It’s an odd life for anyone of any color in East Texas. If you’re black and a woman, it can be terrifying....
“It’s too hot to breathe,” sighed Hibiscus, fanning hard with the ancient cardboard advertising piece that a long-dead snuff salesman had given her grandmother a generation before. The wicker handle, which had been re-stapled many times to the faded fan, wiggled dangerously as she waved it.
“Old High-Biscuits found somethin’ she can’t handle?” her sister asked from her perch on the porch steps. “Thought you could do great things and catch wild cucumbers, since you finished that Yankee college. You don’t mean this little old hot spell has got you down?”
Hibiscus sighed again, more deeply. She’d thought nothing could be worse than staying here, working in the cane fields, probably marrying Jim, and never learning anything about the world. But now she had caught a glimpse of what existed beyond the fields. Tantalized by her reading and the trips she managed to make to New York and Boston and Philadelphia, she hungered for more.
Sunny, however, had never needed or wanted to see anything farther off than the county seat or more complicated than the Saturday night dances at the community center. Her sister was not the material from which scholars were made, and that was dandy. She was just where she wanted to be.
Yet Hibiscus, newly graduated Magna Cum Laude from a prestigious New England college to which she had earned a full four-year scholarship, found herself tied again to the tenant house and the rented farm. Her brand new wings were drying and shriveling, never having been allowed to unfold in the air of the academic world.
There came a groan from inside the house. She rose hurriedly and went into the kitchen, taking a bowl of cold water from the rusty refrigerator, a cloth from the line strung from cupboard to corner. An air conditioner would have been such a mercy to her father.
She pushed the thought away and went to wash his sweaty face. The sheets were sweaty too, and she changed them after she washed his wasted body, which was taking so very long to die.
“Pearlie?” His eyes were trying to focus on her in the dim light of his shuttered room. “Pearl?”
“Yes, Baby, yes,” she crooned, though her mother had been dead for a decade.
“You just take your medicine and go back to sleep, Daddy. You’ll feel better directly.” She took the vial of painkiller Doctor Barry had given her and held it up to the light. There were maybe three doses left. Would he give them some more or would she have to leave Sunny in charge of Daddy and go back to the fields to make enough to buy it?
She took the needle from the aluminum pan, shook the water from the barrel, and put the thing together. By the time she gave her father the shot, he was ashy-blue with the pain. He needed to be in the hospital, she knew, but there was no money, no insurance, and he wasn’t old enough for government help.
She cleaned the needle again and put it to boil on the propane stove for precisely five minutes. The extra heat in the tiny kitchen almost made her feel faint.
The porch felt relatively cool when she returned to it. The sun was all but down. The shadows of the trees along the creek reached long fingers toward the paintless house. Sunny was sitting on the step, her blue-flowered cotton skirt swirling out around her creamy brown legs, giggling at some thought in her pretty, empty head. “George says he goin’ to marry me!” she said casually. Her slanted eyes sparkled as she looked sideways at her sister. “Ain’t goin’ to have him, no way, no how!” She giggled. “But he sure is mad. I told him Sat’day, and he didn’t like it even a little bit.”
Hibiscus, sitting again in the creaky swing, straightened, feeling a dim alarm. George was huge and jealous-hearted. When he got mean-crazy, he could be dangerous. She had known, when Sunny kept leading him on, that the girl was asking for trouble, but that was Sunny’s problem now. She had all she could handle with Daddy.
Sweat trickled down her back and her arms and beneath her breasts. The heat, instead of declining, seemed to be intensifying. It was enough to drive you crazy, without worrying about anything else.
She listened—Daddy’s breathing was quiet and even, his pain submerged in a tide of painkiller. Yet, beyond that familiar sound, there was another. Someone was walking on the grass outside the fence. She rose and went into the house. She was in no mood to make small talk with anybody. Not tonight.
The sound of the cane-knife hacking into flesh shocked her still. There couldn’t be any mistake. She’d heard it once before, when she was ten and Big Eddie had gone crazy and killed his wife right there in the field where the family had been working. Hibiscus grabbed the hog-killing knife from its rack and moved toward the porch.
Sunny was on the porch. Hibiscus felt her panic ease—what could she have heard? Then she saw a bare foot, its pale sole upward, beyond the last step. She was beside Sunny in one convulsive leap.
The cotton dress was now patterned with scarlet poppies among the pale blue cornflowers.
She heard the sound again, this time from inside the house. From the bedroom.
“Daddy!” she shrieked. She was answered by a laugh, quiet and amused. It was more frightening than anything she could recall since that terrible summer when she was ten and Big Eddie killed his wife.
Without pausing, she ran as hard as she could toward the cane field beyond the creek. Once inside the eight-foot barrier of stalks and knife-edged leaves, she might be able to elude any pursuer. The hog knife was no match for a cane knife in length and breadth, not to mention lacking the wicked hook on the leading edge. Still, it was better than nothing.
She cleared the creek in one leap, startling a spatter of frogs into the water, protesting and yelping. A water moccasin slid away before her pounding feet. She shivered, remembering how many snakes usually hunted the cane fields at night.
The field came almost down to the line of trees along the creek. She tore into the thick growth, and in three strides her skin was a network of tiny cuts from the leaves. Her hands went up to shield her eyes, and she looked down past her palms to the ground where her feet must land. To step on a moccasin now was to suffer a worse death than even George could inflict.
She had cut cane in this field all her life. She knew every hummock, every hollow. She knew the place on the far edge where the crop always grew so thickly that it was almost impossible to find room to swing a cane-knife to cut the stalks. If she could wriggle into that jungle of plants, deep in where you couldn’t walk and could hardly crawl, she might escape George’s notice.
She was all but sliced to ribbons by the time she crossed the field. Her dress hung in tatters around her, and her arms and legs streamed blood from the cuts and scratches. She dropped into a panting heap at the place where the cane grew too heavy to penetrate. Lying on her side, she slipped between two thick stools of cane stalks. Beyond that were more and still more.
She was covered with mud and sweat and blood and green stains from the weeds by the time she thought she’d gone deep enough to escape discovery. Then she had time to think, for the first time since she heard that terrible whack from the porch.
She was shaking, her teeth chattering, but she was also so hot she felt she might burst. There was no breeze—almost no air—down at the roots of the cane. Then she understood what shook her. Fury, not fear or cold, had set her to shivering.
She had lost, in those few moments, her entire family. She suffered no grief for her father—George’s knife had saved him many weeks of suffering. But Sunny was young and healthy and full of life. Dumb, yes, but if that were a hanging offense almost everybody would be lined up at the gallows.
She gripped the wood handle of the knife, its wicked curve satisfying something deep inside her. Her mother used to rip open a hog’s belly as easy as cutting butter with that thing. If she could get within reach—but George’s arms were twice the length of hers. The cane knife added a good yard or so to that. She would never get close enough.
Something slithered behind her in the litter of dropped cane leaves. She went still, her shaking forgotten. A moccasin didn’t have to get within arm’s reach of anyone. He stayed down low, where your feet would step, and if you didn’t watch you could step right onto one of the stinking creatures.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She was educated, heir to the entire tradition of western culture. She need not panic, now that she was hidden. She had time to think and to plan, even if George did intend to kill the witness to his double murder.
She had read many things outside the normal course of study. She had read the works of Hawking, who was taking physics outside the realm of normal reality. Studies of the brain, she remembered, hinted at tremendous possibilities. And her own people knew that you could make things happen, if you willed it strongly enough and had the stomach for it.
Hibiscus smiled, feeling the muscles of her cheeks tense in a grimace. Even as she relaxed, she heard the noisy progress of someone in the cane field, crunching and rustling and stomping and cursing.
Moving smoothly over the cane roots and around the stools, she slithered to more open ground. Rustles in the weeds marked the moccasins fleeing her progress, but she paid them no heed. She rose to her full height with her head up and her shoulders back. The knife in her hand was almost invisible in the twilight.
She moved toward the source of the sounds, compelled by something outside herself, as well as a surge of will from within. Her brain throbbed in her skull, forming a vision that she was bringing into focus.
Her bare foot came down on a snake, and she felt the electric tension of the muscle rings as the serpent fled from beneath her weight. It didn’t coil, and it didn’t bite, for she was now the snake’s sister.
George heard her movements. He paused and called, “Woman! You come out here and talk to me. I won’t hurt you, but you better come out.” He chuckled quietly, and she chuckled too, knowing that he thought he had deceived her.
Now it was almost dark. The palest glimmer of a moon rode above the western trees, giving just enough illumination to allow her to see his eyes glinting and his white teeth grinning amid the cane. “Why, here you come, Honey. That’s a good gal. Right to me...yes, Ma’am!”
She felt his arm rise, saw in her inner vision the cane knife poised to slice through her. But she came more swiftly than he dreamed she would, and the hog knife slid under his ribcage. She jerked it up, just as she had seen her mother do so many times.
Something warm covered her hands. The cane-knife fell through the leaves, swishing down until it thudded into the damp soil. George stood stiff, his shape a blot of blackness against the darkness of the cane. Then he toppled, face down, amid the whispering leaves.
“George,” she said softly. “George?”
There was, of course, no answer. She turned toward the house, wiping her sticky hands on her skirt. After a bit, she began, very quietly, to laugh.