JEWEL (5 page)

I said, “Momma, don’t talk. Don’t ” “You listen, ” she said, and looked at the ceiling. She brought a hand from her chest to her forehead, let it rest there. “You need to know what stock you’re from.

I’m telling you.” She paused, let her eyes close. “Your daddy’s daddy was long dead before T met Joseph. But people knew about him.

People knew Jacob Chandler was a horse stealer. He was.”

She took slow, deep breaths, and for a moment I wondered if she was awake at all or if she might be in some haze, maybe even talking in her sleep. But it didn’t matter. She was giving me what I wanted, some history of me so I would know my place here, no matter how fine the dresses, no matter how fine the china. Since the night of the fire I hadn’t let Missy Cook look me straight in the eye, and at breakfast the next morning, during which my guidelines were laid out no skipping school, no playing with the niggers, no turning down the gas by myself before going to bed Momma and I sat silent, our eyes on the food before us. We never mentioned the fire in the back yard. Ever.

“Your daddy’s momma was just a cracker, left Jacob Chetauga with two boys, Benjamin and Joseph, when Joseph was only two, ” Momma whispered.

“And Jacob left those two with his sisters, Choctaws living in shanties up near Columbus. That’s how your daddy was raised. I thought he would be different from his daddy.” She paused. “He wasn’t. But it wasn’t stealing horses he was bad about. It was me.” She swallowed again, and I looked at the picture, rubbed my finger across the face.

“Your grandpa, ” she went on, “was caught stealing horses, and they brought him in to Columbus, run him through court and had him up to a tree just north of town, him sitting on one of the horses he’d stolen, a rope round his neck. All this before sundown the same day. They were going to hang him. And your daddy was there. Him and Benjamin both, sitting on the shoulders of those squaws. They were there to watch their own daddy get hanged for horse stealing.”

All this time I was staring at the picture, at how he held his head and the hand there at his hip. She was talking more clearly than I’d heard her in the last two weeks, but that was nothing I cared to think about.

Maybe she was getting better, I figured, but I only wanted to look at the picture, imagine this man with the invincible pose on a horse and ready to be strung up. This man I was blood kin to.

“They gave the horse a swat, and the thing was gone, your grandpa hanging and swinging from the tree. The way your daddy told it, the only sound he could hear was the heavy creak of the rope. He says he watched his own daddy’s feet stepping on air, trying to find something firm to stand on. But there was nothing.” She took a deep breath, as though thinking about him hanging there was taking her own air from her, then she went quiet, and I had to look at her to see if she hadn’t gone back to sleep.

Her eyes were open wide, her mouth closed. One hand was at her throat, moving slowly back and forth. Her eyes, it seemed, were focused on nothing. “And then, ” she whispered, “the rope broke. It snapped up near the limb, your daddy tells me, and Jacob fell to the earth. He didn’t move for a while. Neither did anybody watching. But then he sat up, looked around. And he was smiling. And then they let him go, because it was God’s will. The sheriff just bent over him sitting there on the ground, loosed the rope round his neck and the one round his hands. It was God’s will.”

I was looking at the picture, and here came my momma’s hand, reaching for it. Her hand was white, as white, I thought, as my daddy’s body’d been when they’d pulled back that wool blanket.

I let her have the photograph, watched as she brought it close to her face. Her hands started to trembling with the effort, and I thought I could see tears in her eyes, her mouth only a thin line now, no color.

She said, “This here picture was taken not a week or two after that.

That’s why your daddy kept this with him. It’s a picture of a man who’s lived through death. That’s what it is. But I wish he’d been killed. I do.” She closed her eyes, and a tear squeezed out, slipped down her cheek and into her hair. “Lord forgive me, ” she whispered, “but I do. I wonder how Joseph’d been different if he’d seen his daddy die. I think he might have been a good man if his daddy’d died before his eyes. But he didn’t, and he kept this picture of a man who couldn’t be killed, and that’s how come he turned out like he did.”

Her hands were on her chest now, the picture face down, and I whispered, “Why’d you marry him then? ” “Love, ” she said right out, the word quick and soft from her. And, just as quiet, she said, “Hate.” She paused. “I knew I loved him. I knew I hated my momma.

Those two things are why I married him.”

She shot open her eyes. She was smiling, the look on her face as strange as any I’d ever seen her give, and I thought that maybe the fever’d gone through her brain, ravaged her such that she’d gone mad.

She reached the picture over to me without looking at me, and I took it, then scooted a little deeper into my chair, away from her.

She said, “But you have to know about this family, too, and what your stock is from here. From my momma. You got to know that, too.” Her eyes were still to the ceiling, as if the painted tin up there with its rows and rows of circles in squares was giving something important to her.

“There’s things about my family you need to know, things Missy Cook won’t ever tell you.” She was still smiling, and I could feel myself pushing even deeper into the chair.

“This one you won’t ever hear her tell, because she knows it’s true.

The reason we’ve got all this, ” she said, and though she made no moves of her hands or eyes to show me what she meant by this, I knew she meant the house, the clothes, the food, the niggers. What else was there? “The reason we got all this, ” she said again, “is because she married a Yankee carpetbagger. A man from Pittsburgh, the man who was my daddy.

And her daddy and this Yankee carpetbagger were in cahoots together, buying up land and houses and banks after the war with money Missy Cook’s daddy’d been able to lay his hands on through my daddy. Don’t ask me how, but that’s true.”

She closed her eyes, the smile grown even wider. There was joy in her now, pleasure found in telling me all this.

“But that’s not the story. That’s not the one I want you to keep, because plenty of women, plenty of old would-be spinsters like Missy Cook married Northerners like my daddy.” She swallowed hard, opened her mouth and took in hollow, quick breaths, as though she’d just climbed a set of stairs. I wanted to reach toward her, to touch her, to stroke her forehead and tell her to stop, to save herself. But I didn’t, because I wanted the story.

“No, ” she whispered now, “no, what I want you to take is this, Before the War, the town of Columbus was known as Coogan’s Bluff. That’s Missy Cook’s maiden name, Coogan. Her daddy was who the town was named for, and that’s because he owned the most niggers. He owned the most niggers in that part of the state, and he wasn’t even in the Confederate forces because he owned so much land, and so many niggers.”

She stopped again, and suddenly she seemed to disappear with her whispered words, her breaths only shallow gulps. I remember the room going even colder a moment, remember gooseflesh all up and down my legs and arms, remember holding myself in the near-dark of the room, the photograph in my lap.

My momma was still smiling, her eyes still closed, fingers clutched and drawing the sheet taut up to her neck. “So when the Columbus, Ohio, militia march into town, ” she whispered even more quietly now, her words only ghosts in the room, “they liberate the niggers, they rename the place, and they burn down every last piece of property they know belongs to the man named Coogan. Missy Cook’s daddy. But they can’t find the man, and do you know why? ” She stopped. Slowly she turned to me, and before I realized what she’d asked, she was staring at me.

But she wasn’t looking at me, I could see. Her eyes were on me, but passed through me, so that my momma was already gone, and I thought again of her profile in the light of a candle held-above my dead daddy, and how God had planted in me the knowledge she would die even back then. This was what my momma was leaving to me, the only legacy she knew to give, stories of who I was from, however failed their lives.

I looked down, said, “Why couldn’t they find him? ” She laughed, the sound in her like dead leaves underfoot. She turned to the ceiling again. Cathe ral or Molly or Marcus couldn’t do any help now. She wasn’t of this world anymore.

She stopped laughing, tears drifting down her cheeks. She whispered, “I watched my daddy get slapped cross the face by Missy Cook the first time he told me this story, and I watched him laugh in her face, Missy Cook standing above him, him in his favorite chair in the parlor, her with her hand back to hit him again. But he’d only laughed, and then, because she didn’t know what to do with that hand held high, palm open, she came straight to me sitting on the divan, and slapped my face. And my daddy only laughed harder at that, brushed back tears from his eyes.

Missy Cook just left the room.”

She paused, reached up a pale hand to her face, and gently touched her cheek, the look on her face surprise, her eyebrows knotted, her mouth open. “She hit me right here on this cheek, right near my eye, because I’d only listened while my daddy told me why they never found my grandpa.” She paused, swallowed. “Missy Cook’s daddy’d dressed as a woman, and hid out in a nigger shanty. And when those Ohio militia came through to liberate all them niggers, let them know about what Mr. Lincoln’d given them, the niggers still hid him, put him into a barrel and let him hide. Dressed as a woman and hiding in a barrel, right there in front of all them niggers he owned, every one of them laughing their nigger hearts out, I’m certain, and then when the militia’d gone, and they’re all freed slaves, they just brought him out of the barrel, and stayed with him the rest of their lives, them and their children and their children’s children. Molly, Marcus, all the field niggers.

They’re all sons and daughters of the ones hid my grandpa when he was dressed as a woman and balled up in a barrel. And don’t think they don’t remember it, neither.”

My hands were together in my lap, beneath them the photograph of Jacob Chandler. Jacob Chetauga.

She whispered, “So you take those two stories now, and you decide. Two stories of people who lived through their own deaths. You take them both, and you decide why I’d marry your daddy.” She paused, and I hadn’t the courage to look at her, simply stared at my hands in my lap, at the photograph. “You choose which of the two you want to take, one who’d lived because it was the will of God, no matter how bad the life he led.

Or one who saved himself, God be damned, and passed on to his daughter a shame so fierce only hate could cover it up.” She gave a small laugh, the sound only thin air forced from inside her. “Or you could do the smart thing, and pass all this up. Make your own story. Maybe, God willing, going out into this world with these stories like stones in your pockets won’t make a bit of difference. The Lord knows it wasn’t that way for me.”

I swallowed, closed my eyes. I said, “And now you’re going to leave me here.” I held my hands even tighter, felt the grip of bone against bone.

She whispered, “It happens to all of us one day, ” her words so quiet I had to hold my breath to hear. “Your momma and daddy leave you at some point, and then you are on your own. Every one ends up an orphan.

Even me. I been an orphan since I was born.”

I let out my breath, opened my eyes. I looked at her. Her eyes were closed, a smile on her face, her fingers holding tight the sheet.

She died late that afternoon, when I was downstairs in the kitchen, Cathe ral and I drinking cold buttermilk Molly’d poured for us. It was Marcus who’d been there when she died, him to come into the kitchen, eyes down to the floor only because I was in the room. He said, “Miss Patricia, she passed on now.” Molly gave out a quick breath, Cathe ral only looking from me to Marcus and back to me, her eyes never really meeting mine.

That night, once Pastor was gone, my momma’s body taken to the mortician’s to prepare her for a proper burial, I climbed into bed with the same nightgown on I’d worn our first night here, when we’d watched our old clothes burn like pine straw in the night air. The gas light above me was still on, and out of habit I sat there, smooth, cool sheets around me, and waited for Missy Cook to push open the door, give me the same practiced and dead smile she gave each night, then turn off the gas.

I was alone, finally. Cathe ral had seen me into my room, followed by Molly, who’d touched me with the gentlest hands I could remember. But now I was alone, sitting in my bed, waiting for the woman who’d struck my momma for no good reason but that she’d been a witness to the truth of her family.

So I waited no longer. I climbed out of bed, went to the door, and reached up, slowly twisted the gas key. The room grew dark around me, the furniture the dresser, the bed, the armoire in which hung my and my momma’s fine new clothing all changing into huge and ugly shapes, drowning in the darkness I was giving. Then the room was black, and I heard the faint pop of the gas shutting off.

My turning off that gas was a move, I knew, just as logical, just as inevitable as me pulling the blanket over my dead daddy barely two months before, further evidence I knew how to take care of myself, even if Missy Cook chose to strike me for it. She couldn’t have me, I knew.

I wouldn’t let her take into me, wouldn’t give up to her.

I had the photograph, and the hard and sure memory of two stories my momma’d told. That was what would keep me alive here. That, and Cathe ral, and Molly. These were all with me.

I climbed back into bed, drew the sheets up around me, and settled in.

I thought of pretending sleep, waiting for Missy Cook to open the door to find I’d broken the first rule she’d put on me the night we’d moved in, but there was no reason to pretend. It didn’t matter what she thought or did. If she chose to beat me in my sleep, I’d awaken. If she chose to do nothing, I’d be asleep already, moving all that much faster toward the day I would leave here.