Black Water (5 page)

Roach didn’t look at it that way. He hated it ever time Pearl helped birth a baby ‘cause she’d get in a slump for days afterwards. She’d just park her highly-cushioned rear end in the rocking chair on their front porch, looking off in the distance, fixed on nothing and blow out poor-me sighs. The whole grieving time she wouldn’t fix nothin’ to eat, the shack would go to pot, and when she looked at Roach, which wasn’t any more often than she had to, the look said it was his fault she didn’t have any younguns pullin’ on her titties. Then she’d sigh and stare off into the distance again. Poor me.

“Forget it, Pearl! We don’t need no baby!” Then he jerked his head back over his shoulder. “’Specially one come out o’ that womb.”

“No! You don’t need no baby,” she spat back. She knew his objections were coming, and she was fully loaded, cocked, and ready to fire.

“Anyway you want it—you, me, us—but witchin’s passed on, ‘n that thing layin’ in th’mud back there with its guts spilled out’s a witch, which means,” he jabbed his finger at the bundle on Pearl’s chest, “’at’s a witch ‘n we ain’t takin’ in no dadgum witch! Now, you listen t’me, God Dammit!” He used “God Dammit” on highly volatile occasions when “Dadgummit” wasn’t enough. Unfortunately for him, to Pearl his “God Dammits” were just as toothless as his “Dadgummits.”

“I know whatchur plottin’ ‘n you c’n f’get it! You think you’ll wear me down, butchur bad mistook ‘n headed fer a haaarrrd fall. I got m’back up ‘n I’m tellin’ ya! Don’t get attached to it! You ain’t keepin’ it!”

Gritting her teeth, rocking the baby, she said…nothing, not a dadgum word, and Roach knew that wasn’t a good sign. Roach would much rather she’d kept argeein’. Not saying anything, he knew she had her feet planted, and he’d have to try another tack.

“Listen. We c’d sell it t’somebody ‘at wants one. We’d probly get good money for it. Find somebody that’d treat it good, butchu don’t tell nobody its mama was a witch ‘r we’ll never get shed of it.” That didn’t work either. She was still tight-jawed, so he tried to make a funny. “On second thought, maybe it’da been better if it was white, too, like its Ma. We’d get more sellin’ it to a circus.”

“She ain’t a it.”

Totally frustrated, Roach slapped the reins across the mules backs. “Git up, you sons-o-bitches!”

Pearl pulled the baby closer to her chest and shot Roach a glare. “Not in front o’ th’baby!”

The next morning, the storm had shut down considerably. Pearl climbed up Roach’s back ‘til he hitched the mules to the wagon and rode off to pick up Smoke’s body. About a mile from the shack, he stopped the mules, set the brake, pulled out a bottle of hooch he’d stashed under a pile of tote sacks, and layin’ in the wagon bed, sipped on the contents in the sporadic morning sun. He closed his eyes and the sun was in one place, opened ’em later and it’d moved quite a bit. On the way back home, he cooked up a story about the body being gone.

Roach and Pearl had an arrangement. An understanding. Pearl made the little, day-to-day decisions, while Roach made the more important big’ns. Roach determined who should be President, whether or not the country should go to war and who with. Everthing else was Pearl’s domain, and if the old thing about possession being nine-tenths of the law carried any weight, Roach was had because Pearl had made another of her little decisions. They’s keepin’ the baby. The second she had her arms wrapped around that tiny little miracle, it was over. Roach had a better chance of waking up handsome than pryin’ ’em apart. There was no doubt, though, the child was gonna have a hard row to hoe. The lightning bolt that blew her mama’s arm off left the baby with a nasty wine-colored splotch that ran from low on her left cheek to high in her scalp. The eye itself was blue/gray blind, an ugly piece of work. With marks like those, she wasn’t gonna have it easy.

When it come to bearing children, the best Pearl had ever done was two or three miscarriages, and one—tiny George, a full-nine-monther, but who’d died within hours of being born—was buried in a shallow hole in the tiny, one-grave cemetery in back of the shack. The sight of that little grave and the faded wooden marker with his name scratched in it bothered her a whole lot.

Within a week Pearl’s breasts were swollen and leaking milk and that sweet life laying on her chest while its little lips sucked on her nipple was the most wonderful thing she’d ever felt. No mother, natural or surrogate, ever loved a child more.

She named the baby Lootie after a little snow-white bunny rabbit she’d had by that name when she was a youngster. Unfortunately, the bunny came along the same time a hard winter bared its icy fangs. Her papa’d had to butcher it for sustenance, and poor little Pearl never got over it. Even as an adult, she would tear up ever time she thought about it.

The nastiest part o’ losing Lootie, the bunny one, was that dear ol’ Papa hadn’t mentioned where that night’s dandy supper had come from until after the meal’d been consumed, the dishes washed up and put away. He figured it was better to keep quiet about her little buddy’s grizzly murder until the meal was over because it was easier to grieve on a full belly than an empty one. He woulda preferred not having to say anything but he knew the next morning Pearl would run outside to play with the unfortunate bundle of fluff, it wouldn’t be in the hutch, and Pearl would wanna know where her friend with the twitchy nose was.

So that night, working around a nose dripping watery snot and a flood of tears, dear ol’ Papa told Pearl that he was real sorry he’d had to do such an awful thing. He remembered it read somewhere in the Good Book, though, that giving your life for your family was about as good as you could do, and that was exactly what that brave little snow-white bunny’d done—saved their very lives!

Pearl told him the bunny hadn’t been brave and it hadn’t given up its life, it’d been taken from it and it was pretty much a stretch to call it family, but if that was what he had to do to make it better, it was all right, she understood. A smarter, more compassionate person woulda left well enough alone, but he added, “It did taste pretty good, though, didn’t it?” That started a whole new flood of snot and tears and two nights worth of nightmares starring a family sitting around the supper table, clubbing and gnawing on blood-slinging, defenseless little pink-eyed bunnies. Her papa was kind enough to give her the pelt though, and they had a little funeral for it.

Pearl told everbody they knew that Lootie belonged to Roach’s non-existent brother and his non-existent wife that lived up north. The brother had come on real hard times so they might have the poor little thing for quite a while. Maybe even for good. Pearl didn’t give it much thought that by telling such a whopper she was putting herself in danger of Hell fire. If she had to go around God to find her own baby to love and God didn’t like it, He could take a walk!

She learned the hard way not to show her around too much because of folks’ reaction to the scars and the blind eye. Early on, she’d made the mistake of telling a couple of women friends that Lootie’d been struck by lightning, but that spooked people where superstition was a hefty part of daily life. A halo around the moon, a bat in the house, or giggin’ a two-headed frog were sure signs of nasty doin’s, but they were nothin’ compared to a lightnin’-struck baby. Over back fences and around supper tables, talk was that it wouldn’ta been the Good Lord that would strike a baby with lightning, and even if it had been, He surely woulda taken it to Heaven rather than to leave it to suffer. The verdict of the majority was passed down—the little Komes girl was marked, and by a lot more than a scar.

***

Pearl took sick in Lootie’s eighth year. It started with a nagging cough that turned into a wet, blood-tinged gagger. Then came the fevers that put her in bed, at first just for a couple of days at a time, but later, weeks. Then she couldn’t get out of bed a’tall. Listening to her breathe made one feel they needed to clear the phlegm from their own throat. Lootie took to feedin’ her, sittin’ on a stool alongside the bed, spooning broth in her, talkin’ to her and makin’ up little stories that always had a happy ending. She cleaned her up when nature called because Pearl either couldn’t get up quick enough to go outside, or, as time went on, she was just too weak and there wasn’t anything to do but let it go. She had bedsores all over her backside and her chest was just a ladder of bones stickin’ out and her poor ol’ titties looked like a couple of worn out socks with nothin’ in ’em, hangin’ off on her sides.

Pearl knew what was happening and it scared her, but not so much the dying—she was more concerned with what would happen to Lootie if she wasn’t there to look out for her. Roach was totally worthless and couldn’t look out for hisself, how could he possibly take care of Lootie. She’d had so many plans for her. For a better life than she’d had, for damn sure. She hated hers; it’d been valueless and empty. Except for Lootie. Lootie made her entire existence worthwhile.

Pearl had taught Lootie how to pray. To make it simple, she told her it was kinda like writing a letter, and you started it with “Dear God.” She said if Lootie needed something bad enough, God would answer her prayers, but she couldn’t ask for something like a new kitty or a fancy dress—it had to be for something special. She told her that God was like a father, and like any good father, he wanted his children to be strong and to try to stand on their own, but if things got really bad, they could ask for help. Then she told her how many times she’d tried to have a child and she thought it wasn’t never gonna happen. But, she kept praying, “And what happened?” she asked Lootie.

Lootie smiled. “I got borned.”

In the last couple of months, Lootie had prayed, day and night. Letter after letter floated up to Heaven. “Dear God. This is Lootie Komes. I’m awful scared. Please make my Mama better. Her name’s Pearl ‘n she’s th’best Mama in th’world. She ain’t never done nothin’ wrong ‘n even if she did, she didn’t mean it. Please God. Make ‘er better.” And with ever letter sent off, she’d run in the house to see if Pearl’d jumped off the bed. She hadn’t.

Roach was sending letters to Heaven, too, but his concern wasn’t for Pearl. His went no futher than his own hide. He was bad scared. He depended so much on her he couldn’t imagine goin’ on without her pullin’ her share of the load, which had always been pretty much the whole load. Roach declared war and elected presidents, but he’d never cooked a meal or washed out a pair of socks in his life.

One morning he woke Lootie up just before sunup and told her, “I’m gonna see somebody ‘bout med’cine fer Pearl.” Then he nodded over his shoulder. “I fixed up some biscuits ‘n greens. They oughta hold you ‘n yer ma ‘til I get back. Probly ‘bout sundown.”

Lootie rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and looked toward the stove. “You cooked somethin’?”

He knew what that meant. “It ain’t that bad!” Her face told him somethin’ else. “It’s that ‘r starve.” He slapped his sweat-stained hat on his head and left. Lootie rolled over and went back to sleep.

Roach’s destination was way back in the swamp to where there was rumored to be a witch who could conjure potions and such, and he detected wood smoke tinged with bacon and eggs two miles before he got to her. His stomach was growlin’, and he wondered if maybe she’d ask him to breakfast when she found out how far he’d trekked to get to her. Finally, he spied it through the thinning trees—a rundown, lop-sided shack with a slow smoky curl snakin’ out the top of the rock chimney.

The skinny old crone was perched on a tree stump just outside the door in the shade of the porch overhang. She had a corncob pipe stickin’ out the corner of her mouth and she was bent over, kinda, readin’ a book with a busted spine. She wore a dress as shapeless as an old sock and a color that could only be described as disappointed. She had a floppy-brimmed hat on her head that shaded most of her face. Her hair hung over her shoulders and down her back like a greasy old mop. Settin’ at her feet was a monstrous thing that had originally been a bristly-coated, Russian Wolfhound, gnawin’ contentedly on a bone. Time and circumstance had ground and battered it into somethin’ mean, hateful, and cunning. When Roach stepped into the clearing, it raised its head. The scarred old nose sipped the air while its head roamed slowly back and forth like it was havin’ trouble seein’ him—the lids hung down, pouch-like, like an ol’ alky’s. It was minus the left front leg clear up to the shoulder. One ear and its top lip had been ripped off the side of its face, revealing a row of long, dry yellow teeth. Its squarish muzzle was peppered with graying hair, and the creature constantly slobbered from the gap in its ruined maw. Finally, the head weavin’ stopped and those blood red eyes stared straight at Roach. It growled low and deep.

Roach stopped at what he considered, or at least hoped, was a safe distance. “G’mornin’,” he said, nervously, with an equally nervous smile. Then he remembered his manners, jerked his hat off his head, and wrung it in his hands.

She lifted her head, slowly, exposing eyes that looked like black glass.

He waited for a “Good Mornin’” back, didn’t get one, and finally told her, “You’re Cob.”

She waited a second, never takin’ her eyes off him, and then croaked, “I awready know that. You want somethin’ or ’dju traipse alla way outcheer just t’sell me some eggs?”

He took two jerky steps closer but stopped when poochie’s remaining lip curled up. He reclaimed his steps. Then he heard a phlegmy cackle as the woman closed the book, leaned down, and softly petted the monster on the top of its scab-encrusted head. “No, les be patient. See wat it wants first.”

The animal looked Roach over then went back to workin’ the bone.

“I heard I might could get somethin’ from you fer my wife. She’s real sick.”

“A rec’mendation,” the hag said, nodding. “Well, well, ‘at’s nice, ain’t it. From a satisfied customah, was it?” She cut loose with another phlegmy cackle, hocked and spat, then dropped the friendly façade. “Wat’s ‘er symptoms?”

“She’s lost a lot o’ weight. Lots o’ trouble breathin’, cain’t hold much o’ nothin’ down. Coughs a whole lot. Got th’shits.”