Three Rivers (6 page)

The congregation remained in the pews, some standing, some slumping forward, but Melody's mother moved. She sprinted through the door Bobby had entered earlier and reappeared in the baptismal pool, where she sank down on the top step and pulled Bobby onto her lap. Her skirt, a beautiful linen the color of butter pecan ice cream, gaped open, revealing a glimpse of her lavender silk panties, a disturbing detail that would remain vivid in Melody's memory for the rest of her life. Mama stroked Bobby's hair and seemed to speak to him, though he didn't respond. One of the paramedics appeared and reached for Bobby. Mama reared her head back and hissed. The paramedic stumbled, nearly fell into the water. He looked confused. “Mama,” Melody said, her voice too soft to be heard. She spoke up. “Mama, you have to let him go. Let them take him.” Mama's lips kept moving; her hands stroked Bobby's face. It was too much, too intimate a display for church, no matter how dire the situation. Melody's face went hot. “Please.” She appealed to the paramedic. “Please help my little brother.” The paramedic locked eyes with her and she saw that he was scared and very young, but he nodded and pried Bobby from Mama's grasp, checked for a pulse, put his mouth on Bobby's mouth, until Bobby's hands fluttered around the man's face. He lifted Bobby, carried him into the main sanctuary, placed him on a stretcher, and wheeled him down the aisle. A second stretcher carried Pastor Tuttle, who was still and gray and obviously dead. Finally, they came back for Melody's mother, who twitched and cried out some sort of gibberish. No one came for Melody, who was left to wonder what would happen next.

*   *   *

Now Melody walked toward town. Rain clouds gathered to the south, a thick gray mass that hung in the sky like a warning, but the sky above was clear blue. The town smelled just as she remembered, sharp and sweet and smoky. It was the scent of fertilizer mixed with poison exhaust from old trucks. The familiarity of the town was terrifying. She couldn't stop thinking about George Walter and his predictions. History repeats, he'd told her. You are your mother, he'd warned. Was that what it meant to come back here? Was she following in her mother's path as she walked these streets? God, she hoped not. She traveled west, in the direction of Main Street, passing the line of grain bins and an old water tower marked with graffiti. Shabby cinder block houses and ramshackle fix-it shops gave way to wood frame houses, tidy redbrick homes, and whitewashed storefronts. An old man wearing dirty overalls and no shirt sat on the front steps of a shotgun house that had once been painted a cheerful yellow by the look of the strips that hung off the sides and dripped onto the ground. The yard was littered with old tires, bits of scrap metal, and what looked like a brand-new toilet. Melody nodded at the man and said, “Mornin'.” The man's head barely bobbed in response. He took a sip from the can wrapped in a brown paper bag that he held between his skinny knees.

The town had not changed, but it seemed to Melody that it had shrunk. Stores were closed at this hour; most wouldn't open at all on a Sunday. In the window of Murray's Department Store, a pair of enormous overalls was on display with a sign reading:
ALL SIZES IN STOCK! XXXLARGE AND BEYOND!
Abel's Hardware was so crammed with tools and lumber and buckets of paint that there was no room for a window display. Instead, the window contained a thick mangle of garden rakes and push brooms. She walked over to the Ruby Cafe, where she once ate so much fried shrimp and chocolate meringue pie that she later puked it all up right on Mama's good leather shoes. Melody could smell the yeast rolls baking in the back kitchen, the early prep for Sunday dinner. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn't eaten since before the performance last night. She walked on. An old black-and-gray dog slept outside the Trading Post building. When Melody passed, the mutt raised its head and watched her with suspicious eyes.

She knew where she had to go, though it meant visiting a place she'd sworn long ago to avoid. What would George Walter have to say about that? She turned on Church Street with determination. She passed by the imposing stained glass of Immaculate Heart and the large stone entryway of Holy Mary. She passed the revival tent outside Riverside Pentecostal and then kept walking past the Church of Christ and Wesley United Methodist. She would not go so far as Old Glory Baptist, First AME, or Leflore Trinity, and she wouldn't make it to Good Shepherd Lutheran or First Baptist or Ridgewood Baptist. She stopped outside the church she'd not entered since the day she tried to forget: Crossroads Baptist, with its white cross piercing the morning sky, and pale pink tea roses lining the walkway. The early service would begin soon; a few stragglers lingered outside the front doors. She hadn't stepped foot inside the church since Bobby's baptism, and she would not enter the sanctuary now. Instead, she trudged across the damp grass to the area behind the church where the Dumpsters stood, their ugly, gray, necessary bulk hidden from the worshippers. A group of teenage boys with oily skin and gelled hair stood smoking.

The boys tossed their cigarettes when she approached, ducked their heads and swore they were headed right in to hear the sermon. She gave them twenty dollars to drive her home. They let her ride shotgun in an old, rusty Camaro. Rock music blared from a stereo with one busted speaker that cracked and popped beneath the guitars and drum solos. She directed them toward the old county road, where men posted signs advertising farm equipment for sale and where families would set up truck bed storefronts offering homemade jam, fresh boiled peanuts, and whole fruit pies for purchase. The road was deserted on a Sunday morning and the air from the open window was thick with moisture and foreboding. It was a road like every other road in the Delta, straight and seemingly infinite in length. To Melody, it felt like a road traversing time rather than distance. The wide acres of cotton and soybeans, broken up by dense stretches of loblolly pines, were the same today as they had been ten years before and ten years before that. An old rusty cotton thresher leaned precariously at the side of the road and Melody recognized it from years earlier, the only difference a steady advance of kudzu. Nothing changed here, except to be swallowed up by the earth.

She pointed ahead to the small, unmarked dirt road. The car veered too quickly and Melody grabbed the door handle in panic. The boy steadied the car before it ran off into the ditch. He apologized and slowed down. They wound through a short stretch of heavy wooded forest and dipped into a cool, dark mist before shooting back out into the brightness of the morning. The road beneath turned from well-groomed dirt to a rutted path. “Man,” one of the boys said. “I didn't know anyone lived out here. This is bum-fucked middle-of-nowhere!” He cut her an apologetic glance.

“You have no idea,” she told him. Nowhere sounded good to Melody, but this was definitely somewhere. The sky pressed down, heavy and dangerous; the rain clouds moved closer. The boys dropped her at the end of a long gravel driveway. It was a quarter mile from the road to her front door, but she was glad for the walk. Trees lined the path—pecan and oak, magnolia and maple. The path had not been maintained and tree roots jutted up from the earth. If she dragged her feet, she knew from experience, the roots would snag her toes and pitch her forward. She paused by the old signpost planted by her great-granddaddy.
THREE RIVERS FARM
, the sign announced, a tribute to the nearby converging rivers that once provided irrigation to the crops: the Yazoo, the Yalobusha, the Tallahatchie. Once the sign had been a shiny, sturdy, important marker, a beacon that proclaimed this was land enough to warrant naming. Now, though, the steel had turned black and the etched letters were caked with grime. No one had bothered to wipe it down and polish it the way Old Granddaddy used to do once a month. No one had so much as aimed a stream of water at it in years. It was probably best. The land could no longer rightly be considered a farm. Nothing useful grew here; nothing was planted, produced, or consumed. Old Granddaddy would be appalled by what had become of his land. Fortunately, as Melody abandoned her faith, she'd abandoned the idea that dead people were hanging out somewhere looking down on her. Old Granddaddy didn't have to be sad or disgusted by the neglect of his land. All he had to do was rot in the dirt, just like the crops he'd once planted.

Melody's father seemed to be rotting while still alive. When Melody was a teenager, her mother often insulted her by telling her she looked “a caution.” What she meant was that Melody needed to brush her hair, iron her clothes, put on some makeup, and stand up straight, lest she scare off every available male in the Delta. As if Melody wanted to attract one of the big, flat-faced, slow-moving boys in her high school. “I'm throwing caution to the wind, Mama,” she liked to say, just because it pissed Mama off. But when Melody saw her father laid out on the sagging sofa bed, she finally grasped the expression. He smelled of urine or worse. An oxygen tank sighed at the edge of the bed. He was thin; his skin puddled around his bones. Melody's father had been a lot of things, but he had never been thin. She knew, looking at him, that her mother should have called her months earlier. There was nothing she could do, and she wondered if her father would even know her. She barely knew him.

Her brother emerged from the kitchen and stood beside her. “Bobby,” Melody said. She squeezed his arm. “When did things get so awful?”

“I don't know, sis.” Bobby pulled away from her. “I reckon when he wouldn't quit smoking two packs a day after his third heart attack.”

“You can't blame a man for living,” she said. “Or for dying, I guess.” She blamed her mother; that's who she blamed.

“The hell I can't.” Bobby turned and stomped back into the kitchen.

George Walter's words came back to her:
No one has to do anything in this world. Everything is a choice.
She wondered what her choices were in this situation. Stay or leave, she supposed, but neither seemed likely to lead to anything worthwhile.

She knelt beside the sofa bed, felt her body fold into prayer position. She hadn't prayed in years, could no longer bring herself to talk to someone who either didn't exist or didn't care. Anyway, her father wouldn't put up with anyone praying over him, not even Melody. She touched her father's hair, rubbed the cottony strands between her fingers.

He opened one eye. His pupil dilated. His cheek twitched. Melody felt irrational terror upon seeing that lone blue orb.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Well, I must be dying.”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel goddamned awful. What do you think? Aren't you supposed to be touring with the Holy Rollers?”

“I'm taking a little break.” No point in telling him she'd offended an entire audience of Holy Rollers and eliminated any chance she might go back. “I'm here to take care of you, Daddy.” She pulled the thin blanket up around his shoulders. “Anything you need, you just let me know.”

“I need a fucking miracle. Did you pick up any miracles out there with the Bible thumpers?”

“Miracles aren't magic tricks, Daddy. I don't believe I can just pick one up.”

“Ain't that the truth, little girl. Ain't that the truth.”

Daddy was still there inside the decaying body, and he sounded stronger than he looked. “Well, we've seen miracles in this family before. Maybe we'll get another.”

The phone rang. Bobby yelled from the kitchen, “I'll get it!”

“That could be your mother. Tell her I'm doing okay, would you? Tell her you think I look more handsome than ever.”

“I'm not gonna start lying, old man.” She kissed him on the forehead and rushed to eavesdrop on Bobby's conversation. She had a few things to say to her mother and she intended to say them all. Bobby stood with the phone against his ear. “Hello, hello.…
Hello?
”

Bobby had changed in the years Melody was on the road. The delicate, beautiful child she remembered had become a strong, handsome man with a broad chest and biceps that bulged under his cotton T-shirt.

He hung up the phone. “No one there.”

“Hey, little brother.” Melody touched Bobby's muscled arm. “Someone's been working out.”

Bobby jerked away, turned his back to her, and rummaged in the refrigerator like he needed something from its cool depths right that minute. His body may have transformed, but he was still her angry, petulant, difficult little brother. He'd drowned his good nature in the baptismal pool.

“You look good. You look strong.” Melody did not look good, and she knew it. Three years of diner food and doughnuts had left her as soft and doughy as the food itself.

Bobby pulled his head out of the fridge. His eyes were damp and his jaw clenched. He glared at her. “You left us. Left us. Left me.”

“But I'm here now.” She reached behind him and pushed the refrigerator door shut, not that there was much in the fridge worth preserving. She began making a mental list of things she would need to do. Go to the store. Clean. Bobby stared at her, gaping. He expected more. “I had a life to live,” she said.

“What about my life, sis?”

“You have a life here.”

“I have a life sentence here.” Bobby looked a bit like the boy he'd been before the baptism; his eyes flashed and his eyebrow cocked. She laughed, too loudly. It felt good to share a joke with her brother, but Bobby wasn't laughing. She cleared her throat, coughed. “Sorry,” she mumbled. Bobby stared.

A sound like the rattle of a struggling engine echoed through the house. “What on earth?”

“Daddy,” Bobby replied in a voice that made it clear he didn't care.

“Good Lord!” Melody turned toward the living room, but Bobby grabbed her arm and held her tight. “Let go of me!” She struggled, but Bobby was as strong as he looked. “What are you doing? What's wrong with him?”