Promise Read online

  Why clip-clop? Dovey had asked.

  Her grandmother had shaken her head, pressed her lips in one long line.

  NOW DOVEY came upon strange things, things that made her stop dead in her tracks.

  A cock crowed, then sauntered in front of her, its waddle quaking angrily. Not a single feather left on it. Looking like it just emerged from the egg.

  She came upon a nanny goat tied to a small tree whose top and branches had been sheared off. What was left of the tree was covered in clothes. Pajamas and nightgowns and girdles and a wedding dress turned gray as a tombstone. A sealskin coat plastered on the stub of a branch like a large dead animal. Dovey spotted a scarf and pulled it down and wrapped it around her neck, then thought the better of taking white folks’ clothes without permission. Who knew what some Miss Lady might accuse her of? She untied the scarf and let it drop to the ground. The goat bleated miserably, pulling at the rope. It picked up the scarf and started chewing on it. Dovey recognized the goat as a family pet, but the house it belonged to, the house she’d come to and gone from, picking up the dirty, bringing back the clean for the past two decades, a fancy house with huge columns inhabited by some people named High, had crumbled into a pile of timber set in place for a giant bonfire. The Highs, now brought low, were nowhere in sight. She stopped and untied the animal. At least it might find some grass left in this world to graze on, if the storm had left a blade or two. At least it wouldn’t starve to death. It ran away, what remained of the scarf dangling from its mouth like a grotesque tongue. Then Dovey looked up at the pile of timber and gasped when she saw the arm and leg sticking out from one end of a fallen column; a sodden napkin covered the upturned face at the other end, plastered down by rain like a mask.

  Old sun, new day, things are going to go my way. It was the song her mother used to sing to wake all of them for school in the morning. It popped into her head and took up residence there, next to the drums. They played well together. As she walked along, the shoes had become an aggravation. They were soaked through now, heavy as shovels on her feet, toting ugly, toting sin, so heavy she considered taking them off, an idea she rejected the minute it posed itself in her mind.

  Unbelievably, old sun was climbing now, just like it did any ordinary day. How dare the world go on! She shut her eyes and saw little Promise hurtling through the air, Virgil’s crushed bed. Now where’d that old man of hers gotten himself off to? She’d never had to ask that question. Virgil was true-blue, solid as a rock, a man who was always right where he said he’d be, not one of them run-around, juke-jointing kind. Never been slippery a day in his life.

  She stopped for a moment and tried to think above the drums in her head. She was heading south on Church, toward Main Street. Should she turn around and head back north, back up to the Hill? If Dreama and them were alive, is that where they’d return to? Doubtful. Food and shelter would be downtown where the white folks were. If Dreama and them hadn’t had the sense knocked out of them by the storm, they’d head into town, especially with the baby. You had to feed and water a baby else you could lose it. The three of them had maybe caught up with each other and would be looking for Dovey now. Maybe Virgil was busy dragging Gum Pond for her that very minute.

  And wouldn’t that be just like him? Since Charlesetta died, Virgil had turned into a bit of a pessimist. Truth be told, his down-and-old moods followed Dovey’s spells of coldness as predictably as the moon following the sun. She’d tried to forgive him for Charlesetta, truly she had, but those spells of hers had a mind of their own, rising like yeast on this day or that, and then all she could see when she looked at her husband was that pine box of a coffin being lifted indifferently from the freight car by the M&O conductor and station manager and laid on the gravel platform beside the track. When she gave him that look, the one with the coffin in it, he would know. His cough would get worse and he wouldn’t work on the house or help people fix what needed fixing. He wouldn’t come up behind her and pick her up and talk about how scrawny she was, how she needed some skin on those bones. He would develop a look about the mouth that was almost, but thankfully not quite, a sneer. After work (he always went to work no matter how bad he felt) he sat himself down on the front porch and stared into space. People would stay away. Virgil got the fantods again, they’d say. Her fault, though only she and Virgil knew that. Neither of them spoke of it, to each other or anyone else.

  She almost turned around and headed home, wanting more than anything in the world to find him sitting on the log pile that had been their front porch.

  She decided to take her chances with downtown.

  One step with the good foot, then drag the other. One step, then drag. The drums drummed on.

  Up ahead, as she crossed Jefferson and neared Main, people milled about in a cluster, jabbering and crying and calling out names. She tried to get the attention of a white woman who looked uninjured, but the woman shoved her to the side. “Out of my way, nigger,” she said when Dovey didn’t yield what was left of the sidewalk. Dovey stumbled and almost fell but caught herself. When she looked down to get her footing, the drums became one long beat that bore down for one unbearable moment, as if the fedora had become a vise.

  A small crowd had gathered around what was left of a huge tree, now stripped of bark and leaves and twisted into a cross. Between the two crisscrossed branches at the top, something large.

  Dovey looked up but the sun spliced her line of vision, blinding her. She drew closer (step, drag; step, drag), then looked up again. A woman in a nightgown lay drooped across the fork in the branches, a white woman, young and pretty, though getting less so by the minute. One leg hung down, a bedroom slipper dangled from the foot. Everyone milled about, the men debating how to get her down. A man knelt and prayed in a booming voice at the base of the tree, his face turned to the trunk. Deliver us.

  Some women stood around him, wailing and carrying on. “That’s little Myrtle Crisp, the new teacher from Oxford,” one said to the other. “The one that took Alice McNabb’s job when Alice had her nervous breakdown back in the fall. What a crying shame.”

  When Dovey was a girl, she’d tagged along with her father in the late fall when he went out to Savery Woods to hunt squirrel and possum. It was November, and she remembered enjoying the way the dead leaves crunched under her bare feet. Her father had just turned to tell her to walk like an Indian when a shadow fell and she looked up and saw the man up in the tree, his arms tied above his head, his trunk burned black as coal, the flesh on his legs welded together by the flames so that he looked like a merman with one large flipper hanging up there. All her hungry eyes could do was look and look, unsure of what they were seeing but curious, oh so curious.

  Even before he turned to look up too, her father had known. He turned only his head, the rest of his body staying completely still, his hand squeezing her shoulder hard, indicating that she should stay still too. He took only a sideways glance upward; then, without even seeming to move a muscle, he felt for her and got her around her waist and picked her up and carried her away from the clearing and back into the woods, forcing her facedown and away. Lickety-split, lickety-split, his feet making all the racket in the world, kicking the leaves right up into her face so that she began to cough and sneeze.

  When he got her away from the clearing and back deep into the woods, he put her down, took her hand, and half-pulled, half-dragged her until they reached the M&O tracks on the woods side of Gum Pond. There he let go of her hand. Shaken by his uncharacteristically rough treatment of her, she felt her legs buckle. He touched her on the shoulder and took her arm again, this time more gently, and pulled her along.

  “Daddy?” she began, as they threaded their way across the tracks.

  “You didn’t see nothing,” he said. He spoke in a tone she’d never heard, like he was spitting gravel. He didn’t turn his head to look at her.

  She never told a soul, and they never spoke of it. But through the years, the merman in the tree never left her sid
e. He hung there, above the clearing with its stomped-down grass, just to the left of her left eye. She never looked at him head-on, but he was always there, casting his long, bulky shadow like a big, slit-open fish.

  She looked up again at the very moment the slipper hanging from one of the woman’s feet fell softly and landed on the back of the praying man, who snatched it up and held it to his cheek. The woman’s neck had been twisted into an unnatural angle, sideways and peeled back, white and tender as a radish, not forward and down and burnt black, the way the merman’s had been. The woman looked like somebody in a picture show, a lady who’d gone to sleep up there in the tree and would soon awaken and burst into song. A flock of blackbirds circled, cawed, and then landed all around the lady in the tree, their heads bobbing up and down, as though urging her to wake on up, rise and shine.

  Old sun, new day. Dovey walked on. Around her, houses still smoldered. In the distance she saw a blaze, heard sirens. She saw some white ladies and white boys in uniforms up ahead. She stopped one of the boys. “Where they taking the colored?” she asked.

  He eyed her soberly. “Ma’am, you’re bleeding down the side of your face. Looks gruesome. Is it coming out of your ear? Did you hit your head?”

  Ma’am? The drums paused. He hadn’t called her auntie or looked over her head when he spoke to her. The drums said he wasn’t from around there. His uniform said CCC. The CCC boys were President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps; they’d been living in barracks out in the county for a year now, planting trees, building earthen dams and playgrounds and schools. They were poor and quiet and glad for the work, glad to have the $25 a month to send back home, plus five to keep for themselves. By some quirk, most of the ones around Tupelo were from Chicago, plain Midwestern boys with large round faces, soft-spoken and shy, invariably polite.

  Dovey again reached under the fedora and touched the ear and came away with blood on her fingers. Where was it coming from? “Where they got the colored?” she asked again.

  “They got morgues set up in the old Hardin’s Bakery building and in the basement of the courthouse too. Got them piled up like cordwood, colored on one side of the room, white on the other. There’s some colored laid out in the alleyway off Broadway too.”

  Dovey wasn’t studying morgues. “I’m talking about live people. What about them what got hurt? What they done with them?”

  The boy brightened. “They put some on the Frisco and took them north, up to Holly Springs and Memphis. Frisco’s been coming and going all night once we got the tracks cleared. They loaded up the Accommodation with the wounded and backed the train up all the way to Memphis, then came on back for another load. Greyhound too, taking folks to Meridian and Columbus. They going all over the place.”

  “Colored too? They taking the colored up to Memphis?”

  The boy looked down at his feet. “They’re putting the Negroes in the boxcars. They took some of them down to the Lyric. They’re using the stage to operate and the popcorn machine to clean the instruments. Chopping off arms and legs like they’re chopping a load of wood, then propping folks up in a seat just like they’re getting ready to run a picture show for them. Whole bunch of them arms and legs just piled up in a corner. Tried to make me gather them up and take them away, and I say no siree bobtail, I ain’t gathering no arms and legs like a load of brush. Last I heard they ran out of ether and was using whiskey. People rowed up in there like sardines in a can, black and white together, waiting their turn at the table, screaming and hollering like the world coming to an end.”

  The boy’s nose, Dovey noticed, was peeling. His face was ruddy and covered with freckles, his hair red and curly. “I’m looking for some folks of mine. You see a colored girl about sixteen? Light skinned and pretty?”

  “I don’t think I seen nobody like that, but things is crazy in town. Everybody’s running around trying to save the ones they can save, bury the ones they can’t. Never seen so many undertakers in one place. Some mill folks named Burroughs down on South Thomas lost everybody in the family, thirteen in all, including a little baby.”

  Dovey shivered. A mule team clattered by, loaded with pine coffins.

  “See what I told you?” the boy said.

  Dovey touched her ear again. The drums under the fedora had grown so loud she could barely hear the boy. “My folks ain’t dead. I just need to find them. Anybody around who know who got took where?”

  “Doubt it. No time for that. Lot of people hurt bad. Hospital roof fell in on some. Me, I’m going around saving people. Heading up to Gum Pond now. They’re draining the pond.”

  What was wrong with her? As he headed in the opposite direction, she thought how much she could have told him, should have told him. How there was nobody left to save in Gum Pond. How he would have done better to head up to the corner of Church and Walnut. She should have told him about the white lady’s leg, about the girl’s piece of glass big as a steer horn. She laid it to the drums. They were too loud. Her thoughts a load of wash on the line, whipping in the wind.

  “Wait up,” she called out to the CCC boy. “Hold up.” She hobbled toward him. “There’s folks that need help up on Church Street. A girl and her mama. The mama’s hurt bad, she’s got a broke leg. You’re going to need another fellow and a stretcher. Corner of Church and Walnut.”

  The boy ran back. “Yes, ma’am! Let me go get some of my buddies.”

  SHE WALKED on, slide-drag, slide-drag. At the corner of Church and Jefferson, she stumbled over a tire and fell. She broke her fall with her right hand, but the forward motion shot sparks through the bad foot and her right wrist began to keep rhythm with the head and foot.

  She fell because she was looking up at the roof of the First Baptist Church, rather than down at her feet where she should have been looking. The church was on her weekly route because the First Baptists ducked each other in a swimming pool behind the altar and if you ducked you needed clean towels. Plus the First Baptists liked to eat after church so there were the white tablecloths. Each Monday morning she gathered the tablecloths and, if there’d been a baptism, the towels. In the middle of July, during revival week when there were duckings galore, she went twice. What got her attention on what was left of the roof were buzzards lined up on the raggedy edge gazing down at her. She studied their attitude and didn’t care for it. Get on, old buzzards, she said to them loud and clear. She clapped her hands over her head. They ruffled their feathers and eyed her with interest.

  The fall made her afraid in a new way, her head barely missing a shard of concrete where the sidewalk had cracked and upended. She began to tremble and couldn’t stop. She felt suddenly unable to get back on her feet. The drums drummed on, faster now. She put her hands over her ears. Lying there, she saw feet go by. Bare feet, and then feet covered in everything imaginable—boots and high heels and wingtips and bedroom shoes and rags, sometimes in odd combinations. She sank back down. The sidewalk scraped her cheek but she didn’t care. She couldn’t go another step. She lay there and shut her eyes.

  She slept for a while. Now somebody had taken her arm and tugged. She squinted upward. Old sun now directly overhead.

  “Come on now, auntie, you don’t want to get trampled on. Get on up from there.” She looked up. A man. He was standing directly over her. The sun peered over his shoulder, blinding her. Who? She recognized the voice, but couldn’t place it. The man’s face was dark, though by the voice she could tell the man was white.

  Now he leaned down and pulled at her arms and shoulders. She made an effort to rise, but her legs were rubbery. He shoved one arm under her shoulders, another under her legs, gathering her up like a little child. She opened her mouth to protest, but his arms felt solid and warm. There was something dreamlike about the way he held her, as if her own daddy had come back and was taking her to bed the way he used to when she was little, clucking softly under his breath, except that this man wasn’t clucking, he was breathing hard under her weight. He smelled like starch and man sweat.r />
  “Dovey?” the man said suddenly. “Dovey? Is that you?”

  At the sound of the white man’s voice, so close to her ear that it tickled, saying her name, not once but twice, Dovey began to struggle to get down. Who?

  “Dovey, is that you?”

  Dovey opened her eyes, and there he was. There he was up close and personal, the Judge, the Devil’s daddy, the dead Devil’s daddy. Wide awake now, she scrambled down from his arms, standing before him dizzy and fearful, still possessed by the sound of drums in her head.

  “Dovey, is that you?” he asked a third time, bending over and peering at her as if she were out there in the distance somewhere, a distant star instead of nose to nose. His breath was sour, his sweat rank.

  She looked up at him. She hadn’t realized how large he was. It was not so much that he was tall, she knew that, but she was struck by the breadth of his chest and shoulders. He was shaped like a bull, and blackened by the sun’s light, he looked like one. Instinctively, she shrank from him and started walking backward onto the lawn between the sidewalk and the church.

  He followed her onto the grass. “Dovey, where’s your granddaughter and the baby? What happened to the baby?”

  He sounded fretful, like a child himself, fussing and whining over some small matter: a toy or bedtime or some such.

  “Don’t rightly know,” Dovey murmured, still moving away. “I’m looking all over for them. Virgil too.”

  “Trying to find my baby boy too,” he said. “He flew right out the window. Can’t go home till I find him. Alice’ll have my hide.” He looked over his shoulder as if worried that his wife would be standing behind him.

  Flying babies. Last night the sky must have been full of them. She could see them as they must have been, hurtling through the night like dying stars. They didn’t seem unhappy or afraid but rather full of themselves, cooing and laughing and reaching for the sun. Where were they now?