Gathering of Waters (7 page)

“That girl,” she muttered to the air, “is going to bring us a whole heap of problems.”

When Melinda finally left, Barbara breathed a sigh of relief. Cole sauntered into the house and tossed a “Hey, Ma” at her before throwing himself down into a kitchen chair.

“What that Thompson girl want?”

Cole grinned. “Me, I s’pose.”

Barbara bristled at his arrogance. “She outta your league, boy, and we don’t need no trouble from her daddy, ya hear?”

Cole heard her, but that didn’t matter. Melinda was prime for the slaughter; he just had to decide where and when.

Chapter Eleven

M
elinda arrived home just in time for dinner.

“My,” Connie exclaimed. “You been gone all day. You must have read a dozen books!”

Melinda floated up the staircase, down the hall, and into her bedroom. If the world had come to an end right then and there, Melinda wouldn’t have complained. She had had the most perfect day of her life and the destruction of heaven and earth couldn’t take it away from her.

Was she happy? Happy was too small a word to describe what she was feeling.

Melinda flung herself onto her bed and screamed with glee into the pillow.

Three days was as long as Melinda’s desires allowed her. Any day beyond that and she was sure her heart would burst from her chest, mount her bicycle, and ride itself out to visit Cole Payne.

“I’m off to the library, Mom!” Melinda shouted from the driveway.

Barbara was sweeping the porch when Melinda rolled into the yard. Barbara’s heart sunk, but she still managed to force a bright smile.

“Well, hello there, Melinda,” Barbara said as she folded her arms across her stomach.

“Hello, Mrs. Payne. How are you?”

“I’m well, and yourself?”

“Fine, ma’am.” Melinda’s eyes swung to the house. “Is Cole home?”

Barbara hands reached for her elbows and she dug her fingernails into the tender skin.

“No, he’s not.”

“Well, where is he?”

Barbara blinked at the girl’s forwardness. She didn’t want to respond and even considered grabbing her up and swatting her across her behind to teach her some manners, but instead she said, “He’s in the fields, working.”

“Where’s that?”

Barbara bit down on her lip and nodded back in the direction Melinda had come. “Down the road a bit on the left,” she said through gritted teeth. “But like I said, he’s working.”

Melinda thought about it for a moment. “Do you mind if I wait?”

Barbara wanted to scream:
No, go back home and find
yourself one of your own kind and leave my Cole be!

“Not at all,” she breathed.

Inside, over cookies and lemonade, Barbara found the girl to be, well, charming, and her earlier steeliness began to soften.

“These cookies are really, really good, Mrs. Payne.”

“Thank you. I baked them myself.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Doesn’t your mom bake?”

Melinda shook her head no. “Sara does all of the cooking and baking in our house.”

“Sara?”

“Our maid.”

“Oh.” Barbara refilled Melinda’s glass. “So, do you know how to bake?”

Again, Melinda shook her head no.

Even as she made the offer, Barbara couldn’t quite understand why she was doing it. “If you’d like, one day we can bake some cookies together. I’ll show you how.”

Melinda lit up like a glowworm. “Really?”

“Sure.”

There were other things the girl didn’t know how to do: iron, wash clothes, clean house. Barbara pitied her.

The back door soon opened and the Payne men spilled in for their afternoon meal.

“Oh Lawd,” Barbara exclaimed. “I haven’t even made lunch.”

They filed into the kitchen and their mouths dropped open when they saw Melinda sitting at the table.

The youngest boy said, “What she doing here?”

“Mind your manners,” Barbara chastised. “Melinda has come for a visit.”

John uttered a low “Hello.”

Cole said, “Hey, girl, how ya been?”

If Melinda were a balloon she would have floated straight up to the ceiling and popped. “Fine. You?”

“Great! So what’s for lunch?”

Melinda helped Barbara prepare sandwiches and she alone stirred the sugar and lemon into the iced tea, poured it into the mason jars, and set them before each of the Payne men.

After lunch, she followed Cole to the back door and stood watching him slip his feet into his work boots.

“You gonna be around when I get back?” he asked.

Melinda looked at the sky. The sun was heading west. The library closed at four and she needed to be home soon after that. “What time will that be?”

“’Bout seven or so.”

“No, I have to get home, but I can come back on Sunday.”

Cole clucked his tongue. “That’s tomorrow, ain’t it?”

Sunday morning, the house was filled with the aroma of fried fish and grits.

Sara knocked softly on Melinda’s door. “Miss, you up? Breakfast ready. Church today.”

Melinda groaned.

The door eased open and Sara’s round, brown face peeked in. “Miss?”

“I don’t feel so good.”

“You sick?”

“My stomach hurts.”

Sara’s eyes swam with sympathy. “Poor thing. I’ll get you some Bromo-Seltzer.”

After the rest of the family headed off to church, Sara began chopping up the boiled potatoes and eggs for tater salad. Upstairs, Melinda slipped on a pair of shorts and a white blouse and brushed her hair into a tail, which she piled high atop her head and secured with a barrette.

Carrying her tennis shoes, she slipped quietly down the stairs and out the front door. The loud click of the lock brought Sara into the foyer calling, “Is someone there?”

* * *

Under an overcast sky, Cole Payne took Melinda Thompson by the hand and guided her through the field of flowers to the place where he had passionately taken Sissy Johnson and then, later, other women.

“This my most favorite place in the world,” he said as he removed his shoes and shrugged off his shirt.

Melinda was unsure what it was she was supposed to do at that juncture, so she just watched.

When Cole reached for the zipper of his pants, Melinda turned her head away. “What are you doing?”

“Freeing myself,” Cole laughed. “You should try it.”

Melinda trembled with excitement. “I-I can’t,” she whispered.

“Sure you can. It’s easy.”

She kept her back to him. “No, no, I can’t”

“Why, you on your period or something?”

Melinda’s entire face turned red with shame. What did Cole Payne know about periods? “No!”

Cole chuckled. “Turn around.”

Melinda turned slowly around to find a completely naked Cole, stretched out on his back with one leg folded over the other. She was relieved to see that his genitals were hidden behind his thighs.

“Come here,” he said.

Her heart raced as she inched timidly toward him. Cole patted the earth. “Here. Lay here next to me.”

She positioned herself alongside his body. Melinda felt dizzy being so close to him, so close to his nakedness.

“Why don’t you take your blouse off?”

The idea was mind-numbing, and everything she had been taught told her that she should not do what Cole Payne was asking her to do. But it was too late; she was lost the moment she laid eyes on him.

Melinda sat up, quickly unbuttoned her blouse, pulled it off, and tossed it aside. She lay back down next to him and used her hands to cover her brassiere-clad breasts.

“No, don’t do that,” Cole whispered as he gently removed her hands. He reached over and freed first the right breast and then the left. Melinda closed her eyes and began to pant.

Cole rolled her hard nipples between his fingers until Melinda went limp.

The entry was slow, painful, and sweet. As he rode her, he conjured a picture of Sissy in his mind. When his seed burst from his shaft, scalding and thick, it was Sissy’s name that Cole screamed, not Melinda’s.

Chapter Twelve

J
ust a month after he had taken Melinda out into the field, she came to him weeping.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

Even though her tears were real and flowing, and the distress in her voice was clear, Cole still asked, “You joking?”

“No, Cole.”

He kicked a stone, fumbled with the lobe of his left ear, and mumbled, “You know anyone who can get rid of it?”

Melinda gasped, “Cole!”

“You’re not thinking about keeping it, are you?”

Melinda shrugged.

“You can’t be thinking that, Melinda. You can’t. Your father will kill me!”

And then she said the words that changed Cole Payne’s life forever: “Well, not if we get married.”

The statement was filled with so much hope and longing that it made Cole feel sick.

“Married?”

Cole always assumed that he would marry for love and not circumstance. But he supposed he could do a lot worse than Melinda, who was monied, educated, and weak in the knees for him.

His female prospects were many—but all cut from the same poor cloth as he was. Cole could have stomached a life of poverty with Sissy by his side, but without her, it seemed a senseless and ridiculous choice.

“I guess,” he uttered, “marriage would be the right thing to do.”

They told his parents first, and then hers.

Arthur, who had never laid a hand on any of his children, grabbed Melinda roughly by the shoulders and shook her until his wife cried out for him to stop.

The wedding was a small affair, held in the Thompson’s home. Cole’s mother could have slashed her wrists with the envy she felt upon stepping into that house.

For a wedding gift, Barbara gave them a piece of framed needlepoint which read,
Happy Family
, in bright pink, green, and blue thread.

Arthur and Connie’s gift was obviously much more extravagant: a deed to land, a store, and a house located miles away from Sidon, here with me, Money Mississippi.

Years later, as Cole Payne sat reading the evening paper on the veranda of his home on Candle Street, he heard the melody he’d mourned for decades.

“Morning, Mr. Payne.” A Negro woman smiled up at him as she walked toward the rear of the house. Cole peered over the top of the newspaper. The woman looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her.

As if reading his thoughts she said, “I’m Reverend Hilson’s wife.”

Cole folded the paper. “Oh,” he grunted, and then tilted his chin toward the wicker basket she carried. “What you got there?”

“I made Ms. Melinda some johnnycakes,” Doll sang.

“Is that right?” Cole offered.

“You know, my johnnycakes taste like a little piece of heaven,” Doll offered with a laugh as she rounded the corner of the house.

Chapter Thirteen

T
he Paynes’ housekeeper was a dark, robust, mute woman named Caress. She clapped her hands with joy when she saw Doll’s face on the opposite side of the glass window and quickly flung open the door.

Doll said, “Hello, how you today?”

Caress bobbed her head and grinned. She grabbed Doll by the wrist and dragged her over to the stove and pointed frantically at the shiny silver soup pot. Doll raised the lid and sniffed.

“Oh, that smells real good, Caress, real good.” Doll rubbed her belly for emphasis.

Caress’s grin stretched. She cast a quick look over her shoulder and then pressed her index finger against her black lips.

Doll nodded and winked.

Caress picked up a spoon, dipped it into the pot, and scooped up a luscious peach wedge, turned bronze by the mixture of sugar, cinnamon, and orange juice.

Doll pursed her lips, blew cool air over the cooked fruit, and then flicked her tongue against the sweet flesh. “Mmmmm,” she sounded before closing her entire mouth over the spoon. “Is this for preserves?”

Caress nodded.

“That’s real good, Caress, best I’ve ever tasted.”

Caress dropped the spoon into the sink, grabbed Doll’s hand, and pumped it until Doll thought her arm would fall from its socket.

“Okay now, okay,” Doll laughed. “Is Miss Melinda in the drawing room?”

Caress shook her head no, made a sad face, and then pointed to the ceiling.

“She in the bed?”

Caress nodded yes, and swept her hand upward.

“She want me to come up?”

Caress nodded again.

Doll walked into the dining room, through the parlor, down a long hall, and up the broad and winding staircase. On the top floor she made her way down a carpeted corridor, at the end of which was the Paynes’ bedroom. She knocked on the closed door.

A thin voice replied, “Come in.”

Doll had been to that room twice before, but the size of it and the lovely furniture always took her breath away. The bedroom was decidedly female. Cole had moved out a year earlier and taken up residence down the hall in the spare bedroom. “I just think you’d be more comfortable,” he’d said as Caress carted clothing from the main bedroom into the spare.

The drapes were open and the sun spilled in, in great waves of yellow light. Doll took a moment to survey the space. With each visit, Doll had made it her business to commit every detail of the room to memory, and so it was very easy for her to spot any new additions. On that day, Doll’s eyes fell on a small crimson vase adorned with white egrets.

“That vase is new,” Doll said as she floated into the room.

“Well hello to you too,” Melinda scoffed weakly.

“Oh, hello, Miss Melinda. I hear you’re ailing.”

Doll waltzed over to the nightstand and set the basket of johnnycakes down, alongside the vase. The day was warm, but the fireplace was lit and Melinda was wrapped in a pewter-colored goose-down comforter.

“Miss Melinda, you’re shaking like a leaf.” Doll retrieved the woolen throw from the foot of the bed and spread it gently over Melinda’s already heavily covered body. “Is that better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

I need to interrupt here for a minute and let you know that soon after Cole and Melinda married, she miscarried the baby. Back then, she was strong and positive and thought for sure that the next one would stick—but it didn’t. And the same fate held true for the following three pregnancies.