The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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      On the night the seed was planted, Juke was waiting for her on her mattress in the pantry when she returned from the creek. Her nightdress clung to her wet skin and her hair was pearled with water.

      She took a step back into the breezeway. Her first fear was the gin—had he noticed it was missing, one jar among so many jars? Or the book—had he discovered it under the mattress? Then she feared Elma would hear. Or did she want her to hear? She could have walked across the breezeway and slipped into bed beside Elma, and then everything would have been different. He would have left her alone, gone back to his bed. But instead she stepped into her own little room, thinking she could quiet him, thinking she knew how to quiet him. She closed the pantry door softly behind her. His face was dead as a stone, and she knew then that he knew. He was drinking, the tumbler nearly empty.

      “Where you been, girl?”

      The tongue is the worst curse, her mother had told her. Ketty’s grandmother had been beaten by her master for running from his bed, but worse? Worse was the shame of lying. Worse was having to look at his white face and say, “I like it” and “I love you.” There was dignity in silence, Ketty said, in keeping your truth inside.

      “Cat got your tongue, kitty cat?” He kept his voice low. He sat up in her bed, placed the tumbler on the floor, and wrapped his hand around her thigh. “You been swimming at this hour?”

      She mimed washing, rubbing soap through her hair.

      “Washing?” He yanked up her nightdress, plunged his face between her legs, and sniffed. “You ain’t washed good enough.” Then he yanked her down to the bed, rolled her onto her back, and pinned her against the wall. “I seen you knock on that nigger’s door,” he whispered. His breath was flaming with drink. “You think y’all are here to skinny-dip? That how you repay me for the food on your plate? The roof over your head?”

      Nan shook her head.

      “You ain’t live in that slave shack no more. You ain’t no slave. You live in my house now. You know how many folks’d like to sleep in this here big house? That how you repay me, run back to that shack?” He was slurring. “Don’t let me see you with him again. You hearing me? I see you within ten feet of that door, I’ll kill him dead.”

      She might have stroked his cheek to calm him, she might have kissed him, but he was holding her down, one arm to the bed, one arm to the wall. She wished her nipples didn’t show through her wet nightdress. She wished her rabbit heart weren’t beating so quickly. Surely he could feel it in her wrists. You could take away the tongue, she thought, you could put out a person’s eyes, but still the pulse betrayed your fear.

      Across the breezeway, through one board-and-batten wall and then another—thick walls built by George Wilson and two hired Negroes whose names he did not know and painted some years ago a milky blue, now fading—Elma sat up in her bed. She had been sleeping, or had been trying to. She had been trying to scare away the image of Nan and Genus in the creek, but every time she closed her eyes, it floated into her mind again like a ghost. When she thought she heard a thump against the kitchen wall, she thought it must be Nan returning from the creek, and then when she heard another, she thought it must be Genus in there with her, and though it was beyond her belief—that Nan and Genus would be so bold in her father’s house—it was not beyond her imagination. Once the idea was in her head, it wouldn’t turn her loose. She sat up in bed, remembering suddenly the night a few weeks back when a man had come to the house looking for Nan to deliver a baby. Elma had looked all around the house and the yard, but she couldn’t find her. The man had left in a huff and a panic. And though Nan had been at the still with Juke, it seemed clear to Elma now that she’d been with Genus, and humiliation knocked her flat on her back. She stuffed her pillow over her face, to drown out the noise and to muffle the sound of her own tears.

      What was happening in Nan’s room was beyond Elma’s imagination. She would have sooner imagined that the noises came from the wall itself, the house coming to life, growing a mouth, giving voice to its ghosts. That was the way Nan felt suddenly—that the walls that had protected her had now betrayed her with their thickness, not keeping her safe but trapping her. This was not her home. Home was the tar paper shack Genus Jackson lived in, before he lived there, before he slept in the bed she used to share with her mother. She thought herself back there now, walked herself from the cabin down to the shack. She wished herself all the way back, the taste of tobacco and clay on her mother’s lips, the smell of her father’s pipe, the warmth of the grits cooking on the woodstove in the morning. She would even wish away Genus, though her heart seized like a fist when she thought of his name—Genus, who was settling into that bed now, oblivious as Elma. She wished he’d never set foot on the farm.

      There was no wool blanket. It was back in the cabin. Here in her room, Juke did not pull away. She could feel his seed seeping into her, thick as egg yolk. Through the mattress, she could feel the shape of The Book of Knowledge under her back. She kept her eyes on the pantry shelves beyond him, the okra she’d pickled, the sorghum syrup, the cornmeal, the salt.

      Afterward, he cried. “Don’t do me like that again, honey,” he said. “Don’t make me do that again.” There was no uglier sight in the world, Nan thought, than a naked white man crying.