The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (13 page)

“We’re both on edge. That’s all,” he said. “We’re just a little tense.”

“Sure,” Hattie said. “Just tense.”

AUGUST WAS OUT LATE
the night before Hattie left him. He woke the next morning to the sun beating on him with two fists. The house was quiet, and he went down to the kitchen hoping Hattie had gone out. But there she was, sitting at the kitchen table with Margaret in her lap. Hattie hardly glanced at him when he walked in.

“How’s she doing today?” he asked.

August loved babies—their wobbly heads and the talc and butter smell of them. Margaret wasn’t fussy and she didn’t cry much.

“She alright? She look good,” he said.

“She’s fine, August,” Hattie replied.

He rummaged in the cabinets.

“Don’t mess up my cabinets looking for the coffee,” Hattie said.

“I’ll hold her.”

She ignored him and held Margaret with one arm while she reached into the cabinet with the other.

“The money for the electric bill’s not in the tin,” Hattie said.

“I’ll put it in there next payday.”

Hattie laid Margaret in the Moses basket resting on the table.

“It’s a month late,” she said.

“The power company can wait one more week. They ain’t gonna go broke.”

“They’ll turn the lights off in a week.”

“You ain’t got some little bit put away somewhere? Just till I get paid?”

“No, August. I don’t.”

“I’ll give it back next week.”

“No you won’t August. You never have. You take every nickel I put up.”

“It’s too early for all this, Hattie.”

“It’s twelve o’clock in the afternoon!”

Hattie found the coffee can and slammed it onto the counter.

“I have an idea, maybe you can ask for a loan at that juke you go to,” she said. “They owe you something by now. All the clothes my children aren’t wearing and the shoes not on their feet are paying the juke’s light bill.”

“Don’t start this now. I ain’t in the mood.”

“I
ain’t
in the mood, either. And I certainly ain’t in the mood to sit in the dark next week. You find a way to get that money,” Hattie said.

“You couldn’t wait till I so much as took a sip of water to start this mess with me, could you? You was just setting down here waiting.”

He started toward the kitchen doorway. Over his shoulder he spat, “Ain’t no money to find, Hattie. It’s next week or nothing.”

Just as he reached the door, he felt a rush of air. Something large and black hurtled past him.

“You crazy, woman!”

The cast iron frying pan missed him by inches and smashed into the opposite wall. It landed on the floor with a crash as loud as a car wreck. Margaret wailed.

“You crazy? You could have bashed my brains in!” The plaster was cracked where the frying pan had hit. “What’s got into you, Hattie? Calm yourself down. We got a baby in the room.” He moved to lift Margaret from the basket.

“Don’t touch her,” Hattie said.

“Hattie, stop it now. She crying her head off.”

“Don’t you touch my child!”

“Goddammit Hattie, she my child too and right now she squalling to pull the roof down, and you too busy acting foolish to tend her.”

“She’s not your child! She’s not yours, and I don’t want you to touch her!”

The knife clattered to the floor. Hattie raised her hand slightly—as if she were going to clap it over her mouth. That would’ve been the right thing to do, to shove those nasty words right back down her throat. But she didn’t do it, and the words hung there between them. Margaret screamed. August’s instinct was to pick her up; he’d always been good with crying babies. He wanted to lift her out of the basket and rock her a while. He wanted to sing to her until she settled into sleep. Hattie’s just talking, August thought. She’s just mad and saying any old thing. But there were tears on his cheeks. He felt so tired all of a sudden. He wanted to sit down at the table and rest his head in his hands.

“Stop now, Hattie. Stop ’fore you say something you cain’t take back.”

“It’s already said, August.”

“You don’t want to talk that kind of nastiness. You don’t want to talk like that.”

He waited for her to take it back, for her to admit that she said it out of meanness and spite. Come on, Hattie, don’t make me stand here in my own kitchen and cry like a baby.

“Hattie?”

She shook her head. She picked Margaret up and rubbed her back with her palm. It seemed to August that she held her more tightly, more protectively than she had before, as if to say, “This is my baby, not yours.”

“Who?” August asked.

“You don’t know him. It doesn’t matter.”

“It don’t matter? You spread your legs! You was some man’s whore, and it don’t matter?”

“Don’t talk to me like that, August.”

“You been passing off this child for mine! I’m putting clothes on her back and food in her belly, and you telling me how to talk to you?”

“Don’t you judge me! I live with your womanizing and your going out every day of the week. I have saved money for down payments on two houses and ended up spending it on light bills and clothes for these children. I have been a mule, twenty-five years. From when I open my eyes in the morning to when I lie down again at night, you make me miserable. You think about that before you call me names.”

“Take that baby and get out my house.”

“I’ll go but I’ll take my children with me.”

Then August said he’d sooner set fire to the house. He rushed out of the room and up the stairs. He was dressed and slamming out of the front door fifteen minutes later. He didn’t expect Hattie to leave. He didn’t know what was to be done about any of it, but he didn’t think she’d go. He came home a few hours later to find the house empty and a note from Hattie on the bed:

His name is Lawrence Bernard. I’m only telling you that in case there’s something with the children and you need to find me. I am going to Baltimore. I will come back for my children. I sent them to the park. You can leave messages for me with Marion.

August couldn’t figure how Hattie had thought to send them to the park but didn’t tell them she was leaving or do anything about their supper.

LAWRENCE TURNED OFF
the highway onto the exit for Baltimore. The skyline was low and the lights were not as bright or as numerous as those in Philadelphia. It seemed that the low, dim city was a reflection of the state of things between him and Hattie. But angry and discouraged as Lawrence was, he was surprised to find himself afraid Hattie would be disappointed in Baltimore, that she wouldn’t want to stay there or stay with him.

“We can take a drive around the harbor. It’s pretty at night with the boats,” he said. “I just need to make a quick stop at the train station.”

“The station? Lawrence, I’m tired.”

“Then we can go to Federal Hill. Just drive by real fast so you can get a feel for the place. It’ll remind you of home maybe. We’re in the South now, people are friendly.”

“Jim Crow’s not so friendly, as I recall,” Hattie said.

Lawrence drove on calling out the street names as he passed them: Light Street and North Charles and Calvert. He was a fool jabbering about landmarks, but if he stopped talking, his and Hattie’s apprehensions would fill the silence like so much rushing water.

“Lawrence,” she said, “I’m so tired and Ruthie needs to lay down. Let’s just get where we’re going.”

“You’re right. Alright. We have all the time in the world.”

He risked putting his hand on her knee. She didn’t pull away.

“It’s so quiet,” Hattie said. “I never have calm at home, except in the middle of the night. Now I don’t even have that.” She glanced down at Ruthie. “She’s up every three hours.”

Lawrence heard a mounting urgency in her voice. He rubbed her thigh to steady her. Hattie swiveled to face him so abruptly that she nearly lost her hold on the baby.

“Somebody always wants something from me,” she said in a near whisper. “They’re eating me alive.”

Lawrence stared straight ahead. He dared not look at Hattie and give away his feelings. Then, softly, hesitantly, “If you need a little break, we can wait to—” He tried to keep the relief out of his voice.

“No! No,” Hattie said, “I didn’t mean—”

“I didn’t either!” Lawrence said, though he had meant it, and he was sure that she had, too.

Lawrence drove along the empty avenues, turning randomly up this street or that one. He wasn’t sure why he was procrastinating. After a time he said, “We just need to make that stop at the station.”

“Can’t we please just get to this boardinghouse? I’m so tired.”

“Just a quick minute, no time at all.”

“What for?”

“I have to see a man about picking up porter work,” Lawrence said.

“At this hour?”

Lawrence parked in front of Pennsylvania Station.

“We’re here now,” he said.

Hattie sighed.

“I guess I’ll go in too,” she said.

“I won’t be but a minute.”

“What’s wrong with you, Lawrence? You wanted to come here. Now let me stretch my legs and use the restroom.”

It was a little after 9:30, the street was all but deserted. Lawrence walked a few paces ahead of Hattie.

“Why are you walking so fast?” she said.

What am I doing? Losing my cool, Lawrence thought.

There were a few people in the main hall: a man at the ticket window, another mopping the floor, and a woman carrying a tray loaded with a thermos and coffee cups. Hattie’s eyes were bloodshot and puffy, and her hair was matted in the back. Her skirt was wrinkled. She tried to smooth it with her free hand. She looked like a little girl, all rumpled and afraid, and she was smaller somehow under the station’s high ceilings. Lawrence showed her the Negro ladies room and told her to wait for him near the ticket window when she was finished.

“I thought you were just going to have a word,” she said.

He was already walking away from her and pretended he hadn’t heard the question. He exited the lobby and went down a small hallway where a newspaper and tobacco shop was locked up for the night. Lawrence rapped twice on the door.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in!” said the man who answered.

“What’s good, Scoot?” Lawrence said.

“Game downstairs. I thought you wasn’t coming till tomorrow?”

“I can’t stay, Scoot. But I need that fifty you owe me. ”

“I ain’t got it yet. We ain’t started,” Scoot chuckled.

“I know you have something.”

“I’m playing with it. You know I ain’t got no cash to part with before a big game.”

Lawrence tapped his foot.

“You can tap-tap all you want. You need to get in this. Ray and all them’s here,” Scoot said.

Baltimore’s best had come out. Lawrence could make five hundred dollars, maybe more.

“I’m telling you, I can’t stay.”

“You want some money so bad, you take your ass down there and see what’s on the table.”

“I don’t have time!” Lawrence said.

“Make time. What’s wrong with you?”

Scoot walked through a door at the back that opened onto a flight of stairs. Lawrence followed him into the bowels of the station. The smell of coal and cooling engines overwhelmed. Overhead, motors idled and iron wheels squealed on the tracks. Lawrence and Scoot made their way down a low-ceilinged corridor so narrow they had to walk single file. They rounded a corner, and a shaft of light stretched toward them from a half-open door down the hallway.

“Looka here!” Ray said when Lawrence and Scoot entered the room.

Eight men sat around a table piled with chips. A layer of cigarette smoke hung like a stratus cloud above the heads of the players. A woman in a tight green dress sat in the corner near a smaller table set up with food, thermoses of coffee, and a bottle of whiskey. There was always somebody’s girl at these games. In a few hours she’d be dozing with her mouth slack. They’d send her upstairs for more booze or cigarettes, and all of the men would look at her backside move under the fabric of her dress. Oil lanterns had been hung from the low ceiling, and the kerosene stink added to the closeness and the heat and the smoke.

Ray had his good-luck stone on the table next to him. He worried it absently with his thumb. Dead giveaway, Lawrence thought. He never learned to keep that thing in his pocket.

“Gentlemen,” Lawrence said.

Ray had chips stacked in front of him and a glass of water. He didn’t drink or smoke, and he was as thin as an alley cat. Lawrence cleared his throat and tugged at his shirt collar.

“You playing?” asked another man he had never seen before.

Lawrence looked around the room—the boy keeping the money counted a stack of twenties. Six, maybe seven hundred. Lawrence would have to get in a game eventually but not tonight, his and Hattie’s first night together. Sure, she’d have to get used to his absences and his late nights sooner or later. And it was true he’d need to start traveling again: up to New York at least once a week for the high stakes games, to D.C. for others, and he’d have to play the numbers to keep the cash flowing between big wins. Nine mouths to feed now. Lawrence eyed the money again—he could have Hattie in a house by Monday.