Four Spirits (61 page)

Then he felt Stella's arm around him.

“I love the snow in the evergreens,” she said. “When I was a little girl, Aunt Krit gave me a candle of a little green pine tree, with snow on its boughs. It was my first Christmas without my family. It pleased me that she had picked out just a natural tree for me, not a decorated one. I never said so to her, but it made me feel understood, and I was grateful to her.”

He hugged her against his side.

“What did Aunt Pratt give you?”

“A huge rag doll. She'd made her just my size. She had very pink polished cotton skin and yellow yarn hair.”

Jonathan put his lips in Stella's hair and kissed her head. She didn't doubt that she was his and he was hers—just the way she leaned against him said that.

“Gloria's going down to Selma to help with voter registration,” she said. “Ellie's interested, too.”

Yes, he loved Stella. She understood him, and he needed her.

Suddenly, they saw Agnes, all bundled up, out in the yard scooping up snow in a big saucepan. She moved fast, bending and scooping in her gray coat with a gray scarf tied over her head. When Agnes came inside, snow frosting her shoulders and dusting the gray, fringed scarf, she said, “I'm gonna make this Yankee boy some snow ice cream!”

 

STELLA GLANCED OVER
at Gloria and Ellie, gabbing in the straight chairs like two old country women on a front porch. Ellie reached over and familiarly fingered the miniature harmonica hanging on a ball chain around Gloria's neck.

Immediately Gloria took the little thing to her lips and, impromptu, played a rousing rendition of “O, Susanna!” The jaunty, confident tune penetrated the party hubbub. “Play it again,” Stella called, and so did others. There were Gloria's aunts, colorful as tropical birds, egging her on. And over in the corner, that quiet couple must be Gloria's parents; Stella had met them at Joseph Coat-of-Many-Colors. Gloria looked like her mother, but she was dressed as flamboyantly as the aunts.

Everybody sang with gusto, especially Jonathan, right in Stella's ear: “I come to Alabama with a banjo on my knee….” The room resounded with it. “O, Susanna, O, don't you cry for me….” Stella looked at the faces, mostly dark, a few light. Some stoic as stone, some singing with twinkling jauntiness,
some with patient determination making a promise to the future that there
would be
no more reason, someday in the South, to cry for me or my children or my people.

How could Gloria possibly get so much music out of an instrument only an inch long? So much volume and sprightly, saucy hope.

And there was Ellie, rising above her personal angst, radiant for freedom in some form that combined the personal and the private.

Gloria was even able to smile as she played; her shoulders danced as she blew herself into an instrument half the length of her little finger. Stella remembered how Gloria had stepped forward not in joy but in anguish to speak and to sing at the funeral, her soul projected by her voice.
No matter who dies,
Stella thought,
the South will always have more Glorias to step forward, to lead.
But then Stella thought of how few they were, gathered in this house, a snowstorm swirling about them.

When the singing stopped, Jonathan murmured of Gloria, “She's really very talented.”

Stella spoke from her heart: “I'm glad she can play the cello, and I don't have to.” She peeked out the window again. Brigades of bundled-up children were bringing Agnes snow for her ice cream. Yes, Stella remembered, it seemed to take bushels of snow to make snow ice cream. She could smell something hot and savory, too, emanating from the kitchen. They were baking hot breads—banana bread, and something with cinnamon and dates, and there was the special aroma of walnuts baking in batter, a smell that made even your teeth water.

 

JONATHAN EXCUSED HIMSELF
to go to the bathroom. He wanted to be closeted, alone for a while. In the bathroom, he thought again of how Kabita and he had stood on the steps looking at the city in the snowfall. He flushed the toilet. And then he remembered another picture, a photograph of the mothers of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. They too were standing at the top of a flight of stairs in New York, leaving the funeral service for Andrew Goodman. Their black purses dangled from their wrists in front of their linked bodies. They had all lost their sons to the Klan: Schwerner and Goodman, white boys from New York. Goodman killed his first day in Mississippi. Chaney a local worker, Negro, from Mississippi.

Jonathan looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and wondered if he had
a fraction of their strength. He wished someone would compose a trio for three male singers with an amazing piano part, a trio for young male voices, preferably aged twenty-one, twenty-one, and twenty-five, preferably two white and one Negro. And a complementary one for their middle-aged mothers, something that would let them shriek their grief. He thought of the weight of Mississippi earth—an earthen dam constructed with bulldozers—under which Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were found.

Maybe Jonathan had been in Alabama too long. Maybe his luck was running out and it was time to leave. Stella seemed ready to go to Selma, but how did he feel? Heavy. Depressed. It was New Year's and he should feel hopeful, be looking forward to change. He thought of Lionel's sermon at the funeral. He needed something to help him spill his sorrow. He was ashamed of himself for longing for Kabita, for times back then in New York, for wanting now to hold Ellie in her fiery dress and warm body.

He left the bathroom and wandered the party. Stella was sitting happily between Ellie and Gloria, and he knew that another friendship circle was forming. Ellie might betray her husband but not her friends.

 

EVENTUALLY, LIONEL HURRIED
among the champagne glasses to get ready for the countdown.

Ellie stood up quickly, breathlessly happy. When Stella and Gloria stood up, Gloria ecstatically threw her arms around Stella, without reserve, and Stella returned the embrace with the same joyful freedom. Jonathan envied Stella, wanted to ask her for help.

At Jonathan's elbow, Jenny said, “This is our first champagne,” but Lionel was popping corks as though he were an old hand at it.

On the other side of Jonathan, someone quietly raised his glass and said, “Here's to my friend Medgar Evers, a great leader, assassinated June 12, 1963. Jackson, Mississippi.”

So others were remembering, too. The big man was standing alone, toasting the air.

Jonathan lifted his glass. He didn't want to intrude. He said quietly, “To all the martyrs.” He thought of a thirteen-year-old boy in Birmingham, on a bicycle, murdered the same day as the four girls. Shot by young Eagle Scouts. The boy's name was Virgil Lamar Ware. Jonathan had still been in New York then,
practicing his fool fingers off. But he spent hours rummaging in drawers till he found his old Eagle Scout certificate, which he burned in the kitchen sink, and resolved to prepare himself to try to count for something in the South.

“To Virgil Lamar Ware,” Jonathan added softly.

To his surprise, the man next to him glanced at him, and raised his glass.

“To Johnny Robinson.”

“Who was he?” Jonathan asked.

“Killed same day as Virgil. As the girls. Shot in the back by police breaking up a crowd.”

Jonathan opened his arm to the man, who stepped forward. A big man, full of grief. When the man stepped away, his eyes and nostrils were running tears.

“Johnny was in with a crowd of kids throwing rocks. I knowed his folks.” He wiped his nose on a square of white handkerchief, then turned away to face the party and the countdown. Lionel hastened to fill their glasses with the sparkling champagne.

Moments before midnight, Lionel solemnly raised his hand for silence. They all looked at the scar like a star in his palm.

“We're here to have a good time,” Lionel said. “To celebrate that we are alive. That we can carry the torch. But we don't none of us forget. Not September 15, 1963.” He paused to gather his composure. “Not our recent losses—Joseph Coat. Not the losses before or after September 15 due to racism. Not Medgar Evers; not young men from the North this last June in Mississippi and James Chaney; southern children, our own young. Tonight we also honor those young and old, white and black, who may yet lay down their lives for equality and freedom. Martin Luther King's coming back to Alabama, working in Selma and the rural parts for voter registration.

“I can't do better as we greet the New Year, 1965, I can't
do
better than to remind you of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He said that ‘the innocent blood of these little girls may serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city.' Remember, friends, Birmingham and the United States got to feel the redemptive force, not just sorrow. We got to bear up that light, each and every one. In my mind, old Vulcan up there watching for the New Year come in—he holding up the light of love in this pure and blessed snow.”

Lionel lowered his arm and put it around his wife's shoulders.

“Now, sisters and brothers,” he said energetically, “count on down.”

At midnight, the guests all toasted one another and yelled “Happy New Year!” Gloria continuously blew her horn obnoxiously onto noses.

Stella came to Jonathan and said, “I think we should go now.”

Ellie said that she wanted to stay longer.

“We'll look after her,” Gloria answered.

At the door, Stella said to Lionel, “I hope 1965 is good to you and Jenny. It's going to be good to Jonathan and me.”

Jonathan was shocked at her public forth rightness, her confidence in them.

“That's right,” he echoed. Yes, he would let his disappointments and frustration go. Yes, he would embrace this odd and wonderful woman who loved him.

Lionel announced, “Before they go—a toast to a happy couple!”

And everyone yelled, “Happy New Year!”

AS THEY WALKED TOWARD THEIR CAR, ANOTHER CAR SPED
by, blasting its horn.

“Wild night,” Jonathan remarked.

“I love the snow,” Stella said. “I had a wonderful time.” She glanced at him, knew he had seemed troubled during parts of the party. Inside the Thunderbird she leaned over and rubbed her cheek against his prickly whiskers.

“Would you like to grow a curly red beard?”

He turned on the motor and pulled away from the curb. The tires crunched in the snow.

“Anything for you,” he said.

She believed him. She believed every word his lips and his body uttered.

He glanced in the rearview mirror, and Stella turned to see a car, iceberg green, hurtle past. There were four men in the car.

“It's starting to get slippery,” Jonathan said as he drove on.

At the next traffic light, the same pale green car rushed up, behind them again, blowing its horn. In this light, it looked too pale, almost white, but definitely the same one.

A great dread clenched Stella's heart.

Irritated, Jonathan glanced in the rearview mirror again. “What's their problem?” he said. “The light's red.”

“Maybe they were afraid they couldn't stop in time,” Stella said. “That they'd rear-end.”

“I hope not,” he said. “Does anybody ever ski or ice-skate around here?”

“There's an indoor skating rink in Eastlake,” she said. “But the rental skates are worn out, and the ice barely covers the refrigeration pipes.” She remembered how she had begged and begged Aunt Krit to take her ice-skating till finally she'd gotten to go. Her sneaky plan had been to learn to skate and then show off to Nancy. But at the rink, Stella had had to cling to the railing to get around; her ankles were too weak. One patch of ice was a rusty brown smear from the decay of the pipes underneath, and it was harrowing to bump along over the almost exposed pipes. Suppose her blades sliced into the pipes; suppose the pipes had poisonous gas inside? She would never take Nancy to such a dangerous place.

“I'll teach you to ski,” Jonathan said. “We'll go to Maine or Vermont. If we got married tomorrow that could be our honeymoon.”

“We could,” she said. She glanced over her shoulder. She could see the ice green car. “I'm afraid of that car behind us,” she blurted.

“I'll just slow down and let them pass,” he said. “They can make the next light, if they hurry.”

But the car—two white men in the front seat, two in the back—sped straight toward them. The driver threw on his brakes, and then veered out of control into the oncoming lane. The car coming toward them pulled aside and onto the curb, honking its own horn. Careening past, the men on the passenger sides rolled down their windows and yelled.

“Yankee, go home! Nigger lovers!”

“What the hell!” Jonathan said.

“Speed up,” Stella said.

“What?”

“We need to get away from them. Turn down the next side street.”

 

ALL THE STREETS WERE
choked with snow. A few adults were out in the wee hours on their lawns, building snowmen.
Now, we're safe,
she thought. But they were tense. They drove for blocks, clenching themselves, not talking.

“I'm not a believer anymore,” she said suddenly. “Not the way I was.” She remembered Darl's defiant angel in Oak Hill Cemetery.

“And you're okay with that?”

“I've evolved. It's been as natural as that.”

“You know I don't care. Evolve again, if you want to.”

“What's happening here in the South. King's courage. Shuttlesworth's. This rising of the South, it's a Christian movement. Oh, I know, plenty of Eastern intellectuals down here. You guys. Maybe some Buddhists, for all I know. Gandhi was a Hindu, and he's the fountainhead of all of it; he's immensely important to King. But the rise of the Negro in the South is really a Christian story. It has to be told that way.”

“Oh, no,” he said.

“What?”

“That car, it's with us again.”

“Kiss!” she said. “Kiss and step on the gas.”

Quickly she leaned to him, brushed his lips with hers, and the Thunderbird shot forward. They raced toward Norwood, straight out raced down Eighth Avenue.

“Maybe the police will follow,” she said. “Faster.” The speedometer rose, forty, fifty, sixty. “Can you see them?” A wake of snow spewed out behind them.

“No.”

So they were safe again, not far from home. She wanted not to go home, though, but to sit in a private place and talk and talk. It was only just past midnight. Aunt Krit wouldn't be expecting her so soon. She wondered about Jonathan's sadness at the party.

“Turn,” she said. “Then turn into the cemetery. It'll be beautiful.”

This evening no chain stretched across the columns marking the entrance.

“ ‘Abandon hope,' ” Jonathan murmured, “ ‘all ye who enter here.' ” But he smiled, mocking his former mood. “I can barely see where the road is,” he added as they rolled between the stone pillars.

“Keep moving. I want to go deep in.”

He killed the headlights. “It's so bright,” he said, “with just the snow reflection.”

“Go deeper,” she said, and he did till they were almost hidden among the snow-shaggy evergreens, the magnolias and snow-bent cedars. The bare limbs of the oaks and elms were shelves for snow. The car crept slowly through acres of monuments and trees.

Finally she felt concealed in the deep folds of the cemetery. Because of the hills, they could see nothing of the streets. He slowed the car, and they could hear the solitary slush and creak of the tires through the snow.

“Turn off the engine,” she said, and he did.

They coasted to a quiet stop, like a boat coming to a dock. Falling snow curtained the landscape.

“Listen,” he said. He rolled down his window a little, and she did, too. “We could be in another country.” Bits of snow drifted through the open space at the top of the window.

“What lovely silence,” she said. “So much peace here.”

He waited, listening, and then he said, “Yes.”

“I wish Cat were buried here.” Cat's grave was in the country near a sunny meadow. “No, I don't,” she amended. Don had said when they were kids, he and Cat used to run in the meadow behind the church, before Cat got sick.

“Just listen,” Jonathan said, “and look.”

So she did, wondering at the hush and beauty of the snow as it shrouded shrubs, monuments, and trees. Gradually, the racing of her heart was slowing down. Again, she remembered the little wax tree Aunt Krit had given her, bedecked with snow, and when she'd won a grade school contest reciting poetry, a pearly bracelet with a large charm—a basket full of jewels. Those lovely gifts had been comforting.

“Do you mind Christmas carols?” she asked. She watched the snow melt as it hit the warm red hood of the car.

He laughed. “No, of course not, but I thought you were skeptical.”

“I love Christmas carols anyway.” Then she sang to him:

“That was lovely, Stella,” he said.

She smiled; yes, to create loveliness—that
was
the only answer. Not her singing but the beautiful words to the carol. “Careful, or I'll convert you,” she said. The cold air nipped her nose.

“Look,” he said. “There's a rabbit.”

And there was a little brown rabbit creeping across the crust of snow. He turned and showed them just his cottontail, almost indistinguishable against the white. Snow fell steadily.

“It's a Christina Rossetti poem,” she said.

“Whose tune?” He rubbed his hands together briskly to warm them.

“I don't know.”

“Such a measured, mournful melody,” he mused. “Very beautiful. Do you want to get out? Walk around.”

“No. I feel safer in here. Warmer, too.” She rolled her window back up. “It's snowing harder now. Feel my nose,” she said, and he did. Then she felt his. Her fingertips loved the fine cartilage of his nose. “Mine's colder,” she said. The snow was starting to accumulate and hide the red of the hood. “
The crimson and the white.” S
he thought of the alma mater of Phillips High School, how those closing words always moved her; she missed Cat again and other classmates, and wondered where they were and what they were doing.

“Sing the rest of the carol,” he asked quietly, and she did, what she could remember:

Looking across the car seat, hearing how the song had bent its meaning when she sang it to him, she wanted to lean through the frigid air and kiss him. Behind his face, fern-shaped frost patterned the window. Surely she knew now what it was to adore another person. This man. This brilliant musician, who didn't mind her singing. Who had made a pilgrimage south. For no one in particular. For everyone. Because Eagle Scouts had shot a boy off his bicycle.

Not just the frost but the driving snow was erasing the world. Downward pelting snow, thicker than angel wings thronged the air. But she wouldn't kiss yet; she would sing the next part to him. What, after all, did she have to give him? Maybe then.

Then they heard the sound of a car motor.

“Rub the frost off,” he said. With the palms of their hands, they circled the frost off the glass. Through the peepholes, they both saw the shape of the green car, blurred to whiteness now, preceded by twin cones of light from its headlamps.

“This was a mistake,” she said.

“Don't say that,” he answered with a quick glance at her. “It wasn't a mistake”—his voice as gentle as though they had seen nothing. With the softness of his tone and gaze, he seemed to offer her a gentle animal, something softly alive and vulnerable—a rabbit, a lamb.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm really sorry.”

The green car wasn't racing anymore. It was coming slowly into the cemetery, pale lime green again, humped, on the one-lane road. Its headlights tunneled through the falling snow.

“They haven't seen us,” she said. “They'd be coming faster if they had. We're camouflaged by the snow.”

“Can you run?” His question was sharply urgent, full of energy.

“Like a deer.”

They swung open the doors, closed them quietly, clasped hands, and ran cross-country. Dodging around the monuments, she slipped, and he held her hand tighter, to the point of pain. Just before they rounded a shielding spruce, Stella glanced back. Down through their headlights cascaded showers of snow.

From the other side of the spruce, they heard a shot split the air, and the sound of glass breaking.

“They're shooting your car,” she whispered.

“Our car,” he said, and she felt married to him. “Just run!”

“This way,” she told him.

Glancing back, she saw the snowfall was quickly filling their footprints, and she began to hope.

“You go left, I'll go right,” she said. “Meet you beyond the thicket of obelisks. See where the angel is?”
Darl's defiant angel.

“Yes,” Jonathan said.

They parted and ran. Stella heard many guns fired at the car. Tires exploded—one, two, three, four—with each explosion, she increased her speed. The men would cautiously approach the car; they would hope to find
two bodies slumped onto the floorboards. She made herself run harder; she leapt the low tombstones in her path. The men would crane their necks to look through the shattered windshield. When they saw the car was empty, they would howl and curse, but she loved and would love the strength in her legs and her own running, alone, at top speed over the snow. The cold air refreshed her cheeks. She was weightless and indefatigable.
I will live!

The men would stand around and talk. Somebody would notice the footprints.

Snow! Snow harder!
she implored the heavens.
Faster,
she implored her legs. As she ran, she lifted her arms in a
V
above her head.
Here the ghost comes, boo-hoo-hoo—
her blood zinged in her body. Maybe snow already had filled the footprints.
Don't be frightened, boo-hoo-hoo!
Jonathan was almost a speck, a dark, vertical dash, running parallel to her in the distance. She ran almost as fast.
The past comes to help us.

Behind the angel they ran into each other's arms; Jonathan seemed star-tlingly large and human. She, too, panting, seemed large and fleshy, full of breath and heaving.

Snow fell thickly between their flushed faces. “Quick,” she said. “I know where we can hide.” She remembered the perfect magnolia where the lone Negro hid, and the rocky draw that lead to it. Surely the rapidly falling snow would cover their tracks. Almost. She surveyed the vague landscape till she saw a rounded dome, like the top of a giant gumdrop.

“Dry creek bed,” she gasped. “No footprints.”

She could see fear in his eyes, but he nodded assent.

“I've been here before,” she assured.

They skittered down the draw. Bits of snow were caught in the grooves where water had scored the rock, but not enough snow for feet to imprint. Soon the steep dry course leveled out, and they passed through the colonnade of sycamores. She glanced up at the branches against the pale sky. But there, where the ground began to slope away to the open meadow, was the magnolia cloaked in white. Beyond the tree, unbroken snow covered the grass, but here, with one long step directly from the rocks underfoot into the tree branches, they entered obscurity.