This Bitter Earth Part 20

Mercy remained in the kitchen, seated at the table, staring out the window toward the place where #10 once stood.

The kitchen was cozy and warm. It reminded Mercy of her grandmother's kitchen and the good smells that always seemed to be there. Even the voices of the strangers were comforting. Mary'd always had a house full of people.

But these people were not dancing, laughing or playing cards; these people seemed to be mad and mourning all at the same time. Mercy wondered who had died.

Grandma.

Her mind reminded her and Mercy felt that piercing jab that would always accompany that realization.

She dropped her head and wished she were dead too.

Seth was still in his seat and Gloria had pulled the matching wing chair from across the room so that she could sit next to her husband.

Jewel whined a bit when she saw her mother and stretched her fat arms out to her.

"Well," Pearl began as she pa.s.sed Jewel off to Seth and then began fingering the small cross that hung from the thin chain around her neck.

Joe rubbed at the b.u.mp on his head and wondered if he was actually still unconscious and all of this was part of that state.

Pearl let out a heavy breath, clasped her hands in her lap, turned to face Joe and began.

"This day been on its way for a long time and I knew the good Lord would let me keep breathing until it got here." Pearl looked over at Sugar and then back to her husband.

"When... when you came here," she continued, turning her attention to Sugar again, "I knew you was suppose to be here with me... with us," Pearl said and laid her hand on Joe's knee. "You look so much like my baby, so much like her! Ooh, it hurt me just to look at you and it hurt me worse not to." Pearl threw her hands up to her face. "Lord, you don't know how I hated you for looking so much like my baby, it *bout drove me mad."

Joe tried to wrap his arm around Pearl, but she shrugged him off.

"What you done to this family?" Gloria hurled at Sugar. "You hush, you hear? You don't know nothing *bout this. Nothing!" Pearl turned on Gloria.

Gloria looked to Seth for support and when he offered none, she shrank back into her chair.

"I wanted to tell you, I tried toa"" Joe finally found his voice, but Pearl didn't allow him to use it.

"You kept it from me, when all the time you knew she was yours. You ain't tell me even though I was dying inside and going mad in my head."

Joe dropped his eyes in shame. "I wasn't sure... I thought... and then the picture..." Joe's mind was jumping between all of the scenes that had led up to this moment. Him and Bertie Mae beneath the birch tree; the full moon and the sound of footfalls echoing above their groans. Sugar moving in next door, the gossip. Seth in love and then in pain almost all at once. And then his dream the night Seth left. Someone was walking through his dreams and he could feel the low branches of a birch tree brushing against his bare back and then came Pearl's horrifying scream from #10.

"I saw that white man call you back over. I saw him give you something, Joe, something that knocked the wind out of you. You sat down on that porch and I thought you would sit there forever."

Pearl looked down at her hands as she spoke. "You came in and I wanted to ask you what was wrong, what that man had found over there, but your face looked so strange I was afraid to ask." Pearl twisted her wedding ring around her finger. "You hugged me. You ain't say a word, just held me real close like one of us was about to die."

Sugar shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She wanted to sit down, but that would mean sitting on the couch with Pearl and Joe and she felt she had no place there.

She turned to look at Mercy, who was standing now and staring out of the kitchen window.

"You had something to drink that night. Plum wine, corn liquor, can't remember which, and you fell asleep on the couch. I tried to wake you, but you wouldn't move and that's when I saw it, slipping out of your pocket."

Joe's face went gray.

"She sure was a fine woman," Pearl said, looking at Sugar. "You favor her around the eyes and mouth."

Sugar smiled back and for some strange reason she felt herself begin to blush.

"Pearl, I'm sorry." "Sorry for being a man, Joe?" Those words carried ten long years of bitterness and Joe closed his eyes against them.

"Ain't nothing you can say to make it better or make it go away. What's done is done." Pearl clapped her hands together. "You two." She pointed to Sugar and then to Seth. "Y*all family. Now you didn't know that then, but you know now." Pearl paused to consider her next set of words. "Y'all more than just family, y*all are brother and sister."

Seth twisted in his chair.

"Seems like there some things happening here that I don't know about," Gloria hissed at Seth and turned an even eye on Sugar. "So what happened ten years ago?" Her words were sharp.

"Something that concern them two and not you," Pearl said as she pulled herself up from the couch.

"She my wife." Seth felt he needed to say something, anything. This had all gone too smoothly for him. He wanted his mother to scream and cry and hate his father the way he was hating him.

"Yes, she is, and that was your choice, not mine." Pearl spoke as she moved past him. "Man and wife don't tell each other everything. Ain't that right, Joe?"

She didn't need an answer and wasn't interested in hearing one.

"Sugar, come on in here and introduce me to this pretty child you done brought down here with you."

Pearl took Sugar by the hand and they walked into the kitchen.

JJ hadn't said much of anything since the band walked in late.

"We ain't late, we right on time," the slick-talking so-called manager of the band called Jericho replied. "My name is Luther Cobbs, my friends call me L.C.," the man with conked red hair said and extended his hand to JJ.

"JJ," was all Joe Jr. said.

"Yeah," Luther said, pulling his hand back and running it across his hair. He gave the place a once-over before he turned his attention back to JJ.

"Nice place you got here. You the sole owner?"

JJ didn't bother to answer him. "Set your boys up over there," he said and turned and walked away.

The band played for three hours straight before they took a break. JJ had to admit that Jericho was probably the best band . he'd had at his club. They didn't start out slow like most bands; they played every song like it was their last. With each tune the tempo rose until JJ thought they would actually blow the roof off of Two Miles In. At one point the entire building was trembling, and the pots that sat cooling on the stove in the back began knocking up against each other.

Mack, the piano player, was a round blind man with lips so tiny they folded away into his fat face when he smiled. He called for a bowl of ice when the trumpet player led him to the bar. His fingers were swollen from the knuckles on down to the tips.

"I ain't never heard ivories sing like that!" Angel said, pushing her hefty bosom out toward him.

"Thanks," Mack said.

"Yeah, the whole band is hot. But you, you are the best onea""

"He's blind," JJ interrupted her.

"He is?" Angel said, waving her hands in front of Mack's face.

"Yep." Mack laughed.

"She fine, though," the trumpet player injected, enjoying the view that was wasted on Mack.

Angel considered the trumpet player for a moment. He was tall and as thin as a willow. "Oh," she said, stepping around Mack. "I can't be leading no man around," she cooed, dabbing at the moisture that had formed in her cleavage. The trumpet player just grinned.

JJ shook his head and rang the cowbell he kept over the bar, indicating the last call of the night.

"Scotch, straight up."

JJ heard the request and reached for the scotch bottle and a shot gla.s.s. He poured the liquor and looked up into the mirror to check out the man who'd made the request. But his features were distorted beneath the haze of body heat that had settled on the mirror.

"One dollar," JJ said, turning to meet the man face-to-face.

JJ knew what his eyes looked like to other people because he saw it when he looked at himself in the mirror.

Living inside of him was an abysmal loathing that had begun when he hoisted the coffin of his baby sister up on his shoulder and watched as his mother folded into herself.

Years later the hate rooted itself deeper the night white soldiers stormed the barracks of his infantry with guns, blowing away most of the men in the company.

JJ had escaped with his life, but not his soul, and he had wandered aimlessly for months, living as a vagrant, first in small towns and then later in big cities. He would hold odd jobs, rent a room and buy a woman's warmth whenever possible.

JJ would realize that it was the women who pushed him over the edge and sent him wandering again. Sometimes he would look down into their painted faces and see his dead sister, his crying mother or the twisted dying face of one of the men from the 364th infantry; or they would be lying beneath him, legs spread ready to receive him and make the sad mistake of looking into his eyes.

The glow would fade from their faces and their bodies would go cold and begin to shake. Some would squeeze their eyes shut and let him do to them what he had paid for, but most would beg to go to the bathroom, which was usually out in the hall. He'd never see or hear from them again.

Alcohol numbed him for a while and then later, smack helped to silence the screams of his mother, helped to quiet the sounds of the machine guns and erase the images of his friends' bodies that were torn apart by the bullets.

But nothing could rid him of the salty taste their spraying blood had left on his tongue when he'd opened his mouth to scream.

JJ slept with the lights on now. He didn't drink or shoot up anymore, and he wore long-sleeved shirts, even through the blistering Arkansas summers, to hide the needle marks and that time in his life.

Now he looked into the eyes of the man before him and felt sure he saw in those eyes what people saw when they looked into his own.

JJ was not a fearful man and did not consider himself a religious one. He hadn't stepped foot in a church since his sister was killed, but now, looking at this man was making the hair on his arms and the back of his neck rise and the only thought that entered his mind at that moment was, Oh, G.o.d.

Part three.

Coming Home to Roost.

Chapter 20.

WHEN Lappy was picked up in Little Rock for hara.s.sing a white woman, he didn't realize that they would arrest him and beat him to within an inch of his life. He was drunk and high and in that state of mind, had tried to plead his case.

"My mama is white and my daddy's mama was white so that make me three-quarters white. I got more cracker in me than n.i.g.g.e.r," he told the four white cops that were taking turns kicking him.

They didn't understand a word Lappy Clayton was saying. His lips were swollen at that point, both of his front teeth were gone and his tongue was split at the tip.

His court-appointed lawyer pleaded guilty to the charges of attempted rape, even though the only thing he'd done was slide his hand down the woman's thigh. And she'd actually grinned at him when he did it.

She had had quite a bit to drink and didn't seem to notice the kink in Lappy's hair.

The place was smoky and no one could hear over the jukebox, but people kept talking anyway. Lappy was half drunk too when he stumbled in from a card game.

The woman had looked dead at him when he walked through the door and Lappy knew that the new position she moved her legs into (crossed at the thigh instead of ankle) was for him.

All he could think of, from the moment he stepped across the threshold until the door banged shut behind him, was running his fingers across those thighs and getting a head start on how it would feel to lie between them.

Ten minutes later someone was pulling him up by his collar and asking her if she was a monkey lover.

She screamed back, "What?" and then, "I didn't know!" Someone called Lappy a half-breed n.i.g.g.e.r c.o.o.n and then threw him out of the bar and onto the wet ground outside.

A sharp pain cut through him as the heel of a boot met with his spleen.

Lappy puked and watched as the okra and grits he'd had earlier in the evening ebbed slowly down and over the sidewalk into the gutter.

By the time the pain faded into a dull thud, spiked black heels were at his nose and he could hear the woman from the bar saying, "That's him. That's the one that tried to rape me."

Lappy looked up and saw that her legs were parted and he could see as clear as day the smiling lips of the woman's v.a.g.i.n.a. He would never forget that.

Lappy laughed and pointed at it and that's when the boot came down on the side of his face and sent his two front teeth scrambling behind the okra and grits.

That was in *58 and Lappy spent five years doing hard labor. He'd worked the chain gang for three of the five, and during that time the woman who had accused him of rape found G.o.d and felt that Lappy Clayton would be the first soul she'd try to save.

She would have thought twice about it had she known about his crimes, crimes that involved more than a misplaced hand or lascivious desire. She would have hollered attempted murder if she knew what Lappy Clayton had done in his lifetime. But she didn't and went right down to the judge that had convicted him, a distant cousin on her mother's side, and said that she had been coaxed into lying by Ned Jeffers, who had been dead two years by then.

"Never was an attempt. In fact the man just came in to ask for directions. I heard him ask for it. He didn't even look at me. Not once."

"That boy threaten you, Janey?"

"Nossir."

"Some other n.i.g.g.e.rs threaten you?"

"Nossir."

"Why you all of a sudden changing your story?"

"I'm telling you it was never mine to begin with. Ned made me tell it."