Promise, page 18
“We’ll help Mama,” said Ezra. “Don’t worry, Daddy.”
Our father’s handsome face was streaked from the yellow lights that shone from our first-floor windows. I saw his smile even in the dark. A beautiful feeling went through me. I realized I was safe, even if my mother and father couldn’t always keep the world from going after us. It was love that made me feel this way. A love the world couldn’t take from me or from our family.
“Give your mother a kiss from me,” he said, laughing a little. “And make sure the fire’s hot when I get home.”
* * *
•••
The December wind was raw and could drain the heat from a man’s skin in minutes. My father guided our car into one of the parking spaces between the main building of the school and Mr. Caesar’s woodshed so that Mr. Caesar would see that he was there working too. As he climbed out of the car, pulling the collar of his deep navy wool coat around his neck, my father was greeted by sweet shouts from the woodshed. Turning his head, he could see the silhouettes of three Junkett children against the light of the janitorial shack: Lindy, Rosemary, and Empire. Ernest was back at the house, having been given his holiday from a Black carpenter with whom he apprenticed in Gunn Hill. Miss Irene was in Gunn Hill for Rising Star’s evening service followed by choir practice and a women’s dinner to discuss more details for the church’s annual New Year’s Eve prayer gathering.
Calling out to the children, Daddy warned them to stay inside. “Keep the door locked,” he said suddenly. Mr. Hobart often had his nephew patrol the grounds.
He went through the side entrance of the school. Pausing, he looked down the darkened halls, nervous that someone might suddenly call out to tell him he no longer belonged in this place. That he’d never belonged.
Since the “theft” of Miss Alley’s purse, Mr. Caesar and my father were no longer given free rein when it came to staying alone at the school. Mr. Hobart had encouraged some of the teachers who resided in the women’s dormitories to “keep an eye” on the men’s comings and goings. He’d even made Mr. Caesar return some of the tools that he’d been allowed to take home and make use of elsewhere, when he picked up odd jobs in nearby towns.
Listening for Mr. Caesar’s whistling or radio now, my father walked swiftly to his own classroom. The lights were already on and the floor had been recently mopped with the lemon mixture that made the room smell like sunshine. My father was grateful, again, for Mr. Caesar’s friendship. My father had drawn a division between him being a man of books and Mr. Caesar being a man of brooms. But the tension of the village had made each man equal to the other and, in the eyes of the white people, equally inferior. They’d become closer since the deputy’s wrongful arrest of Mr. Caesar. The faculty’s implicit barring of my father from nearly all communal spaces opened my father’s eyes to the reality of our future in Salt Point. For many evenings now, he’d listened to Mr. Caesar and Miss Irene go back and forth about heading south. They spoke of Royal, where they were from, and tried to get my father to speak of Damascus. He’d skirted them, but now my father was seriously considering an idea they’d suggested about all of us going south as one family, and finding a town that was big enough, Black enough, and safe for all of the children. My father didn’t think such a place existed. Not in America. Perhaps not anywhere. Miss Irene’s immediate word was Africa, but my father couldn’t bear to think of the strain of such a move, not with his wife being so ill.
Sighing, my father pressed his gloved fingertips against his right temple. He’d have a headache if he didn’t focus on what he needed to do: tidy up his classroom, organize his books, wrap hidden Christmas presents for his family, and help Mr. Caesar with whatever cleaning was left so that they could all leave as soon as possible.
Just then, a large mouse crossed the dry floorboards of my father’s classroom. Cursing aloud, my father thought of how meticulous Mr. Caesar was about rodents in his school. But this was no longer their school. It was delusional to believe anything else.
Sharp wind from the bluffs rattled the windows, and my father shivered. Mr. Caesar had probably turned the heat down to save money. He thought of the Junkett children out in the woodshed, where it’d be warmer.
Daddy hung his coat in the small cloak area on its familiar peg. He allowed himself to anticipate what 1958 might contain for himself and his family. Daddy sensed that there were changes coming and that they would require him to be careful in a way that excluded his usual reticence. For a moment, he stared at the empty desks that faced him. The absent jury of young white children left him a brief, haunted feeling he’d never had before. Shaking away the sense that he was being watched, Daddy chided himself and reached for the worn case that held his beloved fountain pen. He would take some time to read, to fill a notebook with questions and declarations. Gathering the familiar, frayed comfort of logic around his thoughts, he invited reason and fact to guide him, as they always had.
* * *
•••
The edge of the wind carried the acrid scent of smoke, which made my father rush abruptly out of the chamber of his mind. He could make out a huge halo of orange light beyond the warped, antique glass of the classroom windows. Leaping to his feet, he dashed out into the hall. He lifted his voice and called out, hoping his voice would find his friend. “Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!”
My father heard nothing. He raced down the eerily lit hallways, his feet pounding like hooves on the uneven, polished wooden floors. Arriving, panting, at the side entrance, he found that the door had already been locked with a key. This was unusual, as Mr. Caesar would’ve seen my father’s car and known that he was still inside the building.
Daddy wasn’t panicking yet. He didn’t know what exactly he’d seen from the window. But what else could that glow be? Out by the woodshed. The woodshed.
Pivoting around unlit corners, Daddy ran down a long, black corridor that led him to the front entrance of the school. He could see that the tall doors were shut but he knew Mr. Caesar usually locked them last.
My father pushed one of the doors open using his shoulder. The blistering wind from the bluffs nearly knocked him down like a scream.
He stumbled towards the lot where he’d parked the car and where he’d seen the bright yellow light near the woodshed. My father couldn’t explain why this felt so familiar, like a dream, as if he’d lived through this race before and had always woken up before knowing whether he’d won or lost.
As he rounded a bend of low, pruned brushes, he stopped abruptly. Underneath the black shape of a tree, he could just barely make out the shadow of man atop a huge horse with flaming green eyes and a burning tail. The man’s face, my father marveled, was nearly identical to his own but younger. The sadness in the man’s shoulders, which were crowned with strange, writhing shapes like hundreds of wings or hands, brought sudden tears to my father’s eyes. Because he knew this man. When my father blinked away his tears, there was no figure. He shook his head and ran directly towards the radiant light.
It was an inferno. The woodshed was afire. My father could hear the screams of the Junkett children, who were still inside. He recalled that in the winter Mr. Caesar kept the windows of the woodshed locked, to prevent any mischief or theft of tools. He thought of the neatly arranged canisters of gasoline, kerosene, turpentine, and propane that his friend kept labeled. The stacks of matches, wrapped in small towers of cardboard. The entire thing was a tinderbox.
My father could see the thin, black shadows of three children dancing through the windows. One part of the roof was entirely engulfed and sparks, grotesquely festive, sprayed high into the dry, freezing air.
He called out again for Mr. Caesar, aware that the man could be in an entirely different wing of the building.
My father ran to the shed, which reminded him of a church he’d never seen.
The roar of the fire reminded him of the sea down below the bluffs. He used all his strength to push open the door he’d instructed the children to lock. Inside, he felt the Junkett children clinging to him and stopped thinking of anything but how to save them. The air was thick with dense chemical smoke.
Looking back over his shoulder, my father saw that he wouldn’t be able to get the three children out by going out the front door he’d come in through. He’d need to get them out through the glass. Covering his face, he used his elbow to bang at the hot panes. The locks were already melting. Two of the windows were impossible to reach. The children shrieked, and he saw the fire reflecting his fate in the shine of their eyes.
My father lifted Rosemary to his right shoulder and Empire to his left. Raising his voice, he ordered Lindy to hold on to him no matter what.
When he stood at the last window, my father used his foot to kick out the glass. He pushed Empire out into the icy embrace of air. Then Rosemary. He lifted Lindy’s semiconscious body, whispering soothing words to her while she moaned. She’d lost consciousness yet had still managed to hold on to him. As he passed his arm, holding the girl, through the glass, he was surprised to feel strong, firm hands gripping his own, pulling Lindy through to the other side.
My father smiled as he heard somebody shouting his name. It was the fire, or his friend Caesar, or the smoke in his blood from years ago that had never been put out. The wind breathed a surging gale of scorching heat, and he clearly heard a woman’s voice burying him inside her name. Alma, the voice said over and over, until it was sure he was listening, remembering. A vision of a woman whose name had also been Comfort, but who never was, flared in his racing heart. He was close to melting. The fire danced across his sweating back and along the white sleeves of his good shirt. Alma, Alma, he called back to her with hope. His mother and hers and hers would save him.
As my father reached out, his fingers nearly touching what he assumed were God’s own, a blazing wooden beam crashed down onto him, crushing my father’s mind.
17
On the Monday before Christmas, Ruby and her parents huddled in a limousine that would take them to Amity. Ruby’s papa had agreed to a holiday dinner with Miss Alley and the Hobarts. Her father said that it was “big” of him to have accepted the invitation; he said he couldn’t argue with the fact that it was kind of the Hobarts to want to help Ruby improve herself. He’d seemed lighter in his moods since he’d told Ruby that he’d decided to accept Miss Alley’s good intentions for Ruby’s future. Ruby’s papa no longer accused her of having illicit affairs with village boys but Ruby was terrified that the affair, so brief, she’d actually had with Cullen had changed her life in the exact way her father had threatened.
Her ma, being told about the special dinner in Ruby’s honor, pouted for some weeks and could focus only on her own “debut.” Her eyes smarted when she thought of how Miss Alley’s uncle had treated her and Ruby so many years ago. But she wouldn’t stop thinking that Mr. Hobart needed to “pay” for the compliments he’d never delivered to her in her prime. Ruby’s mother was not distracted from her scheming, giving little attention to her husband’s whereabouts, even when her own sisters suggested that Ruby’s father had been seen down near the lighthouse with a woman far above the kind of lusty village woman who would do him a favor. Each of the Scaggses had lived in the uneasy whispers of rumor and innuendo so whatever might be said, about any of them, had likely already been something ugly that pleased the villagers’ scornful lies.
But Ruby had also wondered whether her father’s wicked thoughts about Miss Alley had a lot to do with this generosity. She didn’t want to think that her teacher was using her or her father. But she found herself thinking it over often—whether the woman really wanted to “adopt” Ruby as a daughter, a sister. What if this was just some sort of besotted charity ruse? In the pages of her mother’s magazines, she’d read about the kind of women who were so rich they could afford to buy poor people, treat them like prizes, and then abandon them. More than anything, Ruby feared abandonment now.
She was too worried about her future to find out whether Miss Alley was spending more time with her papa on her behalf. In the limousine, Ruby noted that her father had managed, without her knowledge, to see a barber.
“This all is for you,” he said. “Whenever you doubt me, I want you to remember that I’m trying to help you.” His hair, his voice, his temperament, were abnormally even. “So you can have a chance.”
“She’s had chances,” said Ruby’s mother in a petulant voice. Pulling a nearly bald fur around her body, she rocked her thighs into a solid throne so that she was sitting up very straight. “We all have.”
“Ruby’s different than us,” her father said, producing a pained smile.
“I reckon I need every chance I can get,” Ruby said. It was awkward to hear her papa speak of her as being different from her ma and himself but maybe he was beginning to think it was true. Her eyes settled on her mother’s ill-fitting wool dress. Ruby had tried to excuse Ma’s presence at the dinner, but Miss Alley had insisted that both her parents accompany her to the Hobarts’ home, because she had an announcement to make.
“I had a chance once,” said Ma. “I could’ve been somewhere else, being someone else. God knows I’d be with somebody else too. Somebody deserving. But here I am.”
“Shut up,” said her father, “and think about something more than yourself.”
“At least I do think.”
“Says who? Don’t start with your lousy lost beauty queen routine. Don’t you fucking start.”
Ruby’s mother shifted, turning her head to the window again. She’d fluffed her thin hair into an awful bouffant. Ruby could see her fine cheekbones beneath the dimpled jowls that no cold cream could hide. Still, in profile, it was clear that Ma had been a beauty.
“I can’t see what these people want with Ruby. They got to want something. And whatever they want they probably want it for free. I just don’t understand—why Ruby?”
“You wouldn’t,” her father said.
“I’m as good as anybody,” Ruby said. “Ain’t nobody better than me. Ain’t nobody worse than me.”
“You can’t expect nobody to tell you you’re good or not,” said her father tersely.
“I can depend on myself, Papa.”
He slapped Ruby hard across her face. Staring down at his hand as if it were an unrecognizable face, his eyes were sad. Then her father took the edge of his hand across her face twice more. “You gone depend on whatever I say you gone depend on.”
As the limousine ascended into the soft hills of Amity, the rough land of Salt Point shifted into a groomed landscape of seasonal shrubbery, formal hedges, and gilded lanterns that were already lit. A thin red belt of sunlight banded dusk. As if on cue, a shiny powder of snowflakes twirled down inside the twilight. It was unbelievable that the two places were barely twenty miles apart.
Amity looked like a movie set except that it was real. Ruby had never seen anything like this except in the double features she and her ma used to go to. Ruby had hated these excursions because she and her mother often fought—Ruby asked too many questions, often during the movie, or begged for popcorn, candy, and other sorts of sweetness her mother couldn’t afford. The fights destroyed the dreamy feeling of movies for her. And when she said she didn’t want to go to the cinema anymore, her mother accused Ruby of having no capacity for dreams.
Ruby resisted pressing her face against the glass window of the limousine. She had eyes of her own and told herself to give this new world a good hard look. The sight of curtains in lamplit windows made her eyes sting. She disliked the rich longing that swelled inside her throat.
Moving into the farthest corner of her seat, Ruby could feel the leather under the crinkly layer of crinoline beneath her dress, which Miss Alley said was a dress she herself could no longer wear because of her age. It was the best secondhand dress Ruby was ever given. There was a scorched smell in the air from the curling iron Miss Alley had used to curl her hair into ringlets. Ruby remembered how delicious, and a little scary, it was to have her hair curled. The sweetness with which Miss Alley blew on every curl and how Ruby had looked into Miss Alley’s vanity mirror and seen her teacher’s smile reflected back to her. Despite the mood of intimacy, she’d kept quiet about Cullen while Miss Alley giggled about men. She spoke pointedly about Mr. Hobart, her aunt’s husband. Ruby couldn’t tell whether Miss Alley fancied a rich, distracted man like him for herself, or whether she craved a devastating heartbreaker, the kind of no-good heartthrob that made her ma swoon at the movies.
During an earlier visit to Miss Alley’s apartment, the woman had conspiratorially asked her about her period. Ruby had lied, figuring it wasn’t the kind of thing a teacher was supposed to ask, which meant Ruby wasn’t obligated to tell the truth. But the truth was that Ruby hadn’t bled since September.
By now, Ruby knew that Cullen was a lying sweet talker. He hadn’t taught her to fly. He hadn’t taught her a thing except how to open her legs. His touch was forceful, strong, breathtaking, and, Ruby admitted to herself, so brief she was perplexed as to why adults made such a fuss over something that took less time than brushing her teeth. Being called Sunshine was all right, but Ruby really wanted to know about getting a pilot’s license. She’d pestered him about whether a girl like her had a chance to soar like Harriet Quimby and Amelia Earhart. How long would it take?
