1934
US-17 turned from dirt to paved road at the southern edge of Yulee where Four Creeks Forest began. The morning sun cut low between the pines, throwing shades of almost blue through the trees. Eustis knew that Florida days ran long well into autumn, but, once the sun set, night would drop across the First Coast like a guillotine. By sundown, Yulee would be a disembodied head rolling about in the dark and Jacksonville a writhing, dancing, glowing thing in the distance. Then, at dawn, the two would be reconnected by daylight.
This was one reason Eustis had wanted to make an early start. But he’d woken up late, still had some rock left and the runs to make, and so for two days, he and Pauline shot up between runs and raked in near-about sixty dollars. For ten dollars and a pint of liquor, Eustis was able to pick up two more rocks off Norm Humphries when he went in to have the drive shaft jerry-rigged, yet again. Norm’s stuff wasn’t as good as what Eustis could pick up in the city, but that was true of everything in Yulee. When Eustis and Pauline’s spoons were both boiled dry, the day before the arrival of Bea’s train, Eustis finally started up the truck and turned onto the road that led out of town with their last barrow in the truck bed, snorting and wide-eyed.
Another reason he’d wanted to travel early was that Jacksonville after nightfall was nearly unrecognizable to Eustis. He couldn’t reconcile the urban sprawl, lit up like a whole farm of decorated Christmas trees, with the dusty roads and wooden buildings of his world. The streetlights that lined Jacksonville’s Main Street worked on electricity and lit up every night at eight o’clock sharp. Where A1A cut through the center of Yulee was lined with oil lamps that were only lit when old Mr. Babcock remembered or felt inclined to getting up on his old ladder. Where Yulee was a town of north Florida reliquaries, Jacksonville was a city of transplants—folks from up north, out west, down south, what came to find cheaper lands, cheaper rents, and claim the town for their own. Those folks didn’t care if the lobbed head of Yulee reconnected to civilization with the sun or not. If they woke and found it never existed at all, found that the tiny township was some collective fever dream, then all the better. Jacksonville was full of thousands of folks just like the ones out on Amelia Island, who denied Eustis’s crazy grandmother, the woman who’d raised him and his brother, proper burial. Full of folks who would spit on the Montgomerys unless one was on fire, or unless it was Judge Montgomery.
The barrow squealed from the truck bed and Eustis tried to quiet it with a fast rap of his knuckles on the rear window. Back when the pen was full of pigs and Bea still went to Jacksonville in the summers, his stepdaughter would ride in the bed with the animals. Something about her — maybe her soft small hands, or her cooing voice — quieted the beasts, settled their incessant squealing and snorting. When he would arrive to Jacksonville and drop the livestock, Bea included, Eustis imagined it was these things that made her such a commodity in the city.
Those were the good days, back when Eustis was loaded. The pig haul put at least three hundred dollars in his pocket, and when the summers ended and he ventured back into town to pick up Bea from Judge’s, he’d pocket near a thousand dollars profit. Then there was the liquor that Eustis would run all over Yulee and up past the Georgia line. At least until he had the falling out with Nate Bauer and his sons. Those summers made Eustis rich as royals.
It was Norm what had told Eustis, during his last run, about the new law coming at the end of the month. Eustis hadn’t believed him at first but Norm had shown him the copy of the Florida Star. AMENDMENT RATIFIED, the headline read. If Eustis had still had his gun, he was sure he would have filled Norm’s mule with bullets. But he’d traded the revolver for heroin weeks ago, and so had settled for throwing a bucket of nails across his yard instead.
Now, that anger just as fresh days later, Eustis had to settle even still. He pushed the accelerator to the floor of his old Lincoln. Repeal prohibition? Eustis snorted and spat out the open window. He had never heard something so asinine.
From here, Eustis could make out the tallest steeples of the city’s many cathedrals peeking out from behind the dozen or so high-rise buildings that made up Jacksonville’s skyline. If Eustis squinted, he could see the faint line of the Acosta to the southeast, the newer cement bridge that connected the bustling city center to the old money neighborhood of San Marco, where little stone cherubs danced around carved lions and spit crystal clear water into the air in a triptych of arches.
In Yulee, the tallest building was the Nassau County Courthouse at two stories, and only a couple houses were piped for indoor plumbing. Eustis tightened his grip on the wheel as his tires hit pavement on the bridge’s other side. He’d be to Judge’s soon enough. That meant he’d be part owner soon enough. After all, he had a plan.
His little brother had always had an eye for that girl, even mentioned to Eustis that he could see why his Johns liked her so. “I like me a girl what does what she’s told the first time,” he’d said after her first summer in Jacksonville. When Eustis would travel into the city outside of the summer harvest, Judge always asked after Bea. His brother would send Eustis back with little trinkets for her, a doll he’d seen in the window of Crowley’s Toy Co., or a bonnet to match the one nice dress the girl had. Up until the day Bea walked off the Montgomery homestead at sixteen, Judge kept after her. Sure, in the time Bea had been gone, his brother had found a little wife, started up a little family, but Eustis was hoping—counting on it, actually—that Judge still had an appetite for the girl.
Eustis would pull up the truck. He’d compliment the shop’s new lights, remark on how they lit up the street even in daylight; Eustis would probably get some grief over the pig, he had been too high over the last three days to think to telegram ahead. But Judge would do the slaughter for him. Brothers looked out for brothers. Judge would ask Eustis what finally brought him around to butcher the last pig. Maybe Judge would ask how Eustis and Pauline expected to eat a whole pig before rot got to it. Or Judge would grin and ask, what’s the occasion? Eustis would laugh and off-handedly mention Bea’s return. Drop the name and watch for his brother’s reaction.
Eustis would say something about family, invite his brother and the wife back to the homestead for the pickin tomorrow night. He’d say something about how nice it would be to all be together again. Talk about the importance of sticking together. Eustis had already paid for the most recent liquor haul, but he had a case of plum whiskey on the passenger side floor and forty dollars to put in Judge’s hand. A buy-in. Eustis would say, What with the end of prohibition, I figured we could turn ‘Judge’s Meat Mart’ into ‘Montgomery’s Meat Mart’. That rolled off the tongue better anyhow.
He would reassure Judge he was good for partner. That he was mostly clean. Eustis just needed fifteen percent. Hell, Eustis was willing to settle for twelve. And an initial loan to buy a few new sows and a good breeding boar. The loan would be repaid in a season, for sure. By April, he’d have pigs a plenty to bring to Judge. Folks would like the family business. They’d like knowing exactly where their meat had come from. Like old times. With the end of prohibition, Eustis and Judge could go straight. Together. Make the Montgomery name mean something. Make Eustis into somebody.
#
The Lincoln turned, jerking and sputtering, onto Beaver Street and rolled to a stop in front of the shop. When Judge had first talked about renting out the ground floor storefront at the corner of Beaver and Broad, Eustis had mocked him. “Those white folks in the city will eat your country ass alive,” he’d said with a grin, half believing his younger brother was just blowing smoke. But fifteen years later, the crudely painted Butcher sign that had hung in the window had long been replaced with the commissioned yellow and red filigreed Judge’s Meat Mart sign that swung gently above the door. Judge now rented the other three floors above it, too. The new lights—electric—glinted against the shimmering hams, the twine tied pork loins, and sausage links that hung in the front window.
Through the glass, past the dangling pork cuts, Eustis could see Judge’s back, wide but tense with repetitive movement. He was flanked by two boys that barely reached his shoulder but who were leaning in toward whatever cut of meat sat before his brother’s practiced hands. Then the pig squealed, and when the three inside turned to see the source, Eustis smiled and threw up a meek wave. The half grin Judge wore as he turned and wiped his hands on his blood-spotted apron melted into the beginnings of a scowl. For a moment, Eustis thought maybe he should’ve telegrammed ahead. The door opened with a jingle, and Judge stepped into the sun, his scowl hiding somewhere under his toothy smile, “What’s all this now?”
Eustis fished a cigarette from his coat pocket and offered one to Judge, who declined, “Your wired lights look mighty fine.”
“Did you drive all the way into the city to show your hog electric lights? They don’t got that back home, huh?”
“Hell will freeze over first, I think.”
Judge laughed first, loud and brassy like a saxophone, fighting and winning against the bustling sounds of city-life. Then the pig joined, snorting and squealing as if it were in on the joke. Eustis only smiled and, when Judge finally broke his laugh to breathe, Eustis continued, “I brought some work for you, figured the boss-man needed some work to do too.”
“Oh? What’s the occasion? You finally knock up Pauline?”
Eustis clenched his fists, only just realizing they were slick with sweat. “No. It’s Bea actually,” he said. “She’s coming home.” He didn’t see no need to mention it would only be for one night.
“Really?” Judge said with a promising bob of his head, “And you were talking about Hell freezing over? You should double check your lamps when you head home, might find ‘em wired up.”
Judge’s laugh started up again, a grating croon against Eustis’s skin. Eustis pulled his lips tight into a grin and took a long drag of his cigarette. “We’re having a pickin for her homecoming,” he said, holding in a drag. “I don’t know of a better butcher this side of the Saint Johns.”
“Ain’t you have to cross the river to get here?” Judge said, a small break at the corner of his smile.
“Can you do the slaughter or not?”
His brother’s smirk dissolved. Eustis recognized the twitching around his nose, the one wrinkle slipping between Judge’s eyebrows. He’d seen those same twitches and wrinkles in the face of those Amelia Island coons, in the faces of Nate Bauer and his boys when they grew tired of Eustis’s drunken, belligerent appearances on their property with claims of being shortchanged.
Then, a jingle at the storefront door and a round brown face poked out from behind the glass. “Mr. Monty,” the boy called, “we’re finished up.”
“We got another, Bo. Grab your brother and y’all get to it.”
Eustis could see his little brother’s gears turning. Judge was still watching his brother when he said over his shoulder, “I’ve got some business to take care of.”
Judge led Eustis back through the shop. Passed the glass case counter where he could see pigs’ feet and chitterlings and lines of shoat livers. Out through the back courtyard, where the bricks and metal drains were stained with blood and another boy, this one older than the two at the front, sorted a table of entrails into labeled metal tubs.
“You’ve got new help, I see,” he said, following Judge up the narrow metal stairway to the second story that Judge had converted into an office. His brother said nothing, didn’t even look back.
Eustis hadn’t been back here since Bea still came out for the summers. He dawdled by the bin of pig hearts, watching the boy’s thin, girlish hands sort intestines from stomach linings. When the boy noticed Eustis’s stare, he stilled his hands, met Eustis’s eyes, with a hard look—too hard a look if you asked Eustis. One that said, “You don’t get to watch me work.”
The boy’s expression turned something in Eustis’s stomach. He looked away first, flicked his cigarette butt between two steps. In the third-floor window, two sets of eyes looked down at him. Girls, wide-eyed and waiting with their small hands pressed to the window. He was a beast in a zoo to them. Something other, from some other place.
Eustis had hoped the tension that hung in the air would be cut off, would be smothered, with their entry to the second floor, or with the shutting of Judge’s office door, or with his settling into the wooden chair opposite his brother’s deep-stained mahogany desk. Judge perched himself on the desk’s corner, arms crossed, looking down at Eustis.
“What’s going on? Really?” Judge finally said.
Eustis’s grin and reply were automatic. “I told you. We’re doing a pickin for Bea, you should bring Virgie and the baby.”
“You been holding onto that pig for too long. It’s only so small because y’all aren’t feeding it but table scraps, I’m betting.”
Eustis bit his bottom lip. It was warm, too warm, in his brother’s office. He could feel sweat rising to the back of his neck. What had he planned to say next? Right. “It’ll be nice to have the family, all of us, together again, won’t it? To see Bea again?”
“Eustis,” Judge said his name like a curse. “What the hell is this? You show up with no word expecting me to what? Give you a free butchering? You need a front on the next liquor run? Is that what this nonsense is?”
“No,” Eustis laughed the word out, tried to keep his hands still but they fidgeted in his lap, “I figured you like seeing the girl is all, I know how you like her.”
Judge snorted, ambled around his desk, and sat in the smooth leather upholstered chair opposite Eustis, “What do you want?”
“You could have her.”
“What do you want?” Judge said.
Eustis reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled forty dollars. He set them on the desk slowly, carefully, as if they might shatter. His little brother’s eyes moved between Eustis and the bills. Eyes narrowed. “You’re paid up for the last haul. What is this?”
“I’ve been thinking,” Eustis started, testing his words like steppingstones.
Judge cut him off, “No you ain’t.”
A gunshot somewhere below made Eustis jump in his chair and a menacing grin budded across Judge’s chiseled mouth. Down in the slaughter yard, that boy with the girlish hands held a smoking pistol, and Eustis’s last hog lay on the bricks bleeding out. Finally silent. Eustis felt pebbles in his throat, phlegm on his tongue. Eustis took in a shaky, unsteady breath. He could feel the heat rising in his chest, creeping up his neck. “I figured with the end of prohibition coming, wouldn’t it be nice to go into business together? Like back in the day.”
“Go into? I got my business, and it’s been doing just fine without your underfed hogs.”
“Come on, the runs are all I’ve got. They’re the only thing keeping food on our table.”
Judge was shaking his head before Eustis finished, “Wouldn’t have been all you had if you hadn’t of traded near all your herd for rocks.”
“Let me buy in,” Eustis said in a rush. “I got forty dollars here, a case of your whiskey down in the truck, and Bea is yours.”
Judge’s grin bloomed into a tired smile, “I know you’re not talking about buying into the shop, with your crinkled lunch money, whiskey I sold you, and your old maid of a stepdaughter. You forget I’m a married man?”
Judge stood and made his way to the office door. “I’m going to do this slaughter for you because you’re my brother. But once the pig’s ready, you should get to clearing your lemon out the street and get on home and don’t come back until you’re ready for another run.”
“Brother? You could have fooled me,” Eustis spat. The pleasantries were done. Judge’s sneer stunk up the tiny office, “You damn me and Pauline to starve.”
“I’m sorry about Pauline, honest,” Judge shrugged, opening the door for his brother, who did not move to follow. “She’s a fine woman. Her only misstep was marrying a man what can’t provide for his house.”
Eustis stood, grabbed the wooden chair, and threw it back against the wall. He was shouting the words before he could stop himself, “I seen them girls upstairs. You let me buy in to the business or I’m going to the papers and telling how their Golden Negro is running a whorehouse above his meat shop. I’ll tell how he likes his girls young and green.”
They stared at one another for a moment, Judge’s smile unfading. Then, slowly, he closed the door. Waited for the click of the latch before he spoke in a hushed voice that made Eustis lean in.
“Tell them then,” Judge whispered, “but know that if Nate Bauer don’t send someone across the state line to take you out first, the sheriff will come out to your little dust farm and fill you with bullets himself and finally release me from the burden of being your brother. I got friends in higher places than you know.”
His little brother always had things work out for him, always acted like his shit didn’t stink like the rest of the Mad Montgomerys. Judge was one of them, whether he liked to think of himself that way or not. A fancy ninth-grade education be damned. His wired lights be damned. His friends in high places be damned. He would squeeze those burdens out of Judge, if his brother wanted to be free of them so desperately.
Judge saw the tensing of his brother’s hands, the weight shifting in his legs. He carried a small six-shooter in his pocket and was faster than Eustis. But a soft knock at the door stilled them. Another knock, and Judge answered. Virgie was on the other side, wide-eyed and holding her baby on her slender girl-hip. “Oh!” she said when she saw Eustis, “Mr. Montgomery, I didn’t know you were coming today.”
She peered around the room, her eyes landing on the toppled chair against the wall, “The girls heard a racket, I told ‘em not to worry but they asked that I check anyway.”
Judge softened his smile and laced a thick arm around his wife’s waist. “My savior,” he joked, and plopped a quick kiss on her cheek. “Just a lively conversation between brothers, in fact,” Judge said, peering past Eustis like a piece of furniture. “He’s got to be getting on before his hog cooks in the sun.”
The pig was split, wrapped, and both halves waiting in the bed of Eustis’s truck when he made it back to the store’s front, escorted by Judge and his girl-wife. As he pulled off, head throbbing, throat dry and full of fury, he checked his side mirror. Virgie waved the baby’s fat arm, both grinning. Judge stood stoic, arm around his girl, not waving.
#
Pauline thought the silence in the truck once she hit the paved part of US-17 would bring her some peace. But she could feel her blood boiling under her blistered hands as the truck sailed smooth over the road beneath. Or maybe that was because of the sighing sun, only just beginning to descend, was still high enough to leap through the pine trees and beat down on her until sweat beaded up to Pauline’s forehead and cheeks. She couldn’t know the time, but she knew it would be six soon. That meant Bea’s train from Tallahassee would be pulling in soon. At the thought of her daughter looking around the station and thinking no one had come to meet her, Pauline upshifted to third and pressed the gas to the floor.
She’d told Eustis that Mr. Humphries was no mechanic, the old man still used a mule and buggy for Christ’s sake. She’d asked to look at the truck herself if they couldn’t afford a professional in the city. At least she’d grown up using mechanical reapers. Useless-Eustis would hear nothing of it, and Pauline suspected it was because Norm had that dirty homecooked heroin that always left her head pounding and her hands shaking. Pauline blinked away the coming migraine, gripped the wheel tight to keep the shakes at bay.
Pauline didn’t know what had been said between Eustis and his brother, but whatever it was had left her husband with a soured attitude and readied hands. He’d snapped, struck her with the back of his hand when she asked when Judge and Virgie would be by for the pickin. She ran her tongue over her swollen, freshly split lip and could still taste the whisper of iron.
When Pauline first heard the stories about the Montgomerys, they’d been only murmurs floating between the well-dressed church ladies of New Macedonia AME. Murmurs about a girl from the family who left her two boys on her parents’ pig farm. A girl who woke with the sun and took off into the low-hanging mist between Yulee and Jacksonville. Never seen again. Where she went or why she left, no one could say. Every time one of those Montgomery boys got into some trouble the talk would start up again— some said she ran off to be with the father of her sons; others said she’d hopped on a train north and folded herself into the mass of people migrating that way; and still others said the fog itself had picked her up and carried her away from the horrible place she came from, where her daddy drank like a fish and her insane momma would whip her senseless with azalea switches, even when she was pregnant. Abbie Montgomery’s name became a warning from women to their daughters: Don’t be out there running in them streets, you’ll wind up like that Abbie Montgomery.
She remembered the local legends about Abbie as she’d grown up, and that was why Pauline went about securing her first husband the right way. Sure, she’d gotten pregnant before they were really married, but she’d always been ready to be a wife, even if Wilmer Bowman’s temper boiled too hot sometimes. But marriage, and surely fatherhood, changed a man. And it had. Where arguments used to end in screaming matches, they now ended with Wilmer dragging her by her hair to their room where he’d beat her until her vision turned blurry. Marriage changed her too. Pauline learned to avoid arguments.
While pregnant, Pauline would think about the fabled Abbie Montgomery and wonder if the fog that hung across Amelia Island in the early mornings could take her someplace far away, too. Away from the baby she was cooking up that would tie her to Wilmer forever. But when she gave birth to Bea, perfect perfect Bea, Pauline did away with that idea.
To leave like Abbie Montgomery? No. A mother did not leave her children. Ever. Even if some babies never took a breath. If their eyes never opened. If all there was to prove they’d ever existed were the three smoothed stones on the northeast side of Little Lee Creek, basking under the magnolias beside their mad great-grandmother.
She believed, even now, that it’d been a miracle, truly divine intervention, when that drunk white woman mowed Wilmer down in broad daylight and turned him into another smear across the fender of her Mercedes. Sure, Eustis could get bad when he was deep in the drink. But Wilmer? He would beat her stone sober or shit-faced. And with Eustis, things had been good for a long time. Pauline had worried that Yulee would hold nothing for her but marrying into the so-called Mad Montgomerys had brought her land, something to leave her daughter. Eustis had made her laugh, once upon a time. Had squeezed her hand and kissed her fingers when she talked about how she would work beside him on the farm, tending the cattle while he readied the pigs for market. Pauline had almost loved him then. And with Bea? He treated her as his own at first. Things were different by the second miscarriage, the year Bea turned ten. Pauline was in pieces, having been ripped apart by each hopeful start and following failure. By then, all her husband had for her daughter was contempt, and arguments became more frequent. Pauline picked up her old habit of ignoring and avoiding.
He insisted that sending her off for the summers to Judge’s would bring him some relief. Eustis could be free of Bea, and she would learn a trade at the butchery and Judge was happy to pay. Pauline fought it at first, a slaughterhouse, even a small operation like Judge’s, was no place for a little lady. But Eustis insisted. To avoid the fight that threatened to boil over between them, Pauline conceded. Eustis had bristled with excitement at the wad of cash he pulled from his pocket upon Bea’s return. Nearly a thousand dollars. She’d asked him, “What kind of work can a little girl do for that kind of pay?”
Eustis spat, “We look out for our own in this family. If you don’t like it, take your girl and walk back to Amelia.”
That put an end to Pauline’s questions. Bea would say little of the summers, quiet as ever. Eustis’s bootlegging and Bea’s summer job put food on their table year-round, making the profits from the pig farm a nice extra cushion for them.
Then Pauline’s last miscarriage. A boy. Eustis took to drinking heavy after that and that made him slower in the head and quicker in the lip than usual. He mucked things up with Mr. Bauer, and that had cost them. Word got around that you didn’t want to work with Eustis Montgomery, “Mad like his mammy and grammy,” and made its way back to Judge. When he learned about how Eustis had rolled onto Mr. Bauer’s property and accused the man and his sons of robbing him blind, Judge stopped buying pigs from them. Only for Bea’s work at Judge’s, he still allowed her daughter to come for summers, did their family survive those years at all.
Then Bea left. Pauline hadn’t known she’d applied for a school in Tallahassee, even though Eustis, between throwing plates and punches against the wall, swore she’d been covering for the girl. They started using after that; Eustis to dull the reality of the failing pig farm and his crushed ego, and Pauline to forget how things had gotten this bad.
In the four years Bea had been gone, she’d gotten a degree and was headed for another in D.C. In those same four years, Eustis and Pauline had traded away every head of cattle, their donkey, the pigs, and then finally Pauline, humiliated, began trading away her dishes for food at the open market. Her second marriage was supposed to be an investment into some future that now, with the finale of prohibition, still felt so far away.
Pauline looked across Trout Creek and could see where the fresh water went brackish, where the creek met the great Saint Johns River. The sun was sinking, churning the sky from blue to a rich, stewed orange. Over the puttering of the truck, she could make out the distant clanging of bells, the city’s main Post Office clocktower, singing six. She could make out the steeples of Jacksonville’s endless churches. She pushed the truck faster, maxing out the odometer somewhere past sixty. She’d make it up to Bea when they got back to the homestead. The hog would be ready when they made it back. She’d whip up some of those sweetened Johnny Cakes her daughter had liked when she was little, though they wouldn’t be as good without cream.
Still, Pauline told herself, tonight would be perfect because that’s what Bea deserved. And after four years without her girl, four years with only her dull, dumb husband for company, concocting any plan she could think to keep them from starving, Pauline figured she deserved it, too.
Even if only for one night.
#
The clock at the station entrance was coming up on six-thirty when Pauline pulled the truck into the gravel lot and took off on foot, just shy of running. After some back and forth with a short-tempered porter, Pauline was making her way through the station to Terminal 6, looking for a daughter she worried she wouldn’t recognize. But her worries were wasted. The terminal was grave quiet. The six o’clock passengers had already dispersed and were on to their next destination. Pauline felt her temperature rising, a pressure in her chest and throat. That pressure had bones. The sting of sharp elbows and knees, stretching, twisting, somersaulting between her ribs. Where was Bea?
Her eyes settled on a locomotive across the station, on the departing side, where a few uniformed porters loaded an oversized steamer trunk onto one of the cars, and where, through a window in the last train car — the segregated car — a woman watched Pauline with unblinking eyes. Pauline watched her back. Then, recognition.
The curve of her cheeks, the slope and spread of the woman’s nose. She must have seen it in Pauline’s face. She leaned out of the window frame, but Pauline was already moving, jogging to the segregated car, hands trembling, reaching.
Pauline tapped her palm against the cloudy window, her words breathy and rushed, a litany of her daughter’s name turning to fog on the glass. Through it, Pauline could see the woman with Bea’s face pressing herself back into the bare wooden bench looking away. Time had reshaped her girl. The round face Pauline remembered had been stretched back across a woman’s jaw, pulled into the beginnings of a diamond. Her hands clenched and unclenched, making wrinkles in the folds of her powder blue dress. Pauline tapped again. She needed to see her eyes. Needed to see her smile, the telltale gap in her teeth. But when woman-Bea finally turned, there was no smile. The gathering of the woman’s brows, the narrowing of her eyes, these things made Pauline’s hands slick and restless.
“Honey Bea, what are you doing in there? We got a feast waiting for us at home.”
When Woman-Bea said nothing, Pauline’s feet grew restless, her throat dry as one of Yulee’s dusty roads. She swallowed. Tried again.
“I know I’m late. Your daddy’s old truck was giving me trouble.”
Bea stood from the bench and pried up the ill-fitted window. Pauline’s heart shook in her chest. There she was. Close enough to reach out and touch. Bea’s hands peaked out from the end of periwinkle sleeves, and Pauline wondered if they were still soft like she remembered. When Bea was still toddling about in the room of the Yulee Boarding House, Pauline would make a game of oiling the baby’s skin after her baths, sneaking tickles here and there to watch Bea’s gummy grin bloom big across her tiny face before igniting into giggles.
Pauline was sweating through her old farm dress. She desperately wanted to reach out and hold her hand, see if Tallahassee had roughened her, if she was ready for a big, unforgiving city like D.C. Wanted to feel the texture of her daughter’s hair between her shaking fingers. Wanted to hear Bea’s laugh, something she hadn’t heard since those long-ago games of tickles. Wanted to reach in and pull her daughter off the train and hold her tight to her chest. Wanted to push her back to the place inside Pauline she’d come from and not let go. Pauline reached through the window and Bea snatched her hands back.
Bea tapped a finger against her bottom lip and, in a voice like running water, asked, “Did your husband give you that?”
“Come on, Honey Bea.” Pauline’s voice was a shuddering, misfiring engine. “We got a whole hog waiting for us.”
“Momma, did Eustis give you that?”
Pauline ran her fingers over the split lip. That pressure, the one pushing and kicking in her chest, was back. Resolute, Pauline dropped her hand and said, “Get on down from there, we can make it back before the sun goes down.”
“I’m not going back there,” Bea said. Her words were heavy, like they’d been carved out of stone then pushed down Pauline’s throat.
There was a burning beginning behind Pauline’s eyes. She blinked it away. “I’m sorry I was late, I understand if you’re mad but—”
“Momma,” Bea said, shaking her head, “I was never going to go back to the homestead.” Up at the locomotive, plumes of gray smoke rose from the chimney. Pauline’s breaths came in short gulps. Her head was filling with water, her vision going wooly.
“Stop this,” she said, her voice finally cracking. “Let’s just talk about it on the way back.”
Bea’s hand on her own made Pauline hold her breath, afraid that if she exhaled Bea and the train and the whole city would turn to vapor and she’d be left alone, in a void where it was only her and Eustis and the empty farm, waiting for hunger or loneliness or else the creek to take her.
“We aren’t safe there,” Bea said. “We can’t go back.”
Pauline shook her head, trying to erase the words from her mind. But Bea squeezed her hand and told her momma to look at her. When Pauline finally did, Bea said, “Get on the train.”
“What?”
“Get on.” Bea’s hands disappeared into a fold of blue fabric and reappeared clutching an unpunched train ticket. Pauline’s ticket. “We can leave this place,” Bea said, her hands trembling. “We can find our own way in Washington.”
Pauline shook her head. “What is this? Are you mad, girl?”
Bea squeezed her mother’s hand again. “There is nothing for neither of us here. Come on. Please.”
“No, no, no, no, Eustis is about to go straight with Judge and—”
“The Montgomery men,” Bea spat, “are no better than the swine they work with. There ain’t no going straight for the likes of Judge.” Her daughter’s cheeks were going red, her chest heaving with quickening breath. At the front, the conductor hollered for all to board. Bea raised her voice to be heard over the loudening train preparing to depart, preparing to take her away, “Stay here, and I promise you, Momma, they will eat you alive. Bones and all.”
Pauline didn’t understand. Judge had been their only saving grace when things had started to fall apart. She took in her daughter’s reddening face, the tension in her neck, her chest’s rapid rise and fall, the disgust on her lips when she spoke the Montgomery name. She thought of that wad of cash, and the image brought with it an itching behind Pauline’s eyes. One thousand dollars. A lot to pay a little girl. Too much. She’d thought so when she saw it. Said so, too. What could a little girl do to earn money like that? Pauline’s tongue was thick and heavy in her mouth. Those elbows and knees had worked their way up to her throat, and they now clawed at the back of her tongue.
The smoke rising from the train’s chimney grew thick. Murky. No time. Bea pressed again, pushing the ticket toward Pauline, her voice cracking, and pled, “Come on, Momma.”
Pauline thought of Eustis on the land alone, shooting up and forgetting the lamp. Of him letting the house go up in flames. Thought of him starving to death out in the empty pigpen, searching the trough for old apple cores or fallen millet after their half-eaten, last hog was teeming with maggots. Thought of the three stones at the creek-side, her three babies buried under the magnolias, who’d never gotten to open their eyes, never gotten to feel the sun on their face, and never gotten to meet their sister. Thought of her babies being built over with houses for white folks who owned boats and worked jobs they never broke a sweat for. She thought of having to look her Bea in the eye after this, knowing she’d failed to be her protector. She thought of Abbie Montgomery, riding the mist to some other place while her sons rotted into the men they’d become. No. A mother did not leave her children.
“Woman!” a porter called from behind Pauline. “Get on if you’re going. The train’s pulling off.”
She looked at her girl, brought her daughter’s calloused fingers to her lips, “You are going to make one fine doctor, Honey Bea.”
Pauline stepped back and for a beat, they stared at one another. Each holding back a thousand things writhing in their throats. The train whistle sounded, loud and shrill, and made Pauline jump and release her daughter’s hand. The train lurched forward, and Pauline made to walk alongside as it pulled away. Bea let the ticket catch the strengthening breeze and slammed the window down and disappeared out of frame.
Pauline stood at the terminal, watching the train roll away until she was only staring at empty tracks in an empty station, and the sun had finally dipped below the horizon. Waited until all there was left to do was drive back up US-17, back to Yulee, back to the hollow homestead, and back to Eustis. Alone.
#
When Pauline pulled the truck onto the homestead, the night was already spread across Yulee like a sheet over a birdcage. As she parked the truck, she could see the still-lit fire pit, glowing. The smell of ash, overcooked fat, and burned flesh clung to the homestead, digging deep into the soil and Pauline’s lungs. The spatchcocked hog, laid ribs-down across the grating, was ruined. The fine hairs, burned into tight, angry coils, left behind a pattern that reminded Pauline of cigarette burns across the pig’s, uncooked topsides. She followed the markings up to the head. The ears, in the heat of the fire pit, had shriveled to look like dead leaves. The snout had tightened like dry leather, pulling the pig’s lips back in a sneer. By the light of the embers, Pauline could see the circle of small blisters, the torn and burned skin where the bullet had torn through the pig’s skull. Their last pig, their last hope, a blackened mess.
Curses gathered under Pauline’s tongue like saliva. She turned and made her way to the barn. For this, Pauline would loosen those motor mounts, let Eustis keep rattling about Yulee until the truck fell apart. Let him waste their last few dollars getting Mr. Humphries to fiddle with the drive shaft.
The barn’s galvanized door creaked open, and dim moonlight traipsed in and laid across Eustis like a shroud. He was slumped forward, his chin pressed to his chest, legs kicked out wide in front of him. His left arm, still tourniqueted, was turning blue.
“Eustis,” she said.
No reply came, so Pauline tried again, this time nudging his thigh with the toe of her boot. Pauline crouched, tried to look for the shallow rise and fall of Eustis’s breath. She released the tightened belt around his arm and tried a third time. When, still, Eustis did not stir, Pauline lifted her fingers to his wrist, held her breath, and waited for the faint thump of his pulse.
Outside, the autumn night dense with dark and alive with sound—the cooing of tired warblers, the symphony of cicadas, the small shrieks of bats zipping between the trees. These things, and the unbreakable strings that connected mother to child, pulled Pauline through the woods until her eyes tried to adjust to the night, even as one north-bound string threatened to rip her in half. And if it did, then all the better.
How had she buried her head so deep in the sand? How had she not seen the truth in her daughter’s silence? How had she lounged by, idle and unaware, of the yearly slaughtering of her girl? These questions turned to a slurry with every crunching twig under Pauline’s feet, every scratch to her face of branches she couldn’t see. She welcomed the scratches, the fumbling of her feet when she stepped on fallen pinecones. She walked into a clutch of low-hanging Spanish moss and, for a moment, hoped the wiry tendrils would animate. Would wrap around her throat like hands and squeeze until her head popped off. Until her skull was a thing rolling around on the ground that she could kick along the path like an empty can. A thick branch under her heel brought her down to the forest floor. She spit out the curses that had been spoiling in her mouth, unlaced her boots, and stripped off her stockings.
Pauline had to keep moving.
When she was still part of New Macedonia’s congregation, Pauline had learned about flagellation. Kooky Catholic monks in the old old days would whip themselves, tear open their own backs to atone for the sin of being born imperfect. It brought them closer to God, put them in His favor, supposedly. Pauline didn’t know about all that, being closer to God through pain. Surely, all those summers in Jacksonville was enough for Bea to have earned God’s favor. If that were true, certainly He would have struck Judge down with a pox or raining frogs or the death of his baby boy. God had certainly done as much to Eustis; the empty farm, the dried-up runs, the buried babies. Burrs and pinecones and dried twigs pierced the soles of her feet as she walked, but this didn’t feel like atonement, and they didn’t feel like the Divine. They only hurt.
Pauline could smell the water now, sweet, rich, and full of life. Close. She could hear the water, and in it she heard Bea’s voice, begging her to board the train. How? How could she?
There. She could see the creek’s edge, where the thicket of trees opened into a clearing, lined by magnolias. The smoothed bark of the magnolias was familiar. Pauline liked coming here in the summer when the trees bloomed and showered the graves in flowers and fragrance. Through the dark, she could make out the carved and staked cross that marked Ada Mae’s grave.
She’d heard about Ada Mae from the church ladies too, all those years ago. How she’d gone mad after Abbie left, or disappeared, or was taken somewhere between the two. When she’d first met Eustis, he would tell her stories about his grandmother, about how she would sit on the porch to watch the sunrise, calling out Abbie’s name. How Ada Mae could swing a machete and switches with the strength of two men. He’d told her that the stumps along the dirt part of US-17, just outside the homestead, were because Ada Mae had chopped down the thin azalea trees herself, making whipping branches of every tree. What a nightmare. To wake every day and see the proof your child had existed but was nowhere to be found. To wake and hope that maybe today or tomorrow or the next day, or the day after that, she’d hold her baby again. At least three of hers were here. Right here. She could feel them there, could hear them in the burbling creek water, like she’d heard Bea.
The three stones beside Ada Mae were cool to the touch. Three of those unbreakable strings were taut now, pulling Pauline down, first to her knees, where the cold earth soaked into her skirts, then onto her hands. She dug, first with sticks. When those snapped, opening the skin on her palms, she used rocks. When her blood slicked those so she couldn’t get a grip, she used her hands.
