“What did you tell me just this afternoon?” Elnora needed Cissy to see reason. She couldn’t let her make the mistake of walking away from her baby. “What did you say about Graham Lee?”
“I know what I said—”
“Say it again.”
The two women stared. Then Cissy blurted out, “I was wrong! We’re a family. That’s all Graham Lee ever wanted. I want it too. Hattie should have her mama and her daddy.”
“Stupid kids,” Rayford Drew said.
“I take care of what’s mine!” Graham Lee’s cry woke Hattie. He wasted no time taking his child and holding her. “Hello there. Daddy’s sorry. Daddy’s gonna make it better. For you and for all of us.” He fixed his dove-gray eyes on Elnora. “You’ll help, won’t you? My family... they don’t understand. Cissy says you’ve always been good to her. Will you help us?”
“Why did you take the baby again?” she asked. “You scared her real bad.”
“It was the only way she’d come to me.” He looked at his child’s mother and smiled. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”
“But tearing up the photo?”
“The photo? I didn’t do that. My mama saw it and she...” He frowned. “Look, will you help us or not? We can take her, but it’ll be easier to get on our feet without her. Least for a little while.”
“Where are you going?” Rayford Drew turned from the rain to face them.
“You gonna tell your brother?”
The older man shook his head.
Graham Lee snorted. “I don’t believe you. We’re going someplace safe. That’s all you need to know.”
XI
Elnora had just set little Hattie down for a nap on the wrought-iron bed in the front room when Ed Jenkins stopped at her door. The storm had delayed the Illinois Central schedule so he was stranded in Grenada for a couple of days. With a baby to care for, resolving their disagreement failed to become a priority. He had left word that he was staying at his mama’s over on Poplar Street and that was just fine with her.
His somber expression had her prepared for anything. The storm had left debris everywhere. A toddler’s natural curiosity created mysteries and surprises where Elnora had never imagined. A simple task of cleaning up the backyard had become more involved with Hattie underfoot. One little girl had made Elnora’s reflexes quicker, sharper. So, whatever Ed had for her, Elnora was certain she could handle it without a flinch.
He took his hat off as he crossed the threshold and pulled out a chair for her at the kitchen table. After she sat down, he did the same.
“If you’re here to say goodbye—”
“I’m here about the flooding,” he said. “Ain’t nobody told you?”
“There was some flooding on the east side. I heard about that. It always floods there when we have a bad storm.”
“That wasn’t just a storm. Tupelo had a twister.”
“A twister?” She reared back. “Anybody hurt?”
“Quite a few,” he said. “Nobody told you?”
“I’ve been busy with Hattie—”
“Thank God.” He sighed. The will that had been holding him together started to crumble. His mouth trembled. “I’m glad she was found.”
“Ed, what it is? You dancing around your words. Just out with it.”
“Two bodies were found in the Yalobusha River. Now that the rain’s stopped, the river is starting to go back down—”
“The bodies.” She glanced toward the room where the little girl slept. “Whose bodies?”
“They ain’t identified them yet—”
“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know,” she said. “You wouldn’t tell me if it weren’t fact.”
He reached for her hands. “It’s fact. My uncle helped pull them out.”
“He’s sure it was Cissy and Graham Lee.”
“Yes.”
Elnora wanted to feel something. Her daughter was dead. Drowned in the Yalobusha River. Cissy’s baby would never get to know her mother. History would repeat itself. Life should have more to offer than the act of waiting for the next dose of trouble to arrive. Cissy and Graham Lee just wanted to go where they would be free to be a family. It was not right their dream would never be.
“What can I do?”
She shook her head. Hadn’t enough been done? She tried to pull free of his hand, but he refused to let go.
“We can raise her together,” Ed said. “She’ll never have to know.”
“I’ll know.”
Elnora recognized the strength in his touch and the promises of family that she had never been able to fulfill for Cissy and herself. Her daughter had died never knowing the truth about their blood ties. Elnora’s breath caught at the possibility of more lies affecting her family. Hattie deserved better. Besides, Elnora knew for a fact that untruths had a way of troubling lives in unimaginable ways. She couldn’t help but think the loss of Cissy and Graham Lee were testimony to that.
A faint murmur sounded from the front room. Ed released her hand, and she felt his steps close behind as she went to Hattie. The toddler’s embrace and watery smile filled Elnora with the firm belief that raising Hattie as blood was right, but no more lies would darken their future. Cissy always said that Elnora was good at fixing things. Elnora aimed to hold true to those words.
My Dear, My One True Love
by Lee Durkee
Gulfport
They have the most beautiful eyes, crazy women do, differing tints and gleams, true, but always that pinprick of wilding incandescence, the swamp gas rising. Oh, I have known crazy women with winter’s constellations in their eyes, with flying saucers, brooding lava fields, aurora borealis, and diaphanously pulsing fireflies I have chased with my kill jar across many a darkening field. To put it less romantically, I have fucked the bipolar crazy, the schizoid crazy, the posttraumatic crazy, the obsessive-compulsive crazy, the klepto crazy, the compulsive-liar crazy (especially the compulsive-lair crazy), and, on at least three separate occasions, the nymphomaniacal-multipersonality-sadistic crazy, and so on and so on (I promise); however — and this is important — it is not the madness that enchants but its symptomatic glow, that prick of purest torn-off wildly jagged piece of light I can detect now and then, never for long, usually toward dusk, like a different creature spying out from within the lover you thought you knew: this inner being furtive, crouched, wary, neither evil nor benign but uncomprehending, alien, dangerous with fear.
When a man tells you he has known crazy women he should be able to roll up his sleeves, lower his pants, and part his hairline to show you the accompanying scars. If there are no scars, or few, or faint, then he is not a true lover of crazy women. And he cannot claim to have been lucky in avoiding such fissures because crazy women invariably attack at your weakest moments, when you are vomiting into a plant or narcotized in a recliner or submerged chemically, emotionally, or otherwise into a bathtub. And the more fragile the crazy woman, the more likely she is to employ others to pummel, stab, strangle, and plunge. Crazy women can summon willing accomplices from Parchman prison, from graveyards, Ouija boards, and tarot decks. Streetlights flicker as they walk under. Oh, I have known crazy women.
We are all, of course, responsible for our own crazy lovers. Yes (as we’ve been lectured many times), it’s our own damn fault. And it is. No one to blame but that morning mirror, however blood-speckled or webbed or slashed with obscene lipstick glyphs threatening to castrate you or throat-slit some foul bitch of the imagination you’ve supposedly been fucking on the side. We stare into these mirrors while touching the white seams of scars, remembering, remembering, at times even bringing the scar tissue to our tongues so as to taste that distant pain we apparently learned nothing from. And why do we refuse to learn? Why do we succumb to that lunar lure again and again? The sex, of course. Yes, sex with crazy women is a sleek, diabolical fairground ride rumored to have decapitated two teenagers just last week in Pascagoula. C’mon, we’ve all boarded that ride, haven’t we? We’ve all knowingly taken home the insane, haven’t we? — from the floating slot machines of Biloxi, from the C-scar strip bars lining our beaches? No? Well, then uncork, I say. Unless you are a small man or sleep very deeply then I highly recommend sex with crazy women because crazy-woman sex lasts forever. They embed themselves into your mind like earwigs so that decades later you will be able to savor vivid memories of crazy-woman sex, a montage of baffling rituals, sinister accoutrements, terrifying confessions, shattered furniture, and shocking cumcalls in which hitherto confined interior personalities emerge, one by one, like bats from an attic, and always, always, the unexplainable and indiscrete wounds. Oh, I have known crazy women.