Fire in beulah, p.11
Fire in Beulah, page 11
The wooden door at the back of the office opened, releasing into the room the sharp odor of heated newsprint and fresh ink. A huge brownskinned man poked his head through, said, “Mr. Smitherman, I almost got done with page four. You want me to go back and try and work some on page one?” His glance passed incuriously over Graceful, and then abruptly swept back to her again, and Graceful, looking at the man but seeing in her mind’s eye only the face of her older brother, didn’t at first realize he was staring at her.
“That’s all right, Lawrence,” Mr. Smitherman said. “I’ll be in in a minute.” He frowned down at the paper on his desk. With one hand he kneaded his forehead beneath the visor, and the visor rose and fell in rhythm. It seemed he’d forgotten her, or at least dismissed her. Graceful wanted to ask him more, but she was too intimidated by Mr. Smitherman’s frowning concentration, by his exhaustion, his revered place in the community, and in any case she’d suddenly become aware of the man staring at her from the back. She turned and went out of the Star office to stand, uncertain, confused, on Greenwood Avenue again.
It was late morning now, and the street was fully alive with activity. A few doors down Mr. Thompson came out to sweep the walk in front of his drugstore. Across the street a boy was changing the letters on the Dreamland Theater marquee. Mr. Berry’s jitney passed her, going south now, and all along the street vehicles were passing, belching gasoline fumes and noise, and amidst the Model Ts and touring cars were delivery wagons drawn by blindered drays and shining new delivery trucks, and one battered Nash truck careening recklessly down the avenue, which she realized within seconds was her Uncle Delroy’s. It seemed like that snubnosed truck had been flying toward her down Greenwood forever, and Graceful stepped to the curb to flag it down.
The truck continued past her, but she saw her baby brother, William, jumping around and waving at her from inside the cab, and the truck, almost to Archer now, suddenly stopped and began to back up against the traffic. Willie waved at her wildly. She darted across Greenwood, dancing between wagons and cars, and before she’d reached the curb, Uncle Delroy stuck his head out the open window and shouted back at her, “’M’on, girl, get in!”
Her little brother scooted over to make room, and the instant she closed the door, Delroy ground into first gear and started down the street. His face was a smooth mask, motionless and intent. William, caught between excitement and his wordless understanding of how serious was the situation, bounced lightly on the seat, turning his head to look up at his uncle, and then his sister, and back to his uncle again.
“Where’s Mama?” Graceful said.
Delroy turned onto Archer, squealing the rubber tires around the corner, and, as if continuing a prior conversation, said, “She’s down there already.” He shifted into second and sped up, heading west. Graceful watched the side of her uncle’s face. His profile was a leaner, younger replica of her mother’s, in which bled through the Anglo features of a forgotten white grandfather, but Delroy was much darker than Mama, almost black, and his very leanness and the tight nap of his hair spoke of Senegal. He sure do look like T.J., Graceful thought, her heart catching on the old comparison that was standard in the family: the two lean, loose-jointed men so alike in their faces, their movements. Unconsciously she glanced down at William to see if he’d yet begun to turn lean; but, no, her baby brother carried his same round face and thick thighs; he would be sturdy-built. His soft features were most like their father’s, and Graceful’s heart caught on that recognition, too. Ernest Whiteside had been dead seven years, and it might as well have been seventeen for all the presence he still held in the household: a framed studio photograph on the parlor table showing a round, handsome man in a suit and bow tie, with a stern, serious expression. And yet, for Graceful, who remembered him better than the younger children—and maybe for T.J., too, she thought—her father was a smiling man who brought gifts home from his travels as a Pullman porter and tugged the children onto his lap and teased them and sneaked up on Mama when she was cooking in the kitchen and grabbed her in his big arms and hugged her from behind.
“Your mama gone down last night,” Delroy said. He stared fiercely through the windscreen and did not offer any further explanation. She wanted him to say he had carried Mama out to the pipeline field with her box lunches early this morning. She wanted him to laugh big once and say, What you doing on the street, girl, ain’t you suppose to be working? She wanted a reasonable and lighthearted explanation for her little brother to be fidgeting in the seat beside her; for her mama and sisters being gone from the house on Elgin; for her uncle not being at work in his garage. Graceful waited for the words she knew would never come and watched through the side window as they crossed the trolley tracks and turned west toward Sand Springs. For sure we not going up by Dirty Butter Creek, she thought.
“Where’s LaVona and Jewell?” she said.
Delroy nodded, as if that told her something.
“Uncle Delroy, what is it? What happened?” Her voice was barely audible above the roaring motor, and yet the sound in it was nearly a scream.
Delroy hunched forward, his hands gripping the steering wheel high and tight. “Nothing to speak of, honey. Just … your mama had to go see about some business at Arcadia yesterday evening. She ask me to bring Willie this morning and come on.” He glanced down at the boy, met Graceful’s eyes, and his face when he turned back to watch the road was so furious and veiled that she would ask nothing further.
She felt her little brother’s eyes on her and, looking down, saw him smiling slantwise up at her with the shy grin that could so easily split his face and endear him to any witness to it. “You get that letter?” William said. She saw him trying to be grown-up and sober, but he was just too proud.
“You the one brung that letter?” Graceful said, and the boy nodded, smiling. Her mind flew through adjustments, dropping Hedgemon Jackson as the deliverer of the strange missive and putting her baby brother in his place. Why? she thought, and then, suddenly: What’d I do with it? She didn’t have the page with her; she carried no pocketbook, had no pockets in her skirt, had left her apron somewhere. I must of dropped it by Mr. Smitherman, she thought. Lord, no telling what he’ll think. Aloud she said, “Come all that way by yourself? My Lord, you going to be grown and gone before I get a chance to turn around.”
William ducked his head. The grin spread farther across his face.
“Who give it to you, Willie?”
“Mama,” he said, surprised, the grin disappearing, the look on his face asking, Who else would it be? A fleeting confusion passed over his soft round features, and then the beginnings of fear. His eyes darted swiftly between his uncle and sister once more, trying to decipher how he was supposed to act, how to feel, and Graceful quickly said, “Well, of course, Mama give it to you. I just wondered did one of my snoopy sisters write it, didn’t look like they handwrite to me.”
“I don’t know,” William said, and the beautiful grin was entirely replaced now with the closed sullenness that was the boy’s defense against his impulse to take blame for every trouble. Seeing the change in him, and feeling her own fear rising as her uncle continued west past the shacks at the edge of Sand Springs, Graceful reached down and rubbed the back of her brother’s head; she took small, playful handfuls of nap in her fingers and tugged gently, said, “I don’t know what to think, you so grown up you taking the trolley all that way by yourself. You’re going to be driving a Ford motorcar here in a little bit. Uncle Delroy, you going to teach this boy how to drive?” She touched the smooth cheek, where the smile was beginning to crack again. “Somebody have to teach him,” she said. “Can’t me or Mama do it, and I wouldn’t trust LaVona to teach him how to flyswat!” She laughed, and though her voice was edged in fear, the boy laughed with her, and their uncle joined them as they continued west on the rutted road.
Eyes closed, head pressed against the seatback, Althea surrendered to the jolting, forward-propelled motion, the railcar’s rude lurch and sway. From time to time she would allow her lashes to part slightly, and she’d cast a hidden glance at her husband, or turn slitted eyes to the right, where a golden blur raced past the smeared window. With every mile ratcheting backward, dread and a quavering excitement settled more deeply in her belly. She hadn’t been to Creek County since the last morning she’d boarded the train in Bristow in 1904. She hadn’t seen Jim Dee in over a year. She tried to conjure the image of him staring at her from the far side of the parlor, the dozen or more men milling about the room between them; she searched for the dream and could not find it. She couldn’t even recall in any clear way what her husband’s partner looked like.
The train whistle blew a mournful warning as they neared the Kellyville crossing, and the cry filled Althea with sharp, unexpected longing. An unwilled sound, a near whimper, escaped her lips.
“What is it?” Franklin said. She could feel his eyes on her. “Althea?” The tone was without threat, but he never called her by her full name, not since the first weeks of courting. The word frightened her. She would not open her eyes.
“Thea, I want you to sit up now. Talk to me.”
She forced herself to breathe slowly, feigning sleep, but he touched her arm, and when she didn’t respond he lifted her wrist and shook it.
“Stop!” she snapped, and sat up, frowning. “Lord God, it’s hot.” She fanned her face with her open hand. Franklin’s eyes were steady on her. “What?” she said.
“I believe you’re rested now. Talk.”
“About what?”
But he only stared at her.
“Oh, that … that boy … Well. He’s … Please, Franklin. My head …”
“Talk.”
Why wouldn’t he leave her alone? Her mind was void of creative thought, and this, this grimy railcar was so miserably hot, the leather seat was sticky, the window filthy.…
“He’s your brother, I know that. I can see that with my own eyes. I want to know how come I never heard of him.”
Althea opened her mouth, took a breath, and then just stopped. Not a word came to her, not an image. “Yes,” she said at last. “He is.”
Her husband remained silent.
“I never told you because … Oh, for God’s sake, Franklin, I was ashamed! Ashamed of him, them, all of them! What do you think?” She turned to glare out the greasy window. The train gained speed. Jaws clenched, she watched the folds of yellow prairie give way to a snarled clutch of post oak and blackjack, open to rolling grassland again. Had Franklin pressed her then, he could have received not only the answers he was seeking, but much more: an entire history, dark and long secret, and staggeringly different from all he believed he knew about her. But he didn’t ask; he simply watched her with cold, unfamiliar precision, as if she were a stranger, and in another moment she put her head back against the seat once more, closed her eyes.
Franklin traced the long curve of his wife’s neck, crossed faintly with palely etched lines; he examined the slope of her jaw, the perfectly arched brows, frowning slightly, the tiny whorls of fine black hair at her temples, where the dark tresses began and mounded thickly in a loose chignon toward the crown. As Althea’s face slackened toward sleep, the harsh lines softened and her features eased themselves into the appearance of innocence, and he saw her as he’d first seen her in the Raglands’ foyer: a young girl stepping away from her cotton wrap, dismissing it to the arms of the housemaid as regally as if it had been fur. She’d glanced at him shyly, her hair clasped to one side with a sprig of mistletoe, her lips and cheeks white with cold. Never had he seen anything like her pale avian beauty, stunning in one so young and frail and unformed. And then she’d come fully around and stared directly into his eyes for an instant, secretly bold, before turning to Joe Ragland to smile and offer her hand. Franklin had fallen in love in that moment. Never in the many difficult years since had that infatuation failed. The old tenderness did battle now with the morning’s suspicion and anger; he tried to shrug it away, but the pull was too strong, and he rode swaying with the emotions rolling over him in alternating waves of warmth and cold doubt.
She moaned in her sleep, a low, gritted groaning, and then the little sound came again, clearly now a whimper, animallike in its helplessness and terror. Her hands convulsed in her lap, and her lips moved, trying to form words, though all that escaped was the low moaning. Franklin reached out and brushed the back of his knuckles against her cheekbone. Her hands came up before her throat, clenched, batting the air, and she said distinctly, “No, no, Franklin, get back! There’s a snake on me!” She sat forward. “What?” she said. She looked at him, not seeming to see him, then her eyes swept the inside of the railcar, the row of seatbacks in front of her; she twisted to look behind, where a few passengers were beginning to gather their belongings. Her breath cut the air in short, sharp gasps. Franklin could hear it above the rush of iron wheels. “Where is he?” she whispered.
“Who?” Franklin touched her. “It’s just a dream, Thea. You were sleeping.”
Althea leaned back, allowed him to stroke her, grateful for the fleshy reality of his thick palm on her forehead. Dear God. She tried to retrace the dream, what had terrified her so, but the curtain had dropped, and she was left only with the recollection of a dark, focused terror: fear of someone or something, as if a hidden presence were watching her from inside the car; she couldn’t bring herself to turn and look, but shrank further into the seat, tried to make herself small beneath Franklin’s hand. The locomotive began very gradually to slow, and the more the train slowed, the more terrible the burn of fear rose in her; she closed her eyes entirely against it.
The whistle sounded, not mournful now but shrieking, a terrified warning. The brakes groaned beneath the car and then began their high-pitched piggish squealing as the locomotive rolled into the station. Althea sat up, shrugged Franklin’s palm away. Her eyes were wide as she stared at him, the pupils so swollen her gaze was nearly black. A little boy in a ragged suitcoat raced up the aisle, followed by a woman with a bawling infant in one arm, a battered valise in the other, and two crying toddlers stumbling after. Franklin started to rise, but Althea’s hand on his arm stopped him. Still she didn’t turn her eyes from his.
“We’re here,” he said. He pulled away, stood and put his hat on, reached up to retrieve his case from overhead. Althea didn’t move. Franklin picked up her cloth purse and blue silk traveling bonnet, extended his palm to her. As though coming fully awake at last, Althea suddenly grasped the hand and scrambled quickly to the aisle, rushed toward the front of the car, and then stopped in the open door at the top of the steps, confounded by the neat redbrick depot trimmed in white. For a moment she forgot where she was. She saw the word BRISTOW etched in bold white letters above the façade; the word seemed to float up from a long-ago dream. A tawny head separated itself from the little clutch of waiting passengers and began to move toward them. Althea’s mind cleared then, and she remembered.
He sauntered hatless toward the platform in denim britches and a shortsleeved khaki shirt open at the throat. Even in the relaxed stroll there was an undercurrent of impatience, so that it seemed he kept glancing at a timepiece, though he wore neither fob nor wristwatch. Althea watched him with the same black intensity with which she’d watched her husband, as if she were drowning and the only thing that might save her was the other’s face. But, though she expected and longed to feel the old tremble of excitement, she felt only dullness and a kind of empty wonder at how much older he looked. Not some little bit older, not just a year older, but shockingly so, his face more wind and sun scarred, the squint lines at the corners of his eyes etched deeper, the once faint dusting of freckles now distinct and particulate as paint. All she could think of was why in heaven’s name didn’t he wear a hat.
Jim Dee’s eyes lifted and met hers. He didn’t blink, smile, offer recognition in any way; his gaze passed on, casually, as he strolled toward them, and it was only by how his pace slowed that she knew he was surprised to see her. He shook Franklin’s outstretched hand, nodded at her, turned with hardly a word of greeting and began to walk toward a battered tin lizzie parked at the curb. Althea hurried along, her arm clinging so tightly to Franklin’s and the rush in her step so urgent that her husband looked at her in surprise as she pulled him along.
Franklin tried to help her into the front of the open car, but Althea shook her head and climbed into the rumble seat in the back as Jim Dee moved to the front of the old Ford to crank. Hunkered in the narrow space, Althea watched the few remaining passengers milling about the platform. A couple of roustabouts in stained pants lounged in the shadow of the depot wall, smoking handrolled cigarettes. On the wooden bench facing the tracks an old Indian man sat erect and motionless in a tan suitcoat and a broadbrimmed black hat. The woman with the three crying youngsters came to the curb and climbed awkwardly with them into a battered spring-wagon, where a farmer in overalls held the reins to an old dray and did not offer a hand to help. The whistle screamed, the brakes hissed their released steam, the Frisco engine grumbled to a louder pitch. Althea watched the train grind out of the station, gaining speed, until she heard the whistle in the distance, not shrieking now but lonesome, moaning, as the Frisco roared on toward Oklahoma City. Still she couldn’t shake the sense of a malevolent presence behind her, and she shrank into the well, pressing her spine against the cracked leather binding.
