This Bitter Earth (17 page)

The glow would fade from their faces and their bodies would go cold and begin to shake. Some would squeeze their eyes shut and let him do to them what he had paid for, but most would beg to go to the bathroom, which was usually out in the hall. He’d never see or hear from them again.

Alcohol numbed him for a while and then later, smack helped to silence the screams of his mother, helped to quiet the sounds of the machine guns and erase the images of his friends’ bodies that were torn apart by the bullets.

But nothing could rid him of the salty taste their spraying blood had left on his tongue when he’d opened his mouth to scream.

JJ slept with the lights on now. He didn’t drink or shoot up anymore, and he wore long-sleeved shirts, even through the blistering Arkansas summers, to hide the needle marks and that time in his life.

Now he looked into the eyes of the man before him and felt sure he saw in those eyes what people saw when they looked into his own.

JJ was not a fearful man and did not consider himself a religious one. He hadn’t stepped foot in a church since his sister was killed, but now, looking at this man was making the hair on his arms and the back of his neck rise and the only thought that entered his mind at that moment was,
Oh, God.

Part three

Coming Home to Roost

Chapter 20

W
HEN Lappy was picked up in Little Rock for harassing a white woman, he didn’t realize that they would arrest him and beat him to within an inch of his life. He was drunk and high and in that state of mind, had tried to plead his case.

“My mama is white and my daddy’s mama was white so that make me three-quarters white. I got more cracker in me than nigger,” he told the four white cops that were taking turns kicking him.

They didn’t understand a word Lappy Clayton was saying. His lips were swollen at that point, both of his front teeth were gone and his tongue was split at the tip.

His court-appointed lawyer pleaded guilty to the charges of attempted rape, even though the only thing he’d done was slide his hand down the woman’s thigh. And she’d actually grinned at him when he did it.

She had had quite a bit to drink and didn’t seem to notice the kink in Lappy’s hair.

The place was smoky and no one could hear over the jukebox, but people kept talking anyway. Lappy was half drunk too when he stumbled in from a card game.

The woman had looked dead at him when he walked through the door and Lappy knew that the new position she moved her legs into (crossed at the thigh instead of ankle) was for him.

All he could think of, from the moment he stepped across the threshold until the door banged shut behind him, was running his fingers across those thighs and getting a head start on how it would feel to lie between them.

Ten minutes later someone was pulling him up by his collar and asking her if she was a monkey lover.

She screamed back, “What?” and then, “I didn’t know!” Someone called Lappy a half-breed nigger coon and then threw him out of the bar and onto the wet ground outside.

A sharp pain cut through him as the heel of a boot met with his spleen.

Lappy puked and watched as the okra and grits he’d had earlier in the evening ebbed slowly down and over the sidewalk into the gutter.

By the time the pain faded into a dull thud, spiked black heels were at his nose and he could hear the woman from the bar saying, “That’s him. That’s the one that tried to rape me.”

Lappy looked up and saw that her legs were parted and he could see as clear as day the smiling lips of the woman’s vagina. He would never forget that.

Lappy laughed and pointed at it and that’s when the boot came down on the side of his face and sent his two front teeth scrambling behind the okra and grits.

That was in ‘58 and Lappy spent five years doing hard labor. He’d worked the chain gang for three of the five, and during that time the woman who had accused him of rape found God and felt that Lappy Clayton would be the first soul she’d try to save.

She would have thought twice about it had she known about his crimes, crimes that involved more than a misplaced hand or lascivious desire. She would have hollered attempted murder if she knew what Lappy Clayton had done in his lifetime. But she didn’t and went right down to the judge that had convicted him, a distant cousin on her mother’s side, and said that she had been coaxed into lying by Ned Jeffers, who had been dead two years by then.

“Never was an attempt. In fact the man just came in to ask for directions. I heard him ask for it. He didn’t even look at me. Not once.”

“That boy threaten you, Janey?”

“Nossir.”

“Some other niggers threaten you?”

“Nossir.”

“Why you all of a sudden changing your story?”

“I’m telling you it was never mine to begin with. Ned made me tell it.”

“Ned ain’t had no reason to do it.”

“Ned hated the coloreds.”

“True. Nigger’s what killed his brother in Alabama.”

“So you know for yourself he ain’t look kindly on them.”

“You saying you like them?”

“Nossir, but I believe in God and I don’t hate nobody.”

“They animals, they ain’t people.”

“They a living creature.”

“Yeah. So you saying Ned had you lie to revenge his brother?”

“Yessir.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t want this on my conscience no more.”

“Uh-huh.”

Lappy walked after five years and three days. Forty of the eighty dollars he’d had in his pocket that night was returned to him.

He dressed himself in the clothes he had been wearing when he was convicted and asked the men he’d spent every waking moment with during those five years if he still looked good in his clothes.

They’d laughed at him and shook their heads, amused that Lappy seemed oblivious to the fact that his clothes were board-stiff and stinking with five-year-old dried blood and vomit.

Janey, Jane Ann Clementine, sent her maid’s young son to meet Lappy when he stepped from behind the large iron gate of the prison.

“Ms. Janey said to give you this,” the boy, who was no more than twelve years old said, handing him an envelope. “She said I’m to take you to Elijah’s place.”

Lappy opened the envelope and found six crisp ten-dollar bills staring back at him. He stuffed the money into his breast pocket and followed the boy the ten miles into Carnery.

They arrived at a small green-and-white house just before nightfall. The boy knocked on the front door and then hurried away.

When the door opened Lappy came face-to-face with what he thought was a woman. She was wrapped in a blanket that covered her from the neck down. She had amber skin, high cheekbones and wore makeup that seemed a bit too heavy for the hour.

“You Lappy Clayton?”

“Yeah.”

The woman stepped back and swung the door open. Lappy stepped into a large room that was broken into three smaller rooms by three walls. Each wall had a cross painted or hung on it. There were candles burning in every corner and a single bed sat in the center of each room.

“Toilet out back. Water pump there too,” she said as she eyed Lappy. “You got some good hair,” she added.

Lappy looked down into the small face and thought about how it would feel to have those tiny pink lips kiss his neck. He hadn’t had a woman in five years.

“Where’s Elijah?” Lappy asked, giving the house a once-over before taking a step toward the room to the far right.

“Where’s your teeth?” the tiny pink lips asked.

“Got knocked out.”

“I know a man that could fix that for you.” There was a pause and Lappy saw the tiny pink lips stretch into a devious smile. “Did it happen in jail?”

“Nah, before that.”

“But you were in jail, right?” The voice became excited.

“Yeah,” Lappy responded, thinking that he would have those lips on his neck, and elsewhere, quite soon.

“Me too.”

Lappy cocked his head. “Yeah, where?” Lappy knew some women that had been in jail. This one didn’t look like any of them. If they went in soft, they definitely came out hard. This woman standing before him didn’t even look rough around the edges.

“Evensberg.”

Lappy laughed. “Nah, baby, you must be confused. Evensberg is a male prison.”

“Uh-huh, I know.”

Laughter.

“I’m Elijah, pleased to meet you.” Elijah smiled deviously, snatched a glance at Lappy’s crotch and then extended one delicate hand toward him in greeting.

It was a halfway house that had been set up by the good Christian white women of the Salvation Methodist Church. Lappy figured that all or at least most of them had had a piece of some black dick at one point or another in their lives.

The old ones that came to pray over them hardly ever looked at the men. The young ones, well, it was all they could do to keep their eyes fixed on anything else but the men.

Lappy knew that look: curiosity straining behind their good Christian values and the prejudices that had been instilled in them at home. He saw the moisture that formed beneath their noses, the way they licked their lips after each sentence and how they giggled their way through the Scriptures.

He wanted to fuck them all, but most of all he wanted to kill them, because in them he saw Janey, Jane Ann Clementine, and he blamed them all for what she’d done to him.

He ran his tongue along the empty space in his gums and thought about the whips the guards had used to open up the skin on his back just before sending him out to work, bareback and beneath the scorching sun, and how bad it hurt when the bleeding wounds began to fester in the heat.

Lappy Clayton looked at those women and thought about all of those things and clasped his hands tightly behind his neck and grinned.

He crossed his legs and smiled as he recalled the child in the field of wildflowers: her yellow ribbons, the scent of the earth as he drove her body into it. He could still feel her fists pounding against his neck and face and the sputter of her final breath as it wafted across his cheek.

But best of all, whenever he wanted to, he could go to that place in his mind and see how easily her womanhood gave way to the sharp edge of his blade. Just thinking about it filled him with joy and his chest swelled with laughter.

The second one came years later when he’d almost forgotten about the girl in the field. She was a beauty, that one was. Feisty and forbidden is how the men of Rose described her. She was easy for Lappy to get: She liked money, and the color of his skin intrigued her. Her breasts were still heavy with milk when they met and would leak whenever they made love.

They’d argued about a woman she’d suspected Lappy was seeing, and he was and had admitted it before shoving her aside and walking out. The scene that followed was horrible. She ran up to him in the street, jumped on his back and began clawing at his face. Lappy threw her off, slapped her twice and started off again. “I’ll kill myself!” she screamed. “I will!” she cried before turning and running off.

Lappy had just laughed at her.

“What the hell are all of y‘all looking at?” he’d asked the people that had hurried out and onto their porches to see what the commotion was about.

No one replied, but one man met Lappy’s gaze and their eyes held steady before Lappy blinked and the man turned and started after her.

“Grace Ann.” Lappy sighed.

Taking her life had been sweet. He’d loved her hard, biting at her breast, taking in the milk and then spitting it back into her face. She never let go of him, even though her face was twisted in pain and his hands were wrapped around her neck locking her screams away in her throat.

She melted beneath him and he dragged her naked body across the gray sandy shore and into the waters of Miracle.

The current craved her and tugged relentlessly at her until Lappy knew he would not be able to hold on to her body much longer.

He pulled the knife from his pocket and sliced at the taut skin around her neck, the soft skin of her belly. He took his time, carving long deep fissures into her flesh while the waters yanked and snatched at her.

Finally, he let go and allowed Miracle to have her, and placed that bloody memory neatly beside the first.

Chapter 21

THE house was quiet except for its settling sounds, which sounded so much like tired breaths. Every so often Joe would cough or the baby would cry out in her sleep, but otherwise, there was just silence.

Sugar lay on her back on the small twin bed she shared with Mercy and stared at the thin cracks that covered the ceiling like spiderwebs and wondered, once again, why she had come back to Bigelow in the first place.

Mercy sneezed as if hearing Sugar’s thoughts, reminding Sugar that
she
was the reason for her return.

Yes, Mercy was one of the reasons she’d come back. Jude had made some demands too.

It was strange, Sugar thought, being back in the house among those people. Even stranger was Pearl’s easy acceptance of the truth that Joe had kept hidden from her for so many years.

Pearl seemed genuinely happy to have her back and had spoken to Sugar as if she’d never left and none of the bad things had ever happened, and after a while Sugar eased herself into the flow of Pearl’s words and the ugliness of her past all but disappeared.

Sugar turned onto her side and her eyes fell on the soft thin curls that covered Mercy’s head. The milky rays of the moon lit on the child’s hair and set it ablaze in the darkness of the room.

For the first time in a long time Sugar felt content and safe. She moved closer to Mercy and draped her arm over her waist. She wanted to curl into Mercy, the way Mercy had curled into her when she was eight years old. Those times were safe and content times too.

Sugar’s eyes grew heavy and she had almost slipped into sleep when the fluttering sounds outside of her window dragged her back.

She was immediately seized by fear and then sadness.

Bad times never seemed to have a hard time finding me,
Sugar thought as she pulled the quilt up to her chin.

Joe and Pearl lay facing away from each other, their backs barely touching. Joe stared at the door while Pearl watched the snake-like limb of the rosebush brush against the window.

Neither one of them slept and each knew the other was awake. Years ago, when they slept facing each other, arms and legs entangled, they would have spoken a few words before slumber took them, but now, old wounds bruised, some reopened; there was nothing left to say.

Joe closed his eyes against the darkness while Pearl thought about clipping some of the new pink roses to set on Jude’s grave.

Gloria changed position for the fourth time that night. She wanted to get up, turn on the light and ask Seth, again, what had happened between Sugar and him.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? All what I heard ain’t sound like nothing, sound closer to something. So what was it?”

“Nothing.”

“She your sister, but you didn’t know that when she was here last time, right?”

“Right.”

“But everyone else knew, right?”

“No.”

“I know
I
didn’t know, but I’m just your
wife.”

Silence.

“Your daddy said he felt like your mama always knew. So why didn’t you know?”

Silence.

“Seth, were you sweet on her or something?”

Silence.

“Seth?”

Seth never really put his foot down with Gloria. Had always allowed her to have her way, but this, this was too personal to talk about, too painful.

“And besides that, you got me and our baby down here, making it sound like your mama was on her deathbed. Humph, she looks better than me, Seth. That woman don’t look like she ailing at all. So when we leaving?”

“When I say.”

“When you say?” Gloria sat straight up in the bed, folded her arms across her breasts and smirked. “When you say?”

Silence.

“Seth Taylor, our baby can’t be down here in this heat and dust and for goodness’ sake that girl Mercy look like she got something that’s catching. Ain’t you worried about the baby... me?”

“I’m tired, Gloria.”

“Why you wanna stay around here, Seth? It’s something to do with that woman, right? She’s your sister, dammit! Your own mother and father done told you so!”

That was the last straw for Seth.

“Shut the hell up and turn off the goddamn light, Gloria!”

Seth had never raised his voice to Gloria, not once in all of the years they’d been married.

Gloria huffed one last time before turning off the light. She stood for a long time with her arms folded across her heaving chest. At that moment she hated Seth Taylor.

She didn’t deserve this. She would show him. She would take the baby, take the car and leave her husband in his beloved Bigelow with his two-timing daddy, crazy mama, lunatic brother and so-called half-sister.

As far as she was concerned they all belonged together.

Gloria didn’t have to wait long. Seth always fell asleep quickly. Even when he had things on his mind, he didn’t have a problem dropping off as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Not Gloria though; if she was troubled she would toss and turn until the sun came up, just like she was doing now.

Gloria slipped quietly from the bed and dressed quickly. Jewel fussed some when she lifted her from the bed, but Gloria hushed her as she slipped the car keys from Seth’s pants pocket and moved from the bedroom out into the hall and down the stairs.

Gloria left the front door cracked, afraid that the clicking sound of the lock would wake the occupants of #9.

She laid Jewel down in the front seat and spent a good five minutes re-educating herself on which pedal was the brake and which was the gas before she finally turned the key in the ignition and jerked the car out and onto the road.

She knocked down Ethel Cummings’ new white picket fence, and only someone who hadn’t been behind a wheel for a long time, or ever for that matter, would not have known to go wide on the turn off Sumter Road in order to miss Casey, the cow that always seemed to wander to that spot between two and four in the morning.

Gloria grazed Casey’s behind, knocking out the left headlight and spinning in a large circle before getting control of the car again, stepping down on the gas and doing eighty out of town.

She would show Seth Taylor.

There was a burning in Shirley’s chest that just wouldn’t go away. She’d taken two Alka-Seltzers and still the fire raged. It had been there since she’d gotten the call from Fayline.

“Shirely? Shirley, she back!”

“Who?”

“Sugar, that’s who!”

Shirley’s memory wasn’t what it used to be and so she’d had to think for a good long time before a face formed in her mind, and then the memories followed.

“You hear what I say, Shirley?”

The excitement in Fayline’s voice irritated Shirley.

“Yeah, I hear you.”

“So what you think about that?”

What was she supposed to think? Sugar was back in town and that was that.

“Nothing, I suppose.”

Fayline moved the phone from her left ear to her right. She was astonished at Shirley’s calm reaction to the return of the woman who had claimed to have lain with Shirley’s husband.

“Well, ain’t you gonna go over there and confront her?” Fayline’s voice was filled with disgust.

Shirley was quiet for a while. She looked around her kitchen and wondered if she’d let the cat out for the night. “Cat? Cat?” she called, forgetting about Fayline.

“Shirley!” Fayline screamed from the other end.

“Oh? What you screaming about, Fayline? Lord have mercy.”

“I said, ain’t you got something to say to that wench? I mean, she did sleep with your husband.” Fayline’s words dripped with maliciousness.

Herbert had been dead and gone for a good five years. Did it really even matter anymore?

“Herbert’s dead, Fayline.” Shirley announced this fact as if Fayline was the one with the bad memory.

“I know that, Shirley. I’m talking about before he died.” Fayline took a deep breath. “Remember, she told you—”

“Cat! Cat!”

Shirley’s voice shot through the phone, cutting off Fayline’s words.

“Shirley!” she screamed again.

“Cat?”

A dial tone followed and Fayline was left staring at the receiver. Now that conversation and the burning in her chest had Shirley up pacing her bedroom floor. She still couldn’t remember if she’d put Cat out and now was more concerned than ever, because a car had just torn past her house doing at least a hundred miles an hour.

“Lord.” Shirley sighed as she started toward the front door. “I hope Cat wasn’t on the road.”

JJ was seated at the window when the cream-colored Cadillac shot by Two Miles In leaving clouds of dust and dirt behind it. He’d leaned forward and out of the window to make sure he was seeing right. “Where they going?” he asked himself aloud, happy to have something else on his mind besides the memory of the stranger that had occupied his thoughts from the moment he’d taken a seat at his bar.

“She’s gone.”

Seth didn’t even look at her when he spoke and the words just seemed to drop out of his mouth.

It was barely six and Sugar had thought she would be able to have the quiet of the morning to herself.

She was surprised that Seth had not walked back out when he stumbled in, sleep still clinging to his eyes, and saw her seated at the kitchen table.

“Oh,” was all Sugar could think to say.

“I heard her when she left. I mean, I didn’t even try to stop her from going,” Seth said, finally lifting his head up and allowing his eyes to settle on Sugar’s face. His face was free of the stress and hate it had held the day before. His eyes were soft and his skin seemed to glow. This was the Seth she’d met ten years earlier.

“I wanted her to go. I mean, I love my wife... my baby. They didn’t need to be here. I shouldn’t have asked them to come... but I thought Mama... I ...” Seth threw his hands up in the air and then dragged them across his face. “That Gloria, she something else. Something else,” Seth said, shaking his head.

Sugar just nodded her head.

“She can’t drive worth a lick, you know? I doubt she’ll try and make it all the way to New York. She got people over in Ashton. She’ll probably stay there until she cools off.”

He turned toward the window and the morning sunlight gleamed in his eyes.

“I thought about you a lot.”

Sugar did not want to hear those words and yet she wanted so much to hear those words.
He’s your brother,
the voice inside of her reminded her.

“I mean, I thought about you so much it made me sick to my stomach. I tried to understand what went wrong. What happened.” He cleared his throat against the emotion that was swelling inside of him. “But I could never come up with an excuse that made me feel better.”

Sugar opened her mouth to tell him to stop talking, stop saying those things. But she didn’t; she just pressed her lips closed again.

“You knew, though. I mean you knew that my daddy was your daddy. You knew, right?”

His voice was pleading; his eyes begged her for an answer. Sugar looked down at her hands and then toward the empty field the absence of #10 had left behind.

“I didn’t know until afterwards.” She sighed.

“Yeah.” Seth’s tone turned sour. “But Daddy knew.”

“He didn’t know, not then.”

“Well, maybe not then, but he found out soon after and still didn’t say nothing.”

Seth laid his hands flat down on the table and his tone mellowed again.

“Well, he knew at some point and still didn’t say.”

Sugar considered his words for a moment before she spoke. “He was scared, Seth. Haven’t you ever been scared? You, Miss Pearl, your brother, y‘all his whole life. His saying it would have torn all of you apart.”

Seth pushed himself away from the table. Stood up and walked over to Sugar. “My wife is gone, Sugar, so what you think it’s doing to us now?”

If there were liquor in the house Sugar would have drunk it. Would have emptied every bottle there was, but there wasn’t any, not even the plum wine Pearl used to keep in the cabinet over the sink. So Sugar stepped out onto the porch, settling for the intoxicating warmth of the Arkansas morning air.

Joe was the one concerned about Gloria. It didn’t seem to bother Pearl too much when Seth told her she’d left and taken Jewel with her.

“Uh-huh,” was all she said before asking him if he wanted his eggs scrambled or sunny side up.

“I think we should go out looking for her,” Joe said as he paced between the kitchen and the living room. “She got the baby and all. And Seth, you said she wasn’t much behind the wheel.”

Seth had his elbows up on the table and his head in his hands. “Daddy, she’ll be—they’ll be fine,” he said in an exasperated tone.

Joe looked at his son for a long time. Sugar thought he was going to say something else, but his mouth just twitched.

“You want some eggs, baby?” Pearl was speaking to Mercy, who sat staring down at her plate.

“Don’t she ever say nothing?” Pearl asked Sugar.

“No, she hasn’t said a word since St. Louis.”

“Poor thing,” Pearl said, her voice filling with pity.

“But she’ll eat whatever you set before her,” Sugar added.

Pearl reached out to touch Mercy’s head and Mercy jerked away from her.

“She a lot like you, Sugar,” Pearl said before giving Mercy one last pitiful look and then walking back over to the stove.

“Lord!” Pearl shouted out and threw her hands up in the air. Her outburst startled everyone; even Mercy jumped a bit.

“Mama?” Seth’s face was filled with concern as he and his father slowly raised their bodies from their chairs.

Sugar gripped the edge of the table and wondered if this was how Pearl’s spells began.

“Oh, Lord, I forgot to call JJ.” Pearl wiped her hands across her apron and hurried out of the kitchen and into the living room to where the phone was.

“I guess she want you to meet the
whole
family,” Seth mumbled under his breath as he eased himself back down into his chair. “Daddy, too bad your parents dead, we coulda taken a drive down to Jacksonville, introduce her to them too.”

A bitter laugh tumbled from Seth.

Joe just looked at him and shook his head in disgust.