CHAPTER SEVEN #5
They didn't have long, and they both knew it.
The war was waiting past the creek. Swain's name was tucked into his cut against his chest, the man who'd put one family's brother in the ground nine years back and was reaching now for hers.
There was a traitor somewhere in the club they still could not see, and a thousand miles of dark water between this blue-ceilinged morning and any version of safe.
But they had the morning. They had the rice still in the pot, cold and somehow better cold, eaten standing at the counter out of the same bowl.
They had Mae humming somewhere in the front of the house over her baskets, the old endless tune.
They had Lucía's feet thundering down the hall and Padre's low voice catching her, and the smell of coffee, and the creek-light, and the blue.
And they took all of it, every minute, the way you take a deep breath before you go under, because they both understood without saying it that whatever came after he drove down that dirt road, this exact morning was not coming again.
He left near noon, to drive back to the city and find the right hour to do the hardest thing he'd ever done.
She walked him out to the truck. The day had come up bright and cool, the live oaks dripping moss, a heron standing one-legged at the bend of the creek like it had been posted there.
At the truck he stopped and looked at her a long moment, like a man taking on a thing to carry, and then he kissed her — slow, and sure, no fear in it, the kiss of a man who'd already decided and only had to go do the deciding out loud — right there in the dirt road in front of God and the heron and her grandmother's kitchen window, and she didn't care one bit who saw.
Before he got in, the screen door clapped and Mae came out onto the porch in her marigold wrap and made her slow way down to the dirt, and Knox stopped with his hand on the truck door and waited for her, hat in hand though he wore no hat, the way a man waits for something he's decided to respect. Mae looked up at him.
"You gwine do a hard thing today," she said. Not a question. "I see it on you."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Den do it standin' up." She reached up and patted his chest once, flat over the heart, over the pocket where a dead man's name was folded.
"Whatever da man say to you. You hear me?
You stan' up in it. Good hands ain no good to nobody if de back bend.
" And she turned and went back up her steps, having said the only thing she meant to, and Knox watched her go with his throat working.
Then he got in and shut the door, and Zola stepped back, and she stood on the haint-blue porch with her arms wrapped around herself and watched his taillights go small and red down the long dirt road and wink out where the trees leaned in and closed over the road like a door easing shut.
Behind her the screen door creaked. Mae came out and stood beside her, small and straight, and looked down the empty road where the man had gone.
"Him gwine tell ya daddy," Mae said. Not a question. Mae never asked what she already knew.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Da gwine be hard." The old woman took Zola's hand in her dry one and held it. "But da right. Cyan build nuttin' good on top of a lie, chile. Nuttin' last dat way." She squeezed once. "Him got good hands. I tol' you. Da eye don' lie and de hands don' neither, once you learn to read um."
And she went back inside, the screen clapping soft behind her, and Zola stayed out alone on the porch as the long Lowcountry afternoon went cold and gold and then blue-gray toward evening.
The creek talked to itself. The first frogs tried their voices.
Somewhere a long way off a dog barked twice and quit.
She put her hand on the porch rail her grandfather had planed and joined and raised by hand the year he married Mae, smooth now under sixty years of palms, and over her head was the blue her grandmother had brushed on with her own arm to keep the bad things from crossing, and Zola stood in the place her people had held against everything and let her mind follow the dirt road and the highway all the way back to the city, to a back room at the Forge, to a man walking in alone to tell her father the truth.
She was afraid; she'd have been a fool not to be.
But under the fear was a thing harder and quieter, a thing she'd inherited along with the rail and the blue and the recipe — the stubborn Beaumont refusal to expect the worst just because the worst was likely.
So she did the only thing there was to do with a fear that big and a love that big and no way yet to know which one was going to win.
She hummed. The old tune, the one Mae had hummed over every cradle and every grave the family had filled for as long as anyone could remember, low and wordless and older than the house, older than the road.
She hummed it out into the gathering dark, down the road where his taillights had gone, and she chose — against every cold reason the world had ever handed her not to — to believe that the two of them were going to get to keep this.
Past the trees, the war waited. But here, for one more night, the blue held.