• 15 •

DURING ALL THOSE years in New York, Beulah had managed to keep the past at bay. She learned how to squeeze her eyes shut at night and replace one memory with another, one face with another, one voice with another.

She visited a spiritualist once who told her that she could make a ghost from her past vanish if she only summoned a convincing replacement every time he showed up. She tried it, and it worked, mostly: she simply buried her memories of Richmond, and planted New York memories on top of them.

But now, even the most careless remark sent her hurtling back to those days. Was it because she’d returned to the South? She was not far from Richmond, just across the Potomac, really, breathing in the sweet southern air she’d been raised on, with the same rich black soil under her feet. Many of the girls at camp came from Virginia, and talked like she used to. Their voices took her right back to her days in Richmond.

And then Hack had to call her girlie. Henry Clay was the only one who ever called her that.

Who came first, Henry Clay or Claudia’s baby? It was all mixed up in her head, the events of that year. She had to count backwards to figure their ages. Claudia had been seventeen, a fine age for a mother. Beulah was only thirteen — no age at all for meeting a man like Henry Clay, but who was going to tell her to stay away from him? All eyes were on Claudia that year. Nobody paid a minute of attention to Beulah.

Claudia hid her pregnancy well. You could do that, in those days, with the dresses they wore. To any stranger passing on the street, it looked like Claudia was dressing more modestly, or like she’d finally sat down to a decent meal for the first time in her life. And some girls just carried that way, where nothing showed for seven months. Claudia was like that.

But Meemaw knew. Meemaw could smell it. She leaned over and put her nose right into Claudia’s neck and came away convinced.

“You’re going to have a little bastard baby right here in this house,” Meemaw pronounced, right in front of Beulah, who hadn’t understood about Claudia’s condition until that moment, even though she’d noticed the way the bed sagged on her sister’s side.

“I don’t have to have it in this house,” Claudia said.

“Oh, but you will, and then we’ll take it right over and give it to the Catholic home,” Meemaw said.

“But we’re not Catholic,” Claudia argued.

“It don’t matter. They do the best by their babies.”

“What if I want it for myself?” Claudia said.

“Then you have to marry the boy that done it to you.”

Claudia looked down at her ever-expanding belly. “I don’t want him to see me like this.”

“Not now. You wait until you have that baby, and you go show it to him. Show it to his mama, too. She won’t turn a grandbaby away if it’s put into her arms.”

“I don’t know his mama. They live out in the country.”

“Then you’d better hope it’s a boy, because a farming family needs boys.”

It went just like Meemaw said. One night in August, Beulah awoke and the bed was wet and Claudia was moaning. Meemaw was already up, building a fire in the stove. It was hotter than Hades in that kitchen, but Meemaw told Beulah to stay there and to keep boiling rags until Meemaw said to stop.

Upstairs was nothing but Claudia yelling and Meemaw yelling right back at her. Beulah had no way of knowing if a baby’s birth was always so raucous, but this one was. The rags coming out of the boiling water were so hot that Beulah lifted them out with the fire poker and carried them upstairs in one of Meemaw’s iron skillets. She carried a bucket of water up, too, when Meemaw asked for it.

Claudia wouldn’t look at Beulah and shouted at her to stay out of the room. Sometimes when Beulah stood in the doorway, Claudia was on her back, red-faced and crying, but mostly she was down on all fours like an animal, and Meemaw was down there with her, rubbing her back and putting her gnarled old hands against Claudia’s purple-veined belly as if it might burst if she didn’t hold it together. When the baby came, Beulah was just outside, in the dark hallway with her eyes closed tight as she heard it gushing out from between Claudia’s legs in a river of blood. Never in her life had Beulah seen so much blood as she did when Meemaw called her in to help clean up.

“It looks bad, but it ain’t” was all Meemaw said. She was too busy with the baby, a puckered, oily thing that screamed just like Claudia did when she birthed it. Beulah took away the sheets, and all the rags, and even the braided rug that Meemaw had pulled out from under the bed to push under Claudia’s bottom before the baby came. Beulah carried it all out back to be burned in the yard when it dried, according to her grandmother’s instructions.

It was a boy, just like Meemaw said it ought to be. Claudia wanted to name him Luther after his daddy, but Meemaw wouldn’t allow it. “He can’t have his daddy’s name until his daddy marries his mama,” she pronounced. “You’ll call him Temple after your grand-daddy.”

Claudia didn’t like that one bit, and countered, through her sweat and panting, that she would at least like to call him Crenshaw after her own daddy, but that, too, was unacceptable to Meemaw.

“That Crenshaw has been no father to you. He never had a dime for your keep and you’ve hardly ever even seen him. He don’t deserve it. This baby was born in Temple’s bed and he will take his name.”

That was all there was to it. The baby had a name, and Claudia was a mother now. Meemaw tried just once to take the baby over to the Catholic home, but Claudia wouldn’t let go of him and, if truth be told, Meemaw never tried very hard. She still loved the feel of a baby against her chest and carried little Temple with her every time Claudia would relinquish him. He was a sickly baby, yellow and prone to colic, and for that reason Meemaw insisted on waiting before he was presented to his father’s family. “Just let him pink up a little first,” she would say whenever Claudia asked about it.

That suited Claudia fine. She was in no hurry to marry the man, or to join his family. Luther Powers was nothing but a farm boy, raised in the cotton fields and unschooled to the point of being unable to write his own name. He was a brute, Claudia said. An animal. Beulah tried to ask her sister why she’d gone around with him if she didn’t like him, and Claudia only sighed and said that she hoped Beulah would never understand the appeal of a man like that.

As long as they were keeping the baby a little longer, Claudia said she wanted to show him to their mother. Jessie Binford hadn’t been seen nor heard from since before their grandfather died, but surely she could be found and brought back to set her eyes upon the infant.

Meemaw was reluctant to summon Jessie Binford back to her house, but she understood Claudia’s reasoning. A woman should know her grandchild. If Luther agreed to marry Claudia, Jessie would never be a suitable visitor to Luther’s family’s home. If he didn’t marry her, the baby was to be deposited with the Catholics and none of them would see the child again. This might be the only opportunity for four generations of Binfords to be together.

Meemaw was too old to go out looking for Jessie, and Claudia wouldn’t leave the baby, so Beulah was sent out to search for her mother, beginning with a series of old addresses that Meemaw had saved from envelopes and postcards over the years. Jessie had long ago abandoned each of those places, but from various landladies, roommates, and neighbors, Beulah picked up a theme: Jessie was described by her old acquaintances as a woman increasingly ill, desperate, and dependent upon her medicine. She heard that Jessie had gone to a hospital, to an asylum, and that she disappeared down to Mexico for some kind of exotic treatment. Jessie Binford had been everywhere, apparently, but where Beulah went looking.

Finally it occurred to Beulah that if Jessie’s medicine was all that mattered to her, she ought to ask at the druggists. In Richmond, there were druggists, and then there were the druggists a woman like Jessie Binford might frequent. Beulah, even at her tender age, knew the difference.

Several of the white-coated men behind the counters seemed like they knew her mother, but wouldn’t say. Finally, on her way out of a tiny druggist run out of the back of a barber’s shop, a delivery boy stopped her. He claimed that he had been running packages over to a woman named Jessie Binford, and for a dollar, he’d take her there.

Beulah didn’t have a dollar and told him so. The boy, who was sixteen to Beulah’s thirteen, looked her up and down and said that she could keep him company, and that would be payment enough.

Beulah had, by then, spent enough time on Mayo Street to know exactly what he meant. She told him that there was a family emergency and she had to hurry. If she found her mother, she’d return to him that night.

What did he have to lose? He led her to an old abandoned brick building, once a tobacco warehouse, with the roof half caved in and the front door missing. Beulah couldn’t believe he delivered to a place like that.

“What kind of druggist would make a delivery over here?” she asked.

“He don’t,” the boy said. “I take whatever he won’t miss and bring it over myself. If any of them have a dime, they pay me.”

“Well, you delivered me, so go on, now,” Beulah said. The boy reminded her, half-heartedly, that she’d promised to return to him that night, but Beulah just spat and waved him off.

She stepped inside alone. She’d been in enough disreputable houses by then that she wasn’t too surprised by what she saw. The warehouse had been made into a series of small rooms without walls, only rugs and sheets hanging from rope, and from within those makeshift chambers came the moans and sighs of Richmond’s opium addicts. Beulah crossed her arms and stepped carefully among the broken brown glass and the empty tobacco tins, crossing from one side of the cavernous space to another until she found her.

She hardly recognized her mother. Jessie Binford was nothing but a skeleton. Her hair hung down in oily strands, and she wore a dress that was plastered to her skin, she’d been wearing it so long. Her mother didn’t recognize her either, and couldn’t understand what she was saying about Claudia. The place smelled of the sewer, and up close, her mother smelled, horribly, of sex. It was the very end of summer, still steamy in Richmond, and there were flies everywhere, and enormous beetles and roaches scampering across the floor.

Beulah did try to pull her up, not knowing what she would do with her after that. Meemaw wouldn’t take Jessie back in this condition, but how could she leave her own mother in a place like this?

In spite of Jessie’s emaciated state, she was as limp and heavy as a sack of coal. Beulah couldn’t heave her to her feet. Jessie screamed and spit and fought when Beulah touched her — she said her skin hurt and to leave her alone — and soon others came running, women who looked just as bad as her mother, and men with long crusty beards and filthy trousers. “Leave her be,” they said. “She don’t want you. She knows where to find you if she does.”

She don’t want you. Those words sliced through Beulah like a razor. She didn’t stay to hear any more. She rushed out with a hand to her face so she wouldn’t take another breath of that poisonous air, fled through town, and ran back home to Meemaw and Claudia.

She refused to say anything about what she’d seen. She claimed that she couldn’t find Jessie, and only repeated a few of the more promising rumors. She’d probably gone out West, Beulah said to a skeptical Meemaw. She might’ve married and moved on.

After that, Claudia, Meemaw, and Beulah settled back down, just the three of them, tending to a baby who cooed and smiled and occupied their hearts and minds. As for her mother, Beulah tried not to think about what she’d seen. Your mother’s sick, she told herself, when the image of that broken-down woman rose before her, like a specter, late at night. She can’t live here and you can’t go there. It was as if Jessie Binford had entered some netherworld, and resided not quite on this Earth but not in heaven or hell, either. She was in between, living in a room of locked doors. Beulah could not guess what door might someday open and offer her an exit.

It was just before Christmas when Meemaw decided that the baby was ready to be seen by his father. She and Claudia rode out to Luther’s family farm with the baby in a basket between them. Beulah wasn’t allowed to go.

“They won’t take her if they think she’s got family obligations,” Meemaw said.

But didn’t Claudia have an obligation to her sister? Beulah didn’t dare ask for fear of what the answer might be. She stayed behind, but she learned the story later from Meemaw, and from Claudia’s infrequent letters.

Under Meemaw’s instructions, Claudia wore a plain dress suited for farmhouse work, and kept her hair — all the more luxurious since baby Temple came into the world — in a tight knot at the base of her neck. She complained that she looked like a scullery maid. Meemaw told her that was all she’d ever be, and if she didn’t like it, she could stay behind and Meemaw would deliver the baby to Luther’s family by herself. But Claudia wasn’t about to wait at home. She was unable to resist the high drama of showing Luther Powers the baby he’d made.

Meemaw knew her business and made sure they turned up in the middle of the afternoon, when the men would be out in the fields and Luther’s mother would be in the kitchen making supper. She went around to knock at the kitchen door and held up little Temple by way of greeting. Claudia hung behind her, looking guilty. Mrs. Powers didn’t have to ask who the baby belonged to.

“God damn that Luther,” she said, and pushed the door open so they could step inside.

Meemaw made the introductions and handed the baby to Mrs. Powers. She unwrapped him and looked him over, checking his fingers and toes and running a finger inside his mouth.

“He’s a Powers, all right” was all she said. She left him on the kitchen table, writhing around bare, and turned back to Meemaw with the air of a woman brokering a business transaction.

“Do you intend to leave him here?” she said.

“And her, if you’ll have her,” Meemaw said.

They both looked over at Claudia dubiously. “She don’t look like she’s done a day of work,” Mrs. Powers said.

“No, but she will now,” Meemaw said. “And she’ll give you another boy if you want one.”

“She better hurry,” Mrs. Powers said. “Harrison don’t have more than ten years left in him, and we got forty acres out there. Never had but one boy myself. You can see what good he done me.”

“Then you’d best take her,” Meemaw said. “Get your trunk, Claudia.”

Just like that, it was done. Claudia’s trunk was put into Luther’s bedroom, and when Luther came in from the fields to wash up for supper, he learned that he was a father and a husband-to-be.

Claudia had forgotten what a flat face he had, and how one eye never quite looked at her.

“Where will she sleep until the wedding?” was all he had to say, when the situation was made plain to him.

“It don’t matter about that,” Mrs. Temple said. “You all get started on another boy, and we’ll call the preacher over here after Christmas.”

That suited Luther just fine. He was too shy to take Claudia’s hand in front of his mother, or to smile at her or give her an idea of whether he had any affection for her at all.

Luther’s father had even less to say. He was already old — not as old as Meemaw, but old enough so that he didn’t have to bother with polite conversation anymore. He put another peg on the wall for Claudia to hang up her coat alongside theirs, and that was all there was to it.

Claudia had a new family now, and a new life.