Natashia Deon - Grace

“He was a good man, my Billy!” she said. “A soldier. Now, my baby’ll be a bastard.” She grabbed hold of Doctor and hung on ’im, cried beyond help. “No man’ll have me now.”

Doctor held Kathy the way doctors don’t. “It’s all right,” he said. “You don’t want to upset the baby.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to upset the baby,” Richard said, mad. It didn’t stop her.

“A pretty girl like you?” Doctor said. “You’ll find a husband in no time at all.”

“But so many good men are dead,” she cried. “Like my Billy. What if they’re all dead? But not you, Doctor. You’re so kind. If only I could find a new husband like you. Then my baby and I would truly be blessed by God.”

“Doctor?” Richard said. “Why don’t you come back next week. Give Katherine some time to recover. . from this loss.”

“I reckon I should come back tomorrow,” Doctor said and he took Kathy’s hand, already a fool. “This baby is due any day now. I can keep a close eye on her and the baby.”

“This is all such bitter news for us all,” Richard said, somberly. “I assure you, Doctor. Annie and I will take good care of her. We’ll call on you if we need you before then.”

“As her doctor, I insist that I. .”

“Doctor,” Richard said, final. “That’ll be all.”

Doctor hung in the space for a moment and held tight Kathy’s hand. “Thank you, Doctor,” Kathy said, pitiful, before Doctor gathered his tools and went.

When the door closed, Richard rushed over to Kathy and said in an angry whisper, “What the hell was that?”

“My baby will have a father,” she said.

“What do you want me to do, Katherine? Divorce her? I will. You just say it and I’ll have her out of this house that minute. It can be just you and me and our baby — the nest you want.”

“That’s not what I want,” Kathy said.

“Then tell me what it is so I can give it to you.”

“Why should I have to tell you? Why do I always have to tell you everything?”

“Not everything. Just tell me you love me,” Richard said. “Tell me you only want me. That you want to marry me so I’m sure.”

“You already know I do.”

“Then how am I going to marry you if you don’t want me to divorce her?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He threw his hands up. “I swear I don’t understand you sometimes.”

“She ain’t all bad like you made her out to be, Richard. She has this whole place to run. If I’m fair, I’m the one that took her husband, has his bastard baby, and she’s been nothing but kind to me.”

“You’re simple, Katherine. You think everybody’s got the best intentions, but she’s a cold bitch.”

“Maybe so. But I don’t want to take this house from her. Live in this town. I don’t want people pointing and accusing me of being the whore that stole you from your wife. Divorced or not, I can’t get my good ending that way. Not here.” Her real tears come. “I want to go somewhere where we can build our own memories. Raise our family together.” She took his hand and laid it flat on her belly. He hesitated, almost pulled away, before he gave into it, ran his hand smoothly and gently over her.

“We’ll need money,” Richard said. “I’ll sell everything. Anything that ain’t tacked down. I promise I’ll give you the life you’ve always wanted. A place for our family.”

“When?” Kathy said. “And don’t tell me after the war ends, ’cause that’s never gonna end.”

He swiped his hands down his clothes and hobbled to the door with purpose.

“Where you going?” Kathy said.

Without a word, he ambled down the stairs and to the outside porch where Annie was sitting alone. The last guest had gone. He stood over her and said those final words: “I’m divorcing you!”

GENERAL SHERMAN AND his Union Army — Lincoln’s army — left behind a three-hundred-mile path of destruction, sixty miles wide, all the way from Atlanta to Savannah, the reports say. So Lincoln offered him Savannah as a Christmas present. Our freedom’s coming. But right now, people are hungry, searching for work and food. Whites and runaways. And there’s none — out of spite or shortage — and the reasons don’t matter when you’re desperate.

Almost everybody but us has moved on. Annie lets her hands take what they need from the fields, and leaves beef and pork for Charles and the twelve others still here. And me. I wouldn’t miss this.

JOSEY OPENS THE front door and steps on the sun-wet porch, barefooted, and breathes in the smoke of burning pine and bacon. Her flimsy white dress wind-presses against her body — the winds change — but her sour expression tells me she cain’t feel it.

Her pale skin is drained silver from sickness but not flu. She closes the door behind her and her pupils shrink to pinpricks from morning sun. A fly shuffles the thin blonde hairs on her arm as it staggers over strands, seeking a tangled yellow crumb of cornbread there. She rubs her arms with her bulby fingertips. Her nails are chewed down to the quick, swollen dark pink. A purple color traces the nail beds. She flicks her blanket, scattering crumbs caught in it, and they spread like chicken feed.

I’ll call her name sometimes.

I’ll hover out in front of her and watch her watch me the way a blind man watches someone, not seeing, but seeming so. This time, she looks through me, out toward the trees where those changing winds are bending the world. Naked-bare branches stretch to the left in some dancer’s pose, and brown grasses reach upward from beneath the snow. She folds her blanket and goes back inside leaving me on her steps alone even though it felt like we was talking.

Josey asked Charles about me once.

Maybe more than once, but that one time, Charles’s answer caused me to think Josey was asking about me, and not Annie. It’s not strange for a negro to lose parents and for folks to move on in silence. And that day she asked about me, Charles had come home late from working hard. It was almost midnight when she woke him — a six-year-old rousing a giant of a man. But it was her that made him uneasy when she said, “What happened to my momma?”

She hugged her doll baby to her chest and stood doe-eyed, waiting. Charles told Josey that she needed to go back to bed and he’d tuck her in if she wanted. But she kept waiting and he was tired, hemming and hawing, then a rest came over him when she asked again. He said, “Your momma was beautiful,” he said. “Free,” he said. “Free because she decided so. Because she kept some sliver of hope guarded inside her mind.

“She had courage.

“And when she died, she left that courage inside of you.

“So beautiful a young woman, she was, that she glowed from the inside,” he said.

I felt flush as I listened. Embarrassed that anyone would have those things to say about me. So I decided, no, Charles must have been telling Josey about Annie.

Inside, a fire roars from Charles’s oven keeping the chill a step away. When Josey comes inside, the flames sway. A kettle boils on top of the stove while a wood bucket of warm water steams from the floor just outside the pocket of warm. Charles puts a tall metal rod in the bucket and stirs. The drowned garments wrap around his pole, layer after weighted layer. He lifts the mound and dumps it back in.

Josey sits at the table in front of a bowl of stew that Charles left her. Her parted blonde hair hangs over most of her face and she swoops it behind her ears neatly.

He’s been keeping sharp things away from her. Because sometimes, she cuts. And sometimes, she lies about it. Because sometimes, things can happen that are so hard to understand, so violent in nature, that the mind abandons the body and not all of it comes back right.