My Monticello(44)

Nay-Nay, she said, brow furrowed like she was worried about me. I hugged her so hard, then opened all the windows. When I sat back on the edge of her bed, I wrapped my hands around her once more.

MaVi, I said, smiling like crazy just to see her alive, to hear her voice.

Sun’s up, she said, and it was. The rain had stopped entirely. Outside the window I could see steam rising from the grass.

I asked if she’d been by herself for long, and she gestured toward Ms. Edith’s chair. Y’all keeping me in good company, she said. The bed felt easier beneath me; still, I could feel grit in the sheets. MaViolet curled her arm around my waist, her cool palm slaking my skin.

You need anything? I ventured. What can I get for you?

That clock, she said, looking at Jefferson’s timepiece mounted at the foot of her bed. It had a white face, golden gears, and swirly hands like cursive writing—its head suspended between two black obelisks. My daddy carried a pocket watch, she said. Nothing fancy, mind you, but gold edged too.

MaViolet had grown up in Vinegar Hill, in a two-story clapboard house with yellow curtains in the windows. She used to talk about her old house sometimes, how it, along with her whole neighborhood, had been bulldozed to the ground about the same time she’d finished grade school, and all the Black families who lived there had been forced to move on. My daddy was a prideful man, she told me that morning. Used to let me hold his golden watch, and my mother bought me patent leather shoes, with ribbons. It was a man’s watch—heavy but pretty. I used to pretend it was mine.

MaViolet wrenched her body up to try to get a better view out of the window. The day looked pale with sun.

How come you never talk much about your parents? I said.

I got pregnant, she said. The summer I graduated. But you know that.

I nodded, hoping she would keep talking.

Daddy actually wanted to see me go to college since he didn’t have a son, she said. He was right about one thing: your mother’s father turned out to be no account. It was a while before I met Papa Alred—such a funny man—but I outlasted him too.

You’ll outlast us all, Grandma, I said. We’ll go home soon.

You look so much like both of them, she said. Specially around the eyes: like your Momma, and like mine.

It hurts, I said, struggling to swallow. Sometimes I try not to think of Momma because of how bad it hurts.

MaViolet’s eyes were trained on the window. When they brought us here last time, she said, it was spring.



* * *



When Ms. Edith came—bringing food for MaViolet and standing at the window, the furrows of her face cracking open as she looked out at the kids running wild, the way the sun marked their bodies—I told her briefly what had happened with MaViolet the night before. Then I ducked down through the all-weather pass to the old privy, closing myself off in that dim space. I’d put on the plainest giftshop T-shirt I could find and it hung loose over my body. But my cutoffs, which rode high on my stomach, had tightened around me in the intervening days, pressing a thin welt across my belly. I peered into the small hand mirror and admonished myself, slapping my cheeks, trying to wake myself. I should’ve told MaViolet then that I was pregnant. But how could I heap more worry on top of her worry? I knew her asthma could come back at any moment. And of course, Knox was right: If nothing changed, the next time she might die.

In the yard, near the west porch, Carol was cleaning up from the morning meal. Devin stood beside her, washing dishes in a basin. There you are, Carol called out when she saw me. You were supposed to do this. She pushed a stack of dirty bowls across their table, toward me, but Devin glanced up, our eyes met for a moment. He pulled the dishes back. I got this, he said.

Everybody on the mountain worked harder than ever that fourteenth day, buoyed by the break in rain, I figured, fueled by the feel of sun on skin. They worked in small groups, in the yard or the house, straightening shared spaces. They dug with trowels for hidden root vegetables in the garden, and reached high into crooked branches for ripening fruit in the orchard below. Folks churned wash in basins, strained taut lines with wrung but dripping laundry, their backs bowed, their hands chapping. Afterward, they rubbed in the thick lotion Ms. Edith had found in the gift shop, that smelled of lavender. Folks kept watch too, a steady shift of two or three in a rotation at the welcome pavilion, holding weapons, and walkies, and borrowed grace. I was moved by all that effort, though in truth it felt misguided to me that day. Even so, I did my best to mimic the swing of their arms, the rhythm of their legs moving forward: their hope. I moved my mouth soundlessly when Mr. Byrd opened his to call out to Georgie, asking the younger man to bring the first aid kit down. I shuttled my arms along with Mr. Flores’s movements, as he cleaned and oiled a line of guns in the grass, his expression reluctant, as if he’d been a pacifist in another life. I widened my eyes along with KJ, who sat on a step in the yard, his eyebrows and scar raising in tandem, in anticipation of pain before its arrival. Moments later, Mr. Byrd bent down to remove a splinter from the bottom of KJ’s bare foot with a sewing needle. As I passed them, I caught a whiff of sulfur. It’s done—you can go on and play now, son, Mr. Byrd said.

That evening, Lakshmi ladled out our bean soup supper on the covered west porch. Beside her LaToya and Gary portioned out salted nuts, raw carrots, colorful stalks of chard. Imani and Jobari had set up a small station with a basin of warm water and soap so that people could wash their hands before and soak their bowls after. By the time I got there, my hands were marked by fresh blisters, though I could not recall which action had raised them. Most folks were already settled, with bowls on their laps. Now that the rain had stopped, a few people had pulled chairs outside, borrowed from the parlor or entrance hall. Others sat along the porch steps. The Yahyas, along with Yamileth, sat on blankets in the grass. A couple of the students were guarding down below.