“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s a funny thing. I just know. I just do,” he says. “I just do.”
The brim of his hat catches in the wind, and he dives after it, flattening it with his hand, denting its curved top. Alma walks away, quickly, before she, too, is crying, and he watches her, holding his crushed hat to his heart.
* * *
Lettie sits in the parlor, kneeling on the love seat, elbows over its back. She sees a distant glowing globe, a dark hand underneath. It’s Smitty. She knows his walk, the eager sideways glances, the readiness to duck. He sidles up to the window, holds the globe to the side of his face, now weirdly lit, green with shadows. He taps on the window with his nightstick. The globe is a Mason jar teeming with lightning bugs, the sides alive with black legs. He’s smiling broadly, showing his underbitten teeth. She imagines him coming home, having caught an enormous fish that she’ll bone and skin and fry up for dinner. It is something that one of the hatbox ladies’ husbands might do.
Lettie creeps out of the house, careful with the screen door, because she’s felt a certain tension with her mother. She’s sure that the woman knows something is going on. Minute to minute, Lettie worries that she’ll ask her about it, but the minutes pass and she doesn’t.
Smitty says, “Hey, dollbaby.” He grabs her hand, leads her, running around to the back of the house, through a line of trees. He climbs the farmer’s fence. She climbs up one side and lets him hold her waist, lifting her over. The field is broad and dark velvety green. He’s set out a blanket, more jars of lightning bugs, like lamps around the edges.
“It’s a pretty sight,” she says.
“I set it up just for us. The farmer’s cow is milk-sick. I heard while on duty. His wife’s a near wreck about it, as it’s their last left. Milk won’t foam. It’s silver black. But this field is nice.”
“It’s nice.” She thinks of the cow, moaning, and then of the bear in Mr. Bucci’s bedroom before it died, and her father. A fleeting pang. Death. The way someone’s absence can root, grow, tower. Sometimes she can see her father clearly, and she says, Dance, and he dances like a foal, knees buckling, puppetlike, until his face is red and pulsing like a giant heart. It’s the same way Mr. Bucci used to command the bear—Dance—and the bear would begin to shuffle his paws, upright, in his bow tie and blue-band hat. But then the picture of her father fades. She can’t hold the collection of features. What was the shape of his jaw? Was his nose straight or bent? Did his eyes sag just a bit? He breaks into pieces, becomes a red-faced blur, and the absence is there again, big as a tree, storm-swaying overhead, and she is tiny in its gusty shadow.
Smitty sits down on the blanket, legs out, feet crossed, hands flipped out to prop up in back. He lets his head tilt back and regards the sky. Lettie sits beside him, curling her legs to one side, under her skirt. She glances up to see what he’s seeing.
“I don’t like the idea of you ever leaving my side,” Smitty says. “I don’t like that one bit. People shouldn’t go disappearing.”
“Where did Sir Lee ever go to?”
“Sir Lee would be surprised to see me now, in this uniform. I’d arrest him if I saw him. I know enough rotten things he’s done. But I hope he’d resist arrest, so I could shoot him in the back.”
“But is he around here?”
“I don’t know. I woke up one morning and heard his car in the driveway and then the motor pulling away from the house. I jumped up and ran after the car, but it was dark, and I tripped and skinned my knees, tore them up. He probably went to California to lie on a beach, but I hope he drowns in the ocean. He can’t swim any more than I can. I don’t know why he’d want to go to the beach. But he sure cleaned things out for good, the son of a bitch. It makes me sick to think about.” He pauses. He looks down at his hands in his lap. They shake. There is always a small tremor; Lettie has noticed it. “Can I confess something to you, Lettie? Can I tell you something I’ve never told anybody?”
Lettie nods, but she’s afraid. She isn’t sure that she really wants to know, and she feels guilty about it, for holding back tenderness. Smitty needs tenderness. In fact, she believes that if all of her mother’s customers were granted more tenderness—not sex, it wasn’t always about sex—then they wouldn’t need to come to her mother’s house at all. She believes this.
He says, “He left one thing behind. An extra gun that he kept hidden under the sofa cushions where I’d been sleeping. He left the dogs behind, too. And after it was clear that he wasn’t coming back … maybe days went by, me and the dogs pacing the yard, the house. And before I walked back down the mountain, I shot his dogs. Not out of hate, like you might think, Lettie. But because I knew what was going to come of them. Lonesome and starving. Set out into the wild. I shot them. I should have shot myself, too.” His eyes are teary, a hysteria in them. “But I never would have been here with you tonight.”
He cups Lettie’s face in his hands. She is his savior. She is needed. He won’t ever leave her. He closes his eyes. She kisses him softly.
“It’s such a wide-open field,” she says.
“I think we should have a house, then. Build one right here.”
“That might be a nice thing.”
“Sure it would be nice. I think we should get married.”
“You do?”
“I do. What do you think?”
“Well, are you asking me to marry you?” Lettie thinks of being married to a policeman. She figures they could live in one of the little houses being built on Greenmont Avenue, that they could afford a new Hudson Essex each time the old one wore out, and have children who wear costumes that she’s stitched for parades, clowns in pointy hats.
“I set this all up, just for you, just for tonight. So I’m asking you.”
“Well, it is really very nice.” She pauses. Her mind hushes, waiting for her to make a decision. There is a poised moment, her life teetering. She thinks of the hatboxes, her children in pointy homemade hats, Smitty riding up in their Hudson Essex, pulling out the big fish. She doesn’t want to be like her mother, padded in her new layer of fat, hunched over her money, her one eye’s constant gaze locked on her children, who shuffle within it. She doesn’t want to live in a house of whores, dirty men, loveless, the heaving, grunting chorus of sex. She believes in something pure. Not every man leaves his wife on a dock in Miami. There are rows of houses on Greenmont Avenue, one after the other, with their tidy fences and gardens, who give their hard-won money to bankers behind grillwork counters. She wants to step into the picture. She cannot say no to it. “I think I will marry you. So yes. That’s my answer.”
At this, Smitty stands up and gives out a long hoot. Lettie shrieks and laughs. She’s on her feet but teetering, holding onto her ribs, giddy. He tosses up one of the jars and hits it with his billy club. It shatters. Some of the lightning bugs drop, like pellets, but others find themselves midair and fly, their wings suddenly frantic. He yells out like a coyote. He howls, then picks up another jar.
Lettie pulls at his shirtsleeve. She says, “No, don’t.”
But he is too agitated now. He tosses it up and smashes it, and then another and another, until they’re all shattered, the field littered with glass. The light scatters, dims. It’s dark. Suddenly quiet. He’s breathless. Lettie looks at a lightning bug that has fallen to her arm. Smitty moves to her and stares down at it, too. He unbuttons the top of his shirt, then yanks it up over his head. He plucks the bug from her arm and smears its green oils on his chest. She imagines the delicate casing of its brittle shell cracked.
“You ever done this when you were a kid?” he asks, pulling another bug from the blanket and pressing it onto his skin.
“No,” she says. “We just cupped them in our hands so they looked match-lit.” She can see both of her brothers’ hands, light blinking from the spaces between their fingers. Even Willard, with his clumsiness, was always gentle, never so much as cracked a wing. Lettie thinks that there is little Smitty does jus
t once, and she doesn’t know what to do with him. He’s so different from her. Loud and shirtless. He’s wild. Partly she wants to save him from his wildness and partly she wants to become wild herself. Soon his chest and arms are spotted with glow marks. The whole night has made her feel unsteady—the crawling jars, the confession, the proposal, the broken glass—but love should be like that. It should make you feel off-kilter and wheeling.
Smitty opens his arms and encloses her, the billy club against her back. He pulls her in close. “Do you love me?” he asks.
“You’re crazy,” she says, squirming, her backbone pressed against the club.
“Don’t say that,” he says. “Don’t say I’m crazy.”
She can feel his hardened penis against her stomach. He is taller than she is, bigger. She is aware of her bare neck, how simple it might be for someone as strong as he is to snap it. She’s afraid of what might be coming next. She’s fended him off so far. She doesn’t want to get caught with a baby, but tonight he is wilder than ever before. The girls have told her often enough that the way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach like the old saying goes, but right up through this bulge. She thinks of all the things the girls in the house have taught her about washing a man down, checking him for disease, about using a sheepskin, a Dutch cap, douching, the ugly process based on distrust. She refuses it. And they’re going to get married, so it should be okay. It’s different from those girls turning tricks.
They kneel down, kissing. He rolls her to her back. She can feel the sharpness of a few bits of glass that scattered onto the blanket. He’s breathing hard, sidling out of his pants. He pushes her underwear between her legs, to the side. Before she knows it, he is inside of her and she’s twisting away from the sharp shards. She says, “Smitty, it hurts.” Not just her back now, but a sharpness inside of her, too tight. He doesn’t fit. “Smitty, no, no.” But his face is in her chest. He’s working at her hard. She says no, again and again. But his hand goes to her mouth, smothering her voice, making it hard to get air. She panics, thrashing her head back and forth. She wonders if she could die this way. She worries if the farmer’s wife is dying, too, if she’s panicked because she drank the poisoned milk. She feels Smitty jolt as he releases inside of her. She’s heard a man’s juices called thick milk sweets and worries if it could be poisoned, too, like the cow’s milk. She confuses one for the other, herself for the farmer’s wife, souring like the cow, teats engorged with blackened milk. Lettie feels sick, curdled. Smitty is done. He pulls away from her, sits, yanks up his pants.
“I said no to you. Didn’t you hear me?”
“It’s okay. This is how it is. You’ll get used to it. You’re gonna be my wife.”
She stands up and knows that there’s blood. Between her legs, splotches on the back of her dress. Her body is sore, shaking. The wind makes the blood cool and instantly sticky on her skin.
He stands up and walks toward her unsteadily, like his legs have fallen asleep. She’s afraid of him, and he reads it on her face. He looks around as if seeing the mess for the first time, the bloody blanket and shattered glass, the billy club.
“You still love me?”
She says, “Yes, yes.” But it is a reaction, said wide-eyed, her head still ringing, shaking no. A gush slips from her, more blood or deadly milk. She steps back. His skin is still marked with the lightning bugs’ green oils, and he looks like a leper with horrible, glowing wounds.
Alma burns a sheet of notepaper in an ashtray, waves it, blowing, to kill the flame. She rubs the paper’s waxy residue between her fingers, opens her mouth, staring into the vanity’s warped mirror. She coats her sore tooth, filling the hole as best she can. It pains her to touch it, but when she shuts her mouth, sagging against the chair’s back, she cannot stop tonguing the ache. She looks older now, even in this forgivingly blurred reflection. Her jawline is softening to a sag, and under her eyes the skin is skirted with two puffed lavender crescents. She wonders at what point Henry will no longer recognize her, how many years will it take before she is a different person. Even now, would he know her, Lettie, Irving? Only Willard, she suspects, because he is still the same, ageless.
Alma’s thoughts snag on Lettie, the empty bed. She has let her daughter slip out into the night. She’s turned her back, because there’s a moment when you must let them go. Alma was once fifteen. She was in love with Henry, and it was pure and good. His genitals, she remembers thinking they looked like bits of thing from the garden, swollen radishes, a fleshy, unknown vegetable, grown rigid, tuberous, an edible root, colorful pink, red, a bluish tint, not as blue as a possum’s cod, but tinged. The soft sprig of hair as fine as the finest spray of roots, and afterward, flushed, contented, his penis looked kindly, like the long supple teat of a cow. And it was sweet between them. It was like waking up and the morning is set in front of you, glorious with sun, and she would have liked to have stopped there. Two bodies of promise, so intact and whole, swimming with urgency, but they trudged on into blazing heat, the exhaustion of toil the day expects, and then a slow descent of light, a gathering of darkness, the animalness of night.
Alma closes her eyes. She should pray like Sister Margaret advised her. She knows that she is supposed to pray for her daughter’s soul, her virginity, for her to fall in love with a gentleman. Alma can guarantee the hard march of life, but she can only hope that her daughter has that early joy, knows that pure swimming sun.
Alma realizes that she doesn’t know how to speak to God. She moves to the bed. Her back flat on the bed, she lays her hands at her sides and says, “God, oh, God.” She imagines Jesus on the cross, a serene pose like back-floating on a lake. She imagines Jesus flying off of the cross, pulling down armfuls of water, and Lettie gliding, fearless, on the surface. Her tongue works at the painful tooth, better now, a bit better. It is as close as she can come to asking for a miracle.
4
Alma hears a car rattle to a bereft exhale in her driveway. She has been scrubbing the floor, and when she rises, her knees ache. She bends to rub them and watches through the window as a man makes his way slowly across the yard. He seems astonished to have found himself here, midday, alone. He has the nervous, faded look of a county man, someone official, from the census bureau, certainly not a customer. His eyes shift from the wildflowers, clots of color, to the lone cow—tattered, its ribs sticking out like banister rails, its milk-well sickly engorged. The cow watches him with one wide eye on the side of its head. It seems to startle him, and Alma is sympathetic, because she has felt eyed by that cow before. It can look so mournful, so filled with longing. Alma feels calm now, as if she’s been expecting this stranger, as if her prayer, more an unraveling from her heart, an endless rope, has received some kind of tug.
As he walks up the sloped porch steps, Alma presses back her sweaty ringlets, but adamant, they spring forward. He knocks, and she rushes, opening it too quickly. The screen door claps the wood frame. He swipes his hat from his head.
“Can I help you?”
He glances behind himself, as if she’s spoken to someone over his shoulder, but then he quickly returns to her. “I was supposed to ask for Alma.”
“I’m Alma.”
He seems taken aback. She wonders what he’s heard, perhaps that she’s a madam, and he expected red-painted lips, a feather boa, not a woman, slightly frumpy, in an outdated housedress, knees sorely red from scrubbing. She prides herself on not looking the part. “I’m the Reverend Line. I’ve come to see my daughter. I’ve heard through a good bit of passed-on information that she resides here. Delphine Line?”
Delphine has never said much about her family. Alma has never asked, never truly imagined Delphine as a little girl with a father, a mother, a family, much less that she was a reverend’s daughter. She suddenly feels a surge of guilt. She’s been shortsighted. She wonders what he knows. She hopes he knows all of it so she won’t have to be the one to tell him his daughter’s a whore and a hop addict. “Did you say you’re a revere
nd?” Alma is thinking about her miracle. She prayed, and now there is this reverend, shuffling, stooped, ordinary, in dusty shoes, but perhaps miraculous nonetheless.
He seems resistant now to admitting it, as if he senses her urgency. But he says, “Yes, I am.”
“And you’re here for Delphine?”
“Yes. I’m a married man. I have a ministry just two towns away. Imagine her hiding here for so long,” His face breaks into a momentary smile, but then regains its composure. “My other daughter isn’t like this at all. She’s a schoolteacher. She still lives with us, sleeping in the bedroom where she’s always slept.”
“That’s nice,” Alma says.
But he seems embarrassed, perhaps that he mentioned bedrooms, a hint that he knows what goes on here. He clears his throat. “Is she here?”
She glances over her shoulder. “I’m very respectful of her privacy. She may be resting. I can go ask her if she’d like to see you.” Alma assumes that she won’t want to see him. She’s never mentioned him.
He must have guessed the same thing. He runs his fingers over his bald head. He shakes his head. He turns the brim of his hat in his hands, takes a few steps toward his car. He says, “I shouldn’t be here. I’m uncomfortable. I thought you might think I’ve come for some other purpose.”
“No, no.”
“I’m not perfect. My wife,” he says, “she’s sensitive. Her skin is easily alarmed. And I was afraid of what I might,” he pauses, “see here. I used to bury my head on the side of my wife’s neck that was not swollen by the goiter and I whispered sweetly, not foul, nothing foul, but now I find myself alone with my lust. I don’t like the faintness. I admit I have momentary lapses in an otherwise hardworking soul. I have a hardworking soul.” He looks up at Alma now. “I suppose I’m confessing. The Catholics confess all the time—and just this way, through a screen.”
“Do they?” She’d never seen the nuns at the orphanage confess. She isn’t sure what to do with the reverend’s outpouring. She feels sorry for him. She says, “Well, I’m not a professional, reverend, despite what you might have heard.”