This Bitter Earth (8 page)

“Historical.”

“Preservation.”

“Six thousand dollars.”

“Original and intact.”

Lincoln had slept there, they said, right in that very house. President Abraham Lincoln had walked through those halls and discussed in great length with John Lacey, a good friend, long-time confidant and grandfather to the Lacey women, his concerns about the war his country was about to be thrown into.

Abbey, the Lacey women’s grandmother and slave to John Lacey, had probably served Lincoln from the very same silver tea set that sat shimmering in the china cabinet.

Bigelow
Summer 1956

Chapter 8

To Pearl it seemed that #10 Grove Street was weeping, sometimes screaming and other times just moaning. Sometimes, though, she could almost fool herself into believing that those loud cries of sorrow were the sounds of the wind caught in the trees or tearing through the rows of wheat and alfalfa that grew across the road.

But when it came to the blood, there was no tricking herself into believing it was anything but what it was. So Pearl just bit her bottom lip and wrung her hands when her eyes happened to fall on #10 and the spaces on the house where the clapboard had come loose.

The earth was bitter around #10, the flowers were all gone, killed off by weeds or plucked by people who still came to stand and look at the place where
she
once lived and almost died. They pointed at the window where she’d sat, naked, black and bold. The window where Seth had called to her and then later, where she’d hurled curse words that broke through the night and sent him running.

Pearl couldn’t sleep in full hours anymore, #10 wouldn’t allow it, so she slept during the silent minutes between the moans. She slept during the space of time where the house just fretted before the pain struck again in the rafters, along the floorboards or down the spine of the banister.

Joe never seemed to hear it, or at least pretended not to. In fact he hardly ever looked over at #10. His head didn’t even turn in that direction when he stepped out on the porch to catch a late-night breeze or check the sky for clouds before heading toward town.

He preferred instead to look out at the fields or down the road toward town, allowing his thoughts to drift on something other than #10 and the daughter that used to live there.

Joe had taken to humming to himself whenever he was in the presence of #10, odd tunes that Pearl did not recognize, sad tunes that somehow went along with the misery that was spilling out of #10. Tunes that made Pearl feel as if their time in that place, on that side of town, had come to an end and a change was needed in order to keep on living.

She mentioned to Joe that a change was due and maybe across town, close to where the railroad tracks ran like silver veins through the land, would be the place to resettle and enjoy their old age years together.

Joe just raised bushy eyebrows and asked, “Why, Pearl? Why you wanna up and leave the house we been living in for forty years?”

Pearl couldn’t give him an answer, not without lying, so she said nothing and reached for the Bible as she prayed for a strong wind or violent storm to come along and rip #10 from God’s green earth, hurling it far, far away from there.

Number ten was sold that summer. Joe mentioned it to Pearl in passing over lunch, right before he picked up his glass of lemonade and just as the musical introduction to Still of the Night came across the radio. Pearl nodded her head and waved a fly away from the last biscuit that sat on the small white plate between them. He waited for her to raise her eyes, swallow or at least reach for the biscuit. But she did nothing but continue to chew the food that was already in her mouth.

Joe watched the steady movement of her jaw and the small beads of sweat that formed around her hairline and across the bridge of her nose. He wanted to say something about the dark circles beneath her eyes and make a point of how her clothes had started to hang from her body just as they did all those years ago after Jude was killed and Pearl lost her spirit. But he held his tongue and waited for Pearl to respond. She said nothing.

“It went for about twenty-five hundred. The house and the land,” he said when the silence around them went stale. “They got a good piece of land. Fertile.”

Joe wanted to reach for the biscuit, wanted to reach for Pearl, but he kept talking instead. “The house is sound too. Strong. Solid.”

Pearl still did not say a word.

“That land gives back more than it take. Fertile.”

He stopped then, because the fly was attacking his ear and his thoughts were becoming scattered.

Pearl nodded, flinched a bit as the sounds from #10 cut through Joe’s words and then she reached for the biscuit.

Two days later the sky above Grove Street lit up orange and yellow, and black smoke billowed out and across the fields that marked the south side of town.

The only firehouse in the county was five towns away in Saw Creek. People came out with buckets filled with water to throw onto the growing flames. In the end it was hopeless. There was little anyone could do but stand back and watch as #10 burned to the ground.

“It’s been dry,” some said.

“Hot as hell for June.”

“No rain in weeks.”

There were more than enough reasons for the house to have gone up.

“Anyone seen Alberta’s boy?”

“Harper?”

“Nah, the older one. Kale, I think.”

“Nah, that’s the middle boy. You mean Wilfred.”

“Yeah, Wilfred. He got a thing for matches.”

“Ain’t seen him ‘round.”

“Yeah, that Wilfred got a thing for matches.”

By the time the truck arrived, #10 was nothing more than a pile of smoldering ashes. The grass was black and the trees that stood closest to the house were burnt and naked.

“Damn shame,” Joe said as he stepped up onto the porch.

“Uh-huh,” Pearl said and turned to go back into the house.

Joe watched her walk through the doorway, dismissing the smell of gasoline that followed her.

Part Two

Once and Again... St. Louis-1965

Chapter
9

WHEN the black-and-yellow checkered cab pulled up in front of Mary Bedford’s house Sugar knew immediately that she wouldn’t be there long. It wasn’t because she wasn’t expected or even because there was a strong possibility that she would not be welcomed.

Well, she had been gone for over ten years and had promised to write and/or call. She had done neither. Sugar didn’t really know why she’d come back after all this time, but she supposed it was the nightmares that finally brought her back. Mary beckoning her through the red door and into a darkened hallway where Nina Simone’s version of
Little Girl Blue
played too fast on a phonograph. Laughter and the whimpering sounds of a small child bounced off the walls around them. Sugar would feel herself stepping backward, but Mary would always take hold of her wrist, dragging her deeper into the house.

They’d run forever down a hallway, turning into a tunnel where tiny hands reached out at them, yellow ribbons moved in and out of the darkness, and when she looked down the floor would not be a floor at all but a river of blood.

Sugar feels her heart begin to bang in her chest and fear begins a slow climb up her spine. She tries to snatch away from Mary’s grasp, whose grip on Sugar only becomes tighter.

They’d keep moving until they reached a kitchen where the only light came from the open door of a refrigerator. And every time, Mary would point at the small square kitchen table and begin to weep.

There is a figure huddled beneath it. Sugar can’t see her face, but she reaches to touch the head adorned in yellow ribbons that are torn and ragged at the ends.

Mary is wailing now, screaming: “Save this one!”

The figure beneath the table turns her head and Sugar fully expects to see Jude’s sad eyes and full mouth, but the face that looks up at her nearly makes Sugar’s heart stop.

The face that looks up at her is her own.

Although she didn’t know why she’d come, she knew in her heart that she wouldn’t be there long. Most of the buildings on the street had been burnt out, boarded up and then ripped open again to house drug pushers and users.

Other buildings just sulked with the weight of unhappy families and crumbling walls.

Not even the clusters of hard-looking men congregating loudly on the corners or the scantiily clad women trotting up and down the middle of the street hollering out at passing cars and exposing themselves to the people that stared at them from the passing #65 bus would have changed her mind against staying.

She had seen worse neighborhoods, had lived in dilapidated housing, had lain beneath harder-looking men and had been, a very long time ago, one of those women. Those things were insignificant to her and did not affect her.

It was the feeling that came over her when she looked down at the broken steps that led up to Mary’s red door. The red door in her dreams, the same door she had looked upon when she first came to St. Louis in 1940 when she was just fifteen years old. St. Louis was like a strange country to her then, tall buildings, fancy motor cars and even fancier people. Everything about that town was fast, slick and big.

She could almost hear the laughter and smell the sweat of the bodies that had lived behind those doors so many years ago.

Sugar had lived there, had lain down with hundreds of men, selling herself away a little bit at a time. But she had never believed the lies, not like the other women who walked taller when the men told them they were beautiful, told them that they loved them.

Some knew
beautiful
meant that the only worth they had lay between their legs. So they gave all they were worth just to hear it over and over again.

Sugar had been one of those girls, but when the madam of the house, Mary Bedford, heard Sugar singing she told Sugar she had a gift and Sugar knew she was right not to have believed the men and their lies.

“You sing, you can make something more out of yourself,” Mary had said, and sent Sugar off to Detroit to do just that, but all that record executive wanted her to do was suck his dick and Sugar wouldn‘t, not his, not then and she thought not ever again.

But ten days later and three dollars short from having no money at all, Sugar had found herself in the back alley of that same building, on her knees, her lips bruised from some man who needed to call her “Honey” because Sugar was what he called his baby girl.

“Humph,” Sugar sounded as she shook her head against the memories that swirled around her. She pushed the door to the cab open and placed her feet down on the sidewalk. Almost immediately a chill ripped through her body and a scream, loud and shrill, let go in her mind.

It was Jude’s scream, the one that never got loose, the one that got caught behind Lappy’s fingers as he squeezed Jude’s throat shut.

“Three dollars, miss,” the cabdriver said.

Sugar’s mind teemed with visions of blackbirds, her ears filled with the steady flapping sound of their wings and the insistent peck-peck of their beaks. She thought about the river of blood in her dreams and almost told the driver to take her right back to the train station. She wanted to say that she had made a mistake and that what she had experienced in Bigelow and Short Junction seemed a hundred times better than what she felt she was about to walk into.

But something else inside of her urged her forward, even though the screams in her mind grew louder with each beat of her heart.

She paid him his three dollars, swallowed hard, smoothed her hands over her brown-and-white flowered mini dress and took the first stone step.

Sugar readied herself. She removed her dark sunglasses and licked her lips before stretching them into a large bright smile. She wondered what Mary would say about her hips and the short natural hairstyle she now sported.

Sugar knocked on the door; softly at first, so soft she could hardly hear it above the noise from the street. She knocked again, harder this time, and the door swung slowly open.

She stepped in, pushing the door open a bit wider so that the light from the street could spill in. “Hello” she called. Her greeting was met with the slow deliberate settling sounds of an old house.

“Hello,” she called again and thought about her time in Bigelow, when Pearl had come calling on her, unwanted and definitely unwelcomed, carrying a sweet potato pie and a million and one questions.

Sugar had stepped over the threshold and into the gloomy darkness of the hallway when the smell hit her, a rank odor that reminded her of Sara’s soiled nightgown. Sugar shuddered and stepped back out to the stoop.

She bent over, grabbed her knees and sucked deeply on the hot St. Louis summer air. “Keep it together, girl. Keep it together,” she whispered to herself.

Looking out onto the busy street she tried to force a smile for the two men who watched her suspiciously from the curb.

Sugar straightened, turned again toward the doorway, covered her nose and stepped inside.

The house was dark except for the weak light that found its way through the grime that covered the windows. Long, snake-like slithers of paint hung from the wall and trembled beneath the light breeze following Sugar into the house.

The parlor was empty except for a tired-looking sofa and end table. The walls were open in places, revealing the rotting wood of the house.

Sugar shivered at the sight and moved quickly toward the back of the house where the kitchen and bathroom had been. She had to sidestep the large holes that revealed the pitch-black lower level of the house and the four-legged creatures that scurried and squealed at the sound of her footsteps.

It was clear that no one had lived there for years, but Sugar moved on, calling “Hello,” as she went.

The door of the refrigerator sat wide open and the stench of sour milk and rotting tomatoes floated from its insides.

Outside a truck rumbled down the street and the house groaned.

How long had the house been vacant and in such disrepair? Where were Mary and Mercy? The questions bounced around Sugar’s head like small red balls.

The light was fading and Sugar realized that she would have to find room and board for the night. She would come back to the neighborhood tomorrow and ask around about Mary and Mercy.

She stepped back into the parlor and noticed for the first time the crumpled blanket on the couch.

As soon as Sugar reached down and touched the rough texture of the blanket she regretted her decision, but by then it was too late. The blanket was on the floor and what lay on the couch before her almost stopped her heart.

“Oh, God!”

There was Mary Bedford, curled into a fetal position and weighing barely ninety pounds. She was naked except for the makeshift diaper that covered her primates.

Her honey-colored skin was now the color of chalk, her head was bald except for a patch of silver on the left side above her ear and Mary’s cheeks were sunk in so deep that Sugar could see the imprint of her teeth..

“M-Mary,” Sugar uttered and took a small step forward. Mary did not move, but her breathing quickened and Sugar could see her eyes rolling behind the lids. “Mary,” she said again, but this time she did not move. The fear that was growing inside of her wouldn’t allow it.

The floor behind Sugar creaked and the murky darkness of the room shifted. Sugar was too afraid to turn around, too afraid to take her eyes off Mary and too afraid to scream, so she just braced herself and waited for whatever or whomever it was behind her to make itself known.

There was no sound for a long time and then the darkness shifted and words finally broke through the gloom, taking Sugar’s heart by surprise.

“Who the fuck are you and what the hell are you doing here?”

Sugar knew the sound of bitterness. She had heard it from the mouths of the white men and women shouting obscenities at the blacks who marched through Little Rock demanding equal rights.

She’d seen it curled in the dove-colored smoke that came off the body of a man as he hung smoldering from the limb of a birch tree in Alabama, and she had felt it when Lappy Clayton sliced through her womb, tearing away any chance of a life ever growing there.

She herself was bitter, disgusted at the life she’d been handed and the places she seemed to end up. If it wasn’t for the possibility of God and heaven and the reality of the Devil and his place called hell, Sugar would have sliced her wrists a long time ago.

But this voice that came from behind wasn’t just bitter; it was angry and what made Sugar even more afraid was that it was young. It reminded Sugar of her own voice so many years ago.

“I said, what the fuck are you doing here?”

The question came again and Sugar knew she would not be asked a third time, so she swallowed hard and slowly turned around.

The young woman that stood facing her was disheveled and dirty. Her eyes were wide and seemed to glow in the gloom that surrounded them. Sugar could barely make out her features in the darkness, but she knew those eyes.

“Mercy?” She kept her voice calm, even though her heart was going wild.

Mercy tilted her head a bit and her eyes moved across Sugar’s face.

“Who you?” Mercy said as she moved her hand to her back pocket.

“Mercy, its me, Sugar. Don’t you remember? I lived here with you and your grandmother for a while. Remember?”

Mercy pulled an ice pick from her pocket and pointed it at Sugar.

“I don’t know no Sugar,” she said, jabbing the ice pick into the air with every word. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

What had happened here? Sugar thought as she took a step backward.

“I-I came to see you—you and Mary, but I—”

“Well you’ve seen us, now get the fuck out!” Mercy screamed with such force that she stumbled where she stood. Her eyes rolled up in her head and her knees buckled a bit.

Sugar saw her opportunity and took a small step forward.

“Are you sick? You’re sick aren’t you, Mercy. I can help you, help you and your grandmother.”

Sugar understood what was happening now; she was familiar with the signs. Mercy was hooked on that junk, heroin. She knew it was flowing through her veins and twisting her mind into knots.

“Do you need money, Mercy?” Sugar asked her, her voice still even, her feet moving her closer and closer to Mercy.

Mercy looked at Sugar hard. She was sweating now, rubbing her arms and scratching at her neck.

They stood watching each other, Mercy trying hard to keep the ice pick steady, Sugar waiting for an answer, Mary behind them, dying.

“It hurts, doesn’t it? On top and way down deep? How much you need, five, ten dollars?”

Mercy’s body was swaying; the hand that held the ice pick was shaking uncontrollably. Sugar put her hand into her purse and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “Here, go take care of it,” she said, holding the crumpled bill out toward Mercy.

Mercy swayed again and her eyes rolled around in their sockets as she tried hard to focus on the money Sugar held out to her.

“Here, here,” Sugar coaxed.

Mercy lunged forward, dropping the ice pick and snatching the money from Sugar all at one time, before turning and bolting out the door.

Sugar watched in astonishment as a tattered yellow ribbon slipped from Mercy’s ponytail and floated slowly to the floor.

The doctors said it wouldn’t be long before she would be dead. “She got a day, maybe two.”

How she’d survived this long was a mystery to everyone. Her body was covered in sores and the rats had started on her feet just days before Sugar arrived. She was blind in her left eye, her right hip was fractured and the doctors said she’d had at least one heart attack.

“Tough old gal,” they said, looking down at her chart.

Sugar sat by Mary’s bedside, just as she had over ten years earlier when Mary suffered a stroke just weeks before Christmas. Sugar had been so afraid back then; afraid that Mary was going to die, afraid of what would happen to Mercy if she did.

This time was different. She wasn’t afraid; this time she was just mad.

“Why?” Sugar whispered as she stroked Mary’s hand. “Why is life like this?”