Before We Were Yours(11)

Leslie’s jaw twitches as she acquiesces, making it clear that she finds my silly whim disturbingly unprofessional.

I can’t help it. I’m still thinking about May Crandall and remembering the plethora of newspaper stories about nursing home abuse. Perhaps I just want to make sure that May didn’t come to me because she’s in some sort of trouble.

Perhaps my curiosity has been piqued by her sad, macabre story. She was found two weeks ago in a house along the river with her dead sister’s body….

Was her sister’s name Fern?





CHAPTER 4


Rill Foss

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, 1939

Queenie is as pale as skimmed milk, her body tight and hard as Briny lays her on the edge of the shanty porch and goes after the skiff, which is tied up to a drift pile downwater. Queenie cries and screams, out of her head, her cheek pushed to the smooth, wet wood.

Lark backs herself into the night shadows by the shanty wall, but the little ones, Fern and Gabion, sidle closer on hands and knees. They’ve never seen a grown person act this way.

Gabion leans down to see, like he’s not sure this thing in Queenie’s pink flowered dress is even her. Queenie is light, and laughter, and all the old songs she sings with us as we travel along from one river town to another. This woman with the bared teeth and the cuss words and the moans and sobs can’t be her, but it is.

“Wiw, Wiw!” Gabion says, because, at just two, he can’t say my name, Rill. He grabs my skirt hem, tugging it as I kneel down to hold Queenie’s head. “Keenie owww?”

“Hush up!” Camellia slaps at the little kids’ hands as Fern stretches to stroke Queenie’s long, gold curls. It’s the hair that first caught Briny’s eye and made him set his sights on her. Don’t your mama look like a princess in a storybook? he asks me sometimes. Queen of Kingdom Arcadia, that’s your mama. That makes you a princess sure enough, don’t it?

But my mama’s not beautiful now, not with her face sweat streaked and her mouth twisted in pain. The babies are busting her open. Her stomach clenches and bulges under the dress. She grabs hold of me and hangs on, and inside the cabin, the midwife wipes her hands, gathering her birthing tools in a grass basket.

“You gotta help her!” I scream. “She’s dyin’.”

“Ain’t havin’ nothin’ else to do wit’ this bidness,” the woman says, her heavy body rocking the boat and making the lantern sway and sputter. “No mo’. Fool, river trash.”

She’s mad as a camptown dog because Briny wouldn’t pay her cash money. Briny says she promised to deliver a baby, which she didn’t, and she oughta be glad he’s letting her take the two fat catfish he pulled off the trotlines earlier in the day plus some coal oil for her carry lamp. She’d get back at us if she could, but she’s still blacker than tar, and we’re white, and she knows what could happen if she gives us trouble.

The catfish was supposed to be our dinner, which leaves us with nothing but one little cake of cornpone between the five of us. That spins through my mind with a half-dozen other things.

Should I gather up clothes for Queenie? The hairbrush? Her shoes?

Has Briny got enough money to pay a real doctor? What’ll happen if he don’t?

What if the law nabs him? Once before, when we were hustling pool halls in river towns, he got snagged. Briny’s a good hustler. There’s nobody can beat him at a game of eight ball, and he can play a pool hall piano good enough that people will pay him to do it, but this Depression has made cash hard to come by. Mostly now he hustles pool and plays for things he can trade off to get what we need.

Is there money hid somewhere? Should I ask Briny when he comes back? Remind him he might need it?

How’ll he make the trip across-river in the dark with the storm already lifting whitecaps on the water?

The midwife turns sideways to get out the door, her basket slapping her behind. Something red hangs out the top, and I know what it is, even in the dim light—Queenie’s pretty velvet hat with the feathers on top, the one Briny won in a pool game in a dirty little place called Boggyfield.

“You put that back!” I say. “That’s my mama’s!”

The woman’s dark eyes fold up in her face, and she wags her chin at me. “Done been here all day long, and I ain’t gonna be takin’ no two fish. I gots me enough fish. I take this hat.” She looks around to see where Briny’s at, and then she starts for the gangplank at the side of the porch.

I want to stop her, but I can’t. On my lap, Queenie screams, thrashing around. Her head lands on the deck with a hollow thud, like a watermelon. I grab her with both hands.

Camellia hurries ahead of the woman and stretches herself across the gate, her thin arms stretched from rail to rail. “You ain’t takin’ my mama’s hat nowheres.”

The woman moves another step, but if she knew Camellia, she wouldn’t. My sister might be only ten, but she didn’t just get Briny’s thick black hair; she got his temper to go with it. When Briny gets mad, he’s blind-fool mad, Old Zede calls it. Blind-fool mad is the kind that’ll get you killed on the river. Zede’s warned my daddy of that more than once when our boats have been tied near each other, and a lot of times they are. Zede’s been Briny’s friend since Briny first took to the river. He taught Briny the way of things.