Doll sang.
August frowned. “What’s wrong with you?”
The girl took a tentative step into the bright light that streamed through the kitchen windows. “Daddy?”
“Yes?”
Hemmingway flew into him and nuzzled her nose deep into his neck. He smelled like night air, liniment, and scorched cedar chips.
He was real. It was not a dream.
August patted Hemmingway’s back and shot Doll a questioning look. Doll shrugged her shoulders and pried Paris’s lips from her nipple.
“Baby,” August crooned as he tried to peel Hemmingway off of him, “what in the world is wrong with you today?”
“Oh, August, stop babying that girl,” Doll admonished. “You’ve got her spoiled rotten!” Doll rose from her seat, propped Paris on her hip, and addressed Hemmingway. “I made you some oatmeal. It’s in the bowl over there on the stove. Come on now, let go of your father.”
Hemmingway held fast.
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” August gently pushed Hemmingway off of him and began to examine her. He took her face into his hands, glided his fingers down her arms. “Are you hurt?”
“Who would hurt her, August?” Doll snapped. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with her, she likes too much attention, that’s what!”
Hemmingway slipped from her father’s lap.
“August, you need to wash up and get to bed. You look whipped.”
He nodded dutifully, but his eyes were still resting on Hemmingway’s face. “You’re okay, right?”
She glanced at Doll, who was glowering at her. “Yes, Daddy, I’m fine,” she whispered.
“Good.” August gave his daughter a tender pat on her head and walked out of the kitchen.
“Take care of them dishes when you’re done,” Doll ordered as she followed August out.
Hemmingway didn’t move to retrieve the bowl of hot cereal until the slapping sound of Doll’s house slippers had faded away. At the table, she spooned up a large helping of the cereal and brought it to her open mouth.
Good thing she smelled the turpentine before she ate it, or this story might have ended here.
Cole Robert Payne lived in one of those nice houses on Candle Street. He was a big man, with dark wavy hair and bright green eyes. He had a wife, who was small, meek, and sickly. They had no children.
Before Cole came to Candle Street, before he married Melinda, and before he took ownership of the only store here that welcomed both blacks and whites, he was a sharecropper’s son in a town not too far from me known as Sidon.
As a boy, Cole lived with his family on the edge of a thin line that separated rich from poor and black from white. This line was as significant as the one that separates the sky from the sea. It was this line that Cole stepped unwittingly across.
The Payne’s neighbors were a black family named Johnson. They had four sons and a little girl named Sissy.
Sissy was a dark-eyed, lanky, smiling child with a space between her two front teeth. Cole and Sissy had been born months apart. Cole’s mother Catherine helped pull Sissy into the world, and when Catherine fell ill and was unable to nurse Cole, Sissy’s mother Ethel stepped in and did it for her.
They were friends, these two families from opposite sides of the line.
Sissy and Cole were two peas in a pod from the time they could walk. When they turned five years old, Sissy stole a hatpin from her mother, and beneath a tree in the Paynes’ front yard, she used it to prick Cole’s finger and then hers. They mashed the open wounds together and declared their eternal allegiance to one another.
How could they have known that this promise would turn into love?
Before I move forward, I think it’s only right that I educate you about spring.
Spring has always had a female essence and will forever be a noxious season, choking the air with her scent, having her way with clouds—shaping them into all manner of impractical things. Even the crickets do not escape spring’s demands. To satisfy her wishes, from April through June they strum nothing but Francisco Tárrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.”
Spring is lovely, but she is also a trickster! She can make you forget that you are the wrong color, old, ugly, or fat, and fills your head with foolish possibilities. She impresses upon your heart affections for people who will have nothing to offer in return.
Her showers wash away the gray blotches of winter and everything may appear new. But be aware, there is nothing new, there is only the old shrouded in spring’s bright floral dress.
Over time, Cole and Sissy grew up and apart, their two-peas-in-a-pod friendship dwindling down to just a passing hi.
That changed one day when Cole strode up the road toward home. He was moving slow, his long arms swinging languidly at his sides like loose ropes. He was thinking about the fly ball he’d caught and the whipping he was sure to suffer for slipping away to play baseball instead of finishing his chores.
Sissy was sitting on the wooden railed fence that encircled a wide field chock-full of colorful wild flowers. She was gnawing on a cob of corn when she spotted him.
“Hey,” she sang.
“Hey, Sissy,” Cole called back without slowing his gait.
“Your mama made some johnnycakes. I had myself two. They taste like a little piece of heaven.”
Her voice carried notes he had never heard before. The sound caught him by surprise and stopped him dead in his tracks. He turned around.
“You want some company?”
Sissy shrugged her shoulders indifferently and started on another row of kernels.
Cole trotted over and hoisted himself up onto the fence. Sissy noticed the muscles in his arm rippling with the effort and her stomach did a little somersault.
He looked out over the blanket of purple, pink, and orange blossoms and waited for something in him to stir. “What you looking at?” he asked.
“Nothing and everything.”
“Well, why you sitting here?”
“I was here for the peace and quiet, but I guess now that you’re here, that’s all done with,” she chuckled.
Cole laughed, leaned over, and bumped his shoulder against hers. “Fun-nee!”
Sissy hushed him and with a nod of her head, directed his attention to the sky. “Look,” she whispered.
