“No, son,” I told him honestly. “The Missus ain’t seen the insides of that kitchen since you last saw it. She couldn’t tell you what color it was if you asked her today.”
Jesse laughed, still defiant as ever, although the brunt of his defiance was saved for Silva when she discovered him one day circling the kitchen door at the height of the workday.
“Jesse, you done lost your ever-loving mind!” Silva said.
Her body trembled to a feverish pitch as the folds along her neck released their sweat.
He stood up tall to her, saying, “Miss Lula wanted me to finish the job, but Floyd won’t let me, wanna keep me out there with him all day when I can do both.”
“Floyd can’t stop Miss Lula from doing a damn thing!” Silva insisted. “If she want you here, you’d be here.”
“Floyd just wanna keep me out the house,” he pouted. “Want me to work out there with him forever like I ain’t got a brain.”
“You ain’t got what the Good Lord gave you if you expect me to believe that. Floyd ain’t the master of this house. Now, you know better, Jesse.”
The worst of his contempt, however, was said in private, my ear just happening upon those words as I drifted past the garden. Silva accused the boy of being a silly nigga, and he rushed off with his chest puffed up.
“I ain’t no nigga!” he shouted back.
“You ain’t no man either,” she said.
“I am a man,” he said quietly, these words uttered more for his own acknowledgment than anyone else.
“Then be one,” she said. “You are what you do, Jesse.”
“I work harder than any worker out here,” he said.
“And if the Missus wants to bring you in, she will,” she replied. “But you can’t makes her.”
I overheard them continue their arguing and name calling in hushed tones out by the back porch, when by a slip of my eye I spotted Miss Lula at her upstairs window, her hair at her shoulders and her eyes looking down, her cheeks a faint color that blushed and made her complexion appear alive and fervent.
CHAPTER 11
“I’m going!” Jesse fussed to Floyd one day following that argument with his mother, insisting that the Missus had sent for him despite Floyd’s claims that she hadn’t.
Just before noon, Jesse charged out over the rye grass, those wilting greens that had grown a solid foot after the rains and now reached the heights of the fescues that grew down by the Yazoo River. When he’d made it to the main house, the Missus awaited him, having taken her seat on that porch with her needlework in hand every day since observing the boy’s disagreement with Silva, knowing he’d be coming sooner or later.
“Jesse!” she said, feigning a sense of surprise.
“Yes, Miss,” he said. “Floyd give me permission to finish.”
I cut him a stern look, but he turned away.
“I don’t know,” Miss Lula said, watching both our faces. “There’s lots a work out there, and this house don’t run on decorative wishes. We cotton people. Always have been. Always will be.”
“I can do both if you like,” he said. “I just thought you want it finished. Mr. Kern said it’d make you happy.”
A lie if I’d ever heard one.
“You’re an angel,” she praised. “But work outside comes first, then you can help in here.”
“Yes, Miss,” he accepted.
“And no more running off without telling anyone,” she said. “I heard about you coming to the house without Floyd’s permission. You come when you want now. You have my permission as long as your work is done.”
Jesse smiled at these words, returning to the fields that day with a weightlessness about him, his arms swaying freely and his legs lifting his body some ten inches above the ground. He would make amends with Floyd, yet each time the boy left for the house the wound would grow deeper.
After that encounter, Jesse found himself at the house every day that summer. Silva and I did our best to rearrange the results of Jesse’s work, returning the house to some semblance of a home before Mr. Kern sat down for dinner, or at least shading parts of the boy’s destruction as much as possible until Jesse returned on the next day or the next to finish it. However, it seemed that once Jesse was inside the house, the Missus forgot about him. He was only noticed by Mr. Kern, who’d spot a nail on the floor and howl. He’d look toward his usual sights at dinner to find them covered in plastic and ram his hands so forcibly that it shook the paintings from the wall.
The Missus’s fickle mood was not surprising as she had family visiting from Little Rock, who had arrived the morning of Jesse’s first week inside the home. Blindness could have provided more sight than those skewed headlights outside the car window as Floyd waved the family in just before the stroke of dawn.
“Let me take you to your rooms,” I said as they emerged sleepily from the vehicle. “I know you dying for some rest after that long drive.”
“Just the little ones,” a stout woman said, mean as ever.
The three boys followed me inside as the woman and her husband met Miss Lula on the front porch. Miss Lula gave the boys kisses before leaving them to follow me to their bedrooms, the smallest one just barely making it as he fell asleep in midstride, requiring that I carry him and place him into his bed or else he would sleep right there on the hallway floor. The other two were not so easy, the middle one insisting that he have his own room and the oldest child demanding the same, although less adamantly.
“I don’t have to listen to you!” the middle one shouted. “I’ll tell my mama.”
“And I’ll tell Miss Lula,” I replied. “She told me to have you boys sleep here. Now be a good boy and get to bed.”
“Aunt Sissy don’t control me,” the middle one spat just as mean as he could. “We control her.”
Either unable or unwilling to continue this fight, the older boy hesitantly obliged, leaving the middle child to continue his grief just long enough for that heaviness of sleep and a long journey to finally settle as he climbed into his bed with a fading insistence that he have his own room tomorrow.
Silva and Jesse arrived just as the family unpacked, Floyd taking Jesse to the fields right away while Silva began her work inside the kitchen. With this brief distraction, I stole off to Floyd’s quarters and closed my eyes for a minute. Dreams were never hard to summon, and this time was no different as I pictured some far-off place where Henry awaited me beside the sounds of an infinite ocean that tapped and gurgled and lobbed its soft song. Those sounds met those of our own heartbeats, as I imagined the children’s voices I heard to be those of our own. That I had nursed them to my breast and they’d known my inner touch. But still, there was something different about this place, and I saw it in the tide—the white surf a static motion that did not reflect some endless possibility of distant lands but instead the sights I’d seen every day out here. The air was harsh and brought tears to my eyes as I became painfully aware that I was alone in the cotton and nowhere else but Greenwood.