Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [66]
“What did he do, Sister?” Ness asked as she stood over the pot and sniffed. “My, my, my, Sister, that coconut smells heavenly; I do think we should go up on the price twenty-five cents a bar this year.”
“Next year, Ness. Catalog’s already out with the price, and you know that white man that stamps his name on our soap is not budging a penny from his profit to add to ours.”
Blue honked into the handkerchief and called attention back to himself. “My world is crashing in on me over what I’ve done, and all you two can do is talk profits.”
“When you ready to pull yourself together and straighten your backbone and talk without a quivering to your voice, I’ll listen,” Til said. And to Show: “That honey’s ready to be sprinkled with the coconut flecks, isn’t it? Let’s have as much out of the way as possible so we can meet the beginning of visitors’ hours at Clarise’s bedside, especially after her relapse.”
“Lord, Lord, Lord, and she was doing so well too.” Ness sighed.
Blue cried openly again at the mention of Clarise’s name. He leaned his bent elbow on Show’s shoulder. “Brother, Brother, I can tell you what I’ve done, can’t I?”
“Speak to me, Blue,” Show said. “You’ve got both my ears.”
“Brother, I think I hung the phone up right in the ear of one of the daughters.”
“What!” all three shouted in unison.
Til went to Blue and pulled him from Show’s shoulder, reached up and put her hands on his forearms, shook him. “Look me in the eye and talk to me. Talk me true, talk me now.”
“Lord, please talk to her,” Ness chimed in.
“Yesterday afternoon, when the phone rang and I answered, and I thought it was some pervert just breathing hard and moaning into the phone—”
“When I asked you who was on the phone?”
“Yes, yes, yes. I hung up, just banged it down on the receiver. Didn’t give it another thought until I woke this morning with the daughters on my mind and my chest riddled with guilt.”
“What makes you so sure it was one of the daughters?” Til asked. She stared off into the smoke the boiling soap made. She moved her hands from Blue’s arms and rubbed her own as if she’d just caught a chill.
“Does anybody ever ring this phone on a Sunday? Think about it,” Blue said, putting his hand to his forehead. “Since Finch’s tragedy has that phone rang once on a Sunday afternoon?”
“Brother has a point,” Ness said.
“Damn good point,” Show added.
“And this morning, as I lay in bed and tried to catch my breath over what I’d done, I realized that I heard her voice as the phone was on the way down. She was saying—she was saying, ‘It’s me, it’s me.’” He hung his head in his hands and sobbed.
“It was Shern?” Til asked.
Blue nodded from his hands.
“It was Shern,” Til said to Ness and Show as if they hadn’t also seen Blue’s head going up and down in his hands. “Distraught too, or she would have spoken sooner. It was Shern.”
“What we gonna do, Sister?” Ness asked as she squeezed her fingers and spun her hands in circles.
Til turned the flame down under the pot of boiling soap. “We gonna finish up this batch of soap. We gonna meet visiting hours at Clarise’s bedside, we gonna pass some money down at Family Court and find out where they placed those girls, we gonna say fuck some motherfucking judge’s ruling, we gonna go see about those girls.”
Over that next week, while the aunts and uncles waited to hear news on the girls’ whereabouts from a buggy-eyed clerk who said he had a friend whose cousin was married to Vie’s assistant, they occupied themselves with their soap. That’s all they could do. Clarise’s visiting hours had been restricted again down to thirty minutes a day after her episode of mania the week before, and since they knew the importance of keeping the hands moving when the heart is standing still, they doubled their usual production of two thousand bars of soap to four.
Exotic-shaped ovals this soap was, cream-colored with golden patches where the honey had