* * *
Out in the yard, Narcissus hangs clothes on the wash line, glancing down the road for the return of her daughter and her worthless husband, although she doesn’t expect them. And she’s right. They don’t come. The dogs shift in the shade. Then there’s the cough, like a badger in her chest, like living with a weasel in the cage of her ribs—her daughter, young, in the yard, with a caught squirrel rasping in a crate. She coughs and coughs until there’s a dime-size spot of blood on a white handkerchief, perhaps a sign that the animal is dying—the girl will crush its skull with a rock—or that she is dying; impossible to tell. She puts the handkerchief in her pocket, her body wrung out. She stiffens, pulls a damp old corset from the basket. She isn’t sure how it got in with the other clothes. She hasn’t worn it for years. It reminds her of her sagging stomach, low breasts, those shriveled adornments on her rib-slatted chest. It makes her feel like she is hanging up a confession, an admission of nakedness. But there is no one to see it, and it has to dry. There’s no room in this life for any kind of timidity. She clips it to the taut rope. She coughs again, and beyond her, in the whispering yard, she hears a voice, a lank lisp, a hiss. Sin can multiply like mosquitos’ skeins of eggs, a gritty scrim on stagnant water, a new breed always rising. The yard is filled with ghostly tongues.
Time passes like this, Alma staring down rows of corn, tilled earth lined by green shoots, their leaves unfolded, flopped and curling, full, each row ticking by too fast to count. And then it opens, a stretch of time yawning, something for her to remember it all by: a table, draped in a linen cloth, set in a field, a white woman and a black woman fussing over the place settings, a round cake, children running with kites, screaming. The kites dip, swoon. The girls are in dresses, the boys in knickers. Strings tangle. Two children, a boy and a girl, collide. The white woman calls out, comes running across the field, but everyone is fine. The children stand up. She brushes them off. Everyone is fine, and it is a sign that their own children are taken care of, even though she doesn’t know if they’ve fallen, or if there’s someone who will brush them off. But she needs to believe that they are being tended to, cared for. And it’s not so hard to imagine, with Henry humming as he drives and the sun so warm on her face. It sure is something. The air is clear. She can see on and on. There are no mountains, and she feels at once exposed, unprotected, and yet also let loose. She wonders why anyone would ever build houses on the sheer side of a mountain and thinks back on the little house that slid to the road below it. She imagines all of the houses careening down the mountain till they pile up in the valley like rows of dilapidated boxcars resolved to live under the constant drizzle of ash. The car clips on. The fine air circles.
Willard has stolen sponge cake from the kitchen, a soft rubbery square, and as he looks at his book of knights on horses, emblazoned shields, he slips his hand under his pillow to pinch a bit and let it dissolve on his thick tongue. Every morning he makes his bed, pulling taut the white sheet and the thin gray wool blanket. He lines up to use the bathroom. He prays in a straight line in front of the podium and cross, a litany, a tick-tack repetition. He likes the orderliness, the lack of confusion, that you always know what’s coming next. At twelve-thirty if he looks up from his lunch, usually soup and bread, through the windows of the dining hall, he can watch one of the nuns scatter seed in the chicken coop. Nothing sneaks up on him, not even his own body. He always knows when he should go to the bathroom, because he’s told. In fact, there’s usually a small line, and even when he doesn’t think he has to go, he manages a compliant trickle that makes him proud. Everything seems to be marching toward a simple, common goal that, moment to moment, can be attained, held true. Most of all he likes the sponge cake and this time at night when he can look at the pictures in the book for a while before the nun, always the same one, always dressed the same way, stands up from her chair in the corner, where she prays in such a way it seems sometimes she’s nodded off, and asks the boys to say their prayers and close their eyes. And then she turns out the light.
Lettie doesn’t want to fall asleep, and so she watches the mouse. It doesn’t scare her. It’s tiny, unremarkable, easily overlooked, and yet she’s found it, so perfect with its shiny, gray fur and pulsing ribs, skittering along where the wall meets the floor. She wants to declare it, at first, to send an urgent whisper down the row of beds, until each girl is wide awake, electrified by it. But she chooses not to. She wants it to be a secret. The other girls are all sound asleep by now anyway, their heads denting slab pillows. The nun is gone. The mouse flattens itself to fit under the crack below the door, and Lettie gets out of bed. She has to follow it, she thinks, to protect it, to keep it safe. If one of the sisters saw it, she’s afraid they’d kill it or put it in a cage. She doesn’t trust the nuns, the way they hide in their clothes—too secretive. The mouse continues to scurry close to the wall, but when another door appears, it slips again beneath the crack. Lettie opens the door. The room is nearly dark. She searches the floorboards for the mouse, at first only looking down. But it’s nowhere to be found. When she looks up, she finds herself in a small chapel, a shining gold box on an altar, and Mary, again, she stands at every turn, her beleaguered smile, her obstinate gazing. Lettie is caught by her eyes, which seem to follow her down the aisle to the front pew, where she curls, yanking her nightgown down over her bent knees. Mary watches her, unblinking, and here finally Lettie falls asleep, so deeply that she won’t hear the bell, an alarm to wake the nunnery for a search. She won’t stir when the women shuffle nervously up and down the corridors, calling her name. And when the older nun, the one most in charge, finally finds her and carries her back to bed, Lettie will be dreaming of the dock, the water, the hand. The railed-in dock is nearby. It sits on the orphanage’s property. The plank bridge leading to it floats in deep water, the wood weather-worn to a splintered fur. How couldn’t she dream of the hand with the dock so near? And had she ever seen the dock before? How could she dream up something that she hadn’t seen? But the dream will continue on in its doomed procession. She will be that grown version of herself, able to bend over the dock’s guardrail, which is normally much too tall. She will be larger, and yet not more firmly planted. She will feel like she’s just been let loose, as if she’s been wearing wings that have been snapped off, not from her back, oddly enough, but her chest, causing her to lose her footing, to stumble and catch herself. White flapping wings, that’s what she will see first falling into the water, a tattered flutter. But they will go under, become balled and dull, twisting in the current, snaking. Her mother will be nearby, Willard, too. But not Irving, no, he’s never in the dream. She will smell grass and the deep water, sulphurous, rusting the rocks at the bank. And cake, yes, sometimes she smells sheet cake. Distinctly. White sugar, whipped icing. She will desire to be a little girl again, to think only of the cake. But the hand will appear. It will be demanding, white and knuckled, a man’s hand, she thinks, or a large angry woman’s. She can never tell. She will ask, “May I help you?” But she won’t reach out. Her mother is never far off. There’s always cake and sweet grass. And the hand will disappear eventually. It will go away, and when it does, things will be better, even for the hand, which sometimes, only sometimes, she realizes is attached to a body, an angry, flailing body that will become waterlogged, blue with all the water it’s taken on, blue and swollen, but relieved at last of some dark restlessness. It will be better for the body when the hand goes under, and for her, her mother, Willard, everyone who stands just off, a clutch of women. She never wishes that the hand begins to swim, that the body rises up, its arms becoming strong and stiff to slap itself to shore. She will wish, as always, for the body to become a stone, to sink, but it never does. She will wait at the guardrail, staring into its splayed fingers, its open reaching. This time the hand will be connected to an arm, the arm to a body, and just below the blurred surface she will see her mother’s face, the slow fanning of her hair, and Lettie will cling to the nun’s broad chest.
/>
5
The sky still has some sun and the Miami docks are filled with trucks and men, and beyond them giant ships. Alma can glimpse the inlet, a deep, lurid blue. She has never seen anything so blue, nor so bustling. The commotion, a wild throng. The squat, heft, and pitch of bodies. Men haul tree trunks thick and heavy with green bananas, hundreds of them, mounted on their dark backs. They curse and call out, garrulous crowing amid the clatter of stacking boxes, drumming engines. It reeks of rot, seawater, fumes. The distant horn bellows, like a giant lung leaking air. Everything is lacquered in a wild profusion of light. Colorful sweat-stained shirts, the gleam of oranges through crate slats. Nothing dusky or diffused. Alma spots an elephant, huge, gray, flapping its ears. It is hitched to a wagon as if it were just a horse, but it is magnificent, if a bit saggy and worn-looking, its skin drooping around its thick ankles. Beneath its saddle, a yellow swathe of cloth billows like a skirt, gadrooned in a silky orange trim to prove its exotic past. “Did you see that?” she asks.
But Henry, dazed, doesn’t answer. He slows the car, hunched at the wheel, looking around. He turns down a road lined with warehouses, winds to a back dock. The crowd, its bustle, thins.
Henry parks, walks off toward the warehouse door, a gaping square, unlit hole.
Alma sees a dog, its brown ragged head, at the end of the dock, whimpering, a bit of its leg caught in a trap. She heads toward the water, the dog, its bared teeth. She wishes she’d gone in with Henry. Perhaps they don’t need to buy the trunk. Perhaps they can just turn around and leave the trunk intact, whole, the dream of it.
She begins to panic and runs to the warehouse door. Once inside she will ask if it’s someone’s dog caught in the trap. It’s an excuse to see inside, to stop Henry before it’s too late. She’s breathless. Henry is there, talking to an old man with a loose waggle of skin on his neck that stretches from chin to collarbones where it’s tucked into his buttoned collar. She asks about the dog, but Henry hushes her. It’s disorienting, the lined boxes, trunks, the streaming light, the smell of something ravaged and left to sit, rotten fruit, dank mildew, seawater, and burned coffee. The man says, “It’s a stray. Don’t go near it. It’ll bite ya.” The old man turns to Henry, hushed, asks Henry if he has children, a family who might need this money for food. And Henry says no, that his wife can’t have children. “It’s why she goes so soft for dogs.”
Alma totters out the door, the strong wind in her face, back to the car, and soon Henry appears, his arms stretched to carry the trunk, short and narrow, like a small casket. She thinks of dead children, her own, suddenly dead, each one pale and lifeless, cheeks sunken. And it seems true, what Henry told the old man. She feels childless, lost. Henry sets it down, kneels before it. Twists the latch, metal grating metal.
It gives a small, disgusted pop of air.
Moths rise up, flutter, and climb in the honey light.
6
He remembers the puddles, just like this, the slick sheen of gasoline, the colorful oiliness, shiny as a row of eyes with the lights of Cheva’s Pool Hall reflected in them. This is the city at night with his father—Marquette Street lined with parked cars, and the door to Cheva’s swinging open, the momentary hum of a ruckus rising up, light pouring in a rectangle that widens and then narrows to a glow that slips back quickly beneath the door. It isn’t his mother’s city, day-lit and caterwauling with crisp suits, women in gloves, the jostle, the fever of having a list, getting things done. This is louder, all of it broader, more wild, gusty. The men buy liquor at 1232, just an address, a blind pig, his father called it, and then they hitch their way to the pool hall, where they spike their drinks. A man pisses down the alley between Cheva’s and a seedy bookstore—tobacco shop. His hand over his head, he leans against the brick wall. Irving looks away but can hear him groan and then shuffle.
Up the street he sees someone sitting on a runner, a boy eating chicken from a white, grease-stained box balanced on his bony knees. Irving recognizes the car as Sir Lee’s, and the boy is the one who hauled the liquor into the house this last time when Sir Lee started in about the trunk and then Mr. Bucci’s bear died.
Irving walks up with his hands stuffed in his pockets. “That Sir Lee’s car?”
The boy is biting dark chicken off a leg, his lips and cheeks and chin greasy. “Sure is. I’m Smitty. His boy, and so it’s part mine, too. He ain’t my real father, but he took me in. One day, when he gets the word, he’s going to California and he’s taking me and Delphine right along with him. It’s a fact.”
The boy talks too fast. Irving is hungry and lightheaded because of it. He glances behind him at the glowing eyes of puddles.
Smitty says, “You Alma’s boy? The one with the sister and the ding-witted brother?”
Irving doesn’t like people to talk about Willard like that, but he doesn’t want to start a fight either. The boy is wrangly, his arms pocked with bright sores. Irving figures he’d bite if headlocked, like he does that chicken. Irving says yes, that’s him, all right. But he’s wondering now why he’s here. His father isn’t going to stumble out the door like he did the last time when Irving was told to sit in the car and wait and wait. There are no children allowed in Cheva’s, no guns and no knives either. He doesn’t know where his mother and father are or how long they’ll be gone. He should have headed out to the country. He’d have been there by now, even if nobody had stopped to give him a ride, and maybe his grandmother would have been cooking something up, the house smelling meat-seared, fat snapping unctuously. But that old woman is too proud. She’d have seen his arrival as some weakness in him, and he didn’t want to have to explain himself. Not that she would have asked for an explanation. She wasn’t the type to ask questions, but he’d have felt obliged to come up with something, and she would have seen right through it. He wishes he was with the nuns, now, that he’d been too young to fend for himself. He wonders if Willard and Lettie are eating sponge cake, deep tin pans set out for the orphans to pick through till their hands are gummy with sugar.
Smitty says, “Well, does your momma feed you?”
“She went south with my father to get a trunk.”
Smitty laughs, a snort. Then he looks up at Irving, says, “I’ll sell you some chicken. Do you got any money?”
Irving reaches in his pocket. “I got a bill.”
“Well, I’ll take it.”
Irving has already uncapped the bottle. He hands Smitty a curled dollar and Smitty scoots over, giving up some room for Irving to sit on the runner. He hands him a leg, and Irving takes a bite. It’s cold, but he loves how the flavor swells on his tongue, the way his jaw works the meat in his teeth. It all feels so good. It’s a simple, comforting pleasure. The two boys don’t talk. They curl over their chicken legs, elbows cocked. Irving feels deeply that everything will be okay. His mouth tells him that it’s all going to be taken care of. There’s chicken to eat, and he’s going to be just fine.
Narcissus is cold. It’s spring. The house should be holding onto its heat late into the afternoon. But despite the sun squares on the floor, she feels like she’s freezing, a deep cold from her bones. She pulls her winter coat from the closet. There’s the badger cough, clawing. She finds it hard to breathe, has felt like she was dying for a long time. Since the prophet, yes, since he was killed in his cell. No strong young man dies of falling and cracking his head on a jailcell floor. That’s a death for an old woman. It’s the way she could die now. Alone, a fall, bleeding until the blood has all spilled loose and dried. It was the butt of a rifle. She knows it. She’s been dying ever since, yes, but this is a different kind. This is an animal death.
She turns off the boiling pot of corn. She doesn’t want to eat. She coughs, the creature clawing inside her. She goes to her bedroom mirror, warped and ghostly. She brushes her hair. She walks to her bed, the dogs clicking and rustling behind her, but realizes that she isn’t really walking. Her legs are so stiff, her back so flexed, that it’s more of a stagger. She’s tired, the
wool coat itself a burden of weight. How did she get so frail? She hasn’t had the strength to tend to the farm for years. Each potato was the dirty head of a child who demanded attention, and she had no more time for rearing children, not even her own grandchildren, the oldest boy, the girl, the one in between who messed himself, could never learn to use the pot. How many times did she scrub him down? Too old now. And the yard talks to her, a nuisance of garbled speech. She prefers the house, but even here the earth is trying to take claim, the walls patched with glowing green moss. A vine of ivy roots, trying to find the kitchen sink’s wet seal, winds its way through floorboard cracks. She would not be surprised to find her ceiling, rife with fault lines and peeling paint, replaced one day by a whitewashed sky. The dirt, pressing in from all sides, is snakish with sound.