Ours, p.49
Ours, page 49
This much night shouldn’t have been possible, but it molded around her as her head pained her in pulses, jaw to crown. Then, through the cocoon that darkness and hurt wrapped around her, the sound of a hammer bang shattered the frightening shell like a burst of cold air. Naima moved toward the hammering, was given confidence by it, as the moon’s wan glow returned to clear the way before her. Then the hammering stopped. Orange light floated from an open door, then balanced on some invisible scale that waited for Naima’s arrival.
Thylias was sitting on her porch, leaning forward as the approaching tumult of cry and curses drew closer. Insects spiraled around the lantern and landed on her. She let them. She leaned forward in her chair until she found herself standing, then walking to the road as the image of Naima came into view.
“Heard your foul mouth from the house,” Thylias said, but Naima didn’t remember saying anything at all as she stumbled her way there. Her face hurt. Her head throbbed. “Why you out at this hour and alone?”
Loose flap of Naima’s bottom lip dropped. “I got lonely,” she said.
“Loneliness not a thing you walk off. You get used to it. Come inside.”
Naima rested in Thylias’s room that held little other than a bed and a small table with a drawer in which Thylias kept petals from dead flowers for their lingering scent, replacing them whenever the collective scent of their shared deaths expired. The room had no window.
Naima was fine until she heard the door lock from the outside. Her thrashing could be heard on the other side of the door, and she made a furious fuss for hours, banging on the locked door, shouting awful things to the woman waiting outside, until she fell asleep with sore fists and a ragged throat.
She woke to the sound of a skeleton key unlocking the door. Thylias stood in the doorway, candle holder in hand and her bun unwrapped and draping thick wavy hair down her shoulders. She carried a stern look, her cheekbones high and the cheeks made hard from her clenched teeth. Without speaking, she left the door opened and walked barefoot away. As the woman left, the smell of food entered the once-locked room and Naima’s anger settled into tolerating bitterness. She stepped into the short hall, looking at the floor as she skulked to the table that had a plate of food and a morose-looking Thylias waiting just for her.
“Why the hell you lock me in there?” Naima shouted.
“You said you was lonely. You thought you was gone stay in there when you left from wherever you was? Or did you want to find yourself in the woods?” Thylias said.
They ate in silence by candlelight, morning sun not yet risen. Thylias’s house was noisier than Naima remembered it last time she was there with Saint and Selah. Iron cookware rocked on their ceiling hooks, clanging into each other, urgent as heavy bells. To Naima, it felt the house held an endless squall, creaking and moaning wood in chorus all around in sync with the iron bell-pots and bell-pans. Candlelight fought against the moving air whose source couldn’t be determined. In the interior din, Naima hated Thylias’s quiet and stillness. She looked at the woman’s face expecting to hate it, too, but found herself warmed by what she saw, some kinship that tripped up her heart.
Embarrassed, she looked away, and that’s when she saw the nails hammered into the wall on the other side of the room, opposite the wall that bore the entryway, and wrapping around the corner into the short hall leading to Thylias’s room and what used to be Franklin’s room. The nails stopped adjacent to Franklin’s bedroom door. She hadn’t noticed the nails when she first arrived or when she sat to eat, head down, wrapped in her own harsh feelings, not seeing the clear warning that she shouldn’t be there. That no one should.
Despite her intuition telling her to stay seated, she scooted her chair from beneath the table and went to the nailed-up wall. From where she had been sitting, she didn’t notice the patterns, but up close it was clear that something beautiful had been pounded into the wood. Arcs of nails repeatedly interrupted by other arcs of nails. Hills of nails rolling up and down the wall, broken up by a knife in some places or a shard of thick glass, and there was no telling how Thylias hammered that into the wall without cutting herself or breaking the glass into hundreds of pieces. Naima stepped backward and observed it all at once, then turned the corner to see what little the dark allowed.
Discerning about all things dead, she assumed correctly that the door belonged to Franklin’s room and that the nails were there for him. “Thylias,” Naima said.
Thylias shot her a look. “Ma’am. You will call me ma’am.”
“Your name Thylias.”
“Look at that wall full of nails and tell me my name again?”
The lilt of the question stung Naima and made her reconsider, gazing at the nails then back at Thylias. Still, she didn’t relent. “Thylias your name. Why I got to call you ma’am?”
Thylias placed both hands on her lap. She hadn’t moved an inch from the table since Naima left her sitting there. “You know what a bitch is?” Thylias asked.
The girl paled. Of course, she knew. It was the word of disappearance. It was her favorite word because it hurt people away from her when she wanted space. She couldn’t remember where she first heard it, only when she first said it to someone, and the look they had given her, as though she had stopped time, thrilled her. “Bitch” made people freeze up, sometimes made them ask, “Girl, what did you just call me?” and stop speaking to her altogether. On days she wanted to be left alone, she said it to anyone who breathed near her as she ran errands for Saint. If they couldn’t hurt her first, she would be all right for the rest of the day.
But it was a misunderstood power because people didn’t come back when she most needed them, a need that shamed her each time she felt it. She knew the magic word to make folks disappear, but after they disappeared, it seemed that she, too, disappeared from them. They were already mean to her on their own, but what choice did she have to interact with them when Saint sent her to pick up or drop off a conjure? She thought it unfair to be beholden to the same effect of a decision she made that wasn’t made on the other end. No one ever called her a bitch, though she did hear them whisper about her hair “standing on top of her head,” about her being “one of them Saint girls” whose name they never tried to learn, and about her curt way of speaking though no one taught her any different. “Little rude girl.” “Saint’s terror.” “The mean one.” “The dirty one,” as though she didn’t spend more time washing her ass than Selah. They called her everything but her name and everything but a bitch, and she came back each time to collect their orders and their abuses that stacked so high they toppled over her, until she decided that was enough. Seven years old and full of spite, she called the first person who shook his head at her when she walked by a mangy bitch. “You mangy bitch. Shake your head at your mama.” And from that day on, that man kept away from her. Simple. But she had only meant for him to stay away for a little while, not forever, and her confusion from watching how the other children could act out but be embraced after being corrected turned into a feeling so ugly it had no limits. She threw the nastiness at everybody and ended up throwing it at herself from time to time. She called herself ugly though she didn’t think she was. How could she be ugly when she had her sister’s remarkable face?
But now even that face wouldn’t look back at her. Naima felt hints of this future back when Selah snuck off to Ours without her, hints that Selah had not only imagined a life of her own but had claimed it, could claim it only if Naima weren’t involved. The first finger she hammered in retaliation to her sister abandoning her hurt the most. The pain of being left alone, when Selah was the closest person she had next to Saint, dwarfed the pain of the other fingers she hammered.
It would be years after she smashed her fingers when Naima realized that Selah had no space for anyone else or their feelings. Sure, love existed, enough for Selah to smile at her sister and make sure she didn’t get too close to a snake or poison oak, but when quiet draped its cloth over Selah’s eyes, Naima knew her sister had gone off to some other place, possibly in the freedom of a bird or fox. Naima believed she possessed no skills of freedom, no gifts of her own that would allow her to follow Selah to wherever she escaped. She made sure to speak with her loudest voice whenever the veil of freedom covered Selah’s eyes, though eventually not even the bright blade of her voice cut loose the caul.
The night after Saint watched Selah try to resurrect that woman in the front room, Selah shared with Naima that she wanted to run away but didn’t know where to. Naima’s heart dropped.
“I don’t want to be Saint’s anymore,” Selah had said. “I don’t want to put my life in others’ death anymore.”
Naima promised to protect her so that Selah wouldn’t want to leave her alone, and she made Selah promise that she would stay with her, not leave her behind in the house with Saint, who made it clear she had no intention of loving her, only protecting her and not even from Saint herself. If either of the girls hugged Saint for too long, she shooed them away. Their smiles went unreturned. Saint made sure they ate well and left the house clean and went to bed even cleaner, but she didn’t kiss their foreheads or squeeze their slight shoulders or hold their hands unless they proved their usefulness to her. Young but not stupid, the empty value of Saint’s attention grew more obvious to them, and where Naima wanted companionship through the storm, Selah wanted to do away with the storm altogether.
Now, Naima sat in the nailed-up house of a woman she hardly knew while thinking about her same-face sister who found a way to escape after all in the seduction of infinite dreaming. Selah got away, went inside herself and decided that was good enough, and because she never cared about formalities, or considered she meant something to the people in her life, she left without even saying goodbye. Even a dog deserved a goodbye.
“A bitch a girl dog,” Naima said.
“This is true. And I been called a bitch all my child life until I came to Ours. I have the right to be called ma’am in my grown life. You may not think about other people’s feelings, Naima, but that don’t mean they gone go away. You a child and as a child you learn how to respect people older than you so you can know when you not getting it when you older.”
“I don’t get it now,” Naima said.
“Then you already know better and don’t need telling.” She walked over to Naima and asked, “May I touch your face?” No one ever asked permission to touch her. They just reached out and touched her wherever and whenever they pleased.
“No, ma’am,” Naima said.
Thylias smiled and wiped her fingers across the heads of the nails. “Thank you,” she said.
[2]
On the third day of Naima’s stay, Thylias told her she needed something to guide her grief. She explained how she woke up one day and wanted to hurt somebody. Anybody would do. Hurt them so they would know just how she felt sitting cooped up in that house with her most loyal friend in the dirt. But hurting people only gave them a hurt that was theirs, and she wanted them to feel her specific pain.
“Grief not giveable in that way. You can’t give somebody what you feel to make them understand,” Thylias said, and described how she came about a box of nails and went to hammering them into the walls. At first, the placements were random and not very healing to hammer in, but the violent banging distracted her from the banging happening inside of her. Then she noticed how without trying she had made a kind of pattern: arcs, one beneath the other to make a band of sorts, that stopped and started into each other. So, she kept that up and liked the way it looked, which made her like the sound even more. “Like thunder from a gesture,” she said. “Had a sky of sound in my hands. Just like that.”
Eventually, she imagined Franklin still slept in that room and not underground, that he just needed some waking up music. She hammered more fiercely, and when she ran out of nails, she used anything sharp that wood would take. “Found a piece of broken mirror in the road once. Don’t know where it came from, but I put it here,” she said, pointing to where she wedged the glass in an open space between the nails. “Cut myself terribly. Terribly.
“You have to find what turn your grief useful to you,” Thylias continued, observing what little of her face the mirror shard between the nails showed her. “And you shouldn’t leave here before you do. I can’t keep you here if you want to go. I’m surprised you stayed this long.” Thylias locked eyes with Naima. “I shouldn’t have trapped you in my room. I apologize. I had no other way in my head to keep you from wandering off again. Do you forgive me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Naima said, though she didn’t know if she knew how to forgive.
[3]
That night, Thylias woke to the sound of the front door closing. She had taken to sleeping in Franklin’s room now that Naima slept in her room. Though Thylias slept well, it took a while for her to find comfort where her old friend had found no joy of his own.
She felt the pressure of the nails entering the walls, pushing in a little closer each night. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would hear a hammer knock scattered patterns against the wall, then one powerful bang followed, shaking her from the bed. She would then go to the living room where empty quiet greeted her.
When she heard the front door close, she grabbed up a shawl, an oil lantern, and her gun and checked Naima’s room. She called her name before opening the door. The girl was gone. Outside, she saw a light not too far from the house, floating in the graveyard. Mrs. Wife and Franklin were the only two buried there after all these years who had grave markings. The other dead, the dozen or so orphans who died soon after arriving in Ours, had only flowers to mark their burial. That the flowers grew back every year meant a longer life for the orphans in death than they had in life.
Thylias approached Naima among the flowered graves and saw that her head was uncovered. “Put this on your head,” Thylias said, passing her a long white scarf. “Don’t sit with the dead with your head uncovered.”
Naima wrapped her hair and Thylias left her alone without asking why she had taken company with ghosts.
When Naima returned, she blew out the lantern and left it on the floor of her room. She changed into bed clothes and went to Thylias’s room, got in bed with her, rolled herself into Thylias, and fell asleep.
* * *
The laughter of water falling into a bucket woke Naima. Thylias was bathing outside, naked, joyfully immodest as she stood in the yard out back, lathering her body with a soapy rag. Naima watched from the doorway the suds caught in the woman’s belly fat, rolls of flesh covered in soft white bubbles, and wondered if she would ever take up space that beautifully. Often, she wished she was invisible and often she was treated that way to her detriment. But here was Thylias in quiet nude, refashioning the space around her into a stage where she was both performer and part of the adoring audience, water the only sound other than her heavy breathing as she diligently washed herself. Sunlight washed her along with the water and spun rainbows inside the bubbles.
“Help me with my back?” Thylias asked. “I’ll wash yours.”
Thylias handed her a rag from the bottom of the basin, and they washed themselves, wetting the grass as they handled their bodies with care. Naima took Thylias’s rag to wash her back but froze.
“What do you need?” Thylias asked.
“I never washed somebody else before,” Naima said.
“You don’t have to touch or be touched if you don’t want to. Those days over, Naima. You understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Naima said. With Thylias’s rag, she washed the woman’s back, marking where skin folds took in her hands, holding them as she cleaned skin smooth as porcelain. Thylias asked if Naima wanted her back washed and washed it when she said yes. They rinsed with a small bucket of soapless water poured over both their heads, laughing and screaming while the cool water cascaded over them.
They air dried, hidden from the rest of town by tall bushes that created a gallery from back door to the middle of the backyard, where a toolshed and outhouse stood on opposite sides, guards watching over their dancing in the lifting sunlight. Gnat clouds floated their lace over the scenery, and it seemed to Naima that they were trapped inside the body of a ghost. As she spun, grass prickling her feet, she wished Selah was there with her and began to fall back into her grief.
While Naima washed the floors, Thylias chopped onion, tomato, and leftover mint and added it to a cast-iron skillet glazed with lard. She added corn bread, a splash of water, and honey, making a makeshift grit. The two ate while a breeze touched their bodies through the open window, sweet potion of flower scent caught in the moving air.
“Ma’am.”
“Yes, Naima.”
“I want to cut my hair.”
Thylias inspected Naima’s hair. Thick, hateful of gravity. She tried to run her fingers through, but they got stuck, as if each finger had fallen in love with Naima’s hair and didn’t want to leave. “Cut it how?”
“Low as a boy’s.”
“I’ll help you. You didn’t ask, but your hair is pretty.”
“I know. I want to grow it back this way. I just—” Naima started laughing hard. She didn’t know why but something in her got to feeling good. “I just want to see it get like that with all my attention.”
“Let me find some shears. Gone have to go bald so it grow out low like you asking. You ready to be that new?”
“Yes.”
Thylias thought it a shame for all that pretty hair to drop to the floor like that. She grabbed a few fingers worth of hair and scissored it off. When it was low enough, she went looking for Franklin’s razor, strop, shaving brush, and soap.
