Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

Outside, the sun was descendant and pressed fiercely against the window glass. Clem lay on the cool rim of its sprawl. On the water, light lasted the longest. It was a day that was never going to end was the way it had once seemed to Liberty. But now it was beginning to end. She saw an image before her of her father, the blank canvas before him, beyond the canvas, the brilliantly flowering tree. He raised the brush … There was a moment, and beyond that moment was where the dead began.

“Perhaps we should pray, dear, before you begin,” Poe said.

“What would we pray for?” Willie asked.

“The usual,” Poe said. “Understanding.”

T he summer that Willie and Liberty were fifteen was the summer that someone was mutilating the pelicans. Someone was capturing the birds, slicing off half their bills with a saw, and releasing them

Liberty saw such pelicans once; flying heavily through the bright air, flying with their dreadful injuries home. Once, she saw one closer. This was years ago.

Under everything that summer — the summer that they were fifteen — under the heat and the fitful breezes, the slide of leaves against one another and the soft, whipping sound the water made as it was flung in an arc from the sprinkler, under everything was the voice that says, Are you ready?

Willie’s mother had two gardens. She had her greens garden, but she had her flowers too. The flowers took up almost a quarter acre of their land and were Doris’s pride and joy as well as being the cause of her only moral transgression. She devoted a great deal of time to her flowers and did not want people to know exactly how much, for it was a considerable amount. She would often slip from the house before dawn, just as the stars were fading, to weed, to pick and pinch and dust for insects. Her head would be clear, her movements stealthy, and her heart would pound with excitement at her secret labors. Next to the flower beds, Doris had a little grove of flourishing fruit trees. When she had first planted them she had stone mulched them, and all her friends thought she was stone mulching them still, but the fact was, she wasn’t. Doris was only pretending to stone mulch her fruit trees. Any time one of her friends bought a young tree and commenced to stone mulch it, it would sicken and just about die, which confirmed everyone’s belief that Doris had a gift with things because she was so Christian. What Doris was actually doing was caring for her trees the usual way but rolling stones back around the trunk when her friends came to call.

There was a yard girl who worked for Doris three times a week but the flower garden was not part of her duties. The yard girl, a tall beautiful black girl named Mercury, did not know much about plants but she was strong and dependable and a tireless raker. Actually, she did know some things and these she shared with Liberty. She knew that poinsettia sap could take the hair off your legs. She knew that epsom salts would green up a sick palm and that a woman’s pee could force a jacaranda to bloom. But what Mercury enjoyed far more than plant care was raking the long winding driveway of crushed shells to make, over and over, longer and more numerous lines with the rake tines through the fine shells.

Mercury thought Willie and Liberty were brother and sister, though Liberty was always telling her she was just visiting.

“You sure been visiting for some while,” Mercury said. “Years, like.” She believed Willie to be the best looking white boy she’d ever seen. “That boy is some arresting in his looks,” she’d say, using the word arresting like a dollar she had to spend. “And he must be loaded with hormones too. I like watching his hair grow.” They would giggle together, girl and girl. In the mornings she would come to work, singing, on a pink bicycle.

Doris had a bird bath in her garden. It was a child’s plastic wading pool set in the ground and rimmed with coral rocks, its waters kept fresh by a circulating pump hidden behind some tuberous lilies. It was here, at the edge of the wading pool, where Liberty saw the pelican. She saw it, looking out the window of her room, a window through which light streamed in moteless rays. A pelican, miles from the sea, come to Pelican Estates.

The bird was full-sized although its head was still streaked with the downy yellow of the nestling, and it rested on the damp grass beside the pool, its head drawn back between the cleft of its folded wings. When it finally moved, it did so with a lunge, as though to capture the solace of the water unaware. Liberty saw the malformed, purpled pouch. Her eyes escorted her there, and there abandoned her.

She walked from her room, down the hall, leaving the coolness of the house for the quiet, breathtaking heat of the outside. She could hear the water lapping at the sides of the little blue pool. The heat had a whisper to it that summer, even the rain when it came had the whisper, like the stirring of flies. The pelican had come to drink and it could not drink. It seemed to her that she had closed her eyes, and when she had opened them again, the bird had vanished.

Liberty felt the pulling within her that was the knowledge she had — the something different from her which was the same, but further, pulling.

Mercury came up the driveway on her bicycle, her long black legs turning, the line the wheels’ wobble made following her lightly in the dust.

“Hey!” Mercury bawled.

“Hey.”

“I got a question for you, if you please.” She leaned the bike against a tree and walked over to Liberty. “This sure is a pretty garden, I wish I were accountable for it. Okay, then,” she said, “my question is, if a person is unconscious like from the sipping and he’s lying in his bed and you say something to him, can he hear it?”

“I don’t think so,” Liberty said.

“It’s not gonna all come back later to him? He’s not going to be visited by the total recall?”

“He was really unconscious?”

“My Chester was hardly breathing like,” Mercury said. “Dead drunk out.” She mopped her throat and forehead with a man’s big white handkerchief.

“No, then.”

“I said some things, oh! I had me a time. I worked myself up so I about could have killed him. He was lying there all defenseless and kind of cunning really, but I could have liked to drop an iron on him.”

“Oh, why!” Liberty said.

“I shouldn’t say why to a nice little white girl like yourself.”

“That’s all right,” Liberty said. She felt queasy and took tiny sips of the hot, heavy air, swallowing, trying to calm herself.

“Lipstick on his underwears,” Mercury said promptly. “My Chester’s an infidel.”

The girls stood there, mulling.

“An infidel is an unbeliever,” Liberty said, still distraught.

“Chester don’t believe in much, it’s true,” Mercury said, “and maybe that’s his biggest problem, he don’t have any standards, although he do have nice clothes. He gotten suits, all different colors. But you know the only reason I didn’t drop the iron on him and murder him on the spot? After I took his clothes off and seen the lipstick on his underwears? I seen the electric chair. Right in the corner of my eye. It was a little tiny thing about the size of a postage stamp and it was red but otherwise it looked just the way you know it looks, and the sight of that electric chair deterred me from my actions on the spot, just the way they say.” She nodded somberly and daubed at herself once more with the handkerchief. “This is some cruel weather, isn’t it,” she said.

Pressed in the corner of Liberty’s eye was the bird she had seen, the dreadful poor and feathered thing.