Memphis(10)

“I was minding my business,” she whispered to herself as she climbed the plum tree. “I swear I was minding my business. Kicked out of my own house. And all I wanted to do today was play the piano.” She reached a branch right underneath the window. “Perfect,” she told herself.

And it almost was. The voices coming from the parlor would become muffled whenever a loud car’s engine rolled down Locust Street. But August heard enough to know that her sister would be leaving Memphis.

“So, you want to take my joy from me? My firstborn? What a Yankee won’t steal from a Southerner, God only knows.” August heard the contempt in her mother’s voice. “You want to take my Miriam from me? My sole daughter of Myron’s.”

August gasped, shocked that her mother was telling their business to a stranger, and a Yankee at that. She knew, of course, that she and her sister had different fathers—her mother had been open about that for as long as she could remember—but she’d never heard her mother volunteer that information to someone outside the family. Outside Memphis.

“My word, speaking of that August, did she not offer you some sweet tea?” August heard laughter well up in her mother’s voice. “That one. Spitfire. Acts like she was raised by wolves instead of a God-fearing Southern woman.”

“I’m fine, thank you,” came the man’s deep voice.

“So, you come to take Miriam off me. My only proof I ever loved a decent man.”

“August’s father wasn’t decent, I take it?” the Yankee asked.

“You wouldn’t believe who that girl’s father is if I told you, which I am not doing on this Sabbath. This Sabbath, I’m giving you an honor I doubt you can live up to: making Miriam happy for life. Now that’s a bigger honor, a bigger responsibility than any of them shiny badges and medals on your shoulders.”

“With all due respect, Miss Hazel—”

August raised an eyebrow. Miriam must have briefed him on the proper Southern etiquette for addressing widowed women. That fact, more than anything, told August that her sister was serious about this man.

The stranger in the Marine Corps uniform continued: “I am a commissioned officer in the Marine Corps. I have a steady salary, and I’m certain I’ll make captain. When I do, we’ll move to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Picked us out a pretty little house on the shore. I can provide for Miriam.”

“?‘I can provide for Miriam.’?” August’s mother laughed. “Miriam can provide for Miriam. Lord knows, I didn’t raise a silly girl. It’s not even so much she would be forsaking Southwestern—”

A silver pickup, its bed lined with tall fishing poles, careened down the street, obscuring the conversation in the parlor. “Damn it,” August hissed. She cast a furious glance at the truck as it passed. “Niggas here stay fishing,” she muttered.

“Will you love her, is what I’m concerned about,” her mother was saying. “Treat her right? Do for her and care for her? Be there when she’s sick and when she’s lonesome?”

“You’re an Edith Wharton fan, ma’am?”

“You’re literate, then. Well, at least that’s something. Wasn’t sure what y’all Northerners were taught in school. Or if at all.”

“I love her,” the Marine said simply.

And at the very same moment, both August and her mother said the exact same thing—August whispering sharply into the leaves of the plum tree, her mother’s voice low and threatlike in the quiet parlor.

“You better,” the two North women said.



* * *



—

Seventeen years later, August would answer the phone in the middle of the night to hear her sister sobbing on the other end. Something Miriam rarely did: cry. Barely comprehensible. August had to strain, but she was able to make out the words fight, black eye, and ashamed. Even in her half-awake state, she could remember sitting in the plum tree, straining her ear to the stained-glass window, hearing her mother resign herself to her daughter’s fate.

Lying in her mother’s four-poster oak bed, listening to her sister’s sobs, August silently counted the bullets she had left in the Remington, calculated how many hours it would take to drive from Memphis to North Carolina, reckoned how long she would be in jail for killing a no-good Yankee. If she should even bother with burying the body. Maybe she’d prefer to drive the damn corpse to the police station herself, toss it out the door, and scream, “Take this shit.”

“Come home,” August said. She was certain, felt it in her bones, that her mother would have said the exact same thing.





CHAPTER 5


    Miriam


   1995


The annual black-and-white Marine Corps Ball was an extravaganza. The dress code was formal. Ranking Marine Corps officers would don the Marine Corps dress blue: a blue jacket trimmed in red stitching and paired with brilliant blue trousers that had a matching red pinstripe running down the outer seam of the leg. His sword was at his right side, the ivory handle of the weapon shone like a tooth. As had been tradition for hundreds of years, women wore black or white or any combination of the two.

Miriam’s gold sequined train shone like celestial glimmer on the pinewood floors of the Marston Pavilion. Camp Lejeune, in Onslow County, North Carolina, was the largest Marine Corps base on the East Coast, and the sprawling Officers’ Club overlooked the New River, with sweeping coastal views of the Atlantic. She and Jax approached the Tinian Ballroom, which was awash in light. The ballroom had been christened for a Pacific battle where, in a matter of days, the Marines devastated, captured, and occupied a tiny Asian island north of Guam called Tinian. Three domes too big to be considered chandeliers hung from the ceiling and gave the room a Romanesque gleam.