Freshwater Road (11 page)

"There's ice water in the kitchen." An older woman came out of the
screened door talking, holding a towel, eyes averted from Matt's naked
upper body. "You coulda waited til tomorrow with that Klan meetin' going
on in Hattiesburg and all."

Mrs. Geneva Owens stood barely shorter than Celeste. Her unpressed
gray hair was bunched into a fat french twist, and her dark eyes were not
too old to flash. She wore a waist-tied apron over a soft yellow print cotton
housedress. Her skin was dark brown though not as dark as Matt's, and her
laugh lines were deep grooves that kept to their places, didn't creak off into
small lines and wrinkles. She looked dutiful, alert, and invigorated.

"I didn't know a thing about it til Matt said something. We were almost
here by then." Celeste spoke by way of introducing herself. "We saw a
whole carload of them on the other side of Hattiesburg. Had their sheets
and robes thrown over the seat back." She sounded like an excited child,
as if this woman had never seen the likes of that in her life. She quickly
remembered where she was.

"No need to be worrying the life outta me. What's left of it, anyway."
She gave Matt the towel, then walked right back into her house as if she'd
handed it to him through a bathroom door, never even acknowledging that
Celeste was standing there.

Matt dried himself then tossed the towel to Celeste. He shielded himself
from the house and lowered his coveralls to tuck in his shirt. "Don't go bringing that siddity Detroit shit down here. I know you got it in you." He
spoke very quietly as he slipped the overall straps up onto his shoulders.

Celeste rolled her eyes at his back, water still dripping off her face and
knowing full well she wasn't going to dry her face with a towel he'd used
to dry his body. She'd never even done that with J.D.

"That's better." The woman came out again, walked straight to Matt
and squinted at the knot on his head. "What's that on yo head? Look like
you been in a fight with the devil."

"Wasn't no devil, Mrs. Owens, just a man. And I wasn't doing none of
the fighting." Matt's eyes clouded and dropped in embarrassment.

"State troopers. Two of them." Celeste worked to get the attention of the
older woman off Matt, who seemed to shrink at using the word "fighting."
It had been a beating. She struggled, too, for some acknowledgement of
her own presence. Here she was, ready again to prove she belonged exactly
where she was standing. No way around it.

"Well, you won cause you here." Mrs. Owens heaved out a breath and
put the positive note to it that Matt so desperately needed.

The quiet ride through the surrounding pine forest had calmed Celeste,
blocked out the beating and the gun pointed at them before it was fired into
the air, but it all came back when the woman said, you won cause you here.
If they'd lost, they'd be dead.

"I got you a towel in your room, child." She took the damp towel from
Celeste and smiled the slightest bit as if something was holding her back.
But Celeste seized onto her use of the word "child" and knew she was going
to be fine with this woman. She also figured that by the time they got into
her room, the sun would've dried her off well enough. Mrs. Owens's reserve
reminded her of Momma Bessie. Older Negro women notoriously favored
boys. Always trying to make up for the brutalities of the world outside.
Celeste had traveled that road, had seen Momma Bessie do the same thing
her whole life not just with Billy and Shuck but with every walking, talking
Negro man who came in her door. The men came first.

"You right about that," Matt said, remembering his manners at last.
"This is Celeste Tyree. She's gonna be staying with you over the summer."

She gave Celeste a sideways glance. "You welcome here."

"Thank you, Mrs. Owens." Celeste's head bobbed with a serious expression. Full-out smiles were a long time coming in Mississippi.

"Y'all hurry and come on in here and eat this food 'fore it spoils. And I got something for that knot on your head." Mrs. Owens walked inside, the
screen door giving a muffled version of a slam.

"Hey, Celeste, you got runnin' water-you just got to run outside to use
it." He said it in a husky laughing whisper. "Hasn't been that long they've
had electricity out here. Whole lot of white folks in Mississippi got no toilet
plumbing either." As if that was supposed to make it all right. She got a
better look at the small leaning structure near the pines. She didn't want
to believe it was an outhouse, but what else could it be? Outdoor spigots
and outdoor toilets. She hadn't connected the two when they first drove
up. You missed something, Margo. If the One Man, One Vote office told the
truth about the living circumstances, some of those volunteers would've
taken a pass and stayed in the cities to do their volunteering. She checked
herself. She, of all people, needed to do the harder thing, and this was
going to be it.

A dark wire traveled from the house to a T-shaped pole in the back. The
same poles stood all along the road as far as the eye could see. The wires
were relaxed, swinging between the poles like skinny black hammocks.
They never looked so naked as this back in Detroit. Mrs. Owens's pole had a
transformer-close to the corner, so the power company people didn't have
to venture too far down Freshwater Road, this neighborhood of glorified
shacks. Matt said the houses were built by the loggers back in the days of
the timber boom, when the piney woods stretched across southern Mississippi. When the forests were cleared and the loggers departed, Negro people
squatted in the houses, painted them, made them into homes. It was as if
the slave shanties of a hundred years ago had been painted and electrified.
Not much else had changed. In clearing the land for the houses, all the
shade trees had been cut down too and no one had bothered to replant
them. No lounging under live oaks on Freshwater Road. If you needed to
hide, you had to run through empty space like a moving target, racing for
the remains of the pine forest.

"More thunderstorms through here than anywhere. The lightning fires
burn those trees. They call'em stags' heads." Matt grabbed Celeste's suitcase
and walked into the house. He came back for the boxes of children's books.
Celeste imagined the burned trees as escapees from some miserable past
who hadn't made it out. They were caught in the moment of agony as if
they'd reached their scorched hands up to a God who'd turned his back on
them. She went inside.

Mrs. Owens met Celeste on the screened porch, and Celeste noticed
her charcoal black eyes had a blue ring around the iris. Celeste followed her
inside, noting too the lone rocking chair on the porch. She was directed to
put her book-bag in a small bedroom where her suitcase and the children's
books already sat just beyond the curtain that took the place of a door. There
was a small sitting room directly across a hall of sorts from the bedroom.

In the kitchen, Celeste joined Matt at the small table dressed with a
checkered cloth. She pushed her memories of home and Momma Bessie's
china and crystal out of her mind as Mrs. Owens set down a plate of food
then took the seat between them, closest to the hot gas stove. She grabbed
their hands and prayed over the food. Beyond the back door and some
yards from the house, that cool-looking patch of woods beckoned. Great,
grand trees with delicate branches and long, long needles. They were the
only thing she'd seen that reminded her of Michigan, though these pines
weren't shaped like Christmas trees. A mysterious wood. How far back did
it go? Was there another road beyond those trees, another cleared stretch
of sandy soil with shanty houses up and down?

As hungry as she was, the hot biscuits oozing butter, pork-laced greens,
and smothered chicken gave Celeste pause. Even Momma Bessie lightened
her cooking in the heat of summer. But this was a special meal for Mrs.
Owens, and she should eat no matter how it made her feel. She drank the
iced tea and ate the food, staring out the back way and praying silently for
a breeze. There was a wide work counter on the rear porch with two tin
tubs, one inside the other, beside a big box of Tide and a jug of bleach. A
water pump. Off the kitchen, another floral curtain marked a door. It had
to be this woman's bedroom.

"They're probably going to dredge the rivers up around Meridian if they
don't find 'em soon." Matt chewed and drank his iced tea in long gulping
swallows. Periodically he took breaks from shoveling food into his mouth
and pressed a knot of towel-wrapped ice cubes to his head. "Those boys
went missing over by Philadelphia." Celeste thought again of Matt's beating
on the road. Only the grace of God protected them from some unknown
fate. There was no other help on that highway.

"They start looking in all those rivers and creeks, they gon find plenty
people supposing to have left here for someplace else and never heard from
again." Mrs. Owens ate sparingly. Dribbles of sweat sprouted on her upper
lip. "Nobody speaks it, but they all know."

"They've already found some remains. There was a photo in the Jackson
paper of the police throwing some bones in an unmarked grave." Celeste's
words hung over the table like a dead calm on the ocean. She wiped her
mouth on the thin paper napkin, wishing she'd kept her bone story to
herself. Bones all over Mississippi. "Those cops who stopped us said we had
them in our trunk."

Matt reared back in his chair, surely tight with all he'd eaten. "They
didn't believe that."

"I didn't think they did." Celeste picked up her fork and plowed into
the rich hot food again.

"They was just trying to make life hard for you is all. Slow you down."
Mrs. Owens took a long swig of iced tea and poured more into her jelly-jar
glass, taking a dainty sprig of mint from a saucer and shoving it down into
the tea. Just like Momma Bessie did in summer, only there were no lemons
on this table and Momma Bessie's house had never been this hot. Out the
back door in Detroit was a spread of green grass and roses, peonies, an
apple tree. Mrs. Owens would be the same kind of woman if she lived like
Momma Bessie lived. Stark but warm at the same time, loving but severe.
What brought these women to that place? Bones, Celeste thought, the lost
and the found.

Then there were only chewing sounds and the small clanks of forks on
plates and ice in glasses speaking into the dimming evening air. The red
and white checkered table cloth danced under the plates of food. Celeste
held onto her iced tea. It was the only cool thing. She gripped it, hoping
the chill would work its way up her hand to the rest of her body. Seeing the
trees out the back door made her dream of the shade, quick breezes that
shook branches, rustled leaves. It was a memory.

"Those white boys po mommas and daddies never thought this place
could be so hellish as it is." Mrs. Owens got up from the table to spoon out
three servings of peach cobbler. She put them on the table just beside the
still-working dinner plates. Matt eyed the cobbler and continued piling in
the food. His stomach didn't seem to have a bottom, or maybe he was being
polite to Mrs. Owens, since she'd cooked all that food in honor of their
arrival. With that thought, Celeste ate more of the dinner, already feeling
stuffed, sure now that she'd have to use that dreaded outhouse before this
night was over.

"You sure right, Mrs. Owens," Matt said. He looked at Celeste then took a toothpick out of the little box on the table and openly picked his
teeth. She knew that was for her-his way of telling her again not to get
Detroit-siddity in this house. "That Chaney boy grew up here so his people
know all about Mississippi. They been living it."

Celeste wanted to roll her eyes good and hard at Matt, but instead she
studied the kitchen with its shelves-some doorless, some with lopsided
doors-not wanting to see if Matt dislodged some slight string of chicken
or torn piece of collard. The enameled gas stove with side-by-side oven
doors looked rich and out of place. The refrigerator, too. Matt twirled the
toothpick in his mouth like an old man at a shoeshine stand or a would-be
gangster leaning against a corner on some big city summer night.

"Still and all, nobody wants their child to be hurt whether they been
living here or not." Mrs. Owens's eyes grew sad. "That's why I sent my boys
away from here."

"Mrs. Owens got two boys up in Chicago." Matt continued picking his
teeth.

Celeste wondered how anybody kept their children with them in this
place. They should all have been sent somewhere else, especially the boys.
It was right out of the Bible, only Negro people didn't claim it as so. Kill
all the boy children. Find the baby Jesus. Hang them, shoot them, beat them
to death. Not just in Mississippi. All over the place. It was the boys, the
men who brought down the wrath of white people. Leave the women to
manage on their own, to make do, to be the disconnected maids needing
to be familied-in somewhere, somehow. The isolated woman in the small
house on the barren road.

"Anyway, we prayin' they hiding somewhere, scared out of their minds."
Matt put the used toothpick on the side of his plate next to the low hill of
chicken bones, slid the dinner plate to the side, and dove into the cobbler.

"I hope so. I pray so. I just don't think so." Mrs. Owens spoke with a
dreadful finality. The three were dead and Mrs. Owens knew it.

Matt didn't say a word. Celeste did her best to clean both her plates and
felt like she needed to go somewhere and lie down. Early evening light cut
in through the small kitchen window and threw shadows on the walls.

Matt wanted to get on the road to Bogalusa before dark. He hugged
Mrs. Owens at the front door. The older woman remained stiff but needing
at the same time. Celeste walked him to the car, carrying a large metal
pitcher to fill with fresh water from the spigot for her bedroom. He told her to find the pay phones in Pineyville and to check in with the Jackson
office as often as possible. Her church was southwest of the center of town.
Reverend Singleton would be in touch with her tomorrow.