didn’t offer an answer. When Davie had died, Floyd and his big ol’ arms had been there, too. Floyd had been working on the lawn mower when Davie decided he wanted to play “Catch me” from the porch. Certain as always that his daddy was watching, Davie stepped to the rail edge and stretched out his arms.
Only Johnny had been watching. It was he who had heard his brother’s voice call out “Catch me,” sounding more like the chirp of a bird, and only Johnny who saw Davie drop off the man-tall porch. It wasn’t until his father heard the soft thud on the grass and then something resembling the sound of a twig snapping that he glanced up from the mower to see Davie lying in front of him motionless, his arms akimbo, neck broken, facing Floyd with only the slightest look of surprise.
In the autumn that followed the funeral, Hazel’s unshed tears hung dark and heavy on the family’s horizon like an approaching Delta storm. The drinking continued. Hazel said if she couldn’t drink, she would surely suffocate. She said, “Drinking is like breaking open a window to yell out of.”
Floyd said he was trying to understand, but all he thought her drinking did was make her mad. He said every time he looked at her, all he saw in her eyes was a fight ready to happen, and he couldn’t afford being around somebody that negative all the time. Not with everything they had riding on his positive attitude. Finally, he moved into a separate bedroom.
They left Davie’s bed and toys and clothes untouched, strengthening Johnny’s belief that his brother was coming back. Several times a week he awoke to his father silhouetted in the doorway, looking toward Davie’s bed for minutes at a time. One night, after a particularly loud fight between his parents, Floyd came to the doorway and stood there as usual, staring. This time, Johnny thought he heard a sniffling sound.
“Hey, Big Monkey,” Johnny called out to him.
“Hey, Little Monkey,” his father whispered, in a way that made Johnny’s heart hurt.
“He’s not back yet, Daddy,” he said, trying to comfort him. “I’ll holler at you when he gets home.”
Later, after his father had gone to bed, Johnny woke to the touch of a hand running through his hair. As his mother knelt by his bedside, smelling strongly of medicine, she whispered the oddest question in his ear.
“Who do you love the most? Me or your daddy?”
Certain of the answer she wanted, he said, “You, Momma.”
She bent over and kissed him on his forehead and said before leaving, “Don’t tell your daddy. You’re on my side. Do you hear?”
His mother’s question tore the world in two for Johnny. It was like the day he had seen the setting sun and the rising moon in the sky at the same time, opposite each other. Until that moment, he believed they were the same entity, the silver moon being the soft evening face of the hot, laboring sun. Yet when his mother asked him that question and made him choose between his parents, Johnny grasped how separate his parents really were. They traveled in their own orbits. And most terrifying of all, there could be one without the other.
Chapter Fourteen
ONE WING HANNAH’S
Vida reckoned that if the woman who plopped down uninvited at her table wasn’t drunk, she was within hollering distance of it. She called herself Sweet Pea, and her shiny black hair, greased down and hot-combed, hugged a plump face glistening with sweat. She grinned at Vida like they were best friends.
“You ought to get out of them fields, honey,” the woman lost no time advising. “What are you? Nineteen? Twenty? You wasting yourself. Gal, you do a lot better in town. The mens like your type.”
Sweet Pea smiled brightly at Vida with a mouth full of gold teeth and then winked. Motioning toward Vida’s chest with an empty Mason jar, she said, “You young and pretty, even with that head of drawed-up hair. And you probably toting some nice boobies in that sack you wearing.”
Shifting self-consciously in her chair, Vida yanked at her loose calico dress, trying to pull out some of the slack. Then she stuck her ragged hands under the table and out of sight. It vexed her to think a looped-up stranger could tell straightaway that she had been reduced to being a fieldworker. Especially in a smoke-crowded juke lit by two dim bulbs dangling from a tar-paper ceiling.
Vida made a show of searching the room, partly to defy the busybody stare of her table companion and partly to locate her brother. All around her couples were close-dancing in the cigarette haze to a blues-scarred voice rising from the Seeburg.
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