Paradise (18 page)

He had read the first letter he got from Arnette but put the others in a shoe box in his aunt’s attic; he was in a hurry to destroy them (or maybe even read them) before anybody discovered the eleven unopened envelopes posted from Langston, Oklahoma. He assumed they were all about love and grief, love in spite of grief. Whatever. But what could Arnette know of either the way he did? Had she sat through the night in a copse of shin oak to catch a glimpse? Had she trailed a beat-up Cadillac all the way to Demby just to see? Had she been thrown out of a house by women? Cursed by women? And still, still been unable to stay away? Not, that is, until his uncles sat him down and gave him the law and its consequences.

So here he was, standing at the altar, his elbow supporting the thin wrist of his bride, in his pocket the fold of Easter palm she had given him for protection. He was aware of the heavy breathing of his soon-to-be brother-in-law at his right; and the animosity of Billie Delia burrowing into the back of his head. He was certain it would go on forever, this blocked rage, because Misner seemed to be struck dumb by the cross he held.

A cross the bride gazed at in terror. And she had been so happy. At last so very very happy. Free of the bleak sadness that encased her as soon as she was home from college: the unrelenting suffocation in her parents’ house; the brand-new disgust that accompanied the care of her broken nieces and nephews; the need for sleep that alarmed her mother, annoyed her sister-in-law and infuriated her brother and father; the flat-out nothing-to-doness, interrupted only by wonder and worry about K.D. Although he had never answered her first twelve letters, she’d kept on writing, but not mailing, forty more. One a week for the whole first year she was away. She believed she loved him absolutely because he was all she knew about her self—which was to say, everything she knew of her body was connected to him. Except for Billie Delia, no one had told her there was any other way to think of herself. Not her mother; not her sister-in-law. Last year, when she was a senior she came home for Easter break and he asked to see her, came twice for dinner, took her to Nathan DuPres’ ranch to help with the Children’s Day picnic, and then suggested they get married. It was a miracle that lasted all the way down to this brilliant day in April. Everything perfect: her period had come and gone; her gown, made entirely of Soane Morgan’s lace, was heavenly; the gold band tucked into her brother’s vest was engraved with both their initials entwined. The hole in her heart had closed finally, and now, at the last minute, the preacher was rocking strange, trying to hold up the marriage, distort, maybe even destroy it. Standing there, his face like granite, holding a cross as though nobody had ever seen one before. She pressed her fingers into the arm that held hers, willing Misner to get on with it. Say it, say it! “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here…we are gathered here.” Suddenly, soundlessly, in the muffled silence that Misner imposed, a tiny rent opened in exactly the place where her heart’s hole had been. She held her breath and felt the increase, like a run in a stocking. Soon the little tear would yawn, stretch wide, wider, sapping all her strength until it got what it needed to seal itself and permit the heart to go on beating. She was acquainted with it, had thought marrying K.D. would permanently heal it, but now, waiting for “We are gathered here…,” anxious for “Do you take this…,” she knew better. Knew exactly what was and would always be missing.

Say it, please, she urged. Please. And hurry. Hurry. I’ve got things to do.

Billie Delia shifted her bouquet from her left hand to her right. Tiny thorns pricked through her white cotton gloves and the freesia blossoms were closing as she’d known they would. Only the tea roses remained sturdy with promises you could count on to be kept. She had suggested baby’s breath to flatter the yellow buds but was astonished to find that not one garden had any. No baby’s breath anywhere. Then yarrow, she said, but the bride refused to carry to her wedding a weed that cattle ate. So there they were, both of them, holding water-hungry freesia and tea roses improperly dethorned. Other than the damage being done to her palms, the wait Reverend Misner was forcing on everybody did not bother or surprise her. It was just one more piece of foolishness that made up this foolish wedding that everybody thought was a cease-fire. But the war was not between the Morgans, the Fleetwoods and those who sided with either. It was true that Jeff had taken to carrying a handgun; that Steward Morgan and Arnold Fleetwood had shouted at each other in the street; that people wandered into Anna Flood’s back room to lounge in Menus’ barbershop not for haircuts but to grunt and sigh over the rumor of an outrage that had taken place out at the Convent; that based on this gossip Reverend Pulliam had preached a sermon taken from Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.” Reverend Misner countered with Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “…the greatest of these is love.” But to Billie Delia the real battle was not about infant life or a bride’s reputation but about disobedience, which meant, of course, the stallions were fighting about who controlled the mares and their foals. Senior Pulliam had scripture and history on his side. Misner had scripture and the future on his. Now, she supposed, he was making the world wait until it understood his position.

Billie Delia lowered her gaze from Misner’s searching eyes to the heavy lace on the bride’s head to the back of the groom’s neck and thought immediately of a horse she once loved. Although it was the groom who held in his name the memory of a legendary horse race, it was she whose life had been maimed by it. Hard Goods, the winning horse that K.D. had ridden when Ruby was founded, belonged to Mr. Nathan DuPres. Years after that race but before she could walk, Mr. Nathan had hoisted her on Hard Goods’ bare back, which she rode with such glee it made everybody laugh. From then on, every month or so, when he came into town on errands, he unsaddled the horse and led it around the schoolyard next to her house, holding her waist with the palm of his hand. “Mount up these children,” he would say. “Need more horsewomen in this land. Everybody crying for a motorcar better mount up their children early! Hard Goods ain’t never had a flat!” It continued until Billie Delia was three years old—too little, still, for everyday underwear, and nobody noticed or cared how perfect her skin felt against that wide expanse of rhythmically moving animal flesh. While she struggled to grip Hard Goods with her ankles and endure the rub of his spine, the grown-ups smiled, taking pleasure in her pleasure while calling Mr. Nathan a retrograde Negro who needed to learn how to shift gears so he could get somewhere on time. Then one day. A Sunday. Hard Goods came loping down the street with Mr. Nathan astride. Billie Delia, who hadn’t seen horse or rider for a long while, ran toward them, begging for a lift. Mr. Nathan promised to stop by after service. Still in her Sunday clothes, she waited in her yard. When she saw him coming, negotiating space among the after-church crowd, she ran out into the middle of Central Avenue, where she pulled down her Sunday panties before raising her arms to be lifted onto Hard Goods’ back.

Things seemed to crumple after that. She got an unintelligible whipping from her mother and a dose of shame it took her years to understand. That’s when the teasing began, more merciless because her mother was the teacher. Suddenly there was a dark light in the eyes of boys who felt comfortable staring at her. Suddenly a curious bracing in the women, a looking-away look in the men. And a permanent watchfulness in her mother. Nathan DuPres did not make her another offer. Hard Goods was lost to her forever, remembered publicly as the horse that won the race with K.D. on his back, privately as the recipient of a little girl’s shame. Only Mrs. Dovey Morgan and her sister, Soane, treated her with easy kindness—stopping her in the street to adjust the bow in her braids, praising her work in their kitchen gardens; and once when Mrs. Dovey Morgan stopped her to wipe what she thought was makeup from Billie Delia’s rosy lips, she did it with a smile and no hateful lecture. Even apologized when her handkerchief came away clean. If it had not been for them and Anna Flood’s return her teens would have been unlivable. Nor did Anna or the Morgan ladies make her feel the freakishness of being an only child—perhaps because they had few or no children themselves. Most families boasted nine, eleven, even fifteen children. And it was inevitable that she and Arnette, who had no sisters and just one brother, become best friends.

She knew people took her for the wild one, the one who from the beginning not only had no qualms about pressing her nakedness on a horse’s back but preferred it, would drop her drawers in public on Sunday just to get to the thrill of it. Although it was Arnette who had sex at fourteen (with the groom), Billie Delia carried the burden. She quickly learned the cautionary look in the eyes of girls whose mothers had warned them away from Billie Delia. In fact she was untouched. So far. Since she was helplessly in love with a pair of brothers, her virginity, which no one believed existed, had become as mute as the cross Reverend Misner was holding aloft.

Now his eyes were closed. His jaw muscles working overtime. He held the cross as though it were a hammer he was trying not to bring down lest it hurt somebody. Billie Delia wished he would open his eyes again, look at the groom and bust him over the head with it. But no. That would embarrass the bride who had won, finally, the husband her maid of honor despised. A husband who had propositioned Billie Delia before and after his thing with Arnette. A husband who, while Arnette was away, had forgotten all about her and chased any dress whose wearer was under fifty. A husband who had left his future bride pregnant and on her own, knowing that it was the unmarried mother-to-be (not the father-to-be) who would have to ask her church’s forgiveness. Billie Delia had heard of such things, but any girl who got pregnant in Ruby could count on marriage, whether the boy was eager or not, because he still had to live near her family and with his own. Still had to meet her in church or anywhere else he turned. But not this groom. This groom let the bride suffer for four years and consented to a wedding only when he was kicked out of another woman’s bed. Kicked so hard he couldn’t get to the altar fast enough. She remembered vividly the day the kicker had arrived in shoes already designed for the groom’s behind. Billie Delia’s hatred of the strange-looking girl was instant and would have been eternal had she not taken refuge in the Convent herself one chilly October day after a quarrel with her mother turned ugly. Her mother fought her like a man that day. She had run to Anna Flood, who told her to wait upstairs while she dealt with some deliveryman business. Billie Delia cried alone for what seemed like hours, licking her split lip and touching the swelling under her eye. When she spied Apollo’s truck, she slipped down the back stairs, and while he was buying soda pop, she got into the cab. Neither of them knew what to do. Apollo offered to take her out to his family’s place. But ashamed of having to explain her face to his parents and put up with the stares of any one of his twelve brothers and sisters, she asked him to drive her out to the Convent. That was the fall of 1973. What she saw and learned there changed her forever. Agreeing to be Arnette’s maid of honor was the last sentimental thing she would ever do in Ruby. She got a job in Demby, bought a car and probably would have driven it to Saint Louis, except for her helpless double love.

With or without chaw in his mouth, Steward was not a patient man. So he was surprised to find himself calm watching Misner’s behavior. All around him the congregation had begun to murmur, exchange looks, but Steward, believing he was less confounded than they were, did neither in spite of no soothing wad of tobacco. As a small boy, he had listened to Big Daddy describe a sixty-five-mile journey he’d taken to bring supplies back to Haven. It was 1920. State prohibition was now national. A sickness called rocking pneumonia gripped Haven and Big Daddy was one of the few able bodies able to go. He went alone. On horseback. He got what he needed in Logan County, and with the medicines bundled under his coat, the other supplies tied to the horse, he lost his way and found himself after sunset unsure of which way to go. He smelled, but could not see, a campfire that seemed to be fairly close by on his left. Then suddenly, to his right, he heard whoops, music and gunshots. But he saw no lights in that direction. Stuck in darkness with invisible strangers on both sides, he had to decide whether to ride toward the smoke and meat smells or toward the music and guns. Or neither. The campfire might be warming robbers; the music might be amusing lynchers. His horse decided. Smelling others of its kind it trotted toward the campfire. There Big Daddy found three Sac and Fox men sitting near a fire hidden in a hole. He dismounted, approached carefully, hat in hand, and said, “Evening.” The men welcomed him and, learning of his destination, warned him against entering the town. The women there fight with their fists, they said; the children are drunk; the men don’t argue or debate but speak only with firearms; liquor laws don’t apply. They had come to rescue a family member, who had been drinking in there for twelve days. Already one of them was in there, searching for him. What’s the name of the town? Big Daddy asked. Pura Sangre, they answered. At its northern edge was a sign: No Niggers. At its southern edge a cross. Big Daddy spent several hours with them and, before light, thanked them and left—backtracking to find his way home.

When Steward heard the story the first time, he could not close his mouth, thinking of that moment when his father was all alone in the dark, guns to the right, strangers to the left. But the grown-ups laughed and thought of something else. “No niggers at one end, a cross at the other and the devil loose in between.” Steward didn’t get it. How could the devil be anywhere near a cross? What was the connection between the two signs? Since that time, however, he had seen crosses between the titties of whores; military crosses spread for miles; crosses on fire in Negroes’ yards, crosses tattooed on the forearms of dedicated killers. He had seen a cross dangling from the rearview mirror of a car full of whites come to insult the little girls of Ruby. Whatever Reverend Misner was thinking, he was wrong. A cross was no better than the bearer. Now Steward fingered his mustache aware of his twin shifting his feet, getting ready to grab the pew in front of him and put a stop to Misner’s behavior.