Solemn Read online

  How could I been so stupid? Cut myself off like this? Somebody could see or know something. Figured all this out by now. Returned my son. Shot Hassle. Joined me to pin clothes on the line. Then the covers would’ve been washed fresh and no argument would’ve even started. Played tiddlywinks in the yard with me. Brought over a six-pack (or twelve). Barbecued some pork chops and sausage and fish. Sat in lawn chairs. Snapped our fingers to new music on the radio. Beyoncé. Christina. Like I’m a real young gal. Gone up to see my folks. None of that had happened. I’m just here, now.

  Nichols glided the ashtray in the center of the room’s folding table. He strained the back of the office’s squeaky folding chair to pull the Camels out of his pocket.

  “Do you mind?” he asked Mrs. Hassle, behind a web of smoke.

  “No,” she answered. “Do you mind if I have one?”

  Nichols passed Mrs. Hassle his last, upturned lucky one. It was Pearletta’s first since she had found out she was pregnant a few years ago. She enjoyed it, very much. The three men and woman were all quiet for the next few moments, before parting their unfortunately made way. It was little more to ask or say until someone else said something about it. Pearletta Hassle was definitely heard. And sympathized with. But there was so much else to do. It was just expected her story would not end well.

  THREE

  Tucked right in the bull’s-eye of Mississippi where all once predicted King would be shot, Bev Redvine was wrist deep in well water and Palmolive and cast-iron skillets and racing thoughts. She wanted her family to squeeze onto their convertible couch to watch the Fresh Prince with her; every day she threatened to announce her enrollment in the Magnolia Bible College, twenty miles away. She thought the trailer walls heard her.

  No saint she was, but a Southern belle she liked to think of herself—without the slurry talk, slavery braids, and molasses preference she saw put on the South too much.

  We doing good … been married seventeen years now.

  Once the first ten years passed, the gossip about Bev went from “She had Landon before he married her” to “Least he married her.” And, she was a housewife. She didn’t work. That alone was worth the sacrifice of a grounded house, though Bev made her trailer close. Every day, she swiped vinegar across the fingerprints on the glass end tables. She burned incense. Malcolm, Martin, and Bobby Kennedy were the core faces in her fine-art display: small copper and brass–framed family pictures. She saved the Time magazines with Bill Clinton and Princess Diana on the covers, to sit atop the rest of the material stayed on her coffee table, to show how she did pay attention and she could talk smart. She bought Tupperware like it would go out of style. Her ability to make anything taste good—a cup of tea, unmarinated meat, okra, cabbage, smelt—was unprecedented. She walked to the gas station with dimes to call 1-800 numbers to clerks at Mississippi State, Grambling, Bethune-Cookman, Spelman, and Morehouse. She wanted the brochures. For her children. She had two bedrooms and a living room and a yard, no outhouse or dead-end pipes or water pumps or collapsing porch. Sky-blue and beige stripes papered most walls in their 750 square feet. She had done it herself.

  After Bev bought her daughter her first training bra, her son began to roam. His loose sneakers tripped them all in the middle of the nights. His jackets stuck wrinkled in the crook of the couch like old men. Solemn, of all, was home the most. She usually busied herself with one of the Barbie dolls from her last Christmas or birthday. By now, the figures in her collection were naked and screeched and scratched, with dready blond hair dark fingers once tried to braid. Hopeless. And the girl sang until the radio got too loud and mimed with the singers on television until Bev slammed the power button. And she begged for her allowance too often. This was their small life.

  It had taken Bev more than forty-eight hours to deliver Solemn, at Monfort Jones. Monfort Jones Memorial Hospital was central, at least, to everybody they could know. Bev’s mother came to help a few days, as she had with Landon. Everybody had a few days of patience to savor. They used them to ignore Bev’s cries or to make funny smiley faces outside her room window. When the time came near, family bought her balloons and tiny flowerpots with ribbons around them. Bev got to stay admitted three days. It took almost a day for the quiet gray-white obstetrician to pin down the source of the terror and torture: Solemn was a frank breech birth—a newborn kicking out her behind first. It was almost as big as if Solemn were premature, without others’ understanding the importance. Instead, the trait was only Bev’s recollection and story to tell until the day she died. It was hers to use for and against Solemn, when the girl was either troublesome or unique. It underwrote the girl’s tendency to be distant, then and now.

  As was her name. As such an oddly positioned baby, Solemn drove Bev to painful vomit and insomnia. An interventionist ultrasound speculated Solemn was a boy. A boy was exactly what Redvine wanted. He already had a name: Solomon, the only official brown king in the Bible. And the richest, too. Landon’s name had been her choice, after a tribute to Bev’s mother’s father, because he paid for their wedding at his two-story home in a good part of Kosciusko. So Redvine got the next one, when it showed up. The young couple fiddled around with extensions of his name a girl might possibly be able to live with: Earline, Earlane, Earlestine. Redvine called the child “Solomon” for its last three months unseen. He couldn’t break the habit once she came. Finally, Bev took over with a word she saw in hymnals and the pastor verified how to pronounce: “solemn.”

  And this was why he loved her. Bev never settled to speak of problems without a postscript of solution. She never bashed anyone. One day she got a funny call and Earl drove her, his first passenger in his first Chevy, to Magnolia. In a low two-room house with a few two-stories in view, her father rolled a wheelchair on a dirt floor while he spit out snuff and explained himself. The personal-care lady who drove all that way assured them he was blessed out of losing balance in the outhouse. She kept him changed and cathetered fresh. Two more times until the drinking man died, Earl drove Bev to play catch-up over town takeout they left large containers of. They returned to Bledsoe for all sorts of card parties and yard dances and front-room get-togethers among Earl’s sisters and crinkly eyed, knee-slapping parents. That was why she loved him.

  Before they found Singer’s Trailer Park, when Earl was infatuated with everything from the cute grrrrr of Beverly’s crooked teeth to the way she dared him with misunderstanding his every joke, the brand-new Redvines had rented a clapboard house in Bledsoe proper. A stream flowed behind the yard out back. They traveled to Lake Itasca together, and paddleboated down the Mississippi River, and invited friends to the kids’ birthday parties, and drove Christmas gifts to the primary relatives, and mailed holiday cards to all the rest. They were stable.

  But they had problems with the supposedly gas stove. Dandy turned up too often with mice. Cracks in the windows meant flytraps hung from the ceilings like drapes and trumped as centerpieces of the rooms. Then Redvine hit some kind of lottery. He put down on a double-wide in middle of Singer’s. It had space and quiet, and just a little bit of work to get the propane so Bev could cook. Though Beverly missed having an attic, and an AC would be nice, nobody could say a word edgewise about her or her family. Salt-of-the-earth people, and her kids were definitely going places to boot. Others could only prove the Redvines wrong if what she declared as perpetually “fine” became a grassroots news tragedy, a sudden funeral to attend, or a broke and homeless quartet for relatives to prepare the extra bedrooms for.

  So Bev chain-smoked her husband’s Kools for two hours on the night in Bledsoe, Mississippi, not too many acres from where a child floated in their Yockanookany River cobble well. She stayed calm. There once had been that story in the Star-Herald, of the fourth-grade girl walked straight out the church to vanish into broad daylight before the benediction. That poor girl was found in a shed amidst unmentionable circumstances. But that was yeeeeears ago. There had to be only one story like it for each person who could hear i
n a lifetime. So, it couldn’t be her story to tell, too.

  Solemn is a good girl, Bev thought. And, I have a good husband and son. Nothing wrong—no, certainly not my daughter deflowered and decapitated to decompose unsanctified in a junky, humid shed.

  Except, they were all no longer enchanted with one another. Her family was just, now routine. Any break in their routine was like a fever: duly noted, checked on, hurried for, and taken way too often for its drama more than its results.

  When Solemn was not back after the sun set, Bev foraged for coins to offer a neighbor. One might let her tie up their phone, to hunt her husband back to drive around to look for Solemn. With the pockets of her housecoat weighed down by dollars in quarters, she put on sandals and marched out. The strong metal hills of the former bayou oil fields granted her bearings in the dark. She looked for the first open door.

  Light and laughter drew her down to where she never went, past the same old sheds and storm cellars and bikes and fire pits she saw outside her windows too many hours a day. And she didn’t choose the way. The way chose her. She watched her steps on the same steep she often saw Solemn hike, to the well. Lights strung around trees, a sweet-scented wind blossom, morning glory sprung, pitchforks in the grass, the first stars. All this surrounded these other Singer’s people she only knew due to scarce sightings.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Bev said to who she presumed was the lady of the house: a woman sat down on chalky white patio furniture, in a yard larger than normal, adjacent to a man working up charcoal for a grill, leaning onto a Siamese-eyed daughter wearing all pink, both staring into the fat book the woman held in her hands, and both so absorbed in the story or each other or both they hardly noticed Bev approach. When they did, the woman smiled and she really meant it.

  “No interruption,” she said. “How you?”

  “I’m fine,” Bev said. Then, minding her manners: “Beverly Redvine.”

  “Stephanie Longwood,” the woman said. She put her book down in her lap and shook Bev’s hand. “Honey, you wanna introduce yourself?” she asked the child.

  The little girl looked up, squirmy and grinny, and turned her face into her mother’s hair.

  “Oh, you know how they are.”

  “Don’t I.” Beverly sighed. “I have a daughter myself. I’m looking for her. Do you think you’ve had a look at a girl round here, older and taller than yours?”

  “Well, hmmm … lemme see. My gosh. I should go ask my husband.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” Bev said. “I’m sure she’s—”

  “No, it’s no trouble. We’re neighbors.”

  The girl followed the woman. She stopped to pick up a pitchfork to dig in the dirt.

  Bev eyed her new neighbor having a conversation with her man. He set down the bag of charcoal to really listen to what his wife had to say, put his hands over his eyes, looked around, and squinted his eyes like his wife. They were identical twins almost.

  Cute, Bev thought. She was past that point with Redvine. The woman had set the book down upon a strong pewter patio table, webbed top and latticed sides. The woody-yellow cover picture said The Poisonwood Bible. Good God. Before Bev could wonder too long on what blasphemy the book might hold, the woman returned.

  “That’s my husband, Theodis,” she said. “He wouldn’t notice my new hairstyle, let alone a girl running round here. You have a car?”

  “I don’t drive,” Bev said. “My husband do. He’s out with it.”

  “It’s gonna take him forever and a day to get the grill going. Why don’t we drive round look for your daughter? By then, meat should be ready.”

  “Oh I couldn’t,” Bev said.

  “Really, it’s no trouble,” Stephanie said. “We can’t have these girls round here missing. You hear all this mess on the news these days. Nobody cares if it’s one of us…”

  “She comes back,” Bev said. “But it’s been a long—well, do you have a phone?”

  “Most certainly,” Stephanie said. “I’d be calling the police myself if—”

  “No, not the police,” Bev said. “I think I know where my husband is. If you don’t mind, he can bring back our car and go look. I really thank you.”

  “Don’t mention,” Stephanie said. “Desiree, take our nice neighbor to the phone.”

  The daughter twisted herself round to the direction of the door like a figure in a snow globe, perfect pirouette it seemed. Bev realized it had been intentional, a mock performance, entertaining her mother. How playful they were. Without a word or a caution, the pinkness led her into one of the very few trailers Bev ever stepped into outside her own at Singer’s. She could hypnotize herself to think of what she had as a home, large enough for sure. She recalled what her mother used to say, all the time, about how somebody cried because they had no shoes but then they saw a man with no feet.

  The slim black telephone was stuck into the wall near the back screen, in a kitchen the size of ones she saw in the actual ranch house she and Redvine speculated they would buy one day. It was a cordless phone. Modern. Music came from above her, but she couldn’t find speakers. Then, she noticed small patches of black dots in the white ceiling where the sound came down from—clear and abundant, smooth jazz, fancy-like.

  When the pinkness left her alone with the pretty horn music, Bev almost forgot her purpose: to find a phone to call her husband, to say their daughter had gone out without coming home. Bev thought she remembered his whereabouts tonight was not a bar but a card party. At old Alice Taylor’s house with Alice’s new boyfriend and his friends. She called up there. One of the young boys who hung round Alice Taylor’s for the free food and cigarettes and joints and beers answered quickly. “Yeah, Redvine here.” Then, Bev was surprised: Red didn’t sound tipsy or drunk after all this time gone, not at all.

  She quickly explained. “I’m there in a minute,” he told her.

  Had she not feared embarrassing herself, she would have lingered in longer, to listen to the pretty horn music coming out the invisible speakers in the ceiling in a trailer that had to be at least twice the size of hers … wraparound sofa set, big glass pictures on walls. Outside, Stephanie Longwood and the daughter—chin on her mother’s shoulder—were back wrapped in the blasphemous book.

  “Things okay?” Stephanie asked.

  “Yes. I reached my husband,” Bev said.

  “Perfect,” Stephanie said. She finished the sentence she had been on before Bev came back out into the yard. Then, she minded her own manners and looked up. “I’m sure she’s on her way. Feel free to stay until he gets here. You reading this book?”

  “Why, no,” Bev said. “I was gonna ask … A poison Bible?”

  Stephanie laughed. “Ain’t what you think. It’s a novel. Bunch of white folks go to mess with a bunch of us in Africa. It’s that Oprah thing. You know, the book club?”

  Bev knew all about it, with everybody reading the same book for the month Oprah said they should. She had meant to get into it, perhaps try out for one of the shows where women maybe just like her sat on television with the author. But she was always worried about her English not being too good, so she never wrote in for the contests and letters like she daydreamed she would. Stephanie looked like a type who might do that.

  “I been thinking about getting a little group going out here,” Stephanie said. “Everybody so close, but we stay so spread out. But, well, a book club … maybe. Get together and talk about books. Drink some wine. Oh, and certainly a lotta food.”

  She leaned in close to Bev, like a high school girl behind the teacher’s back.

  “Best part is husbands won’t know what in the world we doing.” Stephanie laughed.

  Bev forgot Solemn somehow. She imagined herself holding a wineglass and laughing about a big, fat book.

  “Better than slucking through all this alone,” Stephanie said. “Would you come?”

  “I guess so,” Bev said. “I mean, I used to read so much more, but now…”

  “We should d
o it,” Stephanie said. “Take my telephone number.” She handed The Poisonwood Bible to the pinkness, to pick up a tote bag slung over her chair. Inside her purse she juggled around sunglasses, a billfold, a heavy bottle of perfume, and other things before she found a gold pen tucked into a leather pouch with a notepad attached.

  “Feel free to use the phone anytime you need it,” Stephanie told Bev, handing her a telephone number to force—much as Bev distrusted sensing it in herself—some trust.

  Redvine had ended the game with money on the table divided equally between the men. Then, Beverly just waited. Redvine arrived home with his duffel bag on his shoulders. The food and tools he carried around for the days were still inside.

  “I’m so tired of that girl running off. Red, I tell you, I’m gonna lock her in here.”

  “She off with Landon, at one of them meetings, learning how to complain…”

  “But Landon was long gone when Solemn left. She didn’t say nothing to me ’bout following him round nowhere. Something’s wrong. I should’ve watched her…”

  “You get back to the phone and I’ll get to the road. I know my kids. Ain’t nothin’ wrong. That girl just out here getting fass. You gotta put your foot down.”

  “Me? And you?”

  The Magnolia Bible College recruiter had said she’d graduate in a year.

  In just one year, she would have not only gotten out of the house on her own. She would have also gotten a certificate to work, have her own mind, and skip out on being the only one steering kids in the proper directions. Landon agreed with her, but he agreed with everything she said. Solemn never understood what she was talking about. Redvine thought school was useless for her; they only had one car. Either he’d have to drive her to her classes or she would have to take him to work and pick him up, or they would have to buy another car for her to have all her own, or they would have to have Landon do all the driving since he had so much spare time. And who was going to watch Solemn? Would they have to pay for that, too? They couldn’t leave her by herself. The idea just became too complicated before it became nonexistent. It relaxed to a wish. If the wish inched into conversation, it could not lengthen. It was a fantasy locked inside Bev’s fixed stare at the television whenever she was alone. Often. And she wondered if she should run back to the neighbor’s house to read the Oprah books, without telling anybody where she went off to, so they could search her out for a change. But that was the future, not real yet.