HIS NAME WAS SHELBY after the town where his mother was born, and he was eight years old and all that summer he had to wear a little black sling around the index finger of his right hand. He had to wear the sling because his great-granddaddy had been a famous portrait painter and had paintings hanging in the White House.
Shelby was so high-strung his mother was certain he was destined to be an artist like his famous ancestor. So, when he broke his finger and it grew back crooked, of course they took him to a specialist. They weren’t taking any chances on a deformity standing in his way.
All summer long he was supposed to wear the sling to limber up the finger, and in the fall the doctor was going to operate and straighten it. While he waited for his operation Shelby was brought to Bear Garden Plantation to spend the summer with his grandmother, and as soon as he got up every morning he rode over to Esperanza to look for Matille.
He would come riding up in the yard and tie his saddle pony to the fence and start talking before he even got on the porch. He was a beautiful boy, five months younger than Matille, and he was the biggest liar she had ever met in her life.
Matille was the only child in a house full of widows. She was glad of this noisy companion fate had delivered to Issaquena County right in the middle of a World War.
Shelby would wait for her while she ate breakfast, helping himself to pinch-cake, or toast, or cold cornbread, or muffins, walking around the kitchen touching everything and talking a mile a minute to anyone who would listen, talking and eating at the same time.
“My daddy’s a personal friend of General MacArthur’s,” he would be saying. “They were buddies at Auburn. General MacArthur wants him to come work in Washington, but he can’t go because what he does is too important.” Shelby was standing in the pantry door making a pyramid out of the Campbell Soup cans. “Every time my daddy talks about going to Washington my momma starts crying her head off and goes to bed with a headache.” He topped off the pyramid with a can of tomato paste and returned to the present. “I don’t know how anyone can sleep this late,” he said, “I’m the first one up at Bear Garden every single morning.”
Matille would eat breakfast as fast as she could and they would start out for the bayou that ran in front of the house at the end of a wide lawn.
“Did I tell you I’m engaged to be married,” Shelby would begin, sitting next to Matille in the swing that went out over the water, pumping as hard as he could with his thin legs, staring off into the sky.
“Her daddy’s a colonel in the air corps. They’re real rich.” A dark, secret look crossed his face. “I already gave her a diamond ring. That’s why I’ve got to find the pearl. So I can get enough money to get married. But don’t tell anyone because my momma and daddy don’t know about it yet.”
“There aren’t any pearls in mussels,” Matille said. “Guy said so. He said we were wasting our time chopping open all those mussels.”
“They do too have pearls,” Shelby said coldly. “Better ones than oysters. My father told me all about it. Everyone in New Orleans knows about it.”
“Well,” Matille said, “I’m not looking for any pearls today. I’m going to the store and play the slot machine.”
“You haven’t got any nickels.”
“I can get one. Guy’ll give me one.” Guy was Matille’s uncle. He was 4-F. He had lost an eye in a crop-dusting accident and was having to miss the whole war because of it. He couldn’t get into the army, navy, marines, or air corps. Even the coast guard had turned him down. He tried to keep up a cheerful face, running around Esperanza doing the work of three men, being extra nice to everyone, even the German war prisoners who were brought over from the Greenville Air Force Base to work in the fields.
He was always good for a nickel, sometimes two or three if Matille waited until after he had his evening toddies.
“If you help me with the mussels I’ll give you two nickels,” Shelby said.
“Let me see,” Matille said, dragging her feet to slow the swing. It was nice in the swing with the sun beating down on the water below and the pecan trees casting a cool shade.
Shelby pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and untied a corner. Sure enough, there they were, three nickels and a quarter and a dime. Shelby always had money. He was the richest boy Matille had ever known. She stared down at the nickels, imagining the cold thrill of the slot machine handle throbbing beneath her touch.
“How long?” she said.
“Until I have to go home,” Shelby said.
“All right,” Matille said. “Let’s get started.”
They went out to the shed and found two rakes and a small hoe and picked their way through the weeds to the bayou bank. The mud along the bank was black and hard-packed and broken all along the waterline by thick tree roots, cypress and willow and catalpa and water oak. They walked past the cleared-off place with its pier and rope swings and on down to where the banks of mussels began.
The mussels lay in the shallow water as far as the rake could reach, an endless supply, as plentiful as oak leaves, as plentiful as the fireflies that covered the lawn at evening, as plentiful as the minnows casting their tiny shadows all along the water’s edge, or the gnats that buzzed around Matille’s face as she worked, raking and digging and chopping, earning her nickels.
She would throw the rake down into the water and pull it back full of the dark-shelled, inedible, mud-covered creatures. Moments later, reaching into the same place, dozens more would have appeared to take their place.
They would rake in a pile of mussels, then set to work breaking them open with the hoe and screwdriver. When they had opened twenty or thirty, they would sit on the bank searching the soft flesh for the pearl. Behind them and all around them were piles of rotting shells left behind in the past weeks.
“I had my fortune told by a voodoo queen last Mardi Gras,” Shelby said. “Did I ever tell you about that? She gave me a charm made out of a dead baby’s bone. You want to see it?”
“I been to Ditty’s house and had my fortune told,” Matille said. “Ditty’s real old. She’s the oldest person in Issaquena County. She’s older than Nannie-Mother. She’s probably the oldest person in the whole state of Mississippi.” Matille picked up a mussel and examined it, running her finger inside, then tossed it into the water. Where it landed a dragonfly hovered for a moment, then rose in the humid air, its electric-blue tail flashing.
“You want to see the charm or not?” Shelby said, pulling it out of his pocket.
“Sure,” she said. “Give it here.”
He opened his hand and held it out to her. It looked like the wishbone from a tiny chicken. “It’s voodoo,” Shelby said. He held it up in the air, turning it to catch the sunlight. “You can touch it but you can’t hold it. No one can hold it but the master of it. Here, go on and touch it if you want to.”
Matille reached out and stroked the little bone. “What’s it good for?” she asked.
“To make whatever you want to happen. It’s white magic. Momma Ulaline is real famous. She’s got a place on Royal Street right next to an antique store. My Aunt Katherine took me there when she was baby-sitting me last Mardi Gras.”
Matille touched it again. She gave a little shudder.
“Well, let’s get back to work,” Shelby said, putting the charm into his pocket, wiping his hands on his playsuit. His little black sling was covered with mud. “I think we’re getting someplace today. I think we’re getting warm.”
They went back to work. Shelby was quiet, dreaming of treasure, of the pearl that lay in wait for him, of riches beyond his wildest dreams, of mansions and fine automobiles and chauffeurs and butlers and maids and money, stacks and stacks of crisp five-dollar bills and ten-dollar bills and twenty-dollar bills. Somewhere in Steele’s Bayou the pearl waited. It loomed in his dreams. It lay in wait for him beneath the roots of a cypress or water oak or willow.
Every morning when he woke he could see it, all morning as he dug and raked and chopped and Matille complained and the hot sun beat down on the sweating mud and the stagnant pools of minnows and the fast-moving, evil-looking gars swimming by like gunboats, all day the pearl shone in his mind, smooth and mysterious, cold to the touch.
They worked in silence for a while, moving downstream until they were almost to the bridge.
“Looks like we could get something for all these shells,” Matille said, examining the inside of one. It was all swirls of pink and white, like polished marble. “Looks like they ought to be worth something!”
“We could make dog food out of the insides,” Shelby said. “Mr. Green Bagett had a dog that ate mussels. My grandmother told me all about it. He would carry them up to the road in his mouth and when the sun made them open he would suck out the insides.” Shelby leaned on his hoe, making a loud sucking noise. “He was a dog named Harry after Mr. Bagett’s dentist and he would eat mussels all day long if nobody stopped him.”
“Why don’t we carry these mussels up to the road and let the sun open them?” Matille said.
“Because it takes too long that way,” Shelby said. “This is quicker.”
“We could make ashtrays out of the shells,” Matille said.
“Yeah,” Shelby said. “We could sell them in New Orleans. You can sell anything in the French Quarter.”
“We could paint them and decorate them with flowers,” Matille said, falling into a dream of her own, picturing herself wearing a long flowered dress, pushing a cart through the crowded streets of a city, selling ashtrays to satisfied customers.
Now they were almost underneath the bridge. Here the trees were thicker and festooned with vines that dropped into the water like swings. It was darker here, and secret.
The bridge was a fine one for such a small bayou. It was a drawbridge with high steel girders that gleamed like silver in the flat Delta countryside. The bridge had been built to connect the two parts of the county, and anyone going from Grace to Baleshed or Esperanza or Panther Brake or Greenfields had to pass that way. Some mornings as many as seven cars and trucks passed over it. All day small black children played on the bridge and fished from it and leaned over its railings looking down into the brown water, chunking rocks at the mud turtles or trying to hit the mean-looking gars and catfish that swam by in twos or threes with their teeth showing.
This morning there were half a dozen little black boys on the bridge and one little black girl wearing a clean apron. Her hair was in neat cornrows with yellow yarn plaited into the braids. Her head looked like the wing of a butterfly, all yellow and black and brown and round as it could be.
“What y’all doing?” the girl called down when they got close enough to hear. “What y’all doing to them mussels?”
“We’re doing an experiment,” Shelby called back.
“Let’s get Teentsy and Kale to help us,” Matille said. “Hey, Teentsy,” she called out, but Shelby grabbed her arm.
“Don’t get them down here,” he said. “I don’t want everyone in the Delta in on this.”
“They all know about it anyway,” Matille said. “Guy told Granddaddy everyone at the store was laughing about us the other day. He said Baby Doll was busting a gut laughing at us for chopping all these mussels.”
“I don’t care,” Shelby said, putting his hands on his hips, looking out across the water with the grim resignation of the born artist. “They don’t know what we’re doing it for.”
“Well, I’m about worn out,” Matille said. “Let’s go up to the store and get Mavis to give us a drink.”
“Let’s open a few more first. Then we’ll get a drink and go over to the other side. I think it’s better over there anyway. There’s sand over there. You got to have sand to make pearls.”
“We can’t go over there,” Matille said. “That’s not our property. That’s Mr. Donleavy’s place.”
“He don’t care if we dig some mussels on his bayou bank, does he?”
“I don’t know. We got to ask him first. He’s got a real bad temper.”
“Let’s try under this tree,” Shelby said. “This looks like a good place. There’s sand in this mud.” He was bending down, trying the mud between his fingers, rubbing it back and forth to test the consistency. “Yeah, let’s try here. This feels good.”
“What y’all tearing up all those mussels for,” Kale called down from his perch on the bridge. “They ain’t good for nothing. You can’t even use them for bait.”
“We’re gonna make ashtrays out of them,” Shelby said. “We’re starting us an ashtray factory.”
“Where about?” Kale said, getting interested, looking like he would come down and take a look for himself.
“Next to the store,” Shelby said. “We’re gonna decorate them and sell them in New Orleans. Rich folks will pay a lot for real mussel ashtrays.”
“That ought to hold them for a while,” he said to Matille. “Let them talk about that at the store. Come on, let’s open a few more. Then we’ll get us a drink.”
“All right,” Matille said. “Let’s try under this tree.” She waded out into the water until it was up to her ankles, feeling the cold mud ooze up between her toes. She reached out with the rake. It caught, and she began pulling it up the shore, backing as she pulled, tearing the bark off the edges of the tree roots. The rake caught in the roots, and she reached down to free it.
“Matille!” Shelby yelled. “Matille! Look out!” She heard his voice and saw the snake at the same moment, saw the snake and Shelby lifting the hoe and her hand outlined against the water, frozen and dappled with sunlight and the snake struggling to free itself and the hoe falling toward her hand, and she dropped the rake and turned and was running up the bank, stumbling and running, with Shelby yelling his head off behind her, and Teentsy and Kale and the other children rose up from the bridge like a flock of little blackbirds and came running down the hill to see what the excitement was.
“I got him,” Shelby yelled. “I cut him in two. I cut him in two with the hoe. I got him.”
Matille sank down on the edge of the road and put her head on her knees.
“She’s fainting,” Kale called out, running up to her. “Matille’s fainting.”
“No, she ain’t,” Teentsy said. “She’s all right.” Teentsy sat down by Matille and put a hand on her arm, patting her.
“It was a moccasin,” Shelby yelled. “He was big around as my arm. After I killed him the top half was still alive. He struck at me four times. I don’t know if I’m bit or not.”
“Where’s he gone to now?” Kale said.
“I don’t know,” Shelby said, pulling off his shirt. “Come look and see if he bit me.” The children gathered around searching Shelby’s skin for bite marks. His little chest was heaving with excitement and his face was shining. With his shirt off he looked about as big around as a blue jay. His little black sling was flopping around his wrist and his rib cage rose and fell beneath the straps of his seersucker playsuit.
“Here’s one!” Teentsy screamed, touching a spot on Shelby’s back, but it turned out to be an old mosquito bite.
“Lay down on the ground,” Kale yelled, “where we can look at you better.”
“Where do you think he bit you?” Teentsy said.
But Shelby was too excited to lay down on the ground. All he wanted to do was jump up and down and tell his story over and over.
Then the grown people heard the commotion and came out from the store. Mavis Findley and Mr. Beaumont and Baby Doll and R. C. and Overflow came hurrying down the road and grabbed hold of Shelby so they could see where the snake bit him.
“Didn’t nothing bite him, Mr. Mavis,” Kale said. “He kilt it. He kilt it with the hoe.”
“He almost chopped my hand off,” Matille said, but no one was listening.
Then Mavis and Baby Doll and Overflow escorted Matille and Shelby back to the big house with the black children skipping along beside and in front of them like a disorderly marching band.
By the time the procession reached the house the porch was full of ladies. Matille’s mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and several widowed aunts had materialized from their rooms and were standing in a circle. From a distance they looked like a great flowering shrub. The screen door was open and a wasp buzzed around their heads threatening to be caught in their hairnets.
The ladies all began talking at once, their voices rising above and riding over and falling into each other in a long chorus of mothering.
“Thank goodness you’re all in one piece,” Miss Babbie said, swooping up Matille and enfolding her in a cool fragrance of dotted Swiss and soft yielding bosom and the smell of sandalwood and the smell of coffee and the smell of powder.
Miss Nannie-Mother, who was ninety-six, kissed her on the forehead and called her Eloise, after a long-dead cousin. Miss Nannie-Mother had lived so long and grown so wise that everyone in the world had started to look alike to her.
The rest of the ladies swirled around Shelby. Matille struggled from her grandmother’s embrace and watched disgustedly from the door frame as Shelby told his story for the tenth time.
“I didn’t care what happened to me,” Shelby was saying. “No rattlesnake was biting a lady while I was in the neighborhood. After I chopped it in two the mouth part came at me like a chicken with its head cut off.”
“He almost chopped my hand off,” Matille said again, but the only ones listening to her were Teentsy and Kale, who stood by the steps picking petals off Miss Teddy’s prize pansies and covering their mouths with their hands when they giggled to show what nice manners they had.
“This is what comes of letting children run loose like wild Indians,” Miss Teddy was saying, brandishing a bottle of Windsor nail polish.
“Whatever will Rhoda Hotchkiss think when she hears of this?” Miss Grace said.
“She’ll be terrified,” Miss Babbie answered. “Then go straight to her knees and thank the Lord for the narrow escape.”
“I knew something was going to happen,” Miss Hannie Clay said, her hands full of rickrack for the smock she was making for her daughter in Shreveport. “I knew something was coming. It was too quiet around here all morning if you ask my opinion.”
Matille leaned into the door frame with her hands on her hips watching her chances of ever going near the bayou again as long as she lived growing slimmer and slimmer.
Sure enough, when Matille’s grandfather came in from the fields for the noon meal he made his pronouncement before he even washed his hands or hung up his hat.
“Well, then,” he said, looking down from his six feet four inches and furrowing his brow. “I want everyone in this house to stay away from the bayou until I can spare some men to clear the brush. Shelby, I’m counting on you to keep Matille away from there, you hear me?”
“Yes sir,” Shelby said. He stood up very straight, stuck out his hand and shook on it.
Now he’s done it, Matille thought. Now nothing will be the same.
Now the summer wore on into August, and Shelby and Matille made a laboratory in an old chicken house and collected a lot of butterflies and chloroformed them with fingernail polish remover, and they taught a fox terrier puppy how to dance on his hind legs, and spent some time spying on the German prisoners, and read all the old love letters in the trunks under the house, but it was not the same. Somehow the heart had gone out of the summer.
Then one morning the grown people decided it was time for typhoid shots, and no matter how Matille cried and beat her head against the floor she was bathed and dressed and sent off in the back seat of Miss Rhoda’s Buick to Doctor Findley’s little brick office overlooking Lake Washington.
As a reward Matille was to be allowed to stay over at Bear Garden until the pain and fever subsided.
In those days vaccinations were much stronger than they are now and well-cared-for children were kept in bed for twenty-four hours nursing their sore arms, taking aspirin dissolved in sugar water, and being treated as though they were victims of the disease itself.
Miss Rhoda made up the twin beds in Shelby’s mother’s old room, made them up with her finest Belgian linens and decorated the headboards with Hero medals cut from cardboard and hand painted with watercolors.
The bedroom was painted ivory and the chairs were covered with blue and white chintz imported from Paris. It was the finest room Matille had ever slept in. She snuggled down in the pillows admiring the tall bookcases filled with old dolls and mementos of Carrie Hotchkiss’s brilliant career as a Rolling Fork cheerleader.
Miss Rhoda bathed their faces with lemon water, drew the Austrian blinds, and went off for her nap.
“Does yours hurt yet?” Shelby asked, rubbing his shot as hard as he could to get the pain going. “Mine’s killing me already.”
“It hurts some,” Matille said, touching the swollen area. “Not too much.” She was looking at Shelby’s legs, remembering something that had happened a long time ago, something hot and exciting, something that felt like fever, and like fever, made everything seem present, always present, so that she could not remember where or how it had happened or how long a time had passed since she had forgotten it.
“Just wait till tonight,” Shelby rattled on. “You’ll think your arm’s fixing to fall off. I almost died from mine last year. One year a boy in New Orleans did die. They cut off his arm and did everything they could to save him but he died anyway. Think about that, being in a grave with only one arm.” Shelby was talking faster than ever, to hide his embarrassment at the way Matille was looking at him.
“I can’t stand to think about being buried, can you?” he continued, “all shut up in the ground with the worms eating you. I’m getting buried in a mausoleum if I die. They’re these little houses up off the ground made out of concrete. Everyone in New Orleans that can afford it gets buried in mausoleums. That’s one good thing about living there.”
“You want to get in bed with me?” Matille said, surprised at the sound of her own voice, clear and orderly in the still room.
“Sure,” Shelby said, “if you’re scared. It scares me to death to think about being buried and stuff like that. Are you scared?”
“I don’t know,” Matille said. “I just feel funny. I feel like doing something bad.”
“Well, scoot over then,” Shelby said, crawling in beside her.
“You’re burning up,” she said, putting a hand on his forehead to see if he had a fever. Then she put her hand on his chest as if to feel his heartbeat, and then, as if she had been doing it every day of her life, she reached down inside his pajamas for the strange hard secret of boys.
“I want to see it, Shelby,” she said, and he lay back with his hands stiff by his sides while she touched and looked to her heart’s content.
“Now you do it to me,” she said, and she guided his fingers up and down, up and down the thick wet opening between her legs.
The afternoon went on for a long time, and the small bed was surrounded by yellow light and the room filled with the smell of mussels.
Long afterward, as she lay in a cool bed in Acapulco, waiting for her third husband to claim her as his bride, Matille would remember that light and how, later that afternoon, the wind picked up and could be heard for miles away, moving toward Issaquena County with its lines of distant thunder, and how the cottonwood leaves outside the window had beat upon the house all night with their exotic crackling.
“You better not tell anyone about this ever, Shelby,” Matille said, when she woke in the morning. “You can’t tell anyone about it, not even in New Orleans.”
“The moon’s still up,” Shelby said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “I can see it out the window.”
“How can the moon be up,” Matille said. “It’s daylight.”
“It stays up when it wants to,” Shelby said. “Haven’t you ever seen that before.”
That was the beginning. They cleared out an old playhouse that had belonged to Matille’s mother and made a bed from an old cot mattress.
It was Matille who made up the game now. She would lie down on the mattress with her hand on her head pretending to have a sick headache.
“Come sit by me, Honey,” she would say. “Pour me a glass of sherry and come lie down till I feel better.”
“God can see in this playhouse,” Shelby said, pulling his hand away.
“No, he can’t, Shelby,” Matille said, sitting up and looking him hard in the eye. “God can’t see through tin. This is a tin roof and God can’t see through it.”
“He can see everywhere,” Shelby said. “Father Godchaux said so.”
“Well, he can’t see through tin,” Matille said. “He can’t be everywhere at once. He’s got enough to do helping out the Allies without watching little boys and girls every minute of the night and day.” Matille was unbuttoning Shelby’s playsuit.
“Doesn’t that feel good, Shelby,” she said. “Doesn’t that make it feel better.”
“God can see everywhere,” Shelby insisted. “He can see every single thing in the whole world.”
“I don’t care,” Matille said. “I don’t like God anyway. If God’s so good why did he let Uncle Robert die. And why did he make alligators and snakes and send my daddy off to fight the Japs. If God’s so good why’d he let the Jews kill his own little boy.”
“You better not talk like that,” Shelby said, buttoning his suit back together. “And we better get back before Baby Doll comes looking for us again.”
“Just a little bit more,” Matille said. “Just till we get to the part where the baby comes out.”
August went by as if it had only lasted a moment. Then one afternoon Miss Rhoda drove Shelby over in the Buick to say goodbye. He was wearing long pants and had a clean sling on the finger and he had brought Matille the voodoo bone wrapped in tissue paper to keep for him.
“You might need this,” he said, holding it out to her. He looked very grown-up standing by the stairs in his city clothes, and Matille thought that maybe she would marry Shelby when she grew up and be a fine married lady in New Orleans.
Then it was September and the cotton went to the gin and Matille was in the third grade and rode to school on the bus.
One afternoon she was standing by the driver while the bus clattered across the bridge and came to a halt by the store. It was a cool day. A breeze was blowing from the northeast and the cypress trees were turning a dusty red and the wild persimmons and muscadines were making.
Matille felt the trouble before she even got off the bus. The trouble reached out and touched her before she even saw the ladies standing on the porch in their dark dresses. It fell across her shoulders like a cloak. It was as if she had touched a strand of a web and felt the whole thing tremble and knew herself to be caught forever in its trembling.
They found out, she thought. Shelby told them. Now they’ll kill me. Now they’ll beat me like they did Guy.
She looked down the gravel road to the house, down the long line of pecan and elm trees and knew that she should turn and go back the other way, should run from this trouble, but something made her keep on moving toward the house. I’ll say he lied, she thought. I’ll say I didn’t do it. I’ll say he made it up. Everyone knows what a liar Shelby is.
Then her mother and grandmother and Miss Babbie came down off the porch and took her into the parlor and sat beside her on the sofa. And Miss Hannie and Miss Nell Grace and Overflow and Baby Doll stood around her in a circle and told her the terrible news.
“Shelby is dead, Matille,” her grandmother said, and the words slid over her like water falling on stones.
Shelby had gone to the hospital to have his finger fixed and he had lain down on the table and put the gas mask over his face and the man who ran the machine made a mistake and Shelby had gone to sleep and nothing could wake him up, not all the screams or shots or slaps in the face or prayers or remorse in the world could wake him. And that was the Lord’s will, blessed be the name of the Lord, Amen.
Later the ladies went into the kitchen to make a cold supper for anyone who felt like eating and Matille walked down to the bayou and stood for a long time staring down into the water, feeling strangely elated, as though this were some wonderful joke Shelby had dreamed up.
She stared down into the tree roots, deep down into the muddy water, down to the place where Shelby’s pearl waited, grew and moved inside the soft watery flesh of its mother, luminous and perfect and alive, as cold as the moon in the winter sky.