“I see you,” Zethray said, her voice flattened by fatigue. Across the room, the little white girl named Daisy played hide-and-seek. Her hair bow poked out from behind the oak sideboard. “I ain’t got time for no nonsense today.” She threaded a pair of newly washed curtains onto a rod. “Got company coming.”
Daisy clapped her hands. Who?
“You guess good as me.” Zethray stopped and spied the child. “Maybe better.”
Your mama knows. Daisy came out from behind the sideboard and started twirling.
“Well, she ain’t speaking to me, is she?” With her good foot first, Zethray stepped onto a stool and hung the curtains over two French doors between the parlor and dining room. Former dining room. She used it as a bedroom now. No sense climbing those steps every night with that limp. Just because she could didn’t mean she had to. That’s what her husband Sam had said the week before he left. And he was right. She’d let him trade her table and chairs for a bed and mattress, but she’d kept the sideboard for a dresser, so she could rent out their upstairs bedroom fully furnished.
When’s she coming? Daisy asked.
“Who?”
Your company.
“So it’s a she.” Zethray fussed with the heavy chintz panels till the folds lay right.
Today?
“Nah, baby. Sometime this week.” Back on the stool, Zethray ran a rag across the top of the doorframe. “But I do my heavy cleaning on Saturdays.”
Daisy skipped down the length of the sideboard, eyeing the contents on top.
“Shoo.” Zethray stepped down and brandished her dust rag. “That ain’t none of your business.”
Where’d you get those crosses? Daisy disappeared, then reappeared near the swinging door leading to the kitchen.
Zethray shuffled over to the sideboard and picked up one of three small crosses woven out of fronds, given to parishioners on a long-ago Palm Sunday. Clarence, she thought, but didn’t dare speak the name aloud. She might not be able to keep the little white girl from filling her head, but she damn sure wasn’t going to invite another spirit in on purpose. Not on cleaning day. Not in this heat. Six days into August, and it was already the hottest month of the summer. And the driest. What she wouldn’t give for a cooling rain.
Your mama thinks it’s funny you saved them, Daisy said, considering.
Considering Mama killed herself over the man who made them. Zethray held her tongue as she moved everything from the top of the sideboard onto her bed. She picked up a second rag, one dampened with a mixture of boiled linseed oil and turpentine, and polished a shine into the oak.
Zethray never took to Clarence, not that he hadn’t tried. He’d tried. Hard. Too hard. When you marry a woman with a child, you have to give her time to come around. Zethray had had her mama to herself for ten years. They’d loved each other truly and solely. And Mama had a way of making Zethray believe she was worthy of all that love. Once, when she’d come home from grammar school sobbing because some white boy had said her skin was made of mud, her mother had kissed her cheek and savored the taste. More like dark cherries, she’d said. And them makes the sweetest jam.
Then Clarence came along, and her mama broke off a piece of that love and handed it right over. Suddenly he got the thickest slice of corn bread, the fattiest pork chop, the top scoop of mashed potatoes with the chunk of melting butter. Somehow Mama had forgotten about her own daughter liking butter too.
After draping a clean runner across the sideboard, Zethray dusted off the items it once held and set them back in place. A hurricane lamp. Her rose-colored candy dish with the hand-painted lid. Three woven crosses. A clear glass paperweight with her mama’s picture glued inside and the name Ruth Jones scrawled across the back. The Old Spice aftershave lotion Sam had left behind. With a quick whiff and a wistful expression, Zethray set the bottle down along with an Avon catalog from her neighbor, Alice Blue, and a pink jar of cream sachet named Elusive. Next, she brushed the beginnings of a cobweb off the tail feathers of a lovebird, one of two Clarence had carved from a piece of black walnut. No denying it, she thought as she put the pair back on their perch, Clarence could turn straw into gold with those hands. Once, he took a broken-down wheelbarrow out of a burn pile at his boss’s house, turned that wood into the finest-looking cradle you ever saw, and sold it right back to the man, who was none the wiser.
Zethray moved the candy dish over to make room for her Bible, a gift from the church after her first baptism, when Mama was still alive. A year later, they hauled her back to the river, after the maiden aunt who’d taken her in saw fit to report her to the congregation for “seeing the dead.” Since Zethray had already gotten a Bible, they gave her a small plaque with the inscription, Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God, which she now propped up against the lamp. Six months after her second baptism and with no gift in hand, they dunked her a third and final time. When that didn’t take, the elders decided to forget they’d ever known about her affliction. And soon enough, their wives started lining up at her back door to hear from loved ones who’d crossed over. On those occasions, Zethray’s aunt refused to step inside for fear of appearing ungodly. Instead, she sat on the porch, cigar box in hand, charging five cents a person for her niece’s time.
Come with me. Daisy held out her hand. There’s a breeze by the river.
In spite of the sweat streaming down her back, Zethray said, “Can’t go for no walk.” She shuffled over to a mahogany chair to the left of the sideboard. “Not on cleaning day.” Since the chair had a cracked back leg, Zethray stored what she called her “treasure chest” on the seat, to keep folks from sitting down. She picked up the maple box and carried it over to the bed where she buffed the tiger-striped wood with her polishing rag.
For Christmas one year, Clarence had cleaned up an old maple toolbox, tacked in a velvet lining, and added a brass handle to the hinged lid. “There’s treasure inside,” her mother had said, opening the top. Three foil-wrapped chocolates winked in the light.
Over the years, Zethray filled that box with remembrances. Newspaper clippings about her mama’s demise. An envelope with a carbon copy of the only witness statement given to the police. Zethray’s diary from 1916, the year her mother died, the last one she ever kept. Condolences from neighbors tied up in a ribbon. Recipes and Bible verses in her mother’s hand. Three letters from the life insurance company. The first one denied Zethray’s claim outright on account of her age. Four years later, the second notice acknowledged her eighteenth birthday before refusing her again. Northeast Casualty had her best interests at heart, or so the agent had said. With no husband to manage her affairs, the money would become a millstone around her neck. After she married Sam, the company sent a third letter agreeing to pay her fifty cents on the dollar, take it or leave it, since the claim was so old and the deceased was a Negro woman. Zethray took their offer, and Sam went right out and put that money on a house. A man needed something to own, he’d said. Zethray looked around. It’s modest, she thought, but it’s home. Sam never fought her for it when he left. That policy was her inheritance, not his, and besides, he didn’t want to risk a run of bad luck. He’d spent enough time with his wife to know the dead keep tabs.
Zethray opened the lid of the box. Her mama’s apron lay on top. The one she’d worn the day she’d jumped. The undertaker had washed it out and given it to Zethray graveside. Not the dress she was wearing. Or the boots. Only the apron. Zethray never knew what to make of that. Lost in thought, she ran her fingers lightly across the blueberries her mother had embroidered onto the fabric.
Huckleberries, Daisy piped up.
“You think you know better?” Zethray shook her head.
I’m just telling you what your mama’s saying.
“She can tell me her own self. I’ll listen.”
Will you?
“I don’t need sass.”
What do you need?
“Nothing, baby.” Exhausted, Zethray nodded toward a broom propped up next to the broken chair. “Unless you can figure out how to give this floor a good sweep.”
Daisy giggled.
Zethray turned her attention to the chair—mahogany frame, clawed feet, kneed legs, and a pierced splat in the shape of a vase. At least once a week, she found herself taking the measure of that chair with her eyes. Low enough to climb. Tall enough to be of use. Had her mama done the same before carrying it down to the Lackawanna Avenue Bridge? Was she sure the seat would hold her? Had she already stepped on it countless times to wash a window or dust a ceiling?
Daisy’s hand shot up as if she were in school. Why’d you take it?
Why, indeed. Even at fourteen years old, Zethray knew better than to take something belonging to someone else. But in the hours after they’d pulled her mama’s body from the river, Zethray didn’t have the will to suss out right from wrong.
They left the chair behind. Zethray had heard those words deep in her soul that first night. At least she thought she’d heard them. As confident as she was in the messages she passed along to others, she could never be certain of the ones intended for her. Maybe she was too close to make out her own truth in the same way a pretty girl can’t always see her own beauty.
Near midnight, Zethray had hobbled back over to the bridge where, sure enough, the chair lay on its back like a dead june bug. Setting it upright, she felt the weight, heavier than she’d imagined. Still, she grabbed hold of the seat and carried that burden back along the same sidewalks her mother had traveled, deviating only when the road broke off toward the colored neighborhood.
“It was the last thing of service to Mama,” Zethray finally said as she got up and carried the chair over to the bed.
Just the same, stealing’s stealing, Daisy responded, even when there’s a good reason.
“Tell that to the woman who kept Mama’s rolling pin.” Zethray sat on the edge of her mattress rubbing circles of turpentine and linseed oil into the wood.
Didn’t you already have the chair by then?
Zethray used her knuckles to knead away the pain working its way up her neck. She’d asked herself these same questions a million times and never could find the right answer. Yet, for all her uncertainty, she knew one thing to be true: her mama loved Clarence so hard, she’d followed him into the grave two weeks after his own passing.
Back then, Clarence played outfield for the Electric City Giants, one of two colored amateur baseball teams in Scranton. They’d gone up against the Dunmore Independents at the Athletic Park that day. Funny how Zethray remembered the opponents’ name but not who won the game. Afterward, the Giants went over to the Newport Hotel on Center Street to celebrate their victory, or drown their sorrows. Either way, according to witnesses, Clarence was itching for a fight after a couple of dollar bills went missing from his back pocket. Halfway through the night, he pulled a knife on a fellow who pulled his out faster.
When the policeman showed up to give Mama the news, she started wailing and dropped to the floor on her hands and knees, a posture so heart-wrenching to a girl of fourteen, Zethray still saw it in her dreams thirty-nine years later.
She loved you, Daisy said.
“But she died for him.” Zethray carried the chair back across the room and set it down, careful not to damage the cracked leg any further. She took a step back to admire the craftsmanship. Beautiful but broken, she thought, like her mother’s body. Like Zethray’s own spirit.
None of it’s your fault. Daisy gave one more twirl.
“I know that, baby.”
None of it’s her fault either.
“Never said it was. Now scoot.” Zethray picked up the broom and swept under the sideboard.
Never said it wasn’t, Daisy whispered before she disappeared.