The blind woman says, “I bet you’re pretty. I bet you are fine-looking.” And she curls forward over the Braille machine, and begins tapping.
He says, “Is he bad to you?”
She raises her head. “He isn’t good. He won’t come looking for me. He’ll be glad to see me go.”
Irving looks at the heavy machine on her lap, the thick Bible. He says, “All right, then. Okay. But you’ve got to come now.” He isn’t certain, but he doesn’t know what else to do. He wants to be a good man, and it seems a good man would have a blind wife.
7
She will remember that it was night, and it stayed night. The dark chased them. It had eyes, and Lettie could feel them on her. But then it broke, and they seemed blessed, for a short time, like they were on the other side of something.
“I need to get a white dress,” Lettie said.
Smitty squinted at the road. The thick smoky air lifted quickly. It was now bright enough that each oncoming car caught sun in its windshield, a jostling rectangle of light. “We’ll stop in town, doll. At a fancy shop. And then we’ll get us a room after the courthouse. We’ll get us a real motel cabin for our honeymoon.”
She will remember the windshields, the nearly blazing procession of them. She will remember that the dress he bought her was light blue, not white. And the way he sneered at the salesclerk, “She don’t need a white wedding dress! Blue will suit her fine.” The courthouse will be a blur of wood railings and empty rowed seats. Papers to sign. White concrete steps and the car again. A shiny flask. The motor cabin’s dark room. The stained sheets. Dull, dark, muddy stains, but blood clearly enough. The smell of feet, sweat, and in the private bathroom, a sharp biting bleach.
She will always be able to recall that once on the bed, it was like splitting open a wound, wordless. The only sound a rustling of the sheets, the suction and rub of bodies. She thought of the restless caged birds. She tried to pretend she was not there, but in the reverend’s house, only listening to birds. But then he rolled her on top of him. It was a break from his weight.
He said, “Put your hands on my throat.”
She did so, gently.
“Choke me. Make it so I can barely breathe.”
“No, I can’t.” She was breathless with pain. He was still inside of her.
“Harder,” he said. “Harder than that.”
She could feel her face tightening. She began to cry, but her hands clasped the cords of his neck, reached around to his sharp Adam’s apple. She started to choke him with all of her strength. His eyes went wild. He grabbed her arms, slapped her face so hard that she was knocked from the bed, her body clattering against the floor.
“You trying to kill me, bitch? You bitch.” Breathless, he sat on the edge of the bed.
It was quiet. She won’t believe that it truly was this quiet. She understood how one person can kill another with barely a sound. She lurched off of the bed, stood, and walked to the bathroom. Her nightgown, wrinkled from riding up around her armpits, wet with sweat.
She will remember this clearly. She pulled the chain on the light. She looked in the mirror. Her neck was red with his handprints. There was a cut from his ring on her cheek. She took toilet paper and blotted the blood. She stared at the bright red on the white paper and sank to the floor, reaching up only to lock the door. The floor looked like water to her suddenly, the swirling water of her dream; the hand reaching out to her was her own hand and her own face underwater looking up. She reached for her hand, but then the image was gone. The floor was simply the bathroom floor, tiled, cool, the grout blackened with dirt.
He knocked softly on the door, saying, “Dollbaby, come on out. Come on out. Don’t be this way, doll.”
But now she was in the bathroom in his seedy apartment. She was touching her puffed lip, shaking because he had held the gun to her face, the gun from his belt hung on the back of their door, and he’d said, Bang, bang, bang. He didn’t like the way she looked around like nothing was good enough for her. She comes from a goddamn whorehouse, and nothing’s good enough for her?
It was a sweet little place in a run-down row. She told him again and again that it suited her just fine, that she adored it. But she hated the rush of days, a murky haze of scrubbing floors, of lurking in the kitchen, the gauzy blur of time, the grind of labor to keep busy, to keep out of his sight. The neighbor women talked while stringing laundry, but Lettie shied away from them. The women were garrulous, rowdier even than the women in her mother’s whorehouse, angrier, more worn. They hissed at her about her bruises, told her to fix it, put him in his place with a kettle of boiling water poured on him while he slept.
She remembers icing a cake, that the icing clumped on her knife, and it made her so nervous that he would beat her for it—he was in a mood—that she wretched in the kitchen sink. And he slapped her for the wretching. The nights were worse, disorienting. He would come home, lights suddenly ablaze in each room. A wild lust. The drunken, loping, arching hunt of his body for hers.
Wasn’t it the day of the cake that she was in the bathroom again when there was a distant knock? Her mother’s voice. Open up this goddamn door. You hear me? Smitty, you let her come home with me. You are some son of a bitch to pull this.
She heard the door open, Smitty saying, Are you disturbing the peace, Alma? I could have you arrested for that.
Lettie slipped out of the bathroom. She stood next to a chair, hoping to see her mother. I could have you arrested for beating on your wife.
No, Smitty told her. And you know what else? You can’t do a damn thing about anything. Because she is my wife. You understand me? Do I have to call the police? Oh, no—my, my—I am the police.
But after he shut the door on her mother, he turned on Lettie with a wholly new viciousness, a betrayed man, and she didn’t have enough time to run back to the bathroom and lock the door. He grabbed her by the waist. He beat her, saying, Why did you go and tell family? We’re family now. What there is stays between us, and we are tied together forever. He beat loyalty into her, and then left her there on the floor. He was going out to get a drink.
She will remember how she set to work, methodically, but quick. The sky was heavy with rain. She took the bullets out of his gun and put them in her pocket, where they clicked together. She picked up his clothes from their drawers, from the closet, from the suitcase he’d been rummaging through for a week or more. They smelled like him, sour, dank. She dumped armfuls into the bathtub. She struck a match and then another and another, watched just long enough to see them catch, the fire to rise up. She took her own suitcase and walked out the back door, a flimsy wood door with a loose screen. The neighbor—was her name Alice?—looked up at her lazily. A cigarette hanging from the sticky inside of her lip. But Alice didn’t say anything. Lettie climbed over fences, took off her ring and thew it into a patch of trees, and the bullets, too. They pattered against trees and onto the ground. The suitcase was too heavy. It pulled her arm. She dropped it, and started running, each bruise ringing through her body. The sky opened, a crack of light, and then rain, too. She felt like she was floating, like she was swept up in a tide. She found her way to the pocked road. Puddles filled the dips, colliding circles. Cars slowed and then passed her. She listed toward home, her body buoying, drifting, until finally she saw the hedgerow, and then her yard, the house growing straight up out of the ground, and there was her mother, windblown and soaking, ripping clothes off the line, her mother, a crazy woman, a screeching gull, drowning, crying out, the sheets wet and swelling as sails.
8
Alma must think, and yet she’s distracted. Her body, rain-wet, slick, her knees muddy from falling while pulling clothes from the line, doesn’t feel like her own. It was anger and hate. Didn’t she throw herself into the full, windy sheet? Didn’t she want it to lift her? But it snapped off the line, and she fell into it. The sun is loud, broken through the sky, but low, about to set. It clamors, pouring in the kitchen windows in great wide, dross-laced
streams. It is disorienting to Alma. When she heard Lettie had run off, the sun was roiled in sooty clouds, a constant night, and then there is this new light. Now, she cannot shake the new gratitude she has for the sun. She had taken it for granted, as she had her daughter. Who’d been taken. The flies bash themselves against the panes. Lettie is back.
The three of them sit around the table, Lettie in the middle, Roxy and Delphine on either side, holding her daughter’s hands, keeping her pinned to earth. She looks as if she would drift up without them, and rise away. The light, they’re golden from it, drenched in sun. She loves them. Her heart grieves.
Roxy says, “I’ll kill him.”
Delphine hushes. “You’ll scare her.”
But Roxy is right. Alma has already decided to kill Smitty, although she doesn’t know how. It shocks her how quickly the notion came to her and how it’s taken hold, become unshakable. The murder exists like a stone inside of her that she won’t be free of, until she hoists it out by the killing. She isn’t afraid as much as she is disturbingly calm. She knows it won’t be hard for her. When she became a mother, she felt what an animal must feel, the deep pain calcifying into an animalistic protectiveness. It was after giving birth, holding her children, that she felt the most tender and the most capable of murder. Men are no good at killing. They murder the wrong ones, for the wrong reasons. Her father, with his bitten, hissing tongue, didn’t ask anyone to kill the Prophet. Her father was already gone by then. And God is no better at choosing who should live and die. Her baby was born dead, wrapped in a sheet and taken away, her mother, too.
“He’ll come for me,” Lettie says through jerking sobs. “He’ll stay out all night tonight. When he’s this bad off, he doesn’t come home until he’s slept it off. He’ll come home in the morning and he’ll find I’m not there. And straightaway, he’ll show up at this door. Tomorrow morning. By ten in the morning, he’ll be knocking on that door, ready to break it down.”
Alma feels like a general, beleaguered, smoldering. The army isn’t unified, the soldiers don’t even always know they are soldiers, and some women don’t even seem to know there is a war. She doesn’t understand them, dainty, gloved, naturally refined, sacrificial, yielding. The problem is that each fight is private. Mrs. Bass, for example, her own stern fortress. Pearly, a defeated queen. Even Roxy’s mother, years ago, her death a revolt. She could go on and on, counting every woman she knows. She thinks back on the stockings in the hosiery mill, woman after woman, their silent charges, captures, defeats.
The light is steady. Alma has never noticed before the way it slides across the floor, and rises, sun squares, in the house while the sun sets. It inches up her legs, her hips as she washes dishes in the sink, circling a bowl with a bristle, again and again. When she steps away, light has pooled in the scrubbed bowl in the sink. It gleams like cat’s milk. If she could, she would lift the bowl to her lips and swallow the light. They are waiting for her to say something. She can feel them, staring at her back, just as she can feel the bees boring into her wooden eaves. In two days, it will be Sunday again. She wonders if Irving will come for dinner. She will ask him to tar the bees’ holes. Sometimes it is clear that Lettie is the only one left to save. She watches the bowl empty, fill with shadow. She thinks of the nun, the dark bowl of her skirt, that her legs beneath it once were a girl’s legs, scissoring through water.
She says, “Can he swim?”
And Lettie gives out a slow breath. Alma turns and watches her daughter soften. Her eyes fill with tears. She blinks, and the word escapes from her, more than it is said. “No.”
Lettie is inside of the office for the first time in her life, and it’s better than being left behind. She is within the dream now. Each turn is a recognition, the way as a little girl on the ride home from her grandmother’s house in the country, she would fall asleep wedged between her brothers in the backseat but would always wake up as they neared home because somewhere deep inside, her body knew this pattern of turns and dips, the familiar bump over a lip as they pulled into the driveway. This is the way it goes. This is the way it goes. Even the sweet soapiness of her freshly washed hair seems true to the dream now.
Sister Margaret strides into the room. An hour ago, Lettie was sitting in her mother’s parlor, and now the plan is in motion. There’s a furiousness in Sister Margaret, but it isn’t exactly anger, more bustle and business. Lettie is afraid of her and yet at the same time, there’s some comfort. Her chest is broad and flat, and Lettie remembers holding onto her shoulders, pulling herself to the scratchy wool of her habit. It couldn’t have been a dream. It was Sister Margaret who carried her from the small chapel back to her bed the night she followed the mouse. Sister Margaret rounds her desk. She looks up as she sits in her chair, pulling herself to her desk, first at Alma and then Lettie, her face still swollen, blue. The nun swallows, stiffens. “What happened here?” She is angry.
Her mother says, “We need your help.” She tells the nun about the reverend. She says, “I thought he was the miracle I’d prayed for.” Lettie is surprised to hear that her mother prays. She can’t imagine a soft conversation or her mother begging on her knees to anyone. Her mother tells the nun how the reverend came back to the house early one morning, alone, the car empty, and told her that Lettie was gone. Every day, the three of them—Alma, Roxy, even Delphine—kept coming back to Smitty’s apartment to take Lettie home. Lettie imagines Delphine in the sunlight, her weak eyes, so pale, blinking in the brightness of day. Irving is gone. He’s disappeared, it seems. The laundry truck stolen, with its wash loads still in it. His rent is late, and Alma paid it for him. He doesn’t come back to his apartment. In retelling this part of the story to the nun, Lettie’s mother nearly begins crying, but instead she stiffens. She has said to Lettie that she fears Irving is gone for good, and Lettie has told her no, that Irving is good. He will return. Her mother tells the nun that finally they were back, Smitty and Lettie, but he wouldn’t let them take her. And then her daughter finally escaped. Alma doesn’t tell the nun that they were both deranged. Her mother weeping in the rain, yanking clothes from the line, and screaming out, not words, just squalling. And Lettie, too, she was insane. She thinks she still is, wonders if she will always feel this crazy and yet there’s a solid march, an end, inevitable, undeniable. “He’ll beat on her until one day she’ll die of it, if we let him. So, I came to you.”
There is an exchange between her mother and the nun. Lettie knows that there is more to this conversation than she understands. “What do you intend to do to stop him?” Sister Margaret asks.
Her mother says, “We’re going to drown him. An accident. He’ll be drunk. All we need is a body of water and a good witness.” The nun stands up and begins to pace. “He’ll be coming for her soon. And we won’t be able to stop him. He’s a police officer.”
Sister Margaret stares at her sharply. It gives her a moment’s pause.
“The police won’t trust us. Not any of us. But they will believe you, Sister. And we have to move quickly. There isn’t any time to waste here.”
Sister Margaret walks to her window. She lifts the curtain. She is staring far off, and then she begins, “I can see the dock from here. Maybe you’ll have a picnic, come to see your brother. Willard can’t watch, though. He’ll be called in to help lift something heavy in the kitchen. He can get the dessert. And everyone, the children, the other sisters will be at a special mass, but I will fall ill at the last minute. I’m just a lonely nun. I’ll be watching from here. I can see you all on the dock, and how he jumps in or stumbles off the downstream side. I can see you reaching to help him, all of you women on the dock, reaching to pull him up. But you’re not strong enough, any of you.”
“We need it to happen tomorrow,” her mother says.
The nun looks up at her, narrows her eyes, nods.
And so the dream is recited, takes on the leadenness of words. Lettie can smell the cake, its whipped white icing. This is the way it goes. This is the way i
t goes. It’s a song that she’s never heard, yet she knows it.
Her mother says, “How can we be strong enough? We’re just women.” Her mother is like this. She isn’t sure how, but she says things and you know she means something brutish. She is the one with the fire in her, not Lettie, not even Delphine anymore. Delphine is just smoke. Her mother has a fire, a lit coke oven in her chest, and Lettie decides that once it was filled with love, something near to pure. Her mother had once been a girl filled with notions. She can nearly imagine the girl that toughened into this fiery, rugged figure, this heavy magnet, Lettie is drawn to. Life is demanding, Lettie can feel the surge of it, and her mother grapples, doesn’t allow anything to budge her. If Lettie is to become a woman in the world, she has to learn something from her mother, but just a squared inch of knowledge, not so much so that she can’t desire. There is the deep pull of her mother’s, s full body, but Lettie will edge away. There will be a dock, a hand. This is the way it goes.
And she knows that at the end of it all, after it has all played out, she will fall asleep and there will be no dream, no absolute, unyielding premonition, no presence of a future ambling toward her. Her life will stretch before her like a green field that shifts and rolls, that is so unpredictable and mutable it barely holds onto its greenness.
Delphine has her head on Roxy’s shoulder, stiffly muscled as the side of a horse. They sit on side-by-side chairs in the kitchen. The house is quiet. It’s morning, the room softly lit with sun. Delphine isn’t sure she can usher Smitty to his death. She asks Roxy, “Do you think I can do it the right way, the way Alma needs me to?” She wants to say, I can’t. I cannot be relied upon.
But Roxy says, “Of course you can. You have got to.”