first to turn around. She stared at me, pillowcase in hand, and then Cleopatra turned. Neither was smiling. Cleopatra only looked at me a moment or two before her eyes started scanning the woods that tunneled us in here.

I looked down at the gravel, took a handful of it in my hand, felt how cold it was, felt how hungry I was, felt how far we’d walked only to end up here. Nowhere I knew.

A minute later they stood next to me, their black leggings and shoes right next to me, Cleopatra a few inches behind and to the side of Bessy.

I said, “I’m hungry.” I let a few pieces of the gravel slip between my fingers, disappear into all the rest of the gravel. I said, “Or did you forget about that part of things? ” “Didn’t, ” Bessy said, her word dead, as though she wished, maybe, I was too. “Not at all.”

Cleopatra gave a little laugh. With one foot she twisted a small circle in the gravel.

Bessy didn’t move. I said, “And? ” “There’s a house ahead, ” she said. “Not more than a mile. We’ll eat there.”