Pat stopped and rubbed the callus on her middle finger. Her elbow and shoulder ached from gripping the pen so hard. Across the hall, through the bedroom door, she could hear her father snoring. As always she wished him pleasant dreams—something to assuage the unhappiness of his days, days spent trying to please, to make up for. Except for marrying her mother, she couldn’t think what rule he had broken that made him so eager for the approval of those who disrespected him. He had described to her once what Haven looked like when he got out of the army. He said he sat on his father’s porch coughing, so nobody would know he was weeping for us. His father, Fulton Best, and his mother, Olive, were inside, reading with great sorrow the applications he had filled out for the G.I. Bill funding. He wanted a college education so he could go to medical school, but he was also their only surviving child, all the others having died in the flu epidemic. His parents could not bear the thought of either his leaving again or his staying in a town slipping into erasure forever in every place except the heart. He was looking up and down the cracked concrete of Main Street when Ace Flood and Harper Jury walked up to him, saying there was a plan. Deek and Steward Morgan had a plan. When he heard what it was, the first thing he did was write to the hazel-eyed girl with light-brown hair who’d had his child during the war. Good thing he didn’t tell them about us. They would have dissuaded him from marriage the way, later on, they did Menus. Maybe he knew they would, which is why he just sent for us. “Darling Delia, Come on. Right now. Here is the money order. I am going to have a lot of trouble keeping my heart quiet. Until you all get here I will be a crazy man….” Their jaws must have dropped when we arrived, but other than Steward, nobody said anything directly. They didn’t have to. Olive took to her bed. Fulton kept grunting and rubbing his knees. Only Steward had the gall to say out loud, “He’s bringing along the dung we leaving behind.” Dovey shushed him. Soane too. But Fairy DuPres cursed him, saying, “God don’t love ugly ways. Watch out He don’t deny you what you love too.” A remark Dovey must have thought about a lot until 1964, when the curse was completed. But they were just women, and what they said was easily ignored by good brave men on their way to Paradise. They got there, too, and eventually had the satisfaction of seeing the dung buried. Most of it anyway. Some of it is still aboveground, instructing their grandchildren in a level of intelligence their elders will never acquire.
Pat sucked her teeth and pushed aside the Best file. She selected a composition notebook and without label or introduction continued to write.
“She won’t listen to me. Not one word. She works in Demby at a clinic—cleaning up, I think, but she makes out like she’s a nurse’s aide because of the uniform she has to wear. I don’t know how she lives. I mean she has a room, she says, in the house of a nice family. I don’t believe it. Not all of it anyway. One of those Poole boys—both of them, probably—is visiting her. I know because the littlest one, Dina, told the class about her big brother showing her a house with a Santa Claus and Christmas lights all over the porch. Well, that was someplace other than Ruby, for sure. She is lying and I would rather be bit by the serpent himself than have a lying child. I didn’t mean to hit her so hard. I didn’t know I had. I just meant to stop her lying mouth telling me she didn’t do anything. I saw them. All three of them back behind the Oven and she was in the middle. Plus I am the one who washes sheets around here.”
Pat stopped, put down her pen and, covering her eyes with her hand, tried to separate what she had seen from what she feared to see. And what did the sheets have to do with it? Was there blood where there should not have been or no blood where there should have been? It was more than a year ago, and she thought everything was seared in her memory. The fight took place in October of 1973. Afterwards Billie Delia ran off and stayed at the Convent for two weeks and one day. She came back during the morning session, while Pat was teaching the under twelves, and stayed long enough to say she wasn’t going to. They’d had ugly, hateful words, but both were afraid to get near the other lest the quarrel get physical as it had before. She left with one of those Poole boys and didn’t come back till early this year to describe her job and write down her address. Since then Pat had seen her twice: once in March and then at Arnette’s wedding, where she was bridesmaid and maid of honor both, since Arnette would not have anybody else, and no other girl wanted the honor anyway if it meant walking down the aisle with Billie Delia. Or so Pat thought. She had gone to the wedding, not the reception, but she hadn’t missed a thing since she had a perfect view of the goings-on at the Oven with those girls from the Convent. She saw them. She saw those Poole boys. And she saw Billie Delia sit down and talk to one of the girls like they were old friends. She saw Reverend Pulliam and Steward Morgan argue with the girls, and when they drove off she saw Billie Delia throw her bouquet in Anna’s trash can before she strolled off, Apollo and Brood Poole in tow.
Billie Delia left the next day in her very own car and never said a word to her about the wedding, the reception, the Convent girl or anything. Pat tried to remember how that pressing iron got into her hand, what had been said that had her running up the stairs with a 1950s GE electric iron called Royal Ease clutched in her fingers to slam against her daughter’s head. She, the gentlest of souls, missed killing her own daughter by inches. She who loved children and protected them not only from each other but from too stern parents lunged after her own daughter. She who had trained herself to reasoning and soft manners and discretion and dignity, falling down the stairs and bruising herself so badly she had to cancel two days of class. Educated but self-taught also to make sure that everybody knew that the bastard-born daughter of the woman with sunlight skin and no last name was not only lovely but of great worth and inestimable value. Trying to understand how she could have picked up that pressing iron, Pat realized that ever since Billie Delia was an infant, she thought of her as a liability somehow. Vulnerable to the possibility of not being quite as much of a lady as Patricia Cato would like. Was it that business of pulling down her panties in the street? Billie Delia was only three then. Pat knew that had her daughter been an 8-rock, they would not have held it against her. They would have seen it for what it was—only an innocent child would have done that, surely. Have I missed something? Was there something else? But the question for her now in the silence of this here night was whether she had defended Billie Delia or sacrificed her. And was she sacrificing her still? The Royal Ease in her hand as she ran up the stairs was there to smash the young girl that lived in the minds of the 8-rocks, not the girl her daughter was.
Pat licked her bottom lip, tasted salt and wondered who exactly the tears were for.
Nathan DuPres, believed to be the oldest male in Ruby, welcomed the audience. He disputed the claim of seniority every year, pointing to his cousin Moss, then saying Reverend Simon Cary was a more suitable choice. But he let the town persuade him in the end because Reverend Cary talked too long, besides which he was not among the first families, so his arrival was associated not with World War II but with Korea. A stalwart man of such loving-kindness even Steward Morgan admired him, Nathan had married Elder Morgan’s daughter, Mirth. Because they had no surviving children, he deeply cherished other people’s: hosting the annual Children’s Day picnic, fine-tuning the rehearsals, keeping cough drops and fireballs in his pockets to pass out.
Now, smelling slightly of the horse he’d just dismounted, he climbed the platform and surveyed the audience. Nathan cleared his throat and surprised himself. Whatever he’d prepared to say had left him and the words he did say seemed appropriate to some other event.
“I was five,” he said, “when we left Louisiana and sixty-five when I hopped in the truck leaving Haven behind for this here new place. I know I wouldn’t have done it if Mirth was alive or any of our children was still aboveground. You all know my babies—all of them—was took by a tornado in 1922. Me and Mirth found them in a stranger’s wheat field. But I never regretted coming here. Never. There is honey in this land sweeter tha
n any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that’s saying a heap. No, I never had a gnat-minute’s worth of regret. But there’s a sadness in me now. Maybe in this season of my Lord’s birth I’ll learn what it is. This parch in my throat. The water that stays in my eyes. I know I’ve seen more years than God usually allows a man, but this dryness is new. The eye water too. When I run my mind over it, all I can come up with is a dream I had a while back.”
In the next-to-last row, Lone DuPres sat next to Richard Misner, Anna on his other side. She leaned forward to glance at Anna and learn whether she, too, was losing her mind. Anna smiled but did not return her look, so she sat back to endure another one of old Nathan’s incoherent dreams.
Nathan ran his fingers over his head, closed his eyes as if to get the details straight.
“Was an Indian come up to me in a bean row. Cheyenne, I believe. The vines were green, tender. The blossoms coming out all over. He looked at the row and shook his head, sorrowful-like. Then he told me too bad the water was bad; said there was plenty of it but it was foul. I said, But look here, look at all the flowers. Looks like a top crop to me. He said, The tallest cotton don’t yield the best crop; besides, those flowers the wrong color. They’s red. And I looked and sure enough they was turning pink, then red. Like blood drops. Scared me some. But when I looked back he was gone. And the petals was white again. I reckon that sighting is like this here story we going to tell again this evening. It shows the strength of our crop if we understand it. But it can break us if we don’t. And bloody us too. May God bless the pure and holy and may nothing keep us apart from each other nor from the One who does the blessing. Amen.”
When Nathan left the platform, amidst murmurs of kindness if not gratitude, Richard Misner took advantage of the pause to whisper something to Anna and leave his seat. He was hoping to relieve nascent waves of the claustrophobia that had not plagued him since he was jailed with thirty-eight others in a tiny cell in Alabama. He had embarrassed himself then, because the sweat and nausea signaled fear to his companions. And it was a hard lesson knowing that whatever risks he took, however eager he was for the dangerous confrontation, a crowded cell could humiliate him before teenagers without pity. Now, feeling the onslaught of suffocation in this tightly packed schoolhouse, he joined Pat Best, standing in the hall watching the play and the audience through the door. A long table of cakes, cookies and punch lined the wall behind her.
“Hello, Reverend.” Pat did not look at him but adjusted her body to accommodate him in the doorway.
“Evening, Pat,” he said, blotting moisture from his neck with his handkerchief. “Out here is better for me.”
“Me too. See everything from here without stretching or peeping between two hats.”
They looked over the heads of the audience as the curtains, made of percale sheets—laundered and carefully ironed—wavered. Children in white surplices filed through the parting, the perfection of their serious faces and flawless hair undone occasionally by a knee sock sliding down to an ankle or a bow tie twisted to the right. After a glance at Kate Golightly they took a uniform breath for O holy night, the stars are brightly shining…
At the second verse Richard Misner leaned over to Pat. “Mind if I ask you something?”
“No. Go ahead.” She thought he was going to ask for a donation, because he had been having difficulty raising money (in the quantities he hoped for) to aid the legal defense of four teenagers arrested in Norman and charged with possession, resisting, arson, disorderly, inciting and whatever else the prosecution could ferret out of its statutes to level against black boys who said No or thought about it. They had been in jail, Richard Misner told his congregation, for almost two years. When arraigned, they’d been behind bars for twenty months. The trial date was about to be set, and lawyers needed to be paid for services already rendered and more to come. So far Richard had collected only what the women had given. Women who thought more about the pain felt by the boys’ mothers than of the injustice of their sons’ situation. The men, however, Fleetwoods, Pulliam, Sargeant Person and the Morgans, had been adamant in their refusal. Clearly Richard had not carefully enough shaped his plea. He should have built a prodigal sons foundation rather than a political one. Then, as he stood outside Calvary, continuing his requests, he would not have had to listen to “I don’t hold with violence,” from men who had handled guns all their lives. Or “Little illegal niggers with guns and no home training need to be in jail.” This from Steward, of course. However much Richard insisted they had no guns, that demonstrations were not illegal, the men kept their wallets closed. Pat decided, if asked directly, to donate as much as she could. It was pleasant to think of his needing her generosity, so she was annoyed to learn that that was not at all what was on Richard Misner’s mind.
“I’m trying to smooth a situation out at the Pooles’, and I think I’d do well to talk to Billie Delia, if you don’t mind. Is she here tonight?”
Pat held on to her elbows and turned to look at him. “Can’t help you, Reverend.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure that whatever’s going on out there has nothing to do with Billie Delia. Besides, she doesn’t live here anymore. Moved to Demby.” She would have liked to stop being so hostile to him, but with the mention of her daughter’s relationship with those Poole boys, she couldn’t control it.
“Her name’s come up once or twice. But Wisdom Poole won’t give me anything to go on. Something’s tearing that family apart.”
“They don’t like prying, Reverend. It’s a thing about Ruby.”
“I understand that but something like this has a way of spreading, touching more than one family. When I first came here it was plain: if there was a problem brewing, a delegation was formed to see about it. Keep people from falling out with one another. Seen it with my own eyes and been a party to it too.”
“I know.”
“This community used to be tight as wax.”
“It still is. In a crisis. But they keep to themselves otherwise.”
“Don’t you mean ‘we’? ‘We keep to ourselves’?”
“If I did, would you be asking me to explain things?”
“Pat, please. Don’t take anything I say amiss. I just remembered that the young people in Bible class say ‘they’ too when talking about their parents.”
“Bible class? More like a war class. Kind of military, from what I hear.”
“Militant, maybe. Not military.”
“No budding Panthers?”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Well, let me tell you. Unlike most of the folks here, we read newspapers and different kinds of books. We keep up. And yes, we discuss strategies of defense. Not aggression. Defense.”
“They know the difference?”
He didn’t have to reply right away because applause began and lasted until the final member of the children’s choir disappeared behind the curtain.
Someone turns off the ceiling lights. Quiet coughing domesticates the dark. Slowly, on a well-oiled pulley, the curtains part. Under lights positioned in the wings, throwing large shadows behind them, four figures in felt hats and too big suits stand at a table, counting giant dollar bills. The face of each one is hidden by a yellow and white mask featuring gleaming eyes and snarling lips, red as a fresh wound. Above a sign tacked to the table front, which reads INN, they count money, make slurping noises and do not stop when a parade of holy families dressed in torn clothes and moving in a slow two-step approaches them. Seven couples line up before the table of money. The boys carry staffs; the girls cuddle baby dolls.
Misner looked at them and, giving himself more time to think of a reply to Pat’s question, concentrated on identifying the children onstage. The four youngest Cary girls: Hope, Chaste, Lovely and Pure; Dina Poole; and one of Pious DuPres’ daughters—Linda. Then the boys, manfully grasping staffs while they two-stepped tow
ard the money counters. Peace and Solarine Jury’s two grandsons, Ansel and one they called Fruit; Joe-Thomas Poole paired with his sister Dina; Drew and Harriet Person’s son, James; Payne Sands’ boy, Lorcas, and two of Timothy Seawright’s grandsons, Steven and Michael. Two of the masked ones were obviously Beauchamps—Royal and Destry, fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds who were already over six feet tall—but he wasn’t sure of the other two. This was the first time he had attended the play. It was held two weeks before Christmas, when he returned to Georgia for his annual visit to his family. This year the trip was postponed because an all-family reunion was scheduled for New Year’s. He would take Anna, if she agreed, let the folks look her over and, he supposed, let her look them over. He had hinted to the bishops that he was up for a new parish. Nothing urgent. But he was not sure he was well used in Ruby. He had thought any place was fine as long as there were young people to be taught, to be told, that Christ was judge and warrior too. That whites not only had no patent on Christianity; they were often its obstacle. That Jesus had been freed from white religion, and he wanted these kids to know that they did not have to beg for respect; it was already in them, and they needed only to display it. But the resistance he’d found in Ruby was wearing him out. More and more his students were being chastised about the beliefs he helped instill. Now Pat Best—with whom he’d taught Negro History every Thursday afternoon—was chipping away at his Bible class, confusing self-respect for arrogance, preparedness for disobedience. Did she think education was knowing just enough to get a job? She didn’t seem to trust these Ruby hardheads with the future any more than he did, but neither did she encourage change. Negro history and lists of old-time achievements were enough for her but not for this generation. Somebody had to talk to them, and somebody had to listen to them. Otherwise…