The Almost Sisters(101)

She runs up the hall and into the kitchen, where a pot of lady peas are slow-bubbling, glistening with bacon fat. Vina made this. It is meant to feed them once the horror in her father’s study is completed and Vina can go home. She runs to the dining room. Ethan’s portrait is on the floor, leaned against the wall. His nail has fallen, and her father is supposed to be rehanging the portrait, now, while she is at Garden Club. He is not. He is attending to other matters.

Her father is still back in his office, but his portrait’s eyes follow her as she walks in distraught circles, twice around the table. She goes to the parlor, and the painted eyes follow her there, sterner than his real gaze on her has ever, ever been. Then she hears his footsteps, leaving his office. He is in the hall. She runs fast up the stairs, slamming the door to her room with a loud, announcing bang. He does not follow.

She paces through her room, into the turret. She sits at the window seat, and her body cannot sit. She paces back and forth, and she can hardly stand to be inside her body. In every other moment, Vina has a human face. A face that looks on her with love. What Emily saw was worse than seeing Bill Palmer’s she-goat, blank-faced and resigned. Worse than her own hurtful rooster, who hops on any hen that takes his fancy. A horror happens, secret, in her house.

She goes into the turret and sits again, then immediately rises to throw up in the white ceramic bowl in the shelving. Downstairs, Vina’s skirts have rustled back into place. Vina will be stirring the peas, counting eggs for cornbread.

She thinks of Wattie in her own home with Big Bear and their newest small, fat baby. And now? Now that she has seen, she sees. She sees how it is written in the way her body matches her friend’s. How long has this been happening, under her roof? Her good Birch brain, well acquainted with sums and figures, is taking bad account here. Wattie is twenty-nine.

As Emily stands in her room, the sun races across the sky. The cornbread is out of the oven now. She can smell it, but for Emily no time has passed. How is Vina already ringing the brass bell on the porch that means supper is served? How is Vina already headed home to her own husband? How is it that the sun is nearly down?

Someone must stop her father. Someone must tell him that he must not do this thing. She cannot think who. Not the good white men of the town who run their businesses inside her father’s buildings, work in his mill, come to him for loans when their children are sick or the weevils eat up half their cash crop. The police all tip their hats when he passes. The deacons approached her father not a week ago to ask for money for a new organ. They watched him write a check for the whole sum.

Not the good black men of Redemption who drink from the colored fountains and call Ellis “sir.” If one of them took a white woman to his bed, there would be strange fruit hanging in the trees outside town.

Can she go to the women, then? The wives. What do they know? They likely do this thing facing their husbands, smiling, making their human babies eye to eye, hands clasped, the way that Wattie has with Big Bear. Wattie has told her in secret; it is a lovely thing, what happens in the marriage bed. It is not the same as what she saw.

No man here has any power to stop him, much less any woman, any child of any shade.

Vina herself cannot make this stop. Has not been able to stop it for longer than Wattie has been alive. Vina’s husband lost his leg to gangrene. This job saved her husband’s life, paid for his surgery and medications, fed her babies, kept a roof over their heads. If Vina tells, who will believe her? If the Birches turn her out, who in Birchville will take her? Vina has no voice.

The only equal whom Ellis Birch acknowledges is hiding in the tower, throwing up. His daughter owns the only voice that he might hear.

She does not remember going down the stairs, but more time has passed without her. Her father has eaten, and his empty dishes tell a story: His appetite is fine. Her own plate is empty and pristine. The lady peas and collards wait in covered dishes for her. The cornbread is swaddled in a napkin to keep warm.

Her father has rehung Ethan’s portrait. The hammer and a small tin of nails sit on the close side of the table. In the morning Vina will find them and carry them back to the tool hutch under the back porch. Emily wonders if Vina will do this chore before or after she is raped again.

Her father sits in his comfy chair in the parlor, having his port. His back is to her, his real eyes turned away. His painted eyes watch her, unreceptive.

“Well, there you are,” her daddy says. “Did you fall asleep?”

“No,” she says, because she has to talk to him. There is no one else. “I was being sick from what I saw.”

“Well, of course,” her father says, sympathetic, calm. “It’s not a sight or a subject for ladies. Don’t think about it. Go on and have your supper.”

Her obedient feet walk to the table, but she cannot imagine putting lady peas in her mouth. They smell like sulfur laced with rancid fat. She removes the lid from the collards, and they gleam with slime in her ruined eyes.

“You have to stop,” she tells the collards.

These are all the words she has, but he has more. They come to her from very far away, and the sky is dark, though she cannot remember when the sun went down. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it is still afternoon and the sun has gone black, a testament to how the world has turned to ruin. Yet it is the same. Nothing has changed except her way of seeing, the image shifting, showing her a secret, second father. She sees there is a secret, second town, too, always present, alive inside the lines of the town she sees. The town she loves.