River, cross my heart (7 page)

Some women who were well established told Alice she was being foolish to pass up live-in work. They said the good families would only want a colored woman who was willing to live in and wear a uniform. You could expect a good pay and tips and holidays from these families. But you had to live on premises. The "best" families expected it. They wanted it. They required it.

Some lucky women worked and lived in a place where their man worked too. The luckiest ones, it looked to Ina and Alice, were the ones who worked out and came home to their children at night. But days work could be hard to get at times and often not regular enough. The pay was lower too. Oftentimes the families that couldn't afford a complete live-in staff, the ones that used day workers, were the ones who lived above their true means and might come up short on payday. But Alice and Ina decided that they would risk it in order to come home to their own place at night.

Alexis St. Pierre considered Alice attractive, for a colored woman. She was not thick or plain or blue-black. Alexis, Mrs. Douglas St. Pierre, preferred a yellow or medium-brown colored woman to work in her house because she thought dark-black colored people were difficult to communicate with. It

was sometimes difficult to discern their reaction to one's words; their very dark faces appeared so dense. The slightly brown or yellow maids seemed more amenable. Alexis especially liked Alice because she was not fat, only pleasantly round and filled out.

Alice had never wanted to work solely for one woman. But Alexis St. Pierre had been gentle and persistent in her request. She'd said she would fix a good weekly rate and Alice would never be obliged to stay late. She'd said she would hire out for parties. Taking care o( children would be unnecessary because she and Douglas were never going to have children. Alexis had told Alice that she would have half a day off on Saturday and all day Sunday because Douglas was Catholic and believed that no one should work on Sunday. She'd said airily that Alice should take the silk kimono Douglas had given her for her last birthday because it was the wrong color for her but would be just right for Alice. This gift had sealed the bargain. Alice would come to work for Alexis and Douglas and work for them only.

Alice's sudden, tragic loss was confusing to Alexis. It was hard to know how to respond. Alexis had known the child. She had seen both of Alice's girls briefly. She recalled them perched on the top step oi the back porch. The day she saw them, they had been chattering like magpies and had started when she opened the screen door and walked onto the porch. She had been surprised by them too. She was, perhaps, more surprised by them than they were by her. Oddly, they hadn't looked like they could be Alice's children and Alexis had had to question herself as to what she had expected. They sat that day on the top step like two small brown birds — Alice's two.

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When Alexis looked into Alice's face the first morning she returned to work after Clara's death, Alexis knew that it was ridiculous to suppose that this tragedy would roll off her easily. She was ashamed that she'd caught herself thinking like some old Virginia planter about how "nigger women whelp like dogs and care no more about their pups than a bitch." The tale was told on Alice's face — in her eyes. This woman had been to the other side of grief and might not be back to stay—not yet.

"I can work some. I'll work some, then go home." Alice looked levelly at Alexis St. Pierre and spoke without polite preamble or dissembling. Alice did general straightening and dusting. She faltered only once—pausing to swipe tears from her face as she removed, dusted, and replaced the framed photographs oi Douglas's and Alexis's families. Before leaving at midday, Alice plucked a chicken and washed up the dishes. Alexis assured Alice that she could put the chicken on to cook herself. As Alice left, she paused with her hand on the knob of the screen door and turned back toward Alexis. She let her eyes and cheeks suggest a smile.

Leaving her own house the next day, Alice said, "Willie, walk up past Miz St. Pierre's. Tell her I'm not coming today. I can't come today. I'll catch up tomorrow."

She walked out o( the house with nothing in her hands. Her arms, unaccustomed to idleness, weren't content to hang at her sides but looped and twisted behind her back. She would have looked like someone out only to stroll if one could imagine that a woman like her had time to stroll. Her face was placid and she walked as if she had no destination. But her

mind was on the spot — her mind was on the Three Sisters. There was a breeze that morning and the wind billowed her dress intermittently.

The scent oi the air changed where the road sloped down to the river. The air was gauzy, absorbent. The moisture held on to every fragrance. The odors were strong on the path that ran alongside the river. They were odors unknown to Alice. She could not pick out specific things causing the aromas. She felt as though she were wading through their thickness.

The Potomac was a sullen battleship gray. And it was still, leaden. The surface appeared impenetrable. It would not be possible to swim through this mass—not even for a swimmer.

Alice walked along the path her daughters had taken on that day. She felt drawn along to complete a task of mothering by putting her feet into the same spots they had taken the day Clara died. She wanted to complete the picture so she could put it alongside what else she knew about the events of that day. She would review the pictures of what she was seeing and what had been described to her and then she'd know more of what had happened.

She imagined the day. She put aside the thoughts of how the mother would wish to see her two girls and saw them as the children they must have been. They would have been naively misbehaving, following the unexamined, unconscious urges of children. Knowing so little about fear and danger, they would have been simply walking.

Johnnie Mae had taken to water like a tadpole. The sizable stream a quarter mile behind Old Man Walker's place, near Marabel, North Carolina, was enough of a waterway to float a raft. Rafting had been the way he brought his crops to market in the older days. Alice's papa had a habit oi swim-

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ming the width of his stream for pleasure and his constitutional. Before Johnnie Mae learned to walk, Old Man Walker swam the stream with her tucked under one arm. He'd stroke with his free arm and grunt and spit water in front of him. Johnnie Mae had floated along, skimming the surface of the water, held up by her grandpa. Instinctively she kept her eyes wide open and her little arms and legs stroking. She and Grandpa would dog-paddle out to the center of the stream. Johnnie Mae believed for all the world that she was towing Grandpa. Old Man Walker laughed out loud and wide. "The squaw's baby can swim. She's a natural swimmer." The water was thrilling to her. Her baby heart pumped like forty — pumped as if the force that propelled her through the water was of her own devising.

Alice had always been a slight bit afraid o{ water, had not taken to it like Papa and the boys. She and her sisters had never followed the urge to swim in their papa's stream. The boys and Papa took a lusty thrill in the water and had made a particularly masculine exercise of it. Alice had no particular reason to fear the water. She'd never come close to drowning because she'd never even tried to swim. Fear depends on a certain knowledge, however incomplete, of the dread consequences of an action. Children are unafraid of the fishhook until they have once snagged their hand. Forever after they've got some reaction to it: wariness, caution, distaste, some something that keeps them from getting snagged again. Alice had never been afraid of water because she'd never put herself at the mercy of it. But she was leery of it. Johnnie Mae—was she scared of water? Had she ever been? Didn't even Clara's drowning make her frightened?

Clara's footsteps would have been smaller, softer than

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Johnnie Mae's or the other girls'. The branches that slapped at Alice's rib cage as she passed by would have slapped at Clara's cheeks. The branches would have stung her face and she would have stifled her discomfort so as not to be left behind by the others. Threading through brambles at the bank, Alice was surprised at how difficult it was to find and keep to the path.

She avoided the edge of the river. She was frightened of the Potomac. She felt the need to be protective of her own life. If she'd been there the day Clara drowned, would she have leapt into the water to save her? If it had been only the two of them? If there had been no one else near who could have swum to Clara, would she have gone into the water? Frightened and unable to swim? Would she have gone with Clara rather than stood on the shore? Would she have told herself, in the split seconds she would have had to decide, that she had another daughter to live for—a husband, too— and others?

Alice shivered and her shoulders rose to touch her ear-lobes. In truth, Johnnie Mae had done — the other girls who were there told it — what she, Clara's mother, could not. Johnnie Mae had dived and dived and tried to save Clara. That, with all her fears and foibles, Alice could never have done.

Always says "Clara" now when she talks about her. She says "Clara" now. She doesn't dare call her "Rat," even in her mind. She doesn't dare whisper "Rat." Her mama would tan her blue and boil her in oil if she heard her say "Rat" now. She wishes she could get her jaws to say it. She wishes she could hear herself say "Rat" out loud. She doesn't even sound like herself when she says "Clara" sometimes. It feels like she's talking about somebody else, or that somebody other than herself is doing the talking.

"I think I've forgot her. But if you remember that you forgot somebody—or come real close—then you've caught yourself in time."

Rat was the perfect name for her. Clara was too big a name anyway. Rat is what you get from Clara if you turn it around on the page when you write the letters. Mouse was more like what she acted like, but you can't get that from turning the letters around and dropping some and adding a tail. You get Rat and that's her — Clara the rat, Clara the

tattletale, Clara that couldn't keep her mouth closed when you wanted her to and couldn't open her mouth to say anything when she was supposed to.

Johnnie Mae saw Clara Bow in the pictures at the Blue Mouse Theater, and Clara Bow had skin as white as snow-flakes. Clara, when she was a little baby, was tiny and pecan brown. But Mama had called the baby Clara, and the sound blended with her sweet skin smell and her little baby cuteness.

Rat was the name Johnnie Mae gave her. Her mama hated that name because she hated rats. Mama hated them because she was scared of them. Some of the houses they'd rented in Georgetown had rats. Mama wasn't used to them. She said that in the country all they had were field mice plus a whole lot of other creatures. In the country they had wild game like possums, snakes, woodchucks, snapping turtles, but not these city rats. The city rats came up to the house bold and dirty and low to the ground. And the city rats weren't afraid of people either.

One evening at dusk Mama was cleaning fish Papa had brought from a fishing trip he had gone on with Mr. Birdaxe and Mr. Pud Allen and some two or three other men he called "the boys." They had gone up by the conduit to drop lines. Mama was gutting the catch on the back porch steps of the house they'd lived in on Grace Street. Everything about that house was rickety and it kept a smell of mildew.

Johnnie Mae handed fish out of the bucket to Mama and put the cleaned ones in another pan. The pail Mama was dropping the guts and heads into was sitting one step below the step she was sitting on. Mama chopped off the heads with the same hatchet she used to chop off the heads of wrung chickens. She lay the fish flat on the step, whacked off the

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head in one clean motion, and pushed the head off the step into the basin with the flat of the hatchet. After a while the blood-and-guts odor got thick in the air and a big, wide rat swaggered up through the yard toward them. He walked out in the open, slowly. He wasn't one bit afraid of anyone. He walked toward where Mama was sitting, stopped about four feet away, and locked eyes with her. There was absolutely no fear in the rat. Somebody's poison had made him cocky. Mama was as stiff in the back as the porch rail. She was scared. Anybody who knew her would know it by the way she held her bottom lip, as if she needed to clamp down to keep from screaming out. She told Johnnie Mae to get up slowly and walk back into the house and close the screen door. Then she rose from the step and sat in the chair the girl had been sitting in. She placed the hatchet in her lap and sat completely still in the chair. She waited for the rat to move. He didn't. He stared at her. After a long wait, the expression in his eyes changed from pure aggression to desperation. The rat's nose twitched in the direction of the fish heads floating in the pail. Mama said later that she knew he was rabid or had just gotten some poison because of the way he eyed that pail. He was mad with thirst and would likely attack anyone between him and the pail. Mama crossed her hands over the hatchet without moving her arms. She slowed her breathing and must have lulled the rat into thinking she was frozen in fear. When he lunged straight for the fish heads, she raised the hatchet up and brought it down on the rat's outstretched neck. The hatchet split him open and got stuck in the step. Mama sat back in the chair and stared at the split-open rat and the fish guts dripping down the porch steps. "Lord have mercy," she said. After a little while she got a bucket of water,

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washed down the steps, and cleaned off the hatchet. Then she finished cleaning the rest of the catch.

Later that night Mama told Papa they'd have to move— would have to find a house on higher ground because Grace Street was too close to the river. The rats just came up out of the river.

The Potomac River disgorges a fair number of rats every night into the streets of Georgetown. They skulk along Water Street and exploit swampy, subterranean tunnels to get into basements all through the town. Aunt Ina whispered to Mama and Papa in the kitchen one night that rats had shunned the Potomac for three days after Clara drowned. From a perch at the top of the steps, Johnnie Mae listened to the adults' conversation after they'd sent her off to sleep. Aunt Ina said, in a hushed voice punctuated with "umph, umph," that folks said after Clara's body was drawn out of the river, hundreds of rats — later, thousands of rats it was—had climbed out and stood staring back at the water. Aunt Ina said that someone said—once she said Press Parker, once she said it was Miz Dottie Sham—that it was as if those rats blamed the river and were ashamed to swim in it. Those nasty rats that will skim garbage off the surface of the water, with greasy sludge covering their backs, were thick along the riverbank for three nights after Clara drowned! Aunt Ina told it as absolute fact though it was only hearsay.