Paradise (9 page)

His smile was lovely and his voice attractive. “Been riding around looking all over for you. Heard you was out here. Thought you might be still.”

“Who told you that?”

“A friend. Well, a friend of a friend.”

“You mean that hearse dude?”

“Uh huh. Said you changed your mind about getting to the train station.”

“News sure travels fast out here, even if nothing else does.”

“We get around. Wanna go for a ride? Go as fast as you want.”

Gigi licked jam from her thumb and forefinger. She looked to the left toward the garden and thought she saw in the distance a glint of metal or maybe a mirror reflecting light. As from a state trooper’s sunglasses.

“Gimme a minute,” she said. “Change my clothes.”

In the game room she put on a yellow skirt and a dark red top. Then she consulted her astrology chart before stuffing her belongings (and a few souvenirs) in her backpack which she slung into the car’s rear seat.

“Hey,” said K.D. “We just going for a little ride.”

“Yeah,” she answered, “but who knows? I might change my mind again.”

They drove through mile after mile of sky-blue sky. Gigi had not really looked at the scenery from the train windows or the bus. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing out there. But speeding along in the Impala was more like cruising on a DC-10, and the nothing turned out to be sky—unignorable, custom-made, designer sky. Not empty either but full of breath and all the eye was meant for.

“That’s the shortest skirt I ever saw.” He smiled his lovely smile.

“Minis,” said Gigi. “In the real world they’re called miniskirts.”

“Don’t they make people stare at you?”

“Stare. Drive for miles. Have car wrecks. Talk stupid.”

“You must like it. Reckon that’s what they’re for, though.”

“You explain your clothes; I’ll explain mine. Where’d you get those pants, for instance?”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing. Listen, you want to argue, take me back.”

“No. No, I don’t want to argue; I just want to…ride.”

“Yeah? How fast?”

“Told you. Fast as I can.”

“How long?”

“Long as you want.”

“How far?”

“All the way.”

The desert couple was big, Mikey said. From any angle you looked, he said, they took up the sky, moving, moving. Liar, thought Gigi; not this sky. This here sky was bigger than everything, including a woman with her breasts on a tray.

When Mavis pulled into the driveway, near the kitchen door, she slammed the brakes so hard her packages slid from the seat and fell beneath the dashboard. The figure sitting in the garden’s red chair was totally naked. She could not see the face under the hat’s brim but she knew it wore no sunglasses. A mere month she’d been away, and for three weeks of that time couldn’t wait to get back. Something must have happened, she thought. To Mother. To Connie. At the squeal of the brakes, the sunning figure did not move. Only when she slammed the Cadillac door did the person sit up and push back the hat. Calling out, “Connie! Connie?” Mavis hurried toward the garden’s edge. “Who the hell are you? Where’s Connie?”

The naked girl yawned and scratched her pubic hair. “Mavis?” she asked.

Relieved to learn she was known, spoken of, at least, Mavis lowered her voice. “What are you doing out here like that? Where’s Connie?”

“Like what? She’s inside.”

“You’re naked!”

“Yeah. So? You want the cigar?”

“Do they know?” Mavis glanced toward the house.

“Lady,” said Gigi, “are you looking at something you never saw before or something you don’t have or you a clothes freak or what?”

“There you are.” Connie came down the steps, her arms wide, toward Mavis. “I missed you.” They hugged and Mavis surrendered to the thump of the woman’s heart against her own.

“Who is she, Connie, and where are her clothes?”

“Oh, that’s little Grace. She came the day after Mother died.”

“Died? When?”

“Seven days now. Seven.”

“But I brought the things. I have it all in the car.”

“No use. Not for her anyway. My heart’s all scrunched, but now you back I feel like cooking.”

“You haven’t been eating?” Mavis shot a cold glance at Gigi.

“A bit. Funeral foods. But now I’ll cook fresh.”

“There’s plenty,” said Gigi. “We haven’t even touched the—”

“You put some clothes on!”

“You kiss my ass!”

“Do it, Grace,” said Connie. “Go, like a good girl. Cover yourself we love you just the same.”

“She ever hear of sunbathing?”

“Go on now.”

Gigi went, exaggerating the switch of both the cheeks she had offered Mavis.

“What rock did she crawl out from under?” Mavis asked.

“Hush,” said Connie. “Soon you’ll like her.”

No way, Mavis thought. No way at all. Mother’s gone, but Connie’s okay. I’ve been here almost three years, and this house is where we are. Us. Not her.

They did everything but slap each other, and finally they did that. What postponed the inevitable were loves forlorn and a very young girl in too tight clothes tapping on the screen door.

“You have to help me,” she said. “You have to. I’ve been raped and it’s almost August.”

Only part of that was true.

SENECA

S
omething was scratching on the pane. Again. Dovey turned over on her stomach, refusing to look out of the window each time she heard it. He wasn’t there. He never came at night. Deliberately she drove her mind onto everyday things. What would she fix for supper tomorrow?

Not much point to garden peas. May as well use canned. Not a taste bud in Steward’s mouth could tell the difference. Blue Boy packed in his cheek for twenty years first narrowed his taste to a craving for spices, then reduced it altogether to a single demand for hot pepper.

When they got married, Dovey was sure she could never cook well enough to suit the twin known to be pickier than his brother, Deek. Back from the war, both men were hungry for down-home food, but dreaming of it for three years had raised their expectations, exaggerated the possibilities of lard making biscuits lighter than snow, the responsibility sharp cheese took on in hominy. When they were discharged and back home, Deek hummed with pleasure as he sucked sweet marrow from hocks or crunched chicken bones to powder. But Steward remembered everything differently. Shouldn’t the clove be down in the tissue, not just sitting on top of the ham? And the chicken-fried steak—Vidalia onions or Spanish?

On her wedding day, Dovey had stood facing the flowered wallpaper, her back to the window so her sister, Soane, could see better. Dovey held up the hem of her slip while Soane drew the seams. The little brush tickled the backs of her legs, but she stood perfectly still. There were no silk stockings in Haven or the world in 1949, but to get married obviously bare-legged mocked God and the ceremony.

“I don’t expect he’ll be satisfied at table,” Dovey told her sister.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. He compliments my cooking, then suggests how to improve it next time.”

“Hold still, Dovey.”

“Deek doesn’t do that to you, does he?”

“Not that. He’s picky other ways. But I wouldn’t worry about it if I was you. If he’s satisfied in bed, the table won’t mean a thing.”

They laughed then, and Soane had to do a whole seam over.

Now the difficulty that loomed in 1949 had been solved by tobacco. It didn’t matter whether her peas were garden fresh or canned. Convent peppers, hot as hellfire, did all the cooking for her. The trouble it took to cultivate peas was wasted. A teaspoon of sugar and a plop of butter in canned ones would do nicely, since the bits of purple-black pepper he would sprinkle over them bombed away any quiet flavor. Take late squash, for example.

Almost always, these nights, when Dovey Morgan thought about her husband it was in terms of what he had lost. His sense of taste one example of the many she counted. Contrary to his (and all of Ruby’s) assessment, the more Steward acquired, the more visible his losses. The sale of his herd at 1958’s top dollar accompanied his defeat in the statewide election for church Secretary because of his outspoken contempt for the schoolchildren sitting in in that drugstore in Oklahoma City. He had even written a hateful letter to the women who organized the students. His position had not surprised her, since ten years earlier he’d called Thurgood Marshall a “stir-up Negro” for handling the NAACP’s segregation suit in Norman. In 1962 the natural gas drilled to ten thousand feet on the ranch filled his pockets but shrunk their land to a toy ranch, and he lost the trees that had made it so beautiful to behold. His hairline and his taste buds faltered over time. Small losses that culminated with the big one: in 1964, when he was forty, Fairy’s curse came true: they learned neither could ever have children.

Now, almost ten years later, he had “cleaned up,” as he put it, in a real estate deal in Muskogee, and Dovey didn’t have to wonder what else he would lose now because he was already in a losing battle with Reverend Misner over words attached to the lip of the Oven. An argument fueled in part, Dovey thought, by what nobody talked about: young people in trouble or acting up behind every door. Arnette, home from college, wouldn’t leave her bed. Harper Jury’s boy, Menus, drunk every weekend since he got back from Vietnam. Roger’s granddaughter, Billie Delia, disappeared into thin air. Jeff’s wife, Sweetie, laughing, laughing at jokes no one made. K.D.’s mess with that girl living out at the Convent. Not to speak of the sass, the pout, the outright defiance of some of the others—the ones who wanted to name the Oven “such-and-such place” and who had decided that the original words on it were something that enraged Steward and Deek. Dovey had talked to her sister (and sister-in-law) about it; to Mable Fleetwood; to Anna Flood; to a couple of women in the Club. Opinions were varied, confusing, even incoherent, because feelings ran so high over the matter. Also because some young people, by snickering at Miss Esther’s finger memory, had insulted entire generations preceding them. They had not suggested, politely, that Miss Esther may have been mistaken; they howled at the notion of remembering invisible words you couldn’t even read by tracing letters you couldn’t pronounce.

“Did she see them?” asked the sons.

“Better than that!” shouted the fathers. “She felt them, touched them, put her finger on them!”

“If she was blind, sir, we could believe her. That’d be like braille. But some five-year-old kid who couldn’t read her own tombstone if she climbed out of her grave and stood in front of it?”

The twins frowned. Fleet, thinking of his mother-in-law’s famous generosity, leapt out of the pew and had to be held back.

The Methodists, early on, had smiled at the dissension among the Baptists. The Pentecostals laughed out loud. But not for long. Young members in their own churches began to voice opinions about the words. Each congregation had people who were among or related to the fifteen families to leave Haven and start over. The Oven didn’t belong to any one denomination; it belonged to all, and all were asked to show up at Calvary. To discuss it, Reverend Misner said. The weather was cool, garden scents strong, and when they assembled at seven-thirty the atmosphere was pleasant, people simply curious. And it remained so right through Misner’s opening remarks. Maybe the young folks were nervous, but when they spoke, starting with Luther Beauchamp’s sons, Royal and Destry, their voices were so strident the women, embarrassed, looked down at their pocketbooks; shocked, the men forgot to blink.

It would have been better for everyone if the young people had spoken softly, acknowledged their upbringing as they presented their views. But they didn’t want to discuss; they wanted to instruct.

“No ex-slave would tell us to be scared all the time. To ‘beware’ God. To always be ducking and diving, trying to look out every minute in case He’s getting ready to throw something at us, keep us down.”

“You say ‘sir’ when you speak to men,” said Sargeant Person.

“Sorry, sir. But what kind of message is that? No ex-slave who had the guts to make his own way, build a town out of nothing, could think like that. No ex-slave—”

Deacon Morgan cut him off. “That’s my grandfather you’re talking about. Quit calling him an ex-slave like that’s all he was. He was also an ex–lieutenant governor, an ex-banker, an ex-deacon and a whole lot of other exes, and he wasn’t making his own way; he was part of a whole group making their own way.”

Having caught Reverend Misner’s eyes, the boy was firm. “He was born in slavery times, sir; he was a slave, wasn’t he?”

“Everybody born in slavery time wasn’t a slave. Not the way you mean it.”

“There’s just one way to mean it, sir,” said Destry.

“You don’t know
what
you’re talking about!”

“None of them do! Don’t know jackshit!” shouted Harper Jury.

“Whoa, whoa!” Reverend Misner interrupted. “Brothers. Sisters. We called this meeting in God’s own house to try and find—”

“One of His houses,” snarled Sargeant.

“All right, one of His houses. But whichever one, He demands respect from those who are in it. Am I right or am I right?”

Harper sat down. “I apologize for the language. To Him,” he said, pointing upward.

“That might please Him,” said Misner. “Might not. Don’t limit your respect to Him, Brother Jury. He cautions every which way against it.”

“Reverend.” The Reverend Pulliam stood up. He was a dark, wiry man—white-haired and impressive. “We have a problem here. You, me. Everybody. The problem is with the way some of us talk. The grown-ups, of course, should use proper language. But the young people—what they say is more like backtalk than talk. What we’re here for is—”

Royal Beauchamp actually interrupted him, the Reverend! “What is talk if it’s not ‘back’? You all just don’t want us to talk at all. Any talk is ‘backtalk’ if you don’t agree with what’s being said…. Sir.”

Everybody was so stunned by the boy’s brazenness, they hardly heard what he said.

Pulliam, dismissing the possibility that Roy’s parents—Luther and Helen Beauchamp—were there, turned slowly to Misner. “Reverend, can’t you keep that boy still?”

“Why would I want to?” asked Misner. “We’re here not just to talk but to listen too.”

The gasps were more felt than heard.

Pulliam narrowed his eyes and was about to answer when Deek Morgan left the row and stood in the aisle. “Well, sir, I have listened, and I believe I have heard as much as I need to. Now, you all listen to me. Real close. Nobody, I mean nobody, is going to change the Oven or call it something strange. Nobody is going to mess with a thing our grandfathers built. They made each and every brick one at a time with their own hands.” Deek looked steadily at Roy. “They dug the clay—not you. They carried the hod—not you.” He turned his head to include Destry, Hurston and Caline Poole, Lorcas and Linda Sands. “They mixed the mortar—not a one of you. They made good strong brick for that oven when their own shelter was sticks and sod. You understand what I’m telling you? And we respected what they had gone through to do it. Nothing was handled more gently than the bricks those men—men, hear me? not slaves, ex or otherwise—the bricks those men made. Tell, them, Sargeant, how delicate was the separation, how careful we were, how we wrapped them, each and every one. Tell them, Fleet. You, Seawright, you, Harper, you tell him if I’m lying. Me and my brother lifted that iron. The two of us. And if some letters fell off, it wasn’t due to us because we packed it in straw like it was a mewing lamb. So understand me when I tell you nobody is going to come along some eighty years later claiming to know better what men who went through hell to learn knew. Act short with me all you want, you in long trouble if you think you can disrespect a row you never hoed.”

Twenty varieties of “amen” italicized Deek’s pronouncement. The point he’d made would have closed off further argument if Misner had not said:

“Seems to me, Deek, they are respecting it. It’s because they do know the Oven’s value that they want to give it new life.”

The mutter unleashed by this second shift to the young people’s position rose to a roar, which subsided only to hear how the antagonists responded.

“They don’t want to give it nothing. They want to kill it, change it into something they made up.”

“It’s our history too, sir. Not just yours,” said Roy.

“Then act like it. I just told you. That Oven already has a history. It doesn’t need you to fix it.”

“Wait now, Deek,” said Richard Misner. “Think what’s been said. Forget naming—naming the Oven. What’s at issue is clarifying the motto.”

“Motto? Motto? We talking command!” Reverend Pulliam pointed an elegant finger at the ceiling. “‘Beware the Furrow of His Brow.’ That’s what it says clear as daylight. That’s not a suggestion; that’s an order!”

“Well, no. It’s not clear as daylight,” said Misner. “It says ‘…the Furrow of His Brow.’ There is no ‘Beware’ on it.”

“You weren’t there! Esther was! And you weren’t here, either, at the beginning! Esther was!” Arnold Fleetwood’s right hand shook with warning.

“She was a baby. She could have been mistaken,” said Misner.

Now Fleet joined Deek in the aisle. “Esther never made a mistake of that nature in her life. She knew all there was to know about Haven and Ruby too. She visited us before we had a road. She named this town, dammit. ’Scuse me, ladies.”

Destry, looking strained and close to tears, held up his hand and asked, “Excuse me, sir. What’s so wrong about ‘Be the Furrow’? ‘Be the Furrow of His Brow’?”

“You can’t be God, boy.” Nathan DuPres spoke kindly as he shook his head.

“It’s not being Him, sir; it’s being His instrument, His justice. As a race—”

“God’s justice is His alone. How you going to be His instrument if you don’t do what He says?” asked Reverend Pulliam. “You have to obey Him.”

“Yes, sir, but we
are
obeying Him,” said Destry. “If we follow His commandments, we’ll be His voice, His retribution. As a people—”

Harper Jury silenced him. “It says ‘Beware.’ Not ‘Be.’ Beware means ‘Look out. The power is mine. Get used to it.’”

“‘Be’ means you putting Him aside and you the power,” said Sargeant.

“We
are
the power if we just—”

“See what I mean? See what I mean? Listen to that! You hear that, Reverend? That boy needs a strap. Blasphemy!”

As could have been predicted, Steward had the last word—or at least the words they all remembered as last because they broke the meeting up. “Listen here,” he said, his voice thick and shapely with Blue Boy. “If you, any one of you, ignore, change, take away, or add to the words in the mouth of that Oven, I will blow your head off just like you was a hood-eye snake.”

Dovey Morgan, chilled by her husband’s threat, could only look at the floorboards and wonder what visible shape his loss would take now.

Days later she still hadn’t made up her mind about who or which side was right. And in discussion with others, including Steward, she tended to agree with whomever she was listening to. This matter was one she would bring to her Friend—when he came back to her.