“What did you think?” I blurted out, heat rushing to my cheeks.
“Of what?”
“My writing.”
“Oh,” Ford said. He looked at me for a long moment before rising stiffly out of his lawn chair. “I think the whole world should read your poems.”
Walking across the field, breathing in the night air, my chest felt light again, as if Carolina had placed her hand on it. I went back to the shed and wrote in my notebook all night long. When the sun came up, I had to step outside to cool my burning hand.
Weeks passed and the days grew hotter. At the end of May, Ford and I fixed his old tractor together and I learned to mow the field. We set out tobacco, repaired a fence in the woods, and trimmed the trees crowded close to the trailer. My muscles grew sore and my skin turned brown. The shed became a sanctuary for me. Carolina brought out an old rug for the floor and a metal fan to make the heat more bearable. In the mornings sun flooded through the shed’s cracks and at night moths circled and bounced off the lightbulb overhead. There was always the sound of crickets and tree frogs and dogs panting outside. I went with Ford to flea markets and auctions but mostly I stayed home with Carolina. I helped her paint the porch posts and plant flowers by the front steps. One day we made birdhouses out of
gourds. On the weekends Ford built a fire and the three of us talked until the wee hours. Soon I came to trust them both. I began to feel a contentment that I didn’t know if I deserved. Maybe a life like theirs wasn’t meant for me. Sometimes it felt wrong being there, like I was fooling them. I would think as I worked with Ford in the field or helped Carolina in the garden how they’d hate me if they knew what I had done and who I really was, what kind of curse had been passed down to me in my blood.
Then Ford walked into the woods one evening and didn’t come back. I knew he was gone when I stepped out of the shed the next morning because the dogs had vanished with him, leaving the yard silent and empty. I found Carolina pulling weeds in the garden, wearing Ford’s big work gloves. “He didn’t come back last night?” I asked.
She glanced up at me, the sun in her eyes. “No.”
“Aren’t you worried?”
“Not really. He does this sometimes. He might not be back for a week or two.”
“He stays gone that long?”
“He has before.”
“Do you think he really has visions?”
“I know Ford makes up stories,” she said, “but I’ve seen a lot of his visions come true. Like when he said you was coming into our lives.” She smiled. “Ford’s not like everybody else, Johnny. He’s closer to God. You ought to hear him pray sometime.”
“Did he ever tell you what happened to his finger?”
She laughed. “He said he went to a whorehouse in New Orleans and met this voodoo woman. She gave him a concoction to drink that got him so high he didn’t even feel it when she cut his finger off. Said she needed it for a spell. Every time I ask about his finger, he tells me another made-up story. I guess I’ll never know.”
I knelt down beside her in the dirt and we pulled weeds together for a while in silence. After a while, I asked, “Do you think … does Ford have any children?”
“I don’t know a thing about Ford except what he’s told me,” she said. “He might have kids all over the country, for all I know.” Then she went back to weeding.
For the first couple of days and nights, I watched the woods at the
edge of the yard for Ford and the dogs to come walking back. But it wasn’t long before I forgot that he was gone. It was peaceful being alone there with Carolina. Sometimes I stood at the shed door and watched her for long stretches sitting on the top step of the porch, looking straight ahead at nothing in particular. She didn’t wiggle her feet, which must have been falling asleep, or shift to a more comfortable position. She didn’t move so much as a finger to scratch her nose. She was utterly still. The more time I spent with her, the easier it was to see why Ford was so taken with her. She cooked for me, in the mornings biscuits and gravy and in the evenings fried green tomatoes and potato cakes and greasy chicken legs. One Sunday morning we made a chocolate cake together, rain drumming on the trailer’s tin roof. I taught her to play poker and she taught me gin rummy. Sitting on the porch one afternoon, she spent almost an hour drawing a splinter out of my palm. When she left to take a bushel of beans to the neighbors down the road I found myself standing at the end of the driveway watching and waiting for her to come back, like that white German shepherd tied outside her father’s barn in North Carolina. I didn’t want those days to be over. But then Ford was home again, as suddenly as he had disappeared.
The first sign of his return was the dogs. They came straggling out of the woods before him, as if to signal his coming, and loped to the porch where Carolina and I sat playing cards. We stood watching the trees expectantly and when Ford finally came into view there was a strange sensation in me, of mixed relief and disappointment. He walked slowly down the wooded slope and into the grass, a bedroll on his back, shirt hanging almost in shreds. Carolina and I hurried across the yard to meet him. He was weak but smiling. He kissed Carolina and leaned against her small body as if for support.
“What did you see this time?” she asked as we headed back to the trailer.
His smile faltered. “Something I didn’t want to,” he said. Carolina and I exchanged a glance but didn’t press him. Once he was clean and fed I expected him to tell, but he didn’t. I felt ashamed for wanting to hear, when Carolina seemed not to care. I realized then how much I wanted to stay there, how much I longed for nothing to change.
LAURA
Before Clint died, when I first figured out I was expecting, Zelda got me an appointment at the Health Department. When you don’t have much money, there’s not a lot of choice where you go to the doctor. I sure didn’t like the one I seen there. That first appointment he didn’t look at me, not even when he was telling me things. I felt like he was there just because he had to be. Zelda said that was probably true, because sometimes the government lets new doctors work at places like the Health Department to pay back their school loans. I missed some of my appointments after Clint drowned because I was too tore up over him to remember anything. Then I got kicked out of the trailer and it felt like everything was upside down. But soon as I got settled in the yellow house, I went back for my appointment. It was the same doctor. This time he did something he called an ultrasound. He squirted warm jelly on my lower belly and moved a wand around. I didn’t like him standing over me, with my shirt up and my pants down around my hips, but I liked seeing the baby’s dark shape on a television screen. His heartbeat filled the whole room. I was proud my baby was strong. I wanted to laugh and clap my hands but the doctor had a stern face. After the ultrasound the nurse left. He set down on his stool and talked to me. “You know,” he said, “you should have kept your appointments, Miss Blevins. It’s important for both mother and baby to have the proper prenatal care.” He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “You’re lucky there are no complications.”
“The baby’s okay?” I asked. He was making me nervous.
“Fortunately, yes. But it was very irresponsible of you. Any number of things could have gone wrong.”
“But they didn’t?”
The doctor’s face didn’t change much but I could tell he was getting miffed. “I don’t think you understand the potential seriousness of your negligence, Miss Blevins.”
That word “negligence” gave me a bad feeling, like when I found out Clint had been wearing a dead boy’s clothes all along. “But the baby’s okay, right?” I asked again. The doctor gave me another hateful look over his glasses, then he got up and walked away. I felt sick as I gathered up my purse and went to the waiting room to find Zelda.
On the way home she kept asking what was wrong but I couldn’t talk. It seemed like somebody was always threatening to separate me from my baby. Zelda let me out and I went up the steep porch steps, straight inside to the bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face and neck. When I seen myself in the medicine cabinet mirror with my face dripping and my eyes big, I looked more like Mama than ever. All of a sudden that scared me more than anything. I rushed to the kitchen looking for scissors but I came to a butcher knife first. I couldn’t stand having Mama’s hair for a second more. I stood right yonder at the sink and sawed it off. It looked awful. I could tell by how everybody stared at me at work the next morning. But I didn’t care. My head felt lighter. I was still worried but it made me feel better to have the weight of Mama’s hair off of my shoulders. Louise said she used to cut all of her kids’ hair. She asked if she could come over later and shape mine up some. When she was done it was like seeing a new person in the mirror.
But my nerves was still ragged. The bigger my belly growed, the worse I felt, and the more I worried over how I was going to raise a baby without Clint. Zelda said I could get help if I needed it. She offered to get me an appointment to talk to somebody about welfare but I couldn’t hardly stand to think about it. The state had been keeping me up just about all my life and I wanted to provide for the baby on my own. That’s why I didn’t quit working, even though Louise and Zelda thought I needed rest. They made me at least take a day off. It was the third of March. I was laying on the couch when the twinges came low in my belly. I should have got up and called the hospital but I couldn’t face the thought of that doctor. I decided I’d wait and see if it got to hurting any worse. It was mostly cramps. Then all of a sudden I felt the baby weighing down like I needed to use the bathroom the worst I ever had to. I got afraid I had been stupid and waited too late. I made myself call the ambulance. I’d seen enough books with pictures to know there was going to be a mess if the baby came before they got there. I climbed in the bathtub to wait for them. It was cold in there. I was more scared than ever in my life.
I don’t remember much about the ambulance coming. The ride to the hospital was like a dream. The first thing I remember is being in the delivery room with my baby moving out of me. I heard myself
hollering but it was like somebody else’s voice. He was gushing out fast between my legs. When the doctor put him on my belly, the first thing I seen was his hair. Even matted down, I could tell what color it was. There was a lot of it, too. It was just like Clint’s. Then something crazy happened. My eyes was so blurry, I got to seeing things. They came back to me, them friends I had on the mountain. There was a window in the delivery room. That’s where they came from. They was pretty as ever, flitting across my belly on their shiny wings. Them fairies danced a crown around my baby’s head, dropping their blessings and kisses. That’s how come I named him Sunny.
It was nice in the hospital, with everything white and clean. I got to stay longer because Sunny was born three weeks early and they had to make sure we was okay. I was happy there with him. I liked the sounds of nurses’ shoes and carts rattling up and down the hall. I didn’t even mind when they took my blood. I tried to mark every minute of it, even the parts that hurt. I’d take Sunny to the window and show him the parking lot two stories below. I imagined he would like cars, maybe even work on them when he growed up. I wondered what kind of man he would make. But even though he looked like Clint, I’d let him be his own person. I knowed he was Sunny, with a life of his own.
The nurse showed me how to swaddle him. I slept with him in a bundle in the crook of my arm. His yellow curls always peeked out of the blanket. When his eyes started opening more, I seen they was the color of Mama’s. Clint had blue eyes, but there was no other blue like Mama’s anywhere. I knowed Sunny took his eyes straight from her. He was a content baby. He only cried when he was hungry or wet. I’d lean close to his open mouth to smell the newness of his breath. I liked them tiny pearls on the roof of his mouth and all the pink ridges and folds inside it. I even liked when his diaper needed changing, after that sticky black tar went away. The nurse called it meconium. I liked the sound of it, even if it was trouble to wipe off. I liked every part of being Sunny’s mama.
The only thing I didn’t like about the hospital was when the doctor came around. It wasn’t the same one from the Health Department but I didn’t like him any better. He looked at us funny. He’d set on his stool with his leg crossed and his pants riding up, showing his long sock. He’d ask me slow questions, like I wouldn’t understand if he didn’t form the words real careful with his mouth. I knowed he
thought I was dumb, like the teachers at school did. Whatever I said, he’d lift his eyebrows and write on his chart.
Louise and the Thompsons and Debbie and Roy came to visit me. They brought flowers and some chocolate cupcakes with cream in the middle. That made me cry a little bit, thinking about Clint, but I was glad to see them. They all thought Sunny was beautiful. Louise cried, too, and I knowed she was thinking about Clint like me. They stayed for quite a while, until I got too tired. I fell asleep with Sunny in my arms.
The only other visitor me and Sunny had was Clint’s mama. When I seen her peeking around the curtain I covered Sunny’s little ears. I thought she might go to screaming and carrying on. I didn’t know if she meant to cuss me out or what, but she just walked across the room and leant over the bed. She smelled like cigarettes. When I seen she wasn’t going to make a fuss, I pulled back the blanket so she could see Sunny better. She jumped like a snake bit her. “They laws,” she said. “He looks just like Clint.” Then she busted out crying. I didn’t know what to think. As mean as she was, I felt sorry for her. After a minute I asked her if she might pour me a cup of water, to get her mind on something else. She gave me a drink and switched the channel on the television for me. She stayed for about an hour. I was relieved that she didn’t ask to hold the baby.
For that short time at the hospital, it was like there was a truce between me and Clint’s mama. Then she got her purse and stood up to go. She stopped at the foot of the bed and stared hard at Sunny. I didn’t like the look on her face. I seen it had been a mistake to ever let my guard down with her. “If they wouldn’t put me in jail,” she said, “I’d snatch that baby up this minute and run out of here with him.” My blood turned into ice water. I opened my mouth to scream for the nurse but all that came out was a tiny squeak. “You finally killed Clint but you ain’t getting this one. It might not happen today. But if it’s the last thing I ever do in this life, I’ll get that baby away from you.”