Authors: Cynthia Bond
When her mama got sick a year later, Otha didn’t have the strength to tell her she had been right. She asked for money to visit Marilyn but the Reverend said train tickets didn’t grow on trees. He gave her money for a trip to the funeral four weeks later instead.
The first two children died before they had fully taken root in her womb. Otha had wanted proper graves but the Reverend said that that was blasphemy as they hadn’t come full term and hadn’t been baptized. The next child was Celia and she was the
Reverend’s child from the beginning, willed to life by the boom of his voice, smiling at his coos and tickles, crying even as she suckled at Otha’s breast. Then five more lost children until her boy Ephram came in ’29.
By this time the Reverend was hitting her good and proper when, he said, she deserved it. He hated to see her reading and would slap her whenever he caught her at it without first asking if she had finished her chores. He never let her cut her hair, but bristled if she primped in front of the mirror.
When Ephram was five, Grueber’s mill went up in flames. It took three whole months before it was up and running, during which time the collection plates suffered greatly. So much so that Otha had to take a job in Newton making lace at Miss Barbara’s Bridal Necessities. The Reverend had taken her there himself early one Monday morning. He’d said that Paula Renfolk, Miss Barbara’s maid, had told him about the job, but when they got there, Paula seemed surprised to see them, and her husband and Miss Barbara were, oddly, on speaking terms. Even so much as for her to make a donation of fabric and notions to the children of his parish, and for him to follow her up the stairs of the shop to lift the heavy box, and then stay up there for a good twenty-five minutes.
Paula had leaned over and scolded Otha. She told her that she’d best keep her husband satisfied at home or deadly trouble would surely befall him. She’d told her that she’d seen Miss Barbara donate plenty to her husband when the shop first opened. Said no White fella would give her the time of day till she got those new teeth from Dallas. Even after they came in that blue medical box, she’d still made plenty of donations to the Reverend.
When Otha asked her husband about it that evening, he
slapped her so hard that blood filled up her mouth. After that, Otha kept her eyes on her work.
Which, truth be told, was not a sacrifice, because, besides her son Ephram, the beauty of lace was her one true love. Her mother had taught her how to move her fingers, how to stretch the wedge of the lacing tat and loop the fine silk thread. Her work was impeccable and soon she developed a reputation. Women from as far away as Pickettville and Beaumont came to Miss Barbara’s because of Otha’s intricate and delicate work there in the small dim room at the back of the shop. Often Ephram sat with her for hour upon hours, watching her work. Although the Reverend expressly forbid it, she silently taught him, stitching slowly when his eyes rested on her work, tilting the pattern downward if he leaned towards her. In this way they shared many evenings before getting on the Red Bus to Liberty.
The Reverend had taken to slipping out most nights. Otha assumed it was to see another woman—perhaps even, if Paula had been right, Miss Barbara, for which he surely would be killed. He had been betraying Otha for years with sisters of his own flock. She could always tell who by the way their eyes leapt and danced when the Reverend placed a hand on their arms or shoulders, by the sly cut of their smiles when they greeted her each Sunday. Otha expected and often found telltale signs on his person: a soiled handkerchief, the pungent scent of a woman, a stray pressed hair curling about a button or in his undergarments.
But Otha started finding other, more disturbing articles. She found a tiny Black doll with a pin through its neck in his breast pocket one evening. One night she found a small red velvet pouch filled with a smell so foul she almost regurgitated, another time some type of fang wrapped in sinew. She would come across
bits of garlic tied to doorposts and small covered holes in her vegetable patch. When she dug into the earth with frightened hands she would always find a strange assortment of bones and nail clippings. But the last item she had found sent her into the piney woods in secret pursuit of her husband. It was the evening before Easter 1937. Ephram was only eight.
That afternoon, Otha had been going through the laundry basket. She had been unable to locate her good bottom sheet. The second best had been on the bed two days now and the Reverend was a stickler when it came to cleanliness, especially on a Sunday. She had searched high and low. It was not in the washroom, not on the bedroom shelves. The thing became a matter of pride for her, she simply could not have lost her single good bottom sheet. So she began looking in unusual places. She searched through the storm cellar, behind fig and peach preserves. Rising uneasiness caused her to ransack the attic and the smokehouse. Finally, balled in a gap of earth under the rotting wall of the unused outhouse, she found it. It was stiff with mud and something gooey dried hard like glue. It was not until Otha brought the sheet to her nose and smelled the low musk salt did she know it was blood. A chill circled her throat and grabbed her diaphragm. She smelled it again and knew that something had been killed there. She lay on the ground until her heart filled her brain with reason. Her hands were moving like air as she lay on the earth and it took her a moment to notice them. When she did she calmed them against her breast. She had been lacing. The movements always brought comfort. She stuffed the sheet back under the outhouse and went to find her children.
Celia, fourteen, was baking for her father, chocolate layer cake, his favorite. Celia was not a particularly inspired cook but she had
an iron-hard will and determination to learn. Celia was fine. Then she went in search of Ephram. Her husband hated the boy with a deep, unruly passion. Otha feared the reason, but pushed it out of her head as quickly as it had come. She hunted in all of Ephram’s favorite spots until she found him feeding fish at Marion Lake. She tried to quiet her heart at the sight of him, little legs curled under him, his breath so smooth and steady. But a bubble of fear stole up from her chest and she could not stop herself from crying when he turned to look at her. A small cloud of worry knitted across his face so she reached out and smoothed it down. She sat beside him and stared out at the water.
“You all right, Mama?” her son asked.
She ran her hand over his small square head. His father had kept his hair clipped so close to the scalp that it felt a bit like a new peach. “There’s not even enough here for a part.”
She watched her son smile. It was an old joke but he kept a fresh grin for whenever she told it. Dragonflies darted by, their wings catching rainbows. They sat so quietly that they heard the lean of the grass and the nuzzling pines. They were quiet people, always had been. He was her stock, had her daddy’s brow and her mother’s grace. There was nothing of the Reverend in him, which made it easy to pull him near. She wanted to tell him about wolves in the world and a gut-wrenching kind of danger. Otha could feel it rushing past the trees towards her. Her heart sped in her chest. Her son’s eyes were so large and dark, his lashes so thick. He peered up at her and she leaned down and kissed him where the part should have been.
She didn’t know that her fingers were moving until Ephram looked down at them.
Their eyes met for a moment. She smiled and shrugged. Then
he mashed his face into her, his spindly arms little spider things reaching to hold tighter. So she gathered him up in her lap like she had when he was a bitty thing, not the big boy he was now, and the two watched as evening crept in like a thief and stole the rest of day.
That night after the house was asleep the Reverend slipped out, but not before walking into his son’s room. Otha was behind him, feet padding softly on the floor. She peeked in and watched her husband leaning low over the sleeping boy, rumbling strange words while his hands swept the air over Ephram’s body. He left a red velvet pouch over the head of her son’s bed. She watched as he went to the trash receptacle, opened his handkerchief and gathered tiny crescents of the boy’s fingernails he had clipped after dinner. Then he started out. Otha ran like silent lightning and hid behind the closet door. He walked right by her and out of the house. She walked into Ephram’s room and ripped the velvet bag from his headboard. Her boy kept sleeping. She sped in bare feet out into the night. She heard a twig break in the distance and she followed. The moon naked and whole above as she tracked noises so quiet that they registered in her unconscious. In this way she walked in her white gown, her hand tight about the red velvet. Where was he taking her boy’s nails? Where? She felt the same danger rushing towards her like water. Like a flood rising as she crept after her husband. At one point he stopped and looked back. She ducked down and stopped breathing, then he was off again towards Marion Lake. She saw a glow in the distant clearing, a light flaring in the black thicket woods. Her husband was walking towards it with clippings from her son, and so she followed. As she got closer she could see the trees around it, some of the branches seemed to wave and move, until Otha got close
enough to see that they were the raised arms of men, staring into the flames. They were waiting for something.
Otha crept closer, as quiet as the air. A wide pine ahead would hide her. She stopped and dropped to her belly, lifted by her elbows so she could see.
Her husband joined the group. The men dropped their arms and parted. He stood taller among them. Without moving a muscle they all seemed to bend down to him. Otha felt a flush of heat through her skin, as if she were standing in front of the pit fire as well.
From this distance Otha watched the men’s blurred images take shape and form. Jaws and noses assembled into familiar faces. Otha’s breath halted as she saw they were men she already knew. Friends—deacons from her husband’s congregation. Men she had shared hymn books with for years, who had worn their Sunday best as they carried the brass collection plates. Men with patient smiles and familes. What were they doing standing before these flames? Otha lifted herself a bit more to better see their expressions. Even at that distance there was something in their eyes that seemed to crackle with the flames. Something she had never seen on Sundays or at P & K or at town functions. It sent her heart into her throat and made it hard to swallow.
In the red gold of the flames, Otha saw two men bring out a speckled calf, white with red dots—it looked like the Simpkins heifer calf not more than six months old. Eyes tender as creatures are who are new to the earth. The calf was scared. A baritone in the church choir, Josua Perdy flapped open a white sheet with strange markings on it—a black circle and twisting lines—and spread it on the ground. She watched as Deacon Marcus, the man
who always bought his wife a bouquet of flowers on Friday, slowly tipped the calf over—it fell with a loud thump and let out a high, lonely mewl. Like a frightened child. Like a—and they bound its feet with a red rope. Tight, too tight, crisscrossed its legs. The animal began crying, long moans rising above the flames. Otha didn’t know she was crying too, until she heard the soft drops on the leaves beneath her chin.
As if part of an orchestrated dance, men in slick city clothes and polished shoes stepped out of the shadows and joined the circle. Men she had never seen—tall, high-yellow Creole men who looked like they had come from New Orleans. As they joined the circle, one by one, they handed her husband what looked like folded cash, each nodding, until her husband’s pockets were bulging and full. They were paying for something yet to come. Yet to—Otha felt the stars tilting, the world spin … it was too much, the thing to come.
She heard her husband speaking to the men. Their eyes rapt, alive. She could only make out a phrase here: “… at the peak of …,” then nothing, so she pushed against the wall of fear and crept even closer until the dangerous melody of his voice fingered the loose edges of her hair.
The calf’s sides were rising and falling like a bellows, skin so thin near its ribs. The heifer began to quiet some, but kept a steady beat, its hollow call unanswered. No mama. No field of grass. Only fire and the eyes of those men.
“Welcome all. Welcome all. Obeah, will you draw the circle?”
Obeah, a squatted man, opened a heavy tan sack and poured red powder in a wide circle around the men.
Otha looked around the forest, hoping for something to stop.
This. To stop it. She looked up. The sky was heavy and a mist hung about the tops of the trees and the calf was groaning low. Nothing. No one was coming.
“We want to welcome our out-of-town members, come down here to experience the way we Sabine Negroes do our business.” Her husband smiled so pretty at the crowd and gave off a little wink. She had never seen him look so handsome.
“Now y’all, we got us two initiates joining us today if they got the grist.”
Two young boys, who looked to be about twelve, turned. Otha gasped as she recognized young Chauncy Rankin. His face fresh and upturned as if he was getting a medal. His younger brother Percy was the second. The men formed a tighter circle. Otha crept closer, and crouched lower still. Little Chauncy Rankin—he’d once stolen a pecan pie from her kitchen window.
All of them, all of the men began speaking into the flames, but they weren’t words, they were chanting something that Otha couldn’t make out. Words like snakes slithering from their mouths that made Otha’s hands fly to her belly, where she imagined her soul to be.
Her husband lifted his hands with a wide embellishment he’d never wasted on his congregation. His voice rang clear through the air. “I speaks these truths, my brothers. They done come into they manhood high time, so I speaks to them and to the rest of you who done forgot.”
Penter Rankin called out, “Tell the truth!”
The Reverend flashed the grace of his body against the flames and leapt up onto a stone. “Now Brothers, I was a little boy when my papa sat me down and tell me this. Just like his papa told him. Just like I’m telling y’all cuz I don’t want you getting down on
your knees asking no God for nothing, not no fine clothes or no grand house. Don’t be asking for no wife to love you, or to feed your children neither. I seen men doing that whiles the whole family starve bug-eyed and them still down on they knees when they carried the youngest one out. I don’t want no man on earth to be that kind of a fool.”