Rosaleen had left dinner on the stove top, her famous smothered chicken. As I fixed T. Ray’s plate, I considered how to bring up the delicate matter of my birthday, something T. Ray had never paid attention to in all the years of my life, but every year, like a dope, I got my hopes up thinking this year would be the one.

I had the same birthday as the country, which made it even harder to get noticed. When I was little, I thought people were sending up rockets and cherry bombs because of me – hurray, Lily was born! Then reality set in, like it always did.

I wanted to tell T. Ray that any girl would love a silver charm bracelet, that in fact last year I’d been the only girl at Sylvan Junior High without one, that the whole point of lunchtime was to stand in the cafeteria line jangling your wrist, giving people a guided tour of your charm collection.

“So,” I said, sliding his plate

in front of him, “my birthday is this Saturday.”

I watched him pull the chicken meat from around the bone with his fork. “I was just thinking I would love to have one of those silver charm bracelets they have down at the mercantile.”

The house creaked like it did once in a while. Outside the door Snout gave a low bark, and then the air grew so quiet I could hear the food being ground up in T. Ray’s mouth.

He ate his chicken fillet and started on the thigh, looking at me now and then in his hard way.

I started to say, so then, what about the bracelet? but I could see he’d already given his answer, and it caused a kind of sorrow to rise in me that felt fresh and tender and had nothing, really, to do with the bracelet. I think now it was sorrow for the sound of his fork scraping the plate, the way it swelled in the distance between us, how I was not even in the room.

************

That night, I lay in bed listening to the flicks and twitters and thrums inside the bee jar, waiting till it was late enough so I could slip out to the orchard and dig up the tin box that held my mother’s things. I wanted to lie down in the orchard and let it hold me.

When the darkness had pulled the moon to the top of the sky, I got out of bed, put on my shorts and sleeveless blouse, and glided past T. Ray’s room in silence, sliding my arms and legs like a skater on ice. I didn’t see his boots, how he’d parked them in the middle of the hall. When I fell, the clatter startled the air so badly T. Ray’s snore changed rhythm. At first it ceased altogether, but then the snore started back with three piglet snorts.

I crept down the stairs, through the kitchen. When the night hit my face, I felt like laughing. The moon was a perfect circle, so full of light that all the edges of things had an amber cast. The cicadas rose up, and I ran with bare feet across the grass.

To reach my spot I had to go to the eighth row left of the tractor shed, then walk along it, counting trees till I got to thirty-two. The tin box was buried in the soft dirt beneath the tree, shallow enough that I could dig it up with my hands.

When I brushed the dirt from the lid and opened it, I saw first the whiteness of her gloves, then the photograph wrapped in waxed paper, just as I’d left it. And finally the funny wooden picture of Mary with the dark face. I took everything out, and, stretching out among the fallen peaches, I rested them across my abdomen.

When I looked up through the web of trees, the night feels over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark. Lightning came, not jagged, but in soft, golden licks across the sky. I undid the buttons on my shirt and opened it wide, just wanting the night to settle on my skin, and that’s how I fell asleep, lying there with my mother’s things, with the air making moisture on my chest and the sky puckering with light.

I woke to the sound of someone thrashing through the trees. T. Ray! I sat up, panicked, tying up my hair. I heard his footsteps, the fast, heavy pant of his breathing. Looking down, I saw my mother’s gloves and the two pictures. I stopped buttoning and grabbed them up, fumbling with them, unable to think what to do, how to hide them. I had dropped the tin box back in its hole, too far away to reach.

“Lileeee!” he shouted, and I saw his shadow plunge toward me across the ground.

I jammed the gloves and pictures under the waistband of my shorts, then reached for the rest of the buttons with shaking fingers.

Before I could fasten them, light poured down on me and there he was without a shirt, holding a flashlight. The beam swept and zagged, blinding me when it swung across my eyes.

“Who were you out here with?” he shouted, aiming at my half tied up hair.

“No-no one,” I said, gathering my knees in my arms, startled by what he was thinking. I couldn’t look long at his face, how large and blazing it was, like the face of God.

He flung the beam of light into the darkness. “Who’s out there?” he yelled.

“Please, T. Ray, no one was here but me.”

“Get up from there,” he yelled.

I followed him back to the house. His feet struck the ground so hard I felt sorry for the black earth. He didn’t speak till we reached the kitchen and he pulled the Martha White grits from the pantry. “I expect this out of boys, Lily – you can’t blame them – but I expect more out of you. You act no better than a witch.”

He poured a mound of grits the size of an anthill onto the pine floor. “Get over here and kneel down.”

I’d been kneeling on grits since I was six, but still I never got used to that powdered-glass feeling beneath my skin. I walked toward them with those tiny feather steps you expect of a girl in Japan, and lowered myself to the floor, determined not to cry, but the sting was already gathering in my eyes.

T. Ray sat in a chair and cleaned his nails with a pocketknife. I swayed from knee to knee, hoping for a second or two of relief, but the pain cut deep into my skin. I bit down on my lip, and it was then I felt the wooden picture of black Mary underneath my waistband. I felt the waxed paper with my mother’s picture inside and her gloves stuck to my belly, and it seemed all of a sudden like my mother was there, up against my body, like she was bits and pieces of insulation molded against my skin, helping me absorb all his meanness.

************

The next morning, I woke up late. The moment my feet touched the floor, I checked under my mattress where I’d tucked my mother’s things – a temporary hiding place till I could bury them back in the orchard.

Satisfied they were safe,

I strolled into the kitchen,

where I found Rosaleen sweeping up grits.

I buttered a piece of Sunbeam bread.

She jerked the broom as she swept, raising a wind.

“What happened?” She said.

“I went out to the orchard last night. T. Ray thinks I met

some boy.”

“Did you?”

I rolled my eyes at her.

“No.”

“How long did he keep you on these grits?”

I shrugged. “Maybe an hour.”

She looked down at my knees and stopped sweeping. They were swollen with hundreds of red welts, pinprick bruises that would grow into a blue stubble across my skin.

“Look at you, child. Look what he’d done to you,” she cried.

My knees had been tortured like this enough times in my life that I’d stopped thinking of it as out of the ordinary; it was just something you had to put up with from time to time, like the common cold. But suddenly the look on Rosaleen’s face cut through all that. Look at what he’s done to you.

That’s what I was doing – taking a good long look at my knees – when T. Ray stomped through the back door.

“Well, look who decided to get up.” He yanked the bread out of my hands and threw it into Snout’s food bowl. “Would it be too much to ask you to get out to the peach stand and do some work? You’re not Queen for a Day, you know.”

This will sound crazy, but up until then I thought T. Ray probably loved me some. I could never forget the time he smiled at me in church when I was singing with the hymn book upside down.

Now, I looked at his face. It was full of anger and despising.

“As long as you live under my roof, you’ll do what I say!” he shouted.

Then, I’ll find another roof,

I thought.

“You understand me?” he said.

“Yes, sir, I understand,” I said, and I did, too. I understood that a new rooftop would do wonder for me.

************

Late that afternoon I caught two more bees. Lying on my stomach across the bed,

I watched how they orbited the space in the jar, around and around like they’d missed

the exit.

Rosaleen poked her head in the door. “You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I’m leaving now. You tell your daddy I’m going into town tomorrow instead of coming here.”

“You’re going to town? Take me,” I said.

“Why do you want to go?”

“Please, Rosaleen.”

“You’re going to have to walk the whole way.”

“I don’t care.”

“Isn’t nothing much going to be open but firecracker stands and the grocery store.”

“I don’t care. I just want to get out of the house some on my birthday.”

Rosaleen stared at me, sagged low on her big ankles. “All right, but you ask your daddy. I’ll be by here first thing in the morning.”

She was out the door. I called after her. “How come you’re going to town?”

She stayed with her back to me a moment, unmoving. When she turned, her face looked soft and changed, like a different Rosaleen. Her hand dipped into her pocket, where her fingers crawled around for something. She drew out a folded piece of notebook paper and came to sit beside me on the bed. I rubbed my knees while she smoothed out the paper across her lap.

Her name, Rosaleen Daise, was written twenty-five times at least down the page in large, careful cursive, like the first paper you turn in when school starts. “This is my practice sheet,” she said. “For the Fourth of July they’re having a voters’ rally at the coloured church. I’m registering myself to vote.”

An uneasy feeling settled in my stomach. Last night, the television had said a man in Mississippi was killed for registering to vote, and I myself had overheard Mr Bussey, one of the deacons, say to T. Ray, “Don’t you worry, they’re going to make them write their names in perfect cursive and refuse them a card if they forget so much as to dot an I or make a loop in their y.”

I studied the curves of Rosaleen’s R. “Does T. Ray know what you’re doing?”

“T. Ray,” she said. “T. Ray don’t know nothing.”

************

At sunset he shuffled up, sweaty from work. I met him at the kitchen door, my arms folded across the front of my shirt. “I thought I’d walk to town with Rosaleen tomorrow. I need to buy some of my personal hygienic supplies.”

He accepted this without comment. T. Ray hated of anybody being dirty worse than anything.

That night, I looked at the jar of bees on my dresser. The poor creatures perched on the bottom barely moving, obviously pining away for flight.

I remembered then the way they’d slipped from the cracks in my walls and flown for the sheer joy of it.

I thought about the way my mother had built trails of graham-cracker crumbs and marshmallow to lure roaches from the house rather than step on them. I doubted she would’ve approved of keeping bees in a jar. I unscrewed the lid and set it aside.

to be continued...