Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

GRACIE SHUT HER EYES. Two white squares fixed behind her blind lids, fixed, for a moment before gradually dissolving into blackness. Her breathing gentle and peaceful. She heard rustling babies leave the room one by one, their feet the sound of rain, and their leaving the sound of sky beginning to blow clear. Then an in-waft of hot light. She opened her eyes to green. She half rose on her elbow. Her keys lay in the square of yellow where they had spilled out from her black leather purse. She picked them up, placed them on the nightstand, slid out of the bed, slapped her bare feet across the wood floor over to her rocking chair. She moved her fingers over the chair cushion. The black velvet had faded to green. She sat down before the open window. The shadows were soothing after the glare of the sun. Outside the window, clouds swallowed the sky, and the sky itself like a blue sheet stretched across the sun. Thirty years ago, John had hit her between the eyes with his words and ways. Their first apartment they shared with Sheila and Lucifer, a two-flat on Sixty-first and May (Englewood). She descended two flights of stairs each day, heels clicking against waterlogged boards, sinking into the wood flesh. Babies rushed from cracks, hissing and spitting, and she kicked at them, heels high (a cheerleader), and forced them to retreat back into the baseboards. Nothing in the city was attractive then, especially not that street with its big leafless trees, tall green iron-ridged streetlamps whose cold white light reflected in puddles and wet car roofs, or the courthouse buildings with chipped pee-stained fountains and leaning gargoyles ready to tumble into the street. The place she remembers from, this house, John had given her for his sins (the down payment he borrowed from his mother Inez, a loan he never repaid). The first night he left her, the room went silent, and the quiet got inside her. Her placing her Bible on the nightstand echoed the slammed door of his departure. (At least that’s how she remembers it now.) She woke to the sound of rain, bed rocking to the downpour’s rhythm. She tried to get out of bed and the floor began to rock. She reached for her Bible. She was lifted off the bed bodily and carried through every room in the house, then she was returned to the bed. She listened to the rain’s silence. This house for his sins, John having vacated it more than ten years ago, leaving only the shell of an old suit, his clean overalls hanging in the garage — and the large nuptial bed where he still steered her desires every night, only — like a sailor — to return to sea at the spreading rays of dawn, trailing a scent of that first fresh shore thirty years ago where she spread the fans of her legs to his waiting hands, where his tongue discovered the circles of her thighs. This house, yes, but the babies had followed her here, hidden in the corners of her suitcase, warm beneath her cotton nightgowns.

Ten years ago, John had tried to throw her out the window.

Bitch, you wanna leave? His words shattered her sleep.

John. What you doin?

You wanna leave? He lifted her from the bed babylike and carried her over to the open window. Go out right now. The city echoed through the window.

She felt cool night air against her back, the wind’s soft fingers trying to push her back into the room.

John. No. These words with the moon behind them, yellow and forceful, long as shafts of corn. John. No.

And the city slamming shut.

After he left, it took her nearly two full weeks to grow used to sleeping in a house flooded with babies — especially the blue one who slapped her with his wet dolphin tail — and she would find herself awake in the night’s stillest hour, in full moonlight, all motion having left the bed, listening to the dull pulse of the infants circulating through the rooms, bumping against the furniture, rustling the onionskin pages of her Bible, and listening beyond that to the slow suck of her firstborn’s lips, because it was city Jack who captured her country eyes, sugared her up sweet, and put a moving inside her, her firstborn, a daughter, Cookie, wine-lipped Jack, in that other life before John, in her very first apartment in the city— a four-room railroad flat on T Street over in Woodlawn that boasted sixteen windows, concealing a single bathroom in the hall with a hole in the ceiling, where you squatted on the toilet under an open umbrella, guarding against the greedy eyes above —which she shared with Beulah and Sheila.

Grunting, the driver hoisted the steamer trunk out of his cab and put it on the sidewalk. I’d take it up fo you, but, see, I got a bad back.

Beulah tipped him a nickel.

Thanks, downhome. He grunted off.

Four bad younguns stood on the stoop of their building.

My name is Ran

I work in the sand

I’d rather be a nigger

Than a no-dancing white man

Get on way from here, Beulah said.

We ain’t doin nothin to you, granny.

Boy, watch yo mouth. I’ll knock yo teeth back to Tupelo.

I ain’t from no Tupelo.

I know where you from. I know yo kind.

Aw.

If yall was nice boys, you’d help us wit these bags. Can’t you see my niece got all these here bags?

It took all four puffing boys to get the steamer trunk to the third floor.

Sho is heavy.

She got some gold.

Or some cold.

Or somebody dead in there.

THE SEEK-AND-FIND-HER MANEUVERS of the babies started after the train sliced off Sam’s leg, smooth as bread or a tube of lunchmeat. Sam and Dave liked to jump the speeding trains. One miscalculated jump landed him in Mercy Veterans Hospital (years later renamed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., General Hospital, MLK, where Dave wasted away).

No loss, Beulah said. That damn fool brother of mine left his sense back home when he came up here, Beulah said. He mightest well have left his leg.

Sam shook for three nights with fever. His tongue spat out red words.

What’s that he’s mumblin? Gracie asked.

Something bout that Filipino woman, Beulah said.

What Filipino woman?

The one who had his baby.

What? This truly surprised Gracie, for Sam had never said word the first about it.

Back when he was stationed overseas. It ain’t nothing, Beulah said. Over there, them women so po they’ll do it all night long for a can of beans.

I was so glad to get shut of them niggas, Beulah said. And when they get out the service, first thing they do come visit me. Well, first they go to California looking for R.L. Ain’t there but a moment. Come visit me. I like to think they come to stay fo good. One night, I prayed to God, Please send them niggas back to Houston … I guess they heard God’s call, or maybe they jus missed all that devilment. They took the first locomotive back to Houston. But those two weeks they stayed wit me …

Well, Beulah, I guess they didn’t want to get shut of you, cause two years after that —

— they come for good.

The doctors put a spoon in Sam’s mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue— like you had to do when Nap had one of his seizures —shaking, like he hadn’t got spilled onto the tracks but had actually caught the train and was riding it. That fever so hot that Gracie saw red plumes spreading over her hands and climbing red up the sanitized white walls. Only Beulah could stand the heat of Sam’s bed.

Sam, Beulah said. Sam.

Quiet down now, Beulah. They gon put us outa this room.

Sam, you want me to hold up yo leg? Sam.

Beulah, he can’t hear you.

Sam. You the baby. Mamma told me to guard after you kids. Mamma told me—

The hours trembled on, and days. Sam shook off the fever. The doctors gave him a wooden leg, the same leg — no, they forced him to buy a new one, the termites crunching down to the roots of that first one — that, years later, Jesus and Hatch mistook for a toy when the family went visiting him, laid up drunk wit that lady who would steal his life, steal the wood of his head with her ax, already knowing and planning her crime, cause she always fled the apartment whenever we visited, didn’t want us to see the guilt in her eyes, read her war plan —the boys knocking one another upside the head with the leg, or using it as a bowling pin, the same leg that Sam often set on fire when he got drunk and bounced down the stairs naked to smother it out.