IMPROMPTU

The keys have changed their pattern. Jessie stares at them, trying to remember, trying to let the music in. She feels like her body is sinking, heavy, into the floor as her head floats dizzily above it. The Conservatory is in Virginia, not far from Hampton where Junior went to school, and if she can be the first colored girl accepted there, living away from her parents—

“Jessie?” calls Miss Loretta, the voice, echoing in the near-empty hall, a shock.

“Yes, M’am,” she says. The white man’s eyes challenged her when he said hello, his steady gaze asking Just what do you think you’re doing here?, and at the moment she has no answer for him. Usually she has only to lay her fingers on the keys, all in their proper pattern, and the music is there.

Royal can come to her in Virginia, they can have the ceremony, and if this is what she dreads the most, everything will be made right. She will be forgiven. She only has to survive this test, to prove herself worthy.

The white man clears his throat, impatient, out there somewhere in the staring rows of seats with Miss Loretta. Jessie looks at the sheet music, notes drawn on lines, swimming.

G-Minor, she thinks, and wills her fingers into motion.

It isn’t wrong, really, just not what is accepted. Miss Loretta sits on the aisle, a few rows behind the Maestro, and can’t help but try to read his reaction from the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. It has been such a trial to convince him to come up, and she worries she may have overstated Jessie’s abilities. What is outstanding in Wilmington may not impress Atlanta or Charlottesville, though her ear and her intuition have not deceived her before.

“Another Hottentot prodigy,” the Maestro smiled tightly when she met him at the station. “You’ve become something of a missionary.”

He is listening, though, eyes closed as always, fingertips of his right hand gently pressed against his temple as if the music is being played inside his head. Jessie has chosen her favorite ballade, and though it is meant to begin in a pensive mode there is something—not tentative, exactly, for the girl’s fingers know where they’re meant to be—something otherworldly about her playing as she begins. The caesuras are much too long, Jessie listening to each phrase, pondering it, before proceeding with the next. The massive hall is cool, as always in the early afternoon, and Miss Loretta realizes she is shivering.

There will be only this one opportunity with the Maestro. She has made an effort not to frighten the girl, tried not to overstress the importance of the audition. But the fact remains that it is one of those rare moments in which the course of one’s future is determined, the road dividing, only one path leading forward. She is so young, Jessie, innocent yet of the terrible knowledge that certain actions, certain decisions, cannot be undone. Miss Loretta dabs at her neck with her handkerchief, then fans herself, suddenly flushing with one of the vaporous attacks she is prone to lately, worse always when she is tense or upset, and then Jessie stops playing.

Just stops.

The ballade is meant to change character here, gaining power and certitude, but Jessie only sits staring at the keys as if this more resolute music is a forest she dare not enter.

The Maestro turns his head to Miss Loretta, arches an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry,” says Jessie, her near whisper carrying out to them.

The girl stands and steps off into the wings, footsteps hammering. Miss Loretta is up and leaning in to placate the Maestro.

“Perhaps if I speak with her—”

“She understands,” he says, shaking his head slightly and reaching for his coat as he rises. “Left to their own devices, they prefer to dwell at their own level.” He pats Miss Loretta’s hand as he steps into the aisle, as a father pats the hand of a child who has lost her balloon. “Your efforts for the girl are commendable, and I’m sure you saw the spark of something there,” he says, slipping his coat on, “but the Academy is not a settlement house.”

“I apologize for—”

“No need. I’ll be able to catch the three o’clock if I hurry.”

Miss Loretta sits then, suddenly exhausted, till she hears the door to the lobby thump shut behind him. The chill that so often follows her hot spells shudders down her spine from the sides of her neck. It is very quiet in the great hall. She stares at the piano, mute and reproachful at the center of the stage. She remembers hearing Anton Rubinstein from this very seat on the aisle, enthralled at thirteen years of age, the music filling her soul. Miss Loretta sighs and stands to find the girl.

Jessie sits on a stool by the bank of pulleys that control the scenery and curtains. Her cheeks are wet with tears as she looks up to see her teacher.

“I am so very sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I.” Jessie flushes as if she has been slapped. Miss Loretta regrets the phrase the moment it is uttered, but she has suffered the Maestro’s condescension, has confused her own thwarted hopes with those of this colored girl.

Softer now, “You’re not feeling well?”

The girl’s forehead is damp, the neck of her shirtwaist darkened with perspiration.

“I was afraid I was going to be ill.”

There was a girl at Conservatory, Antonia, a lovely girl who played like the wind and had great dark eyes that were rumored to be the result of gypsy blood in her family. Miss Loretta and the others would gather outside the rehearsal room and marvel at her facility, her passion. But if more than one of them stepped in to listen Antonia would break off and return to playing scales or pretend to study the score. The morning of her first recitif she began to tremble and by noon was burning with a fever so intense an ambulance was called for. It was said that her symptoms had disappeared by the time she reached the hospital, though none of them ever saw her again. The porters were there to remove her belongings from her room the next morning.

“The nature of your sex,” said Professor Einhorn without mentioning Antonia by name in his next lecture, “disposes you to a heightened sensitivity. It is both your glory and your undoing.”

Miss Loretta chooses her words carefully. “You have performed in front of people, important people, before this,” she says. There was the concert in February, the haute monde of Wilmington present, and but for the girl’s parents not a dark face in the audience. She was brilliant.

“I feel ill all the time,” says Jessie. “Not just today.”

It is unthinkable.

The girl has been rounding out lately, her body ripening. Nothing more. These are growing pains, perhaps, the unruly sway of female humors. We women are slaves to our bodies, thinks Miss Loretta, and our emotions rule our health.

“Have you had—”

She is not the girl’s mother, after all, not responsible. But at the end of all her pleading to lure the Maestro here for a trial, after all her steady instruction and guidance through the years, her investment in this child, there must be an accounting.

“Have you started having your flow?”

The girl seems to understand. “It began last August,” she says. “But since I’ve been ill—”

Unthinkable.

Miss Loretta feels her own tiny swoon of nausea. She is a music instructor, nothing more. “How long has it been interrupted?”

The girl looks at her with fearful eyes. “It can’t be that.”

“Of course not.” It is very stuffy, here in the wings, the air stale and motionless. “Because you’ve never engaged—” they are familiar, Miss Loretta and this colored girl, more familiar than teacher and student, more familiar than society will normally allow, given what separates them, “—because you’ve never engaged in improprieties with your young man.”

It is not a question.

It is a statement begging confirmation and the girl lets it hang too long, another caesura, the sound of Miss Loretta’s words decaying in the narrow space that is heavy with the mildew of the side curtains bunched around them, and then the realization that they are not alone.

“Pologize for disturbin you ladies,” he says, pulling his cap off and holding it over his chest, “but you finish with that pianner?”

It is the day man, old Samuel, a fixture at Thalian Hall since Miss Loretta was a girl, known as Songbird because of his constant humming while at his tasks. He has appeared without a note, however, and stands frozen in a slight bow awaiting her instruction.

“We are quite finished with it, Samuel. Thank you.”

He turns to the girl. “I seen your Daddy out the hallway, here on city bidness,” he says. “He ax if I know how it’s goin for you in here.”

“I’ll have to tell him when I get home,” she says quietly.

Samuel bows again and puts his cap back on. “Yes M’am, Miss Jessie.” He leaves them to attend to the piano.

“It was only the one time,” she says when he is gone, as if this may provide absolution.

Slaves to our bodies.

“Yes,” nods Miss Loretta, wishing there was a place for her to sit. “You will need to tell your father when you are home.”

“I’ve let you down,” cries the girl, Jessie, her Jessie. “I’ve betrayed you.”

Jessie is weeping now and Miss Loretta finds herself holding her, cradling her head against her chest as she stands and the girl sits on the stool, feeling the tight-coiled black tresses she has always wanted to touch, if only from curiosity, stroking her hair now and this is too much, too much to bear. She has lost her, lost her dear Jessie forever.

“What can I do?”

“Oh my dear,” says Miss Loretta, weeping herself now, “there is so very little you can do.”

“They’ll find out.”

“You will tell them. Today.”

She is amazed to discover that she does not think any less of the girl, that there is, in fact, no betrayal. Only sadness. There are worse fates, of course, but she wanted more for this one. Colored society—what, society in general being what it is—the young man may suffer no consequences. Off in the Army somewhere, at liberty, in the eyes of the world, to shoulder his responsibility or not. What must it be to move with that freedom, to love without care. What reckless joy to saunter through life with only your conscience as restraint, ever the raptor and never the ruined.

“You will tell them today, and you will be married, and you will have your child,” Miss Loretta says to Jessie, as gently as she can muster.

“Is that all?”

It is more than she herself has achieved, it is what women are raised to do. Jessie looks up to her from the stool, holding tightly to both of her hands now, waiting for her response.

“You can pray that it is a boy,” says Miss Loretta.

“First you loosen the set screw—that’s right, now lift that lever pin.”

Milsap wills himself to patience, standing over Davey’s shoulder while the boy tries to pull out the distributor clutch. He can follow instruction, Davey, but every time he puts his hands into the Linotype it’s like the first time they been there. No sense of the machine, of what sets what into motion.

“Now you can take the lever and the spring away—get a good holt on it—you drop these little pieces in there we got to tear the whole thing apart.”

“All right—”

“Now—you’re gonna take the screw from the bracket there and loosen the other screw over on the right front so the whole clutch bracket comes off its dowel pins without springing the clutch shaft—”

“There’s so many parts.”

It could have been done with an hour ago but part of the job is seeing if he can train anybody else to fix the apparatus. Maybe come a day when he’s not there and there’s important news and the machines go down, both of them, could be one of a thousand things. What happens then if it’s only Davey or Clifton Lee or that half-wit German they just brung in? The people must be informed, that’s how a democracy functions.

“You do as many things as this machine does, you need a lot of parts. And they got to be in harmony, which is why we’re changing out this clutch.”

Milsap sees that there is God in the machine, in the active interplay of slides and matrices, of wheels and pulleys and discs and shafts and springs and ejectors, of hot lead and cold steel, just as there is God in the holy, complex cycles of rain and seed and growth and harvest, in the cleverness of the human mind that can, like Mr. Merganthaler’s, discover a system so intricate yet so obvious once invented that it surely must be divine.

The copy boy comes up and stands by them but Milsap isn’t ready to see him.

“Anything in this life,” he says, “got to be in harmony to operate how it’s sposed to. Your church organ—how many moving parts you think that has? One of them, just one, gets out of kilter and you gonna hear noise in the house of God, not music. Our society,” he says, picking up a theme that Mr. Clawson has been developing in his editorials this week, “has got some intricate workings of its own. Something, somebody, steps out of their place—well, that’s when you get chaos. That’s when you get anarchy. What you want?”

The copy boy, staring into the guts of the machine, is startled to be addressed.

“Oh. Mr. Clawson need you.”

The boy runs off. Milsap considers leaving instructions with Davey, then decides against it.

“Don’t touch anything till I get back,” he says. “Anything.”

When you put the clutch back on the beam you have to be sure that the timing pin in the distributor screw meshes into the clutch-shaft gear, where the tooth is cut away, so that the screws will be in accurate time with each other. It seems plain enough, like holding a bottle of milk the right way up before you pull the cap off, but some people got no feel for machines and Davey is one of them.

Clawson is in his office in the tilt-back chair, reading, when Milsap ducks his head in.

“I got a telephone call from over at the Armory,” he says without looking up from the copy in his lap. There’s only a handful of telephones in town and the Messenger got the first. Milsap can read the subhead, upside-down, of the copy that lies in the editor’s lap—

FEDERAL BAYONETS TO BE USED IN
CARRYING ELECTION IN NORTH CAROLINA

The yankees are threatening to come back and escort their friends to the polling places and the Messenger is making the proper stink about it.

“They need you to go over and help them with something. Right now.”

“What is it?”

Mr. Clawson looks up and gives him one of those Do I pay you to ask questions? looks.

“Bring your tools.”

Davey is still staring into the machine when he comes back.

“You touch anything?”

“No sir.”

“You might’s well clean out the magazines while this is down.”

“Yes sir.”

If there is God in the machine, his printer’s devil will be the last man on earth to recognize Him.

You got to take note when old Dan start rubbing his ass on everything in sight. Rubbing his ass and jerking his tail around and pulling his lip up to show his teeth like he got something to say. Jubal leaves him tied out front on Terry’s Alley and goes around behind the shack. Mama is off cleaning for somebody, hardly ever find her home this time of day, but she say come by and get herbs whenever.

The wormwood plant is in an old wood tub half-buried away from the rest of the garden. Jubal pulls the leaves off, few from this side, few from that, and stuffs them in a leather sack. Brew up some tea with them, lace it with plenty of honey. Dan won’t take nothing that bitter less you sugar it up some. Maybe mash some garlic in with his oats, lace some honey in that too. He had the roundworm once before, Dan, had to shit every three blocks and fought when you cinched the traces on him.

Jubal has the four-wheel dray with the headboard and seat hitched to him out front. Got to get four, five more years out of Dan, the way prices are. The horse leaves a pile, sick-smelling, in the sand as they turn south to head out of Brooklyn.

If there was some way to know ahead, like these white folks do who got the telephone, you would never roll empty. Drop one load off and pick up another on the same block, and just keep doing that, making triangles all over town. But how it is, they send some little barefoot boy they give a penny to that finds you or he doesn’t and some other man he sees with a wagon get your job. Jubal pulls back on the reins to slow and ease alongside Mance Crofut, walking along Fourth.

“How they treatin you, Mance?” he calls.

“They’s mischief afoot.”

“How you say?”

Mance is a hunting friend of his uncle Wicklow, do up a stew with squirrel or possum make you slap your brains out. Mance have to roll around in this one spot where the deadfall trees are going back to dirt before he goes stalking, cause he always smell of creosote from his years on the dock. Jubal went out with them once when he was maybe twelve—Mance hit a doe neither him nor Royal nor Uncle Wick could even see it was so far back in the trees, little hole just under the ear.

“You know my ole Trapdoor Springfield I got,” says Mance, leaning on the edge of the front wheel as the dray comes to rest. “I allus gets my bullets at Mr. Yaeger store, maybe some chaw that he hang out back. Only this mornin he won’t sell me no bullets, says he fresh out of em. I can see the boxes right there behind him on the shelf, but you don’t want to call no white man out as a liar, specially if he one of the better ones, sell me on credit now and then when there aint no work. So I goes down to Dothan’s and to Bailey Catlin’s and even all the way up to the Phoenix Genral Store, they say they got none either. You know that’s a .45-70, aint like half the town don’t shoot with them old Army rifles, so’s I know somebody tellin stories. I come back to Mr. Yaeger’s, buy a hank of that chaw, an I look right at them boxes behind him an I says ‘You haven’t got noner them .45s in since I come by this mornin, have you?’ Now he look round that storeroom to be sure aint nobody listenin and he lean crost the counter and he lower his voice down, say ‘I be honest with you, Mance, they is an innerdiction on us sellin no weapons nor bullets to the colored folks till we told it’s o.k. again.’ Seems it’s this White Man’s Union, going bout making rules and you break em they gone shut you down or burn you out.”

They are quiet for a moment, pondering this.

“Election coming up,” says Jubal.

“Well I wish it was already past,” says the old man, shaking his head. “White people start actin skittish, you got to step lightly.”

Jubal offers him a ride but the old man is almost home and cuts off into Campbell Street, still shaking his head. Dan whickers and farts as they cross over the railroad tracks on the Hilton Bridge. Mostly it’s the foals you got to worry about with roundworm, eat their whole insides up. A mule Dan’s age has had em more than once, and they don’t usually suffer too much with it. That’s just life, is what Uncle Wicklow says, whatever bad happens to you, you don’t ever lose it. Just learn how to carry it inside.

He turns at Princess, and then again on Seventh, crunching on the shell road now, passing little Jessie Lunceford who his brother is so sweet on, walking alone, dressed pretty and wearing a face like she lost her last friend. He calls out to her but she doesn’t seem to hear him. Jubal pulls Dan’s head to get them off the main street, then stops the dray crosswise to the rear of Turpin’s Pharmacy like they asked. Mr. Kenan is there waiting.

“We not going far,” says Mr. Kenan, winking, “but this here’s a load.”

Jubal has never liked a man, specially a white man, to wink at him, and it makes him uneasy when Mr. Turpin and Mr. Kenan commence to joshing while he helps them lift the big crate out.

“Boys at the Armory gone preciate this,” says Mr. Kenan, winking again. “After this party done, they be some young men wish they hadn’t.”

But the crate is way too big and way too heavy for liquor, dead weight that staggers the three of them getting it out from the back and onto the dray. The springs complain when they thump it down.

“Yes sir,” says Mr. Turpin, “there be some heads hurtin fore this wingding over.”

Jubal just smiles the way they like and shoves the crate farther onto the platform. No need to tie it down with the Armory just about around the corner.

“Whatever you gennemen got in there,” he says, “they’s a good deal of it.”

Mr. Turpin throws a tarp over the crate and goes back inside. Mr. Kenan rides beside Jubal on the seat, looking glad there isn’t nearly anybody around, and hops down quick when they pull up behind the Armory. Mr. Kenan was the Customs House man, where they say you make more salary than the governor. When they give it to John Dancy, who is colored, a lot of people thought there would be trouble but so far it’s just noise.

“Get us some more hands,” says Mr. Kenan, and hurries inside.

Jubal pulls the tarp off and tries to peek between the slats of the crate but it’s covered in there too. Sure as hell aint no whiskey bottles. Mr. Kenan comes out with Colonel Moore and another man Jubal doesn’t know, young man with blisters on his nose. Colonel Moore won’t hardly look at him but then he is one of them die-hard Confederates, marches with the Klan and still hasn’t give up the emancipation war for lost.

Jubal climbs up and kneels and puts his shoulder to the crate to get it sliding, while Mr. Kenan and the white boy take the weight of the back end. He hops down to take a corner but Colonel Moore shoulders him away.

“We got it from here,” he says.

So Jubal holds the back door open for them and when they’re through Colonel Moore calls, “You shut that, boy.”

He’s got to wait to be paid then. It’s always better if you help them carry it in cause then you just stand there in the way till somebody notices and pays and usually give you a tip on top of it. When they leave you outside there’s no telling, you just wait and even if they have forgotten about you they act like you done something wrong if you knock to remind them.

But Mr. Kenan hurries out and gives him an extra twenty-five cents even though he didn’t help them bring it in, and winks.

“Don’t be careless how you spend that, now,” he says. “Don’t let the devil get it all.”

Dan is pulling his lip up and farting more as they roll empty back to the stable, but keeps on pulling strong and steady, and every time they pass a white man Jubal sneaks a look at their face to see if he can guess what they up to. Mance is right, he thinks. Acting strange and skittish.

Not knowing what their problem is, Milsap has to lug both boxes of tools, but it’s just a short walk to the Armory. It used to belong to the Taylor brothers’ family and is more a clubhouse for the Light Infantry and their friends than a real fortress like in Raleigh or Charleston. There’s a long wait after he knocks and then it’s Mr. Kenan who answers the door and pulls him in.

“He didn’t tell you to come to the back?”

“No sir.”

“Least you’re here. Come on.”

Kenan leads Milsap to a room in the rear and there it is, laid out in pieces on a tarp on the floor, beautiful. Colonel Moore is there and a young fellow, maybe one of the Shiner clan from over in Dry Pond, who they don’t introduce to him.

“It’s got an instruction sheet for assembly,” says Colonel Moore. “But we didn’t want any slip-ups.”

The cylinder is already put together, ten blued-steel barrels, smelling of oil and metal shavings.

“Look like it come straight from Hartford.”

“We thought it was heavy,” says the boy, “but they just thrown all the ammo in the same crate with it.”

Colonel Moore holds out the assembly sheet for Milsap but he steps past without glancing at it.

“They done most of it for you,” he says. “Just kept a few things apart to pack easier.”

He sits and opens one of his toolboxes as the men look on, excited. He saw one pulled behind a wagon once when he was a boy, but it was a yankee parade and his father wouldn’t let him go closer. It is one of those inventions that once you see it makes perfect sense, that plenty of people had thought of only the machining wasn’t up to it then or the cartridges weren’t uniform or any of the dozens of little things that have to fall in place at the right time.

“The beauty of this,” he says, cradling the cylinder and beginning to attach it to the frame, “is each barrel got its own breech and firing-pin system. And by the time you crank her around again, your spent cartridge has fell out of the ejection port and a fresh one has slid in from the hopper. What’s this take?”

“Krag rounds,” says Mr. Kenan. “You work it right she’ll put out six hundred a minute.”

“That’s some monkey-buster,” grins the boy, who surely resembles a Shiner.

Milsap sets the brass crank in the socket, gives it a turn to check the action, then begins to secure it.

“It’s a Peace-keeper,” says Mr. Kenan. “Best way to keep the peace, you let the other side know what you capable of, militarily speaking. Deters any ideas they might get about disruption.”

“Or voting,” says the Shiner boy.

“You gone roll it into place?” asks Milsap.

“Haven’t decided yet,” says Colonel Moore.

“Well, it’s best you mount this plate on first—shipboard, wagon bed, wherever you want, get it rock solid, and then bolt the apparatus on top of that. It’ll tolerate some cant, but the more level the better. And if you expect to be firing a good deal,” and here Milsap looks up to Mr. Kenan, “you best put some plugs in your ears. Don’t want to end up deaf like me. Imonna put these on now so you can move it easier.”

Colonel Moore and the Shiner boy lift the assembly up while Milsap wrestles the carriage wheels onto the axle, tightens the nuts on the hubs. When he is done they all step back to behold what he’s put together, silent for a long moment. There is nothing in the magazine yet, the boxes of cartridges stacked against the wall, but there is no mistaking the purpose of this machine. There is God in this design as well, thinks Milsap, the God of swift and terrible retribution. He realizes he is in a sweat, though it’s the others who done all the lifting.

“You think it’s likely to come to this?” he asks.

“It might and it might not,” says Mr. Kenan. “But we’ll sleep better just knowing it’s here.”

“You have ruined us.”

Yolanda has seen him angrier than this, furious over some defiance on Junior’s part, some pointed slight at a Council meeting, but never so cold.

“You understand that, don’t you? You understand what you’ve done?”

Her daughter stands before him, chest heaving with sobs, near hysteria since he began his relentless questioning of her symptoms. He has not touched her, and Yolanda can tell that she is not yet allowed to.

“I was going to tell you earlier,” Jessie manages to say between sobs for breath, “but I wasn’t sure.”

“Sure of what? There is no question about your relations with that boy—”

“But that doesn’t mean—”

“So you think your behavior would be acceptable if there hadn’t been this consequence?”

Yolanda wishes he would stop. Her daughter’s girlhood is shattered, that is all that matters now.

“I see this sort of behavior every day across the tracks,” he says. “I expect it from those people. But in my own family—” He is shaking his head now, eyes fixed with censure on Jessie. He is not a man to hurl objects, not a man to kick and curse. She knows he is gentle with the other ones, the fallen girls he treats north of Red Cross Street, she knows from the way they smile and proudly show off their fatherless infants when encountered on the street. But this is their daughter, their jewel, their gift to the world.

“How could you do such a thing?”

It isn’t shame she hears in her husband’s voice, though public shame is certainly on his mind. It isn’t shock or disappointment or even the fear of how this will be used against him, against them all, that she senses in his tone.

He is jealous.

“I’ll write to him,” Jessie sobs. “Or if you let me, I’ll go to him—”

His smile, his pride, walking arm in arm with her, showing her off to the world—

“The next time I see that boy,” he says, “will be his last day on earth.”

He walked that way with her once, Yolanda, when she was his young wife, but time passes and daughters love their fathers and fathers return that love—

Jessie runs and throws herself on the divan, covering her head with her arms, wailing. Yolanda takes a step but he stops her with his eyes.

“It’s that white woman,” he fumes. “Filling her head with scandal.”

“She’s a piano teacher.”

“And a Suffragist.”

“You’ve never had a problem with—”

“It isn’t the voting, it’s everything else that goes along with it!” He is pacing now, pointedly looking away from Jessie, pacing the way he does when he returns from the city meetings and condemns the latest outrages. “The father is practically an anarchist.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“And that boy—”

“His name is Royal.”

“His name,” says her husband, raising his voice so Jessie can hear over her sobs, “will never be spoken in this house again!”

It is easier, it must be, for the rest of them, the people north of the tracks. Nobody is watching them, nobody hoping for them to fall. And there are women there, midwives and roots women, who can erase an indiscretion if engaged in time. More than once he has spoken of having them arrested, but never made a formal complaint. And some just have the child, acknowledging the father whether he reciprocates or not. Easier, yes, but no option for a decent Christian girl.

“I’ll write to his commanding officer,” he says, “and have him discharged.”

“And what purpose will that serve?” says Yolanda. She is amazed to feel so calm. It is the same calm that came over her when Junior went under at Lake Waccamaw and she was the one to pull him out, the one to flip him on his stomach and work his arms and squeeze his little ribs till the water was forced out and he took his first gasping breath. Jessie is making those sounds now on the divan, drowning in her misery, but Yolanda is calm and already thinking ahead to what can be done. What must be done. The worry will come later, as it did with Junior, trembling every time he came near the water after that, her first thought when he announced his enlistment the anxious relief that, thank the Lord, he had not signed on to be a sailor.

“We need to be strong now,” she says. “We need to think very clearly.”

Jessie is weeping more quietly, having made her last effort and eager to hear what fate will be decided for her. Dr. Lunceford stops pacing, turns to face his wife. We have been so fortunate, she thinks. I will not allow this to destroy us. Jessie has been foolish and weak but not wicked, never that, and what they’ve planned for her is gone. But there will be no tragedy. We have endured worse than this in our lives, she thinks. And then, with the tiniest guilty twinge of excitement—there will be a new baby.

Her husband begins to pace again, but now his eyes are inward, calculating, his step the measured stride that always follows his diatribes.

“We find a husband,” he says. “Immediately.” He shoots a look to Yolanda before she can raise the possibility. “Someone respectable.”

Alma sits on the stairs, waiting for the storm to pass. Her own father had taken his belt to her the first time and for a while she blamed him. The next she lost before she was showing much and by the third he was out of their lives. That was the story with railroad men, her mama said, they went off down the tracks and one day didn’t come back.

Dr. Lunceford uses suspenders to keep his pants up and she’s never known him to raise a hand to any of his family. Not like the Judge, thrash his arm stiff whipping his younger boy’s behind, and him, Niles, only waiting for it to end and taking no lesson from the punishment. The last fight was the worst, with blows exchanged and blood on the rug and her in the middle of it.

And now little Jessie down there sobbing like she’s got it hard.

Alma hurries back up to their bedroom when the girl’s begging loses steam, when Doctor’s plans are fixed and Mrs. Lunceford stays quiet. Alma finishes making their bed, sheets smelling the tiniest bit of smoke from the fire over on Castle Street the day she hung them out, and she hears Jessie running up and slamming the door to her room.

She waits till it is clear Mrs. Lunceford won’t be following, still reasoning with Doctor down the stairs. She steps in without knocking. The girl is sprawled on her belly, exhausted from crying. Alma sits on the edge of the bed. It is a long moment before Jessie pulls her face out of the pillow and stares, red-eyed, toward the window.

“Did you hear?”

“I heard.”

“They won’t let me have him.”

“You didn’t tell him before this? Write to him?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“I told you, girl—”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“I aint a farm girl, neither,” says Alma, “but I know when a melon is set to bust.” She puts a hand on Jessie’s shoulder, tries to remember being this young. By the time she got shoes, ten, maybe eleven, she knew enough not to hope for things. You try to get what you can out of life, but only white folks and the few there is like the Luncefords, the educated colored, bother to make big plans and expect them to work out.

“Can’t spen’ what you ain’ got,” her mama always said, “and can’t lose what you ain’ never had.”

“What you gone do now?”

“What can I do?”

“That boy want you. That’s all you been tellin me—”

“He’s in the Army.”

“So? Texas somewhere—”

“Arizona.”

“It aint the moon. If it’s on the map, there’s a train will get you there.”

Jessie throws her arm across her forehead. “I’m just a girl,” she says in a very small voice.

If there was one like Royal Scott wanting her, she’d walk to the damn Territories if that’s what it took. But she is not this girl and never was.

“You gone marry who they say?”

Jessie covers her face with her other arm.

If I’d been able to keep one alive, keep maybe a couple of them, Alma thinks, I’d of schooled them better than this. Not the way her mama did, no time to do more than warn and worry and pray every night to the Lord for His divine protection, but really telling what was what and keeping the men off them long enough to have some little-girl time, making mudpies without a worry in the world. But after the fourth one came out looking like a tadpole the white doctor told her it was never going to happen for her, and the only mothering she’ll ever do is letting this fool girl know she isn’t licked less she lets herself be. She just got to deal with it, one way or the other.

“You aint so far gone,” says Alma, softly, stroking the girl’s arm. “There’s things that can be done.”

Jessie uncovers her face, looks scared at her.

“I thought them teas and baths was gonna fix you, but it’s caught hold now and there’s—”

“I can’t do that.”

Alma shrugs. “Then you can’t.”

The girl keeps staring at her. “Did you? Ever?”

“Never had to, never wanted to,” says Alma. “Nature done it for me.”

“Oh.”

First time out and this girl end up with a baby, everything goes regular, and she don’t even want it. Alma offers the other possibility.

“You need a train ticket, whatever, I got some money put by. You welcome to it, darlin.”

It will be the end of her job here, for sure, though it probably won’t be long before some of the blame for this spills her way and she’ll be fired anyhow. “Junior will take your side on it if you get there,” she adds. “I just bet he will.”

Jessie takes too long to answer. Alma remembers sitting with her just two years back, maybe three, playing dolls and talking nonsense, the girl laying her head against her when she laughed, little braids back then—how she worked every morning doing up those little braids for Jessie. Girl could melt your heart. Jessie takes too long to answer, but when she does she tells the truth.

“I’m just a girl,” she says.

It never happens in the books. Ruined girls are mentioned, pitied, but there is never one you get to know as a character, as a friend.

Jessie studies herself in the mirror above her vanity. Maybe they’re all wrong. Her father never took her temperature, never listened to her heart or even put his hand on her forehead the way he did when she was little and had a fever. And if they’re wrong about it there is still time to win them over, to make them see who Royal is. If he knew he would come, Army or no Army, he would come and make everything right.

It was his tongue that surprised her more than the rest. Alma told her about the rest, told her not to expect so much the first few times, but that part was nice, was sweet and thrilling, building up after the first strange invasion of his tongue into her mouth, touching her own, breathing into one another for a moment. Intimate. They were intimate. And that is all they will ever have.

Jessie studies herself, studies the swollen wreck this day has made of her face, feeling like a powerful hand is squeezing her throat shut, like each breath is a hill she has to climb. She turns the corners of her mouth down and wonders what it will be like to never smile again.