JEWEL (53 page)

I said, “That’s right, ” and nodded.

A mile or so farther on Leston said, “No doubt you know where we’re headed.”

“You tell me, ” I said, and it was as if our having laughed together a few moments before might have happened a year ago, or ten. I said, “This is your surprise, ” and looked out my window at a green so thick you could see only a few feet back in, and I thought of my daddy, of him disappearing into the same thick green of a Sunday afternoon in a place not far from here, not far at all. Because that was where we were headed, back to the old places.

“My surprise, ” he said, and the dashboard lighter popped. I didn’t hear him pull it out, a moment later glanced from my window to the dashboard to see it still there.

Then I looked at him, at his profile sharp against all this green shooting past him. His hair jumped with the wind in through his open window, the unlit cigarette jammed between the first and second fingers of his right hand holding the wheel, his left arm hanging down out the window.

This was my husband. This was Leston, and I swallowed hard, because I knew what I was doing, knew for every second I breathe what I was doing, fighting him, trying my best to beat him.

I took in a deep breath, held it, looked out the windshield. Afternoon light fell in places through the trees to the road, dappled it with light, my window open, too, my hair jumping just as much as Les ton’s.

The air moving round us seemed fresher, the shattered bits of light out there on the blacktop making the drive feel that much cooler. But I knew better, knew this wind through the car was only a brief fix-up of the heat we had to live in, sleep through.

I hung my arm out the window, too, held it palm forward so I could feel like I could catch the air, hold on to it, keep it cool in me.

Leston popped in the lighter again, said, “Dealer’s choice, ” and drove on.

We were just this side of Purvis when he finally slowed down, hit the blinker, turned left onto an old dirt road, not even oiled, and I knew where our first stop would be.

The trees seemed even thicker than I remembered back in here, that green giving way now and again to fields already thick with rows of more green, watermelon, sweet potatoes, corn. Then just as quick the fields would disappear, and here came the green again, honeysuckle, kudzu, wild grapevine. Now and again, too, a shanty’d poke out from the woods, porch, tin roof, a dog or two.

He slowed the car to a crawl, eased it to the right, and stopped. He let the engine run a second or two before he cut it, then all I could hear was the sound of crickets.

“There, ” he said, and lifted his arm, pointed to my right, his hand in front of me. “Right there, ” he said.

I looked. Shrouded in magnolia and longleaf pine and vines of all sorts was our first house, the cabin Leston’d built. Our first home, here on Rosehill Road.

That same dappled light shone on the house, on the rusted tin roof scattered over with pine straw, on the black and rusted-out pickup off to the left and up on bricks, no wheels.

I could see the rough wood sides of the house, exposed logs, gray mortar between each. The windows weren’t busted out, what I took to be a good sign for the place, and the chimney seemed in order, only a brick or two missing off the top. Otherwise, it looked just about the same, except that when we’d had it Leston kept the front and back and side yards cleared.

Brenda Kay said, “Davey Cockett, ” and we two laughed again though we didn’t look at each other. I was only looking out the window, taking in this place that seemed so long ago my memory of it might as well have been a dream, a chapter out of a book I’d read when I was a little girl.

I said, “It’s a log cabin, all right, Brenda Kay.” I paused. “This is the place where your brother James and your sister Billie Jean were born. Right here.”

“Bijen? ” she said. “James? ” “They’re not here, ” I said, and I knew without even looking behind me she had her face out the window, scouring the place with her eyes for her brother, her sister. “But this is where they were born, ” I said.

I wasn’t thinking about those children, though. I was thinking about how this was the house Leston and I’d come back to from Hattiesburg, a house that’d seemed in its own day a palace those many years ago, a palace to a girl who’d been thrown from a mansion in Purvis on to the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls, from there to a bedroom in a house in East Columbia, tossed and tossed, one life to the next. I looked at the place, me sitting in the powerful silence of no engine running and the whirr of crickets round us. This was where I’d landed those many years and lifetimes ago, me with a handsome husband with deepwater green eyes, dreams of his own lumber company and a family large enough to carry it on into the future.

“Something’s missing, ” Leston said, and I touched my lips with the tips of two fingers, felt the bottom lip tremble, and tried hard to get my mind off what I knew would lead me right on down the road to tears.

He said, “You remember what’s missing? ” I turned, looked at him. He was smiling, cut his eyes to mine a second, then brought them back to the house. He nodded at the place, and I turned back to it, looked hard at it.

“Shutters, ” I said a minute or so later, and felt myself smile, remembered the shutters he’d put up for me after James’d been born, his gift, those white shutters with the pinetree silhouettes in the center.

“Kills the place, those shutters gone, ” Leston said, and I blinked at his voice, nodded, my eyes on the bare log walls. “But looks like it’s holding up good enough.”

The front door opened then, and a colored girl with a sleeping baby in her arms came out. The girl had on an undershirt and a pair of faded green pants, the pantlegs cut off just above her knees. She nodded at us, and I smiled, nodded back. I judged she was maybe ten years old, if that.

Leston opened his door, and I turned to him, saw he was already standing, leaning against the doorframe, his arms on the roof. All I could see of him were those gray pants, his yellow shirt, his belt.

“Momma, ” Brenda Kay said, “Nancy.”

“No, ” I said, “that’s not her, ” and I shook my head. Nancy was one of the retarded colored children from our days up on Adams at the old Foundation house, a girl we hadn’t seen or heard of in years, and I wondered at what all Brenda Kay had stored up, what memories of her life were jammed in her head, looking for escape if only the right object or face or word passed before her. And I wondered, too, . s l , what all of this iiving in Mississippi she’d recall, at what point in her life she might shoot out the name Toxie, the word fish. Leston called out, “How y’all? ” She stood right there in the open doorway, and now another child came out, stood just behind her, this one a little shirtless boy.

“Fine, sir, ” she said, and nodded.

“Your momma and daddy home? ” Leston said.

“No, sir, ” she said. “They working.”

He was quiet a moment, and I looked back at him, at his middle. I said, “Leston.”

“I built this here house, ” he said to her.

“Yes, sir, ” the girl said, and now the baby in her arms woke up. It lifted its head off her chest, looked around, stopped when it saw the car.

“Leston, ” I said again.

“Shh, ” Brenda Kay whispered behind me. “Baby.”

Leston was quiet a moment, then said, “Well.” He tapped the roof of the car twice, said, “Well now, you take care, ” and then he was sliding back into the seat, pulled the door closed.

“Yes, sir, ” the girl said, nodded.

I said, “Bye-bye, ” out my window, and waved.

Leston started up the engine, and the boy took a step back at the sound.

The girl waved at me, and the boy, given bravery, I guess, by his sister’s wave at me, stepped back up to her, then moved in front of her.

He waved, too, and Leston eased out onto the road started off.

I turned from the children to Leston, saw he was smiling. He glanced up at the rearview mirror, said, “Brenda Kay, where to next? ” “Home, ” she said, and for some reason, again one we’d never know she started singing, “Ahh ah stop, love you! ” “Home it is, ” he said, gave it the gas so that behind us, I knew without looking back, there trailed a cloud of dirt.

The next road we turned off on was an oiled one, a step up on the quality of the lives of those living round here. When we’d lived here, though, it’d been just dirt. Now there’d be no dust cloud to follow us, trail us like a hound trying to find some animal on its way back to its nest.

The road, too, was a little wider, and by the time we made it to the other house, the one where Burton and Wilman and Anne’d been born, the sun was starting on its way down, the shadows cast on the road nowhere near as clean and sharp as those on our way here.

Leston slowed down, pulled even with the house, cut the engine.

“Home, ” he said. l I’ I J r rr “Home, ” Brenda Kay said. I said nothing.

Leston turned in his seat, said to Brenda Kay, “You remember this place?

You remember when we lived back here? ” “Home, ” she said again, no question on her voice. Just that word.

“Well, ” Leston said. He turned to me. “Here we are. Scene of the crime.”

“What crime? ” I said, my eyes still on the house.

He was quiet a moment, then said, “Figure of speech.” He popped open his door, climbed out. He crossed in front of the car, was already in the yard and headed for the house before I called out, “What are you doing?

” He took easy strides across the yard, the grass thick in places, other places worn down to dirt as though whoever lived here used the front yard for a parking lot. He didn’t look back at me, didn’t turn and smile or say a word. He only lifted one hand, gave a short wave back at us, and kept going for the door.

That was when I opened my door, stepped out onto the thin grass next to the road. I stood, turned to Brenda Kay.

I said, “Honey, you wait here for a minute or so. Momma and Daddy’s going to have a look.”

She quick nodded, her mouth open and eyes looking over the house, and I thought for a moment maybe she did remember the place. Why not? I thought, and then I opened her door, reached in for her hand. I said, “You just come along, Brenda Kay. We’ll have us a look around here.”

“Home? ” she said, and looked up at me. Finally it’d become a question for her, and I smiled, said, “Once.”

Leston knocked at the door, three quick raps that cut through the thick air, made our stopping , n here more an intrusion than it already was, though there didn’t seem to be anyone around, no cars, the spots in the yard where grass’d been rubbed bare speckled with oil stains.

He knocked again, this time harder, slower, but still no one answered.

He stepped off the stoop, went to the window to his right, the front-room window, and peered in.

“Definitely not niggers living here, ” he said, his hands cupped to the window, his face to the glass.

“Leston, ” I said.

“Coloreds, what have you, ” he said. “Whatever, they’re not living here.”

I still held Brenda Kay’s hand, took a step toward him. He stepped away from the house. twu BMT LUTT “How can you tell? ” I said, and thought of a lavender dress, of a colored boy helping an old white woman park a 52

Plymouth.

He looked at me over his shoulder. “You serious? ” I shrugged, went to the window he’d stood at. Now I was curious wanted to peek in at what someone’d done to the house that’d been our home. I knew the rising danger in that curiosity, in giving over to what was Before instead of eyeing what could come. Still, I let go Brenda Kay’s hand, went to the window.

Inside was furniture, an old divan and a chair, the stuffed back of it worn at the center. In one corner, there beneath where the stairs came down, stood an old radio, big and boxy, just like we’d had. And to my right was the fireplace, the hearth, on it a stack of what looked like magazines.

Scene of the crime, I thought, these were the stairs I’d been carried down by two colored boys after too many hours of trying to give birth to the eighteen-year-old girl behind me, and this was the fireplace, where there’d been a can of lighter fluid left out.

My life in a single room.

I turned from the window, saw Leston standing away from the house, looking up at the place, Brenda Kay just behind him, hands at her sides, her looking up at the house, too. Just my husband and my daughter.

It was a frightening image, the two of them there in the yard, our Lark Regal behind them on the oiled road, all shined and bright Leston and Toxie washed it every four days or so, Leston letting his nephew tinker under the hood most every evening he came by. But it wasn’t just the car out there that scared me, or my daughter still looking at the second story, or my husband, his neck craned to take in the house.

What frightened me was the way the sun suddenly worked on it all, Leston stood in the shadow of the house now, his face no longer squinted against anything, only examining the other house he’d built for his family. Brenda Kay, though, stood just past the line of shadow, out there in July sun, heat beating down on her, shining hard on her head, on the auburn hair she’d gotten not from me, but from her daddy. And the sun shone on her fair skin, her eyes squinted near-closed, her brain never having been granted the privilege of common sense, she could just lift a hand to her forehead, help block out that sun, or just take a step forward, past that shadow line, and be in shade. And the sun was working just then on that shiny car, symbol of what Leston thought we’d achieved in ten years, success measured by the width of a whitewall, the hum of an engine.

“Look up there, ” Leston said, and I moved toward him, then past him to Brenda Kay, took her hand and pulled her into the shadow of the house.

Then I looked to where Leston pointed, an upstairs window on the right side of the house. “Look at that, ” he said. “You see that screen? ” I nodded, not certain what he was after. The window itself was up, inside it thin curtains, still in what had become a breezeless afternoon.

He said, “Look at the screen, will you? ” “I am, ” I said. I was looking, and I wasn’t seeing what he wanted.