JEWEL (24 page)

Then a tall, thin young man a boy, were the first two words in my mind that morning came up behind Mrs. Hilburn, touched her shoulder, and nodded to me as she turned around.

“This here’s Leston, my boy, ” she said, “the one whose room’s empty and awaiting you to come and live in. If you see that as being the Lord’s will.” She turned backlo me, and Leston put out his hand.

“Ma’am, ” he said. I hesitated, not certain what it would mean, a brand-new schoolteacher shaking hands with an unmarried man, but I shook it all the same, felt the calluses on his fingers, his palm.

There’d been no more thought of him than that, a green-eyed boy who worked a lumber mill in Mccomb. September heat banged down on us all, my throat parched from talking all week in school, then all Sunday morning to the same children, the same girl with red pigtails, the same boy with the black-eye bruise gone to yellow now, the same fine-blond girl with hands flat on her little white Bible instead of the desktop.

I looked to Mrs. Hilburn, fanning herself now with a bamboo fan from inside. But unlike the fans of my childhood, the ones I remembered from when I’d sat between my momma and daddy, there were no hymns printed on these, no Psalm 23. Only a gold cross on both sides, lines of gold radiating out, so that, as the cross of Jesus fluttered before me, I wondered how best to find out how much she wanted to rent the room for, and how that amount would seal whether or not it was the Lord’s will for me to stay with her.

But I hadn’t had to ask. She said, “Two dollars a week is all.” I looked up at her. She smiled, said, “Is that the Lord’s will? ” “It is, ” I said, and we laughed.

Her son was already gone. I hadn’t even seen him go.

I moved in that afternoon, left the Columbia Hotel, a two-story building with eight rooms and two bathrooms, carrying the new satchel Mrs. Faulk’d given me for graduating Pearl River, in it everything I owned, which wasn’t much, one other dress, brown and of the same design as the blue, my underclothes, a few books, including my Mcguffey Readers, the fountain pen I’d received from Mrs. Faulk upon graduating from the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls. Tablets of paper. A red pencil.

A photograph.

When I got there, her house only a mile or so outside town, I simply knocked at the screen door, called out, “Mrs. Hilburn? ” and the door pushed open. This small, round lady with the green eyes and hair done the same as Mrs. Faulk’d always worn hugged me, then pulled back, took in my face, a hand still on my shoulder.

“We’re so pleased you saw your way to doing God’s will here, ” she said, laughed again. I laughed, too.

She took the satchel from my hand, set it down next to an overstuffed chair that seemed defeated, its seat flat, the back of it indented where someone’d leaned for years on end. I looked round the front room, saw a fireplace, wood walls painted pale blue, two rockers, the bottoms of the runners just bare wood.

I could live here.

She took my hand, led me back to the kitchen, where sat a table full of people, food heaped and steaming in the middle of it, cheese grits, chicken, red-eye gravy, snap beans and bacon, fried corn and red peppers. All of it hot, filling me up with the wonderful scent of so much home-cooked food. Everybody’s plates were empty, all of them about to dig in.

“You timed this just fine, you did, ” Mrs. Hilburn said, and suddenly I was aware of all five faces at the table turned to me, smiling. .

Mrs. Hilburn, my hand still in hers, held her other hand out in a gesture toward the older man who sat at the head. “This here’s my husband, Mr. James Baxter Hilburn.”

He stood, as did the other two males at the table, the room suddenly ciuttered with the sounds of chairs pushed back. “Pleased, ” Mr. James Baxter Hilburn said, and nodded, smiling. He was tall, taller even than that Leston boy I’d met earlier, and had a thick head of white hair, blue eyes, a white Sunday shirt buttoned up to his neck.

He held a hand out to the empty chair and table setting next to him.

“Have a seat? ” he said.

“I’d be honored, Mr. Hilburn, ” I said. I let go Mrs. Hilburn’s hand, made my way round the table, sidling past the other boy, this one younger than Leston, only a few days into his teens, I figured. Then I was next to Mr. Hilburn, and I sat.

The males all sat, and Mr. Hilburn quick closed his eyes, clasped his hands together in a fierce grip I thought might break bones. He closed his eyes. “Oh Father, ” he started, all of it so quick my eyes were still on him as he started into blessing the food, the day, the bounty we all of us encountered every minute we walked God’s green earth, and giving thanks, too, for this new schoolteacher who’d be living with them from here on out, Amen.

I’d gotten my eyes closed along about halfway through his prayer, opened them only an instant past that last holy word, and saw everyone at the table digging in, shoveling food onto plates like it’d be thrown out in a minute if they didn’t.

Then came the introductions, next to me, on my right, was the oldest daughter, Mildred, hair blue-black, eyes the blue of her father’s. She turned to me only a moment, smiled and nodded as she pulled a chicken-back onto her plate with two fingers, next to her was the other boy there, Toxie. “The son of my first daughter, Brenda Kay, deceased, may she rest in peace, ” Mrs. Hilburn said all in a breath, and though I’d felt the need somehow to say I was sorry at that, Toxie’d only leaned forward in his chair so I could see him around his sister, smiled wide, gave a small wave. “Hey, ” he said.

Next to Mrs. Hilburn, on her right, was Leston, “Who you already met, ” she said. Leston was eating, his mouth full and chewing away. He nodded, smiled. Next to him was the other black-haired girl, Martha, eyes the same blue as her father’s, too, and I started trying to piece things out here, Mrs. Hilburn with a deceased daughter old enough to have had a teenage son, two other daughters with no resemblance whatsoever to the brother, Leston.

Before I could say a thing, not that I would have I’d have ended up lying in the dark in my new room here in this house and eventually figuring it all out Mrs. Hilburn said, “Mr. Hilburn’s my second husband.

My first was killed in a logging accident years ago. Leston and me took on Mr. Hilburn’s name once I married him, ” she said, “though before that we were Scoggins.”

No one at the table got teary, blinked, shrugged. Not even Leston.

Nothing. They only ate, and then Mr. Hilburn said, “These here is my daughters, Mildred and Martha. They momma’s dead, too. I got two other daughters, they living in Biloxi, married.”

“Oh, ” I said, and looked down at my plate, still empty. “Oh, ” I said again, and felt a blush coming up on me, as if I’d been the one to pry into these affairs, dug them up like old bones from somewhere.

“Darling, don’t you worry none, ” Mrs. Hilburn said. She smiled, said, “Fill your plate or go hungry, child.”

I filled it.

We were near on to the marsh now, and still Leston hadn’t elaborated, hadn’t given up to me anything of what his mind was on, what he was thinking. Even though I knew. But I wanted some of that thinking out in the air here, out on this breeze.

I said, “Leston honey, you remember when we met? ” He was quiet, took one stroke, then another. He said, “I do.”

“Tell me of it, ” I said, and I put a hand up to my eyes, blocked the light from above so I could see his face without squinting.

“You was there, ” he said, still paddling.

“But I want to hear of it from you. What you remember.”

He paused, let the paddle hang in the water a few inches, and I could see the eddy around and behind it, felt the canoe slow up. “What do you want to talk about this for? ” he said. He let the paddle sit a moment more, then picked it up, dug into water again.

A few moments later, I said, “Do you remember the watch? ” And just as I’d figured on happening, he gave up with the paddling, his face breaking into the grin I’d hoped would come along with the memories long buried in him.

He shook his head, still smiling, and said, “Now, Jewel, you know I do.”

“So tell me, ” I said. I brought the hand down from my eyes, let it trail in the water, saw the smallest eddies my fingers made of their own.

He lay the paddle across his lap, leaned his forearms on it. “This paddling hurts like hell, ” he said, and he laughed, the sound he made so foreign, strange and familiar at once after years without it, and I couldn’t help but join him.

“You asked, ” he said, the laugh falling away. “And I can’t figure for what.” He paused, shook his head. “But the watch, ” he started, “the l .

watch and sister Mildred and how I gave it to you each night to keep under your pillow and think about me.”

“And? ” I said. There was no sound now, no water across the bow, no children, no birds close enough to enter the quiet surrounding us.

He said, “I love you, Jewel, ” and he looked up at me. The words nearly knocked my wind out, words that hadn’t come from him in years, not since, as best I could remember, when Brenda Kay was born, the two of us alone in a hospital room. They were words I hadn’t heard from him since Before, and all I could say, all I could offer him right there on the water, were my own words, ones I couldn’t remember offering up to him myself since then, “I love you, Leston, ” I said almost in a whisper, and I made sure my eyes were square on his, that I saw as deep into that deepwater green as I could. I wanted him to know I was here, with him, not back on shore and worried with our baby.

Finally that moment was gone, his eyes falling from mine in some embarrassed boy’s fall as he spoke, “Once I’d moved back into Daddy Hilburn’s house after the mill closed, you and I started to courting.

Every night I’d give you my Daddy Scoggins’ watch.”

He shook his head again, gave a quick snicker. “Kids, ” he said. “We was just kids, ” he said. “Silly.”

“Not silly, not at all, ” I said.

He glanced up at me, hands in front of him, forearms on the paddle.

“And you took to knocking on my room door each morning early, before you left for school. Before anybody else was up in the house because that’s the only place you could work, no quiet in the house with Toxie there.” He stopped, shrugged. “Toxie, ” he said again. “Those early mornings Toxie’d never wake up, even when you came into the room after you’d knocked real quiet, he’d be asleeping. And you’d kiss me awake, and you’d give me back my watch.”

He looked up at me again, and he was blushing, the idea of that kiss making my own heart speed up, the trouble and danger and wrath we were asking for, all for me waking him up with a kiss. Because I’d seen in him, even before he’d moved back from the mill, that he was a good man, a good son who loved his mother and stepfather both, who took Toxie up with him and fished with him, chopped wood with him, swam at the creek with him. And he loved his sisters, too, though stepsisters they were, gave them while he was working at the mill a piece of his wages in addition to that he gave his momma and stepdaddy, sometimes bought the girls rosewater and ribbons whenever the crew’d made a trip to Pascagoula, brought back to Toxie tiny carved wood animals he’d made the long nights spent at the camp. He was a good man, true-hearted, and as he sat there before me, I saw I’d been right about him, saw the care with which he’d taken showing James how to tie his shoes one winter morning, James on his lap, Leston’s arms round him and holding him close and warm, whispering in his firstborn’s ear which string to hold where, saw the houses he’d built for us out of wooded land and with those arms that’d seemed so thin when I’d first met him, houses built callus upon callus, thousands of layers of him wearing away with all the trees he’d cut down, all the stumps he’d blasted and hauled, saw the niggers we’d fed and employed for years. Those hands had been through all with him, and now they were almost useless, only good for holding a mug of cold coffee of an evening.

He took in a breath, kept on with what I’d led him into telling. “Then sister Mildred sees you one morning coming out the room, and she comes up behind you, sweeps you out the house and onto the porch outside, and tears into you, tells you you ought to be ashamed of your hussy behavior, sleeping overnight with her stepbrother, the two of you not even betrothe .”

He stopped again, laughed again, shook his head again. And I laughed, too, because of what was coming, the end of the story.

“And you says to her, ” Leston said, ““Why, Sister Mildred, I only stopped in to say good-bye to him for the day. And, you says, we are betrothe . And I’m listening through the wall to all this, you two out on the porch, my heart about to bust out my chest because, I guessed, that was it. Done and done. I didn’t ask you to marry me yet, though you knew darn well it was back there in my head somewheres. But that morning it was done and done. No going back.”

“No going back, ” I said, and I scooted forward, rocked the canoe on my way toward one of those hands. I got near to them, took first one, then the other, held them hard.

Leston was looking at me now, the smile gone from his face, just those eyes and his wild hair, the growing-old man who was this growing-old woman’s husband, and I leaned to that face, kissed him long and strong and soft, a kiss like none I’d given him in years, not since Before. A kiss like a few whispered words of the lost language we’d once known.

I pulled away. I let go his hands, scooted back to the bow, sat there as before. I smiled, said, “Don’t you have some more paddling to do?

” “Yes ma’am, ” he said, and started toward the bulrushes.

CHAPTER 16.

WE MADE LOVE THERE IN THE CANOE, THE WHOLE OF IT HIDDEN AWAY in the bulrushes, Leston having maneuvered us in here, weaving along back channels, the bulrushes and sawgrass rising up round us like a curtain grown only for this.

Though I’d feigned ignorance the whole time he was taking us in here, him smiling back without a word, I’d known since he’d come out of our room this morning with his hair slicked back, the Old Spice on, that this was where we’d been headed.

Even up to when he jammed the canoe into the thick growth, even until the moment he placed the paddle behind him and started moving up to me, I’d still gone on along with him, let him think he was the one whose idea this all was, who’d forged our opportunity to make love, all this planned because of whatever small relief had come with Brenda Kay taking her first steps, steps a sign something might be headed for the better.