JEWEL (55 page)

Then she raised a hand, gave the smallest of waves, just a shake of her fingertips, but enough to make me wonder what my life would’ve been like if my last child, the daughter named after my husband’s dead sister, were born a normal child, and I wondered if that child inside the window might well have been named Brenda Kay, her momma out to work somewheres Bailey Grammar, serving up lunches right now to summer school kids her daughter shut up in an empty house right now while a boy had at her, the two of them finding the surprise and sorrow of love.

And I felt then, too, some of the burden and joy, perhaps, that Cathe ral might’ve felt by passing on words I could use, giving to me fair warning of the life to come while she stood here at the bottom of these steps on a cold March night, me there at the top of them while from behind me spilled warm kitchen light, light that fell out onto the cold hard-packed ground out here, light that seemed to illuminate Cathe ral herself.

The girl turned her head from me, nodded to the boy I couldn’t see, the boy I was glad I’d never lay eyes on. Then she quick turned back to me, her mouth and eyebrows and eyes filled with nothing, and she disappeared.

Leston opened Brenda Kay’s door, and she climbed in. I was already in the front seat, windows all down, my forehead and neck and chest and back all drenched in sweat. I hadn’t wanted to stand outside the car while I waited for my daughter and husband to come back. I just wanted in the car, wanted gone from there. Leston closed Brenda Kay’s door, came around to his side, climbed in.

He put the key to the ignition, started up the car, and I looked at him.

He seemed scared somehow, his face flushed even more than it would for the heat. He smiled too hard at me, wouldn’t let his eyes meet mine for more than an instant. He faced forward, both hands on the wheel, and I wondered if he hadn’t been out scouring the woods behind the place, looking for a brass lighter.

I said, “What happened? ” “Nothing, ” he said, shrugged. He put a hand to his shirt pocket for another cigarette, came up empty. “Maybe the heat. I don’t know.”

I looked out the windshield, said, “Where to next? ” “Well, ” he said, and looked straight ahead. He blinked a couple times, said, “Figured I named the first place, Brenda Kay told us to come here.

Figure it’s your turn. You tell us where.”

I was quiet a moment, the only sound the low hum of the engine. I said, “Cathe ral’s.”

I turned to him. He was already looking at me.

I said, “Take me to Cathe ral’s.”

A slow smile came to him. He said, “You want to make amends. That right?

” I could lie to him, I knew, just agree to what he figured could be the only reason I’d want to see her. Or I could deal him the truth, hand him all I knew, which is what I decided to do.

I said, “I don’t know why. But please do it.”

He lost the smile, pulled away from me until his back touched his door.

He said, “Oh, ” then turned in his seat. He reached a hand to the gearshift on the column, put it in gear. “Okay, ” he said, and we were gone, and as we pulled away I imagined behind us the face of a young girl, a girl I decided right then to name Brenda Kay, a bigbosomed girl whose momma wasn’t home, a girl who watched us from an open window, behind her the voice of a boy, calling for her, giving out her name again and again, while she watched us disappear off the face of the earth. I CHAPTER 37.

NELSON SAT OUT FRONT IN A ROCKER NOT MUCH DIFFERENT THAN THE one that’d been thrown on a fire in a backyard in Purvis. Leston parked the car in front of the house, and Nelson stopped rocking, slowly stood while Leston climbed out the car.

Calling the place a house was giving it more credit than is due, it was a shanty on the right side of an ancient road, to my left a wide field of sweet potatoes, and suddenly all of it was too much like the shanty I’d stood in front of and’d spilled a story to a colored woman while Cleopatra Sinclair and Bessy Swansea stole her food. I got a cold shiver just then, the feeling an ugly surprise in all the heat.

Nelson seemed thinner, shorter, and wore thick glasses, though there wasn’t any doubt it was him as he stepped off the small front porch, an old man with steps as ginger as Brenda Kay’s had been out in the Gulf, each one measured and certain as he headed for the car. His head was down, and slowly he shook it back and forth. One hand was in his back pocket, the other to his forehead, a cigarette between his fingers. He talked to himself as he came toward us. Only when Leston saw he wasn’t going to stop, was headed right up to the hood, did Leston finally close his door, slowly come round to meet him.

I watched all this from the front seat, Brenda Kay asleep behind me, it’d taken almost forty-five minutes to find the place, neither Leston nor me remembering exactly where they lived. I’d been here only once before, couldn’t remember why. I only remembered a huge live oak that’d grown halfway out into their road so that the road jogged out the way of it. When we finally stumbled onto that queer bend in the road, the tree grown even bigger, the branches hanging even lower to the road, I knew we were only a few minutes away, and I’d said, “Brenda Kay, we’re going to see Cathe ral, ” and turned in my seat to face her.

She’d nodded off, her head back and lolling side to side, mouth open, hair matted down on her head. The growth was so thick back here, so close to the road and the car, we weren’t moving fast enough to cool things down.

Nelson stopped in front of the car. He was old, older than I could have imagined, his hair gone white, wrinkles at his throat, the glasses magnifying his eyes so that in the late afternoon light they were huge and wet.

“Mister Hilburn? ” Nelson said, and brought the hand down from his forehead, the other out of his back pocket. He leaned back as though he couldn’t bend his neck, and looked at my husband.

“Nelson, ” Leston said, and put out a hand.

A moment or two passed between them before Nelson looked down from Leston to his hand, then slowly put his own hand out, and the two shook.

Three or four nails on Nelson’s hand’d gone bad, the nails themselves white and crumbled and dead.

He said, “We heard you was here, ” and smiled, slowly shook Leston’s hand. “We was wondering if you’d stop in.” Leston let go Nelson’s hand, said, “How’d you know we were back? ” “Word, ” Nelson said, and nodded, satisfied at his answer.

He turned to me, sitting there in the front seat and taking all this in as though it were some performance, staged right off the front of the car just for me. Nelson nodded, said, “Miss Jewel, ” and put his hands in his back pockets.

I climbed out then, made careful not to close the door too hard for fear of waking Brenda Kay. I walked to the end of the fender, nodded.

Though I felt I ought to put out my hand, let him shake it, I didn’t.

I only smiled, looked at Leston.

“Nelson, ” Leston started, rubbed the back of his neck. “We come by to say hello.” He paused. “You looking good.”

“No complaints, ” he said, and slowly shook his head, the move exaggerated for how slow it was. “Just growing old in the Lord, ” he said. He looked up at Leston, still smiling, and said, “How you doing youselves? ” “Fine, ” Leston said. “Fine. Just out looking around at the old haunts, old stomping grounds.” He swatted at a mosquito on his arm, smiled.

Nelson turned to me, his whole body moving, even his feet, as if his back were a board, unable to bend. He faced me, said, “You bring along yo’ beautiful daughter? Missy Brenda Kay.”

I nodded, smiled at him. “Right here, ” I said, and turned, made for her window.

He followed me, and I wondered how old he really was. It seemed at some time I’d known he was five or six years older than Cathe ral, who was a year or so older than me. Maybe sixty-five, sixty-six, I figured, then wondered what I’d look like, how I’d walk in that not so distant future.

He leaned over, peered in the window, watched her in silence a few moments. Then he stood straight, smiled at me, his eyes growing even larger with the smile. He said, “Bless her heart.”

I was tired of the pleasantries then, tired of the slow movement all this was carrying with it. All of life here in Mississippi carried with it this small dance around the matters at hand rather than talk on the matters, and I smiled back at him, cut my eyes to Leston just behind him, gave a sharp nod he would know.

But before Leston could say or do anything, in only enough time for him to blink at my silent demand that he tell Nelson what it was we were really here for, Nelson said, “She be in the house. She waiting for you.”

I looked at him, saw he’d lost the smile in just that moment. He turned, his feet moving in the slow way they had on his long march from the porch to the car, and now I was behind him, had no choice but to look at the black pants he had on, at how the cuffs were frayed through all the way round, the elastic in the suspenders stretched out and ragged so that they had nothing to do with holding up his pants. It was his old man’s paunch that held them up, and as he walked in front of me, I thought of how this was the man who’d leaned into the light cast from my kitchen doorway to touch his wife’s elbow, tell her it was time to go on home while she prophesied my life, gave me God’s will whether I wanted to hear it or not. This was the man who’d led her on home after that, out into a moonless night, me left outside my kitchen with only the knowledge of what my life would hold, the baby you be carrying be yo’ hardship, yo’ test in the world.

I walked behind him, moved closer and closer to his porch and toward the woman I still wasn’t certain I knew what to say to, what to ask.

But she was the woman, I knew then, I’d been heading toward every day since we’d moved here, and maybe every day since I’d thrown her out of my house, forcing fault on her, blame for the fire that’d scarred my baby’s legs.

Scars that, in a twisted blessing all its own, had finally gotten us away from here, and to California, as much the Promised Land as any place could ever be.

We finally made it to the porch, and I looked up.

I do not know what I expected to see, did not know if I’d wanted her to be older than I remembered, or younger, heavier or thinner or grayer, stooped or standing tall. She’d worn an old quilt over her shoulders the night she prophesied my life, had on a shapeless cotton dress when she showed up at our back door toting food the morning after my daddy’d been killed, had on my own yellow sweater the day I’d slapped her in my own stab at delivering myself of the guilt I bore for being no more than the selfish granddaughter of a selfish grandmother, me a woman who Cathe ral’d already known was for I saking the heart of her husband to further the good of my retarded daughter. She was the one to lead me, I finally saw, from life into life into life, had seen me move from the shack in the woods to my grandmother’s house, had seen me carted away to the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls, had delivered my first five children into this world and’d warned me of the smile of God on the sixth. So many lives she’d marshaled me into, only to wind down to this, the porch of her own home.

She stood in the doorway of the shanty, a hand to one doorjamb, the other buried in the pocket of the brown plaid dress she had on. I couldn’t see a single hair on her head for the blue kerchief she wore, so I couldn’t say whether she’d gone gray or white or salt and pepper.

She was still tall, still thin, still only and always the same woman, Cathe ral.

But the piece of sorrow she’d worn in her eyes the morning I’d slapped her, the morning she’d taken that slap and then offered me her other cheek, was huge now, exploded in her eyes so that there seemed no touching on what misery she’d known. This seemed the only difference in her, her eyes, the whites of them brilliant and cold against her black skin, filled with a brilliant and cutting sorrow.

Cathe ral said, “You come here looking for comfort, then go on home.”

Nelson stopped, leaned back and saw his wife. He whispered, “Don’t go to carrying on now. These Mr. Hilburn, Miss Jewel.”

Cathe ral didn’t move, only let her eyes slice into mine, those same eyes that’d seen God once she’d surfaced from the Pearl River, baptized in the same river as I’d been. Her God was and always would be, I could see, some different face, some different voice and angle, one I’d never know.

I said, “Didn’t come for comfort.”

“Then you came for Hell, ” she shot back at me, though her face hadn’t changed, the crisp wrinkles across her forehead and down her cheeks giving away nothing.

“Cathe ral, ” Nelson whispered. He made it to the rocker, just touched one arm of it, then turned, slowly lowered himself down to the seat.

He didn’t start up the rocking again, only sat with both feet firm on the ground, hands on his knees. He was looking past us all, and for a moment I thought he might be looking at Leston, still just behind me.

But then he blinked, lifted his chin a little higher, and I could see he was looking someplace altogether different, some place I hadn’t yet been.

He said, “We lost a boy year and five month ago. It been hard on us.”

He paused, and I felt myself swallow, looked to Cathe ral for her reaction to his words.

Her eyes were right on mine, and I had to break her gaze, look down at something, anything, and found I was staring at Nelson’s knees, at those black pants again and how thin the material was, skin straining to break through, it seemed, though it was only an old man’s knees, an old man’s pair of pants.

“Sepulcher, ” he whispered, and the name hung there in the air like it was a ghost itself, taken on form and motion, life of its own.

“We got no comfort to give, ” Cathe ral said out clear and simple.

I looked at her. I said, “I am sorry to hear this, ” and found I couldn’t picture Sepulcher himself, only knew him to be one of the two boys who’d carried me downstairs, loaded me into Leston’s pickup for the bumpy ride into town and the hospital. And he’d been the one to fiddle with the cars out to the repair shed.

She looked away from me, brought a hand up in front of her, looked at it instead. She said, “Dead in a ditch. Eyes open.”