A family of wild turkeys spur Josey’s children — almost five now — to get up the path faster, chasing stick legs as they windmill beneath puffy balls of feathers.
The children don’t look like twins.
They are as close looking as two strangers could be. Rachel’s milk-white skin and mousy blonde hair are Josey’s, but Squiggy’s browner like Jackson but with golden-brown eyes and his hair made of big loops of shiny copper.
And he’s slow-learning.
What Squiggy can do puts him about two years behind where he should be. Two years behind Rachel. She stood up to walk before one years old while Squiggy was still scooting at three.
He was just a month old when he started showing signs of his lag-behind. He wouldn’t move his head from one side to the other, or move his body the way Rachel would. And when Josey would lay him on the floor, his legs would splay open like a dead frog. Was mostly expressionless except for the two times he smiled. His limbs would just hang down when she held him. He wouldn’t lift a fist to rub a eye or a cheek, but Rachel would punch your neck from stretching.
He seemed lifeless, but he was breathing, and got so behind in the things Rachel could do easy. There was only one conclusion: “Will he look retarded?” Josey asked herself. Not because she didn’t love him but because she knew what he’d be up against.
THE FAMILY OF wild turkeys escaping the children get swallowed by the brush off the side of the road except for one lone turkey crossing behind Squiggy. Its face is featherless, bright red and puckered blue. A pouch of extra red skin hangs under its neck like a man’s saggy parts. Squiggy goes after it in a clumsy walk. Don’t know how to run yet. Then Rachel goes behind him, slower than she could because she wants to let him catch it and feel a victory. She and Josey have done most things for Squiggy all his life. They’re used to picking him up and walking for him and taking turns talking for him. Josey’ll chew his food to keep him from choking to death on a weak swallow. He always smiles on his own, though. And his good kisses are puckerless.
Josey passes the children up the path, then under an arch of tree branches and over grounded chicken feathers to meet the main road. Sunlight pours over the east field of the Graham plantation — Annie’s new farm store. The Market.
Her children fall behind and that’s good. It’s about time she let ’em go. They’ve already healed her. Some children are born to heal us. To heal the holes we thought were forever or heal the holes we didn’t know we had. Josey’s sickness ebbed because of Squiggy and Rachel. They needed her. Especially Squiggy. And Josey stopped cutting when she decided that his suffering was more important than hers.
When he was born, she didn’t lay him down on his own for months. She carried him in a sheet tied over her neck and it kept him taut against her body because she knew something was wrong with her baby. He was limp like I told you, and when she saw how his muscles were weak, she thought his heart might be weak, too. That maybe it would forget to beat. Maybe his lungs forget to breathe. She wanted him to feel her close, wanted him to mimic her body’s moves. Breathe like she breathed. Beat like she beat. And if God were to take him, he wasn’t gonna die alone like them babies who were laid down for a nap and let go.
“You crazy!” Sissy would tell her.
But some crazy is instinct.
Loud chatter and crowds drown Annie’s market. Rolling wagons leave welts in the grass. A group of children chase a dog under a wagon and through tents. Negro sharecroppers put food baskets on carts same as whites. Two buyers slouch next to a basket sorting collards and cucumbers, figs and something red.
Business is good for Annie. Like Tallassee, she’s growing back, too. Husbandless. Annie don’t say it, but her smile is proof. She rests atop her tan horse — biggest around — watching from behind the sidelines, pleased with what she made, a market for anyone to buy or sell or give free to anyone who needs it.
Josey wanders through the market, unnoticed by Annie, touching onions and ripe okra. She stops at a brown bag of sugar. Her babies can’t eat that. But when they get here, sweets will be the first thing they beg for.
Bantam chickens outnumber the children here. There’re little hens and chickens running around the whole of this market and through the streets. Annie bought two — a boy and a girl — a while back and now fifty of ’em are running all over this place. All her neighbors including negroes got bantams now. Josey and Sissy don’t, though. Chickens too spooked to wander that way and into the darkness of unkept Tallassee. She’s wild.
I cross the main road and back through the gap to the footpath to find my two grandchildren, taking too long. Rachel and Squiggy are laughing as Squiggy pulls hisself out and over the gutter at the side of the road. Rachel’s behind him holding that turkey prisoner.
“Watch this,” she say, lowering it to the forest floor. “Yah!” she yells, and sets the turkey free. It runs right toward Squiggy. I swear it ran over his head and now they cain’t stop laughing. Squiggy claps his hands and say the only word he know — not, Momma—“Again!”
Behind me, an on-the-loose bantam stumbles straight in the road and gets runned over by a wagon. It gets up limping. Falls back down. Gets up again, fixed. I swear they live forever.
Three, four, five children are running after that wagon now. A man, half dressed in a soldier’s uniform, rides in it with a knapsack on his back — one like Jackson had when he first come home. All these years and soldiers’ bodies are still coming home. Not all of ’em dead. But no one asks anymore where these survivors have been. Only about the war.
“We don’t need your help,” Rachel say behind me.
“Just let me help him,” a man’s voice say.
Heat envelops me. Something I haven’t felt in a long time.
“No thank you, suh,” Rachel say.
I turn ’round to ’em. See what I’ve dreaded for five years. George’s face hits me like a madness. And I remember everything. I rush at him, get set ablaze passing through, nerves inside exposed and wild. I’ve wanted this. Burning alive. And I don’t care. Before he disappeared, I swore that no matter what Bessie said, I’d give my life for my daughter’s justice.
But I stop now.
Hesitate.
Children change everything.
Heartbreak.
My grandchildren.
I don’t make a move. Don’t want to leave this place.
George drags Squiggy by the arm out of the gutter and back onto the path. Squiggy’s knees scrape. “There,” George say. “All better now.”
“We fine, suh,” Rachel say. “We don’t want to bother you none.”
“It’s not a bother,” George say and bends through me to pick up Squiggy but Squiggy arches his back, knees George in his sack but George don’t feel that, neither. “Calm down, boy,” he say. “I’m just trying to lift you to the road.”
“He don’t like being helped,” Rachel say, forceful.
“Is that true, little man?”
“He don’t talk, neither,” Rachel say.
“He don’t need help, don’t talk. . You either a true gentleman or the perfect woman.” He laughs and pulls his flask from his pocket and untwists it open.
He takes a swig, then wipes his mouth with his backhand. “Just water,” he tells Rachel, screwing the lid back on. “I’ve been off the poison almost six years now. Then last week. . a small backstep. You ever sneak a little drink?”
Rachel don’t say nothing.
“Good girl,” he say. “Type of thing can put a man in his grave. How old are you?”
“Be five my next birthday.”
“Five years old! Whew! An old soul. Well beyond your years.”