Steve Cash - The Meq

Whatever the reasons, I was being delayed and in my mind the fear kept growing that I might be too late, but too late for what, I didn’t know. I only knew that up ahead, upriver, there was danger, and the closer we got, the more I felt its presence.

After stops in Natchez and Memphis, we docked in St. Louis late at night. I collected some of the wages due me and said I’d be back in an hour. I never returned. I made my way through an unfamiliar St. Louis to the south side, walking hills and streets I knew from memory, but feeling like a stranger.

I rounded the corner where I had met Ray and saw the boardinghouse. I walked toward it. The sun was just rising. I saw the sign out front and it still read “Mrs. Bennings’s House.” I walked around the back to the kitchen door. It was unlocked and I opened it.

She was in the kitchen, in the dark, but I saw her in the half-light that shone through the windows. She was standing by the stove putting water on to boil. Her blond hair was piled on top of her head. She tried to tuck a strand of it behind her ear. I watched her in silence. She was in her mid-twenties and beautiful, even in a worn old cotton robe and unlaced boots. She was at least six inches taller than I was. She watched the stove. I watched her.

“You know it won’t work like that, don’t you?” I said.

She jumped back, kicking over a chair and landing against the table. She regained her balance and looked over toward the door. “Who’s there?” she yelled.

I said, “You can’t boil water and watch it too. You know that.”

She didn’t make a sound for several moments, then she got on her knees and sort of half crawled toward me and the light from the open door. She stopped and looked at me, started to rise, then sat back down on the floor and crossed her legs, never taking her eyes from mine.

“Hello, Carolina,” I said.

“God, Z, I knew it. I knew you would come back just like this, just this way. I didn’t know when, but I knew how.”

I stared at her. I had seen the gold flecks in her eyes before, but now those eyes were in the face of a grown woman, a beautiful woman. Suddenly we both laughed, not a nervous laugh, but a real out loud laugh. It felt so good to see her.

“How’s Georgia?”

“She’s fine, she’s fine.”

She reached up and put her hand on my cheek. It was a woman’s touch. It was my mama’s touch. This was crazy. Inside, I was a man who had traveled fifty thousand miles at sea for twelve years; outside, I was a child being touched by the fingers of a beautiful woman.

“Should we talk about this?” I asked.

“This? What do you mean — this?” She put her hands in her lap and rubbed them together. She nodded at the door. “Why don’t you shut the door. it’s cold.”

I shut the door. “But what about—”

“Come on,” she said, cutting me off and taking my hand. “I’ve got something for you.”

I wouldn’t quit. “But what about—”

“This?” she said, cutting me off again. “I told you a long time ago, Z, ‘this’ doesn’t make any difference.”

She took me out of the kitchen and through what had once been the front room. Walls had been knocked out and the whole space was one big parlor with velvet couches and chairs, a full bar at one end, a card table, and an upright piano between two windows hung with thick, blue velvet. There was one gas lamp lit, next to one of the couches where a woman in a full-length red gown was sleeping, snoring heavily.

“What the—”

“Shhh,” she said, covering my mouth.

She took me up the stairs and down the hall, which now had a runner of rich blue carpeting down the center and tiny gas lamps over every door. She pulled me into her room.

“Carolina,” I said, “you want to tell me what I just walked through?”

“A lot has changed, Z.” She knelt down by a chest in front of her bed. She opened it carefully and brought something out. She stood up and hid it from me behind her back. “I’ve got something for you,” she said, “something I think you forgot.”

She smiled and held out Mama’s baseball glove. I took it from her and put it on my hand, smiling myself. I pounded the pocket with my other hand and rubbed it as I’d done a thousand times before. “I didn’t forget it. I left it so you wouldn’t forget.”

She sat down on the bed and looked directly in my eyes. “That would be impossible,” she whispered.

I sat down on the bed next to her. Everything felt strange, yet familiar. I looked around her room. A few pictures were new, and perfume bottles, and clothes, lots of clothes, but many things were the same. The bed we were on was the same one we had sat on as children. when we were both children. A lot of things were the same, but now I was the only child in the room. I stood up and walked over to one of her pictures and turned around.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve been around a little bit and this place — downstairs I mean — it looks like, well. uh. a whorehouse.”

“Yes. It is,” she said.

Just then, Georgia burst into the room. At first, she didn’t see me. She ran over to Carolina, picked up both of Carolina’s hands, and spread them apart. Then, she waved them back and forth, one at a time, in front of her own face, acting as if Carolina were slapping her. Carolina nodded and took her hands back, then she smiled and pointed to me. Georgia turned and saw me. She cupped her hand over her mouth to stop a scream that never came, never had. She sat down on the bed next to Carolina and stared at me, her eyes welling up with tears.

“How are you, Georgia?”

She didn’t answer, but she looked over at Carolina.

“She can’t hear you,” Carolina said. “She started going deaf about three years ago. Now, she can’t hear a sound. It’s funny, though. It seems the more she gets cut off from the world, the more she gives back. She plays the piano now, real well, and she never did before she went deaf. And she’s the only good thing Mrs. Bennings has got left.”

I looked at Carolina and Georgia. So alike, so different. They were Giza, “the other people,” Mama had said, and I was Meq. But it was like that among us too. So alike, so different. I cleared a place on the floor and sat down. I motioned for them to do the same, like we used to, and they did. I looked at Carolina’s face and thought of my dream.

“Tell me what has happened,” I said.

Carolina glanced at Georgia and Georgia slowly closed and opened her eyes, then nodded her head once. Carolina could still “read” her.

“It happened by degrees,” she said. “After you left, Mrs. Bennings seemed to unravel. I don’t know whether it was you leaving or you taking with you the last reminder of that man you told me about, Solomon. But, either way, she started drinking heavily; drinking to get drunk, and going around more and more with Corsair Bogy.”

I looked at her with alarm and straightened up, unconsciously reaching for the Stones beneath my shirt.

“No, no,” she said, “he hasn’t done anything to us. Yet. But I am scared of him, Z. He’s not a good man and I think he’s hired someone—”

“Wait, Carolina,” I interrupted, “you’re way ahead of me. Tell me the rest. from the beginning.”

She went on. “Mrs. Bennings got worse and worse. Corsair was with her all the time, and for a while, I guess he was good for her. At least he paid attention to her, but in time he sort of took control of her; told her what to do, what to wear, who to see, and who not to see. Georgia and I were in school most of the time and it was during the day, during that time, that I think Mrs. Bennings was finally worn down and let him have complete control of her and this place. Within a year, he had turned it into a house of prostitution and Mrs. Bennings into a madam. A madam with good manners. That was the only thing she insisted on, that all the girls have good manners.