A Little Further Back

Rather than being a symbol of pure virtue, Alex, an older, unmarried woman whose decades of strict chastity have hardened into a lifelong emotional battleground, is isolated. The self-imposed celibacy creates a defensive, bitter armor against long-deceased suitors, traitors, and heroes of her native South. The living in Milton, MS, have it much worse.

She calls her neighbor, “Man-horse-demon,” despite her neighbor also being a woman, albeit a much younger woman who spends as much time reading in her rented studio as she does in her garden, but more often than not, she walks into town wearing the latest fashions, carrying an umbrella that protects her from the Mississippi sun.

“Man-horse-demon!”

Through the screen door, Alex can hear satan’s hooves, even when they are Sear’s slip-on heels. Her young neighbor, Daniella, makes the mistake of turning her neck ever so slightly, giving the old kook just enough acknowledgment to warrant a verbal barrage of Ku Klux, Old Testament nonsense. The delta runs deep down Alex’s face, full of veins that are mistaken for roots.

“Why you got an umbrella, witch? Afraid to get your hooves wet? Satan ain’t got time to saddle your saddeless heathen hooves, you heathen hoove. Going to church to say you’re there, like a parolee who clocks into work and walks back out so he can join the sounder of swine beneath the trees, feasting on watermelon rinds and government handouts? Hm! Might as well change your name to Africanus Lincoln and head over to the river with the rest of the nigra’s and pray they build ya’ll a church to protect ye from the coming flood!”

But Daniella is not going to church or the river. She keeps walking and looks ahead. First, with a sort of malaise one accrues after being insulted enough times, but this is wiped away by the appearance of Coke Chevrolet, who pulls women in with the intensity of a pirate paddling toward land in the midst of a scurvy breakdown. Startled on the inside, Daniella keeps her cool. She continues to walk between the dust-covered disapproval of cruel purity and the dashing alarm clock no woman, to Daniella’s knowledge, has touched, unsure of what sets him off or how to set him. She looked at a clock in the new Sears catalog but found Coke much more attractive. She twirls her umbrella, deflecting the bitter echo of a former South that is in no hurry to trot like a rabbit toward Easter.

“By Moses, by Robert E. Lee, look at her, practically drooling all over the side gravel.”

Alex’s ears are as young as West Virginia, but her sight is gone with the wind. Why the change in Daniella’s pace is a mystery she has time for. She rolls out the front door and into the sun. The previous night’s rain had moved the board she thought lay across her step. She falls over, and the reflection off her white legs reminds the sun that it is a spark between eternal darkness. She hears footsteps and shrinks. She cannot tell if it is a man or a woman, and this new myth approaches her, from nothing to nothing.

“Are you ok?” asks Coke.

She squints and looks like her father’s boot.

“Who is that? I don’t need any help. Go away!”

But Coke is already helping her up and placing her in her chair. She gets a good whiff of what she did not know she was missing, having never been tempted outside the pages of the bible. “My,” says Alex. “And who might you be?”

“My name is Coke, Coke Chevrolet.”

“Chevrolet? New in town?”

Coke smiles a smile only Daniella can see down the street.

“A few years, but here, that might as well be seconds. You must be Alex.”

And for the first time in her life, she turns a rosy pink. She wonders how he had heard of her, as if she were back in school, and he was a new boy from the town over. She forgets about her legs and tries to stand, but nothing happens. She says, “You know who I am?”

“Of course,” says Coke. “Everyone does.”

“They do?”

“I was told about you the minute I moved here.”

“Really? From who, darling?”

“Well, like I said, everyone.”

“Everyone? My, you know how to make a girl feel popular again.”

“A girl, indeed,” says Coke with a grin. “Why, if you were just a bit older, I’d ask your daddy to accompany you to a dance.”

Upon hearing “dance,” Alex’s eyes drew a tear from where there were only tarpits and a broken hourglass.

“I used to like to dance. Daddy didn’t, but I did.”

“Would you like to?”

“Dance? I can’t. Daddy.”

“Your daddy ain’t here.”

Alex covers her smile, a cracked pigmentation around her yellow teeth.

“My daddy?” says Alex in a mild case of selective amnesia. She looks up, though she cannot see. “My daddy is dead, Mr. Chevrolet. I have become what I feared to be, just like Ms. Hammerand, an old and bitter spinster who has forgotten her myth and is trapped in a tale told by an idiot. Is that Daniella over yonder?”

“It is.”

“Would you call her for me? My mouth is not used to this much yelling and talking, though I am sure you have heard otherwise.”

Coke laughs and calls for Daniella, who does her best to ignore the man she adores beside the woman she loathes, so she does what she did when Alex was chewing at her dress and keeps walking, twirling her umbrella, and casting a spell on Coke Chevrolet with its blurred patterns.

“Is she walking away?”

“She is, let me go get her, Miss?”

“Barbour, Mr. Chevrolet. Ms. Barbour.”

Coke ran between old memories and the ones he’d like to make, but as soon as his smell dissipated, Alex knew as much as the sassafras does over the graves in the cemetery across the street. She lifts her thin arm in an attempt to get the light out of her useless eyes that she prays she can do without. “Nothing but a hindrance,” she mutters, seeing a bit of yellow in the sea of green. She reaches for the flower and smells it. The bee that collects its sweets does not sting her when it is brought to her nose and flies off to turn the pollen into honey. Coke never returns, and she does not hear Daniella. She sits in her front yard and sees a future. A violent and complex stimulation of senses. A distraction of sights, sounds, and smells that will be crowded into the shortest time possible. There is only time for hate because it is easy and pretends to be a reward, while love is hard, but like anything that takes time, your happiness will last through the seasons, cold and hot, heaven or hell, as the simple reality of billions of lives marches forward, always wishing to be a little further back.