The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

home but had made Nan a mother. He’d taken Genus, but He’d freed her from Juke. Would she go back, and agree to spend her life under Juke, if it meant Genus would still walk the earth?

      Yes, she told herself, yes. She’d spend a thousand lifetimes on her back. She’d walk herself backward out of his shack, out of his life, to see him again framed in the window in his corn-shuck hat, shaking the rug, the moment before his eyes discovered hers. She would watch him from a distance. That would be enough.

       EIGHT

      

      THE TWINS WERE BOTH BORN IN THE BIG HOUSE, EACH CHILD IN its own time. Before they were twins, though, before they called them the twins—to others, as well as to themselves—they were two babies growing on separate vines. As spring came to Georgia, Elma thought of the baby that way, marveled at the tomato plants (planted on Good Friday, the luckiest day to start a garden), the green fruits first as small and hard as acorns, then growing heavier, hanging lower; she weighed them with one palm and held the other to her belly, which was growing too, as firm and round as fruit. After she left school, she dressed in Juke’s overalls and walked the garden—it was as far afield as he would allow her—pulling june bugs from the leaves and waiting for Freddie to come to his senses. No one knew she was carrying, or at least no one said they knew. Her daddy told folks she was needed on the farm and no one blinked an eye. Freddie would pull up any day now in his lizard green truck. He wouldn’t make a big show about it. They’d sit on the porch and drink sweet tea, and the ring would be in his pocket.

      She was five months along when she discovered her belly wasn’t the only one growing. Nan and Elma were working hip to hip in the kitchen. Nan was frying eggs. Elma was soaking black-eyed peas. Nan lifted her apron to wipe her brow, and below it was a small mound, unmistakable. Nan dropped the apron, and still, there it was. Nan was so skinny, it was hard to see how Elma hadn’t noticed it before.

      But Elma’s mind did something then. It hopped over Nan’s belly and trotted off. Already it was becoming good and fast at trotting, her mind. It ignored the racing of her heart. She drained the beans, then realized the beans needed more soaking, and then she stumbled out to the well to fetch more water, walking as she did with her arms straight at her sides. Genus was out by the shed, chopping wood for the cookstove, the slow, steady sound of his ax chipping too close to her ears, and Elma’s heart sped up again and her hands shook and she spilled half the bucket down her legs, but still she kept her mind far away, at the edge of the fields.

      Juke, he’d noticed first. Out at the still one night, he’d passed his hand over Nan’s belly and felt the mound—round where before it had been so flat it was nearly concave. He pulled away from her, sat up on the mattress. He asked her if she was with child.

      Nan looked to the wall. Sometimes it was awful convenient, her having no tongue.

      “You can’t answer, but you can nod. You good at that.” He put his finger under her chin and turned her face to his. “Answer me. Alls you gotta do is nod or shake your head.”

      He waited for her to respond, thinking already of what to do. He knew people. He knew everyone. But Nan was the only one in the county who handled woman’s matters. What was she to do, take care of it herself? Word was Dr. Rawls took care of that kind of thing, if the pay was high enough. But he wouldn’t lower himself to ask the doctor for help, even if he told him it was a field hand’s child.

      He felt her body relax. She nodded. But there was something in her nod—a different kind of fear—and now it was Juke’s body that tensed.

      “It’s mine, ain’t it?”

      Did he want it to be his?

      “Answer me, girl.”

      It would be better, of course, if it wasn’t his, if the baby was colored. That it would have a proper mother and father. He was nearly forty years old and he had never to his knowledge given any woman but Jessa a child.

      She raised her shoulders and looked to the wall again. Juke dropped his hand. He could see it was true, that she didn’t know. How could she know? And how could he have been prepared for the rage and disappointment, that the child might be another man’s?

      He did what his body knew how to do. He finished having his way with her, thinking, This will be the last time. He had only let go inside her once. Maybe that had been enough. But now he did it again, laying claim to what was his, because what harm could it do?

      When he was done, he lay back and reached for his chaw and, naked, crossed his legs at the ankles. He told Nan about the colored woman whose tit he’d suckled on as an infant, having no mother himself. “Maybe that’s how come I got a taste for darkies,” he said. (It was a joke known across the county. “Ain’t Jesup’s fault he a nigger lover,” white folks might be heard to say. “He been drinking nigger juice since he was a boy.”)

      By the time Elma’s mind came around, calmed down, it was evening. She took another look at Nan at the supper table, her belly sitting in her lap, the same size as Elma’s. What a fool she had been, daydreaming about Genus, following him at night, when here he had been making love to Nan. She had tried for months to unremember that vision of them in the creek, but here was the proof. And then she did something else that surprised her. She said, right there, laying the gravy on her daddy’s potatoes, “Looks like I ain’t the only one expecting.” She said it cheerfully, teasingly, as though she was gossiping about someone else at church. If she said it with a smile in her voice, then she wouldn’t feel the snap of her heart like a twig, for in her mind, Nan was carrying Genus’s child and now they would both be on the farm for good, together, a family, and Elma would be both a spinster and a whore.

      Juke nodded over his potatoes. “I reckon you’re right.”

      “Nan? Is it true?”

      Nan looked from Elma to Juke, then nodded at the table.

      “I seen my mistake now,” said Juke. “You shoulda been sent to church. Your momma and daddy would be right disappointed.”

      “Ain’t your fault, Daddy. Her momma didn’t send her to church, either.”

      “She ain’t hired to go to church,” Juke said. Then to Nan, “You ain’t hired to go to church. You ain’t hired to get into trouble neither.”

      “Daddy, don’t say ‘hired.’” Elma sighed a laugh. “Look at me. I been to church, and I’m in the same shoes, ain’t I?”

      “You in those shoes ’cause Freddie Wilson’s all hat and no cattle. Tell me why I shouldn’t run him out of town tomorrow.”

      “’Cause you still holding out he’ll marry me, Daddy.” And that was what he wanted—for his grandchild to be a Wilson. She didn’t add that part.

      “It’s the only right thing,” he said.

      “You saying Nan and Genus oughta get married?” Elma stuffed her mouth with potatoes. Why had she gone and said that?

      Juke looked sideways at Nan. She had not touched her food. “I got one who can’t talk, one who can’t stop talking.” It was not the first time he’d said it. “You don’t need to make up for her tongue.” He chewed for a while, thinking, muttering. “Hell of a time … two more mouths to feed.” The cuckoo clock above the mantel ticked.

      Juke nodded his head toward Genus’s shack. “Is he the man?”

      Another moment, and then another nod. She could make her face look like a child’s when she wanted to.

      “Tell me why I shouldn’t run him off this farm.” His voice was lower now, as though Genus might hear him.

      “Daddy—”

      “Quit