Freshwater Road (14 page)

Shuck drove around the still-crowded island, the river breezes holding
people reluctant to return to their hot houses and airless apartments. Their
trash lay in crumpled bits near cans, as if the effort to put it in the can
required one step too many. Shuck parked, put the top up, walked to the
river's edge, and sat down on a picnic table. The city lights of Windsor
sparkled on. Hard to fathom how this strait of water separated two places
with such different histories. What, he thought, were Negro people doing
here, struggling and fighting for a place to be after all this time? The numbers rackets never as lucrative there as here. Not as many desperate Negro
people playing hunches, studying dream books like pocket bibles. Whiskey
came across this river during Prohibition. Even now he'd go over to buy
booze and cigarettes, too. Cheaper and calmer over there.

Shuck knew this island, this Belle isle, had come here on summer
days for his whole life, swam from the beach to the city side and back,
rode horses, canoed and ice-skated in winter. Momma Bessie called summer to order with a picnic on Belle Isle and dismissed it the same way
every Labor Day. These were the things to look forward to until age and
death crept in with a different plan. Momma Bessie couldn't stand in her
kitchen making potato salad for fifteen people anymore, packing picnic
baskets, ice chests, gathering everyone around, cooking ribs on the park
grills. Sometimes they'd be on the island for breakfast, too, then a day of
softball, swimming, walking through the zoo and dinner outdoors. It was
an all-day thing. But the children grew and left, the old people started
dying off, and those who remained sat on porches all over the West Side
wondering what the hell was going on. Shuck felt a slipping away like the
muddy riverbank at his feet.

Sailboats lined up on the river heading in for the night, bows shadowing
as the last orange streak of light sank beneath the horizon. He remembered
that day years ago when he and Wilamena carved their initials in the gray
bark of an old beech tree. He always loved the way she looked in the shade
with sunlight filtering through the trees, her skin browner in summer, dark
golden brown.

When he first saw Wilamena at Lakeview High, he thought she was a vision from some island paradise. She stood out. The other boys circled, asking her where she lived, and could she go to the movies or for a ride on the
streetcar. The white boys stole glances at her, too. He stayed back. Almost
lost her when her head starting turning this way and that. He found out she was a small-town girl who knew how to climb out of a bedroom window.
Wilamena had an edge. She wanted out in a way he didn't understand.

Shuck walked along the riverbank. No sand beaches on this side of the
island. Too much water moving too fast. A quick look back at his Cadillac
gleaming in the near dark. He hoped those boys wouldn't come this far
around the drive, find it, slash his convertible top. He pushed forward, the
water sploshing up on the grass and rocks making a small slapping sound.
Cars on the drive lolling by, radios loud, voices kicking through the evening
air. Then quiet. The light dimming to true darkness. He stood in a small
grove of mature trees yards back from the river's edge, went from tree to
tree tracing his hands on the thin bark, searching for the initials he hoped
would still be there, fingers gliding towards the past. He saw himself, a welldressed man digging around for the past like a teenager who still loves the
girl he took to the prom. He laughed then ignited his cigarette lighter and
went from tree to tree until he found the beech with their initials carved,
bigger now, stretched in effigy. They'd dug deep with his pocket-knife. He
stood there tracing the initials and finally snapped his silver-plated lighter
closed. In the dark, he walked on the grassy earth away from the water
toward his car, his creamy yellow shirt a soft light in the night.

Celeste was the ghost-sister of her own mother, headstrong, wily, and
only just beginning. He didn't know what to warn her of anymore, didn't
know how to protect her. She'd taken herself to a place beyond anyone's
protection. Not something Wilamena would've done. He saw Wilamena in
Celeste sometimes, the way she said a certain word or how she moved her
hands, but they were oceans apart. But how had she put it together to go
to Mississippi? He caught himself. If white children had the courage to put
themselves on the line, why not his own? God bless the child. His heart gave a
different answer. Negro people had paid enough. Their ancestors paid with
the lash and the rope and no money for hundreds of years of backbreaking
work. If anybody on earth had a right to be tired, it was Negro people in
America. It wasn't enough and he knew it. The struggle would go on until
the end of time.

Celeste had a rebellious streak and that would bring her pain, the kinds
of pain he could not protect her from. He told her that when he met that
white guy with her. He came down hard on her because he wanted her to
understand she was treading on shaky ground, bound for the big fall, the
kind of hurt that destroyed a spirit. He didn't want to see that happen. Like her mother, Celeste was restless. They were women who stared into
space, loved cold winds, storms, and deep colors. You couldn't hold them
too tight. A man who was like a rock, Wilamena had said, was there to
catch her when she spun one last time out of control. In the old days, Shuck
knew he was too much in the streets to be anybody's rock. He'd forgiven
Wilamena's wandering because he hadn't been there himself. He had to
forgive her whether he wanted to or not. He prided himself on being a
stand-up kind of man.

He scraped his shoes with a tree branch, left the top up, and locked his
doors. He drove around the island, passing the all-white yacht club, the
beach, and headed back to the bridge, then turned to go across downtown
and over to the Royal Gardens. Maybe it was time to keep a gun in the
car the way things were playing out in the city, hard to know where it was
safe and where it wasn't these days. He was a businessman who made bank
drops with zippered bags of cash. Easy to explain to the cops why this Negro
man traveled the city streets with a gun. Then he remembered those boys
high-dancing in front of his car. He didn't know anymore what he'd have
done if he had his gun.

The driver, 'Middleman, "grinned at them in his rearview mirror. He ferried
a steady stream of girls from campus to the abortion doctor in River Rouge,
charging fifty dollars for door-to-door service in his customized hearse. He
collected the three hundred dollars for the doctor's services. Back-alley entrance,
no-nonsense Negro nurse as cold as Celeste 's feet in the icy stirrups, body open
like a cave, cramping, feeling the scraping and hearing the flushing. You had
to have an appointed time, and the doctor was always busy. Images of clothes
hangers, mangled girls, and dead babies skydived in her mind. Momma Bessie
put the fear of God in you, but you couldn't stay scared forever. Lying on a
sheet-covered table, half-asleep in the dark, Celeste waited for the other two
girls who came from Ann Arbor that day. They sipped orange juice and took
huge whitepills with five more to take. She wouldn't tellj.D. and nota thought
about telling Shuck.

Geneva Owens's voice and a man's voice, too, wafted through the house,
seeped into her dream, riding on the aromas of frying bacon and strong
coffee. She woke fighting to free herself from the dream's residue, knowing
she'd revisit it, like it or not. She lay there listening to them talking about a
neighbor woman, Sister Mobley, who had half of a job, three small children,
and a long-gone husband. Her hostess sounded chatty, saying she took food
to the bereft family whenever she could. Her slow and easy vocal gait was a
counterpoint to the strong, stage-savvy male voice. He said the church was
doing all it could for those in dire straits.

The nearness of the Gulf, of Lake Pontchartrain, and God only knew what other bodies of water had directed no cool air to Pineyville. Maybe
the talk in the kitchen would go on, they'd forget her, let her drift until she
adjusted to the swelter, the smallness of the thin-walled house, and the lack
of an indoor bathroom with a toilet or a tub. She was learning the stillness
of the south, the slowness. Less racing around, less body heat. She had a
thought that she might not get a full bath until the end of the summer.

She threw the top sheet aside and studied the color schematic of her
body. Her arms and lower legs were well past a shade that would be acceptable to Wilamena. Good. She knew her face was beyond the pale and
laughed at the double meaning. Wilamena had been known to grow impatient when Celeste played too long in the sun. Stay out of the sun, girl. A
tad too much curl would sneak into her hair in the summer humidity. As
she matured, Wilamena's coolness became profound, the physical distance
a true rendering of the emotional. Eventually Celeste lost interest in struggling to make herself Wilamena's adored child. Maybe it wasn't that at all.
Maybe Wilamena just didn't know how to love.

When she could lie there no longer, she planted her feet on the cool
linoleum floor. The tiny, healed-over cuts in her skin had the crusty feel
of minute scabs. She used every drop of remaining pitcher water to wash
herself from face to feet, realizing too late that she had no clean water with
which to brush her teeth. She dressed in a sleeveless blouse and a skirt and
tiptoed out the front door to the spigot, squinting in the hard sunlight,
beckoning to the distant clouds to bring shade in God's name to Freshwater
Road. She eyed the long-needled pines. No shade trees near any house that
she could see. Where had that car or truck in the night gone? She stared at
the empty road. The two-lane was a short city block in the other direction,
the road Matt had disappeared down. With the sun like a hot iron on her
neck, she bent over to refill her pitcher.

Mrs. Owens stood at the stove frying eggs. Celeste downed a waiting
glass of ice water as the smooth-voiced man rose from his chair. "I wasn't
sure until last week if they'd send someone. We're on the low rung down
here. I'm Reverend Singleton."

"Celeste Tyree." She joined him at the table. What was the high rung,
she wondered? Jackson or even Hattiesburg. "I was with the last group.
They called us the stragglers." She might've said she was happy to be there,
but Leroy Boyd James's name leaped into her mind, followed quickly by
the prowling car. This Pineyville was a lynching town, and 1959 wasn't that long ago. She needed to talk with a local about the real deal in Pineyville
without being rude to the person who'd guide her to what she was there to
do. "The work's the same wherever it is." She said it thinking that maybe it
was true and maybe it wasn't.

"We're so happy that you're here." Reverend Singleton resumed eating,
cleaning his plate. "We'll take you, straggler or not, and we'll show them a
thing or two in Jackson."

"Thanks, Reverend Singleton. Nothing would please me more." It felt
good to say his name, to hear that he understood the undertow of competition between the volunteers to register the most people to vote.

That got things off on the right foot. He had the cheerleading enthusiasm they'd need to get up and running. The question remaining was who
was good for the long haul once the going got rough. She'd learned enough
about Pineyville to know that it wouldn't be a cake walk.

The kitchen vibrated with heat. The coffee smelled bitter, and the plate
of food Mrs. Owens handed her swam in a shallow of yellow grease. Margo
had admonished the volunteers to not waste the hosts' hard-to-come-by
food. Celeste forked in a small bite of fried egg, then ate a corner piece of
biscuit. Thankful she was that the woman had given her less to eat than she
had last evening, when Matt shoveled in food like it was his last supper, and
she'd tried to keep up with him. She chewed a piece of bacon that gloriously melted on her tongue after a crisp beginning, and waited patiently to
pounce on the Reverend about that lynching.

"If Etta'd allow it, I'd eat over here every day, Sister Owens." Reverend
Singleton pushed his empty plate forward. "You make a biscuit that brings
tears to a man's eyes." He reared back in his chair, brown face glowing in
satisfaction. His neatly trimmed moustache camouflaged full lips, and his
thick eyebrows set off dark brown eyes.

"You and Etta both come over here to eat anytime you feel like it." She
took his dirty plate to her pump and washing tub on the small back porch.
She gave the handle a few bricks pumps and sulfur-yellow water belched
and spewed over the plate. "You did real good for a second breakfast, Reverend." She wiped her hands on her apron, eyes bright and strong, her face
ten years younger than yesterday when Celeste and Matt had arrived. Her
hair was tucked into a bun at the back of her neck, her housedress crisp
and fresh.