Grace (18 page)

She's wrong.

She cain't know. Not about me, not this burning, not what I'm gon' do to George.

She don't even know me. She's probably not even a mother. Probably. Advice as old as time: Don't never take advice about raising a child from somebody who ain't got none. They cain't even fathom the kind of crazy a good parent is able to ascend to while still seeming normal on the outside.

There ain't even no children here. So she can save her advice for somebody else.

But . . .

I don't know how she see me.

24
/ APRIL 1863

Tallassee, Alabama

A
WARENESS HAPPENS IN
Stages.

Not all at once.

It comes by age.

Experience.

Or 'cause somebody told you something and you believed.

Before then, you didn't know better. Couldn't judge the consequence right.

But I cain't judge this.

I cain't figure how Bessie could see me. And how she might know something. Maybe what she told me is true. That walking into others to touch the living could bring about my end. I've felt the pain. So if it's true, it could make it so I don't spend another day with Josey. And I want to believe Josey'd feel the difference if I weren't here.

I've got to count the cost.

R
ICHARD SITS AT
his desk thumbing through his papers. Even from here, as I drift in his hallway looking in, I can feel his body warm, like running a hand over a candle. Being in Annie's got me weak. And if what Bessie says is true, I'm deciding that I ain't ready to die.

I pass Annie on the other side of the porch door, making my way home to Josey. But see Annie there, awkward looking, hunched down inside her blanket, staying out of Richard's sight. She cain't let him see her. Cain't have him come out and give her final words that'll end everything.

The porch door creaks and Bessie's in the doorway. Got the door only slightly opened and she's standing square in the middle. Richard's mistress is standing behind her. Bessie say, “Ma'am, Miss Kathy's here to see you. It's all right I bring her out?”

Without waiting for permission, Kathy shoulders Bessie to the left and brushes her pregnant belly against her on the way out. “Good mornin, Miss Annie,” she say, wide-mouthed and loud. Annie's eyes close directly and she sits up straight. “Mind if I come outside wit'cha?” Kathy don't wait for an answer to that, either, before she starts lowering herself into the swing next to Annie. Annie say, “Please . . .” and holds her hand out to the cushioned chair next to the door. “Better on your hips.”

“Thank you,” Kathy say, smiling. She shuffles across the porch, holding her back with one hand, then thuds back into the white wicker chair.

“Bessie?” Annie say. “I'll have more tea now.”

“Don't mind if I do,” Kathy say.

“Yes'm,” Bessie say to both of 'em.

Annie stiffens when she sees Richard staring at her from inside the house. She puts on a smile big enough for him to see.

Kathy waves and smiles at Richard through the window and lies back in her chair. “Ain't nothing like an Alabama winter,” Kathy say, loud as before. “It can't decide if it'll rain or snow. Good thing it don't do nothing. That's what I call patience. Don't nobody got none where I'm from. Miss'ippi. There, if the weather cain't decide what it want to do, it does something anyway. Slush,” she laugh. “Cain't hardly do nothing with slush. Cain't work in slush. Children cain't play in slush. When they go sliding in slush, water sprays this way and that. Makes grass flat. In Mis'sippi . . .”

“Do you mind if we sit quietly for a while?” Annie say, turning her head in such a way that Richard can still see her smiling.

“Oh . . . yes ma'am.” Kathy lays her head back, closes her eyes. “Cain't even have a doggone snowball fight in slush.” She pauses, “Oh. I'll be quiet now.”

Kathy starts tapping her fingernails on the armrests, clicking and pecking. “What is this, wicker?”

“It is wicker,” Annie say.

“Sure is chilly out here,” Kathy say. “Mind if I share your blanket?”

Annie pulls her blanket tighter under her chin, but keeps her smile on. Bessie comes out the house with two steaming cups of tea and a feather-filled blanket for Kathy. She lays it around the pregnant girl's shoulders but Kathy don't thank her.

When Bessie goes, Kathy whispers to Annie, “I woulda spit in my face last night, too.”

Annie's smile leaves her.

“Maybe we can try again,” Kathy say, with one hand out. “Be friends.”

Annie crowds her fingers around her cup and nods. Grins. Kathy say, “Most people call me Kathy, 'cept your husband. He likes to call me Katherine. But my good friends call me Kat or Kathy or Pooty Kat. I respond to most things, though.”

Annie looks beyond Kathy as she talks and searches inside the window where Richard was, while Kathy takes in the fullness of Annie—her poise, even sitting, the soft lines of her mature beauty, the fall of her auburn hair . . . the silver wedding band on her finger.

“In Mis'sippi,” Kathy starts again, “summer got three kinds of hot that time of the year. The kind you can sleep in, the kind you cain't. And the kind you get pregnant in. That's when I met your husband.”

Annie's listening now.

Kathy lays back in her chair, closes her eyes and snuggles into her blanket, like she's 'sleep. Annie sips her tea.

With her eyes still closed, Kathy say, “Must've been hard running a place like this all on your lonesome, without a man's hand.”

“I managed well,” Annie say. “While I waited for Richard, my husband, to come home, I did just fine.”

“Not what I heard. Richard said you was bringing niggers in the house like family. Your hand, Nelson, told Richard this morning. Said it was over his objections. And it was why you fired him.”

“That so?” Annie say.

Kathy leans over and whispers, “I thought you should know Richard hired Nelson back.”

The porch door opens and Richard comes through it. “Are you all right out here, Katherine?”

“Fine, Richard. Fine,” she say, waving him away.

“Annie?” he says. He and Annie hold a friendly gaze. She's the first to turn away. “Well, when you're done out here, Katherine, please join me in my study.”

Kathy nods as he closes the door. She say, “Some people say I talk too much . . .”

“‘Silence is golden,'” Annie say. “It's what the Chinese believe.”

“Then I reckon they don't have bats in China. In Mis'sippi, silence means a dead bat. Bats are blind, see. A bat has to make noise and send it out, so when the noise bounce back, it knows what's in front of it, what it's dealing with.” Kathy stretches her arms. “Besides that, bats keep the mosquitoes away.”

“How old are you again?”

“Twenty-one come my birthday.”

“A baby,” Annie say.

“Same age as when Richard married you.”

“A child.”

“Worse mistake of his life, he said, on the account you couldn't have babies. He'll have his first Graham soon. Be happy when this one comes.” Kathy rubs her belly.

Bessie comes back through the door and picks up Annie's empty cup. “Another, Missus Graham?”

“Two,” Annie say.

Kathy watches Bessie as she ambles back inside. “Savages, they are.”

“Or people.”

“A dirty subject,” Kathy say, resting back in her seat. “Hard to even trust 'em with tea. I wish we could find a way to get rid of 'em without war. Cutthroat abolitionists push the issue. I may not know everything, but I know they cain't free such a people in our midst. Richard understands the order of things. He'd never trust 'em the way you do. They're disgusting, they are. I once saw one of their babies playing in muddy water. Like a giant earthworm, it was. Rolling around, brown and slimy and . . .”

“Maybe you're right,” Annie say. “Maybe you don't know everything. Even things you should.”

There are secrets, it's true. Like the ones between Annie and Richard that Kathy'll never know. Some matters are so private between couples that even the bitter end of love won't give 'em away. Little pieces that meant something once and nothing now. And one of theirs is the accident. Another is Josey.

Josey had just turned one year old the day it happened. That day she was having her birthday party. I had been watching Annie make her house pretty. She hung streamers from ceilings and gathered pins for the paper donkeys she'd stuck to the walls. There was cake and cookies. Lemonade and a beef was killed. But she wouldn't start the party 'til Richard arrived.

According to witnesses, he'd been speeding in his carriage that afternoon. His horse was out of control and Richard's face and body was seized. The animal was killed after plowing the cart into a tree. Charles was the first one to come running. Found Richard thrown from the wreckage, face down in the creek, drowning in two inches of water, his leg gashed open, his speech was slurring after he coughed out water. Paralyzed from a stroke is what the doctor later said. He might not make it, he feared.

Charles carried him over his shoulder that day, back to the house, and into his bed. Told Annie he thought Richard mighta had too much
to drink. But Doctor said Richard had bleeding on the brain and the same could happen again at any time. It was lucky Charles got him when he did.

Richard lost his memory for a while, everything he knew before the accident. He didn't recognize most everybody including Josey, who he once loved. He wouldn't let no one come near him except for Charles. He thought the doctor was trying to steal his money. Annie, too. He wouldn't talk to neither one of 'em unless Charles—the man who saved him—was present.

Charles was the only one Richard let care for him and Charles became a blacksmith turned nurse and Charles did his job with the most care, everything with great patience and concern—the wound care, the measuring out of medicine. He helped Richard walk again.

Charles earned Richard's trust, never asking for nothing for hisself in return, only that Mr. Graham would learn to love Josey and his wife again, the way he did before the accident.

Eight months later, when Richard decided he was leaving from the prison Annie made of their house—against doctor's orders—and said he was recovered, he gave Charles larger living quarters, nice shirts, trousers, and a thank you. And when he discovered that his adopted daughter, a stranger to him now, was negro, he gave her to Charles, too. Told everybody else his precious child died. So after the funeral, the deed was done.

See, some secrets are worth holding onto. And Annie seem secretly proud that Richard hadn't given that one to Kathy. Had she been told, Kathy would have known her baby wasn't the first. Josey was.

“A
NNIE
?” K
ATHY SAY
. “You mind me calling you Annie? You feel like a mother to me. Really. I'm out here on my own, and you're treating me as if I belong. Can I ask you a question, Annie? Did Richard leave you 'cause you couldn't have babies or 'cause you're old? Don't get me wrong. You're pretty, I guess. But I wonder if what my grandmama
say is true. That men don't want to die next to an old woman and that young widows are happiest of all. You reckon that's true?”

“Sweet Kathy,” Annie say. “Maybe your question should instead be, ‘How do I keep my baby from being a bastard?' What did your grandmama say about that?”

Kathy grips her armrest. Quiet finally. A look of anger washes over her face, then the weight of worry. A sadness. Her spine curves behind her belly as she sinks in her seat. She whispers, “I didn't know he was married, you know. Those damned Yankees are murdering us in cold blood, taking our property because we own slaves. All that's left out there are cowards and liars. Same thing, maybe. I wanted to be the wife of a military man. The wife of a brave man.

“Far as I'm concerned,” Kathy say, “Richard shoulda went to the war, gimp or not. Done anything he could to help on the front lines even if that meant cooking for those brave men, one of the good men my baby deserves to have as a father. I deserve a nest for us. A safe place to raise my family. We're women. We need for this war to be over.”

“Is that why you came here?” Annie say. “To take my property?”

“We can't survive in this world alone,” Kathy say.

“Then your grandmama should have told you. Whores survive. Women live.”

25
/ FLASH

Conyers, Georgia, 1847

C
YNTHIA SITS OUTSIDE
on her porch fanning herself while the heat ripples the air near the ground like a clear running stream with no bottom. I bring her a drink, spill a little in the doorway.

“What's wrong wit'cha?” Cynthia say.

“Just hot, is all.”

Truth is, I cain't stop thinking about Jeremy. Last night, I snuck out after Cynthia fell asleep drunk. Walked a quarter mile down the road in the dark, trying to talk myself out of turning around, going home. We had tried intercourse twice before and failed. It hurt too bad and the pain lasted too long. Don't make sense to my body to allow a hole to be dug where there weren't one. So we laid next to each other with all our desire and no follow through. Not 'til last night.

When I got to Jeremy's, he met me at the back door of his manor, grabbed my hand, and hurried me inside before anybody saw. The smell of lavender soap wafted off him, tenderly. I thought that even if all we did was kiss and sleep, his scent on me when I left would be my heavenly reward.

He whisked me along a darkened hallway and past rooms where his boarders stay. Gray paint and paper peeled from the walls there, but
not upstairs. Those walls were clean and tidy 'cause the second floor he keeps for hisself.

He opened his bedroom door where candles burned next to a fancy bed. Wine was already poured in silver-tipped glasses and set on an end table. When we finished drinking—two full glasses each—he told me he wanted to try something different, something to help me relax.

He picked me up easy like I was as lightweight as a house shoe and sat me on his soft bed. He kissed me and asked me to lay back.

He kneeled on the floor just in front of me and bent my knees up, cinched my hips forward to the bed's edge. He put his head between my thighs and skipped down 'em with kisses. When he got halfway, I shivered with nerves and clutched my legs together, held his head there.

He looked up without a word, his blue eyes asking permission, and rocked his head from side to side, wedging my legs apart, leaving kisses on each thigh—left side, right side, left—all the way down 'til my legs were butterflied. With two fingers, he spread me open, sucked me gentle, and rolled his tongue along the middle. I held my head back and lifted my hips to him, smothered him flat against me . . .

“Hey!” Cynthia say, bringing me back. She points out to the road. “Will you look at that?”

In the distance, splotches of color stained the landscape, reshaping itself into a figure on horseback coming toward us. A white-haired man in a black shirt and white collar stops his horse a few feet from our porch.

Cynthia say, “Ain't that nothin. A priest in the South.”

I ain't never seen a priest before. I lean over the railing where Priest is tying his horse to our plank of wood while Cynthia pulls a chewing stick out of her bra. She shoves it in her teeth, then yells to him, “Despite what we look like, we ain't a house of God.”

He laughs a little and checks that his loop's tight.

“And if we was . . .” Cynthia say, “we for damn sure ain't Catholic.”

He smiles and opens his saddlebag, unfolds his money from it.

He walks up the porch steps and past me to the front door where Cynthia's sitting. She throws her leg across the doorway. “I got the right to refuse service to anybody.”

“Ma'am, I'm just here for a quiet drink.”

“The end is nigh, right, Preacha?” she say. “I need to get saved, is that it, Preacha Man?”

I can tell the priest is tired. His shoulders sank with her question and his eyes closed. “Ma'am, you looking to give a confession?”

“By the looks of thangs, you going to hell same as me,” she say. “Can I take yours?”

Preacha Man only nods slow like he understands something. Exhausted-like, he say, “If there are no other fine establishments around here, I hope you don't mind if I have a drink?”

Cynthia puts her leg down. “So God didn't send you here for me?”

“Not unless your first name is Jake, last name Beam-Bourbon.”

“Funny, too,” she say, standing up, stretching and cracking her back real good. “Go'n in.”

Cynthia like to control everybody.

Everything.

Who come in and who come out of here. What people do. Say. She'd control God if she could. Tried to control me. But I made my decision last night, lying there with Jeremy, his body in mine—an ending like a thousand purple butterflies fluttering on my eyelids.

I did what I wanted.

These are my choices.

My body.

No longer a slave.

If I did what she wanted, I'd be living her life, not mine. I cain't save her. Cain't nobody save another person that way. She say she's trying to protect me, keep me from the hard choices she made. But we have to choose for ourselves and our sacrifices are our own to make.

“Can you believe that bastard!” Cynthia say, unwinding a tightly folded sheet of paper in her hand, smaller than a playing card. I go to
look, too, and see the image of our bartender on the paper. But only if he was wearing Bernadette's long blonde wig. It's Jesus.

“Bastard had the nerve to leave his literature on my seat. Does he know who I am? Like he's gon' convert me . . .”

I hear him before I see him.

His clicking boots come up the porch steps.

My whole body flushes when he passes behind me, brushing my hand. My hip. The soft wings of last night awaken me. My eyes close and my knees buckle.

I open my eyes. I didn't know she was watching me.

In her sudden silence, my eyes peek open and slide toward her. Her eyes bore through me. “You didn't!” she say.

“What?”

She charges at me, grabs my arm. “Let me look at you! You slept with him?”

I shake my head. Fast as I can.

“You did! I can see it all over you!”

Jeremy stutters something . . . nothing . . . “Damn you to hell!” she tell him. “You've damned us all to hell! After all I've done for you!” She grabs him by his neck and throws him off her porch, follows him down.

“Cynthia!” I yell.

She slaps him over and over—his back, his head—closed-fisted to his jaw.

“Cynthia!” I race down the stairs.

She face me. In her eyes I see all the spite and disappointment. Whatever she was trying to protect me from, whatever protection she was giving me, is gone now. I don't even recognize her. “How could you give it to this mother fucker? How could you!” She's crying and I'm crying now, too, and I don't know what for. “Why this asshole?” she say.

Not an asshole.

“Naomi, you was pure. You were supposed to stay that way. For both of us.”

I shake my head.

“What'd he give you for it?”

I don't want to look at her.

She backs away from me, throws her hands up, disgusted. She turns her back on me and her boots clap up the porch.