Solemn Read online

  Now let’s skip ahead.

  The night a baby child was lost down the well there, Solemn helped her mother clear the table and straighten up after supper. Lucky tonight she was; no wash piled. She was restless and curious with no one curious enough to see it in her. With exception of Lutheran school and Baptist church, both of which scared her, Solemn lived to get out. She was afraid of a pattern or fate or inheritance demonstrated when only she and her mother alone occupied her home night after night after night. In Solemn’s house, the men stayed out. Night after night after night. More troubling than their absence was Solemn’s guess she was supposed to accept it but not imitate it. It was unfair.

  Sometimes she found loose change in the dirt, even stuck to spilled, dried coffee or soda in the cupholders of unlocked cars. She would put it away, into her savings, she rationalized. But she didn’t speak up about it when she could tell her daddy stomped off after talking about the bills or her mama smoked after looking at them.

  Starting with a dollar she found under her pillow upon losing her first tooth at seven, she kept her money collection in the secretly dismantled underside of her music and jewelry box–in–one, its lid encrusted with rhinestones and a gray unicorn affixed to a top for the handle. She saw its contents as the one thing other parts of the world kept in common with her, but maybe also over her. She counted it all that night: $91.67.

  “Fixin’ to go out! Call out if they gonna play ‘Waiting for Tonight’ again…”

  “Girl, we bought you the CD … I’m so sick of that song,” Bev snapped, in the part of their trailer that home tripled as the study room, den, and kitchen. She put some wooden clothespins in her mouth and stepped to the laundry rack. Then, she spit the pins out and stepped away. No wash now, thank God. Actually, Bev was pinched to ask Solemn, “Can I go?” And she should have. She and Solemn could have talked. They could have hummed choir songs. They could have cracked jokes about “dem boys.” Instead, Bev fished for the dishrag. Another night of scraping dinginess to sparkle, cajoling old to look new, fending off wishes, paying no mind to the girl child who sees the discrepancies …

  The latch door of the trailer clicked and then snapped. Solemn had a wish to see the crop dusters, come by more and more over the sweet potato and cotton and tobacco fields. They were the only planes she ever saw, so she loved them.

  Why would you even stay here? I won’t. I’ll fly away. Stay here if you want …

  Solemn’s place with a name of “Singer’s” told her who she was and what she was supposed to do. She planned to save little by little, dollar by dollar, for her trip away from Bledsoe, with just a few diners and a gas station and slumpy houses and mechanic places, to return in a big car and fancy hat and high heels. On television there was a superstar named Oprah with her own show, and even a road and a billboard called after her in the big town. And, she was black just like them. So it was foreseeable. Solemn heard the bigger folks say “the Trace” rode all way to Nashville. She figured out singers lived in Nashville. She learned in school that Nashville was in Tennessee. She wanted to know if she could be allowed out of Bledsoe, near Kosciusko, Mississippi, and on to Nashville.

  On this night, cotton wisps flew from the dandelions. A whole silver, lavender, and gray universe out there accompanied Solemn in her dance of freedom: a carefree half step one second, a brisk skip the next, a flip-flop high and wild to find something worth mentioning in the darkness, and, at last, a split—out a blue from nowhere, like a gymnast in her win or a prima donna in her audition. If she cartwheeled at the bottom of the steep, around the ones who stayed in, no one would see when her dress fell down. Solemn ran alongside the trees without a look in their direction. Like the rest of them, she took her trees for granted, with their grave stories locked in raspy trunks and long-winded roots. There was so much freedom, playfulness, happiness, beauty, and security around her, but Solemn was aloof. Even the well’s head—stuck up like a bunion on sweltering plains—was a point to make, a goalpost in her eyes.

  Her family never visited the well much. Daddy just always had the water. The well was something to look at from afar, and then up close … for Solemn to see that frantic stalk of a man marching toward it. And for him to see her in turn. Maybe he could show her how to pump it, or maybe he would ask for her help with something and pay her a little bit for it. Or maybe she could dive in the well and get rescued out of nothing but a wet, ruined outfit for her parents to complain of. Solemn was pissed and vinegared, bored, curious, restless, wishful, and looking for even more to be on top of it all.

  She found it.

  TWO

  “Well, sir, I don’t know how or why my husband would kidnap my child. I wasn’t there. I was probably sleeping. My husband beat me up pretty bad.”

  Pearletta shivered under the thin shawl she snatched from a slim pine cabinet on her way out the trailer. She screamed into a magnetic blackness, with a second-guess as to which key fit the ignition of the 1995 Ford coupe her parents gave her as a wedding present—disapproval aside. They intended to give her a sure way up to Jackson, where she was born, to keep her from going down barefoot and pregnant and high. But Gilroy took over the coupe quickly, pretending and musing around. Now she had just stopped him from breaking her neck. Her elbows locked her arms too straight for him to to push it down. She was certain he had wanted to kill her. Pearletta was so beside herself at how her life turned out. She could not admit Gilroy’s efforts this evening were not exactly abrupt. It had mostly been like this. No matter her age, Pearletta found and married Gilroy late. Or perhaps too early, given how it all turned out. But, way back when it seemed now, she was addicted to that stuff—anything at all it could be: weed, coke, booze, rock. She blamed herself. She had been the one to walk off from other comforts. The only reason she spoke the truth aloud now was because her child was involved. All that was left of the baby was a soft pea-shaped impression dug into the covers of a cot.

  Gilroy wanted to upset her. He had to have the baby to do so. It was his highest card, after his cooking and his strength. They had fought before, though never quite like this. He had a problem—not so much drinking and drugs, but skeletons fiddling keys to the closet. Gilroy wasn’t quite right in the head. No one he introduced her to thought to warn her about it. She came to Singer’s, rebelled too far against her family, fell for too many smiles, and thought marrying a man at the wrong side of the tracks would be okay.

  The little township of Bledsoe, Mississippi—parish, really—took its go-to precinct as the one in Koscuisko, the main town, less than eight thousand posed in Norman Rockwell fashion at any one time. She arrived alone. Two policemen filled a cooled room with her. White folks—with pursed, pinched lips underneath gruff red and brown moustaches and slim, sunburned noses. Pearletta smeared snot onto her wrists. The black officer, a thirtysomething tagged “Bolden,” went to find her a box of tissue. The men had seen worse. Much worse on those by the Good Book, helter-skelter, Harley-ridden, Mississippi vestiges of prairie. To all of them and right now, Pearletta Hassle was lucky.

  “So?” an officer tagged “Hanson” inquired. “You say your husband carried your young son out of your house—”

  “My trailer.”

  “Your trailer. He did something with your child, but you don’t know what he did? And, you ain’t seen your baby or husband since early this evening?”

  “Yes,” Pearletta cried. “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “And,” the sergeant Nichols said, “you was apparently recovering from a fight with your husband, so you ain’t see and don’t know the whereabouts of your own baby, that you thought was sleeping?”

  “Yes,” Pearletta responded to the men, looming above her, arms folded. “I still don’t … It took me a minute, a while, to realize my baby was gone. But when I did, I did and, well, I don’t know.”

  A drained and stained coffeepot sat on a rack of papers and folders in the corner, tucked tightly into a baseboard full of dusty neglect, ignored and cold
cases run amok. Pearletta wondered why no one had asked her if they should make more coffee. Her reporting all this was nothing like she had expected: no alarms, no big men with guns, no APBs, no FBI. She wondered why she even came. She wished she had one true friend at Singer’s. The Redvine lights were off when her coupe motioned the dust onto their path.

  Officer Bolden returned to the stuffy, hot interrogation room with a floral box of tissues, the hard industrial kind. Pearletta snatched and cradled a bunch. She never thought she could possibly be examined for the kidnapping of her own baby—wished for, dreamed of, and imagined but finally delivered to bask in its only-child status and sparking a huge change inside Pearletta. But, she was a black woman, immune and tolerant to higher noses on shorter heights, her inquiries and concerns with law enforcement were scrutinized for her phony character and defamations first. They would get to actual feelings and point last. Even now, the rules were entirely different.

  Nichols cleared his throat once more. He wasn’t in a rush. He picked up a pen to write the first things written since Pearletta arrived. “What was your husband wearing when you saw him last, Mrs. Hassle?”

  “Please. Don’t call me Mrs. Hassle.”

  “Okay, um, Pearletta, what was … er … Gilroy wearing when you last saw him?”

  Pearletta squinched the skin atop her nose with the thumb and middle finger of her ring hand. She could not recall. She was coming out of an era, a fog, a time warp, a phase. She hoped. She stopped focusing on Gilroy months ago. Like a snapshot of a funny-looking baby one just smiled at, no real look to commit its features to memory and retelling. But Gilroy had worked today for somebody. For whom, Pearletta did not know. He claimed he was always working, odd-jobbing, tinkering with cars, washing them, and moving furniture. He would have worn his overalls with some sort of T-shirt underneath. Bleached white, courtesy of her dry and itchy hands. A red paisley print scarf. Wore that scarf all the time. He would have started off in thong sandals and switched to some black work boots when he arrived at any job. He would have put the thongs back on when he got home. That’s what she told them.

  “And the baby?” Office Hanson asked.

  This she recounted perfectly: “A light blue T-shirt said ‘Bad to the Bone’ in black letters, and some little Levi denim shorts my mama sent, and some red socks ’cause I didn’t have any white ones washed.”

  “And, Pearletta,” Nichols said, his head down and pen pressed into a carbon copy form the department refused to discard, “what was last thing you and your husband did before this fight? Any walks around where someone may have seen you or him?”

  “We played Mille Bornes Monday night,” Pearletta answered. “We played that until The Honeymooners reruns came on after midnight. I met him at a party where we played it. Somebody I went to high school with invited me to it. Gilroy was there. He was her boyfriend’s friend. Not many people there knew too much about him.”

  “And you ain’t got relatives in town you can call, or houses you can go to, or best friends you might could stay with while he’s so mad at you?” Nichols continued.

  “A few folks, here in Kosciusko. But nobody in Bledsoe where we are. My relatives aren’t from here.”

  “What about his friends, relatives, working buddies, what?” Nichols asked.

  “Lot of friends. A few relatives. A cousin he go out with all the time. Drives to Jackson with for the weekends sometime. I think to go to the girly clubs, got some women there or something. Random fellas who stop by after work. But I called all them. The ones I had their numbers. Nobody heard from him. It sounded like they was telling me the truth.”

  Nichols squinted again. “You mean, you don’t know any of your neighbors? I know Singer’s. It’s pretty tight. He had to have passed somebody who saw him, know what direction they went…”

  “What was your fight about?” Bolden asked.

  * * *

  “I thought we had relish. I want some tuna. Where the saltines? We outta those?”

  This was common.

  Pearletta thought about where her Avon shampoo could be, with her legs crisscrossed on the couch and her fingernails working on her scalp. She was gonna put on her makeup after she did her hair, maybe take herself to the show or bring the baby up to her parents’ on the Greyhound, so Gilroy wouldn’t bitch about not having the car. Daydreaming helped her manage irritation, a side effect of not smoking and drinking and getting high like they used to do together, like maniacs. She used the pickle relish for the potato salad on Monday night, when they played Mille Bornes and had sex on the couch. This was the type of thing he lured her into in the first place, on account of having his little trailer down in this little park. He was an owner. Gilroy was involved with a joint and a jug of Southern Comfort. He slammed a few Formica cabinets and the door to the icebox. Pearletta cautioned him not to be “so loud” and “wake the baby” or “tear up somethin.” Pearletta heard the can opener grind a tub of Starkist she intended for a tuna noodle casserole. “Well Gilroy if you’re gonna open up all the tuna, you should at least open up the door and air it out in here. It stinks.” Gilroy heard “stinks.” But he didn’t. Their comforter did. To him, it didn’t smell like him. And he didn’t think the baby looked like him, either. He been out slaving, running from stubborn acres of white cotton with white bosses passing dollars to black hands. He found better—a dude call him sometimes to help out with his portion of a tobacco field, for an old farmer whose sons moved to Atlanta to work for banks. “Shit … ten dollars an hour to find worms and mice and rats in tobacco bales shipped off to R.J. Reynolds to pass off as Virginia tobacco for Camel cigarettes … tufts of tobacco to my pockets when ain’t nobody lookin. Sell it on the side. Jackpot.” He was hungry. Needed protein and maybe a little sugar too. Had already heard his wife tell him she wasn’t thawing out and cutting up and frying no chicken tonight. Not tonight. Twice in one night was too much for him. So from arising happily from making love to guarding tobacco to planning tuna noodle casserole to fishing for tuna fish to cornrowing hair to looking through makeup, two people passed smart words and one slapped the other and the other was tired of having her hair undone for it all.

  * * *

  “Gilroy was complaining,” Pearletta told the policemen. “I stopped drinking, getting high. He’s kept on. So, he picks fights. I think he’s jealous I’m clean … he said somethin ’bout he thought another man’s been around. Ain’t true. Then I didn’t feel like frying chicken. Too hot for all that. And he couldn’t find any pickle relish or crackers for his tuna salad. He has funny munchies like that.”

  Bolden slipped toward the corner and the last bit of coffee left in the pot. He sipped without slurping. The woman shivered every couple of minutes, announced her sadness and disappointment with every syllable and gesture. Had this creature named Hassle run off to Jackson, or Magnolia, or, indignantly, stayed in Bledsoe with a baby shrieking through a soiled diaper? Who would connive to snatch a baby so a woman could worry, wait, ponder, submit, forgive, and forget? There had to be more to it.

  “So, are y’all gonna call in some dogs?” Pearletta asked the police officers.

  She had seen this, on the news: the hype, the hysteria, the hoopla, the results of missing person reports. A pink baby wanders off too far on the unmapped roads. A brunette or blonde or redhead goes missing after a mass or a dance. Two rumpled parents shoot onto Mississippi News Now in front of microphones and a tearful crowd. A determined, synchronized front line of volunteers and FBI folks and police personnel walk a straight, long, hand-to-hand, person-to-person, unbreakable human chain over forest, meadow, state park, brush, hidden ditches, ravines, corners, tree hollows, river edges, Sanchezia bushes, weeds, and any hint of a shallow grave a missing person could wind up announcing itself from. And those persons find their ways—a statewide and national movement, a rally cry, an importance. Pearletta wanted, at least, a handsome and high-eared German shepherd or a fanatic bloodhound to sniff one of her baby’s undershirts or pillo
wcases or socks. She knew the smell. They could follow her from her trailer steps in search of the scent, and move out through the yard and trailer park and town and state and nation and continent and world. At least.

  “It’s been less than twenty-four hours,” Bolden told Pearletta. It’s what he had been trained to say, what he knew to do. Still, he knew where she came from. There should have been a band of men around her to stalk through the dust and snatch this man out of his overalls, give him something to cry about. Where were they?

  “Twenty-four hours? Twenty-four hours?” Pearletta said. “We’re talking about a baby here. My child. This isn’t some big grown kid who could have run off with friends or tried to run away. This ain’t somebody who can read or find a way or be mischievous for the hell of it. This is a baby. My baby. In twenty-four hours my baby could be dead. Are you crazy?”

  “Mrs. Hassle…” The officers seemed to all echo to her at once.

  “No! I drove myself all way to town for you to tell me to come back in twenty-four hours? Wait for even worse to happen than what probably already has. You think I’m joking?”

  “Well, we definitely gonna look for your husband and send him home.”

  “That’s not what I’m here for, sir. I’m here to report a kidnapping.”

  “Ma’am, how this department handles domestic disputes—”

  “I handled my own domestic dispute. Look at me.” Pearletta rolled her eyes. She shivered in her seat. Her bony collarbones jutted forward. Her prune-colored skin blushed to purple. She looked neat and presentable like a respectable mother and wife, a good daughter, a refreshing friend. She had been, before all of this, before she met Gilroy.