She picks up the framed photograph of her and Chester, cursed, a damaged spirit, and her girl Alma. She takes off the velvet backing, pulls it out, the photograph too, and another piece of paper slips free. It’s a pencil drawing, the Prophet, lean and tall, his dark thicket of hair and wilted smile. She can see him along with the other prisoners, working the field. Her husband in bed, his last fit so terrible that they’d had to hold him down. But now Chester lays there. He says, “You think I’m not the man of the house? You think I’m weak?” Once he dropped a bowl of soup on his chest, a bright burn, and he could not look at his wife. He wouldn’t let her hold a cold rag to it. Alma stays out of the main room where her father is set up in an iron-post single bed. She runs her hands along the farthest walls. And when he starts up again, falling to the hard floor, his body beating sharply against the wood boards, Narcissus calls for help. She runs to the fields, to the officer with the rifle, overseeing the men. She yells, “He’s having another fit. Can you send someone for a doctor?”
The law says, “You, there. You, boy. You in for thinking you’re Jesus, ain’t you? You think you’re some kind of prophet. Go on in and save the man, if you’re Jesus.”
The Prophet runs into the house. By now, her husband has already bit the end of his tongue, and the tip of it lays in dust, blood pouring from his mouth. The prophet holds him down. He stuffs the rag in her husband’s mouth, puts down a bundled blanket to keep him from bruising the back of his skull. After the fit is over, the body lays there limp, a restless panting.
She says, “Are you really a prophet?”
“No, I’m a colored man. If I was a white man, I’d be called a doctor.” He isn’t angry. “But I suppose I come from people who believe in what they can’t see, and they do by it.”
“What kinds of things they can’t see?”
The Prophet asks her, “Was it a good tongue or was it evil?”
She tells him that it wasn’t evil, but it never did him any good.
“Bury it, in that case,” he says. “Bury it in the ground.”
And so she does, while Chester is recovering, while his head is wrapped up, too fat for his hat. She takes Alma out to one of the gardens and they dig a hole. She can smell the sweet dirt. She unwraps the bit of tongue from a handkerchief and lets it drop. They cover it with dirt, and Alma doesn’t ask any questions. The Prophet looks up from his bent back, his hoe, and nods. She’s done the right thing. It’s for the best.
Sometimes the Prophet comes to the house. She asks the law if the Prophet can come inspect her husband, to wrap his wounds and lay hands on him, and he does, while Chester twists in sleep, restless, on the edge of a fit. But once they step into the same spot in the kitchen, face-to-face, and she holds him, suddenly, she reaches out and hugs him like she’s been missing him, and she starts to cry. She never loved her husband. It’s loneliness, the break of it, how it can fall away suddenly, the open expanse in front of you is like a land you’ve never seen before, that reaches on and on. It reminds her of the way the Prophet described heaven while redressing her husband’s bandages—the herald of trumpets, the chorus of angels, the blinding brightness. It is a place, yes, but a place the same way this emotion is a place, this overwhelming love is a territory, a landscape. He comes back every day until her husband is well again, well enough to know better. Chester finds the pictures she’s drawn from her window, pencil sketches. He holds the pictures up to her face, and she simply looks away. He begins to cry from the back of his throat. He tries to yell at her with his stubbed tongue, but it comes out in growls and hisses. He wants to know what he’s done to bring it on. He wants her to say that she loves him, but she doesn’t say anything, although there is something almost like love, a tenderness. She doesn’t allow it. She wants him to leave, if that’s what he’s going to do.
She buried the bit of tongue, and that’s how she learned to bury herself, piece by piece. This is how she went on, until now, and she’s already gone. She’s already buried everything that was once alive in her, except the badger, the weasel, this cough. She presses the pencil drawing to her chest. She wonders if she will find the Prophet in heaven, if there is a heaven, if it will be the heaven he described, if it will be that land that once laid down at her feet. She wants to go, to let the ragged animal die, to put an end to the sibilant chorus tonguing dirt. She can feel a slow suffocation in her chest, a blanket over the animal’s snout. She is waiting for horns and angels and light.
7
Alma is driving alone now. Henry is already ghostly. She tries to remember the heft of his arm around her, the meatiness of his chest. It is almost there, the physical memory of his body, but then gone, only the air in the windows, fluttering her dress. The trunk smells foul with its sea-water, its mildewed books, and wet woolen dankness. She feels like she’s hauling a dead body home. Henry is gone and she’s got a dead body. It is as if Henry has died and this is his body, this moldering trunk with its rusty hinges. She thinks of her mother, after her father left, after the Prophet died, how she looked vacant, like an abandoned house, shutters wind-kicked wide open, a curtain lifting now and then, a reminder that there was once care, attention, a femininity, or even a simple practicality of keeping back some sun.
She pulls the car over to the roadside. She has to pee. She leaves the car running and opens the two car doors on one side to block her from the view of a car that might happen to pass. She pulls down her underwear, a bit crusted from what’s seeped from her, Henry’s old juices from just the night before—they’d made love in the car every night on the trip down, falling asleep with their feet propped out the window—but it seems like weeks already. It seems like another lifetime. Because, from now on, she divides her life this way—before Henry stayed on in Florida and after Henry stayed on in Florida—and she’s aware of this great rift, her life like two Bible parts: first the old, meaning her mother and Mrs. Bass and the factory, as loud as a child’s squalling mouth, her children growing into these bigger, fuller bodies, Henry, of course, her life steeped in his shadow; and second, the new, so far just a long road and a car and a trunk that smells like death itself.
The piss hits the hard dirt and sprays up on her shoes, and the puffed and pinched bare spots of her feet where there are cutaway holes below the thin buckle straps. Her legs are bare. It is too damn hot for stockings. She’s unclipped them and rolled them down her legs. She’s alone now. Who will see her? A farmer maybe in a field? At this distance, she’s a woman, squatting at the roadside to pee. She’s a dirty woman, traveling alone. Someone to be pitied for more than her lost hose. And goddamn it, she doesn’t care anymore what anybody thinks. It dawns on her now that she’s no longer the nigger lover’s daughter. It is as if that girl, with all of her worthless, nagging fears and all of her dreamy desires, has lifted up and out of her. She feels different now, no longer as attached to this world. She feels loose, wild, like she’s spinning away from the things she’s always known and loved, and she likes it. She doesn’t pull up her underwear. Instead she lets the air dry her soft patch of hair. There is no farmer in the field, and she’s stopped looking out for one.
Even as she was standing there on the Miami dock, she knew that the moment would last only briefly here, in this world, and too, that it would go on to live in her mind forever. She watched herself, the wind pressing her dress against her thighs, for example. A clot of gulls startled, and their wings lifted them, het, het, het, into the sky. The setting sun poured on Henry’s back; he was washed in gold light, his skin brassy as he kneeled there before the trunk. In fact, he didn’t look like himself as much as he did a movable statue of himself. There were only a few men, shirtless and distant, still loading a truck bed. The old man from the warehouse shuffled out the large opening and then quickly disappeared back inside. Henry lifted the lid, and it blocked Alma’s view of his expression. A gray coat sleeve flopped over the trunk’s lip. Henry stood, heavily. He looked past the woman in the wind-pressed dress, his wife, past the str
ay dog struggling in the trap, out to the ocean. He closed his eyes, tilted back his head, a pose that seemed to say he was drinking the ocean, one lusty gulp after the other, but maybe he was crying. There was a hitch in his breathing. She knew that it didn’t matter whether he was actually crying or not, because she would decide that later. When it suited her that he was crying, he would be crying. And when it suited her that he was lustily drinking the ocean, he would drink. Alma wasn’t a woman on a dock. She was watching a woman on a dock.
This is how it happened: Her hair whipped around her head. She walked over to him. She looked down into the trunk—a woman’s wilted hat, a moth-bitten wool suit coat, bloated books. There was a spindly umbrella; collapsed, its spokes and leathery cloth reminded Alma of the shiny wings of a bat. She picked up the gray coat, thick and damp, and walked to the dog. She covered her arms with the coat, formed a deep pocket in the back, and quickly lunged to cover the dog’s sharp teeth, its bony head, and folded ears. She held it by its strong neck, grabbed it around its shifting ribs. Now she popped the latch, and what was a taut metal spring suddenly went limp. The bar clanged loosely against the cement. The dog’s leg had three bloody punctures from the trap’s teeth, but they weren’t too deep. As soon as its leg was free, it began to kick. She still had the dog locked in her arms. She didn’t want to let it go. She didn’t want to watch this moment on the dock anymore. She wanted to feel something, and the dog was real, its body vibrating with its low growling. She hugged its bony twisting head to her chest until it wrestled itself free and ran from her, startling more gulls, one scattering and then another, and then a spree of them.
She got up off her knees, draped the coat over her arm, and walked to the car and Henry. She said, “Well, let’s go, I guess. Let’s go on home.” She passed him, shoulder to shoulder.
“I’m not going back,” he said.
“What? Of course you are!” She snapped, like she was talking to one of the children. The gulls screeched overhead. Their wings stopped flapping. They stalled midair to glide.
“I came here to get rich, and I’m not going back until I’m rich. You can have the trunk.”
It flashed over her that he was leaving. It was a trickle of information that swelled quickly to a broad flood. He was leaving her. She saw her father in his brimmed hat, his shadowed face. “I don’t want the goddamn trunk.”
Henry picked up the trunk, angrily, tipped it into the backseat, shoving it in the rest of the way.
Alma stood there. She was a woman with her hands on her hips. Her voice not as loud as it should be, because of the wind that seemed to lift her words from her, casting them up into the air, like something for the gulls to feed on. Henry scuffed his shoes in the dirt. He looked out at the water, his shirt flapping like a flag. “Who do you think you are? You can’t quit me like this. You can’t. You have dragged me through this much. It is your job to take me home.”
“Take the trunk, Alma. Take the car.”
She was shaking her head. What would she tell the children, coming home without him? They’d blame her. Hadn’t she blamed her own mother all of these years for running her father off? They’d think she lost him. They’d mistrust her even more than they already did. She was a terrible mother. One son on his own, the other children in an orphanage. What more proof did anyone need? And now her husband was quitting her. “No. You’re coming back with me.”
“I’m not.”
She couldn’t believe him. “We are going to drive home the way we came here—together.” Now she started screaming, her voice high and hoarse in her throat. “This isn’t right. Can’t you see what it could lead to? Didn’t you know that the trunk was going to be worthless?”
“How can you say that? You believed it, too.”
She had chirped all the way down. She had heard herself saying the most outlandish wishes, and for a long time she didn’t know why. Certainly, she didn’t believe that she was about to become rich. At first, she was playing make-believe. She was being romantic for her husband, and it was romantic. But then she saw that Henry had cast himself away from her, that while he drove, his eyes took on a glassiness. His hair bustled all over his head in the shifting wind, but his eyes were steady, fixed, and she knew that he believed that the trunk was going to change his life, was already changing his life. So her voice took on a dreamy singsong, because she wanted Henry to be the levelheaded one. She wanted him to take on the adult role, so that he could hear himself saying, “Don’t get your hopes up too high.” Certainly, she couldn’t have been the one to tell him that it wasn’t going to amount to anything. She remembered squealing, “We’ll be rich as pigs, can you believe it?” her eyes brimming with tears, her hands clapping wildly, and he had tethered her, and it was a comfort. But she could always see the narrowing end, things coming to a dark, tightening tip. But she hadn’t expected him to leave her. “No,” she says. “I never believed it would hold a damn thing.”
He looked away from her.
“You can’t quit me! You cannot, Henry.” Her voice softened on his name. Her throat closed around it. Her father had walked out the door while she slept.
“Alma,” he said, and then nothing else.
Her hand rose up, a fury in it. She slapped him. His face registered the blow, returned to her slowly. His eyes teared. His cheek already flared red. Her hand stung and then dulled. That was the end of it. She walked around to the driver’s seat. She could no longer feel her own body. Her legs had gone numb. She sat and slammed the door. The keys were in the ignition. She couldn’t feel her hands. She pinched them, then held the key, twisted her wrist, pushing the button to start it up. The engine caught. She would be alone in the world. She thought of the girls lashing her with sticks. She remembered what it was like to bash a rabbit’s head with a rock, to cut into it with a knife and peel back the taut, furred skin. She felt like she’d been struck senseless, a ringing in her ears.
Henry’s face appeared in the open window, his full, flushed face, his ruffled hair, his teeth and lips. His face was too bright, garish with color and pricked with detail. The air was too clear. Alma missed the graying dust, the way it hushed, dismissing brightness, a muffling. She wanted Henry to disappear into a cloud of black coal. She didn’t belong here. “I’ll come back for you in a gold car one day, a gold car with slick runners and shiny tires. I promise.” His voice was noisy in the box of the car, cut off from the wind. He knew better than a gold car. He was leaving her, and yet he could believe that he wasn’t. He was lying, and yet he could pretend it was the truth, and she felt the tidal pull of the lie. She knew that because he had offered it, she would take it in and harbor it in some young, trusting part of herself, the dirt within her that he’d first sowed.
She put the car into gear. Her hand fit around the shift’s knob. The car jumped forward and then lurched away. And she was in it. She was behind the wheel.
Alma pulls up her underwear. She gets back in the car, but then it chugs, heaves a few sputtering coughs, and gives out. The door that she has her elbow cocked against goes still, no longer jiggles with the car’s motor. She turns the key, pushing the button. Nothing. Turns it again and again, pushing. Nothing. She rests her head on the wheel. She wonders when she last ate or drank. She’s tired all of the sudden, deeply tired. She stays that way, arms slung over the wheel, her head resting on its hard center, for a long time. She doesn’t want to leave the car and go for help. The last time she strayed it was to look for the dog. She glanced up and down warehouse alleyways until she saw the dog’s mangy head, its dark body darting between boxes. She stopped the car, slipped out, and clipped down a narrow walk, holding her arms close to her body. She clicked her tongue, whistled. “Here, baby! Here, baby girl!” Suddenly she recalled her own baby born dead and then the eight-legged calf, the thin stick tapping its giant glass jar; the Mule-Faced Woman, her long legs, her oily peanut sack, distorted face, and broad, flared nostrils. It has become an incantation. There was a risen clot in her throat. S
he jogged around a few men who were smoking with their backs leaned up against a truck. She wanted to help the dog, scrub out the wounds and wrap the leg in a proper dressing. Who knew how long it had been trapped? It might need some water, a bit of something to eat. She called out, “Here, baby. Here, baby,” but softer now. She could hear rustling behind empty boxes, one stacked inside the next, four or five deep. The sunlight had slipped now. It was getting dark. She pulled out the stacked boxes. A cat glanced up, a rat in its mouth, held like it would its own kitten, but it was not a kitten. The rat was limp with skinny pink clawed feet and a body so fat it bounced, dead weight, against the cat’s chin and chest. The cat darted off. It had been eating from a nest the rat had chewed into the boxes and filled with newspaper. And there was something still squirming, alive, more than one wriggling body, small, sleek tails. Alma didn’t want to see the pale, blind infants, so she pushed the boxes back into place.
Now, in the dead car, she allows her mind to go slack, lets all of the images come at her—she has no more energy to keep them away. And they do, a bleak parade of ugliness, until a mule and a woman are locked in sex, the woman bent beneath its heaving girth, but they do not make the Mule-Faced Woman—she pours out a nest of rats, and the hawker with the eight-legged calf drowns them in a jar of his formaldehyde that widens to fit Henry’s dead body, too, soaked till bloated, then folded into the terrible trunk. And the tsking nun shakes her head with its heavy wimple.
Alma is rattled by a knock, a tap on the windshield. She doesn’t know exactly how much time has passed. Her throat is dry, her stomach turning, empty. Hunger always gives her a surge of panic. She feels dizzy, gutted. The sun blinds her. There’s a sore indentation of the wheel on her forehead. She rubs at the spot, squinting up toward the tap.