THE FIRST DAY OF November dawned unseasonably warm and sunny. Somehow, the moment I woke up, I remembered to say “Rabbit, Rabbit” out loud, a superstitious practice taught to me by Mrs. Hodges years before, these words to be spoken first thing in the morning on the first day of each month to ensure good luck for all the days of the month ahead. And I even felt lucky as I skipped out after three sessions of playing piano for Phoebe Dean’s groups and ran down the hill toward the greenhouse, looking for Pan.
“Where is he?” I asked, finding Mrs. Morris doing her crossword in a wicker chair she’d dragged out into the sunshine.
She looked up to smile at me. “Listen,” she said. “You can hear him.”
I followed her gaze up the hill toward the Central Building, then followed the music to the wide-open kitchen door, where a group of apron-clad workers had spilled out onto the lawn, some on wooden chairs and stools, some kneeling or seated on the cold, wiry grass. Most were singing along. Pan’s harmonica wailed out above the voices. And there he sat, knee to knee with a blonde girl who was playing a small, handmade, and very old guitar. I could not see her face for the fall of her white-gold hair, but her high voice vaulted and arced over all the rest, sending a sudden chill to my heart, for I knew that voice somehow, as I knew the song, which I had learned from Ella Jean Bascomb years before. I drew closer and began to sing along.
Pan was playing the harmonica furiously and stomping his right foot on the ground, the way he always did. When he looked up and saw me, his eyes lit up and a big grin crept around the edge of his “harp.” He nodded then threw his head back in a gesture of welcome, and my own heart soared with the music. Others greeted me as well. “Hey, little Liza, little Liza Jane,” we sang. I sat down on the grass. From this perspective, I could see the girl guitar player’s face, and then it came to me. She was Flossie, Ella Jean’s sister who had gone off to Knoxville in the car with that horrible man, the one who had tried to kiss me in the dark woods. Flossie! She looked almost exactly like her mother now, though she was paler and even more beautiful.
When they were done with “Liza Jane,” they did not stop but picked up the pace as they moved into “Orange Blossom Special,” leaning in toward each other until their heads touched, his shaggy dark hair and her wild light curls that caught all the sunshine, as they played faster and faster, playing up a storm. For a moment on that bright sunny day everyone else fell absolutely silent; we knew we were hearing something rare, something wonderful. It was a moment caught in time and space that would not come again. Oddly it reminded me of my own senior recital accompanying Lillian Field at Peabody, years before. Then Pan went into a big long train whistle, going away, going down the track, around a curve and then another curve, and she kept up with him, all the way down the mountain. “Oh Lord!” Flossie hollered as she hit the last lick. “Woo woo!” Pan yelled as he jumped to his feet, harmonica still in one outstretched hand.
It was over. They were dispersing, headed back to work, when Mrs. Morris called from the edge of the group: “Pan, I hate to break this up, honey, but Cal needs you to go down to the station with him right now to pick up a shipment.”
Pan touched my shoulder—just once, lightly, as he took off down the hill.
I got up and went to sit on his empty chair next to Flossie. She had appeared possessed, playing, but now she looked drained, slumped back in her chair as if exhausted, every bit of color bleached out of her by the bright winter sun. For a minute I wondered if she might be albino, or part albino, if such a thing were possible; yet I remembered how fair her beautiful mother was. Flossie sat gazing out at nothing, with no expression at all on her perfect paper-white face.
“You are Flossie Bascomb, aren’t you?” I said. “I’m Evalina Toussaint, and I was a friend of your sister Ella Jean, a long time ago. She brought me up to your house one time to spend the night, and I met you then, and your family, and your granny, too. We sat out on the porch and sang the moon up.” I smiled, for this was one of my favorite memories, and in all that had happened to me since, I had never lost it.
Her pale, glittery gaze moved back toward me very slowly, as if across the years. But I could tell that she remembered me.
“Where is Ella Jean now?” I asked. ”And the rest of them? Do they still live up on that beautiful mountain?”
She stared at me. “Don’t you know?”
I shook my head no. “I have lived away from here for a long time,” I said.
“Shit.” The word seemed doubly obscene, coming from such a pretty mouth. “Ella Jean’s gone and got famous. I thought everbody knowed it. Famous and rich and mean! Won that National Banjo championship and got on Jimmy Dean’s show and done made three records already. They call her the Cherokee Sweetheart these days. She was up in Cincinnati on a radio barn dance, the last I heard. She’s done got too good for the likes of us’uns.”
“Oh I’m sure that’s not so,” I said almost automatically, though what I said was true. For I remembered Ella Jean as forthright, honest as the day is long, and totally dedicated to her inexplicable family.
“And you—” I inquired more delicately. “You were on your way to Knoxville . . .”
“Well I got there,” she said, “But it didn’t work out. Ain’t nothing ever worked out since, neither. That’s the God’s truth. You think I want to be over here working in this here kitchen? You think I don’t want to be riding around in a custom-built silver tour bus with all the boyfriends and hundred-dollar bills I can handle? She wasn’t the one—I was the one. She didn’t have no talent to speak of. I had the talent. And the looks. I was the one! I was the talent! And now look at me, here I am, slopping up soup for crazy people, just like Mama.”
“How is your mother?”
“Dead.” She turned to look straight at me, squinting her eyes to silver slits in the sunshine. “Mama’s dead, and Mamaw’s dead, and Wilmer’s in Broughton, and Daddy’s gone, along with the rest of ’em, and the house gone, too. Burnt,” she said in answer to my look. “Burnt to the ground, all gone, but let me tell you, honey, I am still here! Why, you just ask any of them, they know me. They know me around here. And I’ve got me a boyfriend, too. Yes ma’am. You might not think it to look at me, but I’m telling you, Miss Whatever-Your-Name-Is, I’m doing all right. I’m doing just fine.” Her speech became more rapid, more incoherent and hostile, as she spoke. I found myself drawing back, as if for safety. Inadvertently I rubbed my palm, which had begun to itch, for no reason I could think of. I remembered how Flossie’s granny had held this hand so long ago, and the strangest feeling came over me. I shook my head to clear it, very relieved when Flossie suddenly jumped up, putting an end to our conversation.
“I’m glad to meet up with you again, Flossie,” I said carefully. “And I really enjoyed the music.”
“I’m the talent,” she said, absently scratching her thigh as she stared off vacantly into the distance beyond me. I was chilled to the bone as I watched her turn and go back into the kitchen, shutting the door behind her. It struck me that Flossie might well be crazier than many of these hospitalized here at Highland, and I wondered what she meant when she said that she had a “boyfriend.” Surely she didn’t mean Pan.
I WAS VERY excited when told I could move into Graystone, the new women’s halfway house. I would be a sort of hybrid, part patient, part staff. Though officially hired to help Phoebe Dean with music classes and all musical events, even teaching piano, I would still be required to continue my personal counseling with Dr. Schwartz and my group therapy sessions with the new young Dr. Sledge.
“For how long?” I asked Dr. Schwartz.
“For as long as it takes,” she answered, smiling.
Graystone was an appropriately entitled old bungalow on a tiny side street off Montford Avenue, almost but not actually on the hospital grounds. This made an enormous psychological difference. Graystone was an experiment—a residence intended for people in the final stages of “transitioning” into regular life outside the institution. A similar “halfway house” for men had already been operating for about six months, several blocks away on the other side of Highland’s extensive grounds—too far away for socializing with us, or so it was hoped. A big, cheery social worker named Suzy Caldwell was present every morning to make coffee and get us going for the day. Suzy referred to herself as a “troubleshooter.” She’d check our plans, reminding us of hospital events and appointments, sometimes giving us rides into town for errands, though we were encouraged to use the city buses whenever possible. They stopped right at the end of our street.
Everybody’s schedule was different at Graystone, some combination of “day hospital” and work. I probably spent more time at the hospital than anybody else, since my job took place there, too. Well do I remember hiking up and down the icy hill in that winter’s freezing rain or falling snow. Sometimes they took pity upon us and gave us a ride to and fro. Whenever we were all expected to attend the same program or event, the big green van arrived, always a welcome sight. Sometimes Suzy Caldwell came back again in the evening to check on us, often making popcorn or hot chocolate in the kitchen.
Left to Highland Hospital in an old lady’s will, Graystone was like a time warp, homey as could be, with its flowered carpets, puffy old sofas, and antiques galore. China figurines, old framed photographs, and lacy antimacassars covered every available surface. It was like living in your grandmother’s house—if you had had such a grandmother. I was willing to bet that most of the women and girls who would pass through these doors—such as myself—did not, so in a way, Graystone was like a kind of wish fulfillment, or fantasy, or stage set. Still, this was a play I was glad to have a part in, for once. I had lived beyond those hospital walls for years, and was more than ready to do so again.
I was issued a corner room upstairs, other bedrooms having been already taken by Myra, who was “learning to live without Mama,” and black-headed Ruth, now taking phenobarbitol, and so much calmer and friendlier that she really seemed like a different person. Myra had been placed in a volunteer job at the public library. But Ruth had landed an impressive part-time job on her own, working at an exclusive designer clothing shop downtown near the bookstore. Ruth dressed to the nines every day, then caught the bus. I remember a red bead necklace she often wore, and her big lustrous pearls. I could not imagine such a job as hers, dressing up like that or dealing with the public so directly, convincing rich women to buy dresses.
“But sweetie, I’ve always been in retail,” Ruth said when I expressed my admiration. “My parents were in retail, even my grandparents were in retail! They had a little shop on Seventh Avenue. Besides, what about you? You were playing the piano in front of about a hundred people at that program last night.”
“Oh, that’s different,” I tried to explain. “That was background music. I’m just an accompanist, that’s all.”
Ruth’s laughter floated out behind her as she clicked off down the hall in her high heels.
MY LAST PIANO student of the day had failed to show up, so I was sitting in the alcove window seat reading, out of view, when the front door of Graystone burst open and a number of people came in with a rush of cold air, loud voices, and the general stamping of feet. Except for Dr. Bennett, I did not know the men’s voices, though I recognized Dr. Schwartz, of course, and Mrs. Morris’s calm tone. I was surprised that Mrs. Morris had left her accustomed realm of Brushwood and greenhouse and ventured all the way to Graystone. And why was Dr. Bennett here, anyway?
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Bennett said in his clipped, commanding style. “Mrs. Morris will escort our new patient upstairs and help her get settled into her room while we take this opportunity for a brief chat.”
“I’m staying right here.” Soft but steely, the girl’s flat Southern voice hung in the room.
I put my book facedown on the window seat.
“Now wait just a cotton-picking minute, young lady, who do you think you are, telling us what to do, when we’ve done brought you all the way over here?” a man’s deep voice exploded. “Hell fire, I’d just as soon take you straight back to jail. That’s where you belong anyhow, in my opinion. This here is a bunch of damn foolishness.”
“Now, now, Officer Gillette,” a more neutral male voice interposed. “We are here to do the court’s bidding, of course. And as a personal favor to Judge Ervin. Annie Jenkins Feeney,” the same man continued pointedly, louder. “You go on upstairs with the nice lady now. This is your big chance, as we discussed in the car. It may be your last chance.”
I perked up my ears, as you might well imagine, for I had once heard these words myself.
“I ain’t moving. I ain’t about to move. I want to hear what you’re going to say about me.” The girl’s flat little voice remained unperturbed. “Those papers are full of lies. I’m going to stay right here.”
“Miss Feeney.” Dr. Bennett adopted his most military manner. “The law requires us to conduct an intake interview with the referring authorities, under these circumstances.”
“I can talk for myself,” the girl said.
“That’s the goddamn truth!” the deep voice was raised. “And won’t shut up, neither!”
I decided he must be a policeman. Probably the other one was some kind of police social worker.
“Of course you can speak for yourself, Annie,” Dr. Schwartz said, “and you shall have every opportunity to do so. At Highland Hospital, we are here to listen and to help. We hope that we can help you. But before we can do that, we have to admit you, don’t you see?”
“Come along, dear. I think you’ll like your room.” Mrs. Morris’s reassuring voice was followed by her heavy tread on the stairs. The girl said nothing more, and soon I heard their steps and voices above me. I was dying to go up there, too, but at this point I could not show myself, of course, or all would be lost. I shrank back into the pillows to listen.
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Bennett began, “this is an unusual situation. You have brought us a new patient, remanded by the court.”
“Sent by Judge Ervin hisself,” the deep voice agreed. “She up and wrote him a damn letter, damnedest thing I ever heard of. So then he taken her out of jail and sends her over here.” The man made a sound of disgust. “Seems like he knowed this Dr. Carroll in college or something.”
“I’d like to read that letter,” Dr. Schwartz remarked.
“It’s in her file, I’m sure,” the other man said, “which I might as well give you right now.”
“Dr. Carroll has stepped down as head of this hospital,” Dr. Bennett said in a smooth, formal voice, “though he remains closely involved, as a member of our governing board. However, as he is in Florida for the winter, Highland Hospital will be pleased to honor the judge’s request for a thorough evaluation and treatment or whatever.” There was a creaking sound as he stood up.
“Excuse me, Dr. Bennett.” Dr. Schwartz’s voice surprised me in its firmness. “I am sure you’ve got other, much more important fish to fry. But as the Director of Psychiatry for adolescent girls at Highland Hospital, I shall be in charge of Miss Feeney, and I am personally requesting that you listen to her history as presented in these transfer papers from Samarcand Manor, the reformatory where she was incarcerated before being sent to jail in Statesville, thence to us. I want you to understand exactly what we will be dealing with.”
“Yes, Gail.” I heard the sigh and then the creaking noise as he sat back down. I imagined him glancing at his watch; with Dr. Bennett, the schedule was everything.
“Thank you,” Dr. Schwartz said crisply, rustling the papers. “My goodness, this is quite a file for such a young person. Since your time with us is so limited, Dr. Bennett, I shall try to concentrate upon only the most pertinent facts, at this point. Let’s see . . .” At length, she began:
“Name, Annie Jenkins Feeney, age seventeen. No fixed address; ward of the state. Birthplace unknown. Over-sexed female adolescent of the high moron type; a moral imbecile. Mother, Catherine Jenkins Feeney, died in the Virginia State Mental Hospital in Staunton, Virginia. Girl raised by father Kirvin Feeney, drunkard, tinker, and carpenter, primarily at Pocosin, N.C., until his death. Girl then taken into the good Christian home of her aunt and uncle, Mary Ellen and Royster Biggs of Warsaw, North Carolina. After two years of defiance, rude behavior, and disruption including arrests for drunken and disorderly conduct, girl ran off with a Negro, finally apprehended in a Blue Ridge tourist cabin. Whereupon Mr. and Mrs. Biggs were forced to seek the services of the state. Girl declared “unmanageable . . . incorrigible . . . dual personality.” Dr. Schwartz was clearly skimming along now. “Morally defective . . . suspected of prostitution . . . my goodness!” she exclaimed before going on. “Girl admitted to Samarcand Manor where necessary therapeutic sterilization was performed for the public good. Gentlemen, this is outrageous!”
“Now wait a cotton-picking minute, Doctor,” came the deep voice. “You gotta understand, these morons breed like mink. And she had ran off with a Negro, remember that. The duty of the state is to protect the race.”
“Oh, is that so?”
I could just imagine Dr. Schwartz’s face, the way she drew her mouth into tight straight line.
“Yes ma’am,” came the milder voice. “Working in a high-class situation like the present, you may never have encountered such a type, meaning no disrespect, of course. But in our line of work, we deal with plenty of them, believe me, and I want to make you aware that this particular girl, this Jinx Feeney, is a special case. I have never seen such a one as her, I’m here to tell you. It’s been one reckless act of defiance after another. Why, she even set her mattress on fire over at Samarcand! That’s how she got herself out of the reformatory and into prison. That’s the history here. I urge you to be careful, doctor, that’s all. Never trust her. This girl has unusual language and musical abilities, physical coordination, and great cleverness, but she has no sense of right and wrong, and no soul either. Mark my words. No matter how much she fooled the judge, Jinx Feeney is a dangerous girl.”
They hate her, I realized, chilled. They really hate her.
“Wait a minute. What did you just call her? “Dr. Schwartz asked. “Not Annie, but . . . ?”
“ ‘Jinx,’ ” he said. “That’s what she goes by, and believe me, it’s appropriate.”
“Thank you, gentlemen, for these insights.” It was Dr. Bennett’s rising good-bye tone. “It sounds to me as if you will, indeed, have your capable hands full, Dr. Schwartz, and even your famous compassion may be tested. Girl trouble is not my bailiwick, of course, so I shall leave you to it. Gentlemen, we thank you for your services, and wish you a good day.”
It was over. A rush of cold air poured into the parlor in the men’s wake.
Dr. Morris came back downstairs. “She’s sleeping now,” she told Dr. Schwartz. “Out like a light.”
“I’m sure she’s exhausted,” Dr. Schwartz said. “I’m exhausted myself, just from reading her file! But we’d best get on back, hadn’t we, Maureen? I’ve already missed two appointments this afternoon.”
“I wonder if it’s wise to leave her here like this, Gail.”
“We are not operating a prison,” Dr. Schwartz said lightly. “And Mr. Dobson was right, you know. This is her last chance. She ought to be on her best behavior. Besides, the other girls will be back within the hour. In fact, I’ll try to intercept Evalina.”
“I still think the girl should have been placed in the adolescent wing.”
“She’s too experienced, and too smart,” Dr. Schwartz said. “As well as thoroughly sexualized, from the sound of it. Besides, Jinx Feeney will not be with us long, unless I miss my guess entirely. Despite that nickname, her luck may be about to change.”
“Be careful, Gail,” Mrs. Morris said, the last bit of conversation I overheard. “Don’t forget what that awful man said. Sometime you really may be too trusting for your own good.”
“Well, you’re one to talk!” Dr. Schwartz exclaimed.
The door closed behind them.
A FEW MINUTES later, I found our old beat-up pot with a lid and popped some popcorn in it, then dumped it into the basket and took it upstairs. I knocked on our new resident’s door.
“Come in.” That odd little voice.
I pushed the door open to find her sitting straight up in bed, cross-legged and obviously wide awake. Had she really been sleeping?
Or had she fooled Mrs. Morris . . . and if so, why?
“Ooh, I thought I smelled popcorn!” she said. “I was just sitting here hoping it wasn’t a dream and hoping I was going to get some of it. I’m about to starve.”
“Didn’t you have any lunch?”
She gave a disgusted snort. “Hell no! Them cops wouldn’t stop for nothing. They like to starved me to death, I’m telling you. They done it on purpose.”
Warily, I thrust the basket across the bed; after all I’d heard, I was a little bit scared of her. She grabbed the basket and started eating the popcorn ravenously. She didn’t look at all like I’d thought she would. I had expected a large, belligerent person, but this girl was a waif: pale, wiry, freckled, with a mass of curly red hair and light green eyes, small and hard, shaped like almonds.
She looked up from the popcorn once to ask, “Have y’all got anything to drink?”
“Sure.” I ran back down to the kitchen where I poured her a tall glass of milk, then carried it carefully up the steps. The girl drank half of it in one long swallow. She licked her top lip and looked me square in the eye.
“I’m Jinx,” she said.
“I’m Evalina,” I said.
She nodded. “Are you a lady or a girl?”
I had to smile. “A lady, I guess.” I was ten years older than she.
“Are you a nurse?”
“No, I’m a patient,” I said. “Or a resident, I guess I should say, on my way to getting out of the hospital. I’ve got a job playing the piano for their programs.”
She lit up. “I can sing,” she said. “Dance, too.”
“Well, you just might get a chance to do that,” I told her. “They’re big on that here.”
Still sitting straight up on the bed like an advertisement for perfect posture, Jinx stared at me intently. “You are going to be my friend,” she said. “I need one. I have to make friends and have increased socialization and pass a lot of tests to get out of here. And not set fire to my bed and not hit anybody. You think I can do it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You want some of this popcorn?”
“Sure.” I perched gingerly upon the edge of her bed, and we finished it up together.
JINX WAS DYING to tell her own story, which was completely different from the police record I had overheard in the alcove at Graystone, though in a way, both stories were true. Her mother, had she lived, might have offered another; certainly her aunt and uncle had stuck to their own angry narrative. Perhaps any life is such: different stories like different strands, each distinct in itself, each true, yet wound together to form one rope, one life. I couldn’t say. I don’t know why they all told them to me, either. Dr. Schwartz suggested that I’m a good listener—maybe that’s like being a good accompanist.
Anyhow, this is Jinx’s version.
Though born into a “good family,” Jinx’s mother was “never right,” causing that family no end of trouble and embarrassment before she ran away with the Irish tinker and musician Kirvin Feeney, traveling all over the South in his specially built wagon, like a little house, pulled by two horses named Dan and Grace, stopping only for their child Annie Jenkins’s birth. So Jinx’s earliest and happiest memories are of life in the tinker truck, pulling out all the little hand-built drawers one by one, hundreds of drawers, each containing its own nails or bolts or tools; sitting on her mother’s lap before a campfire deep in the woods; feeding hay to the greedy horses, who grabbed it right out of her little hands; and kneeling down to drink from running creeks. Her mother used to laugh a lot in those days and sing endless songs to the tune of Kirvin’s fiddle. Those were the good times, before old Dan died and Grace went lame and a rich widow, one of Kirvin’s favorite customers over the years, up and gave them a place to stay.
The old white frame house sat deep in the pinewoods at the edge of blackwater swamp. Jinx had her own room with no bed but a mattress on the floor with a velvet crazy quilt flung across it and a sky-blue chest of drawers where she kept the little dolls that her mother crocheted for her, an entire village of little dolls. She cannot remember the kitchen, where no one ever cooked, or the parlor, where no one ever sat.
What she does remember is her father’s workroom, the shed beside the house where people came to get things repaired, such as engines and threshers and stoves and hand mills and even radios—or the handles of pots and pans, or the blades of knives or saws, or anything that needed sharpening. Her daddy could fix anything. While they waited, men played cards or checkers at the long table he had made of a single board from the big tree that fell out by the icehouse. Or they gossiped and talked or played music with Daddy joining in, for it was always easy to get him to quit working and fiddle a tune. Even as a tiny tot, Jinx learned to sing “Danny Boy” and to dance a jig with the best of them. Liquor was sold from under the floorboard, where it was hidden when certain people were present. The liquor was brought by a black man named Noah Dellinger and his son, Orlando, who became Jinx’s best and only friend, a skinny, solemn boy who could play the banjo like nobody’s business, joining right in with the men.
By the time she was three or four, Jinx knew to stay out in the workroom and not in the house where her mother spoke often to those who were not there, sometimes obeying their instructions to set off on a little trip with her daughter—hitchhiking into town, say—which Jinx enjoyed—or all the way to Edenton; or moving into an abandoned bread truck out in the woods where there was nothing to eat but blackberries. Jinx stopped going when she grew old enough to resist. Then her mother went off traveling alone, and then she was put into a hospital somewhere up in Virginia. Jinx knew her mother died there, but instead she likes to imagine her still riding on a bus, looking out the window at the passing scenery.
Kirvin Feeney had girlfriends, nice girlfriends who cooked sometimes, or cleaned up, and gave Jinx clothes and taught her to dance and wear makeup when she was just a little girl, a “little fancy girl” they called her. Everybody got a kick out of her. The only problem was that these women tended to leave pretty quick once they realized they were not going to change her daddy. Though Jinx went to school for a while, she soon stopped trying. It was hard to get there, and it was more fun to hang around the shop with the men anyway. The older she got, the nicer they were.
Soon she was going off with some of them to do things that were mostly fun anyway and didn’t mean a damn thing to her anyhow. If Kirvin Feeney knew about these things, he never said so, but his health was so bad by then that he had pretty much stopped working, and he must have been glad for the kerosene and coffee and food that she supplied, though finally he wouldn’t eat hardly anything, living on grits and liquor brought around by Orlando Dellinger and his daddy, the only ones of all that crowd who continued to come to the house at the end.
Jinx was sent to live with her mother’s sister, whom she had never even seen. This was her aunt, Mary Ellen, and her uncle, Royster Biggs, who ran a big hog farm out in the country near Warsaw, North Carolina. The man from the state drove her over there. The highway ran straight as a ruler across the dry red land that lay flat in every direction, laid out in different kinds of fields like some kind of big board game.
Her aunt and uncle’s two-story brick house sat out in the middle of a yellow field as if it had been dropped there. Out behind the house were the hog barns, long low structures, lots of them, and several big scummy ponds that looked suspicious. “Damn,” the man said. “I can smell it already.” He rolled up his window, which did not help. To the left sat a brick garage that was nearly as large as the house, with space for five vehicles. A gleaming white Cadillac with fins was pulled up in front of the house. The door of the house opened up, and there stood her uncle and aunt, who looked like hogs themselves.
“Oh, they did not!” I exclaimed at this part of the story, but Jinx swore they did, from their fat pink hands and arms right down to the hairs in his nose and ears and her aunt’s plump cheeks and rosy complexion, the diamond rings she always wore cutting into the flesh of her pudgy fingers.
“I would have known you anywhere, you poor little thing, you!” Jinx’s aunt Mary Ellen exclaimed, smothering Jinx in a hug, which Jinx hated, she said, even when Aunt Mary Ellen burst into tears and cried, “Oh Royster, she looks just like Catherine!”
“Well, that don’t sound too good to me,” Uncle Royster said, carrying Jinx’s bag into the house, where all the furniture looked like big dark crouching animals. Up they went, one, two, three flights of stairs to a stifling attic room with a fan in it at least. The bedside table held a Bible, which Aunt Mary Ellen picked up and presented to Jinx. “It is never too late,” she said, her cheeks quivering.
The Bible turned out to have a bookmark in it, open to the story of the prodigal son. Uncle Royster turned out to be a deacon in the church, as well as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Jinx found the box holding all his regalia in the crawl space at the back of the attic closet, along with several boxes of guns, carefully oiled and shiny.
They bought her some new clothes in Kinston and made her go to church on Sunday, Sunday night, and Wednesday. The minister’s son, Troy Merritt, had a big crush on her. They made her go to the consolidated school, too, but the kids made fun of her, how ignorant she was for her age, so soon she was skipping out and playing hooky with some of them, and then they all got caught and her uncle disciplined her by spanking her with a hairbrush on her thighs where no one could see the marks. “This is our duty,” Aunt Mary Ellen told Jinx. They knelt and prayed for her, making her kneel, too.
Then she ran away with Troy Merritt in his parents’ car, and all hell broke loose. They stayed gone for two days. Jinx was brought back to the farm by the sheriff himself. A sweet old man, he came into the parlor where he stood with his hat in his hands and surprised them by counseling kindness and mercy. “This girl has already been through a lot,” he said. “It’s time for this family to come together and make a new start.” Jinx hated for him to leave. She stood at a dining room window watching him drive off down the driveway, kicking up a plume of dust that grew smaller and smaller.
Her aunt went, too, out to the grocery store. Uncle Royster made her take off her panties and bend over the sofa while he whipped her with his belt, raising welts on her butt with the buckle which had his initials on it, REB. Her aunt came home and fixed chicken and biscuits, Jinx’s favorite dish, in honor of the brand-new start, the three of them holding hands for the blessing.
That night Uncle Royster came up to the attic and into her bed, and when she fought him, he said, “Why, you’re one little hellion, you are!” almost approvingly. “But how are you gonna like this?” holding the cold gun against her temple so that she would get down and do what he said. Such things happened many nights afterward, so long as Jinx stayed in that house, but she didn’t care anymore, or fight back, or react in any way, which made him “madder than fire,” she said. She made Fs at school, which Troy Merritt no longer attended, having been sent away to a military academy.
One day Jinx got off the bus and came in to find her aunt waiting for her, seated on the floral sofa with an even higher color in her cheeks. “Dear,” she said—this is how she had addressed Jinx ever since the new start—“in doing the laundry today, I noticed stains in several pairs of your panties. It looks to me like they are bloodstains, Annie, and I believe it’s time for you to tell me what is going on.”
“Nothing.” Jinx slung her bookbag onto the marbletop coffee table. “Not a goddamn thing.”
“Don’t you swear at me, young lady. I am trying to help you. This question is just between you and I, dear. Are you having menstrual problems? Or perhaps, er, relations?”
Jinx looked her in the eye. “Why, yes I am,” she said. “With your husband, my uncle Royster Earl Biggs. He pulls a gun on me to make me do it.”
Jinx’s aunt turned bright red, then white, then red again. She stood up and started screaming and pulling at her hair, which came loose from its ugly clamps and clips and stood out all over her head like snakes. “Liar!” she screamed. “Whore!” beating at her own face with a Guidepost magazine.
“I couldn’t believe she even knew those words!” Jinx told me, gigglng.
When her aunt stumbled off to lie down, claiming palpitations of the heart, Jinx stuck her few belongings into her pillowcase and grabbed a set of keys to the old green Ford from the secret drawer in the mudroom. For weeks now, she had been practicing on it. She picked up Orlando Dellinger in Greenville two hours later. He wore a maroon felt cap and carried his banjo and a valise that contained, among other things, several bottles of whisky and a .45.
Dear. Judge. Irven.
If you think you are doing me a faver to let me out of jail here at Carthage and send me back to Samarcand Manor I want to tell you Dear Judge you are NOT. The Moore County Jail is Heaven in my opinon. I will stay in this Jail a hunnerd years before I go back over there.
It is True I set my bed on fire, I am not sorry ether, I do not care. I will do it agin in a minit, anything to tare that place down to the ground so No One will ever go there agin. It is not fit for a soul. I have been chased by dogs over there, and bit in the leg, and made to lie down nekid on the dirty floor and beat with Whips until bloody, I have still got the scars on my legs to show for it, and been locked up for days in a filthy room to sleep with rats, and also with a girl that had the dipthery but I did not catch it ha ha. I am STILL ALIVE and I beg you do not send me back over there.
If you think it is a Reformatery it is NOT they do not reform any one over there but make us mean and sad and turn into Bad girls that do not give a dam, as I was before I landed in this nice jail where Sheruff Tate and his wife treats you good like a real Person and has give me a white Bible for my Own. This Bible is a humdinger with the words of Jesus wrote out in red. I love to read and the Bible above all, I want to be Good above all in fact I will be so good and cook or clean or help out in any way even slops I mean it. Do not send me back over there for the Love of God do not. O please Dear Judge I am a child of God like your own children if you have got any, do NOT send me back over there for the love of God do not, let me stay in the Moore County Jail I will be So Good I sware it.
SIGNED ANNIE JENKINS FEENEY JINX
I believed Jinx’s story, told to me over several baskets of popcorn during late nights sitting up before the electric grate at Graystone. And I read the letter she wrote to the judge, because Dr. Schwartz shared it with the staff, including Phoebe Dean. Yet I was never certain that this letter was completely sincere, though it had obviously been effective. For one thing, I never saw that precious white Bible. For another thing, I soon realized that Jinx lied constantly, almost reflexively, and often for no reason at all. She once told Suzy Caldwell that we had taken a bus to the neighboring town of Black Mountain, for instance, when we had not; she told Dr. Schwartz that I was sick when I was not; she told Phoebe Dean that I was mad at her, when I was not, and on and on. I began to wonder if Jinx could even tell the difference between the truth and a fib. I overheard her telling Mr. Pugh that she couldn’t do her homework because she had lost her history book, when I had seen her stick it in the garbage can myself, and later remonstrated with her about it, telling her how expensive textbooks are, to which she made a face, cutting her green eyes away from mine. “I don’t care,” she said.
This disturbed me, as did some pretty little pearl earrings that tumbled out of her book bag another day. It was hard to tell what Jinx did care about, if anything, other than getting out of Highland. But after all she had been through, who could blame her now for anything she said or did to save herself?