Knee-Deep in Wonder (12 page)

“Monroe, Monroe just up and killed him. They was off a ways from Josephine's house, just playing dominoes like always. Betting and all the money heaping up on Wilde side, and Monroe just losing worse and worse as the game run on—”

Mable stopped. “Liberty, ain't see none of this firsthand.” Any answer that Liberty gave was swallowed up by the cacophony. The death of Wilde was now in the mouths and ears of the café, and because of the strangeness of death and dominoes, the men and women tore at its pieces, making it manageable and commonplace. Snatches of words—the problem with gambling between friends, Joe Louis's recent heavyweight title, and the price of catalog dresses—floated in the air.

*   *   *

They didn't see him because he didn't look like a long journey but rather a hard day's work. He had been in Lafayette for three days. Three days of searching for work at the sawmills, the stores, or as an extra hand for picking cotton, corn, or tobacco, and nothing came to fruition. The sawmills and stores had enough workers, and cotton and corn were out of season. From a casual stroll—the lazy bend and thrust of knee and foot that the newly arrived affect to look as if they've always been in town—to the hurried desperate pace of a traveler running out of what he brought with him, the man walked up and down Main Street, frightened of his idleness. He followed the slow trickle of people that entered the woods and came upon Liberty's café, beckoned by the house whose wings opened in a gesture of welcome.

He walked in mid-story, and it took him time to find the source. Opening the front door, he was faced with stairs, so he looked to the left and caught sight of five pine tables in a loose circle covered with what seemed like large dresses split open to protect the naked wood. Unnoticed, he heard the young woman tell a tale, sitting with her legs open and relaxed like a man drinking, but her mouth hasty and snarled as she spoke.

He took a chair at an empty table and waited, rubbing his palms against his knees. A woman who was taller than anything stood braced against a bar counter—there were no bottles, just clean empty glasses—and he wondered how she pulled off being that big without looking fat. He stared at them all, one by one, assuming that the men were there because they had no work and the women for the free talk.

The man needed food, a cup of coffee with sugar and no milk, maybe a piece of hoecake if there was any to be had. But he didn't realize Liberty ran the café as she would a dinner party; her customers were guests and like the best of hostesses she sensed their hunger without being told. It was not good that the man walked in not bothering with a hello and waited for a moment to catch her eye. It would never come, as there was no need for Liberty to look up and survey what there was.

While he waited, the conversation curled around back to the death; it couldn't help itself. The talk had started out innocent, a soft complaint from Carol Lee about a dress and her man.

“I told him I needs a new dress and he say, ‘You needs a new job.' ‘I tell you what,' I tell him. ‘I gets a new dress or you get a new girl.'”

“I done seen you three times since Sunday, ain't a once in the same dress. That's all a man got to say,” Porch offered his view.

“You cheap, Porch. Shit, you ain't got no woman now.”

“Don't need no woman—cost too much.”

“Man need his drink,” Banky joined in.

“You look at that Wilde. He drink all day, put all his money down gambling and see?” Poo-Poo said. “God didn't even let his eyes close at the end.”

“God good to make a man open his eyes at the end,” Porch said. “Need to see all that ain't no more. God have me see a last bit of tail at the end, bless Him.”

“Now see, Porch, I knowed you ain't had no tail in a year or more.” Poo-Poo laughed.

“Get out my drawers, man.”

“Shit, somebody got to get in them. They lonely.”

“That's not what your mama was moaning last night,” Porch said.

“Damn, man, how you pull that off? My mama dead.” The room filled with the spill of laughter. Porch, doubled over in his chair, held his hands to his chest.

Unceasing, coasting, the laughter rode on, until the echo stopped and tears came unchecked and spread until everyone in the café was crying over pointless anguish. Even Queen Ester's eyes brimmed—she was listening behind the door to the kitchen. There was no shame, no reason for the women not to lift their dresses and hide their faces or for the men not to bury their heads in the crooks of their arms.

On it went until the man whom they had not seen, or maybe saw in a flicker but forgot, coughed. “I think I'm with the Porch man. Can't hate a man for wanting to see the last bit of tail.” Although he spoke softly, his round Mississippi tones restful and quiet in the café, they thought they heard arrogance. With tears still damp on their faces, their hands limp and half open in surprise, they turned on him.

“Ain't nobody asked you. You think, just cause you got a bit of dirt on your pants, you one of us?” said Other. The café awoke as Other strung together more words than they ever heard him say before. It was common knowledge that if anyone was short a hand and needed a strong arm or a pair of legs to walk a mile, Other was the official stand-and-deliver man. What's next? they all thought, watching Other come out of the corner to stand in the middle of the room.

“Chester. From Clarksdale, Mississippi. Call me Chess.”

“So? So? Like we—”

“Other, hush! Since when you start talking that way?” Liberty placed her words in the space Other meant to speak. “Ain't nobody brand new gone get cut up like that in my café. Nobody.”

She grabbed a glass and filled it from the pitcher of water, revealing her teeth as she drank. “Well … I have to say that they make them fine in Clarksdale.” Small teeth. He noticed that as she made a full smile. Small teeth for a big woman like that, Chess thought. As if the teeth of her childhood had stayed in her mouth for safety, just to be contrary, while the rest of her grew and grew. He looked at her teeth, at her mouth that wanted to be still a child's, and then at her breasts.

He wasn't the only one who noticed her smile and the slight swing of her high breasts beneath her workman's shirt. Her words carried weight; the women in the room looked again. But this time they conjured what ought to be there, so now his skin was not brown, it was light chocolate; his lips were wide and pink at the center. Under the spell of sudden charm, they gave him muscles hidden beneath his shirt; they imagined love resting in the crook of his arms.

Shifting in their seats, they leaned forward, uncomfortable and ready. They coiled their questions around him, anchoring him to the floor. “Now, where you from?”

“Mable, didn't you hear him the first time round? Clarksdale.”

“Where bout in Clarksdale?”

“Near Moon Lake.”

“Maybe we all need to hitch a ride to Clarksdale.”

“I think I be satisfied with what we got right here.” Each woman had nabbed a line, picking up where the other had left off, but suddenly they formed a choir; their mouths made one voice.

“What's your name?”

“Chess.”

“What you doing away from home?”

“Where you gone go after here?”

“Sugar, tell me, where you going?”

“All right now.” Liberty broke in. Again, she reached for the pitcher behind the bar and splashed water into another glass. She held it out to him. “Where you headed to?” said Liberty.

“Right here.”

“Got kin in town?”

“Naw, ma'am.”

“Then what you doing here?”

“Didn't know folks couldn't come and go as they please.” He showed surprise when she took a cigarette and matches from her pocket. She tucked in her chin as she put the cigarette in her mouth, her lips soft as she mumbled through the strike of the match.

“Generally speaking, folks move around for a reason, and I just wondering bout yours.”

“Too many good-looking men where I come from; needed to get out so I could be special.” He tried to look casual as he leaned back in his chair, forcing himself to unclench his hands.

“Well, now that you special, where you gone live?”

“Ain't thought bout it.”

“Better think.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He thought of where his feet could take him. He had no family here, no mother. Hard and sweet he longed for a mama with thick thighs, soft breasts, a high swollen stomach that would always look as if she carried a child, a mama to hold his head between her worn hands and murmur with mother love. All right, all right now. He dropped his head into his hands as he thought of being lost in a mother's soft apron.

“What you do that for?”

Chess jumped. “What?”

She was small and lean, dressed or rather strangled in a thin cotton dress, as if someone (and not the girl—no girl would willingly wear a dress meant for a child), as if someone could not resign themselves to the obvious: the small high breasts, the touch of expanded hips. Least seventeen, he thought, regardless of the dress, and she needed a brassiere.

“What you do that for?” she said again.

“Needs to think.”

“Bout what?”

“Bout where I gone stay.” His words dismissed her question because of its simpleness with an apparent answer that stood between them like another person. Staring as she was staring, he looked at her smooth skin, envying the softness that hadn't yet flared to black on the elbows and knees. But about her eyes, in her hands he spied concern and knowing; the sort of burdened anxiety printed on the faces of grandmothers and dying uncles who push themselves up on their stale pillows and point their wizened fingers, as they take account of what they are leaving behind. He could have taken one or the other, but both—worry and wisdom—trapped inside this little girl who didn't even have the decency to wear wrinkles, was just much too much. She stared at him as if she knew about the whistling of his feet as he ran away from home, his journey so fast he didn't think of a jacket until shivering and drinking root beer in Jackson, Mississippi. Chess saw knowing and loving on this young thing, who had woman-ness thrown on her like a coat. But despite his fear, he remembered her age and answered, “You sure nosy.”

“Ain't nosy. Just wondering. You not staying here.”

“Like I told you, I'm thinking.” His voice went high as he leaned in, tilting his chair toward her small figure, and thought now that she could maybe even be eighteen. She had fooled him because he had not seen her hands. What girl who should be licking the taste of flirtation could stand before a grown man and trick him into thinking she was six years old?

Liberty came over. “That's my girl, Queen Ester.”

“Now how a girl get a name like that?”

“Like everybody else do, at birth. Don't she look like royalty to you?” Liberty put her hand on Queen Ester's head.

“Face too quiet.”

“What?” Queen Ester and Liberty said at the same time.

“Her face. It's too quiet.”

“Listen, if you gone stay here with me, you better know can't nothing get as mad as a mama when her child in question,” Liberty said, switching the conversation as if Chess had asked, she had said yes, and she was rolling out the house rules.

He should have said thank you, but she didn't give him time. “My name Liberty.” She spoke low, because he hadn't asked for her name either. He had hit something soft, and Liberty melted under his need. “You can stay here as long as you like. So go get a broom and sweep up that front porch, cause you can't just look good and sit round here. Queen Ester show you where everything is.” He stood up from the table, and she watched him take steps toward the front of the house. “Say now,” she called, and swooped over the bar table to grab a plate. “Eat that.” And she slid cold hash on the table. “Ain't no eggs today.”

*   *   *

He stayed, Queen Ester's wishes be damned. Fluttering around the house, he left chores half done or not done at all. Under his care, plates were stacked in the drying rack still coated with chicken or pork grease; garden rows were dug neither straight nor deep enough for seed to take root. Too clumsy to become Liberty's short-order cook, too sullen to make any long-lasting (or even short but bright-burning) friendships with the men who frequented the café and thus make a way to find outside paying work, Chess spent his mornings plucking chicken eggs from ornery fowl and sweeping (then re-sweeping) the downstairs floors. This one chore, which even Queen Ester grudgingly admitted Chess did well, was done over and over partly because customers brought the swept yard in with them through the front door—it took only three days for Chess to start cursing the yard—and partly because Queen Ester declared the second story off limits to any man, never mind if he lived in the same house as she did.

As for Liberty, too old to be lover to Chess (to be fair, she hadn't thought of it then), she quickly became his mother. I'm big enough for two, she thought, so what if he ain't passed through me? A baby girl and a baby boy all for my own: behind that thought lay deep satisfaction. As she told her little girl, niggers live they lives in threes, and there he came, a third without prompting, making their lives a whole thing that couldn't be splintered.
Cleave unto me.
In the space of fourteen days, she turned soft, loving the shine of what she thought was his innocence. His sullenness toward other men, and sometimes other women, and sometimes toward her own child—she called his quiet ways. Her ease touched the women of her café, and they all began to love his mystery, the way he watched their mouths when they told him of their trivial days.
Looked up and the hemming was crooked as all get-out; scorched the rice; my cake came out just fine, thank you very much.