A Gracious Plenty

  I turn down Meadow Lane and wave to the preacher’s family, who’re painting their house bright yellow. I drive out by Glory Road.

  “See there?” I show Lucy. “A renovated joint. I don’t know what happened to all the hoodlums who used to hang out there. Moved on, I reckon, after Reba Baker took over.”

  “My daddy used to go there after work to shoot pool,” Lucy says.

  “You can bet he’s not doing that now.”

  She pulls little Marcus back in, and the wind seems to have thinned his anger, and he sits on her legs for a while just looking. It’s been a long time since Marcus has ridden in a truck, I guess.

  We ride out toward William Blott’s land, where the smoke is so thick that I have to turn on my headlights. There are trucks parked along the highway, including some fire trucks, and it looks to be such a cluster that I turn before I get to the place where I entered the woods.

  “I came out here last night,” I tell Lucy. “After the late news ran a story about William. Reba Baker talked hard,” I say.

  She nods.

  “She talked hard. So I figured somebody better get a thing or two that mattered to him—before it was too late.”

  She nods again.

  “Leonard helped me,” I tell her, and she looks at me cross. “He’s not all bad, old Leonard.”

  But Marcus begins to whimper when I mention Leonard’s name. So I quit talking about him. Lucy doesn’t want to hear anyway, and I can’t blame her. I’ve tainted her notions of Leonard Livingston, talking bad about him for years and holding old grudges. I even found a way to blame Leonard for letting her mama think she was murdered—and we both know that Lois Armour would have found a way to do that on her own.

  “You ought to give William his things,” she says. “Maybe he’ll feel better if you give him his things.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But the damage is done.”

  We pass the post office and the medical clinic, and I wave to the Vegetable Man, who’s making rounds in our town today.

  “I got a lot of respect for Blott now,” I tell Lucy. “He had his own way of doing things.”

  She nods.

  “He had a whole other way of seeing the world. Did you know he liked to take pictures?”

  “No,” she says quietly, Marcus sleeping against her lap.

  Then I make a mistake. On the way back to the cemetery, I drive past the house where Marcus grew up, the house where his parents still live, and he jerks awake suddenly and begins to tremble—like a washing machine with a load too heavy. His eyes fill up with tears, his little lip poking out.

  “Look,” Lucy says.

  “What’s the matter with him?” I ask her. “Marcus?”

  But he doesn’t respond, and he doesn’t make a sound. He just shakes and cries silently.

  “Oh shit,” I say. “I took him by home. You think he misses his family?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy says.

  The minute we turn off his street, he’s bellowing again. He cries all the way back to the cemetery. He cries until my nerves are just jagged and it seems like all his crying, like all the crying I’ve heard him do for years, is coming at me at one time. His howls echo off the metal ceiling of the truck, diving hard into the windshield, like a bird that doesn’t recognize glass. He cries reckless and doesn’t care, looking right in my face, like he expects me to do something.

  “What?” I ask him.

  He furrows his brow deeper, too deep for a baby. I don’t know how a baby can even do that.

  “What can I do for you? If you can’t tell me, I can’t do it.”

  He screams out, still looking my way.

  “What?” I scream back finally, loud to drown him out.

  “Finch,” Lucy scolds. “He can’t help it if he can’t talk.” She hugs him like he needs protecting from me, when I couldn’t hurt or help him neither one—not even if I wanted to. She’s just jealous about Leonard, and I know it. Lucy’s never liked Leonard at all.

  Out the side of my eye, I can see that baby looking at me like I’m his only hope. And he’s deafening me with his hollering.

  “I don’t know how to help you,” I tell him, and turn my head away from them both.

  When I drop him back off at his plot, I tell the Mediator, “I don’t know how to help him.”

  And later when I’m trading with the Vegetable Man, when he’s pulling up my onions, I ask him, “You got children?”

  “I got great-grands,” he says proud.

  “You ever had one cry on you for hours at a time?”

  “Well, shore,” he tells me. “They do that when they’re teething. You give ’em a turnip,” he says. “A big one they can’t swallow. Something hard to chew on like that, it’ll quiet ’em down.”

  “You got any turnips?” I ask him.

  “Yeah,” he says. “But you ain’t got no baby, do you?”

  “I’m watching a friend’s,” I tell him.

  So we swap onions for turnips, and I take them to Marcus’s grave. I arrange them in a circle around his stone.

  THIS IS ALL I got,” I tell William Blott. “It’s all I could tote. I hope it helps.”

  But he’s not interested in the load I’ve dropped inside his tomb.

  “You want me to arrange it for you?”

  Still no answer. And I’m getting fed up with these dead. Marcus, who screams but won’t tell me what he wants—and now William, who slumps and broods, his silence heavy like the cloud of smoke that follows a hydrogen bomb. I am tired of not getting answers.

  I lean the pictures up against the walls. There is one of a toothless woman making a bowl from clay, another of a man with one arm, standing beneath the awning of a barn. There’s a picture of a woman, swaddled to a stretcher, stomach down and playing a keyboard with her tongue.

  The pictures aren’t even exceptional. They are blurred and out of focus, overdeveloped and underdeveloped, softened and streaked by rain, and I’m amazed that I can touch them at all. I am dead weary and suddenly I just want to go to a movie where the pictures are crisp and in color, where everything gets settled in just a matter of hours. I don’t even want to talk to Lucy or the Mediator, who’ve gone about their work now, leaving William to grieve, Marcus to cling to his legs and hiccup.

  I lean the violin in one corner and sit the horn on the stone that notes his dates of birth and death. I don’t know what to do with the dress. I lay it on the ground like a rug, but it looks funny that way. So I pick it up.

  “Do you want this dress?” I ask him.

  No answer.

  “You know, I was up half the night getting these things. You could say thank you.”

  No answer.

  “Fine,” I say. “I’m leaving.” I take a deep breath and turn away, the dress still thrown over my shoulder. I don’t even know where the nearest movie theater is, but that’s where I’m going. To the movies. Right now.

  “Thank you,” William calls weakly. Then he adds, “Is the dress your size?”

  “Oh,” I say, and walk back to leave it with him.

  “You wear it,” he says sadly. “I don’t need it here.”

  I DON’T GO TO the movies. I call up Leonard Livingston, who is working. I know he’s working. I don’t want to talk with him. I just want to hear his voice.

  His phone rings and rings, and then a machine picks up, saying, “Hello, this is Officer Leonard Livingston. I cannot take your call. Please leave your name and number and a brief message and I’ll call you right back. Thank you.”

  Then it beep, beep, beep, beeps, and I hang up.

  “You like this dress?” I ask a cat, a white one without a tail. I pick the cat up and kiss its head. “You smell,” I tell it. “Whose trash you been eating?” I toss it on the sofa.

  I pull off my dungarees. They are brown from two days’ dust, with thorns still in the cuffs. I unbutton my summer shirt and stand before a mirror, in just my baggy white drawers, my white socks that poof gray about my ankles.
I look like a freak show, standing there, long bones in my legs, skin beginning to give, narrow hips, but a potbelly and ninnies that fall to the edge of my rib cage because I have never worn a bra. My ma told me never to hang a bra on a clothesline, and I’ve never been interested in wearing one wet or dirty.

  I’ve got arms brown to the shoulders from sun, and skin like a road map, like a map of a mountain range on my left side—my left arm, collar, neck, jaw. Even my ear looks cracked. I tie down my hair with a bandanna each morning, but the humidity resurrects it, and now, freed, it waves horizontal in dark brown frizz, floating just above my shoulders.

  A cat jumps onto my back, climbing to my collar, the scarred one with fewer nerves, so that I hardly feel her claws at all. Maybe she isn’t using them. She climbs up to my head and begins to knead as I get dressed. I have to push her away.

  I step into the sequined gown. It’s mermaid green and shimmers silvery in spite of its age. From the outside, you’d never guess that the lining is yellow and stained. I zip it up the side, reach in and adjust my ninnies. I look almost pretty when I stand sideways, though even sequins don’t make up for my lack of a waist.

  My hair needs tying back, and there are bread bags in the kitchen. I go there to get a twist and find myself on the phone again, listening.

  “Hello, this is Officer Leonard Livingston …”

  I study the message a second time, all the way through, all the way to the beeps. I listen to his voice, gruff, almost like he has to work to make it growl that deep. I listen to the way he spaces between each word, careful, like somebody might not understand his instructions, “I … cannot … take … your … call,” and I wonder where he was sitting when he put that message on the machine, or if he was sitting at all. If maybe he was listening to music and turned it off for just a second. And if he was listening to music, I wonder what kind. I wonder if Leonard has ever heard his message before, and if he sounds gruff to himself.

  A kitten chases a mouse across the kitchen floor, a little round baby mouse like you only see in picture books because they grow too fast to look that way for more than one day of their lives. A kitten chases him to the oven, where he gets away, the kitten batting at the floor where he disappeared.

  I tie back my hair and walk around prissy for a while. I sit on the porch in fancy clothes and suck the dirt from beneath my fingernails until they look decent. I rest there in my swing, in the breeze, dressed up and feeling sleepy.

  Then I see the flower truck driving in the gate, and I dart inside. I hadn’t remembered any funeral, hadn’t even heard of any deaths. And it isn’t a holiday. Must be a birth or death anniversary, I think.

  But the girl from the flower shop doesn’t drive on up the hill to deliver her arrangement. She comes to my door, and I don’t have time to change clothes before she sees me.

  I go to the door and sign for the basket of tiny yellow roses like I knew they were coming all along. Though the flower girl has seen me a thousand times dressed in my work clothes, I act like a sequined gown is just the thing to wear. I act so normal in the sequined gown that I’m sure when she leaves, she wishes she had one. She climbs in her van and looks back, puzzled. I wave.

  And when she is gone, I inspect the arrangement. Bud roses in greenery, little yellow heads poking up like small birds in a big nest. There’s a card with my name on it, too—“Finch Nobles”—and beneath that the words “Nobles Hill,” which is what everybody calls the cemetery, since it never got named proper. On the inside, the card is signed by Leonard. It doesn’t say anything else. Just “Leonard”—like that should be enough.

  I call him up to leave a message, glad to have a reason, but this time, he picks up the phone.

  “Hello?” he says.

  My air catches funny in my throat, and I can’t help but wonder if those cut roses would grow if I planted them. Maybe if I planted them somewhere fertile enough. I feel myself flush hot all the way through.

  “Hello?” he asks again, and I quietly put my finger down on the button to end the call.

  I trip over a cat on the way to my room, with the dress already half-peeled off. I change into everyday clothes and run to lock the gate. I skip supper altogether in my hurry, because I’m foolish, feeling stupid, thinking about movies and calling a man, when I’ve never wanted one in my life and have got no use for one now.

  I pick up the arrangement and carry it under my arm up the hill and over to the weeping willow tree. I sit the roses on Lucy’s grave and wait for darkness.

  HAZING MY EYES, thinning to the Dead, I watch as Lucy sniffs the buds, examining them so close, you’d think she was looking for fingerprints. “They’re beautiful,” she says.

  “I thought you’d like them,” I answer, but my voice is wrong, a lemon on a peach tree. My voice betrays me somehow.

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “The store,” I lie. I should know better than to lie, but the words are out of my mouth before my head can catch up.

  “He gave them to you, didn’t he?” Lucy says. “Why are you lying to me?” and as she speaks, her voice ebbs, and then I lose her completely. She withdraws. She closes me out, going down lower, where I can’t get. She leaves me on the ground in my clunky body.

  For a while, I hold my hands on the grass and pretend that she’s just on the other side, her hands held up, touching mine, mirroring mine. I pretend that death is as manageable as a wall made of ice, that we’re so close, we could almost touch, that we could melt through if we held our hands there long enough.

  But she’s not reaching back.

  “You can’t touch me,” I say. “That’s the only thing wrong. It’s the only thing you can’t do.” And I cry about it for a little while, like it does a bit of good.

  She isn’t even there. No one is. I know.

  But it takes me a long time to realize that I’m the one who has receded. It takes me a long time to make my way beyond my lie, and it’s like being caught in a dream, going around and around, replaying the same scene until I get it right.

  For a second time, I thin to the Dead. It’s later now, much later, and this is what I see: William Blott at the top of the hill, playing his horn, blowing those notes out long and mournful, enough to quake my usually steady heart. He’s on his knees, his head tossed back like he’s daring somebody to cut his throat, and that horn an extension of his chin, so right it’s like his body, like something growing out of him.

  He cuts the night with those notes, and the rest of the Dead listen to his concert. He’s making that trumpet wail out high, holding the note until it robs me of my lying, human breath. Baby Marcus Livingston rests at his feet, sniffling in his sleep.

  Then Lucy rises up and begins to dance, making her way closer to the place where William is playing. Her hips cut crescents until they draw moons, whole skies full of moons. She moves slowly, then quicker, without losing the rhythm, and her arms tie bows around the air.

  Give it to me, I think. Give me that air.

  I would take anything she gave me.

  But Lucy, the dancing girl, she dances to the aching horn and furnishes William Blott’s song with shape. She stomps and jerks and undulates.

  I try to imagine her before, when she did it for a living, dancing that way.

  “You took off your clothes?” I asked her when she was new here. “How could you do that?”

  “It was easy,” she said. “My body wasn’t me.”

  “Did they touch you—those men who came to see you dance?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “But they weren’t touching me. It was just a job, Finch. I had a nice apartment and drove a nice car. I could sleep as late as I wanted and spend the whole afternoon shopping before I went in to work. I liked it,” she promised, and laughed at me for wrinkling my brow. “It was just a job.”

  A job that she ran to when she ran away from here. She ran away from her mama, who made her practice baton twirling every day, who signed her up for every pageant for a hundred mil
es around and used the money she won to register for the next pageant with a bigger award.

  She ran away from her daddy, who drank too much, who made her sit on his lap wearing just her little banner and her crown while he watched NASCAR races on TV.

  “You didn’t have on nothing else?”

  “Well, I had on my panties,” she said. “But do you know how long a NASCAR race lasts? I had to sit that way for hours.”

  “What about your mama?” I asked. “Didn’t your mama think that was strange?”

  “No. Mama said he just wanted to hold a beauty queen, and that it should make me feel good. And then she cried because she had wrinkles and a fat ass and because he never wanted to hold her anymore.”

  “It must have bothered you pretty bad to run away.”

  “Well, I didn’t run away till I was eighteen,” she said. “But it did bother me. It made me feel like the worst person in the world. ’cause I always thought there was something kind of funny about it. And if Mama and Daddy both thought it was normal, then I must have a sick mind.”

  “That’s not logical,” I told her.

  “Sure it is,” she answered. “You just don’t like the way my heart was taught to think.”

  And now William Blott has called out to Lucy, and she’s dancing with him, not with me. I want to holler, “Remember the scars. Ask William Blott if he has any scars.” But it’s too late. His horn has cast a spell. And he probably has scars anyway. He probably got run over by a lawn mower when he was a boy.

  His cheeks explode the air, and that music whines on and on in the night, and Lucy gets lost in the wave of it, or maybe the depth. She crosses her arms and clasps her hands to the hem of her tight T-shirt, lifting it to the sky and tossing it aside.

  And there it is. Her bouncing chest, with the words FUCK ME etched into her skin, FUC over one nipple, KME over the other. The scars are thick cords, each letter a hundred slits, and I imagine all the blood she must have lost, how each slit must have laughed and spit and bubbled.

  “I’d already been cutting myself before that happened,” she told me years back. “I’d been cutting myself since before I ran away.”