JEWEL (18 page)

She turned, moved ahead. Cleopatra stood next to me a moment more, her toe twisting another quick circle in the gravel. She whispered, “Come on, girl, ” and before I could look up to see whose side she may have been on in all this, she’d turned, was already headed up the tracks.

And there was a house up the tracks, just as Bessy’d said there’d be, we’d come around a wide bend, crossed a small trestle over a black backwater creek, and’d come upon a small blue house, the roof all battered tin, the chimney puffing out smoke thick as gray cotton.

As soon as we saw it, Bessy put up a hand to us, then turned, moved right past Cleopatra and me and back along the tracks. We looked at each other. Cleopatra said, “What’s going on? ” Bessy said nothing, only walked, and of course we followed.

When we got back to the trestle, only a hundred yards or so from where we’d seen the house, Bessy stepped off the tracks and down the creek bank. She set down her pillowcase, reached in and brought out the blue dress she’d worn her first day in at the school, and we knew what to do.

Cleopatra and I moved down the bank, too, opened our pillowcases, brought out our clothes. By then Bessy’d already taken off her jumper and underdrawers and leggings and blouse, so that she stood before us naked. I saw for the first time her breasts, how full and rounded they were, the nipples up and hard in the cool morning, and I saw the dark hair she had between her legs, the wisps of it thicker than mine.

Then my eyes went to her belly, and to two long scars there. They ran from just below her belly button up to her ribs, her skin all goose-pimpled up, the two scars parallel to each other and purple and the width of a fingernail, and I couldn’t help but shiver at what I saw, at what I didn’t know. She stood before us naked without a single breath of embarrassment or humility, and I felt my breasts shrink into themselves as I took off my blouse, my back to the two of them, felt, too, a cold, sharp twist of pain across my own belly.

I dropped my jumper, quick put on my old dress, hurried into my coat.

I glanced over my shoulder once to see what Cleopatra was doing, saw her there in just her underdrawers and leggings, her back to us, too, as she shimmied into a dress I recognized from nowhere, then remembered she’d been brought in before me. When she turned around, she’d become someone else altogether, the dress, a pink one with a white satin ribbon round the waist tied off in a bow, was a little small on her, but every inch beautiful, from the bit of lace at the neck to the pink ribbon at the hem, and I imagined all the town fathers buying that dress for her as some sort of farewell gift, feeling sorry and pitying her and at the same time glad to rid their fair town of a hellion with a brick. She was beautiful in the dress.

Our eyes met a moment, then hers broke from mine to look down at the dress. She smiled, said, “I haven’t had this on since the day I was brought in, ” words which didn’t mean a thing, just the only ones she could muster at this moment, the three of us suddenly who we were before we’d been pushed into the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls. Just three girls, and I wondered if Cleopatra knew of the scar on Bessy’s belly, wondered if she’d heard Bessy’s story about it, envied her if she knew and at the same time wanted none of it.

Bessy was down on her knees now, and Cleopatra and I watched as she stuffed into her pillowcase the blouse, then the jumper, leg i gings and underdrawers. She stood, went down to the water, brought back a big rock, moss-covered on top and muddy on the bottom, and dropped it into the pillowcase, then twisted the open end into a knot, lifted the bundle.

She looked at us, and smiled. There were her teeth, all perfect and simple and white, and I thought again of what you could not see, the scars, the deep purple and chill of them.

She laughed, the sound dry and hard in her throat. She looked from me to Cleopatra. Then she turned, went down to the water. She said, “Won’t ever be needing these again, that’s for goddamned certain.” She swung the bundle back, brought it forward, and let it sail out into the middle of the creek, where it hit with a loud splash, and disappeared.

She turned to us, still smiling, and walked right between us, up the bank. Then she was up on the tracks.

Cleopatra wouldn’t look at me, and though she was first to follow Bessy, this time she hung back a few extra feet, the three of us spread out along the track, only two of us with pillowcases now, headed for that blue house with the tin roof.

We squatted behind bushes next to the house. Bessy reached into them and pulled back a few branches, peered through. From where I sat all I could see was smoke lift into clear blue air, disappear with the wind up there.

Bessy whispered, “Nothing to this one, ” and let the branches fall back into place. She turned to me, no smile now. She whispered, “Now you find out why we took you on in this here little venture, ” and she reached a hand over near my face.

I flinched, pulled away quick, afraid she might lay fists on me for whatever reason she had in mind.

But her hand reached my face all the same, and she touched my cheek with the back of her fingers before I could do anything else. The touch was soft, and for a moment I wondered if she weren’t thinking of her own face, her own skin, her breasts. Her face still bore the marks of the fight she’d had with Cleopatra months ago, the split eyebrow, a bruise high on her left cheekbone that’d never wholly disappeared, now a red spot the size of a pea, a small scar at the base of her chin.

And as she touched her fingers to my cheek once again, reached up to my hair, tucked a lock of it behind my ear, I wondered, too, how long she’d been trading on her face, that skin, her breasts and the hair between her legs. Long enough, I realized, to let her stand as she had with no clothes on, and long enough, too, to end up with scars like she had.

“Yes ma’am, you little sugartit you, you’re right along with us here because you come from money, you do.” Her eyes met mine now, and she brought her hand to my cheek again, let it rest there. Then slowly she took hold of my chin. “You come from money, ain’t nobody in that shithole school don’t know that.” She was smiling, and I cut my eyes over at Cleopatra, squatting right next to us. Her mouth was open, her own eyes going from Bessy to me and back.

Bessy whispered, “Now you’re going down round to the front door of that shanty, and you going to knock on that door, and when whoever it is lives there comes, you going to engage them in some sorrowful story.”

She started holding tighter to my jaw, pressing hard on my chin, on my teeth, my mouth. “And they going to believe you, they are. Because you come from money, and folks with none, whether niggers or crackers, can smell it on those that do, and they’ll believe whatever it is you have to say, because they can smell that money on you. They always do, and you telling your little story will divert their sorry-ass attention for a while. So you lie your sweet little virgin ass off at that door to whoever it is comes.” She paused, held tight my chin a moment longer, then let it go. I took in a breath, looked at her. She smiled again, tucked a lock of hair behind my other ear. “Now you go.”

I did. I didn’t even look to Cleopatra again, didn’t think of her, only thought of those scars and the sound that rock and her clothes made into the black water beneath the trestle, and before I knew what was happening I was coming round the front of the house the blue clapboards, I could see up close, were ancient, the paint blistered and cracked and falling off and I was heading to the door, gray wood with only a small hole where a knob should have been.

I knocked, and the door opened a moment later. There stood an old nigger woman, her hair white, skin black as any nigger’s I’d ever seen before, her eyes set deep in her head and even blacker than her skin.

She had on a filthy apron, was wiping her thin hands with it.

Before I could even open my mouth, she was smiling, and I knew what Bessy’d said was true, people without money believed the ones who had it, and I didn’t even let her say one word to me as I started in on a story about how I was a little girl whose mother had died recently, and whose grandmama, who owned a mansion up in Purvis, had sent me down to New Orleans for a new dress, and how a swindler, a good-looking young man named Rutledge, had stolen all my money from me, and how I had no other choice of getting back to Purvis than to walk.

The nigger woman frowned, drew her eyebrows up, gave her face a tilt to one side, listening to it all, and when I got to the part about my satchel and all my belongings in it being stolen by that swindler Rutledge, the nigger woman reached out a hand and touched my cheek.

This time I didn’t pull away, though, I only let her touch me, and for a moment as I went on with my story about how I needed help back in the right direction and how I would be able to give her a reward from my grandmama’s cashbox, I let my eyes close. This nigger woman’s hard and callused fingers touched my cheek even more gently than Bessy’d done when she’d started giving my instructions, and suddenly I fell back into my own place in Purvis, pictured in my mind Molly touching me, pictured the old kitchen, the walls, the cupboards, the butcherblock stained black with years of blood. I pictured all of that while I heard myself tell the story of a girl’s mother dying of a fever in an upstairs bedroom, and I found myself telling her, too, of a father who was a logger and who’d broken his neck, and heard, too, of the soft memory of a brother, a small baby who’d died when the girl was only a young child herself. All this time my eyes were closed, the nigger woman’s hand on my cheek, and I felt tears coming, felt them spill out my eyes and down the cheeks of a girl telling her story as a lie, none of it the truth but the truth all the same, my story only to divert her sorry-ass attention for a while, while Bessy and Cleopatra did whatever it was they were going to do here.

That was when I opened my eyes, the story of my life cut short by the sound of a pan knocked to the floor inside the shack, and the nigger woman brought her hand down from my face, turned to the inside of her house.

There stood Cleopatra, holding a skillet with the hem of her pink dress, in the skillet bacon frying up, eggs in there with it. Inside the room was only a fireplace, a metal grate of some kind hooked in there, on it a battered and steaming black kettle. A busted-up chair leaned against one wall, a quilt heaped in one corner. The back door of the place stood open behind Cleopatra, and the light silhouetted her in a way that made her seem bigger than she already was. I saw all this in an instant, the time it took the nigger woman to turn from me to her home. She turned back to me, and I saw in her puzzlement at what was going on here, her old eyes taking everything in and trying to piece it all out. Still Cleopatra only stood there, looking at the two of us, her mouth still open.

From behind her stepped Bessy, who looked first at the woman, then at me. “For god’s sakes, ” she said, “this here’s just some old nigger shanty. We didn’t even have to send you out on your story, ” and she moved to the fireplace, with the hem of her own dress took hold of the kettle. “Grits, ” she said, and looked at the nigger woman, smiled, nodded. “Much obliged, ” she said. She turned, was gone out the back door.

Cleopatra backed toward the door, disappeared.

The nigger woman took a step toward the back door, but turned to me, looked at me, her face no longer filled with the puzzle of this all, but with the stunned and milky look of a dead animal’s eyes. She just stood there, looked at me a long moment.

I ran, took off round the back of her house, saw a pillowcase up on the rise where the tracks lay. When I got to it, I caught sight of the last bit of Cleopatra, saw her running into the woods on the other side of the tracks, the pan in hand. She’d already disappeared from the waist down for the brush back there, Bessy, I figured, was already buried.

Cleopatra stopped, turned. She called out, “Come on, girl, ” and waited an instant before she turned back to the woods, started off again. The last thing I saw of her before she was swallowed up entirely was the back of her head, the short growth of hair there, long tendrils of hair on either side of it trailing back with what small wind she made running.

I held my pillowcase with both hands, turned to the shanty. The nigger woman stood just inside the back door, her hands at her sides, dead, useless. Because what, I thought, could she do? There was nothing, three white girls’d swooped in like chicken hawks and’d taken what they wanted at will. There was nothing she could do, her life in our hands.

But it was my own life in my hands, I saw, and I felt how sorrowful my own story really was, not the story of my family all dying around me, not the story of being sent here by a grandmother who didn’t give a damn about me. No, the sorrowful story, I knew, was that this was where I’d brought myself when I’d taken my own life into my hands.

Come here to this moment, robbing a nigger woman of her food, then tearing off into woods. Which seemed like no way to fix a life at all.

So I ran. I ran back in the direction we’d come, ran along the tracks and over the trestle and the black creek where, at the bottom, lay remnants of somebody else’s life, a life, I knew, would end in disaster, those scars on her belly a good head start on that road. I ran, and ran, and ran, all the while holding on to my pillowcase, wanting to protect what was inside it my tablet and the photograph, my Bible from whatever might come out of the woods to lay into me in whatever way a man or a woman had done to Bessy. I ran.

I made it to Picayune by noon, stopped and slipped back into my jumper in somebody’s privy not far from school. I walked right on to campus, walked right past the big live oak at the east end, strolled right into the dining hall, took my place in line for the food we all were given each day, the girls all around me silent, staring at me, at i the pillowcase I carried, my mouth shut tight with what small piece I knew now of the world.

Then came Mrs. Archibald’s hand on my shoulder, fingers digging into my skin like talons, and I knew it was over.

Mrs. Archibald, still behind me, pulled me out of line, pushed me through the girls swarming now, their words quiet murmurs, each whisper building one on another until the sound in the dining hall roared in my ears. She pushed me to the door onto the courtyard, and I reached to the knob, opened it. Then she pushed me on out to the courtyard, across the lawn to the flagpole in front of the main building.