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SMALL GAMES OF CHANCE Jonathan Wesley Bell © 2018, JONATHAN WESLEY BELL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 1928 Plantation Sainte Elisabeth Annunciation Sunday March 25. 9:45 am. Geneva, Alabama Big and black the cast iron skillet slams against the wall. Bam! With that she calls out “damn Annunciation Sunday.” Her message pulses through the shanty like an orgasm. It gives no release. Solidified bacon fat layered the skillet bottom. Most of that slips to the floor in white lard cakes to skid about in pools of drippings. Glancing at the floor May thinks, “damnation, I’ll have to mop the floor again before Cousin Chinless comes.” The angry woman stands at the kitchen sink. She leans forward close to the room’s only window. Although small the window holds a large landscape for her to scrutinize--and scrutinize again--so she’s been doing this for the past several minutes. From the shanty on the rise May scans for her wandering husband. Looking for him down the long sweep of fields. May’s backdrop is kitchen gloom. Kerosene lamp stands dark on the big round table behind her. Wild flowers in a water glass on the table wilt in the murk. Gloom confines the sunshine into an oval tight around her head. Sunlight, extreme, warped by cheap glass. It shimmers down her in a water music motion. She tenses full-frontal to the window frame, letting the cosmos pass over her in its inexorable wasting. White gold on May’s throat, face and hair. May is carved moonstone. Translucent in such strong morning light. Her searching eyes are violets glaciated, radiant. She is a perfect cameo. Announcing to a fleeting rampage in the other room she says, “You in there! I want you to be ancient stoics. Open your minds. Faites attention.” This is spoken to the empty kitchen but loud enough to silence the other room. To herself, “Bon, par hasard fortune rolls the dice and drops me in this shit.” “How come you got a yankee ma who talks crazy?” This taunts her boys. True, hers is a voice unlike any her boys hear. To people around May does sound odd, she knows. With the family or when in public her impeccably proper Academy English flows in a French accent. From childhood this is a music-less speech, an unstressed monotone, no emphasis on first syllables. It comes occasionally seasoned with the salt and pepper of Black Bob’s slave- soldier English. Her large hands motion to the words of her talk just like his. Always to herself May speaks French. May fillips the window glass to frighten away a dispicable Gull. 2 She lives only a seagull mile from the Florida State line. About 30 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. How fantastical to her that it should be such a bountiful land and yet a place acquainted with wickedness. The plantation wicked for more than 100 years. Each day she witnesses some of the evil. Hears of more. Imagines the rest. Such thought brings the amulet to life where it hangs against her body. For reassurance she touches it lightly. It lies hidden under her blouse. The leather bag stirs burrowing deeper into May’s skin, creeping toward the core of her being. Its contents give an infinitesimal rustling in remnants of something become so brittle it has lost all identity and turned mostly to dust. Among her demanding secrets, desiccated and ugly, the amulet is worn at all times. It is her personal bag of protection. Mojo alive. Black Bob’s gift to her. May can do nothing except wait in apprehension for the day to begin. Helpless for GB to appear, get the day started. Get it over and done with—and forgotten, like a child’s memory of abuse. “Where in hell are you! We’ll be late!” Another plume escapes her. Somewhere in a field out there her dream man lurks. Sometimes May wonders if she carries an odor of brimstone. Sulfurous, yellow burning, blue toxic in the air. A stink of her uncontrollable self. Perhaps too of their rank poverty. For emphasis she again sends the skillet blasting against the nearest kitchen surface. Bam. Bam. Bam. Three times for good measure, murdering the unseen. From the other room comes, “Maman, don’t break the window! Remember last time? Papa got real mad.” To this she calls back, “Don’t fret, dear, this time I missed the glass just for you. And it is ‘papa became very angry.’” Turning from the window view, for a mere mote of time, May sheepishly regards the wretched kitchen hoping there is indeed no serious damage. One plate and two saucers lie broken on the floor at her feet. Poverty crockery, she sniffs, then gives her low deep laugh. “C’est bon, you wouldn’t have won any prize.” Down the sprawling cotton, peanut and sugar cane fields of this once grand plantation she tracks GB with a regard piercing as a wolf’s. Plantation manager? Ha. Grand title for a dead end. Shack bully was more like it. May even scrutinizes the festering quarters where the field hands try to live. Although it being Sunday she knows he’s not down there. The workers are taking their one free morning to sleep exhausted in rags. 3 Farthest below the search bogs to a halt confounded by the swamp. The menace of the swamp stops her short. That malignant world in plain sight, without sun or moon, always amazes her. At least it makes of Sainte Elisabeth a hideout for herself, from herself. Does the swamp wall her off? Or in? An intriguing quandary. Out of sight in the other room a chair topples ponderously onto bare pine flooring. May warps into another being, fractured, burning. “Fini! Those chairs are Aunt Missouriʼs. Cʼest fou. They are the only things we have worth a shit. You might think Mo’s dead but she’s not. Mo will come to take them back. You with them.” A pause. Now, for some reason, they start dragging the chairs. Ornate mahogany legs grate across poor pine. The din rolls up her back Cracking vertebrae. Immediately May calls out. “Ca suffit. Who the fuck is minding James Lamar? Repend-moi, or I’ll cut off your pretty balls.” In despair she immediately regrets the crude outburst. “Whoʼs James Lamar?” The timid reply from the other room trails giggles. The woman relaxes knowing her baby is in good hands. “Get your ass in here, GB Bell! We’ve got to go!” May declares to her ghost of a man. She wagers GB’s hiding to rebuke her. Her gaze is on the move for him again, roaming back up to their sorry home and its less alien landscape. Closer to the shanty the scene presents her with a riotous, overwhelming display. Colors run mad. Colors spilling like blood from hundreds of magnolia blooms, from camellias, azaleas, dogwood, hydrangeas, bougainvilleas. Landscape under glass. May smiles at the whimsy. She becomes La Giaconda. Catching a rebel twist of long golden hair she tucks it back in place. Without blinking she peers into the hazy morning light of far southern Alabama. A light that makes her sleepy. She drifts. Annunciation Sunday March 25. 9:48 am. Geneva, Alabama Instead of her wayward husband May suddenly comes up with Lucky Lindy. The famous aviator materializes to her from out of the emptiness. His plane spirals down across the glass from the high wide blue yonder. It parts the humidity. “But we’re too poor to have such expensive visions,” announces May to the empty room. Reflected in her cold violet eyes Lindberg arrives as a flicker in the warp of the kitchen glass. He’s framed before her by ugly wood, unpainted, splintering. The plane lands on the plantation in a field of weed flowers its propeller churning their colors in her thought into a whirling kaleidoscope. 4 Wild flowers on the old plantation Sainte Elisabeth wave to her in expanses of pointillist red, yellow and blue. She feels their freedom like a dazzling abandon. GB is forgotten. Motor idles while the hero youth taxis to a stop. Propeller whirls on and on. His plane trembles with expectation, as does May. It turns May head over heels and makes her dizzy. She understands. Lindbergh is her descending angel with feathers of flame. Wings folded. Halo askew. Grin crooked. He’s waiting out there in all his charm. For her. Quickly she pats at her ponderous coil of hair. Airplane tail swerves left to right to left in a twister of dust. Beckoning to her the flyer jauntily raises a leather clad arm adjusting his goggles with the other. “Come along May, don’t keep me waiting,” he shouts to her, impatient to fly off again to France. This time with her. May comes to him quickly. She scrambles up into the backseat of the plane. Her hands are still wet from the dishes. “Here, put these on. You’ll be able to see.” He passes her a pair of goggles. “Thank you, Charles,” says May. She knows she can call him Charles. “I hope I didn’t make you wet.” Then up and away they dart, Sainte Elisabeth is soon lost from the earth below. Between banks of cloud they swing. An ocean appears heaving at them, wanting her. Ocean of life—older than land, older than man--from where her tins of tuna come from. Pondering this May studies seething waters for hours. A shore arises on the horizon, nears nearer and nearer.

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