And Delphine thinks of all of the men she’s ushered to bed, and isn’t sex a lot like death? She’s always felt as if she were practicing dying, letting go of the body, allowing it to be a body, a release to animalness, thoughtlessness, a giving in, a handing over. If this is so, then she will die beautifully one day, and she’ll know just how to lead Smitty to it.
It’s nearly ten o’clock in the morning, and Smitty arrives just as Lettie said he would. He knocks at the door with the butt of his fist, and although Delphine expects him, she feels the knock in her stomach, a jolt. She wants to be in her bedroom smoking pills. She can taste the smoke in her mouth, her throat, and the buzz of her mind as it turns over to its gentleness, its slowing tirade, and final loss of time. She can hear voices today—her mother, for example, still screaming for her in the front yard. It is a sharpened echo in her head.
Roxy says, “Answer it.” She sits forward with her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped together.
Delphine says, “Do you love me?”
Roxy tilts her head. She’s caught off-guard. “You are perfect. Of course I love you.”
It pains her, Roxy’s love, even though she desires it. Delphine says, “Stop it. Hush. You know I don’t like that gushing. Go on upstairs. You’ll only scare him.”
And Roxy stands up. She walks to the top of the stairs. “I’ll be up here. Just holler if you need me, and when it’s time to go, I’ll appear, like a chauffeur, and drive out to the orphanage.”
When Delphine looks out through the screen, Smitty is in the yard, looking up at the windows. She says, “It’s been a long time, Smitty.” And it has been. She remembers him as a boy, looking out at her from his shadowed eyes, his need so large, so sickening, she could barely touch him, and that was all he wanted. She remembers once how she picked him up to carry him to a back room where it was quieter. She carried him like a baby, and he woke up and said, “Stay with me here. Hold me just like this while I sleep.” And she did. She hummed for him. But at nineteen, she couldn’t be his mother. She wasn’t even able to take care of herself. She wonders if she could have been better to him, if he isn’t somehow a sin of her own.
He charges back up the porch steps. “Where is she? Where is she at?”
“She’s at the orphanage, visiting Willard.”
“Let me in.” He barges past Delphine and looks around the parlor, wildly. “Who burned up all my clothes? There’s a blackened tub in my house—my clothes burned to nothing but a lump of char.”
“Alma lost her mind. Lettie loves you, and you know what? Alma has learned that now. She’s come around. She’ll buy you all new clothes. You need a drink. You want a drink?”
He stares at her now for the first time. She rubs her dress, smooths it out over her hips. “You know that girl loves you. And I can see how. Her mama did the burning. Alma was upset. But Lettie just told her how much she loved you and how she was set on you.” She pours him a drink, hands it to him.
He stares at the drink in his hand. “I’m an officer of the law now. I can’t take this drink.”
She looks around. “Well, I don’t see your captain.”
He shoots the drink to the back of his throat.
She says, “Sit down. We’ll drive out in a bit. I know where they are. Lettie is visiting with her brother. They’re family. Like us, Smitty. We’re family, right? We go back a long way, don’t we?” She stares at him coolly and then smiles. “There’s no rush to it. Let’s have a few drinks first.” After enough drinks, she’ll let it slip that there’s to be a picnic, and then she’ll admit that it’s an attempt to call a truce.
He sits down on the sofa. And she sits beside him. She refreshes his drink and her own. She sips it, savoring the hot burn in her throat. She puts her hand on his knee. She says, “You and me go back a long, long, long way.”
He looks down at her hand. It’s the one with the scar across her knuckles. Smitty runs his finger along it, suddenly gentle. He says, “You know he loved us both.” He looks up into her eyes. He says, “He could have run it cross your throat—you know that. It was an act of kindness.”
Delphine reaches up. She kisses his sweaty cheek. He is her own ugly child, raised from the rot of her neglect. He leans toward her, to kiss her lips. She’s a whore. She is nobody’s mother. She could have sex with him. She could kill him. There’s a rip inside of her. It makes no difference.
Except that Roxy is on the stairs. Roxy is hovering on the landing. It would pain her, and there is too much pain in the world, too much brash light and heat and noise. She doesn’t think she can live much longer like this. A whore, a mother, a lover, tender and grieving and joyful, the sick mix of love and hate that this world demands. She is surprised suddenly at how easy it becomes to do her part in the killing. She will carry him like a part of herself to his death. It is a kindness, a gentle act of love. One day, she hopes, someone will do the same for her.
Sister Margaret lies in the tub. A glimpse. A moment, only, to pause here. The nuns are preparing the children for chapel, but she has told them that she’s sick. She needs to be washed clean. She usually closes her eyes to her own nakedness, especially when she’s menstruating, as she is now. It seems a waste of blood. Her womb is pointless. She shouldn’t have to forgo this womanly burden.
She usually steps into the tub and enters the dark, knowing her body during these brisk weekly dips only by soapy washrag. But today she is dizzy. Her hand slips off the washrag, the soap dips underwater. The room is unsteady. She is afraid suddenly that someone is there, watching her. Her grandmother, she suddenly imagines the woolly woman poised above her, old, senile, nearly blind and deaf. She opens her eyes, but the room is small, private, the door locked with a hook.
And once her eyes are open, she cannot close them again. She looks at her long legs, the bony hinges of her knees, her ribs like thick spokes. It’s as if her body has just arrived. It doesn’t belong to her after all. It is God’s body. Her body became an instrument, and she was saved from herself. She wonders if Alma’s prostitutes feel disconnected from their bodies, as she does. To go on, to do what they do, to persist, they must learn that the body is only a body, a useful tool. She thinks of those women often, although she knows none of them. Perhaps they know better than anyone that the soul exists elsewhere. Perhaps they could have more faith that the young man who will arrive for a picnic and drown is only a body, dying.
Her backbone is stiff, her knees bare and cool. The small window is open. She watches the drawn curtain kick, puffing breaths of light. Soon Alma will be in the yard, snapping the tablecloth so that it falls open on the grass, and Sister Margaret will look down as he struggles, as his soul spirals up from this earth. Blood, it spirals up, too, from between her legs. It clouds red, dissipates, pinking. I am a lowly handmaid of the Lord. I am a whore. Who could be more a servant than that? This is what she thinks. A loud voice in her head. The words, unmistakable. And although she tries to push it from her mind—blessed art thou among women—it seems like she has become stronger. As if she’s asked for some gift of faith, and it has arrived. She stands, naked, tall. Her body, long and beautiful. It seems to stretch on beneath her forever.
9
Lettie is here, a collection of tender bruises. She’s distant, edging the corners of things. Alma saw her flinch at a bird’s open-winged shadow gliding across the grass. Willard is here, too. She needs him. He is the sum of any goodness she has ever had. He is the part of her that doesn’t think all of the time, that isn’t so knotted by these visions that sweep across her mind as if tidal. She is trying now, as she has for years, not to recount them, a lifetime of things she’s seen and tried to unsee, but in doing so only calls them up in horrible detail. She is trying to fool herself for the moment that there is going to be a real picnic. She sets out the potato salad, meats, a stack of plates on a tablecloth from the convent, white, bought for a visit from the bishop, who has never returned and who isn’t expected to. The foods will gray with a film o
f ash, and be eaten, calmly, happily by her picnickers.
Willard says, “I wish Lettie didn’t hurt herself.”
“I fell down, Willard,” Lettie says. “I told you that.”
He looks away from her as a distraction. He’s nervous, too, because he knows in his own way that it isn’t a normal picnic. He crosses his arms on his chest, breasty with fat. “The sky is bluer.”
“Yes,” Alma says. “It is a little.” But still it is a gray blue. There is no blue like the sky over the oil-stained, rusty, dank Miami docks.
Lettie glances up fearfully as if expecting something to fall from it.
The car appears, Smitty’s, but Roxy is behind the wheel. Doors pop open, and Delphine and Smitty seem to fall out as if pushed. Roxy walks ahead in overalls, her man’s shirt with its cuffed sleeves, and Delphine and Smitty follow, arms clasped, bobbling against each other. They hoot and laugh.
Lettie walks up to Alma and shakes her head. “No, no. It’s not playing out just right. Things have shifted. In my dream, I’m wearing the apron, not you.”
But Alma takes her daughter’s arm and grips it firmly. There’s no time for talk about her awful dreams just now. They walk together toward Smitty, Alma steering Lettie’s arm, as rigid as a rudder.
Roxy says, “We’re here, Alma.”
And Delphine calls out, “Hidy-ho!” She is spirited, and Alma is relieved to see that she’s playing the role. Delphine sits on the tablecloth, pats her knees. “It’s all so nice!”
Roxy is nervous. She glances around. “Yes,” she says, distractedly. “It is nice.”
Smitty says, “Well, now, here’s my bride.”
“Yes,” Alma says. “I hope that we can make things right between us.”
“I see you have got a picnic.”
“Can I eat now, Momma?” Willard asks. “Can I eat now that Smitty is here?”
“Sure you can,” Alma says. “We should all eat, before the food loses its chill.”
Willard kneels, denting the blanket, and begins to dip up potato salad. Smitty walks up close to Alma, his face inches from hers. There’s a small sway to his body. He says, “I think I’ll drink lunch. You are a snakish woman, Alma. I wouldn’t be surprised if you poisoned my food.” Alma imagines his mouth filling with water. His arms flailing, the panicked churn of his legs. He knows only survival. He’ll open his eyes underwater and look up to see the sun, reaching for it. The whole entire world has wanted him to die. He was born only in that hope by some desperate woman who cast him out. He will be difficult to kill.
Alma cocks her head. “Now, Smitty—I’m here to put things right.”
“That’s right. That’s right.” He pulls Lettie from Alma’s arm, picks her up, and staggers in a circle. Alma can see her daughter wince with pain.
“Why don’t you two take a walk along the dock?” Alma says. “And Willard, you go on and get the cake. A nun will be in the kitchen to help you with it. Carry it on back.”
Willard stands up. He’s nervous now. He stammers and claps his hands twice, angrily, a gesture he might have picked up from a nun trying to get his attention.
“Go on, now,” Alma says in a low voice, urgently.
“Well, somebody’s got a sweet tooth that doesn’t like to be put off,” Smitty says. He takes Lettie’s hand, and they head off to the dock.
Willard looks at his mother, sorrowful almost. And then he turns and runs across the field, his heft jostling. “Don’t run,” Alma calls out. “Or you will fall and hurt yourself.” He stops and looks over his shoulder, now lumbering through the clipped grass, his back sweat-stained.
The three women are alone. “Eat,” Alma says. “It’s a picnic.” She looks up at Sister Margaret’s window. The curtain is raised, and she can see the black habit, the long, white oval of her face.
Willard is now out of sight. “Don’t look,” she says to Delphine and Roxy. “Keep your heads down.” They both do what she says, picking at their plates, shifting through congealed potato salad with fork tines. Alma wonders how long Delphine and Roxy will stay with her in the house. She imagines them leaving her sometime, maybe because of this day. It will prove too much, and Roxy will get her way. They’ll move to some quiet town and pretend to be old-maid sisters. They could be invited to picnics, real picnics, and they could sit together as they now do, eating potato salad like normal women, or perhaps, not. They could also stay as they are forever, a mismatched pair, living together in the bedroom across the hall. The routine of dusk and men with their bucking, their spits of cum. (She has never before thought of a woman’s body as a gracious spittoon.) And then early morning sleep, the day sprawling before them. A life as willful as Alma’s.
Alma cranes her neck to see the dock. Her daughter is down on her hands and knees, and Smitty is standing above her, his hands on his bony hips. Lettie is patting the wood planks with her hands, nervously, like a blind person. Alma is scared. What is Lettie doing on the ground? What could she be looking for? Her daughter lacks the strength. Alma charges toward the dock.
“What are you lovebirds doing? There’s food to eat.” She tries to chirp sweetly.
Smitty walks around Lettie. She’s still on the ground, now behind him, at his heels. “Goddamn it if she didn’t lose her wedding ring!”
Now time slows, because Lettie lifts her eyes. She looks at her mother through Smitty’s parted legs. Alma lowers her shoulder. She begins to run toward him. He doesn’t have time to say anything. Her shoulder lands squarely in his chest. His feet catch on Lettie crouched behind him. He tips backward, losing his balance, and Alma pushes him over the hip-high railing. She can feel the give of his muscles. His body flips, and then catches. He has a fistful of Alma’s apron. His hand clutched, and he is suspended there. Alma bends her knees. She’s being pulled, her waist pressed against the railing, her hands gripping the wood to keep herself from going with him. She can feel Lettie’s fast hands, the quick work behind her back, untying the apron. It finally snaps off, a white shimmer before he falls into the water.
Alma can hear him. “Get a stick. Give me something to grab hold of! I can’t swim.” She watches his strong hands, batting, his face bobbing and disappearing and bobbing up again. The river is greedy. It pulls him in hungrily. Alma feels momentarily as if this has nothing to do with killing. It’s more a momentary generosity, like she’s given the starving river something to feed on.
Lettie is kneeling on the dock, her voice, calm now. “The apron becomes the wings. See it twisting in the water.”
His head dips under the water, and then there’s only his hand, opening and closing on nothing, and then it too disappears, swallowed by the choppy waves. Alma hears the distant singing of children in the halls on their way to chapel. She looks down at her daughter, fresh and whole, quite miraculously alive. Alma looks out across the field. Soon Willard will appear, proud, his cheeks glowing with sun, carrying a white sheet cake. And she can feel the nun, looking down from the window.
It is done, and yet not done. There is only a small splintering in her chest, like ice across the surface of a lake. She nearly sighs, but the breath stalls in her lungs. They need to find the body. She walks off the dock and calls to Delphine and Roxy and Lettie to come downstream. Only Lettie doesn’t. She drifts off, and Alma lets her.
“The body,” she says to Roxy and Delphine. “Do you see it?” They huddle together, moving slowly.
Roxy says, “I should wade in and see what I see.” And so she does, her legs slowed by the water like dream-walking, long, lurching steps. Delphine and Alma watch Roxy from shore. It’s too much for her daughter. The water collapses in on itself, swirls, roils on, washing through the rusty rocks on the bank. The rush is loud, constant. Alma is looking for the churn of limbs, an arm like a fish rolling toward the surface. But there aren’t any flashes of white.
She hears an animal noise. Her head snaps in the direction of Lettie, standing near the bank. Alma says, “Stay here,” to Delphine, and she nods, her
eyes fixed on the water.
Alma turns and sees Lettie bending toward a shape, ragged and dark, on the bank. At first she hopes it to be a raccoon, a beaver, but no, it is Smitty’s wet head, his mouth lifted, gasping, retching, one pale outstretched hand gripping a rock. Alma doesn’t scream. She lifts her skirt and walks swiftly. She doesn’t want to alarm Lettie, who seems only remotely interested like a child peering at worms under an upturned rock. Alma thinks of picking up one of the heavy rounded rocks and lowering it on his head. She can nearly imagine the thud of rock and skull and how it would have its own echo of memory in her hands as it was with slicing the rattlesnake. But that isn’t the plan. She refuses to panic. He’s supposed to drown, and that is what he will do.
She’s close enough now to see his soaked shirt, which billows and clings to his knotty back, his stocking feet bob in the water behind him. Lettie now moves closer, scoots down on the rocks, pushes his shoulder with the heel of her shoe to cast him loose.
Alma calls out to her, “No, no.”
But it’s too late. Smitty lifts his face. He looks at Lettie with something near to a mixed expression of fear and love, and then with sudden quickness, he grabs her bony ankle and pulls her down the rocky bank, hand over hand up her leg, yanking violently on her skirts. Lettie tries to scramble up. Her knees knock against the rocks. It happens too quickly. Lettie is now in the water with him, her skirt billows, dry in a puff around her momentarily, until water seeps up, pulling the skirt down.
Alma doesn’t think. She jumps in, her arms and legs turning wildly in the air before her body plunges into the water, cold. She feels swallowed by it. She paddles awkwardly toward her daughter, whose face dips suddenly underwater. Smitty is underwater, too. Alma swims toward him. She is a choppy swimmer. Her feet kick beneath her. She grabs a handful of Smitty’s hair and forces him to stay down. She can see only Lettie’s hair, splayed, pluming like seaweed. The water is thick, Alma’s clothes heavy, her shoes like strapped stones. Smitty strains to tilt his head back so that he is staring up. Alma can see the white glow of his face, his eyes wide. But she does not give. She digs her fingernails into the slick skin of his arm, tries to unlock his hold on Lettie’s waist. Bubbles rise. He thrashes. The surface becomes an explosion of water. His hair is slick and short and hard to hold. Lettie appears, her stringy hair streaking her face. She is carried on a current toward the bank. Alma’s head is still up, above the water, her chin raised, the back of her hair already wet. She can see across to the other side of the river now, a calm sloping hillside in the distance. The far bank is dotted with jewelweed and monkey flowers. The broad field’s green face gazes, the weary sun, too. All so out of place with the hysteria beneath her, the tight muscle of her arms, the strained heat in her face, it shocks her. The instant memory of her father leaning over this very water to show her how to light a bubbled line of natural gas and watch it catch, miraculously flare.