She’ll Do

High Shoals, NC 1922

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A – Exodus 14:19-31

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and turned the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. – Exodus 14:21-22

Since I was seven, I had walked
the same three-quarter mile,
loom room to porch, porch to church,
counting my body among the mill’s machines —
useful, plain, expected to run until it didn’t.

Thirty-two years old, and they had a word for women like me.
Spinster. Old maid.
As if a woman nobody has chosen
has failed some test of thread,
come off the spindle wrong.

Mamie was in Charlotte that week —
Mamie, five years younger, a head taller,
who could read a whole page without her lips moving,
who studied Scripture with me some evenings
because I loved to hear it, and could not read it for myself.

I was not who the car came for.

I heard it before I saw it —
gravel giving way under something heavier
than anything that came up our road on a Sunday.
Mama went to the door; I stayed out of the light.

Is Miss Mamie home?

I knew that voice. Everyone in three counties did —
Thomas Robinson, cotton money,
three wives buried, six children waiting,
a house that needed somebody
standing in the kitchen of it.

No, Mama said. She’s in Charlotte, visiting.

A silence long enough to walk through.

Miss Lillie’s here.

I want to tell you I trembled in that doorway,
waiting to see if the water would hold or wouldn’t.
Some of that is true.
Mostly I just walked in
the way you walk into any room you didn’t ask to be called to.

He looked at me the way a merchant looks
at cotton he did not order
but that has, nonetheless, arrived.

She’ll do.

Two words.
Not my name in his mouth yet, not a word
about the thirty or more psalms I could say start to finish
in the dark, though I never learned to read a line of them.
Just: She’ll do.

Fifty years now, I have turned that sentence over
the way you’d run a length of thread between two fingers,
feeling for the place it means to break.

Old Leah knew this trade, I would think years later —
chosen because you are standing there,
not because anyone came looking for you.

He took me to see water falling from a height
High Shoals had no word for.
Niagara, he called it, as if the name alone
could make a marriage out of an afternoon.
I had never gone thirty miles from home.
Now the whole sky seemed to be pouring.

Whatever that Sunday was, it was not love, not yet.
But I stayed, and learned him
the way you learn a psalm — not memorized,
but said so many times it turns true.

Fourteen years, and then his chair, his heart, was still.
Almost forty since, I have gone on calling him my sweet Tom.