“Oh,” Josey said. She forced a smile. Sissy didn’t bother.
“You got all the privacy in the world,” Jackson said. “Ain’t gotta go outside in the middle of the night with a bad stomach or pull out the pot. Just sit right here and let go.” He wiggled himself on the seat. “It won’t move, see. I bolted it down. Comfy, too.”
“Ain’t the smell gon’ come up in the house?” Josey said.
He hopped up. “Just close the lid like this when you done and that’s it. No smell. We just got to make sure to shovel under the house every day, thas all.”
“And who gon’ crawl under there and do all the shovelin, you?” Sissy said.
“Well. . Josey or me.”
Josey laughed, “I’d rather use the one outside.”
“Come on, Josey.” Jackson said. “People do it all the time. When I was off to the war, I seen books about these people a long time ago. They made holes like this. .”
“I ain’t gon’ use it,” Josey said. “Clean it, neither.”
“Well, you cain’t clean it now ’cause you pregnant, of course.”
“Pregnant?” Sissy said. She rolled her neck, slow and long, like it was on wheels. “You wasn’t gon’ tell me, Jackson? I don’t deserve to know?”
“Aw, Momma. We was just waiting for the right time. Make it special.”
“When Jackson? How far ’long?”
Josey whispered, “Just two cycles I missed is all, Miss Sissy.”
Sissy wouldn’t look at Josey.
“Two months of knowing and you couldn’t tell me?” she say and limps out of his cupboard and back into the room.
“Momma, I’m sorry. I. .”
“That’s your problem, Jackson. You waste all your time on shit. I coulda had my windows. Only a fool shits where he eats and sleeps.” Jackson clears the shelf with his forearm, grabs the bucket and rips it from its hinges. He heaves it out of the cupboard and across the room, past Sissy. He scoops his hammer from the floor and storms out the front door.
“Jackson?” Josey calls, following him. “Jackson?” But he kept on out.
“Jackson Allen!” Sissy say.
He stops directly on the porch steps and was breathing hard and tearful when he spins around to his momma, whimpering like a boy told he couldn’t go out and play.
Sissy limps past Josey to stand on the steps next to him. When she get there, she and Jackson turn their backs on Josey. Josey tries to join ’em but they take two steps down the porch.
“Jackson?” Josey say. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.” But Jackson don’t turn around.
Sissy rubs his shoulders and the back of his neck with her thumbs. She whispers in his ear. He hangs his head low and listens. Josey backs away. She picks up his tools from the corner of the front room and the broken bucket. A shard of wood stabs her hand making her drop the hammer. Just missed her toe.
She rips off the extra shards still stuck on the bucket and carries it back through the cupboard door and sets it over the hole in the floor again. She closes the lid. “I miss you, Daddy,” she whispers.
Josey snaps off another piece of splintered wood from the bucket, then another, then all around the lid ’til the bucket is smooth again. She sits down on it and drops the fractured pieces of wood into a short pile there. But the biggest shard she keeps. She rolls it in her hand before sliding it back and forth across her thigh on purpose, grunting as it reddens, then bleeds. Her eyes roll back in pain. Or feel-good.
35 / MAY 1866, Tallassee, Alabama
BIRTH IS NOT the work of a conscious mind any more than a heartbeat is. It just happens. In its own animal way, it do. Through God. Its own magic. And in its own time.
Josey crawled her way into Jackson’s cupboard — the outhouse, inside — alone and in the dark, then squatted over his broken toilet seat and started pushing.
Jackson never meant for the bucket to be used as a birthing chair but nobody had the nerve to use it in any other way.
The lid’s been kept closed all the time to stop things from crawling up and into the house.
Except right now.
There’s a hole in the floor ’cause Josey dragged the bucket across the room. She’s softened the bottom with the clean sheets and linens, wadded and stuffed inside the bucket — a safe landing for the baby. Now, she hovers over the bucket, pushing alone. Pushing because she is alone.
JACKSON LEFT TWO months ago for the new war, the Indian War west. Wasn’t the same man he was when they married. Everything got to be too much for him — Josey’s sickness, the work needing doing, and most of all, he missed war. Most of the able-bodied men did, black or white. The ones who weren’t flinching at every loud sound and sinking into madness, seemed like they needed guns and to be afraid and needed somebody else to pay with their lives for new anger.
And this condition became a dependency of men.
The same way trousers needed suspenders, instead of finding harmony in a pair that fits. We’re not the same, they tell us. We’re different, they say. We don’t fit together.
The world is too big and too strange now, they believe, and without a conflict or war holding us up, leaders are uneasy. They have the weight of the world on their shoulders and they need straps. Without them, they feel something is wrong. They could be exposed as naked at any time. Vulnerable. They need to feel secure in something familiar and taut. The strain of one thing pulling against another. This is what the new America needs to feel normal, with the wrong question being asked over and over again, “How can we have peace without suspenders?” Not, “How can we have harmony and not need suspenders?” A silly question to too many, so we get more suspenders. And now, our men and their strain are inseparable.
JACKSON NEVER DID finish Josey’s path out back and never started Sissy’s windows.
He told Josey, “You ask, but I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t wake up in the morning saying to myself, ‘I’m not gon’ do nothing today.’ I think I have time to, or I don’t think about time ’til night falls and it’s too late and all I want to do is go back to sleep. So I don’t know what’s wrong.”
But he knew.
In part, he did.
In the first months of Josey’s pregnancy, Jackson was strong. Even when she went in and out of good health — made worser by her morning sickness — Jackson was still eager to love his wife.
Jackson found her more than once naked and standing on that mound squawking like a hawk, or just plain lost. He got good at not staying too far from her. He liked how much she needed him. The same way she had needed Charles. “You can count on me,” he’d tell her. “You don’t need to do nothing. Just sit here and rest your feet.”
By the third month, he was doing more than his fair share of work, the hunting and skinning, the cooking and some cleaning, while able-bodied Sissy did nothing but moan about not having her windows.
By the fifth month, Jackson spent all his time praying for Josey. Twice a day, every day, for healing. That started after he’d snuck up on her in the kitchen, went to hug her, and felt the wet red lines she’d sliced across her forearms. It broke his heart that his love stopped helping her, stopped being the healing kind.
He prayed straight through a week. If his lips weren’t moving to talk, they were moving to say, “Thank you, God, and amen.” Then one day, he stopped.
It was the day he found Josey sprawled out at the edge of the woods, not moving. He didn’t even check to see if she was dead. He just stood there in place, staring at her.
Then he collapsed.
From the ground he cried an ugly cry. Full-bodied, up in the shoulders, cry.