Solemn (28 page)

By this time, Redvine was downstairs with a neat pile of jewelry at the door. The pile was a gleaming high tangle of wristwatches, stopwatches, necklaces, lockets, rings, bracelets, cameos, and cuff links amidst a shiny miscellany.

“Throw all that in there,” Redvine told Solemn. Then, he grabbed a box and hustled to the back of the house. Solemn grabbed a few handfuls from the pile. She heard a crash. She caught Redvine smashing the doors from an imposing cabinet of ammunition and guns. He used a fireplace poker. Like somebody Solemn had never seen, Redvine tore into the cabinet and threw stuff in a box. He looked up only to tell Solemn he needed a new box. She followed him into the kitchen.
A man there in back of the kitchen, broad bellied and white, stern. Ready to lock our hands in little round chains. Hah. He only a stretched-out apron hung down from a nail, his coat strings tied behind.

And so it went. Father and daughter tore through a house in Cleveland, Mississippi, on a quiet afternoon when the
Richards Family
(as engravings on the jewelry introduced them) had decided to take advantage of the nice day to go to the Ellis Theater for a show. An impromptu trip, bluegrass music along the way, the usual seats. Everyone knew them. “Ain't no crime round
here
.” Traveling salesmen came and went; Girl Scouts showed up with cookies; neighbors received neighbors' packages to set on doorsteps.

From the house, Solemn and Redvine collected jewelry and artillery and silver and china. They ransacked a breakfront and desk drawers. They snatched down unopened bottles of aged whiskey and bourbon and scotch. They piled up silk scarves and wrapped kitchen crystal inside them. They found loose fifty- and hundred-dollar bills and Susan B. Anthony dollars and Indian buffalo nickels. There was a coin collection. He uncovered a set of gold pens—
To Thomas Richards, for 30 years of dedicated service to Bolivar County
. He threw them in, jinxed and mad he had ever thought he could be a good enough salesman to buy some of his own. He found a laundry bag in a dumbwaiter behind the kitchen. He dumped out the rank linen and towels to find a few empty pillowcases. Heavy cotton. There was little way to walk outside with two vintage phonographs, one small television and one boom box he found without some potential notice or injury to their finer parts. He spared them. He gave the pillowcases to Solemn to carry out. He watched her carry them across the lawn, straining and losing her balance. If her plans were intercepted, she had already imagined a role: she would be the babysitter, or the cleaning girl, or the help who helped the seniors keep their prescriptions up to date. Her daddy stayed hidden inside. She was the one who did the transporting. And with each new box placed in the back of the car seats there was new excitement and reward. Daddy must have sensed her nature. Some excitement was what Solemn craved. Some adventure and risk taking. And, the last time she walked into the house to see what Daddy had found, she found him sitting alone in the kitchen: relaxed and content. He sweated. He smiled at her. The Richardses had a coffeepot. The hemp bag of coffee near it had a Spanish name. It was nothing he had ever heard of. Redvine brewed himself a cup.

“Bring me my thermos,” he told his daughter.

He sat at a cedar kitchen table with a gleaming varnish he wished someone would hire him to put into place. He knew how to varnish. His father taught him the apt pressure to give so the glimmer wouldn't pucker and split later. It made everything look better than it was and anything that was not better look pretty damned good.

Solemn bought him his thermos. Redvine filled it with the coffee he made in a pot in the Richards kitchen. Solemn left to the car. “Redvine” to others, “Red” to his wife, “Earl” to himself. He'd leave it there in the house. Because so many other men looked up to him for sticking by his children. Because he always made the honest, however harder, living. Because Bev's neck really was long and pearls rewound her face. Because nobody really know shit really anyway so it's okay for everybody not to know it all about him. Because Solemn really belonged in a new paid school, some place can handle her intellect. Money talks, louder than any voice … On top of the tables, cascaded over steps to a brand-new house, piled in the bank, under the bed, under the floor, in the clothes on his back, everywhere … money would be.

The last time he lifted his thermos to drink in the house, a seam along the middle of the index finger of his ladies' glove stretched to a rip and then a full tear. Redvine rinsed his porcelain coffee cup when he finished. He poured the remaining coffee from the pot into his thermos. It was the last thing he took out of the house. A long drive home, back to Singer's Trailer Park in Bledsoe, was silent save for Solemn's songs on the radio.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

Bev worried and wondered why Red hadn't called. She didn't want to bug him, concentrated on her spaghetti instead. With a little extra money, she had driven herself to the Farmers Market on Catherine Street especially for tomatoes. Solemn came in and scooped a mound of it all into a bowl, chewing a loaf of garlic bread. Bev woke up.

“Where your daddy?”

“I don't know,” Solemn said.

Bev elbowed up from the couch. “You don't know?”

“He outside.”

Bev sighed. Straight answers had become as impossible with Solemn as straight hair. She looked outside and saw Redvine outside smoking.

“Come on in … I'm warming up spaghetti,” she told him.

Redvine put out his cigarette and came in. Bev had picked up a box of Franzia at the gas station for dinner. She poured him some. Unsettled and a bit rickety, so she spilled a little on the floor, wiped it up. He hushed into the new phones a lot. And Alice Taylor had never come by before with strange friends for him to drive away with unless he came back sweaty drunk. For the most part, Solemn went out with him. But not all the time. He would be gone for a night. Never before had Bev thought of Redvine and another woman. Never at all. But Stephanie seemed to know better, maybe. Was she stupid?

“How'd it go?” she asked him.

“Good,” he told her. “Some folks want me coming back next week.”

“Okay,” Bev said.

*   *   *

Redvine hid his collection in the unused space of manufactured storage units under the trailer. Once he took care of the utilities and six months' plot rent and food for summer, he consulted his relatives and folks like Alice Taylor—apologetic—on what was coming up. Or he just stopped by for no reason now, with a trunk of gifts to sell. Birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, christenings, baptisms, anybody he heard was tumbling into love … The DigiCates baned, Redvine could give the people what they really wanted now. Through the month, he parceled out much of the space's contents to far-apart pawnshops, secondhand stores, and resale shops in Memphis and Jackson. He only took a little at a time. The terse clerks had seen it all. No questions were asked. Redvine shredded the claim receipts he received more than twenty-thousand dollars cash for, when much of it was said and done. On his way back to Bledsoe, he threw the scraps of paper in miscellaneous gas station and pit-stop trash cans. Alice Taylor got hers, hurried it up between hands rolling weed or money all day. Days on the road ended. Just like that.

“If that ‘Walter' or them DigiCate folks call here, hang up,” Redvine told them. When Bev fussed about impoliteness, Redvine ended it: “Treat 'em like salesmen.”

Abruptly Redvine gave Solemn glasses one day with little explanation but a pat on her back. The clear-framed jewels helped Solemn renew her relationship with grass, distinguishing between points and blades to comprise the whole she had once only seen as a green blob. The patterns in fabric—corduroy, crocheted, burlap—came to life higher than touch alone. Even the sky held definition to marvel at. Solemn realized the proper dimensions and proportions of the scar in her right knee, not nearly as pronounced as she had thought. Smaller. She still used the leftover DigiCate—to yank font size down smaller and smaller until she couldn't see it anymore, going deeper and deeper each time.

“You shouldn't sit up in the house all by yourself,” Redvine tried to explain once. He was more often now thinking about the boys he could one day come home to find in the house with her, behind the thin accordion doors, naked and twisting and involved in the unspeakable. But Solemn was immune to it all, having heard the sounds in the middle of the night and behind the doors of Desiree's trailer and from the car Landon had sometimes parked near the trailer with a girl inside.

“I'm good,” Solemn answered.

Now she smacked gum when she talked to him. She wouldn't watch a show with them together. She looked outside the window all the time and wound up gone for hours, to the well or around Singer's or throughout the makeshift roads she walked alone on now, barefoot.

“Why y'all let me stay out of school?” Solemn suddenly asked, breaking into his mind. As he thought about it, she answered for him: “I wouldn't have let me do that.”

“I thought it's what you wanted,” Redvine said.

“Well, it wasn't.”

“I did everything I could to get you in the Kosciusko high school, but you didn't have the credits.” She sucked her teeth. He went on. “Minute I asked you to come on the road with me, you said, ‘Fine.' Now, you treating me like I didn't care or something?”

“You only care about Landon. It's always been like that.”

“Where you get something like this from?”

“He's your boy. Mama told me you didn't want me at all. You wanted a boy. I was supposed to be named Solomon. I got this old cutoff name instead.”

“Now Solemn, your mama's lying. I never said anything like that. You always been my adorable little girl.”

“You wouldn't have let Landon leave school. That's all I was saying.”

*   *   *

On Solemn's birthday, the Redvines sat at their kitchen table before fifteen unlit candles on a chocolate sheet cake. The TV was off. And the radio was on Solemn's favorite station. A prime rib smoked on a platter in front of them, devoured before anyone bothered to touch their scalloped potatoes, green beans, and biscuits. They planned to visit the movie theater after dinner. They voted between
The Village
and
The Notebook
. Even though she was outnumbered, Solemn won. They settled on
The Village.
It had been nearly two years since they had caught a show all together. Solemn had on a brand-new pair of jeans and sky-blue glitter flats. And finally, her glasses: clear rimmed, large, personal follow-up appointments with an optician.

Earlier that week, Redvine presented his wife with a choker string of pearls. Fake, but good enough for sale in a jewelry store alone, not the simple section at Walmart. He ran down the laid-off Greyhound driver who now lugged a suitcase of Avon across Singer's. From her, he bought Night Magic and Emeraude for Bev. He told her to be sure to stop by with each new catalog. Delightful surprises. The occasion was none.

“Business is good,” he told Bev.

“You like your steak, Solemn?” Redvine asked.

“Yes, Daddy,” Solemn responded, lips greasy.

“Lemme show you how to hold your knife and fork, little girl,” Bev said. She put her hands around her daughter's and the fork and pressed Solemn's middle finger down the spine of the fork. “This the proper way to do it.”

“I don't like it that way,” Solemn said. Bev all but took over her plate and started to cut the meat. Solemn slammed her fork down on her plate. She snatched her hands away. She balled her right fist and stuck it into her cheek.

“Solemn, what's gotten into you?” Bev wondered.

“Nothing,” Solemn said. She turned away and crossed her arms.

“Apologize to your mother, Solemn, right now,” Redvine added.

“For what? I didn't do anything.”

“I don't like how you talked to her.”

“You can't tell me what to do.”

“Lord…” Bev pushed back from the table.

“Oh, I can't?” Redvine peered. Solemn jumped up from the table. Her parents stood with her. She pounded Redvine in his chest with her fists and kicked at his knees. He stood defenseless against Solemn. She was furious. He bent down to steady himself.

“Solemn!” Bev shouted.

“You can't tell me what to do! You're nothing! You're nothing!”

Bev gripped Solemn and turned her around so fast the girl almost tripped. She shook her. Redvine came between them. Solemn ran to the door and out into the yard. With no shoes on and tiny rocks prickling her feet, Bev ran after her.

“Get in here, right now!”

“No!” Solemn shouted back.

“Lord … you gonna have the neighbors callin' the law on us…”

She was about to sprint to Solemn and drag her inside by her back ponytail, if she had to. Redvine grabbed his wife's shoulder.

“Just let her go,” Redvine said.

“I just don't understand … Here we are having this nice supper for her birthday … ready to go to the show.”

“Just let it go. She'll come back.”

“But we ain't even gave her all her presents.”

“Bev, look, trust me on this. We gonna go on to the show by ourselves and leave her by herself tonight. You wanted to see
The Notebook
anyway.”

“No.” Bev pushed him loose. She didn't care who thought she was a witch for it.

She wasn't about to watch Solemn march on, that damned well. Had started that mess back up again. Was she gonna jump? Just normal growing pains. Hormones and loneliness. Aftershocks. Maybe even a boy. Landon gone. Redvine strange. Bev was just tired of it. Not sick yet. Just tired. The ungratefulness and self-absorption of them all. By God they were going to be normal for just one night, even if it killed them.