When we got back to the house, Belinda Jean wasn’t there, thank God. She and Peggy Konicki had gone down to Ocean Beach for the day. I tried to calm Claude down, but he wasn’t in any mood to listen to the likes of me. And when I suggested that maybe Belinda and me could go see Pastor Frickee and he could talk some sense into her, he grabbed my arm and squeezed it and said I was to leave that do-gooding minister out of our personal business or else. All day long, Claude kept walking around the house and out in the yard, short of breath and slamming things and mumbling to himself about “killing that black bastard.” I’d never seen him so mad, and I was scared skinny for Belinda Jean.
When Belinda come home around seven or so, she was wearing that terry cloth poncho I’d sewn her and her bathing suit underneath. He hair was in a ponytail and she was looking sunburnt and healthy. Claude come right at her, backhanding her in the face and splitting her lip. He called her “a disgrace” and “a coon’s whore” and told her to pack her things and get out of his house.
“And go where?” she sobbed. I was crying. She was crying. Claude was wheezing like he’d just run all the way up Jailhouse Hill.
“I don’t care where,” he said. “Plumb to Hell for all I care, because that’s where you’re headed sooner or later anyway. Or why don’t you go next door and live with those two niggers and that white slut they share.”
“Daddy,” she kept sobbing. “Daddy, please. We’re just friends, that’s all. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No? Letting him see you the way only a husband’s got a right to see his wife? Letting him make a dirty picture of the two of you and hang it up for everyone in town to ogle? I don’t know what devil spawned you, little girl, because you sure ain’t my child. Not anymore you ain’t. Now go! Get out of my sight! You don’t live here no more, period.” He wouldn’t back down. Wouldn’t listen to reason. And so she put a few things in a paper bag and left.
I was sick to my stomach all night long with worry about her. Where was she? Was she safe? Should I call the police? I would have, but I was afraid it would set him off again. I didn’t sleep a wink all night with him in the other bed, wheezing and cursing and muttering terrible things about having a score to settle with the nigger who’d ruined his daughter.
Belinda called me the next morning after Claude left for work. What she’d done, she told me, was walk five miles over to Peggy’s house wearing just her flip-flops and her poncho and bathing suit underneath. She’d slept there the night before, and would sleep there that night, too. Then Mrs. Konicki got on the line and said something about how Belinda Jean’s problem reminded her of West Side Story. Whatever she meant by that I didn’t know, but I just agreed with her to shut her up. I was grateful to her, nonetheless. As long as Belinda was staying with the Konickis, I figured, she was safe.
It didn’t turn out so bad, though. Because on the third night, he let her come back home. See, she’d written him a letter and snuck back here and tucked it in the Evening Record, so that when Claude come home from the icehouse and sat down to read his paper, Belinda Jean’s letter fell out. I read it after he did. In the letter, she said Jones and her were nothing more than “acquaintances,” and that she had never disrobed in front of him, nor he in front of her. All that had happened was that he’d come into the library one afternoon while she was working at the front desk and drawn a picture of her face. A pencil sketch that looked just like her. She hadn’t even known he was doing it until he showed it to her, she said. She had no idea he was going to bring that sketch home and use it to paint her face on Eve’s naked body. Whether what she said in her letter was the truth or a lie, I couldn’t tell. But Claude took it as gospel. When I looked up from reading what she’d written, I saw something I’d never seen before: my husband’s tears. “Why are you crying, Claude?” I asked him.
“Because my little girl’s still pure,” he said. “He didn’t foul her after all, except in his filthy mind.”
I pulled the tucked-up hanky from the sleeve of my dress and handed it to him. “Here,” I said. He wiped his eyes, blew his nose, stood and shoved the hanky into the pocket of his overalls. Then he walked out the door.
When I heard him start his truck, and then heard those truck tires on our gravel driveway, I knew where he was going: over to the Konickis’ to bring his daughter back home. And while he was gone, I sat in the rocking chair, rocking and thinking about what I’d seen that day in the movie theater: their two silhouettes down below me in the middle rows. They were talking and laughing easily with each other, like they were more than just acquaintances. Then I thought about what else I’d seen: that picture of his, Eve reaching up to pick that apple. Well, I thought, if it brings us peace around here, then let him believe what he wants to believe. But in the Bible, that’s not the way it went. Once Eve bit into that apple and got banished, there was no coming back. Paradise wasn’t hers no more. Life was hard for her and Adam and all of us who come after.
Still, I figured it was over at that point. For the next several weeks, I thought that, and after a while, I stopped thinking about it at all. Except it wasn’t over. The worst was coming. Claude had just been biding his time.
It come on the radio first. The noontime news said how a local man, employed as a mason by building contractor Angus Skloot, was found dead on the Skloots’ property. Found stuck headfirst down a well. All afternoon, every hour on the hour, the radio kept saying that same thing, just those couple sentences in the middle of the rest of the day’s news. I was so scared that I couldn’t even get my housework done. I just walked around from room to room, letting everything go. Claude had been sullen the night before, but that was nothing new. Then he’d had trouble sleeping. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard him walking around downstairs. When I put the light on and looked at the clock, it said it was two something. I woke up later and lit the light again. It was quiet downstairs now, but his bed was still empty. But that didn’t prove anything. Claude had trouble sleeping lots of nights. One minute I’d tell myself no, he wasn’t capable of murder. The next minute, I’d start worrying that he might be.
In the morning, before I went downstairs to make Claude’s breakfast, I prayed on it—asked Jesus Christ Almighty not to let my husband have done what I was afraid he might have, and if he hadn’t done it, to please forgive me for even thinking along those lines. Claude didn’t say more than two or three words to me while he was eating his eggs and toast. Well, that doesn’t prove a thing, I told myself; he never was the talkative type in the morning. But after Claude went off to work, I decided to go out to his garage and look around. The work I did down at the Loew’s Poli made me a detective of sorts, didn’t it? I’d just go out there and poke around a little, like a detective would do. But when I went out there, I saw that he’d padlocked the garage door. Usually that lock just hung open unless we were going away someplace for the day. And when I went back in the house to take the spare key off the hook, it was gone. All our other extra keys were there except that one. By the time Belinda Jean come downstairs for her breakfast, I was good and worked up. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Not a thing. Why do you ask?” She shrugged and shook a little more shredded wheat into her cereal bowl.
She was working that day. It was her long day because the library doesn’t close until 8:00 P.M. on Thursdays. From the normal way she’d been acting before she left, I could tell she still didn’t know about Jones’s death. But halfway through the afternoon, the front door banged open and I could tell from the look on her face that she knew. “I’m sick,” she said and ran right upstairs. Two or three times, I heard her in the bathroom, upchucking from the sounds of it. I made her a cup of tea, put some milk crackers on a plate to go with it, and went up there. She was back in bed, her face against the pillow. “Here,” I said. “This’ll settle your stomach.”
She turned and looked up at me, her face bright pink from crying. My heart was breaking for her,
she looked so pitiful. “I had two friends in this whole wide world,” she said. “And now one of them’s dead.”
I hated to ask it, but I did. “Is that all you and him were, Belinda Jean? Just friends? Because I heard you vomiting. You’re not baby sick, are you?”
“No!” she shouted. “He was nice to me was all. He was easy to talk to and he said he thought I was pretty. That’s all there was to it.” She put her face to her pillow again and wailed.
After she’d quieted down, I said, “Drink your tea and eat a little. It’ll make you feel better.” Then I left the room. That was all we’ve ever said to each other about Joe Jones, from that day to now, four years later.
That night, the Evening Record run a picture. It showed Jones’s shoes sticking up out of that shallow well. And the headline above it—FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED IN LOCAL MAN’S DEATH—nearly stopped my heart. I held my breath as I read through the article. It said that it might have been an accident, that Joe could have tripped and fallen into that well headfirst, but that the victim’s brother was wanted by the police for questioning. They’d questioned Angus Skloot, too, it said, and he’d told them the brothers had had a violent quarrel after Rufus’s wife had took off and left him. The paper didn’t come out and say there’d been hanky-panky between Joe and Rufus’s wife, but I thought that was what it was saying between the lines. Well, good, I thought. If it was murder, it wasn’t Claude who done it. It was one brother killing the other brother, same as Cain had killed Abel in a jealous rage and been made “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.” The coroner, Mr. McKee, would be conducting an inquest over the next several days to figure things out, the paper said. There was nothing in that article about Josephus Jones being a picture painter. I was relieved about that. I didn’t want anyone who might have seen the scuffle between him and Claude putting two and two together and getting seven. As far as I recalled, when the police stopped their fight at the art show and walked Claude to the exit gate that day, they hadn’t even asked him for his name. That was a relief, too.
Usually, Claude finished work at five o’clock and was home by five fifteen wanting his dinner. But the day that story about Jones’s death broke, he didn’t show. I held his supper until eight or so, then wrapped it up and put it in the Frigidaire. By the time I heard his truck come up the driveway, it was after ten and I was upstairs in bed, staring into the pitch-dark and praying as hard as I could. It had been quiet down the hall for an hour or more, so I figured Belinda had finally gotten to sleep. I got up and went downstairs. Everything was still dark, but when I looked out the back window, I saw the light on in the garage. I went out there in bare feet with just my nightgown on.
“Where you been?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer me. Didn’t even look at me.
“What are you doing out here, Claude?”
He told me it was none of my business what he was doing, but I just stood there, looking at him. “If you must know, Miss Nosey, I’m cleaning some of my tools,” he said then. But his toolbox was shut, still up on the shelf. He had his crowbar in one hand, a kerosene-smelling rag in the other. A pair of his coveralls was in a heap on the workbench. I walked over to them. “These dirty?” I said. “I’ll take them in. I’m doing wash tomorrow.” But when I went for them, he batted my hand away.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “They’re no good anymore. My boots neither.”
It made no sense. I’d bought him those boots for his birthday the month before and they were hardly broken in. “No? Why not?”
He turned and faced me. Gave me a long, hard look. “Because they got nigger blood on them. The overalls, too.” When he said that, my heart sunk.
I said nothing. Just stood there, staring back at him for the longest time until a shiver run through me. Then I turned away and walked back toward the house. A little while later, I stood at the window and watched as he burned those coveralls and boots in the barrel, the flames leaping up and lighting his face like he was Lucifer himself. Like I was married to the devil.
And maybe I had some devil in me, too, because every morning and night for the next several days, and sometimes even in the middle of the day, I’d get down on my knees and pray that Rufus Jones, not Claude, would be arrested—that an innocent man would pay for the crime instead of a guilty one. It was a shameful thing for a Christian woman to do: asking the Good Lord to cover up a lie for selfish reasons, and a terrible lie at that. He didn’t grant my request, either. I found that out the day the radio said that Rufus had been found, questioned, and cleared. That he’d gone off on a three-day toot was all, and witnesses at the places where he’d been had said so.
But at the end of that same long week, the paper and the radio said that Coroner McKee’s report concluded that Joe Jones’s death was accidental—that he’d probably tripped in the dark, stumbled and fallen into the well headfirst, and drowned. The well was made of stone, it said, and was most likely responsible for Jones’s banged-up skull and forehead.
There was some guff about Jones’s death from the colored folks. That big colored woman, Bertha Jinks—the one who’s mixed up in that group, the N Double A CP, and is always stirring up race trouble? She wrote a letter to the editor of the Record saying that everyone in town, black or white, knew how unlikely it was that a six-foot man would fall into a five-foot-deep well and manage to get himself drowned. And that if Josephus Jones had been a Caucasian instead of a Negro, the coroner would have concluded otherwise, and the police would have worked overtime until they’d solved his murder and gotten the victim some justice. My heart was near to stopping when I read that letter, and I got so scared that I didn’t even finish it. I just ripped it out of the newspaper and tore it into a million little pieces and burned them in the sink. Other letters to the editor went back and forth for a week or so after that, most of them in support of the official findings, and one or two saying how the coloreds were always finding something to complain about. After a while, the whole thing died down.
But not in our house. In our house, it kept festering in silence, like an untended-to wound that never quite heals and eventually kills you. Belinda Jean quit her job at the library, stopped speaking to her father, and started staying home all the time. Whenever her friend Peggy called, she’d have me tell her she was out, and after a while Peggy got the message and stopped calling. Claude’s suffering and breathing got worse and worse. And then, nine days ago, he turned purple, gasped for his last breath, and died—unrepentant and undetected in the matter of Josephus Jones’s murder. May God grant him mercy for what he done, I pray each night, and may He grant me mercy, too, for having kept my silence these four years. In the Bible, it says that Jesus told the Jews, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” It’s in John 8:32. But knowing the truth and telling it are two different things, and knowing the truth about how Josephus Jones met His Maker and not saying how hasn’t set me free. It’s put me in a kind of prison. Me and poor Belinda both. . . .
At Claude’s wake last night, it broke my heart the way Belinda Jean kept jerking her head up every time someone appeared at the doorway of the room where we were sitting. I suspect she was waiting for Peggy Konicki to show. Peggy, the only friend she ever had that didn’t get murdered. . . . Her mother come into Benny’s the other day, where I work now, running the cash register. Mrs. Konicki opened her wallet and showed me Peggy’s wedding picture, and a picture of her cute little grandbaby. I hate my Benny’s job, because it keeps me on my feet all day long, and because the manager’s always hanging around, making sure that I ask whoever I’m ringing up if they want the stuff that’s on the counter. “Can I interest you in a can of these deluxe mixed nuts?” Or, “Need any flashlight batteries today?” Or, “How about some bubble stuff for the kiddies? You know how children love to blow bubbles.” . . . I looked at that picture of Peggy’s baby quick. Then I had to look away and pinch my leg hard so that I wouldn’t cry in front of Mrs. Konicki, who was already a grandmother and
I was never going to be one.
I still count heads for that movie distributor, Axion Entertainment, and between that and Claude’s Social Security and my Benny’s paycheck, we get by, Belinda and me. Of course, she doesn’t work. Doesn’t leave the house hardly ever, either. Just hangs around all day from morning till nighttime, watching TV in her housecoat. She’s big as a house now, poor thing. Has those two or three double chins and breathes like she’s out of breath, even when she’s just sitting on the couch, knitting and watching her TV shows. I remember when I first come on the scene and laid eyes on her. She was eleven. Half of her eyebrows were missing and she had a wad of paper towel plugging up the bloody nose she’d given herself. Then I took charge and she got better. And now she’s bad again. Real bad. She don’t turn off that television at night until after Johnny Carson’s over. I get down on my knees and pray for her every single night.
Tonight, after I’ve gotten myself ready for bed, I’m going to pray for that other little girl, too—the one I saw across the hall last night at McPadden’s Funeral Home wearing her blue dress and Mary Jane shoes. Chick and Sunny O’Day’s little daughter, Annie. She could use some prayer, I think. It’s like that song Daddy used to sing back in Alabama. I heard it on the radio just the other day. Johnny Cash was the one singing it, I’m pretty sure. Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. . . . There’s more truth than poetry in that line. When I heard that song again, I sat down and cried a river.