In This Light (3 page)

She sped toward Seventh, Willy Hamilton’s street. She might just happen to roll by, and maybe in the course of conversation she’d say, “Are the Tylers out of town?” Not that she cared; she was only mildly curious. “The house looks absolutely deserted,” she’d say. “I don’t know why anyone would want to live in that big old thing.”

Sure enough, Willy stood in the driveway, hosing down his sky-blue Chevrolet. Iona leaned out the window. “Hey, Willy,” she said. He wrinkled up his forehead and didn’t say anything. Iona was undaunted. “You wanna go get an ice cream with me?” she said. The spray from the hose made a clear arc before it spattered on the cement and trickled toward the gutter in thick muddy rivulets.

Willy was feeling sorry for her in a way. But he still didn’t like her, and he didn’t think he could stand the smell of her truck. He told himself to be brave; it wouldn’t last long, and it was such a small thing to do, such a small, kind gesture; then he felt very proud, overcome with the realization that he was going to do this good thing.

He was still thinking how generous he was when they finished their cones and Iona jolted out along the river road instead of heading toward his house. He said, “Where are you going?” And she said, “The river.” He told her he needed to get home; it was almost dark. Iona said, “I know.” He told her he meant it, but his voice was feeble, and she kept plowing through the haze of dusk, faster and faster, till the whole seat was shaking.

She swerved down to the bank of the river, where all the kids came to park; but it was too early for that, so they were alone. Willy stared at the water, at the beer bottles bobbing near the shore, and the torn-off limb of a tree being dragged downstream. “I’m sorry about Jay,” he said.

“Why’re you sorry? He’s not dead.”

“He didn’t treat you right.”

Iona slid across the seat so her thigh pressed against Willy’s thigh. “Would you treat me right?” she said. He tried to inch away, but there was nowhere to go. Iona’s hand rested on his knee, then started moving up his leg, real slow. Willy swatted it away. “You still think I’m a slut?” Iona said. She touched his thigh again, lightly, higher than before. “I’m not a slut, Willy; I’m just more
generous
than most girls you know.” She clutched his wrist and tried to pull his closed hand to her breast. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “You won’t be fingering Kleenex when you get a grip on me.” Willy looked so confused that Iona blew a snort of laughter out her nose, right in his face. “You don’t know, do you, sweetheart? You don’t know Belinda Beller’s tits are made of paper.”

“I don’t want to hear you say her name,” Willy said.

“Fine,” said Iona, breathing in his ear. “I don’t wanna talk about her either.”

Willy felt the pressure in his crotch, his penis rising against his will. He thought of his mother putting lipstick and rouge on old Mrs. Griswold after she died, but even that didn’t help this time.

Iona Moon pounced on top of him, kissing his mouth and locking the door at the same time. She fumbled with his belt, clawed at his zipper. He mumbled
no
, but she smothered the word, swallowed it up in her own mouth.

When Willy wrestled his sisters, his father told him to be careful: the strong have to look out for the weak, he said. It didn’t matter that his sisters were older. Even if they jumped him two at a time, Willy was the one who had to go easy. He wasn’t strong enough to win a fight without hurting them, without kicking and wrenching and taking a few blind swings, so he had to hold back. Most times he was lucky just to get away.

Willy clamped Iona’s arms, but she twisted free. “You know you want it, Willy,” she said. “Everybody wants it.” But he didn’t, not like this, not with Iona Moon. She bit at his lips and his ears, sharp little nips; her fingers between his legs cupped his balls dangerously tight.

With his hands on her shoulders, he shoved her back, flung her against the dashboard so hard it stunned her, and he had time to unlock the door, leap, and flee. But he didn’t get far before he heard the unmistakable sputter of tires in mud, an engine revving, going nowhere. Slowing to a trot, he listened: rock it, he thought, first to reverse, first to reverse.

He heard her grind through the gears, imagined her slamming the stick, stamping the clutch, thought that by now tears streamed down her hot cheeks. Finally he heard the engine idle down, a pitiful, defeated sound in the near darkness.

Slowly he turned, knowing what he had to do, hearing his father’s voice:
A gentleman always helps a lady in distress.
She’s no lady.
Who are you to judge?

He found small dead branches and laid them under the tires in two-foot rows. One steady push, his feet braced against a tree, one more, almost, third time’s charm, and the front tires caught the sticks, spun, spat up mud all the way to his mouth, and heaved the truck backward onto solid ground. He wiped his hands on his jeans and clumped toward the road.

“Hey,” said Iona. “Don’t you want a ride?” He kept marching. “Hey, Willy, get in. I won’t bite.” She pulled up right beside him. “It’ll take you more than an hour to get home. Your mama will skin you. Now get in. I won’t lay a hand on you.” He didn’t dare look at her. His face felt swollen, about to explode. “What I did before, I didn’t mean anything by it. I never would have tried anything if I thought you wouldn’t like it. Willy?” He glanced up at her; she seemed no bigger than a child, hanging on to that huge steering wheel. “Willy, I got a gun. Right here behind the seat, I got my daddy’s gun.”
Don’t you be gettin’ any ideas of makin’ like a jackrabbit, boy.
Willy didn’t know if Iona meant it as a warning or a threat, but he knew there was nothing real behind her words, no reason not to get in the truck, no reason except his pride, and that seemed like a small thing when he weighed it against the five-mile trek along the winding road, his mother’s pinched face, and the spot of grease from her nose on the windowpane.

White Falls sat in a hollow, a fearful cluster of lights drawn up in a circle for the night, a town closed in on itself. Iona said, “I almost died once. My brother Leon and I started back from town in a storm that turned to a blizzard. Everything was white, like there was nothing in the world besides us and the inside of this truck. Leon drove straight into a six-foot drift; it looked just the same as the sky and the road. We had to get out and walk, or sit there and freeze like the damn cows. We stumbled, breaking the wind with our hands; then we crawled because the gusts were less wild near the ground. I saw the shadows of houses wavering in the snow, right in front of us, but they were never there. A sheet of ice built up around my cheek and chin, and I kept stopping to shatter it with my fist, but it took too long; Leon said, leave it, it will stop the wind. I thought they’d find me that way, the girl in glass, and they’d keep me frozen in a special truck, take me from town to town along with the nineteen-inch man and the two-headed calf. But Leon, Leon never thought for a minute we were going to die on that road. When I dropped to my belly and said I was warm now, he swatted my butt. Not this way, he said, not this way, God. And then I wondered if he’d whispered it or if I heard what he was thinking. Leon talking to God, I thought; that was more of a miracle than surviving, and I scrambled back to my knees and lunged forward.

“Just like a dog, Leon knew his way. I forgave him for everything. I swore in my heart I’d never hold a harsh thought against him, not for anything in the past or anything he might do later on, because right there in that moment, he was saving our lives.

“When Mama wrapped my hands in warm rags and Daddy pulled off my boots to rub my toes as hard as he could, I knew that nothing, nothing in the world was ever going to matter so much again.” She punched the clutch and shifted into fourth. “Do you know why I’m telling you this?” Willy nodded, but he didn’t know; he didn’t know at all.

It wasn’t until Iona Moon eased into her driveway and shut off the engine that she remembered her mother’s chocolate and the ragged dollar bill still crumpled in her pocket.
I think I’ve got to have some pleasure
, that was the last thing Mama said. She rested her head on the steering wheel. A single sob erupted, burst from between her ribs as if someone had pounded his fist against her chest. She fought her own cry, choked it dry, and was silent.

IN 1858, THE SLAVE CALLED LIZE WAS HANGED
in Louisville, Georgia, for the murder of her master’s son. I was twelve that day, and now I’m ninety, but I still see her bare feet, scratched and dusty from being dragged down the road. Those feet dangle among leaves so green they writhe like flames. I stand in the garden. The perfume of gardenias makes me dizzy enough to faint.

From where I hang, I see a woman thrown from a ship because her child don’ come. She screams too loud and long. The others lift her over the rail, let her fall. They all touch her. They all say: I’m not the one. I see the mother of my mother, standing naked on a beach. The men look her over, burn a mark on her thigh. She squats in a cage for fifteen days. Flies land on her face. She don’ swat them away. I see the bodies chained in the holds of ships. Each man got less room than he got in the grave. They panic, break their own ankles, smother in their own waste. They jump if they get the chance. Black sea swallow a black man. Nobody stop to find him. On the distant shore, I see a runaway stripped of his own skin like a rabbit, torn limb from limb. To teach the others. I see Abe’s head. I crawl on
my hands and knees, look for his ears. But Walkerman takes them. Did you see how long a man bleeds? Did you see how his head festers in the heat? No way to clean those wounds though I wash him morning and night.

Mama died of a five-day fever we couldn’t break with wet towels and ice baths. She left her baby squalling with hunger. That’s why Father brought Lize to the house, to keep Seth alive. My brother, four months old, still wrinkled and nearly hairless, was going to have a full-grown woman slave of his own.

Mama would not have abided seeing Lize close to her boy. Father owned more than thirty Negroes, but Mama kept an Irish girl, Martha Parnell, to brush her hair and make her bed, to wipe the vomit off the floor during the weeks when her belly first began to swell, to rock the baby during the days when she lay dying. Mama wouldn’t have no nigger woman upstairs, touching her child, fondling the silver-handled mirror on her dresser or cleaning the long, light hair out of her comb. She said they were dirty, first of all, and they had appetites dangerous to men; she didn’t want Seth getting used to the smell of them. Only Beulah, the cook, two hundred and twenty pounds and fifty-seven years old, was allowed to stay in the house while Mama was living. And Beulah was allowed to care for me, to wash the blood from my scraped knees when I fell in the yard, to lay cool rags on my head when my temperature flared, to cradle me in her huge arms when I shook with chills.

Every day, Mama sat for hours listening to me read from the Bible, making me repeat a verse a dozen times, until every pause was perfect and every consonant clipped. She smiled and closed her eyes, her patience endless:
Again, Selina.
But she couldn’t bear my small wounds or mild afflictions. She had no tolerance for suffering; my whimpering drove her from the room and made her call for Beulah to come with her root cures. And I was not permitted to hold the precious mirror or brush my mama’s hair either. She said I was too rough, too clumsy—seven years’ bad luck—I brushed too fast, only Martha Parnell did it right:
Yes, Martha, that feels nice.
I hid in the shadows of the doorway.
Yes, like that, good girl, Martha, just another hundred strokes.
Mama’s honey hair caught the light, shot back a thousand sparks of gold fire. Martha said, “My mam told me the angels have yellow hair, Missus.” She stopped to press the silken strands to her mouth and nose, forgetting Mama could see her in the mirror. “Stop that,” Mama said. “I don’t have time for such silliness.” Martha raised the brush, gripped it like the stick she’d used to beat the stray dog in the yard, but she brought it down gently, brushing again—a hundred strokes, just like Mama said—before she coiled that angel hair into two thick braids and pinned them tight, high on Mama’s head.

Martha couldn’t make Seth take the bottle after Mama died. She was a spinster at twenty, a girl who never ripened, hips narrow as a boy’s and bone-hard, breasts already shriveled before they’d blossomed. Her body offered no comfort to man or child. Father cursed the sight of her, abused her for the foolish way she cooed at the baby, making him cry harder till he was too hoarse to wail and only squeaked. She dipped her finger in warm milk, but Seth was not fooled. Only Beulah could soothe him, holding him on the great pillow of her lap, quieting him with hands so fat and smooth she seemed to have no bones. She gave him a bit of cloth soaked with sugar water. He suckled and slept. Still, my father’s only son was starving; that’s what drove him down to the slaves’ quarters, looking for Lize.

The man come to the shack. He say, my boy’s hungry. He pulls my dress apart at the neck, looks at my breasts like I’m some cow. He say, looks like you got plenty to spare.

Secretly I was glad to hear my father rail at Martha Parnell, calling her a worthless dried-up bit of ground, threatening to send her scrawny ass back to Ireland if she didn’t find some way to make herself useful. At my mother’s funeral, she tugged on my braids and hissed in my ear, “Looks like you’re no better’n me now, Miss Selina. Nothin’ but a motherless child with no one but the devil to keep her safe from her daddy. Don’t I know. Eight of us. Mama and the ninth dead and me the oldest. Just you watch yourself, little girl, and lock your door at night.” My lack of understanding made her laugh out loud. People turned to stare. When Father caught my eye, my face burned, blood rising in my cheeks as if I’d just been slapped.

Martha’s only pleasure was bringing sorrow to others. Her lies cost Abe his ears. Mama was nearing her sixth month when it happened. She yelled when a door slammed too hard, fretted when the heat got too heavy—she was a walking misery, despising her own bloated body, its strange new weight, its hard curves. When Martha claimed Abe cuffed her jaw and shoved her down, Mama’s judgment was swift and cruel. He was going to be an example. “Can’t let these boys get above themselves,” she said.