Wrapped in Rain(4)

The fire licked the back of the fireplace and painted the wood in white coals.

"Mama Ella, where's my mom?"

Miss Ella looked into the fire and squinted. "I don't know, child. I don't know."

"Mama Ella?"

"Yes," she said, poking the fire with an iron poker, ignoring my use of her forbidden name.

"Is my dad mad at me?"



She squeezed me tight and said, "No, child. Your father's acting up has nothing to do with you."

I sat in the quiet for a minute, watching the end of the iron poker turn bright red. "Well then, is he mad at you?"

"I don't think so."

"Then"-I pointed to her left eye-"why'd he hit you?"

"Tucker, I think the screaming and hitting has a lot to do with your father's friendship with Mr. Daniels." I nodded as if I understood. "To tell you the truth, I don't think he remembers most of it."

"If we drink Mr. Daniels, will he help us forget?"

"Not permanently."

Miss Ella combed my hair with her fingers, and I felt her breath on my forehead. Miss Ella said that sometimes when she prayed, she felt the breath of God come down and cover her like mist in the morning. I didn't know much about the breath of God, but if it was anything like the breath of Miss Ella-sweet, warm, and close-I wanted it.

"Can you stop him from being so mean?"

"Tucker, I'd step in front of a train for you if I thought it would help, but Miss Ella can only do certain things."

The light from the embers bounced off her shiny face and made her skin look lighter. It also showed the scar above her right eye and the little swelling that remained. She sat me up and squared my shoulders to hers. She rubbed my tummy and smiled.

"You know sometimes how I walk into your room with a flashlight or a candle?" I nodded. "Well, love is like that. Light doesn't have to announce its way into a room or ask the darkness to leave. It just is. It walks ahead of you, and the darkness rolls back like a tide." She waved her hand across the room. "It has to, 'cause darkness can't be where light is."



She cradled my hand inside of hers. Hers was wrinkled and callused, and her knuckles were bigger than mine, sort of out of proportion to the rest of her hand. Her silver wedding band fit loosely and had worn thin on the edges. My hand was small and dotted with one or two freckles, and my fingernails were packed with Alabama clay. A cut had scabbed across the middle knuckle of my index finger and cracked every time I made a fist. "Tucker, I want to tell you a secret." She curled my hand into a fist and showed it to me. "Life is a battle, but you can't fight it with your fists." She gently tapped me on the chin with my fist and then put her hand on my chest. "You got to fight it with your heart."

She pulled me back to her chest and sucked through her teeth like she was trying to pick the corn out with her tongue. "If your knuckles are bloodier than your knees, then you're fighting the wrong battle."

"Miss Ella, you don't always make sense."

"In life"-she placed her finger on my knee-"you want the scabs here"-she placed the other on the cracked skin of my knuckle-"not here."

I pointed at the half-full bottle of hand lotion on her bedside table. "Is that why you wear the Cornhuskers?"

Dry skin was her nemesis. "The devil's due," she called it. She ashed up whenever she picked collards and turnips or took me out in the fields looking for arrowheads and pottery shards after a light rain. "Whenever you're down there"-I pointed at the floor and the worn, knee-width parallel lines-"you wear it."

She scratched my back, and the skin around her eyes fell into a smile. "No, child, you won't need the Cornhuskers unless you start working in bleach and ammonia every day."

I looked down and followed the motions of her finger. "Right now, your people place is about the size of a peach or a tangerine. Pretty soon it'll be the size of a cantaloupe and then one day"-she drew a big circle around my stomach-"the size of a watermelon."



I covered my belly button because I didn't want anything to get in or out without my permission. "Miss Ella, will you always be in here?"

"Always, child." She nodded and then stared off into the fire. "Me and God, we're not going anywhere."

"Never?"

"Never."

"You promise?"

"With all of me."

"Miss Ella?"

"Yes, child?"

"Can I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?"

"Child," she said placing her head to mine and her callused fingers on my cheek, "you can whip it and beat it senseless, you can drag it through the streets and spit on it, you can even dangle it from a tree, drive spikes through it, and drain the last breath from it, but in the end, no matter what you do, and no matter how hard you to try to kill it, love wins."

That night, in direct disobedience to one of Rex's loudest spit-filled and bourbon-inspired orders, I curled up and slept next to Miss Ella. And it was there, in her warm bosom, that for the first time in my life, I slept through the night.





Chapter 1


MAYBE IT'S THE JULY SHOWERS THAT APPEAR AT 3:00 p.m., regular as sunshine, maybe it's the September hurricanes that cut a swath across the Atlantic and then dump their guts at landfall, or maybe it's just God crying on Florida, but whatever it is, and however it works, the St. Johns River is and always has been the soul of Florida.