Authors: BRET LOTT
“You two are married, ” I whispered.
“Oh, Momma, ” Billie Jean whined out, “you spoiled it, ” and she let go his arm, came to me, held me and hugged me hard.
I hadn’t even the time to react, only stood there with Billie Jean’s arms tight round me, my eyes wide open and on this Gower Cross, who stood now with his hands together in front of him, smiling.
Then the force of what’d already happened without any bit of help or hindrance from me took over, and I closed my eyes, held her myself, and I started crying, crying at the shock of it, at the grief of it, at the joy. And I cried, I was surprised to find in myself, at the relief of it. Now I knew what’d been on her mind all this time, even since May when she’d been rinsing dishes and giving what I saw now was a smile she felt obliged to give, right on up to her not buying any clothes, and last night sitting silent in the back seat of the car. Another of my children’d been taken away from me, three down now, the family growing smaller, it seemed, with every day.
I opened my eyes, patted Billie Jean’s back, heard her own crying. She pulled away from me, her hands on my shoulders, and we both looked at each other, crying and laughing now, too.
Then she held up her left hand, wiggled her fingers to show me the thin gold band on her finger. She was married.
We turned back to Gower, who was rocking on his heels now. Annie stood back by the kitchen door, her mouth open wide as her eyes. Brenda Kay, oblivious, had gotten hold of an old piece of steel wool from the garbage can, sat on the kitchen floor with it cupped in her hands, looking at it.
“Oh, Brenda Kay, ” I said, and laughed, went to her.
Gower cleared his throat, said, “I’ll take good care of your daughter, y’all can bet.”
I squatted next to Brenda Kay, took the steel wool from her, and heard steps up the porch.
Leston pulled back the screen door, stepped in, wiping his hands on one of the old rags from the shed. He looked at Gower as though he were the only person could be in his kitchen right then. He stopped, Wilman just behind him and with a rag of his own. Leston tucked his rag in his back pocket.
Billie Jean had her arm looped in Gower’s again. She’d stopped crying, but gave out a few quick huffs, getting back her breath.
“Won’t be any bets about it, ” Leston said. “I heard from outside.
And you will take good care of her.”
He put out his hand, his face straight and stone, held it out there in the middle of the room.
Billie Jean gave Gower, who’d suddenly lost his smile, the smallest of shoves. “Oh, ” he said. “Oh. Yes sir, ” and the smile came back, and he went to Leston, took his hand, shook it hard.
I waited for something else, some other words or movement, anything.
His words, the surprise of his blessing, had startled me, too, and I wondered whether there would come from him any more words, or even a hug for his daughter, my new husband, the one resolved to take charge of this family, capable of anything now.
But he only stepped back, nodded again. He reached into his front pocket, pulled from it the roll of bills that was everything we had on this earth, and I watched as he peeled off five twenty-dollar bills, and handed them out to Gower.
“Mr. Hilburn ” he said, and Billie Jean cut in, “Daddy ” “You take it, ” he whispered, “and you do with it what y’all see fit. No more arguing over it.”
“Take it, ” I said, my eyes on Billie Jean’s, hers brimming again. She looked at me, tried to smile, and I nodded. This was the way, I saw, my husband believed he could best bless his children, his loss of work, his selling bundles of kindling for so long a humiliation only overridden by money, and what it could promise.
Gower went to Leston, slowly brought up his hand. He took the bills without looking at them, put them in his pocket. He shook Leston’s hand again, pumped it hard and hard, his face so red I thought it might burst.
Wilman stood next to Leston, held out his hand to Gower, who quick dropped Leston’s, started in on Wilman’s. My second son only nodded at Gower, Wilman’s deep brown eyes never blinking, no smile coming across his face. He could have been Leston thirty years ago, I thought, his face so straight and serious, the perfect mirror of his father’s right then.
Finally Gower let go his hand, and Billie Jean stepped in, hugged her daddy, who hesitated a moment before he brought his own arms up, wrapped them round his daughter, and smiled. He smiled, his eyes closed, and I could see inside him some same sense of relief I’d felt, here was another one gone.
Then Billie Jean hugged Wilman, then Annie, whose mouth still hung open, and then she squatted, hugged Brenda Kay, still on the floor, legs spread.
Billie Jean pulled away a moment later, turned and pointed to Gower, still smiling and with his hands in front of him. She said, “Brenda Kay, this is your brother-in-law, Gower.”
Brenda Kay turned to the garbage can again, reached in, but Billie Jean caught her hand, pulled it out. “Gower’s part of our family now, ” she said, looking into Brenda Kay’s eyes.
“Bijen, ” she shouted, and smiled. Then she lost the smile, reached up and touched at Billie Jean’s eyes as though they’d been wounded, as though maybe, I thought, she’d been burned too, her eyebrows knotted up, and she made an O with her mouth.
“I’m okay, darling, ” Billie Jean said, and sniffed. “I’m fine. I just want you to say hello to your new brother, Gower.” She turned from Brenda Kay, looked at her husband.
Brenda Kay followed her gaze, finally settled her eyes on Gower. “Gow?
” she shouted.
“Yes, ” Gower said, and rocked on his heels again. “Yes, hello, Miss Brenda Kay.” He brought up a hand, gave a short wave, almost a salute.
“Gow, ” Brenda Kay shouted, “you fat! ” And the news and shock and surprise of it all was over, none of us able to hold back. The laughing started right up, though I’d said “Brenda Kay” as stern as I could, and though Gower Cross lost his own smile a few moments, a hand going right to his stomach and touching it like he was trying to hide.
Even Billie Jean was laughing, a hand covering her mouth as her shoulders shook. Then Gower took it up once he’d seen there was no fighting it, and he laughed, laughed and laughed too loud and long, but he laughed.
Above it I could hear Brenda Kay’s “Huh huh huh! ” again and again, tuneless and disconnected, but laughter all the same.
A few minutes later they drove off in Gower’s truck, a black company-issue Ford, Billie Jean’s hand waving the hankie out her window.
We were all on the front porch, and once they were gone we were silent.
Annie and Wilman and Brenda Kay turned back to the house, went on inside, leaving my husband and me out there in the growing dark.
“Well, ” I said. “Another one down.” I turned to Leston, saw him staring off after the truck, though it’d already disappeared. His hands were in his back pockets.
He turned to me. I could see only half his face in the light from inside. He was smiling. He shrugged, then leaned over, kissed me on the lips. He hadn’t even taken his hands out of his pockets.
He said, “Not much time to worry over them. We got our own lives to go.”
He paused. “We’re going to California tomorrow.”
I only looked up at him, surprised at his kiss, his smile, at his saying in words we had a life to worry over.
He turned, went to the screen door, held it open. “Miss Jewel, ” he said, “after you.”
That night we slept on mattresses on the floor, and near morning a storm rolled in, filled the house with low thunder and the soft call of summer rain, chilling down the air round us all. At five we got up, washed our faces, ate cold biscuits and sausage I’d cooked the night before, and we left.
The children’d barely woken up, were already on their way back asleep as we backed away from the house, the front of it suddenly lit up brighter than any day I’d ever known by the headlights of our new car.
The house seemed almost to call out to me, to want me back in it, back in the comfort of knowing what the life we were leaving was all about, no money, Brenda Kay and healing her up and taking her to the bathroom and washing her and wiping up after her, Wilman and Annie to school, Leston and his uniform and cigarettes. Then came Cathe ral and all the children I’d served at the cafeteria, then all our days before, the niggers out in the dark eating food I’d cooked, Leston and JE and Toxie and Garland and the tips of their cigarettes waving round in the dark mornings, the smell of pine tar and engine oil thick in the air all day long.
I looked to Leston, his arm across the top of the seat, his head turned as he backed out.
I looked again to the house, watched it go dark as we turned, the headlights poking out at first the heavy green forest, then the road before us, and I could feel my heart picking up, the fear in it and the clear hope, and I looked at Leston again.
He stopped, shifted gears. Before he gave it the gas, he turned to me, smiled, though I could barely make out his face in the dark, could see beneath the brim of his hat only the hint of his mouth, the corners up.
He said, “Miss Jewel Hilburn.” I smiled, said, “Yes? ” He said, “Miss Jewel Hilburn, we’re taking care.”
“Yes, ” I said, and swallowed, my heart still going away. “I guess we are, ” I said.
He nodded, gave the pedal a push, and we were off, headed for California in our brand new 52 Plymouth, new clothes in old suitcases in the trunk, my retarded daughter settled between my last two children in the back seat. I turned, saw all of them with their heads back, mouths open in sleep.
And I saw beyond them, out the rear window and fast disappearing in the distance we were putting behind us, the house. No dust whirled up behind us for the quiet rain we’d gotten, and I kept my eye on our old home until I lost it for the trees and bushes and all else green there in Mississippi. i BOOK TWO CHAPTER 22.
THIS WAS A HEAT I D NEVER KNOWN. THE SUN WASN’T EVEN UP YET, AND already the small of my back was wet, my hair and eyes and hands hot.
But it was a dry heat, and as I watched the sun come up above the jagged mountains to the east, mountains we’d cut through late yesterday afternoon, mountains that let out into the miles and miles of sand hills we’d passed through before finally hitting this town, Indio, I took in that heat, decided I would want it with me the rest of my days.
I stood in the motel parking lot, the rising sun turning mountains that’d been gray in the twilight before sunrise suddenly black as it rose above them. I started in on my first day in California, and wondered if that sun could possibly be the same one that’d seen over every day of my life so far.
The sun was different, yes, and the air, and the light, and the shadows cast once it’d gone down last night. The mountain to the west what the waitress at the diner last night had called Mount San Jacinto, spelled with ainstead of a Y, like it sounded, her mouth working a piece of gum all the while, her too-black hair whipped high up atop her head, her makeup so thick I couldn’t be certain how old she might’ve been that mountain swallowed up the sun early, yet still the sunset oranges and purples and reds all around lit up the desert so that it stayed light and hot and dry long into the night, and made this an even stranger and more beautiful place than I could have imagined. This was California, and last night had been our first night here.
“Momma, ” Wilman said from behind me, and I turned, saw him loading one of the suitcases into the trunk of our brand-new car. Here we were, in California, in summer heat and desert, Mount San Jacinto purple in the light from the new sun.
“Momma, get Annie out here to give me a hand, hey? ” Wilman said, and lifted the suitcase in, a beat old cardboard thing tied with ropes, and I was glad it’d be hidden away in the trunk when we finally arrived in Los Angeles today. The car was what I wanted seen of us, our brand-new car.
We’d spent the first night in Natchitoches, the second just outside Ft.
Worth, Leston letting Wilman take over the wheel for a half hour every hundred miles or so, so he could nap. The next night we spent in Big Spring, where we met up with James and Eudine and Judy, who’d driven down from Plainfield where James’d set up a-practice taking care of livestock.
I’d called them from Ft. Worth the night before, asked where we could meet them, as Eudine had family down there to Big Spring. We ended up having to meet at the parking lot of the grocery store in the middle of town, then following them to Eudine’s Aunt Charity’s trailer just west of there.
I’d figured on the reunion in the parking lot being just as loud as any meeting with Eudine could be, but when she stepped from their car, her blonde hair stringy and wet, her face sweating at the heat, and’d stood up to show she was wearing a maternity smock, her belly poking out near to finished, I cried out even louder than she did, went to her, held her.
Then baby Judy came out from the back seat, her eyes heavy with sleep, perfect bangs cut across her forehead and plastered there with sweat, her red pigtails dark and wet. I leaned down, picked her up, though she made to push me away for a moment or two before settling herself on my hip, this feel of a baby in my arms as much a part of me as how I made biscuits, as lacing my shoes.
“She’s a sweet three-and-a-half-year-old, ” Eudine said, holding her hand as Judy yawned. Eudine looked from Judy to me to Annie, half whispered in the way she had so that everyone in attendance could hear, “They say the worst is terrible twos, but I think this age ought to be called throttle-‘em threes, ” and she laughed, showed she was chewing a big piece of pink gum. She hugged Annie, started in on how grown-up she looked.
Meantime, James and Leston and Wilman were all shaking hands, eyes meeting only a moment or so before darting out to the flat desert prairie at the far end of town, to the horizon that might as well have been a million miles away.
“Where’s Billie Jean? ” I heard James ask, even though Eudine’d already started in about the sheer hell of diapers, and how she and James weren’t willingly walking into having this next baby, if we knew what she meant.
Leston smiled, shook his head at James’ question. He took off his hat, swiped at his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “Damndest thing, ” I heard him say. He looked at the oiled dirt of the parking lot, rubbed a toe of his boot in it. “Got married day before we took out. Man named Gower Cross.” He looked up at James, who still had his hands on his hips. Hot wind picked at all their hair, lifted it and settled it again and again. “You don’t mean it, ” James said.