Opening my eyes proved a struggle. A thick crust glued the lashes together. Rubbing my eyes knocked most of the sticky mess away, but even then, they only opened a slit. I couldn’t see a thing. Wherever I was had no light to speak of. It was like drowning in dark.
Lifting my head sent throbbing, thundering pain shooting through my neck that traveled all the way down my spine. Still, I sat myself up and leaned against what I thought must have been a wall behind me. I tried not to think that there might be centipedes skittering near my head.
I decided to collect all of what I knew to be true to keep what I didn’t know from terrifying me. I was away from my home. True. Every part of my body hurt. True. It was dark and dry and hard to breathe where I was. True.
The fear, though, of not knowing where I was or if I’d ever get back home jolted me with a sick feeling all over.
Even though I tried to be quiet, a groan released from deep inside me.
“Well, sounds like you finally decided to wake up.” It was Eddie’s voice, and it was so close I could smell his foul breath before his face came into focus. “Good morning, sunshine.”
“Eddie?” I whispered. “Where are we?”
I could see him just enough to know that he smirked at me.
Fast as I could, I tried to push myself away from him. Digging my heels into the dust floor under me, I pushed against the wall, sliding to my right until I got stopped up in a corner. Then I pushed again, wishing I could break through and get as far away from Eddie as I could.
He’s going to save you. I heard Meemaw’s voice in my head. God’s going to save you.
“I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Eddie said, grabbing for me. I didn’t have any strength left to push his hands away. “Not unless you give me cause to.”
“Let me go,” I said, wishing I had even a little scream left in me.
“You gonna be a good girl?” he asked. “I don’t wanna hurt you.”
“You already did,” I said back.
He let go of me, and I sat still, so afraid of his fist I didn’t want to move at all.
“Couldn’t hardly help it, could I?” He struck a match, holding it in front of his face, letting it burn toward his fingers. “You didn’t give me no choice but to knock you out. I couldn’t have you screaming for the whole town to hear. You would’ve spoiled my plans.”
The flame licked down the matchstick until it got near enough to singe his fingers. He dropped it into the dust, and the flame died immediately. Lighting another, he touched the fire to the inside of a lantern, filling the space around us with a dim glow. Still, I couldn’t tell where we were.
“Trying to figure her out, ain’t ya? You don’t got a idea where we are, do ya?” He held up a canteen. “Thirsty?”
“Aren’t you going to tell me?” I asked.
“Tell you what?”
“Where we are.”
“Don’t you worry about that.” He poured a little water from the canteen into a tin cup. “You gotta drink a little.”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Drink it anyway.”
He put the cup in my hand. I sipped it. The water tasted like dirt and gritted between my teeth. I forced it in anyhow and handed the cup back for more.
Blinking against the muggy air, I realized I’d been in that place before. The lantern lit the room enough for me to see a bedroll and the steps leading up to a couple cellar doors. Up against the wall opposite me was a box. The box that had all the articles and pictures and Eddie’s dog tags.
He’d brought me to the cellar in the middle of the dust field. If only I could get out of there, I could get home. Thoughts of home reminded me of Mama and Beanie, bleeding on the living-room floor.
“Did you kill my mama and sister?” I asked, trying to keep from crying, my voice shaking anyhow. “I saw them. Are they dead?”
“No. At least I didn’t aim to kill them. I just hit them to keep them quiet.” He smirked. “It worked, didn’t it?”
Clenching my teeth, I tried to keep him from seeing my relief.
“What are you going to do with me?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
“Are you going to kill me?”
Again, he didn’t answer.
“You don’t know what you’re going to do.” I put on a hard-edged voice like I learned from Mama. “It’s not such a smart thing to steal a girl if you don’t know what you’re going to do with her.”
“It ain’t so smart to sass a man like me, girl. You best mind your manners, little missy.” He stood and spun the cap back on his canteen. “Don’t think I won’t hit you again.”
He walked to the other side of the room, dropping the canteen in the dirt. From where I sat, I could get to the steps in a matter of seconds. The only problem was Eddie stood in the way.
“You got any food?” I asked, hoping he’d move out of my way.
“Nah,” Eddie answered, climbing up the steps and opening the door above him, peeking out.
I tried to listen for the sounds from outside. I couldn’t hear a thing. No creaking windmill. No chugging train. No sounds of people laughing or hollering. I decided to save my scream for when I thought somebody out there could hear me.
“Why did you take me?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you that yet.” He lowered the door and took a seat on the bottom step. Taking Daddy’s gun, he looked in the barrel. He cussed and threw it to the side. “Ain’t no more shells.”
“Are you going to try and get back at my daddy? I know Jimmy DuPre was your brother.”
His smirk was joined with a loud snort. “You figured out that much, didn’t you?”
“What are you going to do to him?”
“Well, I ain’t gonna just knock him over the head, I can tell you that.”
“Then what?”
“I’m going to kill him.”
I hadn’t wanted Eddie to see me cry. Weakness seemed to put him in a hurtful mood, and I didn’t want to get hit anymore. I couldn’t help it, though, the sobs wouldn’t stay in me. When I wiped my face with the collar of my sweater, I felt how tender my nose was. I wondered if Eddie had hit me there.
“I don’t know why you care so much about him,” Eddie said. “The man’s nothing but a liar.”
“He’s my daddy.” I snarled at him, hoping the anger would take the place of my fear. “He loves me.”
Eddie laughed like he was fixing to go crazy. He kicked dirt my way.
“That’s funny right there, did you know that?” he said.
“What’s so funny about it?”
“You know, Pearl, I’ve been meaning to talk to you.” He made his way over to me and plopped down on the floor. “There’s something I’ve gotta tell you that’s gonna change a whole lot for you.”
I didn’t turn my face toward him but watched him out of the corner of my eye.
“Thing is,” he said. “This secret I’ve got’s been kept for a long time. Too long, you ask me.”
He tapped his foot against the dirt. His boots were about all the way worn through. The laces had been tied in a bunch of places where they must have snapped from years of use. They were frayed and worn thin.
“Lots of people don’t want you to know this secret.” He knocked his shoulder into mine, getting my attention back to his face. “But I do. Oh, but do I ever want you to know.”
“I don’t want to know,” I said. “I don’t care what you’ve got to say.”
“Well, ain’t it a good thing it ain’t up to you?” He groaned. “It ain’t something I can tell you all at once. Least that’s not how I want to do it. I been keeping it so long, I really wanna enjoy telling it. I can’t wait to see the look on your face.”
I thought of Daddy teaching Beanie and me poker on Christmas Day.
“You don’t want to show anything on your face, good or bad,” Daddy had said. “You’ve got to keep your face blank. Never break your poker face. Tuck your feelings in your cheek.”
I made my face blank as I could, refusing to look Eddie full in the eyes. I pretended that I’d turn to stone if I did meet his gaze.
“The secret’s about you, Pearl.” Eddie inched his face even closer to me. “It’s about who you really are.”
“I don’t care.”
I’d spoken true. The secret he had was last on my mind. First was how to get away from him. I wondered if he would catch me if I made a run for it. I could throw a handful of dirt in his eyes, scratch my fingernails down his face, and scramble up the steps. I counted them. There were ten steps. I could make it up, push the doors open and scream for all I was worth. Somebody was sure to hear me.
“If I were you, I’d care. I’d care a whole lot,” he said. “You ain’t who everybody’s been letting on you are.”
Ten steps. I could make that in just a few seconds.
“See, you’ve been going on for, what, ten years as Pearl Spence.” Eddie’s mouth went on even though I wasn’t paying him much mind. “You’ve been living in that house and eating meals around that table with folks you called your family. They’ve been raising you as their own.”
He paused, and I glanced at him. He smiled the first real smile I’d ever seen on his face. It was a smile that would have made me trust him if I hadn’t known any better.
“I’ve been fixing to tell you this a long time.”
“Tell me what?” I put my focus back toward the steps and my freedom.
“Thing is, them folks ain’t your family.”
Slow and quiet and numb, that was how I felt. The world seemed to have grown thick. Just like the day when Daddy took the gun from Mr. Jones.
I turned back to Eddie. “What are you talking about?”
“Tom and Mary Spence ain’t your parents.” He smirked, and it made me feel sick how he enjoyed that moment. “They found you on the church steps when you was nothing but a baby. Your real ma didn’t want you. She threw you away like you was nothing.”
“The baby in the paper?” One of Beanie’s newspaper Christmas blobs was folded and sitting in my cedar box with my special things. I hadn’t known why I wanted to keep it. “That baby is me?”
As soon as I said the words, I knew it was true. I was nothing but an orphaned child.
“Well, look who’s finally caught on.” Eddie’s laugh spooked me all the way down to the heels of my feet.
Eddie’s words made it seem like my whole body was bobbing at the surface of a wide ocean, unanchored. I didn’t like the way that felt one bit.
Eddie grabbed my wrist, his calloused hand on my skin anchoring me to what I knew was true. Maybe the only truth he’d ever said. I tore my arm away from him, the rough spot of his palm scratching against my wrist. It stung, and I wanted to scrub it clean.
“You’re lying,” I whispered, wishing I could make his words untrue. I cradled my hand against my stomach more for comfort than because it was hurt. “I hate you.”
“You shouldn’t hate me,” he said. “I ain’t been the one lying to you your whole life. I’m the only one telling you the truth.”
“You made it all up.” I leaned away from him, wishing I had the nerve to run. “That baby could have been anybody. But it wasn’t me. Mama would have told me.”
“Would she have? I don’t know that you know her so well as you think.”
Eddie got right up to my face and smirked at me. I hated him more and more with each second.
Before I knew what I was doing, I spit right in his face. He flinched, and then, figuring out what I’d done, he hit me right in the eye.
I saw the starbursts behind my eyelids before I felt the pain. Tears spilled and added sting to the hurt. My eye would swell and turn all kinds of purple and blue and black, just like Mrs. Jones’s.
But I could run with just one eye if I needed to.
Eddie used a bandana to wipe my spit off his face. He wasn’t smirking just then, and I decided that it was worth getting punched to see him without that stupid grin. I stared straight at him and forced myself to stop crying.
“If you ever pull something like that again …” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.
I knew from the way he glared all the way through me that he would kill me.
Eddie sat on the steps under the cellar doors, staring at me and smoking cigarettes. He smoked one after another, filling the air around us with more choking thickness. The light from above streamed through the gap between the doors, shining on just the left-hand side of his body. Only one of his eyes glowed blue.
We’d gone without talking about that secret of his for hours, at least I guessed it was that long. In fact, neither of us had said so much as a word. I figured he was real sore at me, and I didn’t care one bit if he was. He finished what had to have been his seventh cigarette and tossed it in the dirt, where it burned down to nothing.
“You love them?” he asked, gruff voiced. “Tom and Mary Spence?”
I nodded. The movement, small as it was, made my whole head ache. I would have done about anything for another sip of water but wasn’t going to ask him for any favors.
“Even though they ain’t your family?” He shook his head. “You still love them.”
“Even if they weren’t.” I still fought against believing him. I didn’t want him to be right.
“Why?” He wrinkled his forehead like he really cared about the answer.
“They’re my family.”
“But they ain’t.”
“So you say.”
“Well, let’s just say they are your family. It still don’t mean nothing.” He spit and it landed just a couple inches from my foot. “I never loved no one in my family.”
“Why not?”
“Because we were just plain awful to each other.”
“I heard about your folks,” I said. “Is it true?”
“What’d you hear?”
“About when you were little.”
“That? About how my old man killed my ma?” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s true. How’d you hear about that?”
“I just know about it,” I said, deciding not to tell him how I’d found the paper in his box. “Were you sad about it?”
“It ain’t sad. I ain’t sad about it.”
“But your father killed himself, too.” I hoped the barb would stick.
“That’s where you got it wrong.” He scratched at his scalp. “That’s the story we told the deputy, but it ain’t what really happened.”
Just like I did when Daddy told a story, I waited for Eddie to go on. His eyes were far away, like he was thinking on something. I thought that maybe if he kept on talking, he’d forget all about me and I could make a run for it. All I needed was to make it up the ten steps.
“Don’t you wanna know what really happened?” he asked. “Ain’t you a little bit curious?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, my pa killed my mom. She said something to him. Can’t remember what it was. Whatever she said set him off. He jumped on top of her and beat her bloody. Then he strangled the life out of her.” He pulled another cigarette from his pocket. His hands shook when he brought it to his lips. “I don’t suppose you ever seen a man strangle somebody, have ya?”
I shook my head no.
“Awful thing to watch. It took her a terrible long time to die. And the sounds she made.” He closed his eyes and smoked in quiet. “I’d crawled under the bed. I was scared he’d come get me next. Never was so scared. Jimmy wasn’t scared, though. No, sir. Jimmy never was afraid of nothing. Something in him snapped, seeing our pa do that. After our pa got off Ma, he was wore out. It’s hard work, squeezing the life outta somebody. He fell back on the ground. Just then, Jimmy grabbed our pa’s pistol and pushed it right against my father’s head.”
Eddie made his finger look like a gun and put it up to the side of his own head.
“Pa lifted his hands like he was going to make for Jimmy’s throat. That’s when Jim shot him.” Eddie made a noise like a gun blast. “Just like that. Never have seen nothing like that since. What a mess.”
I rested my head against the wall behind me. It was cool, and I hoped it would soothe the pain that swelled in my skull. Shoving down the pity for him, I remembered the hand marks that were on Beanie’s neck for weeks. Marks Eddie’d made when he hurt her.
I wondered what had made him stop squeezing.
“When you tell me how you love them folks who pretend to be your family, it don’t mean nothing to me.” He looked at the dirt. “I never loved no one in my life. Family or otherwise. I don’t even know what it would be like.”
The world was full of awful people who did terrible and ugly things. Most of them were only awful because of the scars on their hearts.
I thought on Meemaw’s dream words.
God is the one who saves.
I really wanted to believe that was true.