Solemn Page 9

  * * *

  It’s not what Solemn convinced Desiree inside the tent, before the very first time they hugged each other. Theo Longwood spent all night fashioning old lace window panels and the old sheets around his fishing nets. The mosquitoes gave up but the chiggers hung on. So the calamine lotion scuffed up their skin. Stephanie had already spread it down their arms and legs, but the girls wanted to do each other again on the feet, middle of the backs, and arms. The favor of the owls who paid them a visit was welcome. When the sun went down, the owls began to chatter and so did the girls.

  “You have to go down in the well with me, if you wanna see him,” Solemn told her.

  They clenched a scratchy throw tucked up to their chins. They moved in close. Desiree’s eyes widened into wonder and trust. For everything in the Longwoods’ house was structured, ornate, comprehensible. Their telephone chirped with the volume low, the school clothes ironed in advance, her shoelaces replaced regularly. She did not grow into high waters. She accompanied her mother to the Salvation Army, to take a fast ticket to inventory all their donated clothes rather than a patient browse through the Goodwill aisles. And figs drained the stigma from their daily oatmeal. Their own peaches sweetened their ice cream. Pretending shook things up a bit.

  Solemn dictated Desiree pretend to be Oprah Winfrey and she would be the star onstage, with the audience on their feet and maybe even fainting when they saw her.

  “What he look like?” Desiree asked her guest, entered through the tent slit.

  “Like a man,” Solemn thought back. “Nothing different or bad. But tall. Really tall, and walking kind of crooked. But but he ain’t got no face.”

  “No face? Then, Miss Solemn, tell me how come he don’t look different?”

  “’Cause he don’t look like nothing,” Solemn said. “We all look like something, but not him. Or he look like whatever you want him to. If you want him to look nice, he looks nice, but don’t believe it. And you can’t tell nobody about him. If you talk about him, he’ll just follow you. He’ll start asking you questions. Or telling you lies. ’Cause he said he ain’t through. It’s gonna be more of us. Could be me. It could even be you.”

  Desiree screamed. They jerked around to see if a door yanked open, the flimsy covers of their tent torn back, a roar to “get yas asses back in here right now!”

  But there was no one. No one but the owls.

  “I’ma take you there, one day, soon. Down far … And if we just keep on collecting the bottles and cans, doing what we can, working…”

  “Hey, Oprah don’t work,” Desiree said. “So I’m not supposed to—”

  “But you got money,” Solemn said. “So, we make enough money one day soon to go on to the rest of the world to meet new people. And nobody gon’ tell us what to do again. If you get on the shows or I get on the shows, we make sure to pick each other too.”

  So Desiree became the second, after the good brown cop; Solemn gave a peek. She would wait until maybe she got to the place called Chicago and talked to Oprah Winfrey, to tell it all there because everybody would listen and nobody would laugh.

  Them girls started a game of tickling, mostly barely touching. Desiree remained an accomplice to Solemn’s sanity, to dwarf her imaginings down to mere stories and twist bad memories into tolerance. Nothing more. Just stories and living dreams. Just to be able to tell somebody was a revelation, enough to ease the confusion and wonder. Solemn’s visions became no more than fables to share word for word and bit by bit on an occasional morning she remembered them. The secrets became harmless. Even invited. Through a semblance of a yard accentuated by the few fruit trees Singer’s Trailer Park could show off, on a fine dust grain dot of the Earth appearing to be the only world to them, with a sheet of haughty mist coordinating its fine shadows, and the graciousness of garter snakes held at bay, those two girls saw and imagined together.

  NINE

  Even the cicadas, brood buried for thirteen years, weren’t so sneaky as the weather proved to be in 2002. Some didn’t have televisions or good reception to watch the news. The radios went to music. The newspapers got pored over for the obituaries and coupons. If a telephone happened to be in reach, weather was never the message. They were used to heat. The rain was always welcome. The tornadoes happened to “those” people, their curse for being able to stretch front and backyards across acres. The sewage water, from the slaughterhouses dumping the hog and cow shit, only ran up on the neighborhoods fortunate enough to stand tall near the rivers and ravines. God didn’t bother blacks. White people did.

  The Bledsoe Festival was nothing newsworthy or even well-known outside of where it took place. It was the brainchild of a few retired teachers and set councilmen who used it to pull Bledsoe folks into Kosciusko to vote. It was the demarcation between winter and not, in a place where there was rarely a chill or snowflake to remind them of earth’s balancing acts. It was embedded in the people’s circadian time lines and holiday schedules. Toddlers could sense its remembrances in adulthood. Some dying noted it as their last good time. Families buried the hatchets under its ground. Newbie reporters noted it, affectionately, as their first byline. Its talent show contestants hoped it would launch stardom. The day came and went, with indigestion and gossip come along. The hatchets always resurfaced the next mornings, sharpened. The makers were still met. The babies grew up and no longer spent the whole days there but saw it as their chance to run away while the parents were occupied. Its reporters promoted to the obituaries and honor-roll lists. Rumor had it one studious girl, Muscogee tribed, went on to Time or Life.

  The Festival, Easter Holiday, and Tax Day fell almost two weeks to the days apart in 2002, in the new war, when they all waited with bated breath for a variety of cinematic definitions of it to appear in their lives and worlds and homes. Platoon. Saving Private Ryan. The Deer Hunter. Red Dawn. Glory. They discovered their war would be a duller testimony for them. Instead, their war only spiked up conversations from the elders voicing over their own Desert Storms and Vietnams and Koreas and Second World Wars, even a few holding on to mumble about the first one. Because of the unrest, Hall Carter used the coincidences to scare up more money. He appeared earlier on the courier bike he rode for Kosciusko businessmen—his briefcase stuffed with forms, stamps and pens strapped to a rear rack. He left many in Bledsoe hungering for refunds in the mail by Easter, on or before the very end of the month. What they might wear on Easter became the point of going to work, the balm on hands dried out from laundry, the motivation for the organist to try a different key with the same songs, the pedal behind the sopranos’ stretch to one octave higher, the promise blown on hot classrooms in spring fever, the empathy to coach more fish out of water. This year, the talentshow prize was up to $250, more than most of them made for forty hours of work a week. And that was before taxes and rent and utility bills and baby formula and gas and daily bread money.

  Bev invited Ruby.

  “Oh, Bev, now Easter for the family,” Ruby replied, like she spoke to a student.

  Bev didn’t push it. Sounded like the same response the so-called friend gave when invited for supper. The sting didn’t last long. Bev had Stephanie now, an ally against whites. They had shit to do. So Bev started talking to Stephanie about their custom orders and dress efforts long before the Festival, just for them and separate from parades and street festivals in town. It wasn’t that there was anything remarkably wrong, now, between whites and blacks. That part was better. No choice. It couldn’t have gotten worse. There were just, still, different ways and tastes the blacks always had to put down until white folks got through acting up. If they kept it separate, this wasn’t necessary.

  Bev planned a partly chiffon red frock she saw in the Jet Photos of the Week on somebody, amending a similar one she spotted at Sears.

  Stephanie ordered her yellow-and-blue-floral sundress way in advance from Marshall Field’s in Chicago, out of the new spring catalog. It was hanging in her closet by March.

  Solemn
and Desi wanted to match. They chose cutoff jean shorts and hot-pink baby-doll shirts.

  Redvine was out either trying to think of or looking for something to sell there.

  Theo Longwood, banking on a fortune, planned to import pony rides off connections his wife’s father left.

  Landon wrote Easter would be his selected first break. He wouldn’t kill anyone, he promised.

  As Bev liked for it to all appear, they all were very “fine.”

  * * *

  Desi now oddly complained of fevers, often. Solemn followed along. If Desiree was sick, she wanted to be sick too. Usually, the palm test conducted by the two mothers came up unconcerned if not conclusive. The girls gulped baby aspirins, castor oil the chaser. They sat still while their mothers rubbed their throats with goose grease and checked their temperatures with mercury thermometers, like the babies got.

  “Told y’all not to be running around with no shoes on,” Mrs. Redvine reminded them. She wiped the drizzle from Solemn’s mouth, so less neat than the other girl.

  “Right after wasting my good polish to paint your toes,” Mrs. Longwood added, satisfied she had confiscated the pitchforks. She told her husband to say he needed them.

  The girls’ toenails were smudged and overlined with a usual ridge of soot.

  The women always thought the girls either weren’t listening or didn’t know what they were talking about if they were. Truth was, the girls grew out of “One Two, Buckle My Shoe” and moved on to the pitchfork game. Stephanie couldn’t understand it. Tonight, she couldn’t get the girls presentable for the PG-13 movie she promised them for later. They just weren’t interested. Bev called. Would be late to pick her daughter up from the free babysitting Stephanie provided. Again. It seemed she was making new friends now, at the Bible college. Fine. But …

  The girls spread their Hula-Hooping and flopping around to include all their trailer park’s acres. Stephanie didn’t like them running too far off to that other section and part, where some of the mobile home owners just never emerged or, when they did, it looked like they shouldn’t have. The girls often chose the far-off, misty shroud of weeping willows fringed by witch hazel and spurwort. Beyond a few peeks inside, the woods held too many bugs and thickets and unexpected pitfalls to dig a trailer into, or to even bother with going for the petunias and pink ladies clustered inside. Though the area was virtual steel wool on acres, some fed-up undesirables cut through from time to time. If and when they crawled out, they could always find three squares somewhere. But as narrow as both girls were—not yet filled out, getting to it—they could boogie slowly into the nooks and crannies. It was a form of being lost, and missing, with only so much space to be found.

  To count up high and start walking in different directions without looking back, until one of them shouted about it, was Solemn’s idea the moment she set eyes on the pitchforks. Stephanie’s father had once used them to mince hay for his horses. Solemn took to them, three—one for her, one for Desiree, and one to dare any man to come after them with. Now, Stephanie didn’t so much mind the pitchforks’ reincarnation. Had she not expected it, she would have kept them in her mother’s care in Indianola. But the pitchforks had more use than the designer cuff links she went ahead to give to her father’s greedy brothers. They were much sharper. When summer waned and it darkened earlier, Solemn’s push for Desiree to investigate the spookiness of the woods, with only the tips of pitchforks to help them find each other again, just didn’t seem safe. Not at all. But they always marched back: pitchforks in one hand, the other fixing their hair or holding their sandals. Hungry, leaving the pitchforks crossed in the yellow grass to pressure Stephanie’s beds of struggling dogwood and evening primrose.

  Since a little blue was turning into nothing but black within the hour, not to mention they had missed time to get pretty for the movie, Stephanie took the flashlight. This was something she expected her husband should have done. But he was not at home. Again. Along with Bev’s delays to pick up her child, her husband delayed coming home to his own. Folks had noticed this: “big old trees, nice Imperial, daughter dressed to the nines, but that man … hmmm…” The last thing Stephanie needed people talking about now was her girl coming from the woods none of them bothered with, looking like she had been raised by wolves. Enough was enough.

  Stephanie was a pragmatist. Never had her imagination coiled into intimidation: silly faces hidden in dried bushes or the nagging bite of thin branches. Now, she was unclear. That cobblestone well simply bothered her. She hated it. The number of accidents floating inside of it just did not seem to be a coincidence. Nobody drank its water anymore. When burnt apartment buildings in the cities showed up on the news, it was only a matter of time before they were torn down, to keep anyone else from dying just by looking at them. Stephanie thought it should be so for the well. Desensitized, she crept on past it the way a grown woman should. Finally, she heard the girls’ laughter and called their names. They did not call back.

  For a while now, this had gone on. Shady disappearances Stephanie chalked up to the defiance collectivity encouraged. It was part reason she preferred an only child. It seemed she had two now. Out the kindness of her heart she had agreed to babysit the girl, for no pay. Yes, she knew this was her say. Now it was turning into a chore.

  She hadn’t even bothered to change her white capris and sandals into something more suited to hunting through thickets. She was dusty and soot footed suddenly, a running theme in her daughter since this Solemn had shown up. Along with the extra food gone. She crossed a thin line of clay to another portion of the woods where it seemed she had heard them. Despite the Diet Coke and Dexatrim, her bosom and behind were just too meaty now to make it through like the girls obviously had been able to. She gave thanks for trees grown sideways to step over them, rather than try to work herself in between, her ear out for hornet’s nests and nose out for skunks. But behind a shifty fence of Solomon’s plume, Stephanie saw the girls. She stopped breathing for a moment.

  For atop a significant dirt mound with pitchforks laid down at its bottom, Solemn and Desiree sat with their arms around each other and their tongues in their mouths. And they pressed their chests into each other’s with their hands on each other’s behinds. Stephanie blinked, but she saw what she saw. She would have yelled out to them so loud they went deaf, but just her mouth open startled a coven of bats into screaming forth, straight to her. Even so, the girls did not mind the bats. They kept on.

  Solemn and Desiree appeared at the trailer after dark and sandals in their hands. Bev and Stephanie weren’t talking to each other like they normally did. Bev tried, but finally gave good parting. Stephanie just didn’t know what to say to anyone. She left it to Bev to collect Solemn, and she prepared a quiz-slash-speech for her daughter Desiree. She never gave it. Instead, she lay on her convertible couch-bed inside her double-wide trailer, without her man home on time and with her satellite TV turned to the higher channels: committed to showing Mississippians the running, guns, burning lands, and foreign tongues narrating in places not America. And all night, with the cognac set down on the carpet at the edge of the couch, this was so much easier to think about than the alternatives …

  … And the alternative keep me up at night thinkin ’bout my friend and what on earth she doin ’cross the way without me. So I got somethin more than a chore, better than a good grade. I got my own curtain yank it shut to cancel out the world’s surprises: rememberin, liars, baby harmers, sad women, and crazy men. It ain’t just Desiree give me the feelins, but pink too: Desi’s favorite. For now, so long as feelins keep the world lookin correct and my nights full of longer sleep and Desiree fillin the days, I can pretend I don’t want for nothing …

  * * *

  Next time she and Bev hung out, Stephanie was unsure what to say about the alternative so she came up with something else, or something else came up with her.

  “He’s cheating on me, the son of a bitch.” The breeze blew some napkins away, but Stephanie didn
’t boss herself to keep it neat. Bev was trustworthy, less a talker and more a listener. She didn’t know what to say about Stephanie’s ideas on her marriage, how to get in the middle of it, plus stay out of it. She liked both the Longwoods, all of them really. But it was Stephanie she owed. Affairs were certainly possible, sure. It took commitment to mundanity more than a marriage to just never think about it. There could be joy there …

  Solemn and Desiree rushed outside. They played “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” in circles, hands held and jumps in unison and in sight.

  “Mind’s playing tricks on you,” Bev told Stephanie, not as attentive as normal and without a bra under her day-old T-shirt. Last thing she expected was for somebody like a Stephanie to be wading in alcohol over a man.

  “Money’s missing, gone three nights last month to Jackson. Oh, I know…”

  The treat this afternoon was pralines, peaches, ice cream, bourboned coffee.

  “See,” Stephanie went on, “I just never been the type to snoop. But I know.”

  A disadvantage of Singer’s was its intimacy guaranteed all would know why your bed was loud or your kitchen table was silent. Folks had to travel to do a lot of fussing or a little dirt. More than a couple of times were some yards embroidered with scenes of a busted romance and carrying on, to draw snickers and views from indeterminable points; everybody at Singer’s saw it, yet nobody was around. Quarrelers could never live it down. Stephanie wouldn’t do it that way. She had a different take.

  “Well, what would you do? You out here somewhere, class or church, trying to pull your weight and do your part. he’s carrying himself off yonder for some tail?”

  Bev thought. “Just concentrate on the Festival,” she said.

  “At end of the day all I got is my daughter. I’m not thinking about anybody else.”

  “And I got mine,” Bev said, thinking back to ones in wells and sheds and the TV news and Unsolved Mysteries. “We lucky.”