Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

Sharp silver light penetrated Hatch’s arms and legs and pinned him to the leather seat.

Let’s go.

Hatch did not move.

Damn, can’t you hear? Let’s go on in.

Leave that here. Hatch blinked.

What? John trained his red-filled spectacles. What?

Leave that here. You ain’t got to do all that.

You want me to jus walk in? Jus walk in? For this Tambo and Bones stuff?

Tambo and Bones? Hatch had never heard of the band.

You expect us to get strung up so you can hear some silk shit?

The words freed Hatch. The blood of emotion swiftly flushed through him. He fought to get his own words out. Jimi ain’t—

Call it what you want.

Anger rushed to his face under Uncle John’s stare.

I tell you what, Uncle John said. Jus fuck the whole thing. Fuck the whole thing. He folded the bright butterfly back into its caterpillar. That’s fair.

What?

We going home. He dropped the caterpillar into his blazer pocket. Whirled the car back onto the road.

Wait a minute.

You wait.

Hatch took a deep breath to calm himself.

The cab rocked side to side with speed. Uncle John fired up a cigarette, his first for the night. Inhaled and breathed and disappeared inside the smoke.

Hatch rolled down the window as quickly as he could, traffic sounds and city sounds entering the cab, night air sharp on his face.

John singing.

I made a mistake gamblin

I spent my money wrong

I bet on my baby

And she wan’t even at home

Hatch began to sway lightly to the music.

WHENEVER GRACIE SWELLED into her first three months of pregnancy, like a poisoned roach ready to explode, she spent each morning in the rocking chair before the open window on May Street and watched the great circle of the sun pass from one corner of the room to the other. In the last three months, she would swell into sleep, become an extension of her white pillow. Drifting with searching hands or hands searching pockets. Blood swelling to rigid breasts. Breasts swollen with the approach of your period or with milk for shower praise of birth. Milk that would create praise in the baby’s skin and sad remembrance of boiling rivers crossed. John would tell her something, then she would realize that days and even weeks had passed, his words carrying her back. Twice it happened—

John saw the baby. Doctor, why he so red?

Give his color some time.

Redder than them leaves.

— and each time she tried to warn him. More told in the telling.

John breathed very close to her in the bed.

John?

Yes. He put his lips against the back of her neck.

Something’s wrong with the baby.

What? He raised up on his elbows.

Something’s wrong with the baby.

You in pain?

Not exactly.

What is it then?

Jus these strange feelings. It don’t feel right.

With her mind she had practiced manipulating the infant and her umbilical cord, string and puppet, trying to strangle the life.

John looked at her, engraving in her mind forever his look of fear. Tomorrow, we’ll go to the doctor. See if he can help.

John—

He watched her with rain in his eyes, but he wasn’t making any noise. We’ll go now. He cradled her in his arms, took her out in the rain, rocking in his arms. A boat, rocking, rocking, in the rain. He opened the door of the fire-red Eldorado without using his hands — to this day, she didn’t know how he’d done it — and set her gently on the seat. The car smelled new, the tight leather seemingly ripped with the least movement. So she kept very still. The engine roared, driving back the sound of the rainfall, wet constant footsteps. Rain rushed down the window, the twin wipers switching and flicking.

NEITHER HAD SUSPECTED her warm inner circle of life. Every detail of the night held vivid in her mind. Mockingbirds in the moonlight. Curtains blowing in the night air. John began as always, putting his lips on the back of her neck, then turning her around, a kiss on her forehead, placing a coin of light there, then putting his tongue in her mouth, heavy, diving through her body. Gracie could still feel his last hard thrusts — her womb full of raw menace — and his seed burning inside her, filling the vessel of her body with sticky heat. Afterward, she lay cradled in his arm, then drifted off to sleep. Something light and chill breathed upon her. A door slammed in her stomach. She awakened to a torn silver sky.

John, my stomach hurts.

John looked at her stomach. Normal enough. Flat and hard with the same navel, round and bright as an eye. He put his palm over it. Waves of heat washed across his fingers. Does that hurt?

Well …

It’s that time of the month.

No. More than cramps. But I can take it.

John took her into the circle of his arm. They lay like this for a while. Then John gathered her in his arms like firewood and carried her down the stairs. Same way he carried her up the stairs later after it was done. Walking with ease, from the white globe and up the white railing and the white staircase that climbed toward the blue-and-white flowered wallpaper of the second floor.

But I’m not dressed.

He didn’t answer. He placed this most delicate bundle inside his red Eldorado.

The car hummed through wind-torn streets. A gleaming empty sky rushed past the window. Yes, the car — the red Eldorado, the smooth-cruising red Eldorado, not the black Cadillac with power windows and locks (custom items in those days), and Jesus’s erratic baby boots kicking on loose puppet legs — shot down Church Street. Rough black faces pushed into the traffic, not heeding the red lights. And the red Eldorado fled faster than cycle or streetcar, boat and steamcar, train and jet plane. Gracie’s mind reeled full flash, rumbled down an unknown street. Her head stuck to the cutting thorns of her body. She thought she heard a shadow of song on the radio. The song spit and spattered.

The doctor’s white smock took her by surprise. I think you have a tumor, but we need more X-rays to be sure.

Just hurry, John said. Can’t you see she hurtin?

I can take it, Gracie said. It ain’t too bad. I can take it. Red and black ants crawled inside her, working, moving things around. Pain was the one thing that never escaped her, life moving through days raw and wide. Shark-gray clouds in throbbing blue sky, and bird wings curving and cutting. Where did pain begin? Long ago. Certainly that was why the first two hurt so — those aliens lodged in her body, aliens that told her what and when to eat, when to piss (and how hard and how fast), shit; that made her scratch her vagina in public; that made her milk leak from her breasts (two white eyes peering out through her black blouse) — that was why they clawed away with thirsty fingers at her dry womb walls for nearly three days—

Doctor, cut that thing out of her.

Ain’t nobody cuttin me. I’ll die first.

— then shriveled like prunes.

But an hour after John brought her to the hospital, the invisible baby dropped easily from her womb, unraveled as if from a light ball of twine. A living baby in the raw, red-smeared with blood, black-smeared with grease, buoyant in the doctor’s rubber hands, astronaut, the umbilical cord trailing behind, trailing in dark, quiet, sanitized space.

A small room in a small apartment made smaller by the city’s crowded sounds and Beulah’s listening ears. Made louder by the train that thundered by, yes, thundered, the train one long stream of torrential weather, shaking you in your bed at night — ah, the El trains were in touching distance, just reach your hands out the back window — shaking the ancient bones and aching muscles, flaking plaster from wall and ceiling. There was the single white sheet before the sink and clawfoot tub, and it was here that Sheila first revealed the burns spotting her arms and legs, light-colored scars, sand on dark skin. Gracie never learned why Sheila came out the bathroom nude, neither arrogant nor innocent, perhaps unaware that Gracie was in the room, perhaps knowing but not caring since they were sisters, perhaps carrying both feeling-seeds. Gracie had heard different versions of the story — it happened before she was born — but all agreed that Lula Mae had left her baby girl unattended before her fireplace. Mr. Albert Post — so he had named himself, this orphan, stuffed in a white man’s mailbox in Tupelo, umbilical cord wrapped like a turban around his stone-small head — passed Daddy Larry’s farm and heard the baby’s screams. He rushed through the door and saw a bundle of fire on the stones of the fireplace. Lifted the burning baby into his arms, juggled flame and heat, and ran quickly, motivated by both heroism and pain, for the pump. The fire had already been smothered in his arms by the time he reached the pump seconds later. He dunked the blistered baby like an Easter egg into a rusty pail of water beside the well.