JEWEL (27 page)

I’d missed that face the last half hour, my morning routine of care so deep in me that I’d gotten absolutely nothing done in the silence of those last thirty minutes. Because that was what stopped me, silence.

The silence an empty house makes, even with a radio going. There was nowhere in my house a single person other than me, and while I’d stood at the kitchen window wringing out a cold dishrag again and again, searching out the trees for signs of my two children returning, I thought I knew something of how Leston could stand here at night, stare out at darkness. I thought maybe there was some comfort he found here in the dark of a house asleep, as close to quiet and empty as he could get.

Maybe that silence was what he needed to help him solve what was crushing in on him from out in the dark.

California was what would solve his life, I knew, California was what would change things for Leston. But he’d still have none of it, fresh in my head even two and a half years later the image of his half-smoked cigarette shot out into the water, his whispering “California” with all the disgust he could muster.

Brenda Kay’s hand was tight in Burton’s as they came toward the house, and I turned from the window and went to the table, picked up as many plates as I could and brought them to the sink.

I went to the back door, stepped out, my hands in fists at my side.

“You two, ” I said, and shook my head, made like I was all bent out of shape over them. “You two.”

“Momma! ” Brenda Kay said, still smiling, and with her free hand she pointed a thick white finger at her brother. “Burton, ” she said, “Burton! ” His name came out more like Button than anything else, every word she spoke choked off as they were in her throat, each utterance forced and quick. She could say all our names now, could ask for water or milk or more food, could tell me when I needed to take her to the bathroom, tell me if she was cold or too hot, “Momma, cold! ” she’d say, or holler out, “Momma, potty! ” “Momma, food! ” For l some reason her mouth couldn’t form the sound of anor an R, and her words came so fast they seemed fallen in on themselves, shrunken up and urgent no matter what, so that the children’s names became Nee, Wimn, Button, Bijen, James still no one she knew yet. Sometimes during the day she’d holler out “Miss Wimn” or “Miss Bijen” to let me know she might be feeling lonely, and I’d have to go to her, pick her up, hold her. She hadn’t yet attempted Cathe ral’s name, and only called out “Daddy! ” now and again on those few nights he’d pick her up in his arms, walk through the house with her, set her back down, his touch with her always out of duty, I thought, the father’s task.

“That’s right, ” I said there on the porch, still shaking my head.

“Burton came and got you, now didn’t he? I sent him out to get you, and you two take off who knows where. What am I supposed to do with you two?

” Burton squatted, picked her up, settled this suddenly big girl on his hip, and I could see the mud on her white shoes, grass stains at the toe.

“This here’s my sister, ” Burton said, “and she went on an adventure, and I had to save her before she crossed the raging river.” Brenda Kay’s eyes were on his mouth as he spoke. The words meant nothing to her, I knew, but it was the speaking of them that mattered, just for her to be in his arms and listening. She lifted a hand to his mouth, touched his lips as if they were ice, just tapped them as he spoke, and when he stopped she left her fingers at his lips. Then he snarled a little, his eyes on her, and barked, made like he was going to bite her fingers.

“Huh! Huh! ” she laughed, and hit his nose. “Huh, Momma! ” she said, and turned to me, then to Burton. “Huh! Huh! ” “Now you two, ” I said.

Inside, Burton set her down on the kitchen floor. She got on her knees, crawled beneath the table, picked up one of the boys’ old baseballs I hadn’t even known was there. She crawled out, went to the larder door, leaned her back against it. She held the ball with both hands, her fingers so short and thick they hardly seemed big enough to hold it at all.

Burton and I’d watched every move, me at the sink, eyes on her, Burton leaning his back against the counter, his hands on the edge. We hadn’t said anything, only watched as she set the ball on the floor, put a hand on top of it, trapped it.

“There’s a bit more coffee, ” I said, and lifted out of the dishwater the first fork, wiped at it with the same rag I’d twisted to death.

“Just heat it up a little.”

I was waiting for him to talk, waiting for his report. I wanted his words on where she’d gone, but he didn’t seem to want to part with them.

His eyes hadn’t yet met mine since we’d come in here, and the place was silent except for the radio again, “How Great Thou Art” on now, George Beverly Shea’s voice deep and warm through the kitchen.

We were watching her again, Burton now leaning against the counter as before, when Brenda Kay started in to her singing. There were no words she sang, only her mouth open and moving, changing the pitch and shape of those sounds so that what came was more a joining of moans up and down, Brenda Kay oblivious of anyone around her. And she sang.

“Tell me, ” I said, and lifted out my own coffee cup, rinsed it, set it on the drainboard.

“Momma, ” he said, his head turned to his sister. “Momma, ” he said again, “it’s going to be hard to leave here.”

“I know, ” I said. “But if it’s something you have to do, then it’s something you have to do.” I paused, held the rinsed cup in my hand.

“And we’ll be seeing you sooner than you think.”

He turned to me. There was my second son’s face, and no matter how old he would get there’d never disappear from that face the baby he’d once been, the face I’d known at my breast, the face I’d known at his first steps at ten months. There were his dark brown eyes my eyes his fine chin and jaw. And there was the thin line of a scar back near his left ear where Wilman’d hit him with a piece of wood from thirty feet, back before Burton’d learned the trick of standing just out of Wilman’s range so that his little brother would be the one to lose. That was Burton.

Here.

He said, “I hope that ain’t just a dream of yours, Momma.” He paused, his eyes on me. “You coming out to California.”

“It’s not, ” I said. “You just know it’s not.” I lifted out a soapy plate, ran a rag across it. “Once you let it turn into a dream, ” I said, “then it won’t ever happen on you. I’m not letting it turn into a dream.”

He looked at me a few moments longer while I held the plate in my hand, rinsed it, held it.

Brenda Kay hit a note high up, hit it hard and loud and long, and I quick looked to her, surprised I wasn’t yet able to hear the difference between her singing and a wail of pain. She still had the baseball trapped beneath her hand, her eyes hard on it, and let her voice drop down low and soft.

“She didn’t look back or side to side or anywheres, ” he finally said.

He was staring out the window. “I just followed her. All the way back to the pasture. She just looked straight ahead and was walking.” He stopped, and I said nothing to urge him on, knew he was build . E Jrdwll I, ) ing his words to something here. It was in how he looked out the window, how he stared as if there’d be some answer out there.

He said, “When we got to the pasture she just walked right out into the middle of it, on across. Her walking like she does, it’s a wonder grass even bent beneath her feet.” He gave a small laugh, shook his head. “I was only a few feet behind her. I didn’t want her coming up on no snakes, you know.”

“Good, ” I said. I rinsed my hands, done by this time with the dishes except for the skillet.

“Then we were headed into the woods back of the pasture, off towards Casey’s place, the back end of his property.” He stopped again, swallowed hard. He took in a big breath, held it.

“Burton, ” I whispered, “what is it? ” “It’s nothing, ” he said, too quick, and let out the breath. “That’s it, ” he said. “She just walked. She was walking right on back into the woods, walking the straightest line I ever saw. She didn’t look much at the ground, and when she came up to a bush or old stump or tree or something she just went on around it.” He paused. “But then she’d get right back on track, ” he said. “I finally stopped her when she hit the creek. She was going to walk right into it, shoes and overalls and all.

She would’ve gone right on in if I hadn’t come up behind her, took a hold of her hand. That’s when she turned to me. She looked up at me, and it took her a minute or so before she recognized me. Before she smiled.”

He ran a hand back through his hair, in the move more of his daddy than he’d ever recognize himself. He turned to me. “And while I was following her back there, ” he said, looking right into my eyes, “I got this picture in my head of her walking for the rest of her life, right on in a straight line, just walking as long as she lived. And it give me the shivers, Momma. That picture.” He blinked, tried to give me a smile, though I knew that wasn’t what my boy really wanted to give me.

I could see he wanted to cry, to give in to that, but him figuring he was too much a man.

So I took him in my arms, held him close to me, my hands still wet with dishwater, and I held him, and I said, “You just say what you have to say, Burton.”

“Momma, ” he said, and he’d started to cry, my boy about to head out to California and a life none of us could now imagine. “Momma, there’s somebody going to be following her the rest of her days, Momma. And I feel like I’m leaving y’all to do that. That’s what I feel like.”

“You just go on, ” I said right away, “and you lead your life, and then we’re going to come on out there and you’ll be serving as our welcoming committee.”

I pulled myself away from him, held him by the shoulders. Tears had fallen down his cheeks, and he cleared his throat, wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand.

Already I was thanking God for him, and for every other of my children, even the one singing there on the floor, and thanking God, too, for her voice, the chance and confusing beauty of it. I thanked God for this all, even though I knew it was me would be following her all the way through her time on this earth, unless I took to heart the task before me, the one set up by the same God who’d given her to me, find a way to fix this, not simply watch from behind as she walked straight across the face of her days. l BUT WHATEVER I D BEEN THANKING HIM FOR THAT DAY SEEMED NOW A hundred years ago and lost to the smell of her dead skin, lost to the prospect of Brenda Kay’s not walking, lost to the perfect O of her terrible screams. Lost to the point I’d finally turned my face from Him, and took things into my own hands.

The day she went home, Brenda Kay was lifted from her bed and eased into a wheelchair by two nigger orderlies, boys who reminded me too much of Cathe ral’s own, Sepulcher and Temple, the two who’d carried me only to deliver this child in this wretched hospital, and as Leston and Wilman lifted her into the cab of the truck, settled her there, her whimpering all the way through, I didn’t even turn back to look at the place, knew I didn’t ever want to see it again.

Leston was even more the stranger now, even older the man, he said nothing to Brenda Kay the entire ride home, knuckles white as they gripped and regripped the steering wheel. It was a Tuesday morning, and he’d taken off from work for this, had on the green coveralls he wore, Leston stitched in white thread above his shirt pocket, coveralls a little too big on him so that he seemed that much smaller, that much thinner. He didn’t have his hat on, and for some reason I was thankful for that, glad at his not having the damned thing to turn in his hands as he’d stood and done every time he’d come to the hospital.

He was a stricken man, dumbfounded by what’d been tossed at him yet again, but that didn’t give him any more reason than the next of us to spend the rest of his days pondering the universe in a coffee cup, not coming to our bed and to his wife. We’d only made love a handful of times since our time on the canoe, and each time I took him into my arms he felt frailer, his skin a touch more toward paper.

But now there was no more time I could spend in persuading him, I saw as we headed home, him slowing down at each bump, each twist in the road.

He had a heart, had love for his daughter, had compassion on us all, but I saw he’d let the grief and bewilderment he carried overwhelm him, blind him to the truth that the world our world had to make sea changes in order to get right again, or at least as close to right as we’d ever get.

So that when we finally made it home, and when Wilman and Leston’d finally gotten Brenda Kay into the bed I’d had them move down from her room and set up in the front room, I went to my husband there in the doorway, his hand on the knob and ready to pull it closed behind him as he headed out first to drop Wilman off at school, then back to work himself. I went to him, and-I pulled him down to me, and I gave him a kiss, gave it to him hard on the lips, and felt more than anything that it may well have been my kiss good-bye.

Because now we were gone, headed to California, with or without him.

While Brenda Kay napped that afternoon I turned up one of Annie’s tablets from her room, and I sat in my rocker next to her, wrote out what I would do.

I figured to start we had to get as much money together as possible, and knew the only way that’d happen would be by selling things off, so I started a list, quilts radio furniture pots and pans chickens boys’ old clothes As I wrote, the old familiarity came back into my hand, the ease with which I’d worked a pencil on paper, the grading of worksheets, and then came the old feeling of chalk in hand, and I stopped, sat back, started in to thinking of when I’d been a teacher and in charge of all those children and with none yet of my own.

But then Brenda Kay whimpered, and I turned to her, saw a dribble of spit at the corner of her mouth, saw her eyes twitching with whatever dream of fire must have been in her, and I resolved right then and there to cut from my mind the luxury of remembering what’d been before for the certain necessity of thinking ahead. I knew it wouldn’t be tomorrow, but as soon as Brenda Kay was as better as she would get, which meant I’d stay with her each minute I wasn’t working to get us away from here. The sooner she got better, I knew, the sooner we would leave for the next life we had coming to us. It was the future my eye had to be on. No more of the past.