Chapter Seven

I didn’t stop walking until the furthest parking lot, where I swung into the pick-up truck. At home, I lay on the couch, telling Marilyn I was sick, which wasn’t far from the truth. She brought me a bottle of Coca-Cola with a straw and a hot water bottle for the cramps she thought I had. She asked which of the two channels I wanted on the TV. It was like she wished she had a little kid, a baby, to care for.

I half-dozed in front of As the World Turns, hearing Jeff tell Penny that their song would always be “Younger Than Springtime.” Like Robbie and me, I thought, wondering what it would be like to study with him, what his hand would feel like if I reached over and held it. Our song could be “A Summer Place.” What would Robbie do if I told him that Mr. Woods had asked me about masturbating? Would he beat him up or get mad at me for telling him? Either seemed possible.

As the closing music came on for As the World Turns, a siren began, escalating till I thought a fire truck was heading straight for our house. The April sky had gone from gray to green, the color of the celadon vase Marilyn had put on the mantel, a gift from her first wedding.

Marilyn ran in and grabbed me. “Tornado! I saw it.” She pulled me out to the truck, the roar growing like a train in the night, only faster. For the first time, Marilyn got inside Mama’s pick-up. She tried to crank the motor, but it wouldn’t start. She was barefoot, and she had to point her toes to stretch to the accelerator. Nothing happened, just a whining sound you could barely hear for the roaring.

The long gray finger twisted out of the sky, heading toward the house. “Pump the clutch!” I screamed.

“Hell!” Marilyn cried and threw the keys on the seat. She pulled me back inside our house and together we squatted in the hall, Marilyn’s arms tight around my shoulders, her head bent over mine like a bird with its baby. Despite the screaming wind, I felt love more than fear. Marilyn’s cotton shirt reeked with sweat, she was so scared, but she never let go of me.

Wind rattled the whole house, and a hard rain began pelting the roof. Something outside clanged, but there in Marilyn’s arms, it was like Mama was back and I was swimming underwater, someone’s arms holding me safe. I knew what Charlene meant when she described how Brother Beeker had held her while God washed her sins away in the baptistery.

Then, as quickly as it happened, there was dead quiet. We got up and before I could feel embarrassed, Marilyn ran to the TV, where a weatherman had replaced the soap opera. He said a tornado watch was on. “Stay tuned,” he said, and I couldn’t help but think Levi Litvak would’ve known more, where it was going, who it would kill. He would’ve known about the gray finger already raking the earth.

“A watch!” Marilyn cried. “What on earth does he know? Hell, I watched and saw!”

We raced outside. Trees lay in splinters everywhere, so thick you couldn’t see the street. It was like a playground where kids had dumped a giant can of tinker toys. Mrs. Guest came toward us, her apron flapping. “That was close.” She blinked slowly. “That thing went over like a freight train. I hope this is the worst.” She picked up an azalea bush that was whipped to the ground, its blossoms pink and muddy.

As if she were in slow motion, Marilyn started picking up the branches in the yard, so I helped, neither of us saying a word as we piled them by the fence. Some were stripped of bark, so white they looked like broken bones. The sour smell of her shirt wafted over as we worked together silently, and I could still feel the warmth of her arms around me when we’d crouched in the hall. In those strange moments, I loved her so much I had to keep blinking the dampness from my eyes.

Mrs. Guest picked her way through the mess and peered up the street. “Why, here comes Harry,” she said, and waved.

Daddy was running, as well as he could, through the terrible rubble. “Everybody okay?” He looked at us and saw the tears in my eyes. He didn’t know it was because I’d felt so loved, almost like Mama was back. “You okay, darlin’?” He wrapped his arms around me and one of the tears rolled down my cheek into my mouth.

Daddy drew Marilyn into his arms, too. “I was on my way home for lunch, and I swear that twister picked up the station wagon, and then the wheels would bounce back on the road. That’s how hard that wind was. Now the roads are blocked. I parked at the bus stop and walked.”

“Oh Harry!” Marilyn threw her arms around him and kissed him. It was the first time I’d ever seen her really care about Daddy. She was usually too busy talking about her own problems to think about him. “How bad was it?”

“Let’s see who needs help.”

We made our way down the street, climbing over full-grown trees, and Daddy kept saying, “It came close. It sure came close,” and then he stopped. At the corner, the next street looked like the worst things in Revelation had come to pass. Charlene would say God had raged over us and judged us wicked. Some more than others. Tommy McCarty’s yellow frame house stood upside down, right on the same spot where it had been built a couple of years before. The roof was crushed, and the foundation faced the sky, concrete cinder blocks sticking up like jagged teeth against the gray clouds. A power line lay zigzagged across the yard, a black snake waiting to strike.

Daddy’s face went white. “You girls go back on home. Folks are going to need some serious help out here.”

We picked a path back home, and silently Marilyn and I started picking up more limbs. Underneath the green branches, all over the front yard, plastic flowers began to appear, scattered like a sudden garden of yellow and red daisies.

“Look!” Charlene cried. I heard her voice before I knew she was there, her shoes planted in the mud. “It’s a bouquet from God, a sign that everything is okay.” She closed her eyes, and I knew she was praying.

“What the hell?” Marilyn reached down for a red daisy. Daddy told her he didn’t like her to curse in front of Charlene and me, but today she couldn’t help herself. “Made in China,” she read the tag on the plastic daisy. “You mean that thing blew all the way from China?”

In the mud we found toy matchbox cars and broken dinner plates. I picked up a shard. “The price tag is here. Drummond’s Five and Dime.” A knot tightened in my chest.

“Everything okay here?” Robbie Godbold was coming across our lawn, pulling branches out of his way as he walked.

But before I could answer, Marilyn made a cry, a noise from deep in her throat and she dropped the plastic flower as if the red were a blood stain. “Sweet heaven. It’s the shopping center. That tornado must’ve blown right through it. Oh lord have mercy.”

In the distance, sirens wailed again, but this time an ambulance raced past, then a fire truck and police cars, until a parade of them backed up, flashing in front of the house. A great pine tree completely blocked the road. People ran through the lawns and muddy street toward the tree. Daddy was pushing with all his might on the trunk, and Robbie stood next to him and put his shoulder to the tree, his head bent while he strained. The pungent smell of pine filled the air, like a Christmas wreath. The ambulance drivers got out and pushed, too. Marilyn and I started to climb over the trunk to get down to Big Circle Shopping Center and help out there, but Daddy yelled, “Get back in! Look out for those power lines.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Marilyn shouted over the sirens. “It’s just like Vietnam.” There was panic in her voice, and then she was talking to herself. “This must be what Jimmy went through, and here I am, right smack in the middle. Tornadoes coming out of the sky like bombs, aiming right for us.” Her eyes were big in her pale face, and I could see the little girl she had once been.

“What can we do?” I shouted, as much to shake Marilyn out of her reverie as to ask Daddy for advice.

“Pray,” Daddy yelled. Then someone came with a chain saw, sending pine chips flying.

So we did pray. We sat at the kitchen table, feeling awkward except for Charlene. Charlene reached for Marilyn’s hand, and then mine, so I grabbed Marilyn’s too. Her hand was wet and cold. I said a prayer for the people at Big Circle Shopping Center, people who might’ve been buying those plastic daisies in Drummond’s. I prayed for whoever was in Tommy McCarty’s upside-down house. The ambulance siren screeched, then began to recede, and we knew it had gotten through.

“Help the boys in Vietnam,” was all Marilyn said, so Charlene prayed about Revelation, the Four Horsemen and all that. She prayed so long my mind wandered to the terrible sights I’d seen. Was anyone dead under Tommy McCarty’s house, feet sticking out from that crushed roof like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz? It was the kind of day when anything might happen, the kind you hope happens only once in your life. And I’d already had one of those, back in 1963. Even though we prayed, I kept thinking that God had already made up His mind.

When we went out again, Robbie was gone, and I realized how much I wanted him to be there. The tree lay in pieces across the road. The flung mud and plastic flowers all over the front yard looked like the Devil’s own temper tantrum. I poked at the debris.

A rubber doll was wedged under an oak branch, her head half-buried in the mud. She’d lost all her clothes in the wind, but I recognized her as the kind Drummond’s sold. There had been a bin of them, in pink and blue pajamas, in a back aisle. I lifted her out, wiping mud from her glass eyes. “You’re fine,” I whispered. There were doll clothes packed away in the top of my closet that would fit her.

Marilyn came up and flicked some mud off the doll’s ear. “I’ll get a big garbage bag for all this.”

“I’m keeping her.” I tucked her under my sweatshirt.

Marilyn snorted. “You’re too old for dolls.”

Mama would never have said that. “I’ll sew a pretty dress for her, after all she’s been through.” That’s what Mama would’ve said; I could hear her voice. I set the doll on the steps just as Charlene emerged and surveyed the muddy mess with awe. “’The angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth …’”

“Help me pick these flowers up!” I yelled.

“God left a memorial for those He took,” said Charlene, gazing at the mad array of colors.

“It’s a plastic garden, that’s what it is. Garish. You think Mama would’ve wanted trash in the yard?”

“If it came from God. Of course she would’ve,” said Charlene, and I felt like we’d had two different mothers. “Is that a doll?” Charlene peered at my sweatshirt where a rubber leg stuck out “Don’t you throw that away. Mama would’ve made new clothes for her. But you don’t throw anything anyway, do you? Why do you still want that scarf?”

She meant the paper bag with the red and orange poppy scarf in my closet. “Maybe evidence,” I said.

Charlene kept finding matchbox cars in the mud, and stacked them by the garage. “It’s a sculpture,” she said. “A memorial for the lost kids. The tornado is God’s lesson about the mess we make of our lives.” She arranged the toy cars in patterns of blue, red and yellow, and I had to admit it was pretty.

“What were you doing at home?” Charlene asked later, watching me rinse the doll in the bathroom sink. The rubber was cleaning up well. Maybe she’d be my own patron saint. “Man, you missed it. We had to go in the hall and crouch, covering our heads. You should’ve seen ole Langstrom, like he’d pee in his pants. I watched him the whole time. I wasn’t scared.”

It was a satisfying thought, but not enough to make me wish I’d been at Tallulah High.

The news that night told us sixteen people had died, most of them in Drummond’s Five and Dime Store, which was demolished. At dinner, I thought about the record rack, and for a second I wished some good albums had blown our way.

“At least we didn’t get any arms or legs in our front yard,” said Marilyn. “It was like war, they get limbs blown all over the place.” She stared at her tuna casserole.

“Hush,” said Daddy. “It was bad enough.” He was so tired his cheeks sagged, and I wondered what he’d seen down at the Big Circle Shopping Center. “At least nobody was in the McCarty house. Would’ve been a miracle to survive that.”

Marilyn’s eyes glinted with tears. “If Jimmy hadn’t gone to Vietnam, he’d have been working at Big Circle, stocking the shelves at Drummond’s. Maybe there were traps set for him in his life, no matter what he did.”

“Nobody’s got traps set for them,” said Daddy. He was so tired he just handed Marilyn his napkin for her tears.

“But it makes it better, don’t you see?” she cried out and slammed the table. “If he was going to die anyway, Vietnam just got him first. It makes me feel better this way. Don’t you understand?” She started crying hard, and Daddy pulled himself up to put his arm around her.

“You’re right.” His voice was hoarse. “Jimmy must’ve had traps set for him. The tornado would’ve gotten him if the Viet Cong hadn’t.” Daddy sounded the way he would when he used to tell us fairy tales at bedtime.

Marilyn lifted her wet face. “And who knows what would’ve gotten him if the tornado didn’t?”

“But we made it,” said Daddy. “There aren’t any traps for us.” His eyes were dull, as if he were trying to persuade himself.

That night, Robbie Godbold called to tell me about the shopping center. He started to say how he’d helped pull some people out, but his voice quivered and he said he had to go.

“You got a boyfriend?” Charlene asked when I came back to our bedroom. “He’s not cute, but he seemed okay. I saw him cleaning up after the tornado.”

The tornado was a good excuse not to go to school the next day. Let Mr. Woods worry that I was taken by the Lord, I decided. Let him suffer, thinking that his evil words were the last I’d ever heard. Let him think my limbs were scattered like a soldier’s across the lawns of Biloxi. When the phone rang, it was Robbie, calling from the school pay phone. When he found out I wasn’t sick, he asked me to go to McDonald’s after school. Everybody was talking about the McDonald’s that had come to town, but I hadn’t been yet.

As soon as I saw his Chevrolet up close, I liked him even more. A troll doll stood where the hood ornament would have been, and when we hit the road, its hair blew like an undulating rainbow. He turned on the radio, and it was Aretha Franklin singing “Respect,” and Robbie sang with her, drumming his fingers on the wheel. He wasn’t bad, and soon our voices trailed out the car windows together, a single stream of sound. He kept glancing at me when I’d do riffs with the lyrics, and the gleam in his eyes grew.

“You’re great. And you play trumpet, too,” he said, and took my hand. His weren’t soft, like I’d imagined.

“Why are your hands rough?” I asked. Turned out he helped his dad fix cars on the week-ends, and that reminded me of Mama, made my heart move toward him a little more. “Do you like it when Mrs. Hodges calls you Robert?” I asked.

“Why not?” he shrugged.

“But kids make fun of it.”

“They do?” He thought for a minute, then squeezed my hand. “Who cares? You can’t let a few jerks get you down.”

“Mind if I call you Rob?” I asked. It was neither what the rednecks or the algebra teacher called him.

He thought a second, then nodded. “I like it.”

Rob started calling every night and Charlene got mad at me for tying up the telephone. “Ernie’s trying to call,” she said, as if I should know that her calls were more important than mine. It was true Rob wasn’t as cute as Ernie Crenshaw—he was skinny with a patch of acne on his cheek—but I still had some rights to the telephone.

I’d always told Charlene I didn’t mind how people treated me, if they were rude or nice, but with Rob being nice to me, I started singing around the house again, like Mama used to do. I’d belt out Christmas carols, show tunes, Baptist hymns, rock ‘n roll, and blues. Rob said I sounded like Janis Joplin. Even Charlene said it almost made things normal, having somebody singing in the house again, not just my awful trumpet blasting off her ears.

Rob and I spent a lot of time together, walking on the beach and talking about Mama sometimes. Charlene said Ernie prayed that Mama’s murder would stop following Charlene and me everywhere, even when we’d try to read or watch TV, and it seemed to have worked for her. All she thought about now was Ernie.

But, like I told Rob, I couldn’t watch the TV weather report without thinking of Levi Litvak. Instead of weather charts, I saw Levi Litvak’s dark hair pushed into a pompadour, and sideburns sprouting on his cheeks like a thin hedge along his face. Mama used to get nervous when we’d all watch the weather. She’d buff her nails or sip iced tea, but she’d never take her eyes off the screen. Daddy teased her that she was jittery about the weather because it was the one thing she couldn’t control. Daddy didn’t understand. It was the weatherman she couldn’t control.

I’d tell Rob these stories, and he would hug me so tight until all I could think about were his kisses, and how warm his arms felt around me. “Try to forget it, Jubilee,” he said. “You’ve got me now.”

In the Piggly Wiggly, I heard Loretta Holliday telling Evelyn McCarty, Tommy’s mother, that Levi Litvak wasn’t burned up in the crash. They were in the check-out line. It was safe to gossip about Mama in the grocery store now that Marilyn wasn’t working the cash register anymore. They’d been talking about how Mrs. McCarty’s insurance was slow paying to have her house rebuilt, but Mrs. Holliday shifted the conversation to the murder, how Levi Litvak survived.

“Oh Loretta,” said Mrs. McCarty. “You’re not still talking that nonsense, are you?” Maybe that tornado had knocked some sense into at least one person in Biloxi.

Mrs. Holliday edged her basket closer to Mrs. McCarty and bumped her plump rear end. “Levi Litvak is right here on the Gulf Coast, of all the nerve! He never even left.”

Mrs. McCarty moved away from Loretta Holliday’s basket, but Loretta kept pushing it forward. “Oh, Levi has a few scars from that accident,” she said. “Wreck like that, who wouldn’t? He’s not as handsome as he used to be. But he’s pumping gas over in Pelahatchie, big as you please. If anybody could resurrect himself, Levi could. ‘Course, he’s wearing his hair shaved, so he looks bald.” She ran her red nails around the back of her neck. “Only a fringe of wavy hair at the edges, bleached yellow like a woman’s. That gorgeous curly brown hair, all gone.”

Mrs. McCarty laughed. “Loretta, he was burned up four years ago, hon. Listen, I knew some folks didn’t care much for Bernice, liking the coloreds the way she did. But Levi Litvak killed her out of love gone bad, not hate. You tell me, how could he put his ashes back together again?”

I bent my head over the shampoo counter, trying to hear. Mrs. Holliday dropped her voice to a whisper, but it was loud, like an actress onstage. “Weren’t his ashes, that’s how. And you know what? He’s keeping Bernice out on Deer Island. Took her right out of the hospital in the dead of night, in his own two arms, and stole her away from Harry, just like he always wanted. Poor woman’s stranded.”

Mrs. McCarty shook her head. “Stuff and nonsense, Loretta! I went to Bernice Starling’s funeral. If that wasn’t her in that casket, who was it?”

“Wax.” Loretta leaned close to her face, her green eyes gleaming like a cat’s. “You know what they can do with wax nowadays, don’t you? Have you ever been to Madame Tussauds’ in New Orleans? Why, just last week, Kathy and I went, and I thought, if they can do that with Queen Elizabeth, just think what Levi could’ve done to make that look like Bernice. He was an artist with his hands, you know. I saw some sculptures he did at the TV station, things with wire and metal. A murderer’s gone free, I tell you, and unless I tell it, nobody’s going to know it. ‘Course, he might come after me next, but when I think of Bernice out on that island, living all by herself, why, it gives me the shivers.”

Evelyn McCarty glanced at Loretta out of the corner of her eye, then rolled her basket on to the cashier. “God bless you, Loretta Holliday.” Her voice had gotten soft and quiet; she pushed forward and left. Mrs. Holliday kept on smiling, her red lips a jagged crack in her face.

That night, I lay in the bathtub for a long time, soaking in warm water until my toes wrinkled up. Daddy’s old razor lay on the soap dish, the one Charlene and I used to shave our legs. I scraped it against my leg, starting with my ankle, and was halfway up to my knee before I noticed blood edging into the water. The redness billowed into the tub like something alive, like a jellyfish in the Gulf, pushing itself through the water with the grace of its translucent umbrella. The cut on my ankle didn’t even hurt and when the bleeding stopped, I thought maybe it had been like that for Mama when she was stabbed, painless and even a little beautiful, with the liquid warm against her chest, her heart freed from its cage.

I pushed the dull blade against my calf, but nothing happened. Was that how numb I’d become, I wondered, feeling nothing, even when I bled? I pushed harder and a thin stream of blood rose in the water like smoke and I watched, satisfied at the sting, until it dissipated into pink and merged with the gray soapy water.