Ours, p.28
Ours, page 28
‘Frances ain’t a healer,’ Saint thought, and instead of heading toward the house, she headed toward the small shed where she had abandoned her companion during the winter to keep him safe from Frances and Joy, not knowing then what they were all about. Now that she had figured out a thing or two about Frances, she held no fear that Frances posed a threat to him.
Frances, now walking at Saint’s side, didn’t dare ask where they were going. She observed Naima, who seemed completely undisturbed while holding Saint’s hand. Had Frances had the nerve to look at Saint, she would’ve seen a haughty smirk. Instead, she looked ahead as they approached a small shed grown over with dead vines.
“I’d like you to meet someone,” Saint said, opening the door.
From within emerged the tall man whose eyes focused ahead of him. He wore the blank expression of someone lost in the void of thought. Frances thought he smelled like moldy earth.
[3]
Back at the house, Joy blinked twice. Slow, hard blinks, and the kill-heavy glaze that a second ago had covered her eyes dropped its cloudy veil. Selah’s stoic face came into focus, already bored with the event, already calculating a way to return to her rest.
Joy would’ve done worse than nick Selah on the clavicle if the young girl hadn’t, in a mother’s tone, asked, “What I do to you?” right as Joy completed the knife’s downward arc. Selah had opened her eyes just in time to see Joy standing over her with the biggest knife from the kitchen in her closed hands, held just above Selah’s already-hurting body. Too exhausted to fight, too annoyed to raise her voice, Selah raised her tone instead. Before the blade had a chance to enter Selah, Joy blinked twice and stared down at her almost-victim with the agonized expression of a child caught digging in her nose.
She lifted the knife from the small cut it made in Selah’s collarbone and let it drop to the floor. It’s metallic thump annoyed Selah, who wondered why she dropped it when all she had to do was get it up off her. It had become obvious to Selah that Joy had come to, but come to what? If Joy ever had a self to return to, Selah never noticed; she only wanted to sleep, and once the sound of the knife meeting the floor left her ears, she rolled her back to Joy and returned to her rest.
Stupefied, then embarrassed, Joy picked up the knife from the cold floor and left in tears.
She thought the need to kill had gone out of her, leaving only remnants of its past in the form of night terrors. Suppressed in her sleeping mind, the need to kill had no way of making her into a sleepwalker witlessly searching for prey behind closed eyes. Sleeping in Frances’s bed, however, stopped the dreams. Stopped them completely. But what had been refused a home in dreams returned to the old home of her physical body.
Her last moment of walking murder was mere anecdote. Before reaching Ours, Frances had told Joy how she slaughtered a rabbit in the woods during their journey from New Orleans. “Woke up and you was covered in blood and cuddled up with the damn rabbit like a baby doll.”
Deranged with a sudden surge of melancholy, Joy closed her bedroom door and rushed to her bed, knife still in hand. Her vague reflection in the blade showed her half of her face, the other half cut off by the sharp slope where the cutting happens.
She wanted Frances back. All to herself. That time in the woods, the split-open rabbit at her ear like a seashell. Frances had removed the bloody corpse before Joy woke. They never slept far from water, so washing Joy’s face and hands was easy. Her clothes were the only bloody evidence of the kill.
Soon after, Frances lit a bonfire, skinned the rabbit, beheaded it, emptied its bladder, removed the guts and organs, rubbed the last bit of whiskey all over its body, then left it hovering over the short flames on a stick held up by two uneven yet sturdy towers of stacked stones. By the time Joy woke, she had a fresh face, clean hands, and a dress pasted on to her with rabbit’s blood. She thought it was the sudden coming of the month, but Frances shook her head and laughed. “You know better,” Frances said. “You know your body better than that. You blame all the blood, all over you, on the moon? Moon ain’t do it to you.”
Without the enticing smell of iron on her face, without the brownish-red crusting over her fingers (Frances even cleaned out her fingernails), and without the corpse itself there as an icon of her destruction, Joy felt relief almost instantly. It seemed to her that it had never happened at all. They ate well that afternoon. Her killing had been useful, though Frances kept herself from making eye contact for the rest of the day. That hurt Joy, enough to ask Frances to tie her to a tree every night. Frances exploded.
“That don’t make no got-damn sense, Joy. Not one bit of that make sense. You want to be whipped at the tree, too? You want somebody to wet all over you? I’m not tying you to no damn tree. Might as well hang . . .” Frances said, stopping herself, but it was too late. She swallowed hard before she finished. “We don’t use trees that way. We don’t volunteer ourselves to nastiness, Joy. Don’t ever offer yourself over to madness.” Shaking her head, she whispered, “How you got so much hate in you?” but she said it not to Joy, but to the no place in front of her.
“It’s to keep us safe. To keep you safe,” Joy said. “How is that hate?”
“What danger you ever be against me you be against yourself,” Frances said.
Joy had seen for herself bullets flying at Frances’s back, head, shoulders, arms, neck, hands, thighs, shins, and each time the person who shot at her ended up carrying the injury they had meant for her. A man shot off his pistol and his own kneecap exploded. Another shot at her chest, and a hole burned through his heart. Joy knew this, had witnessed it all.
She and Frances had returned to the boardinghouse after shooting practice and found Eloise’s and Amelia’s dead bodies posed on the couch, surrounded by men who waited all day for Frances and Joy to return. The first man shot Frances square in the head. The second, insensible with malice such that he didn’t see his own friend die beside him, shot Frances in the chest. His miraculous aim put lead in his own lung. The third man aimed at Frances, and Joy wished they had aimed at her as well because she sensed why they avoided harming her at all; they were saving her for something else.
Six men, one of them Yves, in the parlor, shooting at Frances just to shoot themselves. Joy never got the chance to grieve Eloise and Amelia, whose bodies had slumped into each other after the commotion, their foreheads touching in mock nap. Frances made her go upstairs and grab whatever she could fit and carry into a hand-stitched leather bag that Amelia had bought her for her birthday. Without delay, they were off, patrollers on their asses because the gunshots from the house caught their attention. Luckily, they found a horse in front of a bar to steal, which brought more gun-toting men after them. Joy rode in the front, leaning forward like Frances instructed her to, and Frances sat behind and leaned over Joy, a shield, while immediately healing the horse whenever it was shot. Had it not been for everyone who tried to kill them ending up dead themselves, they would’ve been caught, easily, before leaving town.
Only after Frances stopped looking Joy in the eye did Joy find some hallow ground within herself under which she buried her urge to kill. She refused to be further isolated, having lost already two women she had called family. ‘Somebody will see the future with me,’ she thought to herself, as she suppressed the want to kill so deeply inside of herself that it manifested only as dreams.
Joy remembered all of this while peering at herself in the knife’s facet. No one had held her ever in her life. Not her tepid mother, abusive father, or Amelia and Eloise. She had been hugged, but briefly. She had been shoved, and once her father slapped snot so hard from her nose that it landed several feet away. That form of touch was brief and sharp as the knife she held in her hand that she turned to make her halved reflection disappear and reappear in the metal. What she wanted was to be engulfed by a lover who wanted nothing more than to wake up and find her still asleep next to him. Without that, how was she any different than the knife in her hand: sharp, hard, cold, and indifferent?
Frances was right about her not being an animal, but the implication that because she wasn’t animal then she must be human wasn’t right, either. Perhaps, she was a weapon, and what else is a weapon to do except harm others? She considered stabbing herself in the heart to get her weapon-life over with, but she wanted to live even if that meant others may die. Did that desire to live, despite her murderous urges, make her less human, too? Before she could take seriously her own question, she heard crying coming from downstairs. She put her knife beneath her pillow and followed the sorrowful sound.
At first, it seemed the crying came from the room itself. Joy stood alone downstairs, but the soft sniffles and low moans persisted. She soon realized that the crying was coming up from the floor, from the space where Georgia had lived then died. The sound brought up in Joy a maudlin sympathy not for herself but for the world and the world’s hard ways. She knelt near the spot where Georgia had once been and touched where she remembered seeing her legs. She then spoke into the space, saying to Georgia, who wasn’t there but was, that she would be fine. Comfort, the need to give and receive it, overpowered Joy. She laid herself down next to where Georgia lived again and died again and wrapped her arms around the no-body. Soon, the crying stopped.
[4]
Boredom forced Selah out of bed. Feeling the slowness of the world, she ignored her pain, which was dulling by the second, and made her way downstairs. Distracted with purpose, she had forgotten about Joy almost killing her and sat her attention on cleansing the front room of Georgia’s spiritual energy. Saint taught the twins years ago that wherever a person dies a hard death is where a spirit rests its tortured head. ‘House is crowded enough as is,’ Selah thought, ‘without dead Georgia moaning about.’
Downstairs, Selah scrubbed the floor where Georgia had lived then died a second time. The strong smell of lemongrass, clove, lavender, and sea salt eased her labor. She had boiled the water with a bluestone inside like Saint showed her, then took the water off heat before adding the other ingredients for steeping. The process soothed her. The brushing anchored her. She brushed in six tight circles where Georgia’s head had lain, six where the torso had been, and six wider circles where the legs were. She did these three times each before letting the dampness air-dry and sprinkling ground rosemary over the floor. She did this around Joy, who slept on the floor through it all.
After she woke, Joy considered the rosemary’d floor beside her head. She sat up, acknowledging Georgia’s life-death spot. It glistened where the morning light touched the damp wood, and Joy got the sense that Georgia’s spirit had finally found its true resting place.
Selah had seated herself at the table in the center of the room, laying her head on the hard, flat surface that hadn’t been cleared of dust that in her laying outlined her throbbing head. Nevertheless, the cool wood comforted her. When she saw Joy surveying where she had cleaned, she closed her eyes and wished the woman would go back upstairs to play with her one good knife.
For months, Selah observed Joy do nothing but whine and coerce Frances into feeling fault for living her own life, a long-occurring activity Joy had difficulty accomplishing on her own. Not like Frances was much better, sleeping in that impersonal bedroom with a woman she was too stupid to see only wanted her close for safety. That’s how Selah saw it, but at least Frances got pleasure lying up under Saint, no better than a piece of lint between the toes. What did Joy get with her lingering? Then quick as a sneeze, the image of the knife entered Selah’s mind, leading her to touch her clavicle as if searching for a forgotten locket. Still not angry, Selah opened her eyes. She felt woozy and out of her body as she had the days when she visited Ours at night, resetting bones and steeping tea. Joy stood by the window, looking out into the sunny cold day.
“It is nice out,” Selah said. “You should leave.”
Joy didn’t respond. She idly fingered the curtains as daylight engulfed her face.
“You should leave,” Selah repeated.
“I’m sorry,” Joy said. “I can’t go.”
“You can do whatever you want.”
“I’m not leaving Frances.”
“Frances already left you.”
Joy cut her eyes at Selah. “What did you say?”
“Frances left this morning. Why are you still here? My head hurts. That’s why I am here. I would be outside playing if my head felt good.”
“I’m waiting on her to get back.”
“He will get back when he do. You could be looking at flowers right now while he’s away.”
“I don’t want to look at flowers right now, Selah.”
“Why not? What a flower ever do to you?”
Joy sat at the table, adjacent to Selah. “Do you want breakfast?”
“Saint say if you don’t clean where the dead died, they never leave that spot.” Selah moved her eyes from Joy to the space behind Joy where Georgia’s body had been. “If you’re fixing breakfast, I can wash your sheets.” Selah’s eyes returned to Joy’s.
“I can wash my own damn sheets,” Joy said, and headed to the kitchen. She stopped when Selah started speaking again with a voice that sounded different: deeper, a tuning fork ringing out in pure disgust. Turning around, she saw Selah’s hair had turned ash white.
“You won’t ever have a past, not one you respect, not one you can lean on or learn from. I know what’s ahead for you and it’s the same as what’s behind you. This means you have no future, either. Might as well do something real with this sad life you living in the now. Instead of sleepwalking in your own dirt, waiting on a man who never waited on you, who dragged you from one murder to the next. Now you want to spread your nastiness all over the house. Talking bout ‘Do you want breakfast?’ You have not bathed. Do not touch any food in there until you have bathed. Keep your shit to yourself,” Selah said in an older woman’s voice, then her hair darkened back to black and her voice returned to its child’s timbre. “No thank you.”
It wasn’t fear that made Joy stop and listen to the grown woman speech and sound coming from the young girl Selah, or that made her watch the gray return to black in Selah’s thick hair. Every syllable rolled out carefully, tinged with what reminded Joy of Eloise’s cadence, the forceful know-it-all-cause-I-seen-it-all husk over the smooth golden kernel of each word. Yes, Joy stopped and listened because Selah was talking like a grown woman, one she missed. But Selah wasn’t Eloise. Never could be. She was no longer sure what Selah was.
Joy celebrated privately that she kept her hands to herself because, surely, her eyes were playing tricks on her, and her ears had locked on to a flash of nostalgia. ‘Maybe there’s too much dust in the room,’ Joy wondered, double-checking if indeed she couldn’t put hands on Selah because, yes, the gray hair she thought she saw was all a figment of her imagination. Must’ve been. Curiosity got to feeling so good to her that she found herself standing in front of Selah, who still rested her head on the table, looking pitiful and giftless toward the west-facing windows.
No, not a grown woman, but “You better watch your mouth if you want to make it to grown,” Joy said to the downed head on the table, not even seeing that Selah herself, though exhausted, still in pain, and dizzy with hunger, wore the face of someone who carried little if any understanding as to why Joy raised her voice. Joy tasted only audacity in the air around Selah, saw only ambivalence in the child’s slumped shoulder, and wanted to fistfight the girl. “Cause you not grown,” Joy continued. She grabbed a bar of soap from a shelf in the kitchen and came back into the front room, still talking, “Cause you think Saint running things around here that you got some of that running, too. But let me tell you a thing about running things . . .” Joy was halfway up the stairs and Selah couldn’t hear the rest of the sentence, just hard-edged mumblings upstairs until Joy slammed the door behind her.
But Selah was too shook from also hearing that voice not her own—older, near-breathless with irritation—leave her body to care what Joy felt. Licking the roof of her mouth, she touched her neck and swallowed hard, staring into the space before her. Only after she had calmed herself did she wonder how long it would take for Joy to realize that she went through all that trouble just to go upstairs without a bucket of water to make the soap count.
• CHAPTER 16 •
The Outsiders
[1]
Mornings in Ours were built for humiliation. Spring unlocked a powerful yearning from young flowers eager for bees, while the young adults sweated into strange beauty with the fervor of saints. Dogwood blooms overtook lush yards, wagons moseyed on by bearing whatever fruit and vegetables that arrived early that year. Children just out of school counted one to one hundred as they passed Reverend, who in peak voice belted a homemade hymn to the children’s rhythmic counting, followed by ecstatic damnations everyone expected in the way foul breath is expected from a known and recurring culprit, though no less offensive.
A few weeks before, in a flash of something unlike God but God enough for the desperate, Reverend thought he had been blessed with the song that would have congregants fighting to get into his church. He stayed up all night humming it, for it had woke him at an hour when songs are easy to forget. But when it came time for him to share it, he couldn’t compete with daily life. Roof repairs and door replacements, nails hammered into wood adzed flat for a tabletop, work was to be done in the crisp mid-May air. Doing his part, Reverend lifted his chin to open his throat for a full bellow, and the sound of metal hitting wood drowned him out.
