Maybe because I’d written V in V so long ago? I’d begun sketching Violence two decades earlier, when I was a senior in high school—practically a fetus myself. Those drawings got me into Savannah College of Art and Design, and the completed graphic novel had been my senior project for my B.F.A. in sequential art.
I’d taken the finished graphic novel to a small con in Memphis, where I showed it to a guy who hired artists for DC. He liked my shading, and he offered me a contract. I’d put V in V in a box and gone to work, parlaying that first job into a freelance career. I was good, and I got better, and I never missed a deadline. Over the years I’d worked for every major publisher in the business, penciling and inking characters from Ant-Man all the way to General Zod.
About six years ago, while updating my website, I’d scanned and uploaded the opening pages of V in V. It was mostly a whim—an easy way to pad my content. The first month it got a couple hundred downloads. The next a couple thousand. By the summer’s end, I had more than twenty thousand shares and linkbacks, and the traffic was crashing my server. My social media blew up with requests for the whole story.
I self-published it, making a print-on-demand paper edition and an e-book, and I sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the first year alone. V in V was still selling, and now, instead of sitting on panels, I was paid to be a featured speaker at comic-book and fantasy/sci-fi conventions all over the country. When I penciled for other series, my name on the cover boosted sales, and Dark Horse had made a truly motivating offer for this prequel. The only problem was, I had zero ideas.
I thumped my pillow, restless, trying to focus inward on my sharp-toothed antiheroine. How had Violence learned to fly, to bite, to wield her clever, crooked knives? When I started the graphic novel, twenty years ago, I’d concentrated on Violet, the heartbroken girl that Violence comes to protect. Violet was based on me in a lot of ways, so I knew her character down to the bone. Violence had been only a means to an end. To a lot of very bloody ends, actually, and I’d never thought past that. It was an absence in the book, and now I had to fill it. I sank deep into the dark inside my body, waiting to see a story begin, waiting for colors and shapes to come and show me. I was almost dozing, but not quite, and I turned onto my side.
When I came to rest, a smallness deep within me kept on turning. I felt it. It was a silent trill of something like a sound. It was the smallest key, spinning in a lock I’d never known was present at my center.
The movement was in me, but it wasn’t me. It was another little something, a someone, willfully choosing to flex his flippery future arms, or whatever it was he had by then. It was a choice, but I hadn’t made it. It was inside me, and mine, but I did not control it.
Right exactly then, my son started. He became real in ways he hadn’t been five seconds before. Much realer than he had been almost four months back, when I was cleaning up my hotel room in Atlanta, finding only one used condom but remembering two sexes. A second condom had been on the bedside table, speaking to good intentions but still mint-in-package. Now I could feel him making small decisions inside me, and I already knew his name. It was a nerd reference so obscure that nobody but me would ever get it.
“Hello, Digby? Is that you?” I asked him, listening in that same odd, inward way for a sound that was not a sound.
It came again, as if in response. Alien and tiny, unfeelable under any other circumstances.
“Oh, my stars and garters, you’re really there,” I told him, though Late Bloomers said he was a few weeks away from hearing yet.
Quickening, my book had called it, and it was the perfect word, because when he quickened, my whole life sped up, too. I was pregnant, and this baby didn’t even have a crib. Right now he had only me. I had to tell people. My Tuesday gamers ran a meal train every time someone had a baby or got sick. I’d made umpty casseroles and quarts of soup over the years; now I would need a turn.
Most important, I had to tell my family. Fast. My parents needed time to get over their initial shock before the baby came, so Mom could teach me to breast-feed and Keith could show me how to properly install the car seat that I didn’t own yet.
Every Sunday afternoon Rachel hosted a family luncheon after church. I’d sat through more than a dozen since I’d gotten pregnant, eating shrimp scampi or beef medallions for two and keeping my mouth shut. This Sunday, I resolved, I would simply say it.
Something sure smells good, and hey, I’m spawning. Boom and done.
I’d pre-forgive Mom and Keith for any less-than-ideal initial reactions. They were going to be so embarrassed. I’d bright-side it for them, reassure them that I was healthy and happy and remind them that they were finally getting a second grandkid. In the end they weren’t going to love Digby any less for being fatherless or browner than they were. But the end seemed a long way off.
Rachel would back me up, but the minute we were alone, I’d get an earful from her, too. She’d be pissed at me for setting a bad example for her thirteen-year-old daughter. So would her husband, probably, but screw him. Of every jackass currently stomping around on this blue planet, Jake Jacoby was the last one who was allowed to have an opinion about me.
I’d eat whatever crap they needed to shovel at me, and then they’d rally around me. Around us. They had to, especially with Rachel there to make them. Rachel could rally so fast and so hard, and I had to be ready for that, too. Before Sunday I needed to go online and order everything I wanted for a bright blue Superman-themed nursery, before Rachel could swoop in with trendy neutrals and distressed wood and those horrifying Swedish animals from GOOP.
Sunday night I’d call my grandmother down in Alabama. If Birchie had been any other small-town ninety-year-old southern lady, the thought of telling her might make me cringe, but she was her singular self. Sure, Birchie lived stiffly, and by rules, but they were rules of her own making. That call seemed more like a reward I’d earn by weathering the storm of telling Rachel and my parents.
When I told Birchie about Digby, I knew that my prim grandmother would be . . . joyful. Joyful that she and I would not be the last of the Birch line after all. Joyful in the same soaring, secret way that I was—and right now? Feeling him move? I was practically giddy with it. I lay in the darkness, reveling in the flutter of this tiny, late, imperfectly got piece of what I’d always wanted.
Now I could hardly wait to call her. She had lived a version of this story: a single son, born when she was past thirty, that she had raised alone. Granted, she’d been a young widow. She’d had a proper husband there for the conception part. Even so, Birchie would understand better than anyone else how, in the wake of my son’s beginning, I felt like my life was beginning, too.
I had no way to know that seven hundred miles south of me, the grandmother I longed to tell was coming to her end.
2
Birchville, Alabama, had its own origin story, so entwined with my grandmother’s that there was no way to tell one without the other. The town itself was founded by Birchie’s grandfather, Ethan, the eldest son of an old Charleston shipping family who had acted as blockade runners in the Civil War. They kept their money safely overseas, surviving the Late Unpleasantness with their fortune intact, if not their reputation. Their newly destitute social circle had small appreciation for southerners who had chosen prudence over patriotism.
By 1874 Ethan, who had been a child during the war, was chafing under the uncomfortable combination of wealth and the Old Guard’s condemnation. He wanted a fresh start, and he was not the only young man in Charleston who felt that way. He left, taking several sons from the old families with him: a Darian, an Alston, and two of the impoverished Mack boys. The Macks had sunk all their money into Confederate government bonds; that family especially was so bitter that it penetrated the bloodline, genes-deep.
Ethan founded Birchville on the bones of a burned-out ’Bama town that had lost its charter in the war. He rebuilt the church first, then perched a big white Victorian house on the hill across the road. When both build
ings were finished, he sent back to Charleston for his girl, to marry her in one and move her into the other. My great-grandfather, Ellis Birch, was born in that house, and my grandmother was born inside it, too.
At 9:00 a.m. on any given Sunday, Birchie would be sitting at her formal dining-room table in that very house, watching her town wake up through the big bay window. Behind her, on either side of the doorway to the kitchen, portraits of her grandfather and father flanked her, watching their town as well, stern and benevolent. Ethan looked proud, after the fashion of portraits in his day. Ellis looked even prouder, plus he had those creepy Uncle Sam eyes that seemed to rove around the room. I had never liked eating in the dining room under his painted gaze, but it was the Lord’s day. Birchie would no more eat a Sunday meal in the cozy breakfast nook than she would take up Prancercise. I could imagine her there perfectly, spine ramrod straight, ankles crossed, eating her egg and sipping coffee with Wattie Price, her bosom friend.
I didn’t have to imagine the wretched events that awaited them across the street at Birchville First Baptist on this particular Sunday morning. I would see the whole story unfolding in my head from a hundred different angles, because every church member who was present—and a few who weren’t—would later tell me all the gory details.
As the church bells pealed ten-fifteen, Birchie and Wattie linked arms to careful their way down the wide steps of their front porch. Those two little old ladies, round and soft and short and fragile, looked like a matched set of salt and pepper shakers as they toddled down the hill toward First Baptist, on schedule and as timely as the tides.
Birchville’s population was a little smaller and skewed a little older than when I was growing up, but there was still a family of Darians, plenty of Alstons, and a slew of Macks who lived in the town. My grandmother was the only remaining Birch, though, and all the old-name families were members at First Baptist. As Birchie and Wattie made their stately way up the left side aisle, folks cleared a path, offering smiles and greetings. Birchie took it as her due, pausing only to exchange a speaking glance with Wattie as Martina Mack clomped up the other aisle in her enormous Sunday hat. It blocked the view, perched high and bright red over Martina’s iron-gray witch scraggles, but Martina would neither remove it nor move back. She had to sit in the second row, right side, exactly opposite Birchie’s pew.
Wattie’s knees were bad, so Birchie helped her settle before sitting down herself, and quite a few folks in the congregation looked away. There were folks at the church who could not seem to remember that Miss Wattie did not work for Birchie. Wattie had never worked for us, in fact. That was Wattie’s mother, Vina. She had been the Birches’ housekeeper. When Birchie’s own mother died in childbirth, Vina had rocked Birchie, and taught her songs, and tucked her in for naps in the kitchen playpen. She still had milk from her youngest boy, so Vina fed Birchie with her own body. A year or so later, Wattie came along to join my grandmother, and they had bonded deep as sisters. The two of them had put up jam together every August of their lives in that kitchen: as babies watching, as helpers too little to be truly helpful, as young girls, as married ladies, and eventually as jam masters who regularly took multiple ribbons at the county fair.
Around twelve years ago, I started worrying about Birchie living all alone in that big house full of staircases with her bad balance and worse eyesight. I’d wanted her to move to Virginia, into an assisted-living apartment near my house, but she would have none of it.
Meanwhile Wattie’s husband had passed, and both her sons lived far, Stephen in Chicago, Sam in Houston. They were worried, too. Wattie’s house was on an isolated road outside of town. She drove herself into Birchville almost every day with less and less regard for what lane the car was in. She and Birchie would sit out on the porch in fine weather or in front of the living room’s wide windows when it rained. They would knit and talk and supervise town life. It was a relief for all of us when Wattie failed her driver’s test and came to live with Birchie in the big Victorian. They could walk to the beauty parlor, the library, three restaurants, the yarn shop. The Piggly Wiggly didn’t have a delivery service per se, but for Emily Birch Briggs? The groceries got delivered.
The longer they lived together, the more symbiotic they became. Church had been the last amalgamation. On paper Wattie was still a member at Redemption, the all-black Baptist church near her old house. Birchie kept her membership at First Baptist, too, but for years now they had gone to services together, half the time walking to First Baptist and half the time being driven to Redemption by one of the deacons. This was a First Baptist week, and they bent their heads over their shared church bulletin until the service started.
Birchie took tidy notes in the margins of her Order of Worship, upright and attentive, giving Miss Wattie small, decorous nods when the preacher got it right, frowning slightly when he got it wrong. There were very few nods.
Miss Wattie remained stoic. Her large, heavy-lidded eyes hardly seemed to blink, but a close observer would notice that her full lips clamped in tandem with every Birchie head shake. The Reverend Richard Smith was new to the church, and very young, and prone to passionate sputtering about the Beatitudes. He told everyone to call him Pastor Rick, and sometimes, when he mentioned hell, it almost sounded like he was putting air quotes around the word. Worse, there were no detectable air quotes when he mentioned dinosaurs. Neither Birchie nor Miss Wattie could approve of him.
The old pastor—a properly powder-dry fellow of their generation—had died. Instead of promoting Jim Campbell, the blandly handsome, middle-aged unter-pastor, the church had called this new boy. He’d been born respectably enough in Alabama, but he’d gone to Golden Gate Seminary out in California.
As far as I could tell, they’d returned him with his old-school Southern Baptist doctrinal stick-in-the-butt still firmly lodged, but he also owned a pair of man sandals and did not eat red meat. Worse, he’d alternately coaxed and needled every single First Baptist member onto Facebook. Even Birchie and Wattie had signed up, strictly as a kindness. He’d betrayed their goodwill gesture by making the church newsletter completely virtual. To save trees, he said, but it meant they’d actually had to learn to turn on the computer I had gotten them. To my grandmother all this meant he was now “from” California, which was practically Babylon—the setting of a thousand movies about fornication that she flat refused to see.
“And he sweats when he preaches,” Birchie had told me on the phone. In her small, pursed mouth, “sweats” sounded like a curse word.
“I’m sure he can’t help it,” I’d told her.
“He most certainly could. The church has air conditioning.”
Birchie should know, as she had single-handedly paid to install it in the 1970s, when she was going through the change of life.
“The pulpit is right under the vent, but he won’t preach from it,” Wattie chimed in. They were on speakerphone. They’d always liked to have a share in each other’s conversations, but over the past couple of years they’d used the speakerphone more and more often. These days they took every call in tandem. It had happened so gradually I thought nothing of it. “He puts on that headset like a pop star, waving his arms around and jogging back and forth.”
“It’s true!” Birchie confirmed. “I feel like I’m watching that communist Fonda girl on one of her tacky aerobics tapes, what with all his gyrations splashed across those . . . screens.”
“Everybody’s using screens now, y’all,” I told them. “And no one watches tapes. Or does aerobics, for that matter.”
I heard a skeptical “Humph,” but I didn’t know if it was Birchie or Miss Wattie.
“They only put the lyrics on that screen,” Wattie said. “How can people sing without the notes?”
Birchie said, “I swan, Lois Gainey has not been on key once since those screens went up. He says the hymnals were getting ratty, but I offered to replace them. Twice.” I understood from her tone—anyone would have—that Miss Birchie’s considerable
resources had not been available to help with the installation of screens.
All this change notwithstanding, Birchie was happy in her pew. Today the church was holding its Summer Kick-Off Fish Fry on the lawn. It was a tradition as long-standing and almost as venerated as Birchie herself.
As a kid I’d been to it every year; I’d spent every childhood summer down in Birchville. I wasn’t a football fan or a fish-the-Coosa River sort, but I’d loved Birchville anyway. Birchie bought me chalk in every color; I’d draw comic strips a block long, every sidewalk square a panel. She’d made Batman and Star Wars patterns on graph paper to entice me to learn needlepoint, and I’d needed no reward but the pie to want Wattie to teach me how to make her perfect crust. She and Wattie together sewed me a new Wonder Woman costume every year. I was allowed to run all over town wearing it, acting out Super Friends with local kids until I heard Birchie ringing the porch bell that called me home for supper. In Norfolk I could only wear it in the house. It embarrasses Rachel, my mother told me, her pink cheeks testifying that Rachel was not alone.
For me summer began with the taste of catfish rolled in cornmeal and coarse salt, served up crisp and smoking hot on paper plates with sweet tea in Dixie Cups. Iceberg and cherry-tomato salad drenched in homemade ranch dressing. Cheese grits. Fried okra. Huge wedges of icebox pie for after. That meal was still the very taste of freedom to me.
This year it was drizzling outside, a thing Miss Birchie’s prayers had not allowed to happen on Fish Fry Sunday for decades. Probably God weighing in on Pastor Rick. But there was no canceling or postponing the Fry. The youth-group boys simply crowded the tables into the fellowship hall. As Miss Birchie and Miss Wattie came in, arm in arm, Pastor Rick was there to greet them.
“Now, there’s no need for you ladies to wait in line. Come have a seat. We’ll bring you plates.”
This was one thing he got right. No grandmother-aged lady or pregnant woman had ever had to stand in line at a church social. Pastor Rick walked Birchie and Miss Wattie over to his own table, already packed with deacons and Associate Pastor Campbell and his wife, Myrtle. Birchie took the seat across from Frank Darian, her lawyer, who lived and worked out of the big blue house two doors down from Birchie’s. He was the only man at the table who wasn’t part of church leadership, but his wife, Jeannie Anne, was the children’s minister. It was a part-time job involving hand puppets, and therefore open to women.