Читать книгу Grace - Natashia Deon - Страница 19

10 / FLASH

Conyers, Georgia, 1847

FOR THE BETTER part of this week, me and Johnny been shooting marbles. We mostly play in secret and only after my chores is done. Mostly. Johnny’s good at keeping secrets.

His momma’s been spending more and more time running to that store for Bernadette’s medicine and been rough-sketching something she wants Albert to build under her house. She been gone for most of the day already so Johnny drew a circle in the dirt hours ago. We just dropped our marbles in. All but one of our little ones and a big one. Two each.

The big one is called our shooter. I painted mine blue and it got three stick people on it, holding hands—me and Hazel and Momma. But it mostly look like a spider.

Johnny’s shooter got all sorts of colors—blue and black and white and tan. He used all the pots of color Cynthia gave him to do it. I think his is pretty.

I drop my shooter outside the circle and lay my body down in front of it, my flat chest in the dirt. I put my thumb behind it, close one eye to make sure it’s all lined up. My breaths make the dust putter.

Johnny snatches my shooter, laughing.

“You cheatin’!” I say. “I was about to shoot.”

He holds out his hand, teasing me with my own marble, and closes it before I get it. So I wrestle him for it, both us laughing. I twist his arm and shake it from his limp hand. He lifts his chin toward the barn and smiles.

“What?” I say. “Your momma kill me if I go out that far. And if you keep going out to that barn after she told you not to, she gon’ kill you, too.”

He raises his brows, daring me.

I admit, the risk-taking makes me want to go. It feels like freedom. Reminds me of Hazel and our dusk runs.

I take off with Johnny. Close my eyes and pretend I’m back with Momma and Hazel, pretend that Johnny’s one of Momma’s gave-away babies here to let me be a big sister one time.

I let the grass brush under my feet, the cool air swish over me, half-waiting for Cynthia’s voice to yell me back to my place and keep me from this stole happiness.

The barn meets us.

Its tall front doors are dark-brown masses, three times my height, streaked black and wet. They gap open wide enough for us to slide through sideways without touching.

We hold hands and shuffle our feet through the hay spread on the ground, then around a column, past another, ’til Johnny stops us near the back of the barn where there’s a broken baling machine. Wood planks lay atop two hay bales there like a roof. He lifts the planks.

Four yellow puppies are trembling inside. The runt ain’t moving much, though. That’s the one Johnny picks up and holds to his chest. Johnny smiles and nods for me to pick one up, too, but I shake my head. I ain’t got nothin to give it. “Where’s the momma?” I say. He raises his shoulders, rubs the sickly one again. It moves for him.

“You probably shouldn’t get attached to that one. It don’t look well.”

He turns his back to me, presses the puppy into the crook of his neck, and kneels down to a pail of milk ready for churning. He takes a cloth from his pocket and dips it in the milk, then holds it to the pup’s mouth. Squeezes.

“Johnny, you steal this milk?”

He don’t hear me.

“Johnny?”

Cynthia’s voice rumbles from up the road. She loud-talking, yelling to somebody. “We in trouble now!”

Johnny puts the pup in his shirt and points ahead to a open place in the barn wall and waves for me to follow him. We climb through the space, then run across the field, keeping low to the ground. My legs move as fast as they can go, leaving Johnny behind. I wait ’round the side of the brothel house, can hear the clinks of glass from Sam serving, so I take my chance and run toward the center of the garden, my head held back, my fringe bangs flying straight up in the air. I dive, sliding to a stop, pretend I been here all along, looking at something in the dirt. My knees are scraped and burning but I stay cross-eyed, focused on a clover, waiting for Cynthia to see me.

Instead, I hear her on the porch talking to somebody, but this time, from here, it don’t sound quite like her. Pete is standing where she should be with a voice that’s high, like a woman’s. He’s yelling and talking to Jessup using Cynthia’s tone. I laugh and thank God it weren’t her and spit the dirt out my mouth, stand up and bend over to brush my clothes down.

A man’s voice behind me say, “I like the look of that.”

“Um-hm,” another man say.

“That makes three,” comes a third. My breath catches.

I turn around and see ’em close to me.

All of ’em are tall and lanky. Brothers, maybe. It’s their voices I remember. That night in Cynthia’s room, when they came ready to take me in my sleep.

“Why you reckon Cynthia’s been protecting you so much?” the first one say.

I don’t answer.

“What brings you to Conyers, girl?”

I cain’t speak.

The second one comes over to me, walking wide-legged. He slides his hand down my backside, pinches my ass with his whole hand. My lips quiver but I ain’t gon’ cry.

“It’s about time we had a go,” he say, unbuckling his pants.

“Right here? Right now?” the third one say. “In the broad daylight?”

I cain’t move.

“Let her ’lone!” I hear her say. Cynthia is running down the stairs coming this way with her two pistols popping in the air. “Let her ’lone!”

The first man, the leader, backs up with a hand in the air. With the other, he pulls me close to him, say, “Whoa now, Cynthia,” and puts me half in front of him.

She waves both pistols across everybody. She say, “I said, let her ’lone, Jonas.”

“Just having some fun, is all,” Jonas say. “We’d have paid you.”

“She ain’t one of my girls.”

“Then this ain’t none of your business,” he say.

She fires in the air again. “I reckon it is.”

“You crazy,” the second brother who had his hand on my ass say.

“I’m crazy, Tommy?” Cynthia points her pistol at him. “That wasn’t what you was saying three nights ago when you were crying on my shoulder about the bitch that stole your shit and you still want her back.”

Tommy steps behind Jonas.

“You hiding, now? Way I see it is I made it a fair fight. It was three on one and now, me and my Walkers here make it three on three. The girl don’t hardly count.”

Jonas tears a pistol from behind his waist and points it at her.

Cynthia gets real still.

Everybody do.

I hear us breathing.

“We at a stalemate,” Jonas say.

“I don’t reckon so,” Cynthia say, keeping her eye and one pistol on him.

She dumps all the bullets except for one out of her other gun without looking, and snaps the chamber closed. “Sometimes, the only thing between life and death is luck. Ain’t no rhyme, no reason, no God to come save you, just Lady Luck.”

“Don’t give me your bullshit, Cynthia. You can take the girl and we’ll go.”

“How lucky you think I is?” she say.

She takes the pistol with the single bullet and presses it against her head.

I close my eyes.

She fires—click, click, click.

I open my eyes, breathing hard. She points the pistol back at the men.

“There weren’t no bullet in there,” Jonas say. “Some kind of trick. Tommy, grab her guns!”

Cynthia flicks her wrists, daring him.

Tommy don’t go.

“This ain’t none of my business,” the third man say, straightening hisself like he just stopped by to say hi. He say, “So I’ll just go . . .”

Cynthia stares at ’im with dead eyes and tilts her head sideways, enough to make him want to stay.

“You ain’t gon’ shoot,” Jonas say. “How will that look to the law? A whore shooting upstanding citizens like ourselves.”

“Regular pillars of the community,” Cynthia say, laughing. “Hell, law can only take me to jail or hell, no place I ain’t already been.”

She keeps the fully loaded gun on Jonas. The other one she holds directly at Tommy’s head.

Jonas say, “Don’t worry, Tommy. Ain’t no bullet in there.” But Tommy don’t move.

Nobody moves.

Cynthia lowers the pistol she got pointed at Tommy and fires. Its sound is like rocks hitting together, but louder.

Tommy screams, grabbing his hand where the bullet grazed, blood spills through. He clinches his hand between his legs, knees the dirt, whining and rolling around.

Cynthia don’t flinch. “Jonas?” she say. “Now how lucky you think you is?”

“You bitch!” Tommy say.

She fires her pistol near him again, burying a bullet in the ground. “Shut up. It’s just a graze.”

He opens his hand, sees the flesh ripped, holds the wound closed and clinches his teeth, swearing and spitting through ’em.

Jonas lets go my arm. He pushes me to Cynthia, his voice shaking. “I’m trusting you now, Cynthia. You know we was just messing around. G’wan and take her. We don’t want no trouble.”

He backs away, pulling the third man away with him, and nudges Tommy with his foot. Tommy’s still whining.

“Quit yer crying,” Cynthia say. “You can pay me with the other hand.” She keeps her pistol on ’em when she grabs me and together we snake our way backward to the brothel house.

I think Cynthia’s gon’ keep me safe, after all.