Knee-Deep in Wonder (18 page)

“And I spose to feel bad about that now? I didn't tell you to take care of them kids. What you think you is, they mama?”

“Chess, I know I ain't they mama. But ain't a one of them full grown. Them boys can't even shave.”

“So you want me to pay you back?”

“Naw, I ain't saying that.”

“Well, you know what I'm saying, Morning? Bye. Ain't got time to fool with you.” And he was out the door, leaving behind not only Morning's broken face but thoughts of her as well. He turned in the direction of Liberty's house. Less than a mile he trudged, through the cotton field that separated their homes. In the middle of the field he looked around in disgust, softly brushing the waist-high cotton that was in bloom.

Don't know why she lets this cotton go bad every year, he thought. He had asked her why she didn't let somebody get out there and pick it—make some easy money. But she had said she didn't need the money. Liberty owned eighty-three acres of land, and not one square inch was dedicated to a sawmill. Such an act was blasphemous. The sawmills covered the land of Lafayette County and black people came to work them, staying in the mill quarters, waking to a constant buzzing. The sound invaded their dreams, rattled their teeth. In church you knew who the mill workers were; they sat in the back and couldn't bring themselves to hum. In the quarters, the women cried for brick, the children prayed for silence, and the men bit their lips because they couldn't stop the ripples in their coffee.

Lafayette County had suspicions about how Liberty had acquired all the land, because not one black man they knew could have laid his hands on so much money at one time. Some rumored she was part Indian and the government must have given it to her people. But how could that be? others asked. Just look at her. Liberty too black to be any part of Indian. The most vicious rumor was one Lafayette men put under their hats because they didn't have enough space for it in their hearts: Liberty had lain down and put those tree-trunk legs in the air to let a white man get in between. Chess didn't care either way. What he knew was, that cotton needed picking. But Liberty kept saying no, so he told her that pretty soon the cotton would kill itself, choke on its own stems.

“Has it?” Liberty had asked, her voice coated with a faraway tone, as if she were concentrating on trying to finish her lemonade and not the conversation.

“Has it what?” Chess said, watching his feet swinging idly on her porch.

“Has it gone and killed itself?” Liberty said, her lips barely moving. She tilted her head back and finished the lemonade and then, like a child still craving the sweet, she stuck out her tongue to lick the rim of the glass.

“No, but—”

“But nothing. That cotton is growing just fine without me going out and plucking at it. I don't want no bloody hands.” She smiled then and pushed the empty glass away from her.

“What you talking bout?” Chess pulled his legs up on the porch floor.

“Come on, Chess. You ever see somebody's hands right after cotton season?” She laughed. Almost yawning, she stood and went inside. Chess followed closely behind, breathing in her scent of dry pine and grass. “What, you ain't picked cotton before?” she said.

“Am I black?”

“I don't know. Is you?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you know what it is to pick cotton and I don't want no bloody hands on me. That's it. I don't want to hear about it no more. You hear? Leave that cotton alone.” She put steel in her eyes after that, and Chess left, the door banging behind him. That was supposed to be Liberty's last word on the subject, but the conversation was replayed every year when the cotton bloomed. Every season, Chess limped through the sea of white to ask again, until Liberty began to wait on him at the door with a no resting on her tongue.

Well, ain't she gone be surprised when I don't bring it up this time, he thought. Liberty was in the back, hanging the sheets on the line. “No,” she whispered, when Chess was less than a foot away.

“See now, I didn't even come to bother you bout that.” Chess, too, spoke low. “Ain't seen you in a while.” She looked him over, her eyes resting on his shirt, which was covered in cotton. “Ain't you white.” Her eyes rose to his hair, coiled and tight, a black rope. “Better go and cut that hair of yours.”

“I ain't had the time. Just got out jail, you know.” Chess closed his eyes to Liberty's face and to her house, the only one in Lafayette that was painted white and didn't lean.

“Really? I was wondering where you was. What you was down in jail for?” Her eyes danced.

“Moonshine.” Chess's voice was curt.

“Moonshine? Didn't know you was into that.”

“Well, I got to make money somehow.”

“Them kids hungry?” Liberty paused. “Didn't they work for Mr. Carthers when you was in jail?”

“Yeah, I think so. They gave me some money today, but they handed it to me like it was they last.”

“Never know, might be. No sense in talking to you about it. Not like you could do much no way.” Liberty took the end of a sheet in her hand, stroking the corner. “What you come by for?”

“Just to say hi and ask you why you didn't come to visit when I was in Texarkana.” And to tell you, Chess thought, that I missed your wide eyes and the way your feet point out when you stand still.

“You look like you was on vacation. You was in jail getting three square meals a day—more than I eat. Look at you. All them bologna and peas sitting round your stomach. Done gained at least ten pounds from the looks of it.” She paused. “You ever figure you too old to get caught up in this kind of mess? Chess, you forty-six years old. Damn near fifty, going on sixteen. What did I need to visit you for? You didn't ask me to come and help you make moonshine, didn't ask for my permission. You grown, came to me grown; I can't hold your hand every time you fall down.” She was becoming angry. She knew it and he did too.

“Well, I just came by to say hi, and I'll go now. Next time I fall, I'll make sure to keep it quiet.” There was sadness in his face, and she didn't know whether to put it in her heart or beneath her foot. Chess made slow steps toward the cotton field and shook his head.

“Don't go off nowhere,” she said, but her eyes roamed the clouds. There was something behind her voice, something that told him to look out. “Watch after yourself. I been worried about you ever since you went off to jail.”

“Thought you said I got treated better than you in there.”

“Something bad waiting for you in the clouds; when it rains you gone get swept away.”

“Liberty, I don't need to hear about no rain. Rain done already come. I got put in jail for moonshining.” Chess barely managed a smile. Liberty looking serious didn't help much. She had stopped licking her thumb and put her hands deep in her pocket.

“Mama?” Queen Ester's voice rang out from the side of the house, where she stood.

“Yes, baby,” Liberty said, not turning around to face her. Chess kept his eyes on the white cotton.

“I'm gone have lunch. You want me to get you something?” Queen Ester asked.

“Naw, I'm fine for now.”

“Mama?” Liberty lifted her head in response. “I was thinking to send out a letter today. You gone check the spelling?”

“A letter, child?” Liberty said.

“To Best, Texas, to Helene.” Queen Ester linked her fingers together and waited.

“It ain't her birthday.” Now Liberty saw her daughter, her little thing who wasn't little anymore but forty years old, though she still talked like a child, still needed waking up in the morning.

“That I know,” Queen Ester said, with a hint of boldness. She unlinked her fingers and slid them into her overall pockets.

“Ain't Christmas.”

“That I know.”

“Ain't Easter.”

“I know,” Queen Ester said again. Her words had been defiant, but now her voice wavered.

“Girl, when you gone learn to leave that child alone? She doing just fine down in Best without you bothering her.”

“She mine, Mama.” Queen Ester's face said, Please, ain't gone beg, but please.

“She know that.” Liberty put her hands on her hips. I ain't young enough to put up with this, she thought. “I didn't teach you pen and paper to go off and mess with that little girl.”

“I'm a mama now too. I got a baby girl.”

“What, you think I don't know that?”

“Like I ain't got no say, like I ain't the mama—” She stopped and swallowed.

“Shut it,” Liberty said.

“Ain't no baby no more. Just cause she ain't here don't change that.”

“What I say? You want me to come over there and tell you shut it?”

“She mine, Mama.” Queen Ester didn't know what else to say. What she knew was that the little girl who had the blue nightgown she had sent to Annie b was hers. She knew the little girl, whose name she didn't know until that child had learned to write and sent Queen Ester a letter signed
Helene,
was the only thing she had that was right. And she knew her child was beautiful, although she had only seen Helene once through a moonlit window, before that bitch Annie b had sent her away from Pine Bluff with the word decent.

“You don't own nothing. Gone in the house fore I knock you back in there.”

“Yes, ma'am.” But a combative stench had risen, and Queen Ester knew that if she pushed the conversation any further Liberty would pounce, as good as her word. So she stopped, not because she was particularly afraid of a fight with her mother, but because it wouldn't be a fight at all. It would be a child taking her punishment. Open-handed slaps that would fall to the middle of Queen Ester's back, then her mother's fingers would find the soft inside of her thigh, while her face, absent of anything that looked like rage or jealousy (never jealousy), spoke the words Queen Ester hated to hear: this gone hurt me more than it hurt you.

She cocked her head, peering around Liberty's tall frame. “Oh, that's Chess, ain't it?”

“Yeah, it's me.” As Chess spoke he turned to face her, his eyes staring at the grass around her feet. He smelled the fight too. “Don't you think you need to go put some shoes on?”

“Naw, I'm fine.”

“Thorns out here nasty.” Get on out of here, he wanted to say to Queen Ester, still fixed on her feet.

“I know that, I live here.” She moved closer to Liberty and Chess. Though her mother's eyes told her to watch out, just turn on back around and do whatever you was doing fore you got here, Queen Ester stepped closer, until she stood between them. Her eyes turned bright and accusatory. “Why you out here with him, Mama? Huh? I can't write a letter to what's mine, but you let him put candy in her mouth while he say God knows what.”

“I ain't said nothing to that girl.” And then they were back there, each in his proper place, Chess in the front yard with the child (Doing what? Just what was he doing? God knows), Liberty on the porch with Annie b offering glasses of mint tea and biscuits, and Queen Ester in the house. (No one had told her about Chess and the little girl squatting in the yard together, laughter flowing between them. But still she knew, if not what they said, then at least the form of Chess's back as he spoke to her child.) A four-year-old hurt throbbed new.

“You lying. I don't know what it was, but you said something. And now you out here talking to my ma'am like you ain't got a care in the world. Ain't that right? Well, ain't it?”

“I ain't came out here to argue.” He lifted his hands in a gesture of apology.

“Well, here it is, anyhow.”

“Ain't gone do this with you, Queenie. Now you gone inside like your mama said for you to do.”

“Ain't going nowhere till you tell me what you said to what's mine.” The smell of combat was strong now, as if something lay on the ground dying at their feet. Chess walked around Queen Ester and stood next to Liberty, glancing at her for a sign that she would slap Queen Ester back into place. She was curiously blank. All three were thinking of where to go next, how to conjure words that would prick and leave a mark.

*   *   *

Not so in Best, Texas. Man, woman, child gathered at a table some five hundred miles away with turnip greens flavored with smoked ham hock, potato salad with a bit of onion and eggs, and a platter of chicken. After a quick prayer—“God bless this…”—adult conversation followed, mundane questions back and forth—“Bill man come by? How your foot getting along?” and so on—until Annie b turned to family gossip. “She done sent another one.”

“Who now?”

“You know who.” Annie b gave a hard nod over Helene's bowed head. “Don't make no sense.”

“Ah, girl, leave that scratch alone. Ain't nobody hurting a thing.”

“She got to cut out this meddling. Let it well alone. You say what harm but you know as well as I do, she keep pulling the way she is and ain't nothing gone come of it but hurt. Once in a while is all right by me, but it ain't her birthday all the time. I got a whole satchel worth of them things; she can't read them fast enough. What's so important that she got to get something to her four sometimes five times a week? Lord know what she telling.”

Ed slid a piece of chicken onto his plate, looking at his wife. “Them letters ain't what got you going, b.”

“Sure it is. That and knowing them two women is nasty as all get-out. I ain't no fool to what's going on down there.”

“Up there, you mean.”

“All right. All right. Up there. Can't tell me, Ed.” Then a nine-year-old voice piped up, curious, hungry.

“What two women, Auntie?”

“I ain't raised you to jump in grown folks' business like that.”

“Now, b, let her be. You get to talking like that and anybody gone want to know.”