Now, not even planning to, he reached out, took up this old woman’s black bone-rake of a hand. He squeezed it, saying, “We underrstood her.” Maimie only nodded. Angus saw her face split, podlike. Weeping, her wrinkles softened from the deepest center creases outward. Each of Maimie’s braids, tipped with rag, seemed worn to blot one tear.
These two people, holding hands, soon felt semi-embarrassed, child—but not enough to stop. Angus, consoled by Maimie’s touch, saw fit to cry in a steadied determined way. Tears, leaving him, seemed Grief’s most natural dividend. Beech sat still, swallowing hard, admiring his ease, fighting back her own strange need to scream, to fall against him, begging, blaming. Fifty-nine years of doing good. Now this. No credit. A person got no credit. Her account was all Checking. No Savings. Nothing saved.
Maimie waited to know what emotion—if any—would be possible here with everybody looking. Angus’ solemn gulps sounded so much like his baby daughter’s. Beech had comforted hundreds of crying white children but never a grown white boss, and surely not whilst holding that gent’s pink cabbage rose of a hand.
She knew that under his slippery Bible-days robe, Angus must be naked as a boy child. This held no mystery or charm for her. Just made her feel the sadder for them both and for Bianca upstairs.
Needing to sob aloud, Beech tried not to (a knot of push and pull). The shoulders shook—her fingers moved in short accidental jerks—and Angus’ hand, scaring her, returned the pressure—his usual “Let’s do this now” authority.
Soon these two practically Indian-wrestled, strength matching strength, wrists locking. They almost hurt each other and respected doing this. They found it someway helped. Neighbors, servants, and children watched amazed from many windows.
Down there, Angus quaked, bucking, steadily moaning, “Oh Lard God.” Unashamed, he coughed and shook so. Out sounds came. Stripes of salt water ran clean down his smooth ruddy face. He hadn’t shaved yet but the pinkish stubble didn’t check the tears. Soon his wet chest and belly shone. Healthy amounts of water cooling his butterscotch skin, Angus quieted some. “Well,” he said, wiping cheekbones with the back of one free freckled hand. “Well well.” Tears had darkened his indigo lapels to black.
Maimie’s wrinkled brown face could’ve been a mosaic made of wild rice. She still dared not make a noise, she hardly let herself breathe now, elbows punishing ribs. If she blurted even one raw sound, it might explode, might prove more shaming than breaking wind beside the Governor during some long mixed-doubles seesaw Psalm of French. Don’t.
Angus McCloud had profited from crying a pint. He sat here steaming, spent like some lover cleansed sleek. Maimie’d released two crooked thimblefuls of tears. But this wetness kept so busied, was so mazed inside her face’s crevices and folds, the woman’s starchy collar stayed bone-dry.
—Hands still gripped but less hard, each too polite to break the other’s hold. Neither person dared look toward the sickroom, the only second-story window still bandaged behind velvet draperies.
From adjacent homes and many household windows, people in pajamas stared down. Sunlight found this fern bench, a man and woman seated here, facing dead ahead, stiff as any King and Queen park statue. It was already getting hot. All over town, rough-sounding local roosters crowed.
Straight up.
The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Roosters called direct toward sky. To Beech, their cries sounded like a homemade Psalm she’d chanted down down at fifty-nine years of fussy eaters:
“Be nice. Open up. It’s me.”
8
BUT I WANDER. What had to happen has to happen—even in the story of it later, child.
The accident itself. With personal money from her taming-Bianca bonus, Maimie L. Beech, sixty-eight, bought her dear child, newly five, a birthday gift: some grown-lady perfume. The price of the bottle has been lost to us but we know it came from Woolworth’s and was very, very sweet—even for a humid magnoliaed back yard during three pianos’ practice in green Falls, mid-May. Too much sweetness can become dishonest and a poison. Remember that. (And, child, I’m just guessing here, but do you figure too much polluting poison might reverse itself? Couldn’t poison come full cycle and swing back to sweetness? For our clogged spoilt world, I dearly hope so. We deserve it. We deserve better.)
It’s the day after a party for fifty handpicked children, my momma’s brown cigar curls need yet another washing. Maimie carries one edgy child into the back yard, she places Bianca on two dozen thirsty towels. The girl feels tired from behaving right well during her party. A few lapses: she pinned the donkey tail onto/into two bossy visiting mothers. Then she purposely broke her sisters’ gift, a brown celluloid hatpin box. (“It’s ug-ly, it’s too old for me, I hate it.”)
In such pre-hair-blower times, damp-headed ladies enjoyed setting outdoors in direct sun. Just take along your brush, a novel, a talkative friend, or all three. Nice ritual—one now lost to us, as is the wholesome scent of clothes dried by a passerby spring breeze.
Bianca—deeply trusting somebody for the first time in her five jumping-bean years—lets herself now be arranged face up, formal as the corpse of some exceptional Egyptian princess. Glad to finally be recognized as shy, she closes her blue eyes—eyes so richly lashed they’re awninged. Maimie counts the curls aloud—Bianca’s hairdo averages between forty-nine and fifty-one, depending on humidity and whim. Beech tugs out each curl so it’s at its fullest length sunning along terry cloth. I picture all of this (and Momma) from above. Feels like I’m in air or else well hid up the loftiest of McCloud pecan trees. From Bianca’s head down there on white towels overlapped in grass—damp curls spoke every which way—they shoot like rays from off some spongy young sun in training.
Maimie occupies a ferny yard chair. The Bible rests against her like the next infant she’ll tend when reading spoils this present darling. Looking over at Bianca, the old woman feels so gladdened. Many casework kids in turn have seemed Maimie’s favorites, but especially this one. It pleases Beech, reviewing simple secret weapons: Never talk “down” to your baby. Treat yours the way you’d expect to be treated—which means loving, hard. Love is a secret weapon, a serious profession and not (like for these uphill parents) some fond sideline hobby.
Bianca has steadily begged to attend Beech’s Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting. Earlier this week two wary parents finally agreed: “Only because you’ve been verra good, only owing to our implicitly trusting your Beech here so.” Parents later worried that a child’s getting this Good might mean her getting a bad dose of that Old-Time Religion. Privately they said, “First we’ll get her civil. Then we’ll discourage the rest.” At Afro Gethsemane Baptist, Bianca arrived in state. She allowed Maimie’s five favorite Sisters to come out of the choir and make much over a stiff white dress, white hat and shoes. On request, she said ten things in French (“Pass the butter, if you please, dear dear Maimie of mine”). She apologized for a accent that her big sisters swore was perfectly shameful. Bianca soon went forward and got saved. Just like that. Out loud the girl admitted how bad she’d acted, said she regretted putting poor Maimie back there on the sixth row through pretty much total hoops but promised she wouldn’t ever be that again, bad—if possible. Then she looked around and begged to be dunked. “Not while you wearing that, you don’t,” Nurse called aloud whilst beaming. Everybody laughed. Bianca didn’t feel taken real serious here.
She’d believed that Baptizing water would—under your feet—go thick, instantly lidded like chocolate pudding’s leatherish cap. Water would support the walking weight of a saved little girl. Imagine hiking over any wet you liked, be it bathtub, be it flood. Your sisters would just hate you, they’d feel sorry as they sank and drowned like Pharaoh’s troops. Bianca pleaded now for Baptism, swearing that Her Jesus would keep Her outfit dry, she knew He would. Bianca announced, “My Jesus will be Water Wings.” She sounded sure as her poppa sounded at his surest, darling, which was sure. This deeply impressed the entire congregation
. Amens sprouted row to row. Older ladies rolled eyes, shook heads, sighed, “Tell it.” Friends had heard their Maimie Beech brag on this most recent child, and sure enough.
And: Here in present sunshine, Maimie, remembering all this, feels so pleased with a girl’s Christian progress, feels so exceptionally appreciated at this address—she trots inside the mansion, fetches back the birthday perfume. Beech kneels on towels. (Maybe she should ask Mr. Angus hisself for reading lessons? “Go to a busy fellow when you want things done.”—If Beech finally admits her lacks, can’t she finally rest? rest here?)
Maimie douses her favorite’s every fat sleepy curl. The dime store calls its best perfume Instant of Joy. Out flows all that amber liquor. “Noint/you/sweet/head/Maimie oil/Cup/runneth/over … goodness/mercy/dwell/house/Lord/ever/’men/.”
Her baby will soon wake in a cloud of sweetness bought with Maimie money. It’ll be a surprise—like your coming to in a tailor-made halo all yours. This smell—addressing the earth’s mysteries, feeling on a first-name basis with earth’s fullness—this smell will say, “Open up. It’s me.” Kneeling, Beech closes her own eyes. Scent lifts a choir of chemical amens.
SUNLIGHT only swells the scent. It grows close to a sound like Psalms’ own trumpets. Scent competes with upstairs pianism of a right high order.—Sweetness sends Bianca pegs deeper into honeycomb sleep. A six-hand arrangement of one Schubert song reaches her. Maimie adjourns to a Bible waiting—warm as life—on sunning cast-iron ferns. She opens to Psalms, shuts her eyes tight, sniffs her own excellent-smelling fingertips, dozes. —The good lunch was heavy, the good sun feels hot. Four black helpers are assigned to tend each white one in this hive of mansion. A McCloud future is based on the poppa’s sought-after secret formula: the most convincing available Blue. Everything in sight seems certified: the verra best. Life comes with a warranty.
THE ACCIDENT is gathering, unnoticed.
MAIMIE, nodding, dreams dreams. Swans are on a bright river—upper bodies white and easy-seeming, hidden colored rubber feet are paddling hard to read the currents—and suddenly it’s Jesus alive in person astride one row boat—His a Scotsman’s pink-orange beard. He leaves the boat to walk, He’s wearing a manly white bathrobe so starched it’s caulked solid as a upright buoy, pretty as a good girl’s crinoline. His pockets are leaking bits of gold. Coins fall straight down through deep water He’s exempt from and just strolls.
I’m mostly guessing here.
Fact: My Baby Momma wakes. Where? Oh, out in sun, on shampoo day, must be the birthday perfume so strong everywhere like evaporating shellac or doctor’s office—music, sisters … Oh, okay, home … But a new sound seems the one fact out of place. (A drone, snipping, clicks like from castanets being demonstrated downtown in the Courthouse Square six blocks off.) Any person peeking from a pecan tree overhead would notice one change: Bianca’s pale brown hair should’ve dried a fairer color than when wet, but it’s gone darker. See, two or three hundred black wasps have been drawn to this maybe overly literal Woolworth’s perfume. Gathered bugs now fret and fidget, sucking at the sweetness sogged along each outspread curl, roads all leading to one Rome, the soft white head of a child who don’t even know yet. She’s been behaving lately, so why is this?
Bianca’s hair fans out around her. Her feet are bare, she’s dressed only in clean batiste panties and a pretty little satin shift. Bianca sits forward, scared to look behind her. Something’s about to happen just in back of her. She knows this. Bianca’s head feels covered with a new weight, shawl or helmet. War bonnet. The sleepy child, curious, now touches the back of her own skull—mashes twenty jet-black stingers into pale scalp.
Here the scream should come. Here fur on the neighbor’s cat should lift, all pianos hush, Maimie jump, and everyone like mad come running. But in Bianca’s mouth’s—complaint, warning, fury—can’t, quite, move, through, teeth clamped this tight owing to a kind of pain she’s never known before or even guessed at.—Till now, what’s been amusing? the fires you set, seeing animals try and get away in time, grown people’s ugly faces when they find out what you’ve done now. Those, plus Poppa always, and dear Maimie lately.—But how can anybody this spoiled and five be prepared for a first grief and so close in?
She’s quiet, owing to a tongue that suddenly feels swollen to the size of a dead trout some days dead. Poison makes the backs of Bianca’s blue eyes spot with blackness then go wider awake. Her mind shoots everywhere—a new emergency of chemicals and thoughts, smeared.
Bianca—dainty, gingerly—hops up. She scampers, barefoot, off the towels and onto grass. Silent, graceful, how she hurries. She wears pretty white underthings and the three glossy pounds of black. Bugs’ humming means they’re starting to be upset. The child runs in seven hushed and urgent circles all around around one chair. It contains Miss Maimie Beech snoozing, mouth open toward her Bible. The child runs so light, she could be flying, winged herself.
THE CHILD’S logic is poisoned, plus it was a child’s to start with.
Logic tells her: Get past Meadows’ Pasture and down to the river Tar and drown them, baptize them into being nicer to you, you.—Logic tells her if she moves quick enough they’ll blow off her like gnats do at a gallop. Meanwhile, rushing, she makes some other mistakes—one being: hitting herself many times across the head and temples, ears, the neck. A cloud of black is out ahead of her and right into that she runs.
Through a rear garden gate, down cinder alley, soft bare feet go. She sacrifices shade. She leaves the safety of her sisters’ doing rounded guardian Schubert. Bianca, soundless, somehow gets six blocks, seven. Courthouse Square is baking, totally deserted at siesta hour. She runs around the whole downtown alone.
9
FAT Mrs. Luke Lucas of Lucas’ All-Round Store sits eating cheese. It got marked down today but is not moving. Nothing doing here at 2 p.m.—except just now, fast as one of them squiggle shrimps of bloodshot ghosts that flit across your eyesight when you’re looking from a shady place into a brilliant one, past the front door of this dim emporium—Mrs. Lucas spies a child dart by so quick, so white in sun it seems a spirit. The body part looks snowy, bare. The head smoked blind—busied with darkest thoughts seeping out into a cloud, a mask and hat.
This black/white ghost lasts just a fraction second. Mrs. Lucas’ jaw hardly misses one chewing beat of cheese eating. And yet this good-sized woman, even whilst doubting her eyes, decides to act. Something decides her. (And God bless the lady for making my life possible by saving poor Momma’s.) Mrs. Lucas, mouth plugged with discount cheese she is trying hard to swallow, the mother of eight herself, is now in air, is off her stool, goes up like the least likely rocket ever launched. She’s been shot vertical by the sudden panting strength Disasters can bring out in certain people—especially usually fairly slow parents secretly packed with just such save-our-babies surplus. She is no longer a fat red woman bored betwixt customers. She is a blurry flour-white angel, she’s Diana in fast motion. Whipping off her apron, she runs on tiptoe.
Barging out the door, she leaves a cash register and every all-round item totally unguarded. She is seeing she was right, it’s real, it’s spastic, roughly thirty feet beyond her. Mrs. L. is half past the store’s sidewalk tool display marked: “It’s May. Think of your Neighbors. Get Your Yard Right This Year.” She grabs a pair of hedge clippers—not sure why till later.
What has changed this often lazy woman into such a jump-back Savior? Something called “You must.” It can make heroes of us in one second. It can just as easy show how deeply cowardly we are, can leave us knowing that forever. Which hurts. But her? Hey—she’s running—it’s the longest such trek she’s made in twenty-seven years since—during a church picnic—she ran unsuccessfully on purpose from the huge and horny Luke Lucas, then eighteen. She is now flapping her apron all around her like some bullfighter’s cape, clippers are hid beneath. Mrs. L. chases a child she recognizes from behind as a definite McCloud, the wild youngest one that stole so bad till right here recent. br />
Nearing Courthouse Square, Mrs. Lucas (made a temporary genius by adrenaline that will, in a short time, fail her the way genius fails some people early—a woman blessed with sudden juice that’ll leave both thighs chafed, her body taxed from two years’ effort spent in six good goddess minutes), Mrs. Lucas draws alongside one fast little barefoot child. The child is galloping with eyes closed, hands wavering in front of her like a drowner’s underwater hope to please grab hold now, please. Mrs. L. sees: The child’s head is already twice a child’s head size owing to what’s released by shiny stingers stinging yet. And the woman throws her apron over this entire buzzing noggin. She uses her own running bulk to knock the youngster off her legs and onto grass beside our War Memorial. The girl goes into a cartwheel that looks almost planned. Mrs. Lucas is seriously falling, too, one prolonged respectful thud. A girl’s worked-on head is now resting in a woman’s lap.
The perfume that Mrs. Lucas suddenly inhales is so strong and unexpected, it almost makes that marked-down cheese come up. She shouts at the slit-eyed features because they seem so far away. She bellows past bugs curtaining a blue-white face. She does what you are always told in First-Aid Classes: “Remember to assure your victim aloud.” It’s something that, in being victimized by the sight of your victim, you can easily forget. A fine stout voice cries, “I’m here. It’s Doris Lucas, honey. It’s okay. I know just what to do.”
Like all of us, this lady during lunch hour is really only inventing it as she goes, child. She’s horrified all during. Sometimes you act because you’re less scared of making a mistake than of not making one in time.
Quick here: fake it.
• • •
HER OWN palms are being bitten so, stingers pock each hand with little map lights. Mrs. L.—hedge clippers in one fist—chops off long curls, throws brittle clotted curls as far away as possible. She’s staring down into the open mouth of the poor head she’s pruning. She swats and crushes insects in the air but never on the flesh itself. And even as wasps bite Doris Lucas, she keeps yelling kind words down at what might be a corpse by now: “Almost over, nearly done now, hold on, sug. They’re off you mostly. You’re with me, it’s Doris. Lucas. Doris’s got you. Fine, we’re going to be fine here. We’re almost through. It’s over with, I swear to you, we’re done. Breathe, you, breathe. For Doris, do.”