Page 57 of The Night the Lights Went Out
I sat up, shivering in the cold, wondering if I had imagined it. But then I heard it again, muffled this time, and then something crashed and shattered as it hit the floor.
“Mama?” I shouted as I slid from the bed and ran downstairs to her bedroom. Her door was shut but not latched, and when I pushed it open I could see my mother’s white nightgown on the floor. It took my eyes a moment to register in the dark and see the shadows on top of the bed.
“Bitch,” a voice said, and I recognized it.Curtis.“You ain’t supposed to be able to talk.” And then the unmistakable sound of a slap against skin, and my mother whimpering.
My fingers fumbled on the wall for the light switch, but he was faster, the sound of broken glass crunching under his feet before he grabbed my wrist, squeezing until my fingertips tingled. “Let go of me,” I shouted, desperate to pull away, and even more desperate to get him away from my mama.
His other hand threaded through my hair, and he pressed wet lips against mine. “I’d prefer something younger and sweeter, anyway.”
Without even having to think about it, I raised my knee and slammed it into his crotch. He let go immediately, but I didn’t run. I needed to make sure that he chased me, that he left Mama alone.
I listened to his breathing, reminding me of a bear my daddy had once caught in a trap. And that scared me, finally. Because I remembered how it had taken three shots to finally kill that bear.
“Bitch!” he screamed at me, and I was glad, because that meant he’d recovered his breath. I turned and ran toward the back door in the kitchen, glancing over my shoulder to make sure he was chasing me. With my bare feet slipping on cold, damp grass, I ran as fast as I could toward the dark woods.
The full moon guided me until I was deep inside, the thick canopy of trees hiding the light, surprising me with random bursts of yellow on the forest floor as my feet pounded, the skin tearing on rocks and sticks and me not feeling any of it. I could hear Curtis, his feet crunching dead leaves, his breath panting behind me. I didn’t turn around, stretching my arms out to protect me. I was half-aware of my nightgown glowing like a beacon, making it easy for him to follow me. But there was nothing I could do about it. I had lost all sense of where I was, simply searching for a place to hide where he couldn’t see my nightgown. My hand struck the bark of a tree, the snap of bone so loud I cried out. I fought to catch my breath, seeing red spots against the inside of my eyelids, before turning in what I hoped was a new direction.
And ran right into Curtis Brown.
He was like that wounded bear in his anger, ripping at my nightgown and howling with rage and pain and victory. He squeezed my broken hand and I dropped to my knees, and that made it easy for the rest of what happened. I don’t remember much. Just his hands on my breasts and then my thighs, the smell of the pine straw beneath my head, the pain that made me feel like I was being ripped in two. He wanted me to cry: I could feel it each time he struck me with his fist and each time he invaded me. So I bit my lip until I tasted blood, telling myself I would rather die than give him the satisfaction.
And somewhere through the river of pain, something big and heavy rustled through the woods toward us, the pounding on the ground vibrating in my ear. I kept my eyes shut tight and clung to that pulsing sound, focusing on it so that I could ignore everything else, and prayed it was a bear seeking vengeance.
A scream like I’d never heard erupted from the shadows, and I forced open my eyes as something huge charged toward us, making a sound that was part wounded animal and part devil. I’d never believed in the devil until that moment, and I didn’t care whose soul he was there to steal as long as it meant all this would be over.
“Get off of her!”
It was Jimmy, riding on the back of Lamar, who’d grown as big as Rufus and could carry Jimmy like he weighed no more than a leaf. Jimmy threw something at Curtis and it struck the side of his head with a sickeningthunk, knocking him off me. My broken hand forgotten, I crawled backward, pulling what was left of my nightgown over my legs and across my chest.
Curtis lay still, his eyes closed, but his breath wheezed in and out so I knew he wasn’t dead. Lamar had stopped running, and with another scream, Jimmy launched himself on top of Curtis and picked up a large rock—the one that he’d thrown the first time—and held it over Curtis’s head. Lamar grabbed Jimmy’s hand and pulled him back.
“Don’t do it, Jimmy. Don’t do it. That be murder on your head, and he ain’t worth it.”
Jimmy waited a long moment before letting the rock fall. He rolled off Curtis, his breath thick with liquid. He began to cough, the kind that wore him out and bent him over. When he’d finished, he began crawling toward me, his binoculars dragging through the dead leaves and pine straw. “We came as fast as we could, but it was so dark...” He started to cough again.
“I know. It’s all right. He didn’t hurt me. Just my hand—I think it’s broke.” I grimaced with the pain, hoping neither one of them noticed. “I need to get back for Mama—I need to make sure she’s all right.”
Lamar crouched next to me, and I could smell his sweat mixed with the stink of my own fear. “Can you walk? ’Cause if you can, I’ll carry Jimmy back to the house.”
We all looked at Curtis, who was moaning quietly. “Leave him,” I said.
There was something in my voice, something stronger and older that hadn’t been there before. They must have noticed it, too, because they didn’t argue. We left him there, and when Lamar went back the next day to check, he was gone.
We told my daddy that I’d gotten hurt falling from a tree where I’d been watching birds with Jimmy. He was too preoccupied with the farm and Mama’s constant crying to pay any heed to how that didn’t make sense. But we’d figured that Daddy would have killed Curtis if he’d known the truth, and like Lamar had said, it would have been murder on Daddy’s head. And we all knew that Curtis Brown wasn’t worth it.
I put Jimmy to bed and laid camphor compresses on his chest, but nothing worked. Even Dr. Mackenzie said there was nothing to do for him, that his heart was too tired to keep going. I sat by his bed and read to him from all his bird books, and I knew that made him happy because he smiled a lot. But it didn’t make him better. I knew it was near the end when he asked me to take those binoculars off him and put them around my own neck.
“Keep them safe,” he said. He began to cough, and I waited until he could speak again. “You don’t really need them, Sugar. You see pretty good already. Except sometimes, when it’s real dark”—he stopped to clear his throat, his voice thick—“remember that everything’s the same. You just can’t see it. You can figure out which way to go, or wait until somebody turns the light back on.”
He started coughing again, and there was so much blood on his pajama shirt that I sent Lamar for Dr. Mackenzie. But by the time they got back, Jimmy was gone. I was still holding his hand, and all I could do was look at him and his dirty glasses and want to yell at him for never cleaning them.
Tom helped me with my grieving, but he couldn’t put back what had been stolen from me that night. But he tried, and he was so gentle and caring, and I knew that if I still had a heart, it would love him. So when Tom asked me again to marry him, I said yes.
Twenty
THE PLAYING FIELDS BLOG
Observations of Suburban Life from Sweet Apple, Georgia
