Ephram wished he were a dog. Somebody’s good dog with a mighty growl and bark. If he were, he would snarl and burrow his nose into the dirt, howl into the earth until it trembled on its axis. But he was only a boy so he buried that scream like an ax in his gut, where it remained to this day.
From far away Ephram felt Gubber’s hands pulling, then hitting, then screaming something, then running. Then silence and him and his daddy staring into the holes of each other’s eyes until another scream, this time it sounded like a sow at butcher time, then it was only Celia wailing, and more hands pulling at him. Hands finally strong enough to pull his body away, but not the rest of him.
They laid his daddy to rest at the Piggly Service. The Rankins’ cousin presided. By the time Ephram turned fifteen, he and Gubber were barely speaking to one another. Ephram watched Gubber swell and grow and strain against the fence of clothing, only to build a bigger fence, only to strain, again and again. Gubber wouldn’t look at Ephram if they passed in school or at P & K, and worse, when circumstance threw them together, Ephram became the perfect foil for Gubber, a soft, weakened thing to point out when collective fangs were bared. The fact that he accomplished this with a chain of rebukes and thick jokes, and that those actions had done more harm to Gubber Samuels than himself, was not lost on Ephram. He’d watched Gubber swallow his kindness and shit it out until all that remained was the waste of a good man.
GUBBER BREATHED in the last of his cigarette and crushed it with his boots. He rose and pointed himself west, towards the Samuels’s farm.
He spat out, “Watch your ass,” then walked down the red road. Ephram sat and watched Gubber’s back until it disappeared over the rise between a pair of pines.
Ephram lifted himself from the stump. His bones felt cold and ached just a bit at the joints. Celia would be rising right about now, drawing the water for his bath, then stopping herself. He felt a sudden longing for her grits and eggs made just how he liked them. For her coffee with a pinch of chicory and the psalm they would choose to read aloud every Sunday evening after dinner. They’d missed 124 last evening, which was one of his favorites. The road seemed to nudge him homeward. He took a step. Then two. Then he was walking, just to see if she was making out all right. Maybe he would knock on the door to say hello, or perhaps sit down over breakfast and talk it out with her.
A smattering of pine nuts rained down to his left. Ephram turned and saw the Bell graveyard, over the rise. And just that quick he knew that if he kept walking that’s where his feet were carrying him. Into that grave of a house, that death of a life. Ephram saw his body cold and still, laid out on Celia’s kitchen table waiting for the undertaker from Jasper to tote him off. He looked much as he did now, a fringe more gray along his temples. Then the picture was gone and he was left with the morning. She had unfurled herself fully and was waving her bright flag across the sky. He turned himself around and walked into Ruby’s door.
Outside in a pine, just above a row of headstones, an old crow gnawed on a pine nut. She was the only creature to see the red powder, rife with ill intent, spread across the entrance of the Bell home. She was the only living being to see Ephram unwittingly step squarely into it and track it like evil into Ruby’s house.
Chapter 16
Monday morning broke through, rubbing Sunday out of its eyes. All across town, coffee had been brewed and cups emptied. The crusts of toast and hardened grits had already been scraped into slop jars. By 9:00 A.M. Ephram Jennings’s sin had already been stirred, baked and left to cool, its scent filling the air of Liberty.
The In-His-Name Holiness Church was bustling in preparation for the one o’clock service. Pastor Joshua was at his desk writing the eulogy, trying to avoid as many R, M and T words as possible, as they played the devil with his nearly conquered habit of stuttering. He wondered if Ephram Jennings would show his face today after the disgrace he’d laid upon Mother Celia. It wasn’t just that he had taken up with another woman, because that was bound to happen in the life of a man given the temptation that surrounded him daily; it was that he had walked into a living room in hell and made himself at home. He was grateful Mother Celia had calmed the crowd, else they might have chased her out of town, like they did Sister Thelma after she took up with Supra Rankin’s husband — and she was a churchgoing woman. Lord knows, he wondered, what they would do to a heathen. The Pastor looked at his paper and thought of how he could weave in Proverbs 29:3 and Matthew 15:22, but doubted that the Rankins would appreciate that many references to harlots and demonic possession during Junie’s eulogy.
RUBY AWAKENED in a warm bed, sheets clean beneath and above her. Ephram was moving about her home so she watched him, in his undershirt, bringing in wood, lighting a steady fire in the stove. Ruby had only seen Ephram in ill-fitting shirts and suits. Now, in the morning light, his body was carved like hard oak — fine sanded, buffed, stained dark and polished. A watercolor tin of browns. She wondered what Billy would say if he saw her here in bed with this man. What would Mrs. Gladdington say if she saw Ephram? Met him, say, on Broadway and Fifty-third? Would she inadvertently try to put a coin into a paper cup filled with cola he’d just gotten from a hot dog vendor? What if Ruby stopped her, introduced them? Mrs. Gladdington could whip a word. Cut an object, a verb and a preposition, a beaker of adverbs, with the delicacy and skill of a cruel scientist. How easy would it be to wound this man, without him ever knowing that he had been hit?
Or what would any of the quick, darting people she had met, what would they say? The liberal world, the brave outsiders, and the wealthy philanthropists. So different, yet all could be depended upon for one common hypocritical judgment against this singular Black man. What disdain would tumble from their collective eyes, their taut, stretched lips?
The disapproval of class and race. If Ephram were a beleaguered member of the abject, illiterate poor, a recipient of their charitable largesse, flown in and trotted out at a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate banquet in their own honor — if he were in a suit purchased by them for the occasion, they would sit and chat and pose for snapshots in Vanity Fair and Page Six and pretend to be the type of people who didn’t care about such things. But bring him to an upper East Sixties party as your guest and the socialite sea would part, leaving him alone with his canapés. Good? Hardly enough. Honest? Utterly boring. An aging East Texas Black man with slow speech and Sunday school clothes was beyond unthinkable.
Yet, there he was, making her a cup of coffee, a nervous start in his movements. She saw the nicks and scars that littered his body like twigs, little badges from a war he had not only survived, but won. Tall, proud, honest, brave. And when his friend had come to call him away, he had chosen to stay. Ruby’s heart became soft like sweet potato pie and she couldn’t wait to press against the man.
Close to eleven-thirty, walking up the narrow road to Bell land, came a migration of men, all dressed in their navy and black suits, nails and underwear clean. They smelled of Lifebuoy soap and Old Spice, except Chauncy, who led the pack, dabbed and splashed in Paco Rabanne, a gift from one of his lady friends in Galveston. Gubber trailed behind, head bowed, carrying a travel bag containing Ephram’s suit, shirt and tie. He had thought to say no, but he wasn’t a man likely to go against a strong woman, much less the whole of a town. Celia had given him Ephram’s belongings with the charge of delivering a message. It was not one he relished. Not even a little.