This Bitter Earth Part 13

"She go easy?" she asked quietly.

"Easy enough," Sugar lied.

"Did you tell me whena"when I was sick?"

"Told you some. Told you she was gone, but you ain't wanna hear any of it. So I guess you didn't."

Mercy looked down at her feet for a long moment before lifting her left foot up and into her lap.

"She ask for me?"

"Yes."

Another lie.

Mercy looked at the bottom of her foot and then up at Sugar. "I got a splinter." Mercy's voice was small the way Sugar remembered it before she left St. Louis back in *55. "You got a pin?"

Mercy cradled her foot in her lap and pressed her fingers around the red swell of flesh.

Sugar lifted her head up and shook it slowly from side to side. "Nah, ain't got no pin."

"Grandma always had a pin," Mercy said and the dam burst. She cried for nearly an hour. Sugar tried to hold her, brought her arms around Mercy in an embrace that neither one of them felt wholly comfortable with, so she backed off and left Mercy to her sorrow.

They left the rooming house beneath a hazy dawn. The streets were quiet except for the clicking sound of their heels against the pavement and the haggard and tired cough of the old man that unlocked the doors of the New Hope AME for Sunday morning service.

Mercy stayed at Sugar's side, keeping time with her quick pace, trying hard to keep her head up even though the misery she felt kept pus.h.i.+ng it down.

They walked five blocks before a cab finally moved up alongside them and Sugar opened the door and motioned for Mercy to get in. They rode in silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

The bus station made Mercy feel worse. It was dark and dirty, with rows of wooden benches filled with people heading to all points south and east.

Old and young sat side by side with greasy brown paper bags filled with fried chicken, pork chops and b.u.t.termilk biscuits resting in their laps.

It was loud, too loud for a Sunday morning. Restless children ran here and there, ignoring the threats of their parents and the stern looks of the ticket agents.

"You want something to eat? Maybe some coffee and a donut? You drink coffee? Maybe tea? Too early in the morning for a c.o.ke, but I'll get you one if you want."

Sugar was rambling and moving her hands over her knees as if she were rolling dough.

Mercy shook her head no.

Mary was dead and she never wanted to eat another bite again. She didn't want to breathe, speak or even see another sunrise.

"Uh-huh," Sugar sounded and her hands stopped moving. "We gonna be traveling a good four to five hours before we stop. It'll be near noon before you're able to get something to eat." She paused and looked up at the large round clock that sat on the wall above the ticket window. "You ain't gonna be able to relieve yourself for that long either, so you better go on and use the toilet before we pull out."

Again, Mercy shook her head no.

The bus was full, except for the first three rows of seats that were left empty; left empty for whatever white people they might pick up along the way.

The first pa.s.senger to board the bus went straight to the back, and the rest of the pa.s.sengers followed suit.

Sugar stepped aside when she reached the fourth row and motioned for Mercy to step in and sit down. Mercy lifted her head from her chest for the first time since leaving the rooming house.

"Sit down. There, by the window," Sugar said, ignoring the wide-eyed looks of the people that were waiting behind her.

"There's still room farther back," someone whispered.

Sugar ignored the comment and sat down.

The bus driver, a white man who was balding and carried a gut two sizes bigger than any nine-month's pregnant woman Sugar had ever seen, threw her a look and grunted something before shaking his head and easing himself behind the wheel.

It was quiet almost immediately as the bus driver checked and rechecked the lights and meter readings.

The pa.s.sengers were quiet for now. There would be plenty of time to talk. Three days' worth of talking needed to be stretched out and sectioned off in proper intervals. Sugar leaned back into her seat and wondered what stories Mercy had to tell.

The bus slowly pulled away from the curb and Sugar looked out the window and saw the dark, heavy clouds that moved south ahead of them.

She wondered if it was raining in Bigelow. Something told her that it was.

Chapter 14.

WHEN the rain began to fall on the twenty-fifth day of April, no one knew that it would rain day and night for the next fifteen days.

No one even really noticed the unrelenting showers until the fourth day. That's when the pictures that came across the televisions started acting upa"going gray, fuzzy, all squiggly lines or just black, blocking out the war that was being fought thousands of miles away, a war that had practically emptied Bigelow of all its men.

Tired of slapping the sides of their televisions and messing with the antennas, people pressed their ears to their radios, watched for the mailman and waited for the phone to ring bringing them word that the war was over and Bigelow's boys were coming home.

Thunder bellowed through the darkness and lightning burnished behind the black clouds. The lights dimmed and then went bright again, but the pictures on the televisions never came back clear and after five minutes Claire Bell started to cuss and slap the sides of her Zenith so hard that the crystal candy jar flew off and sent the red-and-white striped peppermints all over the floor.

Josephine was there and helped her gather them up for the trash bin, keeping one back for herself and popping it in her mouth when Claire Bell wasn't looking.

Across town Anna Lee didn't even notice that the pictures were gone again. She could care less about the television and kept it on only for the light. The volume was turned down and all she could hear was the sound of Edgar Wallace in her ear saying: "Your s.n.a.t.c.h sweet like syrup, baby."

On the other side of town s.h.i.+rley Brown had made herself comfortable in a lawn chair Fayline kept in the back of the beauty shop. Her face was set in a grimace as she stared at the squiggly lines that moved across the old black-and-white portable.

Since her sister Minnie pa.s.sed on s.h.i.+rley spent a lot of time at the shop. She came over daily, except Sundays when Fayline's was closed. s.h.i.+rley went for the company, because her cat was a good listener, but never had anything to say. So she spent her days at Fayline's even though the gossip had gone flat and the women preferred to talk about the war and about whose son, husband or uncle had been killed, injured or listed MIA.

s.h.i.+rley didn't have any interest in what was going on over there. All her family was dead and gone. She wanted to talk about what was happening on The Young and The Restless and Peyton Place.

But lately she preferred to hide herself away at the back of the shop, among the bottles of shampoo, dye and containers of relaxer. She liked the cool, cluttered darkness of that s.p.a.ce. Back there she could hear what was going on up front and think about her life and the end that was quickly approaching.

There she could recall her sins and imagine the warm wrinkled face of the child she'd brought into the world. The child she'd named Ciel and then given away.

"I wonder where she at?" she asked aloud once when she was so deep into her memories she hadn't known she'd even spoken it.

Yes, lately she wondered about a lot of things.

When the pictures on the televisions started to act up, people wandered away from them and onto their porches to look up at the black sky and stare out into the pouring rain. They thought about how bad the mosquitoes would be and how much work it was going to take to bail the water out of the root cellars once the rain finally stopped.

On the day when the Lord rested and Sugar and Mercy stepped on the southbound Greyhound, the earth below Bigelow went soft like baby s.h.i.+t and Hodges Lake devoured its banks, spilling into town and splitting open the hollowed ground of the cemetery, releasing the gems that had been buried there.

Cheap wooden caskets carrying chalky-colored bones floated like driftwood through town while the bodies of the recently deceased popped up where tulips should have been or got caught in the tide the sharp curve and sudden dip in the road near the church created.

Bodies and bones were everywhere, but more so on the south side of town where the land rolled instead of lying flat. The water pooled there and went stagnant.

There was more mud than anything and so the bodies and bones got trapped in the slow-moving thick of it, mangled in the limbs of fallen trees and caught beneath porches and inside the dog houses.

Pearl stepped out onto her porch just as the sun broke through the clouds. The sound of rus.h.i.+ng water came from all directions, filling her ears like the pounding of a hundred drums. She caught sight of the yellow-and-white material, saw the black of the leather shoe and the glint of gold beneath the water.

She stepped closer, blinked and then stepped down into the water.

The water was like fingers, s.n.a.t.c.hing at her ankles, pulling her closer.

She blinked again and took another step. The water had her calves, caressing them, letting her know they would not be satisfied without her knees, thighs and waist.

There were bits of skin still clinging to the skeleton, bits of skin that looked like the waxed paper Pearl wrapped her pies in when she took them to the church banquets.

She moved closer and heard the screen door open behind her.

"Pearl, what thea""

Without looking back Pearl raised her hand to quiet her husband, Joe. She moved closer and leaned down to look into the smiling face of the skeleton that stared back at her from beneath the water.

She knew the dress, the yellow ribbons, shoes, the small thin gold chain and cross. Pearl sucked in the air around her and grabbed hold of her stomach.

Jude had come home.

The bus route followed the muddy Missouri river, its thick black waters and gritty gray banks always to Sugar's right, Jude's presence taking up residence on her left, filling in the quiet s.p.a.ce Mercy had put carefully between Sugar and herself.

There was a point, over a hundred miles from the Arkansas state line, where the river thinned and cleared almost crystal and the air broke free of the heavy Missouri spring, allowing the bus and Sugar's nostrils to fill with the sweet fragrance of Arkansas. It was a comforting scent that settled around Sugar like the warm, colorful, patched quilts the Lacey women had taken to making in their old age.

Sugar's short time away had not erased from her memory the sweet smell of the South and the beauty that emerged from the greens, blues and floating yellows of the b.u.t.terflies that settled here and there before suddenly fluttering away in the soft giggle of a breeze.

Sugar moved herself deeper into the rough vinyl of her seat. She felt ten years slip from her like a long sickness and the calm that replaced it was as soothing and as light as the spring air that filtered in through her open window.

Sugar wanted Mercy to feel that way, but she knew Mercy was too far into herself and her pain to experience it. Sugar would have her feel something though.

She looked down at the sleeping Mercy; her arms wrapped around herself, her head resting on Sugar's shoulder. Sugar wanted to wipe at the spittle that slipped from the side of Mercy's open mouth and run her hands across the short unruly curls.

Why did Sugar want so much for this child, want to do so much for her? Sugar supposed that she had had so much done for her, that it was only right that she should do for someone else.

Not just someone.

The words echoed in Sugar's mind and remnants of the dream that drove her to St. Louis flashed through her head.

Sugar nodded as if agreeing with the thought that swept through her. "Not just someone, Mercy," Sugar mumbled to herself, still nodding her head.

"Wake up, I got something to say," Sugar whispered as she shook Mercy's shoulder. She needed to say something, explain some things to her.

Mercy shrugged Sugar's hand away. Sugar bit her lip and gave Mercy a narrow look before reaching out to her again. She shook her shoulder a bit harder this time. "Wake up, I said. I could tell this just to you or the whole bus. It don't matter either way."

Mercy's eyelids lifted and she rolled a sleepy annoyed look Sugar's way. She did not want to be embarra.s.sed. For now it would be best to do what this crazy woman said, Mercy thought to herself.

"You don't want to speak to me and that's okay. Don't want to share about your life, things that happened that made you do the things you done. That's okay too. But I think it's only fair for you to know where you going, although I can't tell you why, *cause I don't rightly know myself."

Sugar stopped talking for a moment as if she was searching her mind to make sure the "why" was still unavailable to her.

"This place, the people I'm taking you to, they good people. Decent." Sugar paused again and then looked deep into Mercy's face. "Loving," she said, and squinted her eyes to see if that word had had any effect at all on Mercy.

Mercy just twisted her mouth and gave Sugar a bored look.

Sugar was deflated. Mercy seemed unreachable.

Sugar chewed at her bottom lip for a moment, before continuing.

"Joe and Pearl Taylor, they G.o.d-fearing people, like your grandmother was. Take people in when they're in need, treat them like family even when they not."

Sugar waited.

"Like your grandmother," Sugar interjected again.

Mercy's face began to melt. The reality of her grandmother's demise had made everything inside of her go dead. Hearing Sugar speak of her was like being prodded with a steel spike. It hurt.

Sugar leaned back in her seat, satisfied that she had gotten at least a slither of emotion from the child. She was happy that Mercy wasn't totally numb.

"These people don't know we're coming. But like I said, they're good people and you need to be *round people like that."

Sugar breathed.

"We need to be *round people like that," she said before turning her attention back to the road and the place it would lead her back to.

The bus rolled along the tar-laden roads of the interstate, carrying Sugar backward to a place and time that still haunted her dreams. A feeling of home gripped her when the gray that lined the outside of the interstate turned reddish brown and then the rich color of newly turned earth.

When they crossed the Masan-Dixon, the bus seemed to shudder, and by the time they stopped the sun was gone. The ease Sugar had experienced over the past few hours slipped away as she stepped from the bus and down into the dark Arkansas night.

Mercy followed close behind her, so close that the tips of her shoes knocked at the back of Sugar's heels.

A short distance away stood a gas station. A Coca-Cola sign swung restlessly above the doorway and two lone pumps sat ominously before it, their rubber hoses bent like the arms of an impatient mother. The pale white light of the naked lightbulb glowed inside the gas station, permitting the pa.s.sengers to cut through the blackness, sure-footed and quick.

Sugar's bladder was screaming and the soft rain that had started to fall did nothing but aggravate the situation. Mercy was beside her now, eyes wide and alert.