The Twelve-Mile Straight

Wilson howled. Nan bounced him. Then Winna Jean, in Elma’s arms, began to howl too. Then, suddenly at Nan’s feet, Castor and Pollux joined them.

Now Juke did stand up. He took the final step up to the porch. He wasn’t a tall man, but his legs and scarred arms were ropy, and he had a way of making himself appear bigger, of filling a doorway with the wings of his shoulders. The skin at his open collar, already pink with sweat, went a shade redder, and his jaw, still wet, went stiff.

“Doctor, this mother would kindly like a warning. As a courtesy.”

The emptied syringe still dangled between the doctor’s fingers, his thumb on the depressor. Juke palmed the razor.

“Of course,” said the doctor. He dropped Juke’s glance and looked out at the fields, maybe looking at Genus Jackson’s shack, maybe looking for the still, maybe for the quarantine shack that had been burned when Nan and Elma were small. The babies had quieted a bit, the puppies with them. They lay down at Nan’s feet. The doctor said, “I reckon you grown folks are due for shots as well.”

“Ain’t no need for shots for no grown folks,” said Juke.

“A man’s impervious to no illness.” The doctor opened his case, displayed more glass vials. “I can do it here. No need to make the trip into town.”

“Put them shots away. Ain’t no one stuck me yet and I don’t intend to change that. You can stick the babies, but then you’ll be on your way.”

The doctor looked as if he might push further, but he replaced the vials in his bag. “You know something,” said the doctor. “All my years in medicine, I’ve never seen twins with separate paternity. I know some doctors who would be mighty interested in this case. It’s a rarity, I’ll tell you that. Something to be proud of.” He sat with his legs crossed at the knee, the creases of his pants legs sharp.

“Proud?” It looked to Nan like a smile curling the corner of Juke’s mouth. “I ain’t ashamed of my grandchildren, make no mistake. But I ain’t proud for one minute of their ‘paternity.’ Neither way.”

Dr. Rawls gave an ambiguous tilt of his head. He still seemed to be waiting for some sound from above. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“I reckon He does,” said Juke.

Juke looked on as Dr. Rawls gave Winna her three shots and Wilson the last two, and in the middle of the howling, the baby boy, like a fountain cherub, sent an arc of urine across the doctor’s creased pants legs. Elma rushed over with another towel, but the doctor laughed. “Well, aren’t you just full of piss and vinegar?” Elma laughed a relieved and joyful laugh. Wilson laughed too, which made Juke laugh in turn. Nan made no sound at all. She stood with her hands behind her back, clasping each of her elbows to give her hands something to hold. What sound was there for the joylessness she felt then? Relief, yes, that the doctor was leaving, that he’d discovered nothing, but disappointment too, that he was leaving, that he’d discovered nothing.

The doctor bounced Wilson on his knee. “That’s a good quality, son. You keep pissing and spitting, you hear? You’re gone need to in this life.” The doctor blotted his pants with his handkerchief, kissed the top of Wilson’s head, and handed the baby back to Nan.

“I’ll send a bill.”

After the doctor’s black car disappeared down the road, though, after Juke downed the rest of his gin and stuffed his gums with tobacco, he took Wilson from her again. He wrapped him tight in his towel and rocked him back and forth. He wasn’t laughing anymore. “Seems I told you not to open that door to nobody,” he said to Elma.

“He ain’t nobody. He’s Dr. Rawls. And he walked straight to the porch himself!”

“He ain’t to set foot in this house again, you hearing me? He ain’t to set foot on the porch.”

“I thought you said we got nothing to hide. He ain’t the police. He ain’t the papers.”

“I ain’t ascaired of the police or the papers.”

“But you ascaired of an old man?” Elma put a little smile on her face to show she was teasing.

Juke shifted Wilson in his arms and gave her a serious look. “That old man knows people. George Wilson, for one. People in Atlanta. All the way to Washington. He’s an old man with a ticket to Heaven—he ain’t got nothing to lose. He’s been sniffing around here before and I don’t need him sniffing around again.”

“You don’t want him knowing you’re a shiner or you don’t want him knowing you’re daddy to a Negro?”

Juke was looking out to the field. Perhaps he was listening for a passing car, for other listening ears. Nan waited for him to reply. She thought he might strike one of them, or both. Then she saw him remember not to. When he spoke, his voice was low. “Neither one his business, and I reckon they ain’t yourn, either.”

“One of them is,” said Elma. “You made it my business.”

“Quiet. We don’t talk of it. Even in this house, on this porch, we don’t talk of it. You hearing?” He cupped a hand over Wilson’s ear. It was true—they did not talk of it, had not talked of it since the day Wilson was born. “And you,” he said, turning to Nan, “alls you gotta do is keep quiet, and you ain’t even do that?” He spit his chaw over the porch railing, shaking his head, and returned Wilson to her arms. “Put a diaper on this child.”

They retired to their side of the house, Nan to hers. There was no window in the pantry where she slept. For that she was glad. She could sit on her pallet and nurse Wilson without any eyes on her but his.

Juke would have liked both babies to stay all night in Elma’s room, and for Elma to tend to them when they cried. “You can feed him just as easy,” he’d said to Elma when the babies were a few weeks old.

“You worried we gone have midnight visitors, Daddy?” Nan thought Elma suspected what she did—that the only midnight visitor Nan might have was Juke himself, that he wanted to be able to come to her room again, without Elma or the babies getting in the way. He had not come to her room since the babies were born, and she had Elma to thank for that. “I ain’t agreed to be no wet nurse,” she told him. “He don’t like my milk none anyway.”

During the day, when folks might be about—the neighbors, the hands, visitors dropping in—they had to be careful. Nan couldn’t pay Wilson undue attention. If folks came by, sometimes Juke would make Elma suckle Wilson right there on the porch, just to show, though it was true he didn’t take well to her breast. Mostly he turned his head and cried. Folks turned their heads too. So did Nan.

But mostly it was all right. She liked it best when she and Elma cooked together in the kitchen, the babies lying on their bellies on the rag rug at their feet—didn’t matter then whose baby was whose. Didn’t matter if Elma said “your baby” or “my baby” or “the twins”—they were the babies, and they didn’t care what they were called. If Nan had her hands in a pie crust, Elma changed Wilson’s diaper. If Elma was out in the garden, and Winna woke from a nap crying, Nan didn’t think twice before she put her own nipple in the girl’s mouth to calm her. (Well, maybe she thought twice, but rarely three times.) Winna liked Nan’s milk as much as her own mother’s. It was Wilson who was particular, though when Nan was out on a call all day and night, and he was hungry enough, he relented.

When the babies were just a few weeks old, she had left Wilson with Elma to go on a call in Rocky Bottom. The woman—she was more like a girl, Nan’s age, with no children yet—was just seven months along, and Nan knew before the baby was out that it would be born dead. “It ain’t been moving,” the girl said. “Used to hiccup. Ain’t hiccupped in two weeks.” Afterward, after she had delivered the baby, the girl had been shocked and silent, and there was little Nan could do except wrap the baby in a blanket. It was a boy no bigger than a swamp rabbit, and covered in a pelt of rabbit fur. But four days later, after the girl’s milk had started to come in, her mother and father drove her out to the farm to ask Nan what to do. “She’s swolled up awful,” the mother said, and the girl, still in the wagon, sat up straight to show her. It was a trip of perhaps nine miles, a long way to come, Nan thought, for such a question. But then the mother looked around her toward the big house. “I hear the girl got twins up in there. She could use the help of a wet nurse, I expect. The boy really colored?” Nan shook her head firmly. “Can’t you ask her?” the mother went on. “We wouldn’t ask for much.” But Nan refused, and Juke did not come out, and Elma did not come out, and she knew that the family would come no closer to the house. And though she had sent away the poor girl with her poor bloated breasts, still she had nightmares of the family returning to take Wilson, not just to nurse him but to keep him, to replace the swamp rabbit baby, who had been buried, the mother told her, in an apple crate. He wouldn’t take it, Nan wanted to tell her. He wouldn’t drink from you.

Tonight, even Nan’s milk didn’t calm him. He was fussing, ornery from his shots. Or was he cutting a tooth already? When did they start to come in? She wished she could ask the doctor, for she knew nothing about how babies grew after they came into the world. Everything she knew she had learned with her own eyes, watching Winna and Wilson. They were as unalike as any two babies ever were, and their skin was the least of it. Were they foolish to think that the world would believe they were twins, or was it just that every two babies were as unalike as these, with their own faces, their own fingers and toes, some webbed with dirt, like eraser dust, some instead flecked with the white dust of snake skin?

Without putting down the baby, she stood and stepped over her pallet to the pantry shelves, where she found a jar of sorghum syrup. Still holding him, she unscrewed the cap and dipped in a finger and pressed it against his gums. He closed his mouth and sucked. She knew nothing about babies, but she knew Wilson. She knew he was hers, as much as she was his.

She lay down on the pallet, Wilson pressed against her side, her finger still in his mouth. His eyes were glassy with tears but still now, his nostrils caked with dried mucus, like flakes of pastry crust. He smelled of pastry crust, of honey wax and vinegar. She put her own nose inside the tiny bud of his ear, where he had a heartbeat, steady and distant. He was her companion now. He had replaced Juke in her bed. For this she loved him, despite herself. She hadn’t asked for it, she hadn’t expected it, but it wasn’t to be denied, the surge of milk so strong she felt the blood in her veins run faster. Here it came, swift and certain, like the full bucket at the well after you gave it a few strong tugs. If that wasn’t love, what was it?

His eyelids were fluttering closed, fighting sleep, like a trapped moth’s wings. She lifted her gown and dabbed another bit of syrup on her nipple. Slowly, she slipped her finger out of the baby’s warm mouth and slipped her nipple in. He took to it blindly, his eyelids resting now. And then the love filled her chest and she was helpless against it. A sleeping child was easier to love than a waking one, she’d learned. Or maybe it was that, with his green eyes closed, it was easier to pretend he belonged to Genus.

Would she have loved the baby more if Genus were his father? Or was this the only way, that God took something for every gift He granted? He had taken her mother home but had made Nan a mother. He’d taken Genus, but He’d freed her from Juke. Would she go back, and agree to spend her life under Juke, if it meant Genus would still walk the earth?

Yes, she told herself, yes. She’d spend a thousand lifetimes on her back. She’d walk herself backward out of his shack, out of his life, to see him again framed in the window in his corn-shuck hat, shaking the rug, the moment before his eyes discovered hers. She would watch him from a distance. That would be enough.

EIGHT

THE TWINS WERE BOTH BORN IN THE BIG HOUSE, EACH CHILD IN its own time. Before they were twins, though, before they called them the twins—to others, as well as to themselves—they were two babies growing on separate vines. As spring came to Georgia, Elma thought of the baby that way, marveled at the tomato plants (planted on Good Friday, the luckiest day to start a garden), the green fruits first as small and hard as acorns, then growing heavier, hanging lower; she weighed them with one palm and held the other to her belly, which was growing too, as firm and round as fruit. After she left school, she dressed in Juke’s overalls and walked the garden—it was as far afield as he would allow her—pulling june bugs from the leaves and waiting for Freddie to come to his senses. No one knew she was carrying, or at least no one said they knew. Her daddy told folks she was needed on the farm and no one blinked an eye. Freddie would pull up any day now in his lizard green truck. He wouldn’t make a big show about it. They’d sit on the porch and drink sweet tea, and the ring would be in his pocket.

She was five months along when she discovered her belly wasn’t the only one growing. Nan and Elma were working hip to hip in the kitchen. Nan was frying eggs. Elma was soaking black-eyed peas. Nan lifted her apron to wipe her brow, and below it was a small mound, unmistakable. Nan dropped the apron, and still, there it was. Nan was so skinny, it was hard to see how Elma hadn’t noticed it before.

But Elma’s mind did something then. It hopped over Nan’s belly and trotted off. Already it was becoming good and fast at trotting, her mind. It ignored the racing of her heart. She drained the beans, then realized the beans needed more soaking, and then she stumbled out to the well to fetch more water, walking as she did with her arms straight at her sides. Genus was out by the shed, chopping wood for the cookstove, the slow, steady sound of his ax chipping too close to her ears, and Elma’s heart sped up again and her hands shook and she spilled half the bucket down her legs, but still she kept her mind far away, at the edge of the fields.

Juke, he’d noticed first. Out at the still one night, he’d passed his hand over Nan’s belly and felt the mound—round where before it had been so flat it was nearly concave. He pulled away from her, sat up on the mattress. He asked her if she was with child.

Nan looked to the wall. Sometimes it was awful convenient, her having no tongue.

“You can’t answer, but you can nod. You good at that.” He put his finger under her chin and turned her face to his. “Answer me. Alls you gotta do is nod or shake your head.”

He waited for her to respond, thinking already of what to do. He knew people. He knew everyone. But Nan was the only one in the county who handled woman’s matters. What was she to do, take care of it herself? Word was Dr. Rawls took care of that kind of thing, if the pay was high enough. But he wouldn’t lower himself to ask the doctor for help, even if he told him it was a field hand’s child.

He felt her body relax. She nodded. But there was something in her nod—a different kind of fear—and now it was Juke’s body that tensed.

“It’s mine, ain’t it?”

Did he want it to be his?

“Answer me, girl.”

It would be better, of course, if it wasn’t his, if the baby was colored. That it would have a proper mother and father. He was nearly forty years old and he had never to his knowledge given any woman but Jessa a child.

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

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?”