Natashia Deon - Grace

Not-Sissy.

Not a yeller, not a curser, and she don’t pinch him when she think he’s done wrong. Don’t talk down to him, call him lazy, ugly, or need to wash his ass that stink. Josey don’t make him feel bad about hisself, don’t argue, though she say what she need. And when she do disagree, she gives him understanding and words of encouragement. Love. Jackson thinks Josey’s touches are love alive.

So for her, Jackson was willing to cut down all the trees in Alabama. Was gonna reward her love with his love, and with his appreciation, and with whatever it took to make Josey’s sickness never come back. ’Cause sometimes, still, she has bad days.

The first week of their marriage, he found Josey standing half-naked and white on a mound of dirt and trampled tomato vines shouting at the top of her voice, “1:00 a.m. and all is well!” She was counting the time. It was 2:30 a.m. when he finally got her inside.

Even on these bad days, when Josey would turn up paralyzed by the edge of the woods ’cause a tree got too close, he would show her enough love to woo her back, to calm her anxious thoughts. And when she would recover, she’d show him love more than Sissy ever could. And two weeks after Sissy treated him bad for making that path out back, Jackson rewarded Josey’s love by starting to build an outhouse inside.

It took him a month of hammering all day and not letting anyone in the house, near the cupboard, where it was going. He made ’em enjoy the sunshine outside during the day and kept the cupboard door closed at night. “A surprise,” he told ’em every day when they asked what he was building.

On the day he finished it, he guided ’em back inside the house with their eyes closed. Then he pulled open the cupboard doors and walked inside, stood next to a wooden bucket tipped upside down on the floor. “Ta-da!” he said.

The space inside was wide enough to fit hisself plus two or three more people. He put his hands on his hips and smiled.

“Where’s all my food gone?” Sissy said. “What you do to my cupboard?”

“Don’t worry, Momma. Your food’s safe. What you think?”

He turned in the space, smiling hard, shook a shelf that hung on the wall where his two hammers and nails were, and said, “See, you can put your girly thangs up here. Or clean rags.”

From the doorway, Josey leaned into the room but wouldn’t go in.

“This is the real surprise,” he said, lifting the lid of the upside-down bucket on the floor. Sissy took a step inside and peered over the lid. Josey finally went in, too.

The bucket covered a hole in the wood floor and the hole went clear through to the dirt four feet underneath the house.

Jackson lowered his backside on the seat and covered the whole of it with his skinny butt. “See,” he said. “It’s a outhouse, inside.”

“Oh,” Josey said. She forced a smile. Sissy didn’t bother.

“You got all the privacy in the world,” Jackson said. “Ain’t gotta go outside in the middle of the night with a bad stomach or pull out the pot. Just sit right here and let go.” He wiggled himself on the seat. “It won’t move, see. I bolted it down. Comfy, too.”

“Ain’t the smell gon’ come up in the house?” Josey said.

He hopped up. “Just close the lid like this when you done and that’s it. No smell. We just got to make sure to shovel under the house every day, thas all.”

“And who gon’ crawl under there and do all the shovelin, you?” Sissy said.

“Well. . Josey or me.”

Josey laughed, “I’d rather use the one outside.”

“Come on, Josey.” Jackson said. “People do it all the time. When I was off to the war, I seen books about these people a long time ago. They made holes like this. .”

“I ain’t gon’ use it,” Josey said. “Clean it, neither.”

“Well, you cain’t clean it now ’cause you pregnant, of course.”

“Pregnant?” Sissy said. She rolled her neck, slow and long, like it was on wheels. “You wasn’t gon’ tell me, Jackson? I don’t deserve to know?”

“Aw, Momma. We was just waiting for the right time. Make it special.”

“When Jackson? How far ’long?”

Josey whispered, “Just two cycles I missed is all, Miss Sissy.”

Sissy wouldn’t look at Josey.

“Two months of knowing and you couldn’t tell me?” she say and limps out of his cupboard and back into the room.

“Momma, I’m sorry. I. .”

“That’s your problem, Jackson. You waste all your time on shit. I coulda had my windows. Only a fool shits where he eats and sleeps.” Jackson clears the shelf with his forearm, grabs the bucket and rips it from its hinges. He heaves it out of the cupboard and across the room, past Sissy. He scoops his hammer from the floor and storms out the front door.

“Jackson?” Josey calls, following him. “Jackson?” But he kept on out.

“Jackson Allen!” Sissy say.

He stops directly on the porch steps and was breathing hard and tearful when he spins around to his momma, whimpering like a boy told he couldn’t go out and play.

Sissy limps past Josey to stand on the steps next to him. When she get there, she and Jackson turn their backs on Josey. Josey tries to join ’em but they take two steps down the porch.

“Jackson?” Josey say. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.” But Jackson don’t turn around.

Sissy rubs his shoulders and the back of his neck with her thumbs. She whispers in his ear. He hangs his head low and listens. Josey backs away. She picks up his tools from the corner of the front room and the broken bucket. A shard of wood stabs her hand making her drop the hammer. Just missed her toe.

She rips off the extra shards still stuck on the bucket and carries it back through the cupboard door and sets it over the hole in the floor again. She closes the lid. “I miss you, Daddy,” she whispers.

Josey snaps off another piece of splintered wood from the bucket, then another, then all around the lid ’til the bucket is smooth again. She sits down on it and drops the fractured pieces of wood into a short pile there. But the biggest shard she keeps. She rolls it in her hand before sliding it back and forth across her thigh on purpose, grunting as it reddens, then bleeds. Her eyes roll back in pain. Or feel-good.

BIRTH IS NOT the work of a conscious mind any more than a heartbeat is. It just happens. In its own animal way, it do. Through God. Its own magic. And in its own time.

Josey crawled her way into Jackson’s cupboard — the outhouse, inside — alone and in the dark, then squatted over his broken toilet seat and started pushing.

Jackson never meant for the bucket to be used as a birthing chair but nobody had the nerve to use it in any other way.

The lid’s been kept closed all the time to stop things from crawling up and into the house.

Except right now.

There’s a hole in the floor ’cause Josey dragged the bucket across the room. She’s softened the bottom with the clean sheets and linens, wadded and stuffed inside the bucket — a safe landing for the baby. Now, she hovers over the bucket, pushing alone. Pushing because she is alone.

JACKSON LEFT TWO months ago for the new war, the Indian War west. Wasn’t the same man he was when they married. Everything got to be too much for him — Josey’s sickness, the work needing doing, and most of all, he missed war. Most of the able-bodied men did, black or white. The ones who weren’t flinching at every loud sound and sinking into madness, seemed like they needed guns and to be afraid and needed somebody else to pay with their lives for new anger.

And this condition became a dependency of men.