Gathering of Waters (5 page)

He was real. It was not a dream.

August patted Hemmingway’s back and shot Doll a questioning look. Doll shrugged her shoulders and pried Paris’s lips from her nipple.

“Baby,” August crooned as he tried to peel Hemmingway off of him, “what in the world is wrong with you today?”

“Oh, August, stop babying that girl,” Doll admonished. “You’ve got her spoiled rotten!” Doll rose from her seat, propped Paris on her hip, and addressed Hemmingway. “I made you some oatmeal. It’s in the bowl over there on the stove. Come on now, let go of your father.”

Hemmingway held fast.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” August gently pushed Hemmingway off of him and began to examine her. He took her face into his hands, glided his fingers down her arms. “Are you hurt?”

“Who would hurt her, August?” Doll snapped. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with her, she likes too much attention, that’s what!”

Hemmingway slipped from her father’s lap.

“August, you need to wash up and get to bed. You look whipped.”

He nodded dutifully, but his eyes were still resting on Hemmingway’s face. “You’re okay, right?”

She glanced at Doll, who was glowering at her. “Yes, Daddy, I’m fine,” she whispered.

“Good.” August gave his daughter a tender pat on her head and walked out of the kitchen.

“Take care of them dishes when you’re done,” Doll ordered as she followed August out.

Hemmingway didn’t move to retrieve the bowl of hot cereal until the slapping sound of Doll’s house slippers had faded away. At the table, she spooned up a large helping of the cereal and brought it to her open mouth.

Good thing she smelled the turpentine before she ate it, or this story might have ended here.

Chapter Eight

C
ole Robert Payne lived in one of those nice houses on Candle Street. He was a big man, with dark wavy hair and bright green eyes. He had a wife, who was small, meek, and sickly. They had no children.

Before Cole came to Candle Street, before he married Melinda, and before he took ownership of the only store here that welcomed both blacks and whites, he was a sharecropper’s son in a town not too far from me known as Sidon.

As a boy, Cole lived with his family on the edge of a thin line that separated rich from poor and black from white. This line was as significant as the one that separates the sky from the sea. It was this line that Cole stepped unwittingly across.

The Payne’s neighbors were a black family named Johnson. They had four sons and a little girl named Sissy.

Sissy was a dark-eyed, lanky, smiling child with a space between her two front teeth. Cole and Sissy had been born months apart. Cole’s mother Catherine helped pull Sissy into the world, and when Catherine fell ill and was unable to nurse Cole, Sissy’s mother Ethel stepped in and did it for her.

They were friends, these two families from opposite sides of the line.

Sissy and Cole were two peas in a pod from the time they could walk. When they turned five years old, Sissy stole a hatpin from her mother, and beneath a tree in the Paynes’ front yard, she used it to prick Cole’s finger and then hers. They mashed the open wounds together and declared their eternal allegiance to one another.

How could they have known that this promise would turn into love?

Before I move forward, I think it’s only right that I educate you about spring.

Spring has always had a female essence and will forever be a noxious season, choking the air with her scent, having her way with clouds—shaping them into all manner of impractical things. Even the crickets do not escape spring’s demands. To satisfy her wishes, from April through June they strum nothing but Francisco Tárrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.”

Spring is lovely, but she is also a trickster! She can make you forget that you are the wrong color, old, ugly, or fat, and fills your head with foolish possibilities. She impresses upon your heart affections for people who will have nothing to offer in return.

Her showers wash away the gray blotches of winter and everything may
appear
new. But be aware, there is nothing new, there is only the old shrouded in spring’s bright floral dress.

Over time, Cole and Sissy grew up and apart, their two-peas-in-a-pod friendship dwindling down to just a passing
hi
.

That changed one day when Cole strode up the road toward home. He was moving slow, his long arms swinging languidly at his sides like loose ropes. He was thinking about the fly ball he’d caught and the whipping he was sure to suffer for slipping away to play baseball instead of finishing his chores.

Sissy was sitting on the wooden railed fence that encircled a wide field chock-full of colorful wild flowers. She was gnawing on a cob of corn when she spotted him.

“Hey,” she sang.

“Hey, Sissy,” Cole called back without slowing his gait.

“Your mama made some johnnycakes. I had myself two. They taste like a little piece of heaven.”

Her voice carried notes he had never heard before. The sound caught him by surprise and stopped him dead in his tracks. He turned around.

“You want some company?”

Sissy shrugged her shoulders indifferently and started on another row of kernels.

Cole trotted over and hoisted himself up onto the fence. Sissy noticed the muscles in his arm rippling with the effort and her stomach did a little somersault.

He looked out over the blanket of purple, pink, and orange blossoms and waited for something in him to stir. “What you looking at?” he asked.

“Nothing and everything.”

“Well, why you sitting here?”

“I was here for the peace and quiet, but I guess now that
you’re
here, that’s all done with,” she chuckled.

Cole laughed, leaned over, and bumped his shoulder against hers. “Fun-nee!”

Sissy hushed him and with a nod of her head, directed his attention to the sky. “Look,” she whispered.

For five full minutes they sat silently watching the sun slowly bleed into the horizon. When the miracle was over, Sissy let off a long, satisfied sigh and flung the cob across the field.

Cole watched it sail through the air and disappear into the blanket of flowers. When he turned to look at her, Sissy was wearing an expression that was so serious, his heart skipped a beat. “What?’

Her response was a broad, corn kernel–filled grin. They both exploded with laughter.

Eyes leaking and sides splitting, the two friends fell into one another with merriment. Sissy doubled over and would have ended facedown on the ground if not for Cole’s quick reaction and strong forearm.

“Grab on!”

Sissy hooked her fingers around his arm and was tugged back to safety. “Thanks.”

Her fingers were still wrapped around his forearm when the first twinkling star appeared.

The sound of an approaching wagon shattered the magic and her hand dropped away. She hopped down to the ground. “I guess I should be getting home.”

“I’ll walk ya.”

“Okay.”

Spring.

That very night, Sissy began to think about Cole in the way she had only ever thought about Mac Gosling, a colored boy she was sweet on who lived two miles away. She found that the butterflies that invaded her stomach whenever she saw Mac also took flight when her mind stumbled on Cole. And it started stumbling on Cole often, so much so that if her mind had had ankles, those ankles would have had bruises.

In Cole’s mind, Sissy suddenly became a fixture, similar to the crucifix that hung over his parents’ marriage bed. He yearned for her, and rather than trying to quell the desire, he fed it by visiting the fence and running his hands over the slab of wood where the two of them had sat.

He so desperately wanted to own something that had touched her, or that she had touched, that he spent an hour in the field hunting for the corncob. He didn’t find it, and when he went home his clothes were saturated with the scent of flowers. His father coughed his annoyance and asked Cole if he’d abandoned the baseball field for a funeral home.

Once, when Cole thought he was alone in the house, he tried to reclaim the moment by imitating the laughter Sissy had expelled on that afternoon, and his mother walked in on him in the midst of a girlishly shrill giggle. She tapped him on the shoulder, and when the startled Cole swung around, he came face to face with his mother’s perplexed gaze.

“Boy,” she calmly asked, “are you losin’ your mind?”

Cole blinked wildly. Yes, he believed he was.

Spring.

Chapter Nine

H
ow they got away with it for as long as they did was a mystery to me. By the time they were found out, it was way past spring and weeks beyond their first awkward kiss. There had been hundreds of kisses by the time summer swaggered in, bringing with her days upon days of sweltering heat.

It was summer’s heat that drove Sissy’s father, Edgar, off the road into the sparse shade of a pecan tree. If it hadn’t been so hot and Edgar had just kept walking up the road toward home, Sissy and Cole’s affair might have gone undetected for years.

I’ll just sit here a minute and rest,
Edgar told himself as he dragged the blue and white kerchief across his damp brow. Weariness crept over him and he braced his back against the bark of the tree, cocked the brim of his hat over his eyes, and soon fell fast asleep.

Further up the road, Cole was sitting in the crook of a gnarly tree limb, working the tip of his mother’s kitchen knife into the bark.

“What you doing up there?”

He looked down to find Sissy squinting at him. Tiny balls of perspiration covered her face, and when she tilted her head, the sun ignited the orbs, gracing her with an undeniable shimmer.

Cole grinned.

With the handle of the knife clenched securely between his teeth, Cole began to make his descent with the assuredness and agility of a monkey. He hit the ground with a large thud.

The lovers glanced warily around before leaning in and stealing a kiss. They crossed the road, climbed over the fence, and moved through the blanket of flowers to the bald spot of earth which had been scuffed talcumsoft by their lovemaking.

She tasted like syrup.

He tasted like his mama’s johnnycakes.

She felt like butter.

He felt like an iron poker warmed in kindling.

An earshot away Edgar woke from his nap, stretched his arms over his head, and released a great yawn. His gaze swept over the field and stopped on a cluster of swaying flowers.

That’s odd
, he thought before licking his finger and testing the air to find that it was still as death. He rose to his feet and set off to investigate the phenomenon.

As Edgar moved closer, he heard laughter. He knew that laughter, playful, teasing—lovers’ laughter. He stopped walking.

Out here in the open?

He couldn’t help but smile at the couple’s brazen outrageousness.

“Well,” he muttered aloud as he turned around to leave, “I was young once too.”

His intention was to head home, but his mind kept wandering back to the flowers and the laughter.

Who are they?

It was easy to imagine their heat, their complete surrender to one another—but try as he might, he could not imagine their faces. Curiosity got the better of him and he decided to hang around a little while longer, just to see what they looked like.

He returned to the shade to wait. He couldn’t imagine that the couple would go on for much longer—not in that heat.

Cole rolled off Sissy and onto his back. His penis slumped lazily across his thigh. Sissy reached for his hand, pulled it to her mouth, and slipped his fingers between her lips. Cole began to giggle.

They lay there in that field as if it were their own home and the ground beneath them their bed.

“I gotta go.”

“I know.” He turned onto his side and gazed deep into her eyes. “I’m already missing you,” he breathed, and then leaned in and pressed a gentle kiss against her lips. “Let’s run away together and get married.”

Sissy laughed. “Who would marry us? A white boy and his nigger mistress?” She laughed again, but this time the notes were flat.

Cole’s eyes dimmed. “You ain’t no nigger. I hate that word.”

“Come on,” she said brightly, “help me up.”

From where Edgar sat, it seemed as if Cole had emerged from the soil and unfurled like some exotic flower. An exotic,
naked
flower.

Edgar wasn’t yet over the first shock when he was rattled by the second. His heart dropped down into his gut when the brown-skinned girl appeared.

Edgar stood up and took a few steps forward. “What colored girl … ?” he mumbled to himself, and then realized it was his own daughter.

He didn’t even know he was running until the tunnel of wind he created tore his hat from his head.

Sissy was still trying to get her arm into the sleeve of her dress when she looked up and saw her father charging toward them.

“Sissy!”

Cole spun around and jumped protectively in front of her. His green eyes flashed, and Edgar stalled.

Edgar knew he could beat Cole with one hand, if he had to. He was a full foot taller and twenty pounds heavier, but there were shadows swimming in his blind anger, and the line that separated black from white coiled into noose; imagined or not, Edgar could feel the rough rope fibers brushing against his neck.

Edgar took a very deep breath.

“Sissy, come here.”

“You don’t have to go with him, Sissy!” Cole barked.

“She’s my child, Cole, you done enough. Lemme take her home.” Edgar’s tone was replete with disappointment and defeat.

Sissy dropped her head. She wiggled the remaining length of arm through the sleeve and stepped shamefully away from Cole.

“Daddy I—”

Edgar shook his head. He didn’t want to hear any of it.

What could she have said to him to make what she had done—had been doing—all right? That she was sorry? That she was—
God forbid
—in love with Cole Payne? No words she could speak would ever be powerful enough to change the fact that Cole was white and she was black and this was Mississippi, U.S. of A.