Nowhere Is a Place (24 page)

Brown shoes caked red with Georgia earth, the man smiled while he waited for Suce to undo the latch on the screen door, and that’s when she saw the battered black leather attaché case he carried.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” he said, pushing a business card at her.

“Mornin’,” Suce said, looking down at the card but not taking it.

“Is the man of the house available?” he asked with a wide grin.

Suce shook her head no.

There was an awkward moment of silence while the man swatted at a fly and mopped his forehead with the handkerchief. Suce took that time to look out across the field to make sure Brother and Willie were close enough to hear her scream, if she had to.

“I’m from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and the reason for my visit today is to ask you if you and your family members are prepared for what may happen—God forbid—if you were to lose one of your loved ones.”

The baby was in the back room sleeping; there were green beans in a bowl waiting to be snapped, some sheets that needed washing. Suce rolled her head on her neck and waited.

“Well,” the man began again after there was no answer from Suce, “I am an agent for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am here to offer you an Industrial Burial Policy. This policy, which today and only today I can offer to you for the very low price of fifteen dollars a year.”

Suce gave him a blank stare.

The man cleared his throat. “Fifteen dollars a year will cover the expensive costs of funeral and burial expenses,” he said, and then threw a longing look over Suce’s shoulder into the coolness of the house.

He mopped his brow again and waited.

Suce considered him for a moment, scratched at her stomach, and said, “Come back tomorrow.” Then she stepped back into the house, indicating the conversation was over, and let the screen door go and returned to her green beans.

“Will your husband be home then?” the man yelled through the screen.

“Yeah,” Suce said, and settled herself back down into the chair.

The white man came back, not the next day, but the following month, enough time for Suce to mull it over and discuss it with Brother and Willie.

They could only safely afford to purchase one policy, so Brother said that Willie should be the one insured, since he was the one with a wife and family.

Fifteen dollars a year, one dollar and twenty-five cents a month. Lord knew there were months when they had to scrape it together, but it seemed the right thing to do—the white thing to do—and so Suce made sure they did it.

But when Willie died, Suce sent her eldest boy into town to send word via telegram to where the policy said to send it, and they never heard a word back.

Suce waited for the following month to come around, waited for the white man to come and collect his premium. Then she would show him the death certificate and the policy and collect her money, but no white man from that insurance company ever came back.

Other white men came from other companies, but none ever came back from Metropolitan Life.

Suce found a way and buried her husband, even though she had to promise a quarter of the cotton crop plus interest in order to do it. She would have put him down by the stream with the others, but another white man had come along one day and told her that it was a health risk and against the law to bury a body on any land other than a cemetery.

Brother passed a few years after Willie, leaving her alone with the children, but by then the boys were old enough and big enough to handle things.

Spin, well, he’d walked off a few months after the killing. Suce never did see any fear in his eyes after that day, just blood. She’d catch him smacking his lips when there wasn’t a meal being prepared or a plate of food anywhere in sight.

She found out about the dead animals from Brother. She supposed Willie didn’t want to upset her, but he’d taught himself how to shoot the rifles they’d inherited after the white men’s deaths and started watching Spin closely, insisting on putting a bolt on the bedroom door.

After a while Spin graduated from slaughtering small animals and went on to the larger ones that could put up a fight. But the satisfaction he derived from it was minute, so he strolled off one afternoon and never came back.

Suce heard say from folks some years later, when she was comfortable enough to feel a part of the community that sprouted up around her, that “a big ole tree of a nigga came running through the main square with a pitchfork and sent it straight through the first white man he came upon.”

It couldn’t have been anyone else but Spin, though she’d second-guessed herself for a moment when the people went on to say, “When the white folks got hold of him, wrenched that pitchfork from him, slung the noose around his neck, and then asked if he had anything to say before they hung him, he looked at them and just laughed.”

Suce had never heard Spin utter a single word, nor had she heard him laugh—not even a chuckle—but she knew he had a tongue and so she thought that his language was buried down deep inside of him. She supposed there was some happiness down there too and so, she thought, that’s where the laughter came from.

Suce tore her eyes away from the window, her mind away from the memories, and looked down to see water rolling down her bodice. She didn’t even think of her eyes and instead looked up at the ceiling to see if it was leaking again, even though the sun sat high and bright in the sky and not a cloud lingered.

The space above her head was bone dry, so she touched her face and her fingers came back wet.

It puzzled her and she set the small knife down on the table and checked herself for grief and there was none.

Suce wore as a bracelet the blue granite eagle necklace that had belonged to Lou and now she reached for the stone and fumbled with it.

Could be just thinking back over the years, she told herself. Sometimes the memories did that to her—made her sad.

Her mind rolled over them again, but nothing resembling grief stung her heart.

She set the paring knife down.

Could be one of the children.

She whispered each of their names: “Moss, Frederick, Ezekiel, Sara, Lou-Ann, Fleming, Vera-Bell, Vonnie, Sonny Boy, Lillie, Beka, Helen.” A slight pause before calling the next group.

Now the dead ones: “Martini, Willie Junior, Sally.”

Still nothing.

Suce twisted in her chair and probed deeper into the dark spaces inside of herself, looking for the sadness, but nothing jumped out at her. There were no shifting shadows, but still the tears rolled.

“Mama?” she whispered, and dragged the back of her hands across her wet eyes.

Lou had come to her every now and again. A branch pulled across the window, a cup left in the center of the table, upside down. Suce had seen her as clear as day the evening she herself spread her legs and pushed out her third child. Lou walked right out of the wall and looked down at the bloody baby and whispered, “Ezekiel.”

Suce waited for the feeling, and still none came.

She balled her fist, becoming frustrated now. “Martini!” she yelled into the air.

Had to be . . . Maybe.

Willie Junior and Sawyer came out warm and dead. In the ground within an hour. Small wooden cross, names scrawled on it. Date.

Martini was almost grown. Had seen the sky, liked to laugh. Dead three years now, and angry for it. Hiding things, loosening bolts, dropping rusty nails where she knew a bare foot would tread.

Suce sighed.

Martini just gone. Helen in the bedroom trying to shake her awake, then getting scared and running to Suce and saying, “She cold, Mama. Like ice.”

The hollering came after Doctor Dentist made it official. Checking Martini’s face and feeling for a pulse on her wrist and neck and then looking directly at Suce, his mouth not moving, his eyes telling it all: gone.

Martini’s eyes open and staring, lips parted and blue. No breath, but Suce could have sworn that a tear slid down her face just before Doctor Dentist pulled her eyelids down with his index and middle fingers.

Doctor Dentist said that Martini’s heart had just stopped beating.

“A heart attack? She wasn’t no old woman!”

“Happen to young ones too sometimes,” Doctor Dentist said, then snapped his black bag shut.

Suce watched his dusty shoes walk across her clean floors. Her child was dead.

The hollering went on for days, through the preparation, the wake, the church service, the digging of the grave, and the final
pat pat
sound the back of the shovel made across the dark mound of dirt that reminded Suce of the shape her belly took on when she was pregnant.

Now Suce just sat there, half-peeled potato in one hand and mouth whispering, “What, what is it?”

When Vonnie walked in, he just looked at the table littered with the curled brown skin and the naked taters already turning in the coarse air.

“Mama?”

She’d fall into these dazes every now and again, talking to nothing, answering ghosts. Now he wondered if her mind was leaving her seventy-four-year-old body.

Suce’s eyes fluttered and she looked at Vonnie. “You forget your manners out in the field?”

Vonnie—tall and dark, the handsome part of him camouflaged by his ruined mouth. The midwife had almost dropped him at the sight of it. Later, Doctor Dentist would tell Suce and Willie that it was called a cleft palate. “Nothing you can do. Just one of them things.”

“Evenin’, ma’am,” Vonnie said, and removed the straw hat from his head. Suce just nodded, retrieved the small knife, and began again what the sudden sadness had interrupted.

“What that Schiffer boy want?” Suce inquired without missing a stroke.

“Said he got some work down by him if I want it.”

“Hmmm,” Suce said, and tossed the potato into the bowl. “Got some collard greens on the stove. Neck bones and beans already done, but I was feeling for some boiled potatoes.”

“Uh-huh,” Vonnie said, and lifted the lid off the pot of greens.

“Nobody here, so I sent that boy Adam down to Miss Ellie for one of her apple pies,” Suce said as she worked at skinning the potato. “Feeling for pie too.”

“Where the baby at?”

“The mama come for her early today. Good. I was tired anyway.”

“Beka?”

“Gone down to Eloise for a spell.”

“Helen?”

“In the outhouse.”

“Lillie?”

“Ain’t seen her yet.”

The sadness swelled, and Suce dropped the potato and slapped at her chest.

“Mama?” Vonnie didn’t move, but his heart raced.

“I’m all right, just some gas.”

So it was Lillie, she thought.

* * *

Couldn’t keep her from town. Men and drink and music. Lillie was loose. Had just unfurled one day and liberated the tight, neat bun she’d worn since she could, swapping it in favor of the cascading mane that made the menfolk smile so broad, they looked foolish.

Wild, and Suce didn’t know what had turned her that way. Bitten by something rabid. Some lying man who had promised her something for the something down between her legs. Love, probably, Suce thought. Women were always ready to give themselves over for love, when all the men really had to offer them was the word and not the meaning behind it.

“Shoot,” Suce said, and plucked up another potato. “She go o’er to Mr. James today?” Suce tried hard to hold her words steady.

“Seen her heading that way; can’t say that’s where she ended up, though,” Vonnie said as he stared down into the simmering pot of beans.

“You wash your hands?” Suce asked, her eyebrows lifting.

Vonnie set the top back down on the pot.

“Seen Mr. James, though, and he ain’t ask for her, so I suppose—”

“Hmmmmm,” Suce’s murmur cut away the rest of Vonnie’s statement. She rubbed at her chest again.

“Mama, you—”

“I want you to find out for sure if she went there today,” Suce said, and gently put the knife back down on the table before folding her hands and sharing a worried look with the tablecloth.

Vonnie stood for a moment, watching her, before placing his hat back on his head and heading out the door.

It was Lillie, she was sure of it.

* * *

Night came and Vonnie followed, coming through the door, dragging a red handkerchief across his brow.

Suce was in her rocking chair, a small child across her lap whimpering and squirming.

“That the Poole boy?” Vonnie asked.

“Uh-huh. Robert.”

“Where his mama at?”

“Headache. She come to me, I give her the headache powder, she hand him to me.” Suce gently rubbed the baby’s back. “He colicky, I think.”

“That baby with you more than he with his mama.” Vonnie removed his hat and hung it on the nail beside the door.

“Where Lillie?”

Vonnie glanced toward the kitchen. “Mr. James said she come and leave early.”

“Left and went where?”

“He said she had to go and see Doctor Dentist.”

Suce cocked her head, and the rocking chair came to a halt.

“For what?”

“I didn’t ask, but I don’t suspect she would’ve shared her reason with Mr. James,” Vonnie said, and bent to untie his boots.

Standing clouds bearded the moon. Crickets sang for water and now Lillie had gone off and done something to herself.

Suce lifted the baby to her shoulder and began to rock again.

___________________

Three days later an older man stood before Suce. Tall, thin, one leg two inches shorter than the other. Suce couldn’t stop staring at the shoe and how the sole was built up to hide his defect. Everything else on him looked okay, she guessed. Not a man she would have wasted a second look on—long face, creased in the cheeks and across the forehead. Eyes too close, nose spread too wide. Suit dusty around the cuffs and tattered around the collar.

Helen and Beka sat quietly and waited. Vonnie was in the kitchen pacing the floor between the window and the door.

Lillie, waterfall hair hiding her small shoulders, slipped her arm around the man’s waist, pulling his hip in to her side. He wobbled a bit and then steadied himself and blushed.