Knee-Deep in Wonder
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Authors: April Reynolds
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Contents
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To my father
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Memory believes before knowing remembers.
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WILLIAM FAULKNER
,
Light in August
1
AUTUMN IN ARKANSAS
flaunts only its absence; a broken promise, it's the worst of summers called by another name. Sullen September heat causes yellow jasmines and bell-flowers to pant for mercy, the reek of their dying scent as loud as a scream. Buildings bulge with wet heat, and children turned out-of-doors by well-meaning mothers wilt in their front yards or search for shade beneath pecan trees. Even language melts on the tongue. Sentences slur, words gasp for breath in the mouth. Howdy takes days to say. Like death, the autumn heat is inescapable.
It crawled up the woman's skirt as she stepped out of the airplane at Pine Bluff. Her once crisply ironed green dress turned limp and clung to her thighs as she walked past the only baggage claim in the Pine Bluff airport toward the Greyhound ticket booth. And I pick corduroy, she thought, pulling at her sleeve. She felt her collar-length hair curling into a bird's nest from the humidity. Her crayon-brown legs taking long strides, she approached the bus depot directly outside the airport's double doors, licking at the sweat mustache sprouting on her upper lip. “Excuse me. When does the next bus leave for Stamps?” Her voice sounded strong despite the heat.
“That's a thirty-minute wait. But we got a little bench over to the side for folks to sit.” The bus attendant pointed to a slab of shadow.
Her gaze followed his arm. “I don't see a bench.”
He stepped away from the booth. “Over yonder,” he said, a small smile on his lips. “Give me your name and I'll call you when the bus come on.”
“Helene. Helene Strickland. And thank you.” She turned away from the booth, her wooden sandals clicking lightly on the sidewalk. The metal awning that jutted away from the building would no more provide respite from the sun than a leaky bucket hold water. She stood in the shadow and because of the sudden darkness barely saw themâsix or seven lean black men huddled just beyond the bench, wearing the uniform of mechanics: loose green shirts with matching pants. Two squatted on their haunches while the rest stood, each with one leg braced against the dark wall. They watched her approach, their eyes winking. Appreciative but restrained, their eyes drank in the swell of leg between her narrow ankles and dimpled knees.
She stopped for a moment, uncertain. They're just eating lunch, calm down, she thought, as she looked at the aluminum foil and apple cores strewn on the ground. Brown paper bags rolled down like stockings sat in a heap in front of them. When she came near the bench, their low hissing swallowed her up. “Big-leg gal, come here. Come here. Come on, little bit. Baby girl.” The two sitting down opened their legs suddenly and then barked laughter. “Juicy baby. Juicy.” Their whispers, sweet and urgent, came from mouths that didn't seem to move at all. The toothpicks and Kool king cigarettes jutted from their lips, motionless; their faces so still Helene wondered if she was really hearing anything at all. Her doubt surged as she listened to the murmuring. “Big-legged gal. Come here, big-legged gal. Let me give you something.” The voices seemed to escape from the wall behind them. She crept closer, her hands fluttering, smoothing her dress down around her thighs and knees, her collar no longer just wilted but wet with sweat. Damp air curled her pressed hair. She sat, coughed lightly, and fished in her purse for cigarettes. Helene ducked her head into her palm, out of habit, to shield the sputtering flame from nonexistent wind. As the cigarette came to life and Helene breathed in deeply, the whispers grew louder. “Where you going? Can I come with you? Come on, big-legged gal.” But Helene ignored them and dove again into her purse, pulling out a letter. She plunged into its contents, into her mother's rambling words.
My girl,
Done cleaned this house bottom to roof. And I come cross this little thing that only can belong to some baby, when I was washing out theâ
But she couldn't stay with the letter, since what had been whispers rose just shy of regular speech. Constant, beseeching, the voices looped around Helene's concentration, choking off her train of thought. She looked up from her lap, turned toward the young men, and did the unforgivable: she smiled. A woman's smile that conveyed
Thank you, but no thank you,
with a blast of teeth. The flattery that had accompanied her all the way to the bench abruptly stopped, leaving an ache of silence. The two men who sat on their heels stood and the taller one looked right at Helene. His inert face finally moved. Brown lips parted and Helene saw a white gleam. “Twat,” he said softly and spat carefully, aiming at the bare spot between his feet.
She half stood, caught in a stumble, falling over her unsteady feet, hardly hearing the bus attendant. “Miss Helene,” he called out. “Miss Helene?” Her wooden sandals tapped out her path as she turned back for one more look at the clutter of men, but already they had shuffled away. “Miss Helene, you back there?”
“Has the bus come?” She threw her burning cigarette on the ground.
“It's early today,” the attendant said. Perhaps, if Helene hadn't tripped the way she had, out of sight of those brown lips lifting, sneering; perhaps if she hadn't still been chewing on the word
twat,
almost physically trying to rub away the sting, she would have seen it comingâthe attendant's gummy smile laced with curiosity, the bus ticket held just out of her reach. But fresh back in the South, she fell headlong into the inevitable conversation, drowning in its words. “Knew some Stricklands in Georgia. You one of them?” The smile grew as the attendant, still holding her ticket, walked away to stand behind the ticket booth.
Helene followed him. “No, I don't know anyone in Georgia.” She reached for her ticket but the man turned away, his hands dashing beneath the counter as if he were looking for something.
“Eastman, Georgia?”
“No.”
“Barely sound like you from the South, girl. Where you from?” His hand surfaced from beneath the counter without her ticket.
“I live in Washington, D.C.”
“Naw, baby. I mean, where your people?” She heard her own private ugliness wrapped in comfortable talk.
“Uh, listen. I'm in a bit of a rush. Could you give me my ticket? I can't board the bus without it. Thank you.”
Again his hand darted under the counter, and he reluctantly handed over her pass. “Don't mind me. I justâ”
“I won't,” she muttered, yanking the ticket out from his fingers.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Helene got on the bus and the door closed behind her in a muted whoosh. “Hello there, little lady,” the driver said, as she passed his wide grin. Not until she watched Fordyce's textile plants race alongside the bus did she reach inside her purse again. The conversation with the attendant and the confrontation with the men under the depot's awning still pinched. “Southern ugliness,” Helene said quietly to the empty seat beside her. And that's not all that's ugly around here, she thought, as she looked out the window. Factories making transportation equipment rose from lakes of asphalt, meat processing and leather plants gave way to long stretches of forest that every now and then were interrupted by soybean and rice farms.
When the bus reached Camden, Helene's hand was still stroking the closed letter inside her purse. How did she know my address? Unlike the cache she kept in a trunk at her uncle's house, this letter, arriving at her apartment in Washington, was only two weeks old. Helene had opened it but hadn't read all through, afraid that old childhood desires would flare. Queen Ester, Helene's mother, had put her daughter out before she could hold her head up; never mind the story Helene had heard about her mother wanting her to live in a better place, that Queen Ester had left Helene in Aunt Annie b's arms and then crouched to the ground in a wash of tears as she cried out, “This mine, it's my baby girl!” Helene didn't believe any of it, because if that were true, she thought, as she strummed her fingers on the bus window, Mama wouldn't have turned me away so many times since then. Her mother was a hand held up before Heleneâlarge, final, allowing nothing to pass. All she could see were the faint lines etched in the palm, complicated yet soothing.
So, no, she hadn't read more than the first two sentences of her mother's letter, not quite ready to lift the scab of a barely healed wound. But that changed when her uncle Ed called two days ago and told her Annie b had dropped to the floor and not gotten back up. She had fallen in the kitchen with a plate in her hand, sucking her teeth, Helene's uncle said, “Like she was trying to tell the floor to mind and it pulled her on down just for ugly's sake.” Uncle Ed had come in from the yard and seen her folded under the sink. “You get on up, b. Just get on up,” he'd said. Only then, after Ed's call, did she read the rest of her mother's letter, beating back old hurt when she saw the second page was a grocery list: bananas, peas (frozen), milk, bacon. And at the bottom, her mother's words marching on the paper:
You come, hear me?
Now on the bus, as it entered Magnolia, she pulled the letter out, placing it on her lap. The pages fell open of their own accord. This time she didn't bother to read. Wasn't her father gone, her grandmother passed on soon after, and her mother ⦠well, shit, who knew? She didn't need a letter to tell her all that. She fingered the paper's edge, looking out the window again. Now there was just her uncle, fading right before her eyes, although she wouldn't actually see this until he opened his front door. For now, she watched the Arkansas wilderness fly past, and like the letter in her lap, memory fell open, like a sleeping mouth.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Helene had spent her life swirling around the edges of Lafayette County, Queen Ester's county. Taken to Dallas and then to Heber Springs, Arkansas, Helene, by the age of four, knew that all the front doors she walked through were never home. Aunt Annie b, Uncle Ed, and Helene stayed in places just long enough for Annie b to plant maple trees in front yards, put basil, thyme, and rosebushes into the ground out of season, forever limp and wilting despite all her coaxing and cursing. The constant moving Ed put them through was marked by the trail of unfinished gardens Annie b left in her wake.
Edward Taylor was an insurance salesman, peddling home and health policies for twenty-three dollars a year. Parceled and divided, payments were not even two dollars a month, “And for that, that child of yours can get to a hospital and get well if she ever get sick,” Uncle Ed would say over the dinner table, recounting what he told potential customers. “And what they say? What they say, my baby girl?” he asked, looking up at Helene from his plate, and at six years old she could mock a voice full of tired sass: “Just give me the burial policy, anything else just a curse.” Ada, Oklahoma; Colby, Kansas; Monroe, Louisiana; places that were on the brink, as Uncle Ed said, close enough to prosperity that the townspeople could hold out their tongues to feel glasses of instant lemonade and lawn chairs coming their way. McCool, Mississippi; Best, Texas; Floyd, New Mexico. But despite new post offices and the opening of a second bank, there was never a chicken in every pot. Finally, by the age of thirteen, Helene realized that they weren't moving to towns on the edge of affluence (Ed was thirty-forty years late without knowing it), but to places that had just peaked. By the time Helene's family arrived on the four-lane interstate highway, the citizens of any given town had grown tired of hoping for better and were wary of anyone giving guarantees.