The Twelve-Mile Straight

She raised her shoulders and looked to the wall again. Juke dropped his hand. He could see it was true, that she didn’t know. How could she know? And how could he have been prepared for the rage and disappointment, that the child might be another man’s?

He did what his body knew how to do. He finished having his way with her, thinking, This will be the last time. He had only let go inside her once. Maybe that had been enough. But now he did it again, laying claim to what was his, because what harm could it do?

When he was done, he lay back and reached for his chaw and, naked, crossed his legs at the ankles. He told Nan about the colored woman whose tit he’d suckled on as an infant, having no mother himself. “Maybe that’s how come I got a taste for darkies,” he said. (It was a joke known across the county. “Ain’t Jesup’s fault he a nigger lover,” white folks might be heard to say. “He been drinking nigger juice since he was a boy.”)

By the time Elma’s mind came around, calmed down, it was evening. She took another look at Nan at the supper table, her belly sitting in her lap, the same size as Elma’s. What a fool she had been, daydreaming about Genus, following him at night, when here he had been making love to Nan. She had tried for months to unremember that vision of them in the creek, but here was the proof. And then she did something else that surprised her. She said, right there, laying the gravy on her daddy’s potatoes, “Looks like I ain’t the only one expecting.” She said it cheerfully, teasingly, as though she was gossiping about someone else at church. If she said it with a smile in her voice, then she wouldn’t feel the snap of her heart like a twig, for in her mind, Nan was carrying Genus’s child and now they would both be on the farm for good, together, a family, and Elma would be both a spinster and a whore.

Juke nodded over his potatoes. “I reckon you’re right.”

“Nan? Is it true?”

Nan looked from Elma to Juke, then nodded at the table.

“I seen my mistake now,” said Juke. “You shoulda been sent to church. Your momma and daddy would be right disappointed.”

“Ain’t your fault, Daddy. Her momma didn’t send her to church, either.”

“She ain’t hired to go to church,” Juke said. Then to Nan, “You ain’t hired to go to church. You ain’t hired to get into trouble neither.”

“Daddy, don’t say ‘hired.’” Elma sighed a laugh. “Look at me. I been to church, and I’m in the same shoes, ain’t I?”

“You in those shoes ’cause Freddie Wilson’s all hat and no cattle. Tell me why I shouldn’t run him out of town tomorrow.”

“’Cause you still holding out he’ll marry me, Daddy.” And that was what he wanted—for his grandchild to be a Wilson. She didn’t add that part.

“It’s the only right thing,” he said.

“You saying Nan and Genus oughta get married?” Elma stuffed her mouth with potatoes. Why had she gone and said that?

Juke looked sideways at Nan. She had not touched her food. “I got one who can’t talk, one who can’t stop talking.” It was not the first time he’d said it. “You don’t need to make up for her tongue.” He chewed for a while, thinking, muttering. “Hell of a time … two more mouths to feed.” The cuckoo clock above the mantel ticked.

Juke nodded his head toward Genus’s shack. “Is he the man?”

Another moment, and then another nod. She could make her face look like a child’s when she wanted to.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t run him off this farm.” His voice was lower now, as though Genus might hear him.

“Daddy—”

“Quit mouthing! How do I know that nigger ain’t had his way with you too?”

“Daddy!”

Juke shoveled in a forkful of ham. With his mouth full, he said, “Reverend Quick will marry them. He’s married niggers before. Reckon it’s only right. Niggers belong with niggers.” He pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair. After supper, Elma knew, he would pour himself a tall drink and take it out to the back porch. Elma and Nan would be left to clear the table, and at least then there would be the comfort of silence, no sounds but the familiar ones of china and silver.

But now Nan still sat with her head hanging. Juke said, “Reckon you going back to that shack. Reckon you shouldn’t never have left it.”

NINE (#ulink_4124493e-fa01-5f07-ba65-c62507664d05)

THE COUPLE ARRIVED IN SEPTEMBER IN A BEAT-UP MODEL T WITH a license plate from New York, the colossal silver lily of a phonograph player blooming from the back window. The puppies barked alongside it as it made its way up the dusty driveway. For a few clenched heartbeats, as they stepped out of the car, Elma was sure they were there to see the twins. The story had reached across the telegraph lines all the way to New York City, and here they were to take their picture, to record them on their gramophone. She had the bone-tensing fear that they might take the babies too. When they asked for Juke, said they’d heard in Florence that he might be looking for hired help on the Wilson farm, Elma felt her heart relax, and then cool into a flat, dull stone. Her pride was hurt, just a little. Their names were Sara and Jim.

They sat on the back porch, admiring the babies on Elma’s lap, while they waited for Juke to come in from the field. Nan poured them iced tea, and the man said, “You folks do like it sweet, don’t you?” Elma’s heart stuttered when the woman asked if Wilson was Nan’s, but she kept her voice steady. “No, ma’am,” she said. “They’re both mine.”

Juke took them in on the spot, even though they were outsiders to Florence, even though he had enough willing hands in town. “Can’t pay you a penny,” he said, “but I can give you three meals and a roof.” He took them in, Elma suspected, because they were young and white and new to town—they’d come all the way from New York, almost as far as Canada, where no one had ever heard of the Gemini twins or Genus Jackson. “New Yawk!” Juke said, putting on his best radio voice. “Y’all talk just as straight as a skyscraper, ain’t you?”

“Not the city,” Jim corrected him. “We’re from Buffalo.”

Juke shrugged. “At’s a city, ain’t it? What you kids doing down this way? Don’t you know everyone here’s running north?”

They’d been up and down the coast between Buffalo and Georgia and beyond—all the way down to Indian River, Florida, where they’d worked in the citrus groves that summer. They still had a crate of grapefruit in the backseat of their car, along with a basket of wool from a Vermont sheep farm and bolts of fabric from a garment factory in New York City. Because her father asked her to, Elma helped them carry their things to the tar paper shack behind the big house. Genus had left nearly nothing behind, and what he did have Juke had ordered that they burn. The shack had been swept clean. Now boxes and suitcases filled the room, overflowing with books and trinkets and clothing, a banjo, a guitar, the phonograph, fabric in orange and purple and periwinkle blue, a bolt of lemon yellow spilling from the bed to the floor. The couple moved busily about, saying how comfortable the cot was and what a pretty view, as though they were moving into a fancy new hotel. Elma watched from the doorway, arms folded.

“You must have loved growing up here,” Sara said to Elma. She dug into the peel of a grapefruit and scalped it with her fingernails. She had fast, small hands, calloused and strong, her bare arms golden brown from the sun. Her face was square, with broad cheekbones and coffee bean eyes, and she wore her black hair in a braid down the length of her back. She handed Elma a wedge of the fruit. She had no idea who’d lived in this shack, did she? Elma didn’t know whether to be disgusted or relieved.

Elma pressed it tentatively to her lips, tasting the bitter and the sweet. She nodded at Sara’s question—was it a question?—filling her mouth with a brave bite now so she wouldn’t have to speak.

“Isn’t it a marvel?” Sara said. “Here it’s peaches, right? You grow any Georgia peaches on this farm?”

Elma shook her head. “Just cotton, mostly. Some peanuts and corn.”

“Jim, we got to get our hands on some Georgia peaches.”

“If you say so,” Jim said, putting on a twang. He held out a palm and Sara deposited a piece of grapefruit in it. He lifted his fedora in thanks, and under it Elma saw that his head was nearly bald. “You’re a Georgia peach now, ain’t you?”

“You better watch out,” Sara said. “Before you know it I’ll be cooking you grits.”

Jim popped the fruit in his mouth, picked up the banjo, and with one foot propped up on the bed, began to pluck out a love song about a Georgia peach who cooked him grits. He made up the words as he played, rhyming “grits” with “shits.” His voice filled the room, blew out the open windows. Out in the yard, Castor and Pollux began to howl, and he sang louder, so loud that Elma felt his voice thrumming through her bare feet, the twang that sounded as though he had a mouth full of scrap metal. It was Sara he was singing about, but it was Elma’s voice, wasn’t it, that he was making fun of. “She can’t cook worth a fart, but she’s stolen my heart, my sweet Georgia peach!”

Sara rolled her eyes, hiding her smile. She’d heard songs like it before. “Baby, that was delightful. You’re a regular Irving Berlin.”

“Who’s Irving Berlin?” Elma asked. Her mouth still burned with the grapefruit, with the acid shame of never having eaten grapefruit before. She wanted more, but she didn’t want to ask.

“Elma,” Sara said, taking both her shoulders in her hands, looking her deep in the eyes, “we’re going to teach you a thing or two.”

“Or three or four,” sang Jim on his banjo. “Or maybe more.”

When the doctor’s bill came, it came on a Sunday morning, when Dr. Rawls knew Juke would be in church. A colored boy on a borrowed bicycle pedaled barefoot all the way from Florence. He made sure Elma was the one to open it before she scurried back into the kitchen. Inside the envelope, tucked behind the bill, was a letter typed on onionskin paper. Nan stood with Wilson on her hip, watching her read it. It took a moment for Elma to see that it wasn’t Manford Rawls’s name on the letterhead but Dr. Oliver Rawls, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

“Atlanta,” Elma whispered, as though it were the name of a holy city. She thought of Josie Byrd’s spotless white shoes, the knee-high boots of the yellow-haired dog breeder.

Oliver Rawls was the youngest son of Manford Rawls. Elma remembered him vaguely. He was ahead of her in school, far enough that he was graduating from high school when she’d been learning arithmetic. Mostly she remembered his limp, first on crutches, then on a cane. A head of dark curls, and round eyeglasses like his father’s. Now he was a doctor like his father, a hematologist. He studied blood. He had heard about the twins from his father—“an exceptional case indeed.” Would Mrs. Jesup—he said Mrs.—consider bringing the children to his laboratory in Atlanta for a few tests? Nothing invasive—just some blood work. “Our blood reveals more about ourselves than you can imagine.”

Elma was leaning against the stove. When she’d finished reading the letter aloud, she dropped it to her side. “Blood work,” she spat. She felt sick. Then she raised the letter and read it once more, to herself. “No one’s gone stick those babies again,” she said, “not if I have any say.” But she kept her eyes on the page. “Some big-city scientist thinks he’s putting his hands on my babies?” She looked up, remembering Nan, remembering her father wasn’t in the room. “Our babies,” she said quietly.

Then her eyes found the note at the bottom of the page. “PS,” she read aloud. “I understand travel may be difficult. My father is willing to carry you to Atlanta, and I am willing to compensate you for your trouble.”

Elma lowered the letter again, this time creasing it a little in her fist. “Some big-city scientist thinks he can buy me like a hog?” She produced a laugh. “I’m fixing to burn this with the rest of the trash,” she said, but she put the letter in the pocket of her apron and kept it there, and spent the rest of the day singing a tune inside her closed mouth.

Sara and Jim were good hands. Juke taught them how to take the peanuts out of the ground, to thresh and stack them, to bale the hay. He taught them how to top and strip and cut the sorghum, and Nan and Elma helped to mill and cook and bottle it. When the cotton wanted picking, Sara and Jim made a game of it, racing to see how fast they could fill their bags, the way Elma and Nan had done when they were small. Their hats bobbed along the west field, Jim’s voice filling the air with songs of rabbit-tail cotton and candy-cloud cotton, cotton soft as a baby’s cheek. The other pickers stayed along the road, taking their midday meal under the lacy shade of the cottonwood tree, while Sara and Jim ate at the big house. They’d come back for harvest because they needed the work, Ezra and Long John and Al, and because Juke had been good to them. (Al’s wife had begged him not to return to the farm, and Al had said, “He all right. He won’t do me no harm,” and his wife said, “Just don’t be coming back to town dragged by no truck,” and kept all three sons at home and said if they even looked at a white girl she’d kill them herself.) They kept their eyes on the ground, away from Elma, away from Juke, away from the gourd tree, and they didn’t come near the house. At the cotton house, when it was time to weigh in at the end of the day, they didn’t meet the young couple’s eyes, but Jim tipped his hat as though he didn’t notice, and whistled, impressed, at the biggest pull. Usually it was Long John, but on a day when Long John didn’t come, it was Jim himself who picked two hundred and eighty pounds, more even than Juke, who was not shown up but proud. “They teach you to pick cotton in New Yawk, Jimbo?”