Paradise (15 page)

“Just some aspirin and some cough medicine. ’Preciate it. I’ll get my wife.”

The blast from the open door rattled the coffee cups. The man got back in the station wagon; Misner took off in his ratty Ford. Anna thought about making some cinnamon toast. The pumpkin bread would be stale now. Be nice if she had an overripe banana—the baby looked constipated. Mush it up with a little apple butter.

The man came back shaking his head. “I’ll just keep the motor running. She says she’ll stay put.”

Anna nodded. “You got far to go?”

“Lubbock. Say, is that coffee hot?”

“Uh huh. How you like it?”

“Black and sweet.”

He’d taken two sips when the station wagon horn sounded. “Shit. Excuse me,” he said. When he came back he bought licorice, peanut butter, crackers and three Royal Crowns and carried them out to his wife. Then he returned to finish his coffee, sipping it in silence while Anna poked the fire.

“You better gas up when you get on eighteen. Blizzard’s coming.”

He laughed. “Blizzard? In Lubbock, Texas?”

“You ain’t in Texas yet,” said Anna. She looked toward the window and saw two figures approach, then Misner shouldered open the door, with Steward close on his heels.

“Here you go,” said Misner, handing over the bottles. The man took them and rushed out to the station wagon. Misner followed to give him directions.

“Who all is that?” asked Steward.

“Just some lost folks.” Anna handed him a thirty-two-ounce tin of Blue Boy.

“Lost folks or lost whites?”

“Oh, Steward, please.”

“Big difference, Anna girl. Big. Right, Reverend?” Misner was just stepping back in.

“They get lost like everybody else,” said Anna.

“Born lost. Take over the world and still lost. Right, Reverend?”

“You just contradicted yourself.” Anna laughed.

“God has one people, Steward. You know that.” Misner rubbed his hands, then blew on them.

“Reverend,” said Steward, “I’ve heard you say things
out
of ignorance, but this is the first time I heard you say something
based
on ignorance.”

Misner smiled and was about to answer when the lost man entered again to pay Misner for the medicine.

“Blizzard’s heading in.” Steward looked at the man’s light clothing and thin shoes. “You might want to ride it out somewhere. Gas station on eighteen. Wouldn’t go no further than that if I was you.”

“I’ll beat it.” The man closed his wallet. “I’ll gas up on eighteen, but we crossing that state line today. Thank you. You all been a big help. ’Preciate it.”

“They never listen,” said Steward as the station wagon drove away. He himself, having been around in 1958 when whole herds froze, had been pumping water, nailing down, forking alfalfa and storing up since Wednesday. He was in town for tobacco and syrup and to pick up Dovey.

“Say, Steward,” Misner said. “You seen Roger’s granddaughter, Billie Delia?”

“What should I see her for?”

“Anna says nobody has. Of course, we haven’t asked her mother.”

Steward, picking up on the “we,” put a crisp five-dollar bill on the counter. “You won’t get nothing there,” he said, thinking, No major loss if she did run off. Serve Pat right, he thought. She noses about in everybody’s business but clams up if you get near hers. “That reminds me, Deek told me he saw Sweetie this morning—just walking on down the road. No overcoat. Nothing.”

“Sweetie? Out of her house?” Anna stressed her disbelief.

“Down what road?” asked Misner.

“Not Sweetie.”

“Deek swears it was her.”

“Must have been,” said Misner. “I saw her too. Right outside my house. I thought she was going to knock, but she turned around and headed back toward Central. Look to me like she was going on home.”

“Didn’t. Deek said she was way past Sargeant’s—marching out of town like a soldier.”

“Didn’t he stop her?”

Steward stared at Anna as though he couldn’t believe her words. “He was opening up the bank, girl.”

Misner frowned. Anna cut off anything he might have been about to say with, “You all want some coffee? Maybe some pumpkin bread?”

Both men accepted.

“Somebody better speak to Jeff.” It was Anna’s voice but all three glanced at a wall of shelves beyond which was Fleetwood’s Furniture and Appliance.

Despite the predictions—from Richard Misner’s gaze, Steward Morgan’s watchfulness—a tiny piece of the sky flashed a watercolor palette: orange-peach, minty green, seashore blue. The rest of the sky, pewter, served to brighten this odd, picture-book sun break. It lasted a full hour and thrilled everybody who saw it. Then it faded, and a leaden sky solidified over the relentless wind. By noon the first snow came. Stinging pellets, popping, not melting, before the wind. The second snow, two hours later, didn’t pop. It lay down quietly and covered everything there was.

Sweetie had said, “Be back directly, Miss Mable.” “Won’t be gone but a minute, Miss Mable.”

Meant to say it. Maybe she did say it. Anyway it was in her head to say. But she had to hurry quick before one of them gurgled.

On the porch, the walkway, Sweetie’s stride was purposeful—as though there were somewhere important she had to be. Something important she had to do and it would take just a few minutes and she would be right back. In time to massage a little bottom to keep the sores away; or to siphon phlegm or grind food or clean teeth or trim nails or launder out urine or cradle in her arms or sing but mostly in time to watch. To never take her eyes off unless her mother-in-law was there, and to watch then as well, because Miss Mable’s eyes weren’t as sharp as they once had been. Others offered help, repeatedly at first, irregularly now, but she always declined. Sweetie was the best at watching. Her mother-in-law second best. Arnette used to be good, but not anymore. Jeff and her father-in-law couldn’t look, let alone watch.

The problem had never been watching while she was awake. It was watching while asleep. For six years she slept on the pallet near the cribs, or in bed with Jeff, her breath threaded, her ear tunnel ready, every muscle braced to spring. She knew she slept because she dreamed a little, although she couldn’t remember what about. But it was getting harder and harder to watch and sleep at the same time.

When dawn broke and Mable came into the dim room with a cup of coffee, Sweetie stood to take it. She knew Mable had already run her bathwater and folded a towel and fresh nightgown over the chair in the bedroom. And she knew she would offer to do her hair—braid it, wash it, roll it or just scratch her scalp. The coffee would be wonderful, dark and loaded with sugar. But she also knew that if she drank it this one time and went to bed in morning sun this one time she would never wake up, and who would watch her babies then?

So she took the coffee and said, or meant to, “Be back in a minute, Miss Mable.”

Downstairs, she put the cup and saucer on the dining table, then, unwashed, coatless and with uncombed hair, she opened the front door and left. Quickly.

She was not hoping to walk until she dropped or fainted or froze and then slipped into nothingness for a while. The small thing she wanted was not to have that dawn coffee, the already drawn bath, the folded nightgown and then the watchful sleep in that order, forever, every day and in particular this here particular day. The only way to change the order, she thought, was not to do something differently but to do a different thing. Only one possibility arose—to leave her house and step into a street she had not entered in six years.

Sweetie traveled the length of Central Avenue—past the Gospel-named streets, past New Zion, Harper’s Drugstore, the bank, Mount Calvary. She detoured into Cross Peter, left it and walked past Sargeant’s Feed and Seed. North of Ruby, where the quality of the road changed twice, her legs were doing brilliantly. So was her skin, for she didn’t feel the cold. The fresh outside air, to which she was unaccustomed, hurt her nostrils, and she set her face to bear it. She did not know she was smiling, nor did the girl staring at her from the bed of a brand-new ’73 pickup. The girl thought Sweetie was crying, and a black woman weeping on a country road broke her heart all over again.

She peered at Sweetie from her hiding place among empty crates. The Ford truck, heading south, slowed as it passed Sweetie, then stopped. In the cab, the driver and his wife exchanged looks. Then the driver leaned out the window, twisting his head to holler at Sweetie’s back, “You need some help?”

Sweetie did not turn her head or acknowledge the offer. The couple looked at each other and sucked teeth as the husband shifted into drive. Fortunately, the road inclined at that point, otherwise the brokenhearted hitchhiker would have hurt herself when she jumped from the back of the truck. The couple could see in the rearview mirror a passenger they didn’t know they had, running to join the pitiful, ill-raised creature who had not even said No, thank you.

When the girl whose heart was breaking caught up with the woman, she knew enough not to touch or speak or insert herself into the determined bubble the crying woman had become. She walked ten or so paces behind, studying the shapely dark ankles above worn white loafers. The wrinkled shirtwaist dress, pale blue with sagging pockets. The sleeper’s hair—pressed flat on one side, disheveled on the other. And every now and then a sob that sounded like a giggle.

They moved this way for more than a mile. The walker going somewhere; the hitcher going anywhere. The wraith and her shadow.

The morning was cold, cloudy. Wind streamed the tall grasses on either side of the road.

Fifteen years ago, when the brokenhearted hitcher was five years old, she had spent four nights and five days knocking on every door in her building.

“Is my sister in here?”

Some said no; some said who?; some said what’s your name, little girl? Most didn’t open the door at all. That was 1958, when a child could play all over brand-new government housing in safety.

The first two days, after making her rounds on floors ever higher, higher, and making sure she had not missed a single door, she waited. Jean, her sister, would be coming back anytime now, because dinner food was on the table—meat loaf, string beans, catsup, white bread—and a full pitcher of Kool-Aid was in the refrigerator. She occupied herself with two coloring books, a deck of cards and a wetting baby doll. She drank milk, ate potato chips, saltines with apple jelly and, little by little, the whole meat loaf. By the time the hated string beans were all that was left of the dinner, they were too shriveled and mushy to bear.

The third day, she began to understand why Jean was gone and how to get her back. She cleaned her teeth and washed her ears carefully. She also flushed the toilet right away, as soon as she used it, and folded her socks inside her shoes. She spent a long time wiping up the Kool-Aid and picking up the pieces of glass from the pitcher that crashed when she tried to lift it from the refrigerator. She remembered the Lorna Doones that were in the bread box but dared not climb up on a chair to open it. Those were her prayers: if she did everything right without being told, either Jean would walk in or when she knocked on one of the apartment doors, there’d she be! Smiling and holding out her arms.

Meantime the nights were terrible.

On the fourth day, having brushed her eighteen milk teeth until the toothbrush was pink with blood, she stared out of the window through warm rain-sprinkle at morning people going to work, children to school. Then for a long time no one passed. Then an old woman with a man’s jacket roofed above her head against the fine rain. Then a man tossing seed on bare places in the grass. Then a tall woman walked past the window. No coat and nothing on her head, she touched her eyes with the back of her arm, the inside of her wrist. She was crying.

Later, the sixth day, when the caseworker came, she thought about the crying woman who looked nothing at all like Jean—was not even the same color. But before that, on the fifth day, she found—or rather saw—something that had been right there for her all along. Demoralized by unanswered prayers, bleeding gums and hunger she gave up goodness, climbed up on a chair and opened the bread box. Leaning against the box of Lorna Doones was an envelope with a word she recognized instantly: her own name printed in lipstick. She opened it, even before she tore into the cookie box, and pulled out a single sheet of paper with more lipstick words. She could not understand any except her own name again at the top, “Jean” at the bottom, loud red marks in between.

Soaking in happiness, she folded the letter back in the envelope, put it in her shoe and carried it for the rest of her life. Hiding it, fighting for the right to keep it, rescuing it from wastebaskets. She was six years old, an ardent first-grade student, before she could read the whole page. Over time, it became simply a sheet of paper smeared fire-cracker red, not one decipherable word left. But it was the letter, safe in her shoe, that made leaving with the caseworker for the first of two foster homes possible. She thought about the crying woman briefly then, more later, until the sight of her became an occasional heartbreaking dream.

The wind that had been stirring the grass was carrying snow now—scarce, sandy and biting like glass. The hitcher stopped to pull a serape from her duffel, then ran to catch up and wrap it around the walker’s shoulders.

Sweetie flailed her hands until she understood that she was being warmed, not prevented. Not once, while the wool cloth was being wrapped around her shoulders, did she stop walking. She kept on moving, chuckling—or was it sobbing?

The hitcher remembered passing a large house less than a half hour earlier as she hid among the crates. What took twenty minutes in a truck would take pedestrians hours, but she thought they ought to be able to reach the place before dark. The question was the cold; another was how to stop the crying woman, get her to rest and, once they reached shelter, get her inside it. Eyes like those were not uncommon. In hospitals they belonged to patients who paced day and night; on the road, unconfined, people with eyes like that would walk forever. The hitcher decided to spend the time talking and started out by introducing herself.