Ours, p.57
Ours, page 57
Late afternoon, and Saint hadn’t moved from that spot. A thump against the glass. Aurora went outside and returned holding a cardinal in her hand. She showed the unconscious bird to Saint. Black neck and mask, a bandit in her palm.
Aurora lifted a wing with a finger. “Still alive. You can see it breathing. I just like to mess with the wings cause what wings of my own I got to mess with?”
“You say this like this a habit of yours,” Saint said.
“Cardinals fly into my window all the time. I try to keep the windows open but it’s getting cold and y’all here with no coat or shawl. Poor little baby.”
“The bird will be all right.”
“Oh, I was talking about you, honey.” Aurora smiled a genuine smile that melted away. “You haven’t aged in forty years.”
From outside, a spicy smell wafted into the house. “Somebody making curry. I’ll go get us some.”
Curried goat, collards, and rice enough for lunch and supper. By the time evening came along, Saint had grown somewhat comfortable in Aurora’s house that felt like outside. The potted plants strewn about the sweet-smelling room reminded her of—what did it remind Saint of? She dug around her mind for the remembrance but returned with absence, despite knowing there used to be a memory there in the emptiness. Disembarking from the fruitless journey in her mind, she settled her thoughts back on Selah, making sure she remembered the other child’s name, too. ‘Yes, it’s still there,’ she thought. ‘Naima still there. As is Thylias. As is Aba. And Madame Jenkins. Everyone in Ours.’
* * *
Goose feather stabbing her back from the floored bedding, Saint rolled over in the middle of the night and awoke to Aurora, lit by the hearth, with Selah’s head on her lap. Aurora had her back to Saint, which made the moment painfully private. The shared stillness between Aurora and Selah startled Saint, who locked her eyes on this nurturing and became overwhelmed by shame. Aurora’s silhouette appeared as a woman-shaped opening in the fire, a doorway to step through, and what on earth waited on the other side?
The first time Saint saw Aurora’s back was when she first met her. Aurora was standing in the middle of a road facing a horseless covered wagon where the horse had been released. It wandered off nearby. There, just north of the Louisiana and Arkansas border. Saint had cleared her throat to make her presence known and when Aurora turned around, Saint saw splattered blood all over her pale face, like paintbrush bristles covered in red paint had been flicked on her. “He in there,” Aurora said. “He in there.”
By “he” she meant her so-called master, an older man of mixed African and French blood. Before they set off for the trip, Aurora had put a sleep root on him and after ten minutes in the wagon, before he could assault her, he fell into a drooling sleep. On that road, splattered blood drying brown on her, Aurora had told Saint how she watched him sleep, trying to figure out if she should kill him first or the wagon driver who knew what their so-called master did to her and never blinked about it. Never even said he was sorry for what happened to her back there while he drove them. When she decided to kill the driver first, she chose to shoot him in the back of the head with their so-called master’s gun. For the sleeping so-called master, she bludgeoned him repeatedly with a rock she had found after jumping out of the wagon and calmly exploring the area.
“He in there,” Aurora had said. Saint hadn’t seen the dead driver right away. It took the horse running back toward the two women for her to see that he had been tied to the horse, his corpse dragging behind.
Now, looking into the ingress Aurora’s unlit back made against the fire, Saint closed her eyes before the horse in her memory dragged that corpse from the inky entrance and in front of her once again.
* * *
Was a rooster that woke her the second time, hearth burning away the morning chill. Then she heard Aurora inventing a song outside, screeching, juvenile for a woman in her sixties, but ascending beside morning, her voice lifted the sun on its shrill back. Saint ignored the pain in her feet and sat up so sunrays could warm her face. On a small plate beside her bed, Aurora had left mint sprigs and a handful of blueberries. Saint took them in, the fruit refreshing her mouth, the mint telling her she needed it.
She used a heavy stone to prop open the front door, gathered Selah into her arms. When she made it to the center of Turney where the outdoor cooking occurred, circled by a menagerie of stray goats and a single strutting, proud-chested black rooster, she locked eyes with Aurora, who pointed to her left with a cock of her head at the only house that had a fence, the raggedy door already open. Saint nodded and mouthed “thank you.”
[2]
The house wouldn’t let her in. Saint stepped through Frances’s doorway and instantaneously returned outside the door she had just stepped through. She tried again, thinking hunger delirium had overcome her, but the moment her foot touched the floor of the house, she appeared back outside the door, her foot’s full weight on the front porch facing Aurora as she casually cleared leaves from around the hearth. Saint realized she had been flipped around when her heel landed outdoors, Selah in her arms, the entrance behind her, and a cold breeze between her ankles.
“Gone in, honey,” Aurora said, dipping her battered hat over her eyes and now sweeping around the chicken coop. The black rooster paced behind Aurora, peered at Saint, and strutted off back how it came.
Had Saint less sense she would’ve sworn she had gone mad. Madness, that incredulous aspect of the mind’s possibility to be so wounded that it wounds the world in return, that it makes inside out and outside in, that it makes a prayer sob-worthy while making laughter the impetus for murder—madness was her natural state, she believed. She wasn’t going mad and had not gone mad. She existed there from the start, on the edge of everyone’s center, peripheral such that when she tried to move center the world pushed her away.
Essence had rejected her, knife and apple, baby safe inside her bound to come any time. Frances and Joy had done so, too, their own individual offenses paired against her singular resistance. Her now dead friend, Aba, burned her house down and maybe hoped to burn her inside, too. And her own tempestuous mind pushed her out by slapping away memories it deemed too burdensome for her to carry. And not even her own mind pushed her out cleanly, for it left residue of recollection all in her thinking, which allowed her to know she should remember Essence but didn’t let her hold on to the name, just some empty space where “Essence” was meant to be. Saint’s memory acted as the ultimate trickster, a grin with missing teeth and she the tongue easing into the gaps, wondering when they got there and if they could ever be filled.
Saint felt Selah’s weight and cringed when it crossed her mind that she carried the poor child like a mere sack of grain in her arms. Meanwhile, Frances’s doorway remained opened just to loop Saint back outside if she stepped through, back into the continuous labor of holding Selah, back into the wilderness of Aurora’s gaze and judgment, into the line of sight of an arrogant black rooster that turned its neck up each time it looked in her direction.
After several attempts, each time Aurora saying, “Gone in, honey,” Saint stood dumbfounded at the open threshold. Her arms burned from carrying Selah. Brushing beside her, the black rooster strutted up to then past her, and on through Frances’s dark doorway. Its black feathers melded with the dark room until it stepped into the light pouring in from the window, circled Frances, who sat at that very window looking out at the garden, then headed back outside, puffed up its chest, and brushed against Saint’s leg as a haughty goodbye. Its black cockscomb wobbled teasingly before the bird disappeared behind a barrel.
Saint tried to enter Frances’s home three times more and all three times found herself exiting the door after having already entered it.
“Gone in, honey,” Aurora said. She was bent in the same position each time, the words coming out with the same cadence and rhythm, repeating exactly each time.
Saint cursed loud, stomped, and screamed Frances’s name. “Stop sending me back,” she said. Blue jays responded from their perches with pulsing laughter, a tantrum of watercolor as they flew away.
Standing before the doorway through which she could see Frances enthralled by the view outside, her three central fingers on both hands pressed against the window glass along with her nose that with each exhale fogged the pane, Saint’s deepening vexation became weariness. Holding Selah in her arms, feeling heat from Selah’s body travel into her own as would a nourishing soup down her throat, she brought the girl’s head up to her own and held her like a baby, one arm under her bottom while she pressed Selah’s head onto her shoulder with her free hand. She had never felt the girl’s cheek touch hers, had never felt Selah’s hair rub against her locs and tickle the inside of her ear. Standing there tired and sweaty, the weight of a forever-asleep girl humbled her.
Saint flashed a determined glare into the house, watched Frances slowly turn her head toward her. Saint held Selah fiercely and asked to please be let in. “Please, Frances.” Behind her, the black rooster crowed. She tried entering again after Frances looked away and succeeded, only to be punched in the face by a stench that burned.
* * *
Inside Frances’s home, the smell of salt and shit pierced the air and stung Saint’s nose. Overwhelmed, she looked back over her shoulder at Aurora, who shook her head and looked away. Frances continued sitting in a chair, enamored by the window, staring blankly out of it. Her breath clouded the glass, covering the view in a mist of a distant memory forever leaving the mind.
Humidity sealed the brackish air inside the creaky house. Saint lowered Selah onto the bed and rushed over to the windows to throw them open. She hurt her shoulders trying to open one that remained stuck to the windowsill. She called out for help from Frances, but the window before Frances was like a demonic aperture that sucked her gaze into its fogged-up pane. The house creaked again then leaned. Gravity closed the front door. Furniture slid from one side of the room to the other, except the chair Frances sat in, which stayed fastened to the floor as it tilted to the right with Frances stuck in it, staring out into oblivion.
Saint’s breath shortened, the burning in her lungs relentless. When the house pivoted in the opposite direction, she grabbed a chair and slammed it into one of the windows, which rejected it and sent it flying across the room. Then everything stilled. The house leveled out. The hearth lit aflame with a blue fire that drew in the putrid air and replaced it with the softer smell of lilac. Soon after, the flame extinguished, the air grew cold and dry and musty, and every window except the one Frances peered through flew open.
“They want me back,” Frances said. She hadn’t turned to face Saint. The window. The window. “They want me back cause I didn’t save you.”
Saint crept toward Frances, waiting to hear more, if there was more, about who this they was and what they wanted.
Frances lowered her fingers to her lap, dragging them down the windowpane so the fog of her breath left streaks of clarity on the glass. “I thought if I stayed my head in the then then I would remember then for the now to bring it back to you, but the more I stayed in the then the more the now took over and now I can’t save you because the you now need something from the me then that the me now don’t have no more. The you then was closer to getting saved when I was farther from the here that’s always here. Here kept coming and the then-you kept changing into this now-you, your here-now easier to save in mind but my mind harder to save you in this time. If you was the you then that you is now and I had the mind of always-had-happened then . . . then . . . the waters”—Saint held her chest as Frances gulped water not in the room—“ahh water come again today. Through the fire, the elements confused. The waters come again through the fire and our people visited and pulled me up from this chair and dragged me to the flames to send me back to the water where our people at. My leg—” Saint saw that Frances wasn’t wearing shoes and her right pant leg had been rolled up to the knee, revealing burnt skin blistering from her foot to the circumference just below the calf. “They grabbed my leg and slid me back into the fire-water but I fought back and said I had to wait for you cause I knew you was coming. I knew it. But”—Frances placed her fingers back on the glass—“I can’t seem to touch the past like I used to. Today keep getting in the way of the ways and the way. I failed helping you get back to you and now now is all we got. That’s nothing.” Saint listened, covering her mouth with her hand, petrified by what was supposed to be inside coming out—this unstoppable mourning of seconds past, the soul made liquid and pouring from the leg. “This now is all there ever is.”
Frances let her forehead fall onto the glass, her face muddled with tears and snot, still rapt by the goings on outside though nothing of note went on out there: a pair of deer crept along the outskirts of Turney, their faces buried in the bushes. Two young boys ran past the window, two birds fleeing the wind. Dogs barked after being chained to their posts and left there. Goat screech. Gusts raking the trees naked. None of it new, but maybe it was beautiful together, enough to watch closely. Frances kept repeating “they want me back, my people” vocalized, then pantomimed by her mouth warping into the shape of words that without sound were merely a relay of voids.
‘Speak, damn it. Speak the words,’ Saint thought. She looked outside the glass that blandly mirrored her into a ghost over Frances’s shoulder and, too, hovering over the gardener and dying vegetable garden outside, putting her in two places at the same time. She put her hands on her hips and outside her hands clenched tomato vines to her thighs. She opened her mouth and a blue jay outside entered her head and flew out.
‘The past is always escaping us, Frances,’ Saint thought. Floorboards creaked then the walls and ceiling followed. The smell of salt returned, the dark abysmal mouth of the empty hearth burst into blue flames. Whatever Frances looked for in the once-before needed to wait. Selah’s breathing grew audible behind them, loud enough to break through the sobbing house rocking on its foundation.
Quickly, Saint needed Frances to bring Selah out of this endless sleep, needed Frances to wake her up, to bring her back into the now neither Saint nor Frances understood. And every present eventually unpeels and spirals into the past, so it didn’t matter what harm Frances had caused before, Saint thought, because it’ll all end up dead in time.
“Frances. Listen to me. Frances. I need your help. You can still help me,” she said, kneeling beside Frances on both knees, trying to get her to look in her direction, to stop appraising the damn window and the nothing-going-on outside. “Frances . . . Frances . . . I can still use your help. Frances.”
“No, no I got to go back. I got to get ready. They coming to get me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t remember,” Frances said, hitting herself on the forehead with two fists. “I can’t help you now cause I don’t know how. I’m so sorry for what I did to your husband. I didn’t mean to, Saint. He just started bleeding after I touched him. I didn’t mean to open him up like that. Please believe me. I . . .” The house moaned like a weary elder around them.
“Frances. Look at me. Look at me.” Then the blue flame burst forth in the hearth once more, brighter than before, blue whips of fire gone serpentine to the ceiling. Frances began to sob hysterically. Without thinking, Saint grabbed Frances around the shoulders from behind, a hug, rocking side to side, holding on tight, rocking wider and wider with the rocking of the house. “Frances. Frances. We will get your leg together. We will clean you up. Get you fed. And you will help me with Selah. We will get you right, first. Wash your leg so you don’t get sick. Then we will help Selah.”
Frances started to hum. Without thinking, Saint followed. They hummed in unison. Their two voices filled up the room so that the wood groaning all around them muted beneath their song. They hummed together, the same song swimming from their mouths, one they never practiced together, had never heard the other sing, the song swelling up in them both, memories rushing back, the blue flame gone out, the house still.
‘Essence. That’s the woman’s name. Essence. How did I ever forget?’ Saint thought. She squeezed Frances tighter as a storm lit up her mind. It was the dream she had of the ocean at night, birds flocking around them, floating planks of wood and upturned barrels bumping into fresh corpses in the water. And there, in view, Frances floating faceup in the water, eyes-closed, moonlight a lantern on Frances’s wan face. Sting of salt. Sting of remembrance becoming once again remembrance, breaking free from the dreamworld. ‘What is this when?’ she thought.
A void made itself known inside of her. She wanted to hold it as she had held Selah. For the first time. A child whom she could love on. Love? She wanted to hold herself and fill all that was empty inside of her. Love? All of this just by hugging and humming with a woman, an intimacy she needed badly, had kept herself from feeling but why, why? Breathing eased. Her heart extolled. The void throbbed inside her head. A sweet smell overpowered the room. Lilac. Lilac. Salt. Lilac. Love? She had been hugging Frances from behind, around the shoulders, and holding her own arms to secure the embrace. Then, there were France’s hands limp at her sides. Lifeless. Trained never to touch. Never to feel. Never to know Saint’s skin, not as lover, not as friend, not even accidentally.
Saint touched Frances at the elbows, the shirt sleeve damp with sweat. The bones charged with sorrow. Such thin musculature.
“Frances,” she said, soft enough to barely hear herself. “You remember, don’t you?”
Frances nodded. “I do.”
“What do you remember?”
