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  The front door slammed and a man burst in. Behind him were two boys and a young woman holding a baby, all of the children crying, and the baby with a bloody hand.

  The man stopped short when he saw Dovey. He turned to his wife. “What we got here?”

  “She’s cold and wet, Henry. What’s happening out there?”

  “Half the town blowed plumb away. Jessie’s roof is gone. Good thing I got there. They going to have to stay with us. You need to get some beds ready and get out the blankets. It’s freezing out there. Get the girl to help you.” The man pointed at Dovey.

  Dovey moved toward the door. “I can’t. Got to find my own people.”

  When she spoke, the little boys stopped crying and looked at her in alarm. The only sound in the room now the baby’s wail and the crackling of the fire. Dovey reached the middle of the room, her dress still wet, still clinging to her. She was embarrassed by the dress and covered her breasts. She was so tiny even the boys dwarfed her. As the firelight danced and played, she could see only shadows where faces should have been.

  “Well then, get out of here, nigger.”

  The words came from the shadows, but they were spoken by the young woman who held the baby.

  The white-haired woman moved away from the fire. “Don’t go talking trash, Jessie.”

  “She think we running a free nigger boardinghouse here, Mama?”

  Sticks and stones, Dovey’s mother used to say. Don’t pay them no mind. Ain’t worth the spit in your mouth. They just words. Dovey had heard it all before, countless times, but here, in this room, it made her feel tired in a new way of being tired. Tired piled upon tired, a-mountain-of-dirty-laundry tired.

  Dovey headed straight for the door. She was limping now, the cut in her foot heating up.

  She opened the screen door, then turned and looked at the white-haired woman. “Much obliged for the heat.”

  The woman took the shawl from around her shoulders and brought it to Dovey and put it around her shoulders. “Here.”

  The shawl was wool. It held the woman’s body warmth and settled like a live thing on Dovey’s shoulders. She nodded at the woman and tied the shawl across her chest.

  Outside, the hail had turned back to rain, colder and steadier than before. The rain now seemed a thing apart from everything else. Her life was this rain, her grave would be a mud hole. Her cut foot burned and throbbed.

  Cries for help all around. Louder now. Oh please! Somebody, please!

  She tripped over something solid, fell on her face, her right hand thrown out automatically to catch her fall. Her wrist gave a little; something sharp on the palm of her hand. A piece of glass?

  She reached down to feel the object, which was slick with rain. When she first touched it, it felt like the torso of a baby and she shrank from it. Something dead, or a piece of somebody. Then she touched it again. It was smooth and rounded and cold as ice. What? She put both hands down and picked it up. It rolled heavily toward her belly. Pork! It smelled like pork! She brought it to her nose. Ham. A ham. Had to be one of G. M. Crane’s. He had the only white smokehouse in town, down on South Robbins. Her stomach roiled and she dropped the ham. What she and Virgil would have given under normal conditions for one of G. M. Crane’s hams! She could have made it last a good solid year, cutting tiny pieces for seasoning her collards and beans and soups. Her mouth watered, then the water turned to bile and she vomited up her supper.

  The rain washed her clean and she resumed walking, her foot on fire. Men passed her by, traveling in groups of three or four, checking houses, carrying people out on blankets and doors that had blown into the street. Some walked in front of a truck, clearing the street for it to pass. In the truck bed, hurt people holding other hurt people, everybody crying and moaning and calling out.

  A man emerged from the dark. He was carrying a little girl over his shoulder like a gunnysack.

  Dovey went up to him. “Mister, do you know where they’re taking folks?”

  “Down to the Lyric Theatre. Hospital roof caved in. Some folks went to First Methodist but the bad ones they’re taking to the Lyric. Got the doctors and nurses there. Popcorn machine sterilizing instruments. It’s bad. No anesthetic. The worst ones they’re putting on the Frisco. The Accommodation came in right after this thing hit. They’re loading it up with wounded. Going to back it up to Memphis. Coming back for more when it unloads those. They’re on stretchers, lying in the rain, up at Crosstown, more dead than alive, waiting to get loaded.”

  “Colored too? They taking colored out on the train?”

  The man looked at her blankly. “Don’t remember seeing any colored.”

  Dovey stood in the rain as he walked on. As a girl, she’d loved the Lyric Theatre. On Saturday nights her mother would boil peanuts and take her and Janesy and Uldine and Blue to the vaudeville shows. They would pay their three cents and sit up in the balcony and laugh at white men with black faces sing and dance and roughhouse onstage. It was a job of work to keep her little brother from lobbing the peanut shells on the white folks sitting below; she’d swat at him, twist back his thumb when he misbehaved.

  As she stood there wondering what to do next, the man with the girl on his shoulder came back. “Big oak just went over, trunk and all. It’s got Green Street blocked. Got to go up to Church Street and go over.”

  He headed toward Church and Dovey followed, walking a few steps behind. At the corner of Church and Franklin, he turned left toward town. She stopped, the shawl now a wet hairy heaviness on her shoulders. Her knees had begun to buckle. Her bladder had taken on a mind of its own and let go without warning the split second she stepped off the porch of the white lady’s house. Now her legs had turned to blocks of ice. To her left, about three long blocks away (and who knew what shape the street was in) was downtown; to her right, two houses up on Church was the McNabb place, the sturdiest house in Tupelo. Even the front porch seemed fortress-like, with its brick and concrete ledges thick enough to walk on, its giant brick columns. Ugly and square and solid as a mountain. Maybe she could rest under the cover of the porch for a while, get out of the rain just a few minutes without anyone being the wiser.

  Something else too she wanted to see. Something ugly hopped into her mind. Froze like a jackrabbit in the grass.

  Old storm, you get ahold of that Devil? That why you come to town?

  WHEN DREAMA didn’t come straight back from delivering the clean and picking up the dirty that hot, blustery June afternoon more than a year ago, she hadn’t worried. She figured her granddaughter had taken a detour and stopped at Mr. J’s down Green Street, the only black-owned food market in Tupelo, where, because of the weather, she might have pilfered a nickel from the laundry money for an ice cream cone—strawberry was her favorite. Maybe she ran into some of her girlfriends. Dovey frowned. Had Dreama left the laundry cart with the McNabb dirty outside in the sun, where anybody could have at its contents? The girls might have stood around Mr. J’s box fan, their cones melting, yakety-yakking, losing track of the time the way young girls do. Maybe somebody was stealing Mr. McNabb’s shirts right that very minute.

  By the time it was dark and Virgil got home from the mill, Dovey was pacing around the kitchen table. When he came up to the back door to hand her his mill clothes, he was already half undressed. Dovey poked her head out. “What you think that girl’s doing with herself, out past dark? Just sent her by the McNabbs’.”

  Virgil coughed. He began to unbuckle his overalls.

  Dovey knew what that cough meant. That the cotton had been particularly bad that day with the windows closed against the heat. “You reckon she’s at Mr. J’s eating ice cream?”

  Virgil ran his hand through his hair and then scratched his forearms where the cotton had stuck to his skin. “Ain’t he closed by now?”

  Dovey gave him a little push. “Go find her.”

  He sat down on the porch stoop, cursing under his breath, reattached his suspenders, and laced his brogans back up. Then he headed
down the street to Mr. J’s.

  By that time, it was full dark. Dovey went out onto the front porch and looked down the street. A half pie of a moon was rising. Did they have another Charlesetta on their hands? Maybe they’d been too easy on the girl. Dovey pondered various punishments for worrying them so, but none seemed to fit. Would she make Dreama stay home next weekend? No picture show, no visiting the girlfriends. That would be fine with Dreama. She loved nothing better than to sit around the house and read her books. Would Dovey give the girl the back of her hand? Neither she nor Virgil had the stomach for it.

  Dovey had turned to go back in the house and by habit checked Henry’s box on the porch. Henry, Dovey saw, had burrowed down into the sawdust so that only the tip of his nose showed. She touched it, then touched it again. The guinea pig’s nose was surprisingly cool for such a hot night. She went back inside and stoked the wood stove to heat her iron. Might as well get a shirt or two done while she was waiting. She washed her hands and covered the bowls on the table with lids from her pots. They should have finished supper by now, she should be washing the dishes and preparing to tackle the ironing, which she’d saved until nightfall when it was cooler. It had been a good supper too, when it was hot. Mashed sweet potatoes, pinto beans with a piece of pickled pork for flavor, corn bread.

  Would this night never end? She sighed and tested the iron. Despite the warmth from the stove and the still-blistering heat from outdoors, she shivered, once then twice. She went back to the bedroom and reached up on a nail inside the doorway to get down her sweater. She hoped she wasn’t catching a cold.

  She had just fastened the top button when she heard something on the porch. A thud. Then, on the heels of the thud, a metallic clanging. She opened the front door and peered out through the dark.

  The half-pie moon was coming on strong now. The washtub shone, and below it lay someone half in shadow. This somebody had her laundry stick and was banging away at the tub’s legs. This somebody was her granddaughter.

  Dovey ran over to Dreama and bent down. She couldn’t see the girl well so she tugged on her legs to pull her out from under the tub. When Dovey pulled her into the moonlight, she saw that the girl’s face was bloody, her lips blooming, swollen and bruised. There were dark streaks of something—mud?—on the insides of her legs. And where were her shoes? Good shoes. Dovey had planned for them to last at least another year. Now what? How careless!

  Then Dovey saw the one ankle, a large, dark knot. Then the streaks turned to blood. Then there was too much to see all at once, and she couldn’t, wouldn’t, take it all in. She turned away for a moment, looking instead up at her washtub, standing there in the moonlight, solid and clean and not at all broken. But then Dreama whimpered and she had to look again. That’s when she saw that the girl’s dress was torn down the front.

  Dreama began to thrash and pant. She scrabbled at the porch floor like an animal trying to dig a hole.

  Still, after seeing all this, Dovey thought Dreama would be all right if she could just get her into the house. She tried to raise her but couldn’t. Dreama was, even then, a head taller and twenty pounds heavier than her grandmother. Dovey pulled and tugged but couldn’t move her. Through the whole process, Dreama continued to pant, her face turned away. Then she stared up at Dovey with one enormous eye, the other now swollen shut. That one eye was so full of fear that Dovey dropped her down on the porch floor, grabbed the laundry stick from her hand, and hollered out into the dark. “Who’s out there? Go way.”

  When she knelt back down to gather Dreama again, the girl had passed out. By that time the neighbors had been roused. Next door a light flicked on. Dovey hollered again, and they came running, Harmony and Hoover Gates from the shotgun on the right, Melvin and Ollie Hudson from the dogtrot on the left. The men picked up Dreama and brought her inside and laid her on Dovey and Virgil’s bed in the back room. Then they went for Dr. Juber. Dovey got out a washcloth and the small tub she used for delicates. She ran some water and heated it in a pot on the stove. She threw another piece of wood in the stove. Each step she took, each action, required every ounce of strength she had.

  When she went into the bedroom, the two women, Harmony and Ollie, were standing over Dreama, surveying the damage. Ollie was humming under her breath, getting louder and louder. Harmony took one of Dreama’s hands and rubbed it.

  “Shut your mouth,” Dovey said to Ollie. Dreama was pumping blood, couldn’t they see that? Why were they just standing there? Ollie ran next door for menstrual rags. When Dovey began to wash Dreama’s face and Harmony lifted Dreama’s legs so the cloths could be placed, the one eye popped open again and snagged Dovey. You sent me into the lion’s den.

  “Aw, no, girl,” Dovey said over and over, washing the face, pulling back the hair, matted in blood. “Aw, no.”

  But the eye kept on saying.

  IT WAS that eye of Dreama’s, how in that moment it had looked at her and then, somehow, through her to the place Dovey had sent her to, the lion’s den, that made Dovey turn right instead of left on Church Street, north to the McNabbs’ on the corner of Walnut and Church instead of south to downtown where her own people, if there were any left, probably would be.

  She had to see with her own eyes what had happened to Son McNabb. If there was any justice in the world (which she highly doubted), he’d be dead as one of G. M. Crane’s prize hams.

  4

  10:17 P.M.

  Inside the fireplace, Jo awoke to her mother’s screams, which seemed to come, not from upstairs, but from a much more distant place.

  Where was her Tommy? She’d picked him up out of the crib, she swore she had. She could still feel his heft in her arms. She could still smell the rose water and glycerin she’d put in his hair that very morning after his bath. But now he was gone. Where was everybody? Would somebody please come help her?

  Jo tried to call back to her mother, to tell Alice not to worry, they’d find the baby, but Jo’s mouth was clogged with something feathery. Was it soot? She couldn’t see a thing, that much she knew, and there was something else too, something about Son. Had she seen him, or was she dreaming that part? Was she dreaming now? Son had a way of turning her dreams into nightmares. She’d be dreaming an ordinary dream about everyday comings and goings, school and dresses and parties and piano recitals, dreams any ordinary girl would have, and he would slither out from a crevasse in her mind and strike where least expected, fanged and venomous. She’d wake up in a sweat, her heart at full gallop. The only way she’d be able to get back to sleep would be to take her pillow and blanket and crawl into her closet, shut the door, and sleep on the floor, hidden from sight under the hanging clothes, for the rest of the night.

  “Where’s the baby? Somebody needs to find the baby.” Her mother again. Jo could hear her only faintly, clomping around overhead, banging into things, stumbling through the upstairs bedrooms. Jo opened her eyes to a sea of red-clay mud. Blood? Her arm throbbed. Something was drilling a hole in the front of her head. Where was she? With her right hand she felt around her. The bricks of the fireplace, now loose and crumbling. Then, all of a sudden, the sound of settling: a rumble. Instinctively she jumped aside and something came down. Was it the chimney? There was a scrape, then the sickening thud of collapse. Bricks whizzed by her face, crashing all around her. One grazed her cheek. Was the house falling in? Now she was crawling across the floor, the same floor she had crawled upon as a baby, now covered in bits and chunks of debris. She pushed aside boards and furniture pillows, then a sack of what felt like flour. Where was her father?

  Something about Son still nagged at her. Caesar’s army popped into her head: the swords, piercing, gouging.

  Serendipitous: a Word to Keep from her mother. It popped into her head like a cloud above the head of a character in the funny papers.

  Everything black as pitch. Her eyes burned. Her broken arm throbbed each time she moved it. There was a stabbing pain in her forehead. Her head felt too heavy for her neck. She rose on
her haunches and, squatting, put her hand up to her forehead, touched something hard and smooth and cold. Something the size of a spatula, jagged, sticking out of her forehead. A shard.

  Upstairs, still, her mother crashed about from room to room, screaming.

  She tried to stand but her knees buckled. When she sank to the floor she reached out with her right hand to catch herself and touched a bare foot, then a leg. She felt her way up the torso, touched the jellied mass between the legs: a man.

  She heard footsteps to her left, then her father’s voice. “Alice! Jo!”

  Why didn’t her mother come downstairs?

  “Alice!” Her father’s footsteps clattering up the stairs, wild horses.

  “Mort, oh thank God! I can’t find Tommy. He was right here. I had him but now he’s gone. He blew away! He blew right out of my arms! Oh God! I think he went through the window.”

  Now Jo tried to tell them she couldn’t see. The words came out muffled. Her mouth still full of soot. She spit once, then twice.

  Somebody ran down the stairs and into the living room, then stopped short.

  “Daddy?” Jo said, reaching out, feeling for her father, if indeed this was her father.

  There was a deep quiet. A complete and utter silence, punctuated only by a clicking—the sound fingernails make on metal—as something—was it hail?—hit the tile on the front porch. A cold wind blew through the living room. Was the door open?

  “Dad?”

  Then her father’s voice, across the room, muffled. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “Daddy?”

  He was breathing hard now, then the breathing turned to some other sound, so high-pitched she thought for a moment she’d been mistaken and it was her mother.

  “Son, oh my sweet boy.” More heavy breathing now, labored and steady. In and out, in and out. Whoosh, whoosh. Then her father: “Come on back now, boy, come on back. Don’t give up.”

  More heavy breathing. In and out, in and out. Inhale, exhale.