Southeast Georgia, August 1933
My sister Araminta—coiled tight as a camellia bud. Long teeth, snail-colored hair, small, quick hands. We live in our father’s antebellum, spinsters with a talent for stitching and sorrow, Singer treadles humming at all hours, while Papa, grieving the War of Yankee Aggression, keeps upstairs like God never to come down.
We’re primitive wiregrass. Hardshell. I first came into Flat Shoals when Sophronia, our Mama, anchored me on her lap, my bare feet not yet touching the floor, pressing me among her church sisters, stirring the air with their fans, plain dressed, plain faced, packed with secrets.
I told Mint I can’t come here anymore.
Why not?
I see it all.
Not the world Elder Hamp Mizell, Elder Forney Cobb, or Pastor “Toad” Bethea would have us see. Church men crowded on benches to one side, women to the other. Preachers, two or three, on a hard plank behind the pulpit. Half the people born bad seeded, no help for them. Half born good, no need of a shepherd. Saved or lost, no in-between. Like mama, I see better, deeper, than you will ever see yourself.
***
Ouida claims she came into this world Christmas day like Jesus. She made that up. What is not false is that Ouida’s been with us forever. She birthed Mama who slid out cauled, in a mermaid’s purse. Used fingernails to peel that purse off, leaving Mama with premonitions, visions, warnings.
It is no privilege, Mama would say. Nothing to lord over anyone. You keep it to yourself. Help if they’ll listen.
I was born half-cauled, Ouida dragging the veil off my head, draping it over my shoulders, a sticky yellow mess. I see plainest in church. Work hardened hands folded, mouths neat, eyes sad and sorry, sacrificial as the Lamb. But the tongue of the serpent flickers in Brother Shade’s mouth and Brother Isham, old soak, likes to press his calloused thumb into a woman’s soft, white arch, water muttering in the basin, washing away sin. Another lie. Sin is in the blood.
Seeing I’m about to scandalize, Mint slips me one of her crankies. I stick the tiny scroll in my pocket to read later.
When the Queen of France la-di-dahed around the Trianon in muslin, the people, who already hated her, said she was in her underwear. French silkworms, unwanted, suffocated in their threads. More and more cotton fields, more and more slaves, to appease the French court’s “muslin hunger.” One day the Queen would be parted from her head because of her foolish whim to be simple.
Araminta stabs up weird facts from books and radio, sets them down on paper spools, her penmanship a winding trail of black ants.
I keep my eye on the world’s oddities.
Don’t lose your mind over facts that don’t hang straight, I warn her.
At least I’m not some old pickle puss.
Ha.
I have no pastimes. I’m busy fending off information that pours into my head, names and numbers flashing blue in front of my eyes, a tight iron band squeezing around my temples the day before a bad earthquake or typhoon somewhere in the world, or a door upstairs flying open as if from a powerful wind, a crash, then a long, eerie quiet before news of an assassination, a train wreck, some child drowning.
***
Here at Flat Shoals, men come in through one door, women another, reminding us that marriage isn’t the be-all-end-all. Why men sit on one side, women the other, I can’t tell you. No colored church glass, no curtains, no carpet, no Babylonian pipe organ. Not one tambourine. Just heart pine, with an outhouse out back for our animal natures.
I will rise and go to Jesus, He will embrace me in his arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior; Oh, there are ten thousand charms.
I shape sing with the others, sing til the boards shake, let loose a mournful howl until Mint gives me a glare and I glare back.
Elder “Toad” Bethea is a redheaded, dumpy old man, not much liked, his head barely peeping over the “bookboard” of the pulpit. When he gets fired up, he bounces up and down on his heels, appearing, disappearing. Once in a while, like now, he drops to all fours, chants nonsense, his big, fat fundament waving in the air til I whisper to Mint, just give me a pin to stick in it. Elder Toad is a preacher of the wang-doodle sort, he does the suck-in and blow-out of breath, the ah! and the uh! Today it’s Revelations 16:22 …and the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up… his voice rolling and sighing through us like a thousand harp strings, growling, barking, tender-drunk. But I’ve known since I was young and he wheedled me into the woods behind the outhouse that his seed is rotted, a lecher’s eye in soft, white fruit and that his wife, Prucie, is dumb as a day-blind possum. Under her wishful eye Elder Toad gets away with everything. Scot free.
I’m working on a spell.
Mint nudges me with her pick ax elbow. Time to go.
***
We pass by the same old sign nailed to a buckeye. Three faded lines through a stretched out “0,” supposed to resemble a loaf of bread. Food here . . . A big arrow under the loaf points to our house.
That hobo sign is not as hopeful as it looks. We don’t feed drifters unless they work first. Mint and I are old, busy sewing, and Ouida’s half useless though we’ve never known a day without her. Even our burial plots lie close, time to come when every difference, discord and division between us will be stripped and His Kingdom in glory! will come.
When a drifter does show up, hoping for a piece of beef, a cold tater, we might ask him to clean under the back porch, turn a mattress, sweep the sand yard around the house, shell pecans, pop peanuts. After, he can eat whatever Ouida puts out. Hoecake, coffee with cane syrup, turnip greens and potlicker, yams. One time an Odd Fellow came up to the house tricked out in ribbons, tin stars, other gingleties, preaching how the carrion crow has just as much right to his food as the dove. Mint preached back. In our Father’s mansion, she told him, we are Two Seeders, seeds of Christ. You are a seed of the Serpent, a child of wrath. She carried on about the generation of Adam, the generation of Jesus Christ and the generation of vipers from which you—poking him in the chest—and all your other Odd Fellows, Freemasons, Grand Orders of Moose, Heptosophs and the like will drown for all eternity in a lake of endless fire. Mr. O.F. mended the back gate, chopped firewood, ate two hoecakes, drained his coffee cup and moved on, unperturbed.
We go on down the dusty road past now-empty fields where Mint and me used to haul tin pails of molasses and white arsenic, use sticks to paint poison syrup on the cotton bolls, kill the weevils. We cut through the pecan orchard to the family cemetery with its bow and picket fence. Mint and me the fifth, last generation. Papa’s grave, half dug, lies beside Mama’s. He pitched that sad hole one day until we took him home, hid the shovel. Hasn’t rained for two years, not a drop.
We may all starve to death.
We don’t get many hoboes, too hard to find us behind all the loblollies screening the road, dark and high as a fence. It’s the only house we’ve known, ten thousand bricks slapped and molded from local pond clay by the long-dead hands of Negroes, painted white as the dead Queen’s muslin, crumbling to pieces. Doric columns full of termites.
***
First of every month, a Co-Cola truck rumbles in, picks up our finished uniforms, leaves off material for more. After Mama died, we taught ourselves to darn socks on wooden eggs, stitch lopsided handkerchiefs, baste easy pattern skirts, sew housecoats. We’ve made a little reputation off our housecoats, forty-seven cent reversible Hooverettes, sewed from flour sacks with floral designs. The women from Flat Shoals gave us work out of pity at first, then townspeople started driving out, bringing us old clothes to cut down, hem up. Tailorings. A dead woman’s church dress made into girls’ school dresses, Peter Pan collars of white pique. A dead man’s church suit cut down to boys’ short trouser pants.
***
Ouida is half Cherokee, half Negro. Shrimp-sized. She claims to know every important thing there is to know, and I learned from my earliest days not to argue. Her mama and daddy worked for ours until the day they died. Ouida’s daddy was a double-headed conjure man, could do good and jinx work, her mama a root doctor. She blew into Mint’s little baby mouth one time, cured the thrush. Put conjure bags under our beds to protect us, red flannel concerns, lumpy with snake bone, peach seed, lodestone, frog stool, leg of a graveyard rabbit or crow’s foot, maybe some Keep Away or Dragon Blood powder, wrapped tight with string. She could talk the fire out of you or anybody. One time Mint dropped a kettle of hot water, scorched herself. Ouida’s mama breathed over both legs, mumbled some words, the pain disappeared. Negroes mostly, not all, showed up to our back door for spells and cures, and Ouida, small and quiet as a flitter mouse, never missed a trick. After Mama died, she took over as our mother, favoring me, teaching me that the least thing on earth, down to a blade of grass, a mote of dust, a fingernail paring, a spray of spit or drop of red blood has Spirit Power. Used right, the Power takes away sickness, can make people do things like give you money for no reason or love you, forsaking all others. She says the dead walk around everywhere, down roads, through woods, they even pass by windows, sit beside you in church, fly by overhead. Ouida’s seen Mama walk right through the walls of our house, wearing a felt hat with pheasant feathers, a string of black beads.
***
Mint keeps her brown Philco turned low. Flat Shoals preachers say the radio is ungodly. In my sewing room, before I worked for Co-Cola, I used to fall into fits from wandering too deep into some woman’s dress, some man’s trousers, their petty blunderings and bone crimes speaking to me. A tired seam, ripped open, has a bad odor. Soul decay, like grime, gathers, sticks. The seizing got so bad I had to quit tailoring. When an ad went out for Co-Cola seamstresses, I signed right up.
Co-Cola uniforms are a snap. Pants, shirt, tan and green stripe. Shirt buttons, zipper, an apple red patch, Drink Coca Cola, on the right side pocket. Six a month, seventy-two a year. I like to think of all those Co-Cola delivery men driving around Georgia, Alabama, big cities like Savannah, Tuscaloosa, Augusta, delivering bottles, collecting empties, wearing uniforms I made, no clue who.
Watching me, Mint gave up tailoring, took up easier work, sewing uniforms.
***
I see through my sister like I see through everybody else, and these Co-Cola uniforms are creating a havoc in her. I see her stuff the empty sleeves, fill out the flat trouser legs. Scare up dream men. They accumulate in her room, lounge about smoking, winking, lewd-mouthed and handsome, every last one. Instead of crankies, she scribbles secrets, tucks them into shirt collars, trouser hems, waistbands, pockets.
Why?
Ever heard of an S.O.S.? Message in a Bottle?
Message in a shirt pocket, you mean.
Or the place between a man’s legs. Laughs like she’s strangling on a bone.
Araminta. You’re trying to call some man into this house.
So?
You don’t know what type of man, that’s what’s so. You could be calling in a hoodoo phantom ghost-man.
Jelly on a roll, Yankee Doodle, Red Hot Poker. You’re jealous, she hooted.
No, I’m not. I just don’t need some pop-eyed poot to show up, worry whose woodpile he’ll slither into next.
She switches subjects. Have you noticed how Ouida’s getting more and more hooked over? She looks like some old candy cane.
***
Ouida carries breakfast trays upstairs. Washes his body, trims his beard, fingernails, toenails. Changes soiled bedding. Last time I went up there, he didn’t know me, said nasty things before thrusting a scrawny arm out and grabbing my crotch. When he did the same to Mint, I told her he’d gone thin in the head. Only Ouida’s safe around him now.
She rules this house.
In a half-gallon Mason jar, Mama’s caul looks like a big sallow crisp. That’s our gold egg, I tell Mint. If we run short, we can break off and sell the little pieces. Sailors pay up to a thousand dollars for caul protection. With a piece of dry caul in his pocket he won’t drown in case of shipwreck.
There’s no sailors here, Mint says. And Papa’s got money buried everywhere.
Confederate bonds. Worthless.
***
Clayson Odum rose up before us like a pillar of sun. No premonition, no tight band around my temples, no flashes of blue light. No warning but for wavy letters I could barely make out in the green mold on my windowsill. B E W A R
I had stepped out on the porch early one morning, intending to sweep the yard, check for copperhead nests before it got too hot. Instead, I found a huge man squatted square as blazes on the steps. When he stood up, all the way up, I saw he was wearing a brand new Co-Cola uniform, one Mint had sewn a note into, some kind of S.O.S. inside the collar that had itched a boil on his neck so bad, he had to cut the collar open, find what was in there, read the tiny ant cry that had carried him here.
Afternoon, ma’am. Miss Araminta at home? He squinted down, looked worried I might be her. Turning his head to one side to spit, I saw he thought better of it, saw he had patience to wait til Doomsday. I would let him do that, but Doomsday is gone. Mankind is past Doomsday.
That’s my sister. She’s home.
Clayson Odum was square cut, eyes like two blue, shiny stones, a head chiseled too small for his height. Practically no neck. Another thing. It was late August, boiling hot, no breeze, and not a drop of perspiration on his face, no half moons under his arms. No smell. A clunk. A blockhead. Size Extra Large.
Predestinarian, I opened the door.
A wind-up man, he veered into the parlor where no one ever went except for Mint when she sat down to the pianoforte and plunked out wobbly, puny, god awful tunes more like sighs and groans than music.
Another thing. Before he stood up from the porch steps, I’d poked my eyes around to look for an automobile, a horse cart, a bicycle, some kind of transport that had brought him here.
Not even a shoe print.
Mint had clapped a man together from red Georgia clay, a pinch of Rexall’s Come to Me powder, hid an S.O.S. in a Co-Cola uniform, size Extra Large and called this clot forth from the depths of nothingness. Mint’s doing, he plonked himself down in Mama’s favorite chair, a Queen Anne tufted wingback, his big square knees splayed like church planks.
***
It was like we were portrait dolls, faces painted on, lips moving. Whether Clayson Odum was good or bad seeded, no way to know since he was a fiction, entirely made-up. Did I say how massive he was? How pretty? When he turned those hard blue eyes on you, your tongue turned to dust and a hummingbird thrum shot up between your legs. Every time he looked at Mint she would try to wrestle her top lip over her buckteeth to cover them. He followed her with those eyes, looking sad for being born, sad for all the things he couldn’t help or do a darn thing about. Slinking past him, hot faced, she would whang into something, bruise a shin, give herself a fat lip.
***
Before you could say boo, he was in our daily lives. A silent, solid permanence. Made himself right at home in the smoke house, did every chore I asked. Brushed the sand yard with a corn husk broom, found a nest of nine baby copperheads under the porch, whacked their heads off with a hoe, buried the heads deep like I told him to, away from the rest. Repaired broken-off plumbing parts, nailed new shingles where the old ones had come off, fixed a string on the pianoforte. Nothing he couldn’t do. He was solid obedience, naked servitude, and Ouida had an array of suspicions about him. He worked past dark, slept outside where he belonged. I’d given him an old, ugly chifferobe, a spare rope bed, a washbowl and jug. Mint made him a second uniform.
From day one, his sole possession was a pocket Bible, a square bulge in his pocket underneath the red Co-Cola badge. Never saw him read it, seemed he didn’t know it was there. He wore no Co-Cola cap, no tie. Never bathed that I could tell, yet he was always clean as a whistle. No perspiration. No smell at all.
I stood behind the curtains one time, watching him score the sand yard in long, even circles, the way I’d showed him. Keeping a sand yard is an art.
Mint was watching, too.
Why does he never talk about being a Co-Cola man? Did he quit? Was he let go? How did he show up out of nowhere?
I like him. Mint said.
Don’t. He’s unnatural, not long for this world.
But Mint was content, having him around. She went back to making crankies, sticking weird facts, believe-it-or-nots into the pockets of the uniforms she sewed.
Polycephaly: the condition of having more than one head. Giacomo and Giovanni Battista Tocci (b. 1875) were dicephalus parapagus dipus twins who survived to adulthood. Each had his own pair of arms. They learned to speak several languages, but never learned to walk.
In 1894, a two-headed partridge was reported in Boston, Massachusetts.
***
Ouida appeared calm, too, though her spine had bent so far down, like a willow hoop, I worried that one day the top of her head would touch the floor and she’d be staring up at me from between her feet. Every morning she cooked grits and bacon, fried eggs in the grease. Made coffee cut with chicory. Every morning he showed up at the back door, ducked into the kitchen, scraped back a chair, sat down, peppered his eggs black, folded bacon into his toast, slurped his coffee. Two cups. Even with the door closed I could hear him slurping from the dining room where Mint and I sat picking at our tinned fruit, toast, and coffee.
Who lives upstairs, he asked one morning.
First time he’d showed curiosity. Nosiness.
Mint stubbed her toe on a table leg, stammered out an answer. General Hitchcock, 64th Georgia, Wright’s brigade.
Your father?
Yes.
He getting on?
Ninety-one last June.
He whistled, slurped.
War Between the States. What a thing, he said wonderingly.
Mint piped up again. Lost his left arm at the Battle of the Crater, Petersburg, Virginia.
I was remembering his other scrawny arm, coming after me.
Does he come down sometimes?
No. Sleeps most of the time.
And your mama?
Sniffing around. Why?
She died a while back.
Sorry to hear that.
He stood in the doorway, blocking our light.
Your father must have some fine stories. Maybe I can meet him one day.
When hell freezes. Clayson Odum had worked on my last nerve. Plus I didn’t like the way Mint was looking at him, like she was trying to drown.
That lunkhead had charmed his way past my every warning bell. Maybe I liked how quiet he was, how pretty to look at, how much he did to help us every day. Flagrant obedience casts a spell. Maybe I should have asked why he never went to Flat Shoals with Mint and me. Why he slept straight through Sunday until Monday. And the biggest thing: I couldn’t see into him, no matter how I tried. There was nothing to see.
***
Mint and I were up early, drinking our coffee at the kitchen table, when this egg Ouida was frying flew right up out of the pan, floated against the ceiling before it smacked back down in the grease.
What does that signify, Ouida? An egg going up like that?
She didn’t answer, just slid the egg onto a plate, cracked a second one, plopped it into a fresh pour of grease.
You know, Ouida. Confess you know.
She was wearing the housecoat I’d made her last Christmas. Wide lapels, big black buttons, pockets edged in rickrack. Shamrock print on one side, daisies on the other. She had the shamrock, lucky side, out.
Something awful was about to take place. I could tell because my jaw hurt. The letters C O flickered blue in front of me.
It predicts death, doesn’t it? A bad death.
Mint looked scared, then laughed it off.
That’s old root talk.
No telling long he had been standing like a spook on the other side of the screen door. We’d been distracted by an egg, rising up to the ceiling like that.
Morning, ladies. He stepped, a wind-up man, into the kitchen, his Co-Cola uniform washed, pressed, starched. I saw Ouida’s rage in that starch.
I scooted into the dining room with Mint.
Would Ouida give him the flying egg for his breakfast? Was it jinxed? I was thinking in crazy loops while Mint gabbled on about some ball gown she was getting paid extra to work on for some lady in Atlanta, green sequins on a chiffon skirt. She’d forgotten all about the egg.
By the time I carried our plates into the kitchen, he was half out the door, off to burn what was left of last year’s burn pile, like I’d asked. It would be a big blaze.
***
Mint’s radio was turned low. In my room, across the hall, I was laying out buttons for a new Medium-Size shirt when I felt it, a block of ice cold behind me.
How long he gwin be here?
A week or two. I don’t know. He’s a help to us.
That’s too long. She scuffed off, and then I felt it in my whole body. Ouida had just planted a bad picture, a violent spell, in my head.
I couldn’t cut the next pattern to save my life. My hands wouldn’t work. I stood at the window, watched from behind the curtain as he headed to the smokehouse with that tin soldier gait of his and saw something extra this time. I saw a dead man.
***
It took the whole of a long, blistering day, without the slightest breeze, for a pair of men I’d hired from sand and gravel to unload a full truckload on top of the sand yard, shovel extra in the place I pointed to. There’s copperheads buried there, I lied. They can still get you, even dead.
Ate a copper once, the younger one stopped shoveling, his face fox-like, a queer yellow color. Skinned it, fried it, tasted like ‘gator.
I asked him where the sand came from. Pensacola, he said. That sand was diamond white, white as salt from the Dead Sea, white as the flowing garments of the sixth angel.
I paid with half the cash from the Hills Brothers can I’d pulled out from under the rope bed. They hauled away the bed, washbowl, and jug. The younger, fox-faced one took the extra uniform after chopping the chifferobe to pieces for me, pieces for the next big fire. Gave him the hatchet, too, Clayson Odum’s blood cleaned off.
I nearly burned the little book, in case it was a grimoire, a book of shadows and demons, written in some magickal alphabet. But it was a pocket Bible, pages stuck together, never opened. I put it first in the jar with Mama’s caul, then took it out and gave it to Ouida.
Mint had brought some unsaved clodhopper to our house. A soulless dimwit. No sin in removing the head of a phantom. He hadn’t even seemed to mind. Obedient to the last.
I was born a good seed. Heaven will be mine no matter what I have done, what I do.
***
Come, ye weary, heavy-laden, lost and ruined by the fall,
If you tarry til you’re better, you will never come at all.
Elder Daniel Drawdy is the new preacher at Flat Shoals. Elder “Toad” finally got caught, run out of town. I can’t see a speck of error in Elder Drawdy, though people gossip over little faults, how he sprays tobacco juice leading us in shape note singing, gabbles through the day’s Bible passages, scratches his head like he has ringworm. I can see the spotlessness of his soul when he says Sister Gladys traveled home to the Lord Saturday night, that Sister Mayme, not yet ready for the Eternal Embrace, is healed of womb cancer.
What are you staring a hole in the floor for? Mint smashes a love bug with her fan. She’s in a poor mood.
I don’t answer. I’m thinking how tomorrow I’ll take the other half of the coffee can money, go to Rexall’s, buy some Lucky Dice Oil, Come to Me Powder, Keep Away Oil, Follow Me Boys Powder, Dragon’s Blood Powder, a hairy lodestone, a ten-cent bottle of Hoyt’s Cologne, some High John the Conqueror root. Plugged into the toe of your left shoe, High John will get any man on this earth to love you.
Araminta pokes me with her elbow, puts a crankie in my lap.
In July 1874, millions of grasshoppers descended on the Plains. After eating all of the trees and crops, they chewed up the clothes on the clotheslines, curtains hanging in windows, leather saddles and harnesses, every book. Miss Adelheit Viets of Kansas said, “The storm of grasshoppers came on a Sunday. I was wearing a dress of white with a green stripe. Hundreds of them settled all over me, ate up every one of the green stripes in that dress before anything could be done about it.”
The appearance of the locusts was like horses prepared for battle; on their heads appeared to be crowns like gold, and their faces were like the faces of men.
Book of Revelation 9
Men’s feet get washed first, then the women of Flat Shoals stretch out their aching, callused, discalced feet. Corns, bunions, heel spurs, fungus, ulcer, all that chafes, hurts, stings, impairs, sheltered in water, washed clean. When it’s my turn, I might just shove my big toe right in Brother Isham’s eye.
Like Ouida says, the more men you have together, the more devils are among you.
I like to think men are good, but half or more are not.
Gold crowns on their heads, unrest in their hearts.
Piety and perfidy. An ongoing war.
I see it all.
