Tallassee, Alabama
I STAYED BESIDE ’EM, Jackson and Josey, as their wagon rocked from side to side, bumping over weak stones making gravel. Charles had tied a yellow ribbon above the back wheels to mark a special day—their wedding made in freedom. It meant they could own their coming babies now. And each other, never parted.
Charles stood with his hand in the air behind them as their wagon rode away. His good-bye faded the further we got away from him, ’til finally he disappeared. Not because he left that spot, I imagine, but because our wheels kept churning. He probably stood there another two days a statue, perched on the edge of his empty nest.
Josey lowered herself down into her seat and hid on the wagon’s floor with her forehead laid on her arm like a child’s counting game while the trees seemed to walk toward us. Their shadows casted themselves across us, staining and restaining us gray with colored-in outlines of leaf bouquets.
We rolled over short hills separating the slaves’ quarters from the Graham plantation house. The house’s white face rose and its windows were like eyes watching us. The broken shutters hung off ’em like the saggy lids of an old man. We veered right at the bottom of the road and the trees around us thickened and our path thinned. This is the way to our new home. Two miles of road patterned after the scribble of an unsteady hand drawing a half circle. Less than a mile in a walking beeline.
Our final slow roll led us into the yard. A place Josey and I had been before, long ago with Ada Mae. The drowned dead garden and worn steps of the house were still there. No longer just the witch’s house. This was ours now.
Jackson started cutting a path out front of the house the morning after they’d first arrived a month ago. It’s wide enough now for no tree, no shadow, no nothing to come near Josey. It’s almost done.
“Another month or two and it’ll be finished for good,” Jackson told Josey and his momma. “A shortcut straight back to the old slaves’ quarters to Charles,” he said and then took them around back to show ’em the space. Stumps of half-cleared trees erased a space ten feet wide by twenty feet deep, leading into the woods.
“In case of fire or any trouble,” Jackson said. “Josey could go out this way. You, too, Momma.”
“Does that make me second?” Sissy said. “An afterthought?”
“Aw, Ma, I’m just talking. You and Josey or Josey and you . . .”
“Um hm,” she said.
Sissy was first, she’d been reminding him. First to wipe his nose, his butt, to put clothes on his back. Only yesterday, Sissy told him how she was first to come and see the fishpond he’d built above ground when he was eight years old. She reminded him how he had carried bricks home for months and stacked ’em into a jagged circle and packed the inside of it with mud. Eight-year-old Jackson told his Momma, “Mud is what’s on the bottom of any stream. It’ll stop the leaks!”
The retelling of the story made Sissy laugh.
“‘You gon’ eat fish all year long,’” Sissy said. “Then he filled his pond with water and stocked it with a half dozen fish he caught and brung home alive. He was counting his fish eggs before they hatched. Before they were even laid. But by morning, the water was missing. Cats had eaten all but the heads of two, and the flies were settling on leftovers.”
Sissy laughed loudest about the leftovers, mocking Jackson, “Every Sunday’ll be a fish fry!” But Josey was still proud of him. Proud of Jackson’s trying. For building. Proud of how he wanted to make her happy. But now, to Sissy, it seemed he only wanted to make Josey happy. So she took more notice of the words he’d use and their ordering, and even who he’d first pass the bread to at supper. And now, Sissy sees these cut-down trees they never needed before Josey, and this path Jackson made.
“You an idiot, son, I swear it,” Sissy said. “You ain’t grown from the boy who tried to hold water in sand. Ain’t got the sense God gave you. Cain’t do shit right. What we need is light in this house. Some windows. I shouldn’t have to sit outside all the damn time. When you ready to do something for me, get yourself together, get some training, and help me—the one who raised you—then you let me know.”
Jackson bowed his head like a boy chastised, weak and ashamed of hisself in front of Josey. But Josey held his hand. Told him what he did was beautiful. Couldn’t nobody do it better. And she loved him for it. Would always love him. It’s why Jackson loves her, too. For who she’s not.
Not-Sissy.
Not a yeller, not a curser, and she don’t pinch him when she think he’s done wrong. Don’t talk down to him, call him lazy, ugly, or need to wash his ass that stink. Josey don’t make him feel bad about hisself, don’t argue, though she say what she need. And when she do disagree, she gives him understanding and words of encouragement. Love. Jackson thinks Josey’s touches are love alive.
So for her, Jackson was willing to cut down all the trees in Alabama. Was gonna reward her love with his love, and with his appreciation, and with whatever it took to make Josey’s sickness never come back. ’Cause sometimes, still, she has bad days.
The first week of their marriage, he found Josey standing half-naked and white on a mound of dirt and trampled tomato vines shouting at the top of her voice, “1:00 a.m. and all is well!” She was counting the time. It was 2:30 a.m. when he finally got her inside.
Even on these bad days, when Josey would turn up paralyzed by the edge of the woods ’cause a tree got too close, he would show her enough love to woo her back, to calm her anxious thoughts. And when she would recover, she’d show him love more than Sissy ever could. And two weeks after Sissy treated him bad for making that path out back, Jackson rewarded Josey’s love by starting to build an outhouse inside.
It took him a month of hammering all day and not letting anyone in the house, near the cupboard, where it was going. He made ’em enjoy the sunshine outside during the day and kept the cupboard door closed at night. “A surprise,” he told ’em every day when they asked what he was building.
On the day he finished it, he guided ’em back inside the house with their eyes closed. Then he pulled open the cupboard doors and walked inside, stood next to a wooden bucket tipped upside down on the floor. “Ta-da!” he said.
The space inside was wide enough to fit hisself plus two or three more people. He put his hands on his hips and smiled.
“Where’s all my food gone?” Sissy said. “What you do to my cupboard?”
“Don’t worry, Momma. Your food’s safe. What you think?”
He turned in the space, smiling hard, shook a shelf that hung on the wall where his two hammers and nails were, and said, “See, you can put your girly thangs up here. Or clean rags.”
From the doorway, Josey leaned into the room but wouldn’t go in.
“This is the real surprise,” he said, lifting the lid of the upside-down bucket on the floor. Sissy took a step inside and peered over the lid. Josey finally went in, too.
The bucket covered a hole in the wood floor and the hole went clear through to the dirt four feet underneath the house.
Jackson lowered his backside on the seat and covered the whole of it with his skinny butt. “See,” he said. “It’s a outhouse, inside.”
“Oh,” Josey said. She forced a smile. Sissy didn’t bother.
“You got all the privacy in the world,” Jackson said. “Ain’t gotta go outside in the middle of the night with a bad stomach or pull out the pot. Just sit right here and let go.” He wiggled himself on the seat. “It won’t move, see. I bolted it down. Comfy, too.”
“Ain’t the smell gon’ come up in the house?” Josey said.
He hopped up. “Just close the lid like this when you done and that’s it. No smell. We just got to make sure to shovel under the house every day, thas all.”
“And who gon’ crawl under there and do all the shovelin, you?” Sissy said.
“Well . . . Josey or me.”
Josey laughed, “I’d rather use the one outside.”
“Come on, Josey.” Jackson said. “People do it all the time. When I was off to the war, I seen books about these people a long time ago. They made holes like this . . .”
“I ain’t gon’ use it,” Josey said. “Clean it, neither.”
“Well, you cain’t clean it now ’cause you pregnant, of course.”
“Pregnant?” Sissy said. She rolled her neck, slow and long, like it was on wheels. “You wasn’t gon’ tell me, Jackson? I don’t deserve to know?”
“Aw, Momma. We was just waiting for the right time. Make it special.”
“When Jackson? How far ’long?”
Josey whispered, “Just two cycles I missed is all, Miss Sissy.”
Sissy wouldn’t look at Josey.
“Two months of knowing and you couldn’t tell me?” she say and limps out of his cupboard and back into the room.
“Momma, I’m sorry. I . . .”
“That’s your problem, Jackson. You waste all your time on shit. I coulda had my windows. Only a fool shits where he eats and sleeps.” Jackson clears the shelf with his forearm, grabs the bucket and rips it from its hinges. He heaves it out of the cupboard and across the room, past Sissy. He scoops his hammer from the floor and storms out the front door.
“Jackson?” Josey calls, following him. “Jackson?” But he kept on out.
“Jackson Allen!” Sissy say.
He stops directly on the porch steps and was breathing hard and tearful when he spins around to his momma, whimpering like a boy told he couldn’t go out and play.
Sissy limps past Josey to stand on the steps next to him. When she get there, she and Jackson turn their backs on Josey. Josey tries to join ’em but they take two steps down the porch.
“Jackson?” Josey say. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.” But Jackson don’t turn around.
Sissy rubs his shoulders and the back of his neck with her thumbs. She whispers in his ear. He hangs his head low and listens. Josey backs away. She picks up his tools from the corner of the front room and the broken bucket. A shard of wood stabs her hand making her drop the hammer. Just missed her toe.
She rips off the extra shards still stuck on the bucket and carries it back through the cupboard door and sets it over the hole in the floor again. She closes the lid. “I miss you, Daddy,” she whispers.
Josey snaps off another piece of splintered wood from the bucket, then another, then all around the lid ’til the bucket is smooth again. She sits down on it and drops the fractured pieces of wood into a short pile there. But the biggest shard she keeps. She rolls it in her hand before sliding it back and forth across her thigh on purpose, grunting as it reddens, then bleeds. Her eyes roll back in pain. Or feel-good.