Paradise (26 page)

What’s the point? Richard asked himself. Just enjoy the show and let Pat alone. He wanted to discuss, not argue. He watched the children’s movements with mild affection at first, then with growing interest. He had assumed it was in order to please as many children as possible that there were four innkeepers, seven Marys and Josephs. But perhaps there were other reasons. Seven holy families? Richard tapped Pat on the shoulder. “Who put this together? I thought you told me there were nine original families. Where the other two? And why only one Wise Man? And why is he putting the gifts back in the satchel?”

“You don’t know where you are, do you?”

“Well help me figure this place out. I know I’m an outsider, but I’m not an enemy.”

“No, you’re not. But in this town those two words mean the same thing.”

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. In a shower of gold paper stars, the families lay down the dolls, the staffs and form a ring. The voices from the audience peal as one. I once was lost but now am found.

Richard felt bitterness take the place of the nausea that had driven him from his seat. Twenty, thirty years from now, he thought, all sorts of people will claim pivotal, controlling, defining positions in the rights movement. A few would be justified. Most would be frauds. What could not be gainsaid, but would remain invisible in the newspapers and the books he bought for his students, were the ordinary folk. The janitor who turned off the switch so the police couldn’t see; the grandmother who kept all the babies so the mothers could march; the backwoods women with fresh towels in one hand and a shotgun in the other; the little children who carried batteries and food to secret meetings; the ministers who kept whole churchfuls of hunted protesters calm till help came; the old who gathered up the broken bodies of the young; the young who spread their arms wide to protect the old from batons they could not possibly survive; parents who wiped the spit and tears from their children’s faces and said, “Never mind, honey. Never you mind. You are not and never will be a nigger, a coon, a jig, a jungle bunny nor any other thing white folks teach their children to say. What you are is God’s.” Yes, twenty, thirty years from now, those people will be dead or forgotten, their small stories part of no grand record or even its footnotes, although they were the ones who formed the spine on which the televised ones stood. Now, seven years after the murder of the man in whose stead he would happily have taken the sword, he was herding a flock which believed not only that it had created the pasture it grazed but that grass from any other meadow was toxic. In their view Booker T. solutions trumped Du Bois problems every time. No matter who they are, he thought, or how special they think they are, a community with no politics is doomed to pop like Georgia fatwood. Was blind but now I see.

“Do they?” It was phrased as a question but it sounded like a conclusion to Pat.

“They are better than you think,” she said.

“They are better than
they
think,” he told her. “Why are they satisfied with so little?”

“This is their home; mine too. Home is not a little thing.”

“I’m not saying it is. But can’t you even imagine what it must feel like to have a true home? I don’t mean heaven. I mean a real earthly home. Not some fortress you bought and built up and have to keep everybody locked in or out. A real home. Not some place you went to and invaded and slaughtered people to get. Not some place you claimed, snatched because you got the guns. Not some place you stole from the people living there, but your own home, where if you go back past your great-great-grandparents, past theirs, and theirs, past the whole of Western history, past the beginning of organized knowledge, past pyramids and poison bows, on back to when rain was new, before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought they were fish, back when God said Good! Good!—there, right there where you know your own people were born and lived and died. Imagine that, Pat. That place. Who was God talking to if not to my people living in my home?”

“You preaching, Reverend.”

“No, I’m talking to you, Pat. I’m talking to you.”

The final clapping began when the children broke the circle and lined up for their bows. Anna Flood rose when the audience did, pushing her way through to where Pat and Richard stood, animated, eyes locked. Both women had been subjected to speculation about which one the new and young and single and handsome preacher would favor. Anna and Pat were the only single women of a certain age available. Unless the new preacher liked them much younger, he’d have to choose between these two. Two years ago, Anna had won—she was sure of it—hands down. So far. Now she moved toward Richard smiling broadly, hoping to freeze the tongues of anyone who might think otherwise seeing him prefer Pat’s company to hers during the Christmas play. They were careful in their courtship, never touching in public. When she cooked supper for him they made sure the parsonage blazed with light, and he drove or walked her home by seven-thirty for all Ruby to see. Still, no date having been set, tongues might get restive. More than seemly behavior, however, was on her mind: Richard’s eye light. It seemed dulled to her lately. As though he’d lost a battle on which his life depended.

She got to him just before the crowd surged out, pressing toward the food tables, chatting, laughing.

“Hi, Pat. What happened to you, Richard?”

“Sick as a dog there for a minute,” he said. “Come on. Let’s stand outside before it starts up again.”

They said goodbye and left Pat to decide whether she wanted to talk to happy parents, mind the food table or leave. She had decided on the last when Carter Seawright stepped on her foot.

“Oh. Excuse me, Miss Best. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Carter, but please calm yourself down.”

“Yes, m’am.”

“And don’t forget. Right after the holidays, you and I have a makeup lesson. January sixth, you hear?”

“I be there, Miss Best.”

“Is that ‘I’ll’? ‘I’ll be there’?”

“Yes, m’am, Miss Best. I will.”

In the kitchen heating water for tea, Pat banged the cupboard door so hard the cups rattled. It was a toss-up as to whose behavior had annoyed her most, Anna’s or her own. At least she could understand Anna: protecting her stake. But why had she defended people and things and ideas with a passion she did not feel? The deep weeping pleasure the audience took from the play disgusted her. All that nonsense she had grown up with seemed to her like an excuse to be hateful. Richard was right to ask, why seven and not nine? Pat had seen the play all her life, although she had never been chosen for any part other than the choir. That was when Soane taught school—before she even noticed the singularity of the numbers. It was some time later that she saw there were only eight. By the time she understood that the Cato line was cut, there was another erasure. Who? There were only two families who were not part of the original nine but had come to Haven early enough to have a kind of associate status: the Jurys (although their grandson, Harper, had married a Blackhorse original—good for him) and her father’s father: Fulton Best. They didn’t count as originals, so it had to be—who? Surely not the Floods if Anna married Richard Misner. Wouldn’t that count? Could Richard save the Flood line? Or was it the Pooles, because of Billie Delia? No. There were shiploads of males in that family. It would be proof of Apollo’s or Brood’s dalliance, but if that were a deterrent, the Morgans themselves had been in grave danger until K.D. married Arnette. And if Arnette had a son rather than a daughter, how much safer their position would be. The Fleetwoods’ too. Since Jeff and Sweetie had not measured up, Arnette was critical to both families.

The tea was ready, and Pat leaned over it, frowning, and so intent on puzzling the problem out that she did not hear Roger enter until he stood in the doorframe.

“You left too early,” he said. “We caroled some.”

“Yes? Oh. Well.” Pat dredged up a smile.

“Missed some good cake too.” He yawned. “Took up a good collection for Lone afterwards. Lord, that’s a crazy woman.” Too tired to laugh, Roger shook his head and smiled. “But she was good in her day.” He turned to leave, saying, “Well, good night, baby. I have to squeal tires early tomorrow.”

“Daddy.” Pat spoke to his back.

“Uh huh?”

“Why do they change it? There used to be nine families in the play. Then eight for years and years. Now seven.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You know.”

“No. I don’t know.”

“The play. How the holy families get fewer and fewer.”

“Kate does all that. And Nathan. Picking the children, I mean. Maybe they didn’t have enough for the usual size.”

“Daddy.” He must have heard the doubt in her tone.

“What?” If he did, it didn’t show.

“It was skin color, wasn’t it?”

“What?”

“The way people get chosen and ranked in this town.”

“Aw, no. Well, there might have been a little offense taken—long ago. But nothing hard.”

“No? What about what Steward said when you got married?”

“Steward? Oh, well, the Morgans are very serious about themselves. Too serious sometimes.”

Pat blew in her cup.

Roger met her silence and then returned to a less uncomfortable topic.

“I thought the play was pretty nice, myself. We have to do something about Nathan, though. He ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer anymore.” Then, as an afterthought, “What Reverend Misner have to say for himself? Looked awful serious back there.”

She didn’t look up. “Just…talk.”

“Anything happening with you two?”

“Daddy, please.”

“No harm in asking, is there?” He paused for an answer, and when there was none he left, murmuring something about the furnace.

Yes there is. Harm. Pat sipped carefully from a spoon. Ask Richard Misner. Ask him what I just did to him. Or what everyone else does. When he asks questions, they close him out to anything but the obvious, the superficial. And I of all people know exactly what it feels like. Not good enough to be represented by eight-year-olds on a stage.

Fifteen minutes later Pat stood in the garden, seventy yards from Delia’s tombstone. The evening had turned chilly but still not cold enough for snow. The lemon mint had shriveled, but lavender and sage bushes were full and fragrant. No wind to speak of, so the fire in the oil barrel was easily contained. One by one she dropped cardboard files, sheets of paper—both stapled and loose—into the flames. She had to tear the covers off the composition notebooks and hold them slant with a stick so they would not smother the fire. The smoke was bitter. She stepped back and gathered clumps of lavender and threw it in as well. It took some time, but finally she turned her back on the ashes and walked into her house trailing along the odor of burnt lavender. At the kitchen sink she washed her hands and dashed water on her face. She felt clean. Perhaps that was why she began to laugh. Lightly at first and then heavily, her head thrown back as she sat at the table. Did they really think they could keep this up? The numbers, the bloodlines, the who fucks who? All those generations of 8-rocks kept going, just to end up narrow as bale wire? Well, to stay alive maybe they could, maybe they should, since nobody dies in Ruby.

She wiped her eyes and lifted the cup from its saucer. Tea leaves clustered in its well. More boiling water, a little steeping, and the black leaves would yield more. Even more. Ever more. Until. Well, now. What do you know? It was clear as water. The generations had to be not only racially untampered with but free of adultery too. “God bless the pure and holy” indeed. That was their purity. That was their holiness. That was the deal Zechariah had made during his humming prayer. It wasn’t God’s brow to be feared. It was his own, their own. Is that why “Be the Furrow of His Brow” drove them crazy? But the bargain must have been broken or changed, because there were only seven now. By whom? The Morgans, probably. They ran everything, controlled everything. What new bargain had the twins struck? Did they really believe that no one died in Ruby? Suddenly Pat thought she knew all of it. Unadulterated and unadulteried 8-rock blood held its magic as long as it resided in Ruby. That was their recipe. That was their deal. For Immortality.

Pat’s smile was crooked. In that case, she thought, everything that worries them must come from women.

“Dear God,” she murmured. “Dear, dear God. I burned the papers.”

CONSOLATA

I
n the good clean darkness of the cellar, Consolata woke to the wrenching disappointment of not having died the night before. Each morning, her hopes dashed, she lay on a cot belowground, repelled by her sluglike existence, each hour of which she managed to get through by sipping from black bottles with handsome names. Each night she sank into sleep determined it would be the final one, and hoped that a great hovering foot would descend and crush her like a garden pest.

Already in a space tight enough for a coffin, already devoted to the dark, long removed from appetites, craving only oblivion, she struggled to understand the delay. “What for?” she asked, and her voice was one among many that packed the cellar from rafter to stone floor. Several times a week, at night or in the shadowy part of the day, she rose aboveground. Then she would stand outside in the garden, walk around, look up at the sky to see the only light it had that she could bear. One of the women, Mavis usually, would insist on joining her. Talking, talking, always talking. Or a couple of others would come. Sipping from the dusty bottles with handsome names—Jarnac, Médoc, Haut-Brion and Saint-Émilion—made it possible to listen to them, even answer sometimes. Other than Mavis, who had been there the longest, it was getting harder and harder to tell one from another. What she knew of them she had mostly forgotten, and it seemed less and less important to remember any of it, because the timbre of each of their voices told the same tale: disorder, deception and, what Sister Roberta warned the Indian girls against, drift. The three
d
’s that paved the road to perdition, and the greatest of these was drift.

Over the past eight years they had come. The first one, Mavis, during Mother’s long illness; the second right after she died. Then two more. Each one asking permission to linger a few days but never actually leaving. Now and then one or another packed a scruffy little bag, said goodbye and seemed to disappear for a while—but only a while. They always came back to stay on, living like mice in a house no one, not even the tax collector, wanted, with a woman in love with the cemetery. Consolata looked at them through the bronze or gray or blue of her various sunglasses and saw broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying. When she was sipping Saint-Émilion or the smoky Jarnac, she could tolerate them, but more and more she wanted to snap their necks. Anything to stop the badly cooked indigestible food, the greedy hammering music, the fights, the raucous empty laughter, the claims. But especially the drift. Sister Roberta would have pulped their hands. Not only did they do nothing except the absolutely necessary, they had no plans to do anything. Instead of plans they had wishes—foolish babygirl wishes. Mavis talked endlessly of surefire moneymaking ventures: beehives; something called “bed and breakfast”; a catering company; an orphanage. One thought she had found a treasure chest of money or jewels or something and wanted help to cheat the others of its contents. Another was secretly slicing her thighs, her arms. Wishing to be the queen of scars, she made thin red slits in her skin with whatever came to hand: razor, safety pin, paring knife. One other longed for what sounded like a sort of cabaret life, a crowded place where she could sing sorrow-filled songs with her eyes closed. Consolata listened to these babygirl dreams with padded, wine-dampened indulgence, for they did not infuriate her as much as their whispers of love which lingered long after the women had gone. One by one they would float down the stairs, carrying a kerosene lamp or a candle, like maidens entering a temple or a crypt, to sit on the floor and talk of love as if they knew anything at all about it. They spoke of men who came to caress them in their sleep; of men waiting for them in the desert or by cool water; of men who once had desperately loved them; or men who should have loved them, might have loved, would have.

On her worst days, when the maw of depression soiled the clean darkness, she wanted to kill them all. Maybe that was what her slug life was being prolonged for. That and the cold serenity of God’s wrath. To die without His forgiveness condemned her soul. But to die without Mary Magna’s fouled it per omnia saecula saeculorum. She might have given it freely if Consolata had told her in time, confessed before the old woman’s mind faded to singsong. On that last day, Consolata had climbed into the bed behind her and, tossing the pillows on the floor, raised up the feathery body and held it in her arms and between her legs. The small white head nestled between Consolata’s breasts, and so the lady had entered death like a birthing, rocked and prayed for by the woman she had kidnapped as a child. Kidnapped three children, actually; the easiest thing in the world in 1925. Mary Magna, a sister, not a mother, then, flatly refused to leave two children in the street garbage they sat in. She simply picked them up, took them to the hospital where she worked and cleaned them in a sequence of Ordorno’s Baking Soda, Glover’s Mange, soap, alcohol, Blue Ointment, soap, alcohol and then iodine carefully placed on their sores. She dressed them and, with the complicity of the other mission sisters, took them with her to the ship. They were six American nuns on their way back to the States after twelve years of being upstaged by older, sterner Portuguese Orders. Nobody questioned Sisters Devoted to Indian and Colored People paying cut-rate passage for three certainly not white urchins in their charge. For there were three now, Consolata being a last-minute decision because she was already nine years old. By anyone’s standard the snatching was a rescue, because whatever life the exasperated, headstrong nun was dragging them to, it would be superior to what lay before them in the shit-strewn paths of that city. When they arrived in Puerto Limón, Sister Mary Magna placed two of them in an orphanage, for by then she had fallen in love with Consolata. The green eyes? the tea-colored hair? maybe her docility? Perhaps her smoky, sundown skin? She took her along as a ward to the post to which the difficult nun was now assigned—an asylum/boarding school for Indian girls in some desolate part of the North American West.

In white letters on a field of blue, a sign near the access road read
CHRIST THE KING SCHOOL FOR NATIVE GIRLS.
Maybe that was what everybody meant to call it, but in Consolata’s living memory only the nuns used its proper name—mostly in prayer. Against all reason, the students, the state officials and those they encountered in town called it the Convent.

For thirty years Consolata worked hard to become and remain Mary Magna’s pride, one of her singular accomplishments in a lifetime of teaching, nurturing and tending in places with names the nun’s own parents had never heard of and could not repeat until their daughter pronounced them. Consolata worshipped her. When she was stolen and taken to the hospital, they stuck needles in her arms to protect her, they said, from diseases. The violent illness that followed she remembered as pleasant, because while she lay in the children’s ward a beautiful framed face watched her. It had lake-blue eyes, steady, clear but with a hint of panic behind them, a worry that Consolata had never seen. It was worth getting sick, dying, even, to see that kind of concern in an adult’s eyes. Every now and then the woman with the framed face would reach over and touch Consolata’s forehead with the backs of her knuckles or smooth her wet, tangled hair. The glass beads hanging from her waist or from her fingers winked. Consolata loved those hands: the flat fingernails, the smooth tough skin of the palm. And she loved the unsmiling mouth, which never needed to show its teeth to radiate happiness or welcome. Consolata could see a cool blue light beaming softly under the habit. It came, she thought, from the heart of her.

Straight from the hospital, Consolata, in a clean brown dress that reached her ankles, accompanied the nuns to a ship called
Atenas.
After the Panama call they disembarked in New Orleans and from there traveled in an automobile, a train, a bus, another automobile. And the magic that started with the hospital needles piled up and up: toilets that swirled water clear enough to drink; soft white bread already sliced in its wrapper; milk in glass bottles; and all through the day every day the gorgeous language made especially for talking to heaven. Ora pro nobis gratia plena sanctificetur nomen tuum fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra sed libera nos a malo a malo a malo. Only when they arrived at the school did the magic slow. Although the land had nothing to recommend it, the house was like a castle, full of a beauty Mary Magna said had to be eliminated at once. Consolata’s first tasks were to smash offending marble figures and tend bonfires of books, crossing herself when naked lovers blew out of the fire and had to be chased back to the flame. Consolata slept in the pantry, scrubbed tile, fed chickens, prayed, peeled, gardened, canned and laundered. It was she, not any of the others, who discovered the wild bush heavy with stinging-hot peppers and who cultivated them. She learned rudimentary cooking skills from Sister Roberta and got good enough to take over the kitchen as well as the garden. She attended classes with the Indian girls but formed no attachments to them.

For thirty years she offered her body and her soul to God’s Son and His Mother as completely as if she had taken the veil herself. To her of the bleeding heart and bottomless love. To her quae sine tactu pudoris. To the beata viscera Mariae Virginis. To her whose way was narrow but scented with the sweetness of thyme. To Him whose love was so perfectly available it dumbfounded wise men and the damned. He who had become human so we could know Him touch Him see Him in the littlest ways. Become human so His suffering would mirror ours, that His death throes, His doubt, despair, His failure, would speak for and absorb throughout earthtime what we were vulnerable to. And those thirty years of surrender to the living God cracked like a pullet’s egg when she met the living man.

It was 1954. People were building houses, fencing and plowing land, some seventeen miles south of Christ the King. They had begun to build a feed store, a grocery store and, to Mary Magna’s delight, a pharmacy closer than ninety miles. There she could purchase the bolts of antiseptic cotton for the girls’ menstrual periods, the fine needles, the sixty-weight thread that kept them busy mending, mending, the Lydia Pinkham, the StanBack powder, and the aluminum chloride with which she made deodorant.

On one of these trips, when Consolata accompanied Mary Magna in the school’s Mercury station wagon, even before they reached the newly cut road it was clear something was happening. Something unbridled was going on under the scalding sun. They could hear loud cheering, and instead of thirty or so energetic people going quietly about the business of making a town, they saw horses galloping off into yards, down the road, and people screaming with laughter. Small girls with red and purple flowers in their hair were jumping up and down. A boy holding for dear life onto a horse’s neck was lifted off and declared winner. Young men and boys swung their hats, chased horses and wiped their brimming eyes. As Consolata watched that reckless joy, she heard a faint but insistent Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Then a memory of just such skin and just such men, dancing with women in the streets to music beating like an infuriated heart, torsos still, hips making small circles above legs moving so rapidly it was fruitless to decipher how such ease was possible. These men here were not dancing, however; they were laughing, running, calling to each other and to women doubled over in glee. And although they were living here in a hamlet, not in a loud city full of glittering black people, Consolata knew she knew them.

It was some time before Mary Magna could get the pharmacist’s attention. Finally he left the crowd and walked them back to his house, where a closed-off part of the front porch served as a shop. He opened the screen door and, politely inclining his head, ushered Mary Magna in. It was while Consolata waited on the steps that she saw him for the first time. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. A lean young man astride one horse, leading another. His khaki shirt was soaked with sweat, and at some point he removed his wide flat hat to wipe perspiration from his forehead. His hips were rocking in the saddle, back and forth, back and forth. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Consolata saw his profile, and the wing of a feathered thing, undead, fluttered in her stomach. He rode on past and disappeared into the feedlot. Mary Magna emerged with her purchases, complaining a little about something or other—the price, the quality—and hurried to the station wagon, Consolata, behind her, carrying blue-tissued rolls of surgical cotton. Just as she opened the passenger door he passed again. On foot, running lightly, eager to return to the festive knot of people farther down the road. Casually, perfunctorily, he looked her way. Consolata looked back and thought she saw hesitation in his eyes if not in his stride. Quickly she ducked into the sun-baked Mercury, where the heat seemed to explain her difficult breathing. She did not see him again for two months of time made unstable by a feathered thing fighting for wingspread. Months of fervent prayer and extra care taken with chores. Months of tension also, because the school had been enjoined to close. Although the endowment of the wealthy woman who founded and funded the order had survived the thirties, it was depleted by the fifties. The good, sweet Indian girls were long gone—snatched away by their mothers and brothers or graduated into a pious life. For three years now the school had been soliciting wards of the state: impudent girls who clearly thought the sisters were hilarious most of the time, sinister the rest of the time. Two had already run away; only four remained. Unless the sisters could persuade the state to send them (and pay for) more wicked, wayward Indian girls, the orders were to prepare for closure and reassignment. The state had wayward girls, all right, since wayward could mean anything from bedwetting to truancy to stuttering in class, but preferred to place them in Protestant schools, where they could understand the clothes if not the religious behavior of the teachers. Catholic churches and schools in Oklahoma were as rare as fish pockets. Which was why the benefactress had bought the mansion in the first place. It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. Mary Magna wrote letter after letter, traveled to Oklahoma City and beyond, hoping to save the school. In that distracted atmosphere, Consolata’s fumbling, dropping some things, scorching others, making rushed, unscheduled visits to the chapel, were nuisances to the sisters but not signs of alarm distinguishable from their own. When asked what the matter was or reprimanded for some intolerable lapse, she invented excuses or sulked. Looming in her confusion, daily refreshing her hasty piety, was the fear of being asked to step outside the Convent, to shop in the town again. So she did the yard chores at first light and spent the balance of the day inside, mismanaging her work. None of which helped in the end. He came to her.