This Bitter Earth Read online

  This was the mouth of Bigelow, the wide opening that led to the narrow throat road called Pleasant Way, where ten years earlier Sugar had strolled down and past the general store, schoolhouse, Fayline’s House of Beauty and the Baptist church, leaving Bigelow’s residents open-mouthed and wondering who this shameless woman was.

  When the bus came to a stop Sugar did not raise herself up from her seat, but leaned her head back and closed her eyes because she knew that road by heart. She’d walked it a hundred times when she lived there and a million more in her dreams. And now she walked it again in her mind.

  Gloria could hardly wait and was up and out of her seat, adjusting her baby securely to her hip just as the bus rolled to a stop.

  She moved up the aisle and toward the door, stopping to dip her body at every window she passed. Her eyes were wide and her bottom lip turned in as she bit it in quiet excitement.

  Mercy nudged Sugar.

  “This is it,” Sugar said without opening her eyes.

  But she did not move. Her mind was still wandering, taking a left at the bend near the church and following the long stretch of road boarded by modest homes and separated by great green fields of wildflowers.

  The road ended in a fork and Sugar could clearly see the divide, the option that had been crudely forged by man, plow and ox so many years earlier.

  When her mind turned right and onto Grove Street, her body jerked as she was reminded once and again that every step she took forward placed her two steps closer to where she’d already been.

  Joe had to go back in the house twice. The first time he forgot his keys on the dining-room table and the second time he’d forgotten to kiss his wife good-bye.

  His son Seth had shook his head in exasperation each time his father slapped his knee and exclaimed, “Shoot!” before jumping out of the car and running back into the house. It was already two minutes past seven and the bus was due in at seven-fifteen. It would only take them five minutes to get across town, but Seth had wanted to be there ahead of schedule and now it looked as if they would pull up at the exact same time the bus did. Well, he thought, just as long as he wasn’t late. Gloria hated to be kept waiting.

  “Got everything this time?” Seth said as he put the car in drive.

  “Yep,” Joe said, letting out a small sigh.

  “Sure now?” Seth was chiding him and couldn’t help but grin.

  “I said yes, boy, now let’s go and get this grandbaby of mine.”

  “And daughter-in-law,” Seth added as he turned onto the road.

  “Uh-huh,” Joe said.

  Pearl stayed behind, sitting in the parlor staring at the black-and-white floor-model console Seth had brought his parents for Christmas two years earlier.

  She hadn’t even flinched when first Joe then Seth planted kisses on her cheeks and told her they were leaving to go collect Gloria and little Jewel.

  “I don’t want Esther over here in my house,” Pearl had said dryly.

  “You wanna stay here by yourself?” Joe asked, scratching his head, not believing it would be a good idea.

  “I’m grown,” Pearl said without raising an eyebrow or shifting her eyes from Jethro and the rest of the Beverly Hillbillies, who were going through their weekly routine.

  The doctor said Pearl wasn’t sick at all, well, not physically. He said her ailment was all in her mind. “I seen it before in plenty of people.” The doctor shared that with Joe. “She still mourning Jude, I s‘pose,” he said, dropping his voice, and then, as Joe followed him down the stairs and to the front door, “Uhm, say Joe, whatever happen to that woman, you know the one ...” The doctor’s words trailed off. He knew her name well, had called it out when he touched himself during his evening baths.

  “Sugar,” Joe whispered and looked over his shoulder before hurriedly opening the front door and practically pushing the doctor out and onto the porch.

  Joe didn’t speak about Sugar; it was too upsetting to Pearl.

  The spells had started just after Sugar left.

  Some days she was full of energy, cooking up a storm and singing off-key with the radio. But most days, and lately, all days, Joe would find her sitting in the living room, shades drawn, her face solemn and still wet from crying.

  Joe had worried about her behavior, even more so after Jude’s body had ended up right in front of their house. It had shook Joe in a place where he thought he was unshakable, but it didn’t seem to worry Pearl at all.

  He’d expected tears, wails larger and filled with more sorrow than twenty-five years earlier. But Pearl had smiled as if she’d been expecting Jude all along, and Joe supposed she had.

  They’d had to bury her again. Who in the world buries the same dead child twice? Joe looked up to the heavens. Surely God was punishing him, but for what?

  They were all reburied on the same day, all the bones and bodies that people had brought back to the cemetery in the back of pick-up trucks, wheelbarrows and pull carts. It was a horrifying scene that not even Joe could stomach, but Pearl had watched the activity as if the bodies were nothing more than ground provisions.

  This increased Joe’s concern.

  Pearl had insisted on wearing her church shoes and last year’s Easter dress with the hat that she’d worn to each of her children’s baptisms. Wide-brimmed and white with delicate silk daisies, the hat made Pearl look like she was going to a wedding, rather than a burial.

  The families of the other bodies were all dressed in black; some women were even veiled and they looked on Pearl in pity.

  “She crazy.”

  “Mad.”

  The whispers, the easy look of calm on Pearl’s face, all of those things unnerved Joe and he shifted in his heavy galoshes.

  Pearl was quiet most days, more so after they buried Jude for the second time. Joe worried that he couldn’t read her. Worried that she had little or nothing to say to him and was fearful of what she might do if he left her alone.

  That’s when he started asking Esther Franklin to come over and sit with Pearl whenever he needed to run into town.

  But today, Pearl was defiant. “I don’t need no babysitter.”

  Joe huffed and he shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, Pearl,” he said before placing another gentle kiss on her cheek and leaving.

  “Maybe you should have had JJ come and sit with her while we gone,” Seth said as he rolled through the stop sign.

  “You better pay attention, boy,” Joe cautioned as he pointed over his shoulder to the stop sign that was quickly becoming a small dot in Seth’s rearview mirror. “JJ got better things to do.”

  Joe wished Seth hadn’t brought up his older brother. There seemed to be some bad blood between Joe and his namesake, but Joe didn’t know how that had happened.

  One moment JJ was living at home; next thing Joe and Pearl knew he had enlisted himself in the service and was sent off to Camp Van Dorm in southwestern Mississippi.

  Joe and Pearl received a letter a week from him for months and then nothing. When Joe finally inquired with the U.S. Army as to where his son was, he was told that Joe Taylor was serving six months in the brig for disorderly conduct and that no, they would not be able to come and see him and no, there was no further information that could be provided on the matter.

  Two months after Joe’s conversation with Colonel Flint, he received a letter from Joe Jr. with no return address. The post-mark was stamped Chicago and the letter read very simply.

  I am safe.

  Will call as soon as I am settled.

  Your loving son,

  Joe.

  It was disturbing and so were the ones that followed, which always said the same thing. The only differences were the dates and the postmarks.

  Eventually JJ did come home, but those were short, disturbing sojourns that left both Pearl and Joe drained when he was gone.

  During his visits, JJ hardly even spoke and avoided the questions Joe bombarded him with. He always seemed to be angry and preferred to stay in his r
oom brooding over something that he refused to share with his parents.

  JJ was just a younger version of his father: tall, dark and broad-shouldered. They spoke slowly and with low tones, but the differences ended with their eyes. Joe Senior had eyes that were warm and gentle, and while Joe Junior had inherited the same eyes, they’d changed in the years between Jude’s death and whatever had happened after he left home and joined the service.

  Unlike his father, JJ had never been involved in active combat. Joe thought he could have understood his son’s distant disposition if JJ had actually witnessed the horrors of war. Joe knew plenty of men who’d returned home short an arm or a leg, some with half a soul.

  Something else had stolen a piece of JJ’s soul, something, Joe thought, more terrible than war.

  Pearl couldn’t look at him. Something about his eyes reminded her of death and when he hugged her hello or good-bye it was like being enfolded in ice.

  She asked God to forgive her each and every time he came to visit because although she hated to see her son leave, she was more than happy to see him go.

  JJ returned home for good in 1960. He stayed with his parents for three months, then moved into the two-room space above the old cotton house he purchased out on Highway 6.

  “What you gonna do with this place?” Joe had asked as he placed his hands on his hips and looked up at the rafters. “There’s more sky than roof, JJ!”

  JJ just nodded.

  “You ain’t even got a floor, just dirt,” Joe said, stomping his foot on the bare, hard ground. “Look like you might have you some snakes holed up in here too,” he said, squinting at the dark corners that surrounded them.

  A month later Joe found a flyer stapled to the post office bulletin board.

  FOOD, DRINKS AND LIVE ENTERTAINMENT TWO MILES IN HIGHWAY 6 (TWO MILES OUT FROM WHERE YOU STANDING!) OWNER: JOE TAYLOR JR.

  Five years later, Two Miles In was bringing in the best of the best of the chitterlings circuit and had put the Memphis Roll completely out of business.

  JJ wiped the counter off again, even though no one had been in yet and no one would come in before eight or maybe nine. Angel was in the kitchen cussing to herself and banging the pots around like they’d done something wrong, while her fourteen-year-old son, Harry, who looked more like ten with his string bean arms and bat wing ears, struggled to pull the heavy mop across the new linoleum floor JJ had installed in the kitchen last week.

  Harry was a mute and slow in the mind but a hard worker.

  “Boy, get on out my way ‘fore I use this cleaver on you!” Angel screamed at him.

  Harry worshipped his mother, and JJ suspected he would still be attached to her apron strings when he was long past forty. Angel pretended that the boy annoyed her and hardly ever had a kind word for him, but Harry knew that was just Angel’s way.

  Harry never looked at JJ dead on, he never looked at any man dead on. Men seemed to make him nervous and he got real irritable when Angel got too close to one, which is what she did whenever she wasn’t cooking or punishing the pots for crimes no one would ever understand.

  Angel had come on to JJ once when the club was just getting started. She’d rubbed her behind up against his leg during the last set, when the band was feeling their own and the crowd was going wild. Harry was clearing the tables on the other side of the room and Angel’s hands had found their way down between JJ’s legs.

  JJ didn’t bother to push her hands away. He just waited for her eyes to find his and then she would know that he was dead inside.

  Angel still dreamed about those barren eyes and drank a little more than she should to forget about them when she closed her own eyes at night.

  The clattering sound of silverware hitting the floor startled Harry and he moved farther away from the swinging red door of the kitchen.

  “Angel, tell that boy to check on the bathroom,” JJ said as he lifted each liquor bottle from its place on the shelf to check the contents.

  “Harry, get with that bathroom!” Angel yelled out to her son and then let loose a barrage of curse words as she bent to pick up the scattered forks and knives.

  JJ looked at his watch. It was after seven and the band hadn’t even arrived yet. He supposed they may have gotten turned around. You could blink and miss Bigelow.

  He was down to the last bottle and noted mentally that he was running low on scotch when the phone rang. JJ hated the phone, wouldn’t even have one if it wasn’t needed to book bands and order supplies.

  “Yeah?”

  “JJ?” It sounded like his mother, but JJ wasn’t sure. This woman on the other end of the phone sounded too normal, too much alive.

  “Mama?”

  “Uh-huh. Listen, I need some food over here and soon. You know your brother’s wife and child coming in and ‘spect some other people coming along with them and I ain’t got hardly anything here so I need you to bring some of what you got on over.”

  Pearl was talking so fast it made JJ’s ears ring.

  “Mama?” was all JJ could say before the dial tone sounded in his ear.

  He stood dumfounded for a moment, trying to replay what his mother had just told him. It took too much away from what he needed to be thinking about. He looked at his watch again. Seven-thirty.

  “Angel!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Get your boy to take that food we got left over from last night on over to my mama’s house.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it,” JJ said, picking the rag up off the bar and stuffing it into his back pocket.

  He could hear Angel mumbling under her breath about having to cook more now that there were no leftovers. JJ heard the words “crazy” and “insane” mixed up in her spiteful litany, but it didn’t bother him one bit. He knew he was all of those things and more.

  Chapter 17

  SETH was right; they’d pulled up just as the bus from St.

  Louis came to a halt. Seth got so excited that he forgot to put the car in park before he jumped out.

  “Whoa!” Joe yelled as the car began rolling backward. “Seth!” he screamed as he struggled to roll his window down.

  Seth was at the hood of the car before he realized what he’d done, or hadn’t done, and ran back to the car.

  “Sorry, Daddy,” he said as he jumped in and slammed his foot down on the brake. Joe was thrown forward as the car came to a sudden stop and his head bounced off the dashboard.

  “Daddy, you okay?” Seth was asking but his eyes were on the bus.

  “Yeah, yeah I guess so,” Joe said, rubbing his forehead. “Go ahead. Go on,” he said, waving his hand.

  Seth didn’t even give him a second thought, just put the car in park, jumped out and hit the ground running. Joe followed after checking the damage that had been done to his forehead in the rearview mirror.

  Gloria stepped down the stairs and off the bus and Seth scooped up both her and Jewel as soon as her foot hit solid ground.

  “Baby, baby, baby!” was all he could say as he twirled them ‘round and ’round.

  The old men straightened their backs and grinned toothless grins.

  “Seth Taylor! My Lord, man!” Gloria tried to scold him in between giggles. “Stop it now, you’ll make the baby sick.” Her laughter was muffled by the kisses Seth covered her face and mouth with.

  “Gimme my baby girl!” he said as he snatched Jewel from her mother’s arms and began tossing her up in the air.

  Jewel let out a wail of disapproval and then proceeded to puke all over her father’s new shirt.

  “You a fool!” Gloria exclaimed, trying to pry Seth’s fingers from his daughter’s waist.

  “A fool for my girls!” Seth screamed, not even caring that he was covered in sour milk.

  The men grinned wider and nudged each other.

  Joe touched the now tender spot on his head once more before clearing his throat and making his presence known.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Taylor.” Gloria acknowledged him
as if he were a business associate of her husband‘s, rather than his father.

  Joe smiled and stepped toward her.

  “Oh,” she said when he leaned in, gently taking her arm and kissing her on the cheek.

  “Gloria,” Joe said and smiled.

  “Oh,” she chirped again and then pulled away.

  “There’s my grandbaby!” Joe beamed and slapped his hands together. “Give her here, Seth.”

  Seth looked at Gloria for approval; it was a quick look that Joe would have missed had he blinked. His eyebrows came together and the light went out in his eyes.

  “Go ahead, honey,” Gloria said.

  Seth handed the baby off to his father and when Joe looked down into the face of his one and only grandchild a smile as bright as the sun spread clear across his face.

  “Y‘all done good. Y’all done real good,” Joe said.

  Seth didn’t think he could feel more pride than he’d been feeling since his little girl came into this world. Now he knew he could and felt his chest swell.

  Mercy stepped off the bus and around the people who cooed into Jewel’s face.

  “Sorry,” Seth said when Mercy accidentally brushed against him. Their eyes met for a moment and then fell away.

  “C‘mon little one,” Gloria said as she reached for Jewel. “Let’s get going before these nasty bugs and mosquitoes have their way with you.” Gloria slapped at her neck and forearm and shot her husband a look of disgust.

  Seth moved in quick, throwing his arm over his wife’s shoulder. “The car is over here,” he said as he guided his family away from the bus.

  “I guess I’ll get the bags,” Joe mumbled, shaking his head in dismay. He touched the tender spot on his head again before shoving his hands deep into his pockets.

  “Whipped,” one of the old men said, snickering.

  Joe wasn’t sure which one of the men had said it. It really didn’t matter. The truth was the truth and Joe never argued the truth.