JEWEL (2 page)

So that on that Tuesday, when I saw four men through the green of the forest, I was the one to go into the house and take her hand and lead her up from her cane rocker, the one she spent most hours of the day in, and out onto the porch. The men had cleared the trees by then, and I could see them, hair wet, faces white, jaws set with the weight of whatever lay in the doubled-up gray wool blanket they toted, one man to a corner, the middle sagging, nearly touching ground with each step they took. They wore only undershirts and blue jeans, all of them barefooted, their feet red with the dust of the road they’d walked.

I wasn’t afraid, not even when Momma, behind me, whispered, “Oh, ” then, louder, “Oh. Oh.” I heard her take one step back, then another, but there she stopped. The men were off the road and onto our yard now, their eyes never yet looking up to us, men I couldn’t place from anywhere. I looked behind me to Momma, saw her there with a hand to her face, covering her eyes, the other hand at her throat and holding on to the collar of her dress.

I turned to the sound of the men on the porch steps, felt myself backing up too. The four of them moved toward me, struggling with the burden they bore, the wool blanket seeming heavier than anything I’d seen before. Yet they were gentle with it, eased it up and onto the porch itself and inched toward us, finally letting it down onto the wood with a grace I would never see again.

They stood back from it, four men with hands on their hips, eyes on the heap before us. Then one of them, a man with hair as black as my daddy’s, hair flat and wet with strands of it long down and into his eyes, squatted, his elbows on his knees, eyes still on the blanket. He put out a hand, held it a moment above the wool, then reached down, took hold of the blanket, and pulled it back to reveal to us my dead and naked father.

His head was bent back from us, so that what I saw first was his throat, already swelled and purple. His face was gone from me, twisted up and away, and for a moment I had no genuine idea in my head who this was, or why he had been brought here. The blanket had been pulled back far enough to bare his chest and arms and stomach and one leg, the edge of the blanket left just below his waist, so that next I saw the pencil-thin line of hair that started at his navel and traced its way beneath the gray wool, disappearing there. He had no hair anywhere else, his skin already turning the milk-white of the dead, his arms and the one leg I could see bent at the joints, him all movement and peace.

“We was swimming, ” the man with the black hair said. He still held the edge of the blanket, and my eyes went to his fingers, watched as he slowly rubbed his index finger and thumb together. “We was swimming, and then he just didn’t come up. He was jumping off” “Benjamin, ” my momma let out, her word choked and hard in the air.

“Stop.”

The man, this Benjamin, looked up. His fingers stopped moving, his eyes on my momma.

I looked up to her. She still had a hand to her eyes, the other at her throat, and then I moved toward the blanket, toward the body I still didn’t know was my daddy. I wanted to see the face, know who it was, and as I made my way toward where I would see him, two of the men who’d carried him here moved out of my way, their hands still on their hips.

I stood next to this Benjamin, and looked down at my daddy’s face. His lips had gone blue, his eyelids gray, his hair matted and snarled.

Benjamin let go the blanket. I didn’t move, not yet certain what any of this meant.

Then he put his hand to my back, held it just below my shoulder blades.

The touch was near nothing, only contact.

He said, “Your daddy and me was brothers.”

But the words didn’t mean anything to me. I was thinking of Sunday mornings and the smell of pomade, and of me sitting between the two of them while Pastor gave up to God our congregation’s prayers, and how my God had finally answered the prayer I’d been whispering to myself while Pastor pleaded for everyone else, I wanted him never to come back.

Here was my reward for righteous, heartfelt prayer, for asking in Jesus’ name what I knew would make my momma and me better off in the long run, no matter what those sounds I heard from their room meant.

Which is why I reached down and picked up the edge of the blanket my uncle had let fall, and pulled it back over my daddy, covered him up.

The four men were watching me now, waiting, I figured, for whatever might happen next.

I said, “Bring him on inside.” I paused, then said, “Somebody go find Pastor, too.”

It would be lifetimes later before I knew what’d really kept me out there on the porch Sunday afternoons long after my momma, kept my eyes on the green and searching for signs of his life. Only after the lifetime between my daddy’s death and my momma dying, two months that couldn’t be measured by any means of a calendar or the movement of the moon, then the lifetime spent on the little piece of childhood I had left, spent with Missy Cook, my grandma, in a house more dead than my parents would ever be. Then the lifetime of school I spent away in Picayune, lifetimes that ended, all of them, with my first night with Leston and hearing the ghosts of my momma and daddy there in the room with me. And since then have come countless nights spent with those ghost sounds surrounding us, the strength and power and quiet warmth of Leston’s hard worked body the surest comfort I have ever known. My silent husband’s language grew to be my own body and how he touched me, the miracle of a callused hand placed gently to my cheek, my neck, my breast word enough of the love he held for me.

But on that first night, our wedding night, those sounds of my momma and daddy rose up around us like the resurrected dead, I knew love then, the doom and joy of it, the pain of Leston inside me and the pleasure of knowing the promise of a future. I knew only then that I’d stayed out on the porch because I loved them both enough to wish my daddy dead, but loved them both enough to wish him back.

I have taken care of myself since the moment I pulled the blanket over him, a fact Leston already knew before he’d even let out his words to the cold morning of our room. I knew what loss was, knew what it was God could take away from you, His answers to prayer sometimes the greatest curse you could call down. But even so, I prayed right then and there, my husband sitting on the edge of our bed and growing old in what seemed only the few moments we’d been awake, myself going the same way, too, I knew, that the baby inside me would be born alive and breathing, with ten fingers and ten toes. That was all I sought, what I figured couldn’t be too much to ask.

CHAPTER 2.

WE’D BURIED MY DADDY THE NEXT DAY, HIM LYING OUT IN THE ROOM OFF our kitchen just overnight, time enough for Pastor to have his hand at trying to comfort us, and time enough for my momma to dress Daddy in a bundle of fine clothes I’d never known we had. Time enough, too, for the men who’d brought him, my uncle Benjamin one of them, to get back to the logging camp and settle up his monies with the foreman, then pack up his belongings, all of them fitting into one yellowed pillowcase.

When the four of them showed up on our porch the next morning, they were all cleaned up and wearing what I figured were their best clothes, new jeans and white shirts buttoned up to the throat, boots rubbed with a daub of oil. Each of them’s hair was thick with pomade, and for a moment I wondered if they’d used my daddy’s own tin of it, greased up their hair with the toiletries of a dead man.

I’d been the one to answer the door, and Benjamin led them in, the pillowcase slung over his shoulder. Once they’d filed in, Benjamin let it fall off his back, held it in front of him. He started to smile at me, the corners of his mouth just turning up, but before he could finish I’d brought my eyes down to the floor, closed the door quiet as I could.

I didn’t want to see him smile, didn’t want to run the risk, I knew even then, of seeing in his face any bit of my daddy’s.

I turned from the door, and watched what would happen next. If I had my way, I thought, if I could fix all this, I would have them out of here and back at camp, my momma and me the only ones waiting for Pastor and for Mr. Reeves, the coffin-builder in Purvis and the man who would be digging the grave not fifty feet behind our house.

It was what Momma asked for as soon as Pastor had arrived in his wagon the afternoon before, as soon as he’d made his way in the door. She’d looked Pastor square in the eye, her chin higher than I’d ever seen it, and said, “Bring a coffin tomorrow at noon. Mr. Reeves can bury him out back.”

Pastor had only nodded, took off his hat, held it with both hands. For some reason I thought I could see fear in his face, as though her merely meeting his eyes were enough to destroy him, or as though she’d suddenly become someone else, a woman with standing, bearing, a voice he knew he had to listen to.

She said nothing else to him, though he stayed until after dark, reading to her from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes and the Gospels of Luke and John, first by the light from the failing sun outside the windows, then by the fire. All that time she only sat in the rocker, her chin still high, Pastor hunched with the work of recognizing words in a room too dark for reading.

Then he left, his Bible tucked under one arm, the hat in both hands as he backed his way to the door, me standing there and holding it open for him. When he made it to the threshold he paused, glanced down at me. He reached out a hand, touched my head, and I twisted away from under his palm, the move now instinct in me. I wanted no one, ever, to pat my head again.

“Jewel, ” he said, smiling. “You’ll be fine.” He looked at my momma, still in the rocker. “The two of y’all will be just fine. Given time, and the Lord willing.”

My momma gave him a small nod, let her eyes fall back to the fireplace, the dying light there, and he was gone.

As soon as I heard the sound of his wagon moving away into the night, Momma stood, her chin now low on her chest, hands limp at her sides, eyes nearly closed. She stared at the fire a moment, then turned, and I followed her back into her room, listened in the dark to the low groan the bottom dresser drawer made as she pulled it out, heard her move hands through whatever clothes were in there. Then came the sound of the drawer pushed closed, a small, high scream of wood on wood, and I turned, not certain where she was behind me, but knowing we were headed for the room off the kitchen, where the men had laid my daddy on the table.

We moved through the darkened kitchen, the only light the small bits of flickering red that made their way from the fireplace in the front room.

Before me was the room my daddy lay in, but I could see nothing in there, only black, a black so black it seemed to crawl into me, a darkness that came in through my eyes and ears and skin, and I remember closing my eyes, holding my breath, afraid the darkness would swallow me up. I moved into the room, my hand in front of me, feeling the air, and then I touched rough wool. I stopped.

Behind me came the sound of a match strike, the sudden and awful smell of sulfur in the air, and I opened my eyes.

Momma had lit a candle she’d gotten from somewhere, before me now the heap that was my daddy, covered with the blanket. Across the gray folds and contours danced my own shadow, Momma with the candle held high behind me. My head and shoulders were huge, moved across him, bobbed and jumped with the light from the candle, and I knew I would never be that big, knew I could never move in such fanciful ways, my daddy now dead.

“You go on into the front room, ” Momma whispered behind me. “You leave us two alone.” She was beside me, my shadow trailing off the blanket and, I could see out the corner of my eye, taken up by the wall. I was even bigger now.

I stood there a moment, reached to the wool again, took a-piece of it in my hand and fingered it the way Benjamin had. Then I let it drop, looked at Momma.

She had a bundle of clothes under one arm, the candle in the other.

She swallowed hard, her chin down, her eyes never leaving the blanket.

I couldn’t recognize her. I’d never seen her before, never seen the hair pulled back and tucked above her neck, the soft curve of her nose, the line of her chin. A lady stood next to me, one whose beauty I’d never felt nor could lay claim to, and I knew already she was on her way to dying, something inside me, maybe the Holy Spirit, maybe God Himself letting me know what was ahead, the word orphan suddenly too close, loud in my ear.

She lifted her chin, blinked. “Go, ” she whispered, but there’d been no need for the word. I was already backing away from the two of them and toward the kitchen, then toward the fireplace. Once there I poked up the flame, the spring night outside still holding close some last shard of winter, and as I felt the warmth and comfort of the fire rise up to me, I heard the hard, cold weeping my momma gave out, the give and pull of the blanket as she revealed him to herself, and began dressing him.

Benjamin and the others I would never know their names, never even see any of them, my uncle included, again stood a few feet from my mother, her rocker still set near the hearth, the flames and embers and heat long gone.

He still had the pillowcase in front of him, then gently set it on the floor. He said, “Ma’am, ” and paused. I was next to the rocker now, my hands at my sides, though some part of me wanted to place my hand on Momma’s shoulder, feel whatever life might be in her after she’d stayed up the entire night with my daddy. Her eyes were puffed up and full, her hands white as she worked her fingers, clutching them, letting go.

Then, quieter, Benjamin said, “Patricia, ” and looked down.

“Ma’am will do just fine, ” she shot at him, her voice iron. I nearly flinched, her words so quick. Her chin was up, and the same feeling I’d had, the feeling she was no one I knew, came on me again.

“Ma’am, ” Benjamin said right back at her. He looked up, and despite myself I saw in his face pieces of my daddy, his cheeks high and shiny, his skin a deep tan, black hair with the same smell as Sunday mornings.

And there were his eyes, the irises nearly black, the whites all the brighter for it. Of course he was my father’s brother.