Paradise (2 page)

The woman could decide to go back to her own house then, refreshed and ready to sleep, or she might keep her direction and walk further down the road, past other houses, past the three churches, past the feedlot. On out, beyond the limits of town, because nothing at the edge thought she was prey.

At each end of the hall is a bathroom. As each man enters one, neither is working his jaws because both believe they are prepared for anything. In one bathroom, the biggest, the taps are too small and dowdy for the wide sink. The bathtub rests on the backs of four mermaids—their tails split wide for the tub’s security, their breasts arched for stability. The tile underfoot is bottle green. A Modess box is on the toilet tank and a bucket of soiled things stands nearby. There is no toilet paper. Only one mirror has not been covered with chalky paint and that one the man ignores. He does not want to see himself stalking females or their liquid. With relief he backs out and closes the door. With relief he lets his handgun point down.

Downstairs two men, a father and his son, are not smiling, although when they first enter the chapel they feel like it because it was true: graven idols were worshipped here. Tiny men and women in white dresses and capes of blue and gold stand on little shelves cut into niches in the wall. Holding a baby or gesturing, their blank faces fake innocence. Candles had obviously burned at their feet and, just as Reverend Pulliam said, food had probably been offered as well, since there were little bowls on either side of the doorway. When this was over they would tell Reverend Pulliam how right he was and laugh in Reverend Misner’s face.

There were irreconcilable differences among the congregations in town, but members from all of them merged solidly on the necessity of this action: Do what you have to. Neither the Convent nor the women in it can continue.

Pity. Once, the Convent had been a true if aloof neighbor, surrounded by corn, buffalo grass, clover and approached by a dirt track barely seen from the road. The mansion-turned-Convent was there long before the town, and the last boarding Arapaho girls had already gone when the fifteen families arrived. That was twenty-five years ago, when all their dreams outstretched the men who had them. A road straight as a die had been cleared through the center of town and lined on one side by a paved walk. Seven of the families had more than five hundred acres, three had nearly a thousand. By and by, when the road became a named street, a man named Ossie organized a horse race to celebrate. From army-issue tents, half-finished houses and freshly cleared land people rode in, bringing what they had. Out came stored-away things and things got up on the spot: guitars and late melon, hazelnuts, rhubarb pies and a mouth organ, a washboard, roast lamb, pepper rice, Lil Green, “In the Dark,” Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five; homemade beer and groundhog meat fried and simmered in gravy. The women tied bright scarves over their hair; the children made themselves hats of wild poppies and river vine. Ossie owned a two-year-old and a four, both fast and pretty as brides. The other horses were simply company: Ace’s spotted horse, Miss Esther’s ancient featherweight, all four of Nathan’s plow horses plus his mare and a half-broke pony that, unclaimed, grazed the creekbank.

The riders quarreled so long over saddle or bareback, the mothers of nursing babies told them to mount or change roles. The men argued handicaps and placed quarter bets with abandon. When the gun went off only three horses leapt forward. The rest stepped sideways or cut out over lumber stacked near unfinished homes. When the race finally got under way, the women yelled from the meadow, while their children shrieked and danced in grass up to their shoulders. The pony finished first, but since it lost its rider two furlongs out, the winner was Nathan’s auburn mare. The little girl with the most poppies on her head was chosen to present the first-place ribbon hung with Ossie’s Purple Heart. The winner was seven years old then and grinning as though he’d won the Kentucky Derby. Now he was somewhere down in the cellar of a Convent watching out for awful women who, when they came, one by one, were obviously not nuns, real or even pretend, but members, it was thought, of some other cult. Nobody knew. But it wasn’t important to know because all of them, each in her turn, and like the old Mother Superior and the servant who used to, still sold produce, barbecue sauce, good bread and the hottest peppers in the world. For a pricey price you could buy a string of the purply black peppers or a relish made from them. Either took the cake for pure burning power. The relish lasted years with proper attention, and though many customers tried planting the seeds, the pepper grew nowhere outside the Convent’s garden.

Strange neighbors, most folks said, but harmless. More than harmless, helpful even on occasion. They took people in—lost folk or folks who needed a rest. Early reports were of kindness and very good food. But now everybody knew it was all a lie, a front, a carefully planned disguise for what was really going on. Once the emergency was plain, representatives from all three churches met at the Oven because they couldn’t agree on which, if any, church should host a meeting to decide on what to do now that the women had ignored all warnings.

It was a secret meeting, but the rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year’s Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed. So when nine men decided to meet there, they had to run everybody off the place with shotguns before they could sit in the beams of their flashlights to take matters into their own hands. The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women.

The father walks the aisle checking the pews right and left. He runs a frond of light from his Black & Decker under each seat. The knee rests are turned up. At the altar he pauses. One window of pale yellow floats above him in the dimness. Things look uncleaned. He steps to a tray of small glasses positioned on the wall to see if any food offerings remain there. Except for grime and spider webbing, the red glasses are empty. Maybe they are not for food but for money. Or trash? There is a gum wrapper in the dirtiest one. Doublemint.

He shakes his head and joins his son back at the altar. The son points. The father beams the wall below the yellow window where, just barely, the sun announces. The outline of a huge cross comes into view. Clean as new paint is the space where there used to be a Jesus.

The brothers approaching the cellar were once identical. Although they are twins, their wives look more alike than they do. One is smooth, agile and smokes Te Amo cigars. The other is tougher, meaner, but hides his face when he prays. But both have wide innocent eyes and both are as single-minded now standing before a closed door as they were in 1942 when they enlisted. Then they were looking for an out—a break away from a life where all was owed, nothing owned. Now they want in. Then, in the forties, they had nothing to lose. Now everything requires their protection. From the beginning when the town was founded they knew isolation did not guarantee safety. Men strong and willing were needed when lost or aimless strangers did not just drive through, hardly glancing at a sleepy town with three churches within one mile of one another but nothing to serve a traveler: no diner, no police, no gas station, no public phone, no movie house, no hospital. Sometimes, if they were young and drunk or old and sober, the strangers might spot three or four colored girls walk-dawdling along the side of the road. Walking a few yards, stopping as their talk required; skipping on, pausing to laugh or slap another’s arm in play. The strangers get interested in them, perhaps. Three cars, say, a ’53 Bel Air, green with cream-colored interior, license number 085 B, six cylinders, double molding on rear fender pontoon, Powerglide two-speed automatic transmission; and say a ’49 Dodge Wayfarer, black, cracked rear window, fender skirts, fluid drive, checkerboard grille; and a ’53 Oldsmobile with Arkansas plates. The drivers slow down, put their heads out the windows and holler. Their eyes crinkled in mischief they drive around the girls, making U-turns and K’s, churning up grass seed in front of the houses, flushing cats in front of Ace’s Grocery Store. Circling. The girls’ eyes freeze as they back into each other. Then, one at a time, the townsmen come out of the houses, the backyards, off the scaffold of the bank, out of the feed store. One of the passengers has opened the front of his trousers and hung himself out the window to scare the girls. The girls’ little hearts stand up and they cannot close their eyes fast enough, so they jerk their heads aside. But the townsmen do look at it, see the wish in this most militant of gestures, and smile. Smile reluctantly and in spite of themselves because they know that from this moment on, if not before, this man, till his final illness, will do as much serious damage to colored folks as he can.

More men come out, and more. Their guns are not pointing at anything, just held slackly against their thighs. Twenty men; now twenty-five. Circling the circling cars. Ninety miles from the nearest O for operator and ninety from the nearest badge. If the day had been dry, the dust spuming behind the tires would have discolored them all. As it was, just a little gravel kicked up in the tread they left behind.

The twins have powerful memories. Between them they remember the details of everything that ever happened—things they witnessed and things they have not. The exact temperature of the weather when the cars circled the girls as well as the bushel yield of every farm in the county. And they have never forgotten the message or the specifics of any story, especially the controlling one told to them by their grandfather—the man who put the words in the Oven’s black mouth. A story that explained why neither the founders of Haven nor their descendants could tolerate anybody but themselves. On the journey from Mississippi and two Louisiana parishes to Oklahoma, the one hundred and fifty-eight freedmen were unwelcome on each grain of soil from Yazoo to Fort Smith. Turned away by rich Choctaw and poor whites, chased by yard dogs, jeered at by camp prostitutes and their children, they were nevertheless unprepared for the aggressive discouragement they received from Negro towns already being built. The headline of a feature in the
Herald,
“Come Prepared or Not at All,” could not mean them, could it? Smart, strong, and eager to work their own land, they believed they were more than prepared—they were destined. It stung them into confusion to learn they did not have enough money to satisfy the restrictions the “self-supporting” Negroes required. In short, they were too poor, too bedraggled-looking to enter, let alone reside in, the communities that were soliciting Negro homesteaders. This contemptuous dismissal by the lucky changed the temperature of their blood twice. First they boiled at being written up as “people who preferred saloons and crap games to homes, churches and schools.” Then, remembering their spectacular history, they cooled. What began as overheated determination became cold-blooded obsession. “They don’t know we or about we,” said one man. “Us free like them; was slave like them. What for is this difference?”

Denied and guarded against, they altered their route and made their way west of the unassigned lands, south of Logan County, across the Canadian River into Arapaho territory. Becoming stiffer, prouder with each misfortune, the details of which were engraved into the twins’ powerful memories. Unembellished stories told and retold in dark barns, near the Oven at sunset, in the Sunday afternoon light of prayer meetings. About the saddles of the four black-skinned bandits who fed them dried buffalo meat before robbing them of their rifles. About the soundlessness of the funnel that twisted through and around their camp; the sleeping children who woke sailing through the air. The glint of the horses on which watching Choctaw sat. At suppertime, when it was too dark for any work except that which could be done by firelight, the Old Fathers recited the stories of that journey: the signs God gave to guide them—to watering places, to Creek with whom they could barter their labor for wagons, horses and pasture; away from prairie-dog towns fifty miles wide and Satan’s malefactions: abandoned women with no belongings, rumors of riverbed gold.

The twins believed it was when he discovered how narrow the path of righteousness could be that their grandfather chose the words for the Oven’s lip. Furniture was held together by wooden dowels because nails were so expensive, but he sacrificed his treasure of three-inch and four, bent and straight, to say something important that would last.

Once the letters were in place, but before anyone had time to ponder the words they formed, a roof was raised next to where the Oven sat waiting to be seasoned. On crates and makeshift benches, Haven people gathered for talk, for society and the comfort of hot game. Later, when buffalo grass gave way to a nice little town with a street down the middle, wooden houses, one church, a school, a store, the citizens still gathered there. They pierced guinea hens and whole deer for the spit; they turned the ribs and rubbed extra salt into sides of cooling veal. Those were the days of slow cooking, when flames were kept so low a twenty-pound turkey roasted all night and a side could take two days to cook down to the bone. Whenever livestock was slaughtered, or when the taste for unsmoked game was high, Haven people brought the kill to the Oven and stayed sometimes to fuss and quarrel with the Morgan family about seasonings and the proper test for “done.” They stayed to gossip, complain, roar with laughter and drink walking coffee in the shade of the eaves. And any child in earshot was subject to being ordered to fan flies, haul wood, clean the worktable or beat the earth with a tamping block.

In 1910 there were two churches in Haven and the All-Citizens Bank, four rooms in the schoolhouse, five stores selling dry goods, feed and foodstuffs—but the traffic to and from the Oven was greater than to all of those. No family needed more than a simple cookstove as long as the Oven was alive, and it always was. Even in 1934 when everything else about the town was dying; when it was clear as daylight that talk of electricity would remain just talk and when gas lines and sewers were Tulsa marvels, the Oven stayed alive. Until the Big Drought, running water was not missed because the well was deep. As boys, the twins had swung overhand from the cottonwood branches leaning near it and hung dangerously above the clear water to admire the reflection of their feet. Time after time they heard stories of the blue dresses and bonnets the men bought for the women with cash from the first harvest or the first cuts from the herd. The theatrical arrival of the Saint Louis piano, ordered soon as Zion’s floor was laid. They imagined their mother as a ten-year-old among other young girls clustered quietly about the piano, sneaking a touch, a key stroke before the deaconess slapped their hands away. Their pure sopranos at rehearsal singing “He will take care of you…,” which He did, safe to say, until He stopped.