Solemn (7 page)

The most decent of them dreamed about it and the most callous of them stayed silently turned on by it. The well was a crime scene with a question mark around it—not a spot of blood but a death. Most stopped using it for even an emergency. It took a senior couple no one ever saw, who had their young nephews come out sometimes to mow their lawn and drain their tanks, to pump it again. They did not know or understand what had gone on. No news trucks showed up for the story. Just one spectacled reporter, in hopes of a statement or exclusive, parked his Volkswagen outside the Hassle trailer. He waited awhile, approached some of the park's residents standing near, got little to no answer, went to the door, knocked, waited, walked round the other side, ran up on two lop rabbits humping, then got back in his car and left. Hall Carter got in touch with Hinckley Springs Water. He convinced all of Singer's it was time to update—payment plans even, for those who couldn't pay for a month at one time. In many ways, the well's neglect signaled the leveling of their neighborhood, a satiation of a wonder that would come back in their lives soon and often. Even with an embarrassment like Gilroy Hassle removed, the fact nothing was done about one of theirs let them know, all in all, time after time, then and now, front and back again, they were always going to be niggers.

Solemn despised she had no telephone inside or nearby or somewhere, to make a call. She would speak properly and importantly to the brown police officer who carried her up from the road. She would testify. She would tell the whole story up and down, in the middle, side to side. But she bit down on that secret, too.

*   *   *

“How you feelin' now?” Bev asked Redvine, pushing a pill into his mouth.

Redvine wasn't right at the moment. For the last couple of days actually, since the shacked-up girl reported the baby in the well. He lay coiled up in a damp white sheet with a cup of tea steam swirling around his head. He had a thumb in his mouth, not sucking it but just jabbing into his jaw. He thought it was a baby's foot, pulled up by his rough hand to tickle and play. But the crib was empty. Landon plopped a shot of whiskey at the teacup, took a slurp from the jug, and went back out into the yard to talk to one of the old church boys turned grown Army man. The man had brought him pamphlets. Solemn sat in the kitchen with a box of crayons and a notebook on the table. She stared out of the window at the man whose face used to be plumper. Now it looked square and stern, like his big light boots come up to his calf. She pulled out mint-green and beige crayons to try to put him down on paper in an outfit she was seeing more and more of these days, but it wasn't working out.

“You never had bad dreams before,” Bev told Redvine. He stared at her like she was a stranger. She scooted to the edge of the couch. She removed his socks, squeezed the toes of one of his feet in both hands. He relaxed and drifted on back: “It's so much commotion around here now, my head is banging and banging … The crib is empty.”

With the police having set foot on Singer's and neighbors standing outside in summer air to speculate and complain, it had been busy. They were all hot and prickly, on edge. Of course they were disturbed by a child—
an innocent child, have mercy
—so neglected and carelessly handled. Drowned. And not one of them heard the scream or did a thing about it. What did that make them? Heathens or monsters or a combination? Well, least they knew who did it. Wasn't nobody on the loose ready to snatch up one of theirs, kicking and screaming with bloodied fingernails at the tip of that there well.

So Solemn heard her parents say.

A white man's feet crunched gravel at their door. Bev and Redvine looked back and forth at each other. She started up, but he shook off his distraction and struggled off from the couch to go see who it was. Solemn put down her crayons and followed him.

“Good day,” the white man said. He gave his hand. Redvine straightened his back and did the same, wondering how much a blue Jeep like this one here now cost a man.

“I'm Brett Singer,” the man said. He was stout, wild hair and cat-green eyes.

“Yes?” Redvine said.

“From Singer's,” the man continued. When Redvine was blank, he said, “You know, the owners of this here land?”

“Oh,” Redvine said. His mind raced. He paid his plot dues that month.

“Yeah, I ain't been around too much. So, you probably know the others more than me. I'm back on with the family business, so might be seeing me from time to time…”

Redvine thought he must be late on his dues, to have a white man come this far out for him. But Bev never missed a beat insofar as bills were concerned. But the crib was empty … Maybe the mail was late, too.

“You get our dues?” Redvine asked.

The young man wiped a stream of sweat from around his temples.

“Oh, well, the office would know about that,” he told Redvine. “I wouldn't know.”

“Well, what can I do for you, sir?”

“I'm just coming along to check on y'all folks out here,” the man told him. “Considering all that's gone on and everything.”

Bev went to the kitchen to listen in. She nodded at the man.

“What's gone on?” Redvine asked him, Solemn watching behind.

Mr. Singer looked shocked.

“Least so far as we're concerned,” Redvine said.

“W-w-ell,” the man stammered, “with the baby and the well and the news, we just checking in with all you folks. Making sure everything's all right.”

In all the six years or so since the Redvines had been out there on those fields, just one of about five dozen trailers or mobile homes or manufactured digs or vans with no hard addresses (and even a few tents once in a while), no one from town or Singer's or anywhere really had ever checked on them before.

“We're fine,” Redvine said. “But we thank you kindly for your concerns.”

“You know the family, the parents?” the man wanted to know.

“We don't know anybody out here,” Redvine answered. “We keep to ourselves.”

The man stood still.

“I don't know what you want me to say,” Redvine said.

“You've said enough,” the man told him. “Glad to hear everything's okay with you.” And the two men braced in a silence Bev's pots and pans broke.

“Take good care.” The man waved at them. Redvine watched the Jeep drive away. Hall Carter pulled up right behind it, with Hinckley water coolers in back of his car.

*   *   *

At the weekend, one week after her daddy got sick and mumbled out of leaving home (even to do the right thing, be good), at this type of event Solemn had never attended and would never again, she noticed her mother did not speak at all to the woman from Singer's, stuck to a front pew with her hair tied up. The women near her looked like witches, dressed in all black with wide hats. Just no brooms and cats roaming the yard.

“Can I go see?”

Bev thought about it and then nodded yes. For her, as a mother, it was too much.

In Solemn's walk up close after the singing and the humming and long talking, the baby's lips looked as if it had just sucked on blueberries or grape freeze pops. It had no rise or fall under a white gown, just a line of buttons in a stretch of fabric as still as the well's surface now. Its eyes were two crusted slits in a head. A line of people stood behind Solemn, connected like one—all leaned on someone, touched somebody's back, held someone's hand, linked another's arm. Solemn knew in her own way what this was. And more important, no one could change it back to what it had been.

A woman with perfume powder spilling out of her dress nudged Solemn forward. The woman had never seen the baby before, but she wanted to keep the line going—maintain the sense of decorum, stave off the breakdowns that would inevitably flow if the show went on for too long. The relatives had driven or bussed in that morning. The fried chicken and pork chop and sweet potato pie smell crept from the basement into the pews. Bev had already said they would not eat there. Just pay respects. Hand fans flicked faster in the attendees' hands. Solemn looked up to see her mama wave her back.

Then the baby said,
What you say?

I gotta hurry up … My mama want me. And this lady behind making it hard for me.

Oh. I don't even know her. They don't know me.

I know you.

I know you, too.

And I saw your daddy, too. I saw him.

You see your own?

What you say?

Solemn rubbed velvet inside the strong bed the baby rested in. The impatient lady behind her was so outwardly so, rude even, eager to see what she had never known the child looked like anyway. So Solemn tapped the baby's claylike hand and moved along.

I said, meet me at the well, okay?

*   *   *

Before, during, and immediately after the baby's funeral, Pearletta exhausted the attention and strength of her family and friends. They couldn't get through to her. Nor could they convince her to leave those six-hundred square feet behind, not even after she paid a few empathizing boys to accordion the baby's side out back into the whole of the trailer—like a second-degree burn healed flat in no time. It was over now. Nothing worked. Not music, church, prayer, money, flowers, baptism offers, covered dishes left at the step, and, most of all, not vacations. Not even to Louisiana, her brother offered her. Oakland, her sister said. Pearletta turned down these offers to come “stay awhile.” Even from her parents—her same childhood bedroom cleaned, cooled, crisped down to lint off the floor. She felt she couldn't be away from where her child spit and played and breathed and learned to walk. She was unsure how to visualize her baby and herself outside the trailer.

So she stayed clenched to their old nest like a leech, her ruminations dug in like tentacles. Least she wasn't the only one being talked about in all of it. There was a God. A courthouse janitor told his nephew (who parked a van in Singer's in lieu of rent) to spread this: “Gilroy came to the courthouse in handcuffs but he walked out in a silk tie.” So least everybody could say they never saw any sad daddy put a good tie on that quick.

All the talk fluttered around her. Nothing worse than losing a child but being blamed for the loss. Other women were the worst. Throughout Bledsoe, the story of “that woman” was spread. Underneath their own maternal crowns, they doubted her.

“You never put no man before your child.”

“She shouldn'a moved all the way out there where cotton used to grow anyway.”

“I wonder if she even loved the poor thang … she never showed it off.”

There were none among them to remove the apprehension shown to any black person who attracted controversy, whites, or public interest. And Pearletta had attracted it all. The smartest thing to do, in their eyes, was to treat Pearletta with the cordial manners they all grew up on. It went quicker that way. Their antidote to mourning, hunger, heartache, dispossession, repossession, a white: it was the same. Treat it like it isn't there.

 

SIX

Just in time for the holidays, the Route 17 gas station achieved a liquor license. Rumor had it there was to be a renaissance of Tudors on the nearby scrapyard's and oil field's abandoned acres, for corporate executives of Jackson to upgrade upon and Southern natives to flock into. The building was to take a few years. The journeymen would like to drink on the job before drinks after work. Pearletta took advantage and started with six-packs of beer. She figured the walk to the gas station to get it and back home would help manage the pouting belly it soon produced. The little girls on pink and yellow bikes with tassels on the handlebars did not bother her. Nor did little boys racetracking twigs and rocks and cat's-eye marbles. Nor did the growing boys who hinted she could buy them beer. It was grown men's pickup trucks careened in and out of the entrance with ample slowdown for her, and women with brown bundles balanced in their arms, and packs of teenagers with phony, immature whispers.

“Hello, Mrs. Hassle … How you doin' out here in this heat?”

None of them ever knew her first name. Only his last one.

“I'm fine … how you?”

“Good. Have a nice day, Mrs. Hassle.”

At home, the Sydney Olympics occupied her—least the part including a muscular Marion Jones, a cornrowed black gal to root for. When the games ended, Pearletta fell in love with Bruce Lee, on DVDs the gas station rented now. She loved to see the young man from Hong Kong drop-kick his assailants and sneak out of hidden corners by early dawn, grunting and shouting and intimidating. Sometimes, with the blinds drawn, she followed him and replicated his moves, like he was an aerobics instructor at a YWCA her mother was devoted to. At the ends of her unpolished toenails were the faces of Gilroy, cops who looked past her when she talked, best friends who forgot her, old flames who burnt out, neighbors who did not hear the spitting and the choking and the gurgling. Sometimes, there was the little family up at top of the heap with a trailer much bigger than hers, daddy and mama and son and pretty girl inside. She drop-kicked all of them and chopped their heads off with her bare hands.

One day, near Thanksgiving, the man called Redvine pulled in with his family. Pearletta was about to cross into the bend of their shared acres long after he would have cut a soft left to head home. His beige Malibu appeared against the dusk sky and gravel road undulated to firmament. The car seemed to be waiting for her, only no one called out to tell her. This was the difference now. People stopped, stared, hesitated, and seemed to have something important to say. But it all wound around the same topic, so there was nothing. She was on Singer's grounds and she was not barefoot with heels hanging from her hands. She was near home. She knew her place.

There car trouble?
Pearletta wondered. She slowed down with the sweaty plastic bag of beer pinching into her wrist. She sped up, wished to offer her help if there was any to offer. To be useful, preoccupied and snatched into sorts.