Knee-Deep in Wonder (10 page)

Helene couldn't help but smile. Queen Ester grinned back.

“I can never figure out why people down this way say Chess loved Halle like nobody's business. Helene, girl, don't you believe that mess for one minute. Seem like all you got to do to make folks forget your sins is try to save some nappy-headed drowning boy and damn well make sure you drown too.” Her voice trailed off; she pressed down with her hands against the table as if to push herself away.

“Where are you going?” Helene asked.

“Chess make me tired, always did,” her mother answered. “It's a nap for me. Don't go nowhere. You ain't thinking of leaving, is you?” A worried look crossed Queen Ester's face.

“No.”

“All right then. I'll see you in an hour.” Queen Ester stood in the doorway. “Oh, and about Annie b? I still ain't going.” She left, and Helene heard the stairs groaning in response to her feet. A moment more, and Helene was sure Queen Ester would have laughed at her only child for rushing down here to try and throw her in a black dress and claim her as her own.

So why aren't I worried? she thought. Why didn't I tackle her and say she can't run away until I hear what I want to know and in the right order, like a broken stick pieced back together? Why didn't I do that? Why didn't I walk away when she said the dead spoke to Chess and he heard and followed, till he went into the lake, breathed in water like air, holding some young boy he mistook for his wife, who he didn't love or cheated on even if he did? Because it could really happen in this house—the dead poking their heads out from closets could really happen right here. Helene noticed the stillness, the absence of her mother. Longing smashed against her chest, and then fast on that followed anger and bravado. Liar, she thought. Why won't you tell me? Maybe because you won't share him. Maybe because you've got that big patchwork quilt of history that you want to give me bit by bit, but never all the pieces I need to make me whole.

He said it, I know he did. Lies birth lies, like English ivy, tangled greenery that goes on leaping long after it's forgotten its purpose, that only wants to climb the wall to show you it can. Before I leave, if I leave—no, when I leave—you'll tell me just how it happened that this man was mine all along and no one told me different. How it happened that everyone—Helene stopped. She suddenly realized that everyone meant just that: everyone.

Uncle Ed. Perhaps he didn't know. Perhaps he's just like me; he heard what they told him and didn't check their faces. Uncle Ed didn't lie, surely. Maybe Aunt Annie b, because she could be that mean, that spiteful, but not Uncle Ed. He didn't know. A hurtful thought formed and Helene's logic could not sweep it away. He's a smart man, isn't he? Of course he is. Well, no one can be that blind for that long. He knew; he just didn't tell. It's not the kind of secret a bunch of women can hold together. He knew and he never said a word, not a word. Must be nice to be a man in the South. Right or wrong, you're always right. Able to dodge responsibility like a boxer. Yes, that must be nice.

6

BY 1930, LIBERTY
had been living in Lafayette County without Sweets for five years. Five years without someone to sass her and tell her to quit on that every time she wanted to kiss her baby girl under the chin. Five years without back talk, insults, and smirks. Without someone saying, “Who sings night-night songs to a baby that can carry her own tune?” After her husband's departure Liberty fell headlong in love. Suddenly everything about her daughter was charmed and precious. Who more than Liberty treasured the sound of Queen Ester's footsteps as she ran down the hall? Or the way her little baby girl chewed her lunch with her mouth open? Just beautiful.

It had begun simply enough. One night it occurred to Liberty that she didn't have to wait until morning to see Queen Ester. Nothing stood in her way, certainly not Sweets, she thought, as she got up from her bed and tiptoed to Queen Ester's room. As she opened her daughter's door, she called out softly in the dark, “Baby, you come get in bed with me if you like. I'll sing you one more song fore bed.” Liberty was enchanted with the look of wonder and pleasure that stole across her daughter's face when she woke up. She don't want to wait till morning either, Liberty thought, watching her girl fling off her covers. If what make her that happy make me happy, what's the harm? She waited a month to do it again, thrilled with Queen Ester's delight and surprise.

Slowly, once in a while became night after night. After tucking Queen Ester into bed, Liberty would appear again in her daughter's doorway to ask breathlessly, as if the thought had just crossed her mind, “You can come sleep with me, Queenie. I sing you one more song fore bed.” And Queen Ester, who hadn't fallen asleep at all, put aside her pretending to stumble into her mother's arms. She had been waiting on her mother's arrival, listening for Liberty's pacing, since her excitement sprang not from the suspense of whether her mother would come but when. Sometimes Liberty would hold back for just minutes; other nights she would wait for as long as two hours to suddenly step out of the dark. Queen Ester cherished the moment when her mother walked into her room, wearing a mischievous smile, ready to feed her songs that felt like secrets.

Bye-bye blues, bells ring, birds sing,

sun is shining, no more pining.

Just we two, smiling through,

don't sigh, don't cry, bye-bye blues.

Bye-bye to all your blues and sorrows,

bye-bye cause they'll be gone tomorrow.

The song alone was worth spending an hour and sometimes two, clawing the sleep away, struggling against her body's warmth. Liberty would sing the lead and Queen Ester would sing its counterpoint:

Bye-bye blues, bells will ring and birds all sing.

Stop your moping, keep on hoping.

The two of us together, just me and you,

will keep smiling, smiling through.

So don't you sigh and don't you cry.

Bye-bye blues.

Liberty knew very few songs from beginning to end. So what if the song Queen Ester loved best contained the words “just we two”?

They would live three more years alone, eight years altogether without husband, friend, or neighbor, and all the while Liberty treated their love like something covert, though there was no one watching. She knew Sweets had left, but to admit he was gone for good meant they were now two, a breakable number. So she treated Queen Ester as if someone lurked around the corner to snatch her. Strangely enough, it felt like the best way to be with her daughter—at once playful and imperiled. Whether they were two or three, love didn't mean a thing until someone threatened to pull it away.

By the time Sweets walked out, Liberty had skimmed five thousand three hundred sixty-eight dollars. Sweets had to sleep, and Liberty had taken as much as twenty dollars from his money clip at any one time. Sweets hadn't noticed. And if he had, so what? She was the wife. Now church shoes were worn all through the week. Liberty dressed Queen Ester in the same outfit, ordered in three different colors. At forty-two cents a pound, Liberty fed them round steak every third month. Like her love, the money seemed endless. They lived high for almost eight years: ice cream on Sundays, rose-scented soap for washing up, hour-long baths till Queen Ester stepped out from the tub gleaming. Liberty had no friend to shove reality down her throat, no one to say, “Sweets been gone for how long? Girl, he ain't coming back. You better hold on to that money you took off him.” Liberty treated her husband's disappearance like an extended vacation. Man get that mad, got to walk it off. And that takes a spell. No need to cut corners; Sweets would be back to fill her pockets any day now. Never mind that any day stretched into eight years.

But in 1933, the five thousand three hundred sixty-eight dollars Liberty had thought would last as long as Sweets was gone had dwindled down to two. And without Sweets's ever-full money clip, things fell down at Liberty's house. Lemon cakes and rhubarb pies made just because became a habit of the past. The generator in the backyard broke and Liberty didn't have the money to fix it. Now she and Queen Ester had dinners lit by kerosene lamps and candles. Queen Ester turned ragged. Quickly she outgrew the dresses specially ordered, and Liberty's night songs turned to clever explanations. “I was gone buy you a new dress, baby. But you look so sweet in them old ones. Like the little bit you was when everything was just right. And they ain't too tight, is they?”

“No, ma'am.” Queen Ester snuggled deeper into her arms.

“You ain't just saying that, is you?” Liberty pulled back slightly to get a better look at her child's face. Winter air rushed between them and bit hard into Queen Ester's bare stomach.

“No, ma'am, I ain't just saying that,” Queen Ester said, hoping that Liberty would pull her close again.

“All right. All right then. You know, when I was your age, I was damn near six feet.”

“You wasn't.”

“Oh, yes, ma'am, I was.” Liberty could feel beneath her chin her daughter's lips jut out with pouting. “Naw, I was just teasing. I was a little bit just like you. But then I grow right on up.” The cold had vanished, and creeping warmth now made it impossible to fight sleep. Queen Ester yawned. “Like I'm gone grow on up, Mama?”

“Not while I'm watching. You can be a little bit for as long as we want. You ain't got to make a way. That's for me to do.”

But those two dollars wouldn't go very far and she knew it. Worse, Sweets's money had spoiled Liberty, made her proud. Despite having lived in Lafayette County for eleven years, Liberty and Queen Ester were almost strangers. Ignorant of her neighbors' intricate trading system, Liberty didn't know she could get two baskets of tomatoes from Carol Lee for a bolt of fabric. Poo-Poo fixed generators and anything else slightly electrical if you agreed to take in his laundry for a month. She could have gotten her roof retarred by Minyas and his boys if she gave them rhubarb pies anytime they asked.

Liberty was just as ignorant of Lafayette's history. A hundred years had passed before the people of Lafayette County realized they had forgotten to lay down sidewalks. The calm stitching of cement and stone that meant a place had really decided to settle never came to Lafayette, and the county's lapse gave it the air of being an accident. There were things in its favor. It had the wanting. Any man who could walk ten miles without falling down wanted enough to get a car. (Disgusted with himself for loving the Model T—by 1933, the unbreakable metal owned by every farmer and sawmill boss was on its way out—a man would also dream of a Chadwick, which was rumored to run at 110 miles per hour.) But he still couldn't figure out—or, rather, no one told him—how to get electricity or a toilet into his house.

The county also had the strength. Hacking and hacking away under the yoke of the sawmills (which took seventy-three years to get to Lafayette and then the companies just upped and went, taking the money and all that went with it), the people prayed for post offices and courthouses, doorknobs and curtains, all of which never came. Still, they chopped at the oaks and the pines and watched the trains leave with logs and broken men.

Liberty didn't know that in 1901 there had been more folks congregating at the sawmill quarters than at the churches. Years later, when the goldenseals refused to grow anywhere but the cemeteries and the violets sprang stupefied between the railroad tracks, the newly arrived, looking creased in their store-bought khakis, asked themselves if this was all there was: the ripe smell of dying dogtooth violets and the sawmills that at a distance had the awful air of a plantation that ran on wood instead of cotton. But no one was there to answer, because by then the old had vanished, fleeing to Texas or returning whence they came.

Had Liberty known all this, Lafayette's history and thus its wounded pride, perhaps she wouldn't have carried herself the way she did: head up so high people wondered how she managed to get where she was going, and constantly picking at that child of hers. Plucking away imaginary lint, smoothing Queen Ester's eyebrows, and the like. To the town she seemed haughty. No “How you?” or concern that Carol Lee's baby had just died of tuberculosis. “Lady too big for her britches,” they said. Collectively they turned their backs on her, keeping secret the way they got by on grim kindness. And Liberty failed to notice their upturned noses because she was so busy creating explanations for Queen Ester that all came to the same thing: “We can't afford it.” And just as she overlooked Lafayette County's history and its trade-and-barter system, she never registered that there was no line when she went to the general store for supplies and that the manager had begun to wait on her as if she were a white woman. She could spend thirty minutes wandering the aisles if she liked, not realizing that she paid for the “Yes, ma'ams” and “Thank yous” along with the cans of sardines and steak. Mr. Jameson, the owner, was the only adult she traded more than three words with, the only adult to ask her how her day was going. If she said she was tired or mad, he'd cluck out his commiseration. He'd help her find work, now that she had run out of Sweets's money. Liberty was sure of it.

She arrived at the general store just as it opened. “Morning, Miss Liberty,” Mr. Jameson said, when she walked through the door. He stood behind the counter, tall, slim, with a full head of black hair, putting on his work apron.

“Morning.”

“What you in the mood for today?” Mr. Jameson asked. Liberty heard herself respond to the familiar exchange, but wished it would hurry and end.

She spoke abruptly. “You got work?”

He paused, taking in his steady customer as she stated the obvious.