The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 17

Julia Jessup awakens to the crying of her son. She blinks crusty eyes, rolls onto her husband’s thigh. Groaning in exhaustion, she reaches down to shove Tim’s leg, to tell him to go get the bottle-

— and freezes where she lies. Her hand is not on Tim’s leg. It’s on the baby’s belly.

For a few blessed moments she’d forgotten. Now, in the span of a closing synapse, the infinite weight of death and grief returns, pressing her into the mattress.

He left you, says her father, dead almost twenty-five years now.

Alone, says her mother, who followed him not long afterward. Who’ll help you now? Who cares whether you live or die?

Julia rolls all the way over and sees faint light showing through the curtain. This is Daisy’s house. It was the only place she could think to run, the last place anyone would look. Daisy took care of Julia when she was a baby, before her father lost it, when they still had money to pay for a maid. Daisy’s house is old, not even a house really. A shotgun shack, like the ones in New Orleans. The floor is rotted through in places, and when the wind blows hard, the holes whistle and the bedclothes sway.

The baby’s cry grows louder, more insistent. Tim junior is hungry. He doesn’t care that his father is gone. He knows only the ache in his belly. But Julia knows. Her father killed himself when she was eighteen, and she’s missed him every day since. So many times she’s needed him, or someone. God, how different everything would have been had he lived. And how different will life be for her baby? His childhood will be a struggle against want, his mother always away, struggling in vain to keep ahead of the bills. This dark foreknowledge is like a festering mass in her stomach. Tim left nothing behind him but a mortgage. It wasn’t his fault, really. He had nothing to leave-

“Now, now, I hear that baby cryin’,” sings a chiding voice. “He just a bawlin’, and you lyin’ in bed like Miss Astor.”

Daisy is close to eighty now, but she still gets around like a woman of sixty-five, despite her arthritis. Her flower-print dress crinkles as she sits on the bed and gives the baby a bottle to suck. Tim junior’s eyes go wide and blue as urgency changes into bliss, and he grips the bottle with one strong hand. Daisy tries to take the other in hers, but the child will not be led.

“I used to look at you like that,” Daisy says wistfully.

“I know,” Julia whispers. “I wish I was back there again.”

Daisy shakes her head, her eyes on the baby. “Everybody wish that sometime. But there ain’t no going back.”

Julia closes her eyes. The smell of her own breath sickens her. She ran out of the house without even a toothbrush.

“You hungry yet?” Daisy asks.

“No.”

“You gotta eat sometime. Can’t take care of no baby without getting something down yourself.”

There’s a sound of horsehair rope being stretched, and Julia knows that’s Daisy turning her head. She looks up into the yellowed eyes and says, “Thanks for letting me stay here. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Daisy smiles. “Well, I think you gon’ be here a while yet.”

Julia goes still. “Why is that?”

“Well, there was something in the newspaper this morning. I hate to say nothing about it, but I guess there’s no point hiding it.”

“What was it? Something about Tim?”

Daisy’s crinkled lips curl around her dentures like dark papier-mвchй. Julia’s glad Daisy put her teeth in. Last night, the old woman looked one step away from the grave. “I can’t read too good no more,” she says, “but it didn’t sound good.”

“Where is it?” Julia asks, sitting up in alarm. “What did they say?”

“On the kitchen table.”

Julia bounds out of bed and runs for the kitchen.