Four Spirits (62 page)

She passed into the tree as though going through a door into a hut. She entered the tree as though entering a story, a crevice in a fairy-tale book. He followed.

She recalled that summer night when a dark figure had tucked himself under the low-hanging branches and disappeared. Snowcapped now, the leaves seemed to hide them with scoops of Agnes's snow ice cream. What had that summer fugitive thought of Darl and her, as surprising as ghosts?
White folks, lying on the ground!
They'd kept his secret;he'd taught her how to hide.

Within the tree, she and Jonathan wove their bodies between the thick branches so that they could stand upright. Their cold feet moved among old leaves, brown and brittle, and they stepped on rotting magnolia cones like honeycombs. Perhaps a few bright red seeds were still hidden in the spongy folds of the cones. The musty odor of magnolia rose from the debris.

“We can climb up,” she whispered.

He glanced up. “It's made for climbing.” He almost smiled at her.

“Yes, but it's weak wood. Brittle. We can't both be on the same limb, even a big one.”

The magnolia
was
easy to climb, but they ascended as slowly as sloths. Their bare, cold fingers hooked over each limb so carefully that no snow shattered from the outer leaves. Inside the canopy of leaves, the air was still, but occasionally a view opened to the outside. When they climbed into the dome of the tree, higher than the road, they could peep out and see the vast snow-field studded with monuments.

In the distance the four male figures stood with the two cars. Their car was parked twenty or thirty yards from the mutilated Thunderbird. Because the men now concealed their bodies in white robes, only their movement distinguished them from the landscape. Stella thought how the Finnish army, on skis and dressed in white, had surprised the Germans. One of the Klan members lifted his arm repeatedly, driving a knife into the canvas top of the car.

“Insane,” Jonathan said. “They look like demented witches.”

“Haints,” she corrected, but the pointed hoods
were
witchlike. She marveled at how the forms of the men blended with the fallen snow.

One pointed hood circled the Thunderbird. He stopped beside the driver's door as though to study the ground.
“Hunters in the Snow,”
Stella said, more to herself than Jonathan, but he answered with the painter's name in a whisper, “Brueghel.” She took off her red woolen scarf, wadded it up, and concealed it like a nest in a crotch of the tree. The tracker moved to the front of the car, put his hands on his hips, paused to gaze down the road and around the car. The
snow was falling less furiously, and the view began to clear. Still Stella felt safe within the snowcapped dome of the tree.

Another man stood behind the Thunderbird, aiming his rifle at the license plate. He shouted—the cry was thin—and motioned with one hand for his buddies to stand back. The tracker obeyed. As soon as the shot was fired, a whoosh of flame enveloped the Thunderbird.

“Better it than us,” Jonathan murmured.

The four men retreated from the blaze. A pillar of black smoke rose up. They backed toward their own car, disrobing, ready to leave.

When they grasped the tapered hoods and pulled, they revealed ordinary heads. One was almost bald. A heavy, short man. A tall one with a sloping head. Ordinary enough men. Their robes were rosy in the reflected light of the burning car. Each of the men walked backward, as though mesmerized by the majesty of destruction. Suddenly Stella realized the car might explode.
“Watch out,”
she heard herself say, in a normal voice. Jonathan reached past the tree trunk to touch her lips. He gently pressed them together.

The four Klansmen took off their robes and carefully folded them, glancing from time to time at the fiery car. It burned like a chariot from hell. The men opened the trunk of their car and placed the folded cloth inside. They seemed naked in their jeans and long-sleeved shirts. They hadn't worn coats under their robes. One of them held his rifle at arm's length and shot into the sky. He continued to hold out his rifle as the shot echoed through the cemetery.

Finally, he pitched the rifle into the trunk and closed the lid. In unison, the men opened the four doors and disappeared into the humped car.

Jonathan put his cold hand on top of hers. She shuddered. They were like two cold buzzards sitting in the tree.

The Klan's car engine sputtered but started, began to back down the one-lane road. Then the driver swung the rear of the car off the road, trying to turn around. Spinning helplessly, the tires became stuck in the snow, and three of the men got out in their shirtsleeves to push. Among the snowy leaves, Jonathan and Stella sat perfectly still, perfectly patient. At last, the car was turned around; again the three men disappeared inside it, and the car crept back toward the gate, retracing its faint tire marks. For a while, Stella and Jonathan could see the glow of the car headlights moving through the snow. Then they vanished.

“Let's go,” Jonathan said.

Slowly, stiff with cold, they climbed down.

“We were lucky,” Stella said when they stood on the ground beside the tree.

“They didn't even try to track us,” he replied.

She thought otherwise but said nothing. Stella felt great blocks of sadness inside her shifting and settling. “We're alive,” she almost whispered. Her throat was sore, numb with tension. The snowfall was subsiding.

They seemed afraid to touch each other.

“Follow the rocks?” he asked.

“No. It's quicker to cut across.” She led the way across the grass. It didn't matter if they left footprints. “We're headed toward the wall,” she said.

She must put one foot in front of the other. She remembered how: numb, you walk away from fear. And why had she come back to this land of monuments and giant trees?
Turn into the cemetery.
She should apologize again.
I'm sorry,
she had said.
Don't say that,
he had replied in his gentle voice. She watched her shoes and his sinking into snow, now deep enough to chill their ankle bones through thin socks. She thought of her scarf left behind, high in the crotch of the gumdrop magnolia, a bright red nest.

They walked soberly and separately past the dead. Then one or the other of them, she would never remember which one, tentatively reached out to the other. With the exchange of a glance, they walked faster, as though they had someplace to go and the will to get there. The snow surrounded them in crystalline brilliance and the trees with snow-shagged mystery. They began to run. Suddenly exuberant, they gave all their bodies to running. Then she let go of his hand and by herself, in sheer joy, leapt a snow-decked monument.

When she rejoined him, they ran together, stride by stride, till they gained the perimeter. They pushed through the prickly holly-tree hedge and scrambled over the snowcapped stonewall. Holding hands, they walked soberly, casually, on the sidewalk between the wall and the street with its ordinary cars moving cautiously over the hard-packed snow.

 

DEEP IN THE NIGHT
(“Aunt Krit, I'm spending the night with Ellie whose husband is out of town”), she dreams it differently:

A dozen Klansmen pursue her through the snow-choked graves; they grab her wrists and she sinks on her knees into the snow. Like white wolves, they encircle her in their robes and one comes forward and speaks in a voice gray as gravel: “I'm gonna whup her.” In her
nightmare, Jonathan lies behind her on his side in the snow, a slow red worm emerging from his nostril. She watches their hands hanging out of the white robes—ordinary hands? One wears a wedding ring;one has a small Band-Aid tenting his knuckle. She feels the cold metal of a pistol placed on the bulge behind her ear, and another cold barrel shoves against her breastbone. Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih.

With both hands she pushes aside the guns, breaks through their circle, leaps monuments as though they are tennis nets, and runs again through the snow for her life, her life, her life.

When she awakes, her tensed legs trembling with joy, her body cradled in her lover's arms, she fears only that what is real—her life, her love—might be imagined.

IN THE WOODS, A VERY OLD MAN IS TALKING TO HIS
mother, whom white people have called, for long years, Old Aunt Charlotte.

They stand at the edge of a clearing where their ancient shanty leans into a mean wind.

“Mama, I gots to go,” he says. “They say there's a march coming to Montgomery. Black folks marching for freedom.”

“Look at the sky,” she says. To the south, the sky is blue, but from the north gray fluffs, shoulder to shoulder, are coming in. “There's snow in them clouds,” she adds. “I seen it before.”

“Been so long—”

“I can remember. You could, too, if you tried. Forty, fifty years ago. It snowed. Way down here. You remember. Snowed from Birmingham all the way down here and to Mobile and the Gulf.”

“Mama, I was just a boy then.”

“No, you wasn't. Not any more than you's a boy now.” Not quarreling. Banter. Entertainment. Making the time pass with a few sparkles in it.

“I had white hair, then?”

“Sure 'nuff.”

They stand together in front of the small dun house with boards soft as worn denim and look at the sky. Each can see that a few specks of white are striking the face of the other, skittering off their cheeks.

“Mama, I gots to go. I got to take my own steps. I come home again.”

But if he raises up like that, Charlotte knows what could happen, what
has
happened to the uppity.

She holds out her hands and snowflakes float into her palms. The sky has become a uniform gray except for a few bays and inlets of blue far to the south.

“I'm leaving,” Chris says. “Gots to freedom walk.”

“We'll send for you,” Charlotte says to her son, “when the roof's back on.”

He looks at her strangely. “I loves you, Mama. You done the best you could, by everybody. White and dark.” He starts to walk the path through the woods.

 

CHARLOTTE SPITS HER
snuff onto the ground. “I can make snow, too,” she says. “Brown snow.” She chuckles, looks wickedly at her daughter. But Victoria has her blunt nose tilted up, studying the clouds. Charlotte looks with her. What a multitude of snowflakes!

“It's cold,” Victoria says. “We need to move inside.”

“You can go, baby. Hurry and you'll catch Chris on the path.”

In a few patches around the yard, the snow is beginning to stick. It looks like white scabs.

Victoria turns toward the house. She slowly crosses the yard and climbs up the step.

“I'm going to enjoy this snowfall,” Charlotte says to no one.

It's good to be alone. Just herself and the house and yard. The sky. She settles herself on one of the two steps to the dogtrot. Soon all the rake marks in the red dust will be covered. She'll see a pure field of snow, whiter than the best field of cotton. “Y'all should of left long, long ago,” Charlotte says quietly to the vacancy. “This ain't no place for y'all younguns.”

Now there is enough snow on the yard to resemble a threadbare quilt. In the woods, snow is nesting in bright white clumps in the pine needles. “Come on, snow,” she says. “Let's cover this.”

She holds out her hand. On her palm, she catches a clump of snowflakes. She can see a few sparkling spines sticking out from the glob. After the snow melts in her palm, she tastes the moisture that came down
as snow. Her tongue is a warm dove on a cold nest. She wipes her wet hand on her dress.

From behind her, Victoria silently leans down to place a folded quilt over her shoulders. Charlotte looks down at the pad of quilt to see which one it might be. A thick, nice one, pieced curvy to suggest an inlay of blue and yellow ribbons on a white background.

She relaxes under the thick warmth. Then she says, “This be so pretty. All this.” The house faces east, and she looks at the land from north to south. “I'm thankful I'm here to see it.”

She sits for half an hour, and all the cold red dust is blanketed with snow. Charlotte smiles broader and broader at the falling snow. “Tha's right,” she says from time to time. “Come on.”

Birds are flying around like they've gone crazy. A blue jay cuts across the yard screaming. Some smart sparrows are perching on a limb, fluffing out their feathers. “Y'all better eat,” she advises them. “Ain't night yet.”

She sits on the steps till she begins to turn to stone. The gray sky is darker now with the approach of night, and still the snow is falling. The woods and the yard are beautiful. The quilt slides from her narrow shoulders, but Charlotte no longer feels the cold. She tries pinching her cheek, but the flesh is too stiff and hard with cold to pinch up. She can feel her fingernails scratching at her skin.

“Time to come in,” Victoria says behind her.

Charlotte prepares to enter her home. Her daughter's hand is under her elbow, helping her. It takes a while to unfold her body, but once standing, Charlotte looks up once more. From on high, the snow comes right down into her eyes. She blinks and looks and blinks again. She can scarcely get her fill of it, thick as it falls. All that long drifting down of snowflakes, just to fall on her! But she goes inside.

 

A FEW EMBERS
glow in the fireplace.

Victoria takes a newspaper from the top of the knee-high stack and crumples it fiercely into a loose ball, which she throws onto the embers. While the paper ball flares up, she lays fat pine kindling in the flame, and then with her bare hands she lifts a big lump of coal from the scuttle and throws it into the
grate. The kindling catches right up and begins to snap and pop. Charlotte smells the burning turpentine in the pine sticks and draws the aroma deep into her lungs. For a moment she feels she is a pine tree, a young one, ready to grow tall and strong.

Crawl in bed.

Charlotte looks up and sees the ceiling. She has forgotten the ceiling. She wishes it was gone and the roof, too, so she could look right up through the rafters and see the sky, have the snow fall on her face while she lies down.

Plenty of covers
. Charlotte has always kept her winter bed with three quilts. A soft, old-friend quilt closest to her. Old on bottom, newer, newest. Newest, hardest, and prettiest on top. Still, she wishes she'd not left the freshest quilt outdoors, the white one with the wavy blue and yellow ribbon design.

Fend for yourself,
she says to it. She means to sound encouraging, but the pretty young quilt is too far away to hear; she feels sorry for such a pretty quilt out there, alone in the cold.

“Live forever,” she says out loud. She remembers them all in the room: Doctor and Mrs., the three children. “I will,” she promises the little girl.
Blessed girl.

“Victoria,” she calls. She hears her voice like a dry leaf, full of veins and fissures, spreading and crackling itself across the room. “See you in the morning.”

Victoria backs up to the fire, lifts her skirts high in back to roast her legs and fanny.

Now close, eyes, so I can see.

 

THERE ARE HER FOUR
schoolgirls, hovering.

Sing me,
she says to the Birmingham girls, the bombed Sunday school girls.
Sing high,
sweet cherubims,
and not a hint of hate.

With a wish, the ceiling is gone, and the roof.

Lying straight and comfortable under her quilts, she begins to rise. She tilts slightly to pass between the open, snowcapped rafters. From the top of a rafter, she pinches a little snow and puts it like snuff between her lower lip and gum. Rising higher, she passes into swirls of snow. Her mattress comes right along under her, the quilts flapping at the sides while she ascends.
Jesus is raising the dead, like he'd promised he'd do and did do, when he walked the earth.

Black is the night. She reaches out her hand through the snow to try to catch a sparkling star, tiny as a wedding diamond. But oh, the groaning below, mouths distorted in pain. Still, she can ask it of them, and she does.
Sing me!

From all around her, through veils of falling snow, the spirits are gathering.