Gathering of Waters (13 page)

“Dead as well.”

Cole leaned back. His face shadowed with disappointment. He raised his right hand and wrapped his fingers around his chin. “But how did you get the letter?”

“My mother told me everything about her life before she was sent to the orphanage. When the book was published, she bought a copy and we read it together. I sent a letter of introduction to the author, and a week later he came to Oklahoma to visit me and my mother. He was a very kind man.”

Charlotte reached down and ran her finger along the rim of the glass.

“He said he wanted to write a story about my mother and me. We of course agreed. He went back to New York and we never heard from him again. I learned later that he had contracted pneumonia and died.”

She moved her hand back into her lap.

“When the publisher received your letter, he sent it to me. It was my intention to write to you. For the life of me I don’t know why I didn’t.” She laughed. “I’ve carried your letter with me for almost a year.”

Cole smiled.

“Since I was here in Mississippi visiting friends, I thought I would call on you personally, to tell you how much your words meant to me.” Charlotte rose again. “I’ve taken up too much of your time—”

“No, no. Please don’t go. Would you like to stay for dinner?”

Charlotte grinned. “I would love to.”

Chapter Twenty

T
o further express her disdain for Charlotte, Hemmingway prepared a dinner of overcooked chicken, underboiled potatoes, and freshly sliced tomatoes blanketed in salt. After dinner, they returned to the drawing room where Hemmingway served them bitter coffee.

At the end of the evening, Cole walked Charlotte to her waiting carriage. “May I call on you in Greenwood?”

“Yes, I would like that.”

Hemmingway stood in the doorway glaring at them, and when Cole stepped up onto the veranda, she chirped maliciously, “Seems to me she say
yes
to everything.”

“What?”

“Careful now,” Hemmingway mumbled as she walked off, “I’ve only known whores to be that agreeable.”

The next day the stock market crashed. Hemmingway didn’t quite understand what it all meant, but from the way the white people in town were running around like chickens without heads, she took it as an omen.

“You see what kind of bad luck that woman done brought on this town?”

Cole was sitting in his office with his ear hovering near the radio. The broadcast came from WJDX, located on the top floor of the Lamar Life Insurance building in Jackson, Mississippi. “Shush!” he warned.

The announcer said:
“Lines as long as the Mississippi River
have formed outside of banks all around the country, as people
scramble to withdraw their money.”

“Shouldn’t you be in Greenwood trying to get your coins?”

“Hemmingway, please!” Cole snapped.

He wasn’t very worried. He had some money in the bank, but not much. Lucky for him, last year he’d had a nightmare that ripped him from his sleep. In the dream, he’d gone to the bank to withdraw money, and was advised by the teller that all of his money had combusted. She reached down, opened a drawer, and removed a handful of ash, which she slid across the counter. “This is all that remains.”

Cole was so disturbed by the dream that he went to the bank and withdrew all but eighty-five dollars. He brought the money home, stuffed it into jars, and buried them. As for stock, he owned none.

“She evil, I tell ya!” Hemmingway roared.

Evil or not, Cole Payne was smitten, and he began courting the granddaughter of General Custer.

Within weeks, the scab covering his heart curled, withered, and dropped away. Once again, his heart drummed free and wild, and love responded like an animal in heat.

He proposed to Charlotte Custer on Christmas day.

Hemmingway was tightlipped when Cole brought her the news.

“Well, aren’t you happy for me? For us?”

Hemmingway shrugged her shoulders.

“Why don’t you like her?”

“Don’t matter if I do or if I don’t. You the one gotta lay down with her, not me.”

“You watch your mouth, Hemmingway Hilson!”

They were married in February of 1930 and Charlotte Custer-Payne moved into that house on Candle Street. She placed her delicates into the dresser drawers, hung her finery in the chifforobe, and set her parasol in the umbrella stand.

You already know that from the very beginning Hemmingway didn’t like Charlotte. Well, I’m sorry to tell you that the middle didn’t get any better.

Hemmingway continued to sabotage their meals, and when Charlotte addressed her, Hemmingway refused to respond. Any orders that Charlotte wanted carried out had to come from Cole.

A year into the marriage, Cole was at wit’s end. For the umpteenth time, he cornered Hemmingway and reprimanded her about her behavior. The young woman innocently batted her eyes and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The tension continued to build between the two women until it exploded in a screaming match that sent Charlotte flying from the kitchen in tears.

“She is the help! The HELP—and she talks to me like I am
her
employee!” she screamed into Cole’s flustered face. “I want her gone, out, now!”

What could he tell his sweet, pretty young wife? Certainly not the truth, which was that he kept the often rude and always stubborn Hemmingway in his employ as a penance for his wrongdoings. Instead he said, “I promised her mother that I would look after her.”

Charlotte was speechless and hurt. She picked up a bottle of perfume and hurled it against the bedroom wall.

Charlotte took the issue to an acquaintance, and after a long, thoughtful moment, the woman said: “White men and Negro women been a problem since forever.”

Charlotte shuddered at the implication, but back on Candle Street she spat those same words in her husband’s face. Cole was shocked and began to stutter his defense.

Charlotte cut him off with a sweep of her hand. “If you don’t get rid of her, Cole, I swear I will smash everything in this house, and,” she added with fierce conviction, “that semen sack between your legs!”

Cole, of course, acquiesced and hired a man who owned a mule and wagon to cart Hemmingway and her belongings to a small house he owned, near the center of town. Hemmingway would live there for the rest of her years.

The years inched by, and in 1936, after Cole sold off the store and the house on Candle Street and moved to another part of the state, the postman walked right up to Hemmingway’s front door and placed an envelope in her hand. The contents included the deed to the house and ten crisp hundred-dollar bills.

Hemmingway hid the money away and continued to support herself by cooking and cleaning for other families on Candle Street. And like her mother, she made and sold johnnycakes. For the most part, she kept to herself.

In 1940, people began to notice that Hemmingway Hilson was putting on weight … in her midsection.

Not quite out of season, but no spring chicken— Hemmingway was nearly thirty years old. She didn’t have a husband and no one had ever seen her keeping company with a man.

Immaculate Conception?

“Nah,” someone laughed, “that only happens to white folk!”

People began placing bets on her due date—if she was in fact pregnant. She hit the waddling stage quick, so was further along than anyone had suspected.

Someone suggested that Cole Payne might be the father, even though he had moved away years earlier. That insinuation raised the stakes to include wagers on the infant’s color.

“Maybe she ain’t pregnant, maybe she’s just fat,” said the fat woman who looked pregnant.

The talk swirled and bubbled in a cauldron of gossip, but no one was bold enough to approach the often-salty woman and ask, “Hemmingway Hilson, you expecting?”

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-One

H
e had been such a sweet child, but after he died and came back again, he was different. J.W. was suddenly fond of torturing living things: cats, puppies, and fledglings. His own baby sister couldn’t escape his cruelty—one afternoon he bound her ankles and wrists with rope, propped her up against a tree, arranged wood and dried corn husks at her feet, and set it ablaze. Thank goodness a passerby saw the smoke and heard the boy whooping like an Indian, or else the girl would have burned to cinders.

His mother, Eula, made up all types of excuses for his devious behavior:
He don’t mean no harm. Boys are mischievous
by nature.

She coddled him, dubbed him extraordinary because he had died and come back to life. She called him “my little Jesus boy.”

The people around town called him the devil.

When the senior Milam died, Eula married a man named Charles Bryant. He wasn’t a sharecropper like her previous husband, but a businessman who owned two trucks and had purchased the grocery store from Cole Payne.

J.W. gave Charles Bryant the chills. One day he told Eula, “Something ain’t right with that boy.”

Eula rubbed her pregnant belly and retorted nas-tily, “Well, let’s see what
your
seed produces.”

Charles was hoping and praying for a girl, but Eula gave birth to a son, who they named Roy.

In 1942, J.W. was twenty-three years old and went down and enlisted himself in the army. He was deployed overseas where he could actively and openly pursue his burgeoning passion—murder.

He did it so well that he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.

J.W. had departed Mississippi a scraggly specimen of a man, and returned a six-foot-two, 235-pound war hero.

“My Jesus boy!” Eula cried, and burst into tears, when he stepped out of the checkered cab.

His stepfather gave him a job as a truck driver and J.W. bedded every willing female who lived along his delivery route, which snaked through three states.

He eventually married a thick-legged girl named Juanita and the two settled into a small house on the outskirts of this place that I am.

When they made love, J.W. set the .45 he’d brought back from Europe on the nightstand. He enjoyed having it in his sights as he rammed himself mercilessly into his wife.

Juanita knew about the gun, but not the round metal tin which once held snuff, but was now filled with teeth. Teeth from the dead Germans he’d shot and killed in the war. He’d dislodged the teeth by holding the corpse by the hair and slamming the butt of the gun into its dead mouth.

In Mississippi, J.W. tried to feed his passion by hunting deer, possum, and wild Russian boar—but killing animals didn’t offer the same thrill as slaying a living, breathing human being.

When the Korean War began, J.W. went to the recruiting office and tried to enlist. By then, though, his affection for whiskey and cigars had taken its toll. The army declared him ineligible to serve and the morose J.W. went back home and drank whiskey until his eyes blurred.

Juanita had given birth to two sons at that point, and she made the sad mistake of saying, “I’m glad they ain’t take you, ’cause our boys need their daddy.”

J.W. flew at her, wrapped his hands around her throat, and choked her until the capillaries in her eyes exploded.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I
n 1955, that boy came from Chicago down here to spend the summer with his mama’s people. They called him Bobo, but his given name was Emmett.

He arrived with a few casual clothes, one suit, one tie, and a white shirt that was one size too small and frayed around the collar. His black Sunday shoes were scuffed at the toe and veined with cracks. His pride and joy was a pair of brand-new navy blue Converse sneakers that his mother had saved three months to buy.

He was brown and stout with full cheeks and a generous belly that jiggled when he laughed. His ears were long and the lobes were curved upward. He wasn’t anything Padagonia would look at, but Tass was head over heels.

“That boy don’t even know you exist.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“He does too, I saw him looking at me just the other day.”

“What day was that? Where was I?”

“You were wherever you were and we were someplace else.” Tass giggled at her wit.

Padagonia crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth. The two laughed until Padagonia’s mother stepped out onto the slanted porch and tapped the broom handle against the wooden door jamb.

“You out here playing the fool while I’m in the house working like a slave?”

Their eyes swept across Willie Tucker’s gnarled toes.

“Well, what you waiting for?” Willie admonished. “Get the hominy grits out your ass!”

Padagonia sulked into the house.

“And you, Miss Ting-a-ling, I’m sure you got some chore you need to be tending to, don’t you?”

Tass didn’t, but she nodded her head and said, “Yes, ma’am.” And scurried across the road to the house that her mother owned, free and clear.

By the time Padagonia finished her chores, the sun had taken on a tangerine color. Tass was sitting on the bottom step of her porch biting her fingernails. When she saw Padagonia emerge, she jumped to her feet and bounded across the road.

Hemmingway’s face appeared behind the gray mesh screen of the door. “Girl, where you going?”

“To the store!” Tass hollered back as she and Padagonia double-timed it down the road.

The front yard of Moe Wright’s home was a cemetery of rusted cars, bicycle frames, and the metal guts of farm machines. Emmett was seated on the edge of the porch, the blue jeans he wore were rolled up to his knees, and his bare feet were covered in Mississippi mud dust. He was chomping on a slice of sweet pink watermelon.

The girls stepped into the yard and Padagonia called, “Hey, Bobo,” in that singsong fashion girls are partial to using.

Emmett looked up and they could see that his chin was glistening with watermelon juice. He nodded at them and winked.

Padagonia strolled into the yard and was a full five strides from Emmett before she realized that Tass wasn’t at her side. “Come on, Tass,” she urged with a flip of her hand.