Maybe this darkness came to eat her eyes for seeing. She wishes it would. She wishes it would shroud her ears, too, stop them with soot so she cannot hear her daddy telling her in a wash of calm, cool words that men have needs that Emily will never understand. No lady truly can, and that’s all right. That’s only proper. He tells her not to worry about Vina. Vina is not like her. Vina, he says, doesn’t mind.
He is saying Vina is an animal. He is telling Emily that the mother of her heart is always, every moment, nothing more than that blank thing she saw splayed across his desk. She knows better. Her father evicts Vina from her body when he makes her body a bad place to be. He is killing Vina in those minutes, and he believes he has this right. Emily Birch is now deep inside the Second South. Her family helped make it, and her father has maintained it. He is it, and she is him.
“You have to stop,” she says, because no one else in town will tell him. “You have to stop. You have to stop.” They are the only words she has.
“All right, sweetheart. Not to worry. Have your supper,” her father tells her, and he is closing the conversation. He turns back around. He sips his port. “There’s lemon pie for after, in the icebox.”
He will not stop, and no one can help. Not one soul. She knows because she is married to the town. She and the town share this powerful father, who has made both of them in his image.
Emily stands by the table, looking at the hammer, and she says it one last time. “You will stop.”
“Darlin’, we are not going to discuss this,” her father says, getting impatient. “Trust me. They aren’t like you. They don’t mind it.”
They. Not Vina’s name, or even the dignity of the singular pronoun to make her a person. Emily knows that “they” is niggers, though this is not a word he says. Birches say “colored,” because they are not trash, like Macks or Beckworths. They are better. She herself was too good to waste on Carter Mack, who made her laugh. Too good to be thrown away on Floyd Briggs, who asked for her hand in a poem so lovely it made her heart jump in her body.
She chose instead to be a worthy daughter to this man, and he is a horror. Her heart swells with an awful love for him. He is full of decency and sweet tea and Jesus, and he is a good place to live if you are white and well-to-do and Baptist and if you never let the people who are not these things be human. He will not stop hurting Vina, he will keep believing Birches are better than and too good for.
Her hand takes up the hammer, and she says it one last time—You will stop—despairing, because he will not stop and she will not allow it to continue. Her hand rises behind him, and he says, his voice now stern, It is not fit to discuss this any further. It is done, and he is the town, and he is the times, and he is right: It’s done. The hammer has already come down, and the crush and shudder felt the same as stepping on the white seashells he imported for their driveway.
She always knew she was this strong, because he told her so. She never knew she was a horror, but this means that she is still her father’s daughter.
No one can accuse me of being too good for Floyd, now, she thinks, and hears herself laughing. The sound is sick and mirthless.
She sits in his vacated chair with the bloody hammer in her lap and drinks the port and waits for morning. Time, which moved so fast before, has paused. In a thousand years, when the sun rises, Vina will come, and see, and put the nails away. The police will take the hammer. She will be dragged out, a chubby old maid found beside her father’s cooling body. She finds herself wondering what story will grow out of it. Nothing pretty, and is this her family legacy? They will drag her off to squander her next thirty years the way her father has squandered her first thirty. The town, the world, will go on as he made it. It is not the town she wants to make.
She thinks, No. Then she thinks, Not if I can help it.
She has done the worst thing a person can do, but in that dark hour she decides that she will pay her penance on her terms. She is Emily Birch, after all.
She sets to work, making her own story. She marries Floyd and replaces what she’s seen with a better truth of what a man is to a woman. Time passes. A smell comes into the house and leaves the house. The USA puts a satellite right up into space, and Elvis joins the army; Wattie is right. A person cannot hold the worst thing they ever did in their palm, staring at it. Emily Birch Briggs packs her sin away, piles days and months and years on top of it, and serves the town in payment.
This is the story that my grandmother told Regina Tackrey in her offices near Lake Martin. It was morning, Birchie’s best time, and we sat in a sterile conference room with Frank and Wattie and Willard Dalton on our side of the table. The other side was packed with Regina and four staff people I didn’t know. Tackrey’s yellow hair was lacquered into a pouf, and she wore a floral-print dress with a green jacket over it. They were pieces of a costume, sops to southern ladyhood that were at odds with her sharp eyes and squared-up shoulders. Behind her another man ran a camera on a tripod. I could see Birchie beside me and also on a large screen at the head of the table. In her pink belted suit with pantyhose and a small pink hat perched on her bun, she looked as gentle and sweet as a thousand-year-old Easter egg.
Wattie sat beside her, and she wept and rocked quietly, listening, holding Birchie’s hand. Birchie was calm and sad, and her story was as true as time and the Lewy bodies let her make it. On her other side, I felt tangled in the shreds of all their shared and secret stories. The Lewy bodies gathered in the shadows, eating Birchie’s stories up in every future. Six months, a year, they would have eaten this truth, too, and watching Wattie weep, I almost wished they had.
Only three days had passed, but Birchie’d had nine good meals and three good sleeps, and she wouldn’t wait any longer. She wanted to give her confession before the DNA test came back. She would not listen to Frank, or me, or Wattie. She would not hire a new lawyer. She insisted that we bring her here, to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, right up to the hammer. Then she started bending it, and I thought that this was why she had insisted. Birchie wanted to confess while she was still canny enough to lie well.
I saw a stiffness enter Wattie’s spine as Birchie’s story took a turn; she gave all the parts Wattie had done to Floyd. Floyd, who had loved her, and who was past minding, and who could not be prosecuted. She said Wattie never knew what was in the trunk until she saw it opened; she helped Birchie move it only because Birchie begged. Wattie said nothing, though her lips were tight with disapproval.