The Annunciation Read online

  The Annunciation

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Copyright © 1983 by Ellen Gilchrist

  Originally published in print form 1983

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from Don Congdon Associates, Inc.; the agency can be reached at [email protected].

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the following for permission to reprint previously copyrighted material:

  CBS Songs for an excerpt from “These Days,” by Dan Fogelberg. Copyright © 1975 April Music Inc. & Hickory Grove Music. All rights administered by April Music Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Chappell Music Company for an excerpt from “Kiss On My List,” by Janna Allen & Daryl Hall. Copyright © 1980 by Hot-Cha Music Co. & Six Continents Music Publishing Inc. and Fust Huzza Music. All rights controlled by Unichappell Music, Inc. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Chappell Music Company for an excerpt from “Where Or When,” by Rodgers & Hart. Copyright © 1937 by Chappell & Co., Inc. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Random House, Inc. for excerpts from On the Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, and edited, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann. CopyJight © 1967 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Siren Songs for an excerpt from “Dance With Me,” words and music by John and Johanna Hall. Copyright © 1975 by Siren Songs (BMI) and Open End Music (BMI). Used by permission.

  The Viking Press for an excerpt from “Inventory” by Dorothy Parker from The Portable Dorothy Parker, Revised and Enlarged Edition by Brendan Gill. Copyright 1926 by Dorothy Parker; copyright © renewed 1954 by Dorothy Parker. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, Inc.

  Cover design by Barbara Aronica Buck

  For Marshall and Garth and Pierre

  “And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.”

  Luke I:29

  Cargo

  1

  “Amanda McCamey? Sure, I remember her. Lived up on Esperanza when she was a girl. Got famous writing a dirty book about the Church. Fell in with freethinkers. Too bad. She was a pretty girl. Prettiest girl in Issaquena County. And from good stock. Her cousin was Guy McCamey, the All-American. You remember him, don’t you? Well, you would have if you’d ever seen him play.”

  Amanda. What she remembered was the delta, thirteen feet of black topsoil, starched dresses, Baby Doll and Nailor, the bayou, the bridge, the river, the levees, the smell of coffee and powder, her mother’s whiskey, her grandmother’s kisses. What she remembered was Guy smiling at her down the wide hall. He was eight years old. She was four.

  All day she had been in the Packard beside her mother, driving from Tennessee. As soon as they had come to the flat delta farmlands her mother had begun to cry.

  Now they were there. Amanda was standing in the front hall underneath her grandfather’s twelve-point deer. She was leaning on one hip, wearing a white fur coat and hat and muff. She reached up and pulled off the hat and dropped it on the floor, her hair shining like copper in the last light of the long day.

  Guy was coming down the hall holding out his hands to her.

  A day in November. Amanda had been on Esperanza for a month. She had been in every cupboard, every closet, every drawer. Now she was standing on the screened-in porch leaning against the screen, getting her sweater dirty. It was a new sweater, a yellow sweater with grosgrain ribbon down the front and pearl buttons from the Chinaman’s store. Amanda was waiting for Guy, singing songs to herself, pretending she was a singer on the radio. Every now and then she would press her face into the screen and stick out her tongue to taste the strange rusty taste. She had been on the porch for almost an hour. It seemed to Amanda she had been waiting for days.

  As soon as she heard the trucks she came running down the stairs to meet him. He had been out hunting with the men, with his father and Harper Davis and Joe and Peter Holloman. They returned in a flurry of dogs and talk and guns and laughter, in their khaki coats and red hats, smelling of gunpowder and cold weather, the thick Delta mud called buckshot stuck to their boots like clay.

  Guy handed her the box of rabbits and the dogs jumped all around trying to take the box from her hands. They were her grandfather’s dogs, brown and black and white beagles and setters and terriers. She kicked one of the beagles to the ground with her sturdy legs, making the men roar with laughter.

  “Look at Amanda, Guy. She’s about to kill those dogs. Take her inside with those rabbits before the dogs have a fit. And come on out to the back hall. We got to clean those birds.”

  “You look pretty in your sweater,” Guy said. He was making a place for the box behind the heater in their grandmother’s room.

  “They’re hungry,” Amanda said. She was squatting beside the box, watching them squirm. Their little sucking noises bothered her, as though they might get on her and stick to her skin. Part of her wanted to throw them away.

  “We’ll feed them later when I get through with the birds,” he said. He reached down and put his hand on her hair.

  It was growing dark outside, the swift dark that falls in November. Amanda watched the rabbits for a while. They looked like the fingers on her hand, lying so close together, moving up and down with their soft breathing. After a while she picked up the box and wandered down the back hall to look for Guy, past the shelves of musty books she pretended to read. The books were full of silverfish. When she opened them the tiny creatures would slide across the page and disappear into the bindings.

  The voices of the men were growing louder. Their voices were exciting, different from the voices of the women in the house.

  Amanda followed the voices, and there was Guy, sitting on a low stool in the wide back hall that led to the kitchen. He was cleaning the birds and he was crying. The yellow light bulbs in the old wall fixtures cast black shadows all around him and the hall smelled of gunpowder and boots and the sour smell of the icebox and the smell of butter-churns and the smell of whiskey.

  It seemed to Amanda that near the smell of whiskey someone was always crying.

  The men were leaning over Guy, sipping their drinks. One of the birds was so warm Guy thought it was still alive. His thumb hit a tendon and it moved in his hands. He leaned over and vomited onto the pile of feathers. Amanda stood beside a rocker watching him.

  “You want to help your buddy, Miss Rabbit Trainer?” Guy’s father asked. “You want to give him a hand with those birds?”

  Amanda ignored him. She stared at Guy’s hands. Every now and then he would look up and see the terrible stern look on her face. Her eyes were as dark as an Indian’s.

  Later that night she climbed out the window onto the sleeping porch and got into his bed, warming him with her small body while the owls called back and forth across the bayou.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll get to the store and play the slot machine. This time we’ll get the oranges. Maybe we’ll hit the jackpot like Baby Doll did.”

  No one minded when they found her in his bed on cold mornings. Amanda thinks Guy hung the moon, they said. She thinks Guy can do no wrong. She likes Guy the best of everyone in the whole delta.

  These were the people of Esperanza Plantation. These were the ones who taught Amanda everything she would always know. There were three generations of women,
not counting Amanda, who made it four.

  There was Amanda’s great-grandmother, also Amanda, who had outlived three husbands. She wore long dresses and smelled of dried flowers and gave Amanda peppermint candy. She had come to Issaquena County as a pioneer, bringing her silver and the long gray-and-black-striped dresses she wore until she died. There were paintings of two of the husbands on the walls of her room. The third had been a simple carpenter and had built the beautiful wardrobes of Esperanza and the high bed where Amanda sometimes slept, safe in the arms and the soft snoring of the woman whose name she would carry into the future.

  There was Amanda’s grandmother, who never stopped moving, who ran the house with her energy. On Fridays she would get into the Buick and drive the gutted road to Rolling Fork to the Chinaman’s store. Sometimes she took Amanda along and the little girl would watch through the window of the meat counter as the Chinaman cut into the meat with his fierce knives.

  When they paid for their purchases he would turn to her with a smile and hand her a little paper gift, a flower or a bell or a tiny umbrella with beautiful pictures painted on it.

  Guy’s mother worked at the gin and left in the mornings before anyone else was up. She was always kind to Amanda but she stayed away from the other women in the house because they looked down on her and were angry with Guy’s father for marrying her.

  Amanda’s mother didn’t count anymore. She moved through the rooms like a ghost, never laying down her grief for a moment.

  Guy’s father, Frank, hated Amanda. Everything he had hated in his older brother was in the child. When she had only been on the place an hour she turned those black eyes upon him and it was exactly like looking into Leland’s eyes. Leland, who had gone off to Ole Miss in style, then to Nashville to play ball and have his name in the papers, while Frank went to Mississippi State. Didn’t even get to finish that before their father died and he had to come home to run the place.

  Leland, who had come to his own father’s funeral wearing a white suit. Then driven off in a Pierce-Arrow. Not to be heard of again until he died in the war, and the crazy flapper he’d married in Nashville came driving up with a chauffeur bringing the little princess and handed her over to her grandmother.

  Every dish she ate had to be put on a separate plate or she wouldn’t touch it. “She eats cake and sugar sandwiches all day,” he said. “If you want her to eat at meals, tell Nailor to stop feeding her in the kitchen.”

  “Can’t stop her, Mr. Frank,” Nailor said. He was standing in the kitchen door listening to every word. Amanda was refusing to eat mashed potatoes because they had pepper on them. “Can’t stop her. She too fast for me.”

  “I’m going to the back acreage until supper,” Frank said, slamming out of the house. They were seated in the dining room at the noon meal. As soon as he was gone the offending potatoes were removed and some without pepper prepared.

  These were the black people, Baby Doll and Nailor and Gert and Overflow and Sarah and June and Sam, who clapped and laughed when Amanda danced or threw fits. All except Kale, who never smiled at anyone, and Ditty, who was a hundred years old and could tell fortunes and make conjures and tell warts to disappear and was as white as Guy’s mother.

  There was Man, who did no work now but sat on the steps of the store and had his house and his living forever, left to him in writing in Amanda’s grandfather’s will. Man was the tallest Negro on Esperanza. He had stood beside Amanda’s grandfather when the crazy man, Mr. DuBose, came gunning for him. They had stood on the bridge all morning and had shot Mr. DuBose together as soon as he set foot on the land.

  They shot him together but only Amanda’s grandfather stood trial that afternoon at the Grace Post Office. Leland Cincinnatus Eudoxus McCamey was acquitted in five minutes and afterwards everyone went back to Esperanza for quail. Man ate his on the front steps with a mason jar full of whiskey for a chaser.

  These were the stories Amanda was told on the porch at night.

  Then there was Guy, who could do anything, who had picked up a cottonmouth moccasin and slammed its head against a tree when he was eight years old, who was afraid of nothing in the world but his own cruelty. The summer Amanda was five he taught her to swim. He had work to do on weekday mornings but on Saturday Amanda would sit on the floor by his bed drinking the thick coffee Nailor made for her, waiting for him to wake up. The coffee was called Camouflage. It was a cup full of hot milk with a thimbleful of coffee and three spoons of sugar. Amanda would sit on the floor by the bed sticking her fingers down into the bottom of the cup, bringing up the little grains of coffee-flavored sugar, licking them off with her tongue, little rivers of coffee and sugar falling all over the front of her gown.

  She would be quiet as long as she could. But as soon as the morning sun was visible behind the round roof of the chicken house, as soon as the first ray of sun touched the pecan tree above the sandpile, she would get up and stand over Guy, looking down into his face. She would take a sticky finger and push open one of his eyelids.

  “You’re playing possum.”

  “No I’m not, Sissy. Please go away.”

  “When can we go? You promised me.”

  “As soon as it’s warm. Come on, Sissy. Please let me sleep.” He would roll over and pull his head down under the sheet. She would walk around the bed and try another tack. She would pull down the sheet and whisper in his ear. “I’m going to make it to the pier. From the swing to the pier.”

  “If you leave me alone until eight,” he said, “when Nailor says it’s eight.”

  Then Amanda would wander back to the kitchen and get a piece of pinch cake and take it out on the back porch to eat it by the washing machine. The washing machine fascinated Amanda. It was new and only Baby Doll was allowed to run it. Only Baby Doll stood before the high white tub feeding clothes into the dangerous wringer. At any moment one of Baby Doll’s hands might disappear into the rubber rollers and be flattened forever.

  Amanda ran her hands around and around the smooth porcelain finish, then wandered down the steps and out into the yard to inspect the jars of frogs and lightning bugs she had collected the night before. They disgusted her now and she threw them under the house. She wandered on out to the edge of the bayou bank to look in the Mexican jars for treasure. They were tall pottery jars Frank had brought back from Mexico. They reminded Amanda of the jars in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Every few days she checked the jars to see if they were filled with treasure. There was nothing in them today and she went back into the house and into her grandmother’s room, then out through a window to the sleeping porch to see if Guy was still asleep.

  “It’s eight,” she said.

  “It isn’t eight,” he said. Then he gave up. She looked so forlorn. “In an hour,” he said. “Go get on your suit.”

  Then Amanda tore into her mother’s room and got her yellow bathing suit and found Baby Doll and stood very still while Baby Doll put it on and adjusted the little straps, and buckled on her sandals and found her a towel.

  When Guy was ready they left the house and walked the four hundred yards to the swimming place as if they were going on a long journey. Every cypress root, every mussel shell, every dark mud-covered plant was a message, a landmark, a mystery. The bayou was a place of endless fascination for Amanda. She would stand on the bank or lie on the pier looking down at her reflection in the water, thinking about the story of Narcissus, who was turned into a flower for liking to look at himself too much. She would stare down into the water hating and fearing the gods who had such powers, wondering how far she dared go to challenge them.

  There was nothing to fear when Guy was there. He would wade out into the bayou and hold out his hands to her. She followed him, feeling the thick cold mud between her toes, the roots of the trees and the sand that washed away as fast as her grandmother had it poured. Then she lifted her feet and let herself go, sliding out into the water, the heaviness of bearing herself on the earth gone. Now she was borne by the water and Guy’
s hands. Then she let go of even his hands and paddled up and down between the rope and the pier. “Don’t guard me!” she called out, her mouth half full of water. “Don’t guard me! I don’t want anyone to guard me!”

  She flailed up and down until she was exhausted, then clamped her hands around his neck and he would swim out into the deep water with her hanging on to his back, letting her use him as a raft.

  Amanda and Guy. Amanda and Guy. The only white children for ten miles down either road. The only white children with two pairs of shoes and shampoo. Amanda and Guy and the love that passed between them like a field of light. Everyone on Esperanza watched it but only the black people knew what they were watching. Only the black people knew what it meant.

  At first they only touched each other. Guy would wake in the night and find her beside him, pretending to sleep, breathing like a sleeping person. He would rub his fingers up and down between her legs. She trembled beside him, safe in the smell of his skin, the flat hard width of his chest, the warmth of his hands on her thigh.

  Later he took her hand and showed her what he wanted her to do.

  When he was twelve years old Guy would have no more of it. He would not even talk to her about it and became angry if she looked at him in certain ways or came into his room at night, for the great-grandmother had died and he had his own room now.

  “If you talk about it I’ll tell grandmother,” he said. “I’ll let them beat me to death. I want God to let me be good at baseball, Sissy. I want to be on the football team next year. If I do this he isn’t going to let me.”

  “I hate God anyway,” Amanda said. “I hate his nasty old church. I hate Father Agnew. He looks like his face is blue. He was a blue baby. Grandmother said so. He can’t do anything to me.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Sissy,” he said. “You don’t mean that. You don’t mean the things you say.”

  When she was fourteen and he was eighteen grown men came to Rolling Fork from Jackson and Oxford and Starkville and as far away as Nashville to watch him play football and talk to him about where he would go to college.