Heat is an original work and may not be distributed without the author's express, written permission. The following is a work of fiction. Any similarities between the story and its characters, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
(C) 2011 - Aina J. Powell
My mama never was right in the head but nobody paid her no mind. The people in our tiny town of Horsefork, Texas was used to her walking the unpaved roads barefoot and talking to herself. They'd just stare at her in pity and come Sunday morning they'd bow their heads in church and whisper a prayer for her as she flapped her arms and ran in circles around the clearing behind the church. The old baptizing creek down there had long dried up due to six straight years of drought so she wasn't in any danger of drowning. Sometimes, she'd reach in her brassier and pull out a little food that she'd stolen and have a church picnic all by herself, swaying to the choir's thunderous performance of Amazing Grace. She never bothered anybody, so nobody ever bothered her.
Then she come up pregnant. Nobody ever knew who my daddy was and my mama didn't have the mind to know or tell. Shoot, she had to be sat down and told that she was with child. By that time all the family my mama had left was her oldest sister, who was barren and couldn't have any children of her own. So after years of just letting her be, my Aunt Sally – who everybody in town called Sister, as a reference point to my mama – and her husband, my uncle Monk, took in my mama and started to treat her like a baby because that's what she had the mind of. She was a 26 year old baby having a baby – me. And I'm telling you, Monk and Sister? They was happy as clams about me coming! They'd suffered for a child for over ten years and they was praising the Lord that He brought me to them through my childlike mama, who wouldn't know no difference whether I was hers or theirs.
So when my mama was six weeks away from her due date she started carrying on about getting ready to give birth to the devil's child. 'Course, nobody paid her crazy talk any mind but my Aunt Sister started to worry when mama refused to follow them down to the church for Wednesday night service like she'd normally do. Then, that Saturday Monk had to tie her to the bed to keep her from slicing open her belly after he walked up on her waving a machete across herself in contemplation. She said I was the spawn of Beelzebub and that I was burning her insides up. Six days after that, my mama laid spread eagle on that bed, fell into silence, and started refusing food. She only drank pitcher after pitcher of water, emptying them as fast as Sister and Monk could bring them, to douse the flames inside of her. She did this for sixty-six hours, until Sunday morning. This caused my old aunt and uncle to worry something powerful!
“What you s'pose Cora Mae got going on in that head, Sister?” my Uncle Monk asked his wife.
“I don't know Monk, but she's scaring me and we's got us a baby to worry about. Now you run on t'church, and I'll stay here with Cora Mae t'make sure she stay calm and try to get her to eat,” Aunt Sister responded.
That Sunday morning was clear and blue, but it was hot as a boiling pot of cayenne pepper stew. The air was thick and still, the skeeters, too lethargic to attack, had stopped biting, and ladies trudged shamelessly down the dirt road to the church without stockings on. The heat had such a sleepy lull on everyone that nobody cared how the dust from the road snuffed out the shininess of freshly-vaselined legs. Monk got to church and found himself repeating, “Sister and Cora Mae decided t'stay home this morning … oh, they's fine … sho' do 'preciate y'prayers.” And it was a sleepy service because the Reverend was a sleepy man. He, himself, had been up all night lasciviously praying over the body of a woman who was not his wife. The heat within him had been unbearable, you see? And so he'd decided that the church service that he would conduct that morning would be quick and low-key enough to even out his guilt. He blamed his early benediction on the heat, though.
But just as the choir started their regular chorus of Amazing Grace, back down the road at my aunt and uncle's house, Cora Mae felt something stirring inside her. She, too, felt the heat growing inside of her body and it moved from her pelvis, around to her lower back, and then down her legs. And when she screamed bloody murder it was a sound that Aunt Sister, a midwife, knew all to well. I was coming, and I was coming fast – too soon in my mama's sixth month. While mama screamed and fussed, my Aunt Sister busied herself getting ready for my arrival. She knew just what to do and she thought if she did everything right and called on the help of The Lord, me and mama'd be just fine. Cora Mae Jones pushed six times and I fell out into the arms of her sister, Sally Ann Montgomery. I was a big and healthy baby for coming so early. I was born on the hottest day, in the hottest part of the country, during the hottest time of the year – June 6, 1966 – and so my mama named me Lucifer Jones. And as sure as I sit here telling you this, I was born with an extra flap of flesh on my hindquarters that looked just like a tail. I had black eyes with no visible pupils, four molars in the back of my mouth, and long, curled nail-claws that made my mama run screaming from the room and refuse to nurse me. And I was hot, too. My whole body was just a little ball of heat. Mama said that I burned her tit and tried to chew it off.
Monk arrived back from church, directly after my birth. He was halfway home when he heard my mama screaming, so he come running down the dirt road along with a few other people from the congregation. My Aunt Sister? She'd dun fell in love with me already! She didn't care that I looked like a lizard and it didn't pain her at all to hold me in her arms. Everyone came in to peek at me, while my mama, still wearing the soiled dressing that she gave birth in, started throwing things into a suitcase and talking about getting the hell out of town.
“And iffen any of ya have any sense, you'll crush that devil baby's skull! That thing is evil, y'hear me? Pure evil!” she screamed at them. As usual, nobody paid her any mind but there was a seed of accession in each of them as they all passed me around real nervous like, like a hot potato, because my warm little body was just a'scorching in their hands.
My Aunt Sister wasn't scared of me none, and since she and Monk couldn't have their own youngins she was overjoyed that she would have to take care of me on account of my mama having the crazy. She wanted to take care me, her and Monk, and so that's what she set about doing. When my mama wouldn't change her mind about naming me Lucifer, Sister snuck and had Monk carry her to the county courthouse in his old pickup to talk to her white friend, Miss Mildred. Miss Mildred was one of those women's liberation kinda ladies who had been the first woman to work at the courthouse. She had been there for ten whole years, so she knew her way around the whole process. Sister had helped Mildred birth two of her youngins, one breech. Mildred was a nice Christian lady so it was no consequence of hers to have my birth certificate changed from Lucifer Jones to Lucy Farrah Montgomery. That's right – Sally Ann and Hubert "Monk" Montgomery stole me from my mama and gave me their last name, but I don't think nobody really cared cause my mama was plumb out of her mind anyway.
As a youngin, I was always warm but never had a fever. Aunt Sister would feel my forehead and draw back her hand, trying not to show me that I had hurt her. She'd take my temp and the mercury would read a perfect 98.6 degrees. I'd never break a sweat on the muggiest day and my hair, which Aunt Sister took great pride in getting stick-straight with her pressing comb, never reverted back to its kinkiness until she washed it again; it was seemingly immune to heat and humidity. There had been whispers going around about me and the events and circumstances surrounding my birth, but Aunt Sister confronted them full on, shaming grown folks for talking about a defenseless child as they were. My mama, still afflicted with the crazy, had gone back to wandering the town and would warn everyone about me. Folks started to pay attention after her story was confirmed by those few church members who were there immediately after my birth.
When strange occurrences started happening around me, the whole town started paying attention. Sister and Monk took me to church as they normally did, and because Sister does the Good News And Announcements on Sunday mornings, everyone was privy to the knowledge that that particular Sunday was my sixth birthday. That night, everyone glared at me as I hid behind Monk's leg and we all stood helplessly as the church burned to the ground. Sister had begun to let me walk a little ways down the road to play in the grass across from the house, far enough to stay in her eye's view while she did the work of a sharecropper's wife on the porch and in the front yard. But our nosy neighbor Mr. Cleophus could see me too, and he was watching when I went up to pet his old mule Bessie. Bessie immediately and inexplicably took sick – she laid down on his barn floor and never got up again, so Mr. Cleophus had to shoot her dead. Then, when the woman who was not the Reverend's wife suddenly burst open in a fit of unabashed confession, telling everyone who'd listen about what she and the Reverend had been doing for six long years, the town blamed me because included in that confession was a little tidbit about how I had seen them in the grass across the way, and how the Reverend had looked me in the eye and silently held his finger to his lips, never stopping to acknowledge me further as he moved himself between the legs of the woman who was not his wife.
When it was time for me to start grade school in 1971, all the parents got together and had a meeting about me, a meeting that Sister and Monk were not invited to. The other parents didn't want me to go to school with their children in the one-room schoolhouse, and they had started a petition to get the Montgomerys to keep me home. And as word got around that this meeting was taking place, people who had no children in school made it their business to see what would be done about the child who was once named Lucifer Jones.
“Indeed, she's a peculiar child,“ said the high-yellow schoolteacher, in her uppity Boston accent. “But you all have got to remember that she's just a child. These things, these coincidental instances that you're attributing to Lucy – it's all nonsense. You're saying that this child is the Spawn of Satan, but Satan does not exist!”
Everyone gasped at the words of the schoolteacher, and then they grew viciously angry and decided that I had something to do something, considering the delusional state of Horsefork's only educator. Surely, a woman who'd been to college could only be influenced by the powers of the likes of me. They knew that the devil stays busy and they could not have this woman teaching their children such things while she was under my spell – if she doesn't believe in the devil, then she doesn't believe in God – and so the mayor fired her on the spot, lickety-split!
From the meeting, the schoolteacher drove her sleek Buick straight to the Montgomery's house to tell them what had happened. She pressed a handkerchief to the beads of sweat on her temples and neck as she told them that she'd been fired for defending me and if they knew what was best, they'd get me out of Texas as soon as possible. She said that she had seen how people with religious conviction can behave and that she was beginning to fear for my safety because she was seeing traces of it in the people of Horsefork. In low whispers that she thought I could not hear, she told them how one man, a man as grown as the day is long, talked about how the town would be better off without me, a little girl. She spoke of how most everyone nodded their heads in agreement, and how the people who showed any reserve at all didn't show much at all, and how no one outright denounced what the man had said. The schoolteacher said that she'd heard enough and decided right then and there that she had to go home to Boston, where she kept a large home that her parents had left her, and that the Montgomerys were welcome to come along, bringing me with them.
“You'll be able to enroll your child in a quality school in a place where people accept differences. Now, I am a woman who believes in God – not religious, but a deist – but I never entertained the horrible things that people said about your Lucy. She's a sweet and respectful child who deserves the best that you can give her. I'm offering you help with that. Please come with me to Boston.”
Sister and Monk looked at each other, and then off into the next room at me while I played on the floor, pretending not to hear. They wanted to go but they had a few things to straighten out.
“What 'bout Cora Mae, Monk?” Sister asked.
“Well, Sister, y'know she been gone since directly after that youngin come,” he said.
“This is true. What 'bout the house, Monk?” Sister pressed.
“Sister, we never own this house long as I'm sharecroppin' and dirt farmin'!” Monk said, getting irate. Uncle Monk raged on, “High time for us to go, woman! We ain't got nothin' here. This heat and drought dun kilt everything and burned up the soil til it ain't no more good. Now lets get the hell on while we can, our baby girl in trouble!”
So right before dusk, Sister and Monk busied themselves throwing clothes and necessities in suitcases and boxes while the schoolteacher pulled her car around to the back of the house, away from the view of the road and nosy Mr. Cleophus. They sweated and cursed the town as they packed the trunk of the schoolteacher's Buick and Monk's old pickup with just enough to get by and waited for night to fall. When the moon was high in the sky, and torches lit the distant darkness, me and Sister got into the Buick and rode in silence, following Monk in the pickup on the back roads to the schoolteacher's little cottage on the other side of Horsefork. I played sleep as the schoolteacher went into her home to pack a single suitcase and a makeup bag to throw in the backseat with me. I sat up to look out of the window when I heard the clamoring of the townsfolk nearing the square and lots of shouting about going to the Montgomery's place to take care of the problem that is me. Once and for all. I heard it, but Sister pretended not to hear. Monk looked at me listening, concern on his face about what I was hearing, and so I gave a little wave and a smile to him over in the pickup truck to reassure him of my oblivious innocence.
And so there we sat in the Buick in the schoolteacher's yard, quiet and still, until the mob carried forward in the other direction toward the Montgomery's place, their torches lighting their heated, angry faces with my mama, Cora Mae Jones, leading the way. When the center of town was quiet again, we sliced through the thick, hot darkness and humidity with the headlights off until we reached the main road. And it was then that the schoolteacher turned on the headlights, rolled down the windows so we could catch a breeze, and turned on to the interstate, where we followed Monk in his pickup to put hot, angry little Horsefork, Texas in our rear view mirror.
