The Salt Eaters (19 page)

Weariness leaned on Sophie’s Heywood’s spine. She was leaning over the wastepaper basket in Doc Serge’s office wondering how long she’d been sitting that way praying for her goddaughter. It had been a wave of nausea that moved her from the desk to the basket, the whole of the suede and leather seat tipping forward smoothly on its swivel base as if to dump
her, her hat sliding forward revealing the bald spots and bunched scar tissue at the back of her head that never seemed to heal. But something about the swing and rock of the chair, the glide of it across a bit of purple carpet on ball-feet, had distracted her from the buzzing throb in her temples and the lift and drop in her stomach.

Had anyone come into the office, had anyone been able to get past the shield Doc Serge had thrown up to insure his childhood friend her privacy, they would have thought something extraordinary in the balls of paper, cellophane strips, cigar bands and pencil shavings had transfixed the woman. Perhaps a fire, the way she held her hands cupped over the wastebasket as if for warmth.

You never really know a person until you’ve eaten salt together, she told herself. But she’d gone through many a bitter experience with Velma, and still she was baffled. What had gone wrong? What did it mean?

She had been listening for years to the starchy explanations from the quacks who called themselves guidance counselors, social workers, analysts, therapists, whose views had more to do with their own habits of illusion than anything rooted in the natural, the real. Mama Mae might have faith in fools whose faith resided in a science that only filled people’s lives with useless structures, senseless clutter, but she knew better. They needed some way, she knew, to be in the world, to move about, to explain things, to make up things to go on living blind. In time. And in time Velma would find her way back to the roots of life. And in doing so, be a model. For she’d found a home amongst the community workers who called themselves “political.” And she’d found a home amongst the workers who called themselves “psychically adept.” But somehow she’d fallen into the chasm that divided the two camps. Maybe that was the lesson. Maybe the act of trying to sever a vein or climbing into
the oven was like going to the caves, a beginning …

Sophie opened her eyes. The walls were alive. So many possibilities. But not now. Relax, she instructed herself, resuming her former position. In time.

And now she was not even wondering anymore about time or motion, was simply staring into space. A no longer middle-aged widow woman on a sumptuous chair on a purple rug on a parquet floor on a cement stage fixed in red clay, on a bed of black dirt and then the wood and bones of an old buried-over cemetery.

On sand, silt, ash, on rock, tar pits, the earth’s crust, its pin. And at the very core of the earthworks her stomach dropped down to and at the center of the universe her temples throbbed toward and somewhere in between where her heart beat, the divinely healthy whole Velma waited to be called out of its chamber, embraced and directed down the hall to claim her life from the split imposter. But called out from the mouth of the heart, coaxed out silently by baby-catching hands. For not even for her, not even for this would Sophie break discipline, break her silence. She almost had after a mere sixteen hours of the new moon. Once to cry out when Serge’s assistant had called her on the phone. But the news of the spitting, biting, bleeding, thrashing Velma, “actively hallucinating,” the man said—it had so taken her breath away, she could get nothing in her throat to work. And once again she’d almost spoken to settle Cora Rider’s hash, but her eyes had accomplished what her mouth would not. But the hardest test of all, wanting so to speak her speak to her godchild.

And did you think your life is yours alone to do with as you please? That I, your folks, your family, and all who care for you have no say-so in the matter? Whop!

Sophie leaned back in the chair. And the chiffon roses on her hat were finally still, were finally through with bobbing and
fluttering. She sat still though the chair dumped her, sat still though her legs climbed through circles on the same longitude where Mighty Titans poised underground like dragon’s teeth snapping at the life of radishes, yams, grasses and grains, altering the natural cycle, heating up the earth. Climbed on through several circles, through turbulent waters in search of a saline solution, through earthquake landscapes, and landslides, and grumblings where the grinding of the earth’s plates gnashed disturbed. She sat still while motion raced through the office seeking its lack, searching her out, attempting to lure her from stillness, sucking at the petals on her head, slapping at her earrings, tugging at her belt buckle, beating against her wedding band to no purpose, like hammering cold iron. She was still.

It could’ve been a 4×4 cell she sat in, a metal ledge of a cot and not hot leather severing her legs from her thighs, a concrete floor with bloodstains her feet pressed against, a stinking toilet with no lid she stared into. Her neighbor Edgers, not fatigue, bending her head down.

Forehead icy, downpour from her nose, Sophie was swimming in a broth. And once again she almost broke the spell, a threat of an old gospel or line of scripture quivering under her tongue. Silence. Stillness. To give her soul a chance to attend its own affairs at its own level. She breathed quickly, lightly, dispelling pictures, thoughts, sounds. But Velma’s Swahili wailing-whistle filling up her head. Velma throwing her shadow across the screen door that day she came back to marry James Henry and not Smitty.

“M’Dear?”

“Ho.”

“I’m back.”

“I can see that, Vee.”

Working hard to dump the bread-pudding face into the
wastebasket and clear her head. Those lumpy freckles so like raisin moles on her Mama Mae’s face and shoulders, but on Mae’s daughter like eruptions, the ooze of Velma’s lava threatening any minute to engulf everything.

“How you and everybody doing?”

“Everybody doing” would be Smitty in the wheelchair straining, Smitty between the parallel bars groaning, Smitty on the gym mat fighting his way back from the floor and the Academy master pulling no punches. Smitty with a towel around his neck smiling for life, winning for life. Velma’s letters to Smitty abruptly stopping. Velma home to marry James Henry. Velma flinging her life into an oven. How to explain that to Mama Mae when she returned from church retreat?

Behind Velma by the pole beans was Edgers in his overalls, a light dusting of sawdust saying he’d been to the mill and her porch would be fixed. Edgers standing there with his sheriff-ruined hands hugging each other behind the bib of his overalls, the purple nails, the bunioned growths, the gnarled joints. Hands that could manage an ax or a hoe, but nothing so dainty as a wooden match.

And Sophie going to the screen door to let Velma in, one hand on the latch, the other in her apron pocket fingering the fragile blue matchbox Edgers had handed her one day, the day they could finally look at each other and finally speak without holding their breath. To light a pipe was easy enough. She’d been lighting Daddy Dolphys’ for years. And the other men’s who turned up in her yard to trim the bushes or turned up on her porch to bung the cider crocks or secure her mailbox. All the men of the district who had no wives finding their way to her house to pay off the debts they said they’d been owing her husband for years, they said. “Give me a light,” they each said in so many ways, having none of their own. Edgers at least
supplied his own fire, his own light, his own sweat, his own energy. And gave light. Always found the space to let the sun in. Never ever cornering her to say she was a settled woman and ought to quit her activities and settle on a man, a sewing machine, a stove. Never once frowning on her work, her traveling, saying only, “I’ll mind the place” or “Do you want my truck?”

Edgers was standing by the pole beans scraping his work boots against the edge of her brick walk, and she held her breath as his words floated toward her. “Get used to me please, Sophie” was all it was. Then turning to attend to things: mending the fence, liming the trees, sharpening her ax for her, turning over the earth, dumping out sacks of bonemeal, chicken droppings, a compost of his own making that would promote new growth, new life. And no sense telling him he needn’t, cause he needed, and she knew it each time she combed her hair, and she needed. “Get used to me please, Sophie,” he had said after all this time. She thought she had.

“Got his nerve,” Velma had said, wiping her feet on the mat as if to kick up dust and jute in Edgers’ face. “How could he look you in the eye after what he’s done?”

“And what’s he done, Vee?” moving aside to let her in.

“What’s he done!” Velma searching her face for signs of amnesia or senility, Velma clearly under the spell of the “rumor” version of her beating in the jail. “That bastard ought to cut off both his hands.” Then closing her eyes as if the mere thought of Sophie’s terror was too much to bear even in memory, even secondhand. And Sophie wanting to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, shake her for Smitty, shake her for Edgers, herself, shake her till her head flopped. Edgers had had a pistol in his neck but had refused to go on beating her and been beaten himself.

Sophie exhaled it all out and tried to go blank, tried to switch
off memory’s pictures and supplant them with peaceful scenes. To go gathering, the feel of the basket handle on her arm. To talk with the lemon grass, enlist the cooperation of eucalyptus. They didn’t mind her, did not resist her. Always came up easily in her grip. Eyebright in the underbrush calling. Bladderwort singing. Calamus around the salt marshes. One of the few places the spirits had not withdrawn from in disgust—neglected, betrayed. Cool breeze. Walking barefoot. Quiet lapping of thick waters against the embankment. The gathering of fresh things, natural things, fish herbs, salad greens. Natural growth, no forced foods to weaken the will to live. No old, dead food for the folk of her boardinghouse. Food in tin cans on shelves for months and months and aged meat developing in people’s system an affinity for killed and old and dead things.

Wasn’t that what happened to Lot’s Wife? A loyalty to old things, a fear of the new, a fear to change, to look ahead? Sophie’s favorite lesson at the Academy: Lot’s wife and the changing order. She’d been ossified. To go gathering, Sophie sighed. And let her soul get on with its gathering and return with greater force to its usual place. But so hard to do.

What the hell, Vee, did you think you were doing, cutting on yourself and trying to die in an oven? And with so few seasoned workers left. Whop!

And how would Mama Mae find her daughter in the spring? Sophie eased back into the chair and let it lift and swirl her, imagining Serge spinning so, while the Infirmary workers tended their duties and he in his wonderful chair contemplating new ways to implement the pleasure-box principle. She smiled for him. How simple life was for people like Serge who maintained that all knowledge, all energy, all problem-solving techniques resided in the groin, the loins, the pelvis. She smiled. But she longed for contact with her drifting soul, longed for illumination and realization, for conscious contact.
So many things she needed to learn yet, to understand, to share. But she would not break her discipline to comfort herself in a shallow way. Would no more break discipline with her Self than she would her convenant with God.

Fred Holt took the shortcut through the Infirmary yard. He nodded to the boys and young men roosting on the tabby wall, passing joints back and forth, passing pint bottles back and forth, or just sitting and talking. Some were waiting for the girls, scarce women, who waddled to and from the clinic each day between three and four. The men reminded him of the wives who used to congregate outside of the Palace or the Regal, waiting on their musician husbands, waiting to take them home. Some of the other roosters were waiting no doubt for the swayback girls from Safe Harbour, the shelter the Academy and the church ran for runaways. There was a big stink about that in the papers lately, since most of the kids had run not from their own homes but from those other “homes” and were under court order. Those Academy folks were in for it unless the ministers could work something out with the authorities. Between the trees and the cars and vans of the parking lot behind the Regal, he could make out the Wall of Respect of the Academy.

He almost stepped on it, a small bird calling to the air. A tiny bird that had fallen from its nest evidently, had fallen into a plate some not-so-hungry picnicker had left behind. Fred glanced at the plates, pots and jugs and wondered what kind of weird picnic it could’ve been, so much food left. He tilted his cap back and stared at the bird and wondered what he was supposed to do about it. It had been a day for birds, he chuckled to himself, glad to be out of the driver’s seat and on foot. Leaning against the tree on the other side was a couple murmuring into each other’s face, oblivious of the bird, the plates,
and him, and not seeming to know about the caterpillars that were known to drop from this particular tree from late winter and straight through spring. They were leaning against each other, her hands under the front of his shirt, his hand cupping her neck. Fred took off his hat and rubbed his outstretched arm against his sweaty forehead. Tie your apron high, Miz Lucy, he whistled to himself moving on, wondering at what point a hairy green worm might break up the idyll.

Coming out of the rear parking lot, he got sandwiched in by two winos hunkered down in the old stage-entrance doorway of the Regal and a boy with a bike. A mud puddle was in his path, the pigeons circling, fluttering, crowding each other for a drink. He didn’t like what the sight of the nasty pigeons or the puddle was doing to his chili-ruined stomach. The bums weren’t any better, snot-nosed and filthy. He waited on the kid to move. He was taking his time down on one knee tying a sneaker that looked like a planter or a magazine rack or one of them satchels he’d seen in shop windows designed like a basketball sneaker. Fred was glad he didn’t have to feed this kid. Fred was glad he didn’t have a kid anymore. He didn’t seem to have a son anymore either when it got right down to it.