A small room in a small apartment made smaller by the city’s crowded sounds and Beulah’s listening ears. Made louder by the train that thundered by, yes, thundered, the train one long stream of torrential weather, shaking you in your bed at night — ah, the El trains were in touching distance, just reach your hands out the back window — shaking the ancient bones and aching muscles, flaking plaster from wall and ceiling. There was the single white sheet before the sink and clawfoot tub, and it was here that Sheila first revealed the burns spotting her arms and legs, light-colored scars, sand on dark skin. Gracie never learned why Sheila came out the bathroom nude, neither arrogant nor innocent, perhaps unaware that Gracie was in the room, perhaps knowing but not caring since they were sisters, perhaps carrying both feeling-seeds. Gracie had heard different versions of the story — it happened before she was born — but all agreed that Lula Mae had left her baby girl unattended before her fireplace. Mr. Albert Post — so he had named himself, this orphan, stuffed in a white man’s mailbox in Tupelo, umbilical cord wrapped like a turban around his stone-small head — passed Daddy Larry’s farm and heard the baby’s screams. He rushed through the door and saw a bundle of fire on the stones of the fireplace. Lifted the burning baby into his arms, juggled flame and heat, and ran quickly, motivated by both heroism and pain, for the pump. The fire had already been smothered in his arms by the time he reached the pump seconds later. He dunked the blistered baby like an Easter egg into a rusty pail of water beside the well.
Beulah said that Albert Post visited Sheila every day for the ten years he remained in Houston, though neither Sheila nor Gracie had any recollection. Albert Post was nothing like these city men, Beulah said.
A man is a man, Gracie said.
I see you know everything. One day you’ll learn that fat meat is greasy.
Beulah looked at the two sisters. Yall sap’s runnin.
We jus women, Sheila said. Jus women.
Who asked you? Gracie directed the question to Sheila. She gave Sheila her hardest look.
And runnin early too, Beulah said.
Mind yo own business — still talkin to Sheila.
Who mindin yours?
Don’t worry bout it.
Keep yo hand on it and nothing can get in it, Beulah said.
Never could tell Beulah nothing. She love to weigh, to gravitate, to settle. She jus gab gab gab. Never seen nobody had so much to say about other people’s business. Sniffing the dirt out of they clean clothes. Then gab gab gab.
She shoulda opened her legs mo and her mouth less, Sam said.
Ain’t that the truth, Dave said.
Gracie had tried to tell Beulah about what had happened in church.
She was studying the vibrating words of Reverend Tower’s tongue in the celestial roof. Thinking about the church in Houston that had no ceiling, just rafters for you to look through and see God. Thinking about the Memphis church that was hardly better. Thinking how Reverend Tower, the pearl of all city preachers, insisted his church mirror the pearly gates and roads of heaven. She could only wonder about his old church, but the new Mount Zion had a tower that poked the belly of heaven. Yes. Now she understood the eternal validity of the soul. Then she experienced the oldest feeling in the world. Something clawed her ass. The same something slapped its paw over the harp strings of Reverend Tower’s voice and cut his song in its tracks.
She had scars to prove it, four long red lines that ran from her ass to her nape.
Beulah looked at her, her words not meriting a blink. You been drinkin wit that drunk fool Jack?
She tried to tell Beulah about the child, the alien lodged in her womb, chopping and kicking. The hiss words that snaked up from the pit of her belly. She tried to tell but couldn’t. (By habit, she tells everything twice, once to get the words out, the second time for memory.) She knew what the results would be if she opened her mouth. Less told in the telling. So she drew herself tight, curved her umbilical cord into a noose.
WAS IT ANDREW who rushed her to the hospital the night Cookie was born? Or Sam or Dave driving And’s car? Did Sam have two legs then? She seems to remember freight cars that ran by the stinking stockyards, long hooting locomotives drawn by a single engine.
Her sixteen years, Cookie never spoke a word. Her mouth slack, never giving her grunts the muscle they needed to push clear words. And where Jesus, the lone survivor of her womb, had etched his name on the walls of Gracie’s belly, JESUS WAS HERE — to this day she urinated razor blades — his two dead siblings — who could tell what they were, these still births, the first with rubbery skin, gills, flippers, and snorkel, and the last, a two-headed cat with a pigtail — left no trace of their presence, their names erased chalklike from a blackboard. Though they disappeared, for weeks milk remained, mocking white trails of what she had endured and lost and what she might still endure and lose again.
ONE BABY STOLE A CANDY CANE from Jesus’s Christmas stocking. The toddler clutched it by the throat, beating out its life with his bottle. The toddler grabbed another baby, the loop-bodied one — heads at both ends of the loop — and strangled life out of the throats. For those two quick minutes in her life, Gracie believed that Jesus had come to protect her.
EVENING SUNBEAMS set the dust to dancing. John sat with his arm thrown over the couch, his two brown eyes like setting suns, his body short and squat like Daddy Larry’s smokehouse, perfect masonry, and his careful head sinking into his broad shoulders. A real downtown man. Gracie watched him from the other shore of the room, smelled the bright polish on his shoes. The soul travels quickly from a body touched by sin, she said, repeating Reverend Tower’s words.
Ain’t we all touched? John said.
Get out from among them and quit touchin the unclean thing and I will take you in.
John looked at her. He cut a grin. Took her hand hot into his own. Well, Miss Gracie … He played with her hand, searching each finger of memory.
Maybe he knew, all these children who ran her life, line by line. She still didn’t know why they hadn’t slain her, why each infant seemed to be allowed one feeble attempt at violence before it was snatched back to hell — or wherever it came from — sucked back, spaghettilike into the mouth of its creator. Rising for a single gesture of violence, then the bucket pulled back into the well. Until tomorrow.
Seek ye the kingdom of heaven and all things shall be added to you.
Does that include you, Miss Gracie?
What them two boy-men doin wit them old women?
Don’t look old to me. Least not the pretty one.
But they is old. Pretty can’t hide age. Ugly neither. Them McShan sisters is robbin the cradle.
Perhaps, she said. She extended the banner of religion, the white hand leading through the dark. Will he clutch it and follow? Hope you’re takin care of your soul? she said.
Don’t get down to Thirty-fifth Street that often, John said. His breathing had stilled.
Gracie didn’t crack a smile. Power is no jokin matter.
Little green apples and all that.
You sound like that damn fool Dallas.
Years later, John would beat Dallas until he was blue in the face — first time she would see anybody black go blue, coal change to ocean — for reasons she forgets. Years later, Dallas filled John with the alcohol-flavored notion for the Dynamic Funky Four Corners Garage — John opened it with money he borrowed from Inez, money he never paid back; after a month or two, he dropped the Dynamic; Spider tended the register and books, (Engine) Ernie did all the actual car repairs, while Dallas and John drank and looked on — though John did come up with the clever idea to perch an old black Cadillac on the garage’s roof. But that was later. This was now.