Sweetwater Creek (7 page)

“Now,” Cleta said. “We needs to talk about that dream.”

“No,” Emily whimpered, shrinking back into the pillows. “What if I have it again? Oh, Cleta, what if it comes back, and back…”

“Ain’t gon’ come back,” Cleta said, looking far away into some distance of her own.

“How do you know?”

“’Cause it ain’t no dream. I the last person in the world ought to be tellin’ you this, Emily, but it’s past time and I reckon the only other one who knows about it ain’t ever gon’ speak. An’ you got to know, because it ride you like a hag all your life if you don’t. You ain’t gon’ know what it is, but you’ll feel it behind you, and you be wonderin’ all the time when it gon’ catch up with you.”

“I’ve already felt that,” Emily quavered. “For a week now, at least. How did you know about it?”

“We all knows,” Cleta said. “Some people call it a haint and some says it’s a plateye. But we all knows down deep that it ain’t nothin’ but a big truth tryin’ to catch up with you. You run, and it run harder. You turn and stare it down and it go slinkin’ off like some ol’ sissy. I seen it happen a lot of times.”

“You mean—that dream is the
truth
?”

“Yeah, it is. I wondered if you’d remember it on your own. Lots of chirrun never do. It’ll hurt you a lot right at first, but it won’t ever chase you through the nights no more. God knows this ain’t the time for it, but yo’ insides knows it already, an’ it tryin’ to come out now. We needs to help it on out.”

Emily closed her eyes and leaned back. The whole world seemed warm and enveloping. She felt swaddled, cocooned. What could possibly touch her? Elvis’s cries sounded like those of a dog in a far-off TV program.

“You can tell me now,” she said, and smiled. She could feel its foolishness on her mouth. The smile became an even more ludicrous giggle. “All I’ve got to do is keep drinking gin.”

“It don’t hardly never help none, but there’s times it’s a right good friend,” Cleta said. “This is one of them. All right. You be quiet and listen till I’m through, and then we see what we need to do next.”

Emily looked at her silently. Gin or not, this was going to be a bad thing. She could see its dense shadow advancing before it. But it was abstract, unreal.

“What you dreamed happened one night when you was about three,” Cleta said. Her rich voice turned suddenly flat and hard-edged. “Yo’ mama and daddy thought I’d gon’ home, I reckon, but I was still in the kitchen, ironin’. First I just heard their voices real loud and mean, like I ain’t never heard before, and then I could hear what they sayin’. An’ after a while, Jesus help me, I opened the door a little ways and watched. It was wrong, but I ain’t sorry.”

“What…”

Cleta held up her hand. “I reckon they’d been fightin’ for a long time; I knew yo’ mama lose her temper sometime, an’ bang things around when she don’t get what she want. Her daddy spoil her bad. But until that night, they kept it upstairs. The help usually knows, but I didn’t. They standin’ there in the foyer under that chandelier, and she got on that pretty silk dress she got up in Atlanta for that big weddin’ in Charleston, and her little suitcase was sittin’ there on the flo’ beside her. She right up in yo’ daddy’s face, and she hollerin’. He just standin’ there like a statue, an’ he got tears rollin’ down his face. But he mad, too; I could tell. He say somethin’ like, ‘Don’t you care about nothin?’ and she say, clear as day, ‘There ain’t nothin’ in this house for me to care about.’ That’s when I saw you. You was standin’ there by that telephone place in yo’ nightgown, an’ you look like somebody done strike you dead. White as a sheet. I wanted so bad to go get you I couldn’t get a deep breath, but you turn around then, and scoot back upstairs like a little rabbit, so quick and quiet.

“Then he say, ‘You jus’ gon’ leave yo’ chirrun? Just like that? You mean they ain’t nothin’ to you?’

“And she say, ‘The twins got each other. They always did. An’ they got you. They ain’t paid me no mind for a long time. Emily ain’t old enough to even remember me. You’ll find somebody to take care of her. Jenny, maybe. I bet my long-sufferin’ sister would just love to git in this house one way or another. And Buddy…I’m coming back for Buddy. I’m not leaving him alone in this awful dead place where nobody cares about nothing but dogs and shootin’ birds. He’s goin’ with me. He’s sensitive like me; he needs people and music and art and…and
grace
. There ain’t no grace in this house. You tell him I’ll be back for him before he knows it.’

“An’ she pick up that suitcase and walk out that do’, and that the last this house ever see of her. Yo’ daddy just stand there for a long time, and then he go down the hall to his study and shut himself in. An’ I go on home, and worries all night about how to fix things for you. But besides askin’ yo’ daddy where yo’ mama was the next mornin’, an’ he say she gone on a trip, you never talk about her again, that I knows of. It was like it never happened. For a long time I hoped to God you weren’t never gon’ remember it, but all the time I knows in my heart you would, an’ I hoped somebody got the sense to tell you about it before you did. Otherwise I knowed it gon’ chase you down jus’ like it did. But you knows now, and it ain’t gon’ chase you no more.”

Emily felt a great, dead coldness like an iceberg, so deep in her stomach that she knew it would never melt. But it did not flay and cut her like the dream had done. It simply sat immobile, slowly freezing the life out of her.

“It was because of me, wasn’t it?” she whispered. “I always sort of knew it was. Everybody would look at me when somebody mentioned her. I was the nothing, wasn’t I? If I’d been something, she wouldn’t have left.”

“No. It wasn’t you. It wasn’t ever you. She got nothin’ inside her to care about anybody else with, an’ so she think she gon’ find somethin’ wonderful if she go out lookin’ for it.”

“But I remember her…leaning over me, and kissing me, and sometimes she sang to me, and she always brought me stuff from parties…”

“It ain’t that she didn’t love you. Who could not love you? It just that she can’t love nobody enough to hold her anywhere long. Well, wherever she is, I hopes she find it. No. No, I hope she don’t. She don’t deserve it.”

Emily heard real anger in Cleta’s voice, where there had never been anger before.

“You…you don’t know where she is, then?”

“Don’t nobody know, I don’t reckon, ’cept maybe yo’ daddy, and he ain’t sayin’. It’s like she died that night. But at least we’d know if she was dead.”

“You don’t think she…she’s sick, or anything?”

“No. I don’t think that.”

“Buddy didn’t either. He said once he thought she could take care of herself real well.”

“You all talk about her, you an’ Buddy?”

“Just that once. He always changed the subject.”

“I reckon he did, after what she do to him.”

“What? I know she must never have come back for him, because there he was. Is that what you mean by what she did to him?”

“Yeah,” Cleta said slowly. “I think she must have tol’ him she was gon’ but she be back for him. He love his mama somethin’ mighty, and she make over him all the time, about how handsome he is, and how smart, and how proud he gon’ make her one day when she git him away from this place…”

“But she didn’t come back.”

“No. Right before she left, Buddy start stumblin’, an’ fallin’ down in public. I guess she think he slow her up or somethin’. He ain’t never said nothin’ to me about her, but it must of hurt him bad. He know somethin’ ugly and bad was wrong with him from the beginning. He a smart boy. He know why she ain’t come back.”

Oh, Buddy. The words felt as if they were etched in acid on the surface of the iceberg inside her. Oh, Buddy…

Emily felt tired tears well up, but she did not think her sore eyes could shed them. Too big, it was all too big. She knew that if she tried to process it, it would, after all, kill her. Murder her. She kept her mind white and blank.

“And nobody ever said anything about her again?” she said, faintly, as if beneath a bell of glass.

“Not that I hears,” Cleta said. “Yo’ daddy got them boys, and them dogs, and this ol’ place, that he think he gon’ turn into one of them fancy river plantations somehow or other. He gon’ show everybody, yessir. He show ’em he can do it without her, all by himself. He been killin’ himself tryin’ to do it ever since that night.”

“I could help him,” she whispered.

“He see that one day,” Cleta said.

She opened the door and Elvis came bounding in and dived under the covers, as close beside Emily as he could get. He did not sleep, only kept his golden eyes on her face.

Cleta stayed until Emily fell asleep. She did not think that she would ever sleep again, but she did, abruptly and so deeply that she did not stir until twilight, when her aunt Jenny came tiptoeing in and shook her gently. She had not, after all, had the assassin dream again, and after that day, she never did.

Aunt Jenny moved in that weekend. Emily was only vaguely aware of it until she woke, fully and finally, on Sunday night. She had slept like a dormant animal for three days, bobbling up from the depths of sleep occasionally to eat the soft foods Cleta brought for her, go to the bathroom and change the sanitary pads that her aunt had brought, and scrub her face and spiral down into sleep again. She was dimly aware that Elvis was beside her, licking her face gently whenever she woke. It was only later that Aunt Jenny told her that he had refused to leave her side for the entire three days, except to dash outside to relieve himself, and had burrowed almost under her, still as a statue. They brought his food and water into Emily’s bedroom, and he ate and drank there.

“You have a real friend here,” Emily remembered her aunt saying during one of her tenuous excursions into wakefulness.

“I know,” Emily mumbled. “He’s my best friend. He’s probably my only friend.”

“You have lots of friends, Emily,” her aunt answered. “You just haven’t met most of them yet.”

When she woke on Sunday night, she knew instinctively that she would not be permitted to hide in sleep anymore. For the moment, sleep was gone, and all her senses were almost preternaturally sharp. The pale green spring twilight glowed iridescently outside her window. The breeze that came in was like a blessing on her face. Emily heard dogs barking off in the kennels, the TV downstairs squalling, Elvis breathing contentedly beside her, hollow footsteps in the hall and on the stairs, pans rattling in the kitchen. Far away in the marshes she heard the plinking of the spring peepers. She smelled vegetable soup cooking, pluff mud, the sweet, funky odor of warm dog, her own unwashed body, and the light, green-smelling perfume her aunt always wore. She tasted cold artesian well water and the cottony inside of her own long-closed mouth.

She saw, as if limned in light, her shadowy bedroom and the face of her aunt leaning over her. She could even see Aunt Jenny’s pores, and the tiny sun wrinkles fanning out from her eyes.

“Hey,” she said, and cleared her throat around the unaccustomed effort of speaking. “How long have you been here?”

“A while,” her aunt said. “It’s been some fun, watching you and Elvis sleep.”

“How long have I slept?”

“Almost three days, off and on. It was good for you, I think. You look a lot better than when I got here. You’ve got some color in your cheeks, and your eyes are at least focused. How do you feel?”

“Okay, I guess,” Emily said, and then memory flooded in and she closed her eyes and waited. Her stomach gave a snakelike twist, but the deep, grinding pain didn’t awaken.

“Aunt Jenny, all this stuff…did Cleta tell you? She said she was going to. It was—it was just awful. It was terrible. I don’t know what to do about it.”

“You don’t have to do anything about it,” her aunt said. “You’ve done exactly what you ought to do, and that’s sleep. Poor baby, you had a triple whammy, didn’t you?”

“Triple whammy…”

“Yes. The dream, the curse, and—the truth. I’d have slept for ten days, myself.”

“You know about the dream and the…what I remembered?”

“Cleta told me. I needed to know. We didn’t tell anybody else, though. That’s for you to do, if you ever want to, or not.”

“Did you know about…her leaving like that?”

“I knew she left suddenly. I never knew exactly how it happened until now. Your father never spoke of it to me, and none of the boys did either. I really thought you couldn’t remember.”

“I couldn’t, for a long time. Till now. Did anybody try to find her, to bring her back or anything?”

“I don’t know. Your mother and I weren’t very close by then. If your dad tried, I never knew about it.”

“And nobody knows where she is?”

“Not that I’ve heard, baby.”

Aunt Jenny pushed Emily’s tangled hair out of her eyes. People were always doing that.

“But…how could she live? I mean, did she take some money with her, or what? I don’t think she could get a job; she didn’t know how to do much…”

Jenny Raiford smiled. It was not a soft smile.

“She knew how to do what was necessary. Don’t you worry about that. I doubt she went without money for a single day.”

“But…”

“That’s enough for now. Maybe we’ll know more about it later. Right now it’s time for you to take a bath and get dressed and have some supper with me. Your dad and the boys ate early and went over to John’s Island to look at some fencing for the runs. It’ll be a while before they’re back.”

“I don’t want to see my father right now.”

“You don’t have to tonight, but I want you to have supper with us tomorrow night. You need to get back to normal.”

“Are you coming to supper tomorrow night?” Emily said.

“Emily, I’m going to be staying here for a while. Maybe for a year or two. Will you mind that?”

“No. Oh, gosh, no! But why?”

“Cleta and I had a real girl-to-girl the night all this happened, and then we went and talked to your father. There’s no doubt you need another woman in the house. You’re outnumbered three to one, and Cleta is getting old; she’s tired. The deal is that I’ll take over after I get home from school, and make dinner and all that, and be here all weekend. She’ll keep on coming mornings to do everything she used to do except cook at night. I’m not bad at that, even if I don’t fry chicken in lard.”