“I already moved. That pawn there.” He wasn’t interested in chess, or checkers, either; both games made his head hurt. He raised his lemonade glass, and pretended to discover a secret message from the Russians pasted on the bottom, but his arched eyebrow was lost on Harriet.
Harriet, without wasting any time, jumped the black knight out into the middle of the board.
“Congratulations, sir,” crowed Hely, banging down the glass, though he wasn’t in check and there was nothing unusual about the play. “A brilliant coup.” It was a line from the chess tournament in the movie and he was proud of himself for remembering it.
They played on. Hely captured one of Harriet’s pawns with his bishop, and smacked himself on the forehead when Harriet immediately leapt a knight forward to take the bishop. “You can’t do that,” he said, although he really didn’t know if she could or not; he had a hard time keeping track of how knights were able to jump, which was too bad because knights were the pieces that Harriet liked most and used best.
Harriet was staring at the board, her chin cupped moodily in her hand. “I think he knows who I am,” she said suddenly.
“You didn’t say anything, did you?” said Hely uneasily. Though he admired her daring, he had not really thought it a good idea for Harriet to go down to the pool hall on her own.
“He came outside and stared at me. Just standing there, without moving.”
Hely moved a pawn without thinking, just for something to do. Suddenly he felt very tired and grumpy. He didn’t like lemonade—he preferred Coke—and chess wasn’t his idea of a good time. He had a chess set of his own—a nice one, that his father had given him—but he never played except when Harriet came over, and mostly he used the pieces for G.I. Joe tombstones.
————
The heat pressed down heavy, even with the fan whirring and the shades halfway drawn, and Tat’s allergies weighed cumbrous and lopsided in her head. The BC headache powder had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She put Mary Queen of Scots face-down on the chenille bedspread and closed her eyes for a moment.
Not a peep from the porch: the children were playing quietly enough, but it was hard to rest, knowing they were in the house. There was so much to worry about in the little collection of waifs over on George Street, and so little to be done for any of them, she thought, as she reached for the water glass on her bedside table. And Allison—who, in her heart, Tat loved the best of her two great-nieces—was the child she worried about most. Allison was like her mother, Charlotte, too tender for her own good. In Tat’s experience, it was the mild, gentle girls like Allison and her mother who got beaten down and brutalized by life. Harriet was like her grandmother—too much like her, which was why Tat had never been particularly comfortable around her; she was a bright-eyed tiger cub, cute enough now that she was small, but less so with every inch she grew. And though Harriet was not yet old enough to take care of herself, that day would arrive soon enough and then she—like Edith—would thrive no matter what befell her, be it famine or bank crash or Russian invasion.
The bedroom door squealed. Tat started, palm to her ribcage. “Harriet?”
Old Scratch—Tatty’s black tomcat—leapt lightly up on the bed and sat looking at her, switching his tail.
“What you doing in here, Bombo?” he said—or, rather, Tatty said for him, in the shrill, insolent singsong that she and her sisters had employed since childhood to carry on conversations with their pets.
“You scared me to death, Scratch,” she replied, dropping an octave to her natural voice.
“I know how to open the door, Bombo.”
“Hush.” She got up and closed the door. When she lay down again, the cat curled up comfortably beside her knee, and before long they were both asleep.
————
Danny’s grandmother, Gum, winced as with both hands she strained uselessly to lift a cast-iron skillet of cornbread from the stove.
“Here Gum, let me hep you,” said Farish, jumping up so fast that he knocked over the aluminum kitchen chair.
Gum ducked and scraped away from the stove, smiling up at her favorite grandson. “Oh Farish. I’ll get it,” she said, feebly.
Danny sat staring at the checkered vinyl tablecloth, wishing hard that he was somewhere else. The trailer’s kitchen was so cramped that there was hardly room to move, and it got so overheated and smelly from the stove that it was an unpleasant place to sit even in winter. A few minutes ago, he’d drifted off into a waking daydream, a dream about a girl—not a real girl, but a girl like a spirit. Dark hair swirling, like weeds at a shallow pond’s edge: maybe black, maybe green. She’d drawn deliciously close, as if to kiss him—but instead, she’d breathed into his open mouth, cool fresh wonderful air, air like a breath from Paradise. The sweetness of the memory made him shudder. He wanted to be alone, to savor the daydream, for it was fading fast and he wanted desperately to slip back into it.
But instead he was here. “Farish,” his grandmother was saying, “I sure do hate for you to get up.” Anxiously, pressing her hands together, she followed the salt and syrup with her eyes as Farish reached over and banged them down on the table. “Please don’t worry with that.”
“Set down, Gum,” Farish said sternly. This was a regular little routine between the two of them; it happened every meal.
With regretful glances, and a great show of reluctance, Gum limped murmuring to her chair as Farish—rattling with product, ding-dong to the eyeballs—thundered back and forth between stove and table and the refrigerator on the front porch, setting the table with great thumps and clanks. When he thrust an overloaded plate at her, she waved it weakly aside.
“You boys go on and eat first,” she said. “Eugene, won’t you take this?”
Farish glowered at Eugene—who was sitting quietly, hands folded in his lap—and plunked the plate down in front of Gum.
“Here … Eugene …” With trembling hands, she offered the plate to Eugene, who shied back, reluctant to take it.
“Gum, you aint as big as a minute,” roared Farish. “You’re going to end up back in the hospital.”
Silently, Danny pushed the hair out of his face and helped himself to a square of cornbread. He was too hot and too wired to eat and the ungodly stench from the crank lab—combined with that of stale grease and onions—was enough to make him feel he would never be hungry again.
“Yes,” said Gum, smiling wistfully at the tablecloth. “I sure do love cooking for you all.”
Danny was fairly sure that his grandmother did not love cooking for her boys quite so much as she said she did. She was a tiny, emaciated, leather-brown creature, stooped from continual cringing, so decrepit that she looked closer to a hundred than her real age—somewhere around sixty. Born to a Cajun-French father and a mother who was a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sharecropper’s shack with a dirt floor and no plumbing (privations on which she daily refreshed her grandsons), Gum had been married, at thirteen, to a fur trapper twenty-five years her senior. It was hard to imagine what she’d looked like in those days—in her hardscrabble youth there had been no money for foolishness like cameras and pictures—but Danny’s father (who had adored Gum, passionately, more as a suitor than a son) remembered her as a girl with red cheeks and shiny black hair. She’d been only fourteen when he was born; she was (he’d said) “the prettiest little coon-ass gal you ever saw.” By coon-ass he meant Cajun, but when Danny was small he’d had a vague idea that Gum was part raccoon—an animal which, with her sunken dark eyes, her sharp face and snaggled teeth and small, dark, wrinkled hands, she indeed resembled.
For Gum was tiny. She seemed to shrink every year. Now she was shriveled to little more than a hollow-cheeked cinder, her mouth as thin and ruinous as a razor. As she punctually reminded her grandsons, she’d worked hard all her life, and it was hard work (which she wasn’t ashamed of—not Gum) that had worn her down before her time.