JEWEL (46 page)

He whispered, “It took you three years to get me out here. Now I been here ten, ” his words even more quiet now, each of them almost a ghost of its own in this room, a room not a half mile from the Pacific, where waves beat against the shore every day, this world spinning round to reveal what that day could bring, things as strange and full as rows and rows of the letter B, as strange and empty as the idea of Mississippi.

“And, ” he whispered again, his voice now down to nothing, only a dream of real words, “you are my wife.”

The only sound then was me, breathing in and in and in. Only me, and then I swallowed, took one last huge and hard, deep breath, because I understood him.

CHAPTER 32.

I NEVER KNEW MY HUSBAND TO BE HAPPIER.

We sold the house nine days after we listed it, made more money than it seemed we would know to do with. Three days later Leston went right out, bought another new car, and when he came home driving a beige four-door with wide whitewall tires, I wondered if he weren’t just and always the child, joyful at things he could drive, a life he could control the way he’d controlled his voice in the dark of our bedroom, and the way he’d controlled the lives of his children these long years, James the only one to escape early enough on, and the way he controlled the colored men who worked for him at El Camino, and the niggers back in Mississippi, all of them controlled by him.

Except Brenda Kay, of course, me part and parcel of her. Now we were moving to where he called home, and now, I’d seen as he pulled into our driveway that night with the new car, this would be his return in triumph, and his last stand at controlling me. You are my wife.

Hilburn and Wife Lumber Company, trooping off into the dark deep woods of Mississippi.

He cut the engine, leaned his head out the open window. “Well, ” he said, then opened the door, climbed out. He slammed the door closed, slapped the roof, smiled at me. “What do you think? Studebaker Lark Regal.”

Behind him the early evening fog’d begun to bank up, the sky to the east a brutal, deep blue, the gray out over the ocean suddenly soft and obliging.

I said nothing, only turned, went back into the house. He knew what I thought. No need for words.

“Momma, ” Anne said, little Laura in her lap, a pacifier plugged into her mouth now there were twelve grandchildren, an even dozen, and my Annie already expecting another one, too. “Momma, there’s just no sense in this, ” she said.

We were in the kitchen, Annie, Billie Jean, me and Brenda Kay, her at the table with her paper and crayons and making swirls and lines and jagged circles. Annie sat across from her in Leston’s chair. Laura held a saltine in one hand, banged on the tabletop with the other, her eyes moving from me to Brenda Kay to her momma and back again.

Billie Jean had on her white uniform, the nurse’s hat she wore all day long now off her head and on the counter, her hair down. Most afternoons she dropped by on her way home from the hospital, Annie coming by two or three afternoons a week, too, and stayed for a cup of coffee. Matthe and Elaine were taken care of by a lady with two children of her own two doors down from Billie Jean’s apartment, Annie always on her way running an errand or three, and so it always seemed a rush of time, that cup of coffee. But at least my daughters came to see me and Brenda Kay, and for that I was thankful.

But today the rush was gone, and when the two of them’d shown up to the door at precisely the same moment, the looks on their faces the same somber look, eyebrows knotted up, mouths closed tight, I knew right away they were here on business.

“Can’t Daddy see what this’ll lead to? ” Billie Jean said, and pushed herself off the counter, set her cup down. “It’s not a place people want to move to, but from. Annie’s right, there’s no sense in this at all.”

“So you tell me, ” I said, and finished rinsing the beans in the sink, wiped my hands with the dishtowel hung from the refrigerator handle.

“You two tell me what makes sense here. Your daddy knows what I feel about this. There’s been words passed. It’s not that I’m stumbling through this with no regard for my Brenda Kay or me.” I took a breath, put my hands together, as though that might turn my words into sensible ones themselves, not just ones telling of my surrender. I said, “He is my husband, and he has let me know in no uncertain terms that we’re going back.” I paused, took another breath. “I am his wife.”

“Dammit, ” Billie Jean said, and crossed her arms.

“Watch your mouth, ” I said, and glanced at Brenda Kay, transistor to her ear, her crayon still at work. She hadn’t heard a thing, had no idea how her world would soon tumble back what felt like a hundred years, a thousand. Mississippi.

I looked at Billie Jean, saw the anger play across her face like I’d seen it play too many times before. She’d lived with us for three months when she moved back, months too filled with the bickering of her and her kids, too filled with Brenda Kay whining out Momma please! all afternoon and night long.

I knew the look on her face, knew it told of the blame and anger and sorrow she put on that whole idea of marriage, of love.

Before she could say anything if she’d even thought to I said, “You just drop that thought. You best understand even entertaining the idea of the word Divorce in this kitchen will get you booted right out into the street. Understand that.”

She shot her eyes at me, as did Anne. Laura still slapped at the table, quiet music still came from Brenda Kay’s radio.

“Momma, ” Billie Jean started, “it’s just that ” “Don’t, ” I cut in.

“There’s more that’s passed between your daddy and me than you’ll ever know. And there’s more to just me than you’ll ever know, too. There isn’t any escaping this, that ” “Divorce don’t always mean escape, Momma, ” she said, and her hands were on her hips, her teeth clenched.

“Don’t you put that on me, Momma.”

I was quiet. We’d had this fight enough times, the two of us scrapping our way around the house some days, me with the notion she was trying to hide from the whole idea of marriage, that commitment, her with the knowledge of what she’d left, so that she was always right, the one to win. I always had to remember the real truth, she was the only one could know whether she’d done the right thing by getting divorced, just as I was always the only one could know my own history, know why I wasn’t one to give up.

But here I was, my willingness to move as good a sign as any I was giving up.

“I’m sorry, ” I said, and I looked in her eyes, tried to smile. I said, “I just know from the life I’ve lived that what God hands down to me has to be found before I can lay any plans. Before I can see what I can do.”

I paused, still tried to smile. “I don’t know what’s going to happen out there. You both know I don’t want to go back there. You know that, ” and I moved my eyes from Billie Jean’s to Anne’s, saw hers were brimmed up, tears ready to fall.

“Annie, ” I said, and I went past Billie Jean to her, touched her shoulder. Laura reached up, touched the front of my blouse. “Don’t cry, ” I said, though it seemed this was the only thing left for any of us to do.

“Momma, ” she said, her eyes never leaving mine, and now a single tear slipped down her cheek. “I don’t want you to go.”

Then I felt Billie Jean’s hand on my shoulder. She said, “I don’t want you to go, either, Momma.” She paused. “That’s all there is to say.

We don’t want you to go.”

“Then don’t say another word, ” I whispered, felt tears on my own cheeks now.

I leaned to Annie, kissed her cheek, then turned to Billie Jean, and held her. My two daughters, st. ill and always my children.

Yet still my children came by each night, spoke to me in the kitchen in low voices of how we ought not to move, while Leston sat in the living room reading over contracts on the house, the owner’s manual for the car, and studying hard the three photographs of the place Toxie’d lined up for us. It was a rental house on a bayou near Mchenry, a gray wooden house six feet off the ground with a porch across the front, two windows like empty eyes. Behind the house was the bayou, sawgrass and water. In the third picture was Toxie himself, standing at the top of the steps up to the porch, one hand resting on a support post for the porch roof, the other hand the hand with only two fingers there on his hip. He had on overalls and a shortsleeve shirt. He was smiling.

The pictures came the day after Leston’d informed me we were moving, and I never got a straight answer out of him as to when he and Toxie’d worked all this out. What I wanted to know didn’t matter to him, I could tell, all he needed were those photographs, the ones he brought with him to work each day, that he’d shown to every one of his underlings there, that he’d shown to every one of his grandchildren, right on down to baby Laura, him laughing and smiling all the while with the joke of that “Start em thinking about heaven when they’re young, ” he’d laughed to Gene though all I could see in those pictures was heat, and sawgrass, and no single thing for my Brenda Kay nor me to do there.

On the last few Saturdays and Sundays before we moved, the children were at the house with us, packing up what we had into boxes. The grandkids had no idea, so far as I could tell, of what was going on, simply danced around the cardboard boxes and laughed, ran out in the yard or were at the beach with Barbara and Sarah and Gene, and I envied them that. I wanted to know again what it felt like to be a child, the life you planned for yourself lined up and ready to be played out in whatever way you wanted, perfect joy in the belief your life was in your own hands.

But mine’d been taken from me now, wrestled free of my grasp with simple words, You are my wife, my husband banking, and banking correctly, on a promise to love, honor and obey I’d made him thirty-six years ago. Now none of what was happening not the packing, not the money, not the true happiness in my husband none of it felt real.

Nothing was real, not even when Leston brought home the newspaper the week before we moved, there on page twenty-six of the Gardena Chronicle a photograph of him smiling in his white shirt and black tie, his face at a three-quarter angle to the camera.

“Read that, ” he said, and put his hands on his hips, smiled, tilted his head.

I looked at him, me puzzled, surprised, somehow afraid, he’d given no word to me that this was coming, an article about him, the headline reading “ECC Head of Maintenance to Retire.”

“Out loud, ” he said. I looked at him again, tried a smile, and read the article.

Leston Hilburn, Head of Maintenance at El Camino College, will be seeking early retirement, announced ECC president Lawrence Baldwin yesterday.

“Mr. Hilburn has been of great value to the College for the last eight years, ” Baldwin was quoted as saying in a press release from ECC. “In that time he has not only decreased turnaround time for both major and minor repairs to various College facilities and machinery, but he has also increased morale among our maintenance crew and served as a model of efficiency.”

Hilburn, who will be 61 this year, has chosen to retire early “so that I can head back home to Mississippi, ” he said in a telephone interview with the Chronicle. “We’ve been here in Los Angeles for ten years, ” he continued, “and now my wife and I figure it’s time we went back to where we’re from.”

There was more, but that was where I stopped. I looked up at him, said, “I figured no such thing.”

“What would you have me say? ” he said, the smile gone, his chin up and head straight. “I make the paper, and you figure I’ll just say out there to God and the world my wife don’t want to go.”

“I don’t, ” I said, and I quick folded the paper up, handed it back to him.

But what I wouldn’t tell him, and what didn’t seem real at all, was that for a moment I thought the picture in the paper was of my own Jacob Chetauga. The smile and head and white shirt and black tie seemed the same man as in my old photograph, buried somewhere in this mess of boxes we were readying for the move. That feeling’d lasted only a moment, an instant, but I’d felt it, and then I couldn’t help but wonder if in these last ten years Leston hadn’t lived through his own death and won out over it, just like my grandfather had. The broken rope had been proof of God’s hand on all our lives, no matter how hard we tried to will our lives in our own direction. Maybe this was God’s will, I thought, maybe I’d already seen my husband live out his death, and now he was coming up grinning and walking away, just like my granddaddy’d walked away from a crowd ready to kill.

But then, for the first time in my life, for the first time ever, I wondered if maybe, just maybe, it’d been only a broken rope, no more than that. An accident, and suddenly I saw this forced turn our lives were taking might only be my husband’s sad belief he knew what he was doing.

It’d been my momma, dying before my eyes, who’d prayed my granddaddy would have died the day he was hanged, my daddy on an aunt’s shoulders, watching it all. It’d been my momma who’d wished my daddy would have seen his own daddy die, because she thought he’d be a better man for it, one who knew the difference between God’s will and his own, the difference between right and wrong. And for an instant an instant no longer than I’d thought the picture of Leston was of my granddaddy Jacob Chetauga I let the same sort of prayer pass through me as before, me full aware of what prayer could do. It’d been me, of course, who prayed my daddy’d never make it back to our house from that thick woods he disappeared into each Sunday afternoon, and me, too, who pulled back the gray wool blanket, revealed him dead to me and my momma and the entire world. And me, finally, to pray for ten fingers and ten toes on my Brenda Kay. That was the power of prayer.

So I prayed, Leston already unfolding the paper and reading out loud the rest of the article, about his boys Bill and Burt working for Royal Crown Cola in Watts, a third son in Texas, James, teaching high school, and about his son-in-law Gene O’Reilly being a California Highway patrolman. I heard the article talk about a house in Mchenry already rented out, while I let a minuscule prayer course its way through me, Whatever death it is he’s known these ten years, I offered up to my God, that distant and puzzling and conniving God I thought I sometimes knew, let him have died enough to see what’s best for us.