Ours, p.46
Ours, page 46
“You can stop right there,” Joy said, and Madame Jenkins blinked and the room reconstructed before her in patchworks of quilt, the doctor’s room flaking off in squares revealing Joy’s table, the oil lamp, and Joy reaching over and touching her, Joy doing this without even needing to hear what Madame Jenkins saw in the dark—she couldn’t get it out, had sat there the whole time frozen in the past while Joy watched. Madame Jenkins nodded, mouth ajar, at Joy’s words. She nodded and took another sip of heat.
The same day Madame Jenkins sewed that girl up, Saint had arrived with her companion and freed her and the women who had and hadn’t yet been experimented on. When she asked Saint about Stoddard, worried he would see them leave, Saint smiled and said, “Got to have eyes to see,” and pointed to a jar on the table looking back at them. “Bring the girl’s body,” Saint said, her hand on Madame Jenkins’s shoulder. “Keep some tenderness for yourself.” They buried the sewn-up girl just outside of Ours, for the dead couldn’t be brought into town.
[3]
For seven nights, Joy left her lamp on. Each night, a different person knocked on her door. Sometimes three visited in one night, sometimes as many as ten. Some folks shared long stories, most had brief tales, explaining how the very night of their visit to Joy they had experienced their fears with a potency more voracious than its first instance.
The fears came as dreams, visions, premonitions, illusions, physical embodiments that could touch and affect. People had heard from Madame Jenkins of how good a listener Joy was, but she said nothing about the liquor, had instead told them to bring their own bottles if they thought they needed it and that is what they did. Eagerly, they came to Joy’s door, sometimes standing in line, jars of liquor in hand, just to exorcise their fear into her ear and drink away what remained. Aba slept through every visitation, having stomped himself into complete exhaustion during the day.
Back when Saint first gave him the necklace, Luther-Philip had told Joy of the time everyone visited Saint at her new home in the woods and how Saint warned them that their fears and loves would appear before their eyes in every dustless, echoing room had they come in. A parlor trick, Joy had called it, but Luther-Philip swore it was real and explained how only Justice had gone in and soon after he entered he ran out screaming, “Evil!” Joy said he probably meant Saint was evil, but Luther-Philip said, “No, he saw something in there that belonged to him.”
Now Joy sat remembering his story as though living a memory of her own. If it were true that fear and love appeared to visitors in Saint’s house, then what had her visions been and why hadn’t she recognized them? She thought for a while until irritated, then frightened that there wasn’t a thing on earth she loved or feared.
She considered those nights she sat by the window waiting on her neighbors to deliver their frightening stories. It felt audacious that someone with no comprehension of their own fear assisted others with theirs.
After the last neighbor left her home for the night, she laughed hard to herself then shut down, unemotional. She remained stoic for two days straight, refusing to speak with anyone else about what frightened them.
Joy tended to Aba as her emotions reset. She managed her chores draped in lamentation and braided and unbraided her hair with the meticulousness of drawing and undoing a maze. On the third day, her tears came as a not-yet-known understanding made itself known. She grasped, finally, her fear and love and that both existed plainly before her in a way that made them seem invisible. “Me,” she said. “Me.”
Early morning, while Aba flapped his hands to talk at the ceiling, Joy asked Mr. Wife if he would take her to Saint’s house so she could visit Frances. It had been far too long since they had seen each other, and the last time they spoke carried more hostility than she had liked. She was curious to know what Frances loved and feared, as revealed by the curse upon Saint’s home. Mr. Wife obliged, having shared his fear with her for an hour two nights prior. “But I ain’t going in there with you,” he said.
Heading to Saint with Joy in tow, Mr. Wife didn’t go far before coming across the twins standing in the field between Saint’s house and Ours. Saint wasn’t with them, which wasn’t uncommon, but in this instance Mr. Wife found himself irritable and impatient, steering the horse through the grass over which clouds of insects floated and interrupted his view. Sharing a stick between them, the twins took turns poking at something in the grass. He smelled animal rot and guessed that the girls had something to do with it.
He thought he could, with an adult mind, hide his disdain, particularly of Naima, whose uncivility he would’ve exchanged for the company of the very corpse she poked. But when he saw their shared face putting perverted focus into a death he could smell feet away, his disdain not only lasted, it grew.
“Think you can bring it back to life?” he heard Naima say as he rode closer.
Selah shrugged. “Maybe what’s dead should stay dead.”
“You just scared you can’t do it.”
“You do it, then,” Selah said, and Mr. Wife heard the venom from afar.
“What you gals doing in that grass there?” he called from his horse. When they didn’t look up, he shouted, “Hey!” but didn’t leave the saddle. He looked back at Joy, who sat in the wagon on a square of hay, pure exhaustion on her face.
Naima looked up, spat into the grass beside her, and returned to poking the animal corpse. Selah ignored Mr. Wife altogether. He didn’t know what to do next, so he deboarded his horse and slow-stepped toward the girls as though toward a threshold he had encountered in a dream but never crossed because the dream itself wouldn’t allow.
Mr. Wife noticed Selah tracked him with an empty stare from the moment he jumped off the horse to when he stood beside her. In the grass, he observed the emaciated ribs broken and clefted open by powerful jaws of some animal that, by the corpse’s appearance, wasn’t hungry at all. Just mean, for all the meat it left behind. Or frightened away from its own hunger by something more dangerous.
“A dead mole,” he said to them and kneeled to get a closer look. He felt the girls watching him as he grabbed a nearby stick and explored the innards. “No telling what did this. Could’ve been a fox.” He stood and asked the girls when they found it. “Just now?”
Selah shrugged. Naima scowled.
“Saint around?” he asked. The girls looked at each other and Selah looked away, wide-eyed and caught in the confines of a secret knowledge. Naima’s face contorted angrily. “Did something happen?”
Naima’s watering eyes told him to invite them into the cart and, as they boarded with shameful silence, Joy reached down to help them up, giving a surprised look to Mr. Wife when both girls took her hand.
They all arrived at Saint’s house to find that it was no longer there. Not the garden. Not the weeds out back. No debris. Where Mr. Wife remembered there being a house was now a collection of toddler-tall weeds. The twins waited in the cart as he stepped into the absence of house, spun with his arms open to collect pieces of the house’s hidden remains in his spread palms. A small flock of birds lifted from the grass nearby where surely the house had been and flew through where the front room’s chimney no longer reached.
On the ride back to Ours, he heard crying coming from the wagon and “Shhh. Shhh,” that was both the wind in the leaves of nearby trees and the voice of one of the girls comforting the other. After he crossed Creek’s Bridge and reentered the field, he purposely rode past the dead mole to smell it one last time.
[4]
The twins spoke only to Madame Jenkins, who when they arrived said, “Awe, my babies,” and meant it. She called all the children of Ours her babies and made no exception for Saint’s twins. Selah hugged the woman and held on. Naima’s glare softened. When was the last time, if ever, anyone called her baby? Then Madame Jenkins’s big beating heart at her ear, soft breasts pushing into her face, and firm hands grabbing the back of her head while stroking her thick hair without contempt. When had anyone ever touched her this way? Fearlessly, like they wanted her around?
In Madame Jenkins’s small home, where the horizon lowered into glowing pitch through a single pair of north-facing windows, the girls slept on a pallet, both rejecting Madame Jenkins’s offer of her own bed, which she had set up near the sleeping fireplace. Stacked pots leaned in the corner of the dead hearth. Potato peelings freshly cut and dropped into a wicker basket gave the home an outdoors smell. “Gone fry those up later,” Madame Jenkins said when she spotted the girls eyeing the slices.
With just a few candles, the modest home filled with light, allowing the three to see each other. With a clamor of pots and a resurrection of the fire, Madame Jenkins prepared dinner while the twins waited outside away from the heat. After dinner, the twins bathed in the sweetest-smelling soaps they had ever felt against their skin.
Selah noticed a few chairs side by side with their backs to the wall. She asked what they were for, and Madame Jenkins shared how they were for social meetings for the women in town. “Some things we need to share with each other to keep ourselves alive,” she said, unfolding an extra quilt for the girls to lie on and throwing open the windows. She observed the dark, listened to how the silence outside sat different from the silence inside. Most times in the summer, the meetings were held outdoors, and when winter arrived, no woman dared complain about the tight fit of the no-longer-slave quarters.
“What ladies talk about?” Naima asked.
“How to be happy,” Madame Jenkins said. When she turned her head from the window, she saw that the twins were asleep.
The twins slept hard on the floor, two girls growing up with just the company of Saint and that one woman, Frances, whom Madame Jenkins wished hadn’t stopped coming to the social meetings after her first time. Surely, there wasn’t enough love for the girls in that house, if any love at all, for what mother would leave her children outdoors like that?
“Hide the whole house? Not even leave them a piece of house to sleep in?” she said to herself. She doubted calling Saint a mother for she never heard the twins call Saint anything other than Saint, and Saint never called anyone anything but their name or out their name. So, what were these girls to Saint that she could discard them like so?
* * *
The following morning, people who had heard of the twins’ abandonment by Saint came to see them, bringing hand-me-down clothes, a basket of sweets, a kind eye that was so hard to come by. Naima looked at the gifts and squinted away her tears. Selah watched, rubbing Naima’s back, then stopped, shooting a look at the door. She sighed and stood, dusting herself off.
“We’ll be leaving soon,” she said.
The door opened and they were swooped up by a panting Madame Jenkins, who escorted them to Aba’s house. “He need your help with something important,” she said in a rush of breath, and though the girls made faces (one intrigued, the other suspicious), she didn’t notice, moving quickly out the door into the bright day with the air of emergency engulfing her.
As they walked, neighbors greeted them and each one had a story about fear that Madame Jenkins eagerly shared with the twins. They absorbed the stories with unharnessed curiosity, wondering if these were the same fears that would’ve appeared to them in Saint’s house. By the time Madame Jenkins dropped them off, she had told them everybody’s business in a breathless sweep of excitement that neither girl kept up with nor wanted to end.
The girls grinned when Aba opened his door, and he shot air out of his nose in response. He looked at Madame Jenkins, then back at the grinning girls, who started to giggle. Aba smiled softly at them as Madame Jenkins ushered them inside, adjusted their collars, then headed home.
Aba tapped his chest to clear his throat and the girls said, “I don’t know,” in unison. He popped his knuckles and Naima responded, “You know her better than we do.” They understood Aba’s sound talk, which relieved the man and encouraged him to speak more. “You understand me?” he asked, tapping his foot. The twins told him that Saint taught them how to interpret drums and that all he was doing was drumming with his body.
“Makes no difference to us,” Selah said. The girls sat cross-legged on the floor and started playing a handclap game. Aba heard words spilling from their claps, two singing voices filling the room with rhyming nonsense the girls clapped into existence. Because he looked like he wanted to join, they invited him to play, teaching him the intricate rhythms and movements. This way, he told them what he needed.
The morning of Franklin’s second funeral, the other half of the message that had fallen to Aba so long ago came in a sunray. He had looked up, bored and having just finished yawning, when a beam of light entered his eye with the rest of the message that he believed came to him from the stars themselves: “feardom” was the complete word and with it came flashes of a scene that unraveled to him for days on end, wrecking his body with endless motions as he translated everything he received. There would be visitors, on horses, strangers that enter the town from the south, and they will lay Ours to waste three days after the fear visions end. Why they would be able to pass Saint’s stones he didn’t know, but it had to have something to do with the fear visions plaguing them all. He figured with Saint’s house gone, the conjure she put on it had nowhere else to go except into Ours, releasing the fears but keeping the love. Ours had little time to prepare for the visitors. “That we could all be killed,” he said in a final round of claps, “is the true kingdom of fear.”
The girls looked on, impressed with the story, and Naima asked him to tell it again but to do it with the song the stars gave him. After several protests of there being no time, Aba rubbed his hands dry of sweat to begin. He didn’t remember the entire rhythm, having received it in a trance not even hunger and thirst could break. He clapped to them what he recalled and Selah’s face paled.
“You heard wrong, Aba,” she said.
“Heard what wrong?”
“Not three days. Two. They will kill us tomorrow.”
“Nobody killing us,” Naima shouted.
If the deadly visitors would be there tomorrow, then Ours needed to be ready today. The twins began to bicker, and he quieted them. “I know what we need to do. But you two have to help me. Will you?”
“Why should we?” Naima asked.
“Why should you what? Help?” Aba said.
“No reason’s good enough.”
“Girl, you want everybody here to die?”
Fireplace and hammer came to Selah’s mind, vile desperation painting Naima’s face the night she confronted Selah for leaving the house to help those in need in Ours. Naima hammered three of her own fingers in protest. She didn’t want Selah to help then and didn’t want either of them to help now.
It wasn’t that many years ago when Ours’s children taunted the girls with the adults’ laughing approval. Not even after Selah spent three nights helping them survive a harsh winter did anyone attempt to tell the twins apart. Not until today did anyone other than Madame Jenkins show them care and consideration, but to Naima it resembled pity more than anything else.
Ours was as distant as any star Aba mindlessly clapped and stomped at, and if the twins wanted to, they could save the handful of people in Ours they had grown to like. In the silent stare-off between Aba and Naima, adult and child, Selah considered what had happened right before Saint’s house disappeared.
Selah had been playing outside with Naima but went back in for a drink of water. She heard arguing upstairs in Saint’s room. The shouting above brought her strange pleasure. The collaborative nature of arguments that didn’t involve her thrilled her, so she sat in the big chair by the fireplace, listening to the raging altos lilt and boom from wall to wall. Not in her lifetime had she known Saint to sound this angry. Because of the intensity, the gravel scraping Saint’s throat, Selah thought that Saint must’ve been enjoying herself, too.
The only reason she stepped out of the house was because Naima had called for her from outside. The sky shone white and hurt her eyes before they adjusted from the hold of the dark interior. She thought she had gone blind, signaled by the dull pain pounding through her head from the white luminescence the sun slipped over everything. A stray chicken’s dingy, off-white feathers glowed in its strut. Even the smell of grass, ripened by the hard light, dizzied her. A bit of frost crusted strangely over the tulip petals. She couldn’t tell what season it was. How long had she been in the house that, after taking those first steps into the garden, felt like emerging from the bottom of a vast body of water?
When she got her bearings in the sunlit world, she found Naima up the path leading to Creek’s Bridge. “Come see,” Naima had said, and took her to the dead mole. For Naima, seeing the bones with meat still on it interested her the most, and she said so to Selah, who observed the corpse in a teeth-parted stupor. For Selah, the idea that something had the power to make a strange beauty of another creature’s death left her rapt in the purple of the intestine spiraling like yarn from the mole’s corpse.
By the time their curiosity waned, leading them to return to the house, the house was gone, along with it the garden and its frosty tulips and the backyard succumbed to weeds, the small animal kennel that occasionally held chickens, a pig or two, and a goat, all of which would be slaughtered and eaten or salted by winter. Everything gone, including Saint, the most hurtful of all disappearances.
