Where the Heart Is (17 page)

Moses said, “Certain, are you . . .”

“We’ll be fine,” she said. “We’ll be just fine.”

“Are you sure?” Novalee asked. “She can be a handful sometimes

’cause she’s teething right now and—”

“Don’t you worry,” Certain said as she settled into one of the easy chairs with Americus on her lap. “You all go out there and have fun.

Father Whitecotton and I can manage this child just fine.”

“You won’t spoil her, will you, Mother?” Moses tried to sound playful again, but his voice was a little too flat.

“Not before you make it out back,” Certain said, and though she smiled at him, the smile had pain in it.

“Out back” was a rough-hewn oak cabin some two hundred feet behind the house.

“This is where I was born,” Moses said. “My father built it, more than sixty years ago.”

The windows were covered with gingham curtains, and a harvest wreath of gourds and dried flowers hung on the door.

“It looks like a playhouse.”

“Well, that’s Certain’s doing.”

The front room looked bigger inside than Novalee had expected even though it warehoused the castoffs of earlier generations—coal oil lamps, a wooden wheelchair, quilting frames.

“Certain comes in here from time to time . . . airs the place out.

Threatens to clean, but . . .”

Moses stepped through a doorway and into the old kitchen, now his darkroom. As Novalee followed his path through a maze of boxes, she spotted a rocking horse half hidden beneath the front window.

“Moses, do you and Certain have children?”

The cabin was absolutely still for several moments, then Novalee could hear Moses moving again, moving around in the darkroom, switching on lights, opening drawers.

“Never can lay hands on those scissors when I need ’em,” he said.

Novalee tried again. “I said, do you and Certain—”

“Come on in here and you can see how I get set up.”

Novalee knew then she had asked the wrong question.

There wasn’t much “kitchen” left in the low-ceilinged room: a wall cabinet without any doors and a galvanized sink, stained and discolored. Nothing else to suggest the place where families had been fed, wounds doctored, babies bathed.

Now it was a darkroom. Work tables had been squeezed in, shelves shoved into corners. The cabinet was crammed with bottles, cans, boxes and jars. Long shallow pans covered tabletops and counters.

And everywhere . . . photographs. Photographs hung from a clothesline stretched across the room. They leaned against books, stuck out of drawers, stood in files; were packed in boxes and tacked on walls.

“Now as soon as I find that developer, we’ll be set,” Moses said.

“Is it okay if I look through some of your pictures?”

“Sure.” Moses began pawing through bottles in a box on the floor. “Wonder what I did with that fixer?”

Novalee picked up a stack of photographs on a table by the door, pictures taken on the steps of a church, black men in dark suits and broad-brimmed hats, women in spring dresses with tatted lace collars, children squinting into the sun, their hands clutching Easter baskets and Bibles.

Novalee picked up another handful of pictures from a narrow shelf that ran across one wall. These had been shot on a street she didn’t recognize, a tired, dusty street with tired, dusty people. In one, a teenage boy hunkered outside a pool hall, his face pulled into a scowl. In another an old woman gazed with disinterest into the window of a cafe. And in another a little boy sitting on a curb, his face smeared with grime, watched a bony cat carry a dead bird across an empty street.

“These are good.”

“What have you got there?”

Novalee held the pictures out for him to see.

“Shot those in Tangier, out in the western part of the state. Two, maybe three years ago.”

As soon as she put those back on the shelf, she scooped up more.

These pictures were older, many brittle and yellowed with age. She flipped through them quickly . . . a barbershop, a parade, some fences.

She looked at hawks, horses and sunsets, then came to the last of them, the one on the bottom of the stack, a photograph in grainy black and white. Purim Whitecotton, strong and whole, feet firmly planted on the back of a flatbed truck, body straining to lift a hundred pounds of baled hay. Purim Whitecotton, muscles pushing against the sleeves of a stained white shirt, tendons corded across the backs of thick, broad hands. Purim Whitecotton, fierce dark eyes, eyes that would dare and resist, eyes that would be subdued by nothing except a tiny explosion inside his head when he would bend over eighty-three candles on an angel food cake.

And that’s when she knew she was hooked! Even as Moses began showing her the way . . . as he stared into the pans of amber liquid . .

. whispering to the images swimming just under the surface, urging them to life, Novalee knew.

Later, while Moses was cleaning up the last of it, and after she had wandered back into the other room, she stood beside the rocking horse beneath the window. It was handmade of pine with marbles for eyes and tufts of rope for a mane. Novalee put her hand on its head and set it rocking, and when she did, the only sound in the cabin was its rhythmic creaking. Then, from the darkroom, Moses’ voice . . .

“We had Glory.”

“What?”

“We had Glory. But we lost her when she was three.”

Novalee put her hand on the horse, stilled its rocking.

“Certain got rid of the other stuff . . .” He turned on a tap in the darkroom, ran water into a basin. “Topper. Glory called him Topper—

Hopalong Cassidy’s horse.” A cabinet door slammed. “See that mark on the back of its head? Between its ears?”

Novalee bent to examine the wood and found a tiny chip, right between the ears.

“Glory’s front tooth made that. She fell and cracked her mouth, busted her lip.”

Novalee rubbed her finger across the dent, a dent just about as wide as Americus’ front tooth, her first.

“Glory cried. Cried, she said, ’cause she bit Topper.” Moses turned off the water, then Novalee heard the ping of metal against glass.

“We lost her in the spring. That spring. Drowned in Sticker Creek.”

The cabin was quiet again.

“You can’t see the creek from here, but it’s down the hill . . . down below that pecan tree.”

Novalee stepped to the front window and parted the gingham curtains.

“I carried her up the hill,” he said. A gust of wind pushed against the branches of the tree and a single pecan fell near the trunk. “Certain saw me coming . . . ran out across the yard. Met me right there . . . to the side of the well-house.”

Novalee knew Moses was looking out the darkroom window, looking at the spot by the well-house, seeing again what had happened there in another lifetime.

And then Novalee saw it, too . . . saw Certain slip her daughter out of Moses’ arms and into her own . . . saw him lower his eyes and her turn her face away as if each could not bear to see the sorrow of the other . . . because the handing over of a child had caused their hearts to break.

NOVALEE FOUND THE ROLLEI at a flea market in McAlester, crammed in a box with cookbooks, bowling trophies and remnants of cotton ticking. Moses had told her it could take months to find one, but she’d gotten lucky.

She tried not to act excited when she saw it, remembering what Sister Husband had said.

“Never act like you want it, darlin’. Act like you wouldn’t own it if they paid you. Tell them it’s dirty, broken . . . a useless thing. Then make an offer.”

The case looked like it had survived a battle, but just barely. The strap was broken and the top stitching had pulled loose, causing the leather to curl at the corners.

The camera didn’t look quite as worn as the case, but it was dinged and scratched . . . streaked with something black and sticky. She removed the lens cover and blew at layers of dust, but it was too big a job for breath to handle.

The vendor pretended not to see Novalee while he faked interest in a plastic cuckoo clock that didn’t work.

“This camera’s filthy,” she said, intent on following Sister’s advice.

“Yep.”

“Looks like it’s broken, too.”

“Nope.”

“Don’t know what in the world I’d do with it.”

“Be me,” he said, “I’d take some pictures.”

“What do you want for it?”

“Askin’ price is thirty, but I might go—”

Too fast, she blurted, “I’ll give you thirty!”

Moses kept the camera for a week, repairing the shutter. He told Novalee he would need some time, but she drove out every day, hoping it would be ready.

When he did finally hand the Rollei over to her, it looked new—

spit-polished, gleaming. And he’d also had the case repaired: the strap reattached and the seams stitched up. He’d used saddle soap to clean the leather, then rubbed it with wax until it was soft as kid.

The next morning, Novalee strapped Americus to her back and was on the street before eight. She took pictures of everything—the Rhode Island Reds in Dixie Mullins’ backyard, Halloween jack-o-lanterns lined up on the Ortiz porch, Leona’s scarlet mums that grew in clumps along her fence. Novalee shot Henry’s calico cat asleep in the mailbox and got one of a mockingbird dive-bombing a squirrel.

She took pictures of children hurrying to school, juggling lunch boxes and books as they waded through mud over the tops of their shoes. She got shots of a bald-headed man waiting outside a barbershop beneath a sign that said, HAIRCUTS WHILE YOU WAIT.

And she took several more of a large woman squeezed into a child’s Where the Heart Is

Star Wars bathrobe as she crawled out of her stalled car in a busy intersection.

That evening, as soon as she got off work, Novalee skipped dinner and went at it again. At the cemetery she shot old headstones; at the park she photographed splintered merry-go-round horses and broken swings. She took pictures of trees, dead and bare, their branches and trunks blackened by a recent fire. She went downtown, took pictures of graffiti, a bumper sticker that said NO MORE BUMPER

STICKERS . . . a cowboy boot, scuffed and dusty, standing alone in the middle of a street . . . and a Bible in a Dumpster, an indication, according to Sister Husband, that someone had gotten too confused.

Novalee took pictures of anything and anyone—all were fair game.

Americus was her most accessible victim and certainly the least able to defend herself. Sister Husband didn’t object to being a subject—

as long as she had enough warning to suck in her stomach and take off her glasses. But Forney would have none of it and took to wearing his stocking cap again, so if Novalee caught him out in the open, with no place to hide, he could at least pull the cap down and cover his face, a practice that resulted in two dozen photos of a giant man with a brown knit head.

Novalee worked in Moses’ darkroom every night, some nights until after the Whitecottons were all in bed. She worked until her eyes stung . . . until her fingers were stained, her skin chapped and raw . . . until her clothes, her hair, her skin smelled like fixer. And later, in her bed, she dreamed of taking pictures, the same pictures all over again.

The neighbors came often, each time she had new pictures to show. They praised her talent; they were proud of her work. And they brought her rolls of film—gifts, they said, for their friend, the artist.

They asked her to make pictures for them and they wanted to pay, begged her to name a price, but she wouldn’t charge them. She took their pictures and loved doing it, pictures of their cocker spaniel puppies, their prize-winning hot rolls, the fresh dents in their fenders.

She took pictures of their birthday parties, their anniversary celebrations, their piano recitals. She filmed the oldest Ortiz girl in her white communion dress, she took a picture of Leona’s antique Victrola for her niece in New Jersey, she filmed an egg with three yolks, a grandbaby’s footprint and a can of green beans with a worm inside for which Mr. Sprock was threatening to sue the Green Giant Corporation.

And the more pictures Novalee took and the more she developed, the more she wanted to learn about what she was doing. She studied photography magazines— Camera & Darkroom and the Photo Review. She made calls to photo labs in Sacramento, California, and wrote letters to Kodak in Rochester, New York. She asked Moses a thousand questions and remembered everything he said.

Forney brought her stacks of books and she read about Gordon Parks and William Henry Jackson. She studied the work of Dorothea Lange and Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams and Margaret Bourke-White.

Once, on a rare weekend off, she drove the Toyota to Tulsa and went to a photo exhibit, her first. She wandered the rooms and halls of the gallery and wrote pages of notes, then talked to herself all the way home about what she had learned.

Then, after all the hours she spent learning . . . after hundreds of pictures, days and nights in a darkroom, questions about shutter speeds and sepia tones and light vibrations . . . after all that, Novalee discovered what was important to her about pictures of cats and children and merry-go-round horses . . . about girls in white dresses Where the Heart Is

and old women tasting tea . . . about birthday dinners and anniversary kisses. What was important to her was knowing that at the moment she took a picture, she was seeing something in a way nobody else ever had.

On a crisp morning in late November, Novalee got up well before dawn, pulled on jeans and sweatshirt, grabbed a coat and her camera, then slipped out of the trailer as soundlessly as she could.

She was going to Rattlesnake Ridge ten miles east of town to film the sunrise. The ridge ran between two hills that Sister Husband called mountains, the Cottonmouth and the Diamondback, and she told stories of how they had gotten their names.

“Why, darlin’, a boy I knew died the most horrible death up there on the Diamondback. They could hear him screaming all the way into town. When they brought him down, wasn’t a spot on his body didn’t have fang marks. Even got struck in the eyes. Counted near five hundred bites, so I was told.”