The Arms of God: A Novel Page 5

  “Room to breathe,” she would say to Kay Martha, “and space to play.”

  Kay Martha thought, of course, that she meant for Roy, her little boy. But Mattie hardly ever thought of anyone but Mattie. The play space was meant for herself.

  Regardless, however, of his mother’s desires and intentions, Roy liked their new home too. He was given his own room next to the door leading to the kitchen with a window that leaned out to the side where his neighbors lived. The glass was broken in several places; and especially late on Sunday afternoons, he could smell the food cooking next door and hear the low hum of people laughing. He didn’t have a bed, but Kay Martha had given them plenty of quilts so he had a pallet that was soft and drowned out the noises from where his mother slept and entertained company.

  Just after they moved in, Claude painted the walls in the boy’s room blue, like the sky, and Roy fell asleep every night feeling as if he were resting on a cloud, completely alone and free. The child thought this was the best he had ever known. The best house. The best bed. The best walls. The best neighbors. The best window. And it would be to these days that the young boy as a grown man would crawl back to and remember as the very best that life had ever offered him. Since there wasn’t much good to consider before the move to Greensboro, the house on the edge of Smoketown was the only kind place he could recall.

  Roy’s birth was completely unexpected for Mattie. Before he was born she had never known the possibility of motherhood and had not considered the consequences on the afternoon that he was conceived. That too had come as a total surprise.

  Mattie had met Roy Sr. at a Christmas party that her church gave at the local Children’s Home. It was the preacher’s idea as a way to teach the children in Sunday School about missions.

  Mattie, never really interested in church activities, went with the other young people because it kept her from having to clean the outhouse or gather eggs at home; and it kept her away from her father, who was known to swing a belt as often and as hard as he swung the ax to cut wood for the stove, which at the Jacobs house was always burning.

  Roy Sr. was an orphan. He and Mattie noticed each other while the Sunday School teacher and the other youth gave out the presents. There were bags with an orange, an apple, some nuts, and a stick of peppermint. She handed him his bag, beaming as she held it out; but he would not take it and rather glanced around at the other children, rolled his eyes, and walked out the front door.

  She followed him as he moved away, the rest of the group singing carols and reciting Bible verses, calling out behind him, “Orphan boy, here’s your bag. Don’t you want your candy?”

  She followed him because of the longing that stirred beneath the clear blue of his eyes. She followed him because she was curious about a poor orphaned boy who would not take her gift, a homeless boy who lived in a dormitory. She followed him because she could not understand why he had rejected what she knew to be the Christmas wish of every orphan child. She followed him, down the hall, to the screen door, out past the dirt field where the children’s games were played, and into the edge of the forest.

  The way the boy moved in and out of the trees, slow and provoked, made Mattie think of the story she had heard about a tiger in a traveling circus. The tiger had escaped, terror unleashed, and headed up along the river toward Arkansas, ravenous and feral. It had been shot four times before it fell; but no one had ever been able to find the dead or wounded body.

  The boy seemed as angry and wild and as loose as the beast that had killed its trainer before stretching itself in madness toward the woods. And Mattie understood the blue-eyed boy as she would the runaway tiger, certain of the danger and desire. In spite of what she knew, she lay as calm as the sleeping baby Jesus when she pulled up her dress and offered herself as if she were the African jungles, the green and gold pastures that she considered to be the dream of every circus animal.

  There were no words spoken between them. When he quivered inside her for the last time, he just got up, pulled up his pants, picked up the bag of fruit that lay at her side, handed her the stick of peppermint, and walked away. And Mattie just lay there thinking about the price of freedom, wondering if the circus trainer and the tiger spoke before one was mangled and one ran off.

  She knew Roy’s name because she had seen it stenciled on the inside of his collar as he lay on top of her. The letters were in dark brown and she had watched as they moved from his shirt and disappeared into his skin. A name stamped on his clothes like a prisoner’s number. His only form of identity. ROY in big brown letters that slid off of the material and clung to his neck.

  Although her daddy beat her until she fainted, she never told who the father was. And even up until the very hour that they left Red Banks, Mississippi, six years later, people were still whispering about whose child it was.

  By the time he was born, Mattie couldn’t remember what Roy looked like so she wasn’t sure if the baby resembled his father or not. He had her hair, dark and stringy, but his skin color was not like her olive complexion but more yellow. Not jaundiced really, just pale and slight.

  He was born with a thin red line that wrapped around his neck that was a constant source for curious stares and Judas talk. Before he was delivered the umbilical cord had gotten tangled, cutting off his air supply. When he came out his face was all bruised, tinged, and cloudy. The midwife, worried that he might be dead, quickly unwrapped the cord and popped him on his butt. The baby immediately coughed and cried, seeming as normal as any other child except for the small bloodred ring that circled around his neck.

  He had blue eyes. These Mattie knew came from his father since hers were as dark as mud. They had the same longing in them too, a wildness, a hint of sorrow, that she remembered from the orphan and the stories of the circus tiger.

  The child was hardly a bother to his mother. It was almost as if he knew right from the beginning that he was a surprise and that for Mattie, surprises rarely entertained her. He was therefore glad to have the attention of his mother’s employer, Kay Martha. He was happy to go with Mattie every day and stay in the salon. He liked the way Kay Martha spoke softly to him or slipped him a piece of licorice candy or sang him a silly song to ease him into sleep. He liked her stories about all the women who sat in the big chairs and how she almost married each and every one of their husbands but how something always happened to prevent her nuptials.

  The child and the woman would listen to the complaints about their husbands’ dirty feet and loud poker games and Kay Martha would suddenly hear the emptiness rising in her own heart. She would smile, showing just the right amount of empathy; and then when they would leave she would turn to Roy, staring into those sad blue eyes, and say, “Certainly don’t have those problems here, do we, Roy?”

  And with that coming after her last appointment, the shop would fall as silent as the little boy-child. Kay Martha would sigh, giving the day over, glad for the company of Roy and his mother who was outside washing towels.

  Mattie had no problem with the new relationship her son had formed with her boss. She was glad that someone cared for the boy since she knew that she only had very little to offer her firstborn. There just never seemed to be room in her life for a child choking from birth.

  It just wasn’t in her to be a mother. And she could not manufacture what everyone thought should come naturally. This lack of maternal instincts however was only part of the reason she pretended that the widening of her belly was only about her and not about another child. The event of that conception was not so much a surprise as it was a tragedy; and even though a number of months had separated her from the sorrow, she was still trying hard to forget. She left Mississippi, confident that the move would ease the memories; and she was hopeful that her new home would brighten her future.

  Mattie’s new place at Smoketown was next door to two women and two small children whose house seemed to be a favorite gathering spot for the people who lived farther up the road. It was a bright dwelling with a th
ick, ripe vegetable garden in back and tall, sturdy hollyhocks and black-eyed Susans strung around the steps and all along the borders. Spring decorated the driveway and danced out into the street at Mattie’s neighbors’ house.

  There was color everywhere, in the trees, on the path, in window boxes, on the kitchen table; and it was soon understood by Mattie and her little boy what everyone else already knew, that this was a place of pure sweetness.

  Ruth was known for her cooking skills and the delight of her company; and the smells of catfish frying or a rabbit stewing, pinto beans boiling and cornbread popping, drifted from her kitchen like a signal to the rest of the community. A signal that welcomed hungry spirits and starved appetites for something wonderful. A signal that softened the heat of the summer and wiped the edge away from a cruel winter. A signal that promised the taste of something sugary or filling, a signal that led them to a place in their souls that gathered all the joyful things in life and held them there waiting to be remembered.

  Some thought it was Ruth’s choices of seasonings, bay leaf and salted pork in stews and greens, cinnamon and just a pinch of ground nutmeg in her pies, rosemary in her soups, that made grown men forget about the ache in their hands from the longing of muscles to work and feel instead the desire of their youth that teased and pulled at their crotches.

  Others imagined that it was Ruth’s use of dairy, cream for the peaches and blueberries, butter on top of jams instead of beneath them, milk in the cornbread, that allowed women to loosen the tight reins of privation that kept their heads bowed and shoulders squared and made them want to open their legs and feel the breeze that tickled their softness and curved inside them like a wish.

  Everyone understood that there was something about Ruth’s grandness in creating dishes, her kind and ample heart, and all that color around her house that could make the folks in Smoketown forget the darkness of their skin and how they would curse themselves and, worse, each other.

  Ruth’s house was like a poultice and it dried the soreness and eased the weightiness of a pain that was so old it did not need a name.

  She had two children. A boy only two days older than Roy and a baby girl who still only knew life to be as ready and as supple as her mother’s nipple. The boy was named Edward Saul after a great-uncle who was shot four hours after a Union officer came onto the plantation and read the Emancipation Proclamation. It was told that after the officer left, the white man lined his slaves up and shot them all, men, women, and even the children, including three-year-old Edward Saul, whose last words to his mama were, “We free.”

  Miss Nellie was Ruth’s mother and she had asked her daughter to move in with her eight days after her wedding to Ticker. She realized the trouble her son-in-law would be and believed that she would be called upon to protect what her daughter could not.

  She was the one who had given Edward Saul the nickname E. Saul because two syllables were easier than three and cleaner than one. She had already noticed how the little boy played with words like they were building blocks; and Miss Nellie was the one who knew that this child was meant to be more than a farmhand or some white man’s boy. Miss Nellie could tell. Like a secret gift she had, she could tell. And she knew she would hang on to any thread of life just to see her dream unfold in her grandson.

  The baby’s name was Teresa but they called her Tree because her eyes were as steady as wood and her skin was as smooth as hickory bark. She was healthy and strong, born easy and without much pain to Ruth; and she slept in the arms of anyone because that was just the kind of child she was. Even Mattie asked to hold the little girl who could crinkle her face into a knot, then yawn back into sleep.

  The first time, in fact, that Mattie spoke about the child she was carrying and ignoring was when she held Tree. “I wonder if this child is a girl,” she had said with only a slight interest.

  “I believe it is, Mattie, since you carrying it so high.” Ruth smiled, remembering how Tree practically rested under her ribs. “Trying to get near her mother’s heart,” she told people.

  She had realized before anybody else that Mattie was pregnant and pretending not to be. She had recognized the clear complexion and the blue look in the mornings even before Kay Martha. She mentioned it to Miss Nellie but chose not to say anything to her neighbor because she could see that Mattie was not acting like a woman about to give birth.

  Ruth felt a deep sense of relief then when Mattie finally acknowledged what she had known for months. And she thought the acknowledgment was the start of her neighbor’s acceptance of her pregnancy; but that simple statement did nothing to change Mattie. Because even though the denial loosened and made room inside her spirit, there was nothing new to fill its place. The hunger still pushed deep and tight, heavier than the opening body that grew inside her.

  She could not stop herself from going across town to Percy’s Pool Hall or Tiny Clayton’s juke joint down near Buffalo Creek. Not even the polite proposal of marriage from Claude Simpson could ease what made her jumpy or give up what kept her steady. And over time she continued to return home from those places with some broken-down fool who didn’t care or didn’t see that the woman he was screwing was enough months pregnant to bring the presence of another set of eyes watching. She figured if a baby was coming it would just have to come; but as always, it would be her choice whether or not to spread her legs.

  Mattie grew bigger and bigger, but so did her denial and her resistance to motherhood. Even in a new state, with a new job, and her own house surrounded in sweetness, her appetite for something she could not name could never be filled.

  Then finally, when autumn fell behind the earth, the baby dropped, the color from next door faded, and her new house, the place she called home, the place that sat just at the edge of Smoketown, breathed and made room for the one she could not.

  What makes one patch of ground fertile?

  another dry as dust?

  Who blows the breeze across a plant?

  Who trims a pond in crust?

  A dream is memory’s bastard child

  who quietly starts to die

  and smothered by a mother’s eye

  hushed in silence lies.

  —ES

  Two

  The month of November roared into the southeast with a storm that folks marked memories by. There were high winds and low dark clouds that opened up and rained down large rocks of ice, denting tractors and rooftops of buildings. Hail the size of baseballs broke the necks of chickens and hammered deep into the backs of cows and horses. It was a storm that started with ice and ended with a frozen rain leaving lungs damp and aged joints inflamed.

  Pneumonia and an influenza virus began haphazardly wiping out the very young and the very old. The expected misery of winter began with a long wail of death that keened from General Lee Water’s farm at one end of town to the far edge of Smoketown where some gypsies lived in tents.

  Mattie was at home taking a nap when the baby started to drop. The young woman had been inside all week because of the storm and the advanced stages of her pregnancy, unable to get out because of the weather and her swollen ankles and dizziness from hypertension.

  Ruth had come knocking on Roy’s window on the day before the birth and motioned him around front, where she delivered some biscuits and sorghum molasses. She sprinkled ashes across the steps and all along the porch; and when she got to the sitting-room window she caught a glimpse of Mattie and she knew her time was near.

  The first pain that hit Mattie caused her to scream so loudly that Ruth heard it over icicles breaking and falling from the tops of trees and the edges of gutters. It was louder than Tincan’s rooster that crowed every time the sun peeked from behind a cloud, fooling itself into believing a new dawn had come. And it was even heard above the groaning and the tearing hearts of folks that gathered in Ruth’s front room and along the hallway and into the kitchen.

  The people from Smoketown had just returned from a funeral and they were trying to sort through
an evil. An evil so big and so frightening that they knew they had to make it smaller or it could never fit into their minds.

  Three days before the storm silenced the land and covered the earth in a blinding plague of ice and hail, the white preacher at Pinetops had cut down the limp and lifeless body of Elton Williams that swung from the big oak that stood way in the back near the cemetery.

  Elton had last been seen playing basketball over at the park where the white boys assembled to smoke cigarettes and hide out from fathers and teachers and anyone else who did not believe in idle time. Calvin Hiatt and Sodapop Lody had tried to make him leave when the Johnson brothers drove up, but Elton had said it was their court too.

  Calvin and Sodapop left just as three blond skinny boys spit out their toothpicks and rubbed their hands together with a grin like they were glad to see a black person. Elton turned, catching a final glance of the hind parts of his friends running through a grove of trees, then turned back, and with a look of defiance shot the ball from half court.

  Later when they would walk up to the coffin and touch the swollen eye sockets or wonder to themselves if he was wearing shoes, Sodapop and Calvin would still hear the sound of the ball first against the flat piece of pine that served as the backboard and then the rolling in the peach basket before it fell through. Elton had yelled out something but neither boy could recall what it had been, remembering only the thud and spin that used to be the noise of winning.

  The service had been postponed and rescheduled three times because of the storm; but even with the late date, the ice and the snow, as well as the old fear and the recent grief, were still just as heavy as they were the day Elton had been laid out in the front room of his grandfather’s house.