The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (9 page)

Hattie slapped Six across the face with all of her strength. He staggered and fell against the wall. She advanced on him, her fists balled with rage.

“You could go to jail. They could come and arrest you right now! And you want to stand here and tell me you didn’t mean it? Like a fit came on you out of nowhere and the next thing you know …”

Hattie gasped, her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, Lord. What happens to you?” Hattie looked into her son’s face, “You can’t you stop it, can you?” Six shook his head. His mother reached toward him, her fingertips lingered on the scarring just visible above his shirt collar. “I don’t know how to help you,” she whispered.

Six thought Hattie might cry, but she inhaled deeply and turned away from him to take her purse and hat from the closet.

“Go clean yourself up,” she said. “Stay here. Lock the door behind me and don’t let anyone in.”

When Hattie returned, along with August, it was nearly dark. Six had hidden in the crawl space under the stairs. He heard kitchen sounds: water running, something sizzling in a frying pan. Then the clatter of forks against plates. Hattie’s legs appeared.

“You going to come out and eat or not?” she asked, brusque and angry as ever.

He didn’t respond. He expected her to reach down and drag him out. Instead she pushed a plate of fried eggs into the cubby. In the dining room Six’s family ate in near silence. Hattie ordered them to bed as soon as they finished. He heard his siblings’ footsteps overhead as they climbed the stairs. Hattie would do something terrible to him, he was sure.

“Hey!” Six jumped. Bell squatted in front of him. “Lemme see your hands,” she whispered.

“I said everybody in bed now!” Hattie thundered from the dining room.

Bell ran up the stairs behind the others.

“That’s it, Six,” Hattie called. “You have to come out now.”

“Come on out, boy,” August said.

Six crawled out slowly. His muscles ached from the fight and from crouching so long in the cubby. He was more tired than he’d ever been. He wondered if he’d have the strength to stand. The dining room light was on. Hattie sat at one end of the table and August at the other.

“This a mess of trouble,” August said. “They took that boy to the hospital. His mama like to come over here and cut you herself, if them two cousins of his don’t get you first.”

Six shivered with relief. All afternoon he’d been afraid he was a murderer—Avery dead on the street and his mother screaming over his body.

“We got to pay that boy’s hospital, Six. But they ain’t gon’ call the police. That’s something,” August said. “And that’s only on account of his father runs so many numbers that if the Man come round they like to put him in jail and throw away the key.”

Hattie was rigid as stone in her chair.

“We gon’ have to think something up ’cause them cousins out to get you and maybe that boy’s daddy too, and he got a lot of the wrong kind of friends. I reckon we ought to send you somewhere for a minute.” August turned to Hattie, “Maybe we send him down to Pearl. She got a house big as this whole block.”

Hattie gave August a look that would have stopped a train. He leaned back in his chair.

“Well, we got to do something,” he said.

“I sent for Reverend Grist.”

“Hattie, we ain’t been to church since Easter.”

“Six has,” Hattie snarled.

Hattie sent Six to bed when the reverend arrived. On his way up the stairs, she stopped him, “What set you off?” she asked.

Six looked at his feet and shook his head. He didn’t want to tell her what Avery had said. Six walked past him on his way home from school. The boy was gathering the schoolbooks that a group of bullies had knocked out of his arms. Six didn’t know why he’d paused in front of Avery and kicked away a book that the boy was reaching for, but it had scudded across the pavement and landed in a puddle by the curb.

“Your mama Hattie’s a whore,” Avery said, watching his book sink into the murky water. He used her first name. He said he’d seen her with a man that she had kissed on the corner in plain sight and that the neighborhood was talking about how she had become an easy woman because August wasn’t shit. That’s what Avery said, that his mother was a whore and his father wasn’t shit. How could Six let that feeble runt of a boy, that little nothing of a boy, talk about Hattie that way?

Six had intended to give him one good punch in the jaw, but when he hit Avery, the boy fell and wouldn’t get up. He lay in the middle of the sidewalk looking up at Six with something nasty and reptilian in his eyes. And he kept taunting him. He was laid out on the sidewalk, but he kept whispering, “Whore, whore.” A lump of concrete lay on the ground near Avery’s head. Six picked it up and leapt on the boy. He hit him with that rock as though Avery was every bad thing that ever was. He beat him like he was the scalding water that burnt him, as though he was every pitying glance, every cruelty inflicted on him by his schoolmates. The harder Six hit Avery, the more powerful he felt. His arm came down again and again like a part of a machine. His body moved like normal boys’ bodies did; he was invincible and perfect.

Hattie sighed. She raised her hand, as if to squeeze his shoulder or to hit him again—Six didn’t know which—but she thought better of it, and it dropped to her side.

“Go on to bed,” she said.

August and Reverend Grist came into the living room. They watched Six climb the stairs.

“Come back here, boy,” August said.

Six stopped walking but didn’t turn to face his father.

“Let him go, August,” Hattie said. “Just let him go.”

THE SINGER FINISHED
her song. Six kneeled in the dirt behind the tent. He recognized that reptilian thing in Avery’s eyes as a reflection of his own ugliness. He wished he were different. His weak body housed a weak, mean spirit. While Six beat him, Avery looked up at him until he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. They were two cruel souls in a violence together. It just so happened, Six told himself, that he’d had the upper hand that time. They were frail inconsequential boys and that made them the way they were.

“Dear Lord,” Six said aloud. “I ought to ask forgiveness for what I did to Avery, but asking might be a lie. I’m not sure what sorry feels like.” Six—sobbing and praying and feeling the weight of his small cruel heart—walked toward the stand of trees where he’d hidden the night before.

A woman stepped out of the shadows. “You the one healed Coral’s sister?” she asked.

She wore the same yellow dress he’d seen her in the previous evening—canary yellow, bright and loud as cymbals crashing together. Her legs were thin, delicately ankled and softly curved at the calf. Six looked at her and blinked.

“You is him, ain’t you? Reverend Six?” she asked again.

“I’m no reverend,” he said quietly.

“What’s that?”

The woman in yellow took a step toward him. She was so small, the top of her head would have barely touched his chin. The fabric of her dress moved as she walked, pressing briefly against her to reveal the swell of her hips and the length of her thighs.

“How come you ain’t in there preaching?” she asked, looking up at him. “I been to Coral’s place. I ain’t seen Regina so spry in the longest.” She took another step toward him. “I heard you ain’t even touched her.”

The dress was cut high enough in the collar to be respectable, but there was a hint of the round of her breasts just below the neckline. Her collarbones arched toward one another.

“She healed for sure,” she said.

“I don’t know if that had anything to do with me. Just luck, maybe,” he said.

“You sure is soft-spoke outside of the pulpit. I’m Rose,” she said. “I come tonight on account of my mama’s been poorly. She ain’t been goin’ to work these last weeks, just lay about the house. Every day she say she got a pain somewhere different. You might can pray on her? You wasn’t nowhere near Regina and she better. If you lay hands on my mama, I know she be good as gold after.”

Six swallowed and blinked again.

“It ain’t far,” she said.

Rose turned and walked quickly toward the road. He stood in the shadows and thought to call after her, “I don’t think I can do anything for your mama!” But she was far ahead of him by the time he made up his mind to say something.

In twenty minutes they arrived at a small, unpainted wooden house. The woman in the yellow dress, a girl really, only a couple of years older than Six, left him on the porch.

“Wait here,” she said. “I’ma see if my mama’s awake.”

I shouldn’t be here, Six thought. There’s a woman in that house who needs help, real help. But who could counsel her? The ministers were jealous and squabbling, no closer to God than Six. Rose came out onto the porch. She gazed at him with such expectation and such reverence—he wanted to please her, to be what she thought that he was. She led him through a darkened main room and into a bedroom that smelled more of sadness than of disease. A woman lay on a pallet on the floor with the moonlight shining silver on her. Six saw her skepticism and her exhaustion.

“This him?” she said to her daughter.

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl answered.

The woman turned away. Six did not feel the power in him, but he remembered the chaplains who came to see him when he was in the hospital and how they kneeled next to his bed. He sat on the floor next to the woman’s pallet. Rose watched from the doorway. Maybe, Six thought, there wasn’t anything purely good or holy. Maybe good was only accomplished indirectly and through unlikely channels: fake healings or a room full of jealous angry men with Bibles who nonetheless drew these sad people and lifted their spirits for a few days. It could be that Six was one of these—a bad thing used for good purposes. Maybe he was a sword after all.

“What’s troubling you, ma’am?” he asked.

“Nothing a young lick like you could understand.”

“God understands everything, ma’am. Doesn’t matter if I do or not,” he said. “Your daughter says you have some pains.”

She didn’t answer. Six took a better look around the room. There were plants everywhere, spilling out of their pots, hanging from the ceiling, and crowding the windowsills.

“Looks like you have a green thumb,” he said.

The woman turned her head to a blooming plant near her pallet. White flowers glowed in the silver light. Six’s mother had houseplants. She was not a singing woman, but she hummed when she tended her plants. Six wondered if this woman did too. He reached toward one of the blossoms, and Rose’s mother sat up quickly and said in a strong voice, “Don’t touch that one. It’s delicate.” She was not as ill as she thought she was. The realization emboldened Six.

“You must love these plants or they wouldn’t grow like they do. I bet you got them when they were just little things and raised them up with your love and attention.”

“I guess so,” Rose’s mother said.

“That’s how the Lord does us. The plants are there in the field, like we’re here on this earth. He reaches out His hand and makes them grow.”

She looked Six in the face for the first time since he’d arrived.

“Don’t you think the Lord cares for you at least as much as he does a little bitty dandelion?”

“I don’t know if he do or don’t.”

“Sister, I’m not going to try to convince you that God loves you. Though we see his miracles all around us, and if miracles aren’t love, well, I don’t know what is. I know you believe God made these plants, don’t you?”

“Course I do.”

“Then let me pray with you. That’s all I ask. Let’s pray together and let Him show you His mercy.”

Six took her hand and prayed. He prayed though he was aware of his intentions in a way he hadn’t been with Sister Coral, though he only felt the faintest inkling of the divine. The townspeople said Six had the gift, and now he tried to direct it, to wield it over Rose’s mother like a magic wand. He wanted Rose to see him heal her. He wanted to be an instrument of God, even a ruined one.

Like the night before, when Six finished praying, he didn’t know what to do, so he stood abruptly and left the room. He went around to the back of the house and paced the small yard. After a few minutes, Rose came out.

“You want something to eat?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” he said.

“My mama in there a boo-hooing like the day she was born.”

In the moonlight Rose’s skin looked like liquid caramel.

“You ought to have some lemonade, at least, ’fore you go back,” she said.

She took his hand and led him into the main room. The porch light shined in through the window. Rose sat close to him on the low sofa. Six could smell the clean clothes smell of her skin. She kissed him. Her lips were dry and pillowy. Six pursed his mouth stiffly as if blowing on a spoonful of hot soup. He put one hand on her shoulder and the other on the back of the sofa. He was awkward. She leaned into him and parted her lips and breathed into his mouth. “Just be easy,” she said. He thought of her as he’d first seen her, with her wet yellow dress slick against her thighs. He reached under her skirt. Her skin was soft as spring sunlight. The muscles in her legs shifted under his fingers as she took off her dress and straddled him.