This Bitter Earth Read online

  Sugar moved down the aisle of the bus in slow motion. Her body seemed to float.

  She wished it were all a dream, wished it were ten years ago and that she was back in Short Junction surrounded by the sounds of the Lacey women and the scent of stewing apples.

  But she wasn’t. This was Bigelow, where the middle of her life had unfolded and then crumbled.

  Sugar stepped down off the bus; her sandal-clad feet slipped slightly in the Arkansas dirt.

  The grinning men took her in and nodded hello.

  “Seth! Seth! Which one of these suitcases belong to her?”

  The voice was as unmistakable as the name it called and both froze Sugar right where she stood.

  Sugar slowly turned her head toward the sound of the voice that she knew so well, hoping that it belonged to a face she didn’t know at all.

  “Seth, c‘mon over here, boy, and tell—”

  Joe’s words did not trail off and sail away into the early Arkansas evening; they dropped off suddenly and were swallowed up by the earth beneath his feet.

  Their eyes locked and before Joe could take a step toward her, his heart broke loose from his chest and Joe keeled over right where he stood.

  There were still plenty of people left in Bigelow that could remember the first time she walked into town. It had only been ten years ago and while ten years may seem a long time to some people, it’s no time at all to most.

  Any wounds she’d inflicted during her stay there had long since healed (except for Joe’s and Pearl’s) and the people of Bigelow had not even bothered to favor her into folklore.

  The memory of her had been buried beneath the civil rights activities that seemed to follow her departure, and then there was the Vietnam War to consider.

  At the moment her second coming was eventful only to the man who’d fallen unconscious to the ground and the one that was running up from behind her screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!”

  Seth moved past her so hard that Sugar spun around in a full circle.

  “Daddy!” Seth was kneeling over his father, struggling to flip him over. Sugar looked down on Seth’s back, on the clean blue shirt and the tight muscles that strained beneath the material and she was thrown back to the night he walked through the fog and into her life.

  She stumbled as the memory was ruined by the sound of screeching car tires and the heavy sound of Lappy Clayton’s voice in her ear calling her a bitch.

  She was heavy now, heavy all over, and the air was becoming too thin to breathe. She grabbed hold to the side of the bus.

  Seth had Joe on his back now, still calling to him as he slapped at his cheeks and shook him frantically by the shoulders.

  The two old men stood close by, their lips pressed tight as they watched and waited.

  Mercy thought about her grandmother as she stared down at Joe and wondered if this was what death looked like.

  “Uh—uh—” There were words struggling to get out of Joe’s mouth.

  “Daddy?” Seth was shaken and his words spilled out in waves.

  “Uh-uh-uh,” Joe sounded again and his eyes came to rest dead on Sugar’s face. “Shhhh—” Joe tried to get her name out.

  “What you trying to say, Daddy?” Seth asked, leaning into his father. The two old men folded their hands behind their backs and stepped closer to the two men.

  “Shhh—Shhh—Sugar.” It was out and Joe slumped back into the ground and closed his eyes.

  Joe felt euphoric. Seeing her, even saying her name had eased the guilt that he’d been plagued with since her departure. He thanked God for the second chance to set things right.

  “What? Daddy, what you say?” Seth grabbed hold of his father’s shirt and began to shake him again.

  Joe’s hand went up and shoved his son’s shoulder, indicating that he was fine and didn’t need to be shook, slapped or yelled at any more. “I’m okay,” he uttered.

  The sun was in his eyes and Sugar looked like a tall dark shadow. Joe blinked and told himself that the heat of the day and the bump on his head was causing him to see things.

  Sugar stood still. She’d heard her name come off Joe’s lips, even from where she stood it had come across as clear as crystal, so she couldn’t understand how Seth could have missed it.

  “Shit,” Seth spat as he dragged his hands down the sides of his face in frustrated relief. The worry dripped from his face as Joe smiled assuredly at him.

  “You scared the hell outta me, Daddy,” Seth said as he rolled his head on his neck, trying to loosen the knot of tension that’d set in.

  Joe just gave Seth a foolish grin.

  “Now you grinning like it’s funny?” Seth said, still not at ease enough to smile, but allowing a chuckle to embrace his words.

  Sugar wanted to disappear, jump back on the bus, get swallowed up by the earth, anything to be gone from that spot and away from those two Taylor men.

  It was too soon to see Joe; she hadn’t expected him to be right there as she stepped off the bus. And Seth, that was a whole other issue. She hadn’t expected to ever see him again, not ever.

  Seth raised himself up from the ground. He stepped backward to dust the dirt from his pants legs and stumbled right into Sugar.

  “S-sorry, Miss,” he said, turning around and looking dead into Sugar’s eyes.

  Seth spent two years trying to forget about her. Spent weeks at the bottom of a whiskey bottle trying to figure what had gone wrong between them, tossed and turned in his bed for months because Lappy Clayton walked heavy and loud through his dreams and laughed himself into his nightmares.

  Seth couldn’t stand the sound his bedsprings made when he lay down at night because it reminded him of Sugar and that half-breed man Lappy, and how the sound of her creaking bedsprings split the night around him when he stood waiting and wondering below her open window.

  He couldn’t stand that sound for a long time, and had thrown his mattress down onto the floor and slept that way until he met Gloria.

  He was surprised she’d even noticed him. He was rail thin by then, with dark circles under his eyes and a nervous tic that pulled the corners of his mouth up and down whenever he wasn’t engaged in conversation, which was most times.

  She’d come into the diner and taken a seat right at the counter, smiling sweetly and purring her response to Seth’s request for her order.

  “Coffee, black, two sugars.”

  He hadn’t even noticed how soft and supple her lips looked beneath the rose-colored gloss, or her long lashes and button nose. Every man in the diner had noticed that and more, but to Seth she was just another paying customer.

  It took at least three months and hundreds of cups of coffee for him to realize that she was a woman, and a beautiful woman at that.

  A beautiful woman that didn’t need to walk two blocks out of her way and past three coffee shops in order to get to his.

  “Man, she live on 121st Street, near Pop’s and Viola’s Chat and Chew and Morton’s. But she come all the way over here to sip her coffee and Lord knows your coffee ain’t but a half a step over shit!”

  “She had a man, a fellow name Nickel, from the Heights, but he got in some mess and then just disappeared. Now she single. Single.”

  “Heaven knows what interest she got in you. Man, you look like the walking dead if you ask me, but she asked my wife the other day if you were married or had a woman.”

  The men that seemed to spend more time at his counter than at home or work teased and taunted him about Gloria until finally he took a chance and spoke to her about something other than what was on special for the day.

  One Tuesday morning as the rain fell outside his window and dawn remained camouflaged behind gray clouds, Seth lay awake mentally counting out the money he had banked away in Lincoln Federal Savings and realized that that was all he had and nothing more.

  He sat straight up as if awakened from a long dream and looked around the room he’d been renting for the past five years. Two pairs of shoes, one pair fo
r work and one for weddings and funerals—neither of which he attended. A black suit that hung limp from the hook at the back of his closet door and was in need of a good dry cleaner.

  There was the picture of his family enclosed in a simple silver frame, a bottle of cologne he got from a customer one Christmas, his watch and a small Bible his mother gave him when he turned eighteen and struck out on his own. All of these items were lined up neatly across the top of his dresser.

  There was the car, the diner and the bank account. That was it and had been enough until that Tuesday morning.

  He was thirty-four years old with no wife or children and no prospects. His days were filled with sunny-side-up eggs, grits, chopped barbecue and open-faced grilled cheese sandwiches.

  Seth thought about what the men said about Gloria, decided that he would take another chance at that part of his life and went down to Chuck’s for a professional cut and shave.

  Gloria’s mother, Loretta, was the one who’d found Seth. She had stumbled onto the diner and the sorry-looking man behind the counter quite by accident.

  She was looking for a husband for herself and wouldn’t have minded a younger man. The two she’d buried had after their demise greatly increased her bank account, but during their life, had done nothing for her sexual appetite.

  When she wandered into the diner, she’d almost recoiled at the sight of Seth, but business was business and her trained eye wandered to his ring finger and saw that there was no ring present, not even light-colored flesh indicating one had ever been there.

  Loretta patted her red hair into place and thought that he would be good for her daughter Gloria. Loretta liked her men tall and meaty. The man waiting for her to give him her order looked as frail and fragile as the dying potted plant sitting in his front window.

  “Girl, he ain’t married and look like he got one foot in the grave.”

  “Maybe he got a disease?”

  “A disease of the heart is what he got.”

  “A bad heart? Nu-uh, Mama, I don’t want no man dropping dead on top of me.”

  “Not like that, I mean he’s heartbroken.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s the word around Harlem.”

  “Really?”

  And so Gloria began her quest to snag the only single black businessman in Harlem.

  Gloria was beautiful, no one could deny it, and she had had her pick of men. Married men, that is. The single men she met were womanizers and couldn’t seem to give her what she wanted. So for years Gloria had settled with being the other woman—their I‘ll-be-there-after-midnight chick and Did-you-receive-the-flowers-and-chocolates-I-sent-you-because-I- couldn’t-get-out-last-night girl.

  She had had enough of that and wanted her own man ... with money.

  She took a good look at broken, downtrodden, sick-hearted Seth Taylor and she knew that her mama was right, he was exactly what she needed.

  “He drives a nice car.”

  “Yeah, but he living in a room.”

  “And you living in a castle?”

  “Well how come he ain’t got a house?”

  “ ‘Cause he ain’t got a wife.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But it’s been almost two months and he ain’t said more than ‘what can I get you,’ to me.”

  “Be patient, Gloria, be patient.”

  And she was. Every day for three months she took her place at the far end of the counter and sipped coffee, black with two sugars, waiting for the day when he would finally come over to her and say something other than “What would you like today?”

  That day came on a Tuesday.

  “What would you like today?”

  “Coffee, black, two sugars and uhm, toast. Please.”

  “You look nice,” Seth whispered to her and blushed.

  “Thank you,” Gloria responded and smiled. She knew then that she had him hook, line and sinker.

  Joe didn’t think he had an ounce of anguish left in him. He thought it had drained away with each passing year. He knew he was empty when he could walk past the field where Jude’s body was found and not cry. His body still shook, trembled uncontrollably as if wrapped in a blue chill, but at least his eyes remained dry even though he wept on the inside.

  Even when he lost his mother, the pain that took him over was round and dull, so much different from the sharp, biting agony that had gripped him when his daughter was killed.

  Up until the winter of 1955, he had convinced himself that he was done with agony and grief and felt sure that the Lord would spare him the displeasure of looking down on the stitched-closed eyes of another one of his children.

  He’d watched his wife, Pearl, come undone beneath the weight of their daughter’s death and then beheld the wondrous event of her reinvention when Sugar strolled into town.

  He knew that the grief she’d carried inside of her for fifteen years had not disappeared (Sugar’s likeness to Jude would not allow that to happen), but he felt that it had rounded out like his own, had become a quiet ache instead of the wailing pain that had torn her down in the beginning. With Sugar around, Pearl was able to take in some joy and not feel guilty about doing that without Jude.

  Joe should have stepped in as soon as he saw Pearl’s smiles becoming too broad and too bright. He should have sat her down and explained, when she started giving herself over to him again at night. He should have probably called both women to him and revealed his suspicions about who Sugar Lacey really was, but he was selfish and enjoyed hearing his wife greet every new day with a song and so he let it be and then Seth came home and everything fell apart all over again.

  Seth stood staring at Sugar.

  Sugar didn’t know whether to say hello, howdy or ‘evening. She knew she should say something; all eyes were on her now.

  She raised her hand in some sort of awkward gesture of greeting but it came off wrong and so she dropped it back down to her side and rubbed her hip with the hand that still had some sense and skill.

  “Joe.” She finally decided to address Joe when she could no longer stand looking at Seth and it had gotten so quiet that she could hear the thin electric charge that came off the fireflies buzzing around them.

  Joe closed his eyes as the sound of Sugar’s voice washed over him. She was real.

  He wanted to laugh out loud, jump up, grab her and spin her around in the air.

  “You?” Seth said after the feeling came back to his tongue.

  He felt anger pushing at him, pushing him right back to that night on Grove Street, banging on the door of #10, yelling Sugar’s name out over and over again.

  He could feel his parents’ hands on his shoulders, pushing at his chest, restraining him from approaching that half-breed fool that hadn’t even taken the time to look at him.

  He could hear Lappy calling her name, once, sharp and confidently. Then he saw her, the woman he loved, the woman he was going to take back to New York with him and start a family with, he saw her open the door and let Lappy in without even giving Seth a first look.

  “You!” he shouted again after the memories fueled his anger.

  Joe was up and on his feet now. Seth began to move toward Sugar, his mouth working and hands trembling. Joe stepped around him, blocking him, pleading with him to come to his senses.

  Someone was saying sorry over and over again, one sorry for every day of every year they had lived since they last laid eyes on each other.

  Sugar looked at Mercy, who had not spoken a word since they’d left St. Louis, and then over at the long faces on the old men.

  None of their mouths were moving but yet the apologies echoed all around her until her tongue slipped between her teeth and she knew that she was the one making the apologies.

  “You’re sorry? Sorry?” Seth couldn’t seem to understand that she was or that it was even the truth. “I’m sorry you’re not dead!” he said and his anger was punctuated by the long and short sounds of the car horn Gloria had begun to lay on.

  “Wait a
goddamn minute, Gloria!” he screamed, sending spittle everywhere.

  “Son—” Joe tried to interject but Seth took a rough step forward and cut him off.

  “Do you know what you did to me? Do you!” he said, raising his hand and pointing a shaky finger at her.

  Sugar wanted to drop her eyes and nod her head yes. Yes, she did know what she’d done to him, but did he know what had been done to her? Did he know that she had suffered too and was still suffering?

  Seth took another threatening step toward her. His chest bumped his father’s and Joe gave him a rough shove backward.

  “Enough,” Joe barked.

  Sugar jumped at the harsh sound of his voice. She had never, not in the few months she’d been in his company, heard him speak in such a manner.

  “Enough,” he said again, calmer this time, and bringing his hands to rest on Seth’s shoulders.

  Seth had never raised a hand to his father, ever. But he was in the thick of anger and fought to control the urge to knock Joe down to the ground.

  “Seth?” A small voice floated out of nowhere. “Seth, what’s happening? What’s going on?”

  “Go back to the car, Gloria,” Seth said without looking at her.

  “You know this woman?” she asked, taking a bold step forward.

  “Go back to the car,” Seth said again, his anger backing up in his throat, blocking off his air supply.

  Gloria looked at her husband’s face. His dark skin was flushed and there were small beads of sweat forming above his top lip and across his forehead. She had never seen him this enraged, not even when she announced that her mother was moving in with them.

  “Seth, I want to know what the hell is going on here and I want to know now.” Her words were for Seth but her eyes swung between Sugar and Mercy like a pendulum. She clutched her child to her chest and took another step closer, placing herself alongside Sugar.

  “This here is family business,” Joe said, gripping his son’s shoulders. “Go on back to the car and we will all be along shortly.”