Promise Page 11

  Jo wasn’t sure she trusted the washwoman. Why would she want to help them? Why wouldn’t she hate them for what Son had done to her granddaughter? Jo called out to the woman’s receding form, “Promise you’ll send us some help. You hear me?”

  The horn on Jo’s head gleamed in the rain. It had slipped down a bit; if she rolled her eyes upward and cross-eyed, she could see its bright point. It seemed to be growing in length, the tip sharp and dangerous. Was she becoming another sort of creature, strange and fearful? Since yesterday she had felt something changing, a shift. Once her mother had used the verb transmogrify over the dinner table. Jo liked the sound of it but didn’t know what it meant or whether it was transitive or intransitive. She’d asked and her mother had said it meant shape-shifting but in a deep sort of way so that it wasn’t just the shape of a thing that changed but also its very nature, its essence. Jo felt now that she herself was transmogrifying or maybe it was being transmogrified. She remembered the pictures in her gods and goddesses book. What were the ones with horns and four legs called? Minotaurs?

  “All right.” At least the old woman threw that bone back at Jo. It could have meant she promised to send help or could have meant nothing at all.

  Jo watched Son’s fedora on the washwoman’s head bob down Church Street until it melted into the rainy gloom. What a tiny thing under that pile of clothing. Jo thought of all the mountains of dirty clothes they’d handed over to the washwoman, how she’d returned them all, again and again, for years on end, spotless, smelling of sunshine and bleach and starch. How many of their cells had they exchanged with her and her family over the years? Jo must be covered in them, and the old woman in hers. It was like they were related by blood. How much she must know about their most intimate habits. Every day of their lives they wore on their bodies, next to their most private places, the work of her hands, the tiniest hands Jo had ever seen on an adult.

  And not to even know her name! There was a shame in it all.

  Jo shivered and rubbed her legs, which were bare under her gown and robe. She forced herself to turn back to the lonely square of a house, wanting instead to strike out alongside the old woman and walk away from her mother’s pain, to come to the rescue, find someone who would save the day. Clearly her father had failed dismally in his role as protector of the family. Where was he? Even if he hadn’t found little Tommy, he should have come back to see about Jo and her mother.

  Perhaps it was her vision that was cockeyed, but the house looked off-kilter, as if it were a giant ship riding a wave in the ocean. Had it been knocked off its foundation? Part of the roof too, now an off-center peak, which looked like a gable that had been added as an afterthought. Through the sheets of rain she could make out the fallen oak, the perfectly rounded shapes of her mother’s crepe myrtles. In midwinter, Alice insisted on heavy pruning of the crepe myrtle bushes. She wanted them to stay small so that all the energy would go back into the blooms, not the branches. The branches, compacted and tangled by years of cutting back, had grown thick as privet hedges. In July, under sweltering heat, the blooms popped from their little balls, then came on like gangbusters, hot pink, breathtaking. When Jo was little, she would pick the balls and squeeze them, popping out the pink fluff. Now, in early April, the bushes had already begun to surge and leaf out.

  JO HEARD the baby before she saw him. A rattle was all, then a little cough, like an old man clearing his throat; then, as if the baby had just been gathering his wind, an ahhh. Then silence, only the sound of the driving rain.

  Jo stopped dead and peered through the rain. She didn’t fully trust her senses. Her ears had been popping since right before the storm hit. She was at the moment stone deaf in her left ear. She could hear sounds but couldn’t tell what direction they were coming from. There was a constant roar in the bad ear, which was on the same side as her broken arm. She felt split in half, one side functional, one not.

  Was she dreaming? Was the storm a nightmare she was just awakening from? Was the sound she heard one of little Tommy’s bloodcurdling screams, waking her out of a dead sleep, as she had been woken almost every night since he was born?

  Suddenly, the rain stopped. It just ceased and then there was a blessed stillness, a deep quiet, and then a wren sang forth, and the sky, glory hallelujah, began to lighten. Unbelievably, the sun was rising, first pink and throbbing with intention, then smearing the horizon in a butter yellow.

  With her good right hand, Jo rubbed her eyes. In the light from the rising sun, she saw the blood on her fingers. The shard of glass above and between her eyes, her horn as she had come to think of it, gave out a deep throb, a warning. She touched it gingerly. Just the light touch of her fingers made it flare and burn. It felt larger than she remembered. Was it possible that it was working its way out? If so, would she bleed to death? Would her father never come? In the growing light she could now look up and see it clearly, see the tip of the thing. It shone pink, reflecting the sun’s blessed rays. On the sidewalk a prism of color.

  She looked around. The street in front of her house was deserted; she could hear shouts and banging out in the distance. What she’d thought was a baby’s cry must have been some effect from the storm in her ears. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. Jo didn’t have high hopes for little Tommy. She remembered the power of the raging wind, how it had lifted her off her feet, blown her through the air from back door to front like she was a leaf or a small branch. To be blown through a second-floor window, heaven knows how far! What chance did a little child have in that storm? She pictured a town littered with dead babies, blown from who knows where. Little Tommy was probably in the next county.

  But what a miracle for her poor mother if he were alive! Alice McNabb would be the happiest person in Tupelo, maybe the whole world! There would be no more porch sitting or paregoric sipping or napping the day away. Her mother would be back to her old self, bold and lovely and strong: transmogrified. She’d tie up her hair and get her hoe and weed the flower beds, her face splotched and smiling, that wild hair of hers slipping out of the kerchief every which way; she would drive Mr. Nesbitt the grocer crazy with orders for the good food she would cook; she’d give Jo a Word to Keep every day of the week so that Jo’s notebook would runneth over. The two of them would head out together every morning, the way they did before Tommy came, her mother winding her hair into a bun, prettily flushed, shouting orders: hurry and don’t forget this or that and I may be late this afternoon because of a teachers’ meeting, and then the two of them would scramble for books and papers and their purses before leaving for the six-block walk to school. On Saturdays the whole family would all go to the picture show at the Lyric Theatre again and see John Wayne movies and then out for ice cream or they would be invited to play games of croquet on green lawns and drink endless glasses of lemonade at people’s houses.

  They would take little Tommy everywhere, and he’d just have to calm down, settle down. And if he didn’t, well, who cared? He was a baby, he couldn’t help himself. And nobody stayed a baby forever; eventually everybody grew up and stopped teething and using diapers and drinking from bottles and screaming all the time. Poor little Tommy, the life he might have had! She would have taught him to ride a bike, she would have let him come visit when she went to college at Belhaven or Millsaps down in Jackson. He could have been her husband-to-be’s best man in her wedding, and after that a young, boisterous uncle horsing around with her children, who would have adored him. (She pushed away the thought that little Tommy, should he be among the living, was already an uncle.)

  She should have been a better sister. The last time she held Tommy he had been crying (as usual) as she struggled to ram a bottle in his mouth. She had gotten aggravated and pushed it in too hard, hitting the back of his throat. His face turned a bright red and he gagged alarmingly. She put him on her shoulder then and patted him on the back (too hard?) and the gagging turned back to screaming. What an unpleasant baby! Nothing seemed to please him. Her poor mother! No wonder
she’d been down and out since he’d been born.

  Jo wondered if she had been like that as a baby. If so, she was deeply sorry. A wisp of a thought floated through her mind, made the more terrible when words reached out and captured it. Would her mother be better off without Tommy? Would they all be?

  The horror, the shame, of thinking, not to speak of articulating, such a thought! Here she’d gone and killed off one brother and was wishing for the death of the other, a defenseless baby! What kind of person was she to think such a wicked thing! What kind of sister? She took it all back. If only she could find Tommy, she would make it up to him. She would be a better sister. She would take the best care of him anybody could possibly take.

  NOW THE sky was truly light, and miracle of all miracles, the sun was coming on strong. In the first light, she gasped at the damage around her. Before the storm, her town, at least the part she lived in, had been covered over in trees, the giant oaks and magnolias and the smaller gum trees that gave Tupelo its Creek name. Now, stretching out before her, the few trees that still stood were so broken, twisted, and stripped of leaves and bark, they looked as if they might have been dead for years. Jo could see straight across the town. It looked like a scene from a newsreel of Europe in the last war. The fires continued to burn, the smoke making dark clouds against the clearing sky, but she could see even beyond the smoke, into the distance. In that moment she imagined she could see the place at the horizon where the earth began to curve into its ball, where the actual latitudinal turn was. She’d never seen this far in her life and it felt like a tremendous relief to look beyond the town. How vast and beautiful the ruin!

  Immediately she felt guilty again, this time for entertaining such thoughts about her whole town, her dear dear town. She could only imagine what sufferings lay beyond her own yard. And here her own mother was, her leg shattered and little Tommy flown away and Son lying there on the living room floor stone-cold dead. (She needed to cover him with something. Isn’t that what you do with the dead?) Her broken arm gave out a twinge, as if to remind her that it too was in dire shape, it too needed her attention and sympathy. She resolved to go inside and get one of her father’s woolen scarves and wrap the arm to her chest, keep it from swinging loose. She had never felt more alone or full of possibility. Everything, it seemed, was up to her.

  When she turned to go up the first flight of steps to the house and back inside, she was so lost in thought she’d actually forgotten that strange little cry she’d thought she heard.

  Then something snagged her eye. Something out of place. One of her mother’s crepe myrtle bushes, bare now, its new leaves blown into the next county, suddenly quivered as if it had been seized by a palsy. Once, when she was little, she had gotten up one hot summer night for a glass of water and seen something similar: two young raccoons playing in the mimosa tree outside the kitchen window, shaking the branches, sending waves of sweetness from its flowers through the screen and into the house.

  One of Snowball’s kittens? Then, as she paused and turned to look more closely, whatever it was that was shaking the bush let out a little sigh, not a cry, just a little expulsion of air, as if whatever it was had given up.

  Jo walked over toward the bush and bent down to look. The action caused her eyes to cloud over suddenly; a smudge of something dark floated across her line of vision. Was it blood or rain or some combination? She straightened up and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Blood again, pinker now. Brighter.

  The bush had stopped quivering. Maybe it had been a bird, or a flock of those small brown birds, finches that turned nondescript in the fall and bright yellow again by midsummer, that liked to eat the seed balls from the crepe myrtles, landing in raucous groups and feasting enthusiastically, then, in one motion, flying on, to swoop in on the next one in their path. What do birds do in a tornado? She wondered about Snowball and her kittens. Had any of them survived? She wondered about Essie and her daughter Winifred, who lived in half a house perched on the side of a gully up on the Hill, the other half occupied by a family of two adults and four teenage boys named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who kept Essie and Winifred up at night with their raucous goings-on. Some mornings Essie came to work bleary-eyed and complaining. Now there were streaks of gray in her hair and she wore support hose for the ulcers on her legs; her mouth had changed too, the lips thinner and set in a straight line. When she was younger, Jo had thought that Essie loved her the same way her mother loved her; but recently she’d come to understand that Essie’s kindness and good nature should not be mistaken for love, that Essie had Winifred, who was now at Howard University in Washington, DC, and who would send for Essie as soon as she could finish college and find a job up North. Jo knew all this because Essie had left a letter from Winifred on the kitchen table. Oddly she had left it propped up against the salt and pepper shakers the way a person would leave a note specifically for another person. The letter said to hold on, that Winifred was coming to get her mother out of that hellhole in another year.

  JO BENT over the crepe myrtle bush again, and just as she did, she saw something fleshy. This something opened and closed. It had multiple parts. She was studying human anatomy, and for one sickening moment, she thought it was a piece of intestine. A shred of something from deep inside the body. Something that should never be seen in ordinary life and certainly not in a bush.

  She looked closer and then what she was seeing began its long swim along her synapses and neuron connections, and finally, finally, her brain said, Excuse me. Please pay attention. It was a tiny hand, she realized after this terrible pause in which anything could have happened, anything at all. The little hand was beckoning her, reaching out to her.

  You.

  She took a deep breath and touched the fingertips. They were icy. They latched on.

  She looked closer, peering down into the bush, her mouth partly open, her head feeling the weight of the horn. Again, there was a pause in which the information from the eye had to travel again, faster now, only a split second this time, during which she didn’t breathe. Then the information came back, and her brain said: A baby. Then the full sentence: There is a baby in the crepe myrtle bush. Her brain said: Pick it up. Be careful.

  The baby was wedged in the bush; she could see its little arms, and below and between them the crown of its head. It seemed to be standing upright in the bush with its arms held straight up, as if it were preparing to do a cartwheel. Jo reached in with both hands and took hold of its little wrists, her own broken arm throbbing with the motion. She began to pull, waves of pain shooting up from her left arm into her left shoulder and across her upper back. The baby proceeded to shriek as if she were hitting it, beating it.

  You? Could it be?

  She let go for a moment and the baby shrieked louder, its little hands flailing and reaching.

  “Ok,” she said, and her voice quieted it. She reached in again, this time parting the branches carefully and taking hold of the baby at the armpits. She began to tug, her left elbow now a chicken drumstick being pulled apart. The baby took a deep breath and then began again at a higher pitch. It was kicking too. Jo could tell by the movement of the branches below it.

  “Push!” she hollered at it, as if it were a mother giving birth to itself. She realized as the word came from her lips that the poor little thing was totally helpless.

  In her good ear she heard a branch snap, then another. She pulled harder. Then something shifted and gave way. Then here it came, scraped and bloodied and fighting mad. A boy! Naked as the day he came into the world, his little genitals, shriveled from the cold, retracted between those delicious fat rolls on his thighs.

  Squirming and screaming bloody murder, furious and red-faced and utterly alive. There was something biblical about him, something that struck a deep chord: Moses in the bulrushes. With her good right arm, Jo snatched him to her chest like a football and began to run; then her careful brain said, Slow down, be careful, don’t trip, don’t drop, don’t run. Don’t. She sl
owed to a fast walk, up the two flights to the tiled front porch, across the porch, through the opening where the front door had been into the gloom of the living room, past her brother’s body, larger than she remembered, and to her mother who still lay at the foot of the stairs.

  Jo touched her mother’s shoulder with her toe. “May-May, wake up, I found Tommy! He’s alive!”

  Alice’s eyelids fluttered, then closed again.

  “Mother!” Jo knelt beside Alice. Tommy had stopped kicking and crying now. He was cold, too cold, and still and quiet. One of his arms dangled at her side. His head had collapsed between her breasts, his face covered in blood and scratches. Jo needed her mother, his mother, to tell her what to do.

  Alice opened her eyes, looked first at Jo, then at the baby in her arms. She rose on one elbow. “Oh! Did you find him? Did you find Tommy? Is he alive?” Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slid back to the floor.

  Jo looked around. Behind her, in the dim light, the house revealed the full disaster of the storm. Everything sodden, nothing where it should have been. Through the opening where the front door had been, a thin line of light. Beside it, Son. In the night, something in him had changed. At first she couldn’t figure it out; then she saw that his arm had shifted and was now flung outward, the palm up, as if he were gesturing to make a point. Had the incoming rain moved the arm or was this some final fumbling for expression? He was certainly dead as dead could be. His eyes stared, his belly had swelled. There was a peculiar odor in the room now, not totally unpleasant, though she knew it soon would be, but more like apple cider. The morning light played on his face, his open eyes. She could not look at him another minute. She laid the baby on the floor at her feet. He lay there, eyes closed and head turned to one side, his little mouth sucking mechanically. She spotted a loose napkin on the floor and placed it over her brother’s face.