Knee-Deep in Wonder (13 page)

Liberty didn't mind that he always seemed to take sick when church rolled around on Sunday. Or that she constantly found the print of his palm in the hoecake batter. They were three; they were three, and Liberty reveled in their completeness. So what if Queen Ester roamed the house, uncomfortable, anxious, marking her claim on every piece of movable furniture. From the outside (hadn't Mable and Buttermilk both said the same?) it looked as if Liberty fed Queen Ester and Chess from her long trough of mother love and the two had equal shares. And though Liberty served up enough love that for Queen Ester to ask for more would be sheer gluttony, the daughter looked at Chess spitefully, cursing that he shared in what was rightfully hers. Her mother had grown so patient. When did breaking a dish and sleeping most of the morning and sometimes well into the afternoon become not only things to tolerate but reason for gleeful burping laughter? Queen Ester watched Chess's laziness with disgust. They, Queen Ester and Chess, weren't brother and sister, they weren't even far-flung kin, just two strangers thrown in the same house and loved by the same woman. Queen Ester's stomach rolled as she heard of the rumors that reached the house as soon as it became known that some man—or perhaps child, as some declared; no grown person could be that short—lived in Liberty's house for free.

Perhaps they would have stayed that way—Queen Ester counting the slights and Chess basking in Liberty's mother love—but one night, after the café coughed out its last customer, Liberty, Queen Ester, and Chess sat at the kitchen table with leftovers heaped before them. Liberty slid that morning's biscuits onto their plates (Chess's first) and then warmed collard greens and cold ham.

For two weeks this had been the worst time of day for them all. Without the business of chores or hungry customers, they had nothing between them except the kitchen table. Conversation struggled, since everyone at the table understood that some questions could march through easy silence and cause pain. Before the meal was over, Queen Ester was overcome by curiosity tinged with meanness. She was sure that if Chess's story spilled out (maybe he done killed somebody by accident, she thought, and now he on the run), Liberty would have to choose between their safety and his, and he would have to go. Mind, Queen Ester didn't want Chess turned over to some white man in uniform; even she (young and younger still because Liberty pushed her daughter back to the cradle) knew no black man was safe in the hands of white police. No, she didn't want Chess handed over to anyone, she just wanted him to go back to his town, overripe with handsome men.

After the last helpings of collard greens were twice offered and refused, she asked, “How come you don't never tell us where you come from?”

“I told you, Mississippi. Clarksdale, Mississippi.”

“You said, but who is your ma'am? And where your daddy at? Ain't you got no people?”

“Hush all that, Queenie.” Liberty's voice cut between them, and Chess looked at her with relief. “If Chess don't want to say he ain't got to.”

“We got a right to know, him living with us and all. What if his ma'am out there looking for him right now, and he over here living with us and his ma'am out there with her heart broke cause she ain't got a clue?” Queen Ester looked up at her mother. “What if you was that ma'am, walking and asking all over?”

“All right, all right. It's too late for this, Queenie. Tomorrow we gone take care of this very thing.” But indecision shook Liberty's voice. Cleaning away the dishes, she thought about Queen Ester's accusation, some mother roaming, calling out for her only son (if he were the only son). Dinner and nighttime chores were done, and—ready for bed—Liberty again felt a hard slice of uncertainty. Perhaps they weren't three. Maybe Chess belonged to someone else. And then desire came to stand beside her doubt: well, Lord, I just want to know, not even cause he in my care. It's my right. I'm the one who feeds him and shakes him on up in the morning. Just about anybody would say it's my right to know, for my and my baby girl's care. We can't have just anybody living here. And if I said that very thing to somebody, they would amen me. I just want to know for the knowing's worth. Queenie (bless mine) made me want to know; and now here I am, hurt to me and mine be damned. Even if he tell me something so mean we can't go back to these here days. I want to know what's what anyway. Though Liberty didn't (wouldn't) admit it, Chess had become a second chance, a Sweets for Liberty to try again with, the son her mother had wanted so badly, a man who because of his mystery she could fill with whatever she liked. She heaved a sigh and struggled into her robe, groping in the dark for the doorknob to her bedroom.

Chess was waiting for her. Still in his khakis and shirt, he was sitting on the bed, a drowsy smile on his lips, when she opened the door to his room.

“Hey, man.”

“Hey, there.”

“What you doing up this late?”

“Don't make me ask you the same.”

“I won't,” Liberty said, sitting down on the bed next to him. Her hand rose and settled on his knee.

Without prompting, he began. Out it came, full of careful evasions, sprinkled liberally with half-truths, more wishful than really lived. Liberty lapped it up. “God truth's ain't never seen so much water. I ain't gone say when it started, cause truth be told I don't know. I know ten years that's passed ain't so far away I can't recollect, but I wasn't grown then like I is now, and maybe I just had my mind on everything I shouldn't of. I remember asking my ma'am what was all that racket, and she couldn't hear so she bend in close and I ask her again, ‘What's all that noise?' and she must of thought the running around must of curled my mind, cause she screamed back to me, ‘That's the water!' And, well, that's about all I can recollect.”

But Chess was lying. He remembered it all, the look on his neighbors' faces, the sweep of the rising flood. He held that back from Liberty, afraid of what his voice would do. Liberty nodded, and he resumed. “Well, we made it to the levee.” He paused again, slowing carefully. “You ever seen a baby midair? I mean just up in the middle of nothing with they feet out and all? We was all climbing up on the levee and I turned, I turned like this—” he stopped then, lifting his head up, and Liberty saw yearning crawl over his face—“and some white man down a ways threw his baby clean into the air. My heart liked to stop, cause who knows what could of been on the other side of that fall? I mean, the baby turned out to be all right and all, I don't want you to think different. But a whole mess of things could of gone on while that baby was up in the air with nothing to hold it. And I always try to figure what that man must of think right fore his kin left his arms. He could of throw her off too hard or too easy. Why, that baby liable to fly clean over waiting hands or drop in the river and not a nothing nobody could do.

“We got to the levee too, and none of us had to fly in the air to get on and that's the God's heaven's truth. We all got pulled up easy as pie. And boy, I tell you. Just about everything and everybody was on that levee, you hear me? We get up the morning and work the levee till dinner. Nary drop of food in between. I was hungry then, and my ma'am tell me, Bless be you alive. My ma'am was a singer, I tell you that? Go to the jook joints and belt it out. I ain't never went with her, but she tell me all about it soon as she get home.”

He's just about there, Liberty thought, watching him through lowered lids; what's all that sidestepping with some flying baby? What was that? White baby, midair or no, always safe. She sighed gently as Chess continued.

“We worked that levee into the ground, with no sun to show us through. Just the rain that light up sometimes and then it get so gray we can't see none and they tell us to lay off. I can't remember how long we do that for; feel like forever sometimes, and then again when I think on it feel like no time at all. Like all them days push together and one minute we getting on the levee and the next Daddy getting dead.”

His eyes held trouble. “I got my own switch-mark tales,” Liberty spoke softly. “Don't you go around thinking you the only somebody that got something to say that gone make these eyes roll.”

“I ain't trying to make no such thing.” But he was, Liberty heard it in his voice, and she cursed her child, angry that Queen Ester had provoked a curiosity that Liberty initially had not had. “They kill my daddy dead, and you go off and tell me—”

She reached for his hand. “I ain't mean it like I said it. Gone tell it.” She tried to keep her voice calm. Chess's hand was now in her own, and she rubbed the inside of his palm for her own sake, because still she wanted to know. Not about the father, hadn't she heard it all? Some black man out of place or just where he should be was suddenly (and it was always suddenly; no one ever told a story where the dying knew they were on their way) knocked down or strung up. She just wanted to know about the mother, whether she should worry that some singing mama was on her way to snatch back what she had loved so well.

“We was working, just as hard as always. And some white man walked up to my daddy and kill him dead. I can't even recall what that white man thought was the matter. That man blow a hole clean on through my daddy, and then they throwed him in the river.” Finally done, Chess settled into silence, waiting for Liberty if not to say amen then at least to murmur, Yes, well.

Liberty had almost worn a hole in his palm when she finally asked, “But where your ma'am at?”

“My ma'am ain't coming for me. She knew I was gone run and blessed it, and that a fact. ‘Niggers and water ain't never mixed.' That's what she told me. She ain't coming.” And Liberty let go of the breath she had been holding.

If Liberty had loved Chess before, well, knowing there was no mama around the corner made her close to careless. Everything was touched by charm, worthy of laughter. Who could watch a grown man that dearly and never tire? She chuckled at her customers' grumbling, somehow pleased by their complaints and worries. At night, her daughter and Chess would lie on her bed, talking about their day, and Liberty would let them fall asleep, one child tucked beneath her armpit, the other in the crook of her elbow. Didn't I say I could fit them both? she thought, listening to her daughter's heavy breathing. Knowing for sure that Chess was motherless, she paid more attention to everything. An extra kiss when he was tired, a second serving scraped from the bottom of empty pots. One month rolled into two, stretched into three. Not only were they family (even Queen Ester turned soft in the face of Liberty's inexhaustible tenderness), they were three.

But suddenly it stopped. Chess moved into an empty bedroom on the second floor, bluntly telling Liberty he wanted privacy. He kept it locked, but somehow every morning he found his clothes laid out at the foot of his bed. Chess grew disgusted that Liberty didn't wait for him to finish his plate before she filled it again, that she laughed at his jokes before he had told them. There were only so many times a grown man could stand to be kissed under the chin. His mother's stories ran out on him, and still they—Liberty and Queen Ester, though Queen Ester was the worse of the two—prodded him for more. Three months' full of every sort of kindness Liberty could think of crawled into four. And just what lay behind Chess's disgust? Boredom. He looked around the house, tired of the lopsided windows, of the same people who came a wilderness away to share Liberty's company, of Queen Ester, who by now didn't seem as crazy as he had first thought, just sad. Finally, he was bored with Liberty. His listlessness surprised him. He never thought he would grow weary of looking at those small teeth or her high swinging breasts with standing nipples.

Oftentimes mornings fell into afternoons, and Chess would spend those hours asleep, not waking even to relieve himself or eat the meal Liberty brought up to him on a tray. “He take sick, Mama?” Queen Ester would ask, curious to know why Chess stayed willingly in his bedroom for most of the day.

Her mother would reply sullenly, “I don't know, baby.”

Queen Ester felt lonely, not for Chess but for the stories he used to weave for them at night before she dropped off to sleep, lonely because if she were right in thinking Chess had become sick, perhaps her mother was beginning to fall ill as well. They had come close to what they were before Liberty opened the café. What had happened to her mother's laughter that seemed forever tumbling free? Suddenly everything stopped being charmed. Chess's bedridden state made everyone exhausted. Liberty dragged around the house looking too tired to hold up her own head. Now Queen Ester wouldn't dare do the things that used to earn her a light kiss on the nose. Without realizing it, Chess had given Queen Ester courage; without him around she became secretive again, listening behind closed doors, standing where darkness gathered in corners, watching the happenings in the café without taking part. And just when Queen Ester thought things couldn't get any worse, they did. In the middle of the fourth month, Chess, without so much as a by-your-leave, left the house. And yes, he closed the door behind him.

Just as no one saw his arrival, no one saw him go, including Liberty. Three days—Thursday, Friday, Saturday—came and went, and without Chess the house turned sour. His leaving mocked them all. “Where he at?” Queen Ester asked.

“Well, he ain't in my pocket, that's for sure,” Liberty grumbled.

“You think he liable to head back to Mississippi?”

“Queenie—”

“That's a far piece. I mean, you can't gone and get him if he heading that far away, can you?” Hearing slickness, Liberty turned furious.

“If you don't get on with all that, I'm gone lay a hand on you.” Queen Ester leapt out of her mother's reach.

It wasn't that he'd left, or even that he'd vanished and without bothering to tell her, that made Liberty's anger flare. Sometimes a man needed to be let alone, she thought. But he had closed the door behind him, completing what Sweets had left unfinished, and worse yet, in his last harsh gesture he had tried to be polite, as if being mindful of the door meant that Liberty needed this sort of courtesy to soothe her. Not me, she thought. I didn't get a closed door the last time and I sure don't need it now.