The night Jim Beverly dies, Aunt Florence hears Clarice come in the front door and pad, alone, down the hall. It’s just before midnight. Clarice has made curfew. Bruster is sleeping solid beside her. My mama is in Wayne’s old room, dead to the world.
“We’re home, Mama,” Clarice calls.
Aunt Florence is not fooled. She has known this trick ever since it began. She always stays awake until she hears the second girl come in safe. She knows better than to tip her hand. You squeeze girls too tight, they go wild. This is a harmless thing, she thinks. We are good girls. We are not out drinking or letting some boy get us pregnant. We are somewhere with our friends, giggling a little longer. Or maybe we are with a boy, whispering and kissing, feeling like hot stuff for getting away with it. The second girl always creeps in half an hour or at most an hour later. We do not do it often. She gives us this room so we won’t rebel in bigger ways and get ourselves in trouble.
But this night she hears Clarice up in our room fluttering around. And I do not come in. An hour passes, and Florence’s blood is moving faster, heating as it speeds through her veins. She is wide awake. Another half hour crawls by. She is about to go and confront Clarice when she hears her daughter creep down to the kitchen. After a moment, Florence stealthily lifts the receiver on her bedside phone, holding the button down until the phone is to her ear. She breathes silently and covers the mouthpiece with her hand in case Bruster stirs, and then she lifts the button.
“—went up on Lipsmack Hill. Jim Beverly was up there with some girl,” Clarice is saying.
That’s all Florence needs to hear, but she doesn’t hang up lest Clarice hear the click. Clarice wants Bud to go and find me. Bud reminds her that she has his car. He wants to know why I would be chasing after Jim Beverly, but Clarice blows him off. The main thing, she tells him, is that I have not come home and I was last seen heading up Lipsmack. They make a plan. If I am not home by dawn, Clarice will leave a note for her parents, something about a breakfast picnic and football practice, and she will go pick up Bud and they will find me. Aunt Florence waits until Clarice has hung up before she hangs up herself. She listens to Clarice sneak back to her room and take up her vigil by the window, watching for me.
By three, Clarice has fallen asleep with her head down on her desk. I am still not home. Aunt Florence gets out of bed, moving slowly so she doesn’t wake up Bruster. She is seriously worried now, angry and single-minded. She does not think. She acts. She slips into yesterday’s clothes, leaving her nightgown by the bed. As she leaves the house, she peeks in on Clarice. Clarice is beautiful in the lamplight, ethereal and fragile. Clarice is alive; there is satisfaction in watching the breath move in and out of her, but it is not enough. Clarice is not enough. The world is not a safe place, and Wayne’s room down the hall is stark and ample proof. Aunt Florence marches out into the world to find me and bring me home. She wants me beside Clarice, filling and completing the room that is apple green and pink and the living heart of the house.
Florence heads first to Lipsmack. She knows the way. The make-out spots have not changed since she was a girl; she once walked up that hill holding hands with Bruster. It’s deserted. Jim Beverly’s red Jeep is gone. All the cars are gone. She walks up anyway. She has a flashlight in the trunk of her car and knows the path. The top is deserted.
She gets in her car and heads for the highway. Jim Beverly, she knows, lives in Fruiton. On the access road, she sees his red Jeep, crumpled against the pole. She slows down and pulls off. She rolls down her window to look, but the driver’s-side door is open, and the Jeep is empty. She calls for me, yelling my name into the night, but I do not come. She takes her foot off the brake and leaves the Jeep behind, continuing on to the highway. She thinks perhaps I have gone there to flag down help.
She heads for the on-ramp, but as she gets on to drive to Fruiton, she sees a hitchhiker on the other side, heading the other way. He is illuminated briefly in the lights of a passing car. He is blond, the right size. He has his thumb out.
She exits as soon as she can and loops around, getting back on the highway heading the other way. She is relieved to see that no one has picked up the hitchhiker. She slows beside him, pulls over. It’s Jim Beverly. He is alone. When she stops her car, he climbs in without looking at her.
“Hey, thanks,” he says. “I wrecked my Jeep, and I need to get home.” She doesn’t answer.
He seems disoriented. His clothes are dirty, and his speech is slurred. She pulls back onto the highway and gets her speed up before she speaks to him, and then she says, “Where is she? Where’s my girl?”
Jim Beverly has no recollection who Aunt Florence is. “What girl?” he says. “Girl?”
“She was up on Lipsmack Hill with you. You tell me, where is she.”
“The little bitch?” he says. “Little bitch hit me.” He is probably talking about the freshman, but Aunt Florence thinks he is talking about me.
“Good,” she says viciously. “Then what. What did you do with her?”
Jim Beverly shrugs at her, insolent, uncaring. “Take me home,” he slurs. “I don’t care where your bitch is.”
Florence steers hard right, taking the first exit she sees. It shunts them out of the streetlights, leading them into the wilds of Alabama. They pass a gas station and a fireworks stand, both closed. Then they are alone, speeding down a dark country road, with heaps on either side of them rising up black and mountainous in the moonlight.
“This isn’t right,” says Jim Beverly. “I said take me home.” He sounds petulant, and his words are so slurred that it is hard for Florence to understand him. He stinks of tequila. He keeps rubbing the back of his head. Florence brakes and pulls onto the shoulder, killing her headlights. “Where are we,” says Jim Beverly. He is utterly unafraid. He is at most peeved.
He faces Florence in the moonlight, and she can see one of his pupils is huge and the other is a pinpoint. “She hit you hard,” Florence says. “What did you do?”
He shrugs at her again, that insolent roll of his shoulders, and she knows in her heart that I am dead somewhere. She has no illusions about what this boy is capable of. I am dead somewhere and the world is a black place, and in that moment she believes, bleakly, that everything will eventually be taken from her. Her blood surges, and she hates God and this wild boy He has let run loose upon the earth. It is pounding through her, hot and unforgiving. Her vision narrows to a tunnel, and all she can see is this floppy boy with his careless shrugs and his insolent smile. In this moment she is stronger than he is. She is stronger than anyone alive. The adrenaline rush is a black high wave surging upward, lifting her. She rides with it, her blood on fire, rising, and as it crests, she moves.
She reaches out with her big hands. It seems a calm slow movement to her, endless, because here at the peak, time has slowed. She is in a place that I know. I have been there, too, earlier this same night, when I was standing behind Jim Beverly with a bottle. She has a moment to choose, and she chooses. She takes his neck in her huge hands, and he is so surprised or drunk or hurt that in the endless fraction of a second it takes her to grasp him, he is yielding in her hands. He does not fight her at first, as she tightens her massive grip.
At first he cannot process what is happening. Then he begins to struggle, weakly, or it seems weak to her. She is in a place where she could move a mountain with her bare hands. His fists beat at her chest harmlessly. Later, her chest will be black-and-blue from his blows, but now his fists feel as insubstantial as trapped birds, fluttering weightlessly against her.
The blood is coursing through her strong arms like liquid fire, and she feels him yielding to her. His feet drum against the floorboards of the car, a desperate lunging tattoo. The drumming slows and stops, and she remains where she is, holding his throat closed in her grip. Making sure. When she is sure, she releases him and turns his head, so she cannot see his eyes, but she knows the light has gone out of them and he can’t see anything and he never will again. And then she si
ts quiet. There is nothing else to do.
After a little while, she wrestles the deadweight of him out of the car and heaves him into the trunk. At that point she is thinking not so much of hiding him as of not wanting to drive around looking for me with him dead beside her in the car. Beyond that, she does not think.
No cars pass. No one sees her. By the time she gets him loaded and closes the trunk, she is shaking and weak as a kitten.
She heads back to where he wrecked his Jeep, but sees the state police hooking it up to a tow truck. She cruises past without slowing. Dawn is coming. She drives the route from the wreck to our house. She drives slowly, as if she believes she might catch me trekking home, but in her heart, she has no doubt that I am dead. She feels the same emptiness in the world that she felt when she saw Wayne lying in the yard, tangled in his dog’s leash and with his eyes puffed closed, features swollen, unrecognizable as Wayne to anyone but his mother. She feels me the same way people sometimes feel silence. She feels me as the absence of a heartbeat that, like your own, you hear so constantly you do not notice it until it’s gone.
As she comes over the hill to the house, the sun is rising, and she sees Clarice. She stops as her heart gutters and spits, catching at the sight of her living child. Clarice is bending down, facing away from Aunt Florence, digging in the hydrangea bushes. Clarice is helping me up. I am filthy, and I lean heavily on Clarice, but I am alive. Florence can’t breathe, watching Clarice load me into the window. Clarice puts the screen back on once I am through, and then she creeps to the front door and slips inside.
Florence watches the silent house with both her girls safe in it, and the world begins to turn again. She hears birds, and it’s like the first sound she has ever heard. It’s beautiful, and there is a dead boy in her trunk. She realizes that she isn’t afraid or sorry. There isn’t room for anything in her but a fierce ripping joy and the loveliness of the birdsong.
Bruster will be up any second, and she knows better than to lie or try to explain. She simply parks the car and walks straight into her garden and squats down in it, weeding in the dawn, and of course this is the first place Bruster looks.
“You forgot to start the coffee,” he says reproachfully. He is rumpled with sleep, disgruntled and blinking. She shrugs an apology. After he heads back to the house, she realizes she is gutting her vegetable garden, taking out her young tomato plants and setting them aside. She immediately knows why. Behind the shelter of a high bushy clump of lemon balm and in the shadow of the shed beside the garden, she is going to dig a pit.
When she heads in to make breakfast, she absolves us all of yard work. She will need the yard to herself. The house will shield her from the road. Her shed will hide her from Mrs. Weedy. She can back her car down the concrete drive to the garden.
She can see I am so hungover that I can barely function, so she sends me back to bed, where I sleep like a corpse. She sends Bruster off with a huge errand list, and Clarice drives off in Bud’s car to meet him at his Saturday practice. While they are gone, she plants Jim Beverly deep in the corner of her garden, dumping a twenty-pound bag of lye from the shed over him to keep the neighborhood dogs out. Then she repairs and replants her tomatoes, and the lye makes them grow like crap, and for the first time in three years she doesn’t get a ribbon on them at the county fair, and that’s just fine with her. That’s just fine.
After Florence finished talking, I sat with her for a long time, my hands still resting on the unyielding flesh of her legs.
“Why would you think he had killed me?” I said at last.
“That boy was capable of anything. I knew what he did the year before.”
“You knew?” I said. “Clarice told you?”
Aunt Florence shook her head at me. “No, Arlene, you know Clarice better than that. She kept your secret.”
“My secret?” I said.
“But I knew,” Florence said. “When you changed so much, I backtracked it to the night you and Clarice went out on that double date with him. You weren’t ever right after that, wearing all those black clothes and not leaving the house. Never taking a bath. Clarice did a pretty good dance, trying to keep your secret, but I guessed the why of it. At first I thought it had been that Rob Shay, but then we ran into him one day at the Wal-Mart, and you were sweet as pie with him. You didn’t even blink. I figured it was the other one. A football boy like that, you didn’t think anyone would believe you. But I would have. I knew what he was.”
“What have I got in my pocketses,” I said softly, and Aunt Florence looked at me, questioning. I shook my head at her. I didn’t have any of my own secrets left, but I could keep Clarice’s. I could keep Aunt Florence’s, too.
I turned around and leaned my back on her hard shins, dropping my head to rest on her knees. We sat there together for a long time, baking in the dry, dark heat of the attic. Aunt Flo’s fingers rambled in my hair. I suppose there was a lot for us to talk about, but in the silence I think we were both deciding not to. I was done with deal-making and telling secrets. I had told the truth to Rose Mae Lolley, and I had lied to Burr, and I was fine with it. Everything could rest right where it was, even Jim Beverly, in his back corner of Aunt Florence’s garden. We would never say his name to each other, to anyone, again.
“What if I came back down for Christmas?” I said at last. “I’ve spent the last nine by myself or with Burr’s mama, so I figure it’s about y’all’s turn.”
Aunt Florence’s hands stilled, and she said, “That’d be real good, Arlene. I’d like it if that happened.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. But you know, Aunt Florence, if you want me back here, you get Burr, too.”
Her fingers began drifting gently through my hair again. “You know I don’t hold with it. These mixed marriages,” she said, but softly, almost musingly, as if her mind was somewhere else. I smiled, knowing she couldn’t see my face. I was more like her than I had thought; I knew at last how much she loved me, and I was ruthless enough to immediately use it against her, even while I was basking in it.
“We’re a package deal. Love me, love my Burr. And I mean that. You don’t get to be all stiff and barely tolerating. I don’t care how you feel about it, Aunt Florence, as long as you’re a good enough liar. And I guess I know you are. You lie to both of us. Him and me. Every minute. You take care of him like he was me, and you make him welcome. And you make Uncle Bruster be good to him, too. Or I won’t come,” I said.
After another long pause, she said, “I can do that, Arlene.” Then she got a hunk of my hair and gave it a jerking yank that hurt down to the roots. “Ow!” I said and tried to sit up, but she pulled my head back down gently onto her bony knee and rubbed the hurt place. “And you don’t leave me anymore. You bring your little butt home when you have vacation time without me having to fight you near to death over it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
After that we were quiet again for a long time. I suppose I felt too peaceful to move, with Aunt Flo’s hands moving soft in my hair, soothing me. I knew that on Friday we would all go to Uncle Bruster’s party, and nothing bad would happen. Florence wouldn’t let it. There wasn’t a Bent or Lukey alive she couldn’t bend.
I do not know how long we sat there, both of us pouring sweat, but eventually we had to get up and go downstairs. I walked Florence to her bedroom door and kissed her dry cheek. I waited until she had disappeared inside, and then I crept into my old room. Burr was sleeping hard with his face to the wall. I climbed into Clarice’s little bed and molded myself to his back. I fell asleep almost instantly, beside him with my family surrounding us, right where I belonged.
Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama
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