JEWEL (29 page)

He said, “Way I figure it, the only true way out of here is through raising big dollars, not nickel and diming your way there. Luck you’re having, you should arrive in glory land the year 1975.” Slowly he brought the cigarette to his lips, creased his eyes closed, anticipating the smoke about to come.

He was staring at me, and I could feel my own forehead perspiring, my stomach and eyes and tongue all burned red. I wanted him to talk more, to say what his blessing was going to be, and I wanted him never to speak again, to leave me alone and let me go on with getting us where I knew we had to be.

Brenda Kay let out a yelp from behind me, and I turned around to her, saw she was only rolling over in her sleep.

“Oh Brenda Kay, oh Brenda Kay, ” he said, and now he had out the brass lighter Burton’d given him, brought from somewhere when I’d been turned to my baby. He started flicking the lighter lid open and closed, open and closed. He flicked it open one last time, then clicked the flint, shot up the flame, held it on.

He said, “Guess in your head I’m most to blame. Me and my can of lighter fluid’s to blame for what’s happened, for all the rotting smells in this house and all the tears. Because even though you struck down Cathe ral ” He stopped speaking, shifted his gaze from the flame to me. He wanted to prove he knew things about me I didn’t want known.

So I gave it to him. I took my eyes from him, let my head drop. I put my hands together on the table, clasped them hard in an attitude I figured might seem repentant. But all I wanted was for him to be through with this, to get out of his head what’d been festering there for as long as Brenda Kay’d been Brenda Kay.

“Even though you struck down Cathe ral, ” he went on, “I know you still figure it’s my fault. The way I see it, if it hadn’t been for that can, we wouldn’t be here right now having this little talk.”

Though I wouldn’t tell it to his face, he was wrong. I hadn’t put any blame on him, no other blame than the fact he’d pulled out of this family years ago. The truth was we’d been on the road to this night since we’d sat in the cab of the truck on a rainy day almost nine years ago, just down the stairs from Dr. Beaudry’s office and that first examination. We’d been on our way to this table since Leston’d flicked on the wipers in a sad attempt to make clear the world we were entering.

But I only nodded my head to his question, wanted him on with this.

“Look at me, ” he whispered, and I lifted my head, felt my legs set to trembling.

He brought the lighter to the cigarette, the flame twisted to high. He closed his eyes, drew in on the cigarette, let out a small puff of smoke. He brought down the lighter, left on the flame.

“You’re selling everything off, ” he said, his eyes back on the flame, “everything we own. But to my figuring, there’s only two things we own you can’t sell off. Only two things.” He paused, let out another puff of smoke. “Even the truck, I imagine, you could sell out from under us. You probably figure I wouldn’t even notice it gone. And all we’d do would be walk everywhere we had to go. Why not? Niggers do it every day, walk to the jobs they got, to school, everywhere. Why not us? ” Finally, he let go the flame, snapped the lid closed. He held the lighter with two fingers, turned it back and forth, just looking at it.

I looked at it, too, saw how it shone in the light from the lamp above us, saw how cold and shiny and beautiful it was.

“This is one of the two things, ” he said. “This lighter is one of the two things you can’t sell.”

He gave it a quick toss, just as he’d done with the cigarette, and caught it, closed his fist tight around it. He looked at me again.

“The other’s where we are right now, ” he said, “where our retarded child is sleeping, where our youngest son is sleeping and where our other two daughters is sleeping, and all that’s around us all. Right here.” He tapped hard the tabletop. “This place, ” he whispered, “is what you can’t sell. And you and I both know that’s the only hard dollars you’ll ever find. Won’t be by selling jar to jar your pickled okra, or a raggedy-ass pair of bib overalls. Not that way.”

“Leston, ” I said, my voice pitched way up high and out of control, tears already coming because what he was saying was right. There was true sorry I was feeling, but a sorry colored with the fact I could see no other way away from here than what I knew he was about to say.

“Leston, ” I said again, and I reached a hand across the table toward him.

“No tears, ” he said. “This is what you want to have happen, then this is what we’ll have happen.” He paused, and now it seemed some I of the wind’d been knocked from him, that he had to try harder to keep from blinking, to keep his hand steady as he held the cigarette.

He said, “Soon as Brenda Kay’s set, soon as you’re set, I’ll put this place…” He paused, his words a whisper so low they’d have been drowned out by the ticking of the clock his momma and stepdaddy’d given us. His eyes finally left me, seemed to wander round the room, finally settling on the empty space on the wall opposite him. “This place I built for us, ” he said, and tapped the tabletop again, “this place and the land we live on, all of it. I’ll put it up for sale.”

He stopped, held the lighter up to the light again. “But this, ” he said, and twisted it in the light. “This is something you’re not ever going to get. It’d fetch a good few dollars. And Lord knows there’s reason for getting rid of this thing.” He paused, still looking at it, and I thought I could see his eyes glistening, ready to give way to tears of his own. “Lord knows that. I been thinking on this lighter.

And it occurs to me there’s good reason to get the hell rid of it.

Because having this thing goes to remind me I couldn’t even keep my second son around me, couldn’t keep him near to home to give us a hand when we needed it. And of course that leads right on in to my firstborn, and how he wouldn’t stay around neither.” He swallowed, blinked. “And of course every time I light up I am reminded of how my baby daughter was near burned to death because of this little machine.”

He paused again, took a, drag from the cigarette. He didn’t inhale this time, only let the smoke right out. “Reason enough to get rid of the thing, ” he said.

He sat up straight in his chair, the move so sudden I nearly flinched.

He stood, him in his undershirt and pajama bottoms. He held the lighter with two fingers, looked at me, said, “But you’re never going to get this. Now you watch. You come with me, and you watch.”

“Leston, ” I said again, but he only turned from the table, started toward the kitchen door.

I got up, followed him to where he stood with the door open now, cool May night air on my face, fresh and welcome in a room that’d seemed to want to suffocate me. Leston stepped onto the porch, and stopped. I stood just inside, saw past him into the dark nothing that surrounded the house every night.

“You know, ” he said, “all the nights I been walking around inside the house, I never once set foot outside. Something about how dark it is out here that wouldn’t let me.” He looked over his shoulder at me. He had the cigarette between his lips, and said, “But tonight. You just watch.”

He stepped off the porch, and I went outside, looked out into the darkness. The only light out there was that cast from behind me, the same as on the night Cathe ral’d come to warn me about this life I was leading right now, to warn me about the hardship having Brenda Kay would be. True to her word, and true to God’s promise, here I was, and here were our lives. And still I couldn’t see how this was Him smiling.

Leston turned round at the bottom of the steps, held up the lighter, though I could barely make it out. He said, “You saw me light the last cigarette this lighter will ever light, ” his voice too huge out here in the dark, and I wondered if Wilman or Billie Jean or Annie’d wake up to all this goings on, and wondered what they would think tomorrow when they came downstairs, how they would see the two of us differently.

“You saw me light the last cigarette with this, ” he said, “but you’re not getting it. You won’t sell this. It will always be mine, Jewel.

Miss Jewel Hilburn, this’ll always be mine.”

He held the lighter in his hand like a stone, like he was about to skip it across water, and then he cocked back that arm, and with everything this fifty-year-old man had he threw it hard and clean out into the dark, his body swinging around with the momentum he’d made. He threw the lighter farther, I was certain, than anything he’d ever thrown.

And with it went the burning in me, and the weight on me. Even the smells in the house seemed suddenly gone, gone with the strongarm throw of my husband, and I saw the perfect sense in him, saw the clear-eyed wisdom of his throw, the lighter lost now to the darkness of the woods out there and to everything we’d ever been. Lost, too, to everything ahead of us.

Leston stared out into the dark for a long while, bent over with his hands on his knees, his chest heaving with the effort. Then I saw the cigarette drop to the ground beneath him, thought I could see the small ribbon of smoke snaking up from it.

I went down the steps, took hold of one of his arms, then halfpulled, half-pushed him inside and up the stairs and on into bed, where we slept as though we had died, passed on from this world and into the next. l .

CHAPTER 21.

THE NEXT DAY, AND ALL THE DAYS AFTER THAT UNTIL WE MOVED TO California, Leston was a new and different man. Suddenly he was in charge of our moving, him all movement and smiles about the prospect of heading away from the old place, the scene of our lives’ miseries for so long. That morning he’d gotten up, shaved, even whistled as he slapped on Old Spice and put on his uniform, then drove Wilman and Annie to school, Billie Jean downtown to the bank. I’d spent the rest of the morning singing along with Brenda Kay, the two of us at the tops of our lungs as “Sunrise Serenade” went on and on, Brenda Kay’s words to the songs still all made up. She even took four steps that morning, just after she’d had breakfast in the bed in the front room. “Momma, potty! ” she’d hollered out while I was in the kitchen rinsing her dishes, and I’d wiped my hands on a dishtowel, turned, saw her moving all by herself, stiff-legged and slow for the bandages, but moving by herself for the bathroom.

When Leston made it home that night, he was still whistling, ate dinner with a smile to his face. Once we finished, he lit up his after supper cigarette with a wooden match from a box he had in his front shirt pocket. His eyes wouldn’t meet mine as he pulled out the match, struck it on the box, but that was fine with me. Then I looked round the table at my children to see if their faces might betray that they’d heard us up last night. But my children showed nothing, Annie only cleared the dishes like every night, Billie Jean started running water in the sink, Wilman got out the broom and started to sweeping. Brenda Kay sat in her chair next to Leston, watching everything.

“Brenda Kay, oh Brenda Kay, ” Leston said then, and everyone stopped, turned to him.

He was sitting in his chair, and had a hand up to Brenda Kay’s cheek, touched it. Water still ran into the sink, Billie Jean staring at him but with a hand in the stream, waiting for hot, Annie stood between the table and sink, in one hand an empty platter shiny with grease from the fried steak, in the other a half-empty bowl of gravy. Wilman held the broom with both hands, still.

“I think it best we all know right now, ” Leston said, his eyes on Brenda Kay, who smiled at him, finally. “Daddy! ” she shouted, only now fitting that face and the word together. “Daddy! ” she shouted again.

“Miss Daddy! ” He glanced away from her, gave a smile that seemed awkward and real at once. He cleared his throat, said, “We all ought to know right now that as soon as this here child’s ready to go, we’re moving to California.”

“Daddy! ” Annie said, quick placed the dirty plates on the counter, then went to Leston, put her arm round his neck, kissed his cheek.

Wilman set the broom in the corner, went to his daddy’s chair, put his hand to Leston’s back a moment, the closest to a hug or anything else I’d seen him give his daddy since he was three or four. Wilman was smiling, though at the same time I knew there’d be things to worry over for him, starting his last year of school at a new place, leaving not just his friends here but his football he’d been starting linebacker for two years now on the varsity team. And there was Babs Julien, his girlfriend.

As for Annie, it seemed more than clear there’d be no problems in her coming round to the idea, she’d since taken over Billie Jean’s movie magazine pile, knew everyone in Hollywood’s birthdate and real hair color by heart, even if it was old information, passed down from ancient Photoplays. The skirts shorter than her sister’s had been, the jaunty sleeves of her dresses, the makeup and curled red hair and the smiles I’d seen her practicing in the mirror on more than one occasion gave me to know I had nothing to worry over.

But Billie Jean only held her hand at the water. It was her I watched, because she gave nothing out, only turned to the sink, dropped the plug in, swished up the soap with her hand.

I finished with the dishrag and the table, while Annie and Wilman stood over Leston, Brenda Kay right in the middle of it all and slapping her hands together. “Miss Wimn! ” she said, then, “Miss Daddy, Miss Nee!

” all of it shouted out at the same pitch as always.

I smiled, went to the sink, shook out the crumbs in the garbage can beneath it.

Billie Jean dipped in the first glass, said, “This is fine news, Momma, ” and smiled.

“You can’t fool me, my daughter.” I looked at her, dropped the rag into the suds.

“I’ve got friends, is all, ” she said. She wouldn’t look at me.

“We all do, ” I said, but there was something in how she tipped her head to my answer, in how she shrugged just then and worked hard to keep her eyes from mine that showed me there were other worries headed for us.

Most all the days after that seemed to come and go quicker than we could know, as though each week were nothing more than a hail and farewell, the idea of California looming bright and glorious on a horizon closer than ever.