Paradise

  “She is my mother. Your mother too. Whose mother you?”

  Mavis did not answer, partly because she couldn’t speak of it but also because she was trying to remember where, in a house with no electricity, the light in Mother’s room came from.

  After the roast chicken supper, Connie showed Mavis to a large bedroom. From the four cots in it, she chose the one closest to the window, where she knelt looking out. Two milky moons, instead of the one hanging there, would have been just like Connie’s eyes. Beneath them a swept world. Unjudgmental. Tidy. Ample. Forever.

  California, which way?

  Maryland, which way?

  Merle? Pearl?

  The lion cub that ate her up that night had blue eyes instead of brown, and he did not have to hold her down this time. When he circled her shoulders with his left paw, she willingly let her head fall back, clearing the way to her throat. Nor did she fight herself out of the dream. The bite was juicy, but she slept through that as well as other things until the singing woke her.

  Mavis Albright left the Convent off and on, but she always returned, so she was there in 1976.

  On that July morning she had been aware for months of the sourness between the Convent and the town and she might have anticipated the truckload of men prowling the mist. But she was thinking of other things: tattooed sailors and children bathing in emerald water. And exhausted by the pleasures of the night before, she let herself drift in and out of sleep. An hour later, shooing pullets out of the schoolroom, she smelled cigar smoke and the merest trace of Aqua Velva.

  GRACE

  Either the pavement was burning or she had sapphires hidden in her shoes. K.D., who had never seen a woman mince or switch like that, believed it was the walk that caused all the trouble. Neither he nor his friends lounging at the Oven saw her step off the bus, but when it pulled away there she was—across the street from them in pants so tight, heels so high, earrings so large they forgot to laugh at her hair. She crossed Central Avenue toward them, taking tiny steps on towering block heels not seen since 1949.

  She walked fast, as though tripping through red coals or else in pain from something stuck in the toes of her shoes. Something valuable, K.D. thought, otherwise she would have removed it.

  He carried the equipment box through the dining room. Narrow panels of lace spilled from a basket on the side table. Aunt Soane worked thread like a prisoner: daily, methodically, for free, producing more lace than could ever be practical. Out back the garden skirting to the left was weed-free and nicely tilled. K.D. turned right toward the shed and entered. The collies were thrilled to see him. He had to straddle Good to keep her down. Her ears were soft in his fingers and he was steady with the camphor-soaked cotton. The ticks came away like coffee grounds. He put his palm under her jaw; she licked his chin. Ben, the other collie, head on paws, looked on. Life at Steward Morgan’s ranch loaded the dogs with mess. They needed a few days in Ruby under K.D.’s care twice a year. He took the bristle brush from the box. Dug deep in Good’s hair, brushing it smooth and singing, softly in a Motown falsetto, the song he’d made up for her when she was a puppy. “Hey good dog; stay good dog; old good dog; my good dog. Everybody needs a good good good dog. Everybody needs a good a good a good good dog.”

  Good stretched her pleasure.

  Just those concerned would be at the meeting tonight. Everybody, that is, except the one who started it all. His uncles Deek and Steward, Reverend Misner, Arnette’s father and brother. They would discuss the slapping but not the pregnancy and certainly not the girl with sapphires hidden in her shoes.

  Suppose she hadn’t been there. Suppose her navel had not peeked over the waist of her jeans or her breasts had just hushed, hushed for a few seconds till they could figure out how to act—what attitude to strike. In public, without girls hanging around, they would have known. As a group they would have assumed the right tone immediately. But Arnette was there, whining, and so was Billie Delia.

  K.D. and Arnette had separated themselves from the others. To talk. They stood near the dwarf oaks behind the picnic benches and tables for a conversation worse than he ever thought talking could be. What Arnette said was, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” What she meant was: I’m going to Langston in September and I don’t want to be pregnant or to abort or get married or feel bad by myself or face my family. He said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” thinking: You cornered me at more socials than I can remember and when I finally agreed I didn’t have to take your drawers down you beat me to it so this ain’t my problem.

  They had just begun to veil threats and unveil mutual dislike when the bus pulled away. All heads, all, turned. First because they had never seen a bus in the town—Ruby was not a stop on the way to someplace else. Second to see why it stopped at all. The vision that appeared when the bus drove away, standing on the road shoulder between the schoolhouse and Holy Redeemer, riveted the attention of everybody lounging at the Oven. She didn’t have on any lipstick but from one hundred and fifty feet, you could see her eyes. The silence that descended seemed permanent until Arnette broke it.

  “If that’s the kind of tramp you want, hop to it, nigger.” K.D. looked from Arnette’s neat shirtwaist dress to the bangs across her forehead and then into her face—sullen, nagging, accusatory—and slapped it. The change in her expression well worth it.

  Somebody said, “Ow!” but mostly his friends were assessing the screaming tits closing in on them. Arnette fled; Billie Delia too, but, like the good friend she was, looked back, to see them forcing themselves to look at the ground, the bright May sky or the length of their fingernails.

  Good was finished. Her belly hair could stand a light clipping—its knots were otherwise impossible—but she was beautiful. K.D. started on Ben’s coat, rehearsing his line of defense to Arnette’s family. When he described the incident to his uncles they had frowned at the same time. And like a mirror image in gestures if not in looks, Steward spit fresh Blue Boy while Deek lit a cigar. However disgusted both were, K.D. knew they would not negotiate a solution that would endanger him or the future of Morgan money. His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason. And their family had not built two towns, fought white law, Colored Creek, bandits and bad weather, to see ranches and houses and a bank with mortgages on a feed store, a drugstore and a furniture store end up in Arnold Fleetwood’s pocket. Since the loose bones of his cousins had been buried two years ago, K.D., their hope and their despair, was the last male in a line that included a lieutenant governor, a state auditor and two mayors. His behavior, as always, required scrutiny and serious correction. Or would the uncles see it another way? Maybe Arnette’s baby would be a boy, a Morgan grandnephew. Would her father, Arnold, have any rights then that the Morgans had to respect?

  Fondling Ben’s coat, picking burrs from the silky strands of hair, K.D. tried to think like his uncles—which was hard. So he stopped trying and slipped off into his dream of choice. Only this time it included Gigi and her screaming tits.

  “Hi.” She cracked her gum like a professional. “Is this Ruby? Bus driver said this was it.”

  “Yep. Yeah. Uh huh. Sure is.” The lounging boys spoke as one.

  “Any motels around?”

  They laughed at that and felt comfortable enough to ask her who she was looking for and from where she had come.

  “Frisco,” she said. “And rhubarb pie. Got a light?”

  The dream, then, would be in Frisco.

  The Morgan men conceded nothing but were uneasy at the choice of meeting place. Reverend Misner had thought it best to serve protocol and go to Fleetwood rather than season the raw insult done to the family by making the aggrieved come to the house of the aggressor.

  K.D., Deek and Steward had sat in the parsonage living room all nods and conciliatory grunts, but K.D. knew what his uncles were thinking. He watched Steward shift tobacco and hold the juice. So far the credit union Misner had formed was no-profit—small emergency loans to
church members; no-penalty payback schedules. Like a piggy bank, Deek had said. But Steward said, Yeah for now. The reputation of the church Misner had left to come to Ruby floated behind him: covert meetings to stir folks up; confrontations with rather than end runs around white law. He obviously had hope for a state that had once decided to build a whole new law school to accommodate one student—a Negro girl—and protect segregation at the same time. He clearly took seriously the possibility of change in a state that had also built an open closet right next to a classroom for another Negro student to sit in by himself. That was in the forties, when K.D. was a nursing infant, before his mother, her brothers, his cousins, and all the rest left Haven. Now, some twenty years later, his uncles listened weekly to Misner’s sermons, but at the close of each of them they slid behind the steering wheel of their Oldsmobile and Impala and repeated the Old Fathers’ refrain: “Oklahoma is Indians, Negroes and God mixed. All the rest is fodder.” To their dismay, Reverend Misner often treated fodder like table food. A man like that could encourage strange behavior; side with a teenage girl; shift ground to Fleetwood. A man like that, willing to throw money away, could give customers ideas. Make them think there was a choice about interest rates.

  Still, the Baptists were the largest congregation in town as well as the most powerful. So the Morgans sorted Reverend Misner’s opinions carefully to judge which were recommendations easily ignored and which were orders they ought to obey.

  In two cars they drove barely three miles from Misner’s living room to Fleetwood’s house.

  Somewhere in an Oklahoma city, June voices are doubled by the sunlit water of a swimming pool. K.D. was there once. He had ridden the Missouri, Kansas, Texas line with his uncles and waited outside on the curb while they talked business inside a red-brick building. Excited voices sounded near, and he went to see. Behind a chain-link fence bordered by wide seamless concrete he saw green water. He knows now it was average size, but then it filled his horizon. It seemed to him as though hundreds of white children were bobbing in it, their voices a cascade of the world’s purest happiness, a glee so sharply felt it had brought tears. Now, as the Oldsmobile U-turned at the Oven, where Gigi had popped her gum, K.D. felt again the yearning excitement of sparkly water and the June voices of swimmers. His uncles had not been pleased at having to search the city’s business district for him and chastised him on the train and later in the automobile all the way back to Ruby. Small price then, and small price now. The eruptions of “How the hell you get in these messes? You should be with people your own age. Why you want to lay with a Fleetwood anyhow? You see that boy’s children? Damn!”—all of them exploded without damage. Just as he had already seen the sparkly water, he had already seen Gigi. But unlike the swimming pool, this girl he would see again.

  They parked bumper-to-bumper to the side of Fleetwood’s house. When they knocked on the door each man, except for Reverend Misner, began to breathe through his mouth as a way of narrowing the house odor of illness.

  Arnold Fleetwood never wanted to sleep in a pup tent, on a pallet or a floor ever again. So he put four bedrooms in the spacious house he built on Central Avenue. Sleeping arrangements for himself, his wife and each of their two children left a guest room they were proud of. When his son, Jefferson, came back from Vietnam and took Sweetie, his bride, into his own bed, there was still the guest room. It would have become a nursery had they not needed it as a hospital ward for Jeff and Sweetie’s children. The way things turned out, Fleet now slept on a hideaway in the dining room.

  The men sat on spotless upholstery waiting for Reverend Misner to finish seeing the women who were nowhere in sight. Both of the Mrs. Fleetwoods spent all their energy, time and affection on the four children still alive—so far. Fleet and Jeff, grateful for but infuriated by that devotion, turned their shame sideways. Being in their company, sitting near them, was hard. Conversation harder.

  K.D. knew that Fleet owed his uncles money. And he knew that Jeff wanted very much to kill somebody. Since he couldn’t kill the Veterans Administration others just might have to do. Everybody was relieved when Misner came back down the stairs, smiling.

  “Yes. Well.” Reverend Misner clasped his hands, gave them a little shake near his shoulder as though he’d already knocked the contestant out. “The ladies promise to bring us coffee and I believe they said rice pudding later. That’s the best reason I know of to get started.” He smiled again. He was very close to being too handsome for a preacher. Not just his face and head, but his body, extremely well made, called up admiring attention from practically everybody. A serious man, he took his obvious beauty as a brake on sloth—it forced him to deal carefully with his congregation, to take nothing for granted: not the adoration of the women or the envy of the men.

  No one returned his smile concerning dessert. He pressed on.

  “Let me lay out the situation as I know it. Correct me, you all, if I get it wrong or leave out something. My understanding is that K.D. here has done an injury, a serious injury, to Arnette. So right off we can say K.D. has a problem with his temper and an obligation—”

  “Ain’t he a little old to have his temper raised toward a young girl?” Jefferson Fleetwood, seething in a low chair farthest from the lamplight, interrupted. “I don’t call that temper. I call it illegal.”

  “Well, at that particular moment, he was way out of line.”

  “Beg your pardon, Reverend. Arnette is fifteen.” Jeff looked steadily into K.D.’s eyes.

  “That’s right,” said Fleet. “She ain’t been hit since she was two years old.”

  “That may be the problem.” Steward, known for inflammatory speech, had been cautioned by Deek to keep his mouth shut and let him, the subtle one, do the talking. Now his words blew Jeff out of his chair.

  “Don’t you come in my house dirt-mouthing my family!”

  “Your house?” Steward looked from Jeff to Arnold Fleetwood.

  “You heard me! Papa, I think we better call this meeting off before somebody gets hurt!”

  “You right,” said Fleet. “This is my child we talking about. My child!”

  Only Jeff was standing, but now Misner rose. “Gentlemen. Whoa!” He held up his hands and, towering over the seated men, put to good use his sermon-making voice. “We are men here; men of God. You going to put God’s work in the gutter?”

  K.D. saw Steward struggling with the need to spit and stood up also. “Look here,” he said. “I’m sorry. I am. I’d take it back if I could.”

  “Done is done, friends.” Misner lowered his hands.

  K.D. continued. “I respect your daughter—”

  “Since when?” Jeff asked him.

  “I always respected her. From when she was that high.” K.D. leveled his hand around his waist. “Ask anybody. Ask her girlfriend, Billie Delia. Billie Delia will tell you that.”

  The effect of the genius stroke was immediate. The Morgan uncles held in their smiles, while the Fleetwoods, father and son, bristled. Billie Delia was the fastest girl in town and speeding up by the second.

  “This ain’t about no Billie Delia,” said Jeff. “This is about what you did to my baby sister.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Misner. “Maybe we could get a better fix, K.D., if you could tell us why you did it. Why? What happened? Were you drinking? Did she aggravate you somehow?” He expected this forthright question to open up a space for honesty, where the men could stop playing bear and come to terms. The sudden quiet that followed surprised him. Steward and Deek both cleared their sinuses at the same time. Arnold Fleetwood stared at his shoes. Something, Misner guessed, was askew. In that awkward silence they could hear above their heads the light click of heels: the women pacing, servicing, fetching, feeding—whatever it took to save the children who could not save themselves.

  “We don’t care about why,” said Jeff. “What I want to know is what you going to do about it?” He shot his forefinger into the chair arm on the word “do.”

  Deek leaned
back and spread his thighs wider, as though to welcome territory that naturally belonged to him. “What you have in mind?” he asked.

  “First off, apologize,” said Fleet.

  “I just did,” said K.D.

  “Not to me. To her. To her!”

  “Yes, sir,” said K.D. “I will.”

  “All right,” Deek said. “That’s first. What’s second?”

  Jeff answered. “You better never lay your hand on her again.”

  “I won’t lay a thing on her, sir.”

  “Is there a third?” asked Deek.

  “We need to know he means it,” said Fleet. “Some sign it’s meant.”

  “Sign?” Deek managed to look puzzled.

  “My sister’s reputation is messed up, ain’t it?”

  “Uh huh. I can see that.”

  “Nothing can fix that, can it?” Jeff’s question combined defiance and inquiry.

  Deek leaned forward. “Well, I don’t know. Hear she’s going to college. That’ll put all this behind her. Maybe we can help out some.”

  Jeff grunted. “I don’t know about that.” He looked at his father. “What do you think, Papa? Would that…?”

  “Have to ask her mother. She’s hit by this too, you know. Hit worse’n I am, maybe.”

  “Well,” said Deek, “whyn’t you talk it over with her, then? If she’s agreeable, stop by the bank. Tomorrow.”

  Fleet scratched his jaw. “Can’t make any promises. Mable is a mighty proud woman. Mighty proud.”

  Deek nodded. “Got a reason to be, daughter going to college and all. We don’t want anything to stand in the way of that. Credit to the town.”

  “When that school start up, Fleet?” Steward cocked his head.

  “August, I believe.”

  “She be ready then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Steward answered. “August’s a long way off. This here is May. She might change her mind. Decide to stay on.”