Promise Read online

  Dreama always made sure to have her animals named by the time she presented them to her grandmother.

  “No rats coming up here on my porch.”

  “Please, Granny. Look, he’s cold. Can’t he just live in a box up there? He won’t be trouble. They don’t eat anything but grass.”

  Dreama had just turned nine. Her hair fell in loose curls around her face. The morning sun cast her in bronze. She took Dovey’s breath away. Her legs, like Dovey’s, were sticks; her silhouette looked like one of those birds all the time walking around at the scummy edge of Gum Pond seining for fish. Girl needed some meat on those legs.

  “That thing ain’t setting foot in my house and no table scraps,” Dovey said finally, and Dreama rushed off to find a box in the shed.

  Seven years later Henry still lived on the porch when he wasn’t out in the yard grazing. He stayed close, returning to his box at night. Dovey had gotten used to him under her feet. Sometimes, in the summer when she was making jam, she slipped him peach pits and overripe muscadines.

  NOW, ALMOST time for the nine o’clock Frisco. A flash of lightning, then another. The sky suddenly the color of soot. Whatever it was was coming right this minute. She better hurry. She looked around the room for her basket. On the window sill a movement caught her eye. A yellow jacket.

  A yellow jacket in April? It made no sense. But there it was, the ugly thing. It twitched and pulsated, pushing its stinger up and down, just looking for something soft to dig into. Normally she would have opened the kitchen window and shooed it out; she didn’t like to kill innocent things. But tonight she was so aggravated about the coming storm and all those clothes on the line that she reached into the dish drain and picked up the jelly jar Virgil drank his tea from and brought it down hard, crushing the wasp with a satisfying crunch. She rinsed the bottom of the jar. When she opened the window to brush out the crushed yellow jacket, a gust of wind caught its pieces and blew them back at her, scattering them in the sink.

  Through the open window the wind blew in that peculiar smell. She still couldn’t place it. She closed her eyes and sniffed, once, then again. Then a good whiff hit her dead-on, so strong it about knocked her off her feet. Horseradish! Virgil liked it with the catfish he’d catch sometimes down at the river. Horseradish, for sure. She never liked the stuff. It reminded her of piss.

  She looked out the open window. Below her in the street, children were dancing in the wind barefoot, their clothes billowing this way and that. She hollered down at them to get on home, a storm was coming.

  It was coming now, for sure. Her ears popped and she yawned to unplug them. She headed out the front door to get the clothes in. Once in the yard she couldn’t get her breath; the air was like cotton lint, clogging her nose and throat, making her gag a little.

  Dreama and Promise, why weren’t they back? St. John was usually out by now, though this was Palm Sunday, which could run long. That morning she and Dreama had cut the low-lying new branches from the mimosa out front for the children’s procession down the aisle. “Hosanna in the Highest” in those high, pretty voices. (How her Charlesetta had loved to sing! How pretty she’d looked in her navy-blue choir robe with the white collar Dovey had crocheted.) The Heroines of Jericho’s big day, they’d be decked out in full regalia, white all over, head to toe. Dovey had been too busy to go.

  Now she reached up and began to take the McNabb wash off the line. She knew what things were that boy’s. It made her gorge rise to touch them after they’d come into contact with his flesh. Every week she wished him dead, and if not dead, then gone. At the very least gone. She tied a small knot in the toes of his socks and muttered curses she didn’t know she knew. When she prayed, which wasn’t often these days, she prayed for justice.

  Tonight the church service should have been quieter and, more to the point, shorter, heavy with the sense of foreboding, Jesus having been sent on his way to what was to come. And for what good reason? It seemed silly and on God’s part mean-spirited, when there was so much suffering in the world to make more.

  The wind had stopped. The remaining clothes hung limp now on the line. They looked painted there, white patches against the sudden slide into dark, as motionless as the gravestones across the street.

  Now a long moment of stillness. Long enough for Dovey to pause and wonder whether the rain was going to pass them by. The house faced west, and as she stood there in the yard, suddenly hopeful, her basket on her hip, the last of the sun, which had slipped under a soot-colored cloud, emerged at the horizon. There were children twirling around in the street below the house. In that moment she knew, suddenly, that she was about to witness something strange, something miraculous. She remembered her grandmother talking about the night the stars fell. It was Alabama and her grandmother a barely walking girl. Her mother held her up to see and told her that deliverance had come, the stars falling out of the sky was a sign from God. He was setting them free.

  Dovey knew she was being greedy, greedy, having already had herself one good time that day, to ask for more. Early that morning, she’d taken Promise outside on the porch while she did the McNabb wash. She’d gotten a fork from the kitchen. As the early sun crept around the corners of the house behind them, they’d sat together on the porch, Dovey behind the laundry tub, Promise on her lap. Every so often she picked up the fork, dipped it into the soapy water in the washtub and blew, and the bubbles drifted up against the blue blue sky, catching the sun’s rays and separating into color. Pink and yellow and green. Looking out, Promise had made a sound in his throat, almost a purr, and Dovey had gazed down at him. This is what the heart looks like, she’d thought, it looks like him with them bubbles.

  She’d wanted to see Charlesetta in him. Now that would be the true miracle. Charlesetta’s chocolate-drop eyes and tight curls, the dimple in her right cheek. None of it in this one.

  NOW DOVEY put her hand to her temple. The morning and its vision seemed like days ago. Her head had begun to throb; it felt like it had been caught in a vise. One of her headaches for sure, coming on strong. She loosened the top button of her collar, touched the cords of her neck.

  Below her in the street, the children, bereft of wind, stopped twirling and looked up at her. There was a little girl on the edge of the group who resembled Charlesetta at that age. The girl poked a finger in her ear, shook her head like a dog with mites. Her ears must be popping too. The setting sun, cut in half by the horizon, flared. Dovey, now wreathed in gold, looked down at the top of her own right hand, which held the basket against her hip, and saw painted over its ridges and rough spots an unearthly yellow. Then a crack, the sound of a massive limb falling, and she looked up and saw the ball of fire in the sky. Below her, in the neon light, the children, now frozen in place, looked as though they’d just been torched.

  In the distance and getting nearer, gathering and gathering, the sound of a freight train, though it wasn’t time yet for the Frisco to come through. Now, it was louder than a train, much louder, the sound of a dozen trains, a roar and a clatter and a shriek and a groan.

  Then, through the slap of blackness that in the still-long-and-getting-longer moment had just veiled the sky, lightning flashed again, bright as day. Then she saw it coming. The funnel, spewing debris, huge shards of wood and metal, an easy chair, something large with hair and four upside-down legs.

  She dropped her basket and hollered for Virgil. She began to run, down the hill toward the little girl, to snatch her up and get her inside. Dreama and Promise, where were they?

  But now it was upon her, roaring and screaming, a tiger, a train, a monster from hell shrieking and flailing, and she felt her bare, swollen, exhausted feet leave the red clay dirt she stood on—the good sweet earth she loved—and she felt it take her, and she felt herself begin to fly.

  2

  9:03 P.M.

  When the first shard of lightning cracked open the sky, Jo had just opened up a coat hanger and pushed it down between her left arm and the plaster cast that
encased it. She was standing next to the house, in the backyard. The end of the coat hanger was jagged and it tore at her flesh, drawing blood she felt sure. She didn’t care. The itch itched. It had itched all last night and all this morning and afternoon. In the early morning hours she had awoken to a whole colony of fire ants drilling holes into the mound of flesh that covered her broken arm. They bit and stung, again and again. Then, as the day had turned hot and muggy and her arm swelled inside the cast, the itch had progressed from simply irritating to unbearable. Damn that horse of Bill Kelly’s. Whatever had possessed her to get on the blasted thing? The minute she’d pulled herself up into the saddle and situated her feet in the stirrups, before she even had gotten a good grip on the reins, it had started up galloping hell-bent for leather, and then stopped on a dime like it’d run over a patch of glue, lowering its head to a few sprigs of grass as if bowing to some unseen deity. All of which had somersaulted her into the air with a sickening lurch. She did one full rotation and after what seemed like an eternity, she came down on her left shoulder and heard the crack, felt the stab of bone tear flesh and (horror!) emerge through it. She took one look, saw cotton fluffs in the air around her, vomited up her breakfast, and passed out.

  At Sunday school this morning she’d taken her arm out of the sling and cradled it in her lap like a baby. She’d tapped the surface of the cast with her fingers, trying to scatter the ants, but the tapping just seemed to aggravate them and they drilled in deeper, as if they were boring into the bowels of the earth to make a permanent mound. They kept it up all through church, where she prayed, in rapid succession, to God, Jesus, and finally the Holy Ghost to give her some relief, a supplication that had no effect whatsoever. The ants kept it up all through Sunday dinner’s chicken and dumplings (her favorite dish) plus collards, not a bite of which she could enjoy. At the table she resumed tapping her cast, more out of frustration than any hope of relief. Her father told her to stop that; it was irritating, nobody could talk over it, and she snapped at him, asking him what he’d do if his arm felt like it was getting stung by fire ants. He told her to buck up; it was common for a cast to itch. Think about something else. Get it off her mind. She had two more weeks in that thing. She’d stormed from the table, before her mother had dished out the raspberry sherbet, the latter long awaited each spring and just in at Nesbitt’s Grocery.

  Then came the still-as-death afternoon and early evening. She tiptoed around the dim, blind-drawn house so as not to disturb her mother, who was napping while the baby, Tommy, now four months old and the crankiest baby alive, was down. Jo’s mother, Alice, who taught English at the high school, had named her second and third children after literary figures, Jo after the character in Alice’s favorite girlhood book Little Women and little Tommy after Tom Sawyer. One family name, she said, was enough, referring to Jo’s older brother, Morton McNabb III, called Son, who, to everyone’s dismay, was anything but filial. Now, though, Alice was stuck at home with Tommy, having taken the year off. Her substitute, a younger woman named Myrtle Crisp, was wildly popular at school, knew all the latest writers, and rumors were flying that Mr. O’Reilly, the principal, might prefer her over Alice, none of which Jo had told her mother.

  Alice McNabb had bigger fish to fry than worrying about keeping her job. After Tommy was born, she’d gone into a sadness that had descended like a dense fog over the household, then crept out into the town itself. It gathered intensity in whispered talk at church and the Curb Market and Lil’s Beauty Parlor. At home, when she wasn’t in her room sleeping or tending to the baby, Alice took up her post on the front porch, in the big swing, the outline of her slumped body generating something akin to hysteria among the town women. Jo sat beside her mother, watching the ongoing parade of Junior Auxiliary ladies and Bible study ladies and bridge club ladies, and even some of the town’s working women—Lil, who did Alice’s hair and painted her nails Dusty Rose; Marge, the dry cleaning clerk who for years had taken in Jo’s father’s dress suits and ties. They brought her banana pudding, potato salad, even a chuck roast with carrots and potatoes floating in grease. They sat in the swing with Alice and took her soft pink hands in theirs and gave advice. She had a beautiful new boy; she had responsibilities. Alice, for her part, would listen and smile a little and nod her head and say, gently so as not to hurt their feelings, that she just needed some peace and quiet, she would be all right. When they left, she would resume her swinging and staring, pushing the swing higher and higher to the point at which it would squeak and creak alarmingly. When the baby began to cry, she would sigh and drag her feet and slow the swing to a stop and go inside to tend to him, leaving Jo sitting motionless.

  EARLIER THAT afternoon as she paced the dark hallway in the hot wet blanket of afternoon, Jo had begun to think of her flesh as being shredded like hamburger in a meat grinder, pieces of her skin actually sticking to the inside of the cast. By the time she ran through the back door onto the screen porch and then out through the screen door and down the back steps, she’d worked herself into a state. Once outside, she set her shoulders and marched up to the massive pecan tree in the backyard and slammed the cast against its trunk, an act which sent such waves of pain through her arm that she saw cotton again. She collapsed onto the ground and leaned up against the tree trunk while the pain subsided. When it did, the busy, vicious ants started right back up again, now in even more of a frenzy, a seething, infuriated mass. She wanted to chop the arm right off, ship it to Siberia. Instead she decided to go back inside and stick it in the icebox and was headed for the back door when her father emerged from the house and told her it was 5:30, time to get ready for Young People. She gagged at the thought. The food at Young People was horrible, usually some form of odious sandwich, a gelatinous olive loaf or liverwurst or a watery egg salad, all of which she detested. Then Bible study, which she was in no mood for. The church basement, with its painted-shut windows and one small rotating fan, was bound to be stifling. (Why was it so hot today? More like July than early April.)

  Shading her eyes with her right hand, the shaft of afternoon light almost blinding her now, she looked up at her father and said she wasn’t going, her arm was itching so bad she couldn’t think straight. She waved her casted arm at him, making her point.

  “Stop doing that,” said her father. “You’ll reinjure the arm. Young People will take your mind off it. It’s Palm Sunday. Go on in now and get yourself dressed. It feels like rain. Grab an umbrella.”

  Jo kept scratching. “If Son’s not going, neither am I.”

  It was a mean-spirited thing to say, and silly to boot. Son had just turned nineteen, for one thing. He hadn’t been to Young People for at least five years. Her words buzzed in the still hot air like angry wasps. She wished she could reach out and catch them in a jar, put a lid on it, hide it behind her back. Her poor father was doing the best he could with her brother. Of course Mort McNabb Jr. would have liked to have made Son go too, but Son, as everyone knew, now commanded a rough crowd of boys over at Milltown and was out running wild out in the county, despite Alice and Mort’s best efforts to corral him and return him to the sweet-faced baby boy of his early pictures, a boy Jo, three years his junior, had never known. They treated their firstborn son as if he’d developed a malignancy, an illness caused by “bad influences,” which if they were kind enough, firm enough, parental enough, would eventually be excised. He was their failure, a failure that had stooped Mort’s shoulders, plowed a furrow between Alice’s brows.

  The final straw was when Son came home one day in a sportster, a red Alfa Romeo, which he said a friend had loaned him for the time being and which cost more than his father had made in the last three years in his law practice and time on the bench. Mort had gone into the bedroom and, without even shutting the door behind him, begun almost immediately to pull at his hair and pace. “We have failed that boy! How did we let this happen? This is our fault,” he thundered at Alice, then eight months pregnant, who had been sitting there staring out the windo
w. After he stormed out, Jo hovered by the open door, wanting to tell her mother she wasn’t to blame; there’d always been something wrong with Son. His hazel eyes, light and wide and empty of whatever it was that should be in eyes—a spark, a softness, a luminosity? You could see right through those eyes of his, like they weren’t there at all, like they were nothing but clear yellowish water, or ice, and the person behind them wasn’t there either. Jo never looked directly into Son’s eyes. They frightened her in some deep way.

  Then there was the trick. A Friday afternoon in October, how old was she by then? Seven? A delicious chill in the air, leaves everywhere, reds and oranges mostly, maple and gum. She’d just gotten home from her piano lessons with Miss Edwina Edwards next door and had done well. Miss Edwina, as her pupils called her, was said to be unaccountably nervous (though Jo saw no evidence of this), having long ago been abandoned by her husband. He’d hightailed it for Houston, where he’d made a fortune, first in cotton and then oil, leaving Miss Edwina to knock around by herself in the big white wedding-cake house next door. It had enormous columns and a long, narrow screen porch down the side. Some late summer afternoons, when the frogs and katydids revved up and the swallows and bats swooped for mosquitoes, Miss Edwina would throw open her doors and windows and take to her piano. The crashing chords of Rachmaninoff would burst forth from next door and echo up and down Church Street as though Miss E’s heart were being beaten against the cliffs of some rocky shore.

  Miss Edwina was blind. Her eyes were watery and blue with what looked like little white puffy clouds sailing across the pupils. She sometimes wasn’t buttoned or zipped properly or she appeared at the door with crumbs on her cheek and then Jo, who couldn’t bear to see her like that, would whisper in her ear and help her readjust. Throughout the years Miss Edwina’s arthritic collie dog, Major, regally escorted each of her pupils into the house. That fall afternoon, Jo had walked back to the fence line between Miss Edwina’s and her own house, escorted by Major, and then opened the gate to enter her own backyard, giving the dog a farewell pat on the head. She still had on her school clothes: a white blouse and plaid pleated skirt and knee socks. It was an outfit she particularly liked. The morning had been chilly and her mother had gotten out her favorite blue sweater from the cedar chest. It still smelled like mothballs.