Toni Morrison - Paradise

It was some time before Mary Magna could get the pharmacist's attention. Finally he left the crowd and walked them back to his house, where a closed-off part of the front porch served as a shop. He opened the screen door and, politely inclining his head, ushered Mary Magna in. It was while Consolata waited on the steps that she saw him for the first time. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. A lean young man astride one horse, leading another. His khaki shirt was soaked with sweat, and at some point he removed his wide flat hat to wipe perspiration from his forehead. His hips were rocking in the saddle, back and forth, back and forth. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Consolata saw his profile, and the wing of a feathered thing, undead, fluttered in her stomach. He rode on past and disappeared into the feedlot. Mary Magna emerged with her purchases, complaining a little about something or other-the price, the quality-and hurried to the station wagon, Consolata, behind her, carrying blue-tissued rolls of surgical cotton. Just as she opened the passenger door he passed again. On foot, running lightly, eager to return to the festive knot of people farther down the road.

Casually, perfunctorily, he looked her way. Consolata looked back and thought she saw hesitation in his eyes if not in his stride. Quickly she ducked into the sun-baked Mercury, where the heat seemed to explain her difficult breathing. She did not see him again for two months of time made unstable by a feathered thing fighting for wingspread. Months of fervent prayer and extra care taken with chores. Months of tension also, because the school had been enjoined to close. Although the endowment of the wealthy woman who founded and funded the order had survived the thirties, it was depleted by the fifties. The good, sweet Indian girls were long gone-snatched away by their mothers and brothers or graduated into a pious life. For three years now the school had been soliciting wards of the state: impudent girls who clearly thought the sisters were hilarious most of the time, sinister the rest of the time. Two had already run away; only four remained. Unless the sisters could persuade the state to send them (and pay for) more wicked, wayward Indian girls, the orders were to prepare for closure and reassignment. The state had wayward girls, all right, since wayward could mean anything from bedwetting to truancy to stuttering in class, but preferred to place them in Protestant schools, where they could understand the clothes if not the religious behavior of the teachers. Catholic churches and schools in Oklahoma were as rare as fish pockets. Which was why the benefactress had bought the mansion in the first place. It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. Mary Magna wrote letter after letter, traveled to Oklahoma City and beyond, hoping to save the school. In that distracted atmosphere, Consolata's fumbling, dropping some things, scorching others, making rushed, unscheduled visits to the chapel, were nuisances to the sisters but not signs of alarm distinguishable from their own. When asked what the matter was or reprimanded for some intolerable lapse, she invented excuses or sulked.

Looming in her confusion, daily refreshing her hasty piety, was the fear of being asked to step outside the Convent, to shop in the town again. So she did the yard chores at first light and spent the balance of the day inside, mismanaging her work. None of which helped in the end. He came to her.

On a clear summer day, as she knelt weeding in the garden along with two sullen wards of the state, a male voice behind her said: "Excuse me, miss."

All he wanted was some black peppers.

He was twenty-nine. She was thirty-nine. And she lost her mind.

Completely.

Consolata was not a virgin. One of the reasons she so gratefully accepted Mary Magna's hand, stretching over the litter like a dove's wing, was the dirty pokings her ninth year subjected her to. But never, after the white hand had enclosed her filthy paw, did she know any male or want to, which must have been why being love-struck after thirty celibate years took on an edible quality.

What did he say? Come with me? What they call you? How much for half a peck? Or did he just show up the next day for more of the hot black peppers? Did she walk toward him to get a better look? Or did he move toward her? In any case, with something like amazement, he'd said, "Your eyes are like mint leaves." Had she answered "And yours are like the beginning of the world" aloud, or were these words confined to her head? Did she really drop to her knees and encircle his leg, or was that merely what she was wanting to do? "I'll return your basket. But it may be late when I do. Is it all right if I disturb you?"

She didn't remember saying anything to that, but her face surely told him what he needed to know, because he was there in the night and she was there too and he took her hand in his. Not a peck basket in sight. Sha sha sha.

Once in his truck, easing down the graveled driveway, the narrow dirt road, and then gaining speed on a wider tarmac one, they did not speak. He drove, it seemed, for the pleasure of the machine: the roar contained, hooded in steel; the sly way it simultaneously parted the near darkness and vaulted into darkness afar-beyond what could be anticipated. They drove for what Consolata believed were hours, no words passing between them. The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm. She did not know or care where headed or what might happen when they arrived. Speeding toward the unforeseeable, sitting next to him who was darker than the darkness they split, Consolata let the feathers unfold and come unstuck from the walls of a stone-cold womb. Out here where wind was not a help or threat to sunflowers, nor the moon a language of time, of weather, of sowing or harvesting, but a feature of the original world designed for the two of them.

Finally he slowed and turned into a barely passable track, where coyote grass scraped the fenders. In the middle of it he braked and would have taken her in his arms except she was already there. On the way back they were speechless again. What had been uttered during their lovemaking leaned toward language, gestured its affiliation, but in fact was un-memorable, — controllable or — translatable. Before dawn they pulled away from each other as though, having been arrested, they were each facing prison sentences without parole. As she opened the door and stepped down, he said, "Friday. Noon." Consolata stood there while he backed the truck away. She had not seen him clearly even once during the whole night. But Friday. Noon. They would do it do it do it in daylight. She hugged herself, sank to her knees and doubled over. Her forehead actually tapping the ground as she rocked in a harness of pleasure.

She slipped into the kitchen and pretended to Sister Roberta that she had been in the henhouse.

"Well, then? Where are the eggs?"

"Oh. I forgot the basket."

"Don't go softheaded on me, please."

"No, Sister. I won't."

"Everything is in such disarray."

"Yes, Sister."

"Well, move, then."

"Yes, Sister. Excuse me, Sister."

"Is something funny?"

"No, Sister. Nothing. But…"

"But?"

"I… What is today?"

"Saint Martha."

"I mean what day of the week."

"Tuesday. Why?"

"Nothing, Sister."

"We need your wits, dear. Not your confusion."

"Yes, Sister."

Consolata snatched a basket and ran out the kitchen door. Friday. Noon. The sun has hammered everybody back behind stone walls for relief. Everybody but Consolata and, she hopes, the living man. She has no choice but to bear the heat with only a straw hat to protect her from the anvil the sun takes her for. She is standing at the slight turn in the driveway, but in full view of the house. This land is flat as a hoof, open as a baby's mouth. There is nowhere to hide outrageousness. If Sister Roberta or Mary Magna calls to her or asks for an explanation she will invent something-or nothing. She hears his truck before she sees it and when it arrives it passes her by. He does not turn his head, but he signals. His finger lifts from the steering wheel and points farther ahead. Consolata turns right and follows the sound of his tires and then their silence as they touch tarmac. He waits for her on the shoulder of the road.