But this silence was different. It was compressed tightly in a vacuum that was so vast that her spirit grew weary attempting to cross it, and so it would return to her to rest feverishly against her sorrowing heart.
“Mama, I can’t stand much more of this,” she whispered miserably to her mother, as they were washing the dinner dishes.
Her father had stonily finished his meal and gone out to his rocker, where he would sit reading his Bible until late in the night.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Fannie sighed, “he’ll come round. This here thing done hurt him, that’s all.”
“Oh, Mama, I’m so ashamed.”
“Ain’t nothing to be shamed of. Havin’ a baby is the most natural thing there is. The Good Book call children a gift from the Lord. And there ain’t no place in that Bible of His that say babies is sinful. The sin is the fornicatin’, and that’s over and done with. God done forgave you of that a long time ago, and what’s going on in your belly now ain’t nothin’ to hang your head about—you remember that.”
“You didn’t tell him it was Butch, did you?”
“Gal, you think I want to see my man in jail for killin’ the likes of Butch Fuller? And besides, it ain’t for me to tell.”
They heard the screen door slam shut.
“Butt, come here,” Sam called.
Mattie jumped at the unaccustomed sound of his voice. She was finally being summoned across that vacuum, and her spirit rose instinctively to obey, but she held it back in fear of what it might meet there. She looked pleadingly at her mother for help in this dilemma, and the older woman patted her shoulder and whispered in her ear, “Go on now. I told you he’d come round. That man lives and breathes for you.”
She looked out the kitchen door and couldn’t find the courage to move toward the stiff-backed old man, who was staring into the empty fireplace with a face as still and unreadable as a worn stone. So she moved toward the dying vibrations of the nickname, Butt. And it was the memory of the man who used to roll her full cheeks between his fingers and chuckle—soft as a dish of butter—that got her across the room.
“Yes, Papa,” she trembled.
Mattie knew to keep silent and wait. There would be nothing she could explain or plead or reason at that moment that would change the direction that his mind had locked into, like rusted iron clogs.
“I been thinkin’ on this here thing,” he began quietly, without looking around. There was a long pause. “I done always tried to do my best by you. I seen that you never had a hungry day or had to go askin’ nobody for nothin’, ain’t it?”
“Yes, Papa.”
He cleared his throat and continued slowly, “I know some say I put too much store in you, keepin’ you too close to home, settin’ you up to be better’n other folks. But I done what I saw fit at the time to do.”
Mattie gradually began to realize what he had been struggling with the past two days. He couldn’t bring himself to accept any fault within her, and since he needed someone to do retribution, he had laid the blame for this on his own shoulders. She saw with pity how stooped and faltering the proud man was carrying this burden. She rushed in vain to relieve him of it.
“Papa, you ain’t done nothing wrong. This—”
He cut her off. “Could be, I should have let you marry that Harris boy you was sweet on once, but I wanted better for you than some wanderin’ field hand and him wanting to drag you all the way to Arkansas, away from your family and all. Well, past is past. And I still think Fred Watson is a tolerable young man, in spite of what he done.” He cleared his throat again and looked up at her. “I was young once, too. And done made many a mistake and ain’t through makin’ ’em.”
Mattie was stunned that he would think it was Fred’s baby. But then, that was the only man he had allowed her to see, and his mind had been so conditioned over the years to her unquestioning obedience that there was just no space for doubt. She listened with horror as he continued.
“So I figure to go over to his place tomorrow after breakfast and clear this all up. I know he’ll be willing to do right by you.”
Mattie wanted to choke. She felt as if the entire universe had been formed into a ball and jammed into her throat—“Papa, it ain’t Fred’s baby”—sent it hurling out of her mouth and into a whirlwind that crumbled her father’s face and exploded both of their hearts into uncountable pieces. She saw them both being spun around the room and sucked out of the windows along with everything that had ever passed between them. She felt the baby being drawn by the winds, but she held on tightly, trembling violently, because she realized that now this was all she would ever have.
“Whose is it?” came to her over the dying winds of the tempest, but her ears were still ringing and she couldn’t quite make out the sounds.
“I say, whose is it?” And he came toward her, grabbed her by the back of the hair, and yanked her face upward to confront the blanket of rage in his eyes.
Instinctively her body cried out to obey—to tell him that it was Butch’s so he would release her and grab his shotgun and go out and blow Butch into as many pieces as her world now lay in around her. She didn’t care about Butch Fuller, and they had hardly spoken since that day, but this baby didn’t really belong to him. It belonged to something out there in the heat of an August day and the smell of sugar cane and mossy herbs. Mattie knew there were no words for this, and even if there were, this disappointed and furious old man would never understand.
“I ain’t saying, Papa.” And she braced herself for the impact of the large callused hand that was coming toward her face. He still held her by the hair so she took the force of the two blows with her neck muscles, and her eyes went dim as the blood dripped down her chin from her split lip. The grip on her hair tightened, and she was forced even closer to his face as she answered the silent question in his narrowing eyes.
“I ain’t saying, Papa,” she mumbled through her swollen lip.
“You’ll say,” he whispered hoarsely, as he yanked her to the ground by the hair.
She heard her mother rush from the kitchen. “That’s enough, Sam.”
“Stay out of this, Fannie.” He picked up the broom that was leaning against the fireplace and held it threateningly in the air. “Now, you tell me or I’ll beat it out of you.”
Her silence stole the last sanctuary for his rage. He wanted to kill the man who had sneaked into his home and distorted the faith and trust he had in his child. But she had chosen this man’s side against him, and in his fury, he tried to stamp out what had hurt him the most and was now brazenly taunting him—her disobedience.
Mattie’s body contracted in a painful spasm each time the stick smashed down on her legs and back, and she curled into a tight knot, trying to protect her stomach. He would repeat his question with each blow from the stick, and her continued silence caused the blows to come faster and harder. He was sweating and breathing so hard he couldn’t talk anymore, so he just pounded the whimpering girl on the floor.
Her mother screamed, “For the love of Jesus, Sam!” and jumped on his back and tried to wrestle the stick from him.
He flung her across the floor and her blouse tore to the waist as she went sliding into the opposite wall.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” Fannie chanted feverishly, as she got up on her bruised knees.
The broom had broken, and he was now kneeling over Mattie and beating her with a jagged section of it that he had in his fist.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” Fannie kept saying, as she searched blindly around the room. She finally found the shotgun pegged over the front door. She struggled with the heavy gun, and her hand was trembling so much it was difficult to load the bulky shells, but she got them in and snapped the gun shut. She wrapped her finger around the trigger, aimed, and pulled. The force of the gun’s blast almost knocked her off her feet. The edge of the fireplace exploded and sent flying bits of bricks into Mattie’s back and cut up the right side of her father’s face.
The blast
stunned him for a moment, and he looked toward his wife with sweat and blood dripping down his face.
“So help me Jesus, Sam!” she screamed. “Hit my child again, and I’ll meet your soul in hell!”
She cocked the gun again and this time aimed for the center of his chest.
“Look! Just look a’ what you done!”
Sam seemed like a man coming out of a trance. He stared stupidly at the barrel of the gun and then at the stick in his fist and then at the girl balled up in spasms on the floor. His head kept moving numbly back and forth, like a badly timed mechanical toy.
“Fannie, I…Fannie, she…” he mumbled dazedly.
A slow moan came from the pile of torn clothes and bruised flesh on the floor. Sam Michael looked at it, saw that it was his daughter, and he dropped the stick and wept.
III
A week later the northbound Greyhound pulled across the county line, turned right on the Interstate, and headed toward its first stop in Asheville, North Carolina. It was one of a legion of buses, trains, and rusting automobiles that carried the dark children of the South toward the seductive call of wartime jobs and freedom in urban areas above the Mason-Dixon. Mattie sat in an aisle seat and tried to ignore the melting of familiar landscapes. She didn’t want to think about the strange city that lay ahead or even of her friend Etta, who would be at the depot to meet her. And she didn’t want to think about the home that had been lost to her, or her mother’s parting tears, or the painful breach with her father that throbbed as much as the soreness that was still in her back and legs. She just wanted to lay her head on the cushioned seat and suspend time, pretend that she had been born that very moment on that very bus, and that this was all there was and ever would be. But just then the baby moved, and she put her hands on her stomach and knew that she was nurturing within her what had gone before and would come after. This child would tie her to that past and future as inextricably as it was now tied to her every heartbeat.
So as Rock Vale, Tennessee, was buried under the miles of concrete that ribboned behind the bus, Mattie worried and planned for the child within her. When her mind would reach out behind, she forced herself to think only of the back road to the house, the feel of summer, the taste of sugar cane, and the smell of wild herbs. And when her son was born five months later, she named him Basil.
“Well, look a here,” Etta marveled as she stroked the cracked red fist of the baby. “We come a long way from the time the old folks told us babies were mailed from heaven. ‘C.O.D. or Special Delivery?’ you’d ask, and set ’em all a howling. Guess you know what it’s all about now?”
“Oh, no, Etta,” Mattie looked up at her friend with her son mirrored in her eyes, “they still do. Isn’t he the most perfect thing you ever saw?”
“Hardly that,” Etta teased, as she took the baby from Mattie’s lap. “He’s ugly and wrinkled as a monkey, like most newborns. But I do see definite possibilities. Yup, I think we got the makings here of the first colored President.”
Their laughter startled the baby, and he began to cry. “Lord, he’s starting to squall! Here, take him. There, now, there’s your mama.”
She gave him back to Mattie and watched as she gently rocked and patted him to sleep. “See why I can’t have no children? I ain’t got the patience for all that.”
“No one does, Etta, but it comes—when you know it’s yours and you have to do for it. And you are mine, ain’t you?” she whispered to the sleeping baby. “All mine.”
“That’s right, all yours—built-in heartache for the next twenty years. Now me, when I want ready-made trouble, I dig up a handsome man. No diapers to change, and I can walk when I’m ready. And that’s just about what I’m fixin’ to do; Bennett is starting to fray my nerves.”
Mattie looked up, stricken. “You leaving?”
“Yeah, honey. I was ready months ago, but when you wrote and said you were comin’, I stuck around to see you settled with the baby. But this town is dead.”
“Where to now, Etta?” she asked with a sigh.
“Honey, New York is the place to be! All those soldier boys are just pullin’ up to the docks with pocketfuls of combat pay and lookin’ for someone to help ’em invest it. And there’s a place called Harlem with nothing but wall-to-wall colored doctors and real estate men. Why don’t you come with me, Mattie? With all them possibilities, you bound to find Basil a rich daddy.”
Etta’s enthusiasm had almost convinced her, but then she caught herself. “Oh, no,” Mattie shook her head, “I’m not dragging my baby all over the country behind you. When you first left home, you wrote and said St. Louis was the place to be, and then it was Chicago, and then here. Now it’s New York. You ain’t gonna find whatever it is you lookin’ for that way.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna find it sittin’ here, either. And neither will you.”
“I ain’t lookin’ for nothing, Etta.” She stared down at her son. “I got everything I need right here. And I’m content to stay put with what God gave me.”
“Well,” Etta said, going toward the door, “the way I heard it, God got out of the baby business after Jesus was born, but maybe you know something I don’t.” And she winked and left.
“What I know,” Mattie said to the closed door, “is that this boy did come C.O.D., and I’m willin’ to stay here and pay for it.”
Etta left Mattie six weeks later with eight cases of condensed milk and coupon books for fifty pounds of sugar. Mattie didn’t dare ask where they had come from because she knew Etta would tell her. In the loneliness that rushed in to fill the vacuum her friend had left, she found herself thinking of home, and she longed to see her mother. She wrote and asked her to come stay with the baby while she went to work because she didn’t want to leave him with strangers. Her mother wrote back that she wanted to come, but her father was doing poorly and she couldn’t leave him, but, please, send the baby down there while she worked.
Mattie looked around at the cramped boardinghouse room with its cheap furniture and dingy walls that no amount of scrubbing seemed to lighten, and she thought of the organdy curtains and the large front yard in her parents’ home—the clean air and fresh food. But each day her baby was beginning to look unmistakably like Butch, and she thought of the unbending old man who would sit with his Bible clenched in his fist and watch him grow up.
“I can’t put you through that,” she whispered. “Right now I can’t give you much, but you’re too little to see this room anyway. All you see is your mama, right? And you know Mama loves you and accepts you—no matter how you got here.”
As if in answer Basil began to kick his arms and legs and whine. Mattie picked him up and pressed his soft body to her bosom, molding him into her heart as he went to sleep.
She found an assembly-line job in a book bindery, and she paid Mrs. Prell, an old woman on the first floor, to keep him during the day. Mattie thought the woman appeared a bit senile, and she had three cats. To save carfare, Mattie would walk the thirty blocks back to the boardinghouse to see the baby during her lunch break. She had just enough time to rush in, pick him up, see if he was wet or marked in some way, and then go back to work. She resorted to eating her lunch while she rushed through the streets, because she got dizzy in the afternoon from the heat of the factory and the smell of the strong glue on an empty stomach.
Mattie couldn’t seem to save enough money to move. The babysitter cost her almost half of her weekly salary, and after she paid a week’s rent and bought some food, there was just enough left over for carfare. She stopped going to the movies on Saturday nights and only bought clothes or shoes when hers had reached the state where she was ashamed of being seen in the streets. Yet her bank account grew painfully slowly. And then Basil developed a stomach condition and couldn’t keep his food down. So her small reserve went for a specialist and expensive medicine.
She thought about taking night courses at school in order to get a better job, but what with working six days a week, she hardly ever saw the
baby as it was. It was heartbreaking when she missed his first step, and she had cried for two hours when she first heard him call Mrs. Prell “Mama.”
One Friday night Mattie was asleep with Basil, and he had squirmed out of her arms and lay on his stomach near the edge of the bed. His bottle had fallen out of his mouth and rolled on the floor next to the blanket. A rat crept out of the hole behind the dresser and cautiously sniffed around the wall for crumbs. Finding nothing, it grew bolder in its search and circled slowly toward the bed. It had learned to fear the human smell but the stillness of the bodies and its hunger drew it nearer to the bed. It was about to turn away and begin a new search toward the wall when it smelled the dried milk and sugar. Giving a squeak of anticipation, it edged toward the smell and found the baby’s bottle. It licked the sweet crusted milk around the hole of the nipple and tried to gnaw through the thick rubber. Then the same smell drifted down from above its head, and, abandoning the nipple, it crawled up the blanket toward the fresh aroma of milk, sugar, and saliva. It licked around the baby’s chin and lips, and when there was nothing left, it sought more and sank its fangs into the soft flesh.
Basil’s screams sent Mattie bolt upright in the bed, and in her sleepy confusion she instinctively hugged her arms to her and found them empty. She felt something leap from the bed and scramble across the wooden floor toward the dresser. She reached out blindly for the howling child, grabbed him to her chest, and stumbled toward the light switch. The sudden movements and brightness of the room frightened the child even more, and he kicked and fought her in his confusion and pain.
“Oh, God!” she cried as she saw the blood dripping down his cheek from the two small punctures. She tried to calm the wailing child against her chest but he sensed her fear and continued to scream. She put him on the bed and cleaned his cheek with alcohol and rocked and soothed him down into a whimper. She reached for his bottle and, seeing the gnawed nipple, threw it against the wall in anger and disgust. The shattering glass frightened the child again, and he began to cry and Mattie cried with him.