Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

OH, HI, MRS. STERN. How are you? Yes, I’m fine. I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to come to work today. Oh yes, I’m fine. Jus a lil tired from the trip. No. That’s okay. Please don’t. I’ll be in tomorrow. Give my regards to Mr. Stern. Thanks. Bye.

She returned the receiver to its cradle, then lay back on the tumbled pillows in the very center of the high white bed. The night had been hell and now the morning was no better. She would never get used to this. Never.

Gracie studied Lula Mae’s photograph on the front of the funeral program. That looks like me, she thought. Death blackened her. That could be me. Black in death. She looks like me. She is me.

She reviewed the obituary facts. Name. Place. Date. Marriage. Survivors. Name and number. She added. She deleted. Corrected.

Sweet chariot had opened up its doors to her, wet in the Memphis heat. Shut its doors and leaped into the white world above. Sheila, Porsha, Hatch, and herself — all sat as strangers, swinging through the clouds. Her Bible (the funeral program buried inside, interred) weighing down her weightless knees to keep her firmly in her seat. Both the pages and her knees wet with Lula Mae’s nonstop voice. Swim out from my body. Search out your own water. Sweet chariot swung her low to this city. The first to come. Called among the birds. Her fluttered pulse.

What did you come out of the wilderness to see?

She flew to her house on Liberty Island with its ancient implications of order, her rage at Sheila, so hot in West Memphis, already cold, drowned by the rushing in her skull. She emptied out Sheila and filled herself with John.

It belongs to both of us, she said. We both made it. Don’t you want to touch it? Her palm moved in circles over her ripe belly.

John stood, the question holding him in place.

Touch it.

John blinked.

Touch it.

Okay, John said. He didn’t move.

Put your hand here. She reached for his hand and he moved it beyond her reach.

Okay, he said. Okay. I’ll touch it.

She eased her aching bones out of the bed, knelt in yellow sunlight, and mouthed silent prayers. Somewhere in the room, her Bible trilled tongues. She raised her head. Opened her eyes. Cookie’s baby bonnet spread on the carpet like a discarded parachute.

She rose to her feet and went heavily down the stairs.

The morning air received her. Lake shape lying and lifting under a cupping sky. She moved in its direction. She felt her way easily. She had often walked here.

John met her on the path with only the crudest of necessities — a clean shirt, fresh socks, a change of underwear, razor and shaving cream, toothbrush, deodorant — in a flight bag. I’ll be back in a day or two.

She refused to look him in the face. Behold, I am of uncircumcised lips, and how then shall he hearken unto me?

Don’t act like that, he said. He stood there, eyes shining like brown diamonds. Don’t act like that. I got to handle my business. It’s only for a few days.

She heard silent prayer in the words. Yes, she said. I’ll be here when you get back, she said, confident that he would return to her. He would often leave his body all over the place but he always returned to her, flight bag in hand. She wasn’t much to look at and had little to say but he had an eye to see and an ear to hear.

Whenever he left her, she kept the pain of his absence locked up in her chest. But she could open it anytime she wanted, like a jewelry box, and watch the pearl-sparkling images inside. Her buried life.

Her thoughts were in advance of her body and she quickened her steps to overtake them. She found a quiet tree and stretched out beneath it, her back against the hard, rough trunk. Her bright red sandals and scarlet stockings made her thin legs look bigger. Two red rails that ran to Tar Lake. Trunks and trees made a black lacework around the island. Gray shadows and morning leaves. Silent light in shafts on bright grass. The morning sky bloomed above the blue horizon where black-bodied buildings formed a jagged wall. The city. Babies leaped high in the water, high above the city, like black dolphins. Birds studied their reflections in black water. For a long time she sat thinking.

It had been a week now since John had stepped out of her life forever (never to return), made her a ghost in a strange house where she would spend her remaining hours and days wandering. Perhaps she had driven him too deep inside herself to bring him back.

How slowly the water appeared to move. Lagging. Three steps behind the world. She recorded things never before perceived. The veining of each leaf and babies upon them like black locusts.

John gripped the steering wheel like an eagle gripped captured prey, Jesus and Hatch chirping in the back seat of his fast-flying red Eldorado. Flustered and afraid, she fluttered about with protecting wings.

John, please slow down. Can’t you slow down?

Who driving?

I’m gon be baptized, Jesus said.

Why? Hatch said.

So I can save.

Save what?

Reverend Sparrow lifted Jesus high into his arms, kneeled down before the claw-foot bathtub, and leaned the boy across his arms, light, a shovel slanted above dirt. Except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he said, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. He dipped Jesus into the water.

He heard his pleas even before his face broke the water’s surface. John, help me! This preacher tryin to drown me.

John rushed forward and shoved Reverend Sparrow against the wall. The water sucked Jesus in. She heard the separate sounds of the water work on his body. John swooped him up kicking and blowing and blinded. She watched the clean waters, unmoving in the tub.

THE TREE LEAVES were too far apart to give any shade. The sun stood still and burned. Her black skin took on the orange glow of coal. Wet wind crawled off the ocean. Her body felt like dry ice, hot and cool.

A spirit must answer to his right name. Gracie tested the belief. She called John by his true name.

What? He put those brown eyes on her. What you call me? he said.

Nothing. She alone understood John’s secret forms and transformations. And he made her part of that secret world.

I ain’t think so. Deep eyes now upon the deep water.

She walked over to the railing and stood gazing down at the lake, gray, and slightly choppy in the wake of a distant tug. The lake was like a vast stage under the glare-filled sky above, and the boardwalk and beach, seating for the audience. She was unaware of the blazing sun, absorbed completely, caught up in the play of the washing waves.

Look, he said.

She looked. Saw what he saw, what he wanted her to see. Lined up like train cars, several objects rushed through the water below.