This Bitter Earth Read online

  Every now and then Ruby would ask if Sara had said anything before she died.

  “She ain’t say nothing?” “I told you I woke up and she was there in the chair by the window. Already gone.”

  Sugar stuck to her story and never looked in May’s or Ruby’s eyes when she told it.

  May passed away four months later, just as spring was approaching and the scent of magnolia rolled in from the mountains.

  It wasn’t a surprise to anyone when she stopped sweeping the kitchen floor, put the broom to rest in its corner, climbed the stairs, changed into her nightdress and took to her bed.

  The grief she suffered after losing Sara weighed heavily on her and she constantly fretted about the last moments she’d had with her sister.

  “I was so angry, so damn angry at her!” She would interject her regret into any piece of conversation that happened to be taking place, whether it had to do with Sara or not. “I shouldn’t have been, though. That was just Sara.”

  “Yes, Sister, that’s just how she was. But she okay now, she with her maker and everything is okay,” Ruby would say and pat May’s hand.

  “I shouldn’t have slapped her,” May would mumble and then go off to be alone.

  On the fifth day after May took to her bed, she stopped eating solid food.

  “Just bring me another Mason jar,” she would say whenever Sugar or Ruby came to her bedroom with a tray of food.

  “Sister, you need to eat. Got to keep your strength up.” Ruby smiled when she spoke, but Sugar heard the fear in her words, saw the concern in her eyes.

  “Just bring it to me.”

  And Ruby did.

  May dried up as fast as the thyme and rosemary Ruby hung upside down along the inside of the kitchen’s window ledge; wasted away until Sugar and Ruby had to step all the way into the room to see for sure that May was somewhere in the mess of sheets and quilts on the bed.

  “Bring me Papa’s pipe.”

  Sugar was sitting by May’s bed staring at the flames that danced in the fireplace, thinking about Bigelow.

  “What you say, May?”

  “I said, bring me Papa’s pipe.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sugar mumbled and dismissed May’s request as incoherent babbling.

  “Bring it here, Sugar, now!”

  Sugar jumped at the strength of May’s voice. “What, May, what?” May had Sugar’s undivided attention now. “What you want?”

  “Papa’s pipe,” May repeated herself; her words came out heavy and thick.

  Sugar just blinked at her. “Pipe? What pipe? Where?”

  “On top of the mantel.”

  Sugar moved her eyes over the mantel and didn’t see anything there but a small handmade wooden crucifix, two books, a wooden box and a small silver oval-shaped picture frame.

  “Ain’t no pipe up there, May.” Sugar got up and was about to head downstairs to get Ruby when she decided to check the contents of the box.

  Inside was indeed a pipe as well as a small velvet bag filled with tobacco and a gold lighter with the initials I.T. carved on its front.

  She picked up the box and carried it over to the bed. May was wheezing and her eyes watered as she stared up at the ceiling. “Fill it up and light it for me.”

  Sugar hesitated. “I don’t think you should be smoking. I mean, in your condition.” Sugar stepped back a pace or two. “I think maybe I should check with Ruby and see—”

  “Who more grown here, me or you? I say fill it up and light it.”

  “Ruby!” Sugar yelled over her shoulder as she sat down on the bed and hurriedly began to empty the tobacco into the pipe. “Ruby!” Her hands were shaking as she packed the tobacco into the bowl of the pipe before placing the curved end between her teeth.

  “Light it, light it.” May spoke as her head twisted back and forth in the pillow. Her eyes were watering badly now and every breath she took was followed by a sound that reminded Sugar of dry leaves dancing at the mouth of a cave.

  “I’m trying, May. Ruby!”

  Sugar had the pipe between her teeth and had to speak from the side of her mouth. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably now as her attention was torn between May’s twisting head and the lighter. She flicked it, once, twice, three times and nothing happened.

  “Light it!” May was screaming now.

  “Ruby! Ruby!” Sugar yelled again.

  Finally the flint caught and a small blue flame appeared. Sugar had never smoked a pipe in her life, hadn’t even had a cigarette since she arrived in Short Junction. Now she was pulling on the end of a pipe, kindling tobacco for May. Her head spun as her lungs filled with smoke.

  “Jes ... Jesus Christ!” Sugar gagged and then spat into her hand. “Ruby!” she yelled her name again and again between coughing fits. The last thing she wanted to do was put the lit pipe in May’s outstretched hand.

  “Give it here.” May’s eyes sparkled and Sugar thought she saw a small smile trying to break across her face. “Gimme Papa’s pipe,” May said and then she did smile.

  May placed the pipe between her lips and began to take short, rhythmic puffs that even put Sugar at ease. The room filled with an aroma that reminded Sugar of chamomile and the blanket Pearl wrapped around herself when she felt happy, sad or both.

  “Hmmmm.” May removed the pipe from her mouth and let off a long stream of smoke before placing it back in again.

  Her eyes were back on the ceiling but her face looked as though someone had turned a light on inside of her.

  Sugar sat on the side of the bed watching, but not understanding what it was she was seeing.

  “May—” she started to say, but May turned her head toward her and shushed her.

  “Shhhh, now. Papa talking. Mama there too, so is Sara. They look so beautiful ... sooo beautiful.”

  Sugar didn’t want to leave her to find Ruby, but she did not want to see death take another life.

  “Ruby!” she called out again and still no response came.

  May giggled and then smiled and Sugar could swear she saw her blush before she turned her head toward her again.

  “Ruby coming soon, I heard the pot drop,” May mumbled before her hand fell down to her chest, sending the pipe and its charred contents across the bed.

  Sugar slapped at the smoking bits of tobacco, brushing them off the sheet and to the ground. When she turned to look back at May, her eyes were open and staring, her body still. May was gone.

  “Oh, my God,” Sugar cried and threw her hands up to her face.

  The clattering sound of metal hitting the floor followed, and Sugar knew that a pot had indeed dropped and both May and Ruby were dead.

  People stared at her when she came into town to buy food, pick up a package from the post office or just for a change of scenery.

  Children pointed and snickered behind curved palms and the older ones—the ones who felt that they were grown because they had moved past holding their father’s hands or clinging to the skirts of their mothers—felt they had earned the right to sneer at her, talk out loud about who she was and what had happened in the Lacey home when she’d arrived a season ago.

  “Witch,” some called her. “Devil,” most said.

  After May and Ruby died, the sheriff came to investigate Sugar, asking her questions that made her mouth curl and twist as she fought to keep back the cuss words that pushed at her clenched teeth.

  “Why would you give a sick old woman a pipe to smoke?”

  “Don’t you think that pot was too big and heavy for Ruby to lift? Poor thing, the strain and the loss of her sister probably caused her heart to give out the way it did.”

  “Where you been all these years?”

  “Them sisters had any life insurance?”

  “What you gaining from their sudden demise?”

  Sugar looked him right in his blue eyes and answered all of his questions as calmly and efficiently as she could. Whenever she felt herself about to lose control she just picked up the glass of water she’d pou
red for herself and took a sip. Not a big one, mind you. Just small ones, enough to keep her mouth moist and allow her mind to focus on something else, if only for a moment.

  “How you a Lacey and them sisters ain’t never had no children ?” he asked, scratching under his arms and then down between his legs.

  “They just took me in and give me their name.”

  “Just like that? Well, that don’t sound like no legal adoption to me. Sound like one to you, Kurt?” he said, turning his big hog head toward his deputy. His neck was thick and red and Sugar thought how appropriate that was.

  “Nossir, not at all.”

  “Uh-huh. Where your real mama at?” he asked as he picked something from his nose.

  “Dead,” she said.

  “Daddy?” he asked and flicked something to the floor.

  Sugar hesitated for a moment. She could feel her eyes begin to twitch and she took a sip of water.

  “Don’t know who he is.” And then, “Or was,” she added without blinking.

  The sheriff rubbed his massive stomach and gave Sugar a look that made her skin crawl.

  “Uh-huh. Just you here now?” he said, looking past Sugar toward the stairs.

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you stay close, this is still an ongoing investigation,” he said, standing up and hitching his pants over his stomach.

  Hours turned into days and days into nights filled with the sound of Pearl’s voice, Jude’s crying, and a hundred sharp blades that wheeled at her through the blackness.

  Nothing came of the investigation and Sugar stayed in Short Junction for nine more winters before she decided to leave.

  The Lacey women had willed the house to her and Sugar supposed that entitled her to the 7,240 dollars she found stuffed in coffee cans and buried in the freezer May had purchased back in ‘54.

  Sugar kept to herself and didn’t share more than ten straight words with anyone, until the day a white man and black woman came knocking on her door. She didn’t invite them in or offer them a cool glass of water; she just stepped out onto the porch, folded her hands across her chest and listened to what they had to say.

  When they left, promising to return within a week, Sugar couldn’t seem to stop their words from bouncing around in her head.

  “Historical.”

  “Preservation.”

  “Six thousand dollars.”

  “Original and intact.”

  Lincoln had slept there, they said, right in that very house. President Abraham Lincoln had walked through those halls and discussed in great length with John Lacey, a good friend, long-time confidant and grandfather to the Lacey women, his concerns about the war his country was about to be thrown into.

  Abbey, the Lacey women’s grandmother and slave to John Lacey, had probably served Lincoln from the very same silver tea set that sat shimmering in the china cabinet.

  Bigelow

  Summer 1956

  Chapter 8

  To Pearl it seemed that #10 Grove Street was weeping, sometimes screaming and other times just moaning. Sometimes, though, she could almost fool herself into believing that those loud cries of sorrow were the sounds of the wind caught in the trees or tearing through the rows of wheat and alfalfa that grew across the road.

  But when it came to the blood, there was no tricking herself into believing it was anything but what it was. So Pearl just bit her bottom lip and wrung her hands when her eyes happened to fall on #10 and the spaces on the house where the clapboard had come loose.

  The earth was bitter around #10, the flowers were all gone, killed off by weeds or plucked by people who still came to stand and look at the place where she once lived and almost died. They pointed at the window where she’d sat, naked, black and bold. The window where Seth had called to her and then later, where she’d hurled curse words that broke through the night and sent him running.

  Pearl couldn’t sleep in full hours anymore, #10 wouldn’t allow it, so she slept during the silent minutes between the moans. She slept during the space of time where the house just fretted before the pain struck again in the rafters, along the floorboards or down the spine of the banister.

  Joe never seemed to hear it, or at least pretended not to. In fact he hardly ever looked over at #10. His head didn’t even turn in that direction when he stepped out on the porch to catch a late-night breeze or check the sky for clouds before heading toward town.

  He preferred instead to look out at the fields or down the road toward town, allowing his thoughts to drift on something other than #10 and the daughter that used to live there.

  Joe had taken to humming to himself whenever he was in the presence of #10, odd tunes that Pearl did not recognize, sad tunes that somehow went along with the misery that was spilling out of #10. Tunes that made Pearl feel as if their time in that place, on that side of town, had come to an end and a change was needed in order to keep on living.

  She mentioned to Joe that a change was due and maybe across town, close to where the railroad tracks ran like silver veins through the land, would be the place to resettle and enjoy their old age years together.

  Joe just raised bushy eyebrows and asked, “Why, Pearl? Why you wanna up and leave the house we been living in for forty years?”

  Pearl couldn’t give him an answer, not without lying, so she said nothing and reached for the Bible as she prayed for a strong wind or violent storm to come along and rip #10 from God’s green earth, hurling it far, far away from there.

  Number ten was sold that summer. Joe mentioned it to Pearl in passing over lunch, right before he picked up his glass of lemonade and just as the musical introduction to Still of the Night came across the radio. Pearl nodded her head and waved a fly away from the last biscuit that sat on the small white plate between them. He waited for her to raise her eyes, swallow or at least reach for the biscuit. But she did nothing but continue to chew the food that was already in her mouth.

  Joe watched the steady movement of her jaw and the small beads of sweat that formed around her hairline and across the bridge of her nose. He wanted to say something about the dark circles beneath her eyes and make a point of how her clothes had started to hang from her body just as they did all those years ago after Jude was killed and Pearl lost her spirit. But he held his tongue and waited for Pearl to respond. She said nothing.

  “It went for about twenty-five hundred. The house and the land,” he said when the silence around them went stale. “They got a good piece of land. Fertile.”

  Joe wanted to reach for the biscuit, wanted to reach for Pearl, but he kept talking instead. “The house is sound too. Strong. Solid.”

  Pearl still did not say a word.

  “That land gives back more than it take. Fertile.”

  He stopped then, because the fly was attacking his ear and his thoughts were becoming scattered.

  Pearl nodded, flinched a bit as the sounds from #10 cut through Joe’s words and then she reached for the biscuit.

  Two days later the sky above Grove Street lit up orange and yellow, and black smoke billowed out and across the fields that marked the south side of town.

  The only firehouse in the county was five towns away in Saw Creek. People came out with buckets filled with water to throw onto the growing flames. In the end it was hopeless. There was little anyone could do but stand back and watch as #10 burned to the ground.

  “It’s been dry,” some said.

  “Hot as hell for June.”

  “No rain in weeks.”

  There were more than enough reasons for the house to have gone up.

  “Anyone seen Alberta’s boy?”

  “Harper?”

  “Nah, the older one. Kale, I think.”

  “Nah, that’s the middle boy. You mean Wilfred.”

  “Yeah, Wilfred. He got a thing for matches.”

  “Ain’t seen him ‘round.”

  “Yeah, that Wilfred got a thing for matches.”

  By the time the truck arrived, #10 w
as nothing more than a pile of smoldering ashes. The grass was black and the trees that stood closest to the house were burnt and naked.

  “Damn shame,” Joe said as he stepped up onto the porch.

  “Uh-huh,” Pearl said and turned to go back into the house.

  Joe watched her walk through the doorway, dismissing the smell of gasoline that followed her.

  Part Two

  Once and Again... St. Louis-1965

  Chapter 9

  WHEN the black-and-yellow checkered cab pulled up in front of Mary Bedford’s house Sugar knew immediately that she wouldn’t be there long. It wasn’t because she wasn’t expected or even because there was a strong possibility that she would not be welcomed.

  Well, she had been gone for over ten years and had promised to write and/or call. She had done neither. Sugar didn’t really know why she’d come back after all this time, but she supposed it was the nightmares that finally brought her back. Mary beckoning her through the red door and into a darkened hallway where Nina Simone’s version of Little Girl Blue played too fast on a phonograph. Laughter and the whimpering sounds of a small child bounced off the walls around them. Sugar would feel herself stepping backward, but Mary would always take hold of her wrist, dragging her deeper into the house.

  They’d run forever down a hallway, turning into a tunnel where tiny hands reached out at them, yellow ribbons moved in and out of the darkness, and when she looked down the floor would not be a floor at all but a river of blood.

  Sugar feels her heart begin to bang in her chest and fear begins a slow climb up her spine. She tries to snatch away from Mary’s grasp, whose grip on Sugar only becomes tighter.

  They’d keep moving until they reached a kitchen where the only light came from the open door of a refrigerator. And every time, Mary would point at the small square kitchen table and begin to weep.

  There is a figure huddled beneath it. Sugar can’t see her face, but she reaches to touch the head adorned in yellow ribbons that are torn and ragged at the ends.