Beulah, wit a bread knife?
Um huh — nodding her head.
How you gon cut somebody wit a bread knife?
Any knife’ll cut if you mad enough.
I told Beulah to get an ice pick and put it right there. Dave patted his chest.
Her bosom?
Yeah. Right up the middle.
Dave, how you tell her anything? You was still back home, Houston.
I had talked to her on the phone.
Phone? But yall didn’t—
See, cause if me and Sam had been there and got a holt of them niggas …
Gracie, John said, don’t listen to none of that nigga’s lies. Dave been lyin since he was born.
Weren’t you scared?
Why? Ain’t no reason to be scared. When St. Peter call you, better put on your runnin shoes.
Why hadn’t Beulah run away or crumbled away? And was dead. Sam was dead.
White-gloved angels shuttled you to your seat; red-feathered prayers shimmered in the stained-glass mercy of Christ. Reverend Rivers raised the full sleeves of his billowing robe and Reverend Sparrow did the same, but Beulah stopped their words in their mouths. Sam, if I coulda been there to hold up yo head, I woulda pulled the ax out. Sheila fanned Beulah. The organ soared a wave of music.
I tried to warn him, Dave said.
Hush, Sheila said. Hush.
That woman had burnt up her first husband to get the chump change he had. But you know Sam. Hardheaded.
Yeah, Lula Mae said. Out of his cotton-pickin mind since he was a baby. Sneakin liquor in his bottle. Sassin Mamma. Holdin his privates.
Hush.
I tried to warn him, Dave said. That nigga say to me, Dave, I’m honored. If a woman’ll kill you, that mean she really love you.
Maybe she was staying alive to keep Sam’s murderer in jail, staying alive to make the yearly journey, from St. Paul to the city, to the parole hearing and scream, No!
Keep that bitch in yo jail! Or give me a minute with her.
Sam dead. And Dave died, too. All the meat stolen from his bones, like somebody had boiled him in a vat of the brandy (E & J) he so loved. Dead. Like so many others. Andrew. R.L. Nap. Koot. Big Judy. And Lula Mae was near dead. Death growing inside her. Cancer will take us all, Lula Mae said. Your fingers press into her skin like clay. You lift her up into your arms, carry her from the chair to the bed, a dog carrying a weightless bone. And all her other siblings, all her brothers and sisters stretching back to Carrie Sweet, the baby sister, younger than Sam, whom she had killed nearly a century ago. I dropped her on the floor and cracked her head.
GRACIE SHUT HER EYES. Two white squares fixed behind her blind lids, fixed, for a moment before gradually dissolving into blackness. Her breathing gentle and peaceful. She heard rustling babies leave the room one by one, their feet the sound of rain, and their leaving the sound of sky beginning to blow clear. Then an in-waft of hot light. She opened her eyes to green. She half rose on her elbow. Her keys lay in the square of yellow where they had spilled out from her black leather purse. She picked them up, placed them on the nightstand, slid out of the bed, slapped her bare feet across the wood floor over to her rocking chair. She moved her fingers over the chair cushion. The black velvet had faded to green. She sat down before the open window. The shadows were soothing after the glare of the sun. Outside the window, clouds swallowed the sky, and the sky itself like a blue sheet stretched across the sun. Thirty years ago, John had hit her between the eyes with his words and ways. Their first apartment they shared with Sheila and Lucifer, a two-flat on Sixty-first and May (Englewood). She descended two flights of stairs each day, heels clicking against waterlogged boards, sinking into the wood flesh. Babies rushed from cracks, hissing and spitting, and she kicked at them, heels high (a cheerleader), and forced them to retreat back into the baseboards. Nothing in the city was attractive then, especially not that street with its big leafless trees, tall green iron-ridged streetlamps whose cold white light reflected in puddles and wet car roofs, or the courthouse buildings with chipped pee-stained fountains and leaning gargoyles ready to tumble into the street. The place she remembers from, this house, John had given her for his sins (the down payment he borrowed from his mother Inez, a loan he never repaid). The first night he left her, the room went silent, and the quiet got inside her. Her placing her Bible on the nightstand echoed the slammed door of his departure. (At least that’s how she remembers it now.) She woke to the sound of rain, bed rocking to the downpour’s rhythm. She tried to get out of bed and the floor began to rock. She reached for her Bible. She was lifted off the bed bodily and carried through every room in the house, then she was returned to the bed. She listened to the rain’s silence. This house for his sins, John having vacated it more than ten years ago, leaving only the shell of an old suit, his clean overalls hanging in the garage — and the large nuptial bed where he still steered her desires every night, only — like a sailor — to return to sea at the spreading rays of dawn, trailing a scent of that first fresh shore thirty years ago where she spread the fans of her legs to his waiting hands, where his tongue discovered the circles of her thighs. This house, yes, but the babies had followed her here, hidden in the corners of her suitcase, warm beneath her cotton nightgowns.
Ten years ago, John had tried to throw her out the window.
Bitch, you wanna leave? His words shattered her sleep.
John. What you doin?
You wanna leave? He lifted her from the bed babylike and carried her over to the open window. Go out right now. The city echoed through the window.
She felt cool night air against her back, the wind’s soft fingers trying to push her back into the room.
John. No. These words with the moon behind them, yellow and forceful, long as shafts of corn. John. No.
And the city slamming shut.
After he left, it took her nearly two full weeks to grow used to sleeping in a house flooded with babies — especially the blue one who slapped her with his wet dolphin tail — and she would find herself awake in the night’s stillest hour, in full moonlight, all motion having left the bed, listening to the dull pulse of the infants circulating through the rooms, bumping against the furniture, rustling the onionskin pages of her Bible, and listening beyond that to the slow suck of her firstborn’s lips, because it was city Jack who captured her country eyes, sugared her up sweet, and put a moving inside her, her firstborn, a daughter, Cookie, wine-lipped Jack, in that other life before John, in her very first apartment in the city—a four-room railroad flat on T Street over in Woodlawn that boasted sixteen windows, concealing a single bathroom in the hall with a hole in the ceiling, where you squatted on the toilet under an open umbrella, guarding against the greedy eyes above—which she shared with Beulah and Sheila.
Grunting, the driver hoisted the steamer trunk out of his cab and put it on the sidewalk. I’d take it up fo you, but, see, I got a bad back.