The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (7 page)

Footsteps approached the stand of trees.

“Evening, Reverend,” the two men said.

“Praise the Lord, brothers,” Reverend Grist replied.

“That’s your young man preached?’

“That’s right. First time preaching away from home,” said Reverend Grist.

“Got the spirit in him, that’s sho’.”

“Ya’ll seen him? They said he came this way outta the tent.”

“Naw, sir, ain’t seen not hide nor a hair.”

“He turn up, surely. He run out to get some air, maybe. It’s hot in there.”

“Well, if you see him, tell him to meet me at the big tent. His mama left him in my charge,” Grist said. The two men walked away.

At the mention of Hattie, Six’s throat tightened. He sighed, then sat still as he could for fear he’d been heard.

“If it was a boy round here somewhere he’d like as not be tired. He might go on out to the car and take a nap in the backseat.” Revered Grist said. He paused, listening. “Such a boy might say yessir or some such so I’d know he was alright.”

“Yessir.” Six’s voice was soft and breathy, barely audible over the cicadas and the soft shirring of the leaves and the drip drip drip of raindrops falling through the oaks.

When Six was certain he was alone, he climbed out of the tree and, keeping to the darkness beyond the floodlights, found his way to the reverend’s car, where he fell asleep stretched across the backseat.

Six woke once deep in the night, well past midnight and far from dawn, to the sound of the car’s motor stopping. He got out and was led into a house, down a corridor, and into a room that smelled of fried fish. He undressed in a half sleep, too tired to be concerned with whether the reverend saw his scars. A cot had been prepared for him. He climbed in, and the canvas sagged under his weight. Six dreamed he was swinging in a hammock on a porch in front of a big white house with a trellis, and his father came up the porch steps, saying, “I knew you’d like it here. I knew you’d want to stay forever.”

IN THE MORNING
there was no sign of Reverend Grist. The room Six had slept in was drab and cheerless, with yellow walls that had dingied over time. Sunlight streamed in from a window near his cot. The light was clouded somehow and grainy. The window was sheeted with a thin gauzy material through which the light filtered. Voices murmured somewhere in the house—the sound was menacing, as though someone were whispering against him. Six swung his legs over the side of the cot and looked for his pants, keenly aware that he didn’t know where he was or whose house he was in and that he couldn’t recall the name of the town. The only person he knew in this foreign, faraway place was Reverend Grist. Tears welled in his throat. Baby. Baby boy crying. He would not snivel, he thought, and he kneeled to look for his clothes under the cot. He found only his shoes.

“Damn!” he said. Reverend Grist opened the bedroom door.

“The Lord doesn’t like that kind of talk, boy.”

Six, dressed only in his briefs, whirled around to face him, shamed by his scars and his nakedness. He covered himself with his hands.

“Excuse me, sir,” Six said.

“Ain’t fitting of a boy who preached so fine last night.”

The reverend walked further into the room and laid Six’s clothes on the cot.

“The lady of the house washed and pressed them for you.” Grist said. “She prepared a breakfast for you too. These sisters are real kind. Most of them hardly have enough for they own selves, but they put us up, feed us. Just like the widow in the temple. You know that story, boy?” the reverend said.

Six shook his head.

“You got a lot of fire in you, and the Lord does bless you with his spirit, but you don’t know the Word like you need to if you keep on preaching.” He gave Six a hard look. “You want to keep on preaching?”

Six did not want to keep on preaching. It was true that the night before he’d felt something with Coral that he’d never experienced and that, unlike the other times, he could recall it. But Six wanted to go home. The reverend would think him ungrateful, so Six replied, “I don’t know, sir. I guess so.”

“Preacher has to be called, young man!” the reverend said sharply. He gestured toward Six’s clothes. “The Lord brings us into this world naked, but I don’t suppose he means us to stay that way.”

Reverend Grist had been kind to Six during the trip from Philadelphia. “It’s Jim Crow now,” he said, when they crossed the Mason-Dixon. “You ever been down south?” he asked. Six shook his head. “Well, when there’s white folks about you, make yourself scarce, and if you can’t, smile and don’t never look them in the eye.”

The Reverend rocked on his heels as Six dressed.

“The Lord gives us breath and life,” he said. “And He gives us flowers and the moon and eyes to see them with and a heart and mind to appreciate their beauty. That’s something only we can do. You know that? A cow in the field doesn’t have appreciation of beauty. That’s a gift He gave us, just to make life a little sweeter. Ain’t that something?”

Reverend Grist paused, then asked, “What happened to you, boy?”

“Sir?”

“I … I wondered what happened.”

“Burned, sir.”

“Must have happened a good while ago, healed over now, like it is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Must have been real painful—and you was just a little fella at the time, I imagine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Must have given your mama a real scare.”

“I guess so.”

SIX REMEMBERED
the ambulance ride to the hospital and Hattie weeping beside him. He had not seen her cry before or since. He was only nine at the time, but he remembered the heaving sobs that pulled her body to and fro and how she kept touching the parts of him that weren’t burnt. “Please, don’t take this one too,” she said. She shook and rocked, but her hands were calm and steady on him, as though they weren’t attached to the rest of her body.

He stayed in the hospital for two months. Each time he woke from the painkillers, Hattie was there, face white as chalk—sitting straight backed in the chair or standing at the window or pacing at the foot of his bed. August came too. He whistled Six a tune or brought him odd presents: a wooden recorder that he played very softly until a nurse came along and told him to stop, cherries that he peeled with a small knife and cut into pieces so Six could taste the sweetness on his tongue without having to chew with his burned jaws.

His sisters visited. He woke one afternoon to find Cassie standing behind Hattie. “I’m so sorry, Mother. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry,” she said. Hattie turned to face her and nodded. Cassie left the room in tears.

The sun filtered through the heavy curtains in the hospital room. Six felt as though he had been asleep for a long time and that perhaps he was still sleeping and everything he saw or heard was a dream. In the dream he got up from his bed, put his arm around Cassie, and said, “See, I’m fine. It was just a little accident, and I’m just fine.”

The burns covered 50 percent of his body. The doctors told Hattie they didn’t know if Six would live, and so in his sleeping and sleeping he was dying, or almost.

Bell and Cassie thought they had killed him. After he was better and had gone back to school, and even now, six years later, they blamed themselves. Either would do anything for Six if he asked. When he was short with them or cold or looked at them in anger, it hurt them deeply. Six sniped at them purposely when he wanted to inflict pain or when he wanted someone to remember that night with him and to suffer.

On the evening of his accident Cassie was getting dressed for a prom to which an older boy had invited her. Hattie had given her permission because he was, as she said, the right sort, college bound, it seemed. Hattie had managed to pay for most of the dress, and Cassie cleaned houses to pay the rest. Cassie was the first Shepherd to attend a prom. Hattie didn’t say much, but she spent a long time pressing the dress and then laid it out on Cassie’s bed as gently as she would a newborn baby. It was pale green and softly shining. Layers of chiffon frothed around the skirt when it moved. Six kept going into his sisters’ room to look at it lying on the bed. The dress was so delicate and pretty it could have taken flight and floated out of the window.

Cassie and Bell were in the bathroom rolling Cassie’s hair into curlers. “Six,” one or the other called, “bring us some more bobby pins.” Or, “Six, tell Mother we’ll need the hot comb in twenty minutes.” He came when summoned and hung around the bathroom door watching his sisters. When she wasn’t busy with Cassie’s hair, Bell stood behind him with her hands on either side of his face rubbing his cheeks absentmindedly, the way she would a cat. His sisters were prettier than anyone Six knew. They gabbled to each other like bright birds. Bell went downstairs to light the hot water heater. By the time she returned, Cassie had put the stopper into the tub, and the hot water rushed out of the faucet in a loud steaming torrent. The water was hot enough to cook an egg. Six sat on the edge of the tub. One of them, maybe Cassie, asked him to get a clean towel from the hall closet, and the other had made a joke that he was their butler, and they’d laughed. Six was just about to stand for an exaggerated pretend bow when he lost his balance and fell into the tub. Hot enough to cook an egg. So hot that for a long while Six couldn’t breathe or cry out. He felt as though his flesh was sliding off of his bones. Cassie screamed. She screamed as she pulled him out and screamed as she laid him on the floor and screamed as he flailed on the tile. He heard Hattie shouting and footsteps, many footsteps, coming down the hallway, and then, mercifully, he blacked out. He woke in the ambulance to his mother’s hands moving on his feet and legs, fluttering over him as though her hands had become butterflies.

“
THE SCARS DON’T LOOK
so bad, you know,” Reverend Grist said. “And glory to Jesus you still here.”

“Glory be, sir,” Six replied.

Six dressed and breakfasted, and he and Reverend Grist got in the car and drove through the town—the Reverend wanted Six to see a genuine southern municipality. Down at the revival site the ministers would be praying and studying their Bibles in preparation for the afternoon service. It was Saturday, and they would start at four.

“There’s gonna be a crowd this evening like you never saw.”

“Everybody here is so church going as all that?” Six asked.

“The revival’s the only game in town, so to speak. Not much round here for folks to do, save the pool halls and the drinking places, but they can go to those anytime. The revival’s entertainment. But that’s alright—they come for whatever reason they want to, then it’s the Lord that occupies Himself with their souls. Amen.”

The town was five blocks of storefronts and a five and dime. The reverend pointed out the post office and a little place where a woman he called Aunt Baby Sugar made the best sweet potato pie in the state of Alabama. “They have a entrance round back for Negroes to buy something and take it home,” Reverend Grist said.

The white people looked almost as badly off as the Negroes. The women Six saw wore faded dresses and their hair was stringy, or they were fat and red-faced. The men were sweaty and their shoes weren’t polished. Negroes skirted the white people on the sidewalk; one man nearly fell into the gutter as he hopped off the curb to avoid colliding with a white woman who was walking toward him. The town seemed to be comprised of equal numbers of each race. In Philadelphia, Six rarely saw white people aside from the teachers at his school. At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity—like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.

The Negroes and whites in the town knew one another. For all of the shucking and ducking, they greeted each other frequently, often by name. There was something almost intimate in their knowledge of one another, and it was this intimacy that disturbed Six most. These people had probably known each other all their lives, and still one had the power to demand that the other step into the gutter, and that other was cowed enough to do it.

They arrived at the end of the main strip. The sidewalks disappeared, and the street widened into a highway. As Grist drove further from the town, the whites disappeared too. A mile or so down they passed a Negro woman driving a mule with a stick. She wore a man’s hat pushed down over her forehead. Despite the previous night’s rain, the ground was dry; red dust clouds whirled around the woman’s feet as she walked. Her mule had a bell attached. Six recognized it as the source of the clanging he’d heard the night before, and he wondered if this same woman drove her mule day and night along these roads, never coming from anywhere and never having anywhere to go.

The red-dirt road was lined on either side by trees with long fronds that hung like hair and grazed the ground. A white clapboard structure came into view. The church was surrounded with stumps and browning tufts of flattened grass, not so much a parking lot as a widening of the road. Even the plain wooden cross in front had the air of the makeshift. The church didn’t have steps like a church ought to so that the members could stand on them after service and be seen by the neighborhood in their Sunday best.

A few women stood in front of the doors; their voices floated into the car’s open windows along with a nutty, oily smell. The women turned, squinting into the sun, toward the sound of the engine.