The Sweetest Hallelujah
Elaine Hussey
Betty Jewel Hughes was once the hottest black jazz singer in Memphis. But when she finds herself pregnant and alone, she gives up her dream of being a star to raise her beautiful daughter, Billie, in Shakerag, Mississippi. Now, ten years later, in 1955, Betty Jewel is dying of cancer and looking for someone to care for Billie when she’s gone. With no one she can count on, Betty Jewel does the unthinkable: she takes out a want ad seeking a loving mother for her daughter.Meanwhile, on the other side of town, recently widowed Cassie Malone is an outspoken housewife insulated by her wealth and privileged white society. Working part-time at a newspaper, she is drawn to Betty Jewel through her mysterious ad. With racial tension in the South brewing, the women forge a bond as deep as it is forbidden. But neither woman could have imagined the gifts they would find in each other, and in the sweet young girl they both love with all their hearts.Deeply moving and richly evocative, The Sweetest Hallelujah is a remarkable tale about finding hope in a time of turmoil, and about the transcendent and transformative power of friendship.
About the Author
ELAINE HUSSEY is a highly acclaimed and award-winning novelist who has written under the names Peggy Webb and Anna Michaels. She was born and bred in the south and is from Mississippi, where The Sweetest Hallelujah is set.
The Sweetest Hallelujah
Elaine Hussey
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
In memory of my parents, Clarence and Marie Hussey,
who gave me everything.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK WOULD NOT have been possible without my amazing agent, Stephanie Kip Rostan at Levine Greenberg, and my remarkable editor, Erika Imranyi at Harlequin MIRA. Stephanie encouraged me to finish a story I had started more than ten years earlier, and Erika loved it enough to give it a good home. They guided me throughout the process, and I am forever grateful for their generosity and support.
The journey of my characters in this story is entirely fictional, but I would like to acknowledge the nonfiction books that gave me a better understanding of the obstacles they faced: Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin; Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till, Simeon Wright with Herb Boyd; Free at Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died In The Struggle, Sara Bullard; Civil Rights: Yesterday and Today, Herb Boyd, Todd Burroughs; I Have A Dream: Writings & Speeches That Changed The World, edited by James M. Washington.
My deepest gratitude also goes to The Honorable Judge Jacqueline Estes and David Sparks, Attorney at Law, for invaluable advice about adoption and for research into the amended law of 1955 that made Billie’s adoption possible.
To Jane Talbert, dear friend and former colleague at Mississippi State Univerisy, hugs and a steak dinner for helping me recall the rules that match the writing constructions.
Kudos to my research assistant, the incredible Susan E. Griffith.
The Deep South with its riches of music and food, and eccentric, outrageous, courageous people shaped this story as surely as it shaped me. I have an abiding love for my home, and I hope that shines through.
Thank you for reading. I hope you will laugh and cry at my quirky, redemption-infused story, and I promise to write more of the same.
One
THE DAY BILLIE’S LIFE changed, she was already knee deep in trouble.
She’d been playing with Lucy after her mama had said not to. Lucy’s little brother, Peanut, had something that was catching, but Billie wasn’t the kind of scaredy-cat who would stop seeing her best friend just because grown-ups said so.
To make sure her mama didn’t know, Billie told Peanut if he opened his trap about her being over there, she’d make him sorry he was ever born. He believed her, too. Around Shakerag, the other kids knew that if they messed with Billie she’d beat the snot out of them.
Calling out, “Bye, Lucy,” she set out for home. But the only way there was past dead Alice’s tree.
Billie hadn’t even been born when they found the body of eleven-year-old Alice Watkins up in the woods behind Gum Pond cut into six pieces. Still, she knew the stories. Everybody in Shakerag did. Somebody with a heart black as sin had snatched Alice from Tiny Jim’s juke joint right out from under her daddy’s nose. Then he’d done his dirty deeds and got clean away.
Alice was still hanging around like some avenging angel. She’d warn you when something bad was about to happen. You’d hear the harmonica in Tiny Jim’s Blues and Barbecue all over town, the sound so mournful you’d feel defeated. The smell coming from his barbecue pits got so strong you’d close your curtains and stuff towels under the door to keep the scent from driving you crazy. And if you were caught out in the street like Billie, at the mercy of winds that suddenly shook the trees and rattled the trash cans in the alley, you’d feel as if you were made of glass. One look from a stranger could crack you in two.
Billie started running. Everybody knew the boogie man got bad little girls first.
She ran as hard as she could past Tiny Jim’s juke joint and barbecue place where Alice’s arms had the longest reach. The moaning notes of the harmonica poured so loud out the door she put her hands over her ears. It wasn’t any great surprise that when something awful was afoot, blues swarmed around his place like clouds of angry locusts. Tiny Jim was dead Alice’s daddy.
Billie pumped her long skinny legs into double time. With the blues breathing down her neck, she rounded the street corner so fast she nearly tripped on a crack. She flailed her arms to regain her balance, but something even worse was up ahead—Alice moaning in the cedar tree by A.M. Strange Library. When she took up residence in a tree, the birds hushed singing. They’d leave nests shaded from the sun and safe from predators to perch on power lines where anything in the air could swoop down and carry them off. Even the squirrels gave up their high-wire acts when Alice was near.
It was a wonder Alice would even come to the library, dead or not. Mean old Miz Rupert laid down so many rules, you might as well stick your fingers out so the librarian could slap them as you walked through the door. She even acted like she owned the books. Billie only went when her mama made her.
Billie sped past the library toward the neighborhood park. Struck by a bright idea, she veered through the entrance so fast she fell and tore the right leg of her homemade shorts. Now she’d have genuine evidence she’d been playing in Carver Park like she’d said she would. Her mama would think she’d fallen right through the sliding board. It was rickety as all get out. Everybody fell through if they didn’t mind their p’s and q’s.
Billie stomped around in the sand pile till she got enough sand on her shoes to look convincing, and then she flew out of the park and up the steep hill past the Mt. Zion Baptist church.
When she cut down Maple Street, Billie did a victory jig. Home was safe. A house painted robin’s egg blue. Though she liked the color of Lucy’s house best, yellow like sunshine, she was proud of where she lived. It was the only house on the block that didn’t need painting. A neglected house ain’t nothin’ but a sign of pure dee laziness, her grandmother always said.
Everybody called her grandmother Queen, including Billie. She ruled the roost. If you walked into Queen’s house, you’d answer to her, no matter who you were. She was probably waiting behind the door now to ask Billie a gazillion questions. She’d want to know about every minute Billie hadn’t been under her watchful eye.
Lollygagging, Billie waved at Miz Quana Belle Smith watering petunias on her front porch next door.
“How’s yo sweet little mama doing, chile?” the old woman called.
“Fine, thank you, Miz Quana Belle.”
Billie couldn’t put off going inside any longer. If she stayed in the yard, Miz Quana Belle would keep her the rest of the afternoon asking foolish questions. Waving once more, Billie skipped up the steps and eased open the door.
The house smelled like lye soap and fried chicken. As if Billie needed further evidence that Queen was in the kitchen bent over an iron skillet with a dishpan of soapy water nearby, she heard Ma Perkins on the Philco radio giving her silly advice. Queen never missed an episode.
As far as Billie was concerned, the only good thing about Ma Perkins was that she might cover up the sound of a little girl who didn’t like rules, sneaking down the hall.
“Is that you, Billie?” Queen hollered.
“Yes, ma’am.” Queen would whip you if you didn’t mind your manners. And talking polite topped her manners list.
“Has you been playing with Lucy?”
Billie could hear her grandmother shuffling around in the kitchen. She crossed her fingers behind her back. Everybody knows if you tell a lie that way it won’t count. “No, ma’am.”
House shoes scuffed on worn linoleum, and then Queen herself appeared in the kitchen doorway carrying with her the scent of sugar and grease. She was tall, voluminous and black as a stovepipe. Her eyebrows looked like two gray woolly worms above her dark eyes, and her grizzled hair stuck out every which way. You’d be scared to death of her if you didn’t know how she’d read the Bible to you every night, then sing you to sleep.
Billie tried not to squirm while her grandmother looked her up and down. “How you done tore them shorts?”
“In the park.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Queen mumbled. “That Peanut’s got spinal meningitis. If I catches you over there I’ll whup you good. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am. I hear.”
“All right, then.” Queen wiped her hands on a big bibbed apron. “Be quiet, now. Yo mama’s sleepin’.”
When Queen went back into the kitchen, she left behind the scent of supper—fried chicken, boiled okra and fried apple pies, Billie’s favorites except for the okra, which tasted like slime. She grabbed the paper off the hall table, then tiptoed to her room. Now was her chance to read the comic strips before Mama and Queen separated the paper into a gazillion sections. Beetle Bailey was her favorite, but she liked Dennis the Menace, too. He wasn’t scared to try any adventure.
She plopped onto the homemade quilt on top of her bed. Queen had let Billie pick her own design, and she’d picked Wedding Ring. Someday she planned on marrying and having four kids. And you could bet your bottom dollar they’d have a daddy in the house, not some long-distance daddy you’d never seen and only heard about when the other kids in the neighborhood yelled things like prison brat and yo daddy ain’t nothin but a jailbird. That was the main reason Billie had earned her quick-fisted reputation. She didn’t know if her daddy was in prison or not, and Queen and Mama wouldn’t tell her. Either way, she wasn’t about to let anybody say dirty rotten things about him.
Billie perched on the bed among her treasures—a shoe box with a blue rhinestone earring she’d found on the ground near Glenwood Cemetery at the south end of Shakerag, half a robin’s egg shell fallen from a tree where Alice had been seen, a red bird’s feather Billie might glue on her summer straw hat, and two smooth white rocks she’d found along Gum Pond—another place her mama had told her not to go.
She thought the rocks had been dropped by angels. They were close to the place where Alice had been murdered. Everybody said angels kept watch over children who wandered up that way. Billie knew it was true. She’d caught glimpses of their golden crowns and heard the flutter of their great white wings.
She put the angel rocks in her lap, and then she opened the paper to the comic section. When she did, the scent of barbecue seeped under the windowsill, drifted along the floor and swirled up her legs. Billie’s stomach lurched. It was one thing to have barbecue and blues in your house when there was a pile of ribs on the table and somebody in the corner with a blues harp in his mouth. But it was something else when Queen was making fried chicken, and there wasn’t a rib or a harmonica in sight.
Lucy had said her mama was cooking chit’lins the night Peanut smelled dead Alice’s barbecue. And look what happened to him.
Billie’s hand shook as she tore a page off the newspaper. She was cramming it under the windowsill when she spotted the date: July 23, 1955. Last week’s paper.
Queen probably had this week’s edition in the kitchen with the recipes whacked out. As Billie hurried in that direction, trying to outrun the bad thing that wanted in, she heard voices from behind her mama’s closed bedroom door.
“Betty Jewel, you can’t keep that newspaper hid forever.” Queen sounded like she was on her high horse.
Billie’s mama said something in reply, but she couldn’t hear what it was.
“When you gone tell Billie?”
Tell her what? she wanted to know. Billie tiptoed to the door and put her ear to the keyhole.
“I can’t, Mama. Not yet. I want to get it all settled first.”
“I been prayin’ for a miracle, baby.”
“Oh, Mama. There are no miracles for this kind of cancer. You might as well accept the truth. I’m dying.”
The words ripped into Billie like bullets. If she had been Lucy she’d have screamed. But what good would it do? Her lips trembling, she kept her ear pressed against the keyhole, but Mama and Queen had quit talking. There was the sound of shuffling and the bedsprings groaning. Queen was probably helping her mama up. Billie slid away from the door, but she wasn’t fast enough.
“Billie?” Her mama was suddenly there, her color drained so low she looked like a white woman. Queen towered behind her. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
Her mama stood there like she expected some kind of answer, but Billie couldn’t get past the news of death long enough to think up an excuse for being outside her door. That didn’t stop the woman who could spot bad intentions a mile away and see a lie even before you told it.
“Oh, Lord. Billie, what are you doing out here in the hall?”
Billie couldn’t see a thing the Lord had to do with it. He didn’t take folks with little kids who wanted to grow up with a mama. He took people who were too old to get in their flower beds in the spring and plant their Canadians. Like Queen.
“I’m on the way to the kitchen to get something to eat.”
“Supper will be ready in a minute. There’s no use ruining your appetite.”
“You’re mean and I hate you!”
Her mama looked at her like Billie had split her heart in two, but she didn’t care. Why would her mama die and leave her? She wanted to smash everything in sight.
“Young lady, if you speaks to yo mama like that again, I’m gone get my switch and wear you out.”
Queen was older than God. She had a peacemaker for her heart and rheumatiz in both hips, but you could bet she’d fight tigers before she’d allow any sass from the likes of little kids like Billie. If she didn’t mind her p’s and q’s, Queen was going to catch on that she’d been listening at keyholes again.
“I’m sorry, Queen.”
“I ain’t the one needs no apologizin’ to. You better tell yo mama you sorry fore I skins you alive.”
“Wait a minute, Mama. Something else is going on here.”
When her mama squatted down, Billie hid inside herself where she buried the knowledge that was still screaming through her like a tornado. Outside she became a smooth, clear lake, not a ripple on the surface.
“I’m sorry, Mama. Can I go outside now?” The dark circles under her mama’s eyes scared her. Up close Billie could see her trembling hands and her hair falling out in patches. Her mama looked like something awful had grabbed a hold and was eating her piece by piece while Billie had been off paying no attention. “Please?”
“Billie, were you listening at the keyhole?”
There was no use denying it. Queen might be the one with the switch, but Mama was the one with the bulldog attitude. She never let anything go.
“You’re not dying!”
“Oh, baby.” Her mama folded her close, and Billie held on. Maybe if she held on long enough, she could transfer her strength to her mama. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I just didn’t know how.”
“The doctors can give you medicine.” Her voice was muffled against her mama’s shoulder. “They can make you well.”
“They’ve tried, Billie. There’s nothing else the doctors can do.”
“No! It’s not true!” Billie tore herself away and raced past them to the rusty bus parked in a roofless shed under a black jack oak in her backyard. She climbed the ladder attached to the side, then sat in the green plastic lawn chair on top of the bus. She was in her own place now, high up in the sky. The fading rays of sun felt comforting, like God’s eyes peering down through the oak leaves. Alice wouldn’t dare show up in a tree already occupied by God.
Billie gazed upward where she imagined the Holy Face would be. “You gotta make my mama well.” Did God listen to little girls who eavesdropped at keyholes and told lies? “If you make my mama well, I promise to be good.” She made a sign over her chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
Quick as she said it, Billie wished she hadn’t. What if God reached down and snatched her off the bus? She’d never get to see Queen and her mama again.
Billie didn’t want to be an orphan. Orphans didn’t have mamas to plait their hair in cornrows and make sure they wore clean socks and remind them to say their prayers at night. Maybe God was punishing Billie for not minding her mama.
“I promise I won’t go to Lucy’s again when Queen tells me not to. And I won’t tear my shorts and tell lies about hating my mama.”
Tasting the salt from her own tears, Billie swiped at her face with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “I know I’m not a good little girl, God. But please, don’t take my mama.”
If God heard her, He’d send a sign. That’s what He did in the Bible. Maybe it would be a rainbow. Billie looked up through the limbs of the oak tree, waiting.
Two
LOVING SOMEBODY WAS THE most dangerous thing Cassie knew. When you lose them, they take so much, it’s a wonder you don’t become invisible. She’d always prided herself on being in control, and yet here she was in a psychologist’s office trying to keep herself from coming unraveled.
“Cassie, when the jackass is in the ditch,” he said, “don’t ask how he got there—just get him out.”
It took her a while to digest this piece of advice. For one thing, she had a hard time thinking of herself as a jackass. For another, she was in a ditch that had no way out. She couldn’t change being a widow because Coach Joe Malone was dead. No amount of wishing would bring him back.
“Get out of the ditch, Cassie.”
The no-nonsense advice was typical of Sean O’Hanlon. That’s one of the reasons Cassie had chosen him, that plus the fact that he was a hometown man with a Purple Heart displayed on his bookshelves. Sean had served at Guadalcanal. You could trust a man who had risked his life to save others.
“I can’t see that I’m in a ditch, Sean. I’m just feeling a little blue. And even that makes me feel guilty.”
“Why?”
“I’ll never have to worry about my future the way poor old Eleanor Cleveland did when her husband went off the bridge.”
Cassie was the only heir to the fortune her daddy had made farming a thousand acres of cotton. Still, Joe’s death had consigned her to spend the rest of her life alone in a house that rattled with regret.
“That’s no reason to feel guilty,” Sean said. “What else is bothering you?”
“I could never have the one thing I wanted most. Joe’s child.”
She pictured the Empty Room, meant to hold a crib and bookshelves stuffed with teddy bears and dolls and books about Winnie the Pooh.
Sean waited, a kind man whose mere presence opened up a floodgate.
“After Joe’s death, people kept telling me, You’re lucky to have such a full social life. If I have to plan one more charity event or sit through another book club discussion on As I Lay Dying, I’m going to run down the street naked, screaming.”
“What do you want to do, Cassie?
“I want to discuss Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I want to write something besides wedding and obituaries at The Bugle. I want to march down the streets knocking on doors and telling anybody who will listen that women can do more than put Faultless Starch in their husband’s shirts.”
Maybe she was born out of her time, and that, as much as loss, was the reason her sister-in-law, Fay Dean, had caught her standing in her closet last week with Joe’s sweatshirt stuffed in her mouth, crying.
Waiting for Sean to speak, Cassie smoothed a wrinkle from her slacks. Her pants were barely socially acceptable, a small defiance that suited her right down to the bone.
Sean reached for a doughnut from the edge of his desk then passed the box to her.
“What’s wrong with me, Sean?”
“Nothing. It’s perfectly normal for widows to feel pain and loss acutely around the first anniversary of a husband’s death.”
“Joe was too young to die. It was his birthday. I was planning a party for him.”
She’d been in her flower garden gathering roses for the centerpiece when all of a sudden she’d heard a harmonica, haunting as the mixture of poverty and violence and hope in Shakerag. Her heart had separated from the rest of her body and landed at her feet among the scattered rose petals, bleeding.
Common sense told her that on a still summer day it was possible for the music in Tiny Jim’s Blues and Barbecue to reach her prestigious Highland Circle neighborhood, separated from Shakerag only by Glenwood Cemetery and a block of modest houses that belonged to middle-income whites. But Cassie not only knew the legend of Alice Watkins, she’d been there eleven years ago when it was born. She’d been filling in for the crime reporter at The Bugle that day and had used her press pass to gain access to the parents, Tiny Jim and Merry Lynn Watkins.
For two weeks, the murder had been the talk of the town, and then the case was closed. In 1944 with a world war raging and a town strictly divided by a caste system, Alice Watkins was just another little colored girl who’d disappeared. The only thing left of her was Cassie’s story, “Avenging Angel,” which had spawned a legend. Her yearning could still be heard in the blue notes that haunted a town.
A year ago, standing in her garden with the soulful sound of a harmonica ripping her heart out and turning her blood to an elegiac river, Cassie had known the source of her fore-boding was Alice, stripped of justice and restless for vengeance, predicting a disaster too terrible for even a sometime crime reporter to imagine. By the time Joe’s best friend, Ben, had arrived to tell her Joe had died of a heart attack while he pulled a catfish from Moon Lake, Cassie had already let go of the idea of a birthday celebration and was standing among the fallen rose petals, paralyzed with pain.
Funny how you sometimes know a thing before it happens, how you can be going about the ordinary business of living when suddenly you feel electrocuted, shocked with the certainty that your world has just tilted sideways and you are about to fall over the edge.
Cassie was feeling that way now. The faint strains of a blues harp crept under the windowsills, overtaking her with a truth that was both heartbreaking and inevitable. There was no escaping the past. It was stitched to the future as surely as the thick rubber soles were attached to her black-and-white saddle oxfords.
“Cassie, before I see you again, think about finding a project that will fully engage your interest and your energy.”
“Thanks, Sean.”
“When you see Fay Dean, tell her I said hello.”
Feeling the emptiness of her womb and the loss of her husband like a severed limb, Cassie left Sean’s off ice. Her car was parked under a chinaberry tree out front, baking nonetheless in the blistering heat. The summer was turning out to be a scorcher, with the temperature hovering around ninety degrees.
Before she stepped off the porch, she checked to see if anybody was watching. Old Mr. Hanneford was walking his dog, an ugly shepherd that had lost most of his hair when Mrs. Hanneford dropped dead in front of the dog house last year. In spite of the fact that Mr. Hanneford was half blind and hard of hearing to boot, Cassie ducked back onto the front porch and stood behind Sean’s potted hibiscus till the old man was out of sight, not because she cared who saw her but because she didn’t want some busybody spreading gossip that would mortify her dear father-in-law, Mike, who believed if you had problems, you solved them yourself.
As soon as she was back in her car—a red Ford Coupe convertible she’d helped Joe pick out last year only two weeks before he died—she felt unplugged, as if somebody had jerked her life’s cord out of its socket and left it lying on the floor for anybody who took a notion to come along and step on. She was glad she’d agreed to meet Fay Dean at TKE Drugstore’s soda fountain for ice cream.
As Cassie drove through the dusk toward the heart of downtown Tupelo, the soulful music followed her, the blues notes whispering of love lost and lives wasted, of yearning and hatred, of a gathering storm roaring toward a town unsuspecting and unprepared.
She parked near the courthouse one block north of TKE Drugstore on the corner of Main and Green, then breathed in the beauty of a place she loved. Magnolia trees with trunks as impressive as river barges surrounded the domed building, and a towering monument honoring the Civil War dead stood in the southwest corner of the lawn. On the east side, the town’s shoe-shine boy, known only as Tater, sat on one of the park benches, waiting to earn a few nickels from the lawyers who argued best in shiny shoes.
Cassie got out of her car to wait. The courthouse was a convenient place to meet Fay Dean, who had become a lawyer in spite of Mike’s protests that a woman’s rightful place was in the home and the town’s gender bias that a woman was too tender and not intelligent enough.
Fay Dean proved them all wrong. She had carved out a niche for herself when she successfully defended Cassie’s gardener, Bobo “Chit’lin” Hankins, pro bono, for helping himself to a corn patch that didn’t belong to him.
In Shakerag, they called Fay Dean Superman in a skirt. In the courthouse, her male colleagues called her names even Cassie wouldn’t want to repeat.
Vivid as a lightbulb, Fay Dean descended the courthouse steps, carrying herself with the supreme confidence of a woman who knew everything worth knowing. At the sight of her, Cassie’s unease faded into something manageable, angels whispering in her ear.
“I need chocolate.” Fay Dean was the kind of woman who skirted greetings and got right down to the nitty-gritty. “A triple dip.”
“Why?”
“Substitute for sex.”
“I don’t think it’s a substitute, Fay Dean. Just supposed to make you feel good or something.”
“How’d it go with Sean?”
“I sat there blabbering, and he essentially told me to find a project.”
“Same thing I’ve been saying. What do you think?”
“He could be right. I need to get my mind on something besides the inane chatter at the Altar Guild.”
“I told you Sean would help you.” Fay Dean linked arms with Cassie. “He’s asked me out.”
“He’d be a great match for you. Did you say yes?”
“You know me. I’m a disaster with relationships.”
“Fay Dean, what am I going to do with you?”
“Feed me.”
Heads turned as they walked under the streetlights, and Cassie knew they weren’t looking at her. She was an ordinary-looking woman who blended in except for her hair. But Fay Dean had that certain something her brother Joe had. When you first saw her, you’d think she was just another dark-haired woman wearing a tad too much lipstick. But she had a way of smiling that lit her whole face. And then you’d think she was the most beautiful creature you’ve ever laid eyes on.
Cassie had known her since second grade when Fay Dean was the new girl in school. She had the ugliest haircut anybody ever saw. Mike Malone was the new postmaster in Tupelo and had cut it because his wife had died in a hit-and-run accident, and he was experimenting with ways to save money as well as struggling with raising a headstrong daughter and a too-handsome son.
Cassie had been the only second grader who hadn’t laughed at Fay Dean’s chopped-off hair. When you’re seven, that’s how easy it is to become best friends.
When you’re thirty-eight, it’s as easy as taking one look at somebody and knowing what they need without ever saying a word.
A cool blast of air hit them when they walked into the drugstore. Cassie breathed in the familiar smells of French vanilla and rich dark chocolate. She loved this place, the embossed tin ceiling, sixteen feet high, antique ceiling fans hanging down on sturdy brass poles. It was one of the oldest buildings in town. Thankfully, the owner had an eye for keeping the best parts of the past intact. The brass foot railing around the serving counter in the drugstore was original. So were the floors, uneven oak boards that always smelled of the oil rubbed in to keep them from turning brittle.
She and Fay Dean found two empty stools at the soda fountain and placed their orders, cherry Coke for Cassie, chocolate soda for Fay Dean.
“How did Glen Tubb’s fundraiser go last night, Cassie?”
“The men talked politics while his wife herded the women into her rose garden to talk about women’s issues.”
“The way you’re gritting your teeth, do I even want to know the women’s issues Myrtle discussed?”
“Mamie Eisenhower’s bangs.”
“That’s not surprising. Not many women in this town know much about politics, or even care.”
“I know. I guess I ought to be ashamed of myself.”
“Why? What did you do?”
“I told them that I don’t care if Mamie wears bangs or shaves her head—I want to know what this country can to do to support last year’s Supreme Court ruling that struck down racial segregation.”
“They’ll keep fighting it,” Fay Dean said. “Fools!”
“I’d write an article if I could find a way to sneak it past Ben.”
Not only was he Cassie’s next-door neighbor and Joe’s best friend, but he was her editor.
“You know Ben only indulges your opinions because of your friendship.”
“Hush up. Maybe it’s because of my brain.”
The man on Cassie’s right got up and left a rumpled copy of The Bugle behind. Cassie thumped the photographs on the front page, candidates running for state senator. “Just look at that. All men. You ought to run, Fay Dean. You’d be a better senator than the lot of them.”
“I’d be laughed out of town. It’s bad enough that I had the audacity to hang out my shingle and practice law.”
“That makes me so mad I could spit nails.” Cassie shook the paper as if it were the whole town and she was trying to shake some sense into it.
“I believe you occasionally do. In The Bugle.” Heads always turned when Fay Dean laughed. The sound was as full as the brass section of an orchestra.
“Ben tries to keep a leash on me. Do you know what he wants me to do now? The classifieds.”
“Is Goober Johnson retiring?”
“Thank the Lord, yes.” Intent on showing Fay Dean exactly how insignificant her new job at The Bugle would be, Cassie snapped the paper open to the classifieds. An ad buried between Refrigerator for Sale and Free Puppies ripped into her like shrapnel.
“They’re renaming the baseball field after Joe tomorrow. If we’re not there, Daddy will have a stroke. Do you want me to pick you up?”
Staring at the ad, Cassie was thinking about love, how it can be the arms that catch you when you fall or the hands that open wide to set you free.
“Cassie? What’s wrong?”
Cassie couldn’t speak, could hardly breathe. The little ad had settled into her heart like tea leaves, and she knew she’d never be able to remove the stain.
Desperate. Nowhere to turn. Dying woman seeks mother for her child. Loving heart required. Call Vinewood 2-8640.
One look at the newspaper, and Fay Dean read Cassie as if she were a story she planned to use as counsel for the defense.
“Come on.” She grabbed Cassie’s hand.
“Where are we going?”
“To do something I should have made you do years ago.”
Three
BILLIE LOOKED UP THROUGH the oak leaves to see if God was hurrying up with some answers. But it wasn’t God’s voice she heard: it was Queen’s.
“Billie? Where you at, chile? I got supper.”
She leaned over the edge of the roof to see Queen standing by the bus with a plate covered by a blue-striped dish towel.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’m gone leave it here, just in case.”
Queen set the plate on an old tool bench leaning against the side of the backyard shed, then lumbered back to the house. The screen door popped behind her, and the smell of fried food drew Billie down the ladder. She gnawed off a hunk of chicken leg, then balanced the plate and climbed back to the top of her daddy’s old touring bus.
She’d bet if her daddy was here, he’d find a way to make Mama well. She’d bet he knew famous doctors. Her daddy was famous himself. Or used to be. Saint Hughes was a blues great. Ranked right up there with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. They said the Saint with his silver horn could sway an audience like a preacher at a Baptist tent revival.
Queen and Mama didn’t tell Billie hardly anything about her daddy. What didn’t come from the kids taunting her in the neighborhood came from Lucy. She’d got the information by hiding under her front porch and eavesdropping on Lucy’s mama, Sudie Jenkins, and dead Alice’s mama, Merry Lynn Watkins. Both of them were Mama’s friends, and you could bet they knew the truth.
When Billie was little she never thought about not having a daddy. She thought normal was a household of nothing but women. It was after she got to noticing that other little girls had daddies to lift them up so they could see things like parades and stars and birds’ eggs in a high-up nest in a magnolia tree that she started asking about her own daddy.
Mama would never talk about him, and Queen followed suit. She thought Mama’s every word got handed down on Mt. Sinai from the Lord God Himself. If Queen knew Billie was even thinking such mean thoughts about religion, she’d make her memorize the Ten Commandments word for word. And she’d know if Billie got it wrong, too. Queen knew the Good Book from cover to cover. Mostly, she knew about spare the rod and spoil the child. She kept a willow switch behind the kitchen door.
What Queen didn’t know was how a girl of six needed to understand why her daddy didn’t tuck her in at night and how a girl of ten needed to know her roots.
The first time Billie had ever asked about her daddy, Queen said, “Don’t go worrying yo mama ‘bout such stuff,” and Mama just said, “He’s gone.”
“Dead?”
“No, just not here.”
“How come?”
“Just let it alone, Billie.”
But she hadn’t. When she got old enough—eight and a half—she and Lucy started spying, sneaking around at Sunday dinners and church potluck suppers listening at keyholes.
What Billie didn’t overhear, she made up. She pictured him as a darker version of Roy Rogers, only without the white hat and Trigger. She figured she got her height from her daddy. Her mama was only five five, and that’s if she stretched her neck. Another thing was Billie’s skin. She freckled in summer, so Saint Hughes had to be light-skinned. Mama was dark, considering her French daddy, and Queen was blacker than the ace of spades.
Billie also liked to think it was her daddy who picked out her name. She imagined him thinking about all the stars he’d performed with, then choosing the most beautiful, most talented of all, the great jazz singer, Billie Holiday.
Once when Billie had asked Lucy’s mama about the Saint, she’d said, “He dropped from the American jazz scene,” then went back to feeding her husband’s Sunday shirt through the washing machine wringer. Billie liked to think of her daddy traveling around Europe playing his silver trumpet.
Celebrities don’t have time for ordinary lives. Why, some of them hardly know their kids. Billie didn’t know any of them personally, but she kept up by reading Modern Screen magazine in Curl Up ‘n Dye, the beauty shop where Lucy’s mama did the shampoos and swept up the fallen hair.
Billie used to hope her daddy would send a birthday card, but she got over it last year. You can’t just spend your time crying over spilled milk. Queen said that all the time.
The only thing her mama ever shared about her daddy was this bus. It had been on Billie’s fifth birthday.
“Back when I was singing with the Saint and his band, we used to travel in this bus,” her mama said. Then they all piled in, Mama at the wheel, Billie riding shotgun and Queen with a big basket of fried chicken. They drove to the Tombigbee River where they swam till their arms got too tired to lift. Afterward, they spread the picnic on Queen’s quilt called Around the World, and ate till Queen said they would all grow feathers and start clucking if they didn’t pack up and go home.
When the bus wore out, her mama was going to get rid of it, but Billie had a conniption fit, and Betty Jewel built a shed out behind the house so the bus wouldn’t be an eyesore. She called it her potting shed and Queen called it her henhouse. Billie made her leave the roof off the front end on account of the clever rooftop patio her daddy had devised on the bus. He had built the ladder with his own hands and added a shiny brass railing around the top.
Though the railing would never shine again, Billie kept it polished. It was the least she could do.
Billie ate till every last piece of Queen’s fried chicken was gone, then she set in to eating fried pies. A curtain of darkness dropped around her, but Billie wasn’t scared. She wasn’t scared of anything except her mama dying.
She was probably in the house right this very minute asking the Good Lord to make her well again. Billie would like to know what was good about Somebody who’d let her mama die. If He was in charge of things, how come nice people got cancer while folks like Miz Quana Belle’s daddy lived to do their meanness till they got so old they didn’t have teeth? He drank hard liquor and robbed gas stations. How come God didn’t strike him down?
Billie couldn’t ask Queen about such stuff or she’d get the business end of her willow switch.
There was nobody she could ask. Except maybe her daddy. If she ever found him.
Billie just knew the Saint would come back and live with them and pay a fancy doctor to make her mama well and they would all be a family, especially when she proved that she wouldn’t be a bit of trouble. She could cook, and she’d learn to do his laundry.
She could even polish his silver trumpet. And maybe, if she was really a good girl and didn’t tell lies, he’d let her play it. Maybe he’d buy her a silver trumpet, then they’d sit under a sky hole-punched with a billion stars and send a blues duet up to a moon so awesome it felt like God watching. It felt like being on top of the world.
Betty Jewel would never have let her daughter find out the truth from listening at keyholes, but now that it had happened she didn’t have to pretend anymore that she was going to live. Somehow that was a relief to her. She was so tired. She was tired of pretending everything was going to be all right, tired of getting out of bed in the morning, tired of trying to live up to everybody’s expectations.
You’re not dying!
That was Billie’s expectation, and it was so fierce Betty Jewel worried that when she actually did die her daughter was going to do something crazy, such as run away from home. Nobody knew whether Saint was still in prison or God knows where, but Billie might find out about his family up in Chicago, everyone of them crazy as Betsy bugs and that sister of his—that Jezzie—mean as a yard dog.
Drawing her crocheted shawl about her, Betty Jewel walked to the window. The old bus looked like a hulking animal, something extinct, a dinosaur. When her eyes adjusted, she could make out the slight figure of her daughter perched on top, a little brown sparrow getting ready to fly.
“Baby?” She turned from the window to see Queen standing in the doorway, her face shrunken as a dried-up apple. Betty Jewel’s cancer had sucked the regal and the jovial right out of her.
“Did she eat, Mama?”
“She done got that plate I took out. But she settin’ up there like she don’ never inten’ to come down.”
“Don’t worry. Billie’s got a head full of sense.”
Queen stood in the door way till she couldn’t bear the view any longer. And who could blame her? The disease had eaten away so much of Betty Jewel she looked like a one-dimensional cardboard copy of her former self.
Her old house slippers dragging on the linoleum, Queen shuffled off singing, her way of trying to make bad things good. Always she picked a spiritual or one of the gospels. She’d belt them out, too, though it had been twenty years since she’d had the voice for the soaring solos she used to perform in church. Tonight she was singing, “Somebody’s Knockin’ at Yo Door.”
Death, that’s who was knocking. Still, Queen’s expectations were softer and easier to bear than Billie’s. Lord, chile, I ain’t seein’ no way I can carry on without you. You gone have to hang on a mite longer.
Queen was eighty, the age where death could come without warning. She was at least twenty years older than you’d expect Betty Jewel’s mama to be. But she’d been the last of Queen’s twelve children and the only one to survive. Since they’d found out the cancer was too far gone, Queen had told Betty Jewel the only reason she was still living was so she could help take care of Billie awhile longer.
Till you finds somebody, honey. You gotta find somebody to raise that chile. Saint ain’t fittin’.
Betty Jewel shivered so hard her teeth knocked together. Ain’t fittin’ wouldn’t begin to describe the reasons she’d sell her soul to the devil before she’d let Saint Hughes get his hands on Billie.
Saint and his devil ways got into her head as bad as they had the day she’d flown off the handle and taken out that pitiful newspaper ad. Lord, what had she been thinking?
Desperate. Nowhere to turn.
She was desperate, all right, but she’d chop off both her legs before she’d put her child in the hands of strangers. What she needed was some of Queen’s divine intervention. But miracles were hard to come by in Shakerag.
“Please, God …”
Her head was pounding, so heavy with despair and secrets she didn’t know if she could ever lift it again. Or was the pounding at the door?
Before Betty Jewel could get out of her chair, Merry Lynn and Sudie barged in, Merry Lynn leading the way, waving The Bugle like it was a red flag and she was searching for the bull.
“Betty Jewel, what is this?” Sudie cried.
“My, God. You’re trying to give Billie away like a stray cat!” Merry Lynn flung the newspaper onto the couch and sank down beside it. The aroma of barbecue that always clung to her almost overpowered her Evening in Paris perfume. “Are you out of your mind?”
Betty Jewel had asked herself the same thing a million times. In the light of Merry Lynn’s rage and Sudie’s look that said We’re going to have a come-to-Jesus talk, Betty Jewel’s reasons for the ad drained of all plausibility—Queen losing her health, Sudie’s husband, Wayne, losing his job and Sudie sitting on Betty Jewel’s front porch, crying a river of fear, and Saint … Lord Jesus, the idea of Saint’s sorry ass in charge of Billie was enough to drive anybody crazy.
“Not yet, Merry Lynn. I think the cancer likes to get beauty before brains.”
“That’s not funny, missy!”
“Both of you just hush up. There’s no need for any of this.” Sudie’s quiet voice reminded Betty Jewel of the hymn, “There is a Balm in Gilead.” In her white blouse that always smelled of starch and sunshine, she might be one of God’s earth angels, a placid, plain woman put down in Shakerag to keep volatile, broken-to-pieces Merry Lynn from self-destructing and to ease the storm-tossed mind of a dying woman who didn’t know where to turn. “God forbid Betty Jewel’s name is called, but if it is, I’ll help Queen raise Billie like she was one of my own.”
“What makes you think you’d be better than me? Good God, Sudie, you’ve got seven kids already.”
Betty Jewel wrapped her hand around the harmonica in her pocket and held on. Two years ago this kind of sparring would have had all three of them laughing so hard they’d have to hold on to each other for support. Today she couldn’t unearth normal if she got a spade and dug all the way to China.
“I can count, Merry Lynn,” Sudie said. “And if Queen hears you taking the Lord’s name in vain, she’ll whip your sassy butt with a willow switch.”
“Queen knows I don’t have any truck with the Almighty. If He’s watching over His children, why was my Alice murdered? How come somebody took her off to the woods and did those unspeakable things, those …” Merry Lynn covered her face with her hands, a mother whose sorrow was so deep she’d mired in it years ago and never found her way out.
“If you start bawling in front of Betty Jewel in her condition, I’m gonna be the one whipping your tail.”
“What condition?” In one of those mercurial changes she was famous for, Merry Lynn wiped her tears and turned her fierce attention to Sudie.
Betty Jewel held on to the harmonica. It was time for a come-to-Jesus meeting of her own.
“I’m dying, Merry Lynn.” Betty Jewel lifted her chin a notch and dared her to deny it. “And it’s high time you face it.” She didn’t miss the way Sudie put on her mask of denial. “You, too, Sudie.”
“There’s going to be a miracle.” When it came to faith, Sudie was just one notch below Queen.
“Lord knows, Queen’s prayed hard enough. But if my mama can’t call down a miracle, nobody can.”
“Shut up! Both of you just shut up!” Merry Lynn sprang off the couch, lean and wild and fierce, a black alley cat with claws bared. “You’re not going to die. I can’t stand any more dying!”
Making soothing noises the way you would to a baby screaming with nightmares, Sudie put her arms around Merry Lynn. “Of course, she’s not going to die. She’s going to get better, that’s all. We’ll find a doctor up in Memphis.”
If they’d just let Betty Jewel talk about it. If they’d just quit denying the truth that had been staring them in the face since Christmas. She was so weak she’d had to quit her cleaning job at the Holiday Inn, and her blue dress didn’t touch her anywhere now except the shoulders. She looked like a willow twig wearing a pillowcase.
And cold. Lord, she was cold all the time. While Sudie waged a battle to save Merry Lynn’s sanity, Betty Jewel sank into a rocking chair, pulled Queen’s hand-knit afghan over her knees and listened to her mama in the kitchen taking refuge in the old hymns—“Rock of Ages” and “I’ll Fly Away.”
Betty Jewel wished she could fly away. She’d fly backward to a time when she had it all—her health, her future. Love.
Thinking about what might have been hurt so bad she turned her focus elsewhere. The clock. She could hear the too-loud ticking of the big mahogany clock Queen kept on top of the TV.
And the sound of Merry Lynn’s sobs. She was crying quietly now, saying, “I can’t stand it,” over and over.
“It’s all right. I’m taking you home.” Sudie herded Merry Lynn toward the door. “Betty Jewel, you rest up, then you call in a retraction to that stupid ad. And if you don’t, I will. If anybody has to take Billie, it’s gonna be me. You hear me now?”
“Loud and clear, Boss.”
In spite of the fact that plain, petite Sudie looked as if she wouldn’t say boo to a cat, she’d always been the leader in their circle. The three B’s, they’d called themselves—brains, Betty Jewel; beauty, Merry Lynn and boss, Sudie. They let themselves out, and Betty Jewel thought she ought to get up and check on Billie, but she didn’t have the strength to walk to the window. Snatches of her mama’s song floated down the hall. Queen was singing “Dwelling in Beulah Land” now, an old hymn that promised the downtrodden some blessed relief.
What relief was there when your meager savings were running out and the only income you had was from the three people in Shakerag who could afford piano lessons and the pies your ancient mama sold at Tiny Jim’s?
Betty Jewel leaned her head back, drifting on the melody to a better time, a sweeter place.
Suddenly the phone rang, jerking Betty Jewel upright.
Queen hollered from down the hall. “You want me to get that, baby?”
“I’ll get it, Mama.” The afghan slid to the floor, but Betty Jewel didn’t stop to pick it up for fear she’d miss the caller. The phone was perched on a faux maple telephone table by the couch. She was so out of breath when she got there she could barely speak.
“Betty Jewel?”
“Oh, my god.”
“Betty Jewel, is that you?”
She should tell him, No. She should jerk the phone jack out of the wall, then sit back down in her rocking chair and pretend that Saint Hughes was not on the other end of the line, his voice as seductive as dark honey drizzled over yeast-rising bread.
But he was there waiting, and suddenly she was faced with a new horror. He wanted something from her, and he wouldn’t give up. He’d keep calling and calling, and maybe get Billie. And then … She couldn’t let her mind go there.
“What do you want?” She didn’t dare say his name, didn’t dare chance that Queen would hear.
“I want to talk, that’s all. Just talk.”
Betty Jewel’s worst nightmare was coming true. The Saint was trying to weasel back into her life, and she was plunged into a new kind of hell. In the kitchen Queen was singing “Amazing Grace,” but all Betty Jewel could think about was taking a gun and blowing Saint to Kingdom Come.
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Well, I got plenty to say to you. You still my wife.”
“Are you insane? You were so drunk the day I left it took you two weeks to notice I was gone.”
“It’s all gonna be different now.”
“Are you out of prison? Lord have mercy, tell me they didn’t let your low-down hide out of jail.”
“Got out last week. I can’t wait to be with you.”
“I’d rather eat cow shit. Where are you?”
“Memphis.” It was too close, only a hundred miles away. Betty Jewel thought she might faint. “I’m fixing to make a comeback. I’m putting together another band, found some great guys on Beale Street. I want you to sing the lead.”
“I’m not ever singing with you again. You hear me? Not ever.”
“Aw, Betty Jewel. Don’t be like that.”
She heard the oven door slam shut, knew the pies Queen was making for Tiny Jim were cooking, knew her mama would be washing the dough off her hands and would soon be coming to the den to stretch out on the flowered chintz couch and watch Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theater.
“Can you hold on a minute?” Betty Jewel eased the door shut. When she picked up the receiver, her hands were trembling so hard she nearly dropped it. “You stay away from here. I mean it.”
“We were good together, sugah.”
In more ways than one. Her legs wouldn’t hold her up anymore, and she sank onto the arm of the old couch. “Don’t you sugar me. You couldn’t pay me enough money to sing with you.”
“You and me, we got a little girl. What’s she like?”
Betty Jewel bit her lip so hard she brought blood. If she screamed, Queen would come running. And Billie. Tiny Jim would have told Saint about Billie. Musicians stick together. “Don’t you ever call here again. You hear me? If you dare show your face around here, I’ll have you arrested. I’ll say you’re trying to sell me cocaine.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
She heard Queen’s slow shuffle in the hall. “I swear on a stack of Bibles.” Betty Jewel hoped God was not listening. She hoped Queen was not. She’d wash her mouth out with soap, and her a dying woman. “If the cops don’t get you, I’ll shoot you myself.”
She slammed the receiver down and made it back to the rocking chair, but all she could think of was Saint coming to get Billie and Sudie trying to fend him off.
“Pies’ll be ready in twenny minnits.” The old couch springs groaned under Queen’s weight. “Lord, my feets is killin’ me.”
Years ago when Betty Jewel left Shakerag, who would have believed it would all turn out this way—Queen getting ready to bury her only living child, Billie searching for the truth through keyholes, the Saint resurrected from the awful past, and her sitting in a maple rocking chair with cancer cells eating her alive.
But then what twenty-year-old ever imagines herself dying right at the height of middle age—or any age, for that matter—when all she had on her mind was a man who was fixing to set the world on fire? That was the Saint. Lord, that man was the most dazzling person she’d ever laid eyes on, him all dressed in white up on that stage at Blind Willie Jefferson’s juke joint in the Delta, the lights turning him red and blue and green. Like Christmas tree lights. Like one of those chameleons you’d never guess from one minute to the next what color he was going to turn.
Saint Hughes. With his silver tongue and his silver trumpet. When he put that horn to his lips and commenced playing, she’d swear the angels wept. And when he started in on her with his glib talk, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him, including throw away her college education and her blossoming singing career and say I do to whatever he asked.
The wedding dress he bought her was white silk. The real thing, he’d said. It wasn’t till years later she’d learned it was cheap imitation.
Her ring came from a Cracker Jack box. By the time she’d met him, the once-great jazz legend was already on the skids.
“Someday I’ll get you a ring with diamonds big as golf balls,” he’d said, and Lord help her, she’d believed him.
She’d believed everything he told her back in those days, including that he was going to reclaim his fame and be rich. It wasn’t riches she cared about, though, but the dazzling future he promised.
“I’m going to buy an antebellum house bigger than any high-and-mighty cotton plantation. Miz Queen can sit on a blue velvet cushion and drink tea from a china cup and brag to all her friends that a white woman is gonna be scrubbing her floors one of these days.”
Back then, Queen had believed in Saint Hughes, too, but that hadn’t kept her from crying her eyes out when Betty Jewel married him. Still, she stood in the door way and waved as her only surviving child climbed into the old school bus the Saint had painted black with his name in foot-high red lettering on the side. Betty Jewel had thought she was on the way to fame and fortune.
“Baby, I’m gonna take you on a ride you’ll never forget,” the Saint promised. He’d made many promises, but that was the only one he ever kept.
Betty Jewel closed her eyes and could still see Queen standing by the front porch swing, wearing a yellow voile dress calling out, “Ya’ll be pa’tic’lar now, you hear?”
It was the only advice Queen had offered when Betty Jewel left Shakerag, and it wasn’t till years later that she wished her mama had offered more. How to stretch two dollars over two weeks without having oatmeal three times a day. How to conjure up a dream when the only hope she had was the Saint, and the only hope he had was the bottle.
Then, later, the cocaine. Demons clawed at that man’s back, demons she’d never even seen till the jobs got scarce and the music started going sour.
“Someday we’re gonna live on easy street, baby.”
It was uneasy street she remembered. That and the long journey that finally brought her back home.
Now she was on another journey, only this time the road she was traveling was fixing to peter out. Already she could glimpse the end. She’d praise the Lord if she was all by herself, but she’s not…
She looked over to see Queen staring at her.
“What’re you thinking, Mama?”
“I’m just tryin to remember that recipe for molasses cookies. I’d make some if I had me some good black-strop molasses and half the sense God give a billy goat.”
Need makes liars of us all.
Still, she smiled at her mama’s white lie. And that was a good thing. It was hard these days to find something to smile about, any little thing to take her mind off the future.
For Betty Jewel time had become a pink damask rose, the petals dropping one by one, the fragrance fading till the sweet rich smell of living was only memory. Sometimes an urgency ripped through her like a tornado, and she’d go to the bathroom and stuff a rag in her mouth so Billie and Queen wouldn’t hear her scream.
She eased out of her chair and walked over to the window. It was too dark to see the bus, let alone a stick-figure child sitting on the rooftop.
“Maybe I ought to go out there and get her, Mama.”
“Leave her be, chile. She’s gotta mourn.”
Betty Jewel left the window, went to the chest freezer in the kitchen and got this week’s Bugle from its hiding place under the frozen peas. The last sentence leaped out at her. Loving heart required.
There was no way on God’s green earth she’d let her child live with somebody who didn’t love her. If Queen went before Betty Jewel—God forbid—and Sudie couldn’t take Billie, she wasn’t going to die. Period. And she’d fight anybody who told her different.
She slid the paper under the peas, then went back to sit down in the rocking chair. Queen was snoring with her mouth wide open. The sound of the clock on the TV came to Betty Jewel, magnified, and she shut her ears to the loud ticktock of time. Her breath sawed through her lungs, and she reached into her pocket for pain pills.
“Lord, if you’re going to send me a miracle, you’d better hurry.”
Four
THE EMPTY ROOM YAWNED before Cassie, a graveyard filled with ghosts. There, underneath the window facing the east, was the spot where Joe had put the crib.
“The first thing I want our baby to see is the morning sun.” He’d slipped his arms around Cassie and kissed her behind the ear where he knew it tickled and would make her giggle. “The second thing is my beautiful wife.”
She’d lost their first child that night, lying in their bed in a puddle of blood while Joe cried.
She’d been farther along with the second pregnancy, almost three months. Convinced they were having a boy, Joe had bought a tiny catcher’s mitt to put on the new walnut bookcase opposite the crib. Baseball, his first love. Then he’d added a harmonica. Music, his second love.
Afterward, they’d toasted each other with Pinot Grigio, sitting on the patio surrounded by the fragrance from Cassie’s Gertrude Jekyll roses. He pulled a blues harp from his pocket and serenaded her with the Jerome Kern ballad he’d sung for her at their wedding—“All the Things You Are.”
“You give me roses,” he said. “I give you music.”
The next day while he was on a road trip with his baseball team, she painted a pink rose on his B-flat blues harp. She never got a chance to give it to him. By the time he returned, she was in the hospital fighting a losing battle to save their baby.
When she got home, the harmonica with the rose was gone. She never knew what happened to it.
The baby crib, the bookshelves, the miniature baseball mitt and every other hopeful item they’d purchased were up in the attic, consigned to gather dust after her third failed pregnancy. Was that when her relationship with Joe started gathering dust?
Startled, Cassie wondered where in the world that thought had come from.
“Cassie? Did you hear me?” Fay Dean, who had dragged her straight from the soda fountain to the Empty Room, was standing with her hands on her hips and a take-no-prisoners look in her eyes.
“I was just remembering.”
“Stop looking back. We’re going to fill this room with everything you love. By the time we finish, it will be your favorite retreat.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“I do. Follow me.” Fay Dean whizzed past, marched into the living room and grabbed a rocking chair that Mike had given them as a wedding gift. It had belonged to Joe’s mother.
“Wait a minute. I like the chair where it is.”
“You’re going to like it better where I put it.”
Fay Dean sailed out, a ship under full steam, leaving Cassie searching the bookshelves for the photographs she loved best: the one of Joe sitting in the boat on Moon Lake, a harmonica in his hand and his fishing pole in the water; Fay Dean and Cassie, arms linked, Fay Dean in her mortar board when she’d graduated from Vanderbilt School of Law and Cassie in her favorite pink hat, never mind that her mother always said pink clashed with her red hair; Cassie’s famous mother, Gwendolyn, and her beloved daddy, John, the year they’d gone to Paris to hear Gwendolyn sing at the opera. It had been the best year of Cassie’s childhood. Normally, she and her daddy were left behind while her mother trekked the world.
All these years later—her mother and daddy both long gone—she still remembered wondering why she wasn’t good enough to go with her mother. If she’d had children, Cassie would never have left them behind.
As she carried the photos into the Empty Room that no longer qualified for its title, she wondered what her child would have looked like. She’d wanted a girl with Joe’s easy smile.
“Cassie? What’s wrong?”
“She would have been ten years old.” The last baby Cassie had miscarried had been a little girl. “I wonder if she’d have been a tomboy or if she’d enjoy sitting on the bed with me reading poetry.”
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
“After I lost her, I dreamed she was standing in a field of Queen Anne’s Lace on Mike’s farm, and I was doing a watercolor of her.”
“Cassie, if you want to talk about this, I’ll listen, but I really think you ought to focus on something else. Maybe you ought to take up painting again.”
“Maybe Sean was right about making another appointment to see him.” Cassie looked at the pictures in her hand. “I don’t know where to put these.”
“Leave it to me.”
“Don’t I always, Napoleon the Second?”
“Yeah, well, without me, you’d never get across the Rubicon.”
“As I recall, neither did Napoleon.”
Fay Dean had already swept from the room, a woman on a mission.
Cassie set the rocking chair in motion, and Joe stared at her from the picture frame, his smile both comforting and heartbreaking. Had their marriage really been made of stars and fairy dust, or had goblins crept through the cracks?
“I’m going out,” Joe would say, and Cassie would look up from her supper, too weary thinking about the forever-closed nursery door to ask why.
He loves music, she’d tell herself after he was gone and she was trying to get up enough interest to brush the moo goo gai pan out of her teeth. All blues musicians are like that, she’d say after she finally found enough energy to crawl into bed. They go wherever they can find the gut-bucket blues, racial divides as wide as the ocean vanishing in the commonality of music. Joe had even gone to the Delta once, the cradle of the blues, seeking the old songs, the laments invented in cotton fields by a people with a hoe and no hope.
Later, after she’d climbed out of her depression enough to bury herself with work at The Bugle, she’d glance out the window, hoping to glimpse a gibbous moon, that lopsided miracle in the night sky that never failed to lift her spirits. She’d see a blanket of stars and suddenly feel as if somebody had thrown a sack over her head.
Fighting that same smothering sensation, Cassie jumped up and raced to the attic. She wouldn’t look at the baby stuff, didn’t trust herself. She wouldn’t even look at her dusty art-supply kit and her easel, but went straight to the corner where the dressmaker’s dummies stood. Grabbing one under each arm, she struggled across the floor. The fold-down ladder presented another problem. Even banishing ghosts of the past didn’t seem worth a broken neck.
“Cassie? What the hell?” Fay Dean stood at the bottom of the ladder, craning her neck.
“Thank God.” Cassie poked the male dummy down the staircase. “Here. Take Tarzan.”
“What are you doing up there?”
“I’m coming down with Jane.”
“That explains everything.”
Jane bumped down the stairs behind her, and Cassie hoped she didn’t lose body parts in the process. Finally, both of them stood at the bottom, Cassie triumphant and the dummy intact.
“Fay Dean, do you remember when I used to sew?”
“Back in the Dark Ages, I believe.”
“Keep it up, and I won’t be giving you a hand-tailored suit for Christmas.”
“If I recall, you don’t tailor.”
“What’s to keep me from learning?”
Fay Dean pumped her fist in the air. “Now, that’s what I’m talking about. Soon you’ll have so many projects, you won’t have time to think of what you’ve lost.”
They dragged the dummies into the room where the white wicker bookcase from Cassie’s sunroom now sat along the west wall holding her favorite photographs. She placed Tarzan in the rocking chair, and Fay Dean stood Jane by the bookcase.
“They look natural, don’t they?” Fay Dean said.
“They look naked.” Cassie went to the hall closet and came back with one of her gardening hats for Jane and one of Joe’s baseball caps for Tarzan. Her husband’s scent clung to the hat, and he whispered through her mind like a song with lyrics she was struggling to remember.
“Cassie? What is it?”
“Nothing. I was trying to figure out how to get the sewing machine down from the attic.”
“Daddy will do it,” Fay Dean said. “Let’s have something to drink. A celebration.”
They kicked off their shoes, linked arms and went into the kitchen where the moon was shining through the window and anything at all could happen.
Suddenly they heard a knocking at the back door.
“Anybody home?” It was Ben, carrying a bottle of Pinot Grigio. “I saw Fay Dean’s car in your driveway and thought we might all enjoy a drink.”
The bottle in Ben’s hand reminded Cassie of Joe, of how they’d celebrated every major milestone with that same type of wine, and how, in a heartbeat, events you think of as triumphant can turn into regret that follows you everywhere, no matter how you try to hide.
Cassie took down three glasses instead of two. They drank their wine while Fay Dean regaled them with stories from the courtroom and Ben chatted about doings at The Bugle. If anybody noticed how quiet Cassie was, they didn’t say.
Afterward, Ben toted the heavy cabinet-style sewing machine from the attic and moved it around the room four times before Fay Dean was satisfied that it was just right.
When they both left, Cassie sat in the rocking chair staring at the sewing machine. Would her little lost girl have loved pink ruffles on her dresses or yellow ribbon?
Five
IN BETTY JEWEL’S DREAMS, her daughter was a young woman dressed in a real linen suit with dyed-to-match pumps. She was eating at a restaurant where waiters served sweet tea in crystal glasses and sliced sirloin on china plates.
Betty Jewel jerked awake. Her afghan was on the floor, and the only light in the room came from the pattern on the TV screen. Across the room, Queen had turned sideways, one foot hanging off the couch, an arm flung over her eyes as if she couldn’t bear to view her dreams.
Was she dreaming about the years she’d spent cooking other people’s meals at the Jefferson Davis Hotel, the extra job she’d taken scrubbing other folks’ toilets so she could send her only child to college?
Scooping up the afghan, Betty Jewel covered her mama, then tiptoed down the hall to Billie’s room. It took a while before her eyes adjusted enough to see the small lump under the covers. Her daughter had finally come down off that old bus. Betty Jewel said, Thank you, God, or maybe she just thought it.
She stood awhile in the doorway, listening to the sound of Billie’s breathing. Then she slid across the room as silent as a moonbeam and folded her daughter to her, all fragile bones and sharp angles, the beauty as yet unformed in her freckled face. Betty Jewel was thinking of dark rivers that swallow you whole. She was thinking of deep waters that rush by while you fall down dead in a drifting boat. She didn’t want to let go this child of hers. She wanted to hold on to her until they were both very old, and then lie down together in a cool spring meadow and open up like springboks whose brown fur unfurls along the backbone when they die to reveal white as pure as a newborn.
Billie stirred, her voice a sleepy question mark. “Mama?”
“I’m here, baby.” Her daughter curled against her, warm and smelling of sweat and summer and little girl dreams.
There was another scent in the room, too. Barbecue. Since Christmas it had taken over Queen’s house, seeping into cupboards and behind closet doors and into the dug well behind the house. Every drink they made with the well water had a slight tang of barbecue, even their morning coffee. If Queen noticed, she kept it to herself, and thank God, Billie was too young.
With clouds gathering right over her head and a killing storm on her coattail, Betty Jewel drew a deep breath. If she didn’t get off the bed now, she might never be able to. Easing up, she tucked the sheet around Billie’s coltish legs. She was going to be tall. Like her daddy.
Betty Jewel closed her daughter’s door and went straight to the bedroom she’d once shared with her husband. Since the cancer, she’d become a creature of the night, navigating silently through the dark.
The moon laid down a pale yellow path from the window to the doorway. But it was no hopeful yellow brick road leading to a fix-all wizard. It was an aching road, every step she took uncertain.
As she followed the sliver of moonlight to turn on a bedside lamp, her room gave off the odor of barbecue mixed with cherries. Since she’d been sick, the only thing that tasted right was Maraschino cherries. Empty jars tattooed her bedside table, the top of her dresser and even the windowsill. She gathered all the empty jars and tossed them in the garbage can.
For three weeks, Betty Jewel had been systematically cleaning house, filling cardboard boxes with dresses and shoes, hats and purses, labeling them for Merry Lynn and Sudie and the church charity closet. She’d packed her jewelry for Billie in a cigar box covered with blue velvet—the Cracker Jack wedding ring, the fake pearls and ear studs, the bracelet with charms from each state she’d traveled with Saint and his band.
But it was not costume jewelry that urged her on tonight. Rummaging in her chest of drawers, she brought out a pair of brown socks. At first glance, they looked like every other pair of socks in the drawer, folded double and placed at the bottom of the stack.
Betty Jewel wadded them into her fist, then sat at her skirted dressing table and pulled them apart. A path of moonlight gleamed off the mirror and illuminated the piece of jewelry that tumbled out of the sock.
She’d found it last week. Merry Lynn had picked up Queen to deliver her pies to Tiny Jim’s, and Billie had been on top of the bus playing house with her doll.
In her cleaning frenzy, Betty Jewel had been going through Saint’s stuff, too. He might never get out of prison, was what she’d been thinking. The law didn’t take a kindly view to possession of drugs. And even if he got out, she’d never see him again. Not if she could help it. Any chances that he’d reformed were remote, and even if he had, she’d never been able to trust him, so why start now? One minute he was Prince Charming and the next, the devil himself.
She could sell his good white suit and his silver trumpet and get some much-needed cash to pay her doctor’s bills. She’d laid his suit on the bed. It was out of style, but the dry-cleaning bag had kept the shoulders from turning yellow. Tiny Jim could probably help her find somebody to buy it. Nobody in Shakerag was picky about hand-me-downs, especially musicians. If they tried to live by their music, scraping by was all they knew.
She put Saint’s good shirt and tie with the suit, then emptied his socks and underwear drawers into a paper sack. The church would get those.
His trumpet would bring her the most money. She might even get enough for the sale to pay off her doctors and have some left over for her funeral. She got his trumpet case out of the closet, then went into the kitchen for a rag to wipe off eleven years of accumulated dust.
Saint had taken better care of his trumpet than he had his wife. A good polishing was probably all it needed.
Betty Jewel snapped open the case, picked up Saint’s silver horn. And out tumbled the necklace.
Heart-shaped.
Rose gold.
And inside, the frames meant to hold photographs were empty.
Betty Jewel had cried then, and she was pressing her hand over her mouth, hard, to keep from crying now.
“From my heart to yours,” Saint had said when he’d given it to her. “From the one who loves you best.”
The locket was the only real piece of jewelry he’d ever given her. But more than that, it had been a symbol of hope. They’d just finished their first big gig together in Chicago. The fans loved them, the money was good and the future was a shining road they’d travel. Together.
“As soon as we get a chance, we’ll have our pictures made for the locket. You and me, baby. Forever.”
Drugs sucker punched that chance and then dealt their future a knockout blow. The locket had vanished along with Betty Jewel’s dreams. He’d probably meant to pawn it, him with his drug-addled brain, then had stuffed it down in his trumpet case and forgotten about it.
She had been first to come back home. By the time he’d followed, pleading with Queen to take him in, begging Betty Jewel to give him a second chance, she already had a cleaning job and was supplementing it by teaching voice and piano. The extra income was precious little. Few people in Shakerag could afford formal music lessons. In her neighborhood, if you wanted to learn music you picked up a blues harp and tried to find the songs in your soul.
The necklace in her hand tore her in half. She ought to sell it. They could use the money. But parting with it was like letting go of every dream she’d ever had. It was a shining little symbol of hope, one whose loss she’d mourned through the years. And now it was back, a locket that would be a nice keepsake for Billie. She idolized the Saint and would be thrilled to know he’d bought it. Betty Jewel wanted Billie to have something wonderful to hold on to after she was gone. On the other hand, she hated the idea that Billie would treasure the necklace because it came from Saint.
Betty Jewel leaned her head on her dressing table, too sick and tired to know what to do.
Facing your own end didn’t make you a bit wiser than if you thought you had all the time in the world. Betty Jewel dropped the necklace into the bottom of the sock, folded it over twice, then put it at the bottom of the dresser drawer.
Beyond the curtains, the sky was taking on a pink glow. Betty Jewel climbed into her bed, clothes and all. She felt like a woman entangled in a giant ball of yarn. Pull the wrong thread and everything around you unraveled. If she could sleep for a few hours, she might wake up clearheaded enough to know what do.
When Billie woke up, God hadn’t given her any answers. She was still in her yellow shorts, which meant time saved if she could sneak out of the house without her mama or Queen seeing. They’d have a holy conniption fit about her wearing yesterday’s clothes. Queen always said, If you ain’t got pride, you ain’t got nothin’ …
Billie didn’t want wise sayings. What she wanted was breathing room. She followed breakfast smells to the kitchen, then reached under the covered platter on the table and grabbed a buttermilk biscuit.
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sang “Happy Trails to You” from the Philco radio, which Billie took as a good sign. A glance out the window proved her right. Queen was out in the backyard hanging clothes on the line strung between the oak tree and a scraggly apple tree that was too sorry to bear fruit, so Billie didn’t have to waste time saying grace. If Queen caught her in the kitchen, she’d make her say grace, even though the biscuit was in her pocket.
The hall was empty, too. Billie made a beeline for the front door. As she passed the den, she heard her mama on the phone speaking real low like people did when they were telling secrets. She might as well speak up. Billie knew she had cancer.
But you could bet your britches she wasn’t planning on sitting around the house waiting for her mama to die. Being ten didn’t mean being stupid. When you needed help, you asked for it.
Careful not to let the screen door slam, Billie skipped down the steps and raced off. Just her luck, old Miz Quana Belle was out in the yard weeding her Canadians. She perked up, suspicious, her voice following like a cloud of buzzing bees.
“Chile, where you goin’ in them tore-up shorts? Does yo mama know?”
When Billie got to be a grown-up, she was going to let little kids have secrets of their own. She was going to mind her own business. And she was going to find a way to be the boss without having a single willow switch in her house.
As Billie outran the buzzing cloud of questions, she glanced over her shoulder every now and then to see if Alice was out and about. But there were no signs. She guessed even the dead had to rest sometimes. All that tree climbing and floating on top of church steeples and materializing under windowsills had to be hard. Billie felt sorry for her.
She hoped her mama didn’t end up haunting the blue house on Maple Street when she died. She hoped Betty Jewel went straight to Heaven. Billie didn’t know if it had streets of gold like Queen said, but she’d bet its park had a better swing set than the one in Shakerag. And she’d double-dog dare anybody to tell her the library in Heaven would be run by somebody mean as old Miz Rupert. Billie pictured somebody in a flowing white robe with a crown of stars on her head showing Mama to a roomful of books that still had all the pages inside.
Of course, if her mission succeeded, her mama wouldn’t die.
When Billie came in sight of Tiny Jim’s Blues and Barbecue, her steps slowed. The juke joint was shut tight, the front door locked, the shades down. Night was when it came alive, neon flashing, patrons jiving, music and laughter and smoke swirling as thick as molasses.
This was a place for grown-ups. Billie wasn’t supposed to be here unless she was with Queen or Mama. But she’d lost count of all the things she’d done that she shouldn’t. Lied to her mama. Put a bullfrog she’d caught in Gum Pond in old Miz Rupert’s chair. Kept her eyes open when the preacher prayed, though Queen had told her closed eyes showed respect to Brother Joshua Gibson and God the Father Almighty, and open eyes could send you to hell a poppin. Last year Billie had even sent a letter to the North Pole telling Santa she hated him for not bringing her a bicycle.
She marched past the front door of the honky-tonk toward the alley that led around to the little house where Tiny Jim and Merry Lynn lived. Though she told everybody she wasn’t scared of anything, that was a lie. Billie was afraid of getting cut into six pieces and nuclear bombs that could turn everybody to dust with the push of a button and cottonmouth moccasins and the wrath of Queen. But her biggest fear was being left motherless.
She decided to strike up a bargain with God before she entered the alley. “God, if you’ll keep Queen from finding out I’m here, I promise to shut my eyes during the preacher’s long-winded prayers. I bet you get tired of listening to them, too, don’t you? Your friend, Billie.”
At the last minute, she remembered to say, Amen, and then she entered the alley. This time of morning while most folks were in their houses eating molasses and biscuits, the alley was creepy. There was no telling what was waiting to grab her. Just in case God got busy with a more important prayer, like one from President Eisenhower, Billie balled up her fist. It never hurt to be ready to fight.
Something screeched, and she flattened herself against the brick wall. Was it a haint? Or was it a dangerous stranger, come to snatch another little girl away from Tiny Jim’s? Billie didn’t want to end up floating in Gum Pond in a cotton sack.
By the time a gray cat streaked by with its ribs poking through matted-up fur, Billie was shaking with relief. That was another thing. If she could be in charge of things, she’d make it against the law to starve animals and let them run loose all over Shakerag scaring little girls, even if they weren’t supposed to be in the alley in the first place.
Humming “Lead On, O King Eternal” to show anybody listening she wasn’t scared, she walked past the garbage cans. One of the lids was off. She hoped the cat had done it and not somebody up to no good. Just in case, she picked up speed. When she got through the alley, she had to bend over and catch her breath.
The scent of barbecue was strong out back. Tiny Jim’s pits were smoking, and Billie could smell the meat slow-cooking on the coals. When he took it out of the pits, it would be so tender it would fall off the bone. You could cut it with a fork.
A curl of pork-scented smoke followed her all the way to Tiny Jim’s front door. It had once been green but was now blackened from constant companionship with smoke pits. Billie lifted her hand and knocked.
Anybody else seeing the gigantic man who opened the door would have turned tail and run. But she knew him as the man who sent his gold Chevrolet Bel Air to pick up Queen and her pies, the man who passed the collection plate on Sunday, the man who showed up at your door at Christmas with a smoked ham, even if you hadn’t told a soul you had nothing to eat for supper but a strip of fried fatback.
“Good mornin’, Billie.” Tiny Jim peered back down the alley behind her, looking for Queen and Mama, she guessed. He opened the door wider. “Come inside. You just in time for breakfast.”
Queen always said, Be polite. Just because folks is offerin’ you food don’ mean they got it to give. Her stomach rumbled, and on the spot she decided to part company with polite. Besides, the cold biscuit in her pocket didn’t compare to the mouthwatering smells inside this house.
He led her to a kitchen where the linoleum didn’t have cracks. The curtains had lace on the bottom and looked brand-new. There was a cloth on the table, too, as white as Tiny Jim’s big teeth.
“Do you like bacon or sausage?” She nodded and he piled both on her plate, then added two hot biscuits. “I bet you like butter and jelly on your biscuits, a growin’ girl like you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You got manners. I like that.” He spread a big cloth napkin and tucked it into the neck of his shirt. “I done said grace. Go ahead and help you’self.”
He was the kind of grown-up who didn’t make up foolish conversations at the table, just sat there and let you enjoy your food in peace. Billie started to ask, Where’s Miz Merry Lynn, then she heard her. A low moaning coming from down the hall.
“Is Miz Merry Lynn coming to eat?”
“After a while. I keep her a plate warmin’ in the oven for when she’s ready.”
The moaning down the hall turned to a high-pitched keening. It sounded like Miz Quana Belle’s hound dog last year after her pups got toted off to new homes.
“Mr. Tiny Jim, do you know how to find my daddy?”
He took the napkin from under his chin, folded it into a square and pressed it between hands as big as Virginia hams before he laid it on the table. Then he sat real quiet, looking at her. It wasn’t the kind of stare that made Billie squirm, just a sad kind of look that made her wish she could say something respectful about dead Alice. Queen always said, Speak kinely of the dead.
“Mr. Tiny Jim, I’ll bet your little girl was nice.” He nodded. “I’ll bet you’d never take her off and cut her in six pieces.”
“You oughtn’ be thinkin’ such things.” He pushed his chair back, reached over and lifted Billie onto his lap. “I wish you was my little girl.”
Billie pictured her life as Tiny Jim’s little girl. She’d have bacon and sausage every morning. She could go to the juke joint when she pleased because her new daddy would be watching her like a hawk. She’d have her own room with new curtains that had pink lace on the bottom and shiny linoleum floors that didn’t have cracks.
But it would be Alice’s old room, and she might have to sleep with the dead girl’s cold breath whispering in her ear, her floating head perched on the lamp shade, her chopped-off legs standing in the door so Billie couldn’t get past without screaming for help.
Tiny Jim turned his sad eyes down the hall where the sounds coming from Merry Lynn reminded Billie of a starving cat.
“Thank you just the same, Mr. Tiny Jim, but I’ve got a real daddy.”
“Saint could put the mojo on that horn of his.”
“Will you help me find him?”
“Billie, he was a great jazzman and a good friend, but I done reckon he’d be no ‘count as a daddy.”
“Why not?”
“He had problems.”
“What kind?”
“Big ones. The kind little girls not s’pose to worry they purty heads over.” He kissed her on the top of her head. “Now, you run on home befo’ yo mama and Miz Queen catches you.”
“I gotta find my daddy. He’ll know how to make Mama well.”
“I don’t reckon the Saint nor nobody else can do that, sugah. Yo mama’s in a bad way.”
“I won’t let her die!”
Tiny Jim just sat in his chair a long time, shaking his head and watching her with eyes as mournful-looking as a red-bone hound dog. Billie believed he was a nice man, but that didn’t mean he was going to put her in his Bel Air and drive off across state lines looking for the Saint.
“You won’t tell I was here?”
He winked. “I reckon a little mouse done eat them sausage and biscuits.”
She thanked him for breakfast, then went back outside where the alley and the barbecue pits and the garbage cans looked the same. The cracks in the caked dirt path and the oak trees and sagging light lines sprinkled with black birds hadn’t changed. The sun was coming up just like it always had, and nothing about the way folks stirred from their houses and headed off to work said this day was any different from the rest.
Only Billie knew. Sometimes you could be going along thinking you’d enter fifth grade in the fall and walk home with your best friend every day to find cookies your mama had left on the kitchen table. Then a conversation heard through a keyhole could change everything. Suddenly you’d be on an unfamiliar path without a map, without a clue where you were headed or how you were going to get there. And nobody cared that you were walking home by yourself in a sun already so hot you could fry an egg on your front porch steps. Nobody noticed that when you passed by A.M. Strange Library, sorrow dripped from dead Alice’s cedar tree and trapped you if you didn’t know how to run.
Billie ran home so fast the sun couldn’t even catch her shadow.
Six
THE FIRST THING CASSIE did when she woke up was put on her white pique robe with the pink piping, then step outside to get the paper. She wanted to see if that haunting little ad she’d seen in the classifieds of The Bugle was also in the Sentinel. It was a daily and four times as thick as the weekly newspaper. Still, Cassie had never tried to get a job there. Joe had always believed it was because Cassie was first and foremost a housewife who had only taken a part-time job to have a little something extra to keep her busy. Letting him think that had been easier than explaining how she could get by with expressing her unpopular opinions in The Bugle because Ben wasn’t about to fire her. In small Southern towns, big connections kept crusading women with radical opinions safe—as long as they were all talk and no action.
Cassie had beat the mailman. She stood in her front yard beneath a catalpa tree, shading her eyes for him. The hot air was so sharp it looked like stars. The canopy of the catalpa tree had grown so thick nothing could get through, not even heartache. A cardinal swooped from its branches and zoomed right past her head, so close its wings hummed like a harmonica riff. It was the kind of day where anything could happen. Time could rewind, her womb could bring forth a child, or Joe might come around the corner saying, Surprise, it was all a mistake.
“Morning, Cassie.” The mailman waved the Sentinel at her, then trotted across the lawn. With his short, stumpy legs, wide face and toothy grin, J. D. Cotton looked like a friendly troll. “I brought you some fresh tomatoes. My garden’s just run over with them.”
“You’re spoiling me, J.D.”
“Pretty woman like you deserves it. No offense meant.”
“None taken.” You might as well take offense at the Easter Bunny. As long as J.D. was on the route, housewives in Tupelo could expect fresh tomatoes and okra in their mailboxes in the summertime. Kids could expect letters from the North Pole at Christmas. Cassie took the heavy sack from him. “It looks like it’s going to rain. Wait here and let me get Joe’s rain slicker for you.”
“I’d be much obliged.”
Cassie hurried inside, set her tomatoes on the kitchen cabinet, tossed the Sentinel on the table, then rummaged in the hall closet for Joe’s raincoat. There was no use hanging on to it.
Still, when she handed the yellow slicker to J.D., her heart broke in two.
“I’ll get the coat back to you, Cassie.”
“Keep it, J.D. I should have gone through Joe’s things months ago.”
J.D. waved as he left to continue his route, and Cassie hurried into the house.
It was today’s dedication ceremony that had Cassie on edge. She had better things to do than stand in front of a crowd and make an empty speech about how much renaming the baseball field meant to her. She couldn’t hug a baseball field.
She brewed Maxwell House coffee, then sat down at her kitchen table with a cup while she scanned the Sentinel for signs of the woman who wanted to give away her child. Seeing none, she called Ben at home.
“Who placed that Dying Woman ad in The Bugle, Ben?”
“Woman up in Shakerag. Goober said it was somebody calling herself Betty Jewel Hughes. Name sounded familiar because her husband used to be a famous bluesman.”
“I want to do the story.”
“This is the wrong time for a white woman to be poking around Shakerag.”
“All the more reason, Ben. Somebody has to speak out for these people.”
“They’re sitting on top of a powder keg up there just waiting to blow wide open. Can’t let you do it, Cassie. It’s too dangerous.”
“A dying woman and a little girl about to become an orphan? Come on, Ben. That’s a story, and we need to tell it.”
“It’s none of our business. Go to the baseball field today and enjoy the ceremony.”
“Just be Joe’s widow. Is that what you’re saying?”
“If you go to Shakerag and stir things up, there’s no telling what will happen.”
“I’m not going to stir things up, Ben. I’m going to help save a little girl.”
Ben’s sigh was audible. If she could see his expression, she knew it would be long-suffering. Though he blustered and tried to keep his best friend’s wife safe, Ben was proud of Cassie’s spunk. Whatever she did, he would support her.
“Dammit, Cassie.”
“Thank you, Ben.”
“For what? If you go up there, you’re fired.”
“I know.”
“I’m not kidding this time.”
“Bye, Ben. I’ll see you at The Bugle this afternoon.”
“I’ll be at the dedication, Cass.”
The dedication. One more reminder that Joe was gone.
If Cassie had her way, she’d wear slacks and a T-shirt to the dedication of the baseball field. Fashion meant nothing to her; comfort, everything. But there was her father-in-law to think about, dear, old-fashioned Mike Malone, who would be mortified if she showed up looking anything less than a proper lady, as befitted his son’s widow.
She put on a yellow linen sundress with a white bolero and matching pumps, even gloves, for Pete’s sake. A glance at the clock told her she was a full fifteen minutes early. She wished she could break herself of obsessive punctuality. She was so anxious that nobody be inconvenienced waiting for her, she always ending up wasting a lot of time waiting for them. And now that she was all dressed up, she couldn’t run out to her garden and pull a few weeds or start any little thing that entailed getting dirty.
Deciding to brave her former Empty Room, Cassie turned the doorknob. Her rocking chair beckoned—nothing to fear there—so she sat down to watch for her sister-in-law. The sight of her favorite pictures made her smile, but she couldn’t say she felt the sort of favorite-retreat contentment Fay Dean had predicted.
At the sound of tires, she looked out the window and saw Fay Dean coming up the walk with Mike. Cassie hurried to the door and kissed her father-in-law’s cheek.
“Mike, what a lovely surprise.”
“I wanted to come by early and see if there was anything you needed me to do.”
“That’s sweet of you, but I think I have everything under control.”
“Pshaw. You need some help taking care of Joe’s house. Where are those insurance papers?”
“I’ve already paid the house insurance, Mike.”
“I’ve told you, I’ll take care of all that, hon. No need for you to try to do a man’s job.”
“Daddy, Cassie’s not senile. The only thing she needs is an occasional shoulder to cry on.”
“Well, she for damned sure doesn’t need a psychiatrist. One of my mailmen saw her coming out of O’Hanlon’s office and asked if she’d gone mental.”
“For God’s sake, Daddy. Who gives a shit?”
Mike stormed off to the front porch, and Cassie said, “Leave Mike alone, Fay Dean. He means well.”
“I swear to God, Daddy’s going to drive us both crazy.”
“I don’t know about you, but it wouldn’t take much to push me around the bend.” That brought a laugh from Fay Dean, which was exactly what Cassie intended. Though she waded knee deep into every controversial cause, she tried to avoid personal conflict.
You never say what you’re thinking, Joe had told her that awful summer she’d lost her third baby, the summer it felt as if he had vanished to the moon and she was left behind trying to see into outer space. Yell, scream, cry … Just, for God’s sake, don’t shut yourself off from me.
“Are you ready?” Fay Dean linked arms, and Cassie pushed the uncomfortable memory from her mind. “Let’s get this over with.”
They climbed into Mike’s steady Chevrolet sedan, and as they drove the few blocks to the baseball field, Cassie found herself struggling to recall the exact shape of Joe’s jaw, the way his dark hair had felt against her cheek, the way he’d pull his harmonica from his pocket and start playing so his music came through the door before he did. Even the smell of Joe’s old baseball jacket could no longer bring her husband clearly to mind.
Blistering in the sun beside Mike and Fay Dean, Cassie was thinking how love can waylay you when you least expect it. She was thinking how one minute you can have your future mapped out and the next you’re arguing over whose fault it is you can’t carry a baby full term.
And if the sound of a blues harp happened to float by on the breeze, as it was doing now, you might actually believe it was a sign. Was it Joe, telling her he’d always loved her, even during those hard months after they’d lost the third baby and drifted apart?
Last night she’d gone outside to stand under the stars. Venus had shone down on her, a heavenly reminder of the grace that had enabled her and Joe to get past their hurt and come back together.
Shored up by memories, she went onto the baseball field where the mayor would call Joe a hero.
Leaving her gloves and bolero in the car and clutching Joe’s posthumous award under her arm, Cassie entered The Bugle’s offices on the corner of Spring and Court streets. They were in a venerable building in the center of town with twelve-foot tall windows and ivy climbing the redbrick walls.
Joe used to say she could live at The Bugle, and it was true. She loved the clatter of the presses and the smell of ink. Cassie settled Joe’s plaque on the corner of her desk and her coffee cup on a ceramic trivet painted with rainbows. Give Your Soul a Bubble Bath, it proclaimed.
Searching her phone book for the number, Cassie dialed Betty Jewel Hughes.
“Hello.” The woman at the other end of the line spoke with dark, honeyed tones that made you want to sit outside in the sunshine and listen to the universe.
It turned out the woman was not Betty Jewel, but her mother, Queen Dupree. Her daughter, she said, wouldn’t be home till late that afternoon. Though Queen sounded both ancient and anxious, she finally agreed for Cassie to come to Maple Street.
Cassie glanced at her calendar. “I’ll be there today at five.”
A dying woman doesn’t have any time to lose.
Seven
SITTING IN THE PASSENGER side of Sudie’s old car, Betty Jewel wondered if it was possible that miracles are not prayers answered but the answer to prayers you didn’t even know you should pray. Maybe she should have left off praying for a cure for cancer and the freedom for her daughter to walk into the Lyric theater downtown and sit anywhere she pleased. Maybe she should have been praying that her life would be ordinary. Wake up, cook breakfast, plant your collard greens and watch your child grow up. The things millions of women took for granted.
She had been on the front porch swing, wrapped in one of her mama’s quilts and sick from her soles to her scalp, when Sudie’s ten-year-old Studebaker with most of the black paint missing had chugged to a stop in front of her house. Out stepped Merry Lynn wearing a pink hibiscus-print swimsuit—Esther Williams, except colored. Sudie came around the car, her sprigged-green-print skirt swinging as she walked, and her bosom, large for a woman her size, supported by enough black latex to cover a barge.
“Grab your suit, Betty Jewel,” Sudie had said. “We’re going to the old swimming hole.”
“I can barely walk, let alone swim.”
“Sudie took the day off, and don’t you dare try to say no.” Merry Lynn marched onto the front porch with Sudie where the two of them made a packsaddle of their crossed arms and joined hands. “Hop on.”
“I can walk.”
“Not today, you don’t,” Sudie said. “Get on, Betty Jewel.”
“I’m not doing a thing till you promise I won’t hear any talk of finding a cure in Memphis.”
“I promise and so does Merry Lynn, though I can tell by that stubborn look she won’t say so. Now, get your butt in gear and get on this packsaddle before I put it in gear for you.”
She climbed aboard her not-too-steady seat and they hauled her off to the car, thankfully before she toppled off and added broken bones to her list of troubles. Merry Lynn raced back into the house, then returned with a quilt and her blue swimsuit, the one Betty had bought in Memphis the year she’d married the Saint.
“I’m not wearing that. I don’t have any meat on my bones.”
“If you don’t want to wear it, we’ll all swim naked. How’s that, missy?” Merry Lynn fanned herself with a church fan she’d pulled out of her straw handbag. “Start the car, Sudie. I’m melting.”
“Well, roll down the windows.”
“It won’t help till you get moving.”
By the time Sudie had turned the car and headed out of Shakerag, Betty Jewel knew this outing was exactly what she needed.
Surrounded by the hum of tires and the scent of pulled pork Tiny Jim had sent for their picnic lunch, she waited for her first sign of the river. It came to her as the scent of childhood, water so cool and deep it smelled green.
Around the bend, the Tombigbee meandered through ancient blackjack oaks and tall pines, cutting a path that created sloping grassy banks and carved sharp knolls into the red-clay hills.
“Remember that summer I said I was quitting college to marry Wayne?” Sudie found their old haunt, a paradise canopied by spreading tree branches and hidden by a bank of wild privet and honeysuckle. She parked under the deep shade.
“I said you were crazy.” Merry Lynn reached for the quilt Queen had made and the towels she’d brought.
“And I said you should follow your heart.” Advice Betty Jewel would take back if she’d understood how we color another person with our own heart’s desires. What we see is not the truth, clear and unvarnished, but a fantasy built of imagination and stardust.
“Forget that heavy stuff and let’s go have some fun,” Merry Lynn said. “Get the picnic basket, Sudie.”
As they lolled on the quilt, eating pork barbecue, they were reeled backward to a place where the dreams of yesterday might still come true. Betty Jewel could almost believe she’d turned back time.
Afterward, they stretched out on the quilt, side by side, and called out the objects they found in the clouds. Merry Lynn found two angels and Sudie found a frog. When Betty Jewel found a heart, she thought of the locket and felt a pinch of pain that stole her breath.
“Let’s go in the water.” Sudie stood up and peeled off her skirt. “Merry Lynn brought inner tubes. It’ll be like old times.”
“You two go on. I don’t have the strength to struggle into latex.”
A look passed between her friends, and they both started stripping.
“Betty Jewel,” Sudie said, “if you don’t want to see me down on all fours buck-naked, you’d better peel off that dress before I do it for you. I don’t have all day.”
She thought about the cancer that steals all your dignity, and friends who give it back.
“Why the heck not?” She tried to stand up and found herself lifted by Sudie and Merry Lynn. They unbuttoned her dress and folded it onto the quilt, then led her into the shallows and helped her into a black rubber innertube, the kind they’d used as river rafts when they were children.
With the cool green water lapping over her, Betty Jewel leaned back and closed her eyes. For a blissful hour she vanished into the realm of childhood where boundaries between what was real and what was imagined vanished, where things lost might be found, and anything at all was possible, even a future.
When Sudie’s car chugged to a stop on Maple Street, Queen was waiting on the front porch with four yellow plastic glasses of iced tea.
“Did ya’ll have fun, baby?”
“We took her skinny-dipping, Miss Queen.” Merry Lynn plopped on the porch steps with her tea.
“I ain’t never done that, but now I wisht I had.”
Sudie sat in a rocking chair, leaving the seat on the swing to Betty Jewel. “I can’t stay long. I gotta get home and fix supper for Wayne and the kids.”
True to her word, Sudie herded Merry Lynn into the car and drove off ten minutes later, both of them waving out the window, calling goodbye, and Betty Jewel was so grateful for friends who pick you up when you fall that she could do nothing but wave.
“Where’s Billie?”
“I give her a dime an’ she done gone to the movin’-pichure show. Gone see that Tarzan swingin’ on a rope.”
“Lord, Mama, she can’t walk home by herself.” Ever since Alice’s murder, only the foolish let their little girls walk home in the dark.
“I ain’t dum. Tiny Jim gone pick her up.” Queen studied Betty Jewel over the rim of her plastic iced-tea glass. “That newspaper lady’s a comin’.”
“What newspaper lady, Mama?”
“Said her name was Bessie. Miss Bessie Malone.”
Betty Jewel felt like a dying star spinning through the sky, leaving burning bits of herself behind. “Not Cassie. Tell me it wasn’t Joe Malone’s wife.” Queen just sat there with her lips pursed. “You know I can’t talk to her.”
“Maybe it’s bes’ is what I been thinkin’.”
“No, Mama. I can’t talk to her.”
“Lies’ll eat you up inside,” Queen said.
Betty Jewel turned her face from her mama, then wished she hadn’t. Wisps of Alice spun slowly around the yard, phantom legs floating over the grass that needed mowing and arms spread like the broken wings of a little brown bird. But the thing that made Betty Jewel turn away was Alice’s eyes, deep as Gum Pond and clear as mirrors. Look too long into Alice’s eyes and you’d see yourself; you’d see your past bound to your future, the sight so disturbing it could paralyze you.
“What time is Cassie coming?”
“‘Bout five.”
Betty Jewel thought of her options. Hide. Not answer the door. Bar the door and not let her in.
Or let her in and tell the truth.
She’d rather walk into the darkness of her own death than face Cassie with the truth.
Eight
BY THE TIME SHE Left The Bugle, Cassie’s yellow linen sundress was a wrinkled mess. As if that weren’t enough, it was blistering hot in the car. She rolled down her windows, and the first thing she noticed as she drove into Shakerag was the abrupt change from paved streets to dirt roads. Sinking into a pothole big enough to swallow a beagle, her tires spun. As she stomped on the gas, dust swirled through her open windows and settled over everything inside, including Cassie.
Saying an unladylike word that would have given her father-in-law a heart attack, she bumped her way down the gutted road. No wonder unrest was brewing. If she had to travel on roads like this every day, she’d be mad, too. Add to that the mean wages and scarcity of jobs for people who lived in places like Shakerag, and Cassie had to wonder if Ben was right. Was she stepping into a boiling cauldron?
She forged forward, pulled by her own stubborn will and the smell of barbecue that made her mouth water and gave her the shivers all at the same time. There was no escaping the scent of roasting pork on the north side of town. Except on rare occasions, Tiny Jim kept his smoke pits going around the clock.
His blue neon sign was flashing, and, as she drove by, Cassie caught the strains of a soul-searing harmonica. Real this time, not the stuff of myth and magic. The musician could be anybody from a blues legend to some teenage kid with a gut-punched feeling and a harp in his pocket.
The harmonica walked all over Cassie’s heart. It was Joe’s second love. That’s one of the things she missed most: the sound of blues at unexpected moments. She could be in the tub or putting a casserole in the oven or arranging roses she’d picked, when all of a sudden the blues would pull her heart right out of her chest.
Joe, she’d say, and he’d come around the corner, blues harp in his mouth, eyes shining with devilment or laughter or sometimes unshed tears. It was his love of stomp-your-heart-flat music that drew him to Shakerag.
Cassie had begged to go with him, but he’d said, Women don’t go to places like that. Besides, Daddy would disown me if I took my wife to a Negro juke joint.
“I’ve already been there when I interviewed Tiny Jim, and nothing bad happened to me. Even when I drank a glass of sweet tea from their cup.”
“For God’s sake, Cassie. Be serious. Exposing beautiful white women to randy young coloreds is causing race riots.”
“No, the riots are caused by ignorant, hysterical women and hot-tempered men who settle differences with guns and lynching ropes. You’re not ignorant and I’m not foolish. Please, Joe.”
She finally wore him down on his birthday. To avoid unnecessary talk, they took care that nobody in their neighborhood knew where Cassie was going, and, aside from a few raised eyebrows in the juke joint, nothing happened. In their society, white was not merely a color but a privilege, one Joe took for granted and Cassie agonized over.
That evening, he’d driven home with one hand so he could hold his harp to his mouth with the other. The only sound in the car was an old Delta blues song whose words Cassie didn’t know until Joe alternately played and sang.
That was the only time he ever took her, and she’d finally stopped asking to go. She couldn’t remember when. Or why. Or even if she’d ever wondered.
The lyrics Joe had sung on that otherwise silent car trip home suddenly played through Cassie’s mind. Ain’t no use cryin’, baby. The world done stomped us flat. Ain’t no use cryin’, baby. Your tears won’t change all that.
Li’l Rosie had composed that particular blues song. Cassie remembered because she’d asked Joe. She’d wanted to know who knew her so well she’d written lyrics especially for Cassie.
Or had the lyrics been for Joe? Had he been trying to tell her something, but she had looked the other way, shut her ears and walked around him?
Maple Street came into view, but as far as Cassie could see, there was only one maple tree on the entire street. The neighborhood was made up of one wooden saltbox house after the other, mostly unpainted, with a scattering of them featuring washed-out and peeling paint. The rest of the view came to Cassie in snatches—skimpy yards, many of them overgrown with Johnson grass and honeysuckle that will strangle anything in sight if it’s not cut back, old tires stacked under tired-looking oak trees, sagging porches with swings on rusty chains.
Still, they were homes for somebody, raggedy havens where men with grease under their fingernails and women with detergent-cracked hands could lie together on a squeaky bed frame and forget the world outside. The houses sat back from the street on long, narrow lots. Cassie leaned down so she could peer at the numbers tattooed over the front doors.
The frame house she was looking for was painted a pastel blue faded the color of an old chambray shirt, blue gingham curtains at the windows, navy blue shutters, the one on the left side of the small wooden porch pulled loose at the top and hanging crooked. Several scrawny petunias and a few caladiums pushed their way through weeds that were trying to take over the flower beds. The gardener in Cassie wanted to grab a spade and set to work. The reporter saw the dying gardens as a metaphor for their owner.
On the porch an empty swing with a beautiful patchwork quilt thrown over the back swayed as if it had just been vacated.
When she stepped out of her car, an old woman weeding caladiums next door glared at her with such outright hostility, Cassie had to look behind herself to make sure she wasn’t trailing trouble like a blood-stained shawl. She waved and smiled, but the woman stomped inside her house and slammed the door.
What kind of reception would be waiting inside this Shakerag house? When the front door opened, Cassie startled like a cat with its tail in a washing machine wringer.
Miss Queen stood poised behind the screen door. It could be no other, for she looked much the way she had when Cassie had seen her at Tiny Jim’s, pounding out the blues on his old upright. It had been so long ago she couldn’t remember. Ten years? Fifteen? Miss Queen’s face was a map of years, her dress sprigged voile from a vanished era. She had dressed for Cassie. Suddenly she was glad she was wearing her yellow linen dress instead of her usual garb of slacks and a blouse. It seemed more respectful somehow.
“Good afternoon. I’m Cassie Malone from The Bugle.”
Miss Queen unlatched the screen door, but not before she’d put a gnarled hand to the white lace collar at her throat. When Miss Queen stepped onto the front porch, Cassie thought of the Titanic—a ship capable of taking care of thousands of families, a ship that nothing could fell save an iceberg.
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am. I’m Queen. Queen Dupree.”
Cassie climbed the steps onto the porch, and the old wooden floorboards creaked. Through the screen door drifted the mingled smells of lemon furniture polish and freshly baked pies overlaid with the strong fragrance of barbecue. The legend at work or proximity to Tiny Jim’s? Either way, the scent gave Cassie the shivers.
“I remember you from Tiny Jim’s.” Cassie offered her hand to Miss Queen. “You and your daughter used to play piano there.”
“Yessum.” Queen peered closely at Cassie, squinting in the way of the nearsighted, but she didn’t take her hand. Cassie felt foolish. Coloreds didn’t shake hands with whites, not in this ancient, dignified woman’s world. “I seen you there some years back.”
In the way of old people comfortable with who they are and not about to put on airs to impress anybody, Queen didn’t try to hide the fact that she was studying Cassie. Did she pass muster? She wished she’d taken the time to go home and put on a dress without wrinkles. For Pete’s sake, she hadn’t even bothered to comb her hair. She must look as if she had on a Halloween wig.
“I came to see your daughter.”
“Yessum. Do come in, Miss Cassie. She’s waitin’ on you.”
Queen led her down a hallway filled with pictures. The centerpiece was Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the place of honor on his right was the photograph of a little girl with cheekbones slashed high, eyes too big for her thin face and lips compressed tightly together as if she were daring the photographer to make her smile. Something about her eyes made it hard to look away. The arresting shade of green? The frank stare?
Other photographs chronicled her life from laughing babyhood to gap-toothed schoolgirl. Betty Jewel’s daughter, Cassie guessed. Who would take her picture in her cap and gown? Her wedding gown? The pink quilted robe she’d wear home from the hospital when she had her first baby?
Cassie hoped her story would make a difference. Shouldering the awesome responsibility, she followed Queen into a sunlit room where a gaunt woman sat in a rocking chair, staring out the window. Though it was so hot in the house Cassie was beginning to sweat, the woman was wearing a shawl.
“Betty Jewel, honey, look who’s done come to see us. That newspaper lady.”
Betty Jewel’s shoulder blades stuck up through the crocheted shawl like the wings of a skinny-legged bird. The flesh had disappeared from her bones, leaving behind too much skin. But when she saw Cassie, she lifted her chin. It was pride Cassie saw.
“Hello, Cassie. Please do sit down.”
There would be no yessums and Miss Cassie this or Miss Cassie that from Betty Jewel Hughes. Dying strips you of all pretense, carves you down to the essentials.
Betty Jewel’s voice, rich with melodious cadences, was mannerly, but her eyes said keep out. Her posture said don’t mess with me.
Cassie sat in a straight-backed chair closest to the oscillating fan. Words weren’t enough here. She needed to take action. She needed to lasso a couple of guardian angels and say, Look, do something.
“I’m gone leave you two young’uns by yoself so’s you can talk.”
The old woman slipped from the room, leaving Cassie with her purse in her lap, wondering why she felt Betty Jewel’s hostility like a cattle prod. She had to know the consequences of Cassie being here, the gossip she’d endure from the Highland Circle crowd, as well as the suspicions and tongue-waggings of Betty Jewel’s neighbors.
“May I call you Betty Jewel?”
“Suit yourself.”
If Cassie’s maid or her gardener spoke to her like that, she’d fire them on the spot. But in Betty Jewel’s home, Cassie was the outsider. Nothing insulated her in this shack in Shakerag, neither wealth and position nor the color of her skin. It looked as if she had finally let her crusading zeal get her into a situation she might not escape from unscathed.
She tried to melt her unbending hostess with a smile. “I don’t mean to be nosey. I’m here to help you.”
“I don’t need your help, and I certainly don’t need you poking into my private business.”
“Look, I’m no do-gooder who just barges in. Your mother invited me.” Cassie felt her temper rising, and it showed. At the rate she was going, she’d be back on the street before her hubcaps got stolen from a flashy car that obviously didn’t belong in this neighborhood any more than she did.
“Mama shouldn’t have told you to come here. She may sound like some shuffling, obsequious old mammy, but she’s a proud African queen. And so am I.”
The naked expression on Betty Jewel’s face made it painful to look at her. Cassie catalogued the facts. A woman that well spoken had probably attended one of the Negro colleges down in Jackson or the Delta. No doubt Queen had sacrificed to make sure her daughter had a better chance in life. And now Queen’s daughter was making the ultimate sacrifice to ensure her child’s future.
Giving up a daughter in order to save her was a choice of biblical proportions.
Reining in her temper, Cassie held out her hands, palms up. “Look, I’m out of my element here, and you must be feeling as uncomfortable as I. Can we please just start over?”
Betty Jewel bowed her head and stayed that way for a long time. Was she pulling herself together? Regretting her rudeness? Wondering if she’d insulted the wrong person?
Negroes were being lynched for less. With racial violence flaring all over the South, had Cassie jeopardized the safety of this family simply by being here?
“I’m sorry.” She stood up to leave. “I didn’t mean to make things harder for you.”
“No, wait.” Betty Jewel’s eyes were wet with unshed tears. “All I can say in my defense is that cancer has made manners seem superfluous.”
“I’m so sorry. I can’t say I know what you’re going through, because I don’t. But I lost my husband a year ago, so I can certainly understand pain.”
“You and Joe never had children, did you?”
Her familiarity with Cassie’s life was startling until she remembered all those evenings Joe had spent at Tiny Jim’s. Though Joe would never spread his personal life among strangers, he was a well-known public personality. And in a town as small as Tupelo, the gossip grapevine flourished.
“No, we had no children.”
The conversation reminded her all too vividly of the many ways she and Joe had found to blame each other for their childless state. Joe was dead. She wanted him to remain perfect, but a thick blue fog clouded the room, seeding discontent and making sanctifying the dead impossible. If you weren’t careful, you could get lost in that kind of fog and never find your way home. Searching for something solid to hang on to, Cassie spied the piano.
“Tell me about yourself. You play, don’t you?”
“I’m dying. What else is there to know?”
There was no barb in the remark, only soul-searing truth. Cassie took a notepad and pencil from her purse. “Please understand that I’m only here to write a story that might help you find a home for your child.”
Inscrutable, Betty Jewel slipped a pill out of her pocket, then washed it down with a sip from the yellow plastic glass on the table beside her. “Does it make women like you feel good to help women like me?”
Cassie felt as if she’d been slapped. She had better things to do than seesaw between rage and pity with Betty Jewel, even if the woman was desperate.
“You don’t even know me. If you did, that’s the last remark in the world you’d make. I consider us the same.”
“You mean equals? Like I can walk through the front door of your white house and go into your white bathroom without you going in there after me and scrubbing it down with Dutch Boy?”
Anger and admiration warred in Cassie. She thought of Bobo, her gardener, and Savannah, her maid. Had she ever invited them to sit down at her table and enjoy a glass of iced tea? Cassie was beginning to feel like a hypocrite until she remembered how she inquired about their children, went to their homes with soup when one of them got sick.
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly like that.”
Betty Jewel fell silent, her steady stare saying that when you’re dying your life is reduced to the essentials. Eat, sleep, breathe. Tell the truth. The dying don’t have time for lies.
“I’m sorry, Cassie. I’ve been rude and arrogant, and I’ve misjudged you.”
“Thank you. Now will you please give me something I can put into a story?”
“There’s not going to be a story. That ad was a mistake, and I don’t intend to compound it with a news spread I have to hide from Billie.”
Cassie started to ask, Why am I here? Then she remembered it was Queen who’d invited her, not Betty Jewel. Folding her notebook, she put it back into her purse.
“I’m disappointed, naturally, but I didn’t come just for a story. I have lots of connections. Maybe I can help you that way. First, though, I’d like to meet Billie.”
A fierceness came over Betty Jewel that made Cassie think of a mama eagle protecting her young from snakes. “No. She’s going through enough pain without me adding to it with drama.”
The screen door banged open, followed by stealthy footsteps in the hall. Then a bony-kneed, big-eyed child drifted by. Billie. Full of contradictions. Defiant and tragic. Fearless and scared. Forced by her mother’s fatal illness to grow up overnight, she wore an expression that clearly said she’d rather remain a child because growing up was such a tragedy.
The look that passed between mother and daughter was almost beyond enduring. In the face of such devotion, there are things you can’t do. You can’t ask How long before you die? and Will you give your daughter up before or after? You can’t snap pictures for The Bugle, though a photo would be more compelling than that heart-wrenching, hopeful little ad. You can’t think of your empty bed and the empty crib in your attic and the long string of empty years ahead. You can’t think of anything except a little girl who has turned her stare to you, a little girl with eyes so green they remind you of deep rivers and lost love and the unbearable beauty of the human spirit.
With one last, big-eyed stare, Billie slid past the door and out of sight. Cassie was left feeling as if her bones had been rearranged.
It took a while for them to settle back into place, and when they did, she was filled with an unexpected resolve.
“Betty Jewel, what you’re doing is one of the bravest things I know. I want to be personally involved. I want to help you.”
“Joe always said the biggest thing about you was your heart.”
It was the kind of generous compliment Joe used to pass around. But Cassie found it shocking coming from this woman’s mouth.
“You knew him personally?”
“From Tiny Jim’s.”
“Of course.” Cassie pictured her husband in the juke joint, mellow with blues and beer, easygoing and approachable, talking about his wife to strangers as if the very telling could make her more real to him. On those long, lonely nights after the last miscarriage when she’d sometimes felt as if Joe were drifting away, as if she might meet him coming around a dark corner and not even know him, had he felt the same way?
“Cassie, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No. It’s okay. Everybody in town knew and loved Joe.”
A coughing spell bent Betty Jewel in two, and when she turned away Cassie saw patches of her scalp where radiation had stolen her hair. She wanted to cover her vulnerable baldness with a silk scarf, and at the same time she wanted to take a picture and spread it in on the front page under a caption titled Hero.
“Can I get you anything? Water?”
“No. I’m all right.”
Cassie gathered her purse. “I should go. If there’s anything I can do to help you, please let me know. Here are the numbers where you can reach me. Day or night.”
As she handed over the card, another fit of coughing bent Betty Jewel double. With her face covered by her hands and her head bowed, she looked like somebody praying. And maybe she was. Maybe Cassie was, too, though she was sitting there with her eyes wide open.
Should she call Miss Queen? Phone for an ambulance?
Still bent, Betty Jewel reached into her pocket for a bottle of pills and out tumbled a harmonica.
B-flat.
Silver with a pink rose painted on the side.
The pink rose Cassie had painted.
A keening built inside her, and she pressed her hand over her mouth to hold it back.
When Betty Jewel lifted her head, Cassie found herself looking at a woman for whom everything had been stripped away, everything except love.
From somewhere in the house, a tea kettle whistled and a shaky soprano sang a hymn Cassie remembered from childhood. Rescue the perishing. Care for the dying.
Long ago when Cassie had played church piano, she would read the verses at the same time she read the music. Not many people can do that. It’s a gift. Like knowing things before they happens.
Here is what Cassie knew: the harmonica had set events in motion that were beyond her control. She didn’t know the particulars yet, only that her fate was somehow tangled up with this woman.
“Is that Joe’s?”
“I didn’t mean for it to come to this.”
Lord God, Cassie was going to die on the spot. Betty Jewel hadn’t denied it. She hadn’t laughed off Cassie’s question and offered some simple explanation. I found this at Tiny Jim’s juke joint.
Now the woman was scaring her, but Cassie had never been one to back down from the hard things. Smile and carry on. Did her husband die without warning, leaving her to wish she’d held on to him longer the morning before he went to Moon Lake, held on and said I love you, instead of waving to him from the door and saying I’ll see you tonight. Save your tears for private. In public, smile and carry on.
There would be no smiling and carrying on today.
“Come to what?” Cassie struggled to keep her voice low. Somewhere in the house was a dignified old woman who deserved better than a quarrel in her living room.
“What?” Betty Jewel’s silence ripped through Cassie, as damning as the worst nightmare she could imagine. “For God’s sake! Tell me.”
“Something happened a long time ago, before Billie was born, something with consequences that reached far beyond what I’d ever dreamed.”
Betty Jewel’s voice sounded like distant music, a smoky blues song that could haunt a person forever. Cassie fought to hold back terror so fierce it would consume her.
“I never meant to hurt you, and I certainly never meant for it to come to this.”
“You and Joe?” The question tore from Cassie’s gut, deep where the fearsome truth dwells. “Tell me this is not what I think it is.”
“I’m sorry, Cassie.” If Cassie could go deaf on the spot, she would. “Joe is Billie’s father.”
Look for disaster long enough and you’re sure to find it.
Nine
LORD GOD, CASSIE WAS sitting there looking as though somebody had poked a hole in her heart and drained out all her blood. Betty Jewel regretted telling her flat-out that Joe was Billie’s father.
“Cassie?”
She jerked as if she’d been electrocuted, then bolted. Betty Jewel struggled from her chair, calling after her. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry.”
But she was already out the door, tearing off in her fancy red car. Betty Jewel hung on to the door frame, whispering, “I’m sorry.” Now she was the bloodless one. She slid down the door frame and rested on the floor, still apologizing to the woman who was no longer there.
Queen came out of the kitchen with soapy water glistening on her hands. She looked so normal that for a moment Betty Jewel could pretend none of this had happened. She could pretend she’d decided to simply make sure Sudie would help Queen raise Billie and not mess around trying to fix the past.
“You done tole her?”
“Oh, God, Mama.”
Queen bent down and tried to help her up, but Betty Jewel pushed her arm away. “Don’t. No sense in you falling down, too.”
“It’s gone be all right, baby. I been prayin’ ‘bout this.”
Queen didn’t merely pray: she battered the gates of Heaven with her petitions till God got so weary He’d say, All right, Miss Queen, have it your way.
Betty Jewel tried hard to conjure up her mama’s faith, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t think of anything except how she’d destroyed another woman’s life. Not once, but twice.
Not only that, but she’d probably destroyed her daughter.
“Where’s Billie?”
Queen patted her hand. “She didn’ hear nothin’. She done gone outside to that ole bus.”
“Thank you, Jesus.”
“Amen.”
The prospect of her daughter spending another night on top of the bus paled in comparison to the tragedy of finding out the man she idolized was not her daddy.
“Mama, do you think Billie’s ever going to accept this cancer?”
“Give her time.”
“I don’t have time.”
When Queen put her hand on Betty Jewel’s head, she was humming “In the Garden,” probably without even being aware of it.
“Baby, when the good Lord takes you on home, thas gone be the sweetest hallelujah.”
“No, Mama. The sweetest hallelujah will be when Billie can walk in the front door of any place she pleases, and nobody will tell her she doesn’t belong.”
Resuming her hymn, Queen smoothed back Betty Jewel’s falling-out hair. They stayed that way a long time, both finding solace in the ordinary. Finally, Queen ceased her humming.
“Baby, what you needs is a little perk me up.”
“You got any Jack Daniel’s, Mama?”
“I might. Just for medismal ‘mergencies and such.”
“I think this qualifies as a medicinal emergency.”
Queen’s slippers dragged along the floor, slower than yesterday Betty Jewel was thinking. While her mama was gone, she got off the floor, but it took her a while. By the time she was upright, Queen was back with two glasses full of amber anesthesia.
“I fixed myself a little snort. For my rheumatiz.”
Lord, if anybody deserved a little snort, it was her saint of a mama. Betty Jewel tipped her glass. The first swallow went down smoothly, but the next one set everything from her shoe soles to her breastbone in turmoil. She didn’t even have the luxury of drowning in her sorrows.
Queen held her head while she heaved over the toilet.
Lord, this price is too much to pay for loving another woman’s husband.
Cassie didn’t know how she got home. She didn’t remember driving. She didn’t remember the road. She didn’t remember anything except the damning words, Joe is Billie’s father.
Cassie wanted to kill him. She wanted to break him into a million pieces the way Betty Jewel had broken her.
With one arm wrapped around herself to hold the shattered parts together, she picked up her blue stone pitcher and hurled it against the wall. She and Joe had bought it on their first anniversary trip to Mountain City, Tennessee. Got it at Laurel Bloomery. Got a whole set of dishes to match because Joe said the blue reminded him of her eyes.
Cassie plowed through the shards without even cutting herself. That’s how mad she was, so furious she was superhuman, made of broken glass and still able to heft a whole stack of pottery plates off the cabinet shelves and smash them onto the floor.
“Damnyoudamnyoudamnyou!”
A piece of pottery the size of a baseball flew up and cut Cassie’s leg.
I’m bleeding. I’m perishing.
“Oh, God.” She searched the ceiling for help but all she found was a cobweb that needed raking out of the corner.
With her own blood sticky on her leg, she moved to another cabinet. One sweep sent her wedding glasses airborne. Sun caught the Baccarat crystal as it arced through the air. For a moment there was a rainbow on the wall.
After a rain when the sun was shining just right, Joe used to race inside to get her so they could watch the sky light up together. He would tell her I want to give you rainbows.
But he’d given Betty Jewel Hughes a child.
There was an awful sound coming from somewhere far away, the high-pitched wailing of a woman grieving, a woman who had lost everything. Her husband, her memories, her marriage, her trust, her pride.
Cassie cleaned out the cabinets one by one, raking and hurling until there was not a dish left. Not even a salt-and-pepper shaker.
Her kitchen was Berlin, bombed. Her left leg was cut in two places, both arms were scratched, and her linen dress was speckled with blood. She looked like a woman gone crazy. She sank into a kitchen chair and didn’t know how long she sat there, paralyzed.
Her legs would hardly hold her as she finally moved through her house, blind, partially deaf. The phone was ringing and ringing, a small annoyance filtering through the swirling red fog of rage.
Cassie focused on the tub, the water taps, the bottle of pink bath beads. She dumped in the whole bottle, then stripped, stepped into the water and vanished in bubbles.
The phone stopped ringing a while, then commenced again. It was probably Fay Dean. She’d promised her sister-in-law they’d see East of Eden tonight. “We can salivate over James Dean,” Fay Dean had said, and Cassie had laughed at the idea she could salivate over anybody except Joe Malone.
Closing her eyes, she slid under the water and her hair floated out behind her. I could drown in here. I could stay under and let the water steal my breath, still my beating heart.
“No!” She scrambled up, sputtering. “Liar! Cheat!” Cassie fought her way out of the tub, slid through the overflowing bubbles, then slammed the bathroom door on the whole mess. Joe’s baseball jacket was hanging next to her white linen blazer, polluting her closet, filling it with the stench of betrayal.
Holding it at arm’s length, Cassie started to enter her warzone of a kitchen, then backtracked for shoes and a robe. Back in the kitchen it took her a while to find the lighter fluid, the matches.
When she stepped onto the patio, she was soul-punched by the universe. It was her favorite time of evening, that perfect moment when you can see the faint colors of sunset still bleeding all over the sky while a sliver of moon hangs around on the opposite side waiting for the stars.
It seemed a shame to ruin a perfectly good evening with a bonfire of deceit. Cassie sat in the wrought-iron glider and rocked back and forth, trying to find ease.
There was none. Cassie thought about the sneaky nature of disaster, how it could creep into the room without warning and announce itself in the quiet voice of a dying woman. Shouldn’t there have been thunder shaking the ground, sirens screaming, people scattering to take cover? Maybe the quietness itself should have been a warning—the lull before a tornado rips your house apart.
She got up, poured lighter fluid into the bowl of the grill, tossed in a match. She was getting ready to toss in Joe’s jacket when grief buckled her knees. She buried her face in the leather and cloth that still retained Joe’s scent.
“How could you?” she moaned.
She remained on her knees with the flames licking out of the grill and the sky popping with stars. Finally she smothered the flames with the grill’s lid, then went inside and lay down on her bed, clutching Joe’s jacket. She cried until exhaustion claimed her.
Her fitful slumber was raided by memories, all bent on inflicting pain. When she awoke, Cassie huddled in a fetal position in the middle of the bed she’d shared with a man she didn’t even know, a stranger who’d had a life beyond their marriage.
She’d told Joe everything. She’d kept no secrets. Until today, she’d thought he’d done the same.
Was it still today? It was too dark to tell.
The phone was ringing. Cassie counted twelve rings before it stopped, then started all over again.
Fay Dean was probably upset that she hadn’t shown up at the theater, and maybe worried, too.
“I’m sorry,” Cassie whispered.
She stumbled to the bathroom and turned on the light. She didn’t know the puffy-faced, dead-eyed woman with her feet sunk in wet, bubble-ravaged carpet. She used to find part of her definition as the woman Joe loved, but he’d stolen that from her. He and Betty Jewel.
She wanted to smash something. Hard. She picked up her perfume, gardenia, Joe’s favorite fragrance. With her hand raised she was fully intent on hurling the bottle into the mirror.
What if Betty Jewel’s lying? Her tilted world righted itself. “Of course. That has to be the answer.”
Cassie’s gut reaction to Betty Jewel’s shocking revelation had nothing to do with logic. How could she have let the words of a virtual stranger destroy fifteen years of marriage? How could she have doubted Joe’s love?
Powered by restored reason and burgeoning hope, Cassie started jerking on white pedal pushers, a green short-sleeved sweater set. She was planning how she’d race back to Shakerag and force Betty Jewel to admit her lies when she glanced at the clock. It was past ten. She couldn’t barge over there and disturb that sweet old lady, Miss Queen.
And what about Billie? She was innocent. No more than a pawn in her mother’s cruel game. Cassie couldn’t bring the child’s world tumbling down as carelessly as Betty Jewel had hers.
Fully clothed, Cassie lay in the dark, waiting for morning.
When Billie woke up to the smell of ham and red-eye gravy, she thought she was in the wrong house. Queen reserved fancy breakfast fixings for Sundays and special occasions. Ordinary days meant biscuit and molasses.
Her mouth watering, she bounded out of bed, slipped into shorts and a halter Queen had made from the printed cotton sacks her Martha White flour came in, then made a beeline for the kitchen.
“Good morning, sleepyhead.” The way Mama was smiling almost made Billie think this was just another summer day.
Billie pulled up a chair and helped her plate, as if she’d never heard of cancer. What would it hurt to pretend for five minutes?
“That Miss Cassie Malone is sho’ a fine lady.” Queen buttered another biscuit and handed it to Billie, though she already had two on her plate. “And smart. Mmm-hmm. I reckon she got mo’ sense than any white woman I ever knowed.”
There went pretend right out the window. Billie couldn’t believe her ears. All Queen had talked about last night at supper was that newspaper lady. How smart she was, how pretty, how kind, how nice. Billie didn’t know what had got into her. If Miss Cassie Malone told her pigs could fly, Queen would race to the window to see how much pork was in the sky.
“I don’t know how you could tell all that with one visit, Queen. I thought she was just a skinny white woman with ugly red hair.”
“Young lady, I ain’t puttin’ up with no sass from you.”
Billie figured she was in for a session with Queen’s willow switch. She didn’t care. She’d go off and spend the day on Gum Pond and maybe the monster who got Alice would get her, and then everybody would be sorry.
“Mama. Go easy on Billie. She’s got lots on her plate.”
You could say that again. Three biscuits. Two pieces of ham. A pile of backberry jam. It was going to take her practically all morning to eat it.
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