JEWEL (3 page)

He knelt, the pillowcase on the floor blossoming with the move so that what lay inside suddenly spilled out. “This here’s his things, ” he said.

I leaned forward, looked down at the small pile. No one else moved, not even Momma, and for a moment I felt I’d somehow betrayed her by giving in to what lay here. But then I knelt, too, and began to take things up, examine them for what they might tell me about the man I’d wished dead.

The first thing I picked up was a cigar box. I shook it, the sound like rocks inside. I opened it, found only one rock, a chunk of fool’s gold the size of my first three fingers, the gold specks in it bright enough to give good reason, I figured, to keep it. Next were two cuff links, cheap things rusted where the gold paint had chipped off, in there, too, were three small arrowheads, nothing special, one of them even with the tip broken off. I’d seen enough of them before at school, boys bringing them in from the ground their fathers worked.

There was nothing else in the box.

No one spoke while I pawed through my daddy’s souvenirs, what he’d deemed keepable from his life, this pile his legacy to me and my momma.

There were a few picture postcards from New Orleans, a steamboat, Jackson Square, another of a smiling black mammy, a little burrhead next to her, the two of them grinning and holding huge pieces of watermelon.

Scrolled across the bottom of the picture were the words Greetings from New Orleans. On the backs of the cards were no words, no stamps. Only blank space and the small words telling who’d printed up the cards. I held them in my hand, just looking at the empty space.

“He couldn’t write, ” Benjamin said. “Nor read, of course, neither.”

I put them down, then pushed around an old comb, a coil of rope, a belt.

I said, “When was he there? In New Orleans.”

No one answered, and I didn’t look up, didn’t want them to believe I might truly be interested. But I was.

Momma was the one to speak. She said, “That’s where your daddy and I had our honeymoon, right down in the French Quarter. That’s where he got those.”

“Oh, ” I said.

Benjamin took up the cards, held them out to Momma. “You want to keep these? ” he asked.

“I” she started, and I held my breath. She stopped rocking, then slowly put out a hand to him, took the cards. Benjamin put his hand down as soon as she’d taken them, and Momma let the cards rest on her lap, her hands holding one another again. She didn’t look at them.

Then I found the tin of pomade, there beneath a shirt with three buttons missing. I opened up the can, saw inside the dull pink swirls, evidence of his fingertips. I brought the tin close to my nose, took in the sweet smell, but this time it was too much for me, so that I gagged a moment, brought the tin down and snapped back on the lid as quick as I could.

Benjamin must have thought I’d begun to cry, because he put his hand to my back again, the same touch he’d given yesterday when we’d stood looking at my newly dead father, and said, “Now, honey, you go on ahead and cry.”

But I got my voice from somewhere, tried my best to make it the same iron my momma had. I said, “Don’t you worry about me, ” and reached down to the bottom of the sack where a photograph lay face down, all I could see of it the curlicued edges of the paper, the white back faded to brown.

I picked it up, turned it over. It was a picture of a man, the photograph soft and worn, as though it’d been crumpled and rolled flat any number of times. He stood next to a big wingback chair, his elbow resting on top, the other hand on his hip. His chin was hard, the bones in his cheeks high, his skin even darker than my daddy’s. His eyes were black, turned from the camera to something far off. He had on a white hat, the crease in the crown perfect, the vest he wore black and white stripes, gray pants. His boots shone in the picture, one foot crossed over the other so that the toe pointed down and rested on the Persian rug beneath him. Even through the wrinkles and folds of the photograph I could feel the attitude he bore, the one that kept the eyes focused somewhere else, the hand at the hip, his head tipped just a hair to the left, as if daring the photographer to tell him to hold it up straight.

Before I could think of what I might be asking, I said, “Who is this?

” Again no one answered, and I waited, the photograph in my hand.

I looked up from it after a few moments, saw Benjamin eyeing my momma.

I turned to her. Her eyes were on the window, searching for something I couldn’t imagine, and she nodded.

Benjamin said, “That’s his daddy. Our daddy. Your grandpa.” He paused.

“Jacob Chetauga. Then Jacob Chandler. Choctaw. Was. He been dead twenty-one years.”

I looked up to Momma. Her eyes were closed now.

I turned to the photograph, tried to figure what this might mean, my grandpa an Indian.

But it only took a moment before I felt my fingers go hot, felt my face flush at the sudden knowledge that things tumbled down from this photograph, down to me and who I was and the part of me that gave me the same black, fine hair my daddy had, the same thin nose and skin that stayed more tan than any child I knew, even through dead winter, while my momma’s skin turned red after twenty minutes outside.

I held it with both hands, ran a finger across the soft paper, and I saw for the first time that no matter how much I’d wished my daddy gone, he would always be with me, here in me, just as he was here in his own daddy. This was me I saw in the photograph.

I stood. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me now, even Momma’s. I said, “This is what I’ll keep, ” and I turned, headed into the kitchen.

Once in there I didn’t know what to do, where else I could go. From where I stood at the sink-pump I could see into the room to the table my daddy lay on, could see, in fact, his legs from the knee down, boots stiff and shiny, pantlegs black. I knew I didn’t want in there, but outside, right out the back door, was the coop and the garden, beyond that the tree he’d be buried under not long from now.

Then Cathe ral stood in the doorway. She was holding a huge blue cookpot, her thin, black arms straining with the weight, the muscles there shiny with sweat. I moved to the screen door, the photograph in one hand, and pushed it open.

She moved in, and already I could smell the food. Chicken, I knew.

And sweet potatoes, and collards and biscuits. Her teeth were clenched, and I wondered how far she’d carried the pot, as she made her way through the kitchen and toward the room my daddy was in.

“You can’t” I started, but by that time she was in the doorway. She froze.

“Lord have mercy, ” she whispered, and turned, her eyes shut, teeth still clenched, sweat across her forehead. She made it to the stove, and set the pot down. She opened her eyes, looked at me only a moment, her eyes never meeting mine, before she brought them to the floor.

She’d never looked at me any longer than that.

Her hands were at her sides, and she shook them a little, loosing up the muscles, her arms still glistening. I’d always imagined she was a couple of years older than me, her hips still narrow but her face with a grimace I figured could only come with a little more age, more knowledge about the world as she moved through it. But all I knew of her was that a nigger girl had showed up at our house not a week after my daddy’d left, and had been here three times a week since to weed out in the garden or to clean out the coop, take eggs into town, chop off the heads and pluck the chickens we would eat, while my momma sat on the porch and I practiced my multiplications. One evening a few weeks after she’d started I asked Momma where she’d come from, how she’d gotten her name.

Cathe ral never spoke to me any more words than she had to, our language a series of nods and glances defining which rows of tomatoes she would work, whether the rhubarb was ready or not, each jerk of a chin or half-word freighted with what we wanted to give it. I knew her name only because I’d asked her after she’d been working for us a week.

Momma’d answered that Cathe ral’s family’d been owned by Catholics in Bogaloosa, and that she’d hired her on now Daddy was gone, that she’d been paying her a nickel a week. I believed her about the name, but I knew that the money paid out wasn’t true, I’d never even seen the two of them talk to each other, much less exchange any money between them.

She was only here, standing at the back screen door each Monday, Wednesday and Friday once I was home from school, or there just at sunup during the summer, waiting for me to signal her what to do.

She gave her arms one last shake, and stopped. The room was choked with the smells of food now, and I realized I hadn’t eaten since the day before.

Then Cathe ral spoke, and for an instant I didn’t know where the voice came from, or whose it was, my mind on chicken and collards and sitting down to eat.

She said, “Missy Cook, she say bring this here to you.”

I hadn’t seen her mouth move, her eyes still on the floor. She put her hands together in front of her, held her fingers.

“Cathe ral? ” I said.

She looked up. “Yes’m? ” she said, her eyes on my chin, then on my chest, my shoulder.

I said nothing, only felt my stomach moving, hungry for what lay in the pot. But I was thinking about her, and about this look between us, and about the full sentence that’d come from her lips.

“I sorry about yo’ papa, ” she said, and finally let down her eyes.

I heard myself say, “Thank you, ” though I hadn’t felt the words form.

She looked up at me again. “Missy Cook, she say tell you one more thing.

She say tell you she the one be paying me to work for y’all. And she say she want you come live with her now yo’ papa gone.” She paused, looked back to the floor. “I mean, now yo’ papa pass on.”

Missy Cook. My mother’s mother, and suddenly I recognized the line in my mother’s chin, and how she’d held it high, and why, perhaps, Pastor had cowered in whatever small way he had last night, the three times I’d met Missy Cook she’d held her chin the same way, up and above us all, her mouth in a frown that let me know no matter what happened that she was here and would always be here. She was here to stay. She was the woman of standing, of bearing. And my mother was her daughter.

She lived in Purvis proper, on Willow Street in a big house with windows and drapes and fine china plates we actually ate off of, my momma and me. The last time we were there was just before Daddy’d left, the other two times I’d been too small to recognize an occasion.

But I’d seen the furniture, and’d been told to stay off of it by the woman who now wanted me to come live with her.

I said nothing, kept my head as level as I could make it, my eyes cold and steady and focused on Cathe ral, her twisted knots of hair, her thin, cotton dress and bare, black feet.

“And be one more thing, ” she whispered. She glanced toward the door into the front room, where my momma and Benjamin and three other men were, none of them making a sound. “She say she going raise you up right, ” she whispered, her eyes on the floor again, her voice so quiet I wasn’t even certain she’d spoken. “She not be making the same mistakes she make with yo’ mama. She say you her last chance in this world.”

She stood with her hands still at her sides, glanced up at me.

I whispered, “She told you to tell me that? ” She shrugged. “Yes’m.

Except the last part. The part about raising you up right, and about the mistakes and all.”

Though my stomach felt as though it might die on me right then, the smell of cornbread and milk gravy now making its way into me, I held on, thinking instead of my momma marrying some halfbreed Choctaw who couldn’t read or write, me being born to the two of them, so that in Missy Cook’s eyes I was the biggest mistake her daughter could ever make. And now I was her personal mission, what she wanted to save from the horrors of low-living in this world.

I looked at the photograph in my hand, wondered at the man there, my grandpa, and what it took to hold your head just that way, who you had to be.

I looked at Cathe ral. I said, “Why did you tell me? ” She shrugged again. “Don’t need no reason.” She paused. “Just figured to warn you.”

Then I wasn’t hungry anymore, and I turned, went into the front room and past them all, nothing any different than when I had left, my daddy’s belongings still spread on the floor. I went to my room, got from under my bed one of my tablets, a pencil. I took one more look at the photograph, then slipped it between pages in the back of the tablet.

When I came back into the kitchen, Cathe ral had already pulled out the food from the pot, heaps of chicken and cornbread, bowls of collards and gravy, a sweet potato pie, all of it in serving dishes from the same fine china we’d eaten from in a three-story house in downtown Purvis.

She turned from the food, glanced at me. I said, “Cathe ral, you know how to write? ” She gave her head a quick shake, put her hands behind her.

I said, “Come with me, ” and I moved to the screen door, pushed it open.

She glanced up again, then looked to the doorway into the front room, as though we were betraying those in there by abandoning this food and who it came from, the woman Cathe ral worked for the woman who wanted my life.

She stood still a moment, then said, “Yes’m, ” and moved toward me.

CHAPTER 3.

I TAUGHT HER TO READ, AND SHE TAUGHT THE MANSHEENDED UP MARRYING, then taught her own children as well, so that the four niggers outside our back door, all of them employed by my Leston, could read and write, and as I stood at the stove and carved off pieces of bone bacon into the skillet, I held some small piece of pride in me, thought that maybe I’d been a good teacher after all.

The four of them nelson, her husband, and their three boys, Sepulcher, Temple and Crecheworked for Leston cutting down pines, then blasting up the stumps and hauling them down to Pascagoula where they’d be turned to turpentine for the war effort. It was my part to feed them all.

Each morning I awoke to fry up eggs and bacon, boil grits and bake biscuits for my family, Cathe ral’s boys, and the rest of Leston’s crew, Garland and JE, cousins of Leston’s, and Toxie, Leston’s nephew, the three of them the supervisors over the crew, then six more niggers, boys and old men from up and down the woods. We had four trucks in all, plus the Caterpillar, none of it in anywheres near good shape, Toxie and Sepulcher working on one or another of them from the time they put their breakfast plates down until they disappeared up the road, headed home.