Angels Make Their Hope Here (18 page)

E
MIL
B
RANCH SAID THE
day would come—that he alone would decide it. There was no choice for her if she wanted to avoid trouble. There were people who wanted to know about Duncan Smoot. They would like to know what was his true enterprise. Emil Branch knew Duncan was one who thiefed the barges and transport wagons. He knew Duncan was up to other stuff as well, and some people could profit by knowing it. He would have his way. There was no escape—no avoidance. If she screamed out… if she told on him. Go ahead and tell her husband or her cousins. Let them try to defend her honor and end with ropes around their necks. He said he knew about Owen Needham. He knew the fool had come a mountain to try to grab her back for a bounty. He knew the fool hadn’t survived his consequences.

Emil Branch had been pleasant, friendly the first time he took Dossie’s arm and led her away from her market stall. He asked her to come with him to speak with his mama. It was only a few steps, he said. He said his mama could not come out amongst the crowds at market for she was not very well. She wanted to meet the wife of Duncan Smoot. He’d said it sweetly—that his mama said this to him.

Then Emil Branch had made a lascivious sound and pushed
her against the slats of a shed at back of his mama’s house. He fingered her, drawing circles around the nipples on her breasts and sticking his hands between her legs. He rubbed his hands all over her dress as if he meant to measure it for someone else or memorize the body beneath it. He smooch-kissed her neck and ears. He covered her face with his lips.

“You think because I don’ haul him in for his thieving that I don’t know he’s a thief. I know what he is. I know all about him. And I know about you and where you come from and how he got you here. I want some. I’m gonna have it. And you ain’ gon’ tell him a thing. You do, I’ll kill him. I’ll kill ’em all.”

Emil Branch sat on a barrel, smoked a cheroot, and watched the tears and gatherings from Dossie’s nose drip off her face. She saw the sappy accumulation staining his pants and was shocked that his exhausted sausage had not penetrated.

“I wonder is Duncan Smoot really your husban’—a legal husban’? Did the old nigger take you in front of a preacher or a justice of the peace? Or did he just take you behind the barn and tell you you was his wife an’ mus’ do like he say? Look like the old nigger grab up a little girl and say she is his wife ’cause he wan’ her. He ain’ got no more legal right to keep you tied to him than I do if I wan’ to. You sign any papers? Aw, a gal like you can’ do no signin’. You don’t know what man ain’t got a paper on you—sayin’ you b’long to him. You come outta slavery. I know it. You wearin’ a fine dress now, but you was once upon a time somebody’s miserable slave before he snatched you. I’ma grab you up an’ take you away with me. I’ma go west an’ take you with me for my appetite,” Emil Branch taunted her.

The next time he took Dossie away from her stall and pushed
her into the shed, he accomplished a quick, sharp, painful penetration.

After this Dossie considered a pigsticker. She found a knife among the many and various ones that Duncan had. It was a more formal weapon than the cleavers and gutting knives she was familiar with. She drew it out of its sheath and familiarized herself with the way it felt. She cut herself to test it. Throughout a day of duties she stroked and handled the weapon. She ran through her mind should she or shouldn’t she and when she would do it—at what point would she chance it—thinking to be forced no further. What was the mark?

Dossie had become enmeshed so quickly. Emil Branch had grabbed her in the alley and torn her dress, but he’d seemed almost apologetic when he came to Russell’s Knob, when he came to the market stall. He’d fooled her. She’d thought she had no reason to fear him.

Take a stand with the knife. Threaten him enough that he would kill her. If he dropped her, then she could crawl and die somewheres that Duncan and ’em could find her body. Pray they make her sacred to themselves and speak of her again and again—like they do with Cissy and Lucy Smoot. And if he defiled her body pray God the skin would die away and rot quick and the bruises would disappear. Dossie promised herself that she would beg Emil Branch to leave her body in the highlands where the vultures could finish off her flesh when he has done. Then Duncan could see the unblemished bones if the merciful vultures picked her clean, and he would put them bones out next to the honored ancestors. It was a dreadful measure of Dossie’s despair that she began to think that this death and only this could bring her out of the trouble. Further and
further she descended under a cascade of bad thoughts on account of Emil Branch.

This was, of course, her retribution. She hadn’t done it yet. But she had planned. She and Jan had discussed it. They had agreed that her desperate desire merited a desperate strategy. The Grandmothers were making her pay for the sin she was contemplating. Was that it?

“He got hidey-holes all aroun’ town where he kin do his dirty business in,” the pretty, plump-faced girl said when Jan paid her. Mattie Ricks, a hot-corn seller by occupation, was a member of a cadre of colored who watched goings-on on the streets of Paterson. People walked by her. Some bought her corn and butter. She noted them and could be hired to tail them.

“He likely got her in a alley behin’ Caretaker Street an’ the Market Street. His mama got a shed there. He worryin’ her? He hurtin’ her? Maybe, maybe not,” she said. Jan scowled and Mattie Ricks laughed. Ah, she was young to be so coldly convinced! But Mattie Ricks knew what she was talking about. Few colored women who made a living on the streets of the town had not had some experience of Emil Branch. He was known to use his lawman’s prerogatives for personal matters.

Dossie knew Emil Branch was dead because she was certain she would not be breathing and moving if he were alive. She took as evidence of her survival that her arm trembled, that the arm belonging to the hand that reached out and took up the knife and ran it into the man’s back trembled. The courage that
powered the knife’s plunge into Emil Branch’s back was forged from the conviction that she was willing to die to stop him. She was willing to die to save Jan’s life.

When Emil Branch recovered from Jan’s surprise attack, he took a low knife fighter’s stance. His nakedness hung in defiance of all decency, and he moved at Jan.

Dossie grabbed up her knife that Emil Branch had thrown atop her clothes. He believed it was a sham when he stripped her and threw it aside. He considered her protests a game. A black gal will always want a white man, and every one of them wanted to be roughed up some.

Dossie closed her hand over the handle. And because she had been touching and stroking and practicing with it, it came into her hand smoothly, effortlessly.

She plunged it to the handle in Emil Branch’s kidney and, like a practiced fighter, she followed the blade’s plunge with thrusting her body behind it to sink it. She turned it in his flesh to quiet his nascent scream. But still there was screaming. She hollered out and sat back on her haunches.

Her thrust nearly finished Jan as well, though, for Emil Branch tightened his fingers as he was stabbed. For an excruciatingly long moment the three were tangled. Finally Jan was able to dislodge dead Emil Branch. He squatted.

“Cover yourself up, Dossie Bird,” Jan said very quietly. It was a startle. She flinched at his words and reached to gather her clothes.

“Steady yourself,” he commanded and gave her a pull from his flask. “Bear up,” he managed despite his squeezed throat.

Then Jan proceeded in a string of actions that unfolded as they did for recognition that every action is one more advance toward death. What had they done and what will they do with
dead Emil Branch? By the time her mind had spun out the sequence of events, Jan had a plan and had set something in motion and she was borne along.

Jan cleaned up some and went to Dossie’s marketplace. He waited hidden until Hat’s attention was turned away. When she set out to look around for Dossie, Jan caught the eye of Sally Vander, the only other person to have an inkling of what was in the air. Jan drew her to the side of the wagon.

“You know lyin’ is wrong, little girl?” he asked in his boyishly sweet, friendly manner.

“Sir, I’ma youth, but I ain’t no baby. I kin tell a lie for good purpose,” Sally answered.

“Tell Miz Wilhelm that Miz Dossie had to go off to do a thing ’cause my uncle call her. Tell Miz Wilhelm you mus’ ride wid her ’cause Miz Dossie have to take a wagonload for my uncle and me.”

“Yes,” Sally said.

“Stand up now, Sally, an’ help us,” Jan urged her. “Don’t speak about nothing else. Whatever you seen down at the market—or heard—don’t talk about it. If you love Miz Dossie, don’t tell nobody, not even your mama!” Sally nodded assent. Yes, she loved Miz Dossie and she saw Sheriff Emil strong-arm her.

“Can you handle the donkey and the wagon?”

“Yes,” Sally said emphatically.

“Take them into the alley behind the market. Drive slow and steady and casual. Then stop, get down, and go on back and get a ride with Miz Hat.” Jan put two fingers across Sally Vander’s lips, and she pursed her lips and kissed back at his fingers knowing that it was forward of her to do so. “Keep our secret.”

“Yes,” Sally answered.

On market day there is much movement in the hills—wagons on every road and thoroughfare. Like a swarm of bees the market women from Russell’s Knob coalesce at market day’s end. Their wagons are thick on the roads home. Sally was successful at her lies. Seated beside Miz Wilhelm, she was appropriately quiet. In a not-altogether-chaste dream, she cherished and built upon her pact with Jan in her imagination.

Jan wrung what help he could from Dossie. They put the sheriff’s body in the wagon and concealed him under straw and burlap and unsold eggs. They waited for the factories’ shift change and rode out of Paterson under cover of grim-faced exhaustion and drunken frivolity. They escaped town and took the body to the burial place.

At the grave site, Dossie was transfixed. “There’s more to killin’ a man than just killin’ him,” Jan said with little visible emotion other than weariness. It followed steps. Jan was systematic, and it was shocking to Dossie that he was so practiced at burying.

She watched Jan’s movements and responded only when he called for her attention. It felt as if all of her had poured into the knife thrust. All of her yeast was gone. All that was in her vitals had been vomited or drained away. There was a painful radiation of muscle spasms in her thighs. Her legs were soupy. She had lunged onto Branch’s back when he left off pounding her and turned to killing Jan. He had been pounding himself between her thighs. His jasper was rigid and voluminous when he taunted her, then shrunk, then bloomed again and discharged while he slammed it into her. He grabbed her neck, and she thought he’d wring it like a chicken’s. He grabbed her
breasts and mashed them and tore at them with ferocity that caused her such pain she was on the lip of unconsciousness when Jan hit him.

Dossie had imagined dying—being killed by Emil Branch. Her own death was the only outcome she’d figured on. She never thought she would kill Emil Branch. She’d only imagined that it would be herself dropping to the ground dead at Emil Branch’s feet at the spot of greatest impact with his fists, his gun, his hammer, his own knife, or his belt or a rope in his throttling hands. She only saw pictured a murderous impact that would crush her like an insect. Ah, people make all sorts of plans and pacts in their head—plans to die and pacts to kill if this or that line is crossed! But juices overwhelm these schemes and dreams and ideas. The unavoidable, blood-boiling, stomach-churning physical reactions and uncontrollable sauces of emotion change everything.

Jan put Emil Branch in a hole on top of Gideon Smoot, one of Lucy’s grandchildren. Buried years ago, Gideon had already been joined by a bounty agent. Jan performed the work on the sheriff’s body with the determination Dossie was accustomed to seeing from him and Duncan when they were about the duties of hunting and fishing and keeping their hides and traps. Jan was quiet and keen, careful, slow moving, and precise. There was no reason to be superstitious about it. Rebellious, flinty, confrontational Gideon Smoot was likely laughing, pleased to accommodate a somebody that had needed killing. Gone was gone. What bones were left to mingle were mingling in the grave just like the souls attached to them were mingling in the great stewpot of the hereafter.

Jan drank some whiskey when he was done. He emptied his
flask over Gideon’s grave. He sang and he traced steps with his toes and floated his arms out beside his body and whirled and turned. Dossie thought of that first night she had listened to him dancing and cavorting.

When they reached home at last, Jan lifted Dossie to the ground gingerly. She became warm and nauseated at the sight of Duncan sitting on the top step of the porch. Why was he here? Dossie slipped through Jan’s hands onto the ground and her guts heaved up.

Duncan let out a sound that was only partially formed as the word “what.” He roared at the sight of her and rushed off the steps and covered the yard at a run.

“Duncan, you my god,” she said in a wispy voice when he lifted her. He carried her into the house and laid her on her bed. He brought a cool, wet towel to her forehead and wiped her face without asking to know what had happened.

“Jan, gwan and get Noelle and get Hat to come,” Duncan ordered without noticing his nephew’s wounds.

Dossie roused at the words and cried out, “No! Don’t call nobody to come. I take care of this myself. Bring me a tub of water.”

“What happen? Y’all took a tumble on the road—a bad spill?” Duncan spoke to Dossie in a soft, solicitous voice, then turned and shouted at Jan, “Boy, do like I say and get Hat and Noelle!”

“No! No!” Dossie cried again. “I ’on’t wan’ nobody to see me.”

“We mus’ get somebody. I fear you need some fixin’, girl. You fell down in the yard. You got knocks and bruises on you, girl. Gwan an’ fetch a doctor, Jan,” Duncan said. “Go in town and get a doctor!”