Out of Darkness (5 page)

 

NAOMI
Naomi watched the twins play until some of the church ladies started drifting in her direction. She did not want to meet another Miss Glenda Fae Hawkins or Miss Susannah Sally Peters, had no desire to face their smiles and clucking and gloved hands. Some inquired about “eye-talians” in her mother's family. Others did not, but their faces were pinched with the strain of not asking, not saying.

She considered waiting in Henry's truck, away from the dressed-up chickens that would peck and peck at her until they found something tasty. But the men were smoking over there, so the woods seemed like a better escape. She hurried in that direction.

It was cooler under the trees. High in the branches, tree frogs sang shrill
serenatas
. The sharp, clean scent of pine was in the air. Naomi stepped off of the path, leaned against the smooth trunk of an ash tree, and slid down to sit at its base. She put her mind on the small things in the brush. If she focused on all the little lives creeping and fluttering and scurrying around her, she wouldn't have to feel what she was feeling.

Which was mostly betrayal. She was losing Beto already. He was hungry for Henry's attention. She wondered if Abuelito and Abuelita knew this would happen—and if they would care. She didn't get to have an opinion; they had sent her here without once asking what she thought.

Even when Abuelito had sensed that something was wrong, it hadn't mattered. “Don't you see it's for the best?” he had said that last night in San Antonio. He'd reached out a trembling, spotted hand and guided her over to the bed she shared with Beto and Cari. He pulled his chair close and laid his dry palm gently against her cheek. “This is for you, too,
mi corazon
. I want you to go to the big school. They must let you, you see? None of this...” He pulled his hand back and waved it through the air to sum up all the ways the San Antonio schools kept Mexican students apart from whites. The too-small primary schools and the split grades that meant Mexican kids were always and forever behind. The “Mexican wing” of Crockett High School, which was really five dank and crowded basement rooms that no white student ever entered. Abuelito's excitement swept him along. “You will give the twins this opportunity,
¿verdad?
And you will go to the school?”

She had closed her eyes and nodded. It wasn't really a question anyway.

Now she had seen the school. She didn't care about the science lab or the math classes or the typewriters. She didn't want any of it. She only wanted to be away from the eyes on her, the snickers, the too-loud whispers, the boys bumping against her in the halls, halls that were never crowded enough for it to be an accident.

The only thing worse than going there was staying home, where Henry might be. And so she had to go to school. For now. She practiced wiping Henry out of all the places that she had to see him. She filled his seat at the kitchen table with blankness, cleared him from the revival bench, vanished him from behind the wheel of the truck. She was about to subtract Henry from the bathroom mirror where he had stood shaving that morning when she saw him walking toward her.

“There you are,” he said. He came over to where she sat and offered a hand to help her up.

She ignored it, rearranged her legs quickly, and stood up on her own. “I was just going to see the river,” she said, walking fast away from him and toward the sound of the river.

His voice followed her. “I wanted to make sure you were having a good time.”

“Fine, just fine.” She threaded her fingers through the tail of her long braid.

◊ ◊ ◊

To touch her braid was to remember her mother. The code was simple: when her mother had a braid, she belonged to Naomi. When Estella fixed her hair in swirls and curls and combs, she belonged to her dancing and to the men she danced with (and, later, to Henry) and she did not come home for hours and hours and the bed Naomi shared with her was wide and lonely. On this particular evening, Naomi was six; her father was dead; she and Estella still lived in the back bedroom of the nice house Abuelito and Abuelita owned before the stock market crash.

“Like this?” Estella asked, spinning to show the curls pinned in swirls over the nape of her neck. Her mother's yellow dress rode up around her slim brown legs as she moved.

Naomi shrugged and traced the pattern of the lace coverlet on the bed. Snowflake, snowflake, flower. Snowflake, snowflake, flower. She was the snowflake, pointy and awkward. Her mother was the flower.

“Well?” Estella reached out a slender finger and lifted Naomi's chin.

“I like it best in
una trenza
,” Naomi mumbled.

“A braid! But why is that?” Estella studied her. “Don't you like Mami to be elegant?”

Naomi shook her head. Tears began to fall onto the lace.

“Do you want me to stay in tonight?” Estella unpinned her hair and let it fall over Naomi's face. “Here, you braid it for me.”

Later, they draped the ends of their braids over their mouths like mustaches and pretended to be mariachi singers.

That was one of the good memories. The bad ones were edged with silence and blood. Estella's eyes gone glassy, her face gray. And between the good and the bad there were others, moments colored not so much by fear or danger but by tiny heartbreaks, thimblefuls of betrayal. Estella was a woman, not a saint. But at least Naomi had her braid.

◊ ◊ ◊

When she was small, Naomi would snuggle into bed beside her mother, taking in the smell of her skin, tangy like grapefruit. She held on to her mother's braid, rubbing the glossy tail between her fingers until she fell asleep. Even after her mother married Henry, sometimes Naomi slept next to her when he was away working in an oil field.

They were alone in Henry's house when the first disaster happened. Naomi had awoken to the sound of Estella moaning. When she turned over, she saw that her mother's nightgown was plastered to her thighs, dark with blood.

“Mamá—” Naomi shook her. In the moonlight she could see pain move across her mother's face, and then she saw her reach under the dark wet hem of her nightgown.

“
Mírame
,
mi amor
,” her mother said. “Just keep looking at me.”

Naomi tried to obey. But her mother's lips seemed almost white, and her eyes were wide and full of tears. Naomi looked down and saw what her mother had found between her legs. It was the size of a plum, but it had legs and arms that looked black against the white of her mother's hand.

That was the first time Henry made her mother pregnant. That was the first baby she lost.

Abuelita and Tia Cuca came to Houston for a week. They told Estella that this was something that almost every woman went through once. They fed her special soups and brushed her hair, and Estella began to look like herself again, only smaller.

And then they left and Henry came back, and Mami's smile closed down again. At night, Naomi heard their noises through the bedroom wall and her mother crying afterwards. Naomi lay alone in her bed. She held her doll in one hand and her own thin braid in the other.

◊ ◊ ◊

Naomi walked along the riverbank with Henry following behind her. At the edge of the woods, he pointed down the slope to the clearing. The picnic was winding down, and the sun was setting. Cari and Beto were small dark figures moving among other small dark figures in some kind of play.

“Kids sure are taking to the place,” he said.

She shrugged. If he actually knew Cari, he'd know that she could turn anything into a game and make herself at home with anyone. That was just her way.

She turned to the breeze coming off the water. There was a whiff of honeysuckle and rot and skunk musk. The sun shifted a little lower in the sky, and all at once the brown river was tricked out with bits of glittering sun. A water moccasin swam past, a dark head trailing a V-shaped ripple. The boys hustling bait in the shallows scooted back, calling out, “Cottonmouth!”

“Prettiest place in the world,” Henry said. He edged closer. “Pastor baptized me there, just like Robbie today.”

“Beto,” Naomi said, turning to look at him.

Henry slid a finger up under his collar and scratched. “Right there in those sweet waters.”

She stared at a spot in the middle of the river and imagined the moment. Henry's eager face as he was lowered back into the murky waters. If only the preacher had had the sense to hold Henry down just a little longer ... there might have been a small struggle, but in the end, they would have all been better off.

Henry took another step toward the river. Sweat beaded across his forehead. He searched his pockets for a handkerchief, came up with nothing. He prodded the damp ground with the toe of his good shoe. Later, he'd be tracking that mud into the house for sure.

“I thought I ought to ... to explain a bit...,” he mumbled. Naomi heard only part of what he said. There was a vague mention of “that time before” and of saving grace and a promise that he had changed. When he looked up, his eyes shone.

She didn't say anything.

Henry wiped his hands down the front of his pants and smiled. “I guess that's that. Maybe you all can meet a few more folks?” He delivered the final word too brightly. She knew he did not really want another round of introducing the brown stepdaughter.

“I'll be along,” she said, fixing her eyes again on the water. The light was gone from the surface now; the river was just a dark onrushing.

Henry's footsteps grew faint, and for a moment Naomi remembered also the dark blank of her mother's grave, the casket lowered in, Henry next to her, his grip tight on her arm, his mouth so close she could feel his breath on her ear. And his words, slipping in and wrapping around her heart before she could stop them: “You could have saved her.” The twins, bawling in Tia Cuca's arms, were two weeks old. He did not hold them once.

Naomi squatted and trailed a hand in the shallows. Pastor Tom could dunk Henry in saving grace till he was sleek as a muskrat, but he couldn't shake those mistakes off easy as drops of water. If he'd been born again once, what was to say that he couldn't be born again a second time, back into his old ways?

◊ ◊ ◊

When it was time to go, Naomi went over to the long table that had been heaped with food earlier. Her eyes slid past empty plates, crumbled bits of cornbread, a smear of potatoes in a casserole dish. She spotted an empty pie plate on a red dish towel. A stray blueberry was stuck to the side. Naomi reached out a finger and swept it into her mouth. Then she picked up the tin and cloth and began looking for the dish she'd brought.

A moment later she found the chipped blue plate and lifted the napkin she'd draped over the top to keep flies off of the tortillas. They had not been touched. Not one.

She grabbed the plate and turned toward the trucks and cars still parked at the edge of the clearing.

There was a burst of laughter, and two girls tumbled from behind the nearest tree. They had matching freckles and strawberry blonde hair, and they wore dresses cut from the same pattern. The smaller of the two girls looked a few years younger than the twins; the other might have been a year older.

Naomi sidestepped the little one, but she darted right back into her path.

“Excuse me,” Naomi said. Now the older one was blocking her way, too.

“Hold on,” the older girl said. She draped her arms around her sister's shoulders, rested her chin on the little girl's head. “We had the table staked out, see? We was watching to see, wondering who brought them goofy flat pancakes.”

“Okay,” Naomi said.

“Don't you know how to make pancakes? And why'd you bring 'em to a picnic? Ain't picnic food no how.”

They were children. There was no reason to be embarrassed, but she was. It was Henry's fault. If he'd bothered to tell her about the picnic, she could have made something else. There wasn't even an hour left when he mentioned a dinner after the revival, not even time enough to get the oven hot for biscuits.

“Told ya,” said the older girl to the little one.

“What?” Curiosity unglued Naomi's tongue.

“Only somebody new would be dumb enough to bring pancakes for a supper.”

Naomi took in a sharp breath. Her palms itched, and she had a brief impulse to slap the older one.

“They're not pancakes. They're tortillas,” she said, pushing down her embarrassment. She shoved past them and ran toward the cars. Their voices trailed after her.

“Ain't she stuck-up, though?” said the bigger girl.

“I think she's pretty.” That was the little one.

“You would, snot box.”

“Ain't a snot box!”

“You was picking it just now.”

“Wasn't, neither!”

Naomi slid into the truck beside Cari and shut the door. Beto stood between the dash and the gearshift holding a small black Bible. “I got it for being baptized,” he said. His face was bright in the gloom.

“We already got baptized when we were babies,” Cari said.

Henry ignored Cari and smiled at Naomi. “The welcome committee found you?”

“Something like that,” Naomi said. She shoved the dishes down to the floorboard.

 

WASH
Wash couldn't see the girl from where he was unloading potatoes into the cellar of Turner's General Store, but through the trapdoor opening he recognized her shoes. They were the same ones, he was sure, but he couldn't fathom what she'd be doing coming through the front door of a white grocery store.

Voices drifted down to him. Naomi said something he couldn't hear, but Mr. Turner's words rang out clear. “Where you think you are, girl?”

“Hold on, Amos.” That was Mrs. Turner. “Where you from, honey? Who's your folks?”

Before Naomi answered, Mr. Turner started in again. “So there's brown ones and black ones, that don't matter. What matters is that they don't sully up my store.”