BOOKER T'S COMING HOME AND

ALICE'S SOULBATH:

TWO NOVELLAS

by

LAURA PAYNE BUTLER, B.A., M.A.

A DISSERTATION

IN

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved

Accepted

May, 2001 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a debt of gratitude to my dissertation committee, particularly Dr. Jill

Patterson. A talented writer. Dr. Patterson has given more to my writing than she will ever be able to know. An acknowledgement page can do little to express the admiration 1 hold toward her as a writer, an editor, a teacher, and. most of all, a friend. She taught me to be patient and hopeful, while remaining the kindest of mentors throughout the entire writing process. Without her knowledge and guidance, I know absolutely that this dissertation would not have happened.

1 also wish to thank my other committee members. Dr. Doug Crowell and Dr.

William Wenthe. Both of these talented writers and teachers have helped guide my academic and writing career through the past many years. Dr. Wenthe taught me to listen to the Blues in language, and Dr. Crowell taught me to reach deep inside for the writer within. 1 respect both their ideas and work and feel honored that they agreed to work with me on this writing project.

Thank you to Dr. Lady Brown. She has been a mentor to me through the past several years. 1 will strive to live up to her standard of decorum and intellect, style and presence. She is, perhaps, the strongest woman 1 have ever met, and her happiness is infectious and inspiring.

Drs. Donald Rude and Wendell Aycock also deserve many thanks for being advisors, teachers and great friends throughout my entire academic career. Both of these men have treated me as a colleague and a daughter, and 1 will constantly use the memory of my relationship with them as a model in the future.

1 owe a dept of gratitude to the Graduate School. The 2000 research grant gave me the resources to write this dissertation. Thank you to Dr. Aaron Meskin for agreeing to take time out of a busy schedule to act as Dean's representative at my defense.

Most of all. I ha^e to thank m> family—both the one down in North Florida and the ones with me here in Texas. When 1 moved out to Tallahassee, Florida, the Olives— especially Bob and Mary—took me in and taught me so much about living in the southern wa\. I will always feel a closeness to them and will forever return to the South as a "coming home."

Thank you to my parents, Beck>' and Ron Payne, and to my husband's parents,

Gayle and Tom Butler, for all the help. They have come and taken over my life when 1 needed it the most and ha\e never made me feel as if that was bad. Best of all, they each maintained such a bright interest in m\ work; this does more to keep me going than they could ever imagine.

I dedicate this writing to my husband. Brad, and to my son, William. Thank you both for understanding when 1 could not be all the way "there"" with you, when I was tired and distracted. I hope someday I can read m> stories to my son, and he will know them as depicting a wonderful place and a good people, and I hope that my husband will know that this writing is always for him and about him.

Ill The stories in this dissertation have appeared—in greatly different forms—in The

Distillery, New Stories from the South, 1999, and South Carolina Review (upcoming).

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION 1

PART ONE: BOOKER T'S COMING HOME 17

fl. MAMA ELEANOR'S CHILDREN 19

III. ROCHELLE 35

IV. BILLYBOY 48

V. BIG JIM 66

VI. LOU 83

Vn. SISTER VYRJE 101

Vin. ALICE'S EULOGY 118

PART TWO: ALICES SOULBATH. 123

IX. SCRATCHING UP HELLHOUNDS 125

X. SWIMMING AGAINST THE UNDERTOW 147

XI. ONLY HORSES RUN WILD IN CLOUDS 165

Xn. THE BIRTHING OF JUST GETTING BY 182

XIII. ALICE'S SOULBATH 198

XIV. GROWONG OLD IN THE MAIZE 213

WORKS CITED 228 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The poet '.f voice need not merely be the record of man. it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

— William Faulkner

In his Nobel Prize address given in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10, 1950,

William Faulkner did not embark on a discussion of his writing or works specifically; instead, he accepted the award as one he claimed was given to "a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before" (723). The remainder of the speech was dedicated to a discussion of how future writers must continue to search for "problems of the spirit" (what he called "the problems of the heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing . . . worth the agony and the sweat") instead of letting external social problems outweigh these spiritual concerns

(723). Of course, that was more than half a century ago, but as I read this speech, I realize over and over again that Faulkner's simple hopes hold so true and right for writers of my generation.

The impetus behind Faulkner's speech is the fact that he believed emerging writers in his day were overcome by a "general and universal physical fear'' that overshadowed matters of the human spirit in their writings (723). 1 agree this fear is certainly an influence in our time as well. The universal for Faulkner meant internalization of motivation rather than externalization of happenstance, although his concern was for the universality of spirit. 1 have approached the writing of this dissertation by attempting to employ distinct techniques which I hope follow Faulkner's advice and transcend the physical concerns of my world in order to render images of the human spirit that are timeless and, therefore, universal, all the while writing within the constructs of the southern genre.

Two of these techniques are the use of voice and the development of character.

They are both distinctive and necessary in regional fiction because they set the color and tone essential for the creation of place and theme. I write voices determined on how I

"hear" them. The voices in my mind become voices of my characters, and this is a great challenge, because many of them are so culturally different from my own; however, it is the creation of these voices that is my agony and joy in writing. Voice is more than simply dialogue and narration. Voice comes out of happiness and frustration, dreams and deaths that I imagine my characters experienced. These happenstances dictate the spirit within each character, and that, in turn, shadows the manner through which a voice is drawn.

Hearing voice is a mystery to me. I sometimes think that the ability to hear voice comes from reading southern literature or from listening to people talk then remembering. Occasionally I think voice is sheer luck. But the complete answer to the mystery of voice lies in the fact that, when I sit down to write a character. 1 create voice in my mind first, placing myself within the thoughts of my character and attempting to unravel his or her emotional and intellectual workings. It is there, in the heart and in the soul of an individual character, where 1 findactua l voice.

Many years ago, I was gassing up my car outside the Suwannee Swifty gas station just off Interstate 10 in north Florida. The day was stifling hot—in that repressive way that humidity sticks to your skin like dirt. The gas meter clicked, and the pump turned off, but Just as 1 was turning to go inside to pay, this ancient, brown Impala literally rattled to a stop next to my car. The door creaked open, thudded shut, and a small, stooped Black man got out. He strutted—as best he could with that stoop—over to me, flashed a gold-toothy smile, and said, "1 be getting your gas, baby,"' while shaking his pocket full of change. This man became Booker T Goldwire, a name I stole from The

Gadsden County Times ' dead subscription files. To this day I still hear his voice and see that smile. Any time I get a hankering to write Booker's stories, 1 start there, remember his voice, and simply write. I've been lucky that way—1 have a wealth of voices in my head through happenstance and place.

The technique of writing Booker T is a bit more complicated: but his character is the one that moves from novella to novella and, thus, is developed the most thoroughly while functioning as a memory only. He does not actually possess his own voice, rather is rendered through the voices of the other characters. I decided from the onset that 1 wanted Booker T to be complicated in the sense that his heart is both giving and self- centered. He takes in other characters (Lou, Big Jim, Alice), but refuses to take on familial responsibilities. He claims to be free, to live by the river, but he is heart-broken when he is scorned by the white society at Lou's marriage party. I wanted Booker T to ring true throughout both novellas because his character risks becoming a cliche through goodness and badness. He began with only the rhythm of his voice, the rhythm established by his line, "1 be getting your gas, baby" and by the rhythms of his swaggering walk and the rattle of his old Impala. By melding those rhythms with good and bad qualities of action and thought, 1 created what 1 imagined the old man at the

Suwannee Swifty to be: what my family would have called a "dude."

Writing is a process of discovery for me. As I draw a character, I decide upon some particulars like economic, social, and literacy levels, age, race, and sex, and, of course, upon the impetus for the plot. For instance, Vyrie was painstaking to draw, but, at the completion of her voice, she proved a particularly satisfying character. Before writing her story, I knew 1 wanted her to be an uneducated black woman who never missed an opening of the Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, and I knew that she would reveal some truths about Booker T and Eleanor's relationship. How and why she would do that, and how this revelation would make her feel, were unknowns for me as I began to write. As a first-person story, "Vyrie" uses Vyrie's own language and style to dictate the plot and overall themes of the story. 1 attempted to exude the ineffable nature of love—how it continues to confound children and adults alike. So. because

Vyrie opens her story bossy and uppity, she is all the more surprised at herself and surprising to the reader, when she discovers that Booker T Goldwire is more than simply a scandal.

The first lines of her story open with, "I won't never forget as long as I trudge around this good earth the day Booker T Goldwire sure enough was taken home in a blaze of glory, against my better judgment." I wanted the reader to expect little more from her than rantings and rage against Booker T's situation so that she could discover, not that Booker T is an alright character—we already expect that, but that Vyrie possesses the character traits to move beyond the stereotype her voice suggests. At the end of the story, she returns to the story's impetus, Booker T Goldwire's coming home ceremony:

1 still ain't thinking long on his passing getting this big old coming home ceremony as being completely right, especially since they having a memorial up to Mt. Zion. After all, Booker T Goldwire, he still ain't much more than a sinner. But he a good sinner, he be, and we all got our place of goodness, and his sure enough be by that river, it be. He teach me that and don't even know it none. So, I going on down there and tell him, "Thank you, kindly."

Vyrie's remembrances from her childhood meld her uppity. Sister of the Vestry voice with the important realization that love transcends social expectations and norms and that she can learn from that fact. To return to Faulkner, then, Vyrie's struggle with her own social expectations versus her inner discoveries, 1 hope, resonates as a universal issue of the heart and spirit. We all possess socially dictated expectations that do not necessarily agree with our more personal discoveries. The play between the two makes up the human experience.

A second consideration for me as I write is the regional style. Southern writing is written on and speculated about constantly—especially in terms of defining it and constructing its boundaries. In practically e\ ery southern anthology—whether canonical or contemporary—the introduction invariably attempts to define the enigmatic qualities that make southern writing southern. For me, writing within the constructs of an elusive definition becomes a game of sorts, one determined by my past and my heritage as well as by the techniques 1 have learned. A brief look at a couple of anthologies will indicate the almost ubiquitous descriptions of southern writing.

.4 Modern Southern Reader states that all southern writing can be enveloped into an easily definable package:

[T]wo standard features [exist in] modern Southern writing: its preoccupation with the past, with Southern history, and its rediscovery of the hidden resources of Southern language. There is a third resemblance that comes to mind, the general tendency of the Southern writer to speculate on the form and purpose of the story. (17)

This description, of course, suggests that this anthology wishes to stash southern writing in a general description that when examined closely fails to distinguish southern literature from other literatures. After all, what fiction does not look to a past, attempt to rediscover language, and worry about form and purpose? Is this southern or universal?

More recently, Anne Tyler has attempted a definition of southern writing. In her introduction to the Best of the South. Shannon Ravenel's tenth-year anniversary issue of

New Stories from the South. Tyler writes about the changing landscape of the South: It used to be a place where a statue of a Confederate soldier stood guard over a tree-shaded square, but it is now a place where McDonald's and the Gap serve as focal points (vii).

This shifting of the landscape has become normal in the South, I certainly agree, but

Tyler also goes on to write that the distinctiveness of southern literature is that it continues to function in a definable style:

Traditionally, Southern writing is expected to be Southern in its ver> bones, defined not just by the happenstance of the author's origins but by a yeasty prose style, a strong relationship with the past, and a feeling for place. A real Southern story (the theory goes) remains Southern even if you change the name of the locale from Nashville to Boston, the name of the hero from Billy Bob to Kevin, (viii)

Tyler's definition mirrors so closely that of the previous one, it seems that they are in complete agreement. The .southemness of writing is an almost intangible idea; we can't really ever say what makes southern writing southern, yet it is southern. I find Tyler's definition a bit more satisfying than most, however, because of her theories concerning the universal nature of the soulhenmess in southern writing. I think of how Booker T and

Alice would be read if I transported them to New York, and 1 imagine how Lou and Billy

Boy might be read if they were set in Chicago. 1 like to imagine that readers would still hear the southern voice if it came out of the mouths of someone named Maurice or Diane.

The southernness of their voices, 1 like to think, would clearly resonate through diction and syntax of voice construction as well as motivations built into the characterizations.

Lou, for example, wants to be free of the southern aristocracy so marries below her rank.

In her middle age, she begins to regret this decision because she realizes the importance of long established relationships and ideas. These are fairly universal feelings with which anyone could struggle, but Lou's southernness comes from her need to surround herself with memory-shadows in the confines of her parent's ante-bellum mansion. She will not actually act upon her frustrations; that would not be the southern way of her place in society. She did not escape her aristocracy; by marrying Billy Boy, she more firmly placed herself within it. She wallows in this prison she has made, following the shadows of her past. If she sat in Chicago on the second floor of a Tudor-style walk-up, the fact that she seeks her past there yet does not act upon the disappointments of her present make her indelibly southern.

7 Regional writing also carries a negative connotation when it is defined strictiy through place and character. Southern writing certainly would be limiting for a writer if it onh involved place and character. It is at this point that William Faulkner's writing again serves as a beacon, offering both inspiration and practical techniques. 1 want to write my characters and their voices as universal, moving beyond the regionalism through which they are constructed. Vyrie learns the importance of love; Alice, the frustration of dreams; Big Jim, the importance of honest communication. The truths that are discovered by my characters need to be those of the heart and of the spirit, as

Faulkner imparted; otherwise, only setting and dialogue will be of any consequence in my fiction. And no fiction writer, I believe, wishes to be so thwarted. Therefore, I have considered many of Faulkner's works through the years as inspiration for my writing; three of which are absolutely central toward the creation of this dissertation. Faulkner is the writer I turn to when 1 sit down to work but feel the panic of writer's block spread through my chest. He may be a cliche for writers—and I certainly admire many contemporary writers as well as other canonical writers—but Faulkner's ability to confound and amaze me with the complex nature of his language keeps me coming back for more. His characters experience such universal pains with voices that they reach out and grab onto my sensibilities. They become more than just southern. They become the extent of humanity's scope.

The first novella in the dissertation, Booker T's Coming Home, presents several inhabitants of Quincy, Florida, who ponder their own lives as they mourn the death of an old fisherman. This novella's intent is to examine individual satisfactions and disappointments while emphasizing distinct regional voices in order to explore the function of narrative point of view. Each chapter of this novella is written in a different viewpoint; each is narrated by a character who knew Booker T Goldwire before his death and who, while mourning, looks at his or her own place in the southern world. I am interested in how and why each of these characters sees different truths in their hearts when faced with the death and subsequent coming home ceremony of Booker T

Goldwire. He is a character, of course, from my master's thesis, so I wanted him to function as the absent protagonist in this novella, never upstaging the first-person narrator in each of the chapters.

When I first began writing the pieces in Booker T's Coming Home. I did so with the idea that the first-person chapters would work in tandem with the stories from the thesis. I had the idea that the first-person narrations would flow with the more traditional stories from the thesis, so flashback would intertwine with story telling and make a montage of experience. Life functions this way, 1 think. Our minds are filled with the voices of our elders telling us our past while we live our present-day experiences. These two meld, in push and shove, and ultimately help us define how we live and what we think and feel. This, I think, is how our lives become fulfilled.

As 1 wrote these stories, they began to function more universally together. The problem with attempting to build the stories into a novella (to make the chapters move forward toward some climax) is that they need to tell an over-arching story, with conflict and resolution. I found this to be very hard; howe\ er. I feel the conflict is, ultimately, the disjointed telling of the human experience through each individual voice. The conflict becomes the treatment of different perspectives, each encountering events that challenge

original perceptions. Booker T affected each of these characters in divergent ways, and

most of the characters saw him through quite different lenses. The conclusions they draw

from the experience of coming home mix truth with crying, hatefulness with legend,

laughter with lies. Lou and Billy Boy, while married to one another, experience feelings

about Booker T that function in conflict with one another. Booker T becomes a symbol

for their crumbling marriage; he represents the ideas on which they cannot agree:

freedom, truth, and individuality. This mix of experience is the South I know and am

absolutely in love with. It is a grand mix of people and cultures, not always wanting to

mix but having to, nonetheless. When everything is said and done, we don't always have

a traditional narrative to tell. The story is in the voices and all that those voices hold

within them.

Faulkner's short story, "Go Down, Moses," uses the concept of coming home as

the impetus for action and subsequent character development. A grandmother's hopes

for a grandson's future are dashed when he chooses to chase after dreams up North,

because he feels they cannot be achieved in the South of his home, but then dies pursuing

those dreams. The story suggests the ineffable nature of roots and home: We return to

both in our deaths, regardless of what we might have been chasing after. "Go Down,

Moses" presents the tragedy of this ancient, rural, black grandmother attempting to make

funeral arrangements for her grandson who lost his way, lost his southern roots, by running up North. The tragedy is lessoned in the end because she is able to successfully return her grandson to his roots. The point is mythical in its connotations of the human spirit. For me, the reader, the grandmother's process, the begging and borrowing, are fruitless and a waste of money and time. What do they achieve? But for the grandmother, what she achieves, with nothing more than her pride and heritage to barter, is a tiny memory of the hope she had placed on the future generation:

Yes . It doesn't matter to her now. Since it had to be and she couldn't stop it, and now it's over and done and finished, she doesn't care how he died. She just wanted him home right. She wanted that casket and those flowers and the hearse and she wanted to ride through town behind it in a car. (365)

The grandmother needs to carry out the ceremony of his death in the southern tradition, irregardless of how or why the grandson died. She must carry out what she would want for him and would want him to want. It is her rite of passage because she now functions fully as a voice in her community. The story fascinates me because I do not easily follow its logic. Not being from her community (southern, black, old), the narrative makes me work to realize motivation in the conflict and resolution. This is the kind of fiction I like, and it is the kind of fiction 1 attempt to write in this dissertation. For example, Vyrie's respect of Booker T goes against her place in society, but her view of love is stronger so she comes to a realization about sinning and sinners. Rochelle's pity of Billy Boy's predicament serves in direct conflict with the scorn we would expect her to feel for him, but, again, love proves stronger than pride, and her story functions as a tribute to her getting by and remaining a beauty "queen," if only at the newspaper and at class reunions.

My second novella, Alice 's Soulbath. focuses on the life of one protagonist as she chases after dreams she neither understands nor is equipped to achieve. Alice li\es in the margins of society: She is a "backwaters whore" who moves from "Jook" to "jook" all her life. However stereotyped and marginalized she may be, Alice remains a character whose life is determined by distinct desires. This novella explores the frustration of boundaries: Alice is a woman whose dreams transcend these boundaries but whose life does not. She is a sharecropper's daughter who runs away, wanting to make it big as a whore on the Gulf Coast. Her curious inability to take off on her own and go to the Coast rather than only wait to be taken there thwarts her dreams by becoming a boundary.

Thus, her character is determined through circumstances forced upon her and her reactions toward them. She moves from being wishful to being broken and flat.

With this novella, I played with the chronology of action. I did so because the chapters follow what I hope to be a realistic sense of action and climax. Alice has dreams to migrate to the South, but she understands neither her own motivations nor her inability to achieve her desires. Not only does she fail to reach Panama City, but her spirit is broken in the middle of the action. I feel that the breaking of one's dreams and spirit in mid-life (Alice is actually quite young when this happens) is a very human happenstance.

What challenges me as a writer is how to convey through fiction that life continues along lines established by dreams even after the fulfillment of those dreams becomes impossible. To show this drive in fiction. I chose to order Alice's story backwards, opening with the end of her life and moving toward her beginning. This shows not the unraveling of her dreams but rather the birth of her dreams—dreams which will forsake her later in life—to be the impetus for narrati\e momentum.

12 Two of Faulkner's novels. Light in .August and The Wild Palms, inspired Alice's characterization for me. In Light in Augu.sl. the character of Lena moves forward down a road searching for the father of her unborn child. The movement and motivation for this character fascinate me because, again, 1 have to work to appreciate the complication of her thoughts and desires. Throughout the action of her searching, she seems to know that she will not find the father of her child; she seems to realize innately that he is long gone and out of reach. But she continues with the search, taking on help and friends and, basically, a new life. She, alone, becomes the one character who seems to achieve redemption through freedom. The action closes with Lena traveling toward some redemption not really understood—maybe not particularly believed in. The narrator describes her as she continues on this journey:

Yes, sir. You can't beat a woman. Because you know what I think? 1 think she was just traveling. I don't think she had any idea of finding whomever it was she was following. 1 don't think she had ever aimed to, only she hadn't told him yet. I reckon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life. And that she had got along all right this far, with folks taking good care of her. And so 1 think she had just made up her mind to travel a little further and see as much as she could, since I reckon she knew that when she settled down this time, it would likely be for the rest of her life. That's what 1 think. (558-59)

Lena is complicated in the very fact that, especially at the end of the novel, she remains uncomplicated, just taking things as they come. This juxtaposition is hard for the reader because we want her to want, in a specific way. I took Lena's character, then, and granted her more personal desire and even more displacement in society to create Alice.

Lena moves linearly throughout the action of the no\el, but her dreams are actualh created for her as she walks forward into life. Alice is unable to move forward; she

13 begins with well-defined dreams but is thwarted both by circumstance and an ultimate inability to act upon her desires in order to fulfill her dreams. Moving her narrative backwards through her life mirrors her actual dream in which the tide takes her away from what she desires most: a high-class jook in which to be a celebrated floozy. It is a figurative rendering of the tragedy of Alice's experience, of not possessing the qualities necessary to move forward toward the fulfillment of her wanted destiny.

The Wild Palms also features the journey motif Its characters, Wilbourne and

Charlotte, chase after a dream that is not resolutely defined or completely possible.

Going after something not completely defined or possible is a complication 1 also attempted to weave into .Alice 's Soulbath. Why do characters move forward, physically, intellectually, and emotionally, traveling toward something they realize is fruitless, not real? Wilbourne and Charlotte try to create a love-utopia where conventions of society, like marriage and work, are not needed, but they are soon vexed by the fact that they must function within the society that would confine its inhabitants within those conventions. Wilbourne and Charlotte cannot survive and. indeed, do not. The Wild

Palms is one of Faulkner's most tragic and complicated stories, but 1 think that the reality of the situation coupled with the frustration of pursuing impossible dreams, makes it a masterpiece. It is the breaking of Wilbourne's and Charlotte's spirits and their subsequent moving on in spite of their disappointments that 1 attempted to capture when developing Alice. It is this breaking of the spirit for her that dictated the beginning at the end of her story. Alice—given her station—was doomed from the beginning. The onh

14 movement in her life is one backward. Her story was over on day one. The tragedy of her life is built upon this fact, 1 think.

It is not until the close of the action that Wilbourne comes to a realization of his motivations:

With all the grave-yard creeping, the old wrinkled withered defeated clinging not even to the defeat but just to an old habit; accepting the defeat even to be allowed to cling to the habit—the wheezing lungs, the troublesome guts incapable of pleasure. But after all memory could live in the old wheezing entrails: and now it did stand to his hand, incontrovertible and plain, serene, the palm clashing and murmuring dry and wild and faint and in the night but he could face it, thinking, Not could. Will. I want to. So it is the old meat after all, not matter how old. Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it won't be memory because it won 't know what it remembers so when she became not then all of remembering will cease to be.—Yes, he thought, bettveen grief and nothing, I will take grief. (324)

So, Wilbourne's motivations (and I believe he speaks for Charlotte's motivations as well, although she is dead at the point of this speech) are tied to the old axiom that something is better than nothing. Feeling grief and moving forward toward inevitable tragedy is better than feeling nothing, and living amongst a nothingness is worse than being broken or dead. It is this enigma that I wanted Alice to face. Why move toward a dream that she, because of her own lackings and inabilities, carmot achieve and that, she realizes on some levels, she will never achieve? Because, I hoped, having no dream, even if the dream is squashed early on leaving us to mourn it, is worse than having nothing at all.

Both Booker T's Coming Home and Alice 's Soulbath revolve around the same setting of Quincy, Florida, a small panhandle town. The scope of the characters' worlds reaches from the most marginalized of the black experience to the most accepted and desired of the white experience. This Juxtaposition of experiences presents the array of

15 voices within southern society, voices which all tell stories of frustration and boundaries.

All the characters, despite background and opportunity (or the lack thereof), seek something they cannot attain because 1 feel like people in general seek what they cannot attain throughout their lives. Frustration and dashed hopes, then, are for me the foundation of universal heart and spirit that Faulkner urges writers to create and impart.

I hope that this dissertation appears in some way universal to its readers because, as Eudora Welty points out in The Eye of the Storv. the pleasure of writing is the communal experience between reader and writer:

Reader and writer make [looking at short stories] a double experience. It is part of the great thing in which they share most—pleasure. And it is certainly part of the strong natural curiosity, which readers feel to varying degree and which writers feel to the most compelling degree as to how any one story ever gets told. The only way a writer can satisfy his own curiosity is to write it. And how different this already makes it from telling it! Suspense, pleasure, curiosity, all are bound up in the making of the written story.

My curiosity is actually only barely whetted with the completion of this dissertation. The stories still within me feel wrapped up tight with Virginia Creepers and Just busting to get loose. I hope the fiction before you now will at least hint to the desires and frustrations of its characters, all imaginative inhabitants of this town I think of as home, so that you. for Just the moment of reading, can come home—even perhaps with a little hellhound on your trail. PART ONE

BOOKER T'S COMING HOME

17 7 discovered my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth M>riting about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

— William Faulkner

18 CHAPTER II

"MAMA ELEANOR'S CHILDREN'

19 Mama Eleanor s Children

When Booker T, our papa, died this past year, the whole town of Quincy, in fact the entire Gadsden County, seemed to come out, untangling themselves from amidst the deepest vines in the woods south of Jefferson Street to get him up a big old-fashioned coming home ceremony. Thev called around and wrote letters like a fury until they rounded up all of us, his children, from the cities we fled to so many years ago. "You simply must come home to Quincy and look toward the Heavens from your saintly departed mama's Mt. Zion," Brother Theo's wife wrote to us.

We smiled and shuddered as this letter made the rounds among us who endured the years and hours more of sitting on the sweat-slippery pews up front under the flying spit and lather sermons of Theo's own dead papa, old Brother Damon. Those were years of our mama, fanning away flies and the devil, and us wondering how come our papa was exempt from the torture of a Sunday morning at Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal

Church: we wished, as we scratched mosquito bites under the rims of our stiff white socks folded neatly around our ankles, that we could get on down to the river with our papa and listen to him talk about the sport and fun of life. In fact, we tried praying to

Jesus on occasion, Just to see if old, decrepit Brother Damon might be correct in his predictions and mighty assertions that the Lord up above Mama Eleanor's Mt. Zion was listening intently to ever>' individual prayer. Please, Jesus. We've been good. Just let old Brother Damon feel poorly today so as we might go on down to the river with our papa instead of spending the heat of the morning at church. We'll think much of >ou.

20 Booker T will. too. We prayed in unison, our eyes shut tight as we attempted a forceful prayer through number and conviction. We weren't strong enough; Brother Damon remained the healthiest preacher in Gadsden County, and we hang-dogged to church with

Mama Eleanor.

Booker T—we always called him by his Christian name—walked on past our bedroom door and out the front, down the steps and through the yard. Every last morning of our childhood, we peeked through the cracked door and rolled on our beds, hoping the creak from the rusty springs might draw his attention to us and he might, Just once, take us along.

"Get on out," Mama Eleanor bellowed to us while following on his heels. Her voice drowned out our rollings around. "Come on now. Quit peeking at me and get to your chores; school's waiting. You children be trying to sleep right through this day the

Lord done give you. I ain't abiding by that." And Booker T went on down to his river.

Mama Eleanor taught us from before we could comprehend the lesson to get out of bed with the energy of puppies and scamper over to Dr. Merideth's house and accomplish chores for shiny quarters. Mama Eleanor worked for the Merideths as their housekeeper all our young lives. After each school week full of afternoon chores, we marched on into the front house—it was really a mansion of sorts by Quincy's standards.

We hid behind our mama's large form and peeked at the doctor as he onee-a-week checked off tasks on a yellow legal pad and slowly opened his top drawer to pull out a roll of coins. As small children, we were frightened by the cool headiness of the leather and ashen book dust of his library. The ceilings seemed to reach up to heaven, and we wondered if Dr. Merideth wasn't really Jesus' papa.

"Now, children, you had better get downtown and put that money into the bank.

Someday, you'll need to educate yourselves, be a credit to your community," he commanded us as he slowly doled out coins, one blinding blink of silver after another.

At times, if one of us contracted some fever or cough at school, he looked down our throats with a soft, wooden compress that tasted like the stick from the middle of the ice­ cream bars Mama Eleanor occasionally bought us down at the drugstore to commemorate special Friday afternoons.

Indeed, we later walked on down to First Bank of North Florida every Friday afternoon. Staunch and erect, each of us stood in line, not looking around but straight ahead, slight smiles on our faces. We put our shiny quarters in our accounts and were rewarded with free popcorn. Mama Eleanor never let us touch our small reward until we were safely seated on a courthouse square bench under the shady darkness of what she called "Gadsden County's authentically historic oaktree branches."

"Babies," she commanded, "count in, very carefully, that deposit. Be sure you ain't cheated none. Can't depend on nobody else's honesty but your own. Unless you is a fool, and I ain't raising no fool babies."

Mama Eleanor always wore her very best day dress and elegant hat those trips downtown; she reserved her antiquated "Just for good" outfit for bank day and Sunday go-to-meeting. The ensemble never seemed to wear out. although the hat gathered North

n-> Florida dust that clung to the netting with the humidity of summer afternoons on the square.

Dr. Merideth's big house loomed over Quincy, Just a block north of the square, but Mama Eleanor treated Friday afternoons with the deference of a true sacrament. We held our dark red savings books tight in one salt-greasy fist and counted fortunes in twenty-five cent increments, content and cool.

When Mama Eleanor died, we were not surprised the whole town of Quincy came out. We were not even shocked at the showing from Havana, Gretna, and even

Bainbridge. Georgia. We had mov ed away to various, faraway places years ago and, ourselves, come back home to send her to her savior. She had pushed us mightily out of the Quincy nest and on to vaster skies of cities with universities and opportunities. We then came home in a rush of sniffles to hold hands and once again stand in line and not look around too much. We felt gratified to be so envied and praised by our home community.

"Mama Eleanor's children done growed up and made something of theirselves," exclaimed Brother Theo's wife in a mid-eulogy stage whisper.

"Oh, Lord. She must have done died one contented woman. Mmm-hm," replied her companion, a small, very black-complected woman none of us could recall.

They catalogued our accomplishments amidst the fever of eulogy: one doctor, two educators, one Journalist, one wife to a doctor—a mother to future doctors. They fanned all around us. wiping the sweat of the coming home ceremony onto ironed, worn handkerchiefs, then placed the damp cotton squares, folded to slightly browned creases, back into breast pockets. The women continued to fan and gush.

We sat up front at Mt. Zion AME Church and listened as Brother Theo—old

Brother Damon had long since died and left his calling to his son—eulogized our mama's lovalty to her employers and mostly to her community. He preached to us, her children who had gone off to the west and to the north, about forgiveness and about pride. He veiled out as if to a listener beyond the walls of the church: "We all need to give honor to our dearest Lord, up above, as we honor the memory of Mama Eleanor: A woman who single-handedly raised up her own precious children amidst the weighty responsibility of also raising the esteemed white family, the Merideths.

A woman behind us murmured. "Amen, Brother." We sat still and straight as

Mama Eleanor taught us in childhood and smugly thought what fools these country folk could be not realizing that Mama Eleanor herself was a fool for wasting so much more time than her wages compensated on those Merideths. Dr. Merideth had endowed a scholarship in his own name—reserved for Mama Eleanor's children—over in

Tallahassee at Florida A&M University, and we dispersed with hardly a genuine "thank you" to the embodiment of the endowment. We perfected our slight smiles in those long lines as children, but not even Mama Eleanor could try and teach us to supplicate ourselves below our pride. Upon leaving, we didn't, any of us, look back hardly once.

Until her coming home ceremony, where, once again, like so many Sundav s of v'ears past, we sat there, up front, on the same family pew, showered by yet another preacher's sweat and saliva. And we took our medicine, slowly, incomprehensibly

24 steaming at the lowness of coming home to Quincy and finding ourselves peeking around for our papa.

Booker T didn't show his face at Mama Eleanor's funeral, although some of us claimed to have caught sight of him in the sun-dusted shadows. People talked, of course, but we envied him more than hated him. Behind their soggy handkerchiefs, the ladies of the church auxiliary beat their gums in hushed tones. Just loud enough for the entire congregation to hear, clear as a bell, that we were poor fatherless waifs and our getting up right was no thanks to that ingrate Booker T Goldwire.

"That storm-buzzard don't know nothing about nothing unless it have to do with

Juice, canepoles. and boiled peanuts. Here, Eleanor loved him as if he was God himself

She dote on him all her poor, pitiful life long, and he don't even take a morning off from his own God-forsaken old river and wish that angel-wife a little luck in the great reward.

Jesus, please have mercy on his soul as you usher him down into the fiery depths of West

Hell."

We listened to preacher and congregation alike, calmly, and we avoided actual conversation or eye contact as much as possible, figuring all the while that Booker T was still down at the river minding his own. None of us acted to particularly mind or blame him. Nor did we dare to walk on down there and see for ourselves how our papa was doing. We decided, perhaps, we simply couldn't muster up enough curiosity in those days of cities and careers.

Booker T seemed so far away, a sleepy dream-walker from our childhood, no more real than our dusty and shadowy memories. We knew now how he had never

2:> legally been married to Mama Eleanor. Only some of us had traceable physical features

on our faces and bodies to the man, but we all felt confident that Mama Eleanor adored

Booker T. She gave him enough of us so that she could feel, herself the maternal pride

and fulfillment of giving a man a houseful of children. A gift. It didn't matter in her

world whether the man asked for that present or not. It was expected.

Mama Eleanor's final gift to Booker T was our baby sister, Alice. Born late in

life to Mama Eleanor, at a time when all of us were grown, in the years of leaving home,

Alice received what we had all prayed for, the greatest gift we had spent our childhoods

longing for. She was taken down to the river, a part of Booker T's way of living. We

thought we did not mind, that Booker T had simply garnered a sense of paternity in his

middle age, but as we came home for Mama Eleanor's funeral, we realized we were

separate, not a part of this sister, she, a reflection of Booker T. Perhaps it was she, we

reasoned after the funeral, whom we saw in the dusty shadows. But we were too much

older, and she was not part of us.

Booker T rarely reacted to the expected, and Mama Eleanor never settled him

down into our family. We wondered at times: If she could have managed to move our

house from out back in the shade of Dr. Merideth's mansion down to the bank of the

Ochlockonee River, would her relationship with Booker T have fared a bit better for her.

After all, we reasoned, he took Baby Alice down to the river when she was born, and

Alice seemed to grow up happy, even stayed in Quincy all her life claiming she was the youngest, it was her responsibility. Brother Damon said at the time of her birth that

Booker T was anointing her with Devil's water and that her soul was damned—all

26 because he took her to the Ocklocknee. We acted like it was of no concern and moved on.

As was, our lives had progressed; Booker T came and went out the back screen door of Dr. Merideth's kitchen and through the front screen door of our parlor in the dusk of evening and the mist of morning. We thought he smiled at us when we were tiny. He might have even told us stories as we got ready for bed.

We sat at his feet, and he showed us how to crack the shells of boiled peanuts, suck out salt water, spit out shell, and enjoy the meat, all in one moment. It took years and many stories of fishing and backwoods Jooks to perfect the motion. We were afraid if we let Booker T know that we were quite proficient at eating boiled peanuts he might not stay up late and tell us racy stories while Mama Eleanor finished cleaning up the supper mess over at the Merideths'.

When we had finally got old enough, many years before Baby Alice was bom, we begged Mama Eleanor to let us accompany Booker T down to the river in the mornings.

"I don't ever want to hear you even thinking out loud such sinful things. I didn't raise none of you to be breaking my poor heart like such. Booker T Goldwire may be stuck down there, but that don't mean none of you has business down to the banks of a stenchful sin-hole."

She forbade us to ever even think about wandering down to the ri\ er, and, if she heard anything about us going, she swore her poor heart would break into more pieces than the particles of muddy sand on the river bottom. She cried for the rest of the week

27 and on through Sunday service. Old Brother Damon even had to come spend Sunday afternoon sipping sweet tea and preaching to us about the degradation of liquor and loafing one's life away, all the while spitting shells of Booker T's boiled peanuts right onto the steps of our plank-wood porch.

After that, Booker T rarely appeared in the evenings to tell us stories and give us peanuts. He took to slipping in and out of our house in the darkness of night, not so much as peeking through the crack in our door to see about our sleep anymore. We all felt lonely for him and angry at Mama Eleanor. We couldn't understand why she would want so bad to deprive us of this man, but we were still young and much afraid of the forces behind Brother Damon and Dr. Merideth to ever question her to her face. Brother

Damon, full of Sunday ham, greens, and salty, boiled peanuts, even threatened us one afternoon on Mama Eleanor's own front porch:

"If you so much as think about trekking down to that river. Dr. Merideth hisself will be forced to perform an operation on each of you; remove the degradation and sin so it can't breed on to his own family none," he bellowed, spitting salt in front of his angry words. "He'll perform this needed operation in his own library, right up in his mansion, he will. And I'll be there to oversee the spiritual awakening."

We trembled and shifted uncomfortably around the shells cluttering the planks as he warmed to his predictions and continued.

"Jesus will have commanded Dr. Merideth to cut you all open, remove the omen.' parts. Badness lives on down in your intestines, and, when it drives us completely to sin, it must be cut out as if it were a snake. You hear me clear and true, now. Your Mama

28 Eleanor say you all acting like little devils and planning to do bad. You may think that no one on God's earth knows, but Jesus knows everything inside and outside your hearts and minds. And 1 is in cahoois with him on keeping Mama Eleanor's babies going to the light."

We believed Brother Damon and quaked in our sheets, thinking we might actually die of heat strokes but also suspecting that was better than Brother Damon's predictions.

We only missed Booker T real bad when we hid our heads under goosedown pillows within the pitch of midnight. Booker T passed through our little house that looked, outwardly, so much like Dr. Merideth's right there in his backyard, and we almost smothered to death, all missing Booker T in the dark.

Why, we asked years later after she had died, had Mama Eleanor allowed Baby

Alice to be taken to the river with Booker T? We spent our childhoods believing in predictions of hellfire and broken hearts. Had Mama Eleanor's heart broken when Baby

Alice grew up with Booker T? Or—we, at the same time, hoped for and feared—had

Mama Eleanor seen a different kind of light? We forced ourselves to not wonder too long, then we each moved on.

None of us came back to Quincy, nor to Gadsden County, after Mama Eleanor's funeral. Much too old to hold a grudge against anyone, we said amongst ourselves. It wouldn't seem too practical to blame an entire town or even a county for our own unhappiness, but we never looked back. We all secretly wanted to be angrv against

Booker T and maybe even Mama Eleanor and Baby Alice. Instead, we found other

29 interests and created our own new families on which to shower attention. Quincy,

Florida, became a faraway story to tell our own babies about—babies who called us mama and papa and didn't know anything about a mama who spent more time praying than loving and a papa who traveled through a house like a dream shadow.

When the phone calls and letters began arriving telling us that our papa, Booker T

Goldwire, had passed and was being held down at Williams Funeral Home, waiting for his children to make arrangements, we quietly sent messages around in cards and brief phone calls. Finally, we converged together, stranded at the Quincy Motel Just east of the courthouse square on Jefferson Street, in the shady midst of our childhoods.

After Mama Eleanor's death, we lost track of the Merideths and of Booker T and even of our sister, Alice. We supposed and did not care that the Merideth family had tragedy and death, birth and laughter like every other family. Booker T, we heard from

Mr. Williams, the funeral director, still fished down at the river and had moved into some backwoods shack near Gretna. He said it used to belong to a woman named Alice, some old friend of our papa's, someone with our sister's name but whom we knew nothing about. We shrugged off the news as if it were the slow sheen of the afternoon. We felt a surge of youthful Jealousy that this old shack surrounded our mystery Just as the night had draped Booker T's comings and goings in our youth. We smiled back at Mr.

Williams's talk, all the while protecting our wonderment and longing.

Lou Merideth, Dr. Merideth's only child, showed up at the funeral home claiming she was the only one, really, with any supposed famih' connection to Booker T. "1 want to pay for the service, for all of it. Please, 1 have to do this for Booker T. He was my friend," she insisted, crying as if Booker T was her own father. We all felt uncomfortable with her. Mama Eleanor hadn't liked us to spend too much time visiting with Lou

Merideth when we were small, and we had gone to different schools. We knew her as wild and untamable, and we heard rumors about her and Booker T, but Mama Eleanor had told us they were all malicious lies told by lowdown people with only Jealousy in their hearts. We backed away from her memories. Hers were alive and colorful, much like Booker T's stories in those long ago evenings on Mama Eleanor's porch, back when he rocked on splinters and spit dry hulls in the light of the moon. We refused Lou

Merideth's money; we signed cheeks and listened and smiled.

So when the entirety of Gadsden County came out to see our papa Booker T go deep into the earth, we were quite as surprised as we could be. Masses, mostly black, but some white, seemed genuinely saddened at his passing, and even the folks down at Mt.

Zion AME Church acted as if they sincerely wished the best Journey for his coming home. Ladies proclaimed they could feel Mama Eleanor waiting with her heavy arms outspread, welcoming Booker T home to her never-dying love. Old men weaved intricate yarns of fishing tales all complicated with stitches of whiskey and strangers. We listened and pulled our families close so that they too could hear these stories. Some of the tales we had even heard before from Booker T himself, and we delighted at their familiarity. Women we called "aunties" as children pointed out which of our own children looked like Booker T and which looked like Mama Eleanor. Our sister, Alice, stood and gave a eulogy. We listened and thought to reach out to her, to bring her to us, she, the one who had remained in Quincy and was never one of us. But we stood there down by this river and the sun shone upon the water making it shimmer, and we, not certain how to feel, only listened silently to this woman who really was our papa's only daughter.

Lou Merideth had seemed disappointed that we would not allow her to pay for our papa's funeral, and we reminded her that because of her own papa. Dr. Merideth, we all had plenty of money. She insisted on holding the wake at her father's old mansion, closed up for \ears. We said we were honored and welcomed her to sit with us, her and her sons, on the front pew of Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church for the

Coming Home Ceremony. She accepted and cried wet tears that dripped profusely onto the pew. We felt sadness for her.

Along with the rest of Gadsden County on this confusing day, Lou Merideth tried to crack our smiling facade and tell us stories about Booker T, And up there on that front pew on which we had suffered countless Sundays of stiff hardness and sliding sweat, we stopped smiling for Just a prayer's length and listened. We couldn't determine why she got through to us when no one else's stories particularly could, but later we decided that perhaps it was the oddness of this white-woman stranger who was raised up Just a yard away and a world of difference from us by the same two people: Mama Eleanor and Dr.

Merideth. And we thought—only briefly because to think more about it frightened us— that she also was one of the chosen who knew our papa, down by the river. Lou told us things we had no idea about, things that for one reason or another Mama Eleanor and the

i2 rest of our town had wanted to protect us from: how Booker T befriended her as a small child, a lonely little girl with a workaholic father and a drunk mother. She told us that he taught her to live for herself and never allow people who thought themselves on a higher bank to push her off her own rivers and to never, ever go against the current. He taught her that the act of flailing upstream would rob her of her life. Booker T introduced her to her own husband, and when he warned her off from him, she recounted how she left

Booker T and broke his heart. She said that her own heart broke, too, especially now that it was too late to tell Booker T she knows he was right about everything.

Lou Merideth seemed so low down through the whole funeral weekend. We hurt for her and even settled on burying Booker T down by the river on her insistence. The ladies of the auxiliary acted scandalized and whispered how Mama Eleanor "certainly might never rest peaceably again." But the river seemed fitting, and we finally trekked down to our father's world to lay him down in the plain pine box with a soft and prickly pineneedle bed like he had told Mr. Williams he wished to be buried. The day was peaceful, broken only with the chirping of birds and an occasional whine, then deadly slap, of a mosquito. We were struck by the lapping of the current as it rolled lazy and quiet, not stopping to pay homage to one of its disciples, but simply flowing past.

We left Brother Theo up at the church after the memorial. In fact, we left mostly the entire county—all the people who surprised us by coming out for the funeral—up there. They all went on to wait in the grand parlor of Dr. Merideth's mansion while we interred Booker T deep in the soft black dirt, the dirt below the white sand. Just up from the bank of the Ochlockonee River. Lou looked at us and smiled serenely. She told us

j>j we must be pleased at our gift to our papa. She said she felt at peace now, that she figured he might Just forgive her for not understanding after all these years. We had allowed her to bring him home. The sounds of the gravedigger hit into the soft dirt as he shoveled and moved sand that slid and pounded in our ears. We left Lou to watch over him. and we ourselves went up to wait in Dr. Merideth's mansion.

We all left the next day, packed up our belongings and our families and returned to our real lives. We felt less connected to Quincy, to Gadsden County, and to our papa after this coming home. This was not our time to mourn, it seemed. It was our time to continue to wonder at this man and his river and to drive away, dispersed and distracted, to the varied directions from which we had come. CHAPTER in

"ROCHELLE" Rochelle

Lou Merideth, or should 1 best call her Ms. Rutledge since she'd gone and married off with Billy Boy some years ago, came into the newspaper office this morning. Why all them rich folks come traipsing in here and all high mighty-like want to throw their check down and act like we're scratching the last of their copper pennies right out from underneath their mortgage payment or disallowing for their children's big old Emory

University education is beyond the simple likes of me, I tell you.

She sashayed in with those big black movie star sunglasses on—the kind they wear when they is leaving the Betty Ford clinic, acting like they ain't seen the sun in many a day. hair pulled back slick and all. She pulled them glasses down onto that stuck- high nose and sniffed the air. Sounded like the air conditioning vent went and backfired.

Then she acted like 1 made it smell in there somehow. She said all drawn out through that backfiring nose, "Oh, hello."

Took forever for her to not remember me at all. That's the end-all, I thought, and then thought maybe she was Just confused a bit seeing as how we only went to high school together for a couple of years. Not that hoity-toity one she went to her first couple of years—the one over in Tallahassee—but the good old Wildcat High right here in

Quincy. That's our high school, the one she insisted on attending as the ransom she made her parents pay to her invisible kidnappers. Of course, she had gone and kidnapped herself Sure enough. Heard tell of it years ago, right in this here office, when I worked out back bundling papers and stuffing inserts with the colored girls who had gone and got

36 themselves into baby troubles: She used to run off and call her parents, disguise her voice. That last time, as if they wholeheartedly believed her silliness, they agreed to let

Lou come home and live in Quincy, quit boarding at that private Christian school.

Wasn't doing her no good. Just a waste of money, unless you count having Lou Merideth out of your sight worth the price of tuition.

As usual today, she looked right down her nose at me. And I'm a full-fledged alumnus of that damned school she was so proud to attend in 1966. But this ain't 1966 no more, and she never even attends our every-five-year reunions. Send her out a pretty little invite every five years, and she don't respond. I make them up myself right here.

That's what I do. Set type, and 1 think I got a real artistic eye. Pick paper samples and look in on Charlie the printer if it's something special. Charlie hates it. because he don't feel like he can do his drinking straight out of the gallon of Old Crow he keeps stashed between two gallons of ink over behind the old rusted print press. But 1 don't care nothing about old Charlie's mood unless it's a special item needs attending to. Charlie ain't known for his particularity when he's a couple slugs down. Good pressmen who can run a machine are awful hard to find these days. They's all working on computers over at the Democrat in Tallahassee now.

I know Lou gets those pretty invites from me, because Billy Boy shows up to the party every time like clockwork. And he didn't even go to school with us. He was ahead a few years, done graduated and dropped out of FSU by the time 1 got to ninth grade. But he was awful sweet on me back then, back when I was Gardenia Queen of Wildcat High.

Used to drive his daddy's car real slow around the square, sometimes stop at the

37 courthouse and wait, talking casual to the deputies and commissioners under moss shade.

1 wore royal Wildcat blue every day to school my senior year. Felt very important. And

I'd stop and wave a little—Just a little—to Billy Boy before 1 walked on. I couldn't act too available. Besides, 1 knew he'd be driving his car around back of the paper office later that evening about time to quit work. When the big garage-like doors rolled up and rumbled like thunder for the delivery truck, Billy Boy would be sitting on the hood of that shiny Ford truck he drove. He'd smile devil care and I'd Jump in the front seat, sometimes forgetting to wash the ink off my hands. Bet 1 ruined more than one of his shirts in my excitement.

My daddy thought it was awful convenient that Billy Boy wanted to drive me out to the farm so as he didn't need to come fetching after me himself Daddy used to say that sharecropping took it out of a man. Shouldn't need to fetch after a girl in the shade of the evening when there's a smoke to be had under the moss.

I walked by the courthouse every day between school and the paper. We bundled and stuffed in the afternoon when the paper got back from the printer. I was the onh girl who could tie those cotton twines tight enough so as the paperboy could get off a good toss from his bike onto the big porches off the square. The expecting colored girls couldn't tie worth a damn. They mostly listened to their soap operas on the radio and reviewed the happenings around town. Skin shining dark as ink in the half-light of the warehouse. It was always stifling in that back room, with the smell and shadow of dusty paper dancing in the streaks of sun through the windows. Sometimes I Just sat right on a stack of unfolded newspapers and dreamed of Billy Boy coming to pick me up in that truck and zoom down the highway. Of course, I didn't care one twit about going to no

Tallahassee. 1 had my sights on New Orleans or maybe even Panama City. Live on the beach like in the movies. 1 don't know. It was a lazy dream, those afternoons dressed in royal blue.

Poor Billy Boy. He never took me farther than the drive-in or my daddy's tenement farm. Used to go parking right out there. Told me stories about his day, selling at the pawnshop. He used to say, "Rochelle, you should come in and get yourself something nice with all that money you make at the newspaper. Girl works hard as you, shit. Deserves something nice like a watch." He didn't appreciate at the time the fact that my hard-slaving money went to those pretty frocks I wore each day my senior year. I believe it's what made me queen. Lou Merideth never made no queen, because she was always Just as stuck up as could be, only coming to school half the time, and then looking a mite googly-eyed.

Now. Billy Boy Just comes to the reunion parties, drunk and wistful for old times.

He's always saying, "Rochelle, I was sure sweet on you twenty years ago. You were a pretty little thing. Gardenia Queen and all."

But then I remind him I had to hear about my best beau going for Lou Merideth in the stifling heat of the back warehouse from a couple of expecting colored girls. A hard­ working, God-fearing, simple Quincy girl wasn't enough for Billy Boy Rutledge. No, sir.

He wouldn't settle for nothing less flashy than marrying off with a Merideth. He got his, though. Now, he looks at me so sad when 1 bring this fact to his attention. Makes me feel kind of proud after all the crying and fit throwing 1 endured because of him. Fancy pickups and gold rings don't take the place of loving from a good woman. And Jesus lets us know this if we'll pay attention. It's his way.

After Billy Boy run off with Lou Merideth, 1 realized the heat and dust of the back warehouse wasn't nothing lazy and romantic. 1 started sweating bullets back there.

1 got to where 1 couldn't tell the salt of sweat on my brow from the salt-running tears streaking down my cheeks. Got salt water stains all over my royal blue dresses and marched inside of the paper office and demanded me a promotion. Said to that bossman of ours, "1 ain't no knocked-up colored girl. I is Rochelle Thomason—that was my name back then—Gardenia Queen."

And 1 got myself a good old Job. Had it twenty years now. I did feel pretty powerful guilty about the ugliness came out of my mouth that day. Went straight to a camp meeting that very Sunday and prayed hard with my eyes shut tight. It was at that meeting 1 met my husband. He was there with his eyes shut tight, too. He'd gone off and put on a big drunk the night before, and was praying for those sins. I never asked the particulars, and he married me for Just that attribute. Didn't ask nothing fancy.

Billy Boy complains to me about that house he built Lou after the last reunion— four years ago 1 guess that was. I don't know what goes on in a wood-and-rock monster.

Lou Merideth made Billy Boy build her the biggest house in Gadsden County way outside town, right off the loop. She inherited a big enough one right here, smack off the square. Been in her family generations. Built when those planters moved into Quincy proper and only had their hunting lodges on the farms. Back then, I suppose being in

Quincy was something nice, shops everywhere, people walking the walk. Now. they all

40 want to go off to Tallahassee, eat at the Governor's Club, remind people there who really runs things in North Florida.

Lou ain't no different. Heard, though, that she spends half her time Just sitting out in that big old wood house in the country and the other half sitting up in the top of her mama's big mansion. Refuses to live in town. Said she couldn't stand it, that living like her folks. Billy Boy told me himself at the last reunion, before he built her white elephant. Said something like. "She conflicted." whatever that means.

Slobbering drunk, he was, and not making sense, what with whisky tears running into the gold rings he wears as he tried to stop up the crying by wiping over the tears.

Said Lou wouldn't live in her mama's house. Thought it was haunted or something with all those generations of ladies who didn't want her marrying old Billy Boy. As if that dead grandmother of hers had anything to do with it from the grave. I guess Lou thinks she can feel disapproval seep up through the soil like groundwater. If that's the case, she ought to have Billy Boy Just plow over the entire cemetery. They own the land, if I recollect. Or Lou does anyway. Not as if her people disapproved of Billy Boy so much they didn't take him into the business and make him one of them. Left everything to Lou and the kids, though. Poor Billy Boy. Spent the last twenty years acting like a Merideth until it hurt to see him at the gas station. Then, when old Dr. Merideth died, he left all the control to Lou. She never acted like a Merideth nearly as good as Billy Boy. And him being an amateur Merideth and all.

Told him after the doctor's funeral this past year when I run into him at the pawn—he still goes there for lunch with his daddy. Bilh' Boy Senior—he shouldn't want

41 to live in no house that never welcomed him, no matter how pretty it is right off the square. Lou never lets it fall into disrepair, though. It's as nice as the day Lou got married and they took pictures of her in her grandmama's wedding dress outside on the veranda. Photographer from Tallahassee came over and snapped her picture like she was some kind of professional model or something. Made the front page of the Democrat. 1 made sure it only hit the women's page of my paper. Nothing 1 hate more than taking on airs. 1 don't care who you is. The Lord don't care neither.

And you know, Billy Boy did tell her fine and dandy the first time the subject of moving into the family house come up—after Lou's mama, Mrs. Merideth, died. Old

Eleanor, their maid, wanted Lou to move home and help her take care of Dr. Merideth.

Said it was Lou's duty as his only child, especially since Eleanor wasn't no spring chicken, neither. But Lou said no. She'd Just come by every day and take her daddy for an outing. Billy Boy sure enough said that was fine and dandy. Said he was awfully busy taking care of the family business, didn't need to be taking care of no wife on

Valium, rocking on a veranda all day, like Lou's mama done for thirty or forty years.

Built her that ranch house with a million rooms right then. Told me she Just wanted it so she could ignore him inside some air conditioning. Stays shut up out there without speaking to him or having a drink in the evening or nothing.

Bless his heart, I Just don't know what I can do for him. I replied to his whiskey tears at the last reunion by putting my arms around his shoulders, all hunched over. He's still Just as wiry as when he was young, and he curls over and looks pitiful when he's

42 bawling. Makes me feel so bad for him. 1 tell him it's all for the best. He's got those farms and those precious boys who look the spit of him.

All he said to that was Lou wouldn't even discuss that old house now. He thought she went to it sometimes in the afternoon, because he could see her outline up there in the shadows and dust. Through the front window off the old ballroom. He's seared to go up there when he drives by and spies her. Just sits outside in his truck and watches up, drinks a couple of beers, and then goes and plays golf or something. Sad. I told him she's got to know he's down there looking up. But he Just shrugged his shoulders and slumped that same c-curve slump he does with those bony shoulders of his.

He tried to get her to sell after he couldn't take it no more, even said he would only sell to one of the good old families that remembers what it's like to be somebody right off the square. But she got crazy on him and said she would move back into that house herself alone if she had to, but he wasn't selling her family history as if it was pawnshop trash. He asked me right then if I thought he was treating her house like pawnshop trash, and I said, "Billy Boy, you ain't treating Lou or her family memory with nothing less than velvet nestling sparkling diamonds. You Just want her happiness. She don't understand nothing but high and mighty ways, and that ain't nothing you should worry about."

1 suppose he'll go on crying in his whiskey about it. Said Lou bawled hysterically about the incident for days. Then went off to the beach for awhile. Hasn't really had much of a relationship with her since. If you ask me, Lou Merideth is a fake, pawnshop diamond you need a microscope to find. Billy Boy Rutledge is a perfect diamond in the

43 rough, simply lost somewhere over in a dark mine or something. He's so lost, he don't know how to separate his heart from his logic when it comes to Lou Merideth. If he could Just learn that the good Lord gave us a brain and a heart functioning in two different places in our bodies, he'd be doing much better. He might appreciate what he's got and have a little fun with all the money, instead of always wishing that icy-fake Lou would let down her hair from that ballroom window or something equally fantastic.

But when she strutted herself on in here yesterday and slapped that check down on the counter in front of me, only said, "Oh, hello," I felt kind of sorry for her. It built up inside Just like the sweat and tears all those years ago out in back of the paper. Salty and scratchy. This tingly feeling of sad sprouted onto my skin and began crawling like caterpillar legs when you let them move up your arm toward your hair. They'll go for the hair every time. They want a warm, safe place same as anyone. She sure enough looked at me strange, and I consciously felt the same disgust I has been harboring for twenty years now. But 1 thought, Rochelle Green, that ain't very Christian of you. Here you got yourself a good man and Lou Merideth ain't got a soul in the world.

It was then that the good Lord reminded me that Booker T Goldwire had died. I'd been working up his funeral program all morning. Been in a tizzy about where to find a photograph for the front cover. The folks down at Williams Funeral Home are a mite particular about having their programs covered with a pretty picture of the deceased in better days. 1 don't know what's so bad about a little drawing of a Bible caressed by praying hands or even a rose marking a particular scripture. Doves crossing the olive

44 branch is a mite nice, too. What can they expect from me? ft ain't my fault Booker T

Goldwire didn't like to have his picture made or was too low down to do it.

My bossman says that Williams Funeral Home brings in good business. Colored business in the printshop keeps the paper afloat. So I spend the morning hunting down a picture of some old man lived mostly by the river. Only got a funeral because he was common-law married to the Merideths' old Eleanor and because he got off that river enough to get himself enough children to throw him a big coming home ceremony.

Why Lou looking over the rim of those black glasses and down that nose at me made me feel sorry and think of dead Booker T Goldwire has Just got to be divine intervention. I picked up the funeral notice proof Thought she might want to look at it.

I remembered they was friends. When the old ladies at my Baptist bridge club were whispering that Lou spent her days smoking funny cigarettes instead of going to high school, and shouldn't her parents be ashamed, bless their hearts, I knew she spent her days fishing with this old Goldwire. Billy Boy's the one told me. He ran into them one day at a powwow over to Tallahassee aways. He was all bursting with Lou Merideth. 1 got mad and told him I thought hanging around with an old colored man was a little uncool—I think those is the words I used. Then I whirled around as if to storm off He laughed and patted me on the rump a good shot. Said Booker T thought of Lou as a daughter, taught her how to fish and read the water, that's all.

I glanced over my shoulder at him. Wanted to make up. Make him see 1 was as good as Lou Merideth. But, you know. Billy Boy was done gone then. He was looking

45 off into the dancing dust of the warehouse, and 1 didn't shimmer in the sun no more. 1

Just kind of smelled of sweat and newspaper ink.

That's the past. And the riverside mermaid herself stood in front of my counter looking sorrier that any human had a right. So I slid the notice to her. It wasn't really finished. Just getting proofed and all. 1 thought she was going to drop the thing right there. Her hand took to shaking and trembling. Dust was falling off the proofing card a mite heavily—you just can't keep the dust out of a print shop no matter how hard you try.

I was about to say something about the dirt and being sorry and how I thought she and

Billy Boy ought to know poor Booker T Goldwire passed, but she Just took off out of there. She run to her Mercedes car fast as lightning and skidded gravel getting away.

I figured she was torn up with grief or maybe she done gone off to the loony bin like her mama, rest her soul. Figured she'd dropped that proof so 1 went around the counter and looked and looked. Even got down on my hands and knees with the dust balls under the counter. You know, I never found it. Couldn't imagine why Lou took the damned thing, but she did. 1 know, because she finally called back this morning and confessed. Said she was awfully sorry, but she would make it up by bringing in a picture of Booker T. Has lots of them in a box in her mama's attic—the old ballroom. I don't know what to make of it. Said I guessed it was all right. I'd only showed her a proof of the notice, not the funeral program. That would have meant big trouble if she'd gone off with that. Funerals keep this paper afloat, I told her.

She went on and on about how Booker T needed a picture in the paper and his obituary on the front page. I didn't know what to tell her. Ain't nobody but the most

46 prominent of citizens gets on the front page, like Dr. Merideth. But she started crying and moaning soft like a tingling shadow. 1 got scared and put her on hold. Called the bossman to the phone. But when he got on the line, she done hung up.

She sent a nice photo over, too. Sent it by messenger. Going to bring her own subscription check in when everyone else in the world mails theirs, but sends a private messenger from all the way over in Tallahassee with a photo of an old colored fisherman.

Go tell. 1 is glad to have it seeing as 1 had the responsibility of finding the lost proof

And I told my bossman that 1 sure enough had connections around town. Then 1 laughed big and full even though I still feel kind of sorry inside like sweat and tears is mixing up with the dust again.

47 CHAPTER IV

"BILLY BOY"

48 Billy Boy

God damn it. My wife's gone off the deep end, and it's all that Booker T

Goldwire's fault. Even from the grave, dead and gone, six feet under, sifting in river sand. He's done for in this life, but, I swear, if he weren't already dead in his riverside grave, I'd kill him cold, 1 would.

I sit here each and every evening, from dusk on into the night-time, hiding in my truck, sipping whiskey to keep myself sane, and watching her up there in her parents' big house, courting shadows. Shit.

She's up there alright, doing God only knows what but certainly not caring nothing about what I might be thinking on or caring about. Not her. No. She's high and mighty up in the attic, busy being the daughter of the great and wealthy, old-moneyed

Meredith family, and she can't do no wrong as long as you don't count sitting up in your daddy's attic alone each and every evening going crazy wrong.

Of course, me, her husband. I ain't nothing but a pawnshop broker. Trash, 1 hear the whole town calling me, but she chose me and now she's stuck with me, like it or not in that crazy mind.

Yeah, she chose me, and now I sit here spending my whole day sweating over her family business, holding together her daddy's doings, making it more a fortune than her daddy. Dr. Meredith, could ever have dreamed what with all the doctoring of the coloreds in town he did all the time instead of paying mind to the family businesses.

49 Oh, they can call me trash, but goddamn if 1 ain't the smartest son-of-a-bitch in this town, in the county for that matter, then they can all kiss my skinny ass, they can.

And 1 won't care a bit for a minute. So 1 work my ass off, and what do I get for my trouble'!' I get to sit here and stare at my wife, knowing sure as I sit here she's going crazy out of her mind, sitting up there dreaming about some past old as the dust swirling around her in those shadows.

I blame Booker T Goldwire, although I'll be damned if 1 can figure out how a good-for-nothing nigger like that old coot could do so much harm to my wife.

"Whv do you care about his dying?" I asked her that day she heard about his dying from Rochelle down at the paper office. We were standing in the kitchen and she was cooking supper; I leaned against the counter sipping a scotch whiskey and thinking we were having a pleasant conversation. She'd come home pretty late from being out, and when I asked her where she'd been—knowing where I figured she was but giving her a chance to lie about it—she had only said, "Booker's dead. I've been mourning him."

That was all she said. I replied something silly, saying, "Shit, Baby Doll, even the mean die eventually." I was kidding around, you know. I might have even brushed her shoulder, gently, like I meant it. I should have known, though. It weren't friendly when she never turned toward me from frying up hamburger on the stove for our sons' supper.

She was stirring that meat for all she was worth, in a frenzy now that I'm remembering.

All she could say in reply was, "You don't understand. You can't. You nev er did."

I don't even know what that means, but what can 1 say or do against that. I could barely hear her above all the snapping of grease and the vent she clicked on as if to

50 dismiss me as a simpleton. A woman who purposely turns from her husband can't be helped. So now 1 sit and wait for her to come to her senses, and I imagine what she does up there, and it ain't no good.

Lou's always saying these days 1 should let her alone, that I should give her some space and hope this all blows over. In fact, that night in the kitchen, she said, "Billy Boy,

I'm feeling things 1 never felt before. I'm worrying about Booker's dying and me being stuck on the dark side of the moon where I've been a long time. You can't help me with that."

Hell, I don't know what that means, and when I asked her, she replied, "It is something Booker warned me against when I was young, but I didn't listen. He used to laugh and wink at me in the shade of river branches, and I thought at the time it wasn't nothing but a thing Booker was doing. Now it shadows me, and I'm scared."

I figure she's really talking about not wanting to be married to me no more, and that old coot warned her off me years ago when we was Just starting. He's dead now, not yet cold, and I'd still like to kill him dead. None of his damned business what she should've done. 1 ain't hardly done nothing with my own life but try and make Lou

Meredith happy. Tried to give her something to live for besides that Meredith name she used to in the day claim all the time she despised. Now, she acts as if she ain't nothing but a Meredith. Hates her real name, Rutledge. Her married name, signed, sealed, and delivered. Don't even use it no more. Started using the other, her maiden name, all the time talking and talking a blue streak about her family, what they are, who the>' are, what thev used to be in this town. That's what's haunting her. Her famih'. what used to be.

51 And I could still kick the shit out of that Booker T Goldwire. He put that family back into her head after it was dead and buried for years. 1 suppose she thinks on him as a part of that family, even though he weren't nothing but a roust-about, and the maid

Eleanor's common law husband.

When I met Lou, she weren't hardly more than a teenager. 1 wasn't all that much older, but enough to make her seem young. I'd Just dropped out of FSU, not being much for the books and for going to no college classes, studying about nothing much that's going to make no sense here in Quincy selling radios to the coloreds.

1 was back home, learning the family business from my daddy when I met her one night at a powwow over to Tallahassee. I was working a booth, selling to the Indians this time—they buy used shit as regular as niggers. God, she was beautiful that night. She stood in front of me. drawing patterns in the dirt with her toe, and I thought her foot— long and slender, small looking for her height—was the prettiest thing I'd ever laid eyes on. Still is. The night was one of those nights when things seem magical in memory.

Colored Christmas lights were strung up along all the tree branches; they seemed like nothing but ribbon to wrap her up and show her off. She owned the moment then. Still could now, if she wanted to. She was there with Booker T then, said he was the only one who'd drive her out to see the powwow. 1 couldn't hardly breath right when I saw her; she was so wild and shy at the same time. I acted real cool, but I was dying on the inside from wanting her. You can't buy that at a store.

Booker T didn't seem too particularly keen on me taking her off into the shadows so as to make up to her. He didn't say nothing. Just kept his eyes trained our way while

52 he sipped beer with my daddy and that no account friend of daddy's, Tom Louder. 1 remember Booker T looking as evil-eyed as Lou's daddy did when, a few weeks later, I met them, right after we'd run off and married.

I should've seen the signs. But he was her folks" roustabout, and it never crossed my mind he'd e\ er prove no threat to me and my happiness.

I'd heard around town how wild Lou was. Being the only daughter of the richest folks in Quincy, she was the hottest topic for coffee conversation down at the drug store.

She even broke into poker talk and hard drinking murmurings at the Bottom and the other joints back further out.

Can't blame no one for wanting to figure her out or for being Jealous. She looked like a stallion with her long blond hair streaming down her back. It was the color of blond that comes across almost silver, like a whisper or something. And her hips and legs were so narrow and long; she always looked as if she'd bolt away and be gone.

I made out to tame her and make her mine—couldn't take not having her. Later that summer—Just a few days really because I couldn't wait and take no chance of her running—I took her down to the Lake Talquin to picnic and only then realized that, like a stallion, she'd never be completely kept down, saddled and harnessed. She acted all the time like a man. mean and hard, and like a child, confused and scared, all wrapped into one silvery shimmer. Her eyes shone with innocence and delight in the simplest things, running her feet in the water off the boat dock, making little wakes and then giggling a streak at the thought of gators getting after her toes.

53 That day was one of the happiest memories I've ever had—it was the closest I ever came to having Lou to myself for me and only me. 1 sat back on the dock and stared what I'm sure was a look of dumbstruck idiocy. 1 remember it because her words cracked open the air and broke any false impression I might've been holding in my hopes for beautiful remembrances. Even then, I couldn't no more than sit five minutes and enjoy looking at her—she was beautiful, lean and strong—before she'd start cussing in a manner even 1 can't replicate, not even at the tonk table in the men's room at the country club, five whiskeys down.

But that day was the day I knew 1 had to try and make her mine. I suppose now it sounds heartless, conceited, and a trifle manly to say I tried to tame her, but what people don't understand about Lou—and definitely Booker T didn't know nothing about it and so tried to warn her away from me wrongly—was that she needed taming more than any one person I ever met. For her own good.

We went down to Lake Talquin where my daddy. Billy Boy, Senior, kept a boat dock for launching his trolling boat. He'd regularly go out gator-hunting, too. Put out traps made of old tires and meat and rope, then later with an old shotgun and, pow, we'd have fried gator for supper. Ain't exactly legal, so we call his boat a trolling boat. There weren't no real house or nothing. Just this covered boat dock, gray wood sitting out on the water, covered with a ramshackle house made of corrugated tin siding. Sounds cheap, but I loved it. At night, I used to climb it as a kid and sit on the roof looking up all the time. Thinking about all the stars. Don't remember what I was thinking about then. I was Just a kid.

54 The day with Lou, we set up a picnic outside the house, right on the west side of the dock. "1 want to fish," she said with her lips puckered out, full of excitement, like a child. "Booker T's taught me all his secrets; I can catch you some cat to take on back to your daddy. Make him forgixe you for cutting out of work," she laughed with her mouth

full of buttered bread.

I chucked her on the chin because 1 knew she, herself, was cutting high school, and 1 wanted so bad to put her in her place, let her know 1 was important and wasn't cutting nothing. 1 was the boss. 1 said, "Girl, you ain't nothing but a kid. Someday you might grow up and know what it's like to be adult. But you don't know it now, not hardly." I was laughing and she was laughing, but as soon as I told her she was a kid, her face changed.

She kept chewing her bread, but she got a look on her face that to this day 1 can only best describe as manly and sly. Her eyes narrowed, and her entire expression shifted to one of distrust. She turned her head from me and for the longest time looked out to the lake a ways. I tried looking at what she was looking at, but weren't nothing there—1 mean, besides lake water with bugs skating along, making patterns, and birds diving at them bugs, trying for an easy snack.

She looked at me after what felt like the whole day—me sitting there and feeling foolish and, for the first time in my adult life, not having one thing to say that I knew for sure would put me in a better light and make the awkwardness go away. She finally turned her head to me. That manly-changed expression was still plastered across her face, and she said hardly above a whisper, "I grew up round about the time 1 was born.

55 You don't know nothing about me, you or Booker. Neither do. Booker's all the time saying I'm a kid, too. Don't call me that. Don't call me a kid."

With that, she picked herself up and left me. The buzzing on the lake got real loud as I sat there. I hadn't never been treated like that by no girl, and this girl wasn't

Joking around, trying to flirt by acting all mad. She was serious, but 1 couldn't put together why—or why she had all of a sudden lumped me with Booker T Goldwire. How was 1 supposed to know he called her a kid and she didn't like it? Shit.

When I thought I'd given her enough time to calm herself down, I went looking for her, but she had done taken off down the road by herself I suppose she hitched a ride because I found her in the early evening down to the river with Booker T, whistling a tune with him and throwing cane poles in for good measure. It was that whistling and laughing that made me lose it. I ain't particularh' proud to this day. but I lit into her a good one—1 always have had a temper, although it's done subsided with age. I yelled down to the bank from where I stood, "What you think you doing down there leaving me sitting like a damned fool over to the lake?"

She looked up at me, as did that fool nigger. She stared, but he started up a giggling. I'd heard that giggling before when he'd come in my daddy's store looking after to buy a transistor or something for his woman; he occasionally bought fishing supplies there when he heard around town someone pawned them to us. He wasn't the sole property of Lou Meredith even though she acted like she was the only person in town who knew him at all—acted like she owned him or something. I'd been knowing him all my life as well; she ain't the only somebody in this town who knows people, no

56 matter who she thinks her family is. He'd been friends with my daddy and my daddy's fool friend, Tom Louder. My daddy's like that—ain't too particular who his friends are as long as they're entertaining.

I couldn't bare to be giggled at, and 1 could less bare being stared at, so I took off slamming the door to my pick-up and screeching tires on the dirt trying to get away fast.

I went and found another girl I was making time with. This girl, she was sweet to me, never talking back or acting strange. She would smile, and lie back on the seat of my truck. Sigh when 1 touched her, like she needed it, like she liked it. Her name was

Rochelle, and she was a beauty queen around these parts—in her day.

But the whole time I'm driving around with her I can't think on nothing but that damned Lou Meredith. So, later, I'm waiting up from the river for her to come traipsing along. She pretends not to see me, walking and whistling to herself with her nose up in the air and that silver hair flowing, killing me. I finally can't take it no more and drive up in front of her and open the passenger door. 1 guess she couldn't take it either, or 1 suppose she'd gotten bored with being pissed about nothing because she climbed on in and said, "Drive."

Hell, weren't long before 1 married her. Talked her into it. Figured for a while

I'd play Booker T's game, make her feel like 1 was her savior from her family. 1 ain't stupid. I guess. Saw what she was looking for and took after it. She needed to feel free, like she was doing something her family didn't approve of and that she was doing it for herself 1 played right into that, and if she doesn't think Booker T Goldwire was plaving a game, too, she's crazy.

57 Now that I sit here in another truck, newer and more refined, but following her like so many years before, I think on those days when she was a girl and this woman today sitting up in the shadows of her mama's and daddy's house. I wonder if it weren't more about what I needed that brought me to where 1 am right here. Whiskey does this to me, but Rochelle used to say regularly, "Honey, drink acts a fool's truth-serum. Watch out for it."

She's been right most her life; I ain't guessing on her being wrong now.

And drink can't mask that I ain't from good stock like Lou. My daddy and his daddy before him was nothing but Junk dealers. Oh, my daddy, he's proud of his business, and now I suppose I ain't ashamed of it, neither. But, shit. Lou Meredith came from one of them big white mansions off the square. Her folks been running things from the Sewannee Club since long before 1 came along, probably since before my daddy even thought to be selling Junk to niggers.

They weren't that hard on me when 1 come down the pike, surprising though it may seem. I like to claim they was, but that's an embellishment Lou began when we was

Just back from rurming off. She'd strut around the Bottom Bar and Grill where we'd meet in the afternoon for a beer and a burger, saying, "Me running off with my baby about put my mama and daddy six feet under, it did. Ain't it grand, sugar?" I'd pull her to me and place her on my lap, stroking that long, silver hair, and reply, "Baby-doll, it's sure enough whatever you want it to be."

I meant it, but 1 guess now that 1 think maybe 1 didn't, after all, because when

Lou's daddy. Dr. Meredith, called me into his study that first Thanksgiving afternoon

58 when I suppose they all had figured 1 might not be going away any too fast seeing as

we'd married and consummated and everything, 1 smiled at him and tried my damnedest to talk right and proper and to be polite, all the while knowing Lou would never forgive

me if she knew. He called me "son," saying, "come and have a seat and let's talk about opportunities." I sat as still as I could that afternoon. I didn't want the leather of his couch to squeak loud like 1 didn't have any couth. So, 1 sat still and nodded as often as 1 needed to.

He said, "Mr. Rutledge—or I guess I better call you son now that you've married into this family—we need to talk about Lou's future." 1 nodded like a fool because at the time her future, in my sights, included nothing more than drinking an icy beer later at the lake. "As you know, the Merideths have a place in this community. Mrs. Merideth and I have discussed it, and we feel that you had best move into some of our holdings, begin to run some things out at the farm. That way, when we are gone, Lou will be well taken care of She is. after all, our only daughter."

The dim light in his study glowed warm around me; Lou's father. Dr. Merideth, even offered me a scotch saying, "A man can acquire a taste for this with a little practice." I took a nervous sip, nodding all the while, and went right on into business with her family. And 1 have made more of it than they ever dreamed that farm could ever make. I moved them from tobacco into tomatoes, and I diversified their Coca-Cola interests so that they could beat taxes; I took all the Junk-selling skills 1 learned from mv' people, then learned quick to play tonk and golf and to dress right and drink neat. Her dadd\' learned to love me like a son. or at least like a real affable business partner, and

59 Lou's mama, she kept right on drinking her vodka and swinging on the front porch like she always did, at times having polite conversation with me and not seeming at all concerned I had interloped upon her world.

1 did this all for Lou, but only now 1 realize she never forgave me. She married me to get away from her famih and 1 brought her right in tight with them—1 became one of them. So, when Booker T Goldwire died, she realized right and sure she had no one left who thought she might be worth a damn on her own, without her name, and she fell apart. Made all the arrangements for his funeral, made sure his picture and a write-up was printed in the Gadsden County Times. Got his kids all here and then hosted a shin­ dig worthy of the governor, himself, at her mama and daddy's old mansion, empty now for five years or so. The whole town was invited, and, hell, the whole town came for nothing else than to watch Lou Meredith Rutledge give a nigger wake in her mama's parlor.

What 1 am supposed to do about this mess is nothing I ever comprehended before.

I said I was planning to stay away from that funeral and the wake as 1 knew was my right.

Felt bad, though, and snuck in only to hide back in the shadows. I liked Booker T well enough. He hung about my daddy's store on occasion. In fact, my daddy, he was sure to go to the funeral and to say later he cried real tears. Said, "Billy Boy Junior, you ought to be ashamed being Jealous of the likes of Booker T Goldwire. He Just a poor old nigger fisherman and look at you: Jealous because your woman thought kindly of him. If it weren't for him, you wouldn't be married and a big-shot now—introduced vou to Lou, after all."

60 I looked long at my daddy, and he looked long back. We've been like this forever. His stare goes right through me and he wins every time, and this was no different. 1 said, "Daddy, you may be right about me being mad, but what am I supposed to do? Ain't right for a Meredith to be giving no funerals for no colored man. Don't look right, won't set right around town."

My daddy's eyes slit into a sliver of skin, then his face turned ashen, and he whispered harsh and low, "Last I heard, Lou's been a Rutledge for the last ten years or so, and this here Rutledge says it's fine and good to be helping out a family that done raised her up right."

I walked out of his store that day thinking he might be part right and I was sure enough turning into something I ain't, but by then Lou had done turned away from me for good. 1 found her at home that day—I think it was the day before the funeral or perhaps the morning of—she was talking a streak on the phone with the caterer about what to serve at the wake. I heard her there, putting so much care and energy into making these arrangements, and I lost it. I knew in that moment that it was more than she could ever muster for me, that if I keeled over right then in front of her, she wouldn't think to open her daddy's home and invite the town; she wouldn't worry over a menu or take care I was buried down to the lake where she knew 1 was happiest. I waited and stewed and knew she'd throw me in a hole next to her mama and think, "good riddance," and I couldn't stand for it.

This is where I lost her for good.

61 I said, "I forbid any wife of mine to be giving no nigger funeral. It ain't happening." I tore the phone out of her hand and slammed it against the wall. I was panting and sweating, and Lou stood in front of me, in the suddenness of a passing shadow, calmer than I'd ever seen her before. It occurred to me that the last time I had seen her with this look of cold determination was at our wedding when she defied her heritage by marrying a low-rent, red-neck, white trash like me.

1 thought of the time she tried to cry to me about Booker T Goldwire warning her off me. She sat on the end of the dock, again at Lake Talquin. The sun was going down over the vague horizon where the water meets the sky, and 1 remember how she had been tracing her toes in paths with water bugs and giggling at that. It was fall, and the first cooling off had begun, and I watched her hair and skin, light and shining, reflect the lake and sun. I wanted to kiss her right then, but 1 knew she was sad and angry at Booker T

Goldwire telling her she shouldn't marry me to spite her parents. "He ain't right," she claimed a bit too strong and determined. "1 ain't marrying you to spite nobody. I'm marrying you because I adore you." She said the last word long, pulling out the sound like a hug to wrap me in. That's how I feh with her in those days, warm and content.

Crickets and cicadas were cranking up about this time, and she came over to me and sat in my lap, putting her head onto my shoulder and settling in. We sat for the longest time Just like that. I talked after awhile, feeling like I best voice indignation against someone, anyone, especially the likes of Booker T Goldwire, who 1 had thought to be my friend, or at least knew him to be the friend of my daddy. And there he was trying to scare off my woman from me. "Don't you listen to nothing that low-life got to say. He don't know you or nothing about you. He don't know what we got together. He's Just Jealous and that ain't right. Screw him."

She tried to look at me then and question my reasonings. She asked, almost in a whisper made hoarse from needing and wanting to cry, "What does Booker have to be jealous of? He's the happiest person 1 know."

She slid from my lap and laid herself along the edge of the dock. Her long hair hung over the edge, and the ends dipped into the water, floating light and simple. She stared up above her and the Just setting sun glowed crystalline in her eyes. Waves began lapping past us. making the dock move up and down, and 1 couldn't think what to say, and this scared me. I figured I was skating on thin ice; my daddy was constantly telling me I couldn't hold onto Lou Meredith for long: "You ain't good enough for her; she'll soon enough figure it out," he'd laugh over his paper in the morning when I'd try and tell him something furmy or sweet she'd done to me or me to her. After awhile, I believed him completely, and I was desperate.

So on this fall day, when Lou was hurting and I could've been the savior, I blurted out, mean and cold. "Booker's Jealous because he don't want you to be happy. He told me so. He thinks you should stay along with your mama and daddy all your life because you a snotty white girl and you don't deserve nothing better."

1 knew it was a lie and felt terrible immediately. Lou shot up like a rocket, scraping her arm along a plank on the dock. Her hand got a splinter and she unconsciously picked at it, staring me down to some truth. But I was too strong for her

63 for 1 was more than guilty: I was hopeful that my low-down lie might get me where I wanted to go. 1 stared back.

"He never said that. Booker wouldn't ever say anything like that. He loves me too much." Her fingers dug in her hand and blood started mingling with her fingernails and getting brown and terrible.

"He would and did say it, baby-doll. Why would I lie?"

I got what 1 thought 1 wanted. We were married soon after and then I. in turn, shifted my whole life to fit that of her family's. Lou's been drifting away from me ever since. We've had two sons and we've enjoyed dinners and vacations. I built her a house in the woods so she could feel like her own person, and I've taken her all over the world, going to cooking schools with her and looking at paintings and buildings and tennis and boat races. I taught her to bet at the race tracks and she's taught me to take a mud bath.

But we've never been closer than that day on the dock when I lied in order to seal the deal I was scared of losing.

So, when I forbade her to give Booker T Goldwire's funeral and she ignored me completely, with so much venom my blood turned cold, I suddenly realized she'd figured out 1 lied that day, that she'd been wrong to push that man out of her life. I realized I now was the one to be pushed out, and I knew 1 deserved it. I wanted to tell her I loved her so much 1 lied to her but somehow that didn't seem right either.

She looked long and hard, and I thought I saw her start to dig at her hand, all these years later, scratching as if for some truth and answer to the frustration that is all relationships. But I was mistaken. She was only fumbling for the number of the caterer

64 again, to quietly pick up the phone off the floor where it had landed then dial back, finish her business, and leave.

But I ain't given up. 1 sit here now, pouring another whiskey into a coffee cup and staring at m\ wife who sits upstairs by the front window of her parents" house. She stayed the night of the wake, came home at dawn before our sons woke up. She's been doing the same since they buried Booker T Goldwire. She takes the boys to school and then goes on over to the house, unlocks it. walks around its shadows for awhile and then settles in up on the third floor. There, she sits. 1 see her talking to nobody every now and again, and 1 watch her crv' as dust floats around her. 1 sit down here and watch as if at a spectacle going on up there. Maybe after some time she'll decide to come down, and I'll be here to follow after in my truck, finally cut her off and open the door, then drive.

I leave when it's time to have some supper with our boys now being picked up by the maid, and she's there in their rooms for them when they wake up in the mornings.

The cycle begins again, and I again sit and curse Booker T Goldwire. I began cursing him for scaring her off me, I cursed him for making me lie to her, I cursed him for dying and starting all this trouble. Now. I find myself cursing Booker T Goldwire for loving

Lou more than I could, for making me into her enemy and 1 curse him for being right all them years ago. Goddamn you, Booker T Goldwire. Goddamn it.

65 CHAPTER V

"BIG JIM"

66 Big Jim

I be feeling a good, hard drunk coming on. Spending the whole of one week down at my funeral home—where 1 be the director—preparing for Booker T Goldwires's coming home done it to me. It truly laying heavy—known the old coot since we sprites running barefoot all over Quincy, back when most of the roads was sandy dirt and no soul under twenty wore shoes. And now this old fisherman, the friend of my youth, done took off and died on me. Feeling low-down lonely and needing of a good hard drunk, I be. Booker, he used to say to me, "Some things never change none in Gadsden County," and I argued regular on the point. So, yesterday, 1 feeling like I needing to get it straight what with him gone and things certainly feeling different. Even though he dead, I look for the spirit and some remembrances in him, you might say.

When we was youngins running slipshod around town, things was sure enough different. The colored side of town was something to behold. Booker, he an orphan—his auntie and uncle raised him. He used to tell me stories taller than the sky about that Jook his uncle run, the Stardust Club. My own mama and papa was the kind of folks not likely to be wandering into no Jooks, Papa being a deacon at Mt. Zion A.M.E. and Mama being

Sister of the Vestry in charge of hat days, so Booker's stories lifted me above my world.

The two of us always run down Seaboard Street. It was the walk of colored town, of the quarter. We'd stop to get us a coke and sit on the curb. Booker T loved to sit there on

Seaboard and watch the folks in fine clothes with feathered hats and black-polished shoes, ladies prancing along dangling velvet purses with they men stepping tall and spit-

67 shined. He'd point out who was catting around late at the Stardust, who was walking with his wife and meeting up with his girlfriend.

Once, we was sitting right down on the curb and this very thing happened. The wife was brought out in all her finery, but sedate like good church-going ladies brought theyselves out, nothing gaudy or too low cut. Never legs showing more than a bit of shin.

There she be, the wife, with her arm clutching tight onto her husband's arm, all proud and dignified, smiling toothy at her friends and Sisters of the Vestry, patting her new hat she showed off at hat-day Sunday to her other sisters, real proud of how she brung out, husband and all.

Well, they walk on toward us and out walks a woman Booker T points out to me works the Stardust. Now, the man knows the lady's a whore, and she damn well knows it about herself, although she acting pretty coy about the whole thing. In fact, 1 figuring the wife's pretty much knowing it too, because she ain't bom yesterday. The three stand there a moment gawking at one another because they having a face-off on the walk.

Booker and me, we sitting right below them, our eyes rolling out of our heads and us spitting cokes through our noses, and this breaks up the standoff because the man knows he seeing the whore late nights on Saturdays regular-like, and the whore knows this here his wife and she figuring he best be bringing her some finerv like his wife sporting or else. And they suspect me and Booker knows what is what, seeing as they all know who Booker's uncle be. But the wife, she Just standing her ground thinking she be uppity and not step aside for no whore. Me and Booker, we studying on seeing us a cat fight, but then the man, he bow nervous and swish his wife right on past as polite and fast

68 as he can, guilty. Me and Booker break out giggling and rolling along the boardwalk step at this one until the storekeeper come out to sweep the walk and tell us to scat on home and stop taking up his space, making it hard for customers to walk on.

Booker T. he never left that old-time way of living. Booker's roads never got paved or named. This fact be why it so hard dealing with the family right about now.

My kinfolks, they come all this week over to the house and say, "Why you go to this trouble to make up some big coming home for the likes of Booker T Goldwire? He ain't nothing but a boozing stormbuzzer who ain't done nothing but laze his days by the

Ochlockonee. Just a crazy old man," they say to me.

And I retorts to them, "You-all no more know Booker than you know the govemor hisself Booker may have sit the day away down to that river, but he be one good man, and if you ever once sit by that river and try to pull life out of it, you certain to be asking forgiveness from the man upstairs. Go to Mt. Zion itself to do so, too.'' But they don't understand, not a one of them. They coming and going from Tallahassee and having they get-togethers and telling me I can't drink none and 1 can't eat no more. First telling me my business and then telling me to starve and deny myself to death. No one belonging here in Quincy no more, but each telling all they business.

This ain't the way it used to be. Used to be, us upstanding colored folks had our own section of town, proud. Dressed up the sidewalks outside the storefronts with potted flowers and such and dressed up ourselves in finery made for Sunday meeting Just to walk and be seen. We looked good to go out and eat and drink fine things. Then, our children growed up and got bothered about they equality, saying we ain't needing to be

69 having no segregated side of town—the quarter as we called it back in the day. Say we got a birthright to all sides of town. "We as good as," they say.

And now we got it, the whole town. Sounds good to the telling, excepting that the town done fell into disrepair and degradation. Hell, look as if it covered in erud all over, and we ain't able to wash it off none, no matter how hard we scrub. Just bad folks in mn- down buildings everywhere. I study on this town often, how it be and how it used to be, as 1 sip slow on gin at home alone.

Damned if we didn't get our equality, the whole town to call our own. And white folks—hell—they answer by speeding they cars on over to Tallahassee. I got news for them children of ours that educated theyselves at that old Florida A&M and then insisted on having the whole damned town for they own only to cover it with the slime of disuse and ignorance. Them children be indeed growed up and getting on now, speeding they cars over to Tallahassee, too. Yes, they is, and they don't even know the wrong they do.

They the ones screaming to have Quincy proper at they disposal, they say, "We as good as white folks and deserve to live in they midst." Then, when they done get the "midst" they turn away from the very property they cried for crazy for so long. Leave it to them old good-for-nothings coming in with no use for the language or even a bath.

Just yesterday, I feeling lonely for them times past. 1 generally lock up the funeral home right at noon and stay away till two. Only civilized. The whole town of

Quincy used to close up for the dinner hours to eat with family then nap a spell. I locked up, but then I walked on down to the river instead of home for dinnertime. Booker T was being embalmed out in the back room. I got myself an apprentice to do that end of the

70 business now. 1 dedicate myself to the procuring of the program and the handling of the politics of preachers and disjointed families. Seems like half the people dying these days leaving a secret wife or child Just waiting to spring theyselves at the funeral wake. But I couldn't hardly abide by the fact that my friend's body being drained of its blood, making it ready to be shut up and buried in the dirt of Gadsden County. I couldn't much stand it this dav. even though 1 sure enough done buried my own family and friends through these several years. But Booker, he different.

The sun was beating down pretty hard, but I strolled the entire way down to

Booker's spot, right around the first bend off the overpass. Booker, he used to tell us all that if we was to go around the right corner we could pretend we owned the whole river—no sounds of speeding cars. Just lapping water and buzzing skeeters to keep company.

That was the difference between me and Booker all along, I suppose. He could make something his own by simply knowing he belonged. He didn't hold no need to own nothing with paper and ink. He always say to me, "Big Jim, gots to enjoy the feel of the day and let the river run its course." He say that sort of thing to most anyone who listen, he would. Just let everybody bide they own time either taking his advice or not.

"That they own counsel," he say to me.

Me, I looking for my own counsel yesterday. 1 know I feeling all kinds of blue and down and out about Booker dying. I thinking I feel better if I try and pull his spirit out of that river, sitting low off the sandy bank, that if I can feel Booker down by the

71 Oklochnee 1 won't be so blue. He be settled on into his death safe and good, 1 thinking to myself

Of course, the place don't feel quite right without old Booker T being with me in life. 1 got down to his spot and sunk a pint of beer—picked it up at the Suwannee Swifty on the way down to the bank—sunk it right off the shore under a tree limb. Shady and nice. I think to myself 1 see one of Booker T's bottles sunk right off from mine, but when

1 wade out and reach for it, 1 found that it weren't nothing but an empty whisky bottle that got some sand in it and caught up on a rock. 1 liberates it though, and it hurried on down river. Gave me pause, it did.

Something cold unsettled itself in my blood and began traveling toward my remembrances. I backed out of the water, all the time watching that bottle float away, and 1 feeling completely alone. I used to being alone, even with dead bodies at night.

But this particular day, I be completely empty, almost like my own life floating away. I somehow carried myself out of the water, sat right down, and cried. 1 thinking about everything I missed and about how I couldn't never have predicted how much my world would change before 1 died. And I thinking about how lucky Booker T Goldwire be because he done stayed his life true, right by this river where nothing ever changes.

Stayed right here fishing. I cried to Booker's spirit then and there by the river. I cried with respect and longing for a man who lived in his world and stayed true while every single one around him sped on down the road, away to.. .well. Just away. He lived righteous. After a short sit-down, 1 went ahead and dug up my pint and drank down a gulp. I still feeling kind of quiet and empty. 1 wonder if Booker s spirit indeed be with me, drawing me away from myself a bit. Everything around me feel like it dying, feel like the seasons falling from summer down into winter, it do. Like a chill be hiding in the sunlight that sure enough shining down on my head all ready to reach out and take grab of your soul.

I sat like this for a spell, feeling like 1 ain't got a drop of energy, the way you feel when you done cried your heart out and there ain't a bit left to give. I was all let out, 1 was, and I found some peace in this emptiness. This an old feeling I done had once before. 1 don't regularly find myself letting it all fall out like this; ain't right for a man to be allowing for this sort of weakness. But sometimes, in a moment, when feelings is getting the best of a man's heart, it must be done, sure enough. I lie on back and feel the grass scratching my neck again, and that hollowness in my soul works up a remembrance about how Booker be the one the last time I emptied out my troubles and sorrows, how he done taught me to let my own daughter flow her own way and how I listened this one time.

I got me a big family, and that indeed be something for a man in my position in society to be right proud of They call me Big Jim. My family be made up of mosth women folks. Lord, if I ain't had the boy-callers coming along after my girls all the time.

Seeing as all four of them pretty as they mama, I done had some tribulations after them.

But when no-accounts come knocking at my door, I say, "Lookee you, I love each and every one of my girls more than you ever will, and if you think you be taking them from

73 me or if you think that 1 be gaining a son, you dead wrong. As far as I concemed, you gaining Big Jim. And 1 ain't studying on supporting no loafers, neither. You calling me

Mr. Williams till further notice," 1 say, and they look at me like them dogs who crawl into the funeral home looking for Jobs and then crawl out none the better because they don't understand my language when 1 telling them how life be and me not hiring no dogs.

I knowing they all be no account. I thinking I ain't needing one no more than I need none of the other, neither.

With my first three girls, in time, one particular no-account caller sure enough hang-dog long enough on the front porch until 1 relent and let him in. Scratch up the stain I done painted on the front door and all and even trip me up going out to the ear or for a stroll. Force my hand, they do. They ain't turned out half bad, neither. Give me some fine grandbabies, even some boys in the bunch. A couple of Big Jim Juniors and all. Ain't a one of them about to be playing around on my girls, neither. They know who they got to contend with, and they be righteous in accordance.

But then there be my youngest. Deidra, and my sadness over Booker T what commenced me to dwelling on her. Deidra, she my baby, but she done brung home some ringers through the years. It about broke her poor daddy's heart, it did. Especially seeing as she the youngest and my favorite. She the one what takes care of the family, the youngest, as it should be. She stay here in Gadsden County where she be born and raised up right, work hard right along side of me, and someday I know she take over the funeral home and her mama's house.

74 So. when she took sad about some no-account boy, I keep my own counsel. I thinking he can sit out on the front stoop like the rest and see what he made of Thinking at the time he ain't got it in him one bit. No worry. 1 usual-like let her mama and sisters take up the men troubles, seeing as it ain't fitting for the papa to be worrying down them no accounts. Ain't the way it be done. 1 supposed to run them off; they supposed to get theyselves let back in.

But, when Deidra take up with that Ross DuPont, I was beside myself with worry.

He be a wild sort, following after white boys and messing with drugs, that sort of bad business, no good at all. I say, "Girl, 1 don't like it one bit." But she reply to me by laying her head on my chest right there on the couch after dinner on Sunday aftemoon,

"Big Jim," she say soft and trying to cajole me, "Ross misunderstood. He a good man, a smart man."

1 tell her, I say, "If he so all-fire good, you ain't needing to be sitting, making him up to me. Seems to me this whole idea of talking about things the way womenfolks does is Just a way for you to deny the fact that they be more scoundrels out there than decent folks."

Course, 1 right. Ross DuPont mess with the blue eyes and the drugs one too many times and get hisself up to the county courthouse, on trial for murder, he be. "Great white hope. See what it get him." I say.

I can't be keeping my own counsel no more, I tell myself I know well at the time that I had to do something to help my poor Deidra. She cry and cry until 1 don't think she can have no more tears left. Then she crv a whole mess more. 1 want to call the doctor.

75 but her mama say, "Ain't nothing no doctor can do for this trouble." She won't see the preacher, neither. Deidra moaning and crying, "Them all against my Ross, and I ain't seeing none of them." She don't even open her bedroom door for her poor Big Jim, accusing me all the while that 1 ain't never supported her poor Ross neither and if we had

Just invited him once into our house he might not have needed to go off to meet no trouble.

I don't know what to do. 1 can't hardly stand to see my youngest in this kind of pain, especially while harboring such ill feeling toward her Big Jim. I made many mistakes with that girl during this hard time, too. I stand outside her door and yell at her that she was fretting a storm of tears over some damnably dumb nigger—I ain't never used language like this before or since. At some point, I even knocked down the door, pleading and demanding that Deidra get a hold on herself

1 was finally forced out of my own house by the heaviness of the troubles and the insistence of my girls and they mama. So, I walk down to the river to consult with my old friend, Booker T Goldwire. Now, Booker ain't exactly been the best papa hisself, but

I know him to be expert at touchy human situations we all find ourselves in. Besides, I ain't exactly feeling invited in the home after knocking down my baby's door.

When I make my way down to him, he sitting calm and kind of slouched over his cane pole. His baby daughter. Baby Alice—the only one he ever let take up with him down to the river—she standing behind him baiting up a hook with some stink bait I can smell from a hundred feet away. She singing a tune that reminds me of the Jooks when

Booker and me was kids. That child could sing sweet and high, not too strong. Just sweet

76 and high like a mockingbird song trapped happy under mossy night-fog, singing light among the crickets-shrill of deep night.

Baby Alice, she see me and stop singing long enough to smile. She always a good girl, still be, only she ain't too young no more. Don't you know, ain't a one of us still is. 1 walk on up, and Booker turns to me and say, "If it ain't my old friend, Jimbo.

How the dead treating you, brother?" He always be a wicked sort, that Booker. He the one man in town calling me Jimbo. He call me that since we tiny boys in short pants.

But he meaning right all the time. Ain't nothing hellacious about the man—all good, he be.

1 reply, 1 say. "The dead the only body treating me any kind of right these days," and Booker, he say, "That be a problem then if the dead the only-est somebody to keep good company with."

Booker had a way: he hands me a pint and I take a hard chug of it and almost feel better. It fire my indignation, and I launch into my rendition of the troubles. "Booker," I say, "my baby, Deidra, done take up a dog, Ross DuPont. You know, the one locked up in the county Jail waiting trial for shooting a white cracker boy. Hooch and hop involved.

Last Thanksgiving." 1 look to Booker for some recognition and reply. He sitting over his eanepole, swaying with the rhythm of my telling and I go on, "Lord. Deidra crying and crying, and she don't have nothing to do with nobody. She say she ain't coming out of her room until they let her baby go free. He ain't going free, and 1 scared she be w asting away in that room, all for the love of a genuine, true-to-be no-account. 1 done knocked her door down, but she Just say she don't need no locks on her door to make her room a

77 prison. She dead to the world, she say. Her life a prison, and they done throwed away the key, she say."

Booker, he sit in that same slouched position. His cork bobs with the waves, but the fish ain't biting a bit this day. He takes a couple of swigs hisself and then looks at me straight in the face and say, "Big Jim, you remember Dr. Meredith's girl, Lou?"

1 say, "Yes sir, 1 know who she be. She marry a white cracker herself and break her daddy's heart, from what I hear tell."

He say, "Yes sir, that be the truth, that be the truth. Hear she unhappy now, mighty unhappy. It pains me to know this, too. I sure dote on that little white girl when she wasn't nothing but perch bait. She used to love running down here to fish, she did. 1 thinking it alright seeing as my woman, Eleanor, work for the family, live in with the

Merediths her whole life Just about. Eleanor be the one raise that white girl up, too. Poor thing ain't got no parents the least bit worrying down how she be. So 1 figure she best off down to the river where there ain't nothing bad after her and all. Sweet little girl that Lou

Meredith was, sure enough."

1 listening to Booker, but I ain't knowing how that white girl got nothing to do with my troubles other than it all about papas getting they hearts broke. But 1 shows

Booker respect because that the way I should be. He go on with me sitting and feeling frustrated all over again, like I still in my house full of the girls and Deidra's broken door.

Booker say, "I feeling particularly worrisome when she take up with Bilh' Boy

Rutledge, Junior. I know how them white crackers act, and it ain't no part of good. 1 there when she meet him, and I feel responsible. After years by the river teaching her to

78 know the water and the fish and how to take what she need from it and out of it, she lose her head over a white cracker. I more troubled than if 1 be her white daddy, and I know the Merediths ain't liking it none to this day, even being in they graves. Still wonder why none of them Jumped in on something big like marrying outside they own kind.

"At the time, I take it up with Lou herself, 1 say, 'Lou, you come from finer folk than that cracker. He ain't fitting for you. He a stump-knocker and you a fine catfish, fine enough to stuff and mount in your daddy's office. The two don't mix none at all.'

"Jimbo," Booker look at me hard with the glinting sun on his face, getting my full attention to his import, "1 thinking that all need be said on the subject. I thinking Lou will see my meaning and break it off with this boy. You know what she do? She tum tail and take off with him. Not hardly a look back, not even to the river that loved her and she loved back. I never hardly talk to her much after that. Years on the river, summer days in the shade with her telling me all her little girl troubles and me sitting back and listening keen and giving advice. All gone, all for nothing. There, I thinking she always gonna take my advice. But ain't no accounting for a growed-up girl's fancy. Maybe you, yourself, taking the wrong approach. Polecats do that too sometimes, they do, Jimbo."

Booker, he tum back down to his pole and offer up some more of his pint, but now 1 too distracted to drink on with him no more. I had to think on how my approach was wrong when all I been doing was talking reasonable to the girl. 1 can't figure out none how my situation had much to do with that Lou Meredith no how, seeing as how she the white doctor's daughter, a little giri who caused the whole town a scandal her

79 whole life long, not a good colored girl like my girl, Deidra. Whole worlds apart, they be.

1 ponder this a bit, deciding to go on and take another slug. Baby Alice sits back on her haunches in the dirt staring at me a good while and smacking on some Chiclets.

This troubles me and I go on, still feeling and thinking low-down.

White and black folks alike talked bad business about Lou and Booker as soon as word got out that Dr. Meredith's little girl was down fishing on the Ochloknee with a colored man. She be named after her grandmama, a woman who never hardly talk straight with no colored man, much less go down fishing all day and playing truant from school. She named after her mama too— that the way with some white folks—but her mama ain't caring much where she be as long as it out and away, as I understood it. The tongues did wag, though, for God's certain truth, they did. From Mt. Zion A.M.E. to the courthouse square, people was surely scadalized by the two of them.

I hear it from both sides, too. Hear it at church and hear it down to the river. I know ain't nothing wrong excepting that this poor little white girl needing some attention and raising pretty terrible, and she enjoy herself some cane fishing a mite well. 1 also know ain't likely any one soul in Gadsden County willing to accept the fact that ain't nothing bad happening, or so goes the talking up from the bank.

Booker love that little white girl crazy, acted like he didn't, but he did. She be a hell of a fisherman, she be. In the end, though, I know Booker T best off without the troubles of that little girl. He tell me once about the fancy marriage party her parents throwed her to make a big show to the high-up society folks in Quincv and about him

80 getting a pretty invite because his wife Eleanor be they housekeeper going on forty years before she died, and he tell me about going and being too humiliated to even go inside seeing as the white folks was whispering about him being invited and not belonging and the bad talk we been raised hearing all our lives. And Eleanor, in her good going-to- meeting dress and new white gloves and velvet hat pinned just so, smelling like Paris, and every other little thing Booker noticed, being as he loved Eleanor so much he saw evervthing she did in or out of the Meredith house, even though other folks may not have appreciated how much he cared because he generally kept to his own counsel. Eleanor, she walk straight in the front door of the Suwannee Club proud of the Merediths, and the stares and whispers all around her, stop poor Booker at the front door so as he can't even go in. He go around back and hang in the shadows and dust where he feel more at home until the white men, they start to creep out to be with him and drink whisky and shoot craps. Booker stay there and Eleanor, she go on in and 1 sure she fine. Booker, he don't even see the bride or nothing.

Some things don't change none in Gadsden County, he later say to me, as he often did when we sitting and chatting. At the time, 1 don't know for sure he saying nothing right—1 always thinking lots changed since we children. I only get myself home licketv- split and walk as soft and careful as my big frame can into my girl's room. I sit down with her. and for some reason unknown I cry to sheer exhaustion. Then, I leave and have me a good long sleep, dark and complete. Later, Deidra, she come out of her room, puffy but dry. She say, "Big Jim, 1 going down to the beauty parlor, Mayella's, and have my hair crimped. Be down to see you directly." And she get on with it.

In a way, 1 do believe he be correct that day about some things ain't never being different in Gadsden County, even though 1 still bemoaning the particulars about things changing. He right about my approach being wrong, and 1 suspect Booker right about everything else as well.

All along I be worrying down the changes of our way of life and how that leaving me and my place. I best be worrying over the fact that things ain't actually changing none in this pitiful life of ours, and that really only be a crime for our children. Me, I got the best of everything; I got the pride and the belonging here. But poor Deidra. she ain't got none of it. She lost, worrying over some boy done got hisself caught in between yesterday's ways and today's. And he probably be hanging from a tree tomorrow, lynched for his trouble. My Deidra, she crying her heart out for something she can't help none and, I finally supposed, Ross DuPont couldn't help none neither. Just like Lou

Meredith thinking times was changing and she could go off and marry below her kind.

Now she unhappy, mighty unhappy.

To this day, I don't exactly know what it is I done to bring her back to me, but somehow Booker had something to do with it. I know from when we was children that

Booker full of some good spirit and this be why I go to the river on the day of his embalming to make sure his soul running free. It be only fair that this one thing, too. don't change none in Gadsden County.

82 CHAPTER VI

"LOU"

83 Lou

Waiting is something I've gotten real good at, completely adept, as my daddy would have said, and then looked down his nose at me as if to challenge my vocabulary.

When I was younger and wilder than a March hare, 1 waited for neither anyone nor anything. Running was the way to stay young and free, to be me.

But I wait now. Wildness is fleeting, I've learned, and then we are left with ourselves, waiting, alone, to find out what happened, where everyone went. I'm waiting; sometimes, right here at my house, the one my husband built me. More often lately, though, I go into town and wait it out at my mama's house. I climb high up to the third floor, and 1 try talking to the shadows. The dead are in those shadows, and I hope they know what I'm waiting for, because I sure as hell don't. Those who have passed on never bothered me, beyond the fact that 1 figure they know the secret of staying happy through getting older better than I do.

But then 1 heard about Booker's passing down at the newspaper office. I'd gone down there to pay up my subscription, which was past due. I still can't believe I heard about it this way, with that horrible Rochelle Greene sitting behind the counter filing her inky blue nails down and smacking gum. Just as matter-of-fact as could be. that woman grabbed my check out of my hand and slid some copy of his funeral notice right across the counter. As if it was a receipt for goods, as if it was nothing to me, like gossip.

That God-awful woman. She's trailer trash to the core. Stood there, while I read for the first time that Booker'd died, and told me how she and 1 went to high school

84 together. As if I am incapable of remembering with whom or when 1 went to high school. Twenty years is not that long ago, I wanted to tell her. But somehow Booker's funeral notice sitting there on that dirty counter with dust gathering and clinging to the corners of the paper kept my mouth shut.

Rochelle stood there yakking about how the print company at the newspaper was making up the funeral programs, how they were the only thing keeping that rag afloat.

She laughed as she said this. 1 couldn't believe she laughed. Poor Booker's dead, and she's standing there laughing. Then she said, "You know, Lou, sure is hard to find a good picture of them backwoods coloreds. Got to, though. Funeral program's got to have a picture on the front. Them people take these coming home ceremonies awful serious, they do. Don't suppose your mama kept some sort of mug shot, did she?

Eleanor worked so many years for you all."

I grabbed the piece of paper off that counter. It dragged dust along, rising like a path of clouds as the death notice followed, gripped tight in my hand. I heard Rochelle sneeze a couple of times, and I ran out the front door wanting to be alone with the news.

I don't know why. I couldn't let that awful Rochelle Green know 1 was crying. My chest felt like it might explode in there, and I ran. 1 think I got hold of something undone, though, because this notice was on some cardboard paper, all cut-and-paste. It's written like a newspaper, though. I suppose 1 never thought much about what form a newspaper took before it's delivered to my door once a week, assumed it got made like it looks.

Driving home, I could hardly stand it. I wanted to stop and read it again and again, like that might bring Booker back to me or something. The life and times of

85 Booker T Goldwire in three paragraphs. I couldn't believe the truth sitting in the car seat next to me, pieces of it blowing up a bit in the air conditioning. Three paragraphs. If

Booker and old Eleanor hadn't had so many children. 1 suppose they sure enough could have fit it in less. No front page martyrdom for poor Booker. That's saved for white attorneys and powder-blue ladies who leave their shade tree tobacco palaces about as often as my mama left hers. Honor isn't for a good man who spent his life being nice to folks and teaching us all how to fish down at the river. That isn't important enough around here. I cried my way home, almost too much to even be able to read and reread those three paragraphs.

1 was scared to stop the car, even after I left the city limits and was flying down the county road that goes on out to our farm. I wanted to read it so bad, and I kept glancing down at the dust gray corners as if 1 might ascertain some big why in each piece of dust.

Having stolen that notice because I needed it made me feel like I had as a small child on summer vacations, downtown on the square, hiding from my mama and Eleanor.

I used to steal bags of hard, bulk candy from the drugstore. The antiseptic fluorescent light glowed over the top of my white blond head as I tried to blend with all the black kids and their mamas buying thick lemonade and rock-hard ice cream, so hard it didn't melt in the heat of the drugstore.

My favorite bag of choice was lemon drops. They were the hardest to cram into the waist band of my shorts, because the sugar coating that flaked off the candy and settled into the bottom comers of the plastic bag also escaped the bag and mingled with

86 the sweat on my belly. 1 always ended up with a rash around my waist, and then Eleanor would apply all kinds of God-only-knows-what sort of rot-gut remedies while talking a blue-streak about the old days when little girls didn't get rashes so close to their woman places. "Because thev know better than to go fishing with Booker T," she would add as a postscript. She added it to every bitching session she had with me. And then she'd bellow loud to what I feared at the time was Heaven itself that 1 should know better than to set myself down with the chiggers in shorts deep in the woods by the river. "Lord." she used to sav'. "You probably won't never have no children from itching that stomach so hard."

Even back then, before I knew what the hell she could possibly be talking about, back when I figured she was determined to keep me out of Heaven and worried only slightly about not really caring about where I ended in the after-life, old Eleanor tried hard to keep me from spending time with Booker. But he was my father-figure, a confidant, the only friend. Yes, the only one, I realize now. For years, the only one because for all those years I was Lou Merideth, too good to be messing around with the other kids in the county. None of them were good enough for us, or so Eleanor and my mama thought. Ought to seem funny that I ended up down at a river in the country with an old black man when even a shoe salesman's kid wasn't good enough.

Booker loved that hard candy. Loved it a lot more than 1 ever did. 1 used to present my spoils with a flourish of my arms, a ballet move I learned at lessons over in

Tallahassee, ft was a ritual for us. He'd sit in front of me and applaud politely before winking big and exaggerated, and saying, "Miss Lou, you ain't downtown pulling

87 stickups none, is you? That ain't the way no daughter of Dr. Meredith's should be

acting."

And I'd swear on anything I could find handy that I had saved my allowance and

bought said candy. 1 thought of it as a ritual offering for a fishing lesson and a little

kindness, and 1 felt good because I'd gotten away with something. Booker never

believed me, I'm sure. But he sucked on the sour sugar all day long and let me watch the

cane poles for any dip of the cork. He'd hum a tune, singing occaisionally the words, "A

little something for nothing." And he'd smile.

1 stole Booker T's death notice and drove fast. I had this sickening feeling, the kind that pumps along with your heart, seeming to scream inside my stomach: Be alone, think later, get home. I wanted to maybe make it not happen, not that day. Not in the company of Rochelle Greene. And then, driving around the curves of the winding road that led to my house, I felt the same arching ache, because I picked up and again held, gripped in my sweating hand, this funeral notice of my old friend. My stomach felt as if a bushel of goat-head stickers had imbedded Just the edge of their points into the inner flesh of my gut and spread thornily up into my ribs. Funny, I didn't want to determine if I felt this way because I Just ran out of the newspaper office with three paragraphs, or because Booker T Goldwire was dead. But I figured it was a combination of these two pathetic facts, and they both made me sick inside.

I felt the same anxiety that stuffing lemon drops down my shorts always started in my gut—before the sugar and sweat began to itch and, most importantly, before the

88 reward of presenting my heist to Booker took the fear away. Then, it was gratification, pure as sugar. But driving alone with only that notice held absolutely no gratification.

There was no freedom in the artificial breeze blowing in my hair, no anticipation of

Booker's humored approval. I had only this sick feeling in my gut that everything would now be different.

I alvvav s thought in mv little-girl pride that 1 had gotten away with something grand, much more grand than anything happening or perhaps going to happen a few blocks down the road in the big house where 1 lived. Looking back, I realize they must have known: Dr. Meredith's only child, prancing around bare foot and alone, was stealing eandv. 1 used to panic right at the front door where the soda Jerk—Johnny, I think his name was—stood scooping with that one strong, chocolate-colored arm. He smiled at all the customers, ev erv single one. He even smiled at the poorest kids who didn't have mamas to take them for ice cream and lemonade, the kids who Just rested their foreheads against the cool glass of the freezer and stared at the multi-colored tubs of flavored cream. He must have been a soda Jerk all his life—that one right arm of his was so muscular. He seemed about as old as Booker back then. He used to smile and nod at me. "Aftemoon, Miss Meredith," he would say so polite. "Sure is hot and stifling outside. You should taste a littie of my lemonade. Miss Meredith. Icy sweet it is."

And I stopped dead in my tracks, panic spread first white hot through my ribs, and then cold, colder than any ice cream he could possibly scoop, the nerves tingling unbearably to the edges of my toes. But he only smiled a slightly moronic grin and nodded incessantly as I flew out the door and down the street to the river. I got to where

89 I could run lightning fast, barefoot on concrete, my stomach aching inside and out. I'm sure old Johnny knew. After all, he practically told me every afternoon I chose to go on my summer crime sprees that 1 would get away with it, that they certainly could spare some lemon drops for me. Dr. Meredith was my daddy, and he treated all these people standing in line at the drug store—treated them free if they were on hard times. Daddy didn't care one bit about their money. He'd married my mama so was richer than anyone in town.

Once home, 1 went into my son's room and stood in the middle with my face turned up toward the air conditioning vent. This stupid house is brand new, but for some reason, his room has the only vent that works well at all. Standing there with my face pointed up to the vent made me feel a bit better. I focused on the feeling of the air; it rushed like an easy breeze down from the big white, fiberglass circle.

The fact that it works here has always amazed me. "Why in this one room?" I keep asking my husband, Billy Boy. He looks at me like I've slapped him across his face, like he built this stupid house himself and the fact that the air conditioning's screwed up is all his fault and I blame him. He's screwed up plenty in his life, but I'm not demented enough to think this is one of those times. He's crazy. I tried to make him envision the vent system and talk about ways in which the system could go awry, and onh deliver breezy air to my son's room. I go on for a few minutes because it fascinates me and it seems like something worth talking about. But Billy Boy only vows, defensive as hell and for the hundredth time, to call the air conditioning man to fix it. I hear him

90 compare notes with his friends later about the trials of living with a woman during her change of life.

When we built this house, 1 insisted that it feel as if we lived in the woods by the river. 1 wanted cool, fresh air, 1 told Billy Boy. And in my oldest son's room we achieved this. 1 need this feeling to keep my life serene enough to continue. Booker understood this need, only he was able to live it, outside and real. He'd understand what

I was trving to do with this house, I said to the vent, but then stopped short. Probably would have understood, 1 corrected myself, those goatheads sprouting in my stomach again.

1 stood still, clutching Booker's paragraphs, wondering if I had the nerve to read the passage again. The hand that held the cardboard trembled cold and wet with sweat as

I loosened the tight clutch I held onto that piece of paper with. I finally sat down on the shag carpet under the roar of the vent and read:

Booker T Goldwire died Tuesday in the home of his youngest daughter, .Alice

Goldwire. Mr. Goldwire had suffered from a lengthy illness. His death was listed as natural causes. He was 76.

Mr. Goldwire was preceded in death by his wife of 44 rears, Eleanor, and one son, Thomas, who died in infancy. He is survived by four daughters, Frances Jackson and Yvonne Whitson of Tallahassee. Eleanor Travis ofPensacola. and Alice Goldwire. of

Quincy. and by three sons. Theo and John Goldwire. both of Atlanta. Georgia, and

Mat hew Goldwire ofThomasville. Georgia. He is also survived by twenty four

91 grandchildren, thirty-three greal grandchildren, and countless other friends and relatives.

Services and interment will be held at the Ochlockonee River at W a.m. with a memorial following at Ml Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church. Thursday. June 12.

The Wake will be held at the old Merideth home following the memorial, cmd a viewing of the body is 2 to 4 p.m on Wednesday. Williams Funeral Home will handle the arrangements, and contributions should be made to the Goldwires.

1 don't know how long I sat there reading and rereading. Finally, the idea that I should send a contribution to his family gelled in my head. Yes, 1 should do that, I thought and felt real tired. Then it occurred to me that I could put on the whole ceremony—what did they call it—the coming home ceremony. Booker. 1 wanted to call someone and make arrangements. But 1 wasn't so sure whom 1 should call. No one I know would care. Booker T Goldwire was Just a silly old black man who had been married to our housekeeper, a man who drove around in a clunky car that never had a muffler and who avoided work as easily as most of us get up in the morning and lay down on soft feathers at night. He hung around out the back screen door to our kitchen all of my childhood. He lived as the lightning bug, shining through instinct, never through effort.

The fact that he outlived Eleanor was more of an issue of discussion in our family.

She died several years ago. She wasn't more than sixty. Died of a massive heart attack.

Daddy said. He wamed her for years to lose some weight and quit worrying after all

92 those children of hers and that polecat she lived with. Daddy never could stand Booker.

Said more than half of Eleanor's children took after him, and she reacted by keeping all but the youngest away from him as much as possible. She ran seared that they would grow up like him. fly away all the time. So she and my daddy sent them all to college at

Florida A&M in Tallahassee. Reward for being like Eleanor, he said. Of course, when

Eleanor died. Daddy put on a big shindig funeral. And the kids who took after her barely shed a tear. Booker's baby—1 started calling Alice his baby when all the craziness of that funeral wake started—cried her eyes out. She wasn't trying to put on a big educated, proper show for the doctor, 1 suppose. Alice wanted Eleanor and the rest of us to know she felt real terrible and missed her as much as she knew Booker would.

The notice blew a little on the shag carpet. Curly, nylon fibers had mingled with the dust and I wiped it off How long had it been since I saw Booker last? Eleanor's funeral? That couldn't be it, I hoped. That was over ten years ago. I heard that Booker had gone to live with Baby Alice, his favorite, but Billy Boy told me that, only to admit later he didn't know what he was talking about, that he heard Booker was actually living in a shack owned by some other woman named Alice. He's always trying to make me love him by letting loose of gossip. Idiot.

Baby Alice was the one most like Booker. She was the one who took to the riv er after I went off and married Billy Boy Rutledge, Junior. She was younger than me, and, of course, Booker was really her papa. Like me, I suppose she listened to his stories with rapt attention and learned to bait a hook tight. She looks like him. too. Wiry and

93 troublesome. Dark and fluid. She never ran off from the river, not really and for good like me.

Alice never stays married very long. I like to imagine that after years on the river with Booker, she knows better than to put up with much orneriness from a man. 1 know from experience she learned all their tricks from the master himself Just as free as could be in the telling—if you listened. No, Booker would make sure that his Alice knew the score before she got too old to be content to Just lie all day in the pine needles and feel the breeze swish slightly overhead, fishing. Told her right, before she grew up, as I did a few years before her. No, Alice stayed with him. She was a good daughter, listened to his truth and knew it to be that. She lived by it.

I remembered the day Alice was bom. She was the youngest—and the last, according to Eleanor all the way through her pregnancy. She was years too old to be thinking about having babies. Mama told me that after the birthing she laid back on her pillows, heaved a big sighing grunt and said she was tired. Booker T supposedly came in later and Just picked up that little girl, saying something to the tune of, "Well, Baby

Alice, you has come home to me."

Eleanor—my mama had to tell me this whole story because I wasn't allowed in

Eleanor's house—she sat around for weeks looking strange and ashy. Post-partum depression we call it now, but back then she was considered "not right." Then Baby

Alice was kind of Just Booker's baby. First time anyone heard of him having much to do with his babies. But Alice was surely his favorite. He took to driving around town with the baby in the car, and Billy Boy says he actually propped her up on bars at the jooks.

94 That's when Eleanor gained back the reason she had lost in turning over the baby to

Booker in the first place, and tried to take Baby Alice back into the fold. She said she didn't particularly want old Booker back, but that poor baby was Just an innocent lamb child of the Lord and couldn't help what it had been named after.

Brother Damon made a special trip to my Daddy's office to tell him what a mortal sin Eleanor had committed, all because of jealousy of some woman long run off from

Booker and probably dead.

Booker refused to return Alice without being invited back himself He said the two of them were perfectly content to laze by the Ochlockonee River and Eleanor knew why. He said Jooks had been good enough for his raising and, by God, at least one of his children was going to grow up knowing a little more about life than what Brother Damon or Dr. Meredith had to say.

When my mama told me all of this, I prayed at night real hard to the Jesus that lived in the woods, the one Booker used to tell me about when we chased lightning bugs around the back yard on sticky, wet summer evenings. We trapped them in Mason Jars we'd stolen from Eleanor, shook them as hard as we could, and pretended every night was the Fourth of July. He told me that Jesus lived in the backwoods, past the Jooks and the cribs and shacks, where sharecroppers didn't even dare to plow. He said the real Jesus liked to fish and lounge in the white river sand sometimes. He said the real Jesus wasn't scared of chiggers or alligators or big, fat preachers named Damon. The backwoods

Jesus thought up lightning bugs so little girls wouldn't get scared in the night.

95 I prayed real hard with my eyes shut. 1 tried to envision some Puckish Jesus romping around, only taking care of me and Booker, and Baby Alice, too. I prayed that

Booker would get to keep Alice and raise her up right, all Jooky and free, so that she could be like her daddy and wouldn't have to brush her teeth or go to school or run like lightning on the concrete, barefooted, just to fly away from being Dr. Meredith's only daughter.

But Booker finally moved back in with Eleanor—his other children were all grown up and gone. 1 felt betrayed in a way, empty and unfulfilled. I wasn't entirely sure if the backwoods Jesus was a myth, a traitor, now, or if Booker had simply turned his back on him. I kind of hoped the whole story was just another one of those thick yams

Booker loved to weave. I couldn't handle Booker being disloyal to anything outside the constraints of houses and families. I went back to praying real hard in the dark of my bedroom. I squeezed my eyes shut for hours, prayed to Jesus that Booker had hyper- exaggerated rather than turned coat. Finally, I took to waking in the momings with a headache. Daddy decided 1 needed glasses, and I went to Tallahassee to dilate my eyes.

I didn't like that much at all and stopped the hard praying. Let Booker and Baby Alice live on with Eleanor if that was what they thought they needed. Again, I acted on things I didn't understand, as I suppose I've leamed from the shadows.

I couldn't believe, here on the floor of my son's room with those newspaper paragraphs, that Booker was only 76 years old. He had seemed old all mv life, one of those weathered scarecrows that blew in the breeze a little more freely as the years

96 passed, never getting much older, but never staying young either. 1 spread my fingers across the lettering on the cardboard. The words were raised slightly off the paper.

Somehow, if 1 could feel the lettering, I could realize the truth here and know more of what I'd been missing these past several years. 1 wondered how 1 could lose the years in which my childhood friend became this grandfather, years during which 1 ceased to be youthful and wonderful. Even though he seemed old, I could not place him as a patriarch—1 guess he wasn't really.

He couldn't have lived more than ten minutes from my farm. How could my life become so busy and empty that I had lost his? How was I left only with three paragraphs and a loose idea to make some empty contribution, to see the body, and maybe clap hands to the rhythm of a bluesy hymnal in a hot church, surrounded by a family I didn't know and who didn't know me?

Booker was with me when I met my husband, back when 1 was still saucy, back in a time I think of now as "the day." When I told him, hands on my hips, flinging my long hair over my shoulders, and smacking hard on gum, "I am a grown-up, married woman," he laughed a belly laugh that rang so hard, he fell off his sitting log, still hanging a cane pole into the Ochlockonee. The breeze had stopped dead that day, and the words hung over my head suspended with the Spanish moss that dripped gray, speckled tears from the branches. I remembered the scream of a bat and my words hissing among the moss while

Booker rolled on the pine needles holding his sides. I got huffed up then—even though since that time I have come to realize I was also scared silly—and stormed off to tell

Billy Boy that Booker didn't think I was ready to be a wife. I needed someone to

97 approve—anyone besides Billy Boy, Senior, who seemed to silently count the merchandise his son would someday inherit as if he could sell it all in his pawn shop.

But Booker didn't approve. I was eighteen, and for the first time in my life, 1 had somehow achieved what heretofore had seemed impossible: I garnered Booker's disapproving mirth. No bowing and clapping this time. 1 heisted my own childhood and expected winks and claps in return. What an idiot 1 was. Everything 1 did as a little girl that went against my daddy's and Eleanor's creed had received the approving twinkle in

Booker's eyes. Now this laughter rolled out of his mouth, scratchy but lower than the screech of a bat. Not what I had expected. I felt so puffed up with the importance of finally pulling the mg out from under my parents' feet for good. I had shown them I was a grown woman and could make choices irregardless of the carefully orchestrated, antebellum upbringing they had spent years surrounding me with.

I ran from Booker that day on the river. His laughter grew hollow, then faint, as I cried and sweated through the thick weeds and grass, up the slope to my car. I could still hear an echo of his laughter over the pounding of my heart. The pounding and throbbing burst air from my lungs, and I gulped more in, trying to replace what 1 lost in the stifling, humid air of my car. And then I wanted only the dead air of the inside of my car. I couldn't feel the breeze and the laughter, hear the scream of the bat mingle with the scream inside my entire body. The scream yearned to bust loose from inside my ribs but instead stayed inside that car. And I went on being a wife. I showed everyone—I guess I showed Booker, too—that I was my own woman. Things were nev er the same between the two of us, between Booker and myself I became what I never imagined 1 would: old.

98 tired, and boring. It happened without my ever even trying. 1 ran fast away from what I

thought 1 did not want, and somehow ran smack right into it.

1 told my husband that Booker disapproved of our marriage, although I couldn't

hardly bear the idea of expressing even a memory of Booker's reaction. It somehow

made mv actions a mistake, and 1 was too afraid they were Just that to face it. I went on

following my own wav. a way devised quickly from everything 1 suppose I'd learned

about being a wife and mother by watching Eleanor and my own mama. I guessed every

girl must at some point give up her childhood friends and secret escapes, recreate herself

on her own terms from a being who had previously been only a reflection of her

surroundings.

Looking down at the paragraphs nestled in shag, I noticed one of my son's

caterpillars. My boys collect them for pets all spring. They crawl everywhere and look

like tiny, furry, harmless worms. They even seem friendly, soulful. The boys love to let them crawl all over their arms and legs. The feel of tiny caterpillar legs makes the youngest one giggle and roll around in the grass. It makes me smile back. I remembered how as a child I did the same thing. Caterpillars last longer in captivitv' than lightning bugs.

But there, tangled in the nylon fibers was a stray. I supposed it had tried to make a break for it. Probably felt the urge to weave a cocoon and sleep until it emerged a butterfly. It didn't make it. I wanted desperately to cry for the colors of the delicate wings that remained hidden somewhere inside the tangled body stuck in my rug.

99 1 don't know how long I stared at this mangled, furry death and at Booker's paragraphs. I hardly noticed the air breezing above my head anymore. My sons ran into the house and their noise startled me. 1 felt relieved to be brought from my reverie, and I went to the bathroom to get Kleenex to pick apart the mangled body of the caterpillar.

First. I picked up Booker's paragraphs and wiped at the gray smudges from the letters and the corners. 1 thought that I most certainly should be able to flnd a picture of old Booker.

I'd go over to mama's house this afternoon and look while 1 talked to those shadows about finding a little wild girl running with lemon drops stuffed in her waist, then I'd send it and the paragraphs back to the paper. I'd make Rochelle Greene publish his picture in that horrible little rag of a newspaper. Booker T Goldwire deserved more than three paragraphs, children all-inclusive.

But first, my sons would need to hold a coming home ceremony for a butterfly. I picked up the caterpillar, wrapped carefully in Kleenex, and I walked downstairs toward the sound of their laughter, thinking about how to explain to them that they must never lose wild laughter. I hoped they might want to run down by the river and learn to fish with canepoles before I went on up to town and climbed the stairs of my mama's old home to look through shadows for the past, maybe grab a piece of it, maybe understand

Just a bit.

100 CHAPTER VII

'SISTER VYRIE"

101 Sister Vyrie

I won't never forget as long as I trudge around this good earth the day Booker T

Goldwire sure enough was taken home in a blaze of glory, against my better Judgment, ft be with all the pomp and circumstance of a community leader—a preacher or a teacher or even a judge, it be. But that ain't why I won't never forget. No ma'am, it ain't. I won't nev er forget his coming home ceremony because it happened right smack on hat day, and

Sister Irene, she having the nerve to show on up to Mt. Zion's African Methodist

Episcopal Church's early service all wrapped up and tied on tight with an identical hat to mine. "That hussy, she do exceed my patience, sure enough, uh huh," I say at the time to

Sister Mae.

I pondering on the fact that I ain't having no choice but to go on home and change my hat, and I cannot tell you how deflating that be, spent all of one whole week deciding on which beautiful hat to wear. It be midnight blue with tiny cream polka dots splattered across the whole of the silk. The netting be exactly the feature that make the hat for me, the feature that be sure to make me the success of hat day and the envy of all the other

Sisters of the Vestry. Not to mention, it the feature that impress best all the mourners around town who dig up the gumption to go on down to the river and see off that scoundrel, Booker T Goldwire, to home. I do say. Cousin Eleanor, Booker T's poor departed wife—bless her soul even though she ain't be looking after my well-being none from up in Heaven that day seeing as she let Sister Irene, that hussy, show up in a identical copy of my hat—she be thinking my hat scream "class."

102 1 know this to be true seeing as Sister Addie, who sure enough was Cousin

Eleanor's best friend back in the day told me, "Vyrie, don't fret your mind none. Sister

Irene don't do nothing to your beautiful hat but make it look cheap. Can't no netting hide her snarly-snarl lip one bit, honey. She ain't got no class, none at all. She can't wear no hat like you and our Cousin Eleanor, no ma'am."

The netting, it beautiful on me, and 1 might add to the truth, it lay right over one of my eves so I rightly appear both chaste and saddened with only one eye needing the light of dav. the other one needing its own council, hiding and meditating, and also a tad bit saucy, what with the one good eye looking bold under them tiny polka dots, if you know what I mean. And the color—Lord the color, ft shine with superiority and intelligence, the sun beating down and picking its way through the shimmering midnight blue of the silk.

Sisters of the Vestry can't be all the time appearing to possess no charms, all us sitting up front under the preacher. That's why come once a month the Sisters of the

Vestry proudly don hats and strut on to Sunday service like the old times when a lady wouldn't be caught dead with no hat. seeing as going about publicly bare-headed be a practice for back-water whores. Of course, back then, a hussy like Sister Irene wouldn't be let on no vestry as a sister, not even at one of them made-up churches outside of town.

Women like her, they best left yakking they way down to the store on the corner, not being trusted with the honors and duties of the vestry.

But these ain't the old days, and that hussy have on my hat, despoiling its effect, so that I was forced to trudge on home after the most humiliating moment of my life—

103 high stepping I be down the aisle, knowing every last somebody be looking on me with admiration, until I don't no more than sit myself down and here slouches in—hussies don't high step, they can't none—Sister Irene all thinking she done ate on a canary with her hat. It weren't even placed right; she don't have no saucy tilt so that one eye hid underneath the netting. Both her eyes looking dumb and, with no class, right straight at me.

You know what she did when she seed me? She smiled. Dumb and vacant and sheepish, like she knowed she bought my hat right out from under me and like she thought might nobody notice if she weared it wrong. I swear to Jesus, she did. That why

I say: hussy.

It be after this most humiliating moment that a miracle of understanding came upon me like holy water sprinkled on a babe. All the other sisters, some in they own new hats and thinking theyselves grand and some in they old but still good hats and thinking theyselves perfectly adequate, sit there hiding gape-mouths behind gloves—on hat day we also wear gloves because, after all, we be invoking them classy days gone by—and whisper to one another about the scandal and think how grand after-church time will be, all telling my tragedy and her hussiness around the stoops after Sunday dinner.

But I got right past it by looking myself up to the rafters of Mt. Zion and invoking the spirit of poor dead Cousin Eleanor. She my first cousin, and it be her husband's funeral after service this day. I weren't particularly looking forward to it—he a scandal, he be, skinny, too—but I know Cousin Eleanor love that man to pieces. I looked right up because back when she alive. Cousin Eleanor come regular to Mt. Zion when she feeling

104 poorly about something that no-good Booker T done or about something crazy one of them children—especially the youngest, Alice, the one took after him. Lord she bad but sweet—pull right under her nose, embarrassing, especially with her employer, white- man. Dr. Merideth. I figured this morning of all mornings she be right there, a shadow behind my troubles, brooding on Booker T's finally catching up with her in the great beyond.

I sitting in m>' pew trying to keep my head high and thinking hard and mean about

Sister Irene. pra> ing to Jesus to hold Booker T awhile in purgatory until such time poor

Cousin Eleanor might become adjusted to having to chase down his soul. That what put her in a grave—I swear to the cross it did—dedicating a whole life to saving his no-good, sorry soul. And what, I sat there brooding, did all that work and dedication get poor

Cousin Eleanor? An early grave and then a forever after with Booker T Goldwire, that what.

Cousin Eleanor, she a heap older than me. 1 nothing but a small girl when she growed-up already having children by Booker T. I remember Cousin Eleanor by her girth, sure enough. She a big lady, substantial and hippy, but she be considered Just right, my mama tell me. "Men, they like curves. Junk in the trunk, something to hold on to," she say. 1 believed her, and ate second helpings for dinner, already looking torward dinner's leftovers for supper, waiting on the stove, lightly covered with a towel, tempting me to peek later on in the heat of the afternoon.

My mama couldn't never stand the thought that Cousin Eleanor, a woman secure in a good Job keeping house for them rich white folks, the Merideths, could abide by

105 someone the likes of Booker T Goldwire. There she be with her own house in the back of the Merideths' big mansion, with the importance of holding together that family, cooking and cleaning and single-handedly running every little thing for that family, my mama used to rightly claim. And what she take up with? Booker T Goldwire. A scandal of skinny, whiskey-drinking fisherman who never did nothing but laze around the

Ochlockonee all day and sip beers at the Jooks, them back-water kind where racy types claim vou find whores Just taking a sit-down at the bar in they undergarments.

Cousin Eleanor, she spent a godly amount of time in the day down to Mt. Zion praying for Booker T's soul with Brother Damon. Had the preacher regular-like to lunch, serving him up crisp fried chicken, soft yeast rolls, and green beans, simmering a pray-in with hamhock. even creamed her potatoes with real cream, the whipping kind. All Just to buy Booker T Goldwire a slot in eternity with her. Tried to barter him in. she did.

1 can't decide rightly if them dinners had anything to do with Booker T's etemity. but I know for a fact they had a lot to do with Brother Damon's keeping the entirety of

Gadsden County apprised of the sinful comings and goings of that walking, talking scandal of a husband. Kept the preacher rotund and off the Sunday dinner tour, too.

Once he hit clear and clean on Cousin Eleanor's good cooking and mean troubles, he stayed put right there on her front porch, rocking and smacking his lips with divine ecstasy.

At least until he rocked hisself right off and started spreading too many words of what he called "degradation." Told everybody who would listen what a scandal Booker

T being. Told us about his wanderings and his drinking. Said Booker liked whoring

106 better than he loved his babies and that he couldn't make it anywhere near Gabriel for no

Judgment seeing as he be raised up in the false faith of a back-water Jook Joint. Told us how Booker T even fathered a baby the name of Junior by some Jook Joint whore and how her baby turn out backwards and simpleton. "That's God's way of telling on Booker

T Goldwire's sins," Brother Damon loved pronouncing as if none of us quite bright enough to follow his train of logic none. Oh, Cousin Eleanor, she deny Booker T fathered Junior, and swore Booker T acting the part of a good-hearted soul seeing as how he took Junior under his wings after being born out to Gretna a ways. Booker T, he did watch after that boy but I got to ask, what's ajook-joint whore going to do for a poor, backward simpleton of a child?

Brother Damon sometimes went so bold as to preach after Booker T Goldwire on the pulpit, right loud and mighty to everyone at Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal

Church. He get hisself work into a frenzy of delight, putting a hex on nearly all them sinners way to the back of the church. Once he preach a sermon demonizing Booker T, right up there on the pulpit. Understand, now, that only happened if Cousin Eleanor was not in attendance. Brother Damon was brash, but he weren't no fool. If Cousin Eleanor failed to attend ten o'clock service, I suppose Brother Damon went fast, straight into a tizz, he did. Mama used to tell Papa regular-like when she think us children not in hearing range that Brother Damon be sweet on more than Cousin Eleanor s cooking.

Papa would pick at his teeth and nod agreement saying, "Ain't right. Mama, preacher- man and all."

107 I weren't nothing but a tyke the time Brother Damon really take off on Booker T via our congregation, but 1 be right old enough to suspect that what he had to say ain't nothing my mama particularly spent good time wishing after for me to know. I sit up, straight against the wood of the pew, and look to that preacher, me, a rhapsody of attention, knowing all the while that he be sweet on Cousin Eleanor (my mama never lied) and that he wasn't acting in a fashion at all fitting no preacher none.

And he stare straight back at me, square in the eyeballs, or so it seems in recollection. He belted out a sermon this county ain't likely to get over, ever. Standing tall and erect, proud acting of his paunch and presentation, Brother Damon look over everyone carefiil and piercing. 1 knew I ain't done one thing worth this wrath of staring, so I get pretty much excited, hoping some wayward lamb be getting sheared right there that moming in front of me, and I remember praying that the wrong doing be something

Juicy, something I ain't never heard about before, something growed-ups whisper up after supper, taking a sit-down. But Brother Damon's eyes, they be looking furious and his face be beat-red, dark and almost purple around the gills.

"Sisters of the Vestry," he screech and that certainly raised up the ladies on they front-row pews. "Brothers under Christ," he tum to the contention sitting in the way- back, the cigarette and coffee group that usually scoot out the back early into the service to light one up and lean against they cars, worrying down how to get the preacher to cut back on the length of his sermonizing. They don't sit up (it ain't they way) but they all shifting a bit, uncomfortable, groaning, for they be knowing they in for a long one, and it might just be about them.

108 "All of you, my soldiers of the Lord, we has garnered a temptation of sin in our tiny corner of Creation. We busy making up this corner to reflect our dear, sweet Jesus,

Yes Sir, God. we be. We works our good works, we do, and we pray our good prayers, we do..." (an Amen from row three, not convicted. Just force of habit) "...and you. Dear

Lord, you tempt us to hatred. Hatred, Lord. It be black and green and shimmering like a moccasin, slithering on up to us and biting our backs until we can't do nothing but spit venomous hate, hate, hate..." (each "hate" Brother Damon spit more and threw out a bit louder and higher in pitch). ".. .and sisters..." (his octave went higher, booming now with spit, and sweat breaking through the red and purple of his face) ".. .this temptation be brought on by us trying falsely to make our paradise of Gadsden County the home of good Christians, but instead we harbor sinners, drinking whiskey down to the river, befriending whores at Jooks and even going by names of great Negro leaders. Oh, I won't name names..." (he don't have to none, we know, we know) ".. .but he, this sinner, the one's bringing us all down in flames be calling his own baby daughter, a true lamb- child baptized into our own congregation, after a whore."

This bring down the house around every single head, especially over to the Amen corner flanking the choir. There'd been rumors running around town, of course. Always was ugliness being said about Booker T and Cousin Eleanor. Every last somebody— even me not being more than a sprite at the time—be knowing Booker T named Cousin

Eleanor s youngest baby, the one she had Just bore a couple of years before, and the one that take a lot out of Cousin Eleanor seeing as she weren't no spring chicken no more and all. But we ain't knowing for certain he name that baby after no Jook-Joint whore. I

109 thinking I remembered my mama Just finishing telling my papa she thinking it sweet

Booker T's own mama's name be that baby's name, the one that been dead for forty years, the one from down to South Florida a ways. My papa, he click his tongue as if he know more than Mama but keeping his own counsel.

You should of beared the wailing that bring on that morning in church. Ladies be fanning they old mamas who done all fainted dead away right straight on the pews. My mama, she strong as a ox. She sit there with a look screwed up, a mixture of disbelieving

Brother Damon and distrusting Booker T Goldwire. 1 sit there, too. 1 be praying, though,

"Praise God," for bringing me this wonderful, growed-up scandal to witness. But I still feeling bad, for I love Cousin Eleanor, and even at that age know something ain't right about what Brother Damon be doing. The frenzy, it move directly on into a song, and we feel the fever come, swaying and singing our hearts out to Jesus hisself so that after church everybody feeling right and good with the Lord for praying against a sinner, and knowing we better off than poor Cousin Eleanor.

1 run down to the river. I be wanting to see if I can peek at Booker T Goldwire, see if somebody that names his baby girl after a whore don't maybe look a bit different after the fact. I remember feeling mighty winded when I got down there—that singing and clapping taking some of my breath and the running took the rest—so I tiptoe down the slope, not really sure where he might be keeping hisself, but hoping to peek at him all the same.

1 can't at first see nothing, so I sit right down to think some. Alice, she still a tiny baby at this time, but I wonder if she know and if her feelings tingle bad over it. 1 worrv over this and think maybe my mama might have to raise the poor baby. I hurt for Cousin

Eleanor that she might go to hell with Booker T Goldwire—Brother Damon always say

Booker T Goldwire going straight to hell, that a stay in purgatory ain't even necessary,

his being a clear-cut case of sinning. 1 picture me raising up Alice and us playing dolls

and tea cups and all. I picture me showing her how to lay out hopscotch in the dirt and

how to bend over and pick up her rock, balancing on one foot, not even showing off

panties none, and 1 begin thinking up new names to give her: Sarah, Rebecca. Mary—

Bible names for good measure.

It be as I rolling off Alice's new names that, what 1 to this day consider a genuine miracle, occurred.

I hear Alice squeal and giggle and then belly laugh like she be a almost growed- up child like me. I crawl along the bank, hunching down low into the grass, dragging moisture along and making a green mess of my Sunday dress and shoes. I crawl toward the sound of the laughter; I even beginning to giggle low and light inside myself Alice always been infectious with her happiness, even then, even when she be in danger of going on to hell with her papa, and Booker T Goldwire, he infectious, too. We all know even then when 1 little but almost growed up he the good uncle of sinning and that usually make people happy through and through, even though they know he bad. That why there be so many sinners packed into our poor little world, I be figuring since that day.

I finally get right up above where I hear Baby Alice giggling and belly laughing.

She be lying down on the bank and there with her was her papa, like I figured to see. He

11 tickling her and blowing his lips on her belly, and she laughing her head off because I figure it tickled, or at least 1 remember it tickling from when 1 be nothing but a baby and thought that the funniest thing ever.

He blow and he blow, and she squeal. Then, Booker T Goldwire, he give that baby girl the hug of a lifetime. 1 ain't figuring on never forgetting that hug; it ain't that it be no different than the hugs 1 had from my own mama and papa and grannies and even, body that loved me regular. It was that right there watching and giggling herself was my own big cousin. Cousin Eleanor.

I almost fall out and over that bank. I almost give myself up with the shock of the thing. Cousin Eleanor, she supposed to be regular going to church and sitting up front right under Brother Damon risking a spraying—he spit a mite when he get riled up with the Spirit—where only the most pious of Sisters of the Vestry sit. She not only Amen

Brother louder than almost anybody—excepting maybe the drinkers who show up lit on moonshine and feeling bad and crying top-lung so as to be heard good and well—she all the time subjecting herself to lunching with Brother Damon most Sundays.

Cousin Eleanor—Sister Eleanor to most of our community not related—she sitting right there on a log, in a pair of man pants, giggling away at her poor baby named after a whore and her poor baby's papa, watching him blow lip-toots on her belly. My whole world tum upside down and topsy-turvy and then Jumble around good and messy so as I can't make no sense out of nothing no more. After all, I thinking, ain't Cousin

Eleanor always agreeing that Booker T Goldwire ain't no good? Ain't we all the time feeling sorry that she be strapped onto a sinner her life through? Ain't we martyred her

112 for raising up the fashionings of his seed to be upright and Christian children, members of the good Christian flock at Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church? And here she failing Jesus on the last one?

1 had to think about this. 1 entirely too young to make sense of it all quick or easy. What 1 be knowing to be true up to this time in my life was sitting in front of my eyes having a ball, kissing on her baby and guffawing with Booker T Goldwire as if they was the happiest honeymooners around.

It be at this moment, while I still sitting in dismayed confusion that I begin to listen. Booker T Goldwire, he talking a streak to his Baby Alice, he say, "Alice-girl, what you laughing about. Someone getting you? There be skeeters out her, there be?"

Alice baby-laughs. "Pappy." she screeches through breathy gulping up of air.

"Skeeters!" She flailing her arms and kicking her little feet, pulling Booker T Goldwire back down to her stomach so he will toot on her skin again.

"Booker, you let that child alone," interjects Cousin Eleanor, with mirth, and faking a tad-bit of annoyance in her voice. "She going to have a conniption if you don't let her breathe a minute. Booker, I say stop with you now."

Alice, she only squeal over her mama, and Booker T Goldwire chuck her under the chin. "1 ain't hurting her none. Ain't my fault we got ourselves a skeeter problem down about here to the river. Mama, you say we got some fried chicken around about here somewheres?" He take off this old hat he be wearing, and he place it real sweat-like right on the top of Cousin Eleanor's head. I thinking she sure to tear it off—it don't look too clean or nothing—but she don't. She smile at him as sweet as he smiling at her. I amazed.

Cousin Eleanor, she heave herself up (she was hefty even in those days) and walk slow like ain't nothing to hurry about over to a shade tree. She pick up a basket brimming with her good cooking. She walk back over, and I smell that warm cozy smell of fried chicken, making me feel like dying. She sit then, back down with Booker T

Goldwire, and she careful-like spread out a blanket, open up her basket, and make that sinner a plate.

And they ate. This sure enough give me some time to contemplate the chances of my Cousin Eleanor being a sure-fire hussy, but it don't seem too right to me. No sir, I ain't striking up a good feeling with the thought, I ain't. Cousin Eleanor, she a good woman, she sure enough be. I keep telling myself She take care of the Merideths, her

employers, and she take good care of her babies, done raised them up right, even take

good care of Baby Alice who I now did suspect might be named after a whore, what with

my world tuning upside down and going stark raving crazy on me.

Booker T Goldwire and Cousin Eleanor, they sit there with Baby Alice and all

they good food, and they talk up the time of day in front of me and, I suspect, Jesus, both

us peeking in on them feeling Jumbled and hungry and left out of everything, all in a

sudden.

"Girl, mmm. You know how to put a fry on a bird, you do," Booker T Goldwire,

his mouth full and greasy, exclaim with complete satisfaction.

114 "Baby, I know I do. 1 hate being uppity, but I don't mind admitting to my good qualities here and again," from Cousin Eleanor as she yanks a bit on the brim of her hat,

Booker T Goldwire's hat, as if to say "thank you." Flirting she be.

1 about fall over. This be going on through all they good eating, brimming out from down in her basket. They plunge into buttered white bread sandwiches, and tomatoes. Juicy and velvet-red from the Merideths' garden, the one Cousin Eleanor tended, and I supposing Booker T Goldwire help her with on the occasion. They don't plunge into the tomato, eating it like a apple, like I expecting from such a low-down sinner and his woman, neither. They slice it up all delicate and civilized. I sit there in the weeds thinking I Just as soon sink my teeth right in the whole thing. I keep watching, my mouth watering and me almost crying with want. They move on and eat some eggs, deviled with cayenne and pickles, probably some mayonnaise and salt. I be dying by now.

They end—and this sure enough about put me under a good six feet or so—with huge chunks of Cousin Eleanor's famous pecan pie. She telling me when I be tiny and standing at the end of her work table while she be cooking, hoping for some scraps, the secrets of a good crust: "Don't handle the dough too much. It ain't no doll, and these ain't dumplings. Be after it gentle-like," she scold, and slap our hands with her own doughy ones because we all the time wanting to play with it and min it. That make it hard and heavy as a brick. Then she show us children how to stroke the dough with a brush soaked in egg yellows before baking it. This make the crust flaky, vet strong enough to take the burden of the filling and hold it as its own being. Cousin Eleanor, she sure enough spend hours in the Merideth kitchen teaching all us children her cooking secrets. But 1 sit there that Sunday midday, starving and confused, and I know she holding onto a passel of other secrets. I figured on it being a stretch of time before she let go of these ones.

I leave hungry that day and trudge back to my mama's house to enjoy her cooking and the unfortunate company of Brother Damon. But before 1 did, 1 sure enough witness to the miracle 1 done mentioned. Being a child and not understanding nothing, I watch

Cousin Eleanor and her man, Booker T Goldwire, and 1 watch Baby Alice sticking her fat little fingers into they mouths and they dinner, and I feel Jealousy in my soul for the good time they all be having, and me, I ain't supposed to be witness to all this none, and I feeling pretty low-down. They finish they dinner and Booker T Goldwire, he lie right back with his Baby Alice and he coo after her and tell her, "You the prettiest girl ever."

He in his own world of contentment, he sure enough be.

But it was Cousin Eelanor that was the miracle. She sit opposite him, and she look. That all she did. And it the look in her eyes that stick with me and make me a believer in the miracle of what's inside us all. Something was held up in them eyes, something mixed with the watery browness, and shining and sparkling. It indeed love, undying, in spite of whores and hussies and preachers and born sinners. Cousin Eleanor, she sit right there picking at her teeth and looking a love look that teach me something big for a little confused girl, sure enough. She watch her Baby Alice and her Booker T

Goldwire Just being her family and she shimmer with the happiness and the Tightness of it all, despite the protestations of Brother Damon, Just eating himself up with Jealousy for what he ain't got, 1 supposed then and know for a certainty now.

Since that day, 1 ain't thought too much about Booker T Goldwire. Like a child, I dropped his doings from mv mind pretty regular and fast. I was a sprite of a girl, tough and saucv'. Always been and proud of it. I growed up to be me and some may call me uppity, but on hat day when 1 felt like dragging my poor feet back home and feel sorry and mad about that hussy. Sister Irene, stealing my hat and wearing it all wrong and taking away my spotlight, 1 remember poor old Booker T Goldwire and how that day by the river 1 learn the miracle of true love, and 1 think to myself "Vyrie, you carry yourself right down and pay respects to that man. His passing means something leaving from your life."

I do Just that, I do. I still ain't thinking long on his passing getting this big old coming home ceremony as being completely right, especially since they having a memorial up to Mt. Zion. After all, Booker T Goldwire, he still ain't much more than a sinner. But he a good sinner, he be, and we all got our place of goodness, and his sure enough be by that river, it be. He teach me that and don't even know it none. So, 1 going on down there and tell him, "thank you kindly." Then I needing to wam him about putting dirty old hats on ladies, even though they may fall down a bit from on high, occasionally. That ain't right, it ain't.

17 CHAPTER Vin

'ALICE'S EULOGY" Alice's Eulogy

1 stand before you, my friends, but one part of what was the whole of a family, also here today on this river. I speak for them to say thank you for coming down here, to the Ochlockonee to send my papa on off to his reward.

For those of you who don't know, my name is Alice Goldwire, Booker T's youngest child. I have lived in these parts my whole life, staying on to see my mama and papa home, as is the wav in our family. Many of you have been knowing my family for many a vear. and many of you have at least been knowing about us.

But we are here to say goodbye and good luck to my papa, so I volunteered to speak for the family. I know you-all may be a might surprised to see us all congregated here in support of the coming home of our papa, seeing as many of you don't suspect he being around us all that much. Today, I want to tell you a bit about his coming around. I think he'd like that: us all taking a bit of a sit-down and telling some tall tales of big fish.

Booker T Goldwire had a friend in his youth. Being raised up an orphan by his auntie and uncle Goldwires, the ones that runned the Stardust over toward Havana a ways, Booker T made friends with all them boozy-types of people. His best friend was a girl named Alice, my name-sake or so I hear tell around town and from my papa. He told me about her when I got old enough to hear tell I'd been named after a Jook Joint floozy, and what he told me I want to share today. I feel that this story will bring about an understanding of who my papa was and why we be all here sending him off right and good, like he deserves. Alice made her money lying down in the shadows of the Stardust, but she didn't make no life out of it. Her life was one of dreams and wanting all wrapped up in her soul, wanting to be full not empty and hollow. Booker T and she became friends when thev was at the age of looking almost growed but still being little and dumb. She tried to teach Booker T to want and search for better times in better places, but that was against his nature. He thought he loved her when he was so young that he hadn't never loved nobody yet. Then he met my mama, Eleanor, and knew he'd found true love.

But he and Alice, they stayed friends the rest of her life, always remembering the good times thev' had when they was young, and the troubles they had growing up and realizing the shallowness of sandbars bottoming out even the best attempts of wandering down river.

Alice loved to run her hands in the white sand of the banks of this river, right here where we sitting, I suspect. Booker T told me how she'd sift that sand through her fingers and talk a streak, saying, "Did you ever hear about the gulf sand being whiter than

God's robes?" She loved that thought, sure enough. Booker T'd reply, "This here sand's pretty much white enough to suit me, if sand's what you going for," and that's pretty nigh the summation of their relationship. Wanting to leave and happy to stay.

But Booker T, he hurt for that wanting inside Alice. Might be the anchor of their friendship all them years. Being best friends with a floozy can't be the easiest thing for a man, especially if that floozy all the time trying to wander off, but then returning less herself than before.

120 Booker T told me about this woman wandering all the time, even had herself a son who did the same thing. Said, "Wandering be in some's blood and bones. Alice, it be all the way through to the insides of her soul. She taught me that herself, she did."

The whole idea of this woman and their friendship bothered me right good for some V ears, it did. Until one da>' when I was growed up enough to voice my thinking, I came out and asked papa, "What you doing going around naming me after some floozy can't even stav put?"

Booker T. he looked at me with a smile as long as this river bend, looked as if he'd been waiting a lifetime to hear this very question, and he said, "Baby Alice"—that's what he called me even as a growed-up woman like I be now—"I fixing in you what weren't never right with her. Fixing up a soul I couldn't fix without starting over."

You might be sitting there thinking, that ain't a Christian thing to be doing to a man's own littlest girl, and I thought that too at the time. But I done spent the rest of his lifetime thinking on this Alice and the things that went on and done gone bad for her, and

I regularly warmed up to the thought. Proud I be right here to call myself Alice Goldwire because I know I be the product of souls searching for that whitest of sand and deepest of emerald green water and souls happy because they done knowed they found it, 1 be.

So goodbye to my papa, Booker T Goldwire, from his littlest of babies, this part of his whole. He had his own whole beyond the whole of us, right down here on the

Ochlockonee, and that the truth you-all know for sure. But he had the most of his whole because of this here having family and folks around him who he loved. I know this to be

121 the truth, crystal and clear, because 1, his daughter, be here a testament of his faith in souls and in the river and in being.

And Alice, she wandered off years ago, finally to not come back here none, or so papa said, always with that spark bespeaking his mind as changeable. 1 can't truthfully

say 1 know what it means to wander off in this world, but I know it ain't nothing but a

thing to Booker T todav. He ain't wandering off from nothing or nobody. He right here,

friends, with us and this river.

122 PART TWO

ALICE'S SOULBATH

123 1 got to keep moving I got to keep moving blues falling down like hail blues falling down like hail Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm blues falling down like hail blues falling down like hail And the days keeps on 'minding me there 's a hellhound on my trail hellhound on my trail hellhound on my trail —Robert Johnson "Hellhound on Mv Trail'

124 CHAPTER IX

•SCRATCHING UP HELLHOUNDS'

125 Part One

Steam hits Alice in the face, sharp and hard like a slap. The suddenness encloses her. and she longs to sit back and feel coolness, knowing coolness cannot lurk anywhere in the closeness of the cooking shack. Sam Lee's house is built like many more prosperous farmers—even Black farmers—in their community in Gretna: It features a cooking shack out to the side of the main house to keep the heat of the kitchen and smokehouse awav from the living quarters. The cook shack is dark, constantly smelling of food, grease, and wood smoke. Alice stands above a pot of beans she began the night before. They have simmered in hog Jowls too long—are mushy and dull looking—and she knows Sam Lee will be angry and, if drunk and feeling desperate, might well slap her across the face once, perhaps twice. As she takes the cast-iron bean pot off the fire and places it on the small table used for the preparations of breads, cakes, and pickling vegetables, among other tasks, she brushes her cheek with her hand and feels the perspiration on her face, wishing for a cool place in which to lose herself, if only for a moment's wandering.

Alice will not go outside of the cook shack. Sam Lee will likely be in the yard that is enclosed by bushes he takes great pride in tending. He will stare at Alice, following her with his eyes as she moves about the grounds. He will then follow her even into the house and hover about doors and in corners, always watching her. Alice hates this—it feels as if she is enclosed in a prison of bushes and stares. Instead, she sits

126 back in the corner of the cook shack and falls deeper and deeper into its heady, stifling darkness, almost as if she might bathe in its confinement.

Before this confinement, Alice spends her life running from anything mundane, running toward dreams Just out of reach for her. but running all the same. In her old age. she still felt able to garner the memories of those dreams, grasp them up into her arms to rub them upon her face and feel it in her skin like fine, perfumed lotion ordered out of a catalogue.

"Marry me, Alice. And I marry you up right, I be. You say the word, yes-sir-ee.

I be getting the preacher down to the creek right nicely," Sam Lee has said daily for months.

Alice sits on the stool she has made her own through the years, looks straight up ahead at the cracked mirror hanging above the bar at Master Joe Wilson's Backwoods

Club—called Backwoods by the regulars for short. Alice likes looking at herself in the yellow-old, cracked mirror. It hangs over the bar, above bottles of Old Crow and the red and white Coca-Cola sign picturing a pretty blond white woman winking and saying,

"King Size Coke. Big Refreshment Value!" The crack in the mirror does not run all the way through the glass. It starts on the top right-hand comer and mns a path for about a foot, diagonally toward the left. But it stops all of a sudden, as if it's tired of the trip and gives out.

She looks vaguely at her reflection because her eyes water from too much drinking of whiskey with beer chasers all afternoon. Alice always looks beyond her aging face and up toward that crack. She knows the crack, feels it lay itself on her own

127 face, spread across her forehead and branch out from the corners of her eyes, traveling south like the leaving train from Bainbridge to the Coast. Alice doesn't look down that path. She looks up; she likes looking up. Things are better that wav for her, and she doesn't mind telling anyone who listens. Sam Lee is one of those who listens, but he does not understand, instead insisting that marrying him will be the answer.

Thiough the years, her days lengthen long and dissatisfied into the evenings until she can hardlv focus well into the dimness of the bar area. Guitar playing has been replaced bv a cheap phonograph and a huge radio, placed haphazardly on chairs pushed together in the corner, right where itinerant musicians used to sit and scratch out tunes.

"1 miss that old man used to play hell out of a guitar. He knowed how to belt one out when he feeling inclined, he did. Hear he dead. You hear something like that, Sam?"

Alice does not look over to the man who has been ineessanth asking her to marrv' him.

Instead, she continues to look ahead with a phlegmy fuzziness in her voice that Sam Lee translates as husky and sexy. She picks up a cigarette and then digs in her pocket for a match. He swivels around on his stool and puts his left boot over his right knee so that she may run the match tip hard and fast across the sole of his shoe.

"Thanks, Sam Lee," she mutters while lighting the end of the rolled cigarette.

She puffs long and hard, making round balls of smoke, and then blows them out to make room for the next drag. With one long drag inward, the lit end of the cigarette dangles, precarious and orange.

"What you say? You going to marry me or not? Ain't Just any so-and-so in these parts willing to take on a dirty old whore like you for a wife, past your prime and not that

128 great looking no more. Love you, 1 say. All 1 can attest to, and, shit, you ain't even listening.

.•Mice finallv shifts her gaze to Sam Lee. He has been her customer for several years, almost since the first day she walked into the Backwoods a good twenty years before. He asks her to marrv him regularly, but she has never taken him up on it, has never been particularly interested in what would happen if she did. This day—maybe because business has been slow or because its hot and muggy outside and she's bored— she squeezes her eves into a watery slit and considers him. Not too ugly, she thinks.

Wearing coveralls that have seen better days. His hat looks as if the gray-brown cotton material with which it is made has melded with the dirt of the fields to become one blend.

He is tall, has a strong paunch—the kind that looks as if it is muscle rather than fat—and displays bright, happy eyes. "Not bad. she thinks.

"1 ain't no farmer." she mutters, still gazing at him intently through slits. A tear drips out and rolls ignominiously down her face, meandering its way over cheekbone, then wrinkled cheek, finally hanging a second off the side of her chin before it falls onto her lap.

"I ain't no fool. Pretty much every lone soul in these parts know you ain't no farmer, Alice. Shit. You ain't even wife material. But 1 willing to take the chance. You

Just give me the nod."

Alice laughs, and this brings even more tears of mirth. She drinks long of a beer and looks back to the mirror, thinking it would be much prettier to look at if she would bring those picture postcards from home to paste up, the ones from all her years of

129 longing for the Coast and claiming she was getting there, the ones she used to tape to the mirror above the bar at the Stardust Club outside of Quincy.

"What you want to marrv me up for when you can get a poke for a lot cheaper than maintaining me in finerv the rest of m> old days? 1 ain't that old and 1 don't cook, none at all. Raised up one child to maturity and sent him off down the road to make his own way. Ain't doing that no more, neither. Still want to marry me? Paid date's going to sta> a dollar if you keep it around here and then buy me a drink and leave me be. Or drink that drink with me and buy me another. Whatever floats your fancy. But no wedding, I suspect, be the best bet around here for you. Don't suspect you could afford mv price list, Sam Lee." Alice takes a long drag off her cigarette, coughs hard on it, then rolls her tongue over her lips and spits out the bits of tobacco leaves that she has licked off. She stubs out the cigarette on the bar and whisks it off to the floor, then takes another sip. "Put me on some music, Sam Lee. Mama wants to hear her a sweet tune.

None of that white-man music, neither. Won't do at all. Don't feel like swinging around.

Something old and real be good about now."

Sam Lee gets up and sways slightly to the right then to the left as he makes his wav to the phonograph. The records are kept in a splintery carton, the kind left at doors in town in the early mornings, full of ice-cold glass bottles of milk. He picks through the records, most out of their sleeves, until he grunts approval with his find. It is an old

Robert Johnson, and the scratches it makes almost render the music indiscernible from the static. When Johnson s voice comes on, it sounds as if it is breaking through from down a long, narrow hallway at the end of which he might be singing.

130 "I love the shit out of that man," Alice mumbles to herself more than to Sam Lee, but he picks up on it. still set on finessing Alice into a wedding this dav.

"You probably talking about me, I know, but if you be referring to old Robert

Johnson, 1 seen him once, over to Mississippi a way. Went there when I be almost growed-up. Following high cotton w ith my mammy and pappy, looking steady for them crops need picking bad and pav ing highest wages. Them big living years, they sure enough be. Got paid good as could. Hard, though. My pappy almost broke down for the heat. Skeeters big as a cat they was. And mean.

".A.nv how. 1 regular sneaked into a roadhouse where we was working long-term awhile, and the great man, hisself. he be there then. Of course, I didn't know who he be at the time. He Just a traveling guitar picker as far as I be concerned, but the folks there in a tizz to be listening and seeing him, so I ask to nobody in particular, 'Why you-all so all-fire excited? What so special? Look about like every other danged Jook I been in my whole life in Florida.' A lady that can't hardly take her eyes from him, none, tell me,

'Boy, you sure be a backwoods nigger if you don't know that the man, Robert Johnson.'

"I remember that to this day. Looking back, 1 guess she be right: about the backwoods nigger part, I mean, because here you and me be: back in the woods at the

Backwoods." Sam Lee laughs at his story, slapping Alice firm but affectionately on the back.

Upon hearing this, Alice wipes the water out of her eyes and sits straight with greater attention. "You meet this Robert Johnson, you say? What he like?" she asks, all

131 of a sudden verv interested in what Sam Lee has to say and looking at him straight for the first time this day.

Sam Lee likes this attention. He does not care that Alice is more interested in a ston about Robert Johnson than she is in a marriage proposal. She is looking him straight in the eye with a smile, and he likes it. "1 might"ve met him,"' he lies, spinning his story tight to hold her attention. "Just might've. Play that night sweet as this record we hearing. And the ladies. Ooh, gal. Them ladies was dressed for high cotton for sure.

They all primped and smelling sweet and dancing up they dance, dirty and mean, shaking them hips and bumping and grinding to beat sixty. I ain't lying. Good for the soul, I say."

"That man, he has hisself lots of lady friends? They love on him? How many?"

Alice is enraptured now. She lights another cigarette, quick and pert, and settles back, leaning against the bar with her legs swinging two and fro, twisting to the melody of the song on her stool, all of a sudden exuding the youth that only shimmers around her like a faded melody.

"Have ladies? That man, he the biggest flimflamming polecat of them all. He spend the whole night through going after one and then another of them ladies. Like them best if they there with some other man, too. A challenge, he tell me once when I comment upon the fact of his womanizing. Women who already got a man but who be looking for something better give the best time, the best loving, he say. Desperate and wanting to give good, he say."

132 "He say that for reaf.'" Alice looks doubtfully at Sam Lee, but he Just takes a swig from his glass of whiskev' and chases it with some beer and says, "Uh huh," and she accepts it.

"My. mv. Sam Lee. 1 ain't knowing all these years sitting with you and enjoying some cold refresliments and the occasional poke for good measure that 1 be here with almost royalty. Why you not tell me this story before?" The thought of Robert Johnson excites Alice. He is more than a voice that scratches out of the phonograph machine; he is someone who has taken out and made a success on the roads. He is a legend, someone talked about and only floating through their lives as a topic. And here, Sam Lee has actually known him, Alice thinks with sudden longing for more information, something to make Robert Johnson more real.

"You ain't never listening to me this much, Alice. That be why," Sam Lee pouts his lips out and looks down at his drinks.

"Well, 1 don't know about that. Just because I be looking out for your future, keeping you from making a bad mistake by taking in more woman than you can handle comfortably. Don't be pouting about something I can't be helping none, neither. Ain't trying to be hurtful to you-all's feelings or nothing," she replies, looking at him but not feeling sorry enough to place her hand on his back as she imagines he wants. Instead, she twists her cigarette around between her fingers, making a sharp point of the lit end, wanting to know more about Robert Johnson, and contemplating the immediacy of her desire. "What he die of? You know what that be? I hear he long dead, but why? What of?"

133 Sam Lee sniffles loud with indignation, and swallows it whole and swift. He sighs deeph as if to signal to Alice that she has disappointed him yet again but that he is accustomed to her ways. "Oh, I ain't sure about that completely. Think I hear while I still liv ing in Mississippi that it be over some lady or two. Or maybe he got sickly and fall down. 1 remember it be in a town there, though. Might of got the sickness you get from lov ing up on lots of womens and then die of it. Too much loving what it called— the sickness. Wouldn't surprise me, none, the way he take on and all. He a wild one, that

Robert Johnson be back in his day. But sure can sing hell out of a song. Guitar picking ain't bad, neither. Ooh dog, that man could pick and roll."

The song has ended, and he gets up to flip it over, but Alice says, "No, play that one again. That one the one I like. Play it over and over till I say I through hearing it."

She feels desperate all of a sudden, feeling warm and tingly with whiskey and the vague remembrances of past songs, maybe songs from another Jook when she was young and hopeful. She feels desperate to hear this song, to listen to the depths of the voice, so distant and garbled yet still expressing what she thinks of as the greatest pain, the best pain, the only pain worth troubling over: a wandering soul that feels chased into it by hellhounds. She gets up and dances in front of the phonograph machine, swaying and singing to herself much like she did as a younger woman but now not as an enticement to any man's attention as she would have in her youth, swaying her hips slow and deep in the melody and rhythm, catching it on the backside of the beat and then looking over at some man she figured had a dollar or two with a "Come on, baby. Dance with me if you be knowing how."

134 She wants only to immerse herself into the rhythm and melody of Robert

Johnson's words about hellhounds chasing him and creating his blues, realizing as if she is listening to them for the first time that he sings to Just her, about her, and for her. She dances and sings along under her breath, lingering on the final notes of lines, rolling them around in her mouth like her cigarette, savoring the taste of the words and the rhythms, for the remainder of the afternoon. She cooks up something inside her mind and body. It is akin to her wanderings—those days and nights she takes off, not perfectly conscious, but then aw akens only to find herself lost, nowhere near where she suspects she was aiming in her dreams—but not quite the same, for now she is in complete control of her consciousness, knowing for certain she is being chased by something. At the end of the tenth time the song plays, the tenth time with Sam Lee dutifully starting it over, again and again, silently, and then retuming to his seat at the bar to watch over her with a gmnt of frustration, Alice walks outside and takes off down the easterly path leading to her house.

Sam Lee follows her as fast as he can with a gut full of Old Crow and homebrewed beer. His breathing is heavy and labored when he catches up to her, and, in the dusk of evening, he cannot gauge her mood. "Where you off to now? You leave without telling me nothing definite about my wedding proposal. What you thinking, gal?

We getting married or not? Me practically royalty and all, think you be a mite pleased to be known around these here parts as Your Highness, Queen Alice Lee. After all that singing and dancing and me showing you I be the slave to all your wishes all the day long, I thinking you getting ready to say yes, giving me a try-out."

135 Alice does not look at him, does not slow her pace along the narrow path covered in pine needles, roots, and v ines, although she can see that Sam Lee is struggling to keep up, huffing and tripping along. "I ain't got no time for nonsense right now. Sam Lee," she finally says over her shoulder because his closeness is beginning to annov her and make her feel pulled back. "1 thinking on taking a little trip. Ain't going to be back anytime too soon, but don't be worrying about me, none. Be back in good time, sure enough."

Sam Lee stops in his tracks with shock. He had thought on following Alice back to her shack and if not getting a promise of marriage at least getting a free poke for the sentiment. Alice could be real sweet on the mattress when she was feeling sentimental.

"What you talking about you going on a trip, woman? You ain't coming back for awhile? 1 don't understand. This be nonsense I hearing. We was just sitting having a good talking, too. Drinking us a drink and telling a couple of stories and here you go.

Always was peculiar, but this ain't right."

Alice walks on, leaving Sam Lee to follow. She walks so fast, he is unable to implore her from behind and still keep up: all his breath is spent walking fast. When they get to her shack, he stands in the front doorway, watching mutely, helpless to say or do anything constructive to stop her. Finally, he clears his throat loud and sharp, but

Alice moves faster and only grunts at him. She quickly gathers some things together, mostly Just the money she keeps under her mattress, an old wooden mirror that looks to

Sam Lee as if it has seen better days, and then, most curious of all, a bunch of cards.

136 depicting all kinds of scenes from the Gulf of Mexico Coast, a place Sam Lee does not remember Alice ever talking about in the past twenty years he's known her.

She packs all of this into a battered red-cloth bag, something that looks to Sam

Lee to have been fashioned out of an old shirt. She slings it over her shoulder and brushes past Sam Lee. On her porch, he Jumps in front of her and blocks her way.

"What you doing? What're them cards for and that there mirror? You taking a trip to the beach? Alice? 1 take you there. Become my missus and we be doing it up right. You can't Just be leaving me here standing the fool."

Alice pushes him aside, gently, and gives him a smile. She walks on down the stairs, toward the easterly path that continues past her shack and toward the general store in Gretna. She figures to catch a ride from there over to Quincy but knows that if she cannot, it is only five or so miles east along the highway and then only a couple of miles north to the Stardust. She is calculating this distance versus how fast she feels she can walk, what with the rheumatism that's been taking hold lately, when Sam Lee grabs her arm and swings her around.

"Now, Alice, I may be a fool for you pretty damned bad, but I ain't taking this treatment from no cheap and getting-past-her-prime floozy who ain't that good looking no more. You tell me right now what is the matter and where in tamation you be traveling on to, and you tell me if or not you be marrying with me in this here lifetime. I can't be waiting no eternity, now. Not no more. There be womens waiting on me, there be. Waiting in line they be. You be assured of that, you be."

137 Alice sighs and brushes perspiration from her head. She reaches into her bag and gets out a scarf which she ties onto her head in a dew rag; she is no longer a young woman who is ashamed to wear things that make her look old and country. "Sam Lee, vou can't understand. 1 done forget what my hellhound be. How can you understand that? I got to go back to the beginnings to find it, Sam Lee. Can't marry you, none. Got to take these things, these cards and this here mirror, back to the Stardust, have me a soulbath with Booker T Goldwire, and then, if the Lord has any mercy left for my soul, I be running from my hellhound again—if I can scratch up some old hellhound to chase after me on my trail. Otherwise, might as well lay down and die right here." She reaches up to Sam Lee and kisses him full on the mouth, a kiss that lingers for a heaving of his heart. "You be good to me, Sam Lee. Tell all the boys at the Backwoods Alice done gone back to her trail for a spell. I be back when I get tired of being chased after." She walks a few steps more, then looks back one more time to smile at the man, standing with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, dumbstruck in his path. "That is if they be any hellhound willing to be chasing after a cheap, past-her-prime floozie who ain't that good looking no more."

She then walks away giggling, but stumbles, uneasy in her step. After that, Alice no longer giggles, instead breathes deep of the fragrant afternoon shade, humming Robert

Johnson's song as she breathes out, then in.

Later that day. Alice walks unsteady and unsure in the front door of the Stardust

Club. She squints from the sudden change from sun to dimness, looking around for a familiar face sitting at the bar or at the tables scattered around haphazardly in the

138 rectangular one-room shack. Only two people sit in there, with a bartender leaning back and looking blankly at her. "Howdv. \'ou wanting something todav," he says to her low and slow, bored.

Alice walks over to him. The dimness and the dust circle around her. She sits on a stool and fishes in her pocket for some monev, putting the couple of bills and the change she finds on the counter. "Howdy back at you, honey-baby. Fix me right nice with a cold beer. Used to live around here. Spent a goodly amount of time sitting at this here bar, I be. Back in the day, I be. You see Booker T Goldwire?"

The bartender opens a beer bottle and puts it in front of her. "Naw, 1 ain't seed him around today. Be down to the river I suspect he be."

Alice drinks and nods, silently looking around the Stardust. Everything looks much the same, a little older and more decrepit, a few beer and soft drink signs scattered haphazardiv' on the wall that were not there before. Like at the Backwoods, a phonograph has replaced the guitar picker's corner, but here an old piano Alice remembers as old and dusty way back when still sits gathering the dust that hangs in the air, floating in the dusky light, laying on it heavy. The people do not seem familiar to

Alice, not even in their attitudes, hunched over their drinks and minding their own particular businesses—as if they are too bored or worn out to care about their surrounding company. She has not seen Booker T Goldwire in a few years. Since her son, Junior, grew up and let out on his own, she and Booker T have had little contact—no reason to speak, she always figured. But now that she has set herself on finding her hellhound, she

139 feels a sudden need for a soulbath and a sit-down with Booker T Goldwire. like when thev were young.

She is disappointed by not knowing anyone, and the fear that she has come back here looking for something that has died begins to rumble inside of her stomach and then to creep up toward her throat. At least, she thinks to herself while sipping her beer,

Booker T's where he should be; at least one thing ain't died off. After making small talk w ith the bartender and drinking two more beers, Alice takes a long look at herself in the mirror that hangs over behind this bar so much like the one at the Backwoods. She calls for a shot of Old Crow, downs it. and then stares at herself some more. "You know

Booker?" She asks absently, thinking on the times she had here at this bar back in a day when hellhounds were easy to scare up, back when they were all around in the dust and in the shadows.

The bartender picks at his teeth and looks up at her. She stares back. "I knowing

Booker since we ain't hardly old enough to know better. We old-time friends. Ooh,

Lord, he was sweet on me, he was. They all be, if you picking up what 1 putting down."

Alice's voice becomes agitated with the fear that she no longer fits in over here at this

Jook, that the people are not interested in her place here, that she has no legend.

"You don't say," is all the bartender mumbles as he sucks on his pick.

Alice nods quickly, and fingers the red cloth bag on her lap. She thinks on her past, when she had put up the picture postcards flimflam men brought to her because they were sweet on her. "You trying to court me up to marrying you, you be," she winked and pressed her hips and breasts upon any man who brought her a card and a promise to take

140 her there, almost falling on him as if she could not steady herself "1 might be leastwise finding myself able to pay you some time every now and again, "^'ou keep bringing them cards to me and think hard on taking me on down there a ways, honey-baby, and Alice treat you right," she launched into her promise. The promise would be paid for in full within the evening, and each of the flimflam men, more times than not, would be gone, driving off solo in the morning dew.

Alice always sighed as she pasted another card up behind the bar. around the mirror, what she perceived as a pretty promise.

"Booker T," Alice shrugs off the memory by launching into a story, something to prove to this stranger bartender that she indeed commands history at the Stardust, "he all the time playing around, and one day he imbibe too many of them Old Crows, and we was pretending we at the beach and he show me he can dive off this here bar. He dived, alright, into that mirror, he do. Broke pretty much all them bottles. Closest we got to the beach, making that mess. Claimed at the time, he couldn't tell it weren't no ocean because all my pretty postcard was so real to the eye."

The bartender smiles at Alice and nods. "Them must be some right nice postcards, ma'am."

"You bet your ass they nice," Alice's voice rises more in inflection and tone. She clutches her cloth bag and throws it on the bar. "Let me show you if you all-fired to worry me down about them. They right here." She fishes around and grabs the bundle of cards, desperately spreading them then along the bar top between herself and the bartender. He watches her with a look of amused puzzlement. "Them used to go all

141 along that there mirror, pasted in a row making a frame them did. And we all set around in the afternoons and talked up the Coast prettv high and good."

"So you be one of the old-timers from around here back in the dav? I hear tell that this place used to hop with good times. You be here then?" The bartender leans on the bar and begins looking over Alice's cards.

"Hone}' baby, Alice be the day. I the main reason this place hopped at all, much less hummed. Day 1 arrived. 1 be telling folks 1 just needing to rest for a spell, on my wav to the Coast. But things here, they so dull I knowed they need me to stay awhile and liv en things up. So I did. and the party started. See, I used to be seeing old Robert

Johnson. He done wrote me a song special—about me. Called me his "hellhound" he did. Left me one day to go out to Mississippi to make enough money for us to retire in

Panama City. But he got the sickness and died, and I been off to Gretna in mourning."

Alice warms to her story, liking the way it sounds and the way it feels. The bartender looks at her with a distrustful squint of the eye. but Alice looks straight up at the mirror with such clarity that he, in an instant, becomes much more attentive and interested in her, offering to buy her another drink. Alice declines saying, "Baby, 1 got to go down to the river, find my old friend Booker. Take me a soulbath. But you save that for later and

I be coming back to paste these here pictures back up where they be belonging. You tell everyone around this backwater Jook that Alice and her pictures done come home."

With that, Alice scoops up her pictures, places them back in the bag and walks out the door, leaving the bartender to scratch and shake his head, to wonder what the hell he

Just heard.

142 Down at the river, Alice peers over the embankment, down to where she should see Booker T fishing as alwav s. But she does not see him in the dusk with darkness rapidly falling. The river meanders along, and the crickets begin playing their redundant tune with no melody, no rhythm. Alice whistles and silently waves toward the river, as if she might conjure up Booker T Goldwire to follow her up and into the clearing. There, in the old days, he would find her lying in the middle of the clearing, stretched out, looking up at the darkening blue sky, searching for the emerging moon and stars to appear up above.

"Gal, what you doing? Thought you be a aberration, you be. Like to scare me out of my skin," Booker T would say, lying down with her. They would proceed to argue the merits of what Alice called her soulbath, a time when she soaked into her soul the stars and the moon, rejuvenating her spirit.

Alice stretches. She wonders where her friend is and fears her soulbath might not work to bring along any hellhounds if he does not appear. "I be coming home, Booker.

Old home days these be. Brung my picture postcard back here to the Stardust. Having me a soulbath, going to be chased after by a hellhound—if I can scratch one up. They old, I know, but they might have some chase left in them yet." she says to the now- darkness but is answered by only the sounds of the river and the crickets.

Alice imagines Booker T would sit down next to her slowly and wrap his arms around his legs, squeezing them tight, stretching himself in his own way, without lying back. He would look down at Alice instead of up at the sky like he did when they were young, back when he still hoped for Alice to think him grown and strong, back when she

143 did but pretended she did not. He would smile at her, remembering those days when he questioned her ideas, frustrated and in love. "Thought you was done with all that soulbathing. Thought v ou said it weren't no better than knocking up against the wrong side of the moon, ^•ou said the moon be throwing shadows on you because you standing and struggling on its wrong side and that it ain't no good, your soul being already dead," he would argue.

Alice would listen and also smile, close her eyes and breathe deep of the moisture building in the evening air. The fear that had begun to build at the Stardust would dissipate with the familiarity of being here in the clearing beside the river with Booker T

Goldwire questioning her motives.

"1 feeling good, I be," Alice almost whispers, deep and guttural, hurting with the strange familiarity of sitting out in this clearing without her friend, all alone. "I say all that Booker, I do indeed. And 1 mean it then. Still do, I guess. But don't do no good to be giving up on the soul even if I be on the wrong side of the moon with it throwing its shadows crossways against me. Give up the ghost when I think ain't no hellhounds left in me, when 1 think my soul don't need no more bathing for the trouble of it all. Hell,

Booker, but them shadows ain't no different from the crack in that mirror at the

Backwoods. They be what happens for all the living we be doing. Like me, old but still able to look after some coast. Ought to be able to wander off one of these here days if that hellhound'll chase me. Cracks and shadows oughtn't be able to change that none," she says, beginning to cry at the pounding in her chest. It beats strong and incessant as the crickets' song.

144 After a long while—Alice might have slept, she is not sure—she thinks she hears

Booker T whisper into her ear, "Sure feel fine laying right here after all these years, h do.

MMmm. Sure enough good some things don't change none too quick. Coming home a beautiful thing, it be."

But no one is in the clearing with Alice. The pounding in her heart has stopped, and she feels nothing but a tiredness traveling through her body. She gets up, thinking how the crickets have stopped their frenzied playing, and walks down the slope to the river's edge. She sits down on the tree she and Booker T had sat upon countless nights in their youths. She opens up her red cloth bag and takes out the mirror and the cards.

Her reflection shines with the moon's glow, and she touches her face and smiles at the aberration the night makes of her face. She looks young again, and for a moment almost hears the howl of a hellhound and Robert Johnson calling to her. But she knows better. "Goodbye," she whispers to the reflection, then fishes out handfuls of picture postcards. She places them carefully on the ground around the tree thinking Booker T

Goldwire might find them the next day and wonder after her. But then she scoops them back up and clutches them to her pounding chest.

Alice gets up and walks slowly back to Gretna. She finds Sam Lee sitting on her stoop. They stare at one another in silence as the sun begins to lend a gray caste to the woods. Birds are beginning to call to one another. As if in implicit agreement with Sam

Lee and the whistling calls, she follows him back to his house, not too far from hers but a world away from her trail, feeling tired out and dirty from trying to scratch up a dead and buried hellhound, despite soulbaths and legends.

145 In the dank darkness of Sam Lee's cook shack, Alice reaches down the front of her dress where she has been keeping those postcards. They are soft and worn-out from the sweat of her skin, and she squints to see the one-dimensional images that have dictated her dreams for all her vears. Carefully, she runs her hand across the top card, fingering it and whispering a song, low in her throat. Then, with her hands shaking, she places the card on the fire that had so quicklv overcooked her beans.

146 CHAPTER X

"SWIMMING AGAINST THE UNDERTOW"

147 Part Two

When Alice returns from this, which was her second wandering, she sleeps long and deep and wakes up in the shack that belongs to Old Carey but which Alice has occupied for a while. She rises slow and uncertain, vaguely thinking she should be disappointed but uncertain whv', and then travels straight through the woods back to the general store that stands at the crossroads of the highway and the farm-to-market that makes up the town of Gretna. She walks into the front of the store and passes silently past the front counter and into the back room where Old Carey stands over a giant crock, melding hamburger meat. Just ground, with egg and day-old bread crumbs, salt, pepper, and garlic—her secret for the juicy, delicious, fried sandwiches dozens of field hands will stand in sweaty, impatient lines for later in the noon-time.

Old Care>' is talking a blue streak to Alice's friend, Booker T Goldwire. They are discussing her and her baby son. Junior, lying in a basket between them.

"That gal, we gots to do something and in a hurry. This baby boy, he ain't about to be raising up hisself, and you ain't the one to be raising him up, neither. I ain't knowing you nor your business, mister, but I know you ain't fit to raise this here Junior, none. A boy, he needing his mama, he do. You be needing to teach that gal to stay here and raise her boy. Lord, 1 ain't got a right feeling about no gal wandering off like that.

She need to stay put. Old Carey been teaching her to cook right here. She got a adequate life if she Just take it. Lordy, Lord, that poor child."

148 Booker T says little, not agreeing but certainly not disagreeing, either. He looks to Alice to feel low-down and a bit guilty, as if he is not staying true to his principles regarding being a free soul but hating to say as much to Old Carey in her state.

Alice stands in front of them, silent and contemplating the scene, not particularly certain why she has ended up there but knowing she is hungry and tired. After thrusting a few deep massages into the meat, folding it over and over with conviction, from its bottom into its middle. Old Carey raises her head as if to utter her contempt for whoever mav dare interrupt her rampage. She sees Alice and cries her sudden dismay and surprise, "Lord, gal. You look the death. Where you been? Thought you dead. This cousin of yours. Booker T something or other, come and say he be taking Junior to you.

Sav you be feeling poorly and needing him to come and get Junior for you. Oh, Lord, he

Just now brung back Junior and admit he not knowing where you be. I Just about die.

My angel—come here with you."

Alice feels confused and utterly exhausted. She looks around the room for a chair, thinking if she does not sit she will fall. Old Carey notices and moves her over to one, gets her some water and then broth, all the time wailing about "Booker T something or the other" trying to take Alice's baby away. In the melee, Alice is, finally and without uttering a word, taken back to her shack, the one Old Carey had loaned her for her lying in period and had yet to rent out to anyone else, what with Alice's few belongings—a couple of dresses, some picture postcards, and a wooden hand mirror—still in it and it being the place where Alice almost died after Junior's birthing.

149 Old Carey had not been able to quite reconcile herself to the fact that Alice had up and left Gretna, feeling like Junior was a God-child of sorts and his mama one as well.

So, when Alice indeed returns, sorrv and dirty, looking confused and somehow hurt, the general store hears a mouthful until some of Old Carey's particular customers almost want to take off after to Quincy five miles east to get Junior from that "Booker T something or other." These customers are the ones whose sandwiches contain less breadcrumbs and more good meat, the ones who pay their bills promptly. Although Old

Carey is only a cook and the owner of the store is a white man, she stays on top of the outstanding bills bv listening in on the white owner's conversations with his cronies late in the evenings. She plays favorites accordingly. But Booker T returns without any prompting, simply asking Old Carey, "You see Alice around yet?"

Alice lies back down in the bed in the middle room. A sun-dried cotton sheet, soft from years and years of washing in the creek and drying in the spots of sun between tree branches, stretches tightly over a mattress, stuffed with the pine needles that fall each summer's end. Old Carey has washed her off with a cloth dipped over and over in creek water and brushed with strong, lye soap. Alice's skin tingles from the washing; it is not really a scrubbing, but a patting and stroking as a mother might wash off a newbom. In her sweet near-delirium, Alice hums a song she has heard Old Carey humming. She soon falls asleep, deeply, feeling as if she is falling into the mattress, into depths of a bottomless precipice, and into a weightless dream.

In the dream, Alice wakes up on a sand dune. She has seen these for years in picture postcards customers bring her after they retum from taking holidays with their

150 families or from bootlegging down to the Coast, a common trade for men with cars. She has held these images in her mind, images given to her as promises from flimflam men— men who were more to Alice than Just customers because they would be the one she hoped to take her to the fantasized Coast. They also brought her cards from their travelings, images one-dimensional and fleeting.

One particular customer, Joe Ed Jackson—a friend, not a flimflam man—brings her postcards regularh'; he has brought her the first of these cards after months of listening to her go on and on about getting south. She enjoys it so that, after lying down in the back room of the Stardust Club for free as a thank you for the gift, she will gaze at the picture a full three hours, taking long sips from her beer bottle, feeling the bitter cold of the carbonation slide down her throat, not minding the yeast that settles into the bottom of the bottle but sneaks its way into the occasional sip. She never once takes her eyes off the picture, not even when she carefully pastes it to the mirror that covers the wall up behind the bar. Through the years, her collection of pictures grows so that she creates a montage of coastal renditions; she even takes it down as carefully as she put it up when she leaves with the last of a long line of flimflam men, the one she counts on to take her to her future on the Gulf Coast but who does not. She takes the pictures down because she cannot bear to leave behind the symbols of her dreams and also because they will help her to recognize where she is when she gets there.

So, as she dreams deeply, immersing herself in the region of her montage, the images are distinctly drawn from cardboard and paints. In her dream, she wanders upon a one-dimensional sand dune, an exact reflection of one of the first cards she ever

151 procured, a watereolor picture that features sand dunes in front of an emerald ocean with

white-capped waves rolling toward the dunes. Thev are pushed up against the backdrop

of water with no delineation of distance between water and land. Waves crash and hit, as

if the dune actually serves as a barrier to the water, like a bank at the tum of the river that

drops off with no real beach. Long blades of brownish green grass grow out of the dunes,

and as she lies there, relaxing to the smell of salt and the spray from the ocean, the tips of

blades tickle her cheek like kisses.

Alice sits up slowly, smiling, mesmerized by the sounds of seagulls squawking

above her and by the crashing of the ocean directly below her. She looks out over what

she sees, looks out into the sea, all the way to the horizon of the sky, and she marvels at

how they mesh together, reflecting shades of emerald green and rich, white-ish blue,

bouncing color off one another to make a marvelous sea-scape.

No one is around, but in the background, somewhere behind and beyond Alice's

sand dune bed, she hears voices from a cabaret, the kind she feels she will go to later for

work, to lie down with only the finest men in cream-linen suits who smoke fat, sweet-

smelling cigars and glance at her appreciatively with eyes that wink under palm-leaf hats.

The music tinkles from a player piano, not the blues but that westem kind of cabaret

music, upbeat and fast. People laugh and call to one another, high-pitched, happy with

excitement. They seem to call out to Alice, and, for a moment, she turns toward the

sound and listens. "Come on, girl. You be making a big time, you be. Sweet gal like you. Ain't no backrooms here. Only the finest. Keep a high-faluting floozy gal like you in style." The voices go on for a time, and Alice smiles and listens, straining to hear

152 better, thinking she will fly to the voices and Join them, put on a velvet dress with a low bodice and high-heeled shoes with straps instead of laces.

But then she is drawn back to the sounds of waves, as if they are the true calling of the dream. They seem to implore her to dive in and cool off swim away from all the finerv. She figures the voices of the cabaret will wait for her to take a swim; after all, that is the finest dream, she thinks, to swim in the ocean. All this time, Alice is aware that she is in a dream, and that she can almost dictate her actions, so she climbs off her sand dune and wades in. The water is salty and swirls around her, giving her chills of pleasure from her shins to her waist. She wades deeper and deeper until she becomes immersed to her shoulders in the salt water. The voices and music, all of the cabaret noises, have died out, and she simply stands in the water, crying from the joy of the action. The horizon looms ahead of her, and she squints at it trying to differentiate between water and sky, but finally she gives in and floats, bobbing with the swirling waves. She springs from the sand as each wave crashes over her, floating on top and with it until she is finally brought back to shore.

This goes on for countless minutes until Alice decides it is time to seek the voices of the cabaret. It is my time to make it big, to be in high cotton; I have arrived, she thinks, and her heart beats fast at the sudden excitement of the fact that this is her dream, what she has wanted her whole life but has been unable to attain from the waiting to be taken, never taking. Instead of rising from the foamy waves, though, she floats back out in the undercurrent. She begins to swim for shore, but the shore looms ahead, never coming closer, fading in the distance, with its one-dimensional whiteness. Alice strokes

153 and strokes, working faster, harder, kicking her legs and pulling with her arms, but the

shore remains in the distance. "This is mv dream." she cries with each stroke, determined

to exert control. "This is my dream." But it does no good. Just as she knows deep down

it will not. With each subsequent rendition of this dream in the following years, she

becomes more and more certain her struggles are futile. The cabaret noises fade, and she

floats in the ocean, bobbing and looking at the horizon.

When Alice awakens the first time of the hundreds she will dream this same

dream, she lies in Old Carey's shotgun shack after wandering back to Gretna and into the

general store where Old Carey mixes ground beef with eggs, breadcrumbs and spices,

and berates Booker T Goldwire to settle Alice down. She lies on the pine-needle-bed

mattress, bathed in sweat, but knowing, fully in the suddenness that reality streams in

upon her, where she is and how she got there. She knows that she wandered into the

general store and that she is in the same bed in which she began labor, before she gave

birth to Junior, her baby son whom Booker T Goldwire has apparently taken for

safekeeping. What she does not know is where she has been before that or how exactly

she got to be in Gretna without her son.

Alice's wondering and thinking over the frustration of her dream and its possible

connotations to her very real dream, realer that any picture postcard pasted on a mirror or placed carefully in a drawer—as they now are in this shack—is interrupted by the cry of her son, soft and flat in the quiet dusk of the shack. Alice thinks for a second that perhaps she is wrong, that she has been living in this shack of Old Carey's all along and working at the general store boiling beans in ham-hock, making red-eye gravy to pour

154 over collards, and that the dream she Just had is a part of another, longer dream of uncertaintv and pain involving being left behind all her life bv men who go south to live in the high, foamy cotton of gulf waves and cabarets.

But then Booker T Goldwire w alks into her room, balancing her babv. Junior, in a sling around his neck. He holds a bottle and places it into the baby's mouth, quieting the soft, flat-sounding cries. The baby moans contentedly, purring like a satisfied kitten and sucking hard on the rubber nipple. Alice watches without uttering a word, slitting her ev es in order to see more clearly this image.

"Hey you," he says direct and casual. "Give up on you for dead." Booker T walks over. He takes the baby out of its sling, only a ripped-up sheet tied tight with a knot on his neck. He places the baby on the bed next to Alice. Junior is bundled tightly, and the whole of his body moves only slightly next to hers, feeling alien but nice. The baby next to her gives Alice the feeling of having an anchor to hold her onto the shore of reality.

She gazes at the bundled boy next to her, not really touching him but knowing he is a necessity to her now. She stares at Booker T, angry that he has come to Gretna with her baby, angry that he has taken it upon himself to place restrictions on her life when it is he who used to sit and talk about the Coast and stare at the one-dimensional postcards with her; it was he who used to sit under the stars and take soulbaths, talking about mnning away on the backs of wild ponies and how they would free them.

"What you doing here in Gretna, Booker? Why you bringing Junior here to torment me, talking it up with Old Carey? Doing me wrong, you be." she whispers to him.

155 "1 done brung this here Junior back, fine hoy. he be. After you took off again, 1 watched after him over to the Stardust. We been drinking on some beers. Junior and me.

Mv woman, Eleanor, ain't too pleased for me to be raising him, especially seeing as I doing it at the Jook. Glad to gracious she'll be you decided to drag your bones back here and take on your own son's raising. She told me straight off I'd have to be marrying her in the church if she was going to take in any strays, what with her thinking on having her own passel of chickens soon."

Alice and Booker T go on like this through the years, through all of Alice's wanderings and returns, with her showing up after awhile, wandering directly back to what becomes finally known as her shack through Old Carey's grace and charity. Booker

T comes and goes and takes care of Junior, then retums him to his mama for her to love and care for, balancing Old Carey's fears and Alice's needs. After years and travels and dreams and wakings, this wandering-dream-scape imprints itself as a pattern upon their lives.

Alice retums always to her little shack in the woods, lies down on her bed, newly stuffed each year and always left cleanly covered in cotton, dreams her endless dream of the sea and dunes and a cabaret she can only vaguely hear, less and less each year, and then wakes up to reality, always the same. Junior—never very bright but what Old Carey calls "real sweet, like an angel" —grows up to his mother's frustrated dreams and wanderings, finally taking off himself after her intermittently. Booker T sometimes sits down at the store with Old Carey and laments this fact.

[56 "A damn shame that the worst qualities take after each other, ain't it?" Old Carey says and shakes her head and mumbles over the sizzling fry pan, getting herself into a huff

"That be the honest truth, sure enough to be damned," replies Booker T to Old

Carey's disapprov ing cluck. She flips a patty. He eyes the frying with anticipation, smiling up at her flirtatioush with a slyness that does not go unnoticed but is appealing against the cussing and agreement. "That Junior," he continues, smacking his lips, "he taking right after his mama. But he ain't bright enough to be searching after nothing in particular. Gintenics, from what I can see. Hear about it down to the Stardust. That mean the things that makes us all up from our mamas and papas." Booker T is proud of the information he has picked up from some customer, drinking too many whiskeys and cokes and slurring everything together, on a stool, with Booker T taking it all in, thinking things through in terms of Alice. Junior, and wanderings.

"Humph," replies Old Carey, looking at him out of the comer of her eyes.

"Sounds a mite more like too many gins and tonics, if you ask me. But it be a dam, pitiful shame that girl and her boy taking to the road like that. It be the misery. She ain't found Jesus is what I say about it. She be a sweet girl, but her soul done lost itself—in a storm of no good, sure enough."

"I hear you, Old Carey. I hear you," is all Booker T can reply, even though he does not believe for a moment Alice's losing herself has anything to do with Jesus. He puts together his sandwich and begins to eat it. and both silently think about wandering

157 souls to the beat of their chewing, occasionalh stopping to wipe their mouths and shake their heads in dismav and wonder.

Working in the general store, in the back with Old Carey, Alice listens impatiently to the old woman ruminate about finding Jesus and getting saved: "For that poor babv Junior's sake, honey-child." Unlike Booker T, Alice has little patience for discussions of what she does not understand, for all this worrying about her faith and her placement in Jesus' favor; in fact, she feels as confident as Booker T that her situation has little to do with Jesus. So she walks around looking for a Jook in the woods, the kind nestled in and awa>' from the condescension of the crossroads community. She knows the Stardust will welcome her back at any time; she has many friendly customers she already misses and who she imagines miss her.

She works briefly at the general store with Old Carey, but the money is not enough, Alice fears, for her to take care of Junior. Besides, the smell of food all day and the greasy-heavy heat of the kitchen make her sick. She goes home those days. Junior sleeping away or just awake and suckling on one of her breasts, all snug in his sling around her neck. The first thing, like a tradition, she looks deep into the wavy-brown mirror that hangs above the hearth in her front room. Even in the dim light of dusk, with the poor quality of the mirror, she can see the layer of grease over the strain of her expression. She looks at a tired and strained woman, not at the coquettish and pretty one somewhere left behind, pushed aside, the one who years ago, back as a girl in Bainbridge, used to pose with her mama's wooden hand mirror and say, "You can chase me for a minute, honey-baby, but you ain't never going to catch on for good." No. she is tired and

158 empty of delight, middle-aged looking. "Oh my Jesus." she mutters, knowing this is a come-to-Jesus. realizing she looks more like Old Carey with her cotton-picker dew-rag on and a shapeless dress hanging askew over men's boots. "This ain't happening to you. missv." she points at herself, takes off the dew-rag from on her head and wipes her face off Her hair is frizzy and mashed flat, dirty and greasy at the roots. "Jesus God-

Almighty. Alice. What in Hell's tarnation happening to you? You ain't no general store cook, ^'ou be the finest floozy girl in these parts. Shit, you got to find your way or you be waking up on some worse roads than you did Just the other day not knowing or caring no more."

So, Alice walks around the side of the General store in the next evening, after getting off from cooking rabbit stew and baking apple cobblers for what feels like a lifetime straight. Booker T Goldwire comes over to Gretna regularly to check on her welfare and then disappears as unexpected as he shows up, so she asks him to take Junior on to her shack and look after him a couple of hours. She figures Booker T is actually coming over to Gretna to check on her wandering instinct, so she knows he will watch

Junior good—too scared to do anything less.

Outside of the general store each day, what are known as the regular men— usually three or four of them, although not the good-paying customers, but rather the shifty ones—stand around smoking cigarettes and drinking cold beers they have bought in the stores but which their wives will not allow in their homes. They watch cars occasionally bump and slide by, kicking up sand and dirt that floats lazily in the breeze

159 and then settling in a cloud around them. She walks up and casually leans against the wall, a couple of feet from these men.

"What you-all doing this evening?" Alice inquires, light and airy, as if she is Just out for a walk on a lazv' summer evening and has haphazardly run upon them.

"What we doing? Ain't doing nothing special. Just standing and looking at folks that might be driving bv. having a cold drink, trying to cool off in the evening, as if it be any of your concern," one man named Sam Lee, the one on the end who seems to be the leader of the pack, tall and paunchy, says loud in a streaming breath without looking over at her, then adds, "What you doing? Best be going onto home after cooking up a storm with Old Carev."

Alice feels all of a sudden dumpy and dirty with the reminder of her current position in this community as Old Carey's assistant cook and dishwasher. She smoothes down the material of her shapeless dress and touches her hair, minus the dew-rag that is hidden in her pocket. She knows her face is clean—she had sneaked into the back room of the general store and tried to wash her face, bite on her lips and pinch her cheeks, smooth her hair and be pretty.

At this moment in front of these general store regulars, she feels like the greasy fry-cook she has been for the past weeks, not to mention the long pregnant months before them. But she cannot allow this to keep her from the information she needs, so she runs her hand over her hair and strikes a pose. Jutting one hip out to the side and placing her hand on it with her elbow sticking out, sassy, she hopes: "Where a gal find a good time

160 around these parts? Frying up you old polecats' dinner in there be alright, but 1 used to some higher lifestvle, if you-all know what 1 speaking about."

"What you doing here, then, if you used to so much higher of a lifestyle'^" says

Sam Lee. He eyes Alice with another sideways look.

She shuffles her feet a bit, but then scrutinizes him up and down, thinking she must put on a better showing of self-confidence if she hopes to get anywhere with these men. "I be taking a break from all that high-living I be doing—if it be any of your danged business. Ain't you smart? Just tell me if you know anything in that pea-brain."

The men all laugh—even the one who has been talking—and one of them chucks

Alice on the shoulder. The shortest of the group, the one who has stood back and listened, not really Joining in until now, offers up a suggestion in a squeaky high-pitched voice that sounds to Alice a bit womanish: "Why don't you show us what you talking about, "high time." and we might be better able to help you find what you looking for."

Alice looks at him for a second—really only running her eyes over him—and then looks off into the distance at the dusty road they have all been gazing at. She says without taking her eyes off the road and its horizon. "I suppose I could take a little pipsqueak like you around back for a poke or two. Won't take more than a minute I imagine if the pay's right. And I guess a little information I be needing real bad a big old price today."

And with that, she walks off and around the comer of the building. She does not look again at the men; she puts on a mask of intent purpose, blank and unfeeling. She runs her hand along the cement blocks used to construct the general store, and looks to the woods behind it for a convenient spot. She considers a moment sneaking back into

161 the back room but decides immediateh against it, instead opting to lie down behind a giant oak, one with low branches dripping Spanish moss.

The short, quiet man follows her, and, true to her prediction, lowers himself down on top of her and, while Alice stares up at the hanging moss, finishes his business without word or incident in only a couple of minutes. She lies still, does not touch him, only considers how the grav. feathery strands of moss tangle and appear to crawl with tiny bugs and how this image lends more comfort as a focal point than the ceiling of the back room at the Stardust. She looks up to the sky from there, but it is a hazy blue, a mixture of humidity and sky. with no clouds to picture.

After the other two have wandered back and lowered themselves upon her and huffed and left their sweat to dry on her skin, she sits up and spreads her dress smooth again. When she walks back around to the side of the store, she confronts them gaily:

"Oh, boys, you do know how to make a girl feel sweet, you all do. Sure enough feeling fine. Now, tell me whereabouts I finding ajook—the kind of place where the folks'll know how to treat a gal like me, if you hear what I be saying to you all."

They tell her, drawing the directions with a stick in the dirt of the road, using the dust that has settled after a day's worth of cars driving past to fashion their map. She pays keen attention, past needing to apply coquetry or niceties. She then leaves them standing, walks away without another word. Just a wave of the hand as they are left to contemplate their strange luck and her swaying behind.

16: "Mmm, Mmm, Mmmm," is all she hears as she moves into the dusk of the woods, picking her wav over ferns, v ines, and roots until she can discover the path for which she has given three free pokes.

The Jook they have told her about is five good miles into the woods, with paths winding and connecting together the trek there. It is the ultimate hideaway, the kind of place that, if vou have not grown up around these woods or have not been told specifically how to find it, will go unnoticed and undisturbed. By the time Alice reaches it, the sun has completely died away, and only moonlight breaks through the branches of the trees to reflect upon Alice's skin and make eerie splotches of it. She rubs her arms and continues to walk until she finally sees faint lights from the Jook, peek through the branches and lend a glow to the closeness of the woods. She soon hears the muffled sounds of a guitar picking at a lively tune of delta blues a few minutes before she actually comes upon it. Old feelings of excitement and a real thirst in her throat cover her memorv' like a cloak of warm wool might cover the gray splotchy shadows on her arms, and this steps up her pace, running up to the clearing with no current this time carrying her back. The club comes upon her abruptly. One moment she is walking carefully along in the brush of the woods, slapping at the mosquitoes, and the next minute, she is staring down this creaky, slant, one-room establishment the men at the store called,

"Master Joe Wilson's Backwoods Club." ft looks almost exactly like the Stardust Club— certainly no cabaret—but Alice hugs herself with the happiness of the sight.

The emotions and excitement that flood over her actually stop her in her tracks with their surprising ferocity. Her dreams have not completely died away; she may yet

163 find herself in high cotton. She hopes she may feel well soon enough—if she does not have to wallow the remainder of her life in a greasv and stifling kitchen frying and stirring and talking about being saved b> Jesus. She thinks, as she simply takes in the beauty of this Jook and the sweet sounds of the scratchy guitar, that she can bear raising up Junior if she can only make her living here, with something she likes and is used to, not living like something she is not, with Old Carey thinking she is a "poor, sweet child."

.A.lice stands like this for an hour, not walking into Master Joe Wilson's

Backwoods Club, but only watching it. She knows she will not enter it and get a cold drink, that she w ill turn around this evening and pick her way back through the woods, figure out how to get to her shack from here. Her throat still thirsts for a cold, refreshing sip of beer or even for the immediate burn of whiskey, but somehow she feels kind of low and sorry, tired, wanting to get back to her shack, wash off the sweat of the regular men from the store in the narrow but clear and flowing creek behind her shack, lie down for awhile on a pine needle bed, then take Junior in her arms and allow him to suckle her breasts until they both fall asleep to the hopeful conversation of Booker T Goldwire.

164 CHAPTER XI

"ONLY HORSES RUN WILD IN CLOUDS"

165 Part Three

The sun hits Alice square in the face; she lifts her head toward it, allows it to awaken her. hard and mean like a bite deep on the neck. After a time of lying with the palms of her hands over her eyes, a time in which she contemplates the rusty-glow color that the sun makes inside her hands pressed against her face, she sits and looks to the right and then the left. She is not sure for the moment where she is, but knows, as alwav s, it is now here good and not far from usual. Her back aches as she arches it. and she tastes the grit of dirt and sand from the road in her mouth. The sun begins to bring up a sweat, and cicadas buzz loudly in her ear, all around, enveloping her in their ery, as if to say, "Get on with you, girl. You don't belong here, waking up like you do, no good."

She knows too well she does not belong here, on the side of a road on the way to nowhere in particular she can remember. But, she also knows there is no reason to get up. She may as well wait until someone wanders up the road so she can ask her whereabouts and start the always-long trudge back home, down another sandy-dirt road, looking for patches of shade that will sooth her aching feet.

This waking up to nowhere will be something Alice comes to accept. Booker T

Goldwire, her friend since youth and the only soul besides Old Carey who cares about her disappearances or her retums, will someday call what she does a "wandering" because, he claims, she seems to be searching for someplace she cannot find. He will say, after she scratches on his door in the sadness of afternoon, wanting him to clean her up and take her for a cold drink, "Why you feel needful of taking off when you got plenty of

166 goodness right here in the woods, in a nice Jook like this, sipping a cold beer?" Alice will never answer him, never answer this question, as if it is the question of youth's failure that no one can ask nor answer pertinently. She will shrug her shoulders and sip long, feel the cool beer quench her gritlv thirst, mumble something not particularly heard or understood.

But under the morning sun on the first wandering, Alice begins to realize she is

Just up from Booker's spot on the Ochlockonee River. The tree trunk she and Booker have sat upon for years sits as it always has, as if to say, "See, girl, ain't nothing much changed here." She almost suffocates under an avalanche of conflicts as the recent past floods into her consciousness Just as the grass and weeds wake up to the sun and shake off the heavy mist.

In the days after Junior is born, with all the folks in Gretna—a tiny community made up of some backwoods shacks and a general store—talking back and forth about how she almost met her maker in the birthing and how her son would not be at all right- headed from such a close call to Heaven, Alice gets up and takes after Junior's supposed papa, long gone. She knows what she is doing this time, thinking that, if she can make it down to the Coast and find her man, everything will come together nicely. She'll send for Junior later, after she's made her start. The pregnancy was hard, cooking at the general store all day, feeling washed in greasy broth and heat. The woman, Old Carey, took her in as her friend, got her the Job cooking at the store, and when Alice began to get bigger, with her waist disappearing and the buttons of her dress stretching at the stomach

167 and the breasts, she silently offered one of her own dresses, much larger, and began giv ing help where it was needed.

"Old Carey, you be taking good care of my baby. I know you will," Alice tells herself as she walks. "Got to go and make good money for my baby. Floozies make good monev down to the Coast. People live high down there. 1 be in high cotton soon.

Then I come and get my baby. You keep him until then," she tells herself, talking a steadv cadence as she walks to the beat of her unraveling hopes.

But Alice is weak from labor, and she has made it only some five or so miles in the wTong direction. She wants to scream at the terror of her own incapability and the confusion of how on God's earth she could have made it here, to Booker's river, when the main person she wants to hide this pregnancy and subsequent birth from is Booker T

Goldwire. He is her friend, and she cannot bear to have him witness the shame that she has failed to achieve the goal of her youth, the feat they discussed for years while taking what she called a soulbath. She cannot allow Booker T Goldwire to know she took such a wrong tum when all these years he's preached to her to know the river and to stay by it.

Lying on the ground, somehow here by his river, she reaches down to her stomach to feel the swollen mass that spans from her breasts to her legs. It feels like Jelly, almost numb but waking to the touch with vague pain and stinging in her skin. Her breasts lay inert on the mass, swollen with milk needing to be nursed, pulsing a beat, over and over.

She cries out with pain and degradation before again giving into her exhaustion with long deathly sleep.

168 It is Booker T Goldwire who finds her. She wakes to his face close to hers, breathing in her breath, checking. She clutches white and brown sand, although her head lies among pine needles, poison ivy, and Virginia creepers.

.As her ev es open and Booker T comes into heady focus, she again realizes the follv of her attempt w ith an onrush of pain and stiffness. "Goddamn, Booker. Get me out of here," is all she can muster in a gritty whisper, put forth toward the ground beneath her.

"Goddamn, Booker? Goddamn you, Alice. What in tar-nation you doing here on the ground next to the road, half dead, girl? Liked to kill me straight-aways dead, sure enough, seeing you here all to yourself killed, dead as a skunk, side of the river, left to smell bad."

This sits Alice up on her elbows, a movement that brings even more pain. She swallows it and manages to look straight at him saying, "Trying to walk awhile, that what

I doing here by the river. Following it south. Thinking of making it down to the Coast.

Can't take no more than a couple of days, you think?" Alice attempts a smile, all the sudden knowing Booker T will think her half-baked with this idea that in the previous night's panic seemed plausible but now seems completely ridiculous.

"The Coast? Girl, take a train. Shit. Why you want to walk it? Looking terrible, you be. You put on some big-time dmnk last night? Where you been? I ain't seen you in a month of Sundays."

"Shit, yourself I Joshing about the Coast. Been out to Gretna for a spell. Went with my man, the one taking me down south. We stopped to do some courting before we

169 get caught up with all the business of living high. Just for ourselves, we was. But he done gone on down to Panama Citv. get things together for me, don't want me bothered none with the moving and finding a place to stay, all that. But I thinking on surprising him." Alice warms up to her storv some, fancying again what she almost came to believe in the past nine months. "Unfortunately, I ain't got no Jack to get me down on no train— luxurv'-stv le. Been retired from the trade, you may of heard," Alice looks to Booker T for some recognition of believability, but he simplv stares at her with concern and pit}.

Alice does not like this: it makes her nervous and angry to think her predicament may seem pathetic to someone else, even to her friend, and the pain of her skin begins to noticeably pulse with the throbbing of her breasts.

"Well, you looking different. Don't think Gretna been agreeing with you particularh. Looking rough. I say." Booker T sucks in his breath to make a little whistling sound.

Alice has not told anyone about her pregnancy; she has not seen anyone from

Quincy in a year, not since she takes off with the last of a string of flimflam men, with the one who finally promises to take her down to the Coast but then abandons her at the general store in Gretna, Just a few pitiful miles west of Quincy. ft might as well be a hundred miles as soon as Alice figures out she is pregnant; whores never fare as well once the rumor gets around they thinking on starting a family. Customers tend to get nervous—and absent.

So she stays in Gretna, working at the store and biding her time until the birth, and all that is, at last, said and done. And then in her misery misted by dream-tears and

170 sand, here she wakes up to find herself at the river with Booker T, like nothing has happened, like they are still littie more than children taking off from his uncle's Stardust

Club to swim and wonder at growing up, him, making fun of her, and her, holding her own and making fun back. It occurs to Alice that she can go on from here and forget the whole last year, take a swim, lie in the sun, heal up a bit, then take off again, following the river, get down to the gulf, find her man. Be happy in a soulbath with Booker T none the wiser.

"Let's take a swim, Booker," she turns from him and raises up slow. She does not look back to garner his reaction, but fairly wobbles into the water, biting her tongue from the pain stinging over her skin.

As she walks into the river, she feels with relief the lap of water, and the sandy bottom soothes her aching feet. She walks right into the middle, not bothering or wishing to take off her clothing, knowing well from their smudgy dirt and sour smell they could use a washing as well. The water covers her and swirls around, comforting with its sudden brackish cold. It equalizes the pain and transcends her body to weightlessness as she moves more deeply into the middle of the river.

"Ahhh" is all she can muster. Last night's degradation floats away with the current, bobbing on a wave like oak leaves or wayward, swimming June bugs.

Booker T pops up from under water to her left, for he has dived in as is his way, fast and furious, as if to conquer the river's current by adding in his own velocity of weight.

171 "Where vou sa} you been':' 1 hear tell you took off to the Coast and was already liv ing high. Some sa} thev done see you down there to the beach, all playing in the waves and having a big time. But ain't supposing you made it none, seeing as you here nov\. looking a might worn out and rough."

"No, 1 ain't made it. And ain't you smart. 1 been around. You Just ain't looked hard enough. Thought we was friends, Booker T Goldwire." She splashes water toward him, and he splashes back, but the game hurts for the trying and she wades around, looking for a rock on which to hold against the current. She finds one and grabs on to a crag, then swirls around to lie back, feel the water stream past her, and look up at the sky.

The clouds float overhead, and she stares at them, looking for pictures and stories in the white and gray dimensions, a game she and Booker T have played for years. Booker T grabs onto the rock, and his feet roll past, settling next to hers.

"What's up there?" he asks, sucking in water and then spraying it up and out.

She thinks about it a moment, contemplating the dimensions, looking for something with which to draw a picture in her mind and to talk about, something far away from what she wishes not to think about, what is real on the ground, left over in

Gretna.

"I see a wagon right there," she finally decides, looking up and pointing over to her right at a cloud moving quickly past. "It be traveling over to Tallahassee-ways.

Probably some crackers needing to get them supplies for the winter. Can't buy no ear.

Ain't rich enough like us." Alice chuckles low and mean and then also sucks in water and sprays it up and out.

17: Booker T takes a moment to reply. He kicks his legs and laughs at Alice's proclamation: "Thev look rich enough to me. Mov ing pretty danged fast, without no horses, neither." Booker T watches for a moment longer as the cloud moves quickly.

"Breeze be up today. 1 seeing lots of pictures, but 1 can't decipher them none before they moving on past."

"I hear you," Alice replies and closes her eyes. She shivers as the breeze hits her w et skin, so dunks under again, really only re-submerging backwards. The water feels warm and comforting, and she holds herself under for as long as she can easily push against the current. The sound underneath the water rushes past her ears like so many voices lodging complaints. "Go on with you, girl. You ain't safe here, no more than if you was in your grave," the voices taunt her, rushing in the instant of a splash.

But when she resurfaces, out of breath, Booker T sprays her in the face directly, causing her to cough and spit. "Stop that with you. We ain't no children no more," she uncharacteristically cries to him, turning over onto her stomach so as to turn her back to him.

"May as well be as much as we doing no good here. What you see now? Tum back over. Quit being a sissy, none." Booker T giggles uncomfortably and kicks her a bit. the water only allowing his leg to slide against her shin. She knows he is trying to make her feel better—he always has tried and worried after her, and she feels thankful.

Booker T, since their coming to understand one another as youths, never forces explanations. He accepts tribulations as one accepts the heat and humidity of May being

Just the way it is in North Florida—leaving a body raw and choking on the smell of over-

17: ripe vegetation, and stinging the skin from the buzz of mosquitoes. But she is fearful that Booker T will not accept this tribulation. The thought that he will expect her to return to Gretna and Old Care} s disapproval, all to take on motherhood and cooking, terrifies Alice.

She shakes off wanting to cr} and turns back around onto her back. She looks up at the clouds again, finally sighing. "1 don't see nothing, Booker. 1 ain't able to see nothing no more." She feels tired, through and through, and in the moment, lying in the river with her friend, feeling wet and warm, but as heavy as if she was weighed down with river rocks, Alice loses her ability to wander in her mind to a fantasy. She thinks back on what is real about this morning, and the feeling lays on her like an anchor. "I want to get out, now," she finally says, low as a whisper. "This ain't nothing but a game for children. Fun enough. We ain't children no more, is we?" She swims away from him until she gains a footing on the sandy-muddy bottom, then wades against the side current, up and out of the water.

Once on the bank, Alice shakes off the water from her dress and falls onto the grassy slope. She fingers Virginia creeper leaves and falls back, tired through to her bones. Her legs and arms feel as if even the blood has tired out. She rubs on her arms and contemplates how this seems to smooth out the flow. "You ever feel so tired that your blood's moving slow through your veins?" she asks Booker T, still down in the water.

"I suppose so," he answers up and then ducks down, swimming toward shore. He climbs up in two bounds and plops down next to her. "1 suppose I been that tired, after

174 staying up to the Stardust all night shooting craps then trying to court after Eleanor like

she likes, all over Sunday dinner and all. That makes me right tired, 1 guess. Through

and through. A swim makes it better, always do."

'"I'eah. 1 hear you," she nods absently, then continues, looking out to the water

rather than at him. "1 be tired like that, Booker, right now. Gretna ain't no vacation, I'll

tell }ou."

"You been over to Gretna this whole time? Shit, Alice, why you over there?

Ain't nothing but backwoods niggers over there." Booker T laughs at that, whistling his surprise at her whereabouts, but keeping his reaction low as if he intuits that something about this conversation goes beyond friendly chiding.

"Don't act so disappointed. Where you think I been, fool?"

"Hell, I thought you'd done got off, all the way down south to Panama City, like you always say you going to do. What you think I thinking?"

Alice does not answer. She lies back and begins again contemplating the clouds and does so for many minutes in silence. She finally asks, "What you see up there?" She yawns and thinks she could most likely sleep the rest of her life away; now her bones feel heavy, popping at the Joints as she stretches. She closes her eyes and feels the sun warming the skin on her face.

He thinks for awhile and then points to a picture they had often claimed to see through the years. "I see horses racing past real swift-like. They white and tall and mean. Probably galloping away from some cowpoke trying to harness them. They wild.

See that?"

175 Alice opens her eyes again and shields them with the palm of her hand. She looks up at the clouds, and the} indeed travel past quickh . She feels dizz} yet at home in a way, at least for a breath of this day b} the river. "1 don't know, Booker. They looking a bit like clouds now. 1 suppose."

"Naw," he answers her as he has done over and over through the years, whenever the} hav e argued ov er their abilities to really paint a picture in the clouds. "You got to half-close your eyelids. That make them horses. Try it. You see."

She half-closes her lids, content not to think about or do anything much more than this here, imagining vaguely about the pictures inherent in the shapes of clouds.

Booker's ideas are always silly and good, so she settles into them like a soft and deep feather bed. The clouds shape up in the half-dark of her lids. Her lashes filter the images so that they become Booker T's horses running past. "Yeah, Booker, I see them now.

The}' be running fast but awkward. They scared," she whispers now, feeling sleeping and almost well. "1 see that for certain. They be chased out the sky. Where you suppose they going so fast?"

Alice closes her eyes again, waiting for Booker T's answer. When it does not come, she tums to him with a slight movement of her head. Booker T looks up at the sky as if contemplating his answer. She closes her eyes again to listen to birds above, calling to one another with violent whistlings and squawkings.

After time, stretched to its limits by birds pulling cries long and heavy, Booker T clears his throat and answers, "1 thinking on them horses running from being tamed. Like you. They don't want to live in no corral and let children ride on they backs, all the time

176 having to act right and gentle. Just to be forced to pull on some farmer's plow until near- dark. Then getting nothing sweet like a rub or a good supper in they belly. Sleeping in some smelly, cramped corner of a barn with the chicken and hogs. Ain't the life for them. So the} run hard and with the wind. See? Like you."

Alice hears his words and feels only more exhausted than she had before his storv'. But she answers him with a nod: "1 see. Like me, alright. Only I'm tired to my bones w ith running away. I ain't got no more run in me. Wish I did." She eyes the clouds again, full-on this time. "They look like clouds on the run."

"What you mean, you ain't got no more run in you? Girl, I thinking you only made out of run."

"You hear me. I be tired through and through. Like them clouds. I bet they tired of floating. Look at them full in the eye, over there away from the sun." She takes her hand and guides Booker T's face to his left. "See them? They just clouds, and they moving on and on and on, but they got to be tired always pushed on by that wind. Might want to stay awhile and hang over us or something. Well, 1 ain't even got no more wind to push me. Ain't got nothing but this here, heaped up on the side of the river, Booker.

Done for, that's me."

"Don't you suppose they do Just that when they get tired? Sometimes they hang right still, when they big and round here and there, on days. Others, they come on all together and cover up, holding on, making the whole sky dark. They real tired then, I bet.

Having to hold on to one another to keep from falling, heaping together. Still like you."

Booker T warms up to her idea, liking the thought of the clouds being the pictures of

177 themseh es, through which he may still fashion his stories. "And when they get too tired to go on no more, the} up and cry for the hurt of it all. That makes them rain down on all of us so as we know they upset and done for. What you think makes it all prett} for May­ day';' It all the hurting them clouds feeling working up to a frenzy and then making something right nice for left-overs."

He looks to Alice for her approval of his story-telling, but she only squeezes her e}'es tight to keep from crying. Tears escape between her lids, screwing up her face with the struggle of emotions.

"Hell, Alice, what you crying for? I ain't meaning to make you ery. I hate it when you cr}." Booker T looks to her with panic.

Alice is the strong one, the one void of emotions that might overpower her will, and she knows he feels that way. But she knows right now she is the clouds, all come together to smash and crash down upon every little thing below. After what seems like a long time of sitting silently, a time in which she tries to come to terms with running with those clouds, away from her friend, struggling to leave him through silence and keep this secret, the ticket to her freedom. She finally coughs and raises her head, looks at him for only a moment, then says, turning her head down, her eyes squeezed shut with giving in,

"I had a baby, Booker. Done left him over to Gretna. That why you ain't heard from me none. I been having a baby."

She opens her eyes, and something about the saying of her troubles lends her some of her old strength back. She gives Booker T a look that almost dares him against feeling sorry for her. The long cries of the birds pass overhead.

178 "A baby?" Booker T looks at her, blinks at the clouds a couple of times, then

looks back at her, "What about that polecat }ou done left with? Ain't he caring none

about you'!'"

"He don't know nothing about me. Hell, who knows if he be the papa or not. You

know my wa} s as good as I do. He left practicalh when we stopped for gas in Gretna."

Booker T does not answer Alice. He lies back watching the clouds, as if he's

looking for something to say and feel. His forehead wrinkles with the watching, and this

makes Alice wistful. "Booker, remember when I taught you to take a soulbath in the sun.

all them years ago? When you wasn't nothing but a kid?"

He looks to her, wipes his face of sweat and what she suspects might be tears.

"Yeah, I remember. You got all mad at me because I be thinking you ain't right on the

mark with that bathing."

Alice giggles now, hollow, light, and high. "But I be right on the mark, and

proved it to you, didn't I?"

Booker T pokes her in the leg with his foot. "1 don't know as I'd go that far. But

it be nice, that day. Right nice."

"That settles it, then. We going to have a soulbath. Come on, Booker. We

needing it bad today. Worse than ever." Alice gets up, slowly, wincing openly now with the pain in her skin. "Feels like my skin moving up but my insides staying down there," she says over her back as she moves slowly away. "Come on. Make me feel better in my bones."

179 Booker T moves lithely over to her, taking her elbow and leading her up the bank and into the clearing where the sun shines mid-morning rays straight and right. He puts her down in the middle of the clearing and walks away without looking back. She watches him from her vantage point, not calling after him. She knows deep down he is going after her baby. His stride becomes longer as he reaches the point in the clearing where a path mov es through the woods, narrowing as it moves out toward the road to

Gretna.

"Don't you want to know where to find him?" she whispers, all the while knowing he won't need to know, will find her bab} by instinct and cunning. She lies back and closes her eyes, lets the sun dry her clothing, warm her skin and bring the chills through her soul.

When Booker T returns, Alice's baby on his chest in a sling, Alice is gone. When she returns weeks later, dirty and unsure, he tells her that he had looked down at the river for her, even following it for awhile. He did not expect to find her, he realized it after some time, and so wandered, himself off to his own shack in the woods and then off to the Stardust to drink long on cold beer and show Alice's baby to the men who used to know her.

Booker T takes care of this baby himself, at least for a while. He knows Alice cannot do so right then, so he waits, wondering if Alice is traveling along the river's meandering way, wondering if she thinks it will get her to Panama City or if she remembers it will take her to Ochlochonee Bay, eastwardly, not south. "Be careful, gal,"

Booker T whispers to his reflection in the mirror above the bar at the Stardust. "Won't

180 know the Atlantic from the Gulf from them picture postcards, I suspect." He laughs sad

and soft.

181 CHAPTER XII

'THE BIRTHING OF JUST GETTING BY'

182 Part Four

Alice lies on a bed. The back room of the small, rough shotgun shack is stifling.

The doors are shut, but the woods that surround the shack won't allow a breeze to travel through the house. These woods in North Florida grow like a Jungle, with fems and vines filling the spaces between pine and oak trees. Breezes are only heard above the trees, nev er felt. They rustic against the night air and hint to Alice's soul of cooler places in the

North and more refreshing spots on the Coast. But, there, deep in the woods, in a shotgun shack, no breeze finds open doors or windows which are best left closed against mosquitoes.

Earlier in the ev ening, Alice feels a sharp pain in her lower belly. It stabs at her, clawing tightly at the insides of her abdomen, and she doubles over with the pain. She feels her head grow hot and clammy; she sinks to her knees, rolling into a tight ball. "If I can push myself in enough, the pain will go away," Alice thinks, but the pain waves over her without abating much. Alice crawls—trying to remain in the balled-up position—out into the woods, past her outdoor privy and into a bed of mossy ferns, fallen pine needles and leaves. She breathes deep and pushes her stomach muscles, hoping the pain suggests angry bowels and not what she is yet to be ready for.

But the harder she pushes, the more distinct her pains grow until she gives up that notion and begins to accept truth: The baby she has been carrying along with her for the last many months, the same baby that has kept her hidden in the woods outside of Gretna,

183 Florida, safe from gossips and friends, alike, is coming without enough warning for Alice to have figured on w hat to do for the birthing.

Alice holds onto a tree trunk. The bark is soft and pliable. It comforts Alice, and she wonders wh} she has never thought about the softness of trees and the smell of pine- rotting dirt before. The pains subside, and Alice uses leaves and her hands to wipe off her forehead and then decides, lying under the trees with the evening shadows beginning to throw shimmers of light against the pulling landscape, she must get up somehow, make h down the sand road to Old Carey's house, and call for some help. She takes deep breaths—one, two, three—and holds them in, feels air burst her lungs and give her body hope of strength. "Crawl up that tree trunk, hold tight," she tells herself

The pains subside, but the weakness with which they infuse her body lies oppressive in her blood. Alice steadies herself, still pressing hard against the tree trunk.

Now, she thinks the softness of the bark is much nicer on her forehead than any pillow in a fanc} colored hotel down on the Coast might ever have been. She holds tight; her arms wrap around the tree. She stands unsteadily for a brief moment, wanting so much of things she never knew she desired, all in this strange moment, behind a privy, deep in the woods outside of Gretna, Florida.

"Got to get down the road," Alice repeats to herself over and over. She stumbles along the way; pain brings her to her knees every few minutes. "Got to get down the road." Mosquitoes bite her—attracted to the sweat. She scratches furiously at the swollen red bites until they bleed, anything to focus the pain away from her belly. "This ain't right," she thinks as she counts mentally back through the months. Too early, she fears.

184 Alice has kept herself from thinking hard on the baby's time. That wa}, the reality of her life's current direction does not seem so real, so wrong. As she grew in size.

.Alice took to sta}ing at this shack outside of Gretna, far away from the Stardust Club and

Quincy. She has rented the shack and paid up in advance enough months so that she can hide out, safe from wagging tongues of uppity church matrons in Quincy and the talkings of disappointed husbands at the Stardust. She doesn't think too hard on her predicament—that brings too many troubled thoughts. And, as the baby grows, so grows a m}th—one going hard in her own mind—equally persistent as the changes occurring, unwanted, in her body.

Back at the Stardust, before babies and trouble, Alice drinks long from a sweating bottle. "Well, boys, I be leaving this little bump pretty soon." She looks at the faces behind her, reflected in the big mirror above the bar.

"Humph. Don't know why you trying to get out of this piece of earth, girly.

Earth is earth wherever you be. Ain't no different nowhere," laughs the proprietor of the

Stardust.

"Ain't different?" Alice swings around and hops off her stool. She strides swiftly up to the center table, the only one in the club big enough for card games, and the most popular spot for day-time customers to sit and muse on gossip over drinks. "You old coot, you don't know nothing about earth. It be different sure as I be sitting here. In fact, it ain't even earth that makes the big difference down on south. That be the breeze.

Comes on in out from the gulf It cleans the spirit like nothing else in no world I's seen.

185 And underneath that breeze, there be the earth. Not all dirty and dark, neither. All pearly white sand, even under the trees. Not mixed, like here."

Alice realizes most of these men who frequent the Stardust Club know nothing about Panama City or the Gulf Coast that surrounds it, no more than her. Alice hears about it first years before, as a girl, from a bootlegger in a sand-colored linen suit and a

Panama hat. Since that day, she searches for a way there, through bootleggers, flimflam men. preachers and even by trying to save money down at the bank. Nothing works. She first almost manages to escape Quincy and the Stardust with a flimflam man, a snake-oil healer, who shacks up with her in the colored boarding house for a week and then, with the whole Christian contingent in Quincy pushing, sneaks out of town with Alice sitting up in the boarding house watching him drive away, right up front of his shiny, black ear.

Since that time, she searches for another flimflam man to take her away. She studies up on the Coast through stories and picture post cards she saves until she finally meets another man to take her south. This man dances slow and close to the music the piano player pounds out of the old wooden piano in the corner of the Stardust. She whispers to him, "You be taking me on down to the Coast, honey-baby, and 1 show you what a good time really be. Alice, she work hard, and you be taking it easy, you see."

He kisses her long on the mouth, as if searching in her mouth for truths hidden in her promises.

They leave that next morning, driving off in yet another shiny, black car. But this flimflam man stops in the very next town of Gretna, southwest of Quincy. They take up residence, with Alice asking each morning before the flimflam man takes out after

186 customers, "We going on down to the Coast, ain't we? We making a mark down there, sure enough, sugar-bab} '" She smiles uncertainly and displays her shoulder for him, an enticement to travel toward greater riches and opportunities.

"Sure we be," he replies too swifti}' as the door closes behind him. Alice waits each day, all day, for the return of the flimflam man. They stay in a backroom rented at the general store, right out on the main street. It is owned by white folks, but the colored cook named Old Care} takes pit} on the couple's stor}' of a honeymoon with limited mone} s. "Sure, we rents to newlyweds. But don't be coming through into the store too much. Exit you two's room out back or the bossman put you out quick," she says, and

Alice and the Flimflam man move right in. The room is nothing but a thin mattress on a rusted bed placed in the middle of a small room. A gray, wooden table sits against the curtainless window with only one chair. Alice hangs an old dress over the window and then sits at the table, staring blankly each day out from under the corners of the dress for the flimflam man's return.

Alice knows she should discover a club or lounge, some Jook deep out in the woods where the coloreds live, and set herself up for business. All her savings from the

Stardust have gone to establish a wardrobe with which to entice these traveling men. She discovers quickly that if she seems poor and common, even for a country floozy girl, she will only attract men for a moment. They will soon leave her be out in the boons, thinking she is only good enough for a back-water Jook, not something high and nice down to the Coast.

187 Through her youth spent working the floozy trade at the Stardust, Alice completeh transforms herself with clothes and hats. Her stiff, cracked lace-up shoes are replaced b} elegant high-heeled pumps. Alice orders them from a catalogue. She feels the power of dressing up, a power she only imagined as a kid in her mother's dusty room dancing around with a mirror and }oung girl plans, when dressing was something of the imagination.

And thus dressed and dreaming of coasts, she sits and waits, da} by day, unsure if the flimflam man will want her to whore around, out behind this new town. "He don't ask me about no money," Alice reasons to herself and focuses more keenly out the window. Until the day the flimflam man fails to return to their room behind the general store.

Alice sits straight in the dusk of the evening and waits. She waits into the night, and when her back aches and her head drops, she slowly rises and walks to the bed.

Carefully, she draws back the cover and lies down, still in her clothes and shoes. She wants to think hard on the fact that she has been left, but her mind clouds with fatigue and fear; every time she focuses on the problem, her chest swells, and her throat constricts, and this makes her skin crawl. So she takes a deep breath of warm air, and slips her shoes off her feet before sinking into a sweaty-long sleep.

The next moming, she walks out the door of the back room. It opens to a field with garbage and rusted metal lying in the sun. The field stands briefly in front of the woods that grow up all of a sudden and tangle trees and vines with ferns and grass, and

Alice suspects secrets live in that Jungle right off the destruction of the field. She walks

188 around the building to the front as deliberate as possible, mustering all the pride in her stance and demeanor available inside her.

"He}, Miss Alice, how the newlyweds doing this fine morning?" asks Old Carey from the back, behind the counter. She stirs a pot of greens, and the smell of pot liquor churns Alice's stomach.

"1 be pretty fine, thank you. Old Carey. You ain't seed my husband, is you? He get up and out this morning before I can talk at him," replies Alice, a bit low and wavering.

"Naw, I ain't seed him, none. A hard worker that man of yours. Ain't easy to find no hard workers these days, is it?" says Old Carey over her shoulder.

Alice walks around the store, pretending to search for particulars, while she thinks on her next move. She knows, feels inside, that the flimflam man has abandoned her: He never acted too keen on driving her all the way down to the Coast, always repeating that same line, "Sure we be," with a flashy grin. Snakeoil business booms up in North

Florida, near the Georgia line, where tobacco picking wears colored people to the ground, and flimflam men enjoy the work, from what Alice can figure. He probably not wanting to take it easy, let Alice ply her trade.

But how, Alice frets over tins of coffee and packages of powdered oleo margarine, is she to get out of this town? Quincy is bad enough; Gretna is nothing but some shacks on farms surrounded by a white folks saloon, a wood church, and a general store. She hasn't even noticed any school kids running around, and she hasn't an inkling about the possibility of any colored Jooks.

189 Alice knows she should best own up to somewhere near—but not quite—the truth of her situation and ask for help. No other way around this; the flimflam man's been paying by the da} for the backroom, and yesterday's rent isn't even covered yet. And so she replaces the tin of coffee she is gazing at and returns to the counter. "Old Carey, can

I speak with } ou a spell?" Alice scratches lightly along the counter, tracing her nail along a grain in the oiled wood.

"Course }'0u can. honey. Get on back here behind the counter. Have to help me stir these here greens while 1 shell peas, though. Got started late this morning, and the lunch trade be coming in soon enough. Hungry, too," Old Carey beckons Alice, with a wave, to the stove. "What trouble you got on you this morning? You ain't looking any too fine. I must say to you, honey."

Alice picks up the spoon and stirs awhile without speaking. She smells deep of the warm, oaky vapors that steam up from the greens boiling softly in rock salt-water, and it flushes her face, about bringing her to her knees. "If I can Just swim in them greens, I be fine," Alice thinks. They smell and feel warm and comforting, a promise of security and satisfaction lying in the leaves softening softly in water and salt, vinegar and pepper.

"Old Carey," she finally starts, "I ain't completely certain but that my husband not be coming here no more." Alice begins and stops short, the words hanging low in the steam.

190 "Not coming here no more. Lord, child, what you two do? Have some squabble?" Old Care} laughs slight and throaty as if she has known too many men and their goings on to become alarmed at one little newlywed trouble.

"No, ma'am, we ain't had no fight. But he left me here yesterday, earlv. 1 lied before. He ain't come back since." Alice puts on a low-down countenance and rubs the back of her left hand across her eyes, as if to shade them from the deep shame she should be feeling. The act is easy to put on; Alice certainly feels, if not quite shame, a deep disappointment. She also adroitly knows she will have to attack this woman's sense of s}mpathy and sisterhood if she can hope for any help getting down the road—even if down the road means Just backtracking up to Quincy.

"What about his things? You still got them?" Old Carey asks in order to put the entire situation into a logical pattern, and Alice nods affirmatively—knowing he has taken his things while she slept and that she has been foolish to hope. Old Carey states with authority, "Sure. Something Just happened to him. He caught up. You know how them men folks can be. They crawl on out to the Jooks. Sometimes don't get to remembering on us women folk for a spell. You Just wait patient, child. He be home soon enough."

"That's real sweet of you. Old Carey. But I having a small problem in that respect. See, he done left me with no money to pay up on rent, and what if he don't come back no more? You say yourself he be a man, and with them Jooks and all. 1 Just scared."

Alice does not look at Old Carey. She wants her to have space and time enough to think

191 on the situation properl}, to build her sense of a wrongdoing being done to Alice. So she stirs and dreams of taking a full bite of greens, sweet and sour, salty and good.

"That polecat. 1 swears. 1 feel fit to be tied with this. Leaving a poor young wife like vou with no rents and nothing—probably ain't ate in two days as thin as you be—and him out there putting on some big firewater drunk. Only one thing be done. And that for

} ou to be helping Old Care} here in the kitchen till he come for you. Or till we see fit to be putting }'ou back with your people. Where you say your people stay?" Old Carey moves over to Alice and grabs her arm, gently. "Don't be stirring them greens so hard, child. You making nothing but mush."

Alice turns to the woman and wraps her arms around her neck. She stays there and knows full well the sin of her dishonesty.

And, thus, for a brief interlude, Alice becomes a cook at the Gretna General Store.

She learns many things: how to fry a chicken and make red-eye gravy, to wash gas out of beans and prepare grits without lumps. She also learns what making her first woman friend means. Old Carey accepts both Alice's fabricated stories and her presence easily, almost as one she never previously did without. In the following months, the experience allows Alice to save enough money for rent and toward what Old Carey calls a "fresh starting up, nothing shameful," and in that time Old Carey also makes Alice know what belonging might feel like, if Alice ever manages to belong to any one place.

But Alice knows she has created only a moment and that cooking good food for day laborers is not the dream she has in mind, the place to which she longs to belong is not Gretna. Alice grows bitter and distant within weeks of the last flimflam man's

19: disappearance. She almost seems to begin to appear much older than her actual years: her skin grows sallow and droops about the eyes with a sadness suggesting more than frustration. Alice begins to lose hope. She sits curved over the work table and kneads deeph in biscuit dough, before rolling it out to cut into it with a juice glass. She talks absently to Old Care}. "No reason," she repeats. "No reason to knock your fist up against the moon." The men she imagines leaving with become more nameless and ramshackle, and the hope she holds deep in her soul grows more desperate. Old Carey tries comfort, but even she realizes the flimflam man will not retum. Her replies become as rote as

Alice's: "Oh. Sweet Jesus, ain't we got the trouble laying heavy upon us," she says, shaking her head.

Alice grows more malicious and ridiculing with her thoughts and actions until

Old Carey wants only to take her in her arms and rock her like a baby. It is this position which the two women share when Old Carey realizes that Alice is not alone, after all.

She holds a baby growing steadily every day within her.

But putting together the puzzle pieces of her disappointments will not bring her baby. "Breath, Alice, breath," she repeats to herself, over and over. The incantation keeps Alice walking to Old Carey's shack, ft is, like Alice's, a shotgun house, but on a grander scale. It is built on piers and beams to keep it from flooding and to keep out the ever-present moisture which traps itself in the earth. Once on the porch finally, Alice falls in the agony of another labor pain. She screams.

193 Inside, Old Carey's youngest son, John, hears the scream coming from his porch and runs in the shadows to the front room. John is ver} young, only eight, and afraid of the hysterical woman lying in a ball, curled up in the heat and dark, screaming. Alice notices him and reaches along the wood floor of the porch toward him. "John, help me.

It only be me. Alice." The distance between them stretches like a loose ball of yam and runs awav.

He opens the door, still hesitant, and hovers in the darkened safety of the room.

"What wrong with you. Alice?" he asks in a trembling voice.

"It m} time. John. You got to get your mama, get Old Carey, quick. 1 be real sick." Alice sucks in the scream building in her throat and instead moans high and shrill.

John backs away farther into the room.

"1 can't get my mama. She done gone over to my auntie's farm, ten miles away. I only here because of a cold, and she not wanting me getting no worse. Say I be getting everybody sick. My brother be back sometime. Supposed to be here now, but took off soon as Mama left this morning." John warms to his story and ventures onto the porch a bit. "You look bad. Miss Alice. Real poorly."

"I is bad, John," Alice begins to hold her breath again. The floor of the porch feels hot to her, and the wood is coarse. It rubs hard against her cheek as she scrapes deep into the grain, once again trying to hurt herself and redirect pain. "Deep breath," she thinks and floods her lungs with air. "I got to move inside, John. You got to help me."

John bends down and offers his arm to steady Alice. She clutches his shoulders and uses them and the doorframe to pull herself up. She knows she has little time and has

194 to get into a bed. "At least if 1 going to die, 1 be doing so in a bed." She stumbles over to a bed in the second room; she eases herself onto it and tries to hold her breath into infinit}.

The next day finds Alice and John staring at a sleeping baby. "What you aiming on calling him. Miss Alice?" John asks her without taking his eyes off the sleeping, slight!}' pale face.

"I calling him Junior because he ain't got no particular daddy to be namesaked for.

Don't need no particular name, just getting by," Alice replies quickly.

"You can namesake him for me. Miss Alice." John scrutinizes the baby's face.

Alice thinks on this. The baby's face is drawn and gray. It has an expression of pain and exertion on it which fails to excite worry in her. She sighs. "All right, he be

Junior for }'ou. John. You a good boy, about as good as I know." They both contemplate

Junior and think back on the previous night as if on a dream.

That night before, when Alice has fallen into the feathered mattress, John runs like fire and finds the white preacher whose wife knows midwifery. "Why ain't your mama helping her, son?" she asks, but when John tells her his mama is off visiting relatives, she sends her husband for the car and drives quick through the woods to his home.

She finds Alice unconscious with blood seeping onto the sheets. The rest of the night proves give and take, and when the midwife finally pulls out the birthing of Junior,

195 Alice is just about dead. "1 don't know about that baby," she tells her husband later as he crosses himself and looks up at the ceiling. "It started wanting to come on too early, but after the decision was made it was Just in her belly too long after it was needing to come on out. It doesn't hardh en at anything. Not a good sign. Won't ever be right. God help its soul."

"Colored woman doesn't have any call to live out in the woods by herself like that, especialh so close to her time," the husband settles into his chair and warms up to the prospect of sermonizing to his wife about the stupidities of women. "Where are her people at a time like that? I Just don't know about how those people live out there, all ramshackle and hoping for the best. God help them."

"Don't you start that preaching on me, you old coot. Besides, a simple child is a good child most times. Won't give that girl a speck of trouble I expect. She'll be counting herself blessed soon enough," and with that the subject is dropped and Alice and her son forgotten quickly.

After John leaves, secure in the knowledge that Alice's baby is named for him,

Alice lies back and cries. Her tears do not wet Junior because she no longer holds him— he has been placed carefulh' by John in a wooden crate full of clean cotton sheets and pineneedle bedding Just at the foot of Alice's bed. She can hear his breathing, but only after her tears are wrung out and done for. Sleep does not come easily; Alice thrashes her head from side to side until, finally, she decides to travel backwards in her imagination and conjure up pictures of her Coast, all rendered in the brilliant, emerald-green and egg-

196 shell paints from her postcards, safely wrapped up and stored in the drawer across the room. She counts the wav es splashing ov er her until sleep finally takes her, mercifully south.

197 CHAPTER XIII

'ALICE'S SOULBATH"

198 Part Five

When Alice is a young girl—no more than fifteen—and Just moved down to

Quinc} from the backwaters of Georgia, she often tells adolescent Booker T Goldwire, nephew to the proprietor of the Stardust Club, that he ought to take time out from his sweeping and look up at the sky. "You can't know what life's about, kid, if you don't learn to cipher what's happening in the sky." And Booker T gazes upon her face as if it is an angel's, full of truth and purity. That makes Alice feel light-footed, disembodied and nice, and she decides to take Booker T under her wing and teach him a bit about life.

Alice is bom poor. In rural south Georgia, a colored girl is likely to be bom only to a sharecropper, and that means dirt poor, worked hard, tread upon. Alice knows before she is ten she will get as far away from her life as she can, as soon as she can. At fifteen, she takes off walking down the road in the first new pair of shoes she ever owns. Her father buys all his children shoes on their fifteenth birthdays. He thinks this is a signal of adulthood, a send-off into the responsibility of self It will be the last article of clothing bought by the father and is designed as a good showing to farmers around: Children to be hired out in fields and, if lucky, in houses. Alice's shoes are cheap, hard, and black.

Dust from the road covers them at the same rate that the shoes crackle and rub blisters on her feet; Alice's blood mixes with dust to make a purple-brown paste that rubs achingly into her wounds and stings. Determined to make Bainbridge by the final leaving train.

199 the pain in those shoes moves Alice faster and harder along the road. She unties her laces and the shoes clomp along, a farewell, unheeded by a girl who never looks down.

Alice makes that leaving train from Bainbridge, but the money she has managed to save picking tobacco, added to both the mone}' she steals from her mama's hidden savings and the spare coins she picks up around town comes to only enough to make it to

Quinc}, thirty miles south. Alice thinks carefully on her options. "At least if I go on south that gets me across the border into Florida."

Alice's dream is to make good on the Coast. She's heard it from a traveling man.

He gets her behind the shade of the feed-and-seed store one evening when her father sends her to pick up a mess of burlap for wrapping tobacco leaves. She is supposed to come right home, but there stands a tall, mulatto stranger dressed in a light, almost white, linen suit and smoking a long, narrow cigar on the stoop of the store. He pontificates to evening-lazy folks about Pensacola; his foot Jacks up on the top step of the stoop, and he bends over his cigar as if it, too, can relate stories of high times. Alice stops, mesmerized by his descriptions: "Yes, sir, they's the greenest emerald ocean water and the purest soapy white sand you ever see. The best parts, though, is what that Coast is surrounding: highest-living colored folks you can imagine, honest to be. Men dressed like me, here, is nothing down there."

Alice stays, standing stock-still, dumbstruck by this incredible tale of moonshine dealers running their establishments, colored whorehouses, and flourishing honky-tonks.

The rest of the folks leave, one-by-one, with the orange-glow of the sun as it disappears in the westem horizon, but Alice stands and stares at this man.

200 "Well, little girl, what you wanting standing there by yourself You best get on home to your mama. You be getting yourself in trouble," the traveling man moves to

Alice and stands above her with his hands in his pockets. He smiles with a glint of recognition in his eye. and she does not blink.

"Tell me more about this place, Pensacola," Alice whispers up to him.

"Ain't you never heard of it," he asks her as he leads her off the porch and around the comer of the building.

"Sure I hear of it," Alice lies. "1 wants to know more. Thinking on moving down m}self in a spell. Might need to know."

The traveling man tells her all about how he makes bootlegger runs down to the gulf each week and how dangerous his trips can be as he bends Alice over in the dark.

He tells her about the roll of paper money he has stashed in his pocket as he pulls her undergarments down around her ankles.

Alice squints hard with the pain she feels, but her mind has traveled southward, moving swiftly down to a storied place she wishes hard she could at least see in her imagination.

When he is finished, he tells Alice, "Girl, you might Just make a mark in

Pensacola. You could live high, up above what you got here, make a starting there." He helps her up out of the dirt, brushes her dress with his sweating hands. As he leaves, this traveling man fishes in his pocket for a coin, flips it to Alice, and strides away. Alice stands in the dark contemplating. She wishes for Pensacola, rolls the name carefully around with her tongue, and thinks hard on clean white sandy-colored linen suits.

201 Alice often poses after this, holding a tiny, faded hand-mirror her mother keeps in a drawer wrapped in soft cotton. "1 won't be satisfied with Pensacola. No ma'am. I'll, quick, move on to Atlanta and then make a big-old success. Next time they see me, I be rolling into town wrapped in silk, be driven by my man in a shiny black car. I be big then." Alice twirls and hugs that mirror as if it could be used to barter her freedom from sharecropping, and after dancing in the heat of her father's shack, tired and sweating,

Alice knows she will not ever come back. Not with her man, not in the shiniest black car.

She will never think on this life again, if she can Just get out.

Along the dusty road, traveling south to the leaving train in Georgia, Alice begins fabricating her new life. Creating the tale takes her to the train and rides her down to

Quinc}. By the time of her arrival at the depot in north Florida, Alice, the floozy girl from "Atlanta," stumbles painfully, yet with a certain high flair, down the gray wooden steps to her knew life.

Hence finds this girl in the Stardust Club. Excepting the shoes, her clothes are all hand-me-downs and blatant thievery from older sisters and cousins. Her dresses never fit right; they either hang like a sheet off her shoulders or bulge and pop on the buttons.

Alice takes care to wear the tight ones as she makes her first marks as a floozy girl. Her story is simple: "1 come from a mighty fine bordello over to Atlanta-way," her voice lilts slight and melodious as she brushes sweat delicately off her brow. "I be over here getting a bit of rest and enjoying the country scenery for a piece." Alice ends by crossing her left leg over her right, adjusting her cotton dress around her hips and then attempting to let fall one heel of her shoe and dangle it with her big toe. If the shoe drops to the floor and

202 bounces a couple of inches toward her male listener, he is hooked, generally speaking, and taken to the back room.

Alice is a beautiful young girl. Booker T tries telling her how her skin reminds him of a melted Hershey bar and that it gives him a sweet-tooth, but Alice chucks him under the chin and says, "Ah, kid, stop that with you, now. You be trying to make stuff up to me. You knows I don't care for no liar. You ain't getting no where fast with me that way." Alice loves hearing this from Booker T. She knows he is neither lying nor working her, because he looks at her straight on with the deepest concentration of affection she thinks possible for a kid his age~or even for a big man.

Booker T believes everything she tells him with such alacrity and devotion, he actually helps Alice create her own myth. Thus, when she suggests they go on out to the

Ochlockonee River so they might enjoy the sky and the up-above, Booker T goes, not dreaming he will ultimately help her recreate her self through his own fabrications, truths, and skies.

"Booker, lie down here on the grass next to me," Alice instructs him on their first afternoon out together. "Not so close to me so you be touching me. This ain't about making up to me—it be about making up to the sky. Be careful. Get loose-like."

"It ain't nothing but hot down here, Alice," Booker T screws his eyes into slits under a mashed forehead and tries shading the sun from his eyes by backing off the sun with one hand. "What we supposed to see up there when the sweat mnning in our eyes and the sun burning out the rest with white nothing?"

203 Alice laughs, low and rhythmic, like a cat purring. Her eyes are shut and her head falls back on the grass. Her forehead and chin stretch upward to the heat of the sun.

Booker T looks at her under his hand's shade. Her skin seems to melt in the sun: It shines w ith heat, lightening and darkening under her sweat.

"You need relaxing, Booker," Alice whispers low and throaty. "Don't be so fast to burn out or you won't meet no sk}. This heat talking to you. You Just ain't hearing it.

It be about healing. Take you where you need."

"Where's that, Alice? 1 don't know what you talking about. Only place knows to be is inside changing out the ice in the drink box." With that, Booker T wiggles his way up the bank from the river and runs off-feeling singularly foolish and uneomfortable- toward the Stardust Club. Alice hardly moves as he takes swift departure. Her face parts into a slight smile, and she mumbles, "Kid." She readjusts her legs and arms, letting the sweat roll off her body and dampen the grass.

Booker T wonders as he hurries back what Alice could possibly be meaning down there by the Ochlockonee. "There be shadier places to lie down in if she needing to take a rest," he later repeats to his uncle. His uncle laughs hard at that and takes a long drink of his whiskey. "Booker, don't go wondering what makes a whore go round. You min your life doing that, especially starting out young as you is. Lord, if I started out worrying down whores when I was your age, I be dead about now. Go on, drink a sodapop and straighten out them tables and chairs."

204 Booker T drinks his Coke, but he doesn't stop worrying down the river and Alice.

He thinks ma}'be it is the whoring that makes her want to sweat in the sun. It occurs to

Booker T that sweating might be a bit like a bath for her, cleaning off all the men she lies down with. But then Booker T cannot think wh} she does not Just lie down in the river.

She could still float and look up at the sky, and it would be shadier. Of course, Booker T imagines, she might be scared of 'gators' and fish, but he knows that there are no 'gators down about that spot of the river. He plans to tell her later when she retums for the night trade.

Booker T whistles some guitar picker's tune the rest of the afternoon, light and quick about his business. He is almost quite certain he has stumbled upon the answer to this particular life mystery and that Alice will be impressed with his maturity and plain smarts. He looks for her with pride and excitement bulging from within his chest, wanting more than anything else for Alice to think of him as a man.

But Booker T also holds doubt within that chest. She didn't look like she was taking any bath, he thinks. Bathing is tiresome. Alice was purring and stretching down in the weeds.

Alice is a myth to Booker T. She is a woman, almost and not at all attainable, the first girl to whom Booker T is attracted. He thinks always of her skin and her look. If he can clear up the mystery of the sky, then Alice will concentrate her energy on him, make him a man, teach him life's real mysteries, the things going on around him at the Stardust in the dusk of dusty summer evenings.

205 His uncle laughs with his friends over a card game, tells about his fool nephew tr}'ing to figure out the peculiarities of whores.

Booker T taps Alice's shoulder from behind as sun falls and trade builds. She sits on a stool right in the middle of the bar, under the mirror that is yellow-old. She sways slightly to the tune of the guitar picker Booker T's uncle pays to play from eight till twelv e on weekend nights. His sound creaks and cracks its rhythmic melody, not smooth, but mellow. The wood of the guitar struggles to hold up against its steel strings.

Alice hums soft and low, responding from the back of her lungs and the depth of her throat: an animalistic response to the call of the melody. Alice stares at herself intently in the mirror above her head.

"Alice," says Booker T as he catches her eye in the mirror, "I was thinking about today. Sorry I couldn't stay none down to the river with you. 1 know you be needing some kind of rest and cleaning after working on all the loving around this place." Booker

T pauses hopefully and looks for agreement in the depth of Alice's blank expression. "I don't need no cleaning as bad as you, I guess. I washes in the morning, and by aftemoon,

1 ain't worked up no mean dirty sweat like you. Maybe we go on down there to the

Ochlockonee right early tomorrow." Booker T warms up to his idea. He pictures himself and Alice frolicking in the pool of the riverbed, diving and splashing. He might even steal a kiss off her somehow. "I can show you where to swim, where there ain't no cat and no "gator to speak of, and that sure be a heap more good than sweating out all that loving. What you think, Alice? Bet you don't know I know the river like I do," Booker

206 T spits out his speech. His words have stumbled over one another, and he is left breathless, staring up into the mirror at her reflection.

Alice stares back, long and unblinking, until Booker T begins to back off, unsure what he has said wrong but knowing he has made some egregious error in Judgment.

"What the hell }ou sa}, kid?" She looks into the top of her beer bottie as she raises it to her mouth and takes a slow drink.

Booker T panics. "1,1 say, don't you want me to show you where a good hole for bathing is, in the Ochlockonee? So you don't got to do no more sweating like you got the sickness? Alice'^'"

"I am completely unknowing what you putting down, Booker, but if you think I be taking some sort of sweat dunk out there, you ain't be hearing nothing I tell you never, ft ain't about getting no body clean, kid. ft be about the soul. Deep down, being free, taking a soulbath."

Booker T keeps looking at her. He feels bottomless and lost again. In one speech, he has digressed from manhood right back to being the kid who sweeps up messes for Alice, only, one step behind in action and in thought.

Alice Jumps off her stool. Unlaced, her shoes clomp and crack with worn cheapness. She brushes past Booker T, throwing over her shoulder, "Once and for all,

Booker, you got to leam to live up to the sky. You don't know nothing, but, if you be patient and stop trying to be such a man, I show you something. Meet me back there tonight. After I done here."

207 With that, Alice Joins the piano player, swaying her hips opposite to her

shoulders. Each movement fights against the tight cotton floral dress as it pushes and

pulls, a dueling dance, skin and cotton, melody and rhythm. A middle-aged man

stumbles over to Join her, grabbing onto the swaying hip motion. He is pulled as he

attempts to Jive along with her song. She takes his hand, leads him off into the shadows

of the Stardust.

Booker T beats Alice down to the river. Saturday night is, of course, the busiest night at the club, for drinkers, gamblers, troublemakers, and, especially, whores. Booker

T cleans up slow as he can, even looking in on the dice and poker game in an attempt to put himself behind Alice. He does not want to go ahead of her. He wants to sweep up her mess and then follow her to the river. He thinks her beating him to the river will make him seem less eager; he will appear older, more sure and casual.

But the moon casts solitary gray on him as he regards the silence broken only by crickets playing shrill songs to the beat of river-waves rolling rhythmically downstream.

Booker T strips off his shirt, kneels down at the shore, plunges his hands in, and splashes cool water across his face and chest. He feels the wetness run off his shoulders and drip down his arms, good and clean. "Washing off that damned old Jook can't be such a piss- poor idea, no matter what Alice say. She trying to make me the fool so she feel all high- mighty and old, thinking she be what she ain't," Booker T reassures himself almost becoming angry as he scrubs the grime of closeness, tobacco, and beer off his skin.

208 In a flash of disquietude, Booker T makes a shallow dive into river and casts his bod} lightly over the sand} bottom. He stays under as long as he can hold breath. The dark is confining, and in this moment—as onl} this moment can allow—he feels death would not be terrible; in fact, it might hold some security and warmth, like a mother's womb. As his chest bulges with held-in air, his body instinctively moves upward. His head breaks the wave, and Booker T gulps in, deep and sweetly, cool night air. He positions himself on his back and floats, barely moving his arms to stay afloat. The wav es move Booker T downstream, and he paddles slightly against it, looking all the while at the stars.

The night is deep and late, the time of night in north Florida when humidity rises into the sky and then opens to stars in endless layers. Booker T becomes lost in those layers, engulfed by them as the waves lap slightly over his skin. He tries to reach the layers of stars, feel them in the tingling of his skin, to fly up cool into them and Join their movement with his heart beating in time to the rhythm of the water.

"Watch out there, Booker," comes Alice's laugh from the dark shore. "Watch out what side of the moon you on. Get on the wrong side, you east your shadow where it don't belong."

Booker swallows water as his consciousness abruptly lands back into the river water. He makes for shore. He climbs out of the sandy mud and shakes his feet up off the river floor, watching Alice.

209 "You sure is skinny for a boy," Alice suggests as Booker T self-consciously pulls at his wet trousers, tiding to puff them out away from his skin as much as possible.

"Well, which side of the moon you on, Booker?

"1 ain't on no side of no moon. Ain't but a three-quarter moon, no how, Alice.

What kind of shadow you think 1 throw out there? That some peculiar thinking you got.

1 taking a dip, cleaning off Feels good. You ought to try it."

"Don't need to Booker. I ain't dirt}. What you looking at out there if it ain't no moon?" Alice scrutinizes Booker T with narrow eyes, taking in his dimensions.

"I suppose I was looking at stars. Millions up there. They always seeming so far awa}, but tonight they kind of close, like they inside twinkling and making me feel tingly and light." Booker climbs to Alice's spot up the bank and sits heavily down on the tall grass next to her. Bugs grab onto his skin, and he scratches absently at his thigh and ankle.

"You ain't scared of getting eat up while you contemplating them stars," Alice asks.

Booker can smell the whiskey on her breath, sweet and deep like the gardenia perfume she wears occasionally in the fresh blue light of morning. Her skin emits heat, and Booker T can feel it take hold of the coolness of his wet skin. The night plays against body temperatures, neutralizing the extremes and bringing both bodies close.

"Naw, 1 ain't scared. I told you ain't no 'gators or nothing in this part of the

Ochlockonee. Ain't nothing out there but a bit of a pool in the middle between shores."

210 Alice stands up mid-sentence, then walks swiftly off "Come on. kid. We look at that three-quarter moon and think about some shadows."

He follows her into the clearing, out of the woods that surround the bank of the river. Off that clearing, Booker T can see the narrow sand road that leads back to the

Stardust. Alice is ahead of him and settles in the center of the clearing. She lies down flat against the short grass and weeds. Booker T drops down next to her, not close enough to touch her, yet hoping to feel her heat some more.

But Booker T's body warms quickly in the summer night. He complains, "Alice, wh} }ou ahva}'s calling me kidl 1 ain't but a year or two younger than you is. That makes me almost growed-up. Ain't fair always being called kid by every single so-and- so and you, especially seeing as you nothing but a kid, too."

Alice stretches her arms above her head and rolls like a cat, curling arms and legs, hands and feet in circular patterns. "I call you kid. Booker, because you is one. You got everyone looking out for you so you can't look out none for your own self, at all. I may only be a bit older than you, but I be on my own all my life. Since I be six, ain't never no one caring what I be into so long as I work cutting tobacco from moming to dusk." Her voice does not raise during this revelation. She whispers as she satisfies her body's need to feel the push and pull of the ground and the stretching of her limbs. Her statements are matter-of-fact, without regret or emotion.

"I works, Alice," Booker T whines. He sits up, feeling the pang of dissatisfaction and insecurity. He thinks hard on leaving again. "I works every last day at the Stardust."

211 "\eah, you work, Booker, you work. But you also got an uncle to teach you things and give you things. He worry over you and talk about} ou when you not around.

He dote on you, and that keep you a kid. It's a beautiful thing. Don't let it go Just because }ou think }'ou got to be growed up all the time. I growed up when I born, and it ain't nothing so special. You be on the right side of the moon, Booker. Don't go beating no fist up against it. Find yourself lost like me. Twisting out here in a clearing somewhere, wishing hard you could find some place where you don't throw no shadow wrongways in the wind so much."

Booker T sits for a moment. He feels tired and close and alone, all wrapped up.

He finally settles back down next to Alice. They both contemplate the moon and stars in their own silences. Alice rolls over and places her head on Booker T's shoulder. He smells her and breaths in deep and long, trying to hold in that smell of her in a breath for swimming underwater. Crickets begin to play and, if Booker T and Alice listen carefully, beyond the stars and the three-quarter moon, they can hear the waves of the Ochlockonee

River slightly moving east toward the Coast.

212 CHAPTER XIV

"GOWING OLD IN THE MAIZE'

!13 Part Six

The boy has worked for Alice's father for scant wages, as many traveling crop pickers do. He and his mama pick for a week here and there throughout the season, and if times are poor, the} pick for hardly nothing, sometimes only a place to sleep and some w ater to drink.

From the first, Alice admires his strength and charm; he never seems to tire under her father's stern direction. The first stifling morning he shows up for work, walking up the dirt road, almost emerging from within the heat waves and humidity, he keeps to himself looking only down at his work. She watches him because she rarely sees strangers out on the farm. Her father is poor and controlling; his children work hard and close to the land, keeping to themselves. This boy seems different. He ignores everyone while whistling a light tune Just loud enough for Alice to hear. He does not appear to hate the sun's progression over the horizon, even smiling to himself, slightly.

As the day grows overbearing with heat, however, Alice walks over to him with water and a blank face. She is normally closed to others; she has learned that meanness creeps along the rows of cotton and maize, tobacco and tomatoes. The crops grow with the toil of man and his children, the bending of dirt against water and sun to force life out of the oppressing heat broken only by insects and birds who hover then fly swiftly away.

After the insemination of crops, all that is left, Alice has found, is stripped-down meanness inside the broken bodies and ugliness of her father, tired and wintering on that ugliness so that it can rejuvenate and grow stronger next spring. But that first morning

214 when Alice approaches the boy who would become her first friend, he looks up at her with weeds hanging in his hands and simply smiles.

"What you smiling about'? Is you a fool?" Alice thrusts out the hand that holds tight to a gourd of water from the well bucket.

"Naw, I ain't no fool. Miss. 1 Just enjoying hav ing this Job on a mite pretty day."

He continues to smile openly with a look so true it causes Alice to shuffle in the dry dirt.

His e}'es are clear and big, spreading across his face evenly and with a distinction Alice is unable to decipher. He reaches for the water and drinks from it. "Thank you. Miss. Sure be tast}'."

He turns back to his work, and Alice is called on down the row by the booming voice of her father. "Alice, what you dawdling about, girl? Come on now. We needs water to get this work finished."

She hurries toward the voice, but looks back, stumbling among mounds of dirt, to again gaze back at the boy.

"Miss," he says, still looking, and she hurries away.

Later that afternoon, while Alice herself bends over rows, clearing out stubble from last year's crop and weeds that flourish in the fine, black soil, she wonders at this boy.

He might be a couple of years older—she speculates probably not—but he seems so simple, so content. Alice does not understand how this is possible. "He ain't from around here," she murmurs, then laughs out loud that any black soul from Brainbridge,

Georgia, working for almost nothing in her father's sharecropper fields, could ever smile at a gourd of water offered and then call her "Miss."

215 "My papa and his papa was slaves here. 11 orked this very land that be feeding

you youngsters. Worked it with sweating blood grinding it in, from the lashings of the overseer \s whip That be what feed the crops and that be what make our crops sweet.

Don t forget that when you thinking you tired and wishing after going in to the house or over to the shade-tree. Don 't forget none M'hat you come from because that be the end of you, that be. .And I certain to kill any one of my own children that forgets who they be. I swear to God .Almighty, I will. Kill you down. dead. My own papa near about died when he a baby so that we have this here land to work and feed us. His papa did die from it and the sadness that follow it. Yes sir, kill you down dead if you go against your soul, this land. I will. "

Alice's father repeats this speech to his several children, usually on Saturdays and

Sundays when work is put off in the evenings to enjoy her mother's cooking of fried meats and boiled greens in pot liquor. The family eats, then the father drinks from moonshine he makes with a still hidden deep in the woods bordering the east field. He sits in an oversized, cypress rocker he claims to have been fashioned by his own father's hands years after the Emancipation Proclamation was read and he decided it was safe to try and sharecrop his former master's land while studying on also making a family.

Alice's father drinks moonshine mixed with fresh, cool, sweet tea out of a mason Jar her mother refills diligently. He acts as if no one notices that he spikes his drink, but with each swallow, his voice becomes louder and fuzzier, and his threats become more

216 focused and pointed. The evening drags on into night with mosquitoes buzzing around ev er}'one. taking bites at ankles and even cheeks.

-And if any one of you girls disgrace this here family, under God I SM'ear, 1 will kill you as well. I will. We only Negro sharecroppers, but we be brought up by this dirt—this here be a proud family, a good family. My papa M'as an old man by the time he took hisself a wife. Waited till he could give her something. Give her this here house keeping you-all safe and dry. and give her this chair, he did. And 1 ain 't about to let none of my childrens disgrace his land by making up no bad family. "

With this part of his rantings, he often looks at Alice with a glint of suspicion and accusation in his eyes. He sometimes picks up a handful of dirt from the ground and throws it in her direction. The gaze and his rantings make Alice shuffle her bare feet in the dirt, feeling guilty from suggestion, before getting up the courage to stare back.

Somehow she knows he is wrongheaded, and the silent look she finally manages tells him so. It is a discipline of survival for her, the innate sense that she must maintain some mysterious pride in herself

She does not understand why he accuses her especially or why she feels she must stand up silently for herself She is neither the oldest nor the most discontent of his children. Her older brother sneaks out nightly to cat about town, and her two oldest sisters secretly yearn after boys from Bainbridge, often sneaking off to meet them clandestinely.

Yet, it is Alice that her father looks at hard and cold as he booms his threats. He swats flies and mosquitoes with a crack of the paper as if to accentuate his threats. Alice

217 w inces at each crack knowing that the threats are not idle and that she best move away from her father s reach before he trades the paper for his belt and begins handing out beatings, his favorite reminder for good behavior.

One da}. soon after the strange boy begins show ing up with the sun to pick cotton, her father decides to take a swipe after her because he is tired of her gazing back at the boy. As he finishes the hitting and slapping, he hisses, "Your look bespeaks sin, it do."

Afterward, she takes off running hard in the dust. He has walloped her a few good ones across her head, legs, and bottom. Her body stings and her head pounds with each fiercely swift pace, but she does not stop, instead enters the maize field to run away along the rows that are wide and generous.

The maize is waist-high at this point, and, although Alice knows she cannot really hide from anyone or anything, running along these stalks, she feels at least focused in a direction that leads away from her father. She imagines the fields are a purgatory, a border to that place in which she is almost safe. She runs, pretending to take off like the ever-present crows and be in the woods, then in the town, then simply gone.

"Hey, what you running for?" A voice raises from the dirt, sounding out to Alice clearly. It stops her abruptly, and she balances between stalks and tries to make herself completely still and invisible.

"Who there?" she finally asks, bending over and breathing hard. "Who there, where you ain't supposed to be?"

"It me, Miss Alice. 1 work for your papa. You give me water," says the boy from behind her.

218 She tums around and walks along, looking down between the stalks for the source of the hidden voice. "Where you hiding, fool- She walks along, poking her foot out.

"I be right here, under your foot. Miss Alice. You best watch out. You be falling soon." the voice floats up. muffled by the leaves.

Alice snorts, annoyed, at this warning. "1 ain't falling none. I been walking these row s ni} whole life."

At this, a hand reaches out from between two stalks and grabs her ankle and tumbles her down into the depression of the row. The fall takes the wind out of Alice as her knees hit and pain shoots up through her thighs, up to her shoulders and neck, across her temples. She cries out a moment into the dirt before stifling the crv' with her fist. The bo}', laughing, does not notice that she is really in pain, and he pounces from his row to hers.

"See, I told you to watch out. Ain't that fun? It ain't nothing but a game, called hide-and-go-seek. Now you it—go mn and hide, and 1 find you sure enough."

But Alice sits, still, grasping at her knees, with her head resting on them. The fall has accentuated the pain from her father's beating, and it now fills her blood with a pounding and throbbing that makes her want to vomit in order to expel it. She begins to cry. even though the shame of it only makes the pain worse. The boy sits back on his haunches next to her and touches her shoulder lightly. His fingers feel dry and thin, yet somehow they also seem warm and kind.

"What's wrong? That fall ain't hurting you as all that, is it? If it did, 1 sure enough sorry. I Just playing around. You can trip me up all you want. Pay me right back," he

219 says, his voice full of playful concern as he suspects the tears to be those of hurt girl- pride.

"1 ain't hurt," Alice shrugs off his fingers from her shoulder, but she is unable to stop erv'ing completely and her nose begins to run. "You go on out of my papa's fields.

You don't belong here playing and killing it down to nothing and all." She wipes her nose and attempts to look the bo} straight in the face, her look the only weapon against forces she cannot control.

But with her look of defiance the boy meets a swollen and bruised face. He sits back completeh into the dirt and whistles. "You sure enough got you a wallop. Miss.

Who do that to you, your papa?"

She touches her face and again winces from the pain. She is angry that she has forgotten what her face would look like, and she steels herself with the emotion to put the boy in his place. "This ain't no kind of business of yours," she throws out her voice, elevating it with feeling and conviction. "This here my property, and it be my business if

I get hurt on it." She looks away and shoos him with a flick of her hand.

But the boy does not obey. Instead, he scoots along the dirt, coming closer to peer at the biggest bruise on her temple. "That look pretty bad; it going to be a doosey before it done," he whistles again. Alice does not reply; instead, she again shoos away the hand that touches the bmise and makes her want to cry again. "Before he left, my own papa, he hit me all the time," he continues unperturbed by her rebuke. "Come in regular-like drunk as Cooter Brown, and he and my mama get into it real loud. The hitting start up after a bit, and I get in the middle seeing as we never had more than a room to live in. 1

120 guess it be lucky he run off with some floozy from down county a ways; Mama and me been following crops ever since."

"What you mean?" Alice looks over from between her fingers. Regardless of her hurt and embarrassment, she is interested in this bo}, in what he tells her happened to him. so like } et unlike herself someone with an open smile and a desire to play games in the fields. She has never met an}'one not from Bainbridge or at least from the countryside of the county, and even there she knows few people—her father being particularh' distrustful of relationships. In fact, Alice's father has never afforded hands in the past; sitting here with this boy from not around is completely new for her. She shifts a bit away from the boy but asks, "What you mean following crops?"

The boy smiles carefully. He suspects she is frightened and, like all seared animals, will react violently to any swift movement, so he is careful to contain himself "Me and m}' mama, we follow crops according to what area be paying best or at least where crops needing picking bad. We stayed in high cotton down in south Mississippi last fall for a pretty good spell. They paying best right now if you can stand the work. Back breaking, it be. And stifling hot. Worse than here, 1 telling you the tmth. Skeeters pretty much big enough to carry away a skinny girl like you. But we come on over to stay here right now, we is. My mama, she visiting her auntie who ain't feeling all that pert lately, so we here sitting and chatting a spell, and I here in your papa's crops, working usual-like, but relaxing some today. He don't pay good, though. We won't stay long."

Alice puts her head back down on her knees, wipes spent tears into her eyes with her fingers and feels the salty wetness smear across her skin. Her lashes hang wet, and.

221 when she closes her eyes, they tickle the skin Just below them. She contemplates his

answer. Wh} on earth would he want to be here in her father's crops if he could be

an}'vv'here else, she wonders incredulously, rubbing her face slowly back and forth,

lubricating it w ith tears and sweat.

"What you shaking you head for like that?" the boy interrupts her methodical

movements. "You don't think I ought to be sitting here in this field, do you?"

.Alice thinks about this for one breath before answering: "Naw, I don't. 1 think

}0u got to be loco in your head to be here. This the worse place on this here planet, and you choosing to come here when you, with no mean papa, Just your mama and some peaked auntie to answer to, could be running off by yourself having the time of your life.

Be playing after girls in town and everything."

The boy laughs a smooth chuckle, like he expects this answer from her, an ignorant country girl. This angers Alice enough to challenge the boy again with a face-on gaze. She looks him straight. She does not see an} condescension, only that same open kindness, now mixed with a tinge of true mirth. But the openness of his face unnerves her, and she dives in: "What you looking at, boy? I gonna kick you right out of this here field. Ain't yours to be laughing at me in. Ain't yours at all, I say."

He continues to gaze at her, as if he knows she simply has a lot to leam and that her mdeness is not her fault. He looks at her as if she is a much younger sibling whom he is glad to tolerate, what with his vast superiority of intelligence and experience. "1 guess you sure could kick me out. Miss," he replies, easy, sitting back even further, resting his shoulders on the weight of his elbows. He throws his head back and contemplates the

OTO sky a moment. "But then you would be here, in your papa's field, all by your lonesome, and that wouldn't do, now would it? 1 ain"t thinking you liking this field too much, and

1 suspect you ain't about to start liking it too much, you ain't."

"Liking it—what you putting down, liking it. What there be to like? 1 calling you out this time, ^'ou a flimflam man, you be. There ain't nothing to like here, and you nothing but loco and craz} and dirty." Alice too leans back and kind of stretches out, feeling the dirt slide eoolish along her legs, not scratching, kind of tickling and soothing.

She begins to forget the pains.

"No, Miss, I don't suspect I particularly crazy none. I thinking I Just know what feel good and what a body needs to feel good about itself after doing what it forced to do to make a living." He yawns and lies completely back in the dirt, not earing about his hair, actually rubbing it deep in the dirt to make a depression. "Ever since my mama and me been running after the crops, I ain't felt like I got no home, see. We stay in shacks a little while, but by the time my mama, she get it feeling the slightest bit homey, we be moving on to some other farm my mama hear be giving out better wages. And usual-like at that there other farm, the shack a bit worse for wear, and the fields, they be made of harder dirt and meaner bossmen.

"That don't feel so good, and 1 even start to feeling sometimes like I rather be in one place with my papa hitting on me to death than always moving on. 1 go on feeling like this till one day 1 in a field—1 think it might have been in Mississippi or Alabama— and I bending low to get this one weed that had itself a long, strong root. This weed tormenting the cotton pretty near to death, it is. And I realize that the dirt I pulling

901 against be Just the same as the dirt from where 1 come from originally. 1 think on that the whole da}. and later that night when everyone done gone home to eat and sleep. I sneaked back out to the crop and laid myself right down in it and thought about how 1 be home, realh. If 1 lay low-down and feel the dirt and look up at the sky. it the same one I come from, and it be the most beautiful sk} and dirt in the world because it mine, and 1 be alone with it having lovely talks whenever I want."

Alice thinks on what the boy says to her. She decides to move herself completely down; she even slides her head a bit back-and-forth to depress her head into the dirt.

Patches of sun variegate with shade from the leaves to lend a sensation of heat and coolness that calms her hurting and angry soul a bit. She lies next to the boy, not so much thinking consciously about what he has told her, but enjoying the feelings of safety and commonality with him.

Alice falls asleep dreaming of running through a land Just south of the woods, past the blackberry brambles and safe from the chiggers and poison ivy. When she wakes up, she realizes that he has risen and gone away, but she stretches and stares up almost confused by the calmness she feels. She is not sure how or why, but her head and body feel better, regardless of the bites from mysterious bugs swelling on her legs and even on her back, under her clothes. She does not care and stays in the dirt, down under the maize leaves, until the sun stretches woody shadows long over the rows and her mother begins ringing the bell for evening supper.

224 It is to this field, then, that Alice mns most days when her work is finished. The

boy is often there, but not always. When he is, Alice makes him tell her stones of his

traveling and stories of his papa, and she makes him explain how the dirt and the sky are his because he makes them his, over and over, as often as he will tell it. One lazy

afternoon, she ev en makes him kiss her on the mouth, and then later in the summer, she

makes him pla} with her undergarments like her sisters whisper about late at night under

the covers about Bainbridge boys.

For the first time in her life, Alice thinks she is completely happy. Even when the bo} fails to be found in the crops, Alice lies back and stretches long in the dirt and leams to lean against her loneliness and depend upon it. Sometimes she clears her mind and simph' feels heat and coolness, scratches and tickles. Other times, she contemplates leaving and following the crops with the boy and his mama, but she cannot make up her mind to picture herself as happy working in the fields, following "high cotton" as the boy has described. But those days lying in the crops, the leaving part of her imagination does conjure up a marvelous picture.

So, on the inevitable day when the boy fails to appear in the fields, Alice instinctiveh' knows he will never retum. The auntie has finally died, she hears at Sunday meeting. She hears her mama talking to the preacher's wife who tells her, "That old woman done died off without so much as leaving that poor gal and her boy one cent for their troubles. Lord bless them, after they toiled after her to make her coming home a comfort to herself and all. Sure be a shame, it be."

OOS After meeting, Alice begs off from eating with the family, claiming she has a stomachache; instead, she runs lightning out to the fields that stand high toward the sun. completeh covering her when she is down. She knows in her soul that the boy will not appear this da} or an}' da} in her future, but she also knows that if she waits this day out w ith the sun and shade and the dirt under her that she will somehow be with him, and can talk to him, and feel safety in his stories.

Alice hides, hing under the leaves of maize, in the sifted dirt of the row, wrapped in the uncertain cast of a clouded sun. She stretches long for a moment, a length of time, immemorial, feeling the dry dirt and grasping at thick stalks. Alice likes the maize field because it beckons to her with a voice of a thousand lives, any of which she would gladly trade for her own. She hides there when the leaves are burnt yellow yet alive in what she imagines to be their own souls, separate from the overall amassing crop. Crawling things make the dirt move under her—she can feel minute legs tickle her shins and thighs—but this makes Alice only lie quieter so as to know each sensation low and real, down under the leaves, under the clouds.

She listens to the cicadas crying to one another with their scratchy whistles, and she yearns after her absent friend because it is he who showed her this place, and it is he she thinks of, running after high cotton, swift as a wild horse. But he will not come back to the maize field; he will not lie down with Alice to contemplate the world under the fields beyond.

It is on this day that Alice, alone, talks over leaving with the now-absent boy, her friend. She imagines he hears her as she explains she will one day take off not chasing

226 after high cotton, but chasing fiercely the sun's shade or perhaps even running away from the shade, depending on her mood on that da} when she leaves.

227 WORKS CITED

Faulkner, William. "Address Upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature." The Portable Faulkner. Ed, Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking Press, 1969. 723- 24.

—. Go Down. Mo.ses. New York: Random House, 1990,

—. Light in .August. New York: Vintage Books, 1985,

—. The Wild Palms. New York: Vintage Books. 1985,

Forkner, Ben, and Patrick Samway, eds, A Modern Southern Reader. Atlanta: Peachtree, 1986,

LUerature of the American South, The: A Norton Anthology. Ed. William L, Andrews. New York: W,W, Norton, 1998.

T}ler, Anne. "Introduction." Best of the South. Ed, Shannon Ravenel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1996, vii-xii.

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