Toni Morrison - Paradise

The tea was ready, and Pat leaned over it, frowning, and so intent on puzzling the problem out that she did not hear Roger enter until he stood in the doorframe.

"You left too early," he said. "We caroled some."

"Yes? Oh. Well." Pat dredged up a smile.

"Missed some good cake too." He yawned. "Took up a good collection for Lone afterwards. Lord, that's a crazy woman." Too tired to laugh, Roger shook his head and smiled. "But she was good in her day." He turned to leave, saying, "Well, good night, baby. I have to squeal tires early tomorrow."

"Daddy." Pat spoke to his back.

"Uh huh?"

"Why do they change it? There used to be nine families in the play. Then eight for years and years. Now seven."

"What're you talking about?"

"You know."

"No. I don't know."

"The play. How the holy families get fewer and fewer."

"Kate does all that. And Nathan. Picking the children, I mean.

Maybe they didn't have enough for the usual size."

"Daddy." He must have heard the doubt in her tone.

"What?" If he did, it didn't show.

"It was skin color, wasn't it?"

"What?"

"The way people get chosen and ranked in this town."

"Aw, no. Well, there might have been a little offense taken-long ago. But nothing hard."

"No? What about what Steward said when you got married?"

"Steward? Oh, well, the Morgans are very serious about themselves.

Too serious sometimes."

Pat blew in her cup.

Roger met her silence and then returned to a less uncomfortable topic.

"I thought the play was pretty nice, myself. We have to do something about Nathan, though. He ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer anymore." Then, as an afterthought, "What Reverend Misner have to say for himself? Looked awful serious back there." She didn't look up. "Just… talk."

"Anything happening with you two?"

"Daddy, please."

"No harm in asking, is there?" He paused for an answer, and when there was none he left, murmuring something about the furnace. Yes there is. Harm. Pat sipped carefully from a spoon. Ask Richard Misner. Ask him what I just did to him. Or what everyone else does. When he asks questions, they close him out to anything but the obvious, the superficial. And I of all people know exactly what it feels like. Not good enough to be represented by eight-year-olds on a stage.

Fifteen minutes later Pat stood in the garden, seventy yards from Delia's tombstone. The evening had turned chilly but still not cold enough for snow. The lemon mint had shriveled, but lavender and sage bushes were full and fragrant. No wind to speak of, so the fire in the oil barrel was easily contained. One by one she dropped cardboard files, sheets of paper-both stapled and loose-into the flames. She had to tear the covers off the composition notebooks and hold them slant with a stick so they would not smother the fire. The smoke was bitter. She stepped back and gathered clumps of lavender and threw it in as well. It took some time, but finally she turned her back on the ashes and walked into her house trailing along the odor of burnt lavender. At the kitchen sink she washed her hands and dashed water on her face. She felt clean. Perhaps that was why she began to laugh. Lightly at first and then heavily, her head thrown back as she sat at the table. Did they really think they could keep this up? The numbers, the bloodlines, the who fucks who? All those generations of 8-rocks kept going, just to end up narrow as bale wire? Well, to stay alive maybe they could, maybe they should, since nobody dies in Ruby. She wiped her eyes and lifted the cup from its saucer. Tea leaves clustered in its well. More boiling water, a little steeping, and the black leaves would yield more. Even more. Ever more. Until. Well, now. What do you know? It was clear as water. The generations had to be not only racially untampered with but free of adultery too. "God bless the pure and holy" indeed. That was their purity. That was their holiness. That was the deal Zechariah had made during his humming prayer. It wasn't God's brow to be feared. It was his own, their own. Is that why "Be the Furrow of His Brow" drove them crazy? But the bargain must have been broken or changed, because there were only seven now. By whom? The Morgans, probably. They ran everything, controlled everything. What new bargain had the twins struck? Did they really believe that no one died in Ruby? Suddenly Pat thought she knew all of it. Unadulterated and unadulteried 8-rock blood held its magic as long as it resided in Ruby. That was their recipe. That was their deal. For Immortality.

Pat's smile was crooked. In that case, she thought, everything that worries them must come from women.

"Dear God," she murmured. "Dear, dear God. I burned the papers."

In the good clean darkness of the cellar, Consolata woke to the wrenching disappointment of not having died the night before. Each morning, her hopes dashed, she lay on a cot belowground, repelled by her sluglike existence, each hour of which she managed to get through by sipping from black bottles with handsome names. Each night she sank into sleep determined it would be the final one, and hoped that a great hovering foot would descend and crush her like a garden pest. Already in a space tight enough for a coffin, already devoted to the dark, long removed from appetites, craving only oblivion, she struggled to understand the delay. "What for?" she asked, and her voice was one among many that packed the cellar from rafter to stone floor. Several times a week, at night or in the shadowy part of the day, she rose aboveground. Then she would stand outside in the garden, walk around, look up at the sky to see the only light it had that she could bear. One of the women, Mavis usually, would insist on joining her. Talking, talking, always talking. Or a couple of others would come. Sipping from the dusty bottles with handsome names-Jarnac, MTdoc, Haut-Brion and Saint-+milion-made it possible to listen to them, even answer sometimes. Other than Mavis, who had been there the longest, it was getting harder and harder to tell one from another.

What she knew of them she had mostly forgotten, and it seemed less and less important to remember any of it, because the timbre of each of their voices told the same tale: disorder, deception and, what Sister Roberta warned the Indian girls against, drift. The three d's that paved the road to perdition, and the greatest of these was drift. Over the past eight years they had come. The first one, Mavis, during Mother's long illness; the second right after she died. Then two more. Each one asking permission to linger a few days but never actually leaving. Now and then one or another packed a scruffy little bag, said goodbye and seemed to disappear for a while-but only a while. They always came back to stay on, living like mice in a house no one, not even the tax collector, wanted, with a woman in love with the cemetery. Consolata looked at them through the bronze or gray or blue of her various sunglasses and saw broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying. When she was sipping Saint-+milion or the smoky Jarnac, she could tolerate them, but more and more she wanted to snap their necks. Anything to stop the badly cooked indigestible food, the greedy hammering music, the fights, the raucous empty laughter, the claims. But especially the drift. Sister Roberta would have pulped their hands. Not only did they do nothing except the absolutely necessary, they had no plans to do anything. Instead of plans they had wishes-foolish babygirl wishes. Mavis talked endlessly of surefire moneymaking ventures: beehives; something called "bed and breakfast"; a catering company; an orphanage. One thought she had found a treasure chest of money or jewels or something and wanted help to cheat the others of its contents. Another was secretly slicing her thighs, her arms. Wishing to be the queen of scars, she made thin red slits in her skin with whatever came to hand: razor, safety pin, paring knife. One other longed for what sounded like a sort of cabaret life, a crowded place where she could sing sorrow-filled songs with her eyes closed. Consolata listened to these babygirl dreams with padded, wine-dampened indulgence, for they did not infuriate her as much as their whispers of love which lingered long after the women had gone.