Faith's Reckoning, page 18
“I love you so much, Joe,” she said, searching his eyes. They were a light blue, contrasting with his brown hair, close cropped and peppered with gray. His high cheekbones accentuated the slight hollow at his temple. Sylvia loved that he was over six feet, a good three inches taller than she was. She rested into his lean, muscled body and wrapped her arms around him, the heft of their down jackets cushioning the space between them. She nestled her face into his neck.
“How did I come to deserve a love like yours, Joe Lambert?” she whispered.
“Well,” he smiled, “they say the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“Now don’t you start working on my salvation, too,” Sylvia chuckled, poking him playfully in the ribs.
She hugged him a minute longer before bending over to gather the mugs and leftover snacks into the picnic basket. She pondered what Faith had said, knowing it was truer than not and wishing she could see things differently. Perhaps with meditation she could find a way out of her old thinking. The most she could hope for was to trust in the Mystery. She stood up with the basket in one hand, a blanket and the thermos in the other. She shivered against a gust of cold wind stirring the oak leaves around her feet. Joe gathered the folding chairs and took the basket from Sylvia, offering his arm to her as they walked down the hill together. The space between them was soft and quiet. Approaching the car, they saw Faith nestled into the back seat, having arrived just moments before they did.
“Are you warm enough?” Sylvia asked, as she slipped into the front passenger seat.
“Yep, just got here a minute ago. But I will take another mug of that special eggnog of yours.”
“Coming right up,” Sylvia unscrewed the top to the thermos. “Last cup is yours.” She stumbled towards an apology.
Joe put the chairs and the basket into the back of the Jeep and closed the hatch.
“I’m sorry about my little fit back there,” Sylvia said as she handed the cup of eggnog to Faith.
“You don’t need to apologize, Sylvia,” Faith replied, taking a sip. “I’m just sad for you and your mother. Seems like a long time to have been at odds with each other.”
“I know,” Sylvia said softly. “Truth is I miss her, too.”
Joe got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. He could tell that Sylvia was mending her fences, so he stayed quiet. He pulled out of the parking lot and began the long winding descent back toward the highway. The heater purred, warming them. It would be a good forty-five minutes before they reached the turnoff to the ranch. They rode in silence for some time.
After finishing her eggnog, Faith spoke up.
“Grace is coming to see me at Easter. I’d love it if you joined us, Sylvia. I’m sure I could scare up a fourth hand for Bridge.” She suddenly had a great idea. “How about you, Joe? Do you play Bridge?”
“I do,” he said.
“Gerber or Blackwood convention?”
“Blackwood.”
“Alright, my kind of man. Not afraid to bid up,” Faith said, becoming more animated. “You’ll be my partner and we’ll take Sylvia and her mother to the cleaners.”
“Ganging up again, guys!” Sylvia interrupted.
“Penny a point?” Joe asked.
“Maybe a nickel if I can goad Grace into it,” Faith chuckled.
“Well, I could take a few days off and come at the end of your visit, if you decide to go Sylvia,” Joe looked over at her and winked. “We could stop in New Orleans on the way back.”
“I’ll think about it guys,” she said. “But you might have to sleep on the couch while you’re there, Joe, because…”
“Couch is fine with me, Babe. But maybe you just need some time alone with your mom.”
“I’ll think about it, really, I will.”
Faith hummed a soft tune from the back seat, the brandied eggnog having warmed her from the inside out. “That moon will be full in a couple of days,” she said, looking out the window. She paused. “Isn’t it remarkable what we take for granted; that morning will follow night? Here we are living on a miracle, a revolving ball that is the perfect distance from the right star. How did elements conspire for us to find ourselves living in paradise? Makes you wonder.”
It made Sylvia wonder too and, for once, she did not grasp for an answer. Faith resumed her humming, and Joe reached over to hold Sylvia’s hand. As Joe steered the Jeep toward home a stray meteor entered the atmosphere in the distance ahead and burned an exclamation mark into the night.
Sylvia hung up the phone after the conference call with the Chance House Board of Directors. It was good to be back at work after the holidays. She lifted her briefcase from the floor and looked around her office one more time before leaving. The Miata was already packed for her weekend getaway to the Hill country. Joe had left for a horse auction in Amarillo that morning. His boss had agreed to a new cutting horse after the old Paint, Picasso, came up lame. Sylvia would miss Joe terribly but, sadly, she needed time to think things through. Since her trip to Mississippi the dreams had become more explicit, their meaning transparent. She could no longer escape the reckoning with her own past.
She walked the short distance to the car, which was parked on the street and threw her briefcase in the passenger seat. There was just enough daylight left to make it to Canyon Lake for a sunset walk on the dam, which was close to the cabin she had rented. She pulled onto Interstate 35 and felt herself relax as she hit the outskirts of town. Sylvia need this weekend to begin facing her feelings, in a place with enough open sky and beauty to hold them. The turnoff to San Marcos arrived before she knew it. The flat grassy fields gave way to gentle rolling hills of limestone studded with juniper and scrub oak. She arrived at the dam just in time for the short stroll across and back as the sun set. The gravel lot was sparsely populated this evening and she met few people on her walk. Without any clouds for reflection, the sun set without fanfare. But Sylvia was too deep in thought to notice. Perhaps it would be easier to sort through her feelings if she could share her secret with someone. But who? She still considered seeing a therapist but hadn’t made an appointment yet.
On her way to the cabin she pulled into a roadside café offering flame-grilled burgers and sides and got some nourishment to go. She unpacked quickly when she arrived and took her dinner outside to the table on the back porch, overlooking the Guadalupe River. She ate a couple of bites of her burger and reached for a tablet in her briefcase. She began a letter to Faith.
Dear Faith,
I am still relishing the gift of our time together. Thank you for letting me drag you to all the places that have become touchstones, for witnessing my life with such compassion and understanding.
I have thought a lot about our discussion on New Year’s Eve atop Mt. Bonnell. I wasn’t completely forthcoming about the reasons that I remain estranged from Mom. I must take responsibility here. It’s not just about God or her need for me to be saved. Or maybe it is, because of something I have kept from her all my life, for fear I would never be forgiven.
She may have talked to you about her frustration when I dropped out of college half-way through my freshman year. You remember they had moved to New York the summer before so Dad could take over the family import export business when his father retired. John, of course, moved with them as he was still in high school. My sister, Sophie, had just received her degree from University of Texas and landed a plum teaching position in Connecticut so she could be near them. I left Dallas at the same time to go to UT, happy to be on my own. I loved Austin, the expansive world of ideas at a large university. I felt released from my cloistered suburban world, arriving in this diverse new country. Having slipped the leash of my parents, life became an experiment in discovery. I said yes to everything, including my love for a man named Antwan Chatman.
We met in my only elective that fall semester, Intro to Drama. I sat in the back of the auditorium, wall flowering. He on the other hand stood out, not only for his stunning beauty but also because he was the only Black student taking the course. I just watched him the first couple of days as we practiced monologues before the rest of the class. Then we were paired for the first duo exercise. The skit was simple. Taking turns, we each played a teenage panhandler approaching a passerby on Guadalupe Street. For the first round I was the passerby. I was avoidant, fearful but polite. I pulled the largest bill from my purse and handed it to him, barely making eye contact. The intention was to move along without shaming him. Obviously, the scene didn’t last but a couple of minutes, even after he called out to me to say thanks and perhaps open a conversation. I just nodded, waved, and kept walking. It was an entirely different scene when I was the panhandler. Antwan stopped when I approached him. He looked deeply into my eyes with a compassion that left me breathless. He asked me my name and where I was from. How did I end up in Austin? How was I getting by and did I know about the youth shelter on Congress Avenue? Only after that lengthy conversation did he reach into his pocket and give me all his spare change. I was in love with him from that first improv exercise, but I wrote it off to theatrical transference. But a chord had been stuck and we went for a beer after class. Pretty soon it became our routine and transference or not, our attraction grew.
He was my first lover, Faith, and even now I feel blessed by him. It was more than sex. His tenderness, the thrill of his scent, the safety I felt in his arms. We tried to deny where we came from, such vastly different worlds. We would dwell in the present, in the musky smell of autumn. It was all we could do to keep our class schedules and study for exams. By Thanksgiving, I was three weeks late for my period. He almost always used protection, but our passion made us reckless a couple of times. When I told him, he held me gently. I tasted the salt from his tears as he silently rocked us in that embrace. He said he loved me, that he would marry me. We could be a family, he insisted.
Faith, you must remember that was 1972. The Texas miscegenation law had only been overturned five years earlier by the US Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia. Unimaginable that our love, but for a handful of years, would have been a crime. The law may have changed but racism in Texas had not. We stayed together until the spring, but I couldn’t see our future. How could I ever tell Mom? Can you imagine her response? I was the one who ended the relationship. I was terrified of the racism we would face, and shamefully, more concerned for myself than the violence that might come to Antwan. But I never considered aborting our child. Not Antwan’s child. He still lived in me even if I had sent him away.
I obviously wasn’t traveling in Mexico in the spring and summer of 1973. I dropped out of school and lived with a friend, waitressing to pay the bills. I had Terrell Antwan Barbarino on July 4th and gave him up for adoption through the Home of the Holy Infancy. Maybe now you can understand the distance that has grown in my relationship with Mom. I am finally owning up to my part. Secrets preclude a trusting relationship. But I also find her relentless quest for my salvation, through confessions of my sins, unbearably painful. She has no idea of the forgiveness I seek, the redemption I long for after abandoning Terrell. Every time I think of him, I wonder ‘Would I have raised him if he was White?’ I don’t know how to live with that. It is why I could never have another child, not even Joe’s. He doesn’t know why I will not give him the family he wants. Where that leaves us, I don’t know.
Sylvia looked up from the letter she had written, the river babbling beneath the oaks. A mockingbird trilled in the branches overhead. She felt the constriction in her throat, the banished grief, the unspilled tears. A drink of water loosened the knot enough for her to pick up the letter and read it again. She knew she could never send it. This was Sylvia’s work to do. She had never been able to tell Joe about this part of her past and her dilemma was now acute. She knew she would not find peace until she reached out to Terrell, which was allowed by the adoption agency once the child reached adulthood. But that meant she had to level with Joe. Ironic that just as she was admitting to herself how much she loved Joe, she might have to let him go, while he could still have a family of his own. But she had to reconcile with her own son, or at least try if there was the slightest possibility. The knot of thoughts and feelings was too much to untangle alone. Sylvia vowed to make an appointment with the therapist who had helped her through the rough patch after New York. She was scared. But she could no longer deny what she needed to do.
MISSISSIPPI 1934
The wind howled in concert with Delsey’s contractions, coming every two minutes now. Gusts of air whipped around the sturdy yellow farmhouse as if trying to get in to see who was being born. A thin stream of light from the waning crescent moon peeked through the bedroom window.
“Keep breathin’ Sugar, it’ll be time here soon enough to start pushing,” said Lettie Burris, a silver-haired rail of a woman who had birthed more babies in the north end of Hattiesburg than most of the doctors in town.
Plessy had drawn two big pots of water from the kitchen tap and was warming them on the stove, as instructed. A small blanket was draped on a chair nearby, close enough to absorb the heat from the stove. A week shy of their first wedding anniversary, Plessy and Delsey were about to welcome their child into the world. Miss Lettie had guessed it was a boy because Delsey carried the baby low, but she readily admitted that she was not a hundred percent in her prognostications. She was closer to fifty-fifty. Predictions were not her specialty; perfect timing of a delivery was. And she rarely had a mother or baby suffer injury during childbirth.
Plessy and Delsey had finished the interior work on the house by early summer the year before, the last coat of lacquer applied to the maple trim of the doorframes on June 19, Juneteenth, an appropriate day for what had felt like their own personal emancipation. They now had running water pumped by the new windmill to a raised holding tank. The bathroom had a tub and a flush toilet. It was a luxury beyond Delsey’s greatest expectations and now, with the pain of childbirth homing in, she found respite in the comfort of their new home. A fire flickered in the woodstove in the bedroom.
“I gotta push Lettie. I gotta push,” Delsey insisted.
“Not yet. Breathe, breathe. He ain’t started down yet.”
Delsey puffed like a locomotive at full speed while Plessy paced in the hall outside the bedroom. He poked his head through the half-closed door.
“You OK, Shugs?” he said, hands fidgeting from forced idleness.
“No!” she hollered, another contraction pushing the baby deeper towards the birth canal.
“She be OK, Mr. Walker, she be OK,” Lettie said, reassuring the expectant father. “You can go get that water shortly and some towels. But keep that blanket by the stove so’s it’s warm when the baby’s washed up.”
Delsey caught her breath when the contraction subsided and looked at Plessy who still stood in the doorway, his brow furrowed and slightly damp.
“It’s OK, Love, I’m OK,” she said, forcing a smile. “Do what Lettie tells you.”
“I love you, so much,” he said, a question in his voice somehow asking forgiveness for his part in the pain she was bearing.
“I love you, too,” she replied, then lay her head back, resting. Positioned at the foot of the bed, Delsey alternately sat up or reclined back against a mountain of pillows. Her knees were bent, her feet gripping the edge of the bed. A slightly longer pause preceded the next contraction.
“OK, Sugar, let me see where that little fella is.” Lettie reached two fingers inside Delsey and felt the baby’s head at the fully dilated cervix.
“OK, you can start pushin’ with the next big pain,” she instructed, “but only for long as you got the urge. You gotta pace yourself now. He’s gonna be here soon. You push as long and hard as you feel like, but when it starts to burn you’re gonna slow down, OK?”
Instinct took over and Delsey eased into a natural rhythm of intensely painful work, then rest, work and rest. She could feel her child inching his way down, out of her body and into the world. An abiding sense of peace and gratitude tempered the physical pain. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this, the sheer magnitude of the experience. Plessy came to the door every five minutes to inquire in whispered tones as to the progress of the birth. He wanted to be by Delsey’s side but did not know if custom, much less Miss Lettie, allowed such a thing. Finally, after an hour of pushing, the small head began to crown, and Lettie called for the water and towels. When Plessy entered the room, it was clear he was not going to leave. He closed the door behind him with his foot and carried the pots of water over to the foot of the bed. He had towels draped over each arm. The mix of blood and fluids did not bother him. He was mesmerized as the baby’s forehead appeared. He watched, speechless, as Lettie coached Delsey to slowly ease the baby’s head out. Once the head emerged, Lettie cradled it in her hands. She gently angled it down, tugging slightly, until one shoulder slipped out then the other. The child slid into her arms and let out a robust cry. A small stream of urine shot into the air announcing his relief to be out.
“It’s a boy, Delsey, it’s a boy,” Plessy shouted.
“Told you she was carrying him low, didn’t I,” Lettie piped in, pleased to have chalked up another accurate prediction. “Now, let’s tie off that cord, Daddy Walker, and get this boy cleaned up.”
Plessy reached for two lengths of string already cut and waiting on the bedside table. The table also held the tools from Lettie’s bag: scissors, gauze, rolled cotton, vinegar and alcohol. There was even a needle and thread in case Delsey tore herself as she pushed the baby out. Lettie tied the cord securely in two places, an inch apart, and let Plessy cut it. She then quickly began cleaning the blood and buttery film from the baby’s eyelids and skin, first with a flannel cloth soaked in castor oil, then with warm water.
“You can go get that blanket now, Mr. Walker,” she said, directing him with a sense of calm focus. She could see the blood still streaming from Delsey’s womb into the basin.
