This Bitter Earth Read online

  “Humph.”

  “Look at them scars all across her stomach. My God, someone ripped into her like she was a pig gone to slaughter.”

  “Yeah, looks that way. We got any of the rubbing alcohol left?”

  “Used the last of it two days ago. Got some brandy, though.”

  “Too much sugar in that. Go on and look under my bed, I got a jar of corn liquor there.”

  “You got what? Doctor say you was to stop drinking that stuff.”

  “You talking again, Sara.”

  “Umph.”

  “Sister, you okay? You swaying some. Maybe you should sit down.”

  “Ruby, you don’t worry about me. It’s ‘bout my time to go. This one here the one we all need to be worried about, she got plenty of years left. Plenty.”

  “You may think so, but ain’t it plain as day that that ain’t what she think? Lord have mercy, you know anyone that want to live sit out in the bitter cold all night? Look to me like she prefer the comfort of a pine box.”

  “Lord, child, what you go and do to yourself?”

  “You think she can hear you, May?”

  “She can hear me. Somewhere in the blackness she can hear me.”

  “Shoot, she crazy just like her grandmother. Come to think of it, her mama wasn’t wrapped too tight neither.”

  “She ain’t crazy, just tired.”

  “Tired?”

  “Tired of living?”

  “Just tired.”

  “Them scars, you think she did that to herself?”

  “They still fresh.”

  “You think she did that to herself?”

  “Lord, them cuts must go at least two inches deep.”

  “Sisters, you think she did that—”

  “We did it to her.”

  “What you saying?”

  “I’m saying we did it to her.”

  “We did no such thing!”

  “Now you talking crazy. I think you’d better sit down like Ruby suggested ‘cause I know I ain’t got that child’s blood on my hands.”

  “Her blood on all of our hands.” “Look to me like blood on the hands of the one who carved her up and—”

  “Look to me like you need to stop running your mouth and get to fetching some more hot water. Ruby, empty that corn liquor over these here scars.”

  “Sister, but they open and so deep ... I don’t think we—”

  “I can see that, I ain’t blind.”

  “But, uhm—”

  “Do as I say, Ruby.”

  “Yeah, do it, Ruby.”

  “She can take it, she’s strong enough to take it.”

  Sarah Cummings’ boy, Albert, was the one who’d discovered Sugar and got her heart to beating again. He was the only one who stopped and really looked hard because he’d passed the same spot twice in little more than half an hour and realized that the person sitting on the Lacey porch hadn’t moved at all, not one inch.

  The pounding of his fists on Sugar’s cold hard chest pulled the Laceys from their slumber; the screams for help ripped them from their beds and dragged them down the stairs and out the front door.

  “Who that there?”

  “Lord have mercy, who that? Albert?”

  “Jesus, is that Sugar?”

  Each sister took a step back before taking a step forward, clutching their chests and looking down into the half-dead face of the woman they had raised from infancy.

  They moved closer, one baby step at a time, clutching at the embroidered breasts of their long cotton gowns. Timidly they moved closer, shoulders touching. They leaned over Albert’s shoulder, careful to avoid his curled fist as he swung it up and then down hard onto Sugar’s chest.

  “She dead?” They turned suddenly on one another, eyes meeting and then dropping away, realizing that all three had asked the question at the same time in the same low tone.

  Albert didn’t answer, because he wasn’t sure, so he just kept pounding, making sure to stop every fourth blow to press his head against Sugar’s chest and listen for the sound of her heart.

  A crowd was gathering, but not more than one or two people ventured inside the gate and onto the Lacey property. The few who did kept their distance, preferring to brave the glare that came up from the snow rather than step too close to death.

  May grabbed Albert’s fist in midair.

  “She dead,” May said in a matter-of-fact tone. Their hands, suspended in midair, trembled, and Sara and Ruby did not know if it was the wind that shook them so or the forces that moved invisible around them.

  “Leave her be, she’s gone.”

  May tightened her grip on his fist. Sweat slipped in streams down the sides of Albert’s face, even though the temperature was well below zero. He struggled to get away from May’s strong grip.

  “Leave her be,” May said again.

  They stayed that way for a long time, May holding back his fist, her sisters alongside of her staring down at the woman they’d raised and loved the best way they knew how.

  The wind let loose a long moan that terrified the spectators and sent some hurrying off to tell of what was happening.

  The ones that remained, moved closer.

  Sara didn’t notice the cold until the wind cried out, startling the trees and causing their limbs to chatter like teeth.

  She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth and that’s when she saw the small puffs of air, like chimney smoke, coming from between Sugar’s parted blue lips.

  “She breathing,” Sara said in a small voice.

  “What you say?” May said, turning to look at her.

  “I said she‘s—”

  “—breathing!” Albert finished her sentence, snatched his fist from May’s grasp and scooped Sugar up all at the same time. He pushed past the women and into the house, leaving the sisters standing in astonishment on the porch.

  The scars, all five of them, ran horizontal, from hip bone to hip bone. The flesh had been stitched badly and the thread had torn in some places, pulling the flesh apart and allowing it to smile, open mouthed, up at them.

  The sisters shuddered.

  Sara snatched the bottle of grain alcohol from Ruby and poured it over the crooked smiles on Sugar’s stomach. She was happy to do it, because she had had enough of those tortuous grins, those reproachable smirks.

  She emptied the whole bottle over Sugar’s wounds and smiled as the skin folded and then puckered until the smiles, all five of them, were replaced with frowns.

  Sugar’s body jerked, but her eyes remained closed.

  May donned her glasses and called to Ruby to bring the oil lamp and to stand close by as she began the process of re-stitching Sugar’s open wounds. When she was done, Sara went out into the parlor to where Albert was waiting to help Sugar into the bedroom she’d prepared for her.

  “She won’t make it through the night,” Sara mumbled beneath her breath.

  Sugar’s body was still cold to the touch and her dark skin looked as if she was covered in a pale blue film.

  Albert laid her gently down on the bed.

  The sisters looked down on Sugar. They all had the same thought floating through their heads, but Sara was the only one to say it aloud.

  “I said, she won’t make it through the night.”

  “Albert, bring in some more firewood before you head out,” May said, ignoring Sara’s remark for the second time.

  “Yessum,” Albert said and rushed from the room.

  “Ruby, fill this here up with some fresh water, please.” May handed Ruby a blue-and-white ceramic pitcher.

  “All right, Sister.”

  “What you got for me to do, Sister?” Sara said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “All I want you to do is shut up. That’s all. That’s the most I’ve asked of you all day. Do you think you can do that for me now?”

  May spoke to Sara as she moved around the bed, checking to make sure the sheet corners were tucked tight beneath the mattress.

 
; “I’m just saying, Sister, ‘cause she’s breathing don’t mean she’s all the way alive. She could be dead in here,” Sara said, tapping her index finger on her temple.

  May shot her a long, sobering look. “No,” she said with a heavy sigh. “You the one that’s dead in there and in there,” May said and pointed her finger at Sara’s heart.

  Chapter 3

  Word about Sugar got out quick. Even as May pulled the last stitch through Sugar’s flesh and tied the final people were on her porch, rapping on the door and fixing their faces with mock concern.

  “We done heard. She all right?”

  “She the one use to stay with y‘all. The one y’all raised from a baby?”

  May just fixed them with her cold eyes and said nothing. Ruby answered most of the questions, though not all. Sara stood back in the hall among the shadows and for once, said nothing at all. Family business was family business and she never talked outside the house about what went on inside the house.

  The last person came just as the snow started to fall again, and May had Ruby get down on her knees to pull a second Mason jar of corn liquor from beneath her bed, that along with the shotgun May had had to use the one time back in ‘24 when Shonuff Clayton tried to choke Sara to death.

  May was a big woman, six foot easy and wide. She rarely laughed and hardly ever smiled, and if that wasn’t intimidating enough to the men that had spent their time and money there, May spoke in one even tone and her eyes never wavered. May didn’t just look at you, she looked inside of you.

  No one, man or woman, had ever messed with May Lacey and that still held true, even in her old age.

  But on that day in ‘24, six days after the hog had been slaughtered and the smell of blood was still thick in the air around the pen, Shonuff Clayton stumbled in from wherever he’d been, his yellow skin tinted red and his breath stinking of alcohol. He was still clutching the pint of whiskey when he tossed two dollars at May, snatched Sara by her arm and dragged her into the house and up the stairs to the bedrooms.

  May had huffed a bit and exchanged glances with Ruby, but said nothing. She knew she was lucky to get the money; Sara was in the habit of giving it to Shonuff Clayton for free.

  “I loves him,” she had whined one day when May approached her about it.

  “If he loves you so much, then let him fuck you some other place but here. Here, there is no love and no free pussy. Here, in this house, is all business and business bring in money, not love.”

  May knew Shonuff didn’t give two bits about her sister, but Sara was too far gone to see that.

  “Men don’t fall in love with whores, Sara,” May had screamed at her back when Sara stormed off angry and hurt.

  Now someone yelled for May and then Ruby, but not Sara, and so May knew immediately Sara was the one in trouble.

  May could recall taking the stairs in twos, the sound of Ruby’s feet behind her. Her hip still pained her in bad weather from where she’d slammed into the doorframe of her bedroom in a rush to get to her bed. She’d dropped down to the floor so hard that her stockings ripped and the skin on both her knees split wide open.

  The pain must have erased the moment she reached beneath her bed and wrapped her hand around the cold steel of the shotgun, but it had happened. She knew that for sure when time swam back again and she was standing over Shonuff Clayton, the gun pointed right at his head.

  “You let her go!”

  Shonuff had Sara pinned in the corner of her bedroom. His hands were locked around her throat and his eyes were stretched wide open. He didn’t even flinch at May’s demand; his hands went tighter around Sara’s throat.

  There were four men in the room, standing behind May and Ruby, all of them shouting, pleading for Shonuff to let her go.

  “C‘mon, man, what you doing?!”

  “Shonuff, you drunk, man. Let go of her now!”

  “Please, Shonuff, please!”

  Even now the memory of it made May wince. Not the words, but the sound of their voices and her own: loud and scared.

  Up until that day May had never known fear for any moment of all the years she had been alive, and now it had been thrust upon her, stealing her breath and filling every pore of her body. She tasted it in her mouth and felt it moving through her bladder and curling through her bowels.

  “I said let her go now!” May screamed and stepped in closer.

  Sara was almost gone. Her hands had stopped clawing and slapping at Shonuff’s face and she seemed to melt beneath him.

  ‘Now! May screamed again, stepping close enough to push the barrel of the gun against Shonuff’s temple.

  He didn’t let go until May cocked the gun. He knew even in his drunken madness that she was through with talking, she had said too much already, so he let go and Sara fell gagging and coughing to the floor.

  Three men jumped on him, locking their hands around his neck, arms and waist, while the fourth man gently, very gently, eased the gun from May’s hands.

  The jar was half empty, the sun gone and the sky black when the knocking started up again. The stars were out and that’s all that should have been out at that hour of the night. “Decent people are in their homes with their families,” May grumbled as she raised her massive bulk from the wooden kitchen chair and started toward the door.

  Ruby started to follow, had even gone as far as raising up and out of her chair, but she saw the look resting on May’s face and how she rocked on her heels before reaching for the shotgun she’d placed in the corner closest to the doorway. Ruby knew then that May’s patience had slipped away with each sip she’d taken from the Mason jar.

  Her suspicions were confirmed when May swung the front door open without asking who or even what for.

  “Yes?”

  The visitor, the nosy busybody (as Ruby liked to call them), took note of the smell of liquor that came off of May’s breath, looked down and saw the shotgun that hadn’t been seen by any outsider since ‘24, and then looked up into those eyes that didn’t just look at you but looked deep inside of you, and knew that May Lacey had had enough.

  There were words that sounded like “sorry” and “good night,” but Ruby couldn’t be sure, because May had slammed the door before the words had fully spilled out from the visitor’s mouth.

  Three days passed before the wind let up, the gray clouds parted and the sun was finally able to take hold of the sky again. Three days, and the three women that at any other time would have been napping, cooking or mending remained seated around the kitchen table. They only ventured away for brief moments and then only to relieve themselves or run a damp cloth across the back of their necks and beneath their arms.

  Little conversation passed between them, and the small words that did were as insignificant as the tiny cracks that ran through the wood of the table they had stationed themselves at.

  May and Ruby took turns checking on Sugar, making sure she was still with them and hadn’t gone on to join her mother in the afterlife.

  May kept checking the corners of the bed, kept tucking them tighter and tighter beneath the mattress, as if tightly tucked sheets could keep Sugar’s life from slipping away.

  Ruby stepped in to adjust the drapes with the time of day: fully open in early morning, half drawn in the afternoon and closed at night.

  Sara wouldn’t go into the room. She watched from the hallway, wrapped in shadows as she gnawed at her cuticles.

  They waited, and on the morning of the fourth day Sara looked out the window to find twenty-four unblinking, tiny black eyes staring back at her.

  “What the—” Sara was startled and stumbled back from the window.

  “Yes, I know. Them blackbirds been out there since dawn,” Ruby said.

  “They have? Lawd have mercy, what now?”

  “Don’t know, guess we just got to wait and see.”

  “Them are some ignorant birds. Look how they done run off all the others.”

  “Yep.”

  “Mean something fo
r sure.”

  “Yep.”

  “They worse than black cats.”

  “Some say,” uttered Ruby as she tipped a bowl of peeled apples into a pot of boiling water.

  “C‘mon away from the window now. Leave ’em be ‘fore they get it in their mind to do something.” Sara said and wiped her hands across her apron.

  “What can a blackbird do to you?” May’s voice dripped with disgust.

  Sara and Ruby turned to face her. May looked like a specter behind the steam curling up from the teacup.

  “Nothing, I suppose,” Ruby said and stole one last peek out the window before dipping her long wooden spoon into the pot of boiling apples.

  “Humph,” Sara added and moved back to the table. “We all know what blackbirds mean.”

  No one said anything for a long time. There was just the sound of wood knocking against metal and fruit as Ruby stirred the apples and stared out the window.

  “You should have told me the truth.”

  The words swirled around the sisters as gentle and easy as the sweet aroma that escaped in clouds of steam from the stewing pot of apples.

  “What you say, Sister?” Ruby asked May as she peered at her over the thin rim of her glasses.

  “I ain’t said a thing,” May replied and turned her bleary eyes on Sara. May had been drinking steadily for three days and the liquor was taking its toll on her vision.

  Sara looked back at May and then over at the pot.

  “I said it.” The accusation was clearer now and as thick as the molasses Ruby was spilling into the pot.

  The sisters slowly turned their heads toward the doorway. Sugar was there, propped up against the wall. Her lips were chalky and cracked, her eyes puffed and tearing. She was rail thin and looked like a vagrant in May’s old gown.

  The women jumped to their feet and placed three pairs of hands on her. Sugar tried to shrug them off, but she was weak and her struggle, a brief one.

  They helped her to the table and set her down gently into a chair.

  The sisters took their respective seats and studied their fingers instead of answering Sugar’s question.

  Sugar laid her eyes on each of them. They were all totally gray now and the wrinkles that covered their faces were few enough to count. Their cheeks hung like jowls and age spots had begun to dot the honey-brown skin of their arms.