Ours, p.19
Ours, page 19
It took little time for her to slide into the rhythm of woman-life, and they welcomed her enthusiastically, helping her clean her tiny home, sweeping from the back of the house to the front and tossing the dirt at the foot of a tree, while commenting on how she should just take the bigger house next door, “cause it’s been empty for some time,” and Madame Jenkins smiled and said, “No. I’m tired of places where things can be hidden from me,” and when the women all looked up at her, she almost cried from embarrassment until they looked down at the same time and returned to sweeping in the quiet of their mutual understanding that, yes, there is danger in a house with too many rooms.
At the first meeting, three women came. They each brought something to eat and a question they desperately needed answers to. They were fine with keeping the group small until one woman had problems with hitting her husband and the women in town gathered her up and sat in a circle fifty-deep in the grass behind the tiny house. They put the woman in the center and each of those forty-nine other women, Madame Jenkins included, said something beautiful about her: “You send your babies to school clean and straight-backed,” “Your smile make me jealous of your lips,” “I wish we was sisters cause you be knowing the good in things,” and they laughed until Madame Jenkins entered the circle with the woman and asked her as loud as she could, “Ruth, who you when you hit Mathias?” and the woman sat alone in her head for a moment, then answered, “Can’t be nobody but me,” and Madame Jenkins asked the woman to stand and gave her a hug. “The you I know wouldn’t hurt a bug.” Then the rest of the women left from their part of the circle and one by one whispered both their disappointment and encouragement to Ruth, hugged her fiercely after they finished. By the final hug, Ruth was a crying mess, promising to do better. At the end of the meeting, she tearfully asked, “When we meeting again?”
Madame Jenkins invited Saint to one of the meetings, but Saint declined, impressed by the idea. “I appreciate you considering, Miss Saint,” Madame Jenkins said, thinking Saint a much younger woman than she was, and carried on with the thirty-plus women who wanted to.
One of the aftermaths of Madame Jenkins’s intervention was that her own relentlessly eager disposition toward romantic partnership infected the younger women. The older women warned the young ladies against Madame Jenkins’s desire for male affection, but the idea of romance, its possibility, burned new and irresistible. Soon, they sought out young men for regular and public one-on-one rendezvous around town. This did two things: First, it made it obvious that there were more women than men in the town. Second, it created a need for new businesses to entertain the new couples ambling about with nothing to do but garden work, animal work, Delacroix work, and learning their letters. Mr. Wife’s bakery became more popular than ever and with added visitation meant added visibility for Justice and Luther-Philip. But both boys rejected all suitors, Justice with a heavier lean into the darker edge of his personality. So awkward he was impolite, Justice scrunched his face and looked at the floor when a young woman waved at him. If she flirted, he flared his nostrils and turned away. Luther-Philip blushed but still said no. His kind rejections made the women swoon even more and eventually he had a line of potential suitors lapping up sweet bread just to be near him. Some brought him gifts of new clothes sewn just for him or a small basket of fried fish. They giggled and he darkened two shades, grinning all the while.
[2]
Though neither Selah nor Naima could tell, their living in seclusion had made them strange and more like the ghosts of children than living children. Where once their visible youth protected them from scrutiny, their blossoming into nine-year-olds made what were once considered petulant phases into worrisome futures.
They were juveniles but not toddlers, young but not incapable, such that their distinct vulgarities—Selah’s overly polite manner while disregarding what had been communicated to her, even walking away in the middle of being spoken to; and Naima’s ghastly and relentless rudeness that only deepened as she aged—were no longer adorable oddities.
They mostly interacted with others while running errands for Saint, but their presence, off-putting as two headless dolls, made it difficult for the Ouhmey to welcome them. After all, they were Saint’s kin of sorts and isolation had warped the twins into foxes: skeptical of their surroundings and in constant search of an escape route.
The Ouhmey did think it a shame that Naima and Selah should be as cooped up as they were. The girls didn’t attend school, which made them unfamiliar to the rest of the children in town. But it also never occurred to the Ouhmey to welcome the twins beyond their given tasks. No invitations to play with their young’uns, no thank-you gifts, no just-baked cookies wrapped in fabric. They were simply “Saint’s girls,” and though the Ouhmey believed Saint had grown warmer, she kept herself even farther from them than when Ours was first created. Half the time they forgot about her, the other half they missed her with an intensity that bordered resentment. And because the twins sensed hostility in indifference, they armored themselves without apology.
Then Selah, upon seeing Frances step long-legged from the hall of trees, felt for the first time a human-sourced fear that delighted her so much that she hid her face in Saint’s dress. Naima, seeing Joy’s long hair drape over her shoulders and mix in with shawls that were almost as colorful as Saint’s floor fabrics, stood a bit in front of Saint and Selah in a defensive pose as though welcoming a messenger of war. She paid no attention to Frances until Frances got up close, her towering figure making her difficult to ignore. Naima thought, ‘Who this man with all this leg,’ and returned her attention to the woman with the shawls, the too-much hair, and sad mouth, who up close had the most frightening aura and eyes to match: an aura of death and eyes the color of honey throwing back candlelight.
Saint welcomed the two visitors and told them to follow her to Franklin’s wagon. Thylias sat on the porch, shotgun between her thighs, hair bun a frozen demigod atop her head. She laid the gun across her lap and smiled when Frances smiled at her and shouted from the road, “My name Frances. This Joy.”
Franklin drove them all to Creek’s Bridge in a quilt-covered wagon, so shoddily made it was deviant. No one spoke the duration of the trip. Franklin kept his gaze ahead and Joy, still bitten by Frances’s chastisement at the cabin, took to throwing her anxiety at Naima, who had nerve enough to stare her down. They walked the rest of the way from Creek’s Bridge.
Frances, followed by Saint, entered Saint’s house first while Joy waited cautiously outside with the twins. The moment the door closed behind them, the fireplace blazed up and a book on the table flipped through all its pages, front cover to back, then slammed shut before sliding across the table, stopping right at the edge. Then the orange fire in the fireplace became blue and the light turned the room into an underwater scene. Children’s laughter filled the room, followed by the sounds of chains and crying. When hands reached out from the floor and grabbed Frances by the ankles, Saint thought to interrupt the vision somehow, but the hands weren’t pulling Frances in, rather pulling themselves up through the floor as full-bodied children. Where should’ve been legs were fish tails belted by chains. Manacles braced their wrists and chain links dangled down from the metal rings, ending with clipped links from where they had been broken from the rest of their length. The children swam through the room unburdened by the metal they wore, laughing and spinning around Frances, who reached up and danced with them. Saint regarded Frances’s walnut-colored skin stained blue by the blue flame. The color engulfed even the whites of Frances’s eyes.
The room filled with swimming, filled with the blue percussion of iron on iron, of restraints clanging into song. Blue fire wavered and its light painted a sea on the walls. Leaving the circle, one child swam toward Saint. Eye to eye, the child leaned in, squinted, and jolted back. Saint didn’t recoil when the child reached cautiously for her cheek and shook their head as though disbelieving what they saw. Satisfied with the feel of her skin on their own, they said, tearfully, “Us.” Then, the entire scene ended as though it had never begun: The fire burned orange again in the fireplace. The swimming, fish-tailed children disappeared, replaced by the dull flamelight entering and mingling with the darkness it couldn’t conquer.
By the fireplace, Saint stood holding herself, disturbed by what she had seen and even more by what she felt. Children’s laughter echoed in her mind and a grave homesickness tore through her.
“You haunted?” Saint asked.
Frances laughed. “If I’m haunted, then you just as much a ghost as they are.”
The circumference of her suspicion widened, and Saint felt both validated and regretful that she had decided to let Joy and Frances stay with her just so she could observe them.
Frances had already gone back outside, cool air racing in from the door she left ajar. Saint closed the door. Salt stink had filled the room, like the Apalachicola had crept through the crack of the open door and steered into her front room. Disregarding the cold, she opened the windows to relieve her home of the smell of the sea—foam frothing the water’s surface, fish stink, brackish smell of decay. Sea for sure, not coming in from the once-open door but pouring from the mouth of the fireplace whose flame now softly asserted its heat, casting low shadows that shook like frightened animals beneath the chairs.
[3]
Joy refused to greet anyone in Ours on the rare occasion that she did go to town, and she resisted going for as long as she could. She refused to help at the school as a teacher, brilliant as she was, and refused to get to know the other women over tea. When men acknowledged her, she turned away. When women appraised her, she faked a cough to avoid looking into their eyes and seeing her own face fade away in a tear-mirrored reflection.
Folks thought she had “the consumption” and, instead of staying away, offered her even more help: noxious teas, sleep remedies, more soups than she could stand, herb-scented compresses, spice-laden berry cobblers, mint-soaked rags from which to inhale—it wore her down, this frequent and unrequested generosity of others, until what drove her off became a craving.
It took her passing the abandoned-looking, one-story house for her fearful concentration to return. Most of the plants had died in the cold, leaving the boney remnants of burgeoning thick-stemmed weeds and invasive trees to claw their skeleton remains against the house and sky. Smoke unspooled from the chimney and filthy windows shut out what little sunlight touched the panes. Standing in the doorway, a shirtless and withered man with a round belly looked out to the road, his solemnity infecting the air. Joy stopped and nodded at the man, who nodded back, then went inside, closing the door behind him. The creak of the door sounded like a frog saying “need” and, back at Saint’s house, Joy asked Saint who the man with the frog door was.
“Aba,” Saint said. “Door talk more than he do.”
“Why doesn’t he speak?” Joy asked.
Saint wandered toward a task she didn’t have to do.
Joy visited Aba’s house every day to nod and hear what his door had to say. One day the hinges creaked and she heard from the metal “please.” She went to the market, bought a few apples, and left the basket at the front door. The next day, the hinges said “leave,” and Joy made sure not to stick around any longer. The following day, the hinges said “Saint,” and the next day, the hinges ached out another word: “now.” From then on, the creaking was just creaking and eventually Aba stopped waiting at the door. It took Joy a week more to realize that the words weren’t meant to be heard alone but together, and Aba telling her through the throat of his rusty hinges to leave Saint’s house worried Joy enough to end what she read as the still-standing silence between herself and Frances.
When she mentioned the tension between them, Frances looked offended. “I was done with it after I said what I had to say. You the one moping around for a month and a half,” Frances said, and offered her a spoonful of apple cobbler. Joy sighed and let Frances feed her. They were sitting on Frances’s bed and the snow-bright day entered through the window. “Saint made it.”
A bolt of lightning entered Joy’s mind. “It’s been a month and a half, already,” she said. “How could that be? What have we been doing all this time?” She licked her lips and shook her head when Frances offered another bite of cobbler. How did so much time get away from them? And Frances, oblivious or unconcerned, said nothing about it; Frances, whose obsession with the past made her suspicious of the present and in sublime awe of the future.
Joy wondered what, in the first place, made her stay. This was Frances’s adventure after all, and the tether that tugged Frances from New Orleans to Ours had no interest in tugging Joy as well. She had wanted to leave this place of unpeaceful quiet but to go where, and upon going, how would she survive the two wildernesses that awaited her: the unfamiliar Missouri hills and the dense hunger of her need to kill?
With her only family dead, Frances, her only friend, was all she had left and suddenly to the point of abuse: shepherded off, haunted by the image of her once-guardians propped up like puppets on the couch, not only did she not get the chance to bury Eloise and Amelia, she also never got the chance to mourn. So, the two dead women sat in limbo, waiting on her to call their names, to cry out, so that her heart could finally attend to their absence.
It didn’t frighten her that a month and a half had passed so quickly. It frightened her that all that time had passed without her having broken down. When the floodwaters would come, she knew that after all this time they would nearly drown her. It was because Joy hadn’t mourned that she felt fastened to this pilgrimage, as though knowing eventually the dam of her grief would rupture, requiring someone to sit close by and make sure she didn’t rupture with it. She feared being alone, not knowing when the time would come, so remained near to her only living anchor to the world: Frances.
“We’ll stay for two weeks. No longer. It shouldn’t take no longer than that,” Frances had said when they first arrived. But now Frances had fallen into impenetrable distraction. Joy knew how long Frances had been following the tether’s pull all over the South and some of the North, too. Resistant though understanding, Joy didn’t pressure Frances to abandon discovering the point of her journey, seeing that it had something to do with the woman downstairs whose welcome felt to Joy more like spying. She looked over Frances with skepticism. She saw Frances, but it seemed Frances had left her body.
“You all right?” Joy asked. Frances yawned and nodded. “What do you think of Saint?”
“I think there’s a lot to know that we don’t know. Not sure when she gone tell us, but for now I’m grateful that she’s taking care of us.”
“Why here? Why we stop here?”
“Where else?”
“Was she the one pulling at your heart all this time? Did she pull you into this place that only you could see?”
Frances shook her head. “Spirits guided me here. That pulling could be her needing me and our ancestors helping me get to her.” She paused, then said, “Could be me pulling myself where I’m supposed to be.”
“You can’t pull yourself when you’re only on one side.”
Frances laughed. “Spirit world can make anything happen.”
“I’m asking why the spirits guided you here.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. But I know this is where I need to be.”
Joy watched her eat the cobbler like a child and wanted to pop her in the eye. Frances’s movements were slothful. Her thinking not as sharp. She seemed giddy but not happy. And the more Joy thought about it, the more she realized that Frances hadn’t gone into town with her the entire time. She had thought it was because Frances was angry, but with that revealed as untrue, why had the person who carried her exhausted body into a lifeless cabin—making a fire, leaving her food and water—and who feared Joy would take anything as a weapon and kill without thinking, not walk with her in an unknown place full of unknown people? It was all too uncharacteristic, a mind tampered with, or something worse. She left for town and Frances retreated into sleep.
Joy passed Saint sweeping dust out the front door. The twins were in the kitchen banging on pots for only God knows why. Joy used the noise to ignore Saint and pretend she didn’t hear her asking if she were heading to Ours. Joy shouted goodbye over the cacophony and with her basket hanging from the hinge of her bent elbow, she went straight to Aba’s, knocked on his door, and waited. It took a long time for him to come out and when he opened the door, it creaked “what” in a long, trebly whine.
She needed help with something out at Saint’s, she said. The moment the words left her lips, Aba attempted to close the door in her face, but she placed her arm in the opening. The door closed hard on her forearm. Aba snatched open the door, eye to eye with Joy. The hinges cried out “why,” as the door opened, and Joy showed no signs of pain.
“You want to help me. Do not act unkindly. You might as well help.” Truth was, Joy thought the man, in his decrepit state, looked just as magical and ornery as Saint and that look alone led her to believe that he also carried as much knowledge about conjure as anyone in town.
He didn’t let Joy inside, so she stood out in the cold on the other side of the threshold while she described the emanations from the house when Frances entered and Frances’s stupefaction and isolation. Aba’s face creased with panic while she talked.
