Glorious Read online

  When it was all said and done, Rain was soaking wet, the thin shift cleaved to her body, outlining every luscious curve. Easter heard someone whisper, “My Lord,” in a sinful and dirty way, and when she looked around to see who had uttered the sacrilegious statement, two sets of eyes were staring right back at her. Easter clamped her hand over her mouth, turned, and fled.

  ***

  Easter didn’t have a plan or a place to go and so she hung around the brigade grounds, hoping to catch sight of Rain one last time, but she had disappeared and had not reemerged. Easter tried to look as inconspicuous as possible lugging that brown suitcase and dressed in a blue and white dress that made her look like a schoolgirl on the run. She tried to blend, but instead she stuck out like a snowflake in a vat of coal.

  “Ain’t you got no place to go?”

  Easter spun around and found herself eye to eye with Slocum. He considered her, and she took in his blistered lip and heavy eyelashes.

  “I need a job.” The words jumped out of her mouth and landed on the ground between them. Slocum grunted, slipped his hands behind the bib of the overalls he wore, and rocked back on his heels.

  “Oh, really now? What you do?”

  Easter shrugged her shoulders. “This and that.”

  “This and that? Well that’s just what we been looking for!” Slocum clapped his hands together and laughed. “Go on home now, ain’t nothing here for you.” He dismissed her with a quick wave of his hand.

  “I—I can cook and clean.”

  Slocum was walking away. “Can’t use you,” he threw over his shoulder.

  “The hell you can’t!” The unmistakable voice boomed behind Easter causing her heart to lurch in her chest. Slocum turned around, an annoyed smirk resting on his lips. “Bennie like to kill me with his cooking, we need a feminine touch. I’m tired of eating lumpy grits and undercooked eggs. Besides, I need someone to attend to me,” Rain barked.

  “Aww, come on, Rain,” Slocum whined, “she just a child—”

  “Shut up, she looks pretty grown to me.”

  Easter was shaking like a leaf.

  “Turn around, sugar, lemme get a look at you.”

  Easter turned around. Rain was standing outside of her tent; the silk robe she wore flapped open revealing her naked body. Easter dropped her eyes.

  Rain waltzed over and caught her by the chin. “What’s your name, girl?” Her fingers felt like fire against Easter’s skin.

  “Easter, ma’am,” she quaked in a timid voice.

  Rain’s eyes sparkled. “Easter? That’s a real old-timey name. Had a great-aunt named Easter.” She cackled and released Easter’s chin. “And I ain’t no ma’am.” She spat, then, “You say you cook and clean?”

  “Yes m—I mean yes.”

  Slocum stepped between the women, wagging his finger in Rain’s face. “We ain’t pulling in enough money to pay and feed another soul, Rain!”

  Rain eyed him menacingly. “Nigger, if you don’t get outta my face …” Her words trailed off, but the threat hung heavy in the air.

  Slocum’s hand floated back down to his waist and he stepped cautiously to one side.

  “I’ll pay her myself, don’t you worry about it, you cheap bastard!” Rain snapped, and then turned and started back toward her tent. Easter just stood there, frozen, watching Rain’s hips sway beneath the fabric of the robe.

  “I done told her ’bout talking to me like that,” Slocum grumbled to himself as he kicked at the dirt. “Well what you waiting for, sun-up? Go on, git!”

  Easter jumped to life and double-timed to Rain’s tent.

  “I want you to know right now that I likes women,” Rain said as she shrugged her robe off and tossed it onto the cot.

  Easter’s face unfolded and her stomach clenched. “Not to worry, sugar,” Rain laughed, walking over to Easter and pinching her cheek, “you too young for Mama Rain. I like ’em seasoned and you just out of the shell.” She laughed again and glided to the opposite side of the tent where she squatted daintily over a cream-colored chamber pot and relieved herself. “You still a virgin?” she asked in a non-chalant tone.

  As embarrassed as Easter was by the question, she was more than a little disappointed that Rain wouldn’t even consider her as a lover, and then she became angry with herself for wanting such a thing. Easter remained silent.

  “Figures.” Rain chuckled, gave her bottom a quick shake, and then stood. “Dump it before this entire tent is rank with the stink of piss.” She pointed to the pot and after a moment’s hesitation Easter hurried to fetch it.

  Rain sighed and began to untwine the feather boa from her neck, exposing the keloid scar that looped from one collarbone to the next, resembling a string of brown pearls. Easter’s mouth dropped open and then clamped shut again when Rain turned smoldering eyes on her.

  “Well what you gonna do, stand there all night holding my piss?”

  “Uhm, no ma’am—I mean no,” she stammered as she backed out of the tent.

  Outside Easter moved quickly and recklessly, causing the piss to slosh over the sides, wetting her hands. She was disgusted and intrigued. She looked cautiously around her, and when she saw that no one was watching, she brought her finger to her nose and sniffed. Rain’s piss smelled like gardenias.

  Easter would learn that Rain didn’t much like men or the snake that grew down between their legs. It had never been sweet to her, not from the time she was someone’s sweet little girl, with pigtails, living in Louisiana and singing in the choir, just eleven years old when her brother’s best friend cornered her in the outhouse and pressed his forearm against her throat as he rammed himself inside her, all the while whispering in her ear that she had it coming. “This is what happens to cock teasers,” he’d said. Afterwards, he called her a “yella heifer,” while he used his shirttail to wipe her blood from his penis.

  Nothing but trouble followed the men that came later and Hemp Jackson was trouble with a capital T. As mean and black as the day was long, Hemp had the body of a bulldog and his right eye was a cloud of cotton. He chose not to wear an eye patch; he liked the hideous look that damaged eye graced him with and the fear it struck in the hearts of men. He claimed that Rain was the only woman he’d ever loved and gave her a feathered boa to prove it, which turned out to be a poor substitute for an apology, since he was the one who’d sliced her neck in the first place. After that there had been a period of gentleness from a soft-spoken man with kind eyes. That relationship had produced a son who after two months Rain had wrapped in a blanket, placed in a basket, and left on the front porch for the soft-spoken man’s wife to raise. Then she walked right out of that life without even so much as a goodbye to her parents.

  Rain didn’t like men, which made it easy for her to shake her ass and roll her hips for them. It was the women she loved.

  At night, Mama Rain would stretch herself out on her cot, naked except for the boa, and she’d smoke and sip from her flask of white lightning and talk about all the good and bad that had been done to her, the whole while absentmindedly stroking the hairs of the triangle of black hair between her legs. When she caught Easter staring, which was often, she would snort, “This here my cat, I got a right to pet it.” And then she would laugh, long and hard, until the laughter became a chuckle and the chuckle became a snore and the empty flask fell down to the sawdust floor.

  Show after show and night after night, through downpour and drought, snow and clover, Easter’s thirst for Rain swelled and so she reached for her Bible and plunged herself into Scripture, and when that didn’t work she turned to her own words. But words—anointed or not—offered no solace and absolutely no quench.

  CHAPTER 4

  What you got there, gal?”

  Before Easter could answer, Mama Rain snatched the notebook from her hands and held it high above her head. “Some type of diary?”

  Easter tried desperately to grab the book, but Rain was tall and easily kept it out of Easter’s reach. “Give it here!”r />
  Rain laughed, bringing the book toward Easter and then snatching it away again. “Give it here,” Rain mocked. “You always scribbling in this book. What you writing?”

  “It’s my business!” Easter snapped as she made yet another futile leap for the book. “Goddamnit, Rain, you evil bitch, give it back!”

  Rain’s palm came across Easter’s cheek with so much force that Easter stumbled backwards until she lost her footing and fell over, hitting the ground with a hard thud.

  “You watch your tongue, you hear?” Rain’s voice was even, her green eyes narrowed to slits. “You don’t ever call me outta my name.”

  Easter rubbed her stinging cheek. Rain spent a few more seconds glaring at her before she returned her attention to the book. Easter watched as she flipped through the thin pages, pausing every so often to stare intently at some word or phrase that had caught her eye. Easter watched and waited for Rain to see herself in those words in the pages and pages of passages. It was all about Rain, and about the smoldering love Easter had for her. The thirst was there too, blatant and screaming, aching and throbbing. She’d written about it in bold, dark letters. She would have written it in blood if she could have.

  Rain finally closed the notebook and gave it one last thoughtful look before tossing it back to Easter.

  “So what’s it say?”

  Easter was bewildered. She’d seen Rain flip through pages of the newspaper as she sat sipping her morning coffee.

  “Pardon?”

  “I asked you,” Rain growled, eyeballing her, “what’s it say?”

  “Ma’am?” Easter was still confused.

  “Goddamnit, don’t ma’am me!” Rain yelled. “You poking fun at me?”

  Easter scurried backwards. “No, I just thought—”

  “Yeah, I know what you thought,” Rain spat before turning and stomping off.

  Her ankle wasn’t broken, but it was sprained. The result of a cartwheel gone wrong that sent Rain crashing to the floor, where she lay stunned, her legs splayed wide open. The men in the audience leaned in and groaned with pleasure. Rain was not wearing any underwear.

  In her tent, on her cot, between sips of white lightning, she moaned, cussed, and confessed that she was getting too old for that particular type of bullshit. Easter sat at her feet, listening quietly as she gently pressed the chunk of ice onto Rain’s bruised skin.

  “I’m twenty-eight, you know, an old woman. I ought to be ashamed of myself,” she slurred as the flame of the oil lamp danced in her eyes. “I thought I was gonna be famous, but ’stead look at me, dancing and singing for niggers that got a day’s worth of dirt under their fingernails.” Her words were soaked with disappointment. “My mama probably turning over in her grave.”

  Easter stared down at Rain’s pretty toes.

  “What about you? What you wanna be? I know you don’t wanna be my maid for the rest of your life, do you?”

  Easter shrugged her shoulders. Being with Rain for the rest of her life sounded just fine to her.

  “I don’t know, haven’t really given it much thought.”

  Rain turned the flask up to her lips and drank deeply. “Stand up, girl, raise your dress and let me see your goods.”

  Easter turned a crooked eye on her. “What?”

  Rain’s face went slack. “Well someone’s got to do it, might as well be you.”

  “Do what?”

  “For all the writing and reading, you just as dumb as a doornail, ain’t you?”

  Easter blinked. She was completely lost.

  Rain leaned over and peered directly into Easter’s wide eyes. “You gonna have to take my place in the show until I’m healed.”

  Easter’s jaw dropped.

  “Close your mouth, chile, this place full of flies,” Rain chuckled.

  Easter knew Rain’s entire routine by heart, every hip-swaying, groin-thrusting boom-chica-boom-chica-boom-boom-boom move, but that didn’t mean that she could pull it off in front of an audience of sex-crazed sharecroppers. And furthermore, Easter didn’t have Rain’s curves—she was as flat as a board.

  Nor did she find it easy to melt into the music, so her attempts at a lascivious bump-and-grind were appalling; in fact, she resembled an epileptic in the throes of a seizure. Comedy was not her intent, but it was the end result and the audience roared with laughter and threw pennies at her feet.

  “You a clown, girl! A straight-up fool!” Rain howled when Easter chicken-walked off the stage and into her open arms. “It wasn’t me, but it was good!”

  “You think so?” Easter was panting.

  “Better than good,” Rain said, and then pressed her warm lips against Easter’s. It happened just that once but Easter would relive it a million times in her dreams.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ten shows and three towns later, Rain’s ankle was healed, good as new. Easter was glad for it, because she was growing tired of playing the fool. The show was working its way down the Savannah River toward Elberton and Easter had fifteen dollars saved. A few more weeks and she figured she’d have enough to hop a train heading somewhere. Maybe, she thought, Rain would come with her.

  But Slocum had other plans for Easter, and one evening as she sat eating her dinner of fried snook and boiled potatoes, his bloated, bow-legged shadow fell over her.

  “What?”

  Slocum grinned as he ceremoniously unfurled the burlap poster he held, revealing a colorful caricature of a cross-eyed, tongue-wagging, knock-kneed Easter.

  Rain clapped her hands together and squealed, “You’ve arrived!”

  Arrived where? Easter wondered. The bowels of life? The filthy heels of existence?

  That night after the show, the moon sat low and full in the sky as Easter made her way to Rain’s tent. This was something she looked forward to all day. It was their time and their time alone in which they did whatever they wanted. Sometimes Easter would sit snug between Rain’s legs as Rain used the comb to carve fine lines through Easter’s thick hair and then braided it into neat rows. Other times Easter would paint Rain’s toenails or knead the knots in her neck until they melted away. Sometimes they’d play Bid Whist or just talk. Always, Easter waited for another kiss, but it never came.

  “You never stop scribbling in that notebook, what you scribbling?” Rain had pressed until Easter broke down one day and began to share the stories she’d written about Waycross and the people who lived there. Easter read aloud the tales heavy with Southern dialect and folksy wisdom and Rain’s eyes rippled with the images Easter’s words created. “You should write a book like dem white folks. You just as good as they are.”

  That night Easter arrived at Rain’s tent as usual, pulled back the canvas flap, and stepped inside. She saw Rain and something else … someone else, and then the light suddenly disappeared. She thought she’d been struck blind, but then her eyelids suddenly popped open and her shocked gaze collided with Rain’s dreamy, moist one. The young girl she’d been kissing blushed, turned her face away, and raised delicate fingers to her lips. Rain caught hold of her wrist and gently eased the girl’s hand back down into her lap. “Don’t be ’shamed,” she cooed lovingly, and Easter almost bit through her tongue.

  After that, Easter made up her mind and then made her escape. She crept past the watching horses, the sleeping dog, and the blind prophet who strapped himself to a tree at night because he had fits that sent him stumbling deep into his own black heart. He saw nothing and he saw everything, but Easter never mustered the nerve to place her hands into his; had she done so he would have warned her to avoid the city sweet and told her to point her compass north.

  CHAPTER 6

  Elberton, Georgia’s landscape was littered with gaping holes and the sound of dynamite blasts echoed frequently across the horizon. Most of the men in and around Elberton worked in the quarries, gauging the earth until they struck rock that resembled sparkling river water frozen in time.

  Easter had walked all through the night and only stopped to rest w
hen the night sky began to flake away. She caught the scent of strong black coffee and followed it to a shack with a picnic table set out front. A woman was standing in the doorway staring thoughtfully down at the chickens that pecked at the dirt around her feet. When she looked up and saw Easter coming she hollered out, “Got eggs, grits, and hopping John. That’s it.”

  “That’s fine,” Easter said.

  “You look bone-tired, girl.” The woman set a battered metal cup down on the table and poured it full with coffee.

  Easter stared down into the dark liquid. “You got milk?”

  The woman shook her head. “You a li’l early, the boy ain’t come with the milk yet. Got sugar though.”

  “That’ll do, I guess,” Easter said and waved her hand through the screen of steam rising from the coffee.

  The woman walked off and called over her shoulder, “I’m Claudia, by the way.”

  By the time Easter had finished her meal, two men and a woman carrying a basket of johnny cakes on her head had joined her. They were all heading into Elberton and welcomed Easter into the back of their horse and buggy. The johnny cake she’d bought from the woman was wrapped in newspaper, which was how she came across the ad:

  Colored woman wanted for general housework. Ironing. Some cooking. Fond of children. See Mrs. S. Comolli at 115 Heard Street between 2PM and 4PM.

  115 Heard Street loomed over a sweeping emerald lawn that was dotted with crab apple trees. It was an ostentatious structure, carved out of stone with columns and floor-to-ceiling windows. The Spanish-tiled roof glowed ginger beneath the sun.

  Easter’s body felt condemned by the time she climbed down off of that buggy. Her knees popped and creaked as she walked around to the side of the house and scaled the steps. When she caught sight of her reflection in the shiny glass pane of the window, she didn’t recognize the woman looking back at her. Her hair was a mess and her clothes were disheveled. Who in the world would hire someone who looked like they’d walked across the state? Easter quickly did the best she could with her hair, tucked her blouse tight behind the waistband of her skirt, and then raised the bronze knocker and allowed it to fall. A few moments later a dark, generous-sized woman opened the door. She winced when she saw Easter standing there—as if the very sight of her caused her pain.