“Thank you,” she said in some sort of island accent and wiped the toothpaste away with a wet washcloth. Daffy’s mouth had closed but her eyes were wide and looking at me like I had lost my mind. Viola was a bit older than we were and she just wasn’t part of our clique, but I wanted to find out about her. It’s an urge some people have that makes you want to know, need to know about other people.
So Viola, Daffy and I signed out of the dorm and walked to chapel on that brilliantly sunny Sunday morning. Lucille didn’t come, claiming she had a toothache, but she was just being lazy and sleeping in, Sunday being the only day you could do that.
Now prison churches never have a problem with attendance like some free-world churches do, and I believe I have never been so close to God as when I was locked up. For one thing you just don’t have the same distractions, and you are not under any illusion that you have the slightest bit of control over anything in your life. So when we sang, “And He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am his own,” I could really believe it.
We had a beautiful chapel at our prison: pews made of a glossy light-colored pine and a high A-shaped ceiling, paneled in wood. The floor was carpeted in bright red and the stage area had a simple podium and a place for flowers. This was one of the reasons I loved to go to church because for a few hours every week I didn’t feel like I was in prison. Just like when we had the classes with Lolly. It was a form of escape.
That day the preacher was talking about how God is looking for the fruits of the Spirit not the nuts. Of course some of those nasty-minded women took it the wrong way and were giggling. Okay, I will admit that often as not I used to sit and daydream about Antwan during that preacher’s boring-ass sermons (Jesus, forgive me). And I always went back in my head to this one scene: Late at night Antwan and me walking along the beach, me wearing a sarong and him with his shirt off and pair of rolled up white trousers. I had a big old banana daiquiri in my hand, and he was carrying a bottle of Red Stripe and a blanket. Finally we found a deserted spot and neither of us could keep our hands off each other any longer. Well, I don’t have to go into the details. Just picture the most ecstatic moonlight sex possible. When we came in unison, the whole earth trembled and probably caused a tidal wave out on some remote island in the Atlantic that no longer exists thanks to our moment of passion.
Viola was still there, next to me on a pew in the chapel. I could tell during the service that she was steady praying. I mean she was praying fierce, hands clenched together and head bowed, lips moving. Daffy glanced at me, and I had to hit her to keep from laughing at that wide-eyed expression of hers.
After church Viola sort of latched on to us. She came with us to the cafeteria, and so Daffy and I didn’t sit with our usual cronies, which I was glad about because there was this one stud who had the worst kind of crush on me. She wasn’t the only one after a piece of me, but she was damn sure the most persistent. Now I’m open-minded and all, but I just didn’t have all that much time left, and I wasn’t about to squander my chance at going to work release in the fall because some wanna-be-a-man type of girl thinks she’s in love with me. If I were to get tangled up in something like that it would be just for kicks, and kicks aren’t worth it—not when you can see freedom waving its hands at you, wanting you to come out and play in the free world.
So the three of us sat at a table down at the end of the hall. My curiosity was getting the best of me. I finally broached the subject and asked, “Viola, is something bothering you? I noticed you were having trouble sleeping the other night.”
Viola took a dainty bite of the canned spaghetti we were having for lunch that day and put down her fork before turning to me and saying, “I am being haunted.”
Daffy, with a mouth full of food, nearly spit it all over the table. She swallowed and said, “Oh my god.”
“By who?” I asked.
“By my dead husband, Raymond Carpenter.”
I was plenty creeped out by this. I have always sort of believed in ghosts since I was a child and my Granny Hazel swore up and down she ran one out of her house when she lived down near Lake Okeechobee. She said the ghost was a woman who was a victim of the 1928 hurricane that broke the dikes and took all the water out of the lake and dumped it on top of the people, killing more than 2,000 people. She knew she had a ghost because she’d find wet foot prints on the floor and wet spots on her furniture and water would overflow the sinks for no reason at all. When I asked her how she got rid of it, she said she did her own exorcism with a cross and a Bible and a stick of burning sage.
“What do he do?” Daffy asked.
“Does he do?” I corrected.
“Shut up, Miss College,” Daffy said.
“He touches me and I get real cold,” Viola said. “He whispers to me at night and won’t let me sleep. He takes my things and hides them.”
“Is he here right now?” I asked quietly.
Viola paused as if listening for something. All I could hear was the noise of six hundred woman all running their mouths at the same damn time. Viola shook her head.
“How did Raymond die?” Daffy asked.
Viola took another bite. She looked so prim and proper, even had a paper napkin in her lap. She sighed and said, “I shot him to death.”
Daffy and I sat back like a couple of Siamese twins.
“Why?” I asked.
Viola’s shoulders sort of slumped forward, and she looked like she was bearing a fifty pound weight on her back.
“Have you ever loved someone so much that he was your whole life, he was your reason for breathing, for eating and for waking up in the morning? Have you ever loved a man so much that if he asked you to, you would lay down on a set of railroad tracks, not getting up even when you could feel the tracks shaking and the whistle blowing?”
“Hell, no,” Daffy said, dropping her little tin cup of kool-aid on the tray.
But I unfortunately knew what she meant. And now I understood what drew me to her.
“Yes,” I said. “I think I have.”
“He shamed me,” Viola said. “He gambled all the time. And he lost all the time. One night he gave me, his wife, to another man to pay off his debt. I did it. I thought I was saving his life.”
She breathed heavily and looked down at her hands.
“That other man treated me like a dog, girls. I . . . I can’t even tell you the things he and his thugs did to me.”
I felt a real sick feeling in my gut then because my imagination had no trouble conjuring up various scenarios.
“But I thought that Raymond would come back and get me,” she said, leaning forward, suddenly urgent. “I waited, and I waited. But he never came. He just went out and got himself another girl. My brother Junebug finally found me and got me away from that man. I was locked in this little room without a stitch of clothing. My brother had tricked them into letting him in to see me. When he came in, I just fell to the ground in relief and shame. I was so ashamed for my own brother to see me like that. Junebug is a big fellow, and he carries a big gun. A .44 magnum. He pulled out that gun and told those other men, he would kill them if they came near me. Then he made one of the men take off his shirt and give it to me. Then my brother took me out of there and got me home. He wanted to go back and kill them, but I begged him not to. I didn’t want him to wind up in a place like this.”
I breathed a sigh of relief myself and fell nearly in love with Junebug.
Viola continued, “It took me about three or four months to get my sanity back, and even then I still couldn’t hardly sleep at night. Finally, I woke up early one Saturday morning and I knew what I had to do. It was perfectly clear. I snuck into Junebug’s room and I took that .44 magnum out of his dresser drawer. I took a bus over to where Raymond’s new girlfriend lived in a little duplex down on the eastside