Solemn (6 page)

Solemn was home.

And a police officer was in the living room. No. Nothing happened. Solemn just wandered too far and lost her way.

When the men first came face-to-face, there was a reflection of each other. So small the area was, they could have been related. Somehow. Redvine shook the officer's hand to start small talk.

“I live in Kosciusko, not too far from the courthouse,” Bolden told Mr. Redvine. “I like to sleep in when I get off from all this, so it makes things easier.”

Bolden leaned back on their convertible couch-bed. Mr. Redvine extended an Old Milwaukee can, top already pressed in. Bolden shook his head no. Technically, two hours after his salary and shift had ended he was still on the job. Mr. Redvine took a strong slurp from the can instead.

“It's definitely easier to get to work when you ain't going that far,” he said. “I can say the same. I take the work I want to take when it's convenient for me. Mostly I'm called in to the electronics plant, if they need me.”

The two men were unusually tired. Finally: “Where you find my little girl?”

“Not too far off from here, at the train tracks headed to the Trace.”

“That's far, for her. For us. I didn't know she ever walked out that far.”

“Well,” Bolden said, “she did. If I hadn't been fearing for a freight turning my Buick into a tin can I might have run her over. She was in the middle of the road, just … layin' there. I keep my pistol loaded. I ain't scared of no animal in the middle of the night. I thought that's what she was. But she wasn't.”

“Well, Officer,” Mr. Redvine said, “I'm glad she wasn't that. We take good care of our kids. They don't run off like that. We love 'em.”

“I can see,” Bolden answered. “Took her awhile to talk to me. But she knew where she was coming from and where I needed to take her. She wanted to get home.”

Bolden wondered where Pearletta Hassle lived throughout here, if she was even back. It had looked like she could use a few stiff drinks last time he saw her. He could have asked Redvine about the woman, the man, the baby. But he would be back at work. And probably for nothing. Most didn't even call back to say
Oh, it all worked out fine.

Solemn was in the one-person bathroom with Bev, getting yanked out of her dress, scrubbed with a cloth, and oiled up with Vaseline. Bev was cautious to enter a room where men talked. Solemn intuited she should feel the same. Solemn thought she had just a little slit in her knee, from her fall, starting to chase a lightning bug and ending with what, she was unsure. It was really a gash. A quarter bottle of peroxide, a singe of alcohol, and two cotton patches later, it felt like hope. Bev extended the cleanup until she heard a slight tap of the front screen door and the howl of a Buick.

*   *   *

Our part of the world was less than quiet that night. Without tellin what The Man at the Well did or how he darted to me after he did it or how I heard the splash but knew I cain't swim or how I ran from the man after, I just went to my room, off the kitchen with a shelf fit for my dolls. I woke up in middle of the night. The slit in my knee, from my fall early with the firefly, itched me into scratchin away the scab. I cleaned the blood off my fingers with my tongue. When I turned round in the bed it was three men standin shoulder to shoulder in my little room.

A snake or a bullfrog hissed underneath the trailer. Dandy shuffled from the closet and flashed her eyes at me. Branches clanked and clacked against the roof. A leaky faucet was in the kitchen. I sweated. I looked, buck-eyed and wondrous, at what men could have entered to find out something I ain't know nobody needed to find out. I crisscrossed my mind for my secrets and got ready to offer one. A breeze whished through the window and nudged my rhinestone music box of money from the windowsill down to the floor. If not for fact my room had carpet, I bet it woulda broke. The unicorn horn chipped though.

But my coins and bills flew out the underside down to the floor. Seem like money always supposed to be stolen or gone. I figured it was time for a robbery. But no. I forced myself to look again. Them men was just one of my dresses hung on a coatrack turned into my dress rack. What I thought was one of them men's long lyin nose was just a hook of the rack. Hah. It poked through the sleeve of my white dress I wear when we got to go to a special supper or church service. What I thought was the man's beret was one of my starched collars, pointed up high.
How silly, Solemn
, feel like my mama say. All that jerkin and freezin for nothing but a trick.

“Get on out from inside me,” I told the secret. “Go on now.”

*   *   *

She knew she wasn't so special. Had to have been the secrets somebody chased, and not herself in her own body. Until now, with this night when figures in the distance turned round and round before her very eyes, trying to gouge out what was inside, no one cared to know her. She heard the toilet flush, but couldn't tell who did it. They all had a different way. Bev held it down, to make sure. Redvine just slapped it a bit. Half the time, Landon forgot. She herself did it twice, to pass time. She wasn't at wits. Now there was a rim of dark under the bottom edge of the door, blacked out, slit in two parts. She hadn't heard anybody walk to it, nor did the trailer shake close to her way. She dreamed the knob turning. Solemn awoke the next morning to a bowl, Cheerios, and a glass of milk on a small stand next to her small bed. A belt hung on the doorknob: a reminder she shouldn't leave the house again with no notice and she definitely shouldn't return in a dirty dress.

*   *   *

Beyond any man Solemn saw suited up in pretend good use, or spaced out in the pews of Battle of the Cross Pentecostal Church, or flung out a passenger side, her brother was actually okay and forgivable. Solemn always discovered his better uses. She used to tag along with him whenever she asked, to catch the ball for his new beard and lank-armed friends. Lately, his boys drove up in haggard cars and trucks to carry him where she could not go. She speculated she could be just as self-absorbed and clandestine when she was many years taller like Landon. He was a D/C student at the high school in Kosciusko, but nobody minded or pressured more. When he got the diploma, he would do better than Redvine had with a GED. The dining room, a harried nook of a round maple table between two partitions with built-in shelves for records and books, smelled sharp like lemons and menthol. Landon's eyes were a rheumy pink. Solemn saw a spray of pink ovals around his mouth, more along the boat rim of his T-shirt.

But the cicadas ain't here yet
 … she wondered.

“What's that smell?” she said.

“I stopped at the drugstore and messed around the cologne samples … Police was here last night?” Landon poured himself cornflakes with last of the milk. Then, he slurped last of a beer his father left undone. Solemn leaned her elbows on his thigh and rested her chin in her hands. She rocked back and forth.

“How you know 'bout that? You wasn't even here,” she said.

“Daddy told me be nice to your mama today 'cause Solemn and a cop done set her off.” Landon grinned. “Worried about what the neighbors was gonna say and think, if they knew. What you do to get police coming round here?”

“Nothing,” Solemn said. “I lost my way home. A policeman brung me. Just one.”

At back of her brother's shoulder, jagged and silent, came The Man at the Well, with unspoken malice and charm. It was a puzzle. But with Landon there, he didn't move Solemn. She closed her eyes and blinked, and it all went back correct.

Landon rose and took Solemn's hand, to the window to see the three-planked fence horizoned against the dawn. Their neighborhood's signpost and mark, like a brand, was prominent to double take and second glance:
Singer's Trailers … Park With Us.

“See that fence?” he asked Solemn. Their faces pressed to each other in the four-by-four kitchen window. He pointed to the slate-gray weathered logs erected decades before, logs creased softly like smokers' faces. Solemn nodded. “Ain't no black man's blood ever drop from inside this fence and ain't no cotton come up from the ground inside it, either. Some Freemasons marked it off, before we got here on this earth. They shot up any white man who come past. Blew his head off. Popped it like a balloon.”

“Ugh, Landon…”

“Well, they did.”

“How you know? You wasn't here.”

“I know. Trust me. I know. I told Daddy to move here. Well, not directly. I just hinted. We came out here together. First. I could feel it was something clean about it. No haunts here.”

This was reassuring to her. The tricks would go away. Landon went on.

“You know, I been meeting and planning. Every day. Shooting my guns…”

“You gotta gun, Landon?” Solemn relaxed, fascinated and absorbed. It was better than TV and a singer singing. It made more sense than her little eight-room school.

“What you talking about? Got a lot of 'em. Rifles, pistols, shotguns, revolvers. My man said he got a few Uzis he gon' bring by the meetinghouse. But, yeah, me and my partners, my brothers … we got 'em. Can't tell nobody though. So, you gotta stay away from them cops. They ain't your friends. You see 'em coming, you run. Fast. But not too fast, 'less they think you stole something. And you stay inside this fence. It's here for a reason. The Masons knew. Don't go out it without one of us.”

“What if the cat run to the road?”

“Then let her run. She'll come back.”

“Okay.”

The predictability of Bev's shuffling and stirring interrupted them. Landon went along to put on a shirt with a proper neckline. Solemn slept all day. Meanwhile, Bev's reaffirmation of their life and daily reconstruction of its peaceful iconography included a red paisley print scarf not normally a part of it. It was tucked into the corner of the creamy faux velvet couch behind one of the matching faux velvet pillows. She had told Landon (too many times) to stop perching his greasy new Afro on it. And Solemn,
that girl
, she never put the pillows back uncrooked or right side up. Ever. Bev chalked the unplaced and unfamiliar item up to her son, unapproached for the new morning curfew he apparently decided on for himself but punished for it nonetheless. She threw it away.

 

FIVE

It took a few days before a teenage girl complained the pump in the main well was too jammed for her to get the water her family did not want to drain their own gray water tanks to run again, to risk overflow. It took a couple of well-side consultations and politicking sessions for that girl's father and the men who talked often to come up with a solution to unjam it—namely, force. It would take one of those men's woman, an unmarried girl shacking up until she could do better, to let the drunk she lived off know to stop the guessing: “Just stick a flashlight down there.” It took one more day and one more lost bout with sobriety for that man to follow her advice. It took a half hour for the new white officer to figure to take the unmarried girl's sickened call seriously. It took two hours for the brown officer to volunteer to walk up to Pearletta Hassle's shell in the world—with Gilroy thinking the blue suits were the devil catchers and they should have caught up with the brute in him long ago. It took that brown officer a moment to tell Pearletta he saw what could be her baby floating in that well: bobbing, like a determined apple, begging a little blindfolded party guest to bite into it. It took less than an hour for a drunk and high Gilroy Hassle to remember he “dropped” the baby down there.

“Stay here” meant a correct way to keep on seeing things. Solemn stayed.

Bev and Redvine went to see what the fuss was about. So did as many who were home in Singer's. From the steps of the trailer, Solemn saw a group of folks looking and talking and stretching and pointing, with morning glory crushed under an uncharacteristic pile of people. Solemn strained to see through the crowd and thought her Man at the Well was just a man, bossy and controlling with children at his hands but crumbled and obedient with handcuffs on his. He spit at the other men or whomever along the path to the patrol car sending firework lights across the field. He missed Redvine because, at Bev's caution, Redvine stood back far from the circle. The couple walked back to Solemn with their faces incorrect. They left her on her own to find something for supper, put the puzzle together, and believe she saw what she saw for real, with all she saw proving Landon wrong about there being no hauntings at Singer's.

*   *   *

Taken aback, Officer Justin Bolden thought of the discovery of two black children in the wild twice in one week, one in earth and one in water. He did not want to seem too pesky or accountable, but it all had the itch of connection to him. He said nothing.

The first problem was Officer Hanson forgot to give Gilroy Hassle his Miranda warning before his hazy admittance. Town authorities could shield Hanson, make no mention of this fact—but a hoarse-toned female state attorney did. The second problem was lack of credible witnesses, no one to unpack Gilroy's euphemisms: “too much to drink,” “can't recall,” “just playin',” “can't recall,” “slipped,” and “can't recall.” The final problem was a black baby with no dependents or friends or societal responsibilities was not worth the risk of a fight with the NAACP, or a tiny-boned black attorney driving in from Jackson for a bereaved hardworking victim of “discrimination.” So Mississippi State gave Gilroy Hassle rehab, a grief counselor, and a regular psychiatric check-in package as a sentence, for the disappearance and killing of a black child. And that was that.

*   *   *

The Bledsoe blacks who heard about the accident or slaying or excuse or tall tale were incensed and mourned. They felt forgotten. They shouted out their versions of hostility: “Ain't shit changed … We always got a white judge, all-white juries, a still–Jim Crow town, white prosecutor, white public defender, black accused, black victim.” This time a black baby just happened to be cut up for the soup. The outraged who knew not to crave justice had to get to work, pay bills, eat, survive. So, nothing about what happened at Singer's Trailer Park well got a second look. The police were advised to stay quiet at the stations and ignore any telephone calls about “that baby.” Procedurally, it was finished. Otherwise, it was just getting started.