Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins (read any book .TXT) 📕

the choir roared a rendition of “Total Praise.” With each octave they reached, his wavering body needed another person to lay hands on his arms to steady him. He buried his face in his hands and unleashed a cry that cut deep beneath the chorus and repeat of the bridge. When he lifted his head, he looked behind him out of embarrassment and choked back another cry upon seeing the Melancon women taking their place behind him. If he were not a man of God and the law, he could have strangled every last one of them. He briefly wondered if he could at least slap the breath out of Maman and still bargain his way into heaven.

“How dare you,” he said. The evangelists and deacons tried to restrain Officer Evans as he lunged forward at the Melancon women. “You have the audacity to take the pew behind me like you’re family? Like you’re friends?” He raised his voice and his circle of supporters gently shushed him and pulled back his shoulders to thwart his advancing lunge.

“We came to give our respects,” Josephine answered.

“What respect? To the dead? You can’t respect what you do not know. And y’all don’t know nothing ’bout no death. You’re—you’re a bunch of witches! Witchcraft—that’s what you do!”

“We’re not witches, Officer Evans. We loved Sister Evans, and we as members of the community wanted to do right by her.”

“You aren’t members of this here community. Y’all are all for yourselves, and you lie to me to my face in God’s house, of all places. You no good and you ain’t honest.”

“Your wife’s all right now.” Iris lifted her face and removed her sunglasses to regard Officer Evans the only way she knew how. “She’s all right now. But she’s unhappy with you.”

“Now—now—now you cut that out.” One of the deacons wagged a trembling finger at her. “Cut that out right now. That ain’t of God.”

“She won’t leave me alone, Officer. No, no, no. Yes. No. Well, I can’t ask him that. Not here. He’s not ready, Sister Evans.”

“What’s she saying?” the same deacon asked but shrank when Officer Evans and the other deacons glared at her.

“She knows about the caul. She found it in your office drawer, and she wanted me to”—Iris cracked her neck and cleared her throat—“she wanted me to tell you that she had been waiting for years—five years—for you to give it to her. Though the caul wasn’t going to work. You took too long and rendered it ineffective anyway. But she didn’t know that. She just wanted to know why. She wasn’t going to steal from you, but you never gave it to her. She gave up fighting, Officer. She was only forty-four. You were only forty-five. You both had many years left together. She wants to know, ‘Why did you let me go?’”

Officer Evans leaned over the pew and slapped Iris in the face. He wrapped his hands around her neck and shook her like a chicken. The deacons tried to pull him off, but their strength was no match for the weight of grief and his physical rotundness. Iris’s eyes rolled into the back of her head then toward the ceiling, where she could see Sister Evans take flight around the sanctuary. She no longer had a hump in her back or uneasiness in her gait. Iris allowed him to get all his frustration out and fell on the ground. To avoid drawing attention to what was happening, the evangelist threw a long white cloth on her and yelled a couple of Yes, Gods for Iris appearing to be slain in the spirit. But then Iris crawled onto her hands and knees and used the edges of the pew to support her getting to her feet. When she finally stood up, people could see that the marks from Officer Evans’s hands around her throat had disappeared.

The funeral attendees left saying they saw the marks vanish with their own eyes. Others would say the lighting was bad in certain parts of the church and they couldn’t see a thing. Many would not speak of what they had and had not seen. But what filled everyone’s spirit when the benediction was given was an entrenched contempt for the Melancon family—and this spite extinguished the incense of Christian worship and Christlike friendliness well beyond the walls of the church.

This contempt was subtle at first, as most grudges tend to be. Passersby on their block would slow their pace as they approached their gate and cease all conversation. They would extend their necks in hopes that the brownstone interiors would be accessible by eavesdropping. Some would be vocal in their belief that the Melancon women were possessed by some demonic spirit. Eggs were thrown at the street-facing windows, and dead birds were left on their stoop. There were two additional expenses that Maman had to account for: a vestibule, in case someone was strong enough to break down the doors, and more advanced home security.

On an otherwise uneventful afternoon, Josephine placed several layers over her body, adorned her head with a hat, and put on large sunglasses to prepare for a walk around the corner to visit their bodega. As soon as she exchanged greetings with the cashier and deli counter employees, the workers trailed Josephine with their eyes as she made her way down the aisles. She grabbed ahold of a bag of oatmeal cookies, blinked, and found that she’d misread the label. They were macadamia. When she raised her eyes to the row of processed snacks, the corners of her vision became blurry, and multicolored circles were floating everywhere. She was stressed and anxious; her skin constricted and her breathing became shallow. Unbeknownst to everyone else, from the moment Josephine hit Iris, she didn’t trust herself, and though she hadn’t had an outburst since, this visit was what she thought she needed to get out of her own head.

“Well, look who it is.” A voice addressed her.

Josephine spun around to