Perfect Peace (23 page)

So Bartimaeus wept, alongside a befuddled father, for having proven himself an accomplice to his family’s trauma. “I should’ve told Authorly,” he murmured regretfully, sure that, if he had, he could have ushered the family through the details of Perfect’s transition without anyone being strangled. Yet since he didn’t, he’d have to live with the fact that whatever pain his baby brother endured was, at least partially, his fault.

Eventually, Gus calmed and joined Bartimaeus in the wailing. Unlike in past years, their voices, echoing throughout the barn, carried a bluesy tone. It was a low, raspy moan, like an Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong duet, with the patter of the rain keeping time. Sol stood on the porch, listening to the muffled performance, swaying and humming like a nightclub attendee, until remembering that the sound wasn’t supposed to entertain. It was supposed to soothe the soul, he guessed, and prepare one to endure another year of human frailty and transgressions. So, as though returning from a daydream, he shook his head rapidly and watched the rain nurture the earth as the voices faded among the thunder. He noted that, unlike in previous years, Gus’s and Bartimaeus’s voices weren’t erratic and out of sync, but rather complementary and accommodating to the hum of the rain and the occasional claps of thunder. Together, the combined voices of God and man created a natural, harmonic orchestra, which Sol found at once eerie and intriguing. He told himself that if Gus and Bartimaeus sounded like that each year, maybe he’d start going to the Jordan.

Swamp Creek residents became alarmed when, listening throughout the night, they failed to hear father and son crying in the wilderness. Most wondered what had happened. Like Sol, a few stood on the edges of their porches, staring through the downpour, wondering if somehow spring had decided not to come that year. As much as they had criticized him, they needed ole Gus Peace now to confirm that the world wasn’t coming to an end. It was all a bad omen, they agreed privately. Few remembered any spring’s arrival without Gus’s lament at the river, and Miss Mamie told W. C. that something bad was going to happen. She could feel it, she said.

Only Sugar Baby understood. But since no one consulted him about anything, his foresight was his alone to enjoy. If any of the Peaces, especially Sol, had bothered to look just twenty feet beyond the cocoon of their trauma, they
would have noticed Sugar Baby’s blurry form, standing at the edge of the road, studying the Peace home like one trying to memorize its exact measurements. As Gus had done in previous years at the Jordan, Sugar Baby stood amid the watery torrent with arms outstretched, bellowing words that were immediately usurped by the wind and the rain. Gus heard snippets of the familiar voice, but convinced himself that it was all in his mind. Bartimaeus also thought he heard someone say, “Beware the blaze!” but, like his father, he dismissed it as mental rubbish since talk of a fire made no sense in the midst of a storm.

By nightfall, after the rains had drizzled to a mist, Bartimaeus and Gus exited the barn for the house. Gus was still furious with Emma Jean—and intended to tell her so—but that wasn’t what troubled him. What troubled him was that he still didn’t know how to treat Perfect. Should he embrace the child or leave him alone altogether? Wouldn’t he be a sissy, at least at first? And how in the world, Gus thought, was he supposed to fix that? The rains had dulled his fury enough for him to return inside without killing Emma Jean—although he wanted to—but God had not told him how to treat a son who acted like a girl. Those had been the only times Chester Sr. had beaten him—when he cried like a girl—and he promised his father, after the last lashing, that he wouldn’t be a sissy. Now he promised himself he wouldn’t raise one, either.

Gus entered the house without looking at Perfect. Of course this wasn’t the boy’s fault, he knew, but the whole ordeal made him sick all over again.

“I want everybody in this house to come here right now!” Gus demanded, standing in the center of the living room.

The boys gathered quickly, but Emma Jean remained in the bedroom.

“I said,
everybody
!”

Only then did she emerge, massaging her neck slowly, unable to elicit the sympathy she needed so badly. Leaning against the wall, she waited for Gus to go on.

“It’s gon’ be some changes ’round here from now on.” Gus looked at each Peace. “What yo’ momma did is a shame befo’ God and man, and she gon’ have to pay for it one way or the other.” He shot Emma Jean a nasty look. “God gon’ handle that. But I’m gon’ handle this.” Gus pointed to the four walls of the living room and the floor. “This is
my
house, and I’m the man in it! And ain’t nobody, and I mean
nobody
, gon’ destroy my family.”

While the younger boys trembled, Authorly and Woody nodded their approval
of Gus’s newfound strength. Authorly almost said,
That’s right, Daddy!
but feared Gus might reprimand him for interrupting.

“This boy ain’t no girl no mo’.” He pointed at Perfect, but didn’t look at him. “He never was.”

Emma Jean bowed her head.

“But he’s still a Peace. And he’s yo’ brother and my . . . son, and we gon’ have to make this work. It ain’t gon’ be easy, so ain’t no need in thinkin’ it is, but we can make it.” Gus paused as he tried to maintain the resolve he had gathered in the barn, but it was slipping fast. “We ain’t lyin’ no mo’ and we ain’t hidin’ from nobody. Folks can say what they want to, and we might as well get ready for that. But we been a family and we gon’ stay a family.”

No one knew if Gus was finished, so everyone remained still. Emma Jean dared not move.

“Now, boy, you got a hard row to hoe,” he said to Perfect, looking at him for the first time since the transformation, “but whether you make it or not is up to you. We yo’ family and we gon’ help you, but we can’t save you from other folks talkin’. You gon’ have to be strong enough to take it and go ’head on ’bout yo’ business. It’s gon’ be hard at first. Real hard. But you can do it. Ain’t that right, Authorly?”

“Oh, yessir!”

“You a Peace man just like the rest of us now. And Peace mens is strong. My daddy used to say that all the time. It’s yo’ job to believe it.”

Perfect didn’t know if he should speak, so he didn’t.

“Authorly, you and James Earl can sleep in the other room now ’til y’all move out. Then Woody, you and Sol’ll get it and so on until everybody have it awhile. You”—he nodded toward Perfect—“gon’ sleep out here from now on.”

Mister rubbed Perfect’s shoulders.

“Now everybody go to bed. We got a lot to deal with in the mornin’. Good night.”

Gus moved toward the master bedroom, then turned abruptly. “And, by the way, we ain’t callin’ no son o’ mine
Perfect
. I don’t never wanna hear that name again.”

Authorly asked, “Then what we gon’ call him, Daddy?”

Gus shuffled to the sofa end table and retrieved the dusty family Bible. He opened it and drew a line through Perfect’s given name—
PERFECT
—then, after a slight pause, said, “We gon’ call him Paul—’cause he done been
changed.” Sol spelled it slowly and Gus wrote PAUL beneath the initial entry in the registry.

“All right,” Gus said, closing the Bible. “That’s that.” He exited the living room as the boys mouthed their brother’s new name. Paul never looked up.

In the bedroom, Gus rolled out the pallet without saying a word. “This is for you now.”

Emma Jean reclined onto the floor without argument.

Gus sat on the bed and removed his shoes. “This ain’t gon’ neva make no sense to me, woman. Neva. I cain’t believe no mother would do this to her own child. I jes’ cain’t believe it.”

Emma Jean held her peace. Her neck was still sore from earlier, and the last thing she needed was another dose of Gus’s wrath.

“Don’t you neva call him Perfect again. And I mean
never
!”

Emma Jean twitched as Gus shouted.

“His name’s Paul from now on. You remember that.”

She nodded.

“I oughta beat you for real, woman,” he said, staring at her, “but that wouldn’t fix nothin’, so I ain’t gon’ waste my strength.” He set his boots beneath the bed. “I ain’t neva met nobody like you, Emma Jean. Yo’ name is Emma Jean, ain’t it?”

She closed her eyes and hoped Gus wouldn’t hit her.

“Ain’t no tellin’ how many lies you done told. If you’d lie about yo’ own child, you’d definitely lie about anything else.” Gus blew out the coal oil lamp. “You gotta lotta nerve. I mean, a whole
lotta
nerve. Most men woulda kilt you over somethin’ like this.”

Emma Jean heard Gus wrap himself in the quilt she had made last year. She was grateful he had spared her.

“And, now, I’m s’pose to make a boy out o’ him? Huh?” He leaned over the bed in the dark. “I’m s’pose to make a man oughta that . . . that . . . child?”

What could Emma Jean say?

“You don’t know what you done done, woman. You don’t know what you done done.”

Within minutes, Gus was snoring. Emma Jean had never imagined how uncomfortable and drafty the floor was, and now she knew her husband possessed endurance she simply didn’t have. It was a reasonable price to pay though, she admitted, for what she had put Gus through. The boys, too. If she slept on that hard, uncomfortable floor the rest of her life, she knew it would
never compensate for the pain she had caused. Yet, even with that, Emma Jean prayed for Gus’s forgiveness as she continued rubbing her neck throughout the night.

Paul lay on Authorly’s old cot, whimpering. How could Gus just take his name away? He’d been Perfect his whole life, and now he was Paul?
Paul?
He hated the name. The
L
made his tongue graze his upper lip every time he said it. But he’d have to say it. He had no other choice. Having stricken “Perfect” from the Bible, Gus obviously wanted to obliterate all histories of a daughter—starting with her name—and Paul feared what might happen to him if he relapsed into his former identity. He’d simply have to get used to the name, he told himself.

Now he understood why Bartimaeus had acted so strangely that day among the honeysuckle blooms. But why hadn’t he explained things? Paul could’ve digested the news a little better, he convinced himself, had Bartimaeus explained the problem and told him what to do. He certainly wouldn’t have suffered the way he was suffering now. Paul wished Bartimaeus had said,
You’re a boy, Perfect
—or something like that—to prepare him for this impending transformation. As it was, Paul felt like someone who’d been pushed off a steep ledge into a mighty, rushing river.

Maybe Bartimaeus hadn’t understood. Of course he knew what he’d felt, but, without sight, how could he have explained anything with absolute certainty? No, Paul couldn’t blame him for anything. Bartimaeus’s silence had been his way of protecting his sister, and for that silence Paul was grateful. It might not have been helpful, but it was loving, and love was something Paul needed more desperately than anything else now.

He clutched his arms around his shoulders and glanced at the shadows in the dark. Everyone agreed that he was a boy now, and there was nothing he could do about it. In the past, Emma Jean had made the lump irrelevant, but now it seemed to be the center of things, hanging freely and shifting slightly whenever he moved. It obviously meant more than Emma Jean had said. Gus and the brothers’ reaction to it, lying at the base of Paul’s flat stomach, suggested that, in fact, it meant everything. They had stood and gazed, waiting to see if Paul had what other men have, and when they discovered he did, they immediately began constructing for him a new, masculine Self. It was as if the penis were the male identifier, the main thing, the
only
thing that made a boy
a boy
, and Paul now knew why Emma Jean had gone to great lengths to trivialize it.

He reached beneath his underwear and felt it. There was nothing particularly striking about it—of course he had no standard of comparison—except that it was there. And it was supposed to be. Shifting it with his forefinger, he was surprised at its malleability. He had never really felt it, not
really
, since Emma Jean had taught him to pee sitting down and to wipe the tip instead of shaking the shaft. What else did men use it for, he wondered. And why had God chosen to place it
there
, in the center of a man’s being?

Paul removed his hands and closed his eyes. With his hair gone, his head felt naked against the feather pillow. What would life be like when the sun rose again? Would he recognize himself? Would Eva Mae still want to be his friend? The only thing he knew for sure was that he wouldn’t be special anymore. Those days were gone. Never again would he comb Emma Jean’s hair or sit at the kitchen table, stirring cake batter. He would start going to the field with his brothers, he presumed, and doing only God knows what. And what would people say when they saw him? How would he explain that he
used
to be a girl? Who would believe him? Paul prayed no one asked him to disrobe as his father had. That had been the worst part of the ordeal—exposing himself to judgmental eyes. Gus’s gasp had made him believe that something was terribly wrong with him. That maybe he was the carrier of a deadly, contagious disease that promised to eliminate all the Peaces. Now, lying among his brothers, he knew the problem wasn’t biological. That had been proven. The trouble was something beyond his comprehension, something grown-ups knew more about than children. All he knew was that he represented an abnormality, a maladjustment, an aberration that folks in Swamp Creek knew nothing about. They’d have to make room for this absurdity, however, now that Emma Jean had revealed the truth, and all Paul knew to do was pray he could withstand it. If he could, then maybe he could live again, but that was yet to be seen.