The boy Ephram fidgeted in a chair. The light caught his face and Ruby saw him, eye purple and swollen shut. Two fat lips. Nose busted for sure. Cotton balls stuffed up in it. Hand bandaged. He sat like he’d wet himself in front of class. Shamed like that. Damn Maggie.
“Hot chocolate, y’all share,” Ruby heard Ma Tante say to Ephram. Ruby could smell the sweet bitter before it reached her and she pretended to wake.
Ma Tante set the cup down on a side table and wiped Ruby clean with a wet towel.
Then she handed the cup over to Ruby and turned to Ephram, “Come on over here, son.” Ephram carefully lifted himself onto the far end of the bed and sat there quiet. Ruby caught the tail end of his silence and let it settle across her lap. She sipped the hot cocoa. There was a knock on the door.
“You ain’t ready yet,” Ma Tante called and Ruby could hear Maggie stomp across the porch and sit hard. Ruby handed the cup to Ephram.
He waited, then took hold of the handle with his good hand. “Thank you.”
“Maggie give me this,” Ruby said after a pause and pulled a silver thimble from her dress pocket. “From P & K. She got that five finger discount.”
“Hmmm.”
“She do that for me sometime. Steal me treasure. She ain’t always like that, how she were with you. She get jealous is all … that, and she ain’t too fond of your daddy, the Reverend.”
He was quiet in a way that seemed to say that he understood very well how someone might come to dislike his papa.
Ruby took in the wreck of his face up close. Bits where Maggie’s knuckles had busted the skin on his cheek wide open. His limp right hand swollen and wrapped like a splint.
Damn.
Ruby felt the lonely before it came. Knew that for all she’d have to face when she left this tiny shack, the lonely would be the worst of it. She knew too that it was the thing each of them shared, only it was waiting for them in different places. For Ruby it was a room at Miss Barbara’s. For Maggie it was the minute after Ruby said good-bye. And for Ephram, it was right here, right now. She felt how the lonely never left him, not even sitting beside her.
Her throat squeezed until her lashes got wet. But she never cried, not since moving away. Not since she’d gotten her room at Miss Barbara’s. She swallowed it down.
He looked right at her. “I’m fine.”
“It hurt?”
“Little bit,” he lied.
He handed the chocolate back to Ruby and she slid in close to take it.
“Who look after you?” Ruby asked.
“My sister Celia — who look after you?”
“Mama’s up in New York City. She’s gonna send for me next month she misses me so bad. But ’til next month and since my grandmama got all that work to do — this White lady up in Neches take me in.”
“You working for her?”
“Sometime.”
“What you do?”
“Stuff. Pick up after folk. Take care of her other children too. But she sends me to school and such. She gone a lot. Own a couple a’ shops in Lufkin and Newton.”
“What kind?”
“Miss Barbara Brides.”
“Miss Barbara’s Bridal Necessities?”
“Think so.”
“There is where my mama usta work!”
“Naw! What did she do?”
“Stitching hems and such. And she a lace-maker too. She real good at it.”
“Miss Barbara be there?”
“Sometime. Usta be.”
“Your mama worked with her? Ain’t that something. Was she — nice to work for?”
“Miss Barbara was nice enough, I ’spose. She give me candy sometime. Do she you?”
“Oh yes.”
“What she give you?”
“Them gumballs mostly.”
“I like those. She mostly give me Tootsie Rolls.”
“I like them.”
“Yeah, they real good.”
They sat quiet for a minute. Then Ruby added, “But, if you see her, don’t tell her I said nothing ’bout her. She don’t like being in people’s mouths. She say it uncouth.”
“I won’t. Promise.”
“Thanks.”
MA TANTE walked to the front door and swung it open. “Come on.” Maggie walked in like a scolded puppy. She watched Ruby and Ephram lean against each other on the edge of the bed for a moment. She looked to Ma Tante, busy pulling the black drapes from the windows, then slowly sauntered over to the bed, hoisted herself up and tickled Ruby in her side. Ruby laughed.
“What y’all doing?”
“Talking.” Ruby said, “He know Miss Barbara. Say his mama usta work for her.”
Maggie loosely put her arm around Ruby’s shoulder, drawing her away from Ephram in one easy move. “Now ain’t that something.”
Ephram looked away and saw that the sky had turned a soot black. Ma Tante lit a kerosene lamp and walked over to the three of them and scooted them from the bed like chicks.
“Y’all got to leave. I got me a paying customer comin’.” She took the empty cup from Ephram. “Open yo’ right hand to the sky.” And all three turned their right hands up.
Ma Tante looked down at the three of them. Stupid as dirt before God blowed across it to make up some humans. Dumb as dishwater, light on suds. Three ignorant children with grown up sorrow living inside they eyes. They wasn’t worth her time. Didn’t know why she’d wasted so precious much of it.
Ma Tante sighed and felt suddenly old. Her whole life a drop of water in a pool. Make a little wave and then fade away to nothing. The eyes were still looking up at her. Palms raised. So she answered them.
“Ain’t nobody ever gone answer you cries. You can fill a well with tears, and all you gonna get is drowned. You sit there long enough and the crazy man find you. You weep too long, your heart ache so, the flesh slip off your bones and your soul got to find a new home. You wait on answers ’til the scaredy-cat curl up in your belly and use your liver for a pin cushion. And that’s just how you die. Ascared and waiting. And death find your ghost wailing for help. In this life, if someone promise you aid, they a lie. If someone offer they hand, check five time ten to see where they hide the bill. You ain’t nobody but alone. And God come to those with the fight to find It. Ain’t nothing easy. Not for the likes of you.”
The sky groaned outside. The storm was not over. In fact, it had not yet begun.
Useless, Ma Tante thought. To give them the gris-gris she’d made. What difference could it make? Didn’t have the juice time would have fed them. She’d made them up quick when she’d smelt the children coming through the rain. Couldn’t stop nothing. Still, it was a sin not to paddle your boat, even in a lake of fire.
So, into each hand Ma Tante put a teeny Black doll with red cross eyes. No bigger than a child’s pinkie.
“Don’t peek,” she warned.
The doll with the crow’s wishbone stitched to its heart she gave to the boy. The one with a woman’s silver ring sewn about its waist she handed to Maggie, and the third — the one with the oval lodestone tied on its back — was for Ruby.