Standing at the Scratch Line (79 page)

“What else did she say?” Serena asked. She knew that neither Ma Wrangel nor Ida had missed the signs of morning sickness.

“Only that I should help her get you over there for a steak dinner tonight. Listen, Dr. Stephens sent me over to see if we could use your sewing room for a temporary hospital. We’ve got a lot of injured people. He says you have more room than he does and you have the best light in town.”

“Tell him to bring them over. Ask Ida to clean off the sewing jobs and put an oilskin on the table.”

“I knew you’d do it!” Clara asserted. “You Tremains are such good people. I’ll go tell Doc Stephens right now. Oh, by the way, Lightning Smith’s livery stable is wiped out. He was found behind it still holding on to one of the supporting timbers. We had to pry him loose. He’s in shock. He keeps walking around looking for that old horse of his. Nobody has the heart to tell him that his horse was found spread-eagled on a hill on the other side of town. Doc was wondering if you’d let Lightning take care of the livestock that you have in your barn; that may help to bring him back to reality.”

“Sometimes reality is pretty tough to come back to,” Serena observed.

Clara stopped and looked at her for a moment and in that instant saw inside of her. She saw through a window that appears only intermittently in relationships and may last only seconds, but through which sometimes a soul may be seen, with all its doubts and fears. Both women saw each other clearly and understood that they shared some of the same fears.

Tears glistened in Clara’s eyes as she walked over and put her arms around Serena. “You’re right. Sometimes reality tests your faith.” The two women held each other for several seconds. Then Clara pushed back and said, “My mother said she heard you had morning sickness but you were trying to hide it.” Clara looked her in the eye and said, “By tomorrow, it will be all over town. People will be wondering why you aren’t celebrating. What’s wrong, Serena?”

“I’m pregnant.” Serena turned and walked away into the store. “Tell Doc Stephens he can bring his patients over in fifteen minutes.” The window was gone. Clara paused and stared after Serena, then turned and went out the front door.

She had never thought there would be a possibility that she would ever destroy a child, even an unborn one, particularly her own. It was unthinkable and at the same time necessary. King would never look at that child without seeing his torturer and her rapist. She had seen the hate smoldering, never allowed to truly catch fire but never extinguished either, that was burning just beneath his expressionless look. She understood that by King’s lights, he had to kill Corlis; otherwise the sheriff would haunt his thoughts for the rest of his life. King didn’t like ghosts. That was part of the problem: this child would be part hers and part ghost.

“Miz Rena? Miz Rena?” Serena swam to the surface of her consciousness. She had gotten lost in thought again. Lightning was asking her a question.

“What can I do for you, Lightning?”

“Miz Rena, can I stay out in yo’ barn. I ain’t got no place else to go. Everythin’ I had is gone,” Lightning explained in a soft voice. “My can of money done swooshed up in the sky. Everythin’ done blowed away. Even ol’ Red is dead. I had that horse almost sixteen years, since he was a colt.” He stared at the floor sadly. “I just want to stay in yo’ barn.”

Lightning’s humbled state touched Serena. “Lightning, you can have a pallet by the stove downstairs until my menfolk return. Then we’ll fix you up a room. I’ve got work for you now. If you want it, you can earn your keep.”

Tears formed in Lightning’s eyes and he stuttered. “Clara’s right ’bout you folks. You is real good peoples. You don’t have to worry ’bout a thing. I’ll work for anythin’ you folks wants to give. Even though I ain’t got nothin’, I don’t want charity.” The tears began to stream down Lightning’s purple black face. “You got to pardon me cryin’!” he protested, wiping his face with his crumpled hat. “I ain’t no weaklin’! I ain’t used to doin’ this kind of thing, but I can’t seem to stop. I worked my whole life and everythin’ is gone!” The tears continued to come. Lightning covered his face with his hat, turned, and walked away. “I’ll just go check on thin’s in the barn, Miz Rena,” he explained as he walked out of the rear of the store.

“Dinner’s at six-thirty,” she called after him. She had not even planned to prepare dinner and didn’t know what she was going to cook, but it seemed the thing to do. The old man had suffered a life-shattering setback. She wanted to ease his pain. It was sure obvious that she wasn’t the only one with problems. Serena walked over to the stacks of denim overalls and pulled out a pair for Lightning. She had noticed the ones he was wearing were torn and dirty. She picked up a flannel shirt and wrote both items down in her inventory book.

Serena and Ida were closing the store for the evening. Dr. Stephens had finished with his patients and the sewing room had been returned to its original state. Serena was wondering whether Ida was the source of the gossip about her morning sickness and was about to ask her about the matter when Cordel Witherspoon entered the store. “Mrs. Tremain, Ma Wrangel say she expectin’ you for steak tonight.”

“Oh, I can’t, Cordel. I told Lightning that I would cook dinner for him.”

Ida said, “Don’t worry ’bout him, Mrs. T. He can eat with me and my husband tonight and tomorrow night too, if he need it. You need to go on and get a good meal into you. Let Ma Wrangel take care of you tonight. We’ll take care of Lightnin’.”

“Ma Wrangel expects you in half an hour,” Cordel said before he went out the door.

In the face of Ida’s offer to feed Lightning, Serena felt chagrined for wanting to confront her over the gossip issue. “Good-night, Ida, and thank you so much for inviting Lightning for dinner tonight,” she said as Ida went out the door.

Ida stopped and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “See you in the mornin’, Mrs. T. I’ll close the shutters before I go.”

Serena went upstairs and for some undefined reason went into the bedroom that she and King had once shared. The bed was made and there was nothing on the bureaus or side tables. He had left everything neat and military. She went to the left side-table and opened a drawer. Inside was a neatly folded letter. She picked up the letter and smelled it. It smelled of him. On the day King had received it, he had gone on a long horse ride and he had carried the letter next to his skin. She could not resist opening the letter again and reading its painful message.

Friday June 1, 1921
Dear King,
    
I can barely think to write this letter. Phillip died in the early hours of this morning. He did not live to see the sun rise again. He died in darkness and in pain. He struggled mightily with death, but his body was too torn and ruptured to live. Mortal flesh is only mortal. I am sorry if my tears have blurred the words I have written. I cry for my son. The only son I had left. I cry for the horrible way he died. These last weeks were hell for him and for me. Sometimes when I saw him striving to hang on to life, to take that next breath, it made me realize how much I loved him and how helpless I was to aid him in his last battle.
    
We will bury him this Sunday next to his mother and his older brother. This formality brings me no pleasure. It is an empty good-bye. My son should not be lying in the earth, under flowers, so soon. He should be still standing tall, admiring the summer blossoms. He should have been given the chance to grow into one of those pillars that support our community. Now, none of that will happen.
    
I am left here with nothing but echoes and pale memories. For the first time in my life, I feel hate, sodden, disgusting hate! I have always maintained that hatred is for small men, men who cannot look themselves in the eye and find joy. I now find that I am one of these men. I am not big enough inside to find forgiveness. When they murdered my son, they crushed my soul and crippled me before God. I cannot rise above this! I want to live by the Old Testament! I want an eye for an eye, a life for a life! I must have revenge or go mad!
    
I know that you too have suffered at the hands of these dogs! I ask you to join with me and let us ride upon them like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. With you beside me I know we will send these beasts through the Gates of Hell. I cannot and will not rest until I see Corlis Mack’s blood spilled out on the floor.
    
You have been a good friend and we owe you much already. What I propose is dangerous. I want you to feel free to say no. Your courage has already been tested and found to be solid. Our friendship will endure whether you join me or not.
    
My prayers and best wishes to your wife. She is a brave woman and without her fearless efforts, you and Phillip might still be imprisoned under the Lafayette. You and she are both cut from the same cloth.
                                                      

All my Blessings and prayers,

Claude Duryea

Serena folded the letter and placed it back in the drawer. She thought of King’s last words to her before he and Sampson left for New Orleans: “If I don’t call or come back in two weeks, I’m dead and don’t waste time looking for me!” She was worried and concerned about King’s safety, but Sampson was with him and Corlis Mack was not expecting them. Serena’s intuition told her that King would return. During his absence, she too had a dangerous journey to make, and she had to make sure hers was completed by his return.

She locked up the store and made sure there was sufficient wood in both the downstairs and upstairs stoves. She put on a shawl and hurried across the street to Wrangel House. “I need to speak to you, Ma,” Serena said as she came into the empty restaurant.

“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens. Squawk any way you feel like,” Ma Wrangel shouted from the kitchen.

“I need somebody to help me lose this baby,” Serena said as she stood at the kitchen door and watched her hostess move pans around on the big cast-iron stove.

Ma Wrangel’s big body paused midstride and then continued on moving between the chopping board and the stove. “Ain’t no reason to take a racehorse chance like that if’en you don’t have to, honey,” Ma Wrangel observed as she threw some sliced onions in a skillet with oil. “This somethin’ you got to do?”

“It’s not my husband’s child!” Serena answered without inflection.

Ma Wrangel stopped to look at her. “That don’t even sound like you, Rena. Must be somethin’ mo’ to it than that. You ain’t the kind of woman to play games on yo’ man and he ain’t the kind to take it lyin’ down. Must be somethin’ mo’ to it than that!”

“The truth is hard to believe,” Serena stated.

“Try me,” Ma Wrangel urged.

“I let a white man have me so I could break my husband out of the prison where they were keeping him, and I killed him after I found out where my husband was.”

“Rena! Rena! You’s a colored woman in a white man’s world. That ain’t hard to believe. Let me tell you, girl, at least a third of the women in this town had to lie down for some white man durin’ they life to either save a man or feed their chil’ren. You don’t get this many light-skinned Negroes from lyin’ naked under a full moon!”

“King won’t understand it. He hates most white people!”

“Sounds like a healthy colored man to me.” Ma Wrangel slurped some gravy and offered Serena the spoon. “Taste this. Don’t that thyme just bring the flavor out?” Serena took a taste and nodded her head in agreement. Ma Wrangel continued, “Honey, if you looks at the way a colored man is treated in these here United States in nineteen twenty-one, it don’t seem that he can do anything but hate them whites. Slavery was supposed be over more’n fifty years ago, but look at it! He can’t look no white man in the eye and best not even smile at a white woman. You knows a colored man got too much spirit to take that without some kind of doin’!”

“I don’t want this child, Ma! Now, are you going to help me find someone, or do I do it on my own?”

“You talk to Clara?”

“About what?”

“She pregnant too. Her and Mace decide they gon’ keep the baby anyway, bedamned what people say! You got to gives yo’ man a chance to be big! Don’t go off thinkin’ he gon’ be small ’bout this. Trust him, honey! Even yo’ man ain’t so hard he want to chance losin’ you over this here baby.”

“I’ll think about what you said, Ma, but right now I want to know who can help me with this!”

“The only one around with a lot of experience with this is Wichita Kincaid out at the Black Rose Saloon. She got about six women workin’ out there pleasurin’ men and I hear she ain’t had a pregnancy out there in more’n two years.” Ma Wrangel stepped out from behind the stove and put her hands on her hips. “I hears Wichita uses a mess of different potions, but her womens use ’em befo’ they with child. It’s always mo’ dangerous after you’s with child. Them potions used to kill a live child is sometimes strong enough to kill the mother. This ain’t gon’ be no light-weight thing, now. And you sho’ don’t want nobody stickin’ no metal up there and scrapin’, hear me!”

F
 R I D A Y,  
J
 U N E   1 7,   1 9 2 1