But those were the thoughts he’d had while breathing. In death it had become much simpler. Jesus was a fluff of tobacco smoke. God was a figment of distilled whiskey. The name his mother had given him, Omar Jennings, and the name he had forged, the Reverend Jennings, both were dust in the crack of his shoes.
He had gathered at the pit fires since he was thirteen, nearly seventy-five years before. Then later, as a man, leading the circle, fear and awe freshly painted on every man as they looked upon him.
But first he had been a boy and the whole of his life had been spent sleeping in the corner of a one-room dirt cabin. His daddy had been too useless to feed all twelve of them so Omar had taken to stealing chickens before he turned six. He brought them home to his mama, beaming, and she would slap him to the ground for thieving. But when she served that chicken plucked, cleaned and fried, her eyes would land soft over his features. It was the one moment of joy he remembered in all of his young life.
His daddy drunk up any two pennies his mama found to rub together, then got mean and limp, eyes blood red with raw hate piercing through. He was too lazy to stand up and beat a boy, but if one happened to be wandering too close to his spider hands he would snatch arm, leg, hand and start beating with whatever was handy — broom, stick, frying pan, hammer. He would say his son’s name with heat and spit, “Omar, Omar … you a low-down piece of donkey shit.” Or “Omar, you the asshole of a maggot.”
If it bothered Omar Jennings as a boy, he had no recollection of that fact. Certainly he could recall the physical pain of the beatings. The hiding his face from his friends. His arm in a sling. He even remembered getting on his knees in church, with a hollow nothing for his efforts.
So when the old man was killed after passing out near Master Gibbs’s cotton fields with his pipe burning too close to the twenty-pound gas tank, Omar wasn’t particularly troubled. Even later, when he heard how they found his father, writhing on the earth, every stitch of clothes and skin seared right off his muscle, Omar took the news in stride.
A week after his daddy died Omar Jennings, feeling far older than his twelve years, put the other children to work. The girls to Miss Sybil the laundress, the boys collecting scraps at the mill. He organized and planned and collected all the money from his siblings and put it in his mama’s apron come every Friday night. Now she didn’t slap him. Instead, with the children out playing where she had sent them, she took his hand and guided it under her skirt. Told him when he held it back that he had grown plenty big, that he was the man of the house now and had to perform certain duties. How the first time they rutted, she ate him whole in the dim of that shack, on the pallet where she and his daddy had slept, on top of the dirt he had watched her sweep. How his mama worked against Omar’s fear for the first ten minutes and then, to his young shame, in spite of it for the next hour. Availing herself of his embarrassed reflexes like a bear waits for salmon. Until, exhausted and spent, she nudged him from her mat as the girls stumbled in, complaining about the dark.
That whole next week Omar kept his eyes tight on the floor whenever his mama was near, pulling up a root, specializing on a pebble. But by the time Friday found its way back to his doorstep, the steel his papa had beat into him held Omar in good stead. When she spread her apron out for his collections, he slapped her hard across the face and took her by force instead, pushing and beating until they were the two of them beasts in the night, thrashing like hooked fish on the dry, hot floor.
Things went on like that for another two years, Friday nights coming and going like swallowing a briar patch dipped in chocolate. Until his mama came up pregnant. When he asked about sin, she threw back her head, mouth wide, teeth white. She laughed until she choked on her spit, then coughed and laughed some more. She rolled from him and a chuckle burped from her throat. What she told him next was worse than all the rest put together. Her eyes glazed, she leveled them at him. “You a worse halfwit than your daddy. He weren’t much, but at least he was a man. You ain’t nothing but a woman’s whore, and give her money besides. You leaving come morning and Ernest Meagers moving in. He think it’s his and you ain’t standing around moon-eyed to tell him no different.”
Face wooden, Omar said, “But I looks after things round here.”
She was lying down limp when she grinned. “You ain’t nothing but a tadpole wriggling in the mud, ’s time fo’ a bullfrog.”
Some people said it was the chain gang that had escaped from Tallahassee that had done it. Most thought it was Gibbs’s poor relations or the Klux, but the way they found Sofia Jennings cut up like a prize hog was the shame of Jessup County. Both White and Black talked about it for years. White women from the Ladies Sugar Beet Society brought Omar and his siblings cake and round bread for weeks, mashed potatoes over cauliflower and beets with crinkly onions. He took it and pained his face according to their needs. He took their money too when it was offered and still set his sisters to work. He took their money come Friday and from the middle girl, Betty, who’d just turned ten, he took more than that in the outhouse while the rest of his siblings slept.
When he left Jessup three years later he had $400.45 rolled tight in his knapsack, every nickel in the family bank.
Omar also left with his mama’s pallet folded in his knapsack, brown with years of sweat, and a few remaining bloodstains his able sister had not been able to wash clean. He left with the ax handle he’d buried in the thick of the forest the night his mama had forced him to kill her. And the same pack of matches that had proved so useful some two years before, when Omar had found his daddy passed out from drink, tied him to a mule and dragged him two whole miles to the Gibbs plantation, and set his past aflame.
As he walked away he could almost hear them screaming just under the loom, their souls blocked from rising by the lodestone he placed over each of their graves and the cold ice terror he’d frozen in their eyes at the moment of their death. Omar learned one thing for certain. Not all souls rose.
Chapter 21
An entire week had passed after Junie Rankin was laid to rest, but the porch at P & K still chewed on the fat of the funeral. How Sister Celia had taken the high road and how Ephram Jennings had vomited all over Chauncy Rankin’s new suit.
Plenty had made their way out to Bell land to inspect the sinful goings on. Each acting as if they were wandering that way on some errand or another, after which most had come knocking on Celia’s door reporting, as she had requested, on the things they had seen.
Verde Rankin came to Ruby’s door for her mother’s dishes and had seen Ephram breaking the hard sod in the yard with a hoe, seeds at the ready, while Ruby was sitting next to that chinaberry tree talking to the wind.
Cleary had seen Ruby and Ephram walking around hand in hand down by Marion Lake while Moss Renfolk had caught sight of Ephram nailing fresh lumber from the mill onto Ruby’s roof.
Minnie Hardy, K.O.’s cousin visiting from Beaumont, got in on the act and said while she was taking the bus from Newton she had spied Ephram holding red roses, no less, tucked under his arm with a big white bow. She had also peeked and seen that he was carrying two bags full of groceries with things that looked like Vienna sausages and two big rib-eye steaks.
Righteous Polk and her cousin Grace reported that Ruby’s clothes, even her drawers, were out on the clothesline when they stopped by to drop off pound cake and, Lord, if they hadn’t seen Ruby walking around in clean clothes, with her hair braided and put up, looking for the life of her like a normal girl.