Out of Darkness (27 page)

They came back with him half an hour later. Wash began laughing the minute he saw the spread on the picnic blanket. “Y'all,” he said, “did I really make myself out so pitiful that you had to go to this much trouble for my birthday?”

“Yes,” the three of them said in unison.

“Open your presents! Open your presents!” Cari chanted.

“What's in there?” he asked, pointing at the burlap bag.

“Not telling!” Cari said.

“Open it and find out,” Beto said.

Wash reached a hand into the bag and groped around for a second. He made a face, then pulled his hand out, still empty. “You sure you didn't mix something up? This is my present?”

“Go on.” Cari pushed his hand back into the bag.

Wash peered inside and grabbed something. “Just what I've always wanted! A spare foot! Now I'll never worry about sprained ankles again. Light, too.” He weighed the object in his hand. It was a club-like, crudely sculptured foot painted a muddy brown with pale pink toenails. “Please thank the artist for noticing that my nails are not as dark as my skin,” he said, nodding appreciatively.

“We've seen your toenails before,” Beto said, barely able to contain himself.

“There's more,” Cari said. “Go on.”

Wash extracted three additional feet, four hands and two heads painted with garish grins. They were all a little blockier than the human parts they were meant to correspond to, but they were recognizable.

“That's unusual,” Naomi managed. She tried to imagine some use Wash might have for papier-mâché body parts, but nothing came to mind.

“There are some parts of the whole missing,” Cari said, “but can you figure out what they're for?”

“Think hard!” Beto pressed.

Naomi hoped he had more of a clue than she did. The only thing worse than when the twins disappointed her was when she disappointed them. She was sure that Wash would feel the same way.

He appeared to be deep in thought, but she could see a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth, fighting to break out. “How many guesses do I get?” he asked.

“Three!” Cari and Beto said together.

Wash scratched his chin. “Leftover parts from the lesser-known black Frankenstein's monster?”

“Not even close!” Cari giggled.

“A puppet I can build and take with me when I join the circus?”

Beto and Cari shook their heads.

“Hmmm...” Wash closed his eyes tight as if racking his brain. His eyes popped open again. “Oh, I know, it's a—”

“Wrong!” the twins shouted before he even finished.

“No fair, you don't know what I was going to say.”

“There's no way you could be right,” Cari said.

“Are you sure about that? I might be smarter than you think,” Wash said. He was now cradling the body parts in his arms. “I might think, for example, that this is what I need to build my very own scarecrow!”

Cari and Beto clapped.

“When we finish it,” Cari said, “the birds won't bother your mama's garden. And she'll give you all the rum raisin pies you want.”

Beto grew serious. “One of these should be good enough to do the job, but we made two so that the first one won't get lonely.”

Wash nodded as if this made perfect sense.

“What do you think?” Cari asked.

Wash smiled. “I'm going to hide these parts in the cowshed until we can get the whole setup in order. Then we'll surprise my ma.” He lifted the other package. “Is this for me, too?”

Naomi threw a napkin at him. “You know it is.”

“Golly,” Wash said. He fondled the drawstring bag. “A bag, a magnificent bag, a bag almost as wonderful as my fine burlap sack—”

“Cut the bull, you!” Naomi said.

He winked at the twins and then pulled out the shirt. “It looks like something that came straight from France ... all this fine stitching.” He ran his hands over the shirt. The jest disappeared from his voice. He studied the monogram near the waist of the breast panel. “Look.” He held it up for the twins to see. “It's got my initials.”

She'd snuck an “N” in there, too, stretched out like a flourish under his initials. You had to know it was there to see it. It was like their love: invisible to anyone but them.

“You think it'll fit you?” she asked.

“Try it on, try it on!” the twins chanted.

Wash bowed and then ducked behind a tree, pulling off his shirt and buttoning himself into the new one.

When he came back out, the twins clapped.

“It fits,” Naomi managed. She did not think she could stand to just sit there with him looking so handsome. Desire turned her crafty. She slapped her forehead. “Sodas! We forgot to get sodas to go with the cake!”

“We can get them!” Beto and Cari said. They were up before Naomi fished the coins out of her pocket.

When she could no longer hear the twins' footsteps on the path, she ran for the tree.

Inside, he pulled her close. “Thank you, baby.”

She smiled. “Do you feel special? The cake is going to be delicious.”

“Spoiled rotten,” he said. “But there's one present I'd still like to open...” He ran a finger up from her leg and gave her thigh a good stroke before she slapped his hand away with a laugh.

“Can't blame a guy for trying.”

“Sure I can,” she said, biting his finger lightly.

 

THE GANG
We were pretty sure that a year ago Miranda wouldn't have gone anywhere with Chigger Watson. For one thing, Chigger was the scrawniest boy ever to ride the bench of the football team. For another, he reminded Miranda of her dirt-poor past. Back before her daddy made his money, Miranda and Chigger were playmates. Back when the Gibblers lived in a lopsided farmhouse without electricity. Back when Miranda wore hand-me-downs. Back when people thought of her as a mangy, motherless girl.

But Chigger got lucky because Miranda was on a losing streak and was starting to get a little desperate. There was the failed business with Gil, of course, and her father's short leash. There was the blow-up in home economics when Mrs. Anderson called her out for turning in a store-bought dress as her sewing project. There was Tommie; the chubby chatterbox stayed chipper no matter what Miranda tried to bring her down. And then there was Naomi.

All of us could see there was something new, something good in the Mexican girl's life. Some folks were betting it was her handsome stepfather. Others of us thought one of the boys on the football team was putting the wood to her on the sly, and Forrest Evers wasn't the only one trying to take credit for it. Some of us had other theories, but only Miranda seemed to take Naomi's happiness as a personal affront.

Miranda was scrambling. And so none of us were really surprised that she allowed Chigger to take her on a Saturday canoe ride. She didn't give many details, but we knew how to fill in a story.

◊ ◊ ◊

We rarely felt sorry for Miranda, but the thought of being stuck in a boat with Chigger brought us close. Like we expected, Miranda didn't much care for the river. The mosquitoes weren't too bad yet, but every once and a while, a whiff of something foul would roll out of the woods.

“What is that?” Miranda asked. “Gosh but it stinks.”

Chigger shrugged. “Could be you're smelling some sour crude from a rig. Or a fox carcass left by a bobcat. Even a deer that lazy hunters didn't track down.”

“Charming,” Miranda said.

“Down that way is the old pulpwood and paper factory. Remember how that stank?”

Miranda was not interested in traveling down Memory Lane, so Chigger dropped the subject and opened up a jar of worms. He split one in two with his fingernail and baited their fishing lines.

“Ugh,” Miranda said. She didn't take the rod he offered her. “So this is what boys do for fun when they're not playing football?” Miranda said.

“Ain't it great?” Chigger grinned.

Miranda was not impressed. There were a bunch of trees, one bank full of scraggly bushes where bits of trash had caught, and another bank with a more gradual sandy slope.

But then she saw something. There was another sort of trash in the woods, apparently. She knew, like all of us, that the woods were where you went to do things you didn't want other folks to know about. Through the trees, Miranda saw an unlikely foursome being happy and alive and not at all careful. And that was the part of the story she told and retold, proof of her intuition that Naomi was a nigger-loving hussy.

MARCH 1937

NAOMI
Naomi was serving Henry a late supper when it happened. In the end, he didn't even ask her. He announced what was supposed to happen: “Naomi, we ought to marry.”

He spoke to her around a mouthful of fried chicken while she had her head inside the fridge. She stood up and pressed the door closed with her back. She held eggs in both hands.

“Did you hear me?” Henry asked. He was holding his fork and knife extra tight. A drop of gravy clung to the corner of his mouth.

Naomi placed the eggs on the counter and pulled a napkin out of a drawer. Time turned to syrup as she tried to take the four steps that separated her from where he sat at the table. His eyes on her were not a father's eyes. They never had been, but she still could not get over the wrongness of it.

She handed him the napkin. He took it from her. Instead of wiping his mouth, though, he dropped it to the table and grabbed her hand.

“Just think about it,” he said. He flashed her a wolf's smile. It was worse than lust; it was desperation. Henry was a drowning man casting about for something to save him. For someone. He'd tried first with Pastor Tom, who gave him Jesus, and then with the twins, who still admired him at least a little. But that wasn't enough. Now he wanted her. That was how it would be: him pulling her down ... Slow or fast, did it really matter? He would keep at it until he'd drowned them both.

He still held her left hand between his. She curled her fingers and tried to pull away, but he held on. The callouses on his fingers pressed into her hand.

“Sit down,” he ordered.

Naomi lowered herself into the chair next to his. The veins in his arms pulsed as he clasped her hand still more tightly. His Adam's apple stood out stark against the flesh of his neck. He looked to have swallowed a peach pit. On his jaw, there was an island of stubble. Lately he had become careless in his shaving. The gravy was still on his lip.

She waited for a long moment and then looked him in the eye. His eyes glinted with an indiscernible emotion. “No,” she said firmly, “there's nothing to think about.”

To her amazement, a smile spread across his face, making his single dimple appear. He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed it against his dry lips. “Thank you,” he said. A bit of the gravy grazed her knuckles.

She snatched her hand away from his and hid it in her lap. She wiped her fingers on her dress.

“I mean the answer is no. I can't do what you're asking. It's not ... it's not right.”

His grin widened. “Of course it is. It's exactly right. It's sanctified. I've—I've prayed about this.” He leaned forward and opened his hands, palm-up, on the table. “God has a plan for us. And when I say ‘us,' I mean you and me. Together. That's the path he's been leading us toward since you came here.” He stood and began to pace back and forth on the far side of the table. “The twins, they're like, like a rope that binds us together. You're a mother to them already. It all fits. Don't you see, Naomi?”

He went on in the same vein, filling her ears with lines cribbed straight from Pastor Tom. He didn't seem to require any response. Meanwhile, she studied the cheap, nubbed fabric of the tablecloth. There was a loose thread; she longed to pluck it out. Instead, she slid her fingers back and forth across the rough grain of the table's underside, letting her skin drag over the unfinished wood, working out a kind of counterpoint to Henry's rambling.

Only when a splinter caught under her fingernail, biting deep into the tender flesh, did Naomi react. She gasped and pulled her hand back, bringing the finger up instinctively to her mouth. She worked the splinter loose with her tongue and teeth and began to reckon up the too-few options left to her.

 

HENRY
Pastor Tom pulled Henry aside as he came out of the church building on Sunday. The twins ran ahead to play leapfrog with the other kids while Naomi helped Muff with her boys.

“Did you talk to her, brother?” Pastor Tom asked in a low voice. He waved good-bye to some ladies as he spoke.

“Yeah, I did, but...” Henry shrugged, a little defeated.

“Well?”

Henry shook his head. “I reckon I botched it.”

“You tell her what we talked about? Sharing a path? God's plan? The conviction you've been feeling in your heart?”

“Sure, but it don't come out so clean for me.”

“What'd she say?”

“She said no,” Henry admitted, “but then I explained it to her again like you told me, about God's plan, about the twins and all. She listened to that, but she sure didn't say yes.”

Pastor Tom stroked his beard. “Let her think it over a bit. And pray. If there's something she's put between you, the Lord'll work it out. You just wait on Him. In the meantime, you flee temptation, you hear?” He clapped his left hand against Henry's shoulder and reached his right one out to shake. “I'll be around, and I'll be praying.”

Henry weighed up Pastor Tom's words. He was a man of God; his confidence counted for something. But Henry didn't want to wait on the Lord. For one thing, he knew a little more than Pastor Tom about Naomi's reservations. For another, he wanted what he wanted.

That night, he wrote a letter.

 

NAOMI
Naomi knew she needed to tell Wash about Henry's proposal, but after nearly a week she still hadn't caught him alone. His every spare minute was spent with Beto and Cari assembling the scarecrows. She got a report on the progress from the twins every night. Wash brought them the things they needed, worn-out clothes from his mother's scrap bin, heavy wire to connect the limbs, armfuls of straw they could pack into the sleeves and pant legs. Each day, though, their plans seemed to grow more elaborate.