Knee-Deep in Wonder (27 page)

“Mama, Jesus. Mama!” Helene's voice rose, taut and shrill. “There's nothing there, you know that, don't you? Just so fucked up, Mama. Just fucked!”

Queen Ester's face closed like window shutters. Helene saw her mother not next to her but through eight-year-old eyes, standing on a porch with her hair wild. She spoke through a child's voice, trying to say the only thing she knew for certain would bring Queen Ester back to the room. “Mama, Mama, be—”

Queen Ester pulled the word from Helene's mouth before it was said. “Decent. Decent?” The memory of Aunt Annie b, her hair shorn and manly, stood between them. Queen Ester opened her lips wide enough that Helene could see the three decaying teeth in the back of her mother's mouth, but she didn't make a sound. They were almost out of the room when Helene tried to take the word back and make it unheard, knowing even then that she couldn't.

“No, Mama, no.” Her mother's arm rose above her head. The sleeve of the housedress slid back to reveal an elbow no darker than the rest of her arm, elbow and forearm all of a piece—straight, unbearable.

Helene wanted to stop her there and say, Look at us, our stale arms open and empty. I bet her arm's like that from years and years of reading Sears catalogs, Helene thought, looking at dresses she can't afford while resting her elbows in halved lemons. She wasn't prepared for Queen Ester's arm to fall on her like a crowbar thrown out of a window.

Helene ducked.

Like stairs anywhere, it did not take nearly as long to run down them as it did to run up. Queen Ester ran too. Helene heard her mother's feet right behind her and imagined her arm raised again sharply, housedress lifting and falling. Queen Ester called out, but the words—“Wait, wait”—sounded strangled.

The front door did not slip out of Helene's hands when she twisted and pulled; though large, it swung open easily. Out the door, off the porch, in the swept yard, Helene turned back to look at the house. Still the same, squatting on the land like a grounded bird. Queen Ester appeared in the doorway.

“Mama, I'm leaving,” Helene said, her hands clenched at her stomach as she moved backward toward the car. At the edge of the yard she began to cry and then to hiccup uncontrollably, her feet full of thorns. Fumbling in her purse for her keys, she said, “You hear me? I'm leaving.” Helene felt for the door handle and yanked it open, climbed inside. The car roared to life.

“Good,” Queen Ester said softly, as she tiptoed closer to the edge of the porch. “Good,” she said again, clearer this time. “Good, good.”

12

SHE CRAVED SHOES
most of all. On her knees, with her ass high in the air, she had chewed six pairs of shoes into unrecognizable lumps—all on the sly, of course. The leather soles of brogans, with just a trace of dust, she loved best, but they were hard to find. Sunday shoes and bedroom slippers were reduced to piles of leather scraps. She sucked at the tips of shoes like sucking out the marrow from a chicken bone. Dutifully, Liberty would leave her daughter ketchup in a bowl and pickled eggs swimming in red dye, open boxes of Argo cornstarch, and Queen Ester, trying to please, would dip a finger into the bowl and lick it clean. But what she really wanted were shoes—perhaps with the heels worn away and shards of grass tucked into the groove between the sole and leather—or even a work boot, though the rubber aggravated her gums, if anyone were to ask. The first three months she gnawed away at a pair of bedroom slippers and her single pair of loafers; but after the fourth month of pregnancy her house shoes lay at the foot of her bed, unidentifiable. Queen Ester grew swollen and picky, every undone and gone-to-sour thing Liberty could think to give her daughter remained untouched, until finally Liberty handed over an old pair of garden shoes.

Nobody spoke about him.

Not quite gone, Chess and his almost-absence had seeped into both women's dreams. Queen Ester's belly, of course, didn't help matters. First stranger, then son (her baby boy, all her own), then—before Halle's death—finally lover had leapt from the mother's arms to the daughter's and, not satisfied with that sin, had topped himself and made a baby. At least that was what Liberty told herself. Maybe not leapt, she thought, but stumbled. But when? Almost nine months ago, unable to put him completely out of mind, Liberty put him out of reach. Beyond her hands but not beyond her sight. Like Chess's stumble (hmm, yes, she liked that word) into Queen Ester, Liberty too had blundered into Chess. Watching her daughter's swollen stomach, she didn't like to recall how eagerly she had shared him, just barely, with his wife Halle and his black night mistress.

She wondered how he had managed all of them. Wasn't Halle demanding (especially at the end, when she couldn't help but be), Morning sullen, and Liberty greedy? She had felt satisfaction that he loved her best. He had said Halle was a sore he couldn't help picking, and Morning—Morning just kept in his path all the time. And herself? “Oh, I love you, baby. As soon as—” Liberty had put her hand over his mouth then, not allowing him to finish, knowing he wouldn't be able to stand up to his words later on. But now?

Now nobody spoke about him.

For years he had flickered in and out of their lives, him and that wife of his, Liberty thought. Though Halle had stayed just long enough to have six babies. Then she dropped dead, some said from heartache. Hah! She could dish it out better than anybody. Halle fought dirty and more often than not won, leaving Chess to pant in a corner somewhere, licking at a cut she had just inflicted. Heartache? She was the wife and the bitch and that was all. Yes, Liberty knew Chess felt Halle was a sore he couldn't help but tear at (wasn't he the same for her?), but Halle, at least in Liberty's mind, had possessed a streak of meanness that could turn clever and hurt in unexpected places. Though Liberty (and Morning) hated to admit it, Halle proved to have a stronger hold dead than she had ever had while living. Her ghost (prettier and sweeter) slept between the sheets of both of Chess's women and smiled when they and Chess argued. She wasn't that nice when alive, but her ghost was a saint. Don't believe it? Just ask Chess. Liberty did constant battle with a dead wife's memory.

Now, though, nobody spoke his name and Halle wasn't even a thought.

Nine months had galloped past them all with only Queen Ester's swelling stomach ticking off the time. When her water broke, a clear mucus running down her legs, Liberty's first impulse was not to catch her daughter, slumped over the table, but to race out the door through the cotton field and snatch up Chess. “She ready now and I want you to see,” she said, as they stumbled back through the stretch of land that separated their homes. His feet fumbled as she dragged him along.

“All right, all right, I ain't fighting you, is I?” Chess gasped, afraid to say another word because this was the first time Liberty had spoken to him since she had opened his face with her hands and then put him out of touch. Queen Ester in labor—this was to be his punishment for impregnating her child, she said. As far as Chess was concerned it wasn't that much of a punishment; hadn't he seen his own wife (God bless her) grow with child six times? Granted, he had never been in the room with Halle when she had given birth; she always went away to her mother's house and would come back to Chess a week or so later with something swaddled in her arms. But he didn't think Liberty would really put him in the room with Queen Ester. No, he thought, as he watched Liberty's long legs saw back and forth through the tall grass, his punishment was the absence of Liberty; he missed the way she untucked her laughter. Morning had become complacent these past few months without the threat of Liberty stepping through the door to pluck away “her man.” She had become lazy in bed, telling him no when she felt tired, something she never would have done if she thought Liberty lurked around the corner. “Say, slow down,” Chess said, as he stumbled for the second time.

Liberty broke the bolt she'd begun at Chess's house. “Better?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Chess panted. “I done missed you,” he blurted. Both he and Liberty were surprised by how quickly she turned with her hand raised ready to strike.

“What you say?”

“Nothing. I ain't say nothing.” He took a small hop back from her. Liberty turned away, almost running toward the house.

Queen Ester had crawled into her bed by the time Chess and Liberty entered the house. They took the stairs three at a time, and both lover and beloved paused when they heard Queen Ester's heavy moan behind the closed bedroom door. “You stay on here, I got it.” Liberty let go of Chess's hand. “No, maybe we should—” She stopped. “No. I got it. No. Wait. Go get Other and tell him—”

“Where he at?” Chess interrupted.

“Well, shit, I don't know. He can't be far.” She licked the inside of her thumb.

“Sure he could.”

Both heard Queen Ester's mewing again. “Just shut it, Chess.” Liberty scowled.

“Well, goddamn, baby,” Chess said. “You need to hurry up on whatever you gone do.”

Her nervousness created a wall between them, and Chess hadn't the faintest idea how to climb over it. Instead, he watched, fascinated, as Liberty paced up and down the hall, her thumb inside her mouth, saying the one thing she knew to calm herself, “All right. All right, all right.” Finally she stopped in front of the door. “I done this before.”

“When?”

“Okay, maybe I haven't, but gone and get me some hot water and some rags from the kitchen. Gone, now.” She walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. For the next three hours, Chess stayed alone in the hallway without a chair to sit in.

“She done yet?”

Liberty didn't bother to stand up and walk to the door, she merely yelled out, “You get some respect, Chess. And no, she ain't done.”

Chess smiled lightly at what he thought was Liberty's conversational tone. “You know, Halle would go to her mama, stay a week and come back with a baby. Just one, two, three.”

Liberty stepped out and slapped Chess lightly, and he saw something playful and joyous in her face. “She at her mama's. That's me.”

*   *   *

Then they were four, an awkward number easily broken. And only Queen Ester could stand it. They kept the baby for just seven days. Seven solid days of Queen Ester's heavy cooing and oh my's that even she, full of new-mother bliss, knew wouldn't last. Mama planning, she thought, and I ain't got the know-how to stand up to her like I should. She was right. Liberty spent those seven days thinking there were some things a body couldn't bear and, Lord be a witness, shouldn't have to bear, such as your lover making a baby with your daughter, and then to have that baby plus lover plus daughter all under the same roof. No, she thought hotly, nobody should be called upon to bear that. Big as she was, Liberty wasn't big enough for that sort of nonsense, and she knew someone would have to go.

Those seven days, when Queen Ester was wrapped in a thin cocoon of rapture, Liberty thought of the man she was going to pass off as the father, husband to Queen Ester except that he died too soon. Duck didn't have the decency to stay alive for eight months. Nevertheless, she prepared for Annie b and Ed, two people she had laid eyes on only once in her life, with a faith that in spite of everything things would work out. A letter full of looping handwriting had been sent out to Duck's kin and they were coming, on their way to see what Duck left behind, and thank you for sending the body so promptly. Liberty planned for their arrival, stalking her house, making everyone bend to her will. They were three and baby be damned. On the seventh day, early in the morning, she sent Chess to fetch Mable and Other. Liberty stepped into the bedroom, already mid-speech even though she hadn't said a word, Queen Ester couldn't pretend surprise. “It ain't even got a daddy,” Liberty told her daughter.

“Yes, it do.”

“Duck dead, baby.”

“I ain't talking about him.”

“Well, that daddy already got too many babies of his own. And I'm too old to be taking care of no brand-new children.”

“I ain't ask you to mind after what's mine.”

“I ain't said you did.”

“Well?”

“Well, you telling me that you can mind after what's yours, but who mind after you?” Liberty walked further inside the room. “That's right, I do. And you ain't even got a job.”

“I can gone and get one.”

“Then who gone take care your baby while you working?”

“Mama.”

“Duck people's coming down here today. I want you to stay on up here.”

“Ain't.” Defiance laced her voice.

Liberty moved, striding across the small room. She crouched over the bed where Queen Ester lay and yanked her daughter's shoulder, shaking her furiously. “You hear me? I said don't you come down when they get here.” She pulled back and raised her other hand. Her palm and fingers waved in the air, poised to strike. Knowing she was beat, Queen Ester laid the baby, too small to be named, in her mother's arms, sighing gently as Liberty closed the door behind her.

*   *   *

She walked downstairs, baby in her hands. Mable waited for her friend in the café. “Chess come and got me. Other outside on the porch.” Mable saw the baby tucked in the crook of Liberty's elbow. “What's going on?”

“I need you to do something for me.” Liberty's voice came out, flat and mean.

“What, Liberty?”

“Some of Duck's people gone come by and pick up the baby, and I want you to give it to them.”

“What?”

“You heard.”

“Liberty, what's going on?” Mable's concern sat naked on her face, but then both women heard a cranky rumbling enter the yard. Together they stepped to the window. “Who that?”

“I told you, Duck's kin coming.”