The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (30 page)

Sala had fallen asleep again. I’m sorry, Hattie thought, looking at her granddaughter. She’d seen Sala running after the car the afternoon they took Cassie to the hospital. But she hadn’t said anything to August. He would have wanted to stop and explain things. And what could they have said? Hattie had looked through the rearview mirror at Sala waving and running; she glanced at Cassie, who was so taken up with whatever was in her head that she couldn’t see anything outside of herself. Every bit of Cassie was twitching: eyes twitching and hands twitching and mind and the very soul of her twitching. How Hattie had wanted to sit in that backseat with her and hold her hand until she stopped shaking. When Hattie was a girl in Georgia, they’d have taken Cassie to the preacher, and if that hadn’t healed her, they’d have kept her fed and clothed and left her alone to be how she was. Hattie snorted. We couldn’t go to the hospital bloody and dying, much less when somebody went wrong in the head. It was true that a part of Hattie blamed Cassie’s condition on a failure of character, a creeping weakness that had gotten the better of her. But when she saw Sala running toward the car, she knew Cassie wouldn’t have wanted her child to see her in her worst hour. That was Hattie’s kindness. She had spared her daughter and grandchild that pain.

Hattie knew her children did not think her a kind woman—perhaps she wasn’t, but there hadn’t been time for sentiment when they were young. She had failed them in vital ways, but what good would it have done to spend the days hugging and kissing if there hadn’t been anything to put in their bellies? They didn’t understand that all the love she had was used up in feeding them and clothing them and preparing them to meet the world. The world would not love them; the world would not be kind.

She had been angry with her children, and with August, who’d brought her nothing but disappointment. Fate had plucked Hattie out of Georgia to birth eleven children and establish them in the North, but she was only a child herself, utterly inadequate to the task she’d been given. No one could tell her why things had turned out as they had, not August or the pastor or God himself. Hattie believed in God’s might, but she didn’t believe in his interventions. At best, he was indifferent. God wasn’t any of her business, and she wasn’t any of his. In church on Sundays she looked around the sanctuary and wondered if anyone else felt the way she did, if anyone else was there because they believed in the ritual and the hymn singing and good preaching more than they believed in a responsive, sympathetic God.

Hattie was an old woman when August began attending church regularly. He had taken to telling her he loved her—and Hattie let him, because he said it had something to do with his newfound belief in Christ. Besides, what did they have after fifty-six years but each other’s company, and wasn’t it something how, as her body lost its vitality, so did her desire to leave him and begin again? August was seventy-four, sick and getting sicker—it was just so typical of him to run into the arms of God when his heart was too weak for him to run into the arms of some woman. He persuaded Hattie to go with him to the local church, and she discovered, to her surprise, that it was a place of solace and beauty. The church brought her great peace, and if she only pretended to believe, if she was a fraud, well, that was the price she had to pay for comfort and fellowship.

Hattie pushed a piece of hair back from her granddaughter’s forehead. No sense in waking the child to take her temperature, and anyway, Hattie could see fever, and the girl didn’t have one. She ought to go to bed, but she was too tired to get out of the chair; these sick children wore her out.

In the car on the way to the hospital, Cassie had said—how could she have said that?—that Hattie had never loved anything. It was just a whisper really, barely audible. “You never loved anything,” Cassie said. Hattie had done the best she could. She was done with regret and recrimination, there was no sense in it for an old woman. And there had been so many babies: crying babies and walking babies, babies to be fed and babies to be changed. Sick babies, burning with fever babies. Hattie’s first babies. They fell ill on January 12 and were dead ten days later. Penicillin. That was all that was needed to save her children. They would be fifty-five now, grayed or graying, thick at the waist and laugh lined around the mouth. Maybe they’d have grandchildren. The lives they would have had are unoccupied; that is to say, the people they would have loved, the houses they might have owned, jobs they would have had, were all left untenanted. Not a day went by that Hattie did not feel their absence in the world, the empty space where her children’s lives should have been.

Sala feigned sleep. She peeked at her grandmother from under her eyelashes. Hattie was looking up toward the ceiling, and Sala wondered what she was thinking. She didn’t dare ask. Hattie was like a lake of smooth, silvered ice, under which nothing could be seen or known. When she was angry, the ice creaked and groaned; it threatened to crack and pull them all under, the way Cassie had been pulled under. Cassie would have said there wasn’t anything wrong with her, that her own mother had turned on her in a betrayal so spectacular it defied belief. August would say Cassie had been sent away to be cured. Hattie, Sala thought, wouldn’t say anything at all.

ON SUNDAY
Sala was well enough to go to church with her grandparents. The members of the congregation were kinder than usual. They bent at the waist to greet her, took her hand in theirs. Brother Merrill, the pastor, knelt to speak to her. “We’ve been praying,” he said. “Such a brave girl,” his wife said. Hattie looked embarrassed.

The church was a squat brown building off the New Jersey Turnpike. It was a poor place, with a packed-dirt parking lot and a large white cross that had dingied over time. The sanctuary was dim and smelled of Murphy Oil Soap, but there was an earnest wooden pulpit and the pews were polished to a high shine. Brother Merrill was saving for a stained glass window. Toward this effort, Sala dropped fifty cents into the collection plate at every service. In her pocket were two quarters August had given her that morning. She rubbed her fingers over them as she and her grandparents made their way to a pew near the front. “Well, Little Miss,” said one of the congregants, “Will you bless us with a song this morning?” Some Sundays after the group hymns and before the sermon, Sala would sing “Amazing Grace” or “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” She sang a cappella, with her hands clasped in front of her, knees shaking. During her solos, the church was utterly silent, and when she finished, the parishioners shouted “Praise Jesus” and kept on shouting even after she’d reached her seat. Brother Merrill told her that singing was its own kind of worship, though Sala felt something closer to pride than reverence. There would be no singing that Sunday.

After the announcements and the opening hymns, Brother Merrill began his sermon: “ ‘Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.’ Brothers and sisters, I want to talk to you about the book of Job this Sunday. The Lord tells us in Job, Chapter five, verse seven, that man and the sons of man are born into suffering. Now, Job was a righteous man, but the Lord saw fit to test him. He lost his house, he lost his camels, his sheep, his oxen. And just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, just when he thought he had reached the darkest hour, he lost his sons and his daughters. He was covered with boils from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. He rubbed himself with ashes, and his wife said to him, ‘Job,’ she said. ‘Curse God and die.’ ”

Sala’s grandparents sat in rapt attention. Hattie’s face was expressionless—placid lake, silvered ice—but her hand grasped the top of the pew in front of her so hard that her knuckles whitened and the tendons showed through her skin. August’s finger rested on the verse Brother Merrill read. Sala read it too. Curse God. She had heard the quick, nasty words that some of the kids used on the playground at school. They formed now in her mind. It was transgressive to think of them while the pastor preached. Fuck and damn and shit. How could my mother allow herself to be taken away?, Sala thought. And if she would just be normal, just normal, none of this would have happened. She did this to us. Sala wanted to put the words together: Fuck and God, Fuck and Mom, but when she tried, a fearful place within her would not allow it.

Sala had seen them take Cassie away. She got home early that afternoon. No one had remembered that there was a half day at school. She ran from the school bus stop through the sparse pine forest along the highway’s shoulder. Her house came into view through the trees. She was thinking about what her mother had done to the yard two days earlier. Most of the holes were filled, though the white wire fences around Hattie’s flowerbeds were still bent. If she hadn’t been looking at those fences, Sala would have seen her mother and grandparents walking to the driveway. She would have seen August struggling to carry Cassie’s small suitcase. She would have seen all of that, but she didn’t because she was looking at those stupid little fences, and by the time she saw her grandfather lift Cassie’s case into the trunk, it was too late. Cassie jumped when August slammed the trunk closed. Hattie stood beside the passenger door; she leaned toward Cassie as if she might have to pounce on her like one does an escaping animal. “Mom!” Sala shouted and ran toward the car. But in that moment Cassie opened the back door and got in. August backed out of the driveway and pulled onto the road, and they were gone.

Brother Merrill continued, “Job wouldn’t curse his God. He remembered his children and his house and his barn. The Lord had blessed him so much, Amen, so long, Amen, so bountifully—Amen!—that if He never saw fit to give Job a single blessing more He had already given him enough for a thousand lifetimes. Now, we struggle, brothers and sisters, and we strive. We have our trials and our tribulations—yes we do—but we are blessed. We go to bed, praise Jesus, and we rise again in the morning. And if that’s not a blessing, I don’t know what is.”

“And on top of all of that, the Lord gives us more. He gave Job more. Yes, He did. ‘For He maketh sore.’ Stay with me now. ‘For He bindeth up; He woundeth.’ But I am here to tell you today that ‘He maketh whole.’ Glory be to God.”

The preacher’s hands were balled into fists. August’s Bible slid from his lap. Hattie cried “Amen!” The sermon crescendoed to such a volume that Sala found herself tapping her foot to the rhythm of the reverend’s words. The pastor pushed up his sleeve, and before it slid back down, Sala caught a glimpse of the faded tattoo on his forearm. Grandpop said that Brother Merrill had been in a bad way, that the Lord had saved him from something terrible and that was why he was such a good preacher. Sala looked up at him from her pew and saw that her grandfather was right: the preacher was wild eyed, dark circles of perspiration spread beneath his arms and across his back. He pounded the podium with his fist.

If Cassie were with Sala now, she would nod her head slightly, and smile and her eyes would glisten. Sala listened closely; she tried to commit Brother Merrill’s words to memory so she could repeat them to her mother if she called.

It was the groaning hour. The congregation swayed on its heels.

“His arms are ever open. His grace is right on time,” Brother Merrill said. “All we have to do is say yes to Him. Yes to glory. Yes to joy.”

The parishioners closed their eyes and raised their arms to heaven. The spirit of the Lord came down and lifted the people out of themselves. Hattie bowed her head, but she did not close her eyes. She watched the congregation. It seemed to Sala that she and her grandmother were the only ones who were not absorbed into Him.

“Is there anyone here this afternoon that would like to give his soul to Christ?”

Once Sala asked her grandfather how big God was, and he’d said he was smaller than a grain of salt and bigger than the ocean. When Grandpop prayed, he could hear His voice like a soft white bird cooing in his ear. “I hope you hear it one day,” he’d said. Sala heard only organ murmur and someone crying softly in the back pew. Tears ached in her throat. She raised her hand like the ladies in the congregation had done —just to see how it would feel, just to see if something divine would flow into her.

“The Lord doesn’t care what you’ve done,” Brother Merrill said. “He’ll take your sorrow and your suffering and He will wash it clean. Accept Him as your savior. Come on up. Come on up to the mercy seat.”

A man made his way toward the altar. Brother Merrill said, “Praise Jesus. Brother, come on up.” The man took small wavering steps, as though he had just learned to walk. The preacher came down from the pulpit and put his arm around the weeping man’s shoulders. Sunday after Sunday Sala had seen the people walk sobbing down the aisle; she had seen them fall to their knees. Sala’s mother and grandparents had come to God in this same way, and they had been saved.

“Is there anyone else?”

Sala felt a stab of mother-want so strong it winded her. She stepped out into the center aisle that led to the altar. The preacher stretched out his hand to her. Someone said, “Praise God, He’s bringing the babies back to his fold.” Sala was swept forward on the current of the congregation’s fervor. The ladies wept in the pews behind her. At the altar Sala would become a child of God, and all of those women would be her mothers in Christ. She arrived at the pulpit, and the pastor took her hand.

“Do you understand what it means to take Jesus into your heart?” he asked.

Sala understood nothing. She didn’t feel the way the other parishioners seemed to feel. She had only the slightest inkling of their devotion, as though it were an image in a mirror glimpsed through a half-open door. But she nodded in response to Brother Merrill’s question—because the organ thrum compelled her, and the preacher had extended the promise of love.