The Annunciation

“Amanda McCamey? Sure, I remember her. Lived up on Esperanza when she was a girl. Got famous writing a dirty book about the Church. Fell in with freethinkers. Too bad. She was a pretty girl. Prettiest girl in Issaquena County. And from good stock. Her cousin was Guy McCamey, the All-American. You remember him, don’t you? Well, you would have if you’d ever seen him play.”

Amanda. What she remembered was the delta, thirteen feet of black topsoil, starched dresses, Baby Doll and Nailor, the bayou, the bridge, the river, the levees, the smell of coffee and powder, her mother’s whiskey, her grandmother’s kisses. What she remembered was Guy smiling at her down the wide hall. He was eight years old. She was four.

All day she had been in the Packard beside her mother, driving from Tennessee. As soon as they had come to the flat delta farmlands her mother had begun to cry.

Now they were there. Amanda was standing in the front hall underneath her grandfather’s twelve-point deer. She was leaning on one hip, wearing a white fur coat and hat and muff. She reached up and pulled off the hat and dropped it on the floor, her hair shining like copper in the last light of the long day.

A day in November. Amanda had been on Esperanza for a month. She had been in every cupboard, every closet, every drawer. Now she was standing on the screened-in porch leaning against the screen, getting her sweater dirty. It was a new sweater, a yellow sweater with grosgrain ribbon down the front and pearl buttons from the Chinaman’s store. Amanda was waiting for Guy, singing songs to herself, pretending she was a singer on the radio. Every now and then she would press her face into the screen and stick out her tongue to taste the strange rusty taste. She had been on the porch for almost an hour. It seemed to Amanda she had been waiting for days.

As soon as she heard the trucks she came running down the stairs to meet him. He had been out hunting with the men, with his father and Harper Davis and Joe and Peter Holloman. They returned in a flurry of dogs and talk and guns and laughter, in their khaki coats and red hats, smelling of gunpowder and cold weather, the thick Delta mud called buckshot stuck to their boots like clay.

Guy handed her the box of rabbits and the dogs jumped all around trying to take the box from her hands. They were her grandfather’s dogs, brown and black and white beagles and setters and terriers. She kicked one of the beagles to the ground with her sturdy legs, making the men roar with laughter.

“Look at Amanda, Guy. She’s about to kill those dogs. Take her inside with those rabbits before the dogs have a fit. And come on out to the back hall. We got to clean those birds.”

“You look pretty in your sweater,” Guy said. He was making a place for the box behind the heater in their grandmother’s room.

“They’re hungry,” Amanda said. She was squatting beside the box, watching them squirm. Their little sucking noises bothered her, as though they might get on her and stick to her skin. Part of her wanted to throw them away.

“We’ll feed them later when I get through with the birds,” he said. He reached down and put his hand on her hair.

It was growing dark outside, the swift dark that falls in November. Amanda watched the rabbits for a while. They looked like the fingers on her hand, lying so close together, moving up and down with their soft breathing. After a while she picked up the box and wandered down the back hall to look for Guy, past the shelves of musty books she pretended to read. The books were full of silverfish. When she opened them the tiny creatures would slide across the page and disappear into the bindings.

The voices of the men were growing louder. Their voices were exciting, different from the voices of the women in the house.

Amanda followed the voices, and there was Guy, sitting on a low stool in the wide back hall that led to the kitchen. He was cleaning the birds and he was crying. The yellow light bulbs in the old wall fixtures cast black shadows all around him and the hall smelled of gunpowder and boots and the sour smell of the icebox and the smell of butter-churns and the smell of whiskey.

The men were leaning over Guy, sipping their drinks. One of the birds was so warm Guy thought it was still alive. His thumb hit a tendon and it moved in his hands. He leaned over and vomited onto the pile of feathers. Amanda stood beside a rocker watching him.

“You want to help your buddy, Miss Rabbit Trainer?” Guy’s father asked. “You want to give him a hand with those birds?”

Amanda ignored him. She stared at Guy’s hands. Every now and then he would look up and see the terrible stern look on her face. Her eyes were as dark as an Indian’s.

Later that night she climbed out the window onto the sleeping porch and got into his bed, warming him with her small body while the owls called back and forth across the bayou.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll get to the store and play the slot machine. This time we’ll get the oranges. Maybe we’ll hit the jackpot like Baby Doll did.”

No one minded when they found her in his bed on cold mornings. Amanda thinks Guy hung the moon, they said. She thinks Guy can do no wrong. She likes Guy the best of everyone in the whole delta.

These were the people of Esperanza Plantation. These were the ones who taught Amanda everything she would always know. There were three generations of women, not counting Amanda, who made it four.

There was Amanda’s great-grandmother, also Amanda, who had outlived three husbands. She wore long dresses and smelled of dried flowers and gave Amanda peppermint candy. She had come to Issaquena County as a pioneer, bringing her silver and the long gray-and-black-striped dresses she wore until she died. There were paintings of two of the husbands on the walls of her room. The third had been a simple carpenter and had built the beautiful wardrobes of Esperanza and the high bed where Amanda sometimes slept, safe in the arms and the soft snoring of the woman whose name she would carry into the future.

There was Amanda’s grandmother, who never stopped moving, who ran the house with her energy. On Fridays she would get into the Buick and drive the gutted road to Rolling Fork to the Chinaman’s store. Sometimes she took Amanda along and the little girl would watch through the window of the meat counter as the Chinaman cut into the meat with his fierce knives.

When they paid for their purchases he would turn to her with a smile and hand her a little paper gift, a flower or a bell or a tiny umbrella with beautiful pictures painted on it.

Guy’s mother worked at the gin and left in the mornings before anyone else was up. She was always kind to Amanda but she stayed away from the other women in the house because they looked down on her and were angry with Guy’s father for marrying her.

Amanda’s mother didn’t count anymore. She moved through the rooms like a ghost, never laying down her grief for a moment.

Guy’s father, Frank, hated Amanda. Everything he had hated in his older brother was in the child. When she had only been on the place an hour she turned those black eyes upon him and it was exactly like looking into Leland’s eyes. Leland, who had gone off to Ole Miss in style, then to Nashville to play ball and have his name in the papers, while Frank went to Mississippi State. Didn’t even get to finish that before their father died and he had to come home to run the place.

Leland, who had come to his own father’s funeral wearing a white suit. Then driven off in a Pierce-Arrow. Not to be heard of again until he died in the war, and the crazy flapper he’d married in Nashville came driving up with a chauffeur bringing the little princess and handed her over to her grandmother.

Every dish she ate had to be put on a separate plate or she wouldn’t touch it. “She eats cake and sugar sandwiches all day,” he said. “If you want her to eat at meals, tell Nailor to stop feeding her in the kitchen.”

“Can’t stop her, Mr. Frank,” Nailor said. He was standing in the kitchen door listening to every word. Amanda was refusing to eat mashed potatoes because they had pepper on them. “Can’t stop her. She too fast for me.”

“I’m going to the back acreage until supper,” Frank said, slamming out of the house. They were seated in the dining room at the noon meal. As soon as he was gone the offending potatoes were removed and some without pepper prepared.

These were the black people, Baby Doll and Nailor and Gert and Overflow and Sarah and June and Sam, who clapped and laughed when Amanda danced or threw fits. All except Kale, who never smiled at anyone, and Ditty, who was a hundred years old and could tell fortunes and make conjures and tell warts to disappear and was as white as Guy’s mother.

There was Man, who did no work now but sat on the steps of the store and had his house and his living forever, left to him in writing in Amanda’s grandfather’s will. Man was the tallest Negro on Esperanza. He had stood beside Amanda’s grandfather when the crazy man, Mr. DuBose, came gunning for him. They had stood on the bridge all morning and had shot Mr. DuBose together as soon as he set foot on the land.

They shot him together but only Amanda’s grandfather stood trial that afternoon at the Grace Post Office. Leland Cincinnatus Eudoxus McCamey was acquitted in five minutes and afterwards everyone went back to Esperanza for quail. Man ate his on the front steps with a mason jar full of whiskey for a chaser.

Then there was Guy, who could do anything, who had picked up a cottonmouth moccasin and slammed its head against a tree when he was eight years old, who was afraid of nothing in the world but his own cruelty. The summer Amanda was five he taught her to swim. He had work to do on weekday mornings but on Saturday Amanda would sit on the floor by his bed drinking the thick coffee Nailor made for her, waiting for him to wake up. The coffee was called Camouflage. It was a cup full of hot milk with a thimbleful of coffee and three spoons of sugar. Amanda would sit on the floor by the bed sticking her fingers down into the bottom of the cup, bringing up the little grains of coffee-flavored sugar, licking them off with her tongue, little rivers of coffee and sugar falling all over the front of her gown.

She would be quiet as long as she could. But as soon as the morning sun was visible behind the round roof of the chicken house, as soon as the first ray of sun touched the pecan tree above the sandpile, she would get up and stand over Guy, looking down into his face. She would take a sticky finger and push open one of his eyelids.

“As soon as it’s warm. Come on, Sissy. Please let me sleep.” He would roll over and pull his head down under the sheet. She would walk around the bed and try another tack. She would pull down the sheet and whisper in his ear. “I’m going to make it to the pier. From the swing to the pier.”

“If you leave me alone until eight,” he said, “when Nailor says it’s eight.”

Then Amanda would wander back to the kitchen and get a piece of pinch cake and take it out on the back porch to eat it by the washing machine. The washing machine fascinated Amanda. It was new and only Baby Doll was allowed to run it. Only Baby Doll stood before the high white tub feeding clothes into the dangerous wringer. At any moment one of Baby Doll’s hands might disappear into the rubber rollers and be flattened forever.

Amanda ran her hands around and around the smooth porcelain finish, then wandered down the steps and out into the yard to inspect the jars of frogs and lightning bugs she had collected the night before. They disgusted her now and she threw them under the house. She wandered on out to the edge of the bayou bank to look in the Mexican jars for treasure. They were tall pottery jars Frank had brought back from Mexico. They reminded Amanda of the jars in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Every few days she checked the jars to see if they were filled with treasure. There was nothing in them today and she went back into the house and into her grandmother’s room, then out through a window to the sleeping porch to see if Guy was still asleep.

“It isn’t eight,” he said. Then he gave up. She looked so forlorn. “In an hour,” he said. “Go get on your suit.”

Then Amanda tore into her mother’s room and got her yellow bathing suit and found Baby Doll and stood very still while Baby Doll put it on and adjusted the little straps, and buckled on her sandals and found her a towel.

When Guy was ready they left the house and walked the four hundred yards to the swimming place as if they were going on a long journey. Every cypress root, every mussel shell, every dark mud-covered plant was a message, a landmark, a mystery. The bayou was a place of endless fascination for Amanda. She would stand on the bank or lie on the pier looking down at her reflection in the water, thinking about the story of Narcissus, who was turned into a flower for liking to look at himself too much. She would stare down into the water hating and fearing the gods who had such powers, wondering how far she dared go to challenge them.

There was nothing to fear when Guy was there. He would wade out into the bayou and hold out his hands to her. She followed him, feeling the thick cold mud between her toes, the roots of the trees and the sand that washed away as fast as her grandmother had it poured. Then she lifted her feet and let herself go, sliding out into the water, the heaviness of bearing herself on the earth gone. Now she was borne by the water and Guy’s hands. Then she let go of even his hands and paddled up and down between the rope and the pier. “Don’t guard me!” she called out, her mouth half full of water. “Don’t guard me! I don’t want anyone to guard me!”

She flailed up and down until she was exhausted, then clamped her hands around his neck and he would swim out into the deep water with her hanging on to his back, letting her use him as a raft.

Amanda and Guy. Amanda and Guy. The only white children for ten miles down either road. The only white children with two pairs of shoes and shampoo. Amanda and Guy and the love that passed between them like a field of light. Everyone on Esperanza watched it but only the black people knew what they were watching. Only the black people knew what it meant.

At first they only touched each other. Guy would wake in the night and find her beside him, pretending to sleep, breathing like a sleeping person. He would rub his fingers up and down between her legs. She trembled beside him, safe in the smell of his skin, the flat hard width of his chest, the warmth of his hands on her thigh.

When he was twelve years old Guy would have no more of it. He would not even talk to her about it and became angry if she looked at him in certain ways or came into his room at night, for the great-grandmother had died and he had his own room now.

“If you talk about it I’ll tell grandmother,” he said. “I’ll let them beat me to death. I want God to let me be good at baseball, Sissy. I want to be on the football team next year. If I do this he isn’t going to let me.”

“I hate God anyway,” Amanda said. “I hate his nasty old church. I hate Father Agnew. He looks like his face is blue. He was a blue baby. Grandmother said so. He can’t do anything to me.”

“Don’t talk like that, Sissy,” he said. “You don’t mean that. You don’t mean the things you say.”

When she was fourteen and he was eighteen grown men came to Rolling Fork from Jackson and Oxford and Starkville and as far away as Nashville to watch him play football and talk to him about where he would go to college.

He had a job that year caretaking Doctor Usry’s summer place on the lake. The use of Doctor Usry’s sailboat was part of his pay and Amanda would go along with him on Saturdays to crew for him. Anytime it was warm enough they would take the little boat and sail out across the lake to an island of cypress and pine where Guy was trying to tame a Cooper’s hawk.

One day they took the old tarp out of the sailboat and made a place to eat their lunch under the tree where the hawk nested. It was a windy March day and they had had a great sail to the island. Amanda was gobbling down chicken sandwiches, pleased with herself for the way she had handled the lines.

Then Guy showed her the letter saying he had won the scholarship to the university.

“It’s the most money they can give anybody,” he said. “It will pay for everything. Coach Voight said they’d even have a car I could use if I needed it.”

“It will be a big help to Daddy. It means Coach Voight’s going to let me play my freshman year. Anyway, it means he thinks I’m good enough. The rest depends on me.”

“You’ll get to. No one’s as fast as you. Just because some boys are from Jackson or something doesn’t mean they’re going to be fast.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think it means you won’t come back here. You won’t want to come back here.” She turned away from him, moving over to the edge of the tarp, looking up into the trees, trying to imagine him gone.

“I’ll be back all the time to visit. And you’ll be coming up to see the games.”

“I don’t care. I still don’t like it. I can’t help it if I don’t like it.”

“You’ve got your friends. You’ve got lots of friends. Come here, Sissy. Don’t act like that. Be glad for me.”

Then she turned around and pulled him into her arms and began to put her hands on him.

“I can’t imagine it here without you. I can’t imagine what it would be like not to see you.”

“You won’t come back. You’ll forget us.” She moved her hands down his legs. Guy is ours, she told herself. Guy belongs to us. Guy belongs to me. “I want to do things with you,” she said. “I want you to do things to me.” She undid her short wool sailing pants and took them off. “Don’t look like that,” she said. “It isn’t bad. Nothing’s wrong with doing it to someone you know.” Of course Amanda didn’t know exactly what to do but she had watched the horses being bred and she had dreamed of it and once, when Gert was drunk, she questioned her about it. “He puts it in,” Gert said. “And then you do it.”

Afterwards, Amanda always believed it was that afternoon when they made the baby. Afterwards, it was always that afternoon she chose to remember, that wind in those trees, that great hawk circling like a black planet.

Amanda. What she has forgotten. What she refuses to remember. What she must carry with her always. Her cargo. The stone house on the corner of Saint Charles Avenue and Jena and what took place there that summer and that fall.

“I sees them there in the summertime. They sits on the porch. Some of them are rich and some of them are poor. All of them are pregnant. I think doctors and nurses are there and people work there.”

Later, Amanda never was sure whether it seemed like a long time or a short time, those unreal days of the strange New Orleans summer and fall. Humid days that all ran together into one long day in which she rose, dressed, attended mass, went to classes, dreamed, listened to the radio, walked in the afternoons with the other girls to the Katz and Bestoff drugstore to buy magazines and stationery and makeup. One long afternoon spent reading the names of the lipsticks, Persian Melon, Love That Pink, Cyclamen Evening, Crimson Lilac. One long summer and fall that smelled of Tigress and Aphrodisia and Coty’s Emeraude and something new called Something Blue.

One long day of steady afternoon rains and nights with no stars. Mostly she read, the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes, the romantic histories of Thomas Costain, the books of Pearl S. Buck with their terrible accounts of young girls enduring the torture of having their feet bound, of girls sold into teahouses, of arranged marriages and cruel mothers-in-law. Frightening descriptions of women giving birth, aristocratic women with bound feet giving birth in dreadful three-day ordeals surrounded by their in-laws and servants.

On Fridays Amanda would ride the Saint Charles streetcar to the Latter library and check out four books at a time, riding back past the home to the bakery at Jackson Avenue to shop for coconut cookies and petits fours, or brownies or ginger cookies. She saved the sweets to eat while she read herself to sleep at night, her mind far away in fifteenth-century England, taking sides in the War of the Roses, or in pre-revolutionary China, pitying the pagan women.

She would sprawl on the bed in the small room lit by the light of a single reading lamp. It was an old-fashioned pink china lamp with a worn silk shade cocked at a rakish angle toward the figure on the bed. A stranger passing along the wide hall outside the room, and drawn by the light to the doorway, might have stopped for a long time, entranced by the vision of the girl’s bright hair in the soft light, by the concentration on the lovely profile, by the way the darkness of the high-ceilinged Victorian room seemed to close around the bed, as if waiting for the end of a story.

The smell of sweet olive trees outside the window mingled with the muffled sound of tires going along the avenue. A streetcar stopped at a corner, sounded its bell, started up again with a clang. In the background the endless hum of crickets. Amanda turned the page.

If anyone had told him there were small hands like these he would not have believed it, hands so small and bones so fine and fingers so pointed with long nails stained the color of lotus buds, deep and rosy. And if one had told him that there could be feet like these, little feet thrust into pink satin shoes no longer than a man’s middle finger, and swinging childishly over the bed’s edge — if anyone had told him he would not have believed it.

Then she hung her head and toyed with a button on her coat and said, shy and half-murmuring.

“Because my mother binds a cloth about my feet more tightly every day and I cannot sleep at night.”

“No,” she said simply, “my mother said I was not to weep aloud because you are kind and weak and do not like the sound of pain and you might say to leave me as I am and then you would never love me.”

“Jesus,” Amanda said out loud, and sat up, hearing a knock on the frame of the open door.

“Aren’t you burning up in all those pillows?” Sister Celestine said, standing in the doorframe, her hands in the folds of her skirt.

“You ought to read this book,” Amanda began excitedly. “You wouldn’t believe what they do to these girls in China. They make cripples out of them. They can’t even walk. You wouldn’t believe it, Sister. It makes my feet hurt just to read about it.”

“I wouldn’t read things that disturb me,” the Sister said. “It doesn’t do you any good to read those kinds of books. Aren’t you ready to turn out the light now?”

“This writer’s father was a missionary. She’s a Chinese Christian! This book’s on the list!”

The intern holding Amanda’s hand listened to her drugged heroics with tenderness. She was a beautiful child, high as a kite on the pre-op, flirting with the young white-coated men who surrounded the hospital bed where she waited outside the operating room. He looked at the chart. She was fifteen. Reason for the cesarean, premature breech birth, a footling. Doctor Williams covering all his bases.

The hallway smelled good to Amanda, clean and antiseptic. No one was in a hurry. She was making the good-looking young men laugh. The one holding her hand rolled her into the operating room. He turned her gently on her side, her legs up against her belly. “This may feel cold for a moment, and you’ll feel a little prick. It won’t hurt.” The needle went into her spinal column. In a second it was over.

“Good girl,” a nurse said, and the young man began to tie her hands to the sides of the bed.

“You’re going to be fine. This is the way movie stars have babies. Try to breathe normally. We’re taking care of you.”

She could hear the hemostats, like a hundred crickets. She turned her head. On the floor was a pile of large gauze pads soaked with blood. Every now and then a nurse dropped another one on the pile. She had never seen so much blood, except once, when Guy took her to a hog killing.

The anesthesiologist held her head in his hands. “It’s all right. You have plenty of blood.”

Then the sensation of a cow pulling its foot out of the mud. The mysterious feeling of the child leaving the body, like music, like part of herself floating free and away into space, the pull on the spinal column, as though part of her spine were leaving her. It seemed to take a long time for the baby to leave, to rise above her. As if part of her body had moved away, leaving her lighter and at peace.

Then the sight of the baby, covered with blood, still attached to the long sinewy cord. A small bloody thing wriggling in the doctor’s hands, struggling for breath beneath the huge circular light. She was afraid the doctor would drop it. It looked so slick, so slippery.

“It’s a fine baby, a girl,” someone said. The pediatrician and an intern were working on the baby with syringes, sucking mucus out of its nostrils and throat. Then two nuns were there, wearing great white hats like birds in flight. They took the baby to a table in another part of the room. Four or five nuns clustered around the table. They looked like a great flowering shrub, in their gray dresses, their white hats.

The anesthesiologist put his hands back on her head. “They’re cleaning her up and baptizing her. They always do that to preemies. Don’t worry. It’s good luck. Rest now.”

“Now you can be a girl again,” Sister Celestine said. They were sitting in the coffee shop, waiting for the train to take Amanda to Virginia. Her mother and grandmother had wandered off to see about the luggage, and left her alone with the Sister. “You’ll love Virginia Sem. It’s beautiful in that part of the country. I know you’re going to have a wonderful time and learn so many new things.”

“She’s fine, Amanda. She’s in a wonderful home. The people who took her are very special, very devout. She’ll have everything the world has to offer. Put it out of your mind, dear. You’ve made a barren woman happy. Now you belong to yourself again. God knows what he’s doing. If you get worried, write to us.”

“There’s no need to talk to me like that,” Sister Celestine said, twisting her gold ring. Her finger was swollen around it from the humidity and her predilection for potato chips.

Amanda’s mother and grandmother returned to the table and handed her the tickets.

Somewhere on the train was a trunk full of new clothes and matched set of dark green luggage. There was even a short fashionable beaver coat. Her grandmother had sold the Deadning, a sixty-acre stand of wooded land, and put the money in an account for the next six years of Amanda’s life. “She will have her chance,” she told the rest of the family. “She is all that we have left of Leland.”

Amanda arranged her things beside her on the seat and looked around the daycoach. It was deserted except for a family of four sitting in front of her.

Jesus, I’m glad to be alone, she thought. She looked out the window. They were still there, her mother and grandmother and Sister Celestine, staring up at the train as if they were watching a public hanging.

Amanda tapped on the window, smiling down at them. They waved and smiled back. She opened the window and stuck her head out.

“I will. I’m fine. Go on.” She closed the window and watched them leave. Jesus, she thought.

The train smelled musty and close and exciting, like an old sofa. Amanda took a deep breath and sat up straight, running her hand across her midriff. She was filled with elation. She was free. Last night she had orgasms in her sleep, for the first time since the child was born. She touched herself through her clothes. Later, she told herself. As soon as it’s dark. I don’t need Guy. I can do it to myself.

She smoothed the skirt of her new plaid wool suit. Everything she had on was new, her green sweater, her gloves, her hose. Even her shoes were new, brown leather pumps with two-inch heels.

She looked down at her hand, at the diamond solitaire her grandmother had given her that morning. It had been her grandmother’s engagement ring. She turned it around and around on her finger, thinking about her trunk somewhere on the train full of the clothes her grandmother had bought for her, linens and underwear and gowns from The Lylian Shop, skirts and sweaters and party dresses from Holmes and Maison Blanche and Gus Mayers. There were jodhpurs and riding boots although she had never been on an English saddle in her life or dressed up to go riding. There was a fitted makeup kit with a silver-backed comb and brush. There was even a little manicure set with four different shades of nailpolish and an ivory buffer. Amanda settled back into the seat, making a catalog in her mind of her treasures, imagining herself in her new white formal, surrounded by young men in uniform.

By the time the train got to West Virginia in the morning Amanda was losing her feeling of adventure. She was even bored with looking at her diamond ring. She had slept fitfully in the little bunk of the deserted Pullman, dreaming all night of the baby, seeing the bloody thing in the doctor’s hands and the nuns carrying it away. In the dream the baby came and stood over her where she lay strapped to the operating table.

Go away, she screamed to the baby. Can’t you see I’m not your mother? Then the baby turned into the doctor. She reached up and threw her arms around the doctor. I love you, she said. I love you. I love you.

She woke up thinking about Guy. What had they told him? Why hadn’t he called her? She made up her mind to call him as soon as she got to Virginia. I can’t believe I haven’t called him, she thought. I don’t know why I’ve been letting everyone boss me around. No one can keep me from calling him. No one can make me do anything I don’t want to do.

She dressed carefully, taking a long time with her hair, and wandered down to the dining car. It was barely seven-thirty in the morning. Outside the windows the picked tobacco fields of West Virginia were going by, rich and neat looking in the morning sun.

There was no one in the dining car except a well-dressed man reading the paper and eating breakfast alone. Amanda played with the menu, hoping the good-looking man would notice the ring and think she was engaged. She put her hands under the table and switched it to her left hand. She took a package of Pall Malls out of her purse. She walked over to the man’s table and asked him for a light. When he held out his lighter she cupped her hands around it as though she were an actress in a play.

“Looks like we’re the only people on this train,” she said. “I thought it would be full of people.”

“I haven’t talked to anyone since yesterday,” she said. “I might forget how.”

“Would you like to talk to me for a while?” he said. “I wouldn’t want anyone to lose the power of speech.”

“Sure,” she said, taking a seat. “I’m used to being in a house full of people all the time.”

“In Mississippi. Esperanza Plantation in Issaquena County, Mississippi. I know you never heard of it.”

“It has been my experience that most of the best places in the world are secrets,” he said. “I’m awfully glad you came over. I was staring at you when you came in. You look like someone I used to know. For a moment I thought it was her.”

“Someone very beautiful.” He was laughing, as if the memory was a good joke on himself. “Now, then, where are you going on this lonely train in the middle of the week?”

“I’m going to Virginia to college,” she said. “I had to be late starting school because I’ve been sick.”

“You don’t look like you’ve ever been sick a day in your life,” he said, laughing again. He had a handsome face, like a movie star, and he talked with an accent. Amanda thought he must be an Englishman. She had never seen clothes made of such fine material.

“Do you always get up this early?” the man said. “I thought girls your age slept until noon.”

“Not on a train,” she said. “Besides, I’m excited. I’ve never even seen the school I’m going to. Are you from England?”

“Well,” Amanda said, “I guess it is. I’ve never known anyone from Virginia before. But all my ancestors came from Virginia.”

“Did they? Then we should celebrate your returning to the land of your ancestors.”

“I like to drink champagne anytime I think it up. ‘Three be the things I shall never attain. Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.’ That’s from a poem I like a lot.”

Now he was laughing harder than ever. Amanda decided to press her luck. “Do you have a compartment?” she said. “I would like to sit in a compartment and drink champagne. I was reading this book about these people going through Spain and they were sitting in compartments drinking champagne. The minute I read something like that I want to do it.”

“I suppose that could be arranged,” he said, wondering what the headlines would say when he was arrested for child molesting on the Southern Railway. Perhaps it will kill mother, he thought. That would certainly be worth the price of the champagne.

They walked back to his compartment through the swaying railroad cars. It was exciting to move from one car to the next across the noisy platforms. It was wonderful to be out in the world talking to this handsome man while the train rattled toward Virginia, the sound of the wheels like a strange music.

“What do you do?” she asked, when they were settled in the compartment. She was trying to remember to look him in the eye while she talked, trying not to stare at his beautiful foreign-looking clothes.

“I don’t do much of anything lately,” he said. “I used to be a writer but I ran out of things to write. Actually I got tired of doing it.”

“Because it was very hard work and it didn’t seem to make much difference in my life.”

“Are you famous?” she said, looking surprised, as if she had just thought of that.

“I suppose you could say I’m famous. In some circles.” He told her his name but it meant nothing to her.

“I don’t guess I’ve read your books yet,” she said. “But I’d like to. I read all the time. I read everything I can get my hands on. I’ve never known a writer before, except Mr. Carter. He’s the newspaper editor in Greenville. Do you know him?”

Amanda took off her jacket and leaned back on the seat. The scenery outside the window was changing now, the small mountains of the Appalachians beginning to appear in the distance. “He’s a good friend of my family,” she said. “He speaks French to me. I speak French, you know. And Italian. That’s three languages, counting English.”

“I had a tutor. Well, I had one with some other girls. He came over to Aberdeen Plantation on Saturdays to teach us. Anyway, his name was Armand. He’s Italian. He said I was so good at it I could learn any languages I liked. If that isn’t bragging. I hope it isn’t bragging.”

“I could do Spanish if I wanted to but it’s so easy it isn’t worth fooling with. That’s what Armand said.”

“So you’re going off and study languages. Then what will you do, get married and have children?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I won’t do that. I won’t ever do that. I’m going to live in New York and have a job.” She pulled her eyes away from him and busied herself with her jacket, arranging it across her shoulders. “Are you afraid of dying?” she asked.

“I used to be,” he said. “When I was your age I thought about it all the time. I’m more accustomed to the idea now.”

The waiter brought the champagne and opened it. The writer poured a glass for her and raised his own. “To Amanda McCamey, returning to the land of her ancestors.” She accepted the glass, held it up to the light and tasted it. Then she drank it and held out the glass for more. “I almost died last month,” she said. “That’s why I’m so late getting to school.”

“I had my appendix out and it ruptured. I was awake the whole time they were trying to save my life. There was this sheet on the floor and they kept throwing these big pieces of gauze soaked with blood on it. You wouldn’t believe that much blood was in anybody. You wouldn’t believe anybody could bleed that much and not die. But I have a strong constitution. All the McCameys are real strong people.”

“Look out there,” he said. “The mountains are beginning.” What a marvelous careless girl, he was thinking. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a girl that careless with her body. Amanda was sprawling on the seat now, holding up her glass as she had seen him do. She drank several more glasses one right after the other. He was trying to think of a polite way to put a stop to that but nothing occurred to him.

“This is just like that poem I was telling you a while ago,” Amanda said. “This writer in New York named Dorothy Parker wrote it. Have you ever heard of her? The rest of it goes, ‘Four be the things I’d be better without, love, curiosity, freckles and doubt. Three be the things I shall never attain. Envy, content and sufficient champagne.’ I’ve forgotten how it starts. I’ve got the book with me if you want to borrow it.”

“I know Dorothy Parker,” the writer said. “She’s a friend of mine. The next time I see her I’ll take great pleasure in telling her a young woman who had just escaped the jaws of death was quoting her on a train.”

“Would you like to kiss me then?” Amanda had meant never to kiss anyone again but this chance to kiss a writer was certainly not something she was going to pass up.

“I’m sure every man you ever meet will want to kiss you,” he said. “But I’m not going to. It’s against the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia for a man my age to kiss girls your age. Very short-sighted of them, I must say.”

“I just thought it up for something to do,” she said. She was embarrassed. The whole morning was ruined. Now he thinks I’m cheap, she thought. Now he thinks I’m terrible. Now he’ll have a bad taste in his mouth whenever he thinks of me. “I better be getting out of here,” she said. “I have to write some letters and things. I have a lot to do.”

“Good luck at your school then. Don’t let them make you forget who you are. And keep up with those languages.”

“I have to go,” she said. “I really have to go.” She went back to her seat and ate several sandwiches she bought from a vendor and slumped down on a pillow all the way to Madden lost in gloom, thinking about what a fool she had made of herself.

Many years later on a cold Sunday morning the writer would open the book section of The Washington Post and read a review of a book by a woman named Amanda McCamey.

When I read Jean Morrow’s review of your book in The Washington Post I thought perhaps Jean must be turning giddy in his old age. Still, you never know, so I went straight down Wisconsin Avenue to a bookstore where a stack of your books was on display in the bestseller section.

Jean was right. You are the real thing. My concern is whether you are the real Amanda McCamey, whom I met once on a train returning to the land of her ancestors.

If you are that golden headed girl who was going off to college at about age fifteen then memory is the wonder I always dreamed it would be. If not, at least you have snatched a dreary Sunday from the jaws of despair for one jaded member of your species.

Put me down as a fan —
Monroe Preis

In the spring of that first year Guy came to Virginia to see her. He borrowed a car and drove all one day and night to come visit her for a few hours.

Virginia Seminary was built on a hill. At the foot of the hill was a stone wall with iron gates. Amanda had been sitting on the wall all afternoon looking down the road, waiting for him, trying not to mess up the blue and white sundress she had borrowed. The dress was a size too small. Amanda had squeezed into it by wearing it over a miserably uncomfortable garment called a Merry Widow which took all the baby fat from around her waist and deposited it under her armpits. Over the sundress she was wearing a white stole. She kept rearranging the stole to cover the fat places around the top of the Merry Widow. It was hard sitting on the wall wearing the Merry Widow but Amanda was managing it. All around her the redbuds were blooming and the mountains in the distance were turning wonderful intense shades of blue but Amanda wasn’t thinking about redbuds or mountains. She was too busy hating her body. She thought of her body as some undependable animal she was doomed to carry around like a penance. Already it had betrayed her. Now, on top of everything else, it was getting fat. Amanda hated her body so much she had stopped giving it pleasure. She didn’t even like to give her body anything good to eat. Anytime she ate cookies or ice cream or candy she paid herself back by sleeping in a Playtex girdle. She had started a rage at Virginia Sem for sleeping in tight belts and Playtex girdles.

Now she sat on the wall with the stays of the Merry Widow sticking into the armpits of her treasonous body, waiting for Guy, hardly daring to believe he was really on his way to see her, driving all that way to be with her for a few hours. It seemed more like something she would do than something he would do.

As soon as she saw the car in the distance, as soon as she saw his big hands on the steering wheel of the borrowed Chevrolet, she felt a dark iron sail of love filling her chest and she scrambled down off the wall forgetting the stole and tore open the door of the car. She threw herself into the safety of his arms. “I don’t believe I’m crying,” she said. “I swore it would never make me cry.”

“It makes me cry,” he said. “I want to kill myself for what I did to you.”

“How did all this happen to us?” Amanda said. “I don’t know how it happened.”

“It happened because we did things we weren’t supposed to do,” he said. “I ask God all the time to forgive us.”

“There isn’t any God,” Amanda said, pulling away from him. “Only idiots believe in God. If there was a God I’d hate his guts.”

“You look wonderful, Sissy,” Guy said, changing the subject. “You look beautiful.”

“No, I don’t. I’m fat as a pig. All I do is eat cookies all the time. That’s all there is to do around this place. I’m always campused. I never get to go anywhere.”

She moved away from him. “It was a girl. It was all covered with blood. I barely saw it.”

“It wasn’t terrible. But thinking about it is terrible. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s over. I want to know about Ole Miss, about your games.”

“I’m the best player they have, Sissy. I really am.” He straightened his shoulders, smoothing one hand with the other. “Do you ever read about me in the papers? I keep wondering if you do.”

“Of course you’re the best. You’re a McCamey. You’re supposed to be the best.”

“I wish you could see me play. I’d give anything if you could see a game.”

“I will sometime,” she said. They were quiet then, thinking about all the things they couldn’t do a thing to change.

“I have to start back late tonight. It’s Coach Voight’s car. I have to be there Monday for a special practice. I have to be very careful about things like that, Sissy. Because they’re jealous of me. I have to go to a lot of trouble not to act like I’m special.” He looked up at her and smiled a funny bemused smile.

“That doesn’t matter at college, Amanda. It isn’t like Rolling Fork High. Everybody’s fighting to be on the team. I can do things they can’t do. I can run faster and I can throw farther and men hate other men for that. It’s been a hard year. All that terrible stuff last summer, then the hate and the jealousy. I don’t know what I would have done without Coach Voight. I wouldn’t have made it without him.”

“I wish I’d been there with you,” she said, wanting to go to Oxford and kill his enemies. “Well, come on, let’s walk up the hill and I’ll show you this dump. All my friends are dying to meet you. I told them they could meet you.”

Because he was her cousin Mrs. Lowry gave Amanda permission to go off with him to eat dinner in town. “She has to be back by nine, you know,” the fat old headmistress said, going all coy and girlish in the face of Guy’s marvelous shoulders and the elegant manners that well-raised Mississippi boys wield like rapiers. “And drive very, very carefully.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’m always careful with Sissy. She’s the only cousin I have. She’s all we’ve got.”

As soon as they left the schoolgrounds Amanda snuggled up against him in the seat. And forgot everything else in the world, the sun going down in the trees along the road, the burning blue skies, the fear, the sadness, the warnings. All she remembered was desire, that sweet flame, that honey, that sugar to end all sugar.

“We can if we want to. Go get some rubbers. If we get some rubbers we can do it. I know you do it. Tell me who you do it with.”

“I do it with everyone. I do it with so many girls I can’t tell one of them from the other. They ask me to. I don’t even have to ask them.”

“Then do it to me. Take me somewhere and do it to me. Goddammit, Guy, I mean it. I want to do it. If you don’t do it to me I’ll start doing it with every boy I see. I’ll go over to VMI and do it with the whole football team.”

He stopped the car by the side of the road and put his hands on her arms and held her away from him. “If you do that and I find out about it, I’ll come up here and kill you. I’ll kill every man who touches you and then I’ll kill you. So you can just stop that damn screaming and all that bad stuff, Sissy. I’m tired. I drove all night to get here. I love you but I won’t do things to hurt you and I won’t have intercourse with you ever again.”

“Why not?” she screamed at him. “I want you to. I want you to do it to me. Why won’t you do it to me?”

“I’ll touch you. I’ll touch you as long as you want me to but I won’t be inside you. I won’t do that. I swore to God I’d never do that again. After I went off to Oxford I stayed on my knees for two days begging God to forgive us and I promised him I’d never touch you again.”

“There isn’t any God,” she began, then thought better of it, fearing he would go back on his promise to touch her if she started that. “I’m sorry. It’s just because I’ve been so lonely. It’s just because it’s such a terrible place. I hate it here so much. You can’t believe how terrible it is. Take me somewhere where you can touch me. Please do it. Please let me have you close to me.”

They drove along in the darkening day down several roads until Guy found a place to park beside a pasture. He pulled the borrowed car up under a tree that was growing into a barbed-wire fence and turned to her and helped her take off the sundress and the silly undergarment and made her come over and over again with his hands and with his mouth, something he had learned to do at college.

“If you do this to a man and do it right, you can make him your slave,” he told her. “It’s worse than fucking, Sissy. It’s worse than anything.”

“I won’t tell you. I can’t stand to think of you saying it.” The dark was gathering all around them. A white and black spotted horse came up and stood beside the tree watching them with his big blurry eyes. Then the stars came out and then the moon and it was ten-thirty by Guy’s watch. Amanda put her clothes back on and they drove back to Madden and told lies to Mrs. Lowry until they were blue in the face.

Mrs. Lowry didn’t believe a word of it. She was so angry she wouldn’t let Amanda walk Guy out to the car. “I trusted you,” she said, when he was gone and she was alone with Amanda in the hall. “I put my trust in you.”

“I’m not responsible for automobile motors,” Amanda said. “I can’t help it if the steering wheel got stuck.” She walked upstairs with her head held high, not giving away a single thing.

She got three Milky Ways out of the candy machine and got into the bed with a book by Daphne du Maurier. She could feel the dried come between her breasts. She pulled the wrapper off the candy and opened the book. By the time she got to the layer of caramel on the second candy bar she was lost in an old English mansion called Manderley, with the sea beating down on the cliffs at the end of the lawn and the fog moving in to cover everything.

In the night Amanda had one of the attacks of cramps that had plagued her since the baby was born. Most of the time she stayed so busy and had such forward motion that she was almost able to forget the whole thing. Most of the time it seemed like something that had happened in a dream or to someone else. Except for the scar. The scar was there, stretching all the way from her navel to her pubic bone, and when she bathed she would run her finger along the length of it, feeling the hard ugly ridge. Then she would wonder at the strength of her body, for she thought that she was lucky to be alive. I will never do that again as long as I live, she would swear to herself. I will never have a baby again as long as I live. I will never marry anyone and I will never have a baby and no one will ever make me do that again. No one will ever make me do anything I don’t want to do as long as I live.

The scar was there, and debilitating cramps when she menstruated. There had been several letters from her grandmother reminding her to see a doctor but she had never bothered to make an appointment. The thought of telling her story to a strange doctor was too embarrassing. The attack that began after Guy’s visit lasted two days and hurt so much it brought tears to her eyes. When she was better she gathered up her courage and asked the school nurse to arrange an appointment. I’ll think of something to tell him, she thought. I’ll tell him I got raped. I’ll tell him it happened while I was asleep.

She dressed up in her best skirt and blouse and rolled her socks down around her ankles the way the girls from New York wore theirs and started down the hill trying out stories. I’ll tell him the boy I did it with had cancer, she decided. I’ll say I did it because he was going to die. She walked on down the hill to the town imagining Guy in a bed, dying of cancer, calling her name. She walked faster, pleased with her daydream. In the distance great banks of clouds were moving to the west. It really is beautiful up here, she thought. I ought to start appreciating that and quit feeling sorry for myself. For all we know the world is a speck of dust on someone’s cello, she quoted loftily to herself. Someone could step on us at any moment. They might be fixing to step on us right now. Then it would all be over. Just like that. Would I feel it? Would I know I was dying? I would have to leave this all behind. I would never see it again. I would never see her again. But I don’t even want to. She’s in a wonderful home. She’s with very special people. I won’t think about that. I’ll never think about that as long as I live. That isn’t important. That’s all over. That doesn’t even matter.

She pulled the piece of paper with the doctor’s address out of her pocketbook and turned a corner onto a street lined with elm trees. The office was in a frame house. As she climbed the stairs she began to worry again. He doesn’t care, she told herself. He doesn’t even know you. He’s a doctor. He can’t tell anybody. They aren’t allowed to tell anything you tell them. It doesn’t matter, she told herself. You have to do it. You have to make sure everything’s all right. Go on in. Go on in the door.

The doctor was a young man. He came out into the waiting room and helped her with her things.

“Tell me what’s going on up on the hill,” he said. “I haven’t had a talk with a Sem girl in a long time.”

“It’s a crazy place,” Amanda said. “I stay in trouble all the time. I get caught smoking.” She pulled her Pall Malls out of her pocketbook and lit up, wondering if he would tell her to put it out. “Mrs. Lowry hates me.”

“I went to dances,” he said. “I specialized in getting Cokes for people. I was extremely good at getting Cokes passed around.” He helped her into a chair. “Now then, what can I do for you?”

Jesus Christ, he thought, wondering how many years he would have to practice medicine before he learned never to be surprised at anything.

Amanda went on with her story, embroidering the embarrassing parts. The young doctor laced his fingers together, trying to look unconcerned. Every stupid and pointless thing in the outworn gothic mores of the Deep South was in the garbled story she was telling him. I should have been a dentist, he thought. I should have been a ballet dancer. The north light was slanting in the windows to the left of where she sat, lighting up her wide strong hands as she made designs in the air to illustrate her story, circles and triangles and parallelograms.

“So they don’t know about it at school. My grandmother promised me that. They think I had my appendix out. But what if I need to have my appendix out? That’s what my grandmother is worried about. Anyway, here I am. It was pretty hard for me to come. I don’t like to talk about this stuff. Bury the past, that’s what my grandmother says. Well, I’ve been having cramps. I never used to have them. So I decided to come see you.”

“Why don’t you let the nurse take you into a room and I’ll take a look and then we’ll talk some more.”

In the examining room he asked her a series of questions, going over and over several of her answers. He was trembling by the time he finished the examination. She might never conceive again, he thought. I can’t believe this fucking outrage. Not even to mention taking her child away. Not even to mention that.

“Is something wrong?” she said, squeezing the nurse’s hand as he removed the speculum.

“Nothing’s wrong. You’re in perfect health. In a minute you can get dressed and we’ll talk.”

“I’m glad you came to see me,” he said, when they were back in his office. “I want you to think of me as a friend, as someone you can call on if you need anything. Tell me, did you ever see a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a person like that at the home?”

“Oh, God no,” she said. “I’m not crazy or anything like that. My mind’s just fine. No one in our family’s ever been crazy, although I guess you could say my mother’s a hypochondriac.”

“The Sisters did. The Sisters talked to us all the time. Of course, I’m not a Catholic. I was raised an Episcopalian.”

“I read all the time,” Amanda said. “I read everything I can get my hands on. That’s why I’m so mature. I can read French. And Italian.”

“How did you learn that? I didn’t know they taught Italian at the seminary.”

“Oh, no, I learned it at home. In the delta. Aurora Alford and Charlotte Myers and I had a tutor that came to the Myers plantation on Saturday. He was Italian. Well, he was teaching us French but he just taught us Italian while he was at it. I was the only one that was any good. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that. I guess that’s bragging.”

“Yeah, everyone loved him a lot. Well, Mr. Myers didn’t love him. He said he was a pansy. That’s why we quit our lessons. He told me all about translation. You know, most of the people in the world just think everything is written in English.” She straightened up her shoulders, liking the sound of all that knowledge. “You have very nice bookshelves. I’ve been looking at them ever since I got here.”

“Come borrow a book if you like. If you exhaust the Sem library. Here, try this. It might keep you busy.” He reached behind him and took down a little book called The Golden Apples. “Keep it for a while. I’d like to see you again in a few months. And have that prescription filled. There’s no point in a strong girl like you putting up with cramps. Aside from that, you’re fine, Amanda. You’re just fine. Call me if you need me.” He walked her to the door and stood watching as she went on down the street, the shadows of the elms falling all over her head and shoulders like a web.

But she won’t be fine, he thought, stuffing his hands down into his pockets, leaning into the doorframe, watching until she was out of sight. She won’t be fine, goddammit all to hell. That gorgeous child, with a mind like that. Goddamn their crazy outworn used-up terror and ignorance and hypocrisy and fear. Imagine letting that child carry a baby to term. She’ll probably never conceive again. That goddamn uterus is tilted so far back I can’t find the cervix. Not to even mention the really unforgivable part.

How long until she starts seeing that baby in every one-year-old on the streets, in every two-year-old, in every three-year-old? He walked back into the surgery and picked up a hypodermic needle and held it in his hand. When I am the sheriff of the world I will bomb Rome off the face of the earth. I will watch the Vatican go sailing up to God in a million pieces. He stuck the needle into his arm and felt the rapture spread across his body until it filled the room.

Then he poured himself a drink and called a woman in Boston he liked to talk to when he was high.

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