Paradise (24 page)

“When Daddy got back everybody was worried sick about what to do and how long the bodies could last before, father or no father, husband or no husband, you both had to go in the ground. But Daddy came back the second day. No time for a decent wake. So you were his first job. And a wonderful job he did too. You were beautiful. With the baby in the crook of your arm. You would have been so proud of him.

“He doesn’t blame anybody except himself for being at mortuary graduation. We have quarreled about it and he doesn’t agree with me that those 8-rock men didn’t want to go and bring a white into town; or else didn’t want to drive out to a white’s house begging for help; or else they just despised your pale skin so much they thought of reasons why they could not go. Daddy says more than one woman has died in childbirth and I say, who? So the mother without one died and the baby whom you planned to name Faustine, if a girl, or Richard, after Daddy’s oldest brother, if a boy, died too. It was a girl, Mama. Faustine. My baby sister. We would have grown up together. Patricia and Faustine. Too light, maybe, but together it would not have mattered to us. We’d be a team. I have no aunts or uncles, remember, because all of Daddy’s sisters and brothers died of what they called walking pneumonia but what must have been the 1919 influenza epidemic. So I married Billy Cato partly because he was beautiful, partly because he made me laugh, and partly (mostly?) because he had the midnight skin of the Catos and the Blackhorses, along with that Blackhorse feature of stick-straight hair. Like Soane’s and Dovey’s hair, and like Easter and Scout had. But he died, Billy did, and I took my lightish but not whiteish baby and moved back in your pretty little house with the mortuary and your headstone in back and have been drylongso teaching the children who call me Miss Best using Daddy’s last name as everybody else does, so short was the time I was Pat Cato.”

The words had long ago covered the back of the page, so she was using fresh sheets to continue:

“I may as well tell you that except for you and K.D.’s mother, nobody in Ruby has ever died. Please note I said
in
Ruby and they are real proud about that believing they are blessed and all because after 1953 anybody who died did it in Europe or Korea or someplace outside this town. Even Sweetie’s children are still alive and God knows there is no reason they should be. Well, crazy as it sounds, I believe the claim of immortality is this town’s rebuke against Daddy’s mortuary business, since he has to wait for our killed-in-actions or somebody out at the Convent or an accident someplace else, otherwise his ambulance is never a hearse. (When Billy died there was nothing left to bury except some “effects,” including a gold ring too twisted to poke a finger through.) They think Daddy deserves rebuke because he broke the blood rule first, and I wouldn’t put it past them to refuse to die just to keep Daddy from success. As it turned out, war dead and accidents in other towns (Miss Fairy died on a trip back to Haven; Ace Flood died in the Demby hospital but was buried in Haven) were all the work Daddy has had and it is hardly enough. Neither is the ambulance business, so I work hard to convince him that the money the town pays me for teaching is just household money and he doesn’t have to borrow anymore on his shares in Deek’s bank and should forget gasoline stations and what all.”

Leaning back in the chair, Pat folded her hands behind her head, wondering what was going to happen when more people got as old as Nathan or Lone. Then would her father’s craft be required or would they do what they did on the way out of Louisiana? Bury them where they fell. Or were they right? Was death blocked from entering Ruby? Patricia was tired now and ready for sleep, but she couldn’t let Delia go just yet.

“That was some ride, Mama, from Haven to here. You and me, Mama, among those skinny blue-black giants, neither they nor their wives staring at your long brown hair, your honey-speckled eyes. Did Daddy tell you, Don’t worry your head; it was going to be all right? Remember how they needed you, used you to go into a store to get supplies or a can of milk while they parked around the corner? That was the only thing your skin was good for. Otherwise it bothered them. Reminded them of why Haven existed, of why a new town had to take its place. The one-drop law the whites made up was hard to live by if nobody could tell it was there. When we drove through a town, or when a sheriff’s car was near, Daddy told us to get down, to lie on the floor of the car, because it would have been no use telling a stranger that you were colored and worse to say you were his wife. Did Soane or Dovey, new brides too, talk woman-talk with you? You thought you were pregnant again and so did they. So did you talk together about how you all felt? Make tea for hemorrhoids, give one another salt to lick or copper dirt to eat in secret? I craved baking soda when I carried Billie Delia. Did you when you carried me? Did the older women with children too advise you, like Aaron’s wife, Sally, with four children already? What about Alice Pulliam—her husband wasn’t a reverend yet but he had already heard the Call and decided to become one so they must have had some charitable, some godly feelings then when they were young. Did they make you welcome right away, or did they all wait for the Oven to be reassembled or, the following year, when the stream came back, baptize you just so they could speak to you directly, look you in the eyes?

“What did Daddy say to you at that AME Zion picnic? The one held for colored soldiers stationed at the base in Tennessee. How could either of you tell what the other was saying? He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must have been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since—no matter what business venture he thinks up.”

Pat stopped and rubbed the callus on her middle finger. Her elbow and shoulder ached from gripping the pen so hard. Across the hall, through the bedroom door, she could hear her father snoring. As always she wished him pleasant dreams—something to assuage the unhappiness of his days, days spent trying to please, to make up for. Except for marrying her mother, she couldn’t think what rule he had broken that made him so eager for the approval of those who disrespected him. He had described to her once what Haven looked like when he got out of the army. He said he sat on his father’s porch coughing, so nobody would know he was weeping for us. His father, Fulton Best, and his mother, Olive, were inside, reading with great sorrow the applications he had filled out for the G.I. Bill funding. He wanted a college education so he could go to medical school, but he was also their only surviving child, all the others having died in the flu epidemic. His parents could not bear the thought of either his leaving again or his staying in a town slipping into erasure forever in every place except the heart. He was looking up and down the cracked concrete of Main Street when Ace Flood and Harper Jury walked up to him, saying there was a plan. Deek and Steward Morgan had a plan. When he heard what it was, the first thing he did was write to the hazel-eyed girl with light-brown hair who’d had his child during the war. Good thing he didn’t tell them about us. They would have dissuaded him from marriage the way, later on, they did Menus. Maybe he knew they would, which is why he just sent for us. “Darling Delia, Come on. Right now. Here is the money order. I am going to have a lot of trouble keeping my heart quiet. Until you all get here I will be a crazy man….” Their jaws must have dropped when we arrived, but other than Steward, nobody said anything directly. They didn’t have to. Olive took to her bed. Fulton kept grunting and rubbing his knees. Only Steward had the gall to say out loud, “He’s bringing along the dung we leaving behind.” Dovey shushed him. Soane too. But Fairy DuPres cursed him, saying, “God don’t love ugly ways. Watch out He don’t deny you what you love too.” A remark Dovey must have thought about a lot until 1964, when the curse was completed. But they were just women, and what they said was easily ignored by good brave men on their way to Paradise. They got there, too, and eventually had the satisfaction of seeing the dung buried. Most of it anyway. Some of it is still aboveground, instructing their grandchildren in a level of intelligence their elders will never acquire.

Pat sucked her teeth and pushed aside the Best file. She selected a composition notebook and without label or introduction continued to write.

“She won’t listen to me. Not one word. She works in Demby at a clinic—cleaning up, I think, but she makes out like she’s a nurse’s aide because of the uniform she has to wear. I don’t know how she lives. I mean she has a room, she says, in the house of a nice family. I don’t believe it. Not all of it anyway. One of those Poole boys—both of them, probably—is visiting her. I know because the littlest one, Dina, told the class about her big brother showing her a house with a Santa Claus and Christmas lights all over the porch. Well, that was someplace other than Ruby, for sure. She is lying and I would rather be bit by the serpent himself than have a lying child. I didn’t mean to hit her so hard. I didn’t know I had. I just meant to stop her lying mouth telling me she didn’t do anything. I saw them. All three of them back behind the Oven and she was in the middle. Plus I am the one who washes sheets around here.”

Pat stopped, put down her pen and, covering her eyes with her hand, tried to separate what she had seen from what she feared to see. And what did the sheets have to do with it? Was there blood where there should not have been or no blood where there should have been? It was more than a year ago, and she thought everything was seared in her memory. The fight took place in October of 1973. Afterwards Billie Delia ran off and stayed at the Convent for two weeks and one day. She came back during the morning session, while Pat was teaching the under twelves, and stayed long enough to say she wasn’t going to. They’d had ugly, hateful words, but both were afraid to get near the other lest the quarrel get physical as it had before. She left with one of those Poole boys and didn’t come back till early this year to describe her job and write down her address. Since then Pat had seen her twice: once in March and then at Arnette’s wedding, where she was bridesmaid and maid of honor both, since Arnette would not have anybody else, and no other girl wanted the honor anyway if it meant walking down the aisle with Billie Delia. Or so Pat thought. She had gone to the wedding, not the reception, but she hadn’t missed a thing since she had a perfect view of the goings-on at the Oven with those girls from the Convent. She saw them. She saw those Poole boys. And she saw Billie Delia sit down and talk to one of the girls like they were old friends. She saw Reverend Pulliam and Steward Morgan argue with the girls, and when they drove off she saw Billie Delia throw her bouquet in Anna’s trash can before she strolled off, Apollo and Brood Poole in tow.

Billie Delia left the next day in her very own car and never said a word to her about the wedding, the reception, the Convent girl or anything. Pat tried to remember how that pressing iron got into her hand, what had been said that had her running up the stairs with a 1950s GE electric iron called Royal Ease clutched in her fingers to slam against her daughter’s head. She, the gentlest of souls, missed killing her own daughter by inches. She who loved children and protected them not only from each other but from too stern parents lunged after her own daughter. She who had trained herself to reasoning and soft manners and discretion and dignity, falling down the stairs and bruising herself so badly she had to cancel two days of class. Educated but self-taught also to make sure that everybody knew that the bastard-born daughter of the woman with sunlight skin and no last name was not only lovely but of great worth and inestimable value. Trying to understand how she could have picked up that pressing iron, Pat realized that ever since Billie Delia was an infant, she thought of her as a liability somehow. Vulnerable to the possibility of not being quite as much of a lady as Patricia Cato would like. Was it that business of pulling down her panties in the street? Billie Delia was only three then. Pat knew that had her daughter been an 8-rock, they would not have held it against her. They would have seen it for what it was—only an innocent child would have done that, surely. Have I missed something? Was there something else? But the question for her now in the silence of this here night was whether she had defended Billie Delia or sacrificed her. And was she sacrificing her still? The Royal Ease in her hand as she ran up the stairs was there to smash the young girl that lived in the minds of the 8-rocks, not the girl her daughter was.

Pat licked her bottom lip, tasted salt and wondered who exactly the tears were for.

Nathan DuPres, believed to be the oldest male in Ruby, welcomed the audience. He disputed the claim of seniority every year, pointing to his cousin Moss, then saying Reverend Simon Cary was a more suitable choice. But he let the town persuade him in the end because Reverend Cary talked too long, besides which he was not among the first families, so his arrival was associated not with World War II but with Korea. A stalwart man of such loving-kindness even Steward Morgan admired him, Nathan had married Elder Morgan’s daughter, Mirth. Because they had no surviving children, he deeply cherished other people’s: hosting the annual Children’s Day picnic, fine-tuning the rehearsals, keeping cough drops and fireballs in his pockets to pass out.

Now, smelling slightly of the horse he’d just dismounted, he climbed the platform and surveyed the audience. Nathan cleared his throat and surprised himself. Whatever he’d prepared to say had left him and the words he did say seemed appropriate to some other event.

“I was five,” he said, “when we left Louisiana and sixty-five when I hopped in the truck leaving Haven behind for this here new place. I know I wouldn’t have done it if Mirth was alive or any of our children was still aboveground. You all know my babies—all of them—was took by a tornado in 1922. Me and Mirth found them in a stranger’s wheat field. But I never regretted coming here. Never. There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that’s saying a heap. No, I never had a gnat-minute’s worth of regret. But there’s a sadness in me now. Maybe in this season of my Lord’s birth I’ll learn what it is. This parch in my throat. The water that stays in my eyes. I know I’ve seen more years than God usually allows a man, but this dryness is new. The eye water too. When I run my mind over it, all I can come up with is a dream I had a while back.”