48
You’ve never had a child, so you don’t know. But I have two girls, real pretty, one fifteen, the other ten. But just saying it that way doesn’t explain anything. I could be describing someone else’s kids, I could be talking about dogs or canaries. You see, having children’s different from anything else on this poor earth, and maybe you can’t ever explain it to people that never have had them. But those girls come from me, from my body, I held them in me, I gave them life in blood and pain, and then nursed them and watched them learn to walk and say words and ask for more than food, hear me? You ain’t ever had that, child, so you don’t know why I up and went when I got the word. Maybe you’ll never know. Maybe no man ever could.
Those girls been part of me for half my life, since when I was younger than you are now, the oldest one anyways. I never had a time after I was sixteen that I didn’t have a little girl pulling on me, followin me from room to room, callin for me scared in the night. Never. Maybe that’s part of why I’m here and not in New Orleans. To be free of that love, that need, for just a little while. That and James Robinson. Maybe you don’t want to hear about James Robinson but I better tell you, child, because if you’re talkin to me you’re talkin to someone who is part of James Robinson. As James Robinson sure is part of me. There’s no getting round it. He is there. In my life. Important as those little girl children.
I was fifteen when I met him, the summer of thirty-eight. He came walking down Burgundy Street in a white suit and white shoes and the sun was on him and he was more than six foot tall and I thought I was seein some kinda god that come rising up outta the swamps and the morning and landed in New Orleans and came walkin right at me, so close I could reach out and touch him. He walked in a rollin way, on the balls of his feet, like he knew all kinds of things and had been everywhere and he looked at me and paused and then kept on walkin, headin for Esplanade and the Faubourg Marigny. At the corner, he stopped and looked back and he had me.
I didn’t know him and neither did anyone else. He just came from nowhere and then I was pregnant and then he married me, dressed in that damned white suit, and we set up housekeepin. My daddy didn’t talk to me for three months after the wedding, cuz he didn’t like James Robinson from the startup. I was a girl and Robinson was a man and my daddy saw things I didn’t see, I guess. Robinson wouldn’t tell me what he did, he said it wasn’t women’s business, but he brought home money, lots of it, and my family helped me with the furnishing and the cooking, cause he had no family and this was the Depression still and everybody was tight, even them that had. James Robinson would bring me flowers, and fancy hats, and pretty clothes, and once even a pink silk parasol to hold off the sun. But most days he went to work in the evening and slept late in the morning and when I said to him at last that I wanted a body beside me at night, when I said I wanted him to do with me what he wanted to do, when I said I wanted to do with him some things too, that I had urgings, that I had wife need in me, James Robinson just smiled and said, Yes, my dear. That was all: Yes, my dear.
So I followed him one evening, me all swollen up with the first girl, feelin fat and watery and ugly, afraid that he had some other woman, some life that I didn’t have a part of. And he went into a club on Rampart Street, with men and women at the door, all of them nodding at him when he went in, some dark place where they all knew him and I felt a chill then in August, a cold breeze upon my heart, knowing that James Robinson must be a man who was living off women. Just like that, just watching him, I wondered too did he have something, a disease or something, that made him scared to come to me in the night. And I was terrible afraid, not of that, not catchin something, but afraid that when the baby was born, he would take me to that place on Rampart Street and make me work for him.
But knowing that, knowing where he went, I couldn’t come to askin him about it. It was his secret and it was mine, but I never told him of my knowing of it. I didn’t sleep with him for the rest of the time of the waiting. I felt the baby’s life in me, the stretching and pushing, that other heartbeat, that new need for room that the baby wanted: and that was what I had instead of James Robinson. We called the first baby Nola after New Orleans Louisiana. Nola Robinson. He thought she was the cutest thing and he held her in his arms and was sweet to her and brought her all silk and satin clothes, but he never did come to me in the night, not for months, saying to me I had to heal long after I was healed, saying it wunt a good thing to have too much of that too soon and then I got mad and asked him did he get what he needed in the house on Rampart Street and that was the first time he beat me.
He put the baby down and tore off my clothes and took a strap to me, puttin welts all over me. And when I was bent over on the floor, weeping and hurt and the baby cryin, he just dressed and went out the door and walked away. He come home that night and run his hands over the welts and heard me cryin and then he finally came to me. And finished quick, with me all achin and unfilled and everything in me all coiled up and ready to burst, but not bursting, ready to be lost but not losing, ready to die but not dying, and he said, Yes, my dear. Like that. Yes, my dear.
So I knew that was what it would always be like with him and I kept it secret. He would come to me only when he caused pain. He would beat me and hurt me and then come to me. So that I hated it, the bed part. I didn’t want it, the loving part. I erased it, the wife part. I watched movies and when people kissed I thought Yes, my dear. And waited for the beating to begin. I’d read a novel, and when it got to the point where they would sleep together, I began to tremble, afraid for the person in the book, afraid for me, thinking, Yes, my dear and Yes, my dear and Yes, my dear. I put everything into Nola, I touched her, squeezed her, kept her too long at my breast. And James Robinson, with his long body like a god, with his fine wild eyes and white suits, he just kept leaving for Rampart Street.
My mother must have picked up the grieving, knew there was an emptiness, a thing not happening. She knew just about everything about me anyway, cause I’d come from her the way Nola came from me, I’d been her extra heartbeat. And she started visiting in the afternoons, after James Robinson rose from his bed, and she would look at me and then hold the baby, then look at me and change the sheets, then look at me and go to the garden, then look at me and touch my face and say, finally, the last time, tired of looking, tired of not saying what she wanted to say, held my hand and said, You a woman now. You got to get you a man.
And I knew she was right. I was a woman now. I’d had a child within me and a child at my breast. I had a right to have a man. But there was one big problem: I had made a holy vow. That promise meant something to me. The keeping of it. And there was another thing: I was afraid. Afraid that a new man would be just another James Robinson. Sometimes I would look at men, all lathered with sweat in the hot sun fixing the streets, or delivering ice, or sawing off limbs in trees full of Spanish moss and I would imagine how they’d feel beside me, on me, in me, and then stop: seeing in my mind James Robinson in white walking up the street like a god. And not trusting myself, I closed up, sealed myself. I didn’t even cry anymore, didn’t fall into grieving. My mother saw that too.
And then the war started and the army took James Robinson and I was happy. We closed the little house and I moved back home with Nola and my mother cooked and cleaned and I started to read. I read every kind of book from the library down on Burgundy Street. I read Gone With the Wind, but that didn’t sucker me in; I knew what Rhett Butler was, I seen my Rhett Butler go into a house on Rampart Street. I read Anna Karenina by this Russian Tolstoy, and that was better. He knew something about people. I read poetry. And I read books on nature. I learned the names of all the trees and plants, the birds and the insects and the animals. Readin those books, I was suppose to be teachin Nola, but I was really teachin me. My father was workin at the Higgins Shipyard then, making torpedo boats, and the money was comin in for the first time in his life and he bought a car and taught me how to drive and then when we had paid the car he bought a house out by the Atchafalaya River, an old house and small, but with plenty of room for us because my brothers and my sister were all grown up and gone by then. So my mother and I made that sweet little house into something. We planed the wood clean, we changed the windows, we painted everything white, inside and out, and hung pictures that she bought in the old markets in the Quarter, we scraped down the wide plank floors and stained them dark and shellacked them and kept polishin them until they were nearly black. And I was glad bein there, sweatin at the work and seein Nola walk. I was happy. James Robinson was gone. I hoped he’d never come back.
Nola learned to talk in that little house beside the river, and we had a Victrola and she began to sing too, learnin all the words of some songs before she could even make full sentences. My father loved her. Probably more than he loved me. On weekends he would take her fishing in the bayou, givin her a line, and they’d come home with buckets of catfish and sometimes my sister would come out with her children and we’d eat all night and sing the old songs and Nola would sing what she learned from the phonograph, and I was happy. Sealed up, closed, manless and happy.
I expected to hear some news from James Robinson, but I sure wasn’t eatin my heart out over him. The truth be told, I dreaded hearin from him, or seein him show up. There wasn’t a letter from him, not a call, and then I started hoping that one day someone from the army would come to the door, looking sad and proper, like all the scenes in the movies, and he would tell me that James Robinson had been killed in action. The truth be told, I came to want that. The truth be told, I wanted him dead. Every day, I read The Item and The Times-Picayune, lookin at the list of casualties, hoping in a shameful way that he’d be there among them and then I’d be free. I’d be through with the holy vow. I could start another life. The real one.
But the war ground on and there was no word about James Robinson, and Nola started school, and I didn’t even think anymore about a man beside me in the night. And then the war ended. There was a big celebration in New Orleans and we drove in, and my father said, “Well, now we see if the Depression’s really over,” and my mother looked at him in a funny way and there were soldiers and sailors all drunk on Bourbon Street and brass bands and girls dancin and people makin love in public and noise like the greatest Mardi Gras in history and we cheered and shouted and then went home. I lay in bed thinkin of all those young men I’d seen in the Quarter and how I could have had all of them that night, in cars or hotels or backyards, and didn’t want even one. And I couldn’t sleep, thinkin of their young hard bodies and sad drunk eyes, and got up and went outside, where it was hot and buggy, August it was, and my father was alone out there on a white chair, just looking off toward the swamp. He couldn’t sleep either. He said, I’ll have to look for another job tomorrow. He said, They ain’t gonna need no more torpedo boats. And, of course, he was right. The war was over and both of us were sadder than we’d ever been.
I was in the garden a few weeks later, with the first cool breeze of the autumn blowin and no sun under a haze, when I heard the car and looked through the loblolly pines and saw him. James Robinson. Walkin with a limp, dressed in an army uniform. I stood up. He saw me. I waited. I wasn’t gonna run to him. I waited and waited and he came to me limping and reached out his hands and I could see that he was much older now and he was cryin. So I hugged him and he hugged me and my mother came out and saw us and then took my father’s car to school to get Nola.
James Robinson cried and cried and said he was sorry for everything, for the way he used to treat me, for not writin, for being the way he used to be before the war. But he was different now, he said. The war had changed him. He’d almost died and knew when he didn’t die that there were things in his life that meant something and now he was home, had been home for three days, had walked the streets lookin for me, askin where we’d gone, and now he’d found me and now everything was going to be okay, now everything was going to be real truly fine, now everything was goin to be the way it should have been in the first place.
My mother arrived with Nola, and the father and the daughter regarded each other like strangers. Until the girl just started bawlin and James Robinson did too, and they hugged each other and took a walk down by the water and talked for a long time and I thought, Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s gonna be real truly fine. He came back holdin Nola’s hand, and then my mother said to Nola, well, we better go spread the word, girl, so your momma and your poppa can be alone.
Alone with me, he was desperate, comin at me like a crazy man, sobbin, apologizin, tellin me not to look at his leg, not to touch it, not to let that leg bother me. I laid with him, and he started saying the names of places, all in the Pacific, the names of strange islands and old battles, all the while askin for forgiveness. Until at last I gave him what he wanted. And renewed the vow, in the back bedroom where everything had for so long been sealed.
We moved out two weeks later, to another house in the country that he bought with cash. He said he won the money gamblin while he was in the Pacific and I believed him and maybe he told the truth. But he said he didn’t want to go back to the city, that he had no more to do with that life, that he would never even look at the house on Rampart Street again. He had money from the government too, he said and that helped when we needed paint and shellac and furnishings, and he kept busy all winter cleanin and fixin the house and choppin trees to make a path to a bayou, saying here we’d be happy, here we’d be safe. He didn’t much like goin to my momma’s house. He said he didn’t like people watchin him. Not even relatives. And maybe I should’ve known then. But I wanted to believe what he was, that he’d changed, that he was this new man, that he’d been made different by the war. Made good.
And soon I was carryin Jesse within me. I could feel her bumpin, and Nola came and laid her hand on my belly, her eyes fillin up with wonder, and she sung lullabies to the sister she couldn’t even see. And then James Robinson got silent again. I asked and he didn’t answer, just glared at me for the sin of askin. Soon he would say only what had to be said, little telegrams of words, and he would stare off at the road and if a boat came down the bayou he would hurry into the house or hide behind some trees. Once we were driving across the Huey Long Bridge, the back seat full of new clothes for Jesse, and he kept looking behind him in the rearview mirror, and then took a right into Algiers and went up and down side streets and pulled into an alley and just sat there breathin hard and never said a word. I asked what was the matter and he snapped at me, No woman’s business. I held his hand to calm him, and he pulled it away.
I was thirty-seven hours in labor with Jesse, in more physical pain than ever before in my life, my insides tearin apart, my every pore teemin with blood it seemed, feelin split, turned inside out. James Robinson come to the bedside later, looking down at me, his eyes all funny. I told him he had another little girl and we’d call her Jesse after my grandmother, if that was okay with him. He just nodded and looked out the window. And I could feel his goin away. Right there in the room.
He stayed with me when I came home cause I was sick still and exhausted and sore all over. I slept for almost three days. There was blood still leakin from me too and it was on the sheets and he took the sheets off the bed in a disgusted way and burned them and went to New Orleans for more and came back late at night, lookin at me in a scared way. I thought it was the blood, that maybe it reminded him of the war, and what had happened to his leg. But when I said that, he slapped me hard across the face and knocked me down and I knew then that it was beginnin again. I wouldn’t cry. I knew that if I cried that would set him on me, and I was still hurtin from Jesse. He kept hittin me and I started thinkin about escape.
He knew. He told me in the morning, You better not run, woman. I told him I was free, I could go where I wanted to go, and then he took a board and hit me with it. Right here, see? Under the chin. The scar. The blood was drippin off me and I was knocked to my knees. And that got him hot and he made me do something to him, with the new blood flowin off me and the blood from Jesse still leaking out of me, and I knew that was the end. When he had his way, he went out, leavin me there, and drove off somewhere in the car. I was all alone with the new baby—Nola was at my mother’s—tryin to fix myself; no phone, no car, my jaw hangin loose, broken so I couldn’t even brush my teeth, couldn’t rinse him away with water and salt, and the blood not stoppin and the baby at my breast, the blood mixin with milk and then I heard another car and it pulled in front of the house and it was the police.
The two of them came to the door and I yelled through that I was locked inside, and they smashed down the door and saw me there, ragged and beaten and bloodied, and the older cop said, Oh my god, and they took me out to the police car with Jesse in my arms and rushed me to the hospital and on the way they told me they were tryin to find James Robinson.
The doctors wired my jaw and called my mother and father and everybody came to the hospital and Nola saw me and cried because I looked like an eggplant, all bent and distorted and purple and yellow. And then I found out from Daddy that there had been no war, not for Mister James Robinson. I found out he’d been part of a robbin crowd that shot up a place while he was in the army, and he’d been shot up too, by the cops, all of this out in Texas, and they’d put him in the penitentiary, slammin him away for twenty-five years, because two cops were shot and another man killed. That’s what happened to his leg. And he’d spent the war there in prison, not in the Pacific Ocean fightin for his country. And then had escaped, comin back to New Orleans, looking for me, for refuge, for hiding. Until they picked up a trail, a stickup here, another one there; they smelled him like a hunter in Africa smells a lion.
And I cried and cried, not for him, but for the children, for Nola and Jesse, because they carried his blood, they carried the wildness, the anger, the lies, the need to inflict pain, and I knew that for the rest of their lives there would be a contest in their blood between me and James Robinson. The truth be told, I felt like such a damned fool too. For listenin to him. For believin him. For lying with him after what I knew. For renewin the goddamned holy vow.
The police pursued him, catchin him at last in Memphis a year later. By then I was back home at the house beside the Atchafalaya. This time sealed for good. I went to church every day, prayin for strength, wanting to resist everything now, hopin I would last long enough to cage the blood of my children, and then, when they were grown and decent and had found their way, I could be released. To Paradise. Yeah. That’s what I thought. My father died. My mother grew old. The girls grew up and played piano and spoke French and Spanish along with English, taught to them in the Catholic school. Last year, Momma died too. I thought: When will it be my turn?
I was alone in the old house beside the Atchafalaya one morning last November. I went down to the water, to look at the boats goin by, sittin on the little dock we had down there, feeling empty and content. And when I came back to the house James Robinson was sittin at a table in the kitchen. On the table he had a big .45 pistol. He was peelin an apple with a parin knife. He didn’t say anything to me. Didn’t even look up.
I backed up to go to the door and run. To just get away from there. From him. He picked up the gun and said if I ran he would shoot me down and then when the children came back he would shoot them too, because he didn’t care anymore, he wasn’t afraid of death, he’d just as soon go out that way as any. And I stopped then and he told me to lock the door and I did and he took me there on the floor, tearin at me, slappin at me because I was dry, because I wouldn’t move, because I wouldn’t cry or even speak. He did what he wanted for an hour. In every place and every way he could think. And then said he was going to be around again, that he was free of prison, that he would always be around for me, that he would come and have me whenever he wanted. And left.
I said nothing to the children. He stayed away for a week and then came again to me in the middle of the night with the girls sleepin and put that big gun on the table beside the bed. This time I was wet without wantin to be and hated myself for it and tried to laugh at him to stop him and he beat me again with the strap, exulted at my wetness, made me beg for more when I didn’t want more, and then pushed me face down on the floor and hurt me bad, and then started to dress. Don’t you come back, I whispered to him, or I’ll call the police. He smiled at me and shoved the big gun into his belt and said, Yes, my dear. And left.
That night I packed up the children and their clothes and took my father’s old car and drove to my sister’s house and hid there. For two weeks, I never saw the day. All the while, the children were wanting to know what was happening and why they couldn’t go home and my sister’s husband went out with a gun on his hip to the house on the Atchafalaya to pack up more things, all the old and good and personal things, and stored them in his place of business, while I trembled when I saw a shadow at the window or heard a board creak or a tree branch brush against the eaves at night. And then I discovered I was pregnant.
This time I knew what I had to do, knew I couldn’t pass on more of James Robinson’s evil blood. My sister found me a doctor in Atlanta. And before Christmas, I went up there and had an abortion and made the doctor tie my tubes. It was terrible. But when it was over, the truth be told, I was happy. I knew that I’d never have to worry, ever again, about life risin in my womb. That’s when I saw you, child. Comin back from Atlanta, on New Year’s Eve. Or more accurate, comin away from Atlanta. Because I wasn’t going home. Not with James Robinson roaming around free. My sister found a place in a Catholic boarding school for my daughters. She sees them every Saturday and I tried to explain to them that this was only for a while, that James Robinson was still out there, with his big gun and evil ways. The police were lookin for him. My sister’s husband had some people lookin for him too. And I came here, to Pensacola, to hide, to start to live.
I wasn’t even sure what that meant, child. To live. But I knew that I was tired of not feelin anything but fear. I was tired of not bein a woman. Of bein sealed up. Of bein alone. I have missed so many things in my life. And then I met you and you were sweet and you were like the boy I should have had, the boy that might have come down that block the next afternoon, instead of that man in the white suit that I thought looked like a god. You are so good to me. I want to be good to you. I want you to know what I know and for you to know it for the rest of your life.
So when I had to leave so sudden, I hoped you would understand. It wasn’t planned. I had called my sister to ask after the children and she said she’d been tryin to find me for two days because Nola hurt herself at the school, fell off a horse, fractured her skull. My heart just fell into my stomach. I went there as quick as I could, thinking: She could’ve been dead and buried and I never would’ve known. So I had to go. There just wunt any choice. The blood called me. Nola was so happy to see me and the doctors said she had a close call but would be all right and I explained and explained to the girl about where I was and what I was doin and how it would only be for a while (which is the truth) and explained again (tryin to find the words and not scare her too much about the blood of James Robinson that was coursin through her own sweet veins) and she understood, she’s smart, she said she would pray for me and have the nuns pray for me too. I stayed until she was up from the bed and all right, and spent the rest of the time with little Jesse. She doesn’t understand in the same way. She was hurt the most. But I think in the end that she understood too. I hope so. I hope you do too. Somewhere out there, James Robinson is movin in the dark. But I’m with you, child. So please be good to me.