The Almost Sisters

  I had to nip this in the bud, but damn, they were having so much fun. Watching them gambol and romp in their astounding innocence, it made me happy, too. I needed a little innocence tonight.

  I stepped up onto the low brick porch, sheltered from the moonlight in the shadows of the roof and wall, arms crossed to cover my shirt’s light pink letters. In my all-black outfit, I was invisible inside the darkness, so I gave them another minute. I would make them come back in the morning and apologize and clean it up. But right now I let them have the glory of watching the high arcs of paper unfurl, the stifled laughter, the simple pleasure.

  Movement caught the corner of my eye. Beside me the screen door swung stealthily open. The dogs were silent, which could only mean that someone had told them to be silent.

  Martina Mack stepped out in a voluminous flowered nightie, knee length, with a matching summer housecoat hanging open over it. Her skinny calves stuck out like leathery twigs beneath the hem, disappearing into huge puffy slippers. Her hair hung around her shoulders in iron-gray witch scraggles. She moved slow and crafty, and the kids, intent on wreaking their small havoc, did not see her any more than they saw me.

  Her front lip pulled up like an angry donkey’s, and I saw that she’d taken the time to put her teeth in. She must have been up and seen them from the very start. I was about to speak to her, assure her that we would reverse this process, when I saw what she had cradled in her arms.

  I was so shocked to see that double-barreled shotgun that my voice caught in my throat. She raised it, too, flesh hanging down in wrinkled dewlaps from her bare arms. She brought it up to bear in a smooth arc. Not at the sky. Not at the ground. Martina Mack raised the silver barrel, and in her mottled hands the shotgun’s arc of wide aim was pointed right at the children.

  15

  It wasn’t the heat. It was the humidity—so dense I felt that I’d been suspended in a liquid. Birchville had become Atlantis, and I was launching myself through air gone thick and salted toward that gun. I was so slow. I floated like Digby, every move blunted, rendered harmless as a flutter. The barrel swung up through the gelled air, and it moved slow as well, in a long, endless arc. The steel gleamed cold in the moonlight. The gun was almost all I could see, my vision pinholed to its shine.

  I felt my hands on it, and the metal felt so cold it burned me, like it was iron and I was half fairy. It bucked once in my grasp like an animal, and the roaring boom, when it came, was louder than planets crashing. In the ear-ringing, awful wake of it, in the stink of smoke and chemicals, I couldn’t tell if I’d been in time.

  I had to actually look, look with my watering eyes, to see that the barrel was pointing up, as if Martina Mack and I had conspired to pepper that fat, smug moon with buckshot, right in his pale face.

  Then the air was only boiling summer air again. I shivered in it, drenched in my own panicked sweat. The kids were already sprinting away in two directions. Hugh’s T-shirt glowed as white as the tail of a deer in full retreat. They had abandoned the grocery bag, spilling its remaining rolls of Charmin onto the grass. Did Lav know I was here? Or had she just seen a dark shadow moving to block Martina Mack’s scraggly head? Catwoman versus Swamp Hag.

  The gun’s unearthly boom was still ringing in my ears, but now, from very far away, I heard dogs going crazy. Martina did not have three or four. I’d been wrong. She had at least a thousand, all hellhounds judging by the rising noise. They were deep in the throes of whole-body barking, near hysterical with joy or fury, who could tell? The raucous chorus got louder as my ears cleared, and I could see the dogs pushing and jostling in my peripheral vision. The screen door had clicked closed behind Martina, or I might have been swarmed by them.

  Martina Mack snarled, her pearly dentures gleaming uniform and square, and yanked at her gun with her veiny claws. She was a thousand years old, though, and I was so swamped with adrenaline that I had superstrength. I yanked back, the force of my pull ripping it right from her hands. She cried out, an outraged squawk under the dog noise.

  “Are you insane?” I yelled into her face, and my voice sounded far away because of the noise of that shotgun in my ears and the ceaseless clamor of the hysterical dogs. “Are you fucking crazy?”

  This woman who had just shot at children blanched at the profanity, then launched one of her own. “Those li’l shits was trespassers! I had every right!”

  “To shoot? To shoot at kids? Was your own life in danger from the Charmin double rolls, Martina?”

  I had a white-knuckle grip on her stupid, stupid gun, and I was screaming over all the noise, screaming so hard the words hurt my throat. I took a step back, trying to calm down.

  She turned to the screen door and shrieked, “You dogs! Shut it!” The barking stopped. Stopped flat. “Sit your butts!” and they promptly sat. I could see them watching us through the screen. There were only three after all, which seemed impossible, given the huge racket they’d been making.

  We glared at each other, Martina Mack and I, so upset that our chests heaved in tandem.

  “Give me back my gun,” she said.

  “Why?” I snapped. “I don’t see any babies to shoot. You want to go find Bambi?”

  She held her hands out, adamant. “Give it.”

  I cracked the shotgun open and removed the remaining shell. It was strangely light in my hand. I held the gun out to her, unloaded.

  Martina snatched it, saying, “What kind of a grown woman brings a gang of teenagers out into the night to torment a old woman!”

  I was so gobsmacked by this that my jaw unhinged. “You think I brought them here to roll your house?”

  “Looks like,” she said.

  “I didn’t bring those kids! I heard Lavender sneaking out, so of course I came looking for her so I could shoot her with a gun. Oh, no, wait. Actually, I didn’t, because that’s insane. I came out to find her and take them home.” It wasn’t completely true, though, was it? I had paused and watched, charmed, for a long, complicit minute. I added a true thing that made me feel better. “Once I saw what they were up to, I had every intention of making them come apologize to you in the morning. I still do. They will be along right after breakfast to clean this up—assuming you can agree not to bury land mines all over your yard to blow their feet off.”

  She cradled the gun to her chest, her face sour with disbelief. She really thought I’d formed a team of teenage vigilantes to roll her yard.

  “Martina?” called a quavery voice from off the left. It was her equally elderly neighbor, Mrs. Teasedale. She was a Methodist, but I knew her to speak to. “Are you okay? Should I call the police?” She said “police” with a long o, the emphasis landing on the first syllable.

  “We’re fine, Fanny! Go on back inside!” Martina hollered at her.

  “What’s all that white stuff in your yard?” Fanny Teasedale called.

  “We’re fine!” Martina said, a vicious shriek this time, and Mrs. Teasedale retreated.

  Probably to call the PO-lice, if another neighbor hadn’t beaten her to it. Whichever officer was on duty was probably heading in this direction. Please, Jesus in heaven, let it not be Cody. “You better clean it up right now your damn self, or I will have you arrested.”

  I leaned in toward her, uncomfortably close. “Do it. I can’t wait to tell the judge how you got up out of bed and took the time to put your teeth in. How you hushed your dogs first, so the barking wouldn’t scare the kids off. How big and high the moon was and how both of those dumb-ass kids were wearing summer colors. You saw them, you saw exactly who it was, and you knew what they were doing. You weren’t feeling in danger, not a bit, and you weren’t aiming at the sky to scare them off either. I saw you. You meant them harm. So please, get your grandson to arrest me, and best of luck with that. I’ll use my phone call on the chief, tell him what you did, and you and I can sit out the morning in the cell together. Dibs on the cot.”

  She cocked her hip at me like Lavender in a snit might, an insolent, easing-back ge
sture.

  “My gun is only loaded up with ice-cream salt,” she said, sulky. “I keep it to run off cats and possums.”

  Ice-cream salt? No wonder the shell felt so light. Even so, I could not calm down. My brain chemicals had hit Digby now, and he was awake inside me, going off like teeny Pop Rocks. I took a deep breath, trying to get my heart rate down.

  “Oh, well, if you were only going to shred their skins open and salt-burn them. Maybe put a kid’s eye out,” I said, dripping sarcasm and venom in equal parts.

  “Yes, I meant to burn their vandalizing hides a little. So what? Teach them a good lesson, but that’s all. We Macks? We don’t kill people.” That one hit, and she saw it in my face. Her front lip lifted again, baring those fake white teeth in a sneer. That face she made—it was so familiar that I blinked hard, twice, and stepped back. She followed me, pressing her advantage. “Guess that little jail cell is going to get right crowded, once your granny joins us.”

  “No one is going to send Birchie to prison,” I said, but I had a faint tremor in my voice, and we both heard it. “She’s ninety years old. She has a terminal disease.”

  Martina shrugged, insolent, and reared that donkey lip up again. God, I knew that look! Why was she so smug? Her threat to call the cops had rolled right off me, but she was acting as smug as the moon.

  “Maybe so, maybe so. She’s rich enough to buy her way past fifty murders, I reckon. But Cody says anyone who helped her cover up? Why, they might as well of done the deed themselves. That’s the law.”

  I felt my cheeks flush, and I said, “Wattie didn’t have anything to do with it,” before I could stop myself. I should have pretended I had no idea who she was referencing. It sounded defensive and, worse, untrue.

  “Course she did. Everybody knows,” Martina Mack said, so certain of herself that it sounded offhand. “Train a nigger right, they can be as loyal as them dogs in there.” She jerked her thumb at the screen door, her eyes avid on my face, watching to see how her words would land. They hit my heated skin like a slap. I clenched my fist around the unspent shell, feeling the salt shift and crackle in the plastic casing. My other hand went to Digby, as if these ugly words could burn the buds of his ears, twist his little stomach.

  Cody really needed to stop confiding in his granny. She could not keep her ugly mouth shut. So they were going to come at Birchie using Wattie, and I should not have needed Martina Mack to unload her ugly words into the summer air to have known this. I should’ve guessed at Sunday services, in the speaking silence after Birchie claimed that First Baptist was Wattie’s church, too. When I watched the pastor trying to take Miss Wattie’s place at Birchie’s side. When Cody blocked me in the narthex with this same ugly-donkey braying mouth, and that was why Martina’s smug face looked so damn familiar.

  I’d seen that look on Cody’s face before, years ago, when I was a seventh-grader at First Baptist’s Summer Youth Lock-In. Thirty-some-odd kids, ranging from sixth grade to seniors, eating microwave s’mores and singing “Blue Skies and Rainbows,” playing hide-and-seek all over the building and then gathering for a midnight prayer circle. By 2:00 a.m. most of the kids were sleeping, girls in the youth room, boys in the prayer chapel. I was still awake and roaming, looking for a quiet spot to curl up with The Dark Knight Returns.

  I ran across Cody Mack, chaperoneless in the kitchen with three of the other high-school boys. He was doing what looked to me like a magic trick. He had a shallow soup bowl full of water set out on the linoleum counter that ran in between the kitchen proper and the fellowship hall.

  “So this here is the swimming hole,” he said, not quite a whisper, and something in his tone told me there was naughtiness afoot.

  It felt much like last year’s lock-in, when he’d snuck in a single Fuzzy Navel wine cooler. Every kid still awake at 3:00 a.m. had shared it. A precocious insomniac, I was the only sixth-grader left standing. As the lowest on the food chain, I got the bottle last, when there was barely a quarter inch of room-temp orange liquid remaining. For years I’d thought that alcohol tasted mostly like human spit. But it had felt brave and naughty-good to be included, so instead of crossing through, I came over to the counter to watch.

  Cody’d fetched a set of salt and pepper shakers from the stove, and he upended the salt over the bowl.

  “See here? Lookit, here’s all the white kids, swimming in the Coosa River. Pretty happy, right?” At once I felt the muscles in my belly going tight. I knew what he’d say a full shocked second before he lifted up the pepper shaker, dumped some in, and said, “But then all the little nigger kids show up.”

  I’d heard that word before, of course. I’d heard it at school. I’d heard a loud man say it at the Dillard’s in Montgomery this very week. But not inside the walls of Birchie’s own church. It made me hot-faced to hear it, always, but inside these walls? It felt much worse. Earlier that day Wattie had come over and spent her afternoon teaching me how to make fudge for this lock-in. We’d made three batches, and she’d cut them into fat squares. Hearing one of the same mouths that had eaten her good fudge saying this word, it made my stomach drop like I’d just tipped over on a roller coaster.

  “Don’t say that,” said a high, unhappy voice, and it was mine.

  Cody Mack ignored me. Well, almost. “So here’s the white kids swimming with all these little niggers now, nigging up their nice white swimming hole.” He did not address me directly, but the repetitions were aimed at me.

  One of the boys, James Beecham, said, “I don’t . . . I . . .” But his voice was quavery and soft, and Cody Mack grabbed a bottle of Dawn dish detergent and talked over him.

  “Uh-oh, look! Here comes the KKK!” He blopped some Dawn into the water, and instantly the floating bits of pepper shifted in a chemical reaction, moving faster than displacement called for, zooming to the edge of the bowl. The salt sat mostly placid at the bottom.

  Cody Mack and the other boys snorted and laughed, except James Beecham, who looked as green as I felt. I hated to make eye contact with him, because I knew, we both knew, that we should have done more, said more, stopped him. But James was a skinny worm of a kid with bad skin. I was a Birch, but I was only here in the summer. These were high-school sophomores who played JV baseball and who didn’t care what girls said, especially not flat-chested, dorky, middle-school ones. We neither of us spoke again. Our shared silence made it hard to meet his gaze.

  I met Cody’s instead and saw a look on his face that was being echoed, twenty-five years later, on his granny’s. That donkey lip, rising in entitlement. Cody acted like he owned First Baptist, a building that my family had raised to celebrate a faith that called for love and mercy. That word and all the history behind it gave him power, though. His sneering mouth, smeared with Wattie’s fudge, had been glad to say that word in front of me, especially, just as Martina liked saying it to me now.

  In this frozen moment, Birchville split in two around me. No, more than that. It wasn’t Birchville only. I saw there was a second South.

  My whole life I’d only seen one. I loved my South, though I could see how it was broken, plagued still with the legacies of slavery and war and segregation. History and a thousand unseen walls divided up the territory, so that we had a black Baptist church and a white one, and the narrow aisle between the color-coded lunch tables at the high school was invisibly a chasm filled with dragons. Still, I always thought my homeland was a single place. I was wrong.

  The South was like that optical-illusion drawing of the duck that is at the same time a rabbit. I’d always see the duck first, his round eye cheery and his bill seeming to smile. But if I shifted my gaze, the duck’s bill morphed into flattened, worried ears. The cheery eye, reversed, held fear, and I could see only a solemn rabbit. The Souths were like that drawing. Both existed themselves, but they were so merged that I could shift from one and find myself inside the other without moving.

  The South I’d been born into was all sweet tea and decency and Jesus, and it was a real, t
rue place. I had grown up inside it, because my family lived there. Wattie’s family owned real estate there, too. The Second South was always present, though, and in it decency was a thin, green cover over the rancid soil of our dark history. They were both always present, both truly present in every square inch, in every space, in both Baptist churches, at both tables. Martina Mack had moved me from my South into hers, and yet we stood on the same ground.

  The Macks were born and raised inside the Second South, and they lived there all their lives, as if there were no other. Their gaze never shifted. They never saw the duck, or if they started to, they closed their eyes or lied about it. And me? I did not want to see that ruined, bad rabbit.

  I dropped the shotgun shell because I needed both hands pressed protectively against my belly now. In the middle of this endless, moon-drenched night, I had stepped into the Second South and seen that my South was a luxury I did not know I had. I could pass through this second one on and off all day and rarely feel the difference.

  For the first time, I understood that I was pregnant with a boy who would always know. Right now, secreted inside me, my son was protected by the lining of my own white hide. I could drift along, seeing only the South’s best version of itself if I so chose. But once my son was out, brown-skinned and himself? He wouldn’t have that choice.

  I had known I would not want to raise this boy in Birchville, but I had not understood why. Not in this deep-down angry way that made my chin come up and kindled a righteous mother fury in my belly.

  The Second South was coming after Wattie, too. Wattie who was welcomed at First Baptist by some folks, loved and valued. But there were pews, a lot of them, whose bases were planted in the second one. They tolerated Wattie as an appendage attached to Birchie. The people in those pews could never quite remember that Wattie wasn’t—had never been—Birchie’s employee. If they could shift us, draw all eyes to the place where Wattie was nothing but that word, they could take her down. Wattie could be lost.