Promise Page 4

  That day, there were leaves everywhere and black moldy pecan shells scattered on the ground among them. They crunched under her feet.

  Her brother had some friends hanging around in the backyard. They told her there was a stray kitten out behind the garage, which was true. When she rounded the corner, one boy had the kitten by the scruff of the neck. It was white and dirty with green eyes that oozed. It was crying and hissing and twisting, its little legs bicycling the air. When she ran to the poor thing’s rescue, Son reached out and grabbed the tail end of her blue sweater.

  He did it all, her own brother. He took her down to the ground and pulled off her underpants and held her legs open for his friends to see. She fought, then froze like a rabbit in the field, large-eyed and quivering, as their faces closed in. There was more, but she couldn’t now recall the rest, only that she was a door to a house they wanted to enter. She’d gone somewhere else in her mind, somewhere where there were green trees and mountains and little trickling streams moving over rocks. There was a picture of this place in the dentist’s office, on the ceiling right above her head as she sat in the dentist’s chair, and she’d come to think of it as a place she’d actually been. In the distance she heard birdcalls and Miss Edwina playing Rachmaninoff. She had just lost her two front teeth and when she tried to scream only a whistle came out, causing Major to come to the fence line and paw the ground frantically, bark his high-pitched bark, then run back and forth. Son and his friends were going on ten, still in knickers, large for their size.

  Now that she was sixteen, what was left of Major was only a bump in the ground under the giant sycamore in Miss Edwina’s backyard and Miss Edwina herself long gone to a first cousin in Meridian, the wedding-cake house sitting empty behind closed venetian blinds. Jo didn’t think about the trick much at all and when she did, she did her dead-level best to think of it as just that, a prank, one big fat joke on her. Jo liked to think of herself as an ordinary girl; she had a nice family and nice friends and she lived in a nice town. Her father was a lawyer and a judge (more precisely a referee in bankruptcy), her mother a schoolteacher. What could be more respectable? The most exciting thing that had happened to her to date was falling off Bill Kelly’s horse and breaking her arm.

  That day of the trick, after the boys had run off, she had gathered her things and walked around to the front of the garage and made her way inside to a dark corner at the back, squatting down behind a spare tire her father kept there. Her mother was still at school, her father at the courthouse downtown. While she waited for one of them to get home, she’d drawn pictures in the dirt of the garage floor. A sun with twelve rays, one for each month. When she got up, there was a bit of blood, which she covered with an old greasy rag.

  Later that night, she took a bath. She even sang in the tub as she watched the water turn pink, behind the locked bathroom door, just so her brother would know she wasn’t bothered by his silliness. The next day she took her time getting home from school, stopping by to visit with her great-aunts, Fan and Sister, in their musty house farther down Church Street, toward Main, and having peppermints and tea with them, the late afternoon sun filtering through the drawn drapes, letting their old-lady smells descend on her like the clouds of mosquito repellent the town wagons sprayed on alternating Monday nights during the summer. In the months ahead she became quite fond of Aunt Fan and Aunt Sister, taking pleasure in their little squabbles, the way their nails were always perfectly done and their fingers dripped rings from long-gone McNabb matriarchs. She absorbed their parsed pleasures as her own, the way they brought her into their circle, talked of miscarriages and legal squabbles and the price of black-eyed peas at the Curb Market. She liked their independence, the way they lived lean as the meat they ate, how they washed out their own personal laundry and hung it on their side porch, not caring who saw what. The washwoman picked up their sheets and towels, but only once a month.

  By the time she climbed the steps to the back door that afternoon of the trick, her mother was at the stove stirring a pot of leftover soup, and Son long gone. The black stains from the molded pecans on the ground never came out of her blue sweater despite the washwoman’s best efforts, and so it was donated to the First Presbyterian Church to send abroad for an orphan child, who wouldn’t care, Alice said, that Jo had been careless enough to dirty her best sweater. The orphan, who didn’t have the advantages Jo had, would be happy to have such a pretty sweater.

  The kitten came back the next day. It followed Jo up Church Street to school, a little white ghost with emerald eyes, dingy and silent, with a sprinkle of gray on the top of its head. It always seemed to be walking on tiptoes. When school was out that afternoon, it reappeared about halfway back to her house and followed her home. It was thin and there was a scab on its nose. As they grew close to the house, it began to call out to her. You, you, you. For reasons she wasn’t clear about, Jo was a little afraid of it. It followed her into the kitchen and she put down some milk in a saucer. It lapped it up and called out to her again. She went to the icebox and got out some leftover ham, which it gobbled down and then jumped up onto a kitchen chair and went to sleep. Later, Alice came into the kitchen and took one look and said it had to stay outside. Did Jo remember that guinea pig she’d insisted on getting, how it used the whole house for its bathroom? Pellets in the cooking pots, pellets in Jo’s underwear drawer, pellets here, there, and everywhere. The kitten could live in the garage.

  Jo got an old towel and made it a bed on a shelf. When she carried it out to its bed, it hissed and ran off into the night. She was worried that it had run away the way the guinea pig had. One minute Piggy was grazing in the front yard, the next he was gone forever. (It was assumed that he’d strayed into Miss Edwina’s yard and Major had dispatched him, though no one ever brought up this probability to Jo.)

  The next morning, though, Jo found the kitten curled up nice as you please on the towel. It stretched and offered her its belly. When she rubbed it, it tapped her hand as if to say hello. She named it Snowball, a silly name she knew, but in truth it resembled a ball of old snow, dirty and refrozen. Mort McNabb had gone to Harvard Law School and he talked about how the snow up north lingered until May, freezing and refreezing and piled up on the sides of streets until it was the color of soot. Jo had loved the idea of snow, which she was always wishing for and which had only come twice in her lifetime and then, in the blink of an eye, had melted.

  NOW, A decade later, Son was the talk of Tupelo. Why couldn’t Mort McNabb control his own boy? His failure to do so was a source of deep embarrassment; Jo had heard her father telling her mother he’d never be elected an elder in the First Presbyterian Church and they both knew why; his father and his father before him had been elders, Mort had been a deacon for a decade now.

  At first, the boy’s actions had seemed like high jinks. Four years ago, when he was fifteen, there was the trouble at Reed’s Department Store when he grabbed not one, not two, but three fedoras off the hatstands, piled them on top of his head, and sailed out the side door on a busy Saturday morning, leaving the clerks gaping. Just a prank, he’d told his father, he was going to bring them back.

  Then, a little more than a year ago, there was something about that colored girl, the washwoman’s granddaughter. When the washwoman, so skinny and little she looked like a child herself, and her husband, a tall, wiry man, came to the back door one day during the noon meal, not on a Saturday morning the way she normally did, and asked to see Jo’s father, Jo knew it had to do with Son. Mort was aggravated by their sudden, silent appearance at the back door. They hadn’t knocked or made a sound. How long they’d been standing there like two statues nobody knew. Mort was still at the table, enjoying his after-dinner favorite, a slice of corn bread in a glass of ice-cold buttermilk. He’d just dropped the corn bread into the glass and broken it up with a spoon when Essie, the McNabbs’ cook, called to him. He had gone out and stood on the top step looking down at the two of them, his napkin still tucked into his coll
ar, his hand on the screen door. Mort was a tall man and, standing several steps higher, he dwarfed the two of them. This didn’t seem to bother him in the least, Jo observed through the kitchen window. He was used to looking down at people from the bench. The two of them looked up at him from the driveway, talking and talking in low agitated voices, their hands shading their eyes, which were full of trouble and sadness and something else: an accusation, an old rage. Tears rolled down the washwoman’s gaunt cheeks. Her husband, who looked like he’d come straight from the mill and had cotton fluff all over his overalls, had his arm around his wife. Jo had drawn close to the open window to hear.

  “He bothered her, he hurt her bad,” said the washwoman. (What was her name? Jo couldn’t remember.) “No telling what going to happen to her now. Won’t go to school. Won’t even get herself up off that bed, just lays there and not a mumbling word. Doctor had to stitch her up. Smart girl. Dead set on going up to Holly Springs to that school up there.”

  Jo’s father snatched the napkin from his collar and wiped his mouth with it. “Dovey, you sure it was Son? Is she sure? Your granddaughter. What’s her name again?”

  The washwoman’s husband stepped forward, his eyes flashing. “This woman here been washing that boy’s diapers since the day he come into this world. Been doing his laundry ever since. Dreama been delivering it clean to this house every week for the past four years. You think that girl such a fool she don’t know what he look like?”

  The washwoman pushed on her husband and shot him a look.

  Jo’s father didn’t seem to notice. He shook his head, his face opening to the bone underneath. “Damn that boy’s hide.”

  “May not be the worst of it,” said the washwoman. “I got me a bad feeling.”

  “I’ll make it right,” Mort said. “Count on it. I’ll make it right.” He wiped his mouth again.

  The washwoman raised her knuckled hand and pointed one finger at him. “No making it right. Not enough bleach in this whole wide world to make it right.”

  AT YOUNG People the church ladies served fried catfish in a pool of bacon grease and potato salad. Jo didn’t bother to get any food, just sat dumbly in her chair, a lock of hair, heavy with oil and dirt, over one eye. She hadn’t washed her hair thoroughly since the accident a month ago. It was hard to keep the cast dry in the tub; she had to sit up straight as a board and hold her left arm above her head. Her mother had instructed her to take sponge baths, but the hair washing, with her mother preoccupied with little Tommy and her new sadness, had gone by the board. Jo had tried to help her mother with the baby, but little Tommy was a handful; Jo thought him a most unpleasant baby. When he was newborn, the town pediatrician, Dr. P. D. Campbell, said he had the colic and they just had to live through the screaming (blood-curdling screams, as if someone were pricking him with pins) until his insides straightened out. Now that he was presumably teething, Dr. Campbell’s nurse said to rub paregoric on his bottom gums, and sure enough, that took the wind out of his sails. Now he gave halfhearted yelps every so often during the night. Alice would feed him his bottle, then rub some more paregoric, sometimes sipping a bit too, just to calm her own self down. Last week Jo had been looking for some aspirin in the back of the bathroom closet and had come upon a dozen empty paregoric bottles, pushed into a back corner.

  After supper at Young People, one of the deacons, Mr. Lumpkin, a skeletal fellow with monstrous ears, talked about Jesus making a decision, a conscious decision, to be crucified. Why had he let himself be talked into getting nailed up on a cross? He could have headed back home up to Heaven and told God the Heavenly Father to just flat forget it, he didn’t cotton to the idea of nails being driven into his hands and feet and hanging up there on a splintery cross for days on end, he didn’t appreciate having to wear a crown of thorns. He did it, Mr. L said, pointing at each of them in turn, for you and you and you. When he pointed at Jo, she wanted to bite off his hairy forefinger. Did her sins amount to all that?

  Just as Mr. L was winding down, Jo’s father came into Young People without his coat and tie and told Jo to come on, they weren’t going to go to the evening service. Odd, since he was a churchgoing man and believed in the necessity of giving God one’s undivided attention as often as possible. He earnestly lectured Jo on right behavior: that faith without works is no faith at all, just as mercy without justice is no mercy (though Jo wondered whether he’d gotten the latter statement turned around). Alice McNabb had avoided churchgoing like the plague since the baby, so Mort had come to count on Jo to sit on the hard cold pew beside him, the third on the left, where his grandparents and parents had sat for umpteen years. He would put his hand on Jo’s shoulder and belt out the hymns in his cracked voice, the way he’d done at night when she was little and he put her to sleep singing, not lullabies, but, for her, worrisome hymns. In the sweet by-and-by they would meet on that beautiful shore or fall into a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins. (For years Jo thought it was Emmanuel’s brains.) She had a soft spot for her father’s bad singing and she admired him generally. Despite some inconsistencies, which she tried to overlook (she’d found a jar of moonshine and a well-worn copy of what she would later come to know as the Kama Sutra behind his law books in his glassed-in bookcase), she appreciated how he worried about doing the right thing as a judge: weighing all the evidence and handing down fair judgments. On summer nights they would sit alone together in the big porch swing. He would tell her about his job of judging other people’s promises. Bankruptcy, he explained, happened when people broke their promises. His cheeks flared pink, and sweat collected on his forehead as he talked on. He would push the swing faster and faster until her stomach did flips and he would explain to her about justice, the necessity of justice. Opinion, politics, prejudice: they all dissolved in the face of justice.

  Her father had his ways. He was particular about his clothes and he believed in schedules. On Mondays nights, he went to the Tupelo Elks Club meeting; on Wednesday, it was Prayer Meeting. On Thursday nights for as long as she could remember, he would return to work after supper and put in a good long evening at the office, just to keep up, he said. She’d once begged to go with him, she wanted to help him, she thought she might file his law papers. She liked to put things in order. Her blouses were on the left side of her closet, her skirts on the right, with dresses between. Each night before she went to bed she stacked her school notebooks in the chronological order of her classes. But he said no, he needed to concentrate; filing was too complicated for her to manage. Sunday, of course, was church from morning to night. But tonight, much to her relief, Mort said he didn’t like the look of the sky; he wanted to get on back home, batten down the hatches. He didn’t want the two of them getting caught in a big rainstorm; he didn’t want Jo’s mother left alone with the baby. The lights might go off.

  Back at home, Jo changed into her nightgown, brushed her teeth, and washed her face; all the while the ants were still having a field day. She had a test the next morning on Poe’s “The Gold Bug.” Plagued as she was by the ants, she didn’t like the idea of a bug biting anyone; she rather generally hated the story, the idiocy of the colored man (she couldn’t believe anyone was that stupid), everyone going crazy over buried treasure. But she was a conscientious student so she sat down at the little desk in her room and reread the story and took some notes in her English notebook. Then, for Latin, she translated a chapter on Caesar’s conquests, which she cared not a flip about (and really, how could anyone expect her to study while she was being tortured by this eternal itching?). She disliked the idea of men on horses with swords, hitting at one another, all in a frenzy of self-righteousness and greed. Except for amo, amas, amat, which she liked the sound of, she generally detested Latin with its eternal conjunctions and declensions.

  As she put up her books, she heard a scratching at the screen door out back, then a series of bumps and bangs. The back door from the downstairs hall to the screen porch had been propped open to let in some air
, though the air outside was hotter and muggier than it was inside the house. She went to the door and there was Snowball, something wet and wriggling in her mouth. A kitten. It looked like it had just been born. Snowball had gone and done it again. Over the course of the years, she’d had a zillion kittens. Some of them still hung around, taking care of the mice in the garage, but most were long gone. And now a new litter! But why was Snowball carrying this one to the house? She always kept her kittens well hidden until they were so lively they couldn’t be contained and came tumbling out of whatever hiding place she’d stashed them in.

  When Jo opened the door, Snowball ran in and dropped the kitten under the table on the screen porch, where it lurched about blindly, and then went back to the door leading out to the backyard and cried for Jo to open it. Jo let her out and a minute later she was back with another bedraggled kitten, which she put alongside the first. Jo went back inside and got several towels from the bathroom and put the kittens on it. When Snowball came back with number three, she stayed, placing the last on the wood floor of the porch. She dragged the towel with the first two kittens on it farther back under the table to the back wall, then picked up the last one and placed it alongside the rest and settled down beside them. Jo hoped her mother wouldn’t notice. The screen porch held a haphazard assortment of things: the table with its oilcloth tablecloth was covered in pots and gardening supplies and canning jars; there was a clothesline for her mother’s stockings; in the corner, mops and brooms, a large crock for pickled peaches, a chair for Essie to sit in when she needed to take a break from the heat in the kitchen, though now they no longer employed Essie full time in an effort to cut costs, which was all the pity since Alice McNabb was not gifted in the kitchen, and between the baby and the cleaning, she was always late with the midday dinner. This made Mort McNabb grumpy when he walked home from his law office down on Jefferson to eat and have his midday nap. But money didn’t grow on trees, and without Alice’s salary, Essie had become a luxury, not a necessity. Now all she did was the heavy cleaning and Saturday dinner, muttering under her breath about how she was now having to peck around like a chicken all over town to piece together a living wage, how this arrangement couldn’t go on.