Paradise (22 page)

“Must be pregnant.”

“You trying to see the nurse, honey?”

“She better hurry up.”

“Let’s take her to Rita.”

“You take her, Billie. I got to go.”

“She got a hat on but no shoes. Okay, go ’head. See you tomorrow.”

Pallas straightened up, clutching her stomach, breathing hard through her mouth.

“Listen to me. Clinic’s closing less you an emergency. You sure you ain’t pregnant?”

Pallas, trying to control another retch, shuddered.

Billie turned to watch her friend’s car leave the lot then looked down at the vomit. Without making a face she kicked dirt until it was out of sight.

“Where your pocketbook?” she asked, moving Pallas away from the buried sick. “Where you live? What they call you?”

Pallas touched her throat and made a sound like a key trying to turn in the wrong lock. All she could do was shake her head. Then, like a child alone in a deserted playground, she drew her name in the dirt with her toe. Then slowly, imitating the girl’s earlier erasure with the vomit, she kicked her name away, covering it completely with red dirt.

Billie took off her shower cap. She was much taller than Pallas and had to bend to see into the downcast eyes.

“You come with me, girl,” said Billie. “You a pitiful case if ever I see one. And I’ve seen some.”

She drove through blue evening air speaking quietly, reassuringly. “This is a place where you can stay for a while. No questions. I did it once and they were nice to me. Nicer than—well, very nice. Don’t be afraid. I used to be. Afraid of them, I mean. Don’t see many girls like them out here.” She laughed then. “A little nuts, maybe, but loose, relaxed, kind of. Don’t be surprised if they don’t have on any clothes. I was, at first, but then it was, I don’t know, nothing. My mother would have knocked me into next week if I walked around like that. Anyway you can collect yourself there, think things through, with nothing or nobody bothering you all the time. They’ll take care of you or leave you alone—whichever way you want it.”

The blue darkened around them except for a trim of silver in the distance. The fields rippled in a warm wind but Pallas was shivering by the time they reached the Convent.

After handing her over to Mavis, the girl said, “I’ll come back to check on you, okay? Name’s Billie Cato.”

The candle had burned down to an inch but its flame was high. Pallas wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The rocking chair rocked. Connie’s breathing was so deep Pallas thought she was sleeping. She could see Seneca, hand on chin, elbow on knee, looking up at her, but candle flame, like moonlight in Mehita, distorted faces.

Connie stirred.

“I asked who hurt you. You telling me who helped you. Want to keep that other part secret for a little longer?”

Pallas said nothing.

“How old are you?”

Eighteen, she started to answer, but then chose the truth. “Sixteen,” she said. “I would have been a senior next year.”

She would have cried again for her lost junior year, but Connie nudged her roughly. “Get up. You breaking my lap.” Then, in a softer voice, “Go on and get some sleep now. Stay as long as you like and tell me the rest when you want to.”

Pallas stood and wobbled a bit from the rocking and the wine.

“Thanks. But. I better call my father. I guess.”

“We’ll take you,” said Seneca. “I know where there’s a telephone. But you have to stop crying, hear?”

They left then, stepping carefully through the darkness, eyes trained on the low light the candle flame shed. Pallas, bred in the overlight of Los Angeles, in houses without basements, associated them with movie evil or trash or crawly things. She gripped Seneca’s hand and breathed through her mouth. But the gestures were expressions of anticipated, not genuine, alarm. In fact, as they climbed the stairs, images of a grandmother rocking peacefully, of arms, a lap, a singing voice soothed her. The whole house felt permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected domain, free of hunters but exciting too. As though she might meet herself here—an unbridled, authentic self, but which she thought of as a “cool” self—in one of this house’s many rooms.

A platter of tortilla-looking things sat on the table. Gigi, spruced up and quiet, with only a lopsided lip to mar her makeup, was fooling with her wide-band radio, trying to find the one station that played what she wanted to hear—not the agricultural news; country music or Bible stuff. Mavis, muttering cooking instructions to herself, was at the stove.

“Connie okay?” Mavis asked when she saw them enter.

“Sure. She was good for Pallas. Right, Pallas?”

“Yes. She’s nice. I feel better now.”

“Wow. It talks,” said Gigi.

Pallas smiled.

“But is it going to puke some more? That’s the question.”

“Gigi. Shut the hell up.” Mavis looked eagerly at Pallas. “You like crepes?”

“Um. Starved,” Pallas answered.

“There’s plenty. I put Connie’s aside, and I can make even more if you want.”

“It needs some clothes.” Gigi was scanning Pallas closely. “Nothing I got will fit.”

“Stop calling her ‘it.’”

“All it’s got worth having is a hat. Where’d you put it?”

“I’ve got jeans she can have,” said Seneca.

Gigi snorted. “Make sure you wash them first.”

“Sure.”

“Sure? Why you say ‘sure’? I haven’t seen you wash one thing since you came here, including yourself.”

“Cut it out, Gigi!” Mavis spoke from behind closed teeth.

“Well, I haven’t!” Gigi leaned over the table toward Seneca. “We don’t have much, but soap we do have.”

“I said I’d wash them, didn’t I?” Seneca wiped perspiration from under her chin.

“Why don’t you roll up your sleeves? You look like a junkie,” said Gigi.

“Look who’s talking.” Mavis chuckled.

“I’m talking junk, girl. Not a little boo.”

Seneca looked at Gigi. “I don’t put chemicals in my body.”

“But you used to, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t used to.”

“Let me see your arms, then.”

“Get off!”

“Gigi!” Mavis shouted. Seneca looked hurt.

“Okay, okay,” said Gigi.

“Why are you like that?” asked Seneca.

“I’m sorry. Okay?” It was a rare admission, but apparently sincere.

“I never took drugs. Never!”

“Said I was sorry. Christ, Seneca.”

“She’s a needler, Sen. Always sticking it in.” Mavis cleaned her plate. “Don’t let her get under your skin. That’s where the blood is.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Mavis laughed. “There she goes again. So much for ‘sorry.’”

“I apologized to Seneca, not you.”

“Let’s just drop it.” Seneca sighed. “Is it okay to open the bottle, Mavis?”

“Not just okay; it’s an order. We got to celebrate Pallas, don’t we?”

“And her voice.” Seneca smiled.

“And her appetite.
Look
at her.”

Carlos had killed Pallas’ appetite. While he loved her (or seemed to), food, other than that first chili dog, was a nuisance to her, an excuse to drink Cokes or a reason to go out. The pounds she had struggled with since elementary school melted away. Carlos had never commented on her weight, but the fact that from the first, when she was a butterball, he liked her anyway—chose her, made love to her—sealed her confidence in him. His betrayal when she was at her thinnest sharpened her shame. The nightmare event that forced her to hide in a lake had displaced for a while the betrayal, the hurt, that had driven her from her mother’s house. She had not been able even to whisper it in the darkness of a candlelit room. Her voice had returned, but the words to say her shame clung like polyps in her throat.

The melted cheese covering the crepe-tortilla thing was tangy; the pieces of chicken had real flavor, like meat; the pale, almost white butter dripping from early corn was nothing like what she was accustomed to; it had a creamy, sweetish taste. There was a warm sugary sauce poured over the bread pudding. And glass after glass of wine. The fear, the bickering, the nausea, the awful dirt fight, the tears in the dark—all of the day’s unruly drama dissipated in the pleasure of chewing food. When Mavis returned from taking Connie her supper, Gigi had found her station and was dancing the radio over to the open back door for better reception. She danced back to the table then and poured herself more wine. Eyes closed, hips grinding, she circled her arms to enclose the neck of a magic dancer. The other women watched her as they finished the meal. When last year’s top tune, “Killing Me Softly,” came on, it was not long before they all followed suit. Even Mavis. First apart, imagining partners. Then partnered, imagining each other.

Wine-soothed, they slept deep as death that night. Gigi and Seneca in one bedroom. Mavis alone in another. So it was Pallas, asleep on the sofa in the office/game room who heard the knocking.

The girl was wearing white silk shoes and a cotton sundress. She carried a piece of wedding cake on a brand-new china plate. And her smile was regal.

“I’m married now,” she said. “Where is he? Or was it a she?”

Later that night, Mavis said, “We should have given her one of those dolls. Something.”

“She’s crazy,” said Gigi. “I know everything about her. K.D. told me everything about her, and she’s the whole nuthouse. Boy, is his ass in trouble.”

“Why’d she come here on her wedding night?” asked Pallas.

“Long story.” Mavis dabbed alcohol on her arm, comparing the bloody scratches to the ones Gigi had put there earlier. “Came here years back. Connie delivered her baby for her. She didn’t want it, though.”

“So where is it?”

“With Merle and Pearl, I think.”

“Who?”

Gigi cut her eyes at Mavis. “It died.”

“Doesn’t she know that?” asked Seneca. “She said you all killed it.”

“I told you she’s the whole house of nuts.”

“She left right after,” Mavis said. “I don’t know what she knows. She wouldn’t even look at it.”

They paused then, seeing it: the turned-away face, hands covering ears so as not to hear that fresh but mournful cry. There would be no nipple, then. Nothing to put in the little mouth. No mother shoulder to snuggle against. None of them wanted to remember or know what had taken place afterward.

“Maybe it wasn’t his. K.D.’s,” said Gigi. “Maybe she was cutting out on him.”

“So? So what if it wasn’t his? It was
hers.
” Seneca sounded hurt.

“I don’t understand.” Pallas moved toward the stove, where the leftover bread pudding sat.

“I do. In a way.” Mavis sighed. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

“Not for me. I’m going back to bed.” Gigi yawned.

“She was really mad. You think she’ll get back all right?”

“Saint Seneca. Please.”

“She was screaming,” Seneca said, staring at Gigi.

“So were we.” Mavis measured coffee into the percolator basket.

“Yeah, but we didn’t call her names.”

Gigi sucked her teeth. “How do you know what to call a psycho who’s got nothing better to do on her wedding night but hunt down a dead baby?”

“Call her sorry?”

“Sorry, my ass,” Gigi answered. “She just wants to hang on to that little dick she married.”

“Didn’t you say you were going to bed?”

“I am. Come on, Seneca.”

Seneca ignored her roommate. “Should we tell Connie?”

“What for?” snapped Mavis. “Look. I don’t want that girl anywhere near Connie.”

“I think she bit me.” Pallas appeared surprised. “Look. Is that teeth marks?”

“What do you want, a rabies shot?” Gigi yawned. “Come on, Sen. Hey, Pallas. Lighten up.”

Pallas stared. “I don’t want to sleep down here by myself.”

“Who said you had to? That was your idea.”

“Ther’re no more beds upstairs.”

“Oh, Christ.” Gigi started toward the hall, Seneca following. “What a baby.”

“I told you. The others are stored in the cellar. I’ll put one up tomorrow. You can sleep with me tonight,” said Mavis. “Don’t worry. She won’t be back.” She locked the back door then stood watching the coffee percolate. “By the way, what’s your name? Last name, I mean.”

“Truelove.”

“No kidding. And your mother named you Pallas?”

“No. My father.”

“What’s her name? Your mother.”

“Dee Dee. Short for Divine.”

“Oooo. I love it. Gigi! Gigi! You hear that? Her name’s Divine. Divine Truelove.”

Gigi ran back to stick her head in the doorway. Seneca too.

“It is not! That’s my mother’s name.”

“She a stripper?” Gigi was grinning.

“An artist.”

“They all are, honey.”

“Don’t tease her,” murmured Seneca. “She’s had a long day.”

“Okay, okay, okay. Good night…Divine.” Gigi vanished back through the door.

“Don’t pay her any attention,” Seneca said, then, whispering quickly as she left, “She has a small mind.”

Mavis, still smiling, poured coffee and cut bread pudding. She served Pallas and sat down next to her, blowing into the coffee steam. Pallas picked at a third helping of dessert.

“Show me the tooth marks,” said Mavis.

Pallas turned her head and pulled at the neck of her T-shirt, exposing her shoulder.

“Oooo,” Mavis groaned.

“Is every day like this here?” Pallas asked her.

“Oh, no.” Mavis stroked the wounded skin. “This is the most peaceful place on earth.”

“You’ll take me to call my father tomorrow?”

“Yep. First thing.” Mavis stopped her stroking. “I love your hair.”

They finished the nighttime snack in silence. Mavis picked up the lamp, and they abandoned the kitchen to darkness. When they were in front of Mavis’ bedroom door she didn’t open it. She froze.

“Hear that? They’re happy,” she said, covering her laughing lips. “I knew it. They love that baby. Absolutely love it.” She turned to Pallas. “They like you too. They think you’re divine.”

PATRICIA

B
ells and pine trees, cut from green and red construction paper, were piled neatly on the dining room table. All done. Just the glitter was left for the trim. Last year she had made a mistake letting the smaller ones do it. After cleaning their fingers and elbows of glue, after picking specks of silver from their hair and cheeks, she had to do most of the decorations over anyway. This time she would hand out the bells and trees while monitoring each dot of glue herself. In staging the school’s Christmas play the whole town helped or meddled: older men repaired the platform, assembled the crib; young ones fashioned new innkeepers and freshened the masks with paint. Women made doll babies, and children drew colored pictures of Christmas dinner food, mostly desserts—cakes, pies, candy canes, fruit—because roast turkeys were too much of a challenge for small fingers. When the little ones had silvered the bells and pine trees, Patricia herself would thread loops at their tops. The Eastern star was Harper’s department. He checked it for repair each year making sure its points were sharp and that it would glow properly in the dark cloth sky. And she supposed old Nathan DuPres would deliver the opening remarks once again. A sweet man, but couldn’t stay the point to save him. The church programs were more formal—sermons, choirs, recitations by the children and prizes for the ones who managed to get through them without stuttering, crying or freezing up—but the school program, featuring the Nativity and involving the whole town, was older, having started before the churches were even built.

Unlike recent years, the December days of 1974 were warm and windy. The sky was behaving like a showgirl: exchanging its pale, melancholy mornings for sporty ribbons of color in the evening. A mineral scent was in the air, sweeping down from some Genesis time when volcanoes stirred and lava cooled quickly under relentless wind. Wind that scoured cold stone, then sculpted it and, finally, crumbled it to the bits rock hounds loved. The same wind that once lifted streams of Cheyenne/Arapaho hair also parted clumps of it from the shoulders of bison, telling each when the other was near.

She had noticed the mineral smell all day and now, finished with grading papers and making decorations, she checked the showgirl sky for a repeat performance. But it was over. Just some lilac shapes running after a Day-Glo sun.

Her father had gone to bed early, exhausted from the monologue he had delivered at the supper table about the gas station he was planning. Eagle Oil was encouraging him—no use to talk to the big oil companies. Deek and Steward were interested in approving the loan, provided he could persuade somebody to sell him the property. So the question was where. Across from Anna’s store? Good spot, but Holy Redeemer might not think so. North, then? Next to Sargeant’s Feed and Seed? There would be plenty of customers—nobody would have to travel ninety miles for gasoline or keep tanks of it where they lived. The roads? Something might be done to the two dirt ones that extended south and north of Ruby’s paved road to meet the county route. If he secured the franchise, the county might tarmac them both. It would be a problem, though, trying to get local people to agree to petition for it—the old ones would put up a fight. They liked being off the county road, accessible only to the lost and the knowledgeable. “But think on it, Patsy, just think on it. I could fix cars, engines; sell tires, batteries, fan belts. Soda pop too. Something Anna don’t stock. No point in getting her riled up.”

Patricia nodded. A very good idea, she thought, like all of his ideas. His veterinary practice (illegal—he had no license—but who knew or cared enough to drive a hundred miles to help Wisdom Poole yank on a foal stuck in its mother?); his butcher business (bring him the slaughtered steer—he’d skin, butcher, carve and refrigerate it for you); and of course the ambulance/mortuary business. Because he had wanted to be, studied to be, a doctor, most of his enterprises had to do with operating on the sick or dead. The gas station idea was the first nonsurgical proposal she could remember (though his eyes did fire when he spoke of taking apart engines). She wished he had been a doctor, had been accepted in a medical school. Chances are her mother would be alive today. Maybe not. Maybe he would have been away at Meharry instead of the mortuary school when Delia died.

Pat climbed the stairs to her bedroom and decided to while away the rest of the evening on her history project, or rather what used to be a history project but was nothing of the sort now. It began as a gift to the citizens of Ruby—a collection of family trees; the genealogies of each of the fifteen families. Upside-down trees, the trunks sticking in the air, the branches sloping down. When the trees were completed, she had begun to supplement the branches of who begat whom with notes: what work they did, for example, where they lived, to what church they belonged. Some of the nicer touches (“Was Missy Rivers, wife of Thomas Blackhorse, born near the Mississippi River? Her name seems to suggest…”) she had gleaned from her students’ autobiographical compositions. Not anymore. Parents complained about their children being asked to gossip, to divulge what could be private information, secrets, even. After that, most of her notes came from talking to people, asking to see Bibles and examining church records. Things got out of hand when she asked to see letters and marriage certificates. The women narrowed their eyes before smiling and offering to freshen her coffee. Invisible doors closed, and the conversation turned to weather. But she didn’t want or need any further research. The trees still required occasional alterations—births, marriages, deaths—but her interest in the supplementary notes increased as the notes did, and she gave up all pretense to objective comment. The project became unfit for any eyes except her own. It had reached the point where the small
m
period was a joke, a dream, a violation of law that had her biting her thumbnail in frustration. Who were these women who, like her mother, had only one name? Celeste, Olive, Sorrow, Ivlin, Pansy. Who were these women with generalized last names? Brown, Smith, Rivers, Stone, Jones. Women whose identity rested on the men they married—if marriage applied: a Morgan, a Flood, a Blackhorse, a Poole, a Fleetwood. Dovey had let her have the Morgan Bible for weeks, but it was the twenty minutes she spent looking at the Blackhorse Bible that convinced her that a new species of tree would be needed to go further, to record accurately the relationships among the fifteen families of Ruby, their ancestors in Haven and, further back, in Mississippi and Louisiana. A voluntary act to fill empty hours had become intensive labor streaked with the bad feelings that ride the skin like pollen when too much about one’s neighbors is known. The town’s official story, elaborated from pulpits, in Sunday school classes and ceremonial speeches, had a sturdy public life. Any footnotes, crevices or questions to be put took keen imagination and the persistence of a mind uncomfortable with oral histories. Pat had wanted proof in documents where possible to match the stories, and where proof was not available she interpreted—freely but, she thought, insightfully because she alone had the required emotional distance. She alone would figure out why a line was drawn through Ethan Blackhorse’s name in the Blackhorse Bible and what the heavy ink blot hid next to Zechariah’s name in the Morgan Bible. Her father told her some things, but he refused to talk about other things. Girlfriends like Kate and Anna were open, but older women—Dovey, Soane and Lone DuPres—hinted the most while saying the least. “Oh, I think those brothers had a disagreement of some kind.” That’s all Soane would say about the crossed-out name of her great-uncle. And not another word.

There were nine large intact families who made the original journey, who were thrown out and cast away in Fairly, Oklahoma, and went on to found Haven. Their names were legend: Blackhorse, Morgan, Poole, Fleetwood, Beauchamp, Cato, Flood and both DuPres families. With their siblings, wives and children, they were seventy-nine or eighty-one in all (depending on whether the two stolen children were counted). Along with them came fragments of other families: a sister and a brother, four cousins, a river of aunts and great-aunts shepherding the children of their dead sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews. Stories about these fragments, which made up some fifty more, surfaced in the writing compositions of Pat’s students, the gossip and recollections at picnics, church dinners and woman talk over chores and hair preparation. Grandmothers sitting on the floor while a granddaughter scratched their scalps liked to reminisce aloud. Then bits of tales emerged like sparks lighting the absences that hovered over their childhoods and the shadows that dimmed their maturity. Anecdotes marked the spaces that had sat with them at the campfire. Jokes limned the mementos—a ring, a pocket watch—they had clamped in their fists while they slept and the descriptions of the clothes they had worn: too big shoes that belonged to a brother; the shawl of a great-aunt; the lace-trimmed bonnet of a younger sister. They talked about the orphans, males and females aged twelve to sixteen, who spotted the travelers and asked to join, and the two toddlers they simply snatched up because the circumstances in which the children were found wouldn’t let them do otherwise. Another eight. So about one hundred and fifty-eight total completed the journey.

When they got to the outskirts of Fairly, it was agreed that Drum Blackhorse, Rector Morgan and his brothers, Pryor and Shepherd, would announce themselves, while the others waited with Zechariah, who was too lame by then to stand unaided and straight in front of unknown men whose respect he would have demanded and whose pity would have broken him in two. His foot was shot through—by whom or why nobody knew or admitted, for the point of the story seemed to be that when the bullet entered he neither cried out nor limped away. It was that wound that forced him to stay behind and let his friend and his sons speak in his stead. It proved, however, to be a blessing because he missed witnessing the actual Disallowing; and missed hearing disbelievable words formed in the mouths of men to other men, men like them in all ways but one. Afterwards the people were no longer nine families and some more. They became a tight band of wayfarers bound by the enormity of what had happened to them. Their horror of whites was convulsive but abstract. They saved the clarity of their hatred for the men who had insulted them in ways too confounding for language: first by excluding them, then by offering them staples to exist in that very exclusion. Everything anybody wanted to know about the citizens of Haven or Ruby lay in the ramifications of that one rebuff out of many. But the ramifications of those ramifications were another story.

Pat went to the window and raised it. Her mother’s grave lay at the edge of the yard. The wind soughed as though trying to dislodge sequins from the black crepe sky. Lilac bushes swished the side of the house. The mineral trace was overcome by the smell of supper food in the air. Pat closed the window, returned to her desk to prepare for another entry in her log.

Arnette and K.D., married last April, were expecting a child next March. Or so said Lone DuPres, who ought to know. Lone was one of the stolen babies. Fairy DuPres had noticed her sitting quiet as a rock outside the door of a sod house. The sight of the silent child in a filthy shift could have remained just one more lonely picture they came across, except that the desolation about the place was unforgiving. Fairy was fifteen then and bullheaded. She and Missy Rivers went to investigate. Inside was the dead mother and not a piece of bread in sight. Missy groaned before she spit. Fairy said, “God damn it. ’Scuse me, Lord,” and picked the baby up. When they told the others what they’d found, seven men reached for their shovels: Drum Blackhorse, his sons Thomas and Peter, Rector Morgan, Able Flood, Brood Poole, Sr., and Nathan DuPres’ father, Juvenal. While they dug, Fairy fed the baby water-soaked meal cake. Praise Compton tore her underskirt to wrap around it. Fulton Best fashioned a sturdy cross. Zechariah, flanked by two of his boys, Shepherd and Pryor, and resting his ruined foot on its heel, delivered a burial prayer. His daughters Loving, Ella and Selanie gathered pink yarrow for the grave. There was a serious discussion about what to do with the child—where to place her—because the men seemed adamant about not adding a half-starved baby to their own quarter-starved ones. Fairy put up such a fight she wore them down and then argued with Bitty Cato over the name. Fairy won that, too, and named the baby Lone because that’s how they found her. And Lone she still was for she never married, and when Fairy, who raised her and taught her everything she came to know about midwifery, died, Lone slipped right in and took over the birthing for everybody except now Arnette was insisting on going to the hospital in Demby to give birth. It cut Lone to the quick (she still believed that decent women had their babies at home and saloon women delivered in hospitals), but she knew the Fleetwoods hadn’t given up on thinking she was partly responsible for Sweetie and Jeff’s children, in spite of the fact that she had delivered thirty-two healthy babies to doing-just-fine mothers since the last broken Fleetwood baby was delivered. So she said nothing except that Arnette’s time would be March of ’75.

Pat located the Morgan file and went to the limb that, so far, contained one line:

Coffee Smith (aka K.D. [as in Kentucky Derby]) m. Arnette Fleetwood

She wondered again who was that boy Ruby Morgan married? An army buddy of her brothers, it was said. But from where? His first name, Coffee, was the same as Zechariah’s before he changed it to run for lieutenant governor; his last name was as generic as you could get. He was killed in Europe, so nobody got to know him well, not even his wife. You could tell from his photograph there wasn’t a brush of Private Smith in his son. K.D. was a mirror of Blackhorse and Morgan blood.

There wasn’t much space beneath the K.D.–Arnette entry, but she thought they probably wouldn’t need more. If it lived, the baby they were expecting would certainly be an only child. Arnette’s mother had only two children, one of whom had fathered only defectives. In addition, these later Morgans were not as prolific as the earlier ones. They were not like