When I got to Jeremy’s, he met me at the back door of his manor, grabbed my hand, and hurried me inside before anybody saw. The smell of lavender soap wafted off him, tenderly. I thought that even if all we did was kiss and sleep, his scent on me when I left would be my heavenly reward.
He whisked me along a darkened hallway and past rooms where his boarders stay. Gray paint and paper peeled from the walls there, but not upstairs. Those walls were clean and tidy ’cause the second floor he keeps for hisself.
He opened his bedroom door where candles burned next to a fancy bed. Wine was already poured in silver-tipped glasses and set on an end table. When we finished drinking — two full glasses each — he told me he wanted to try something different, something to help me relax.
He picked me up easy like I was as lightweight as a house shoe and sat me on his soft bed. He kissed me and asked me to lay back.
He kneeled on the floor just in front of me and bent my knees up, cinched my hips forward to the bed’s edge. He put his head between my thighs and skipped down ’em with kisses. When he got halfway, I shivered with nerves and clutched my legs together, held his head there.
He looked up without a word, his blue eyes asking permission, and rocked his head from side to side, wedging my legs apart, leaving kisses on each thigh — left side, right side, left — all the way down ’til my legs were butterflied. With two fingers, he spread me open, sucked me gentle, and rolled his tongue along the middle. I held my head back and lifted my hips to him, smothered him flat against me. .
“Hey!” Cynthia say, bringing me back. She points out to the road. “Will you look at that?”
In the distance, splotches of color stained the landscape, reshaping itself into a figure on horseback coming toward us. A white-haired man in a black shirt and white collar stops his horse a few feet from our porch.
Cynthia say, “Ain’t that nothin. A priest in the South.”
I ain’t never seen a priest before. I lean over the railing where Priest is tying his horse to our plank of wood while Cynthia pulls a chewing stick out of her bra. She shoves it in her teeth, then yells to him, “Despite what we look like, we ain’t a house of God.”
He laughs a little and checks that his loop’s tight.
“And if we was. .” Cynthia say, “we for damn sure ain’t Catholic.”
He smiles and opens his saddlebag, unfolds his money from it.
He walks up the porch steps and past me to the front door where Cynthia’s sitting. She throws her leg across the doorway. “I got the right to refuse service to anybody.”
“Ma’am, I’m just here for a quiet drink.”
“The end is nigh, right, Preacha?” she say. “I need to get saved, is that it, Preacha Man?”
I can tell the priest is tired. His shoulders sank with her question and his eyes closed. “Ma’am, you looking to give a confession?”
“By the looks of thangs, you going to hell same as me,” she say. “Can I take yours?”
Preacha Man only nods slow like he understands something. Exhausted-like, he say, “If there are no other fine establishments around here, I hope you don’t mind if I have a drink?”
Cynthia puts her leg down. “So God didn’t send you here for me?”
“Not unless your first name is Jake, last name Beam-Bourbon.”
“Funny, too,” she say, standing up, stretching and cracking her back real good. “Go’n in.”
Cynthia like to control everybody.
Everything.
Who come in and who come out of here. What people do. Say. She’d control God if she could. Tried to control me. But I made my decision last night, lying there with Jeremy, his body in mine — an ending like a thousand purple butterflies fluttering on my eyelids.
I did what I wanted.
These are my choices.
My body.
No longer a slave.
If I did what she wanted, I’d be living her life, not mine. I cain’t save her. Cain’t nobody save another person that way. She say she’s trying to protect me, keep me from the hard choices she made. But we have to choose for ourselves and our sacrifices are our own to make.
“Can you believe that bastard!” Cynthia say, unwinding a tightly folded sheet of paper in her hand, smaller than a playing card. I go to look, too, and see the image of our bartender on the paper. But only if he was wearing Bernadette’s long blonde wig. It’s Jesus.
“Bastard had the nerve to leave his literature on my seat. Does he know who I am? Like he’s gon’ convert me. .”
I hear him before I see him.
His clicking boots come up the porch steps.
My whole body flushes when he passes behind me, brushing my hand. My hip. The soft wings of last night awaken me. My eyes close and my knees buckle.
I open my eyes. I didn’t know she was watching me.
In her sudden silence, my eyes peek open and slide toward her. Her eyes bore through me. “You didn’t!” she say.
“What?”
She charges at me, grabs my arm. “Let me look at you! You slept with him?”
I shake my head. Fast as I can.
“You did! I can see it all over you!”
Jeremy stutters something. . nothing. . “Damn you to hell!” she tell him. “You’ve damned us all to hell! After all I’ve done for you!” She grabs him by his neck and throws him off her porch, follows him down.
“Cynthia!” I yell.
She slaps him over and over — his back, his head — closed-fisted to his jaw.
“Cynthia!” I race down the stairs.
She face me. In her eyes I see all the spite and disappointment. Whatever she was trying to protect me from, whatever protection she was giving me, is gone now. I don’t even recognize her. “How could you give it to this mother fucker? How could you!” She’s crying and I’m crying now, too, and I don’t know what for. “Why this asshole?” she say.
Not an asshole.
“Naomi, you was pure. You were supposed to stay that way. For both of us.”
I shake my head.
“What’d he give you for it?”
I don’t want to look at her.
She backs away from me, throws her hands up, disgusted. She turns her back on me and her boots clap up the porch.
26 / MAY 1864, Tallassee, Alabama
THERE’S NO SUCH thing as justice when somebody’s killed. Only satisfaction. The person cain’t be brought back for no amount of punishment or cost. I cain’t have the old Josey back and I’ve been long gone. My loss is worse when I think about how George got away with it. And how he did it. How he had to have been watching Josey before it happened. Watching her the way animals do prey. How else would he have known that Charles would be gone that day, or the moment she’d come home?
George was there waiting in the dark for her — black. Blending into trees — black. Squatting behind a bush — black. Pushing the leaves aside to make a space for his peeping eye — black.
There’s no justice for that.
Bessie said to let it go but I won’t. She should understand the pain of no justice ’cause she black, too.
And three weeks ago, George came back. Again, I got no justice.
His return was just a shadow of something I’d been waiting for, had hoped for, and crushing disappointment ain’t sour enough a phrase. I was helpless but he was right there. Like needing to buy the life-saving medicine in front of you, but being ten dollars short and finding no charity.