By the Rivers of Babylon

By the Rivers of Babylon

Mary Glickman

For the musicians of Charleston, who inspire and sustain me

1.

Ella Price raised her eyes to heaven and begged deliverance. It was a hot South Carolina day at the end of June 1997, the kind tourists love and natives abhor. She was stuck on the approach to Fenton Bridge after a long trip upstate to buy belts and handbags for her dress shop. All the way home, she’d thought how grand it would be to sit on her back porch and revel in the caress of a cooling island breeze. Now, she wondered if she’d ever get there.

She studied what she could see of the drawbridge ahead. It had been locked straight up and open for the last twenty minutes, with no repair vehicles in sight. Experience taught that she might be trapped for an hour or more, so she turned off her engine to save gasoline. The papers said the new suspension bridge would be completed by the millennium, but that was three years away. Even though building the new bridge would bulldoze poor folks’ homes on either side of the river, at this moment Ella had to think it would be a good thing.

She rolled down her window. The air was heavy and still. The river sparkled in the sun. People left their cars for relief, and she did, too. Looking around, she saw Roland Fenton, a dapper Black man thirty years of age, a restaurant manager whose family had once been owned by the Confederate general for whom the drawbridge had been named in ’47, fifty years ago. Ella Price was born Ella Sassaport, a surname her people acquired from their owners as well. She’d gone to grade school with Roland’s mama back in segregation days. The two waved and made faces of misery at each other.

A slender, young white man standing three cars between them mistook her gesture for one aimed at him. His long, thin face arranged its features into a similar expression of distress, then smiled. Raised to be polite, Ella smiled back. A young woman exited his car. She was a remarkable creature, fulfilling every criteria for beauty the entire white world held dear: unmarred porcelain skin, deep blue eyes, chiseled cheeks and jaw, an admirable nose, sumptuous lips. Her hair was black and thick; her legs, long and shapely; her belly, flat; and her bust, high and generous. She dashed through the line of stopped cars to the railings at the foot of the bridge, bending over the uppermost to regard the river below. Drivers all around stared as she did.

Sirens wailed. Repair trucks with a police escort at the bottom of the bridge threaded through stalled traffic to make their way slowly to the engineer’s booth. People reentered their cars and revved them up to try to give the trucks a path. The young man called out to his beauty, Abigail, come here! She ignored him. Drivers behind him leaned on their horns. Abigail! She remained where she was. Abigail! We’ve got to move! At last she became aware that there were other people on earth besides herself. She turned and dashed back to the car, making adorable gestures of apology to everyone. The young man circled around his hood to stand by and open her door, helping her in, then fastening her seat belt for her as if she were a child. Ella thought it an odd thing to do when people were waiting for them to move. The woman wasn’t disabled—her scampering about proved that—she was certainly capable of strapping herself in. Then it struck her that the young man’s tender care was proprietary, that he did it to reclaim her, to snatch her back from every man who’d stared at her.

Young love, Ella thought, shaking her head. How it ties us up and ties us down. How it burns and flares, dies down, then flares up again. She’d been no less a beauty in her youth than that woman. Now that she was middle-aged, people called her a handsome woman, as Black and beautiful as her noble African ancestors. She hoped she’d grown wiser over the years, but she’d been a fool for love plenty in her day. She could spot a fellow traveler miles off. As the young man’s car inched closer to her own, she saw it was from Massachusetts. It was packed high with suitcases and odd, unpackable items: a wicker chair, a laundry basket full of folded towels. So they were moving to Sweetgrass Island. Something in her laughed at the idea, but it was a rueful laugh. That Abigail’s going to cause some kind of trouble on Sweetgrass, she thought. Lord help us all when the island men catch a look of her. My, oh my. Just wait.

It wasn’t much of a wait. The island men got wind of Abigail Becker soon enough. By the time she and her man made their social debut at Declan’s Pub ten days later, she’d already been the topic of speculation at Harold’s Stop and Go and at the fire station. After that evening, even those who hadn’t been there had heard of the beauty from Boston.

When Abigail walked into the pub, it was early, just after six o’clock. Whoever walked into Declan’s at that hour was treated the same by the crowd gathering within. All eyes turned toward the door, the way a swarm of honeybees turn toward a bank of flowers, with curiosity and without malice. Each one hoped a friend had walked through the door and not some stranger; a tourist slumming it with the locals, or a resident of one of the new gated communities eating up the island’s farmland. Early evening was the hopeful part of the night, when alliances were forged or reawakened. By nine o’clock, nobody gave a damn. Patrons had either hooked up with their buddies, or not. By ten o’clock, they were one breathing mass of fellowship. They bought each other pints and shots, sobbed their stories of problem children and faithless wives, brutal husbands, and hated jobs. They swore their love, told jokes, and lied in equal measure. They lent each other money. One of the musicians hired for Saturday nights, a bluesman from Memphis, said he loved playing the pub because it was small and friendly, an Irish shoebox full of drunks. The regulars at Declan’s liked that, including the handful of Blacks. They knew who they were.

That night, Abigail’s arrival aroused more than customary interest. Her husband, Joe, was parking the car. He’d dropped her off at the front door, telling her to grab a table near the music, as music was what they’d come for. All eyes turned as she walked in alone.

Billy Euston, sitting at his usual spot near the end of the bar, raised his glass to the sound of the door opening, turned, and saw the black hair, the Tartar eyes, the nose straight and thin as a pencil, the full lips, the china-doll skin. Her long legs were in summer shorts, and her breasts rose out of a halter top. Instead of smiling above his raised glass, Billy Euston dropped his jaw. The glass slipped from his hand to shatter on the floor in shards that spread in a glittering arc as far as two barstools down. Declan grumbled that was the last time he’d give Billy Euston a decent glass. He took a thick, sturdy tumbler from behind the bar, poured the man a fresh whiskey, and sent his nephew Tommy over to clean up the mess. Everyone else continued to stare.

Abigail did not react to Billy or his shattered glass. She saw a free booth by the front windows near the music stand and slid over the leather bench facing the band. A guitarist, a mandolin, a banjo, and an upright bass player tuned their instruments and checked the sound. Each glanced her way and gave a nod of welcome. Straightaway their shoulders broadened, their guts retracted. They passed hands over their hair, neatening up.

A minute later, Joe came in. He was denied the common glance and greeting; all eyes were still on his wife. The waitress came over to see what they wanted.

What can I get for y’all? she asked.

Guinness for him, Abigail said, and a barrel shot on the rocks for me. You might bring us a food menu, too.

The musicians started their first set. Joe and Abigail loved music, every kind of music. Their first date was to the opera; they courted in blues clubs, married to rock and roll. They were new to bluegrass, but so far they loved it. When the boys launched into Walking Boss, they scrunched up in the booth, holding hands. Joe put his free arm tight around her waist. Their joined hands beat against the table in time.

I asked that boss man

For a job (for a job)

He said, son what can you do?

I can hold a jack,

Line a track (Line a track)

I can pick and shovel, too

Abigail’s face lit up. She looked at Joe and mouthed as there was no way he could hear: I love this! He smiled and bobbed his head to the song’s rhythm.

Walkin’ boss (walkin’ boss),

I don’t belong to you.

I belong (I belong)

with that steel drivin’ crew

The song ended to an appreciative clamor. The lead singer introduced himself and the members of the band just as the waitress served Abigail and Joe their drinks. She dropped two menus on the table. The couple put their heads together over one of them.

Y’all new around here? the waitress asked, although she knew the answer already. Strangers stood out at Declan’s like burrs on a wet dog.

He is, Abigail said without looking up. When I was a child, I used to visit my grandaunt on Catawba Plantation. She died a few months ago and left us her house.

Catawba Plantation was a farm-gobbling gated community. The people who lived there were not especially admired by the crew at Declan’s Pub. Generally, Catawba residents were loud, cheap, arrogant, and clueless about the place to which they’d moved. In other words, they were Yankees, twentieth-century carpetbaggers. Nobody liked but a handful of them, and that handful had to prove their worth over time.

I’m sorry for your loss, but welcome, the waitress said. So you’re livin’ here now?

Abigail explained that they were spending the summer on the island, trying it on for size. She was a teacher; she had summers off. Joe was a writer, so he had off whenever he liked. She laughed when she said that. Joe stiffened, pulling away from his wife a little, not that she noticed. Abigail always gave strangers too much information. What made her think a waitress in a bar had to know intimate details about them?

Joe ordered fish and chips, Abigail a local greens salad. The band played original songs next, ones with driving beats and virtuoso licks for each instrument. The lyrics were about lost love, Dixie pride, and legendary beasts of the backwoods. Joe set his irritation with Abigail aside and put his arm back around her waist. Their hands once again joined and thumped beats on the tabletop. They cheered after each tune, whooping and whistling their appreciation along with the regulars.

After they ate, Abigail went to the ladies’ room at the back, then noticed the rear exit. She pushed the door open out of curiosity and was rewarded.

Joe, you’ll never guess what’s out back, she said when she returned to the table.

Joe spread his arms and lifted his shoulders.

What?

A wonderland.

She picked up his hand and pulled to get him up and out. By now, the pub was packed. The musicians were about to start their second set; standing couples eyed their booth. Joe was unsure about giving up the spot, and he wanted to hear the second set, but he followed her to the back of the pub anyway, stopping near the wait station for a nanosecond to signal that they weren’t walking out on the bill. The back door opened onto a walled courtyard with benches, a firepit, and another music stand. Lush vines of confederate jasmine climbed all over, filling the air with their powerful scent. Strings of fairy lights blinked through white petals. Although Joe heard the murmur of numerous voices, the only patrons he saw at first were two bearded men with a plump young woman sitting between them by the unlit firepit. The men’s beards were untrimmed. They wore feed caps. The woman had a sleeve of tattoos on her left arm. Their conversation looked intense, private. Abigail pulled him along. There were more benches, a deserted outdoor bar. She stopped.

The air changed. The smell of marijuana overtook the scent of jasmine, no mean feat. They were in front of a whitewashed pergola. Inside were the vague shapes of men and women hunkered together, illuminated by a rolling flicker of cigarette lighters coming on, going out like twinkling fireflies. A gravelly voice, the voice of a two-pack-a-day smoker, called out.

C’mon in, pretty gal, Billy Euston said. C’mon.

Abigail looked at Joe with pleading eyes. She wanted very much to make a connection. Lack of weed was the sole thing missing from their Southern idyll. This would be the answer to a prayer. Joe wasn’t sure. Those inside the pergola were strangers; he couldn’t even see what they looked like from outside.

C’mon, called Billy. Bring the skinny dude with you.

Grinning wide, Abigail ascended the few steps into thick shadows. Joe shrugged and followed.

As they entered the dark, their vision adjusted to its embrace. Through a haze of soft grays and smoky blues, they discerned at least a dozen people sitting at small wooden tables or on a bench that wrapped around the pergola’s interior. Most of them were Abigail’s and Joe’s ages, somewhere in their thirties; others were younger, but a handful were men with white in their beards or women with wattled necks. Billy Euston was creeping up on fifty, a short, wiry man, sunburnt with crinkly eyes, a nose several times broken, a laughing mouth, and a high, broad forehead from which a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair retreated. One hand held a fat joint. He swept his arm across the room.

We’re havin’ a safety meetin’, he said. Are you in need of safety?

Abigail’s eyes went round.

Oh yes.

The air was thick with more than weed. Everyone, even Joe and especially Abigail, felt it. Its tentacles reached out to draw them close. There was a sense that something was going to happen, though no one knew what.

Someone who’d inhaled too deep and too long hacked, breaking the mood. There were grumbles all ’round.

’Scuse me, the hacker said, his voice weak, oxygen deprived.

The group quieted, their eyes on Billy and the strangers. They knew that Billy was capable of being gracious, teasing, or hostile, however the mood struck him. It was better than the TV to watch and wait for what he might do. Billy took his time, regarding Abigail’s face with rapt admiration, enjoying the fact that a woman so rare wanted something from him.

Abigail didn’t understand his hesitation. Maybe he’s waiting for an introduction, she guessed.

I’m Abigail, and this is Joe, she said. She gave Billy an imploring look. He handed her the joint, which she grasped and inhaled twice in quick succession. She offered it to Joe, who waved it away. She stuck it back in his face. She gave him a look that said he should take a toke to be convivial. He acquiesced, then handed the joint back.

That’s enough, he said.

Billy took her hand and led her in a solicitous manner to a corner bench. The two talked in soft tones, trading the joint back and forth, while Joe fell into a chair. He wasn’t like his wife. He didn’t smoke often. When he did, it was only to please her. The smoke hit him hard, making the room swim. Somebody asked him what he did for a living. When he said he wrote books, his interlocutor wanted to know what kind.

Children’s books, he said, hoping he wouldn’t be asked next if he had children himself. Whenever he was asked that and he said no, people looked at him as if there was something wrong with him, as if his interest in writing for children might be something unnatural. He’d have to explain why children, why their stories, without exposing everything about himself. Some might think he was a pervert, that his marriage was a beard. Hardly the way he wanted to start life out in a new place. Luckily, no one inquired further.

On the way home, Abigail could barely sit still. She had two joints stuffed in her shorts’ pocket. Her head buzzed pleasantly. Joe was irritated, but that didn’t tamp down her excitement. He had no right to be annoyed. He’d taken his toke-of-the-month, hadn’t he? Why should he care that she’d had more? Even so, she wanted to be sure they were on cozy terms when they arrived home, so she put her hand on the back of his neck and rubbed.

Honey, you’re so tight, she said. I thought you had a good time.

Joe tilted his head this way and that.

Part of it was good. Part of it was great, he said. The music part. I loved those guys.

Abigail agreed by humming the tune to "Shady Grove." If she’d been sure of the words, she would have sung them.

Usually, Joe liked her singing. Usually, it soothed him. But his neck did not yield. Abigail thought of Billy Euston’s neck, its braided muscles, sunburned and wiry as the rest of him. She smiled to herself. Her redneck friend; that’s what Billy Euston was going to be. She rubbed Joe’s neck harder until he shook her off.

2.

Once Billy got to know him a little bit, he thought Joe Becker might well be a different species from his own. They were as unalike as a zebra and an eagle. On the surface, there was reason for that. Joe was urban, reserved, private. Billy was full-on country, every bit of him proudly out there for the world to see. If Joe’s favorite tool was his Selectric, Billy would have a hard time choosing between his smoker, his cooking knives, and his 1995 bush hog. Billy noticed right off that Joe wore too many clothes on a warm day: long pants, shirts with sleeves, shoes with socks. Providing he wasn’t attending a funeral or wedding, Billy dressed in cargo shorts and tees, even in winter. The feel of fabric on his limbs penned him in. His flesh needed to be free.

He was making a study of Joe with the harebrained idea of stealing his wife, if only for a short time—he’d be happy with an hour or two, he’d be over the moon with more—and there was one thing Billy Euston wanted to know about Joe above all else. It was always on his mind. It plagued him when he drove to the restaurant downtown where he worked three days a week as pitmaster, when he paddled through the bayou looking for fish and game, when he sat on a damp dawn in his deer blind testing the floorboards before the season started. It bothered him when he visited Ella Price, a Gullah woman he’d known since he was fifteen; a woman who loved him no matter how he felt about her, and who could be depended upon to be kind at his whim. How, he wondered, did a knob like Joe Becker win a prize like Abigail?

You’d know ’em if you’d seen ’em, darlin’, he said. He was stretched out naked on Ella’s bed with an ashtray on his stomach. He lit a cigarette. They’re the oddest match.

I’m too busy to take much note of new people, she admitted. She no longer recalled seeing the Beckers on Fenton Bridge. The name Abigail might have rung a bell, but Billy was too wily to use names. He could have been talking about any one of the transient couples who summered on the island every year.

She’s a marvel, he said, blowing out a column of smoke. His words took on a hint of awe. Way out of his class.

Billy felt Ella stiffen beside him. A quick side glance told him her round black eyes had narrowed to a squint, that her perfect teeth clamped for a second against her lush lower lip. She looked about to give him a good cussin’ out. In the next moment, her features relaxed into their usual loveliness, but he had been warned. Never speak of another woman in the presence of this one. There’d been too much of that in the past. Ella Price didn’t care what he did, especially. She knew other women existed in his life, but she didn’t have to hear about them. It was a simple rule, one they’d established more than a decade ago. He realized he’d forgotten it in the rush of a new tempest brewing in his heart.

Way out of mine, too, he added, a hair too late.

Huh. Ella sat up and reached down to the floor for her robe. Everyone’s out of your class, baby. Even me.

The robe was of white Japanese silk embroidered with stalks of peach-colored blossoms. Billy bought it for her one Christmas. When Billy went off on one of his crazy-assed romances, Ella took other lovers, but she wore the robe only for him.

Time for you to go, she said. It’s turned to Sunday. I’m goin’ to church.

Billy sat up also, filled his chest with air, and raised his eyebrows.

You want me to go with? he asked, because sometimes she did. Over the years and in her honor, he’d favored the Holy Tabernacle of Jesus Christ by the Sea with his award-winning BBQ at annual fundraisers without the catering charge. It made him a pew celebrity. More congregants came up to shake his hand before services than they did Pastor Ronald T. Quirk. He figured Ella took him to church because she liked to show him off more than she cared for his soul, but he’d be wrong.

Ella was tall, with long, willowy legs. She painted her toes a periwinkle blue, which complemented her flawless black skin almost as much as the white and peach robe. Her fingernails shot out a quarter inch from her fingertips and were painted the same shade. A rhinestone crescent moon adorned each one. Her middle-aged stomach was fairly flat despite having borne a child, now grown. Her breasts hadn’t sagged even though she’d nursed him. She was proud of that, always standing with her shoulders back so Billy would notice. Her thick black hair sprang three fingers from her head au naturel, glorious and kinked. The ends were tipped in red from the time six months before when the object of Billy’s fleeting attentions had been a red-haired woman, and she’d tried to distract him in his pursuit by copying her. It didn’t work.

No, you go on, she said. The Lord and I need some private time.

Billy’s chest deflated in relief. She wanted to kill him for that, but showered instead. By the time she finished, he’d left without saying goodbye.

When it came to women, Billy had no conscience. The heart wants what the heart wants, he’d say, adding that to foil the heart’s desires led to coronary disease and death. It was something he announced to whoever would listen. Any female foolish enough to take him on heard it during the initial assignation. Ella was the first female he’d said it to when they were just kids. Up until then, she near worshipped him.

She couldn’t be blamed. There was something godlike in the way Billy first appeared in her life. As it happened, she was about to drown in Paw’s Creek after getting trapped in a high tide during a sudden thunderstorm. If she’d died, she’d not have been the first Black child to die there. Paw’s Creek pulled at least one child a summer into the harsh embrace of its charging currents, dragging them under its rising tide, especially during storms. In those days, Black children didn’t go to the beach, and Paw’s Creek was the best they had to cool off on an August afternoon, so they often took the chance. Ella had gone to swim by herself after arguing with her brother. When the storm came, there was no one to help her; she was tossed wherever the creek wanted. She put up a fight, but although she was strong, she was only fourteen. She could not defeat nature. It wasn’t long before she sank and rose, sank and rose, her lungs filling with water. Terrified, she prepared to give up her soul and prayed to Jesus. He must have heard her. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear, but out of that wet darkness two strong arms found her and hefted her up and over into a motorboat, itself pitching wild against storm-driven waves. It was Billy Euston’s granddaddy’s fishing boat, and it was Billy Euston who pumped her chest, who breathed his air into her lungs, who gave her life. She coughed up water while he held her tightly in his arms. For a while, it looked like the boat would turn over and they’d drown together, holding on to each other. Then suddenly, the storm departed as unexpectedly as it arrived. The sun broke through the clouds bright as the voice of God at Sinai. The first good look Ella got at Billy was with his head haloed by a shaft of light. It was impossible not to fall in love with him.

Billy could have been Black, brown, red, or Chinese; Ella had to feel as she did. Every woman falls in love with the man who saves her life. It would be against nature to feel otherwise. In the same way, every young man of fifteen falls in love with the woman whose gratitude satisfies his most intimate predilections, especially when she’s a looker like Ella. Billy was no different.

Two became one. They were each other’s first at everything for a couple of years, until a big-boned blond woman of twenty-five tempted Billy away. She was the woman who first inspired his refrain of hearts wanting what hearts wanted, although it turned out there was not much more