Marching to Zion (8 page)

I’m coming, Papa, Minerva said from hers.

By the grace of God, it rained the next two days. The three slept in the caravan in close quarters, which made any monkey business Minerva had up her sleeve impossible. By the third day, they were nearly to Memphis. Once again, Magnus Bailey went ahead to make arrangements for their accommodations. It did not escape her father’s notice that his daughter either moped about their campsite or paced anxiously to the road and back, watching for the first sign of his return. He attempted to soothe her.

Our friend will be fine, he said. He was born near Memphis. This is not like his last excursion,
mine kind,
where he was among strangers. You need not worry.

It didn’t help. Minerva became increasingly troubled as the hours passed without sight of Bailey. On the second day, she was near inconsolable. She sat on a boulder near the road’s edge with a face as long and miserable as Fishbein’s. By noon, the sun beat down upon her, making her hair a cap of bright, wet ringlets. Her dress clung to her breasts and waist. Her father brought her water, which she refused to drink. When the night came and with it a crisp, cool breeze, she began to shiver off and on as if a dark terror seized her intermittently and shook her nerves. Fishbein draped her in a blanket. She did not appear to notice. Minerva was locked in her thoughts and her father could not raise her from them. By dawn, he himself was pacing. At last, he stood over her, ready to strike to see what good a shock might do, but he hesitated. His hand went up, then froze in midair; he bit his lip, and tears ran down his face as he summoned his resolve, when, without warning, she blinked three times, got up of her own accord, and disappeared inside the caravan, reemerging some minutes later dressed in a pair of her father’s pants, a plain white shirt, an old jacket, and her sturdiest shoes. Her hair was tucked up under one of Magnus Bailey’s bowler hats.

He must live, she said. Or I would be dead. I will go to the town and find him.

Nothing Fishbein said could dissuade her. He put his hands on her, but she was the stronger and easily evaded him. He slapped his cheeks with two hands, whimpered, begged.

Suddenly there he was, Bailey, striding down the road, hands in his pockets, his hat tipped to the back of his head, his step light, jaunty you might say. With him was another man, shorter, rounder, brown as a coffee bean, and as smartly attired as ever Magnus Bailey himself was. The man swung a walking stick in a wide and winsome arc, his gait that of a man without a care in the world out for a day’s stroll. Minerva Fishbein took off running toward them. The bowler fell off and rolled in the dirt. Her hair cascaded to her shoulders like flame. She knocked against Bailey with a fearsome force, nearly throwing him off balance. She hugged him and kissed his cheeks, one after the other in a kind of frenzy. His companion’s eyebrows raised in surprise at her display, his chin tucked. His gaze went to Fishbein, who’d hurried behind. What is this? the stranger seemed to ask of Minerva’s father.

He shrugged and replied, Magnus Bailey is with us since she is a baby.

With some difficulty, Bailey detached himself from her. In order to make what had happened less scandalous in the mind of his companion, he went to her father and embraced him, clapping that frail man on the back as if dramatic moments of physical affection were common between them. Startled, Fishbein coughed and was released.

The four stood in the middle of the road smiling at one another with varying degrees of sincerity.

Ah, I am forgetting myself, Magnus Bailey said at last. This is my cousin, Thomas DeGrace. Thomas, the Fishbeins of whom I’ve told you much.

They all nodded, shook hands, and dispensed pleasantries.

Thomas has agreed to help us.

With what? Minerva asked, an edge to her voice.

Taking a deep breath, puffing himself up, Magnus Bailey laid the foundation of his grand plan.

As luck would have it, child, when I got to town, I found my mother in difficulty. Her health fails. Her home is in need of repair. There are legal problems. Financial ones. I’m afraid I must devote myself to her welfare from now on.

He turned toward her father.

But of course I would never leave you all high and dry. My cousin Thomas here can take over my duties with you. He’s a hand in many businesses you’ll find interesting. His energy is boundless.

Thomas DeGrace took Fishbein’s arm and led him away from the other two, bending his ear about the opportunities that lay ahead. Once they were gone, Bailey’s chest deflated. He could not look at Minerva. He feared her reaction to what had just happened. He had taken the first step toward abandoning her. Part of him wanted to take her in his arms and tell her that in another world, another time, he would have loved her, taken care of her for the rest of her natural life, and found heaven on earth in doing so. Except we are in this time, in this world, he would have said. Yes, he would have said it, but he knew if she protested, he would be lost. Instead, he walked apart with his head down, ashamed, dejected. He muttered to her that he would get a towel and bathe in the creek nearby and then sleep. The dust of the road had near done him in. Her heavy silence behind him pierced his back and went straight through his heart.

During the next weeks, Thomas DeGrace proved a useful fellow. In short order, he found them a furnished house on a pleasant street, a house modeled on the old Gayoso Hotel with the same wrought-iron balconies and views of the river as that legendary establishment. He took the gypsy caravan off their hands and acquired on their behalf a modest motorcar in which he drove them around wearing a dark suit and a chauffeur’s cap. Once they were settled, he found tutors for Minerva that she might continue her education. He introduced the Fishbeins to the Loebs, the Ottenheims, the Goldsmiths, and the Levys through the good offices of their help, ensuring Minerva’s chances of entering Memphis’s highest stratum of Jewish society. Of the many projects he brought Fishbein, there were only two or three that captured the man’s halfhearted interest. From these he selected just one—a concern that supplied essential tools for the lumber mills, such as ropes, chains, saw blades, and the like. The investment was more thank-you to DeGrace for services rendered than a hope for significant return. His experience in East St. Louis had changed him. He had little interest now in making more money. He was, in the wisdom of the Talmud, a rich man. He felt he had enough. He intended to spend what remained of his life in study and prayer. His only tie to the world was his daughter, and materially, at least, her life was secure. Minerva’s temperament remained problematic. A new listlessness had overtaken her. She neither brooded nor exploded with frustration, but her common occupation was to stand at a window watching the street, anticipating he knew not what. Even on Sundays, when Magnus Bailey paid them a short visit, she remained dull, barely responding to his questions and ripostes. On one visit, she spoke but once.

Fishbein inquired after the health of Bailey’s mother.

She’s doin’ better, but weak, Bailey said.

I would like to visit her, Minerva announced in a voice oddly loud, strident even.

You cannot, child, Bailey answered.

His features took on a guarded cast while his voice went as mild, as warm, as hers had been everything opposite.

She’s in Orange Mound, and Orange Mound’s not a place for the likes of you, Miss Minnie. You’d be better off strollin’ down Beale Street in the dead of night. But I’ll tell her the prettiest little white gal I ever knew has been askin’ for her.

She made a soft snort in response and said no more.

The following Sunday, Bailey did not come. Neither did he come the Sunday after that. On the third Sunday, Thomas DeGrace came in his place and told them Magnus Bailey’s mother had passed on. Bailey had gone downriver to bring her home. Minerva walked up to him and grabbed DeGrace with two hands by his lapels. Where is that? she demanded. Where? Startled, he answered her. A small town a ways away. Tulips End.

Tulips End, Tulips End, she said over and over, and the next morning she was gone.

Minerva was but a
single night into her journey, headed on foot by an ill-used road to a town she did not know, when a ragtag band of men, desperate and cruel, came upon her, dragged her screaming to the bushes, and took from her everything she had, including a small velvet bag containing three gemstones she’d stolen from her daddy’s hiding place. Their leader, a bearded, burly man of indiscriminate race, could not believe his good fortune in coming across such treasure in the middle of nowhere. Pickings that easy had never fallen to him before. He could only imagine that this redheaded vagabond was some kind of good-luck charm to him. He stopped his boys just as they were getting up for a round of fun and put her under his personal protection, which did not sit well with them except that they feared him. Although they’d been on their way to rob flatboats and ferries operating along less-traveled points of the river, there seemed no point chasing nickels and dimes after the capture of Minerva Fishbein. They returned to their camp, a dismal spot tucked away in the backwoods of Arkansas. Without horses or a motorcar, it took a night or two to get there. She would never recall which, as her mind was driven into darkness by the rigorous and intimate service her captor demanded once it got dark and they were alone inside his bedroll. At his first rough touch, she descended into a pit in which a part of her remained until her last breath.

There were women at the camp and a handful of dirty children, huts made of scavenged planks of wood and hunks of rusted metal. As soon as the women saw the captive, her delicate hands and flawless face, her wild eyes and flame-colored hair, saw her tied by the wrists and tethered to the boss, they determined to be rid of her. They got their men stone drunk, and while the thieves slept wherever they had fallen, the women cut Minerva loose, then beat her with sticks in the direction of the same road on which she’d met her great misfortune. When she was free of them, she ran helter-skelter into the pitch-black night without a sense of where she was or in what direction she was headed. She fell into stones and puddles. She ran until her feet bled inside her shoes.

When she collapsed at last, she lay in the mud on a patch of river grass and thanked God for it. She could hear the river flow nearby and the birds waking to song. She slept a little, then found a secluded spot on the riverbank. She took off her shoes and immersed her feet, swollen and cut, in a place where the tide pooled. Removing all but her underclothes, she washed herself and her dress, spreading the latter out on a rock to dry in the dawning sun. She lay nearby with her eyes closed and tried, very hard, to order her thoughts and emotions. The hardest effort she put to ignoring the burning pain between her legs, which hindered her from stuffing the memory of what caused it into an irretrievable place. It stayed there at the fringes of her consciousness, threatening to rush back to the forefront and overwhelm her senses. She slept some more. When she awoke, a ravenous hunger afflicted her, but she had no knowledge of what there was that grew or hopped or swam around her that she might safely eat, and so she put her dress back on, tied her shoes by their laces to wear them about her neck, and went back to the road hoping that she might encounter someone who would help her. Wiser now, she kept her eyes and ears alert to any sight or sound of approach, planning to hide by the side of the road until she could determine whether the passersby looked kindly.

It was hours before anyone at all came down that stretch of dirt. By then, she was so hungry and miserable, she stood in the middle of the path waving her arms at an encroaching cloud of dust as if it were Elijah’s chariot descendant from heaven to rescue her. Just as good luck often follows bad, the dust cloud turned out to be a motorcar driven by an elderly white man in company with a middle-aged woman and three half-grown children, all of them on their way to a potluck Sunday dinner at their church. He stopped and picked her up out of Christian charity, taking her to the House of God Triumphant, where a flock of well-meaning women fluttered about tending her wounded feet and feeding her sundry victuals from all their kitchens, dishes of crab and shrimp and pork, none of which had she tasted in all her short life. They asked her who she was and where she was going. She told them she was Minnie Bailey and that she was headed toward Tulips End in search of family. None had heard of such a place. When she told them it was a small town just downriver of Memphis, Tennessee, a clucking of tongues erupted. Why, you are in Mississippi, they told her. Memphis is up thataway, they said, pointing north.

The congregation drew lots to find who would have the honor of taking their guest home for the night. By a curious piece of destiny, the winner was the same man who’d picked her up in his car, a planter by name of Mr. Deacon Brown. Brown and his wife took her back home. At sunset, they put her to bed between their daughters, two sweet girls not much younger than she. By nine o’clock, she was out of bed with her head stuck out the window, vomiting most of what she’d eaten that afternoon.

Deacon Brown’s wife heard the ruckus and went to see what was going on. She put her arm around Minerva Fishbein’s waist and guided her to the kitchen, where she washed her face and gave her cool well water to drink.

What’s makin’ you sick? she asked the girl. You don’t seem to carry a fever.

That food wasn’t regular for me, she answered. Her voice box rasped from exertion. I never ate things like that before.

This was unbelievable to a child of the Mississippi. Mrs. Brown looked doubtful she heard right.

What? No pork, no shrimp? Ever?

Never ever.

Deacon Brown had got up too by now and stood in the kitchen doorway in long johns and bathrobe, a shotgun in his hands, just in case.

Why in Jesus’ good name not? he asked.

My papa never let me have it. We’re Jews, you see.

There were gasps from both the Browns and then a heavy silence. At last, the couple exchanged a look of agreement as if they’d heard each other’s thoughts. Deacon Brown laid down the law.

Alright, then. I cannot harbor a daughter of the demon Lilith under my roof, much less have her lay her head between those of my innocent baby girls. You can finish out the night in the barn, but be on your way at daybreak.

Yessir, Minerva said, I’m going and I thank you for what you’ve done for me already. But can you tell me, please, which way is north again?

She spent the night on a bed of straw with what livestock the Browns kept, leaving at the crack of dawn after raiding the henhouse of eggs, which she stored in a stolen feed sack. She headed north, keeping to the cover of bramble and hedge at the side of the road, avoiding others, rationing her eggs and eating them raw. After a few days, she came upon a clearing where a quartet of lovers, two young men and their honey-haired sweethearts, picnicked under the trees. They ate fried chicken from a wicker basket, tossing their refuse into the bushes where Minerva hid, watching them. She scrambled after chicken bones with plenty of meat still on them and ate while she watched. One of the young women, reclining in her lover’s arms, enjoying his every warm caress while gazing at the gently rolling hills beyond, said, Someone is watchin’ us.

The other young woman said, I was thinkin’ the same thing, sister.

The young men chided them at first, sweetly, using pet names and other intimate phrases so that for all Minnie knew they spoke a foreign language. But the women insisted. The men got up to police the perimeters of their hideaway and in short order produced a struggling Minerva Fishbein, who, despite her writhings and determination to be freed, clung to a gnawed-up chicken breast in one hand and a gnawed-up chicken thigh in the other, because that’s how very hungry she was at the time. The women instantly saw her extremity and ordered their men to let her go, after which they petted her and fed her as if she was a big old doll they played with, cooing and ahhing until she told them she was on her way to Tulips End to be reunited with her family. Tulips End? they asked, surprised. That’s not much farther, the boys can take you there, but it’s a colored town, you know. Are you sure that’s where you’re meant to go?

Minerva wiped the grease from her chin with the back of her hand.

I’m meeting a man from Memphis at Tulips End who will take me to my papa, she said.

The women studied her then as if she were some strange child of nature who’d grown up under a rock. Neither would venture into a colored town without male protection if their own mothers were tied to stakes and burning in the public square. They backed away and stood, collecting their blankets and drinking cups, putting them away in the wicker basket, instructing the young men first to drive them home and then transport Minerva to Tulips End. They wished her good luck but ceased more familiar attentions straightaway.

After they dropped the girls at their daddy’s farm, the young men took Minerva to a place some distance down the road before turning off it. She feared they might be planning to abuse her, that they figured she owed them something for interrupting their lovemaking and taking them out of their way. But either their minds were not quite so vile or the posture she took—arms locked across her chest, her knees pressed tightly together, her face a storm of aggression about to erupt—put them off. They shoved her out the car and into the dirt without a care, joking about her destination, the local nigger town, as they called it, and clapped each other on the back, full of themselves, telling her as they sped off that Tulips End was not more than a quarter mile away. They hoped she’d find as good a time there as they’d just shown their gals, although they doubted such was possible.

She knelt in the dirt where they had cast her, wept awhile, then filled her spirit with the thought of seeing Magnus Bailey again. If only they could be together, she thought, all her troubles would melt away. Tired and hungry as she was, this was the idea that saved her, that kept her going, that leapt to her mind over and over. He is near.

It was dusk by the time she took to the road again. Soon enough, before night had time to take hold of the world, two Negro women emerged from a hidden path some distance ahead of her, walking arm in arm, their heads together. Their voices came to her soft as a river breeze on a calm, summer day. They murmured then laughed or gestured with their free arms in a way that bespoke amusement or surprise. Everything about them looked gentle and affectionate. Minerva took a chance and ran up to them, tugged on the back of their clothes. They jumped and turned about.

Who? What? they said, looking behind and beyond her in every direction wondering where this weird white child came from and who might be with her, following in secret.

Begging their pardon for startling them, Minerva told she was on urgent business to find a Magnus Bailey from Tulips End. Did they know it and could they help her find him?

They took her to a plain, unremarkable cabin with two goats tethered in the yard under the shade of a gum tree. Standing there on the porch, her eyes teared, she chewed her lip. Her chest felt as if white-hot nails were implanted between her breasts, searing her insides with every breath. Calling upon the great love within her heart to give her courage, she knocked on the door and waited. A shuffle of footsteps from within nearly put her into a faint. The door creaked open and on the other side was an old black woman, hair pulled back in an unassuming bun, her bony frame draped in a loose flowered dress. She was barefoot. She wore glasses.

Good evening, ma’am, Minerva said, bowing her head a little to show respect and that she meant no harm. I apologize for disturbing a house of mourning. I’m looking for Magnus Bailey. Is he here?

Who’s that, Mama?

The voice of her beloved sent such a blaze of joy through Minerva Fishbein she did not hear how he’d addressed the very-much-alive-and-well woman before her.

Magnus Bailey! she cried out, and he came to her and he was all she could see. The old woman faded from her vision so that she might have been a ghost after all.

Bailey was as she’d never seen him, dressed in overalls and a broadcloth shirt, his feet as bare as his mother’s. His hair, bereft of pomade, sprung up around his head in a thicket of curls. But it was Bailey, it was him, and she threw her arms around his neck and dissolved into a shivering fit of happy tears against his chest. His own eyes welled. He held her close, stroking her back, rocking her as one would any hysterical child, saying: Shhh, shhh. Hush now, my Minnie, hush.

How did you come here? he asked when she’d calmed enough to be led to a deep couch set before a stone fireplace. Does your daddy know you’re here?

In fits and starts she told him the story of her flight from her father’s house, leaving out nothing. When she came to the worst bits, he groaned and held her close again.

Oh, why did you do this? he asked, his voice tortured and raw. Why? Why have you done this to yourself? To your father? Lord, even to me?

She pulled away from him and took his big, black face in her small, white hands.

I’ve lived all my life motherless, she said. It’s a pain I’ve never stopped feeling. There’s a place inside where my mother’s absence eats at me every day of my life. I can’t imagine what a sorrow it is to have a mother, have her always, then watch her grow ill and die. To bury her. I love you too much, Magnus, to let you suffer that alone. I had to come. To look after you as you’ve looked after papa and me for as long as I can remember. And for all that’s happened, I’d do it again. I would.