The Ground Beneath Her Feet (17 page)

The making of a bad girl: Born Nissa Shetty, she grew up in a shack in the middle of a cornfield outside Chester, Virginia, above Hopewell, between Screamersville and Blanco Mount, down a nothing track snaking east from 295. Corn on both sides of her and goats in the back. Her mother, Helen, Greek-American, full-figured, nervy, a reader of books, a dreamer, a woman of humble origins who carried herself well and hoped for much, fell during the World War II man shortage for a sweet-talking Indian gent, a lawyer—how’d he get all the way out there?
Indians get everywhere, isn’t it? Like sand
—who married her, fathered three daughters in three years (Nissa, born during the Normandy landings, was the middle one), went to jail for malpractice, got struck off the register, came out of jail after Nagasaki, told his wife he had revised his sexual preferences, went off to Newport News to set
up as a butcher with his beefy male lover, “as the female in the relationship,” in Vina’s words, and never wrote or called or sent money or presents for his daughters on their birthdays or Christmas. Helen Shetty in that loveless peace tumbled into a downward spiral of drink, pills and debt, couldn’t hold a job, and the kids went to hell at high speed, until she was rescued by a jack-of-all-trades builder, John Poe, a widower with four kids of his own, who met her drunk and blurting in a bar, heard her out, reckoned she had good reason to despair, called her a good-looking woman who deserved a break, swore to look after her, got her off the sauce, took her and her three kids into his simple home and never differentiated between her children and his own, never commented on their dark skins, gave the girls his own name (so that at the age of three Nissa Shetty became Nissy Poe), worked hard earning money to put food in his family’s mouths and clothes on their backs, asked nothing from Helen in return but conventional woman’s work and an agreement that they have no more children, and though she had hoped for high things in her life, she knew how close she’d come to the gutter, so she was lucky to have found this instead, stability, a kind of gruff monosyllabic average love, a generous-hearted man, solid ground under her feet, and if he wanted things old-fashioned, that was an adjustment she was prepared uncomplainingly to make, so the shack was kept spotless, the clothes were cleaned, the children fed and bathed, John Poe’s dinner was hot on the table every night when he came home, and he was right about the children thing too, so she went into the city and had the operation, and that was okay, that was really okay, she had her hands full and this made things easy, he was old-fashioned in bed as well as out of it, didn’t hold with rubbers and such, and now everything was just fine, it was finer than fine, it was fine. Once a week they all went out to the drive-in in John’s pickup, and Helen Poe looked at the stars above instead of those on the screen and thanked them, with certain reservations, for her luck.

If John Poe had a dream, it was of goats. In the corral behind his home there was a white Saanen doe who provided the family with milk, and a small, transient population of Spanish and myotonic goats being bred for the slaughter. Nissy Poe grew up without knowing the taste of cow milk. John Poe told her that goat milk was easier to digest, and even encouraged her to wash her face in it as a beauty treatment,
as Queen Cleopatra used to do. She had learned from her mother never to contradict this big, kindly but dominating man, and she meekly drank down that thin bluish rancid-smelling liquid which she had come to hate. And after the doomed Spanish goats were taken off to the abattoir in their season, there would be nothing but chevon, goat meat, to eat for weeks at a stretch. Helen Poe was not a woman of great culinary skills, and little Nissy came to fear mealtimes above all things, because of the smile she had to paint on her face. John Poe was a man who needed regular thanking for the blessings he bestowed.

After a big goat dinner he would push back his chair and tell the future. These few creatures out back, in the paddock surrounded by a five-foot-high fence with the wire spaces just five inches or so apart, these were just the start, Nissy’s stepfather declared. He wasn’t going to labour for other folks all his days, you bet. A goat farm was what he had in mind. Not a meat farm, though; he held meat goats in something like contempt, especially the myotonics, whose genetic disorders caused them to fall over stiff-legged if they were startled. Some nights, John Poe looked forward to the day when he would go into the dairy-goat business, in Oregon, maybe, or Florida. He rhapsodised about the virtues of the “Swiss” Alpines and Toggenburgs and the “desert” Nubians. He spoke of the delights of goat cheese and goats’ milk soap. On other nights, his vision was of angora and cashmere, and a future in fibre farming in Texas or Colorado. “You’ll like that, with your Oriental blood, huh,” he told Helens daughters. “Cashmere is from Kashmir, India, originally, and angora came from Ankara, Turkey, and the name mohair, which is what we call the cloth made from the hair of the angora goat, is Arabic or such, meaning ‘what we prefer.’ ” The Uzbek black goat, whose wool fibre was longer than the guard hairs and was of high, cashmere-type quality, often cropped up in these reveries. Nissy Poe, Eastern blood and all, came to detest the very words mohair, cashmere and Uzbek. But she smiled and said thank you as required. And John Poe, beer in hand, wafted off into his private Oriental fantasy.

Ormus Cama and I, growing up in India, felt our hearts striving towards the West; how strange it is to think of Vina’s early years under the aegis of that good plain man with his lust for the East, or at least its hairy beasts.

Sometimes John Poe told goat jokes. (Two goats break into the projection room at the drive-in and start munching. “God, this film is good,” sez the first, and the second goes, “Yeah, but I thought the book was better”) However, he did not tolerate such levity in others. A new neighbour dropped by once and said, “Goats, hey. Sure, we dig goats, we were thinking of getting a pet goat, but this guy said to us, ‘Thing about goats is, they’ll eat your car.’ ” After he left, John Poe placed him, his family and their land off limits. The man received a life sentence without ever knowing what he’d done, and John Poe being the man he was, it was a sentence from which there was no possibility of appeal.

It was a home without privacy, the children stacked in their bunks three and four to a room. Some of them grew up quiet, inward, defended. Nissy ran wild. In kindergarten she became notorious as a biter of other kids and teachers too, and she had to be withdrawn from class. John Poe whaled her soundly and she went back and bit harder. The war escalated and then suddenly stopped, because both combatants realized that if it went any further there might be a fatality. John Poe told Nissy he loved her and put away his belt, and Nissy Poe told her terrorised classmates, “It’s okay, I ain’t gonna kill ya.”

In the matter of race John Poe was close to being a liberal. He went with Helen to see the school authorities to explain that the girls’ darkness was not Negro darkness, they were Indians from India and didn’t need to be discriminated against, they could ride on the bus along with the regular kids. This argument the school accepted, though it brought problems of its own.

As Nissy grew older she learned that the other kids, the white kids, called her Blackfoot Indian, and also goatgirl. And then there were these three neighborhood boys, they looked Negro and spoke Spanish—boy, were
they
confused—and they used to jeer at Nissy Poe because she could ride on the bus to the white folks’ school. And then one day the three boys were waiting for her bus, they kept saying there was a law now and they were going to her school too, except the driver wouldn’t let them aboard, not on his bus. As she climbed on, she heard them shouting insults at her, something about her family’s
cabritos
when she was the
kid
of a
cabronito
. She looked it up.
Cabrito
meant kid goat and
cabronito
meant small homosexual. The next day they were waiting for the bus again, with their daddy this time, but so what, she
just took them all on. The father pulled her off his boys, she was kicking and punching air as he hauled her away, but she was satisfied, because in that short time she had inflicted a startlingly disproportionate amount of damage on the slanderers. John Poe got his belt out again, but his heart wasn’t in it, because he knew that her will was greater than his. He began to ignore her, and didn’t accompany Helen when she went to the school to plead with the staff to let her daughter stay on, and get an education, and escape from the trap of poverty, as she herself had once hoped to do. “It is a hard thing,” Helen Poe told her daughter’s class teacher, “for a child to live without hope.”

Goatgirl
. Not far from the shack, up towards Redwater Creek, there was a wooded hollow called Jefferson Lick. According to local legend, a kind of centaur lived there, a refugee from a Canadian travelling circus, mad and dangerous on account of all those years spent in a cage for the pleasure of the public, whipped and half starved. The Goat Monster of Jefferson Lick was the local bogeyman, used to frighten small children into obedience, and at the annual fancy-dress dance during the summer fair there would always be a Lick Man or two, the great god Pan come to Virginia, dressed in rags. When children were sure they were far enough away from Nissy Poe to be safe, they would call her the Goat Man’s daughter and then run for their lives.

Helen attempted to steer her daughter on to a better road. When the girl was almost ten years old the mother stood with her (this was Memorial Day weekend, 1954) and looked up at the galaxy blazing out of the night sky. “Just follow your star, honey, don’t get sidetracked by anyone or anything,” Helen said, with a tremor in her voice that made Nissy glance at her sharply. The mother broke out a quick, thin, hard little smile that didn’t fool Nissy for a minute. “Not like me, hey,” Helen grinned, like a skull. “Just pick one of those beauties and follow where it leads.” A meteor flashed. “I’ll take that one,” said Nissy Poe. “Looks like it’s going places.” Don’t pick that one, her mother thought, a shooting star’s bad luck. But she didn’t say it, and the girl nodded firmly. “Yes, ma’am. That’s the one that I want.”

That weekend, after finishing her chores, Nissy Poe went down to Jefferson Lick on her own, unafraid. She didn’t expect to meet any monsters but she did want to be in there, as far in as she could go. The
woods were lovely, dark and deep, and as she pushed her way through springy foliage into the depths of the hollow she felt something quite unknown fall upon her, like a blessing. It was solitude. To see the birds, you have to become part of the silence. Who said that? Some numskull. In here it was like
Snow White
. Birds everywhere, like butterfly clouds, and if you sang, they sang right along with you. Hooded warblers, yellow-breasted warblers, provided back-up vocals; woodpeckers laid down the beat. Nissy Poe let everything go, and sang. Shake, rattle and roll! This was her great secret, this voice like a rocket blast of power. Sometimes when John Poe was at work, and when John Poe’s children were all out of the house, so they couldn’t tell tales—John Poe might treat everyone alike, but the kids were another thing entirely—Helen would turn on the radio and find a station that played the new stuff, the Driftwoods, Jack Haley, Ronnie “Man” Ray. Sometimes they’d even find one of the Negro rhythm and blues stations, and Helen would swing her hips and join in with that music, the segregated music, the music John Poe called the devil’s boogie. “Come on, honey,” Helen urged, “sing up here along with me,” but Nissy Poe would always refuse and press her mouth into a white, bloodless line, and Helen would shake her head. “I don’t know what it’d take to get you to have a good time,” she’d say, and then the music would seize her again, she’d roll her eyes, and dance, and whoop it up, under the loyal, impassive eyes of her own daughters. (Two out of three; the youngest was usually placed on sentry duty in the front yard, in case John Poe returned unexpectedly.) Helen seemed in those moments to be a child herself, to be reaching out for a version of herself that had been crushed beneath the adult she had been forced by necessity to become.

Nissy Poe never sang for her mother but would go to Jefferson Lick to be alone, and only then, far from the world, protected by an apocryphal ogre, would she unleash the voice that revealed her heart’s deepest desire. Music! It was all she wanted in life; to be a part not of silence, but of sound.

If there had been a Lick Monster present, he would have applauded. From the beginning, Vina had the voice, and the relentless attack. She sang her young heart out, then lay back on a bank of earth though she knew she would have to suffer for her dirty clothes later on, fell asleep, woke with a start, to find it was dark, scrambled out of the Lick and
began to run, and when she got home she found she could have taken her time, because everybody was dead.

The children had been murdered in their beds, stabbed in their hearts with a large kitchen knife. They died without waking up. But John Poe had had his throat cut, and from the wreckage in the room it was plain he had staggered around for long moments before crashing down on top of the old tv cabinet. Blood was smeared down the tv screen, and he lay at its feet in a great sticky puddle, the swamp of his lost life. The tv was on, and somebody was saying something about a war starting up involving the Vietwhat? At Dienbienwhere? In Indochina, right. That was between India and China? And really had a whole lot to do with a girl in a shack near Hopewell, Va., standing knee-deep in her dead family’s blood.

Helen wasn’t in the shack, but Nissy found her soon enough, because all the goats were dead too, and Helen was hanging by her neck from one of the cross-beams of the three-sided loafing shed John Poe had built with his own hands to give the livestock someplace to stand when the weather turned mean. In the dirt below her dangling feet was a large kitchen knife coated thickly with dark, congealing blood.

Because she didn’t go for help until morning; because she set up a stepladder and cut her mother down with the murder weapon; because she stayed out there in the loafing shed all night, alone with the knife and her mother and the dead goats and the universe on fire in the sky, the shooting stars shooting every which way, the Milky Way pouring down (it was probably made of fucking goat milk and smelled like fucking piss); because of her bad-girl track record, the biting, the fighting, she was a suspect for about five minutes, five minutes in which she, goatgirl, the goat monster’s daughter of Jefferson Lick, saw the thing in the officers’ eyes that’s there only when they look at big-time killers. Call it respect. But after five minutes even Sheriff Henry had worked out it would’ve been pretty tough for the kid to have done it, hanged her mother, for Chrissake, she was only ten. It wasn’t a hard case to crack, crazy woman ran amuck, big handsome woman like her, still plenty there for a man to hold on to and be comforted by, too bad, things got to her, she snapped. Shit happens.