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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Sara rolled her eyes, hiding her smile. She’d heard songs like it before. “Baby, that was delightful. You’re a regular Irving Berlin.”
“Who’s Irving Berlin?” Elma asked. Her mouth still burned with the grapefruit, with the acid shame of never having eaten grapefruit before. She wanted more, but she didn’t want to ask.
“Elma,” Sara said, taking both her shoulders in her hands, looking her deep in the eyes, “we’re going to teach you a thing or two.”
“Or three or four,” sang Jim on his banjo. “Or maybe more.”
When the doctor’s bill came, it came on a Sunday morning, when Dr. Rawls knew Juke would be in church. A colored boy on a borrowed bicycle pedaled barefoot all the way from Florence. He made sure Elma was the one to open it before she scurried back into the kitchen. Inside the envelope, tucked behind the bill, was a letter typed on onionskin paper. Nan stood with Wilson on her hip, watching her read it. It took a moment for Elma to see that it wasn’t Manford Rawls’s name on the letterhead but Dr. Oliver Rawls, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
“Atlanta,” Elma whispered, as though it were the name of a holy city. She thought of Josie Byrd’s spotless white shoes, the knee-high boots of the yellow-haired dog breeder.
Oliver Rawls was the youngest son of Manford Rawls. Elma remembered him vaguely. He was ahead of her in school, far enough that he was graduating from high school when she’d been learning arithmetic. Mostly she remembered his limp, first on crutches, then on a cane. A head of dark curls, and round eyeglasses like his father’s. Now he was a doctor like his father, a hematologist. He studied blood. He had heard about the twins from his father—“an exceptional case indeed.” Would Mrs. Jesup—he said Mrs.—consider bringing the children to his laboratory in Atlanta for a few tests? Nothing invasive—just some blood work. “Our blood reveals more about ourselves than you can imagine.”
Elma was leaning against the stove. When she’d finished reading the letter aloud, she dropped it to her side. “Blood work,” she spat. She felt sick. Then she raised the letter and read it once more, to herself. “No one’s gone stick those babies again,” she said, “not if I have any say.” But she kept her eyes on the page. “Some big-city scientist thinks he’s putting his hands on my babies?” She looked up, remembering Nan, remembering her father wasn’t in the room. “Our babies,” she said quietly.
Then her eyes found the note at the bottom of the page. “PS,” she read aloud. “I understand travel may be difficult. My father is willing to carry you to Atlanta, and I am willing to compensate you for your trouble.”
Elma lowered the letter again, this time creasing it a little in her fist. “Some big-city scientist thinks he can buy me like a hog?” She produced a laugh. “I’m fixing to burn this with the rest of the trash,” she said, but she put the letter in the pocket of her apron and kept it there, and spent the rest of the day singing a tune inside her closed mouth.
Sara and Jim were good hands. Juke taught them how to take the peanuts out of the ground, to thresh and stack them, to bale the hay. He taught them how to top and strip and cut the sorghum, and Nan and Elma helped to mill and cook and bottle it. When the cotton wanted picking, Sara and Jim made a game of it, racing to see how fast they could fill their bags, the way Elma and Nan had done when they were small. Their hats bobbed along the west field, Jim’s voice filling the air with songs of rabbit-tail cotton and candy-cloud cotton, cotton soft as a baby’s cheek. The other pickers stayed along the road, taking their midday meal under the lacy shade of the cottonwood tree, while Sara and Jim ate at the big house. They’d come back for harvest because they needed the work, Ezra and Long John and Al, and because Juke had been good to them. (Al’s wife had begged him not to return to the farm, and Al had said, “He all right. He won’t do me no harm,” and his wife said, “Just don’t be coming back to town dragged by no truck,” and kept all three sons at home and said if they even looked at a white girl she’d kill them herself.) They kept their eyes on the ground, away from Elma, away from Juke, away from the gourd tree, and they didn’t come near the house. At the cotton house, when it was time to weigh in at the end of the day, they didn’t meet the young couple’s eyes, but Jim tipped his hat as though he didn’t notice, and whistled, impressed, at the biggest pull. Usually it was Long John, but on a day when Long John didn’t come, it was Jim himself who picked two hundred and eighty pounds, more even than Juke, who was not shown up but proud. “They teach you to pick cotton in New Yawk, Jimbo?”
For supper there were boiled peanuts and greens and salt pork and beaten biscuits soaked in syrup, and Jim and Sara remarked over every bite, falling over themselves, and even Nan couldn’t hide how pleased she was. After the meal, the men would throw horseshoes in the scrubgrass yard while the women washed the dishes. Then Sara would bounce a baby on her knee while Jim played his banjo or guitar on the front porch, “Travelin’ Blues” and “Buffalo Blues” and “Boll Weevil,” and they’d all listen, shelling field peas while the sun went down. After a while, the music eased even Elma. The voice Jim used was his own. He sang and the dogs howled after him. When they howled too long, Juke threw the pea jackets at them, and they ate them up. One evening a chain gang limped up the Straight, their sweat-soaked handkerchiefs hanging like bright tails from their back pockets, and as they leveled the ditches Jim played them “Birmingham Jail,” and they sang along, and then, wanting to give them something brighter, he played “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and they sang and danced too, even the shotgun guard Lloyd Crow, who was known to enjoy a pint of gin with Sheriff Cleave now and then, clapping his hands along to the music before moving the men on. Jim and Sara talked of their travels—speakeasies and soup kitchens, revivals and picture shows, the camps along the flooded Mississippi. Many nights they’d slept in their car at the edge of shantytowns, giving shelter to those who needed it. At marked houses, they begged for food; at farms they worked for milk and eggs; they stayed put until they had enough to buy or trade for gasoline; then they kept going. For a while Jim had run rum in Philadelphia, but he got into some trouble and they went south. They’d been traveling for three years. Now they were twenty-three, and Sara wanted a baby.
“I can’t stand it one more minute,” she said, taking Winna Jean into her lap. “I’ve got to have one.”
“Another mouth to feed,” Jim said. “No, thank you.”
Sara blew a raspberry on Winna’s cheek. “Babies eat nothing but momma’s milk. Look at this momma! She’s got two and they’re still fat as can be.”
“They don’t drink milk forever, darling.”
“Well, by the time they’re through, times will be better.”
Juke laughed from his rocking chair, sending shreds of tobacco flying from his mouth. “Maybe in New York they will. In Georgia, times is always lean.”
“We never have missed a meal,” said СКАЧАТЬ