Rails Under My Back (14 page)

I don’t know, Lula Mae said. He sent me jus that one letter. Them cowboy friends in California told him bout it.

California? Porsha said. California on the other coast. West. The Pacific, not the—

Where the letter?

Beulah said nothing.

See, they gots lots of cowboys down there in the pampers.

Pampas? You mean—

That’s what I said.

Aunt Beulah, Porsha said. Beg yo pardon. Ain’t no pampas in Brazil. Daughter, close yo mouth, Sheila said. What I tell you bout talkin grown?

Yeah. Go geography somebody else.

Hush, Sheila said. You know ain’t nobody killed nobody.

And I bet they didn’t kill Nap either?

Hush.

Down there in that Houston jail.

Hush. I don’t want to argue with you.

Shit, Dave said. You know how white folks is. Jealous.

You said that right.

R.L. famous all over California.

Yeah. Rodeo man.

Say he could rassle a steer by his balls.

And ride a horse
—

What you know bout it? Who tellin it?

…

You know how white folks is. Jealous. They kick him and that Indian girl off the train. And they spend the night out in the desert, that Indian girl snapping her umbrella open and shut open and shut to scare off them coyotes.

Gracie stayed out of it. Far as she was concerned, California was Brazil was Paris was Timbuktu cause it was so far away she’d never go there. Beulah knew (Lula Mae had mailed her R.L.’s letter, the letter that Beulah showed no one, like the letter from R.L.’s wife that she hid in her bosom, repeating the message out loud for everyone’s ears), it was on a spring green day that R.L. galloped off to Brazil, and it was on a summer green day that Beulah told war-bound Lucifer and John, See if you can find his grave. Robert Lee Harris. And don’t forget to look up Robert Lee Junior. Harris the name.

Damn, Beulah, Dave said. San Francisco is a long ways from Los Angeles. So I’ve heard. One south, the other north.

Yeah, Sam said. And how you spect them to find
em
when we couldn’t find R.L., when we tried and tried after the war, after they discharged us.

All I’m sayin is they can try, that’s all.

We’ll try, Lucifer said.

Yeah, John said, mouth tight, we’ll try.

I can’t believe yall, Sheila said. These boys are going off overseas, they are going off to … Don’t you think they got enough on they minds?

We’ll try, John said.

A few days later, George—the man whom John refused to call father, who made John frown and spit at the thought—issued his request. Don’t forget to look up Port Chicago. They have it all cleaned up now. But still …

We’ll try.

And don’t forget my buddy on Leidesdorff Street, if yall need a place to stay.

We’ll keep him in mind.

Steam and hiss rose from the tracks. Redcaps fetched luggage for tips. Lucifer kissed Sheila long and heavy, tongue working. He planted a kiss on Gracie’s cheek, then boarded the train without looking back. John kissed Gracie, his tongue diving through her body. He handed her his car keys.

Houston, Fulton, Memphis, the city, Decatur, Houston again, St. Paul—Beulah changed towns and cities as easily as she changed the colorful hats she wore each day. (She had a coatstand in every room of her Decatur house, octopus arms reaching for every visitor’s jacket.) It seem like when I came North something cold crawled over my skin, she said.
Standing on the icy platform after she stepped down from the frozen train.
The cold crawl up inside you and try to weigh you down. But I ain’t no ways tired. And this cramped-up chicken coop don’t bother me none.
Cause she was on T Street then.
I done lived worse.

Newlyweds, she and Andrew came up from Houston to the city, where they found jobs in the war plant—
You and Sheila stayed back home in Houston, for how could Beulah take you with her when she had a new husband? And there was a war to fight. Them krauts hate niggers, Daddy Larry said. They got airplanes too, so ain’t no hiding place. But you hid under the bed from those flying Klansmen, arms over your head to protect you from their steel lynch ropes that could drop down from the heavens and yank you back up into them
—bringing everything with them, both the seen and the unseen. But Andrew could not escape the draft. They took him, flat feet and all. When the war ended, Beulah moved to Decatur, and Andrew took to the Pullman car.

And was the best man I ever had, Beulah said. After he got that Pullman job, his pockets were always filled to the brim with gravy. And he spread it thick, even if he was skinny, and forget sometimes, and was no-hearing.

Gracie remembered. And had a lean and easy frame. He was forever losing his hearing aid, dropping it in the sink or flushing it down the toilet like some wedding ring; sides, what good was it? Wearing it, he still could barely hear. The war did that to him? she asked.

The war? Beulah shook her head. From the day I met him And couldn hear. That war mighta made it worse. I can’t tell. All told, I had three kin overseas, three fighting.

Sam and Dave enlisted.
R.L. caught the Panama Limited west for New Mexico and ended up in California and became a cowboy and made enough money to buy a brand-new Eldorado and a big farm and a lounge, and traveled to Brazil and brought him back a white-looking woman called China the Indian.
Nap was too young to follow. (And you know he had those seizures.) Koot say—and she would know cause she was his mamma—she had to strap him in a seat and sit on him to keep him from going off with Sam and Dave.

Sam and Dave were some dang fools, Beulah said. Couldn tell them nothing. Hardheaded. Most peaceful days of my life when they went off to the service. Them niggas needed giant feet to kick up enough dust to reach me from overseas.

These two cutthroats troubled my days when I first came here, Beulah said. Miss Glencoe paid me every Friday and these two cutthroats use to lay fo me Friday nights on my way from the Currency Exchange. She shook her head. Never will forget them two. Tweed golf caps. Long wool coats that stopped jus above they puffed-out knickers and long skinny silk socks. They see me. Hey, downhome, they say. They tackle me, and roll me round in the snow like a rolling pin or something. I didn’t tell And cause I didn’t want him to jump in and get hurt. Sides, lotta times he worked nights. Now, these two devils bout tired me out after four or five weeks of they mess. I puts me a bread knife in my pocket and the next time I sees those two devils, I cut them every which way but loose.

Beulah, wit a bread knife?

Um huh—nodding her head.

How you gon cut somebody wit a bread knife?

Any knife’ll cut if you mad enough.

I told Beulah to get an ice pick and put it right there. Dave patted his chest.

Her bosom?

Yeah. Right up the middle.

Dave, how you tell her anything? You was still back home, Houston.

I had talked to her on the phone.

Phone? But yall didn’t
—

See, cause if me and Sam had been there and got a holt of them niggas …

Gracie, John said, don’t listen to none of that nigga’s lies. Dave been lyin since he was born.

Weren’t you scared?

Why? Ain’t no reason to be scared. When St. Peter call you, better put on your runnin shoes.

Why hadn’t Beulah run away or crumbled away? And was dead. Sam was dead.

White-gloved angels shuttled you to your seat; red-feathered prayers shimmered in the stained-glass mercy of Christ. Reverend Rivers raised the full sleeves of his billowing robe and Reverend Sparrow did the same, but Beulah stopped their words in their mouths. Sam, if I coulda been there to hold up yo head, I woulda pulled the ax out. Sheila fanned Beulah. The organ soared a wave of music.

I tried to warn him, Dave said.

Hush, Sheila said. Hush.

That woman had burnt up her first husband to get the chump change he had. But you know Sam. Hardheaded.

Yeah, Lula Mae said. Out of his cotton-pickin mind since he was a baby. Sneakin liquor in his bottle. Sassin Mamma. Holdin his privates.

Hush.

I tried to warn him, Dave said. That nigga say to me, Dave, I’m honored. If a woman’ll kill you, that mean she really love you.

Maybe she was staying alive to keep Sam’s murderer in jail, staying alive to make the yearly journey, from St. Paul to the city, to the parole hearing and scream, No!

Keep that bitch in yo jail! Or give me a minute with her.

Sam dead. And Dave died, too. All the meat stolen from his bones, like somebody had boiled him in a vat of the brandy (E & J) he so loved. Dead. Like so many others. Andrew. R.L. Nap. Koot. Big Judy. And Lula Mae was near dead. Death growing inside her.
Cancer will take us all, Lula Mae said. Your fingers press into her skin like clay. You lift her up into your arms, carry her from the chair to the bed, a dog carrying a weightless bone.
And all her other siblings, all her brothers and sisters stretching back to Carrie Sweet, the baby sister, younger than Sam, whom she had killed nearly a century ago. I dropped her on the floor and cracked her head.

GRACIE SHUT HER EYES. Two white squares fixed behind her blind lids, fixed, for a moment before gradually dissolving into blackness. Her breathing gentle and peaceful. She heard rustling babies leave the room one by one, their feet the sound of rain, and their leaving the sound of sky beginning to blow clear. Then an in-waft of hot light. She opened her eyes to green. She half rose on her elbow. Her keys lay in the square of yellow where they had spilled out from her black leather purse. She picked them up, placed them on the nightstand, slid out of the bed, slapped her bare feet across the wood floor over to her rocking chair. She moved her fingers over the chair cushion. The black velvet had faded to green. She sat down before the open window. The shadows were soothing after the glare of the sun. Outside the window, clouds swallowed the sky, and the sky itself like a blue sheet stretched across the sun. Thirty years ago, John had hit her between the eyes with his words and ways. Their first apartment they shared with Sheila and Lucifer, a two-flat on Sixty-first and May (Englewood). She descended two flights of stairs each day, heels clicking against waterlogged boards, sinking into the wood flesh. Babies rushed from cracks, hissing and spitting, and she kicked at them, heels high (a cheerleader), and forced them to retreat back into the baseboards. Nothing in the city was attractive then, especially not that street with its big leafless trees, tall green iron-ridged streetlamps whose cold white light reflected in puddles and wet car roofs, or the courthouse buildings with chipped pee-stained fountains and leaning gargoyles ready to tumble into the street. The place she remembers from, this house, John had given her for his sins (the down payment he borrowed from his mother Inez, a loan he never repaid). The first night he left her, the room went silent, and the quiet got inside her. Her placing her Bible on the nightstand echoed the slammed door of his departure. (At least that’s how she remembers it now.) She woke to the sound of rain, bed rocking to the downpour’s rhythm. She tried to get out of bed and the floor began to rock. She reached for her Bible. She was lifted off the bed bodily and carried through every room in the house, then she was returned to the bed. She listened to the rain’s silence. This house for his sins, John having vacated it more than ten years ago, leaving only the shell of an old suit, his clean overalls hanging in the garage—and the large nuptial bed where he still steered her desires every night, only—like a sailor—to return to sea at the spreading rays of dawn, trailing a scent of that first fresh shore thirty years ago where she spread the fans of her legs to his waiting hands, where his tongue discovered the circles of her thighs. This house, yes, but the babies had followed her here, hidden in the corners of her suitcase, warm beneath her cotton nightgowns.

Ten years ago, John had tried to throw her out the window.

Bitch, you wanna leave? His words shattered her sleep.

John. What you doin?

You wanna leave? He lifted her from the bed babylike and carried her over to the open window. Go out right now. The city echoed through the window.

She felt cool night air against her back, the wind’s soft fingers trying to push her back into the room.

John. No. These words with the moon behind them, yellow and forceful, long as shafts of corn. John. No.

And the city slamming shut.

After he left, it took her nearly two full weeks to grow used to sleeping in a house flooded with babies—especially the blue one who slapped her with his wet dolphin tail—and she would find herself awake in the night’s stillest hour, in full moonlight, all motion having left the bed, listening to the dull pulse of the infants circulating through the rooms, bumping against the furniture, rustling the onionskin pages of her Bible, and listening beyond that to the slow suck of her firstborn’s lips, because it was city Jack who captured her country eyes, sugared her up sweet, and put a moving inside her, her firstborn, a daughter, Cookie, wine-lipped Jack, in that other life before John, in her very first apartment in the city—
a four-room railroad flat on T Street over in Woodlawn that boasted sixteen windows, concealing a single bathroom in the hall with a hole in the ceiling, where you squatted on the toilet under an open umbrella, guarding against the greedy eyes above
—which she shared with Beulah and Sheila.

Grunting, the driver hoisted the steamer trunk out of his cab and put it on the sidewalk. I’d take it up fo you, but, see, I got a bad back.

Beulah tipped him a nickel.

Thanks, downhome. He grunted off.

Four bad younguns stood on the stoop of their building.