Meridian

  "What will it get me but a lot of trouble," grumbled the husband.

  "I don't know," said Meridian. "It may be useless. Or maybe it can be the beginning of the use of your voice. You have to get used to using your voice, you know. You start on simple things and move on...."

  "No," said the husband, "I don't have time for foolishness. My wife is dying. My boy don't have shoes. Go somewhere else and find somebody that ain't got to work all the time for pennies, like I do."

  "Okay," said Meridian. Surprised, Truman followed as she calmly walked away.

  "What's this here?" asked the husband ten minutes later as they came through his front door with two bags of food.

  "To go with the venison." Meridian grinned.

  "I ain't changed my mind," said the husband, with a suspicious peek into the bags.

  And they did not see him again until the Monday after Mother's Day, when he brought them six rabbits already skinned and ten newspaper logs; and under the words WILL YOU BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO VOTE in Meridian's yellow pad, he wrote his name in large black letters.

  Treasure

  THEY FIRST SAW the home of Miss Margaret Treasure through a landscape of smoke, while walking down a flat dirt road looking for people the census takers always missed. It was the middle of summer, hot as an oven, and sweat fell from their skin and evaporated before it hit the ground. On both sides of the road last year's cornstalks rustled in dry, lonely talk, and as the chimneys of the house wavered through the haze they saw a large black woman in a tight red dress hobbling toward them, a gasoline can in her hand. She was setting fire to the field.

  Truman and Meridian stopped to watch her, and when the woman reached them she too stood still. She was obviously surprised to see them and dropped her gasoline can at Meridian's feet.

  On the wide front porch of Miss Treasure's neat white house there was a gigantic mahogany bed with head and footboards towering over their heads. Meridian held the fat left hand of Miss Treasure and helped her down on it. Miss Treasure's tears dripped onto the snowy covering and had already washed pink grooves into the blackness of her skin.

  "I got to burn this bed," said Miss Treasure, slamming her head against the footboard.

  "Wait awhile," said Meridian, looking out at the burning cornfield, "and Truman and I will help you."

  "You will?" asked Miss Treasure. Her tears, for the moment, subsided, and she smiled quite happily. Because she was so fat they had not realized how old she was, but now they could see that, indeed, she was an old woman. Her hands were ropey with veins and knotted from arthritis, her moist eyes were rimmed with cataracts. As Meridian and Truman sat with Miss Treasure on the bed, a younger woman, perhaps in her middle sixties, came to the door and leaned outward against the screen.

  "Git away, Lucille!" croaked the old woman, Miss Treasure, whose voice was hoarse from crying.

  "Shame," said the other woman primly, turning away. "Shame. Shame. Shame. Upon our father's name."

  Miss Treasure rose from the bed and went inside the house, emerging a few minutes later with a pitcher of lemonade and a tall glossy black wig on her head. Under the wig her face was ravaged and wrinkled.

  "In the first place," said Miss Treasure, sipping her lemonade, "I'm only burning what is my own. All this land you see belongs to yours truly. I can burn it up if I want to, ain't that right?"

  "Sure," said Truman.

  "Yes, ma'am," said Meridian.

  "You hear that, sister!" called Miss Treasure.

  "Humph!" came from behind the screen.

  "What you say y'all name was?"

  "Meridian and Truman," said Meridian.

  "I'm Miss Margaret Treasure, and that's Little Sister Lucille."

  "Miss Lucille Treasure," said the voice behind the screen. "I'm a Miss same as you."

  "Y'all children want some lemonade?" asked Miss Treasure, pouring it.

  Miss Lucille Treasure came out on the porch. Thin and the color of wet sand, she carried herself with the rigid arrogance of a walking stick held in the hand of a prince. There was cruelty in her eyes when she looked at her sister.

  "What mind she got left," she sniffed, "is gone wandering."

  "It ain't," protested Miss Margaret Treasure. And she began to tell her story: They had lived on the Treasure plantation--not as tenants but as owners--all their lives. How their father had managed to own a plantation in that part of Georgia they had been as children forbidden to ask. In any case, Miss Margaret Treasure--at Little Sister Lucille's prompting--had been selling bits and pieces of the place until now all that was left could be seen from the front and back porches. They had lived for years without seeing anyone, except when Little Sister went into town for staples she bought, as her father had done, twice a year. Everything else they needed the farm provided. They had chickens, a few cows, a pig. The only time they saw people for any length of time was when Little Sister Lucille contracted with painters to come and paint the house every five years. It was at the last painting of the house that Miss Margaret Treasure's troubles started. She had fallen in love with one of the painters.

  Well, Miss Margaret continued, now she was down to the last few acres and the house, which she wanted to keep. But she had to sell them in order to keep her good name and her self-respect. Because six months ago she had looked out of her bedroom window and seen a face hanging there above a ladder. It was the face of her fate. His name was Rims Mott. A dog's name, she added, bursting into fresh tears.

  Little Sister Lucille stood with her hands on her hips, scowling at the quivering shoulders of her fat sister.

  "They was keeping company," she said sourly, spitting over the porch rail, her brown spittle falling between two blue hydrangea bushes. "At her age! All night long I'd hear 'em at it. Yowlin' and goin' on like alley cats."

  "Git back!" said the crying woman. "I don't need you to stand over me and gloat. Just because he never looked at you!"

  "What do I want with a forty-five-year-old man?" asked Little Sister Lucille. "I knowed better than to let myself get messed up. At least," she sniffed, "I'm going to meet my maker a clean woman, just as pure on that day as the day I was born."

  Miss Margaret's wet face was twisted in agony. From a compact which she held in trembling fingers she dabbed on more face powder, even as her tears continued to wash it away. "They say I got to marry him," she sobbed, "but I don't want to now."

  "Then don't marry him," said Truman and Meridian in the same breath.

  "Because if I marry him," Miss Margaret continued, "he'll be sure to outlive me, and then his name will be on this house. He'll own it, and I don't trust him enough to raise no child."

  Meridian's face at last showed surprise, and at the same time, the reason for Miss Margaret's tears came to Truman.

  "Yes," said Little Sister Lucille smugly, watching their changed faces, "she's fat and black and seventy-two years old, and the first man she opened her legs to made her pregnant."

  "Sixty-nine," said Miss Margaret.

  Laughter, like a wicked silver snake, wriggled up Truman's spine. It knocked him out to hear Meridian ask, conversationally, "How far along are you?" He glanced at her expecting to see a face fighting to control itself, but there was only a slight blush already fading into her brown skin.

  "Ahhh!" Miss Margaret screamed and jumped to her feet, pulling at the heavy bed. "Help me burn it up now, y'all," she cried, and yanked with such force her wig fell off at their feet. Little Sister Lucille grabbed it up and began to laugh, forgetting, apparently, that her own hair was severely marcelled and dyed a foolish orange.

  Truman and Meridian took hold of the bed and pushed with all their strength. It hung over the edge of the porch like an ancient ship hovering over the edge of the sea. Miss Margaret pulled and the bed crashed down the steps and into the yard, Miss Margaret's leg caught under it. She did not seem to feel the pain but tugged relentlessly at the bed trying to pull it over her and out to the edge of the cornfields where the fire, by this time, had go
ne out.

  "You're out of gasoline," said Meridian, holding up the can.

  Meridian and Truman sat in the yard under a hot midsummer sun, binding Miss Margaret's leg in cold-water wraps.

  "Miss Margaret," said Meridian, holding the leg on her lap and giving it an affectionate pat every now and then, "from the way you handle yourself, I don't think you're pregnant. Do you think she looks pregnant?" she asked Truman. "Truman's wife had a little girl," she explained to Miss Treasure, "so he'd be a good person to ask because he'd know."

  Truman shook his head slowly, "You don't look a bit pregnant to me," he choked out.

  Miss Margaret's face lit up, but quickly went dark again. "Rims said it, too," she said. "Him and Little Sister Lucille both said it."

  "Well," said Meridian, "when we take you in to the doctor for your leg we can ask him."

  Miss Margaret looked at them in fear. It had been years since she was off the plantation, and from the magazines she read the world beyond her property was not safe. She grieved over her life and moaned from the pain coming into her wounded leg. She had been a virgin until Rims came into her life, filling it with fluttery anticipation and making her body so changed, so full of hurting brightness she had known it was a sin for which she would be punished. She lay on the hot ground like a lost child, or like a dog kicked so severely it has lost its sense of smell and wanders about and leans on the tree it otherwise would have soiled.

  Truman and Meridian supported her every step of the way, holding her fat arms firmly, up to the very door of the doctor's examination room. Her face, when she emerged an hour later, held a vacancy of grief that made it appear blank and smooth, as if all her wrinkles had been, by kisses, erased. The next day she came to place her name in Meridian's yellow pad.

  "Ask me to do anything, young peoples," said Miss Treasure, "I'm y'all's!"

  Pilgrimage

  AND SO THEY MUST GO to the prison. And so they must. And so they must see the child who murdered her child, nothing new. But the prison was. Only two stories high, it was set back from the road in a sea of green, the black trees around it like battlements around a castle. The grate of the key, the lock, the creaking door opening inward, sucking in the light into the gloom. Signing in. Hearing the harsh music of women's voices, women confined to sit and buzz like insects, whine, wait in line. Who was that person? That man/woman person with a shaved part in close-cut hair? A man's blunt face and thighs, a woman's breasts? But they had not come to stare or feel the cold security of being who they were, unconfined.

  She was in a cell as small, as tidy, as a nearly empty closet. Meridian had brought magazine pictures of green fields, a blue river, a single red apple on a white page, large, containing in itself all the mystery there ever was or will be in the world. It was the apple (not the river or the green fields) the girl liked. She liked red, liked roundness, liked a clean shine on things she ate.

  Yes. She had bitten her baby's cheek, bitten out a plug, before she strangled it with a piece of curtain ruffle. So round and clean it had been, too. But not red, alas, before she bit. And wasn't it right to seek to devour a perishable? That, though sweet to the nose, soft to the touch, yummy, is yet impossible to keep? It was as if (she said, dreamily) I had taken out my heart (red and round, fine, a glistening valentine!) and held it in my hands (my heart was sweet, sweet, smelled sweet, like apple blossoms) and took a bite out of it. It was my heart I bit, I strangled till it died. I hid beside the river. My heart the roaming dog dug up, barking for the owner of that field. My heart. Where I am (she continues) no one is. And why am I alive, without my heart? And how is this? And who, in the hell, are you?

  "People who ask people to vote." (To struggle away, beyond, all in the world they have ever known.) (She laughs, heartily and young.) Well, you don't think there's anybody here to vote? Peals of laughter washing them down to the absurdity of worms after a rain wrigglingly constructing ridges of sand to sink between before the crushing boot that's raised above comes crushing down.

  "Your mother and sister told us where you were."

  A mother and sister oddly smug about this child who killed her child. Thirteen (her mother said) and too damn grown, since before she was even ten. Doomed, I told her. Get out of my house. Walk the streets for all I care. She never was (turning to look) like Carrie Mae, the one that pained me most being born. Must have been because all my pain from Carrie Mae come then, and was got over with. Now (lifting her chin) this 'un in the prison was too easy coming. Like grease.

  Spare me (says the girl). Across her face the sun has burned squares between the lighter color protected by the bars. I look out of my window every evening (she says) until it goes down, warming my chest. If you all can't give me back my heart (she says suddenly, with venom), go the fuck away.

  It is too much for them. Outside again they are strangers to the green land, the ground they walk on, have known forever. It is so close to Meridian she takes to her sleeping bag, there to weep underneath Truman's trembling arm, there to rouse her own heart to compassion for her son. But her heart refuses to beat faster, to warm, except for the girl, the child who killed her child. Doomed, she thought, doomed. A fucking heart of stone.

  Truman lay as if slaughtered, feeling a warmth, as of hot blood, wash over him. Shame. But for what? For whom? What had he done?

  Meridian sat, watching the workmen from the city begin to clear the debris from the ditch, preparatory to filling it in (yes, the voters had won this small, vital service), and she wrote with such intensity and passion the pen dug holes in the paper--

  i want to put an end to guilt i want to put an end to shame whatever you have done my sister (my brother)

  know i wish to forgive you

  love you

  it is not the crystal stone

  of our innocence

  that circles us

  not the tooth of our purity

  that bites bloody our hearts.

  She slept that night with Truman's arms around her, while Truman's dreams escaped from his lips to make a moaning, crying song.

  One day, after Truman--who was beginning to experience moments with Meridian when he felt intensely maternal--had wiped her forehead with a cloth soaked in cold water, Meridian wrote: there is water in the world for us brought by our friends

  though the rock of mother and god vanishes into sand

  and we, cast out alone

  to heal

  and re-create

  ourselves.

  These poems she did not burn. She placed them just above Anne-Marion's letters, after which she did not look at the letters, the poems, or even the walls, again.

  (Atonement: Later, in the Same Life)

  TRUMAN HELD HER HANDS away from his shoulders. "I have something to tell you, Lynne. Try not to be upset."

  "You're going to divorce me," said Lynne bravely, sillily.

  "No. I don't think so. The truth is, I still love you."

  "Still?"

  "I always did. I love you. You irritate me sometimes..."

  "You irritate me, often."

  "... but. But I don't desire you any more."

  Lynne sank back into her rocker. Truman knelt on the floor.

  "Is it because I'm fat?" she asked. "Is it because I smell, maybe? Is it because my hair is messy? Or is it because--" and she laughed a strangled laugh--"is it because I have now become Art?"

  "No, no," he said, wondering about her. "I do love you. It's just that--I don't want to do anything but provide for you and be your friend. Your brother. Can you accept that?"

  Lynne chuckled, thinking of the South, the green fields ...

  "Maybe we can start over again," she said. "Let's go back South."

  "What for?" he asked.

  Settling Accounts

  "BUT DO YOU KNOW what I want from you?" Truman asked Meridian, leaning over her sleeping bag. "Promise me you won't laugh at me...." He hesitated. "I want you to love me."

  "But I do love you," said Meridian.

/>   "You pity me. I want your love the way I had it a long time ago. I used to feel it springing out to me whenever you looked into my eyes. It flowed over me like a special sun, like grace."

  "My love for you changed...."

  "You withdrew it."

  "No, I set you free...."

  "Hah," he said bitterly, "why don't you admit you learned to hate me, to disrespect me, to wish I were dead. It was your contempt for me that made it impossible for me to forget."

  "I meant it when I said it sets you free. You are free to be whichever way you like, to be with whoever, of whatever color or sex you like--and what you risk in being truly yourself, the way you want to be, is not the loss of me. You are not free, however, to think I am a fool."

  He noticed, above their heads, an addition to the line of letters. A blank sheet of paper and, next to it, forming the end of the line, a photograph of an enormous bull's-eye. When he stood up close to it he discovered--after much twisting of his head and neck--that it was not a bull's-eye at all but a gigantic tree stump. A tiny branch, no larger than his finger, was growing out of one side. The piece of paper next to it was not blank, though the handwriting was grotesquely small. Even so, he recognized it as Anne-Marion's. It contained one line: "Who would be happier than you that The Sojourner did not die?" She had written, also in a minute script, "perhaps me," but then had half-erased it.

  Behind him on the floor Meridian was bending forward again and again to touch her toes, her flushed face tense with determination; a rush of gratitude that she was alive flooded Truman's body. When she stopped for breath he dropped to the floor beside her and gathered her into his arms. But Meridian leaned against him for only a moment, then she continued to flex and stretch her muscles.

  "Truman," Meridian said, when she lay back, exhausted, on the floor. "Do you remember what happened the last time we went out? Remember how that woman attacked me and then slammed the door in our faces?"

  He remembered.

  "I never explained to you why she did that. She did it because I know something about her life that she told me, but now she wishes I didn't know it because she's afraid of what people will think about her if they know. That woman left her husband because he was infatuated with his dog."