The first letter from Oliver Rawls arrived on the first of December, delivered not by the boy on his bicycle but by Mr. Horace, the postman, in his mail truck. It was not sent through Dr. Manford Rawls, and it did not contain Dr. Manford Rawls’s name; it did not contain Juke’s name or Nan’s name, and other than “Dear Miss Jesup”—now she was Miss—it did not contain Elma’s name. If you’d gotten your hands on the letter first and steamed it open, if you had the means to read it, you would not know that Dr. Rawls had carried Elma and Nan to Atlanta just before Thanksgiving; he had not. Nan had not nursed Wilson in front of the doctors’ eyes, and Elma had not spilled the truth, like Nan’s milk, that he was the child of Nan and of her father, that was why no one must know, because what would become of them? She had not cried. She had not pleaded for their confidence. The doctors had not repaired to the hall, had not from the other side of the door argued in hushed voices, the father objecting, the son reasoning, had not returned to the room, the father gruff, the son wearing the kind of bright smile parents wear for their children in difficult circumstances. Dr. Rawls had not gone in search of a sandwich and a whiskey, his first drink in a dozen years, leaving them all to eat from their lunch basket in the basement, and had not said, upon dropping them back at the farm that evening, long past dark, “I’m too old a man to keep women’s secrets,” as though Elma and Nan were but schoolgirls spreading gossip in church.
What Oliver Rawls’s letter contained was the kind of chatter a cousin might put in a letter to another cousin. News from the city, his work, the weather, his father’s health, which had suddenly declined. He wrote about his own brothers and sisters, who had children of their own, and he wrote about those children, his nieces and nephews. Elma nearly fell asleep reading their names, Elizabeth Jane and Jane Elizabeth and baby Camilla Josephine Jane, but she wrote back to say how darling they must be, and he how doting. The letters came one after the other, so fast she could barely reply to one before another arrived, but she did, regular as thunder following lightning, because she felt she owed it to him. In keeping him talking, she felt, she might keep him quiet. His letters were long, five and six and seven pages, all typed on the same onionskin paper, and the ink sometimes rubbed off on Elma’s fingers and wouldn’t wash. She told her father it was from the newspaper, and hid the letters inside her pillowcase. All morning she waited for the mail truck, her ears standing up straight when she heard any sound from the road. Often it was just the school bus, or the road scraper, or traffic to the crossroads store. One morning it was a wagon from the county camp carrying prisoners out to the pines. With the cold weather, the visits to the twins had quieted, and Elma welcomed the peace, but she did not welcome Oliver’s letters. They were a new hazard to head off, another secret she had not asked to keep. She wrapped herself in her mother’s shawl, ready, and when the mail truck came she walked fast, but not so fast as to catch her father’s attention, down the driveway and over the plank bridge to the mailbox, and when she retrieved one letter from Oliver, she slipped her letter to him into the box.
One morning she was doing this with Winna Jean bundled on her hip just as a car came up the road. Elma slipped the letter into her apron pocket. It was a great, pearl-colored Buick with ivory-colored tires, the spare tire hiked up over the left wheel well like an extra eyeball. It was a fine car, finer than any Elma had seen on the dirt Straight, but she wasn’t particular about the way those tires stared at her. The car slowed when it approached the mailbox, and Elma could see that it was a colored boy driving it. Through the window behind him, she saw a woman sitting in the backseat, face hanging close to the window, eyeglasses like two silver dollars and pearls tight enough to choke her. Her hat was blood colored, with a brim a bit wider than the fitted hats younger women wore, topped on one side with ivy leaves and small, tightfisted, blood-colored roses and holly berries frosted with what looked like sugar or snow. The woman’s eyes took stock of Elma, then the baby in her arms. Elma’s eyes saw all of this like a camera, though it wasn’t until the woman had turned her head sharply from the window and the car had resumed its regular speed west down the road that the picture developed and she realized who the woman had been.
To Winna, she said, “That there was your great-granny.”
Elma was cold in the wake of the car, as though it had left behind a tailwind. She held Winna closer.
“Can’t say what business carried her out here.”
Elma remembered something Ketty had said once about a lady they’d passed in town. Elma had understood it was not a compliment. She said it now to Winna. “That was a hat fine enough to build a nest in.”
* * *
But in fact Parthenia Wilson did have business west of town, west of the crossroads, as far west as one could travel on the Twelve-Mile Straight. She asked the driver, whose name was Frank, to park at the edge of the road behind a stand of pines, where the Buick would be out of the men’s sight but they would be in hers, and sent him to fetch Mr. Crow. While she waited she watched the men work their shovels and saws, clearing the land. Were it warmer, she thought, they might take off their shirts and the sun would shine on their broad backs as on the backs of the fishes in the creek. She had known this creek and the fishes in it once. She had washed the laundry in it. She had bathed her young body in it. The men were as young as she had been when she had bathed in the creek.
Mr. Crow came and she lowered her window and said the work was coming along fine, wasn’t it? (For though it was the state paving the road, her husband had matched Georgia’s contribution dollar for dollar, and had driven the Buick up to Macon himself, the trunk full of Cotton Gin, for the lucky men who had won the road contract, though he told her he was going to play golf.)
Most certainly it was, Mr. Crow said.
What they needed in that clearing was a garden, she said. Just an acre. Corn, tomatoes, peppers, some wildflowers. Even a prisoner deserved God’s bounty.
She looked beyond and around him as she spoke, looking at the backs of each of the men, looking at their faces.
A memory rose up in the woods then. It was something she hadn’t thought of in years: little John Jesup with his father’s sickle, cutting down the corn in her garden. She had watched from the window. She had let him go, thinking he needed it, thinking everyone deserved God’s bounty. Now she saw that was how it had started: he had taken and taken from their family, and he had gone and taken her grandson too.
Mr. Crow would take it under advisement. Mrs. Wilson would report to her husband that it was all coming along fine. Her colored girl, whose name was Mag, had baked four blackberry pies for the men, for even a prisoner deserved God’s bounty. The driver unloaded the tray from the car. Mrs. Wilson reminded Mr. Crow that they were God’s children, all of them. They were mothers’ children too. They had mothers and grandmothers, every one of them.
“How many are there, Mr. Crow?”
“Ma’am?” He stood with the tray of pies, which weighed some.
“How many prisoners?”
“A dozen,” he said. “They’ll be plenty to go round.”
“I count ten,” she said.
Mr. Crow looked over his shoulder. “They’s two digging latrines in the woods,” he said.
“You make sure they each get some of that pie, then,” she said, adjusting her hat.
* * *
Parthenia Wilson had not walked into the creek on the day the twins were baptized, and she did not catch the influenza that took up residence in the lungs of half the population of Florence. Manford Rawls too had chosen to stay on the shore, but he returned from Atlanta to find a line of patients out his office door and down Main Street. He treated them for two days straight, and on the third day, which was Thanksgiving, he woke with a fever, and after breakfast he returned to bed. He did not tell his wife that he believed it to be the whiskey that still sat with him funny, nor the weight of the girls’ secret. He said instead what he did not believe, which was that his patients had succeeded at last in giving him the flu. He was not accustomed to being sick, or being cared for. He was not accustomed to lore, the tale his patients told him about the sickness brewing in that creek. But by the second day in bed, it was clear that the flu was what it was, and by the third day, his wife, Camilla, was in bed with him. With a shaky hand, Dr. Rawls wrote a letter to his youngest son, asking him to return home to take care of his patients. It was the least he could do, having not even returned home for Thanksgiving. Dr. Rawls did not say what else was in his mind, which was that, whichever way you looked at it, whether you believed the story or not, those girls, those twins, that family, Juke Jesup, they had brought the illness on him.
Oliver told this to Elma in his letters, told her of the request his father had made. He asked Elma her opinion. Should he come to Florence, the prodigal son returning to his father to beg for acceptance? Or should he stay in Atlanta, where he had important work to do, work his father didn’t understand?
Where she wanted him was Atlanta, she thought, far away from home, where her secret was safe. But maybe her secret would be safer here in Florence, far away from any laboratory, where Oliver could keep an eye on Dr. Rawls. She remembered the gentle voice he had used to appease his father, the voice a man might use to calm a spooked horse. If he came back to Florence, she thought, she might see him again. She might like to see him. She gathered all the letters from her pillowcase and looked them over. Was he hiding something from her, or just from her father? She could see he was still being cautious that, should Juke get ahold of the letters, he’d see nothing but a city boy courting a country girl. And then it occurred to Elma that the letters might be just that. That he was asking her what their life together might look like.
She stood up from the bed of wrinkled letters. That a scientist at Emory, the son of the beloved local doctor, might fancy her—the idea struck in Elma a dread and distrust. It had been beyond her reckoning to consider such a man a suitor. She had been so relieved, so grateful for his confidence, that she had carried on their correspondence with all the trust their secret called for. She’d been blind. She saw now that he must be after her for all the reasons he’d kept out of the letters, for business, for research, for the complicated kind of gain that was familiar to men in suits in cities, to men like Manford Rawls and Q. L. Boothby and George Wilson, but not to her.
She sat up and took the ledger in her lap and wrote back to him, You can write free and honest to me. My father can neither read nor write. You can call him the fool he is and you can call me white trash if you please. Write me please what is in your heart for I won’t be taken for the fool you believe me to be. She spit on the seal of the envelope and the next morning she mailed it.
“We won’t be taken for no fools,” she said to Nan. In answer, Nan handed Wilson to her. She was carrying Ketty’s satchel and gathering her coat around her shoulders. She had been working more often since Dr. Rawls had taken ill. Two nights before she had delivered two babies within four hours, and they were both named Young, a colored one and a white.
* * *
The next morning, the men took the twenty-two out to kill the pigs. Elma paid little attention to the pigs; she did not love them; she did not name them; they were like fat, dirty-faced neighbor children she tripped over in the yard as she threw them the scraps. She didn’t like to love a creature she loved to eat so much.
So when Juke and Jim went out to do the butchering, Elma and Nan and Sara stayed in, sitting down in the front room to work on an old quilt. Ketty had started it with the two girls years before, piecing together bits of tablecloth and feed sacks and the dresses they’d outgrown, but she had little patience for sewing. She’d used her needle to sew up women’s wounds, to keep them alive, and, when necessary, to sew up the holes that ate through the family’s clothes. What little time she had on the farm, when she wasn’t paying visits, she did not care to devote to sewing squares into quilts. But Elma’s hands were restless, empty of letters, and Sara had bolts of fabric that she said wanted quilting. Elma said, “I do feel like putting my fingers on something pretty.” She thought she might tell Sara about her correspondence with the doctor, ask for her advice, though she couldn’t think how to tell it without telling all of it.
She took the half-finished quilt from the cotton basket under her bed and shook the dust from it over the porch railing. Then the three of them gathered in kitchen chairs around the woodstove and laid the quilt over their knees. Nan had the idea to put the twins in the emptied basket, and found that they could both fit in it propped up on a bed of cotton batting. They liked to sit in it under the canopy of the quilt, where the warmth of the woodstove was trapped, and when the women fluttered the quilt like a flag over their heads, the babies saw the firelight flashing through the tissues of colored squares and laughed, and the women laughed. They studied the old squares and Elma said, “Remember this one, Nan? I think it’s from an old apron of your momma’s.” And, “This one’s from the hem of that little gingham dress we wore. I wish we had that dress to put on Winna.”
Sara said, “How about if I told you this could be a baby blanket.”
“Good Heaven!” Elma fumbled her needle. “Are you fixing to have a baby?”
Sara laughed. “I told you I might have a surprise come Christmas. I think I must have been pregnant already when I told you that.”
“Oh, Sara, that’s grand!” Elma put a hand on Sara’s hands and a hand on Nan’s. “Nan! You hear that?”
Nan had heard and was smiling her congratulations.
“You hear that, you two?” Elma peeked under the quilt at the twins. “You’re gone have you a playmate. Come summer, I reckon?”
“July, I’d say. If I’m counting right.”
“Nan can tell you. Once you start to show, Nan can measure you with her tape.” Nan nodded agreeably. “She can do all your care and deliver the baby too. She’s the best midwife you could ask for.”
Sara went back to sewing her square. It was lemon yellow and crawling with green leaves, and against the faded, flax-colored square beside it, it was bright as summer.
“You’ll be here,” Elma said, “won’t you? In the summer?”
Sara didn’t look up. “I can’t say for certain.”
“Does Jim want to stay?”
Sara sighed dismissively. “If Jim had his say, he’d live in that shack forever.”
“He wants y’all to raise the baby here on the farm?”
“He doesn’t know about no baby.”
“Sara! Ain’t you gone tell him?”
“I plan on it. Wanted to tell you girls first. That’s not all I want to tell you.” She rushed on, lowering her voice. “I don’t want to be the one to tell you, but I don’t want to be the one not to tell you.”
Nan was sewing with her corner of the quilt held close to her face and now she lifted her eyes to Sara.
“You girls got to know I never meant to keep nothing from you. I didn’t know at first why we came to the farm. You got to know I thought we ended up here same as any place.”
Elma gripped her needle. “Jim’s in with my daddy, ain’t he. He’s been running for him all along.”
Sara shook her head sadly. “No. No, he ain’t in with your daddy. Your daddy thinks he is. But it’s George Wilson he’s in with. He’s in deep.”
Elma listened, the quilt moving under them like a patch of ocean, while Sara told her what she’d come to the big house to tell her, bearing bolts of fabric, as though it were a regular sunny morning: that Mr. Wilson had put Jim and Sara on the farm, that he put them there to keep an eye on Juke, and to learn about the still, and to take over the business after Mr. Wilson took Juke off the farm. “He said any fool can plant cotton. It’s the gin he cares about. He needs someone to run the still.”
Elma’s sewing sat in her lap. She felt as though it were her head the quilt was falling over. The room felt close and dark and full of wood smoke. She saw Nan sewing with her eyes wide. She thought Nan too was trying to imagine the farm without Juke on it. Just the three women and three babies, and Jim to do the man’s things. “But where’s he gone put him? My daddy?”
Sara shrugged apologetically. “It’s not just your daddy he’s running off.”
She looked from Elma to Nan and back.
Elma tore the needle and thread from her square and stuffed them into her apron pocket and stood up. From under the quilt, she slid the basket and lifted Winna out of it. “He’s gone just run us all off, then, is he? I suppose you and Jim are set to move on into this house and replace us. You even got you a replacement baby on the way, with no darky blood!”
“Elma. You got to know I had no sights on this. I don’t even want to stay. Jim says there was a man killed just before we came, and Juke was the one who did it, and George Wilson wants us to help prove it. I don’t want no part in that.”
“You don’t know nothing about that! Not one thing! It was George Wilson’s dog of a grandson who did it, just as bad as my daddy, and it’s George Wilson’s filthy tit you’ll be living on! Have at it! You want to live under George Wilson’s thumb? Have at it all you want.”
“How am I to know who did it? You folks don’t talk about nothing! Mr. Wilson wants us to spy on you, but you’re closed up as a bunch of clams! I thought my folks in Buffalo was bad. You folks might as well all be mute.”
“We got nothing to say to you,” Elma said. She was transferring Winna from hip to hip. The baby’s cheeks were hot from the fire and Elma herself felt feverish, the sweat cooling on her upper lip. She felt above all foolish, that she had allowed herself to be suckered by George Wilson, that in her apron pocket was a letter from Oliver Rawls and she had expected to show it to Sara and she had expected Sara to fawn over it as she had the first time, to say, “You’re gonna marry a doctor, Elma! That’s grand!”
Nan had stood up. She was holding Wilson on her hip as Elma held Winna, standing across from Sara as if to say that their sewing circle was over.
“Mr. Wilson said there’s something unnatural going on in this house. I don’t know what it is, but I’d say he’s right.”
“Gone be your house soon enough,” Elma said, walking Sara to the door and opening it for her. “You’re welcome to it. We’ll leave it real clean for you.”
Elma listened for Sara’s steps across the hard winter earth between their houses, and the sound of the shack door. Behind her Nan was holding her needle between her lips and Wilson was playing with the thread hanging from it.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Elma said, turning to Nan. “We gone find another place. I got somewhere in mind.”
* * *
The letters now were short, but they came with greater frequency, on some days more than one, as though he had dashed one off on the typewriter and then, after pacing around his room, thought of another sentence to say. What was in his heart, he wrote, was that he loved her, Elma Jesup, and that he cared not a wink that she was the daughter of a moonshiner and a monster and yes, a fool, that his father’s opinion of her father was of no consequence to him, for his father was a fool of his own kind.
I haven’t finished but eleven grades, she wrote. I am both a spinster and a whore.
What was in his heart was that he cared not a wink for what the hicks of Florence thought of her. He knew her for what she was, which was a woman of honor and sacrifice. He too wished to be a man of honor and sacrifice, and if she had him, he would mean to be. He knew those children to be what they were, which was not twins and not even siblings, and not two regular country bastards, but, taken together, something the opposite of bastards, something holy.
Did she know of the premature babies at Coney Island? People came from all over the world to see them. He had seen them himself, he wrote, on a trip to New York City as a boy. Tiny, tiny babies no bigger than a man’s hand, weighing but two or three pounds. Used to be such small babies would live but a few hours, but now they were kept alive by a doctor ahead of his time, who could practice the miracle of medicine only by making the babies a sideshow. Today, incubators were coming into use in the hospitals in Atlanta, and did she know why? Because of that doctor. As a boy, Oliver had peered into one of those incubators and experienced such awe, such love and fear (for that was what awe was), that he had decided then and there that he would be a doctor, that he would devote his life’s work to the creatures that folks might find unworthy of living, but which man, working with God (for that was what science was), had chosen to save.
Where would we live, Elma wanted to know. She imagined a house in Atlanta with scalloped roof shingles shaped like tulip petals. She didn’t know where she got such a picture, but it was fixed in her mind.
As a young man, he wrote, he had believed the science he practiced superior in morality to the morality of his father’s, for it was a science whose purpose above all else was to serve Negroes, to save the lives of Negroes, to know their blood.
The house would have an electric kitchen, she imagined, and two floors, and many rooms, a long hall with door after door, and they would fill the rooms with their children, hearty, legitimate, clean-faced children with auburn curls.
When he’d seen Nan spilling her milk, he wrote, when he’d seen her courage and the lie that the babies were meant to uphold with their lives, Oliver had understood clearly—though it seemed to Elma that he was figuring it out as he wrote—that the best way to serve Negroes was to work as his father did, as a family doctor, but a good one, one devoted with his whole being, not to serve Negroes by studying their blood between slides of glass but to touch their blood, their milk, the fluids that made them human animals the same as he, with his hands. His father at least had known that much.
Was his hair blackish brown? Or brownish black? She tried to put together the features of his face. She made his eyes narrow, the mouth playful.
Therefore, he wrote, it was his intention to return to Florence and assume his father’s practice. They would live in his parents’ house on Main Street, for they wouldn’t be long in it. After Christmas Manford and Camilla Rawls would move to their daughter’s house in Savannah, where Dr. Rawls had a colleague who specialized in influenza.
Still clutching the letter, Elma crossed her room and opened the curtains, as though she might be able to see the doctor’s house from where she stood, past the place where the Twelve-Mile Straight became Main Street. It was the same road of a different name, but it might as well have been across the ocean. As a child, she had passed the doctor’s house many times, white brick with pine green shutters, and two great ferns on the porch the size of peacocks.
* * *
For several days Elma moved about the big house thinking, Soon I will not look out this window, soon I will not walk on this squeaky plank of floor, seeing everything around her as if for the last time. She did this with Oliver’s letter in her apron pocket, because if it was there, if she could feel its crinkle and weight when she leaned against the stove or knelt to milk the cows, she had a plan. She had Dr. Rawls’s house and she had Oliver. She said his name aloud, feeling it in her mouth. Oliver. Was that the name she wanted to call to dinner for the rest of her life? To call out in their bed?
Perhaps there was still something else to be done. She imagined herself going to town, taking her daddy’s truck, or catching a ride with Mr. Horace, the postman, and knocking again on the Wilsons’ door in the mill village. She would demand to speak to Mr. Wilson. She would demand to know if it was true—if he intended to evict her family from the farm. She would say, “How does it feel, putting your own blood on the street?” She wanted to hear it from him straight. Or perhaps Mrs. Wilson would be the one to come to the door, and Elma would hold her eye, longer than she had held it at the baptism, or as she’d passed the house in her pearl-colored Buick. She could see something in that old woman’s eyes, some weakness or window, the sense that she was unsettled, vulnerable, that she was looking for something. Perhaps she was simply looking for Freddie. Perhaps that was why she’d been driving down the Straight; perhaps she had her driver drive that Buick all over the county, looking. A woman who could love a man like Freddie, a man who now seemed to Elma incapable of loving a dog or a baby or anyone but himself—surely she could find some love for his innocent child. Elma would bring Winna Jean, of course, who had her daddy’s blue eyes, clear as if she’d stolen them, and Mrs. Wilson would see the baby and turn her head, because seeing those blue eyes for too long would be too painful, and she would retreat into the house and say to her husband, “George, have some pity.”
But she remembered the last time she’d stood on that porch, pregnant and waiting for what felt like hours for her father to emerge from the house, and she remembered what pity felt like.
She and her father had been on the same side of things then. She felt a sick stab remembering it, the blind love she’d had for him, solid and square, even in his angry impotence. He’d risked his own pride going into that house, and now she saw it wasn’t only pride he’d lost—he’d lost the farm too. It had started that day, hadn’t it, before the babies were born and Genus was killed and Freddie disappeared—it was the day her father had had the nerve to ask for George Wilson’s benevolence, to presume that George Wilson might consider his grandchild and his daughter and himself a kind of kin. That was the day George Wilson had decided to excise them, to carve them off his land like a cancer. He might have done it already, if he’d had another man ready to run the still.
It was her fault. If she hadn’t gotten into that truck with Freddie Wilson, if she hadn’t been fool enough to say, “Only if you’ll marry me.”
After Sara had come to warn her, the day they’d taken out the quilt, Elma had waited for her father to come in, ready to tell him, ready to make a plan. She made a pie, because she was sorry for him already, and because her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, but her mind went off and she burned it. She sat the burnt pie on the windowsill—it was a pecan pie—and through the window she watched her father and Jim come out of the smokehouse, talking in their low, friendly way as they raised water from the well to wash the blood from their hands and arms and faces. She did not want to tell him then, not with the traitor Jim there. She’d had quite enough scenes in that yard. She’d wait until supper. First there was meat to cook right away, a ham and a shoulder and some sowbelly, and then her father invited Jim and Sara to celebrate the first fresh pork of the year. She gave Sara the smallest serving of pork and the largest of the burnt pie and did not speak to her and did not look her in the eye, only said to Jim, “I hear congratulations are in order.” She looked only at her own slice of pie as she listened to Sara, recovering, tell Jim the news, and then Jim yelped and stood up so fast his chair fell over behind him.
After supper Elma pled a headache and, after putting the babies to bed, went to bed herself, while Nan tended to the dishes and Juke and Sara and Jim put on their hats and coats and went out to the porch to pour some gin, because it was time to celebrate. Elma lay on her side in her bed (she did have a headache, she realized) and listened to the carefree notes of Jim’s banjo as he played along to the songs on the gramophone. When the notes went high, the dogs barked, and there was laughter.
She would tell her father tomorrow, she thought.
It was the kind of merrymaking, she decided, that could only be followed by plentiful lovemaking. The music played on but already Elma was seeing Sara and Jim stumbling back to the shack, could already hear the squeal of their mattress. He adored her too much to be anything but glad. He would lift her dress. He would stroke her belly, tenderly, and then hungrily, her breasts. What would it be like to be adored like that?
Slowly, as though to ensure she might not notice herself what she was doing, she turned onto her back. She drew the flat, dull pillow from under her head and pressed it to her own belly. She squeezed her knees around it. She squeezed her eyes closed.
In her mind she drew Oliver’s face above hers. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open. But he wouldn’t stay put for long. Sara and Jim kept floating back into view. She pressed the pillow closer, against her pelvic bone, crossed her ankles around it. And then just when she had Oliver within her reach, just as she moved toward the shudder she’d brought on with the bar of cornmeal soap, there was Genus again, standing naked in the creek, and she sat up and flung the pillow to the floor.
* * *
That Tuesday morning she was down at the creek washing laundry when she heard the mail truck. It was early. She leapt up so fast she pulled a muscle in her right calf, and if she hadn’t had to hobble she might have made it to the mailbox first. As it happened, her father got there just before she did, and he had an envelope from Oliver Rawls in his hand as she limped over the plank bridge.
“Look like this one’s for you,” he said. He didn’t hand it to her. “Who’s it from?”
Elma thought of what lies she might tell. It was from a cousin from Carolina, or from Josie Byrd in nursing school. Instead she settled on a half truth, because she felt it was time to be brave, and because she had another truth to tell him, ready to distract him with. It was time to tell him that too. She said it was from a doctor in Atlanta who’d gone to school ahead of her. She said they’d been writing letters. She said he was thinking of coming to Florence to practice medicine. She did not yet dare say the last name of the doctor, who shared the name of another doctor, who distrusted Juke as much as Juke distrusted him and who was married to the WCTU.
“He sweet on you? That what you telling me?”
Elma said she supposed he was. She had expected him to tear the letter to pieces, but he did not raise his voice. He simply made the noises of possessiveness and doubt a father made at the news of a daughter’s courtship. He asked her more questions, but did not ask if she was sweet on the doctor. What would she have answered if he had? Then, grumbling, he relented, granting a blessing Elma had not dared ask for. She stood with her weight on her left leg, her right calf throbbing. She had expected her father to shout. She’d expected him to keep her a barefoot old maid on the farm. But now she understood that he was, above all, proud. She recalled the ease with which he’d accepted the news of her pregnancy. Long as he’ll marry you. That a doctor should want to marry her was not a surprise to him; it was the divine order of things; it was the easeful life to which he believed his family was entitled, and justice for the loss of her first blue-blood fiancé, who had spurned her. She saw now that she was as much her father’s pawn to move about as he was George Wilson’s. He did not know, Elma realized, his own poverty, his own wretchedness.
Satisfied, he turned back to the field. She did not tell him what Sara had told her. She was thrown off balance, her right leg buckling beneath her. Let him stand or fall on his own two feet. She would look after herself.
She had fallen for grander ideas before. She had sat with her head on Freddie Wilson’s shoulder overlooking the mill village while he said, “This here’s all fixing to be ours.” Look what trouble that had gotten her. But she didn’t see how this proposal, so small in comparison, could trouble her any more.
She moved toward the house, up the porch steps. That Oliver accepted her not in spite of the fact of her poverty, her wretchedness, but because of it—it astonished her. It occurred to her to be insulted, that she might be the object of his obscene fascination, like another race or species, like a two-pound baby.
But she remembered Ketty sitting on this porch, saying, We are all children of God. Oliver was a child of God, so was she. And she was poor and wretched, and Oliver loved her that way as God did, as her father didn’t, and who was she to want a man who might love her for something other than her true nature?
She went into the kitchen and found the scissors, the ones she’d used to cut Nan’s hair. Because it was something she’d read in a book, she tied a lock of her own hair in a ribbon and cut it with the scissors and put it in an envelope. In the accompanying letter, she wrote, My Nan would come with us, of course, and both the children.
* * *
That Christmas Eve, there was Dr. Rawls’s beady black car in the driveway and a knock on the door. Winna Jean was at church with Juke, playing Baby Jesus in the Christmas pageant. Later the story of that night, the one that was told by the town, would center on the pageant, where Winna Jean, who’d been requested special by Reverend Quick, hollered all night, until Pauline Gentry, who played Mary, checked her diaper and announced to the congregation that Baby Jesus had wet Himself. Elma, who’d had enough of the congregation at the baptism, had chosen to stay home with Nan and Wilson. Nan was nursing him off the kitchen, and at first, Elma hissed at her to quit it, there was someone at the door. Then, seeing through the window that it was Oliver Rawls, she laughed with relief. This was the feeling she fell in love with: the exhilaration of being herself, of throwing open the door to their house and letting their secrets out into the night air. What did it matter what he saw?
On the porch he held a baby loblolly tree against his side in a clay pot and two striped stockings, lumpy with toys. He could barely keep hold of the gifts, and she saw that he meant them to hide his cane. He was wearing a gray serge suit and a black coat, and Elma wondered if he hadn’t borrowed both from his father. She had the feeling that it had been a very long time since she’d seen him and that she’d seen him just a moment ago. Her fingers were still smudged with the words of his last letter. She’d hoped he was handsome, and that she hadn’t only remembered him that way. He was handsome but he was short.
She let him stand there a minute. That he’d assumed the babies needed stockings, and that she’d not thought to make them herself—she might have sewn them instead of wasting time on that quilt—filled her with a quick and dirty shame. She thought to be ashamed too of the unpainted house and the threadbare rug under her feet, of the forks and spoons and knives setting in a tin can on the bare table behind her, rather than laying like sleeping ladies in a drawer. She remembered his father coming to give the babies their shots, how panicked she’d been, how desperate to put a cloth on the table. Then she remembered that Oliver knew what she was and that was why she wanted him, and that she’d intended to offer nothing else. She’d hoped he’d be coming, and she’d worn her daddy’s overalls so he could see just how deep in the country she lived.
She took the tree and the stockings from him. “Is that you, Oliver,” she said, “or is it Santa Claus?”
She was being silly as a tramp. It was because she was nervous. Why was she so nervous? Here he was standing in front of her. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He took off his hat. All those pages, and now he was struck dumb.
“Look a-here, we don’t have much time,” she said. She couldn’t seem to stop her mouth; she was showing him the tramp she was. “My daddy’ll be back in an hour.”
Nan caught her look and took the twins to visit with Sara and Jim in the shack. Elma didn’t bother making him a pot of coffee, didn’t even let him into the front room. She turned him around and led him across the breezeway to her room and took the tree and the stockings and put them on the nightstand. The tree looked so pretty she wanted to string it right then with popcorn and ribbons. Her mother’s quilt was on the bed. It was the bed where she had longed to reach out and touch a man’s back, the bed where she had clasped her pillow between her legs, and her cheeks flushed with shame and the memory of her wanting. She wished now she had worn a dress and not the overalls, that she hadn’t mistaken poverty for homeliness, but it was too late.
“You here to talk to me about cells?” she said to Oliver Rawls.
He shook his head. She took his hat and tossed it on the bed.
“You study on blood all day,” she said. “I reckon you got some red blood yourself.” She knew the red blood of men, knew it coursed through them whether they lived in a big city or small, whether they were in a hotel room or a truck bed, doctors or preachers or mill men, and she was telling him that she knew, that that was what he’d come for, and that her blood ran red too. Gently she helped him out of his coat. She had the feeling she was undressing a scarecrow.
“I want to marry you,” he said. “I came to ask your father’s blessing.”
“My daddy ain’t here, and even if he was, it ain’t his blessing to give.”
“Your blessing, then.”
“You want my blessing?”
“I want to marry you. I want to ask you.”
“You want to.”
“I do. I am.”
“Is that you asking?” She took off his glasses and lay them on the nightstand beside the tree.
“It is.” From his breast pocket he removed a little silk coin purse, and from the coin purse he removed a thin gold ring set with a jade stone. He did not tell her that he had taken it from his mother’s dressing table, that she was too sick to miss it.
He came close and, when she didn’t object, slipped the ring on her ring finger. Without his glasses he looked like a young boy dressed up for church. “Is that you saying yes?” he said.
His dark hair fell over his forehead and his ears were red from the cold. She didn’t like that he was shorter than she was, so she lowered herself to the bed. That was how she said yes. She unfastened each strap of her overalls and let the bib fall. Then she unbuttoned the top of her shirt, one, two, three, and her white breasts spilled out. They did not spill milk but stayed full and firm as he stood his cane against the bed and, as though they might do its work of supporting his unsteady weight, lowered his hands to take them. His hands were sticky with the sap from the tree. Later they would laugh at this, but now they were serious.
Genus was standing in the creek, and now Nan joined him—the dark shapes of their shoulders on the water, the sound their voices made together. Elma closed her eyes against them.
Oliver was leaning into her, losing balance. She felt his hands fall from her breasts to either side of her on the bed, where he braced himself. She helped him lower himself to the bed. He sat beside her, breathing heavily. From the pocket over his heart he removed his handkerchief and blotted his forehead with it.
“I’m afraid we don’t have enough time,” he said.
She tried to laugh. “We don’t need much.”
“We do. I do.”
He caught his cane before it slid from the bed to the floor. It was the kind with a handle that looked like the business end of a golf putter, and resting between his knees now it looked like his manhood risen. She had not heard of men whose manhood couldn’t rise, and so she assumed only that he was a gentleman. She sat there beside him, unwanted, with her shirt unbuttoned, her eyes closed again and her cheeks burning, until she thought to button it again. Then he put his hands on hers to stop her. He opened a fourth button and opened her shirt wider, as though drawing open two curtains to have a look at the day. With some trouble, he reached for the glasses on the nightstand. “To see you with,” he said. He was blind as a mole rat without them.