The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson
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Название: The Twelve-Mile Straight
Автор: Eleanor Henderson
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780008158712
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“Course we can,” said her father. “Dogs look after theyselves.”
And he made Elma take the woman into her room, where the babies now shared a larger crib that Juke had built. The woman leaned over the sleeping twins but didn’t pray. “Would you look at that,” she said.
“Please don’t touch the babies,” said Elma. “They’re still fragile. They were born small.”
“They look strong,” said the woman. “Especially this boy here. That’s hybrid vigor.”
Elma joined the woman at the crib, pulling the quilt to Wilson’s chin.
“Most people don’t believe a woman can have two babies from two fathers at the same time. They think it’s witchcraft, don’t they? Or just tales from Bible times?”
Elma felt a sudden pressure in her chest, like a blush, or a rush of milk.
“With dogs in the wild, it happens all the time. You take any bitch in heat, they’s as good a chance as not that every mutt in the litter’s gone have a different daddy.”
“That so?” said Elma, head cocked. One of her pins sprung out of her hair and she bent to pick it up, then took it between her lips, chewing it over.
“Your babies will be fine,” the woman said. “Black or white, they’re fixing to be strong.”
Of course, Wilson wasn’t true black. Nor was he red like Isaac’s child Esau, though under his skullcap was a rusty shock of hair, like the bronze wool used to scrub the pans. When he had grown into his skin, he was a warm, loamy brown, the color of the earth tilled for seed—sand and silt and clay mixed together. And when his eyes finally settled, when he could stare back at the faces that loomed over the crib and hold them in focus, they were a pale gray-green. You didn’t have to look twice, some said, to see those eyes were Elma’s.
Winnafred, though—already she was called Winna Jean, or just Winna—took after her father. When her skin cooled from the pink of infancy, she was white as a gourd, with Freddie’s sun-bleached hair, even before she’d seen the sun. It wasn’t until years later, when the twins spent their days running between the house and the fields and the barn, that their freckles came out, like stars appearing in the night sky. If you wanted to believe they weren’t twins—and at some point, everyone did, even the twins themselves, as often as they wanted to believe that they were—their freckles were there, finally, to connect them, Castor and Pollux joined in their immortal constellation.
When they were still babies, Elma dressed them head to toe, even indoors, even in summer. She wanted to protect them, to hide them, to make them more the same. You couldn’t blame her. After all, Juke said to the visitors, she’d been expecting only one. When she was pregnant, singing “All the Pretty Horses” to the baby kicking in her belly, she’d sewn six identical guano sack dresses, stitching them together with hay bale twine. When two babies came instead, she dressed both of them in the sacks. If she could have, she would have stitched the babies together at the waist, like Siamese twins. Sometimes it seemed she wanted to believe Wilson and Winna were one child, or that she needed others to believe it. It didn’t matter how the babies came to be. Babies were babies. Even Juke believed that.
“Course I love them both the same,” Elma told the women from church, the reporters who tracked white clay across the floor. She followed them with a broom. “All children live in the kingdom of God, don’t they?”
And they nodded with certainty, saying “Amen” and “Praise His name.”
But they were thinking of all the things she might have done with that baby, all the doorsteps she might have left him on in the middle of the night. The colored school. The colored church. In a basket on the creek. She could see the scheming in their eyes, the stories they were writing in their heads. Just like they wondered what had happened between Elma and Genus Jackson in the cotton house or creek or cornfield, a cornfield she hadn’t even been in, but they were following her there.
In some of their eyes, doubt. They had seen their share of mulatto babies. The Jesups were as liable as any country family to have some black blood along their line, black blood that decided to rear up and show itself. (The white Youngs who owned the tobacco plantation and the black Youngs who owned the juke joint? “You think they ain’t kin?” a white farmer, drunk enough, might be heard to say to his wife. This was raised as a diversion, because that white farmer might himself have a favorite colored girl in town, or in a shack, and likely as not his wife knew the girl’s name.)
It wasn’t a miracle, some thought, just a disgrace.
But mostly people believed. Folks in Cotton County were believers. They believed in Jesus foremost, and every holy cow and sheep in the barn he was born in. They believed in the Promised Land. It was far away, the Promised Land, on the other side of the world, but they believed that Jesus meant for them to be here, in Georgia, in the land of cotton, their own Promised Land, hard as times were. Jesus and Mary and Joseph were their people, country people suffering under the sun, and the people of Cotton County would be redeemed. They believed in Redemption, that their losses on battlefields, their losses in cotton fields, would be remembered and repaid in the Kingdom of Heaven. They believed in the Commandments. They believed in work, and rising early, and the crops in the field, and the rain that nourished them, never did they believe in the rain more, now that there wasn’t enough of it. They believed in progress, in automobiles and airplanes, and a few of them in the tractors that sat like jungle beasts in their barns. They believed in Charles Lindbergh. They believed in Ty Cobb. They did not believe in Herbert Hoover, but they prayed for him. They believed in prayer, and praise, and warm meals, in the kindness of strangers. They believed in their neighbors. They believed in Georgia, its clays and creeks, in the heavenly mists that drifted over the fields in the morning. They believed in ghosts—for what was the Almighty but the Holy Ghost?—and they believed in miracles. They believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Getting caught not believing was like getting caught with your hand in the collection plate. “Any faithless fool tells you your babies ain’t kin,” Juke said to Elma, “you tell them the only sin the Lord don’t pardon is the sin of nonbelieving.”
So they believed that the babies were twins. Because if they didn’t believe, then they didn’t believe Genus Jackson was one of the daddies. They’d have to believe that the daddy was someone else. They’d have to believe that a mob of white men killed a black man for no reason. And they couldn’t believe that.
Except the black folks. They knew what their white neighbors were capable of. They believed in the same things the white folks believed in, except they didn’t believe in the white folks. (Some of them didn’t believe in Georgia. Some of them believed the only Promised Land lay north.)
Except they didn’t believe in outsiders, either. Neither the white folks nor the black folks believed in outsiders. None of the folks, black or white, knew Genus Jackson. If they had, maybe one of them would have been seen crying on a porch, or writing a letter to Walter White, or taking up a collection for a funeral.
So even Ezra and Long John and Al believed the story that was told. They sat on their stools at Young’s and talked it over. Ezra said, “Boy done come to the wrong town.”
Long John said, “Never did like that hunchback boy.”
Al, СКАЧАТЬ