This Bitter Earth Part 8

"Ruby!" she called out again and still no response came.

May giggled and then smiled and Sugar could swear she saw her blush before she turned her head toward her again.

"Ruby coming soon, I heard the pot drop," May mumbled before her hand fell down to her chest, sending the pipe and its charred contents across the bed.

Sugar slapped at the smoking bits of tobacco, brushing them off the sheet and to the ground. When she turned to look back at May, her eyes were open and staring, her body still. May was gone.

"Oh, my G.o.d," Sugar cried and threw her hands up to her face.

The clattering sound of metal hitting the floor followed, and Sugar knew that a pot had indeed dropped and both May and Ruby were dead.

People stared at her when she came into town to buy food, pick up a package from the post office or just for a change of scenery.

Children pointed and snickered behind curved palms and the older onesa"the ones who felt that they were grown because they had moved past holding their father's hands or clinging to the skirts of their mothersa"felt they had earned the right to sneer at her, talk out loud about who she was and what had happened in the Lacey home when she'd arrived a season ago.

"Witch," some called her. "Devil," most said.

After May and Ruby died, the sheriff came to investigate Sugar, asking her questions that made her mouth curl and twist as she fought to keep back the cuss words that pushed at her clenched teeth.

"Why would you give a sick old woman a pipe to smoke?"

"Don't you think that pot was too big and heavy for Ruby to lift? Poor thing, the strain and the loss of her sister probably caused her heart to give out the way it did."

"Where you been all these years?"

"Them sisters had any life insurance?"

"What you gaining from their sudden demise?"

Sugar looked him right in his blue eyes and answered all of his questions as calmly and efficiently as she could. Whenever she felt herself about to lose control she just picked up the gla.s.s of water she'd poured for herself and took a sip. Not a big one, mind you. Just small ones, enough to keep her mouth moist and allow her mind to focus on something else, if only for a moment.

"How you a Lacey and them sisters ain't never had no children ?" he asked, scratching under his arms and then down between his legs.

"They just took me in and give me their name."

"Just like that? Well, that don't sound like no legal adoption to me. Sound like one to you, Kurt?" he said, turning his big hog head toward his deputy. His neck was thick and red and Sugar thought how appropriate that was.

"Nossir, not at all."

"Uh-huh. Where your real mama at?" he asked as he picked something from his nose.

"Dead," she said.

"Daddy?" he asked and flicked something to the floor.

Sugar hesitated for a moment. She could feel her eyes begin to twitch and she took a sip of water.

"Don't know who he is." And then, "Or was," she added without blinking.

The sheriff rubbed his ma.s.sive stomach and gave Sugar a look that made her skin crawl.

"Uh-huh. Just you here now?" he said, looking past Sugar toward the stairs.

"Yes."

"Uh-huh. Well, you stay close, this is still an ongoing investigation," he said, standing up and hitching his pants over his stomach.

Hours turned into days and days into nights filled with the sound of Pearl's voice, Jude's crying, and a hundred sharp blades that wheeled at her through the blackness.

Nothing came of the investigation and Sugar stayed in Short Junction for nine more winters before she decided to leave.

The Lacey women had willed the house to her and Sugar supposed that ent.i.tled her to the 7,240 dollars she found stuffed in coffee cans and buried in the freezer May had purchased back in *54.

Sugar kept to herself and didn't share more than ten straight words with anyone, until the day a white man and black woman came knocking on her door. She didn't invite them in or offer them a cool gla.s.s of water; she just stepped out onto the porch, folded her hands across her chest and listened to what they had to say.

When they left, promising to return within a week, Sugar couldn't seem to stop their words from bouncing around in her head.

"Historical."

"Preservation."

"Six thousand dollars."

"Original and intact."

Lincoln had slept there, they said, right in that very house. President Abraham Lincoln had walked through those halls and discussed in great length with John Lacey, a good friend, long-time confidant and grandfather to the Lacey women, his concerns about the war his country was about to be thrown into.

Abbey, the Lacey women's grandmother and slave to John Lacey, had probably served Lincoln from the very same silver tea set that sat shimmering in the china cabinet.

Bigelow

Summer 1956

Chapter 8.

To Pearl it seemed that #10 Grove Street was weeping, sometimes screaming and other times just moaning. Sometimes, though, she could almost fool herself into believing that those loud cries of sorrow were the sounds of the wind caught in the trees or tearing through the rows of wheat and alfalfa that grew across the road.

But when it came to the blood, there was no tricking herself into believing it was anything but what it was. So Pearl just bit her bottom lip and wrung her hands when her eyes happened to fall on #10 and the s.p.a.ces on the house where the clapboard had come loose.

The earth was bitter around #10, the flowers were all gone, killed off by weeds or plucked by people who still came to stand and look at the place where she once lived and almost died. They pointed at the window where she'd sat, naked, black and bold. The window where Seth had called to her and then later, where she'd hurled curse words that broke through the night and sent him running.

Pearl couldn't sleep in full hours anymore, #10 wouldn't allow it, so she slept during the silent minutes between the moans. She slept during the s.p.a.ce of time where the house just fretted before the pain struck again in the rafters, along the floorboards or down the spine of the banister.

Joe never seemed to hear it, or at least pretended not to. In fact he hardly ever looked over at #10. His head didn't even turn in that direction when he stepped out on the porch to catch a late-night breeze or check the sky for clouds before heading toward town.

He preferred instead to look out at the fields or down the road toward town, allowing his thoughts to drift on something other than #10 and the daughter that used to live there.

Joe had taken to humming to himself whenever he was in the presence of #10, odd tunes that Pearl did not recognize, sad tunes that somehow went along with the misery that was spilling out of #10. Tunes that made Pearl feel as if their time in that place, on that side of town, had come to an end and a change was needed in order to keep on living.

She mentioned to Joe that a change was due and maybe across town, close to where the railroad tracks ran like silver veins through the land, would be the place to resettle and enjoy their old age years together.

Joe just raised bushy eyebrows and asked, "Why, Pearl? Why you wanna up and leave the house we been living in for forty years?"

Pearl couldn't give him an answer, not without lying, so she said nothing and reached for the Bible as she prayed for a strong wind or violent storm to come along and rip #10 from G.o.d's green earth, hurling it far, far away from there.

Number ten was sold that summer. Joe mentioned it to Pearl in pa.s.sing over lunch, right before he picked up his gla.s.s of lemonade and just as the musical introduction to Still of the Night came across the radio. Pearl nodded her head and waved a fly away from the last biscuit that sat on the small white plate between them. He waited for her to raise her eyes, swallow or at least reach for the biscuit. But she did nothing but continue to chew the food that was already in her mouth.

Joe watched the steady movement of her jaw and the small beads of sweat that formed around her hairline and across the bridge of her nose. He wanted to say something about the dark circles beneath her eyes and make a point of how her clothes had started to hang from her body just as they did all those years ago after Jude was killed and Pearl lost her spirit. But he held his tongue and waited for Pearl to respond. She said nothing.

"It went for about twenty-five hundred. The house and the land," he said when the silence around them went stale. "They got a good piece of land. Fertile."

Joe wanted to reach for the biscuit, wanted to reach for Pearl, but he kept talking instead. "The house is sound too. Strong. Solid."

Pearl still did not say a word.

"That land gives back more than it take. Fertile."

He stopped then, because the fly was attacking his ear and his thoughts were becoming scattered.

Pearl nodded, flinched a bit as the sounds from #10 cut through Joe's words and then she reached for the biscuit.

Two days later the sky above Grove Street lit up orange and yellow, and black smoke billowed out and across the fields that marked the south side of town.

The only firehouse in the county was five towns away in Saw Creek. People came out with buckets filled with water to throw onto the growing flames. In the end it was hopeless. There was little anyone could do but stand back and watch as #10 burned to the ground.

"It's been dry," some said.

"Hot as h.e.l.l for June."

"No rain in weeks."

There were more than enough reasons for the house to have gone up.

"Anyone seen Alberta's boy?"

"Harper?"

"Nah, the older one. Kale, I think."

"Nah, that's the middle boy. You mean Wilfred."

"Yeah, Wilfred. He got a thing for matches."

"Ain't seen him *round."

"Yeah, that Wilfred got a thing for matches."

By the time the truck arrived, #10 was nothing more than a pile of smoldering ashes. The gra.s.s was black and the trees that stood closest to the house were burnt and naked.

"d.a.m.n shame," Joe said as he stepped up onto the porch.

"Uh-huh," Pearl said and turned to go back into the house.

Joe watched her walk through the doorway, dismissing the smell of gasoline that followed her.

Part Two.

Once and Again... St. Louis-1965.

Chapter 9.

WHEN the black-and-yellow checkered cab pulled up in front of Mary Bedford's house Sugar knew immediately that she wouldn't be there long. It wasn't because she wasn't expected or even because there was a strong possibility that she would not be welcomed.

Well, she had been gone for over ten years and had promised to write and/or call. She had done neither. Sugar didn't really know why she'd come back after all this time, but she supposed it was the nightmares that finally brought her back. Mary beckoning her through the red door and into a darkened hallway where Nina Simone's version of Little Girl Blue played too fast on a phonograph. Laughter and the whimpering sounds of a small child bounced off the walls around them. Sugar would feel herself stepping backward, but Mary would always take hold of her wrist, dragging her deeper into the house.

They'd run forever down a hallway, turning into a tunnel where tiny hands reached out at them, yellow ribbons moved in and out of the darkness, and when she looked down the floor would not be a floor at all but a river of blood.

Sugar feels her heart begin to bang in her chest and fear begins a slow climb up her spine. She tries to s.n.a.t.c.h away from Mary's grasp, whose grip on Sugar only becomes tighter.

They'd keep moving until they reached a kitchen where the only light came from the open door of a refrigerator. And every time, Mary would point at the small square kitchen table and begin to weep.

There is a figure huddled beneath it. Sugar can't see her face, but she reaches to touch the head adorned in yellow ribbons that are torn and ragged at the ends.

Mary is wailing now, screaming: "Save this one!"

The figure beneath the table turns her head and Sugar fully expects to see Jude's sad eyes and full mouth, but the face that looks up at her nearly makes Sugar's heart stop.