Chapter Twelve

The car door slammed and I felt the seat belt being wrenched across my chest, biting into my skin through my shirt, and sweat broke out on my neck and chest and back, soaking me. I couldn’t breathe for the longest time, and everything was so blurred that I couldn’t see much either. I could hear Anna’s hushed sobs and her mother babbling hysterically and her father growling cusses under his breath. I pulled weakly at the strap across my chest and squinted in the hot sunlight burning through the window in blinding flashes. The leather burned my ass and my cheeks were suddenly wet. Was it raining? I wiped at them and licked my lips, and sure enough the salty tears were there on my tongue.

The car lurched into motion and I blinked some of the blurriness away. Anna looked at me, and her face was flushed and tears were streaming down her cheeks. My stomach was heaving as I thought of the blood, and I put my hand over my mouth and bent over in the seat, putting my head between my legs. The jolting motion of the car wasn’t helping me. Anna’s hand pressed over the back of my neck, cool and wet, and I choked on the tears streaming down my cheeks. The seatbelt cut into my throat and it made me angry. I tore at it, sobbing.

“I can’t breathe!” I gasped, stomach flopping around. “I can’t breathe!”

“Papa!” cried Anna. Her hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me upright, looking at my face, which was wet. All the blood drained from it. “Papa, stop the car!”

He pulled over grudgingly onto the side of the road and peered into the backseat. I undid my seatbelt and leaned back in the seat, sweeping back my damp hair with one hand. I took long gulps of hot air, my head throbbing, and Mr. Burwell snorted.

“Being a bit dramatic, isn’t he?”

“Oh, hush it up, Howie! The poor boy looks like he’s about to be sick! He shouldn’t have seen that. We should have left as soon as possible …”

I didn’t want to listen to their conversation. I concentrated on getting back control of my goddamn stomach. Anna’s hand touched my cheek, and I flinched away, pressing my forehead against the cold glass of the window.

“Jess? Oh, Jess, please … it’s okay. It’s okay. Let’s get back home, okay?”

I nodded, face damp with sweat, and pulled my seatbelt back into place. Mr. Burwell started the motor again and swerved back into the road. We rumbled down the road, car being jarred with the rocks in the road. I closed my eyes and tried not to be sick as we headed, careening, towards the ranch.

I didn’t realize that I was the one who had screamed, “STOP IT!” until much later, when I asked Anna before dinner about who had said it and she had told me—real confused-like—that I was the one who screamed it, like I should know.

When we got back to the ranch and the Ford had pulled into the drive, I stumbled out of the car, and the first thing I did is I ran into the house, busted into my room and threw open my closet, searching for Bobby’s shoes. I sat back with a thud when I found them and hugged them as tightly as I could. And before you go bitching about how dumb I am to be hugging a pair of shitty old shoes, those were the only things I had that were even close to being my older brother.

I couldn’t even do any of my homework after what had happened at church today. I sat down at my desk, my pencils all sharpened up and sitting in their special cup waiting to have a chance to be used, and I needed to use them because I had an essay due the day after tomorrow, but every time I picked one up, the picture of the man on the ground pointing the gun at the black man flashed into my head. I got so frustrated at one point, trying to concentrate with nothing but screams and cracking gunshots in my head, that I was nearly in tears and broke every single one of those new yellow pencils with them red erasers on the ends.

I buried my face in my arms and tried to erase the memories from my head, them pencils just littered around my head like paper wads get littered around a wastebasket, but it was like I got branded with the images of dead bodies in my brain, and no matter how hard I tried to get rid of them, they just kept replaying. Blood on blood on blood.

There was a timid knock on my door and I yelled, “Don’t come in!” I hoped I would sound angry, but damn tears to hell, I just sounded choked up. Anna’s voice came through the wood, and she sounded scared.

“Jess? Are you okay?”

Why would I be okay, damn it? I just saw two fucking people die, right in front of me! Why in the name of God would I be okay?

“No,” I said loudly, and I sounded no angrier than I did the first time. She pushed open the door and looked around, spotting me at my desk with the pencils all snapped in half and scattered across my desk. I looked at her glumly and she tried not to laugh. “Don’t laugh at me!” I yelled. “Why would you think that this is a good time to laugh?”

I blinked away tears and looked back down at all the broken pencils and sheets of paper on my desk. It made me so angry, and I wasn’t sure why. Is this what the new Jess Simmlet was reduced to? A kid who would be angry just for having a bunch of broken pencils? I’m sure the old Jess Simmlet wouldn’t get worked up over something this small. But the old Jess Simmlet would have never gotten so involved in other people before, and wouldn’t have gotten exposed to such horrible things. Maybe what Bobby was doing was right. Maybe, by not going to church or getting involved with anything, it would be better. Maybe I wouldn’t face such terrible things as the reality that death can be right around the corner.

So I scraped all the truck off my desk into the wastebasket and stood up, moving to my bed and sitting down, tracing the story of the Corn-Man—that’s what I called the man on my blanket—with my eyes. Anna looked at me with a pucker between her dark eyebrows. I tried to pretend that she wasn’t there. And then the drought came—

“Jess, I’m really worried about you.”

I looked up at her. She had her hands folded behind her back and she rocked on her heels, but I could tell she wanted to come nearer and hold my hand. I nodded a little to let her know that I heard her. She came to the bed and sat down on the corner, picking at the fuzz that had appeared on the woolen surface. I watched, and she looked at me.

“I’m worried about you too, Anna,” I mumbled, and glanced down quick before I could get myself lost in those blue eyes. “How could you act so calm after you watched those two men die? How could you pretend like it never happened? Isn’t that disrespectful to the dead or something, not recognizing their deaths?”

“I shut my eyes, Jess. It isn’t nearly that bad because I didn’t watch the whole thing.”

I just stared at her with a wounded expression, and she moaned and wrung my hand. No one knew, I figured, about how I felt seeing the black and white die, and now I was all on my lonesome. The pain was killing me.

She looked at me again, long and hard, and I looked back at her, feeling sick to my stomach. No one here understood the way gravity seems to stop working when a dead body falls. No one understood what it felt like to watch. And no matter what I said, people weren’t going to listen. They wouldn’t want to hear.

“I need to be alone for a little while,” I whispered, my stomach churning, and she stood up, not looking angry, but worried, like she seems to be a lot of the time—for me, at least. I squeezed a weak smile out of my twisted features and then lie down on my bed and faced the wall, letting my grimace come through when she left the room. The sunlight sparkled through the windowpanes and stretched in long yellow rectangles across the room. The blanket beneath me was soft and warm from lying in the sun all day. My whole body went limp and my eyes drooped shut as the warmth cradled me in its soft embrace and rocked me like a newborn babe.

I tried to erase every bit of consciousness from my mind and fall asleep, where I could escape the misery of today’s tragedy, but as soon as I put a shade down over my babbling mind, a single thought wormed its way through like a maggot into an old lunch and the whole silence would be shattered to pieces again. A word Father Zachariah said, or my essay, or Anna’s face as she watched … and then I had to start all over trying to silence the screaming in my head. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I got up and sharpened up my pencils in the pencil sharpener on my desk, and then started to write my essay on “Of Mice and Men”.

The essay was supposed to be on the main thought of loneliness in the book, and at first my essay started out okay. I had a lot of good ideas with all them quotes from the book and all the experience I had with being alone. But by the time I got to the part where George has to shoot Lennie, like Candy shoots his dog, my hands were shaking so bad that I dropped my pencil in the middle of my last paragraph before I could get the conclusion down and my stomach made a few dry heaves. I put my head down on the desk and tried to calm my stirred up insides, squeezing my eyes shut and wishing for the hellish visions dancing on my brain to just fly up in smoke and leave me alone.

“I need to write this essay, damn it!” I grumbled into the desk. I could smell the clean, fresh scent of paper and the dim, waxy odor from the desk. Pencil shavings littering the white fields of paper leap-frogged across the pages. The pencil, which made the little black marks that marched like ants across the pages, was lying miles away from my head on the other side of the desk, tipping back and forth on the edge of the table dangerously. I reached out to grab it, but I figure the gust of wind my arm made let the pencil slide just enough so it slipped and hit the floor. I sighed and leaned down, picking it up and breathing deeply. My stomach had settled. If I wrote quick enough, I might not have another episode and I could finish the essay.

So I managed another paragraph until only the start of another episode, and flopped back onto my bed with a sigh, so exhausted that I shut my eyes. I lay there for only a second to rest my eyes—or at least I thought so, but the light in my room was dusky—before Anna hurried past my bedroom door, calling out, “Dinner!” as she passed. But I wasn’t hungry. How could anyone be hungry after that? How could people’s lives go on after something like that? People have short attention spans in others’ matters. They don’t think about others’ problems for more that a few minutes, and then they go right back to worrying about themselves, the selfish bastards.

So I didn’t go down to dinner. Starving myself wasn’t going to help them dead men, and my growling stomach told me so, but I couldn’t eat thinking about it. So five minutes later, when Anna knocked on my door and came in, I didn’t bother to look at her, simply sprawled across the bed with my head propped up in my hands.

“I’m not eating,” I said, “because I don’t feel hungry.”

It was silent, and then there was a low grumbling sound echoing from my stomach. I glanced down at it as it whined at my comment.

“You’re hungry,” she insisted, nodding towards my complaining belly. I shrugged and it snarled angrily. I turned over onto my side and ground my fist into my stomach to keep it from growling any more. “You can’t starve Jess.”

“I’ve been doing it for years. It’s fine with me. Besides, I couldn’t possibly eat with all those memories galloping through my brain.” I shuddered and shut my eyes tightly. My stomach grumbled again, and I pushed my fists harder against my stomach. It obviously didn’t remember being just about starved for almost six years.

“If that’s your choice, I won’t stop you. But sooner or later, you’re going to want to eat, and Delia will be so disappointed if you don’t want to eat her cooking anymore.”

“I just can’t eat tonight. Tell Delia that I love her cooking.”

She looked at me doubtfully for a long second before nodding a bit and turning, leaving me to my thoughts again. Silence finally settled over my brain and I shut my eyes, hoping to fall asleep. And then my stomach snarled again. I uncurled my fist and rubbed it absently, gazing up at the ceiling.

“Why do you gotta growl like this? You haven’t had decent food for that long. No way could you be that spoiled on good food in five months when you’ve been starving for six years.”

It grumbled in reply and I sighed. I guess it takes way less time to get spoiled than it took to get used to being starved. But my life had gotten better since I had moved in here. I was able to help Delia in the kitchen with all manner of food, and I had learned so much more about baking and cooking in just a few months than I would have ever learned at the Shack.

The smell of food made it so irresistible. I couldn’t just lie there when all those delicious smells were trailing through the air like Anna’s perfume, so inviting. My stomach nearly shouted in protest against my starving. I set up, the dim sound of voices coming through the wood of my door. I got up and pressed my ear against the door. I could make out Delia’s confusion and Anna quietly explaining what had happened, and then the sound of terror from Delia and rushing footsteps into the kitchen.

I opened the door and stepped into the hallway. The hot smell of chili and sweet, buttery smell of cornbread pulled my feet to the dining room, where everyone was sitting at the table and chatting like everything was normal, and I watched like one of them angels, who just hovered on the edge like a bystander. I felt like there was a curtain hanging between them and me. Anna looked up at me suddenly and her face switched to shock.

“Are you okay?” she asked, like I was about to be sick or something.

I leaned against the doorjamb and looked at them all with a small smile twisting off to the side a little sarcastically. I paused for a second, just thinking about the distance in emotion between them and me, and the words were painful to spit out. “I’m fine.”

Delia hurried out of the kitchen at the sound of my voice and grinned through the tears that were sprinkled across her cheeks like little diamonds, her round face dimpled.

“Mr. Jess! Ya came to dinner!”

I didn’t have time to respond, my insides still a little jumbled around as I tried to sort out the various emotions and thoughts that were swirling around. She rushed back out with a pot and a bowl and started to ladle chili into it, red flecks splashing up as she talked excitedly. She, too, acted as though nothing ever happened. She put the bowl on a plate and loaded that with cornbread and grinned at me the whole time.

“I thought you would never come to dinner again, and what a thing for a boy to see! That man sho’ shouldn’t let something like that happen. It jest ain’t right, I tell ya, it jest ain’t right!”

She pushed the plate to my chest and smiled at me happily, even though her small, dark eyes were still glistening with tears. She shook her head, smoothed down her hair and pressed her hand down over her bosom, sighing. Her face was filled with such gratitude and kindliness that I thought she might kiss me, and I felt mighty embarrassed.

“I’m jest so happy that you came to dinner. You make my whole life light up when you’re here to help me cook and I have some body to talk to the whole time. It’s mighty fine to know a boy like you, Mr. Jess. Mighty fine.”

And she patted me on the cheek with her soft, big hand before ambling slowly back into the kitchen, her calming, motherly presence following her. The air seemed to balloon with tension as I set down and ev’rybody looked towards me. I looked down at the meal before me and felt a little sick. Good God—I was turning into one of them.

But I took a spoonful and chewed with three pairs of eyes on the spoon the whole time, watching it go to my mouth and swallowing, like they had spent the whole day cooking over a hot stove and wanted my approval. And my stomach took it, real grateful. So I ate the rest and they finished their own meals. It was silent now, like they were all waiting for me to go crazy or something, and I kept waiting for them to break down in tears. But nothing happened. I collected the dishes as usual and brought them to the kitchen.

A shocking sight met my eyes. I saw Delia sitting on the stool she usually set on when she was cleaning potatoes or shelling peas, but she wasn’t shelling peas or cleaning potatoes. Her face was in her hands and she was sobbing fit to rival a banshee. I set those plates down quick as I could and hurried over to her.

“Delia?” I asked, having to raise my voice over her loud wails. “Delia, what’s the matter? Did Anna tell you about what had happened?”

She wouldn’t even look at me, but her wails got louder and she started to shriek words between them. “You’re the only one that cares any, Mr. Jess!”

I put my hand on her shoulder, which was shaking, and she looked up at me.

“Delia …”

“That man … that man at the church today … I knew him since I was five years old … Billy Wiggins. I played with him every day of my God-loving life, Mr. Jess. He was my best friend … my best, most kindly friend I had ever had … and now he ain’t here no more …”

Her sweet molasses voice dwindled to a small, choked whisper as a wave of crushing realization hit her, and I put a hand on the back of her neck, kneeling next to her and just setting there as she sobbed. She wailed and threw her arms around my middle and dragged me into her warm, plump body, squeezing me against her big bosom. I hugged her back, a little surprised by her reaction.

“People have shit for brains sometimes,” I said softly. “They don’t think about what they’re saying or doing half the time. It’s just what they learned of society, I figure.”

She squeezed me so hard that I could just barely breathe. Then she let go and stood up, wrapping her arm around my shoulders and crushing me against her side. I looked at her, and she wiped her eyes and looked at me, teary but feeling better. I smiled at her, and she laughed, voice higher with tears, and pulled me with her as she walked to the kitchen cabinet with her slow, ambling stride. Her body was warm like the sun.

“Ya wanna know what I do when I’m feeling down in the dumps? I bake something. I don’t care how long it takes or how much it makes. I do it to take my mind off things, ya know? And let me tell ya, it feels good.” She laughed again, and her voice was stronger, and had regained the sweet slowness of molasses. “Oh, Lord! It feels good.”

I laughed with her, and our laughter mixed into one beautiful ringing sound and bounced off the clean walls. I picked up the plates and put them in the sink, picking up the rag. I felt a sort of pang in my stomach as a routine from weekends at the Shack took hold in my mind. Reach for a plate, scrub it clean, until every speck had disappeared, and then hand it to Bobby to dry. I cleaned, but when I turned, to my shock, Bobby was not there. Instead, there was Delia, holding out her hand with a warm smile and a towel in her other hand. She wiped the water away and pushed it onto the shelf in the cabinet above the counter. And even though I missed the familiar touch of Bobby’s fingertips as they brushed against my fingers to take the plate, or how he would ruffle my hair when we were done and then flop on the couch and lean back with his eyes shut, looking mighty peaceful, Delia’s smooth, coffee colored skin, sweet voice and shining eyes was a pretty sight all on its own.

So when I had finished the dishes for Delia, she pulled bananas out of a paper bag on the counter and spread them out. I looked at her as she spooned floor into a blue ceramic bowl, clean and as new looking as the day it had been bought.

“Fritters,” she told me with a giggle. “I’m teachin’ you how to make banana fritters.”

She got out a deep cast-iron skillet, put it on the gas stove and filled it with oil, turning on the heat. She put baking powder and salt in with the flour, and then milk and eggs. She broke the yolks with a fork and whisked the whole mixture together, telling me that this was the batter for the bananas. I watched real close the quick way she moved her arm, in fast, neat strokes that threw the liquid against the side of the bowl that she held pressed against her side. The way she did it was an art form all on its own, shaping something great out of a bunch of stuff, like an author throws together words to make something people want to read. She walked briskly to the counter by the gas stove and cut up the banana, first in half the long way and then into quarters the short way. Into the batter the bananas went, and she coated them by flipping them around with the fork and tossing them into the hot oil. They bobbed around, popping and sizzling, and she flipped them over. They were a pretty golden-brown, maybe a little darker than the chickens that were now in their roost because the light had faded from the day.

Late into the night we worked on the fritters, and during the time we talked. I told her about school and Red bullying me, and Gumby being mad for not letting him tell Bobby I wanted to go back home. She looked at me firmly and said, “Mr. Jess, don’t let people hurt ya, because you’ve been hurting your whole life. You’ve gotta be your own self, and your opinion counts among ev’rybody else’s. Don’t let Red beat on you and Gumby scold you for your opinions on things.”

She taught me that fritters could be made with any kind of fruit, not just bananas, and when they were done, she piled some onto a plate that had a blue rim with a bunch of designs on it. When I got a better look at it, I saw the faces of pretty women in the rim making up the design. She caught me admiring their faces, their cream white skin and straight noses and sweet smiles, and she said, “That was my momma’s plate. Had it in our family for generations. Her momma had it, and her momma before that, and her momma before that.” She sprinkled the fritters with powdered sugar and put it in my hands with a proud smile.

I looked down at the fritters, giving her a brief, embarrassed smile, and one of the extremely hot fritters, coated in a glistening sheen of scorching oil, slid into my thumb and I could feel the skin burning on contact.

With a low curse, I dropped the plate and pressed my thumb to my lips, forgetting my mistake in a haze of pain that blinded me. The jolt of shock as I heard shattering ceramic caused me to look down hurriedly. The jigsaw of ceramic pieces and the pain of the burn brought tears to my eyes, and my stomach knotted up like a fist. She would hate me for breaking the obviously expensive plate. A shard had broken one of the pretty women’s faces into three pieces, cutting down from her forehead, breaking her eyes apart and splitting her lips in half, ruining her pretty smile forever. I bit my lip and looked up at her, my eyes watery, heart pounding with shock.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, praying for her to forgive me for ruining a family heirloom. I bent quickly to scrape up the shards, white ceramic powder mixing with the powdered sugar on the fritters. They were still very hot. I avoided them as my finger screamed in pain, and more tears oozed from the corners of my eyes as I thought about how worthless I was and how useless it was to try to clean up … “I’m so sorry, Delia. I didn’t mean to; my hand got burned. Oh, I’m sorry! It’s all ruined now—I ruin everything—”

Delia seized my hand and pulled it away from the shards of broken plate. I looked up at her, sniffing and flinching as she looked at my thumb. I could see an angry red blister already beginning to form. She looked at it, shaking her head, and I apologized again. She looked at me hard, and I glanced at the floor.

“Boy, don’t apologize! You’re the one with the burnt hand, not me!”

And with that, she gently pressed her lips over the burn. I haven’t been much turned by anything, unless it was Father Zachariah’s sermons or something pretty like an Arizona sunset, but never in my life have I been as surprised by such tenderness as Delia had just showed me. I loved her like I had loved my mother, though it had been brief the time that I had with her, but never had I expected her to love me back.

“Delia, you’re just like my ma,” I said, even though I didn’t mean to say it so adoring.

She chuckled low in her throat, smooth like molasses, and hugged me.

“And I love you like my own son.”

Sorry about not posting for—what, five months?—but with school and everything, it’s kind of hard to get anything you want done just done. I hope you like this chapter. I acknowledge the fact that some people might be offended by the events that took place in the last chapter, but I won’t take them back. Everything happens for a reason, and there was a reason behind that, too—it was there to prove something.