He opens his mouth to speak but no more words come out.
“How you know anything about me?” She points at him with her bowls. “What plantation you from?”
“N. . none.”
“So you don’t live no place, ain’t from nowhere, but you know it’s my birthday? How long you been coming around here, liar?”
“Not a liar.”
“For sure a peeper.”
“We met before,” he say.
“Never.”
“Twice.”
“Liar.”
“I promise we did. My momma is Sissy.”
Josey laughs. “You the witch’s son?”
“Ain’t a witch!” he say.
“Evil,” Josey say.
“I shouldn’t a come.”
“I’ll be dog gone, if you ain’t the witch’s son. Wait ’til I tell Ada Mae.”
Before she finish laughing, he’s gone back across the slaves’ yard and path, nearing the woods.
“Good,” she yells from behind him. “You leave. You shouldn’t be coming ’round here peeping on folks no way.” She yanks the blanket around her shoulders and watches him. But she don’t go inside right off. She keeps watching. Watching the way the moon rests in the cleft of his neck beneath the round of his head. A perfect scoop, smooth and hand-shaped under the nap of his hair.
She studies his blue-black skin and her heartbeats slow. He’s an impressive color, the kind of shade that Josey had already wished for in a husband, in the father of her dreamed-of children. And now he’s disappearing deeper into the brush. Her own color leaves her face as she stares, confused now, at that empty space where he was.
“Wait!” Josey yells, breathless. “Wait!” she say to the shadows, coughing now, her breath lost.
When she breathes deeply and puts her hands on her knees, dropping her bowls, her blanket slides off her waist. “Come back here!” she say, coughing.
Nothing.
A wheeze. She pats her chest to clear the sound. She coughs and finds relief.
She reaches down to collect her bowls and picks up her blanket. Wayward say, “You all right?”
A fleeting smile graces Josey’s face but she pretends not to notice him, sets her bowls on a stump of cut log, and takes her time tying the blanket over her shoulders. She coughs again.
“You all right?” he say.
“What do you care?” she say.
“Well, if you’re all better, I’ll go.”
“You haven’t even told me happy birthday.”
“You ain’t gave me a chance to. Not properly.”
“Go on. Here’s your chance. .”
“Happy birthday,” he say.
“’Bout time.”
“Awnry.”
“You like it,” she say.
“Maybe.”
“Josey!” Charles calls from the doorway.
“I have ta go,” she say in a hurry, bunching her bowls against her chest.
“Wait,” he say, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a braid of wound-together red string.
“Josey!” Charles calls.
“Coming, Daddy!”
“I made it myself. . for your birthday. In case I. . Can I put it on you?” he say.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“Jackson. Jackson Hayes.”
He smiles and reaches for her hand and she lets him tie his strings around her wrist. He scoots the knot around and down her arm.
“This is silly,” she say.
“Can I see you again?” he say. “Tomorrow?”
She only smiles.
“Eight o’clock?”
“Good night,” she say, running toward Charles’s call.
“Good night,” Jackson say to the closing door.
16 / FLASH, Conyers, Georgia, 1847
THE MUSK OF burning wax is seeping through Cynthia’s bedroom door. I knock.
No answer.
I press my ear against the cool door. Cain’t hear nothin.
My hair tumbles over my shoulder. It smells of Jeremy. Makes me smile.
I knock again, ease the door open. “Cynthia? You call me?”
Flames atop two candles sway above their silver holders. The holders are pushed back on the vanity, painting soot on the mirror.
Fancy plates that Cynthia usually keeps under her bed wrapped in a velvet cloth, is out. One of the plates is on the floor, half-pushed under the vanity, mounded with gray chicken bones, thin as thistles. Rib bones are branched off a greasy spine. A leg bone’s still got the white crunchy gristle on the end.
I take a step in.
An empty bottle of wine lays tipped over next to the bed. And next to it is the rest of that chicken — bones piled on a book beside a knocked-over, empty wine glass.
Her naked white toes wiggle off the end of the bed while the rest of her is crumpled on the trunk I sleep on. She got one arm against the wall, propped straight up in the air like she’s waiting to be called on. Her head is sunk in her shoulders, her body is draped in a man’s undershirt pushed up above her stretched-out belly. I pick up the glass near her foot and put it on the vanity next to another bottle of wine. My hip bumps her chair, knocks her hanging dress to the floor. When I reach down to pick it up, her eyes shoot open. “What the hell you doing walking in on me?” she say. She pushes herself up but falls back, pointing a bread roll at me like it’s gon’ hold me in place.
“You called me?” I say.
She washes her hand over her face, says, “I called you a long time ago. Where were you?”
“I knocked but you was ’sleep.”
She strains her swollen eyes open, bends over her lap with her elbows on her knees.
“I was shootin marbles,” I say.
“I can tell you lying. The way your voice just rose.”
She stretches both arms above her head, cracks her back. She sticks her finger in her ear and wiggles it around, snorts at the same time. “Next time you see me not waking, you come see if I’m dead before you go and wait over there with my wine.”
“Yes’m.”
I take the half-full bottle of wine from the vanity and pour her a glass before she even asks and watch the dark-purple color slide in. I give it to her, sit back at the vanity, and work at pushing the cork back in.
“Just so you know,” she say, “I wasn’t sleep. I was praying. I don’t never sleep. You remember that.”
“Yes’m,” I say. The cork is stuck sideways.
She finishes her wine like a shot of whiskey. She say, “You think my momma’s in hell?”
My cork pops.
“If there is one, I reckon she is,” she say.
She reaches her empty glass out to me to refill it. I say, “I thought you don’t believe in heaven or hell?”
“I said if. And I don’t. Come on, have a drink with me.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“So you don’t drink, neither?”
I don’t answer.
She raises her glass. “A toast — to all you bitches that don’t drink and think your shit don’t stank.” She chugs a big swallow of wine, continues with a loud burp, laughing now. “You know what special day it is today? Go’n and guess.”
“Your birthday?”
“Guess again.”
“Johnny’s?”
“Know what Yom Kippur is?”
“No, ma’am.”
“A religious holiday,” she say. “Thas today, started at sundown.” She raises her glass again, sips.
“I thought you weren’t saved. Didn’t believe in Jesus.”
She laughs. “Christians ain’t the only ones that got religion. I’m a pure country Jew. And this is my Day of Atonement.”
“I thought you was white?”
“I am. Wrong kind of white for these parts.”
“And you said you didn’t believe in nothin?”
“I can give God one day. . most of it, anyway.” She drinks again, leaves a gulp at the bottom. “I’m s’posed to be looking at things I coulda done better this year. Repenting and asking God for forgiveness — saying things like, ‘I’m sorry I slapped my child, I won’t do it again,’ and apologize to people I wronged.” Her breath catches, “If you think I wronged you, sorry.”