Page 5 of Junie

Chapter Five

“You going down to supper, like the mistress said?”

Bess. She hovers around the corner, always ready to pounce on Junie’s indiscretions.

“You ought not to spy, Bess,” Junie hisses.

“After everything you put me through this morning, I’d say I have the right,” Bess retorts with a laugh. “Now, you going or not?”

“Later,” Junie says, eyeing the objects in the room. Would the value of Violet’s dresses, books, or furniture be enough to save her from exile in New Orleans?

“You gonna have to face Muh sometime, Junie. No reason to starve over it.”

“I’m not hungry,” Junie lies, her annoyance simmering. Who is Bess to tell her what she has to face? She isn’t the one about to be ripped from her home.

“Suit yourself,” Bess says, stepping into the linen closet. “I’m to fix the rooms for the guests, so if you’ll excuse me…” She starts pulling the closet door closed.

Guests . Bess was at dinner, too, and she might have answers to Junie’s questions.

“Bess, wait!”

“What is it,” she says, cracking the door open. “And quiet your voice down.”

“If Violet marries this man, do you really think I’ll have to go with her?”

Bess’s eyes widen. She grabs Junie by the wrist and drags her into the closet with her, closing the door behind them. “What are you doing askin’ things like that in the hall like those white folks ain’t got ears like bats? You really can be a fool sometimes.”

“That don’t answer my question.”

Bess sighs. “Junie, I try not to think too much about what Mrs. McQueen says or doesn’t say if I can help it, and I suggest you do the same.”

Junie holds back an eye roll. A scolding from Bess is worth the annoyance when her future is at stake.

“I know that I give you grief, but you’re my only cousin. And without…” Junie lets the sentence dangle, long enough for Bess’s expression to soften. “You’re the only one who might tell me what’s what.”

Bess rolls her lips under her teeth. “Junie, I don’t—”

“Minnie would have told me,” Junie says, her voice shaking under the tension of tears in her throat. “Please, Bess, just tell me the truth.”

Bess looks down at her feet, untying and retying her apron sash. Her buckle shoe heels scrape nervously over the wood planks.

“Yes. Yes, you’ll have to go with her,” she whispers.

Junie clutches her stomach, digging her nails into her abdomen to keep from being sick.

“What if he won’t have her?” she musters.

“Then, they’ll find some other man. Violet will marry, and when she does, she’ll take you with her. It is only a matter of when.”

You’ll have to go with her. The six words she’s feared burn her skin like July sun, relentless and consuming. Junie’s knees slacken as pressure builds in her chest.

“Bess?” The mistress’s voice echoes down the hallway and through the door.

“Lord Jesus that’s her,” Bess says, snatching a handful of sheets off the shelf. “I have to go, she’s had me running like a chicken with my head off since dinner.”

“Violet doesn’t even want to marry!” Junie exclaims, her pulse quickening. “Can’t they sell something in this house, something worth enough to pay for what they need?”

“Quiet, damn!” Bess says. “The mistress will never sell anything she owns. It’ll look shameful to her. Marrying off Violet’s the simplest way to get the money and still keep up with society. Now stay in here until I’ve left with Queenie,” she commands. “Otherwise she’ll think we’re up to something.”

She stiffens her face and steps back out into the candlelit hall.

Junie’s heart rattles against her ribs as her chest tightens. She shoves the panic down as her vision blurs at the edges, trying to bury her terror even as her hands tremble.

—

Once bess and the mistress have gone, she slips out of the main house and into the thick-aired night. Despite their instructions, Junie wants to avoid the cookhouse. With its stifling heat and watchful relatives, it is the last place Junie wants to be, even if she is hungry. Her family will watch her eat her meal, forcing smiles and clutching one another the way they did over Minnie’s feverish body, knowing her fate is sealed. She will be as good as dead to her family, and them to her.

She ends up at the stables, rifling through a pile of old men’s work clothes until she finds a worn-out shirt and trousers that fit. She shoves her maid’s uniform into a bush before she speeds through the woods, shoving away brambles and branches until she reaches the edge of the creek.

Carefree.

Of course, she’d promised Granddaddy she wouldn’t go back to the woods. But he knows as well as anyone that her promises mean nothing anymore. Her failures and their disapprovals are as reliable as the change of the seasons.

From her seat on Old Mother’s exposed root, she wills her body to relax, to find the calm she felt this morning when the water slithered over the rocks and the mud drew her in. Instead, her body aches with the desire to scream.

Violet has to listen to her parents, the McQueens won’t care if Junie is gone, and her family is powerless to stop them. There is no way out, no one to solve this for her. The creek writhes like a cottonmouth in the dark of the new moon. She follows the stream with her eyes, watching it bend to meet the Alabama River. Does that river go all the way to New Orleans? Will it be the water that carries her away from home?

Being forced to leave Muh and Granddaddy is more than she can bear. The nightmares have cursed her enough, the penitence she will forever pay for being the reason her sister’s dead.

Darkness opens the barely scabbed wounds, releasing thememory she longs to forget, the hostile December wind, the indifferent river current, the mocking creak of the tree branch. She’d been sitting up high over the river on a wobbling branch, chasing peace after a fight with Muh. Minnie appeared at the trunk, a threadbare blanket wrapped around her maid’s uniform.

“That tree ain’t no good! Get down from there!”

“I ain’t coming!” Junie yelled, leaning off the branch.

“You’re being carefree again! You can’t even swim.”

“It’s careless! The word’s ‘careless’! You can’t even say it—”

The branch cracked. Frigidity pierced through Junie’s bones as river water filled her lungs. She screamed and kicked, fighting to push herself to the surface as the current dragged her to the silty, black riverbed. The pressure had squeezed her skull like a muscadine crushed underfoot for wine. By the time her feet touched the muddy bottom, all she could hear was the ringing of the current.

In church, she’d heard about the ring of light, the gates of Saint Peter, and the chorus of angels who sing you into the kingdom of heaven. As the last bubbles of air escaped her, all she’d seen was an indifferent darkness.

She hadn’t felt the arm wrapped across her chest, pulling her to the surface. She doesn’t remember her sister swimming their bodies to the bank, turning Junie on her side until she coughed up the water. She doesn’t remember being wrapped in the threadbare blanket and rocked until the blood ran through her limbs again. What she does remember is the silver pendant swinging from her sister’s neck, hair slicked against her skin, and soggy leaves circling her forehead like a crown. The necklace was far finer than anything a Negro should have, yet Minnie kept it around her neck every day, hidden underneath her maid’s dress.

“How did you get that necklace?”

The first words Junie had mustered after she came to.

“You’re a damn fool, Junie.”

The next day, Minnie got sick. Junie found her, crouched in the grass in her own vomit. By the time they made it to the cabin, she couldn’t stand, only able to crawl to her knees to be sick. Nausea scratched at Junie’s insides, like a cat desperate to get out, but no matter how ill she felt, she couldn’t release it. Muh used every remedy she knew as the family waited over her sister, watching her twist herself in the blankets coated in sweat, her eyes black and glossy as lead. Junie thought then that would be the worst part—the eyes.

Then the shaking began.

Minnie shook with such violence Junie thought she would snap her neck. Junie felt the tremors in her own bones, the ache for unrelenting movement, but was paralyzed. It was then that Muh clutched her sister’s pale body, calling on gods beyond the ones they knew from church.

Them demons are coming. Them demons are taking her. Them demons are taking my baby.

By morning, Minnie was dead.

Was it a life for a life, Minnie’s traded for Junie’s, the one the devil wanted? Auntie told her the day after Minnie died that grief started strong, but flickered away like an untended fire. That if you were strong enough to let the feelings alone, eventually you’d forget the pain. Junie licks the tears coating her lips. Her own voice echoes in her head.

You aren’t like the other women in your family, stalwart and enduring.

Your mind’s too stubborn to stop remembering.

You’re the reason she’s dead.

Even here, she can’t scream.

She curls herself into a ball, her knees massaging her knotted gut. Minnie would have known how to solve this. Minnie was the fixer. She was the one who hoisted Junie onto the hay that was too high to reach. Minnie was the one who slammed her hands into Junie’s chest until the river water came out.

Junie snaps a stick between her palms. Truthfully, Minnie was not an easy person to love. She was controlling, condescending, and downright moody most of the time. Even after Junie came to from nearly drowning, her sister wouldn’t answer the simple question of where she got her silver necklace.

The necklace.

Junie’s back snaps straight. The necklace was made of true silver, the same silver the McQueens used for their finest dishes. It wasn’t just silver; in its center was a circle of ivory, the same ivory that made the keys of McQueen’s expensive piano.

The necklace is expensive, maybe even priceless. Bess said that Mrs. McQueen would never sell anything of her own. But what if she could give Violet something to sell that didn’t belong to her?

Had Minnie been buried in the necklace? She forces herself to remember the body, wearing her church dress, her hair braided to hide the tangles and sweat from the fever.

No, the necklace wasn’t on the body. She remembers now, the echo the metal made as it hit the bottom of the clay jar they’d placed on top of the grave, the one filled with Minnie’s things. The necklace would still be there.

She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t take it from Minnie’s grave. She’d listened to enough of Muh’s stories to know you couldn’t touch a grave. Even if Muh was just spinning tales, Junie wasn’t no thief.

But what if the necklace is the only way?

Junie peers through the zigzagging tree trunks. The slave cemetery is only a short walk downriver. She’d already be in trouble for skipping supper, staying out longer wouldn’t change that.

Silence settles like smoke as the animals and insects go quiet. It is the new moon, leaving the world blanketed in pitch darkness. She crouches next to a bush, striking a match to relight her lantern. The black wall of trees watches, unforgiving. She takes a deep breath and heads into the woods, walking toward the cemetery as though each twig on the forest floor is one of her bones. Every smell, every touch, every sound, only yesterday as familiar as Granddaddy’s smile, seems an unearthly portent. Gold flares around her; are they lightning bugs, or a stranger’s candle? She creeps on.

Her lantern light guides her through trunks and tangles until she makes out the wooden stakes that mark the graves. The cemetery is carved from the forest itself, a narrow oval of crooked cross grave markers, broken clay jars, and spindling weeds a few paces beyond the colored church. Muh claimed the spot was the site of an unholy massacre of Creeks long before Bellereine, and that their bodies lay tangled into the red dirt, their spirits hardening the earth to protect their souls forever. Junie didn’t believe her until the day of the funeral when she watched three field boys chip away at the icy, hardened rock for hours to dig her sister’s grave and saw the mist rising out of the earth like bony hands stretching toward the sky.

Junie hugs the tree line until she reaches the distant end, the resting place of her sister and her father. While her father’s clay jar has long since been destroyed, her sister’s sits at the head of the grave, lid still intact, just as her family left it. Junie drops to the ground and crawls toward the jar. How many bodies rest underneath her knees?

Her fingers tremble as she reaches for the lid. I can stop now, she thinks. I haven’t touched nothing. If I stop now, nobody will know .

No, another voice in her head answers. There ain’t no other way but this one.

She pulls the lid off.

Her lantern light reveals the jar’s contents. The flowers are rotted, the blanket scrap is covered in dust, and the silver pendant’s glow peeks from underneath the folded drawings. Junie wiggles her hand inside the opening, catching the chain around her finger and pulling the necklace to the lantern. In the glow of the night, the jewelry is a moon in her palms.

A twig cracks in the distance. She has been here too long. Junie shoves the necklace into her apron pocket and dashes back into the woods, this time moving closer to the river instead of the road. The riverfront is safer, farther from where any night travelers may catch her. She slips between a part in the trees, hopping the creek rocks until she reaches her familiar seat on Old Mother’s roots. The new moon continues to obscure the night in darkness, with only starlight rippling over the river water. She draws the chain from her pocket. In the center is the ivory cameo of a woman looking over a rose. She thumbs the back, feeling the incisions of an inscription. She flips it over and holds it closer to the light, staring at the jumble of letters before her.

Cor meum alia

Aliud animam meam

Supermundanae potius pietate erga te mei

Semper

Whatever it says, it certainly isn’t English. Her fingers slide down the sides, finding an opening. She slips her thumbnail into the groove, and the pendant pops open. It is a locket, but where a picture should be, there is nothing but silver.

A bush rustles beyond the trees that face the river.

She isn’t alone.

Junie snuffs out the lantern’s candle and leaps behind Old Mother’s trunk, pressing her back into the bark. The bush crinkles again, and her pulse chokes her breath. Is this one of the patrollers her family is always warning her about? Even though Junie is dressed in men’s clothes, they’d know she’s from Bellereine. What would her family say if she were dragged home, wrists in chains, or worse?

Carefree, Muh’s voice whispers. Or is it Minnie’s? The bush stirs again, this time followed by a croak. A group of toads hops from the bush into the creek. Her shoulders relax as she slips the necklace back into her apron pocket, curling her hand around the cool silver.

A flash of gold moves through the trees, over the river water.

Junie’s eyes bulge. The light is too far over the water to be a person’s candle, too bright to be a reflection. The water is the same starlit black. The night is playing tricks. The golden light glows again, half blocked by the tree trunk.

Run, a voice in her head screams.

Junie’s legs are stuck in place. She stares into the light, its warmth like a fireplace in the dead of winter. She knows it is foolish to step closer, but the light draws her nearer. I know these woods better than anybody, she convinces herself as she steps over the creek rocks toward the river’s edge. I blend into the night without my lantern. Dirt turns to mud beneath her bare feet. Birds call to one another, the urgent scream alerting of a predator lurking nearby. The flicker of gold grows stronger, floating impossibly far over the water and glowing like candlelight. Junie steps forward again until the water touches her toes. Despite the warm air, the river is as cold as the day she nearly drowned in December.

The light solidifies and takes shape. Junie’s blood runs cold.

It is a naked woman, legs curled into her chest, face buried into her knees, sitting on top of the water. Hairlike tangled threads of flame wrap around the figure’s shoulders and down into the water, where the ends disappear into the darkness.

Junie takes a step backward, her breath stolen by fear. She has to get out of here—she has to leave this place unseen, and for good.

Her heel cracks a twig.

The candlelight woman turns toward her. The face is incandescent and the eyes are empty, but Junie would still recognize the ghost anywhere.

Minnie.