The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

She tried to stand up and found herself lifted by Sudie and Merry Lynn. They unbuttoned her dress and folded it onto the quilt, then led her into the shallows and helped her into a black rubber innertube, the kind they’d used as river rafts when they were children.

      With the cool green water lapping over her, Betty Jewel leaned back and closed her eyes. For a blissful hour she vanished into the realm of childhood where boundaries between what was real and what was imagined vanished, where things lost might be found, and anything at all was possible, even a future.

      When Sudie’s car chugged to a stop on Maple Street, Queen was waiting on the front porch with four yellow plastic glasses of iced tea.

      “Did ya’ll have fun, baby?”

      “We took her skinny-dipping, Miss Queen.” Merry Lynn plopped on the porch steps with her tea.

      “I ain’t never done that, but now I wisht I had.”

      Sudie sat in a rocking chair, leaving the seat on the swing to Betty Jewel. “I can’t stay long. I gotta get home and fix supper for Wayne and the kids.”

      True to her word, Sudie herded Merry Lynn into the car and drove off ten minutes later, both of them waving out the window, calling goodbye, and Betty Jewel was so grateful for friends who pick you up when you fall that she could do nothing but wave.

      “Where’s Billie?”

      “I give her a dime an’ she done gone to the movin’-pichure show. Gone see that Tarzan swingin’ on a rope.”

      “Lord, Mama, she can’t walk home by herself.” Ever since Alice’s murder, only the foolish let their little girls walk home in the dark.

      “I ain’t dum. Tiny Jim gone pick her up.” Queen studied Betty Jewel over the rim of her plastic iced-tea glass. “That newspaper lady’s a comin’.”

      “What newspaper lady, Mama?”

      “Said her name was Bessie. Miss Bessie Malone.”

      Betty Jewel felt like a dying star spinning through the sky, leaving burning bits of herself behind. “Not Cassie. Tell me it wasn’t Joe Malone’s wife.” Queen just sat there with her lips pursed. “You know I can’t talk to her.”

      “Maybe it’s bes’ is what I been thinkin’.”

      “No, Mama. I can’t talk to her.”

      “Lies’ll eat you up inside,” Queen said.

      Betty Jewel turned her face from her mama, then wished she hadn’t. Wisps of Alice spun slowly around the yard, phantom legs floating over the grass that needed mowing and arms spread like the broken wings of a little brown bird. But the thing that made Betty Jewel turn away was Alice’s eyes, deep as Gum Pond and clear as mirrors. Look too long into Alice’s eyes and you’d see yourself; you’d see your past bound to your future, the sight so disturbing it could paralyze you.

      “What time is Cassie coming?”

      “‘Bout five.”

      Betty Jewel thought of her options. Hide. Not answer the door. Bar the door and not let her in.

      Or let her in and tell the truth.

      She’d rather walk into the darkness of her own death than face Cassie with the truth.

      Eight

      BY THE TIME SHE Left The Bugle, Cassie’s yellow linen sundress was a wrinkled mess. As if that weren’t enough, it was blistering hot in the car. She rolled down her windows, and the first thing she noticed as she drove into Shakerag was the abrupt change from paved streets to dirt roads. Sinking into a pothole big enough to swallow a beagle, her tires spun. As she stomped on the gas, dust swirled through her open windows and settled over everything inside, including Cassie.

      Saying an unladylike word that would have given her father-in-law a heart attack, she bumped her way down the gutted road. No wonder unrest was brewing. If she had to travel on roads like this every day, she’d be mad, too. Add to that the mean wages and scarcity of jobs for people who lived in places like Shakerag, and Cassie had to wonder if Ben was right. Was she stepping into a boiling cauldron?

      She forged forward, pulled by her own stubborn will and the smell of barbecue that made her mouth water and gave her the shivers all at the same time. There was no escaping the scent of roasting pork on the north side of town. Except on rare occasions, Tiny Jim kept his smoke pits going around the clock.

      His blue neon sign was flashing, and, as she drove by, Cassie caught the strains of a soul-searing harmonica. Real this time, not the stuff of myth and magic. The musician could be anybody from a blues legend to some teenage kid with a gut-punched feeling and a harp in his pocket.

      The harmonica walked all over Cassie’s heart. It was Joe’s second love. That’s one of the things she missed most: the sound of blues at unexpected moments. She could be in the tub or putting a casserole in the oven or arranging roses she’d picked, when all of a sudden the blues would pull her heart right out of her chest.

      Joe, she’d say, and he’d come around the corner, blues harp in his mouth, eyes shining with devilment or laughter or sometimes unshed tears. It was his love of stomp-your-heart-flat music that drew him to Shakerag.

      Cassie had begged to go with him, but he’d said, Women don’t go to places like that. Besides, Daddy would disown me if I took my wife to a Negro juke joint.

      “I’ve already been there when I interviewed Tiny Jim, and nothing bad happened to me. Even when I drank a glass of sweet tea from their cup.”

      “For God’s sake, Cassie. Be serious. Exposing beautiful white women to randy young coloreds is causing race riots.”

      “No, the riots are caused by ignorant, hysterical women and hot-tempered men who settle differences with guns and lynching ropes. You’re not ignorant and I’m not foolish. Please, Joe.”

      She finally wore him down on his birthday. To avoid unnecessary talk, they took care that nobody in their neighborhood knew where Cassie was going, and, aside from a few raised eyebrows in the juke joint, nothing happened. In their society, white was not merely a color but a privilege, one Joe took for granted and Cassie agonized over.

      That evening, he’d driven home with one hand so he could hold his harp to his mouth with the other. The only sound in the car was an old Delta blues song whose words Cassie didn’t know until Joe alternately played and sang.

      That was the only time he ever took her, and she’d finally stopped asking to go. She couldn’t remember when. Or why. Or even if she’d ever wondered.

      The lyrics Joe had sung on that otherwise silent car trip home suddenly played through Cassie’s mind. Ain’t no use cryin’, baby. The world done stomped us flat. Ain’t no use cryin’, baby. Your tears won’t change all that.

      Li’l Rosie had composed that particular blues song. Cassie remembered because she’d asked Joe. She’d wanted to know who knew her so well she’d written lyrics especially for Cassie.

      Or had the lyrics been for Joe? Had he been trying to tell her something, but she had looked the other way, shut her ears and walked around him?

      Maple Street came into view, but as far as Cassie could see, there was only one maple tree on the entire street. The neighborhood was made up of one wooden saltbox house after the other, mostly unpainted, with a scattering of them featuring washed-out and peeling paint. The rest of the view came to Cassie in snatches—skimpy yards, many of them overgrown with Johnson grass and honeysuckle that will strangle anything in sight if it’s not cut back, old tires stacked under tired-looking oak trees, sagging porches with swings on rusty chains.

      Still, they were homes for somebody, raggedy havens where men with grease under their fingernails and women with detergent-cracked hands could lie together on a squeaky bed frame and forget the world outside. The houses sat back from the street on long, narrow lots. Cassie