Love and Sleep (11 page)

When she had lost her fear of the room she dared open the door and peek out. She heard voices, Mousie's and a male voice she didn't know (it was Joe Boyd), and closed the door again. She tried a chair—it had a wooden coat hanger affixed to the top of it, with a coat draped over it, and big shoes on a rack below: a chair wearing clothes. She went to the bed and lay down on one side of it, listening to the hum of the clock (which she couldn't read) and smelling the familiar male smell of the pillow, like her grandpap's. When she got up, she noted that an impression of herself remained on the bed and the pillow.

She opened Sam's drawers, and marveled at the black eggs of his rolled socks; she looked at huge glossy issues of
Esquire
magazine that Sam prudishly stashed there, at pictures of cars and bottles of amber whiskey and elongated women the color of biscuits. She found the furry humpbacked box that held Opal's wedding rings: she opened it, and watched the tiny stone color the light that entered it, her thighs tight together and her hand pressed between her legs.

She had seen the commode in the little house where the children lived and thought there might be another one in here too, but where. She bent to look under the bed for the pot, one side, the other side, wetting her pants. No pot. At length she lifted a ginger jar off the headboard of the bed, and used that as well as she could, watering the flocked rug too. She rolled up her damp pants and tossed them deep under the bed where no one could ever find them; she capped the jar and put it back. Later she could ask where to empty it.

She forgot it, though, when she saw the knob of the door turn, and Pierce's anxious white face looked in: and though Winnie eventually found the pants, still for a long time Sam would smell in his room the tang of stale urine, and not know why.

"Come on,” Pierce whispered.

"There's a diamond ring there,” she said.

"Come on.” He had sat all day in Sister Mary Philomel's classroom burdened with his knowledge that she was in the house, knowledge that at once filled and shrank his heart; now when he opened the door and saw her, she seemed to be a different person than the one he had been thinking of, denser, more problematic, renewing his fear and wonder.

"I'm hungry,” she said.

Could it really have been (Pierce wondered, having cause to ponder these things again) that they had kept Bobby to themselves for many days, a week at least, without Mousie knowing? Maybe there were enough children in the house that Mousie hadn't detected an extra pair of feet clattering on the back stairs; maybe Sister Mary Philomel couldn't distinguish a Cumberland whisper amid the urgent whispers in the garden plot below her schoolroom window (Bobby refusing to stay in the hideaway under the house they had found for her). Anyway no one caught her. She slept with Bird, and the one time her shape under the covers was discerned by Mousie, Hildy had been in the bathroom, and Mousie thought it was she in Bird's bed.

Days she moved from room to room, or snuck up into the woods or into the chicken house or down into town with Pierce and Bird (dangerous, daring, if they hadn't felt themselves to be truly Invisible, and Bobby too as long as she was in their keeping, they would have betrayed themselves and her). She could stay preternaturally still and silent, make herself transparent to observation somehow, like a speckled toad in dead leaves; if you looked long at her (Pierce hiding out with her in the upstairs closet, waiting for a chance to run), there could seem something alien in the shape of her face, something opaque in her hard eyes, as though she only closely resembled a human girl.

She still talked about getting to Deetroit and her maw, but—though they schemed with her and stole from the kitchen and the closets to provision her—they knew, Pierce and Hildy at least, that this was like make-believe, like Joe Boyd's constant threat to run away to sea. It seemed clear that she didn't know the way, and when once they took out the volume of maps from the cabinet where the maroon Encyclopedia was kept, and found Kentucky, she couldn't follow what they did.
There's
Clay County. There's Pikeville. There was the No Name River too and the centipede of the railroad track. Bobby watched them without interest.

It only slowly grew clear to them that she couldn't read at all. “Yes I sure can,” she said defiantly, and sang out “A b c d e f g, hi jk ello mello pee,” but couldn't pass the real tests Hildy quickly put to her. For her part she didn't seem to believe completely that they could read what they read, and would challenge them to read passages aloud, from pages she chose, so they couldn't cheat.

"Ophites,” Pierce read from the Dictionary where her finger, tipped with a black-moon nail, pointed. “The Ophites were a sect who, like most Gnostics, regarded the Jehovah of the Jews with great abhorrence, and believed that the emancipation of human souls from his power was the great work of life. Thus they considered that the Serpent who tempted Eve to revolt was the great benefactor of the human race. They worshipped a serpent which they kept within a sanctuary, and after it had blessed (by licking with its tongue) the Eucharist bread, the communicants each kissed it on the mouth."

Bobby considered this. “Don't wonder they didn't like Jews,” she said. “They kilt Jesus. My uncle took up a snake once in church, cause the Bible says if you believe, you can handle snakes, or drink pizen, and no harm come to you. He didn't kiss it though.” She leafed further through the book. “Kissn snakes,” she said in disgusted disbelief, and turned the page. “Who's this all?"

"Statues."

"Where's ther clothes?"

"They didn't wear them like we do."

She lifted her eyes slowly to Pierce, as though he had planted the picture of Hermes there for her to find. “This was long ago,” he said, blushing. “In another country."

"What country?” she said. “I guess Bar Nekkid Land."

"No, Greece."

"Grease, huh,” she said cynically, regarding the page.

What she knew and they didn't: how to light a paper match by closing the matchbook cover over the match head and the brown sandpaper strip together and then pulling the match sharply out. How to spit between her teeth, a fine straight spray like a bullet, and hit a target feet away. How to roll a cigarette with paper and loose tobacco, and smoke without choking. When Pierce bought the tobacco for her (charging it at the little store, the incurious keeper noting it on the long strip of other Oliphant charges, where it would puzzle Winnie later on amid the pop and bread and milk), they paused before the chewing tobacco displayed there: some of it tasty looking golden squares inside cellophane, another kind that was plain twists of tobacco like hanks of thick grapevine.

"You ever chew?” she asked him.

"No."

"My grandpap does. Try it,” she said, and held one of the shaggy twists to his face.

"No!"

"Jes try it!” she said urgently, and when he did touch his tongue to it, and recoiled from the burning bitterness, like an awful practical joke, like everything terrible he had ever tasted by mistake, she laughed with satisfaction.

While they tried smoking the loose-rolled bundles of tobacco she made, like Saturday's bonfire, Bobby showed him another thing she knew.

"Lookit,” she said. She tore out two of the paper matches from the book she carried, and with her long fingernails she pried the layers of paper apart and spread them open. Now she had two little stickfigures like the ones that warred in Joe Boyd's endless battle. Squatting by a flat rock, her sharp knees up and her dress pushed down with a fist between her knees, she laid the two figures down, one on top of the other; then, laughing low, she lit a third match in her special fashion, and with it touched the match heads of the little figures.

"See?"

They leapt when they ignited, and then their limbs began to writhe languorously together as the flame curled and blackened them, legs spreading and backs arching. Bobby watched delighted, then looked at Pierce, her opaque eyes alight with devilment.

"It's your mawn pa,” she said. “Fuckn."

Then she jumped up to run, sure she had insulted him outrageously; but Pierce only looked from her to the two matchstick people, twisted as in agony, their bodies afire. Fuckn. From a distance Bobby laughed, waiting to be chased.

Nights they talked about death, God, and revelation in the dark of the bungalow by the heater's glow.

"When you die,” Bobby said, “you get put down in your grave, and there you lie, dead and asleep till Jesus come. Then on that day ever'body gets out of their graves alive again, and gets judged.
Then
y'all go to hell, and Christians live on earth with Jesus ‘bout a thousand years, and then they go on up to heaven forever. That's all."

These certainties had come, she said, out of the Bible. Didn't they read the Bible? Her grandpap read the Bible all the time, with the Holy Spert guiden him. The Holy Spert had revealed to him a secret Gospel underneath the Gospel everybody read.

"Holy Spirit is another name for Holy Ghost,” said Hildy.

"Not a ghost!” said Bobby, scandalized. “Ghosts are dead people come back, clankn ther chains or a big knife in ther backs. The Holy Sperta God."

"What about us?” Pierce said. “We're Christians."

"Ain't neither. You born again? You cept Christ?"

"What about you?"

"I ain't gone die yet."

"What about little babies? Who die, who don't get baptized? They didn't do anything wrong."

"They go to hell too."

Bird drew breath at this, shocked.

"Well to get baptized you got to cept Christ. How can a baby do that?"

"Godparents do it,” said Bird, whose own sent her a present every year on her christening day. Bobby snorted in contempt, having no idea what a godparent might be but quick to put up a defense.

"When babies die without getting baptized,” Hildy told Bobby, “they go to Limbo. That's not hell. It's outside heaven.” Hildy thought of death as being like going into a closet or a wardrobe, the earth; only (like the one upstairs) the closet had an exit on the other side, the wardrobe was one such as magicians had, where after you were shut up in it you could be shown to have exited without having come back out: you exited into a geography that seemed to Hildy to be not in the sky or even in the earth but within death itself. Heaven. Hell. Purgatory. Limbo. When she thought of people there she always thought of them as on the move, in passage, migrating always farther within the endless interior of death. “Because they never got baptized, they can't go to heaven, but it's not
their
fault, so they go to Limbo, where everything is sort of nice, but they can't be with God. Ever."

"
But
,” Pierce said, “if you're not baptized and you grow up, and you're like bad, you still go to hell.” An inequity in this struck him for the first time: it was like being able to lose in a game you didn't know you were playing, but not allowed to win.

"
Unless
,” Hildy added, raising a finger, “you have Baptism of Desire. That means you
would
have believed in God and gotten baptized and been a Catholic if only you had heard about it, only you didn't, and you did your best anyway."

Bobby sat listening, chin in her hands, in a flannel nightgown of Bird's, her own invincible ignorance (Pierce realized uncomfortably) slipping fast away, and with it her chance for Baptism of Desire. Nor was she an infant. Where did that leave her?

"Anyway our mother's in heaven now,” said Bird.

"No she ain't,” said Bobby. “She ain't yet, cause Jesus ain't come yet. Then he'll see."

But there was only one of her, and three smart Oliphants (four after Warren had to be let in on the secret), and she knew which side her bread was buttered on; she listened to Hildy's catechisms, not unpleased at the fuss made over her.

Anyway there could be no objection, Pierce thought, to the mild dogmas they wanted to convince her of. Like Sam, the children believed that nothing which could be shown to be true could contradict faith, not evolution or the great age of the earth or Relativity; natural casuists, they were quick to notice and adopt any qualifications, ecumenicisms, loopholes in the strong fortress of faith to let in the real world, which had for them a primacy they neither perceived nor questioned. For the Oliphants—for Pierce at least—the long story read out in snatches at every Mass, never heard whole, endlessly recycled, never completed, though unquestionably true, happened somewhere elsewhere: in eternity, maybe. It was History that happened now.

But Bobby had never heard of History; she had only the one story, her grandpap's, about the dead and their awaking and their judgment, graphic as a horror comic, which she seemed to believe was taking place right now, this week, this winter. She had no ritual obligations, she didn't even go to church on Sunday, no church having the true story the Holy Spert had taughtn her grandpap; and she knew no prayers at all.

Under the bungalow with Hildy and Bird, close around Bobby, showing her how to pray: hands pressed palm to palm, thumbs optionally crossed or side by side. Hail Mary Mother of God. At Jesus's name Hildy tipped Bobby's head down with a finger and then released it. The fruit of thy womb. Which had what to do, exactly, with the name of the underpants Pierce wore, it must be something, chance alone couldn't account for such a similarity. From above their heads (they were right below the schoolroom) they heard the sharp strike of Sister's desk bell. They dared ignore it once.

"If you're Catholic you aren't prejudiced,” Hildy said, “and you don't have to think Negroes are worse than other people. It's a sin to have prejudice.” Colored people are no different at all from us, Opal Boyd had told them all, and Hildy believed it, though she'd known none; neither had Opal.

"Sun don't set on ther heads in Clay County,” Bobby said mildly. “My ma said they better not let it."

She had begun to shiver. Sister's bell rang again. They could see it in their minds, silver, but shaped exactly like a chocolate marshmallow cookie, why. “Don't leave,” Hildy said. She pressed Bobby back against the cold dry clay.