“I didn’t hear anything, not bad. Honestly. I knew that I wouldn’t see my girl. I knew that I’d go home empty.”
Just then, at the end of the driveway, a car pulls in. A woman’s wide, white face behind the wheel. The car comes to a stop, very close to the bottom porch step, so close there’s a rise of dust. The reverend starts to cough. It’s Mrs. Ming, Delphine’s connection from the Chinese laundry. Alma wonders if Delphine will come down to greet her, if she’ll find her father on the porch. She finds herself hoping that Delphine will show up.
Mrs. Ming gets out of the car, her hair tied back, black but shiny as a kettle. She’s wearing a very American skirt and blouse, but she seems uncomfortable in the getup. She’s pretty, with fine features, small, dark eyes, her face heavily powdered. She pulls out a small, tightly knit bag; it tinkles as if filled with bells. Alma wonders what the reverend thinks of all of this. He’s wide-eyed, his face wet with sweat, a bead inching along the curve of his brow. He pulls a handkerchief from his back pocket and wipes his forehead.
Mrs. Ming shuffles to the steps, little bells, little bells. She climbs the steps, bows to the Reverend Line, who isn’t sure how to respond—whether he should bow, too, or nod or tip his hat. He does a clumsy combination, nearly losing his balance, and then walks down the steps into the yard.
Mrs. Ming shuffles to the front door. She says to Alma, “I got what Miss Delphine want.” She has a southernness to her accent that always surprises Alma. “She need to pay me. You know it, sweet lady?”
“I know. I know,” Alma says.
The reverend stands by his car but doesn’t get in. He’s watching Alma, now a distance away. She wonders if he notices that she’s wearing no stockings. It’s the first time she’s felt aware of her bare legs in years. It gives her a small jolt of arousal.
There’s a screeching above. A window opening. “Mrs. Ming? Is that you? You’re late. How long now? But all’s forgiven. You’re my savior.”
It’s Delphine’s voice. The Reverend Line scrambles toward the house, gazing up. Alma steps off of the porch. The sky is blinding, her face just dark, at first, against it. “Delphine, I wanted to let you know—”
But the reverend cuts her off. “Delphine! Delphine! It’s you. You look like a dream to me. You look wonderful.” But it isn’t true. Her eyes dark and small, as if peering out of pits on her face. Her cheeks and lips are drawn. Delphine stares at him, blinking. “Where’s Mrs. Ming?” There’s a rise of panic in her voice. “I heard her. Just now. That’s her car!”
“I’m here to take you home.”
“I am at home.”
“Don’t you know who I am?”
“Do you think I’ve lost my mind? Do you think I cannot recognize my own daddy in the brightness of an afternoon?” But then she rubs her eyes, as if maybe she’s not so sure herself. She looks backward, into the room, as if responding to someone who might be talking to her—Roxy. Her figure appears in another window. Her long face, full of bones, cheek, jaw, bridge of nose. Alma sees the reverend glance at her. She wonders if he thinks it is a woman’s face, but too large to be a woman. Roxy disappears.
“Sorry to be late!” Mrs. Ming says. Now the Chinese woman is beside the reverend. She startles him. He flinches, instinctively covering his genitals with his hat. Alma wonders what jingles in her bag. She always sounds this way. Perhaps he doesn’t hear little bells as much as the ting of knives. He’s scared. She can see the terror on his face.
“Come up, Mrs. Ming. Join me! I’m looking for company. Come up now,” Delphine insists.
“Sorry, I cannot stop. It is too much for me if I do each time.”
“I’ll join you, Delphine. We can talk,” the Reverend Line offers, as if the Chinese woman has brought food. Delphine stares down at him. He looks small, like a child waiting for some word from her.
Delphine gazes at him desperately. “Where would I go if you were there with me? Where would I go? You see, I go places in this way. It’s the wonder of it. What would I say to you? No, it wouldn’t work. You need to stay in the place where I keep you.”
The reverend looks at the Chinese woman now shuffling through the door, her plump arm pushing it open. He looks out at the cow. Alma follows him, surfacing beside him. The idea has come to her, so purely, so heaven-sent. She says, “I’ll take care of her. We can work a trade. I have one that needs to live with a reverend and his wife and his schoolmarm daughter. And I’ll watch over yours. I’ll keep an eye on her. I’ll keep her safe here.”
The reverend looks up. He’s confused, stares at her as if she’s speaking in tongues. He blinks and then blinks again. He says, “Everywhere there’s the sunspot image, a dark reflection of Delphine, her body leaning out the window, her face.” He looks up at the house. “The house is tilted,” he says, “it’s leaning toward Jesus, as they say.” He looks frazied, sick.
“Are you okay?” Alma asks.
“I had a bird when I was a little boy. A bird that no matter what the time of day, I could cover its cage with a sheet and it would fall asleep. It was so trustful. And I could play God. I could make night and day. It is a mistake. A sin I commit again and again. I still have birds. A house of cages. I cover them at night and count myself lucky.”
She knows that he can barely hear her. He’s blanched, unsteady. She says, “You might not be able to save your own, not the way you want to, but maybe you can save one all the same. I was waiting for you. If you believe that kind of thing. You are the miracle sent to me, for my daughter.”
“My daughter?”
“No, my daughter.”
She hands him paper and pen. He writes down his name and address. He is agreeing, nodding, but she isn’t sure that he is really understanding her.
He says, “I’m thirsty. But it isn’t thirst. It only resembles thirst.” He looks as if he’s about to sob. He says, “Ma’am, can I have a drink of water?”
“Oh, yes,” she says. She runs to the house, to the back, where she fills a glass with water. When she gets to the screen door, he is staring at the cow. It is grotesque. It eyes him horribly. She stalls. He pulls out his handkerchief and presses it, the ball of his hand and his fingers, to his eyes. His chest gives a small heave. He walks away from her, past the Chinese woman’s car, to his own. He climbs in, waves his handkerchief, and she raises the glass of water as if she can still reach him.
Alma stands above the pan, which sits in the dirt in front of the porch step, holding the hot kettle of water. When she bought the chicken, it looked plain and fat. She was only shopping for size. But now, dead in the pan, it glows white, its beak orange and clawed feet red, as if painted by someone who had no sense of what he was doing. A chicken should be dull colored, not allowed such signs of brightness, but there it sits, looking almost glorious, and Lettie is there on the bottom step, one foot on either side of the pan. She looks like a queen with something delivered dead to her feet. Lettie is beautiful, her green eyes and dark lashes, her full bottom lip, now bitten by her pretty white teeth. But Alma knows she’s being lavish again. She is stepping away from herself, being fanciful, a weakness she’s practiced against. For five years, she’s worked to dampen it so that now she walks around with a clean, spare mind and labor. But it’s been harder since she met the reverend. He is Alma’s miracle, after all. For the first time, perhaps in her whole life, she’s doing the right thing. She nearly loves the reverend, his shyness, his tendency to tremble his head, ever so slightly, as he speaks. His lips puffed and soft, his bright blue eyes watery, his dark brows lifted with concern. He’s a perfect father, as gentle as her own but not nagged by doubt and wrongheadedness. Her father was muddled, his core slack, sapped by punishment (his mother had tried to beat him out of the habit of seizing), stunted. And the reverend is nothing like Henry, who was so full of himself, boastful and robust, yet really, under it all, quite feeble. No, the reverend is more like the Prophet, appearing as salvation, someone Alma is not allowed to love. The reverend appears weak,
scared you’re going to slap him one minute to the next, unsure of everything—where to stand, how to hold his hands, whether to put his hat somewhere, and, if so, where. But under the weakness, there is some otherworldly strength or at least conviction, sent from God, she supposes. He reminds her of Wall-Eye. She should have married a man like those two, calm and measured. Wall-Eye, in his own little house of shelves and shelves of books. She could have learned to overlook the parrot always clamped to the shoulder of his jackets, so loose and long in the arms it seemed he’d recently shrunk, like wet wool in the hot sun. She could have gained a contentedness. She would have liked to have been a reader, sitting in a well-lit room, turning pages, becoming someone of knowledge. She wonders if the reverend has books, not just the Bible, but many books on animals and science. She wonders if his wife reads them, too, if they sit together and talk about the things that pass through their minds. It’s an inkling, really, that something else exists, more than it is based on any fact.
Lettie is looking up at her from the bottom step, waiting for her to loosen the feathers with boiled water so she can pluck it. But when Alma’s eyes catch hers, her daughter becomes teary, her eyes rounded. She looks deeply sad, her voice whispery and confidential. “The neighbor’s cow is milk-sick.”
Alma wonders why her daughter is so moved and, too, who she’s heard this from. Who’s she been talking to? Alma has seen the farmer and his wife a number of times, but they don’t speak. They are two quiet pillars that move somberly about their farm, silent, childless, and probably more solitary because of the lack. Childlessness raises too much suspicion and sympathy, too much to bear, Alma thinks. She has always let them alone. She always felt more akin to the cows and was sad to see fewer and fewer until they were down to this last one, a bony thing, soulful and lonesome. “I suppose this will kill it. Are they poisoned, too?” Alma can feel the small hand of panic, more people going hungry. It gives way to a certain grim anger. She despises a world that allows poverty, handing over death like teacakes.
Lettie shakes her head, bends over to wipe her nose on her dress hem. “I don’t know.”
Her daughter is so easily woebegone she wonders if she will ever toughen. Alma pours the scalding water over the chicken’s plump body, and the feathers dull, the bird seems to shrink down. It suddenly looks frail, meatless, all bone. It’s a disappointment. She’s angry about how much she paid for it. She doesn’t like the grocer, thinks he’s a cheat. He eyes her not so much like she’s a whore, but as if he is one. As if he’s mocking her with his raised eyebrows and the pursing of his lips that he sometimes shows her when no one else is looking. She doesn’t understand what he wants from her. She, on the other hand, is the normal one. She’s come for a chicken, one as fat as she’s paid for. Alma can feel her cheeks redden. She despises going to town. She doesn’t like the way hate flares up in her, and even more the spontaneous rushes of love. Today a black girl, not but fifteen, looked her in the eyes. It was a brief moment. The girl, poor and thin with one mottled cheek, lifting her baby to her lap, covering its head with a worn blanket so it could nurse. She was searching Alma for reproach, but Alma had none. She wanted to say, I’m the nigger-lover’s daughter, the madam of a whorehouse. My husband has left me. I’m as alone in this world as you are, as each of us is, even if we pretend not to be. She felt so much tenderness, she thought she might cry. Every time, she says it’s the last trip to town, and yet she sometimes needs the throng of people, how she can get lost in them, at least for a while, until that hushed whisper at her back, an accusation of who she is, the pinprick of suspicion and hate. She’s different. It’s taken sometimes as a rebuke. As if her choice not to be like other people were a condemnation. And, well, sometimes it is.
Lettie hitches her skirt above her knees, getting ready to set to work as the steam rises and the bird cools. Alma doesn’t like the bruised redness of her knees. She knows her daughter has been rolling on the ground with some boy or—worse—a man, but it won’t be long now. She is here to tell her that she’ll be living with the reverend and his wife and their daughter, Eloise. Alma just got word today. A letter in rolling script. They will pick up Lettie tomorrow. The reverend will take Lettie away, whether she likes it or not, and Lettie will not marry the first man who shows her some attention. Alma will not allow it.
Alma arches her back, watches her daughter fan the feathers a bit by quickly grabbing into them. “Be patient. Let her cool,” Alma says.
Lettie gives a short huff, taps her shoes, and then starts in. She grabs handful after handful. Occasionally, she pulls her hands back, pressing them against her dress to get the hot sting out. She piles the slick feathers beside one shoe. They stick to the dirt; some come unglued and are picked up by the wind and trail off a bit through the dirt. A week from now, even two, Alma will find a feather in her garden, dry again and white, its quill sharp as a pin.
“You’re getting too old to live here, Lettie,” Alma says.
“I know that!”
“I’ve decided that you’ll be living with the Reverend Line and his wife, Delphine’s mother and father, and their daughter, Miss Line, Eloise, who teaches school. They come tomorrow to pick you up.”
Her daughter’s hands don’t stop pulling. “Delphine should live with them if she’s the daughter. Not me.”
“Delphine will stay here with us. You know she can’t go back home. She’s a grown woman now. And a certain kind.”
“I’m a grown woman.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“I’m going to get married. I’m almost a wife.”
“No, you are not.”
“To Smitty. I’m getting married to Smitty. He is a police officer now. He’s upstanding.”
It’s the first time Alma has heard the boyfriend’s name. She’s surprised she recognizes it. Smitty was the boy with the liquor boxes, the runty slave of Sir Lee, and now he is the runty slave of the captain. She doesn’t like his manner, his gruffness, his sharp teeth. She wants to convince Lettie of the quiet house, the reverend studying, the days that yawn into solitude and thoughtfulness. She would have been good at that life. She knows it, the way a musician knows that he can play a piano before he puts his fingers to it. She wants to tell her to marry someone like Wall-Eye, not Wall-Eye himself with the bird-stained shoulders and the skittering eye, not a show person, but the idea of him. She realizes that it’s through Smitty somehow that Lettie has heard of the neighbor’s milk-sick cow. Her daughter has secrets and shares them as it suits her. Alma says, “Well then, I’ve made it in time. Just in time.”
Lettie is already crying. And Alma is relieved to see it. Because of it, she knows that Lettie has already conceded, that her daughter is crying over the idea that she’ll have to do just what her mother has said. Despite the relief, Alma wishes her daughter would fight more. She shouldn’t be so easily tearful and, in turn, obedient. Was this the way it had been for Alma and her own mother? She can’t remember. There’s only this sick longing. She doesn’t recall her mother ever telling her not to marry Henry. Maybe her father would have, if he’d been capable of staying, enduring humiliation, for her sake if not the family’s. She wishes now that her mother had, and wonders if there had been at least one small moment when her mother had thought to spare her by warning her, by maybe even begging her not to get married to a willful boy when she was so young. And although she knows she wouldn’t have listened, she can feel the moment turning, her mother’s mouth almost opening, but then not. A slow recession, an arm extended and then recoiled to rest in a lap.
Lettie’s wet hands are covered in feathers. She holds them out at her sides, indignant, and then slowly her head gives a twitch. She looks almost stricken. She stands up, turns, her dress flaring at her red knees, and she runs into the house.
Alma sighs. She decides to go in after Lettie, although she has no idea what she’ll say. She begins to walk up the porch steps. She feels heavy, as if she’s hauling her body up. The cow, she thinks of the dyin
g cow, and feels more of a burden because of it. As she reaches the top, there’s a darting movement, out of the corner of her eye. She looks and sees a snake’s pointed, triangular head, then its long body pouring out of a splintered hole in the porch boards, black and tan stripes. She holds perfectly still. It’s a bell-tail, a rattler. Its end, crusted with horny, crisp gauze shakers, suddenly buzzes, whirs. There’s a new button about to bloom into its own hollow segment. It isn’t so young. For a moment Alma is dazed. Her eyes dart to the window, catching a pane of sky, the sun-struck hubcaps, a razor left on the porch rail where Pearly had given one of the johns a shave, the blinding brass pot of the steaming chicken. Her mouth forms the opening sounds to call Henry. It’s been so long, and yet she still expects him to be there somewhere, ready when she needs him. Her mouth folds in on his name. Her face floods with a rush of blood, anger. Henry should be the one facing the pointed head of the snake, not her. She could have seen its head nudging from the hole, but then he should have appeared with a butcher knife pulled from the kitchen drawer. She despises Henry, his pride, his greed. He has abandoned his own, and how could he, that son of a bitch, let her die of a snake bite on her own porch? She wonders if the snake has a nest, shifting with leathery, yellowed eggs. How many others, she wonders, rattlers under the house? If the snake bites her and the poison sinks into her blood and she dies here, what would become of her fearful, sensitive daughter? Sister Margaret would take care of Willard perhaps forever, but Lettie wouldn’t have it. She’s too old now anyway. And Irving would marry that no-good, mean-hearted woman? Delphine and Roxy would be set out into the world. Where would they go, a hop fiend and her enormous lovesick lover? Even Pearly would be returned to walking Courthouse Square, turning tricks in cars on country roads where she could be gang-raped, get her throat slit.