45 / FLASH, Conyers, Georgia, 1848
THERE ARE THINGS that happened to me when I was alive that I didn’t know happened ’til I was dead. So I cain’t place myself there now and lie about it, ’cause it didn’t happen that way.
I wasn’t there to know. Didn’t see it. Didn’t hear it.
It’s the same thing that’s happening to you.
Other people will make choices for you, about you — win or lose, work or won’t, live or die — and you’ll have missed it.
Choices that could change the rest of your life and you won’t even know it happened ’til you’re dead. ’Til you get your turn with the flashes.
And once you’ve been in ’em long enough, you’ll get to see everything.
I BEEN IN Cynthia’s cellar below the saloon since daybreak. Ain’t been back to sleep since before dawn. “Cellar” is what Cynthia renamed this secret place under the saloon. She gon’ use it to store her good liquor. “It’ll keep them skinny Irish from sliding over the bar top when Sam’s back is turned,” Cynthia said after Sam told her, “There ain’t no way in hell I’m reaching into some man’s drawls and retrieving the bottle they’re stealing. Not even a twenty-dollar bottle.”
So Cynthia keeps her good stuff down here in the cellar now. Daylight is seeping through the spaces around the door that leads from in here to under the porch outside. The weight and wobble of drunk folks, fat folks, and the occasional horse taking a step up the porch, has made the doorframe pull away from the brick walls. All connected.
It’s already getting warm down here. It’ll be hot by one.
Heat gets trapped in this cellar and turns even the cool shadows to coal steam. It’s hotter in the corners where night-made cobwebs melt and break in their centers like little hands letting go. I brush those webs away with my broom, roll ’em in the bristles.
I’ve been picking up all the solid dead things around me, pinching my nose before I touch ’em even though they probably don’t stink. The other trash that was never alive is easy — paper, napkins, and cigarette ends kicked through the upstairs floorboards. I put ’em in my trash bag and tie it up ready for outside.
One-thirty has me washing the walls ’cause it’s hot like I knew it would be. The water feels cool.
Albert just laid this wood floor a few months ago so the nails are still flat against the boards and deep in the wood. They ain’t been disturbed by shifting earth yet.
He didn’t finish the corner pieces of the floor, though. That’s where he decided to throw all the bothersome things I got to clean up now — wood scraps and tins.
The floor near the door under the porch ain’t finished right, either. You gotta tug the door real hard to get it open ’cause it’s warped and wonky. Cain’t spy good in the saloon above because of its noise and the strength you need to wrestle it. Best to come through the trap door under the tub and close it quiet behind.
I yank at the door now ’cause there ain’t nobody in the saloon to hide from. I barely get it opened and drag my bag of trash under the steps hunched over ’til I get beyond the porch and can stand straight. I scratch a trail in the dirt behind me now, erasing my wide footprints. I reckon my weight is half baby, even though everybody tells me I’m still small.
I can hear Albert at the side of the house hammering before I see him. Today, he said, is the last day he has to finish Cynthia’s liquor cabinet before her grand reopening. Saloon and gambling only.
Albert’s giving Cynthia a gift of metal finishings that he’s melted to shapes — flowers and birds to work as doorknobs and drawer pulls. He made a big gardenia to be the centerpiece of the cabinet. I stand behind him, watch him nail it together.
YOU MAY NEVER know.
May never know about the choice somebody made for you that changed your life. Just like I didn’t know about the choice made for me that day. By the time I was standing behind Albert, watching him bang those last nails in, my life had already changed.
Two fields over, down a hill and off to the left, Soledad’s house had been sitting quiet for most of the morning even though Mr. Shepard had been home almost six days. He had been sick with food poison for three days of ’em and stopped eating. He started feeling better. Good enough, he thought, to finish that letter to his brother. Good enough to keep his promise to Cynthia to host her grand reopening the next day. Good enough, he thought. But he rested instead.
His shirt wouldn’t get ironed.
His shoes wouldn’t be shined. And his menudo would be left on the table cooling, then cleared from the table, thrown out rotting, then swallowed by the ground as if it was never there.
He had meant to pack his new deck of cards, pay his bills, start reading the book his gentleman friend gave him. So many things he was finally home to do, so much intention. All of it met by Soledad’s decision.
She sat at her dining room table a full half hour after the choice she made, eating her stew. When she finally spoke, she said, “Mr. Shepard? You really should try this,” and stirred inside her bowl of menudo. “You know it took me all day to prepare it. Just for you, dear.”
She lifted the cloth that covered her pile of tortillas and took one, broke it, dipped it in. That was when she first seemed to notice the red stains smeared on the backs of her hands. She put her spoon down and snatched the cloth from under the pile of her tortillas, knocking them to the floor, crumbled to pieces. She used the cloth to wipe the blood, rubbed harder because it had dried. She gave up trying before they were clean, picked up her spoon, scooped her stew, brought it to her mouth.
Her fingernails were packed black-red and moist underneath.
MY PLAN IS to help Albert lower his cabinet doors from the bathroom upstairs to down here in the cellar. His eyesight changed ’cause of the way his skin has healed at his brow. Above his right eye, the skin is pulled back tighter and thinner and it makes his eye water for no reason. So I’m his line of sight even though he want to do it all hisself.
“Shoo, fly,” he say to me. “Get back.”
He say he gon’ use his ladder to guide the doors down instead of me since the last came rushing fast and almost hit me.
“You could hurt the baby,” he say and shoos me again.
“I’m pregnant, not useless. How you gon’ get it through this gap without me keeping it on track from down here?”
“I’ll manage it. Just move.”
He squats and lowers the long door along the ladder slide, got a rope tied around the gardenia piece, with the other end connected to his wrist. I reach my skinny arms up and help keep the door flat against the ladder so if the tie slips, it’ll follow the ladder down, like tracks.
He say, “You not under this, are you?”
“No,” I lie and step back. The new wood floor he laid creaks like old knees in an empty tunnel.
“You are down there. I can hear you. Get back against the wall.” I squeak across the floor but when I reach the looser wood planks near the sidewalls, the squeak of the boards give out a donkey’s hee-haw.
“All right,” I say. “I’m all the way back now.”
“Good. I’m gon’ let it down now. If it falls, let it fall. You just watch it’s fitting through and ain’t caught on nothin.”
“All right.”
It slides smoothly as he lowers it, then stops. “What’s in the way?” he yells.
I take a step forward — hee-haw.
“I said get back,” he say. “I can hear you.”