Paradise (3 page)

The twins were born in 1924 and heard for twenty years what the previous forty had been like. They listened to, imagined and remembered every single thing because each detail was a jolt of pleasure, erotic as a dream, out-thrilling and more purposeful than even the war they had fought in.

In 1949, young and newly married, they were anything but fools. Long before the war, Haven residents were leaving and those who had not packed up were planning to. The twins stared at their dwindling postwar future and it was not hard to persuade other home boys to repeat what the Old Fathers had done in 1890. Ten generations had known what lay Out There: space, once beckoning and free, became unmonitored and seething; became a void where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose—behind any standing tree, behind the door of any house, humble or grand. Out There where your children were sport, your women quarry, and where your very person could be annulled; where congregations carried arms to church and ropes coiled in every saddle. Out There where every cluster of whitemen looked like a posse, being alone was being dead. But lessons had been learned and relearned in the last three generations about how to protect a town. So, like the ex-slaves who knew what came first, the ex-soldiers broke up the Oven and loaded it into two trucks even before they took apart their own beds. Before first light in the middle of August, fifteen families moved out of Haven—headed not for Muskogee or California as some had, or Saint Louis, Houston, Langston or Chicago, but deeper into Oklahoma, as far as they could climb from the grovel contaminating the town their grandfathers had made.

“How long?” asked the children from the back seats of the cars. “How long will it be?”

“Soon,” the parents replied. Hour after hour, the answer was the same. “Soon. Pretty soon.” When they saw Beaver Creek sliding through the muzzle of a state shaped like a gun, on through the acres of grass (cheaper than cheap after the tornadoes of 1949) that their pooled discharge pay had bought, it was pretty, soon and right on time.

What they left behind was a town whose once proud streets were weed-choked, monitored now by eighteen stubborn people wondering how they could get to the post office where there might be a letter from long gone grandchildren. Where the Oven had been, small green snakes slept in the sun. Who could have imagined that twenty-five years later in a brand-new town a Convent would beat out the snakes, the Depression, the tax man and the railroad for sheer destructive power?

Now one brother, a leader in everything, smashes the cellar door with the butt of his rifle. The other waits a few feet back with their nephew. All three descend the steps ready and excited to know. They are not disappointed. What they see is the devil’s bedroom, bathroom, and his nasty playpen.

The nephew always knew that his mother had tried as hard as she could to hang on. She had managed to see him ride the winning horse, but beyond that she had no strength. Not even enough to get interested in the debates about what to call this place she had traveled to with her brothers and her little boy. For three years New Haven had been the name most agreed to, although a few were loud in suggesting other names—names that did not speak, they said, of failure new or repeated. Pacific veterans liked Guam, others Inchon. Those who fought in Europe kept coming up with names only the children enjoyed pronouncing. The women had no firm opinion until the nephew’s mother died. Her funeral—the town’s first—stopped the schedule of discussion and its necessity. They named the town after one of their own and the men did not gainsay them. All right. Well. Ruby. Young Ruby.

It pleased his uncles who could then both mourn the sister and honor the friend and brother-in-law who didn’t make it back. But the nephew, winner of Ossie’s Purple Heart, heir to his father’s dog tags, witness to his mother’s name painted on signs and written on envelopes for the rest of his life, was displaced by these sad markings. The heart, the tags, the post office designation outsized him somehow. The women who had known and tended his mother spoiled Ruby’s boy. The men who enlisted with his father favored Ruby’s husband’s boy. The uncles took him for granted. When the decision was taken at the Oven, he was there. But two hours ago, when they’d swallowed the last piece of red meat, an uncle simply tapped him on the shoulder and said, “We got coffee in the truck. Go get your rifle.” Which he did, but he took the palm cross too.

It was four in the morning when they left; going on five when they arrived because, not wanting engine hum or headlights to ruin their cover of darkness, they walked the final miles. They parked the trucks in a copse of shin oak, for light could signal uninterrupted for mile upon mile in this country. When casing heads for fifty miles were invisible, a lit birthday cake could be spotted as soon as the match was struck. Half a mile from their destination fog surrounded them to their hips. They reached the Convent just seconds before the sun did and had a moment to see and register for all time how the mansion floated, dark and malevolently disconnected from God’s earth.

In the schoolroom, which used to be a dining room and now has no function except storage of desks pushed to the wall, the view is clear. The men of Ruby bunch at its windows. Finding nothing but confirming evidence elsewhere in the Convent, they gather here. The New Fathers of Ruby, Oklahoma. The chill they first encountered is gone; so is the mist. They are animated—warm with perspiration and the nocturnal odor of righteousness. The view is clear.

Track. That’s all the nephew can think of. Four-hundred-yard dashers or even the three-mile runners. The heads of two of them are thrown back as far as their necks will allow; fists tight as their arms pump and stretch for distance. One has her nappy head down, butting air and time wide open, one hand reaching for a winner’s wire nowhere in her future. Their mouths are open, pulling in breath, giving up none. The legs of all are off the ground, split wide above the clover.

Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary, they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game.

God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby.

MAVIS

T
he neighbors seemed pleased when the babies smothered. Probably because the mint green Cadillac in which they died had annoyed them for some time. They did all the right things, of course: brought food, telephoned their sorrow, got up a collection; but the shine of excitement in their eyes was clear.

When the journalist came, Mavis sat in the corner of the sofa, not sure whether to scrape the potato chip crumbs from the seams of the plastic cover or tuck them further in. But the journalist wanted the photo taken first, so the photographer ordered Mavis to the middle of the sofa, with the surviving children on either side of their distraught and grieving mother. She asked for the father too, of course. Jim? Is it Jim Albright? But Mavis said he wasn’t feeling so good, couldn’t come out, they’d have to go ahead without him. The journalist and the photographer exchanged looks, and Mavis thought they probably knew anyway that Frank—not Jim—was sitting on the edge of the bathtub drinking Seagram’s without a glass.

Mavis moved to the center of the sofa and cleaned her fingernails of potato chip dust until the other children joined her. The “other children” is what they would always be now. Sal put her arm around her mother’s waist. Frankie and Billy James were squished together on her right. Sal pinched her, hard. Mavis knew instantly that her daughter wasn’t nervous before the camera and all, because the pinch grew long, pointed. Sal’s fingernails were diving for blood.

“This must be terrible for you.” Her name, she said, was June.

“Yes, m’am. It’s terrible for all of us.”

“Is there something you want to say? Something you want other mothers to know?”

“M’am?”

June crossed her knees and Mavis saw that this was the first time she had worn the white high-heeled shoes. The soles were barely smudged. “You know. Something to warn them, caution them, about negligence.”

“Well.” Mavis took a deep breath. “I can’t think of any. I guess. I.”

The photographer squatted, cocking his head as he examined the possibilities.

“So some good can come out of this awful tragedy?” June’s smile was sad.

Mavis straightened against the success of Sal’s fingernails. The camera clicked. June moved her felt-tipped pen into place. It was a fine thing. Mavis had never seen anything like it—made ink on the paper but dry, not all blotty. “I don’t have nothing to say to strangers right now.”

For the second time the photographer adjusted the front window shade and walked back to the sofa holding a black box to Mavis’ face.

“I understand,” said June. Her eyes went soft, but the shine was like that of the neighbors. “And I do hate to put you through this, but maybe you could just tell me what happened? Our readers are simply appalled. Twins and all. Oh, and they want you to know you are in their prayers every single day.” She let her glance sweep the boys and Sal. “And you all too. They are praying for each and every one of you.”

Frankie and Billy James looked down at their bare feet. Sal rested her head on her mother’s shoulder while she clenched the flesh at Mavis’ waist.

“So could you tell us?” June smiled a smile that meant “Do me this favor.”

“Well.” Mavis frowned. She wanted to get it right this time. “He didn’t want the Spam. I mean the kids like it but he don’t so. In this heat you can’t keep much meat. I had a whole chuck steak go green on me once so I went and took the car, just some weenies, and I thought, well, Merle and Pearl. I was against it at first but he said—”

“M-e-r-l-e?”

“Yes, m’am.”

“Go on.”

“They wasn’t crying or nothing but he said his head hurt. I understood. I did. You can’t expect a man to come home from that kind of work and have to watch over babies while I go get something decent to put in front of him. I know that ain’t right.”

“So you took the twins. Why didn’t you take the other children along?”

“It’s a weasel out back,” said Frankie.

“Groundhog,” said Billy James.

“Shut!” Sal leaned over Mavis’ stomach and pointed at her brothers.

June smiled. “Wouldn’t it have been safer,” she continued, “with the other children in the car? I mean, they’re older.”

Mavis slid her thumb under her bra strap, pulling it back over her shoulder. “I wasn’t expecting no danger. Higgledy Piggledy is just yonder. I could of went to the Convenience but their stuff sits too long for me.”

“So you left the newborns in the car and went in to buy some chuck steak—”

“No, m’am. Weenies.”

“Right. Wieners.” June was writing quickly but didn’t seem to be crossing out anything. “But what I want to ask is, why did it take so long? To buy one item.”

“It didn’t. Take long. I couldn’t of been in there more than five minutes, tops.”

“Your babies suffocated, Mrs. Albright. In a hot car with the windows closed. No air. It’s hard to see that happening in five minutes.”

It could be sweat, but it hurt enough to be blood. She didn’t dare swat Sal’s hand away or acknowledge the pain even slightly. Instead she scratched the corner of her mouth and said, “I’ve punished myself over that, but that’s pretty near the most it could of been. I walked in there straight to the dairy section and picked up two packs of Armours which is high you know but I didn’t even look for the price. Some of them is cheaper but just as good. But I was hurrying so I didn’t look.”

“You were hurrying?”

“Oh, yes, m’am. He was fit to be tied. Spam ain’t nothing for a working man to eat.”

“And wieners are?”

“I thought about chops. I thought about chops.”

“Didn’t you know your husband was coming home for supper, Mrs. Albright? Doesn’t he come home for supper every day?”

She’s a really nice person, Mavis thought. Polite. She didn’t look around the room or at the boys’ feet, or jump at the crashing noise from the rear of the house, followed by a toilet flush.

The sound of the photographer snapping his cases was loud when the toilet stopped. “Got it,” he said. “Real nice meeting you, m’am.” He leaned in to shake Mavis’ hand. His hair was the same color as the reporter’s.

“Get enough of the Cadillac?” asked June.

“Plenty.” He made an O with thumb and forefinger. “You all be nice, hear?” He touched his hat and was gone.

Sal left off squeezing her mother’s waist. She leaned forward and concentrated on swinging her foot, only occasionally hitting Mavis’ shin.

From where they sat no one in the room could see the Cadillac parked in front of the house. But it had been seen for months by everybody in the neighborhood and could now be seen by anybody in Maryland since the photographer had taken more shots of it than he had of them. Mint green. Lettuce green. Cool. But the color wouldn’t show in the newspaper. What would show would be the size, the flashiness of the place where babies had died. Babies forever unseen now because the mother did not even have a snapshot of their trusting faces.

Sal jumped up and screamed, “Ow! Look! A beetle!” and stomped on her mother’s foot.

Mavis had said, “Yes, m’am. He come home for supper every day,” and wondered what that would be like: to have a husband who came home every day. For anything. After the reporter left, she wanted to go look at the damage Sal had done to her side, but Frank was still in the bathroom, asleep probably, and it wasn’t a good idea to bother him. She thought to clean the potato chip crumbs from the seams of the plastic covers, but where she wanted to be was in the Cadillac. It wasn’t hers; it was his, yet Mavis loved it maybe more than he did and lied to him about losing the second set of keys. It was what she talked about last as June left, saying, “It ain’t new, though. It’s three years old. A ’65.” If she could, she would have slept out there, in the back seat, snuggled in the place where the twins had been, the only ones who enjoyed her company and weren’t a trial. She couldn’t, of course. Frank told her she better not touch, let alone drive, the Cadillac as long as she lived. So she was as surprised as anybody when she stole it.

“You all right?” Frank was already under the sheet, and Mavis woke with a start of terror, which dissolved quickly into familiar fright.

“I’m okay.” She searched the darkness for a sign, trying to feel, smell his mood in advance. But he was a blank, just the way he had been at supper the evening of the newspaper interview. The perfect meat loaf (not too loose, not too tight—two eggs made the difference) must have pleased him. Either that or he had reached balance: enough in, enough at hand. In any case, he’d been easy, even playful, at the table, while the other children were downright bold. Sal had Frank’s old shaving razor unfolded by her plate and asked her father a series of questions, all starting with “Is it sharp enough to cut…?” And Frank would answer, “Cut anything from chin hair to gristle,” or “Cut the eyelashes off a bedbug,” eliciting peals of laughter from Sal. When Billy James spit Kool-Aid into Mavis’ plate, his father said, “Hand me that catsup, Frankie, and Billy you stop playing in your mother’s food, you hear?”

She didn’t think it would take them long, and seeing how they were at supper, enjoying each other’s jokes and all, she knew Frank would let the children do it. The newspaper people would think of something catchy, and June, “the only lady journalist the
Courier
had,” would do the human interest.

Mavis tried not to stiffen as Frank made settling-down noises on the mattress. Did he have his shorts on? If she knew that she would know whether he was looking to have sex, but she couldn’t find out without touching him. As if to satisfy her curiosity, Frank snapped the waistband of his boxers. Mavis relaxed, permitted herself a sigh that she hoped sounded like a snore. The sheet was off before she could complete it. When he pulled her nightgown up, he threw it over her face, and she let that mercy be. She had misjudged. Again. He was going to do this first and then the rest. The other children would be behind the door, snickering, Sal’s eyes as cold and unforgiving as they were when she was told of the accident. Before Frank came to bed, Mavis had been dreaming of something important she was supposed to do, but couldn’t remember what it was. Just as it came to her, Frank had asked her was she all right. Now she supposed she really was all right because the important thing she’d forgotten would never need doing anymore.

Would it be quick like most always? or long, wandering, collapsing in wordless fatigue?

It was neither. He didn’t penetrate—just rubbed himself to climax while chewing a clump of her hair through the nightgown that covered her face. She could have been a life-size Raggedy Ann.

Afterwards he spoke to her in the dark. “I don’t know, Mave. I just don’t know.”

Should she say, What? What you mean? What don’t you know? Or keep quiet? Mavis chose silence because suddenly she understood that he was talking not to her but to the other children, snickering behind the door.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe we can fix it. Maybe not. I just don’t know.” He let out a deep yawn, then, “Don’t see how, though.”

It was, she knew, the signal—to Sal, to Frankie, to Billy James.

The rest of the night she waited, not closing her eyes for a second. Frank’s sleep was sound and she would have slipped out of bed (as soon as he had not smothered or strangled her) and opened the door except for the breathing beyond it. She was sure Sal squatted there—ready to pounce or grab her legs. Her upper lip would be raised showing eleven-year-old teeth too big for her snarling mouth. Dawn, Mavis thought, would be critical. The trap would be agreed upon but maybe not laid yet. Her sharpest concentration would be needed to locate it before it sprung.

At the first hint of gray light Mavis eased out of the bed. If Frank woke it was all over. Clutching a pair of red pedal pushers and a Daffy Duck sweatshirt, she made it to the bathroom. She took a soiled brassiere from the hamper and got dressed fast. No panties, and she couldn’t go back in the bedroom for her shoes. The big thing was to get past the other children’s room. The door stood open and, although there was no sound coming out, Mavis chilled at the thought of approaching it. Down the hall to the left was the little kitchen–dining room, the living room to the right. She would have to decide which way she was headed before she ran past that door. They would probably expect her to go straight to the kitchen as usual, so maybe she should shoot for the front door. Or maybe they counted on her changing a habit, and the trap was not in the kitchen at all.

Suddenly she remembered her purse was in the living room, perched on the television cabinet, which, when the set broke, had become a catchall. And the spare keys were pinned under a tear in the purse’s lining. Holding her breath, eyes wide to the darkness, Mavis padded quickly past the other children’s open door. With her back exposed to that much danger, she felt feverish—sweaty and cold together.

Not only was her purse where she remembered, Sal’s galoshes were lying at the front door. Mavis grabbed the purse, stuck her feet in her daughter’s yellow boots and escaped onto the front porch. She did not look toward the kitchen and never saw it again.

Getting out of the house had been so intense, she was pulling the Cadillac away from the curb when she realized she had no idea of what to do next. She drove toward Peg’s; she didn’t know the woman all that well, but her tears at the funeral impressed Mavis. She had always wanted to know her better, but Frank found ways to prevent acquaintance from becoming friendship.

The one streetlight seemed miles away and the sun reluctant to rise, so she had trouble finding Peg’s house. When, finally, she did, she parked across the street to wait for stronger skylight before knocking on the door. Peg’s house was dark, the shade of the picture window still down. Complete quiet. The wooden girl in the petunias, her face hidden by a fresh blue bonnet, tilted a watering can, a family of carved ducks lined at her heels. The lawn, edged and close-cut, looked like a carpet sample of expensive wool. Nothing moved, neither the tiny windmill nor the ivy surrounding it. At the side of the house, however, a rose of Sharon, taller than Peg’s roof and older, was shaking. Stirred by the air conditioner’s exhaust it danced, roughing blossoms and buds to the grass. Wild, it looked wild, and Mavis’ pulse raced with it. According to the Cadillac’s clock it wasn’t five-thirty yet. Mavis decided to drive around for a while and return at a respectable hour. Six maybe. But they would be up, too, by then and Frank would see that the Caddy was gone. He would call the police for sure.