JEWEL (23 page)

But then Leston turned from us, his eyes back out to the water, and I knew his mind was on the canoe, and what we’d do once we were out there.

And though I was smiling at him, at his boyish try to keep hidden from me precisely what he wanted to do, a piece of me kept tearing inside, sharp with the knowledge that, of all my family, he might have been the biggest casualty of all, the one most laden with the weight of what God had dealt, no job, a retarded daughter, children growing up and away.

A wife working in a grammar school cafeteria. His might’ve been the biggest burden of all, though when I’d first met him he was untouchable, a strong boy, me a brand-new school teacher in a two-teacher school in East Columbia, him just moved from home with his eyes on owning his own lumberyard.

Once I’d recovered from the whipping I’d received from Mrs. Archibald, things around and in me started to changing, and I finally surrendered myself to the work at hand, my classes. I saw that there was no means of escape except to take the years handed you, make them your own by holding them tight, wringing from them all you could.

It’d worked, by the time I was to graduate, somewhere in my mind had been planted the idea of college. Though I cannot remember for certain when it happened, I know the notion was put there by Mrs. Esther Faulk, my Latin teacher, an aged woman with whom I’d met the last two years.

The two of us and four other girls met in her classroom Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to work not only on Latin, but on our other coursework as well. That room became a friend of mine, so much more giving and filled with light than where I slept at night.

But there came a day a week or so before graduation when the topic came up, the word “college” uttered by me for the first time, the two of us there in her room and going over I can’t remember what. The other girls’d already left.

“What is it you plan to do once you leave here? ” she’d said out of nowhere, maybe in the middle of one last geometry problem, perhaps at the end of a bit of Latin I’d done my best to translate on the spot for her. She was old, older even than Missy Cook, and wore her hair wrapped tight in a bun that sat at the very top of her head.

“College, ” was all I’d said, and suddenly the idea sounded ridiculous, a place I’d never end up because I knew it cost money, something I had none of at all, Missy Cook’s house had burned down in March, and she’d died not three weeks later, living in the Pastor and his wife’s home.

I’d been told of the funeral by Mrs. Winthrop, informed by her I could be brought there and back if I so desired.

But I hadn’t desired that at all, not out of hate for Missy Cook that was over, I knew, since I’d turned and run back to school on railroad tracks two years before, over and done with in the whipping I’d gotten, over and done with in the cold metal of the flagpole on my face.

Over, too, with each letter Missy Cook’d sent me starting some six months after I’d been there. The letters came like clockwork each first Monday of the month, and were written on delicate, perfumed stationery, her handwriting always elegant and billowing and beautiful.

In each letter she suggested I come back home home her word, I l not mine for a short visit, during which we could chat, that being her word as well.

And at the end of each letter was written a Bible verse, divine signals of how I was to act, her never wanting to surrender control over me, “The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me. Psalm 18, 20, ” she once wrote, another time, she wrote, “I have taught the in the way of wisdom, I have led the in right paths. Proverbs 4, 11.”

But with each letter she sent I sent one back, mine written on the coarse and heavy paper I received from Mrs. Winthrop, and in each letter back I politely declined, citing any number of homework assignments and class activities as my reason. And I finished each letter with a verse of my own, my own signals from the same book she drew hers from, “For thou wilt save the afflicted people, but wilt bring down high looks.

Psalm 18, 27, ” I wrote, and, “A high look, and a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked, is sin. Proverbs 21, 4.” And still her letters had come.

No, I hadn’t gone back for her funeral, because that part of me was over, long dead, and the self-pity I knew Missy Cook had wanted me to feel, pity for the sad and ugly life she knew I must be leading at this girl’s school, would only have been magnified were I ever to lay eyes on her again. What she didn’t know, though, and what she’d never know now, was that there’d been no room in my life for the kind of self-pity I’d been stripped of there in front of all the girls, in front of the hall mistresses, in front of Tory. Just no more room for that luxury, feeling sorry for myself.

I’d chosen not to go back because this was my home now, where I lived, worked, ate and slept. Here.

“College, ” I said again, only this time in a whisper, a word to myself I wasn’t sure I wanted divulged even to Mrs. Faulk.

“Then go, ” she said, and I remember looking up at her from where I sat in the front row desk, her eyes above her half-glasses right on mine.

“How? ” I said. “I don’t have any money.”

“What if, ” she started, and leaned back in her chair, a move she’d never made in front of us before, her back always straight as a board, her hands always holding her glasses or papers or both. She took off the glasses, and I watched as she placed them on her desk. Then she turned, looked out the window. It was hot that day, June already and all those windows open, air in the room warm and thick. All you could see out there was the green of trees, the haze-blue sky.

I looked at her, saw a drop of sweat slip down her cheek, disappear I LL into the high collar of her dress, and I saw again my mother in a fever, sheets soaked, her near on to death.

“What if, ” she said again, “the school were to help you out in this situation. If the school were to contribute in its way to your furthering your education? ” She hadn’t taken her eyes off whatever she saw out the window. I said nothing.

“You have performed here exceptionally well, even in-the face of your, shall we say, indiscretions early on.” She looked at me, smiled, but not a smile that took glee in the memory of my being whipped. Rather, it was almost a conspiratorial grin, and I remember being startled at that, at the warmth of a smile brought on by my sad attempt at escape.

She looked back out the window, said, “We are prepared to pay for your tuition at Pearl River Junior College, provided you do there the best work you are capable of producing.”

She turned her eyes to me again. She smiled, said, “What is it you wish to do as a career? ” I hadn’t even the need to blink, to take in a breath, before the old answer came to me, what had been with me even before my daddy’d died. I said, “A teacher.”

I wrote her letters from school, made the hour walk to the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls at least once a month, sat in on some of her classes, even taught a few sessions myself over the two years I was at Pearl River, furthering my education. I took courses in literature, courses in mathematics, courses in Latin, courses in drawing, courses in physical education. And, after two years of studying and listening and talking and reading, I found myself with a job at a two-teacher school in Columbia, Mississippi, the superintendent of schools for Marion County a friend of Mrs. Esther Faulk’s.

My class was the first through fourth grade, and that first morning I wore a new blue dress I’d paid for with money I’d earned over the summer working as a typist for Pearl River, no lace on that dress anywhere, no ribbons, only a blue dress that spoke nothing but teacher.

I entered the room, saw before me the faces of thirty-three children, all of them seated in desks, inkwells dry, desktops scarred and carved.

Some of the bigger kids in the back rows wouldn’t look my way, some sneered at me. A girl, red hair in pigtails, picked at her nose, another girl, this one with fine blond hair and seated in the front row, had her hands flat on the desktop, smiling, no front teeth.

Another student, this one a boy in the third row back, had a black eye, a bruised chin, his hair filthy and mussed.

But how these children looked didn’t matter, nor did the fact I’d I be three weeks in getting ink, two more in getting pens, two months in scraping together from castoffs at schools around the county enough Mcguffey Readers to start in on.

None of that mattered, not even the fact I was making only twenty dollars a month, because I was a teacher now. Because I’d gotten here, had survived and in fact had fixed in the best way I could everything God’d seen fit to throw me for whatever reasons He’d had, reasons that wouldn’t come clear to me until years later, when I’d gotten from him the giant blessing and curse of a retarded child, the one I held in my arms right now, and to whom I sang hymns in His honor. He, my God, wanted to see how I could fix this huge piece of all our lives.

Billie Jean was coming back toward us now along the old trail that circled the lake, a trail the children’d all explored at one time or another before Brenda Kay was born, that word before pushing in on me again. She pushed back branches and vines as she came, waved a hand in front of her face at the gnats that’d started in on us.

And I saw the boys coming round the cypress out to the end of the point, the two of them still hollering, still paddling that canoe with the same mighty grace only young men could have, each stroke of their paddles reaching deep into the water and into themselves for whatever new strength they could find.

Annie set the basket next to Brenda Kay and me, then sat down, held her knees to her chest, stared out to the lake. Somewhere, too, James was breathing, taking in air and letting it out just as we all were here, him in Texas, a place so foreign, so unimaginable all I could see of it was a barracks painted white, two girls standing before it, one named Eudine, the other Clarenda.

And I asked myself I had to what I had-done wrong, what I’d done to God in heaven, to have been given these fine five other children, and my good husband, each of them slipping out of my hands, it was simple to see, the older the baby grew. And I had no answer, no voice in me like’d come to Cathe ral when she’d been hanging clothes, God’s mystery rising in her heart until those words burst in miraculous sounds from her own mouth. There was nothing, no word from Him up above. Only me here, and the knowledge that what I had to do today, here, on this picnic, was my best chance to fix our lives.

CHAPTER 15.

, WILMAN AND BURTON GAVE THE CANOE A HARD PUSH, AND WE GLIDED out onto the water. I sat in the bow, facing Leston and the shore, watched Wilman and Burton take a couple extra steps into the water, their blue jeans wet up the knees now. Then they stopped, the two of them hands on hips, just watching. Annie’d climbed up into the live oak, almost hidden in the leaves, and watched us, too. Billie Jean, on the wool blanket with Brenda Kay in her lap, hollered out, “Y’all don’t worry!

” She picked up one of Brenda Kay’s hands, waved with it. Brenda Kay’s mouth hung open, and even as we headed out onto the lake, my children growing smaller with each stroke Leston made with the paddle, I could see the neat white row of Brenda Kay’s bottom teeth. Then we were alone.

We were silent a few minutes, the only sound the thin wash of water against the canoe as we cut across the lake, Leston choosing to head us south, I could see, away from that old trail, and the possibility of the children following us. I knew what he was after.

By this time lunch already over, the sun straight up so the only shadows cast onto the lake were those where trees hung out over water Leston’s smoothe -back hair had started to loosen up, strands here and there lifted on the small breeze, his forehead shiny wet with the work of paddling us. He had another cigarette in his mouth, his forehead furrowed in concentration as he tried his best to dig the paddle into the water with the same ease, the same abandon and grace the boys had.

The cigarette was burned down near to nothing before he thought to pause in the paddling, take it out, flick it with his thumb and first finger.

In the quiet out there, my children already gone from view, I thought I could hear the hiss of the butt as it hit water.

I looked away from him, there on the piece of gray wood that served as a seat, the paddle flat in his lap.

The water was green, a thick green that wouldn’t let you see more than a foot or so into it. I looked at the water for a long while, until

!

. l Leston put the paddle back in, started us on to wherever we were going.

I said, “Mr. Hilburn, how’ve you been? ” I looked up from the water.

“Just fine, ” he said between strokes.

“Just fine, ” I said. “That’s good.” I waited a few moments, said, “But if you care at all to elaborate on that, I’d be glad to give a listen.”

“Elaborate, ” he said.

“Talk more on it.”

He stopped paddling, and smiled at me. “I know what elaborate means, Miss Jewel, ” he said. He ran his hand back through his hair, tried to put it in some kind of order.

“Then go ahead, ” I said. I let a hand touch the water, watched my fingers go into the green.

“No need, ” he said, “no need at all.” He started paddling again, and I could see we were heading back toward the marsh end of the lake, the bulrushes and sawgrass it was easy to get lost in, to disappear behind.

The first time I laid eyes on Leston I’d been unimpressed.

I’d just started at the school, had attended the East Columbia Church there only two Sundays, my job as schoolteacher also to teach the same grades in Sunday School.

That second Sunday one Mrs. Luvena Hilburn’d thought it her Christian duty to introduce herself to me, and told me as we stood outside the bright red door of the church that she should offer me an empty room in her house, one that’d been recently vacated by her son, Leston, who’d headed out to Mccomb to work in a lumber mill.

Mrs. Hilburn was a heavy woman, but kind all the same, her eyes a beautiful, clear green, a green I couldn’t know then would be a green I would see the rest of my days.