JEWEL

Jewel by Bret Lott

When the child is finally born, it seems that Cathedral’s prediction was empty: the baby appears normal in every way. As the months go by, however, Jewel becomes increasingly afraid that something is wrong with little Brenda Kay—she doesn’t cry, she doesn’t roll over, she’s hardly ever awake. Eventually husband and wife take the baby to the doctor and are informed that she is a “Mongolian Idiot,” not expected to live past the age of 2. Jewel angrily rebuffs the doctor’s suggestion that they institutionalize Brenda Kay. Instead the Hilburns shoulder the burdens—and discover the unexpected joys—of living with a Down’s syndrome child.

Bret Lott has written a novel that spans decades, follows the lives of several characters, and cuts back and forth between Mississippi and California. Given these challenges, a lesser writer might lose focus.

Lott, however, has wisely chosen to keep his eye trained on Jewel—a narrator who is smart, perceptive, and above all, honest. He has also bucked the trend toward political correctness by allowing his characters to think, feel, and talk the way white Mississippians of that era would have. (“Mongolian Idiot,” “nigger,” “cracker,” and “buck” are just a few of the epithets sprinkled throughout the text.)

The language may be discomforting to some readers. Few will deny, however, that Bret Lott has crafted a clan that is all heart in this bittersweet paean to the enduring strength of familial love.

Also by Bret Lott

THE MAN WHO OWNED VERMONT

A STRANGER’S HOUSE

A DREAM OF OLD LEAVES

REED’S BEACH

HOW TO GET HOME

FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

THE HUNTCLUB

JEWEL

POCKET BOOKS New York London Toronto Sydney hryo Singapoore

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. .

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Copyright t 1991 by Bret Lott All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230

Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Lott, Bret. Jewel: a novel / by Bret Lott.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-671-03823-0

I. Title PS3562.0784J49 1991

813’.54dc20 91-17842 @

First Pocket Books hardcover printing November 1991

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

2

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.

And this is the father’s will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. JOHN 6:39.

How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out.

ROMANS 11:33.

BOOK ONE.

CHAPTER 1.

I WAS BORN IN 1904, so THAT WHEN I WAS PREGNANT IN 1943 I WAS near enough to be past the rightful age to bear children. This would be my sixth, and on that morning in February, the first morning I’d known I was with child, I’d simply turned to Leston in bed next to me, the room gray from a winter sky outside the one window, that sky not yet lit with the sun, and I’d said, “There’ll be no more after this one.”

He rolled onto his back, his eyes still shut, the little hair he still had wild and loose on his head. He put his hands behind his head, and gave a sort of smile, one I’d seen enough times before this. Five times before, to be exact.

He said, “Another one, ” and kept the smile. Then he said, “What makes you think so? ” I said, “Doesn’t take divining, not after five, ” and I paused. I reached a hand up from beneath the quilts, felt the chill of the morning on my skin, that skin the same color gray as the small strip of sky I could see above the box pine and live oak outside the window. I touched Leston’s cheek, did the best I could to smooth out his hair. He was still smiling.

I said, “I just know.”

Then came the morning sounds, sounds of the everyday of our lives, first the slam shut of the front door as James, our oldest, started on his way to work at Crampton’s Lumber, then the scrape of our other two boys, Burton and Wilman, from their room above us, the first sounds of tussling and fooling that started now and ended only after dark, the boys back in bed. Those two, I thought as I lay there, my hand back under the quilts to keep warm as long as I could, we’d had too close together, Burton seven, Wilman almost six. Billie Jean, my second child, would not be up for as long as I would let her sleep, around her on the bunched and rumpled blankets of her bed the movie magazines she lived for, fanned around her like leaves off a tree. And Anne, my baby, would be stirring soon, then following Burton and Wilman around like a lost dog, wanting only to be one of them, blessed by the rough and tumble of pinecone wars and whittling knives.

I heard Wilman say, “That’s not yours, ” then Burton putting in, “But it was, ” and then the pop and crack of the heart pine floor above us as the two started in on each other.

“Boys, ” Leston called out, his voice as deep and solid as every morning.

The fighting stopped, the room upstairs as quiet now as when they were asleep.

“Sir? ” they called out together.

Leston smiled, though on my boys’ voices was the certain sound of fear.

He said, “Chunk up the stove. The two of you.”

“Yes sir, ” they gave back to him, and then their whispering started, and I knew whatever they were fighting over wouldn’t be settled until sometime late in the day, if at all.

Leston sat up in bed, turned so that his back was to me, his feet on the floor. He looked to the window, then down to the floor. He brought a hand to his face, rubbed it, ran that hand back through his hair. Wisps of it still hung in the cold air, copper going gray, the line of his shoulders still the same hard and broad line I’d seen the first time I met him, the same shoulders I’d held while we’d conceived each of our children this far. But now, his head hung forward, his hands holding tight the edge of the mattress, I thought I could see for the first time the weight of age upon him, those shoulders with the burden of our years and our five children, one of them already set to working his way through the world, and me with a brand-new one now on the way.

Leston had left the quilts pulled back, my face and shoulders and arms out there to the cold. He lifted his face to the gray window again, gave out a heavy breath that shone in a small cloud before him, the room so cold. Leston said, “No more after this will set fine with me.”

Then I shivered, felt it through my whole body, a shiver so deep whatever warmth I’d had beneath the quilts disappeared entirely, and I knew my sleep was over, that day and all the days left to me until this next child was born now begun. I let out a deep breath, too, saw the cloud it made in the room, and in that breath I saw what I’d known all along, known all the days until this one when I’d been thinking maybe, just maybe I was going to have another child, it was me, too, that age was weighing down on hard.

I sat up in bed, put my feet on the cold pine floor, my back to Leston.

I stood, called out, “Boys, ” heard Wilman and Burton holler, “Yes ma’am! ” The floor above us filled up with the scrabbling of two boys trying to get their clothes on, then the rattle of them both on the stairs.

I was on my way to the door and breakfast when Leston, behind me and still on the bed, said, “Jewel Hilburn, you take care.”

I turned to him, my hand already on the doorknob. He’d gotten the smile back, his eyes the same deepwater green I’d known for what felt all my life.

I said, “You know I will, ” and held my eyes on him.

He said, “That I do, ” and nodded, and then I was out the door and on into the kitchen.

I’d taken care of myself most all my days, though things had eased up once I met Leston. Before that, though, before Leston and the stop and start of our having children and trying to feed our own selves, there was a world sometimes I would like to sooner forget than think about at all. But it’s history that matters, what keeps you together in the tight ball of nerves and flesh you are and makes you you and not someone else.

I was an orphan at age eleven, my mother dead of a fever, my father not two months before she passed on having broke his neck on a log just under the water at the bend in the Black River, the bend nearest town where the post oak lay low to the water, and where, in spring, light through the leaves breaks across the river so that nothing can be seen beneath. He broke his neck right then, right there, with the quick and simple dare of diving into water, and when I was a little girl of eleven with both my mother and father gone, and me living suddenly with a grandmother I’d only met three times before, I used to imagine it wasn’t a fever that killed my mother, but a broken heart at the death of her beloved.

But the truth was he’d moved into a logging shack a year before he’d broke his neck, and only showed up to our house at twilight on Saturday nights to have at my mother, then to attend church the next morning, his black hair slicked back and shiny with pomade. It was the thick and sweet smell of his hair that woke me up Sunday mornings, me staying up just as late as the two of them the night before, listening through the walls to the mystery they tended to each Saturday night, sounds I’d hear again only when Leston and I were together, so that on our wedding night twelve years later the low moan he made and the pitch and twirl of sounds I heard coming from me were like the ghosts of my long dead parents, sounds I knew but had forgotten in the cloud of years filled with taking care of me and me alone.

Sunday mornings we would go to church, where we’d sit in the pew, me between my momma and daddy, their only child. I’d had a brother, who only now comes to me as part shadow, part light, a baby born when I was three and who died when I was four, and there are times before I go to bed when I will stop in at Burton and Wilman’s room, sometimes even James’, though he has fast become a man and lost the look of a child, and I will see in their faces the faintest trace of my brother, the thin baby line of an eyebrow I believe may have belonged to him, the open mouth and pale lips soft with air in and out which perhaps I am remembering, perhaps imagining. No real memories do I have of him, except for the idea somewhere of my daddy holding Joseph Jr. on one knee and playing buggetybuggety, and the picture in my head of a baby asleep.

But that’s all I remember of my brother, and even calling that a memory is giving the image in my head more credit than is due.

After church we would file out of the sanctuary into air even hotter than inside, live oaks thick with gray moss like clumps of a dead man’s hair fairly lit up with the noise of cicadas, everyone everywhere fanning themselves with bamboo and paper fans printed with the words to “Amazing Grace” on one side, Psalm 23 on the other. Daddy would shake hands with Pastor, pass time with whoever might want to, all the time his one arm round my mother’s shoulder, his hair still just as shiny, little runnels of sweat slipping down his sideburns. He acted the part of my daddy, would even on occasion hunch down and kiss me on the cheek, pat my hair, smile at me, though everyone in the entire congregation, and even those heathens not in attendance, knew we no longer lived together.

Once we were home, he would simply see us to the door, give me the pat on the head good-bye I hated even more than his showing up at sundown the night before, and kiss my momma full on the lips. Then he would turn, step down off the porch. Without so much as a backward glance or the smallest of waves, he would head off down our dirt road, back to the logging shack not two miles away.

Momma and I watched him go each time, watched until the road took him deep into pine and cypress, the green of wild grape vines everywhere that swallowed him up. I wished each Sunday afternoon that green would never let him go, wished he’d never make it back to whatever pleasures he found during the week, pleasures he wanted to pursue more than plant himself at home with us, his own. We watched him go, and only once we could see no more movement, no more slips of white shirt through the shield of green forest, did we go in. My momma always went in first, though it had been her he’d given his kiss to, her who’d given her whole self to him. She turned, her eyes down to the porch floor, and moved on inside. I was always the last one out on the porch, just watching that green, hoping he would not find his way out.

The day he broke his neck was a Tuesday. I was already home from school, out on the porch with my tablet and thick red pencil, doing my figuring for the next day. I knew even then I wanted to be a teacher, something in me with the need to lead and stand before people and explain in a plain and simple voice bits of the world they could not know were it not for me. I was only eleven, but knew already, too, that my wanting to teach had to do with my momma and how she acted once Daddy had gone, how our trips into Purvis had become ordeals for her, her standing at the dry goods store and touching a bolt of gingham, a tin of baking powder, looking at them as though they were troubling bits of her own history, things she knew she needed but hated all the same. I ended up taking her by the hand to Mr. Robineau at the register, where she’d give her feeble smile to him as I placed our items on the glass counter, him never meeting our eyes but smiling all the same.