Holofernes

[Contains strong language.]

When Michael finds Jude, she is cloaked in red from head to toe. 

Not in clothing—she wears what was pure white negligee, edged in chantilly lace—but in something more visceral. Red cakes nearly her entire body, stopping at an almost clean break at her ankles. There is a smudge on her right foot and on her left, a thin, single line trickling toward the bridge. He focuses on that line, that lonesome, dark red tributary, as he lowers her into the tub. 

The water blossoms into petals of pink. Michael’s hand does not feel like his own as he grabs a washcloth, also white like her negligee, and smoothes it across her face. Dark ruddiness gives way to mahogany. He sees the Jude he knows, the woman with the round, dewy skin and brown, almond eyes that he’s fallen in love with. 

His hand shaking, he sweeps the cloth over the rest of her, dipping his arm shoulder-deep until the water has gone from pale pink to light red. 

No gashes. No bruises. No inkling of a cut or rash around her neck or wrists. 

But she isn’t okay. 

Her whole body trembles. Her hair is wild, stuck in strange, stiff directions as if it had been tugged. Her eyes are half-lid and glazed. She’s undoubtedly shaken, but Robert Frost, her husband, the only person capable of striking this much fear in her, is nowhere to be seen. He thinks of the dining area, the table aglow in the candlelight of what appeared to have been a forgotten dinner.

Michael had arrived knowing Robert would be present, but he hadn’t cared. All concern for subtlety had left him. He had come for one thing and one thing only: to free her. 

Life and war had shown him the fragility of life, how it could be taken quickly with the flick of a trigger or slowly, through means of torture. For years he had lived with this reality, enclosing himself within walls of smoke and ash, bouncing from one side to another until he was a hair’s breadth away from finally hitting the end of his tailspin. He had been walking the streets late in the afternoon, the world around him leaden with dark clouds and torrential rain. This was the day, he had told himself, the day he would expel himself from the universe and allow Janie, his little sister, to live the life she deserved, far, far away from his darkness. Only an act of Jesus would keep him from following through. 

And just his luck, That Fool seemed to have been listening, catapulting Judith Frost into his path with a mighty gust of wind. Their first meeting had not been very good—if the unprovoked slap she gave him was worth noting—but it had blessed him with something he later came to realize as not only the personal will to live but the will to preserve life in others. No more would he witness another die an unkind death, no more would he stand aside and watch the tendrils of life seep from someone he loved.

Michael had begged Jude to leave with him, promising that with Janie in tow and this damned city behind them, they would lead better lives elsewhere. 

But Jude had gone back to Robert, resolute to her life, knowing the sort of siege a white man could wage on a colored woman who thought herself important enough to act against him. He had given her this life, a world outside of Mississippi, situated in a lovely house in a one-of-a-kind suburb in Illinois, filled with priceless China, porcelain, top-of-the-line appliances, the newest fashions, and the latest car to boot. He could just as easily take it, and then some, away. If she wanted to maintain this life, this false dignity, she would have to accept his heavy hand in all the ways it came. Grasped around her neck, across her face, fisted in her hair, in her eyes, or any part of her that seemed fit.

Michael had come to put a stop to it.

He had known it was crazy. If a colored woman didn’t have a chance against a white man then how could he, a colored man, have a fortune any greater? He had known this and came anyway, prepared to whisk Jude away like the damsel she deserved to be.

He had walked into what he could only describe as Korea. There were no screams, flying shrapnel, or popping guns, but there was blood. Enough to turn the tub into a white casing of watered-down hunch punch. 

“Jude, tell me what happened.” His voice trembles as much as his hands. “Jude, tell me.”

She doesn’t speak. She only looks on, her eyes square with the pink tile. 

Michael stumbles to his feet. “Stay here.” He looks for more words and finds none. 

In the hall, there are red, incomplete prints on the carpet. He is just inches outside the kitchen when he realizes they are feet, like Jesus’s footprints in the sand. 

There is food on the stove. Roast, rolls, turnip greens. A cake stand sits on the counter nearby, housing a three-layer caramel cake. It's been cut already. He returns to the dining room for the second time and finds the rest of the cake, divided into two slices, one half eaten and the other nearly gone. Candles in the center of the table have melted down to brass. He snuffs them, calculating. He thinks of her white negligee and knows where to go next. 

The red is worse in this part of the house. A handprint almost runs the length of a wall. Where it stops abruptly a streak of blood on the carpet more than makes up for, moving from the bedroom and into the hallway. The door, speckled in red, is slightly ajar. 

Already his senses are flaring. Korea is roaring in him like sirens. His stomach is rearing.

He pushes open the door. He takes it back: the red is far worse here. It covers the bed, the sheets so soaked he can’t tell where they end and begin. And it covers Robert who lies as still as a country morning. Michael wants to laugh at the comparison. Really, how could he not be as still as a country morning? With his torso on down lying on one part of the bed and his head lying on the other—

He isn’t sure how long he blacks out, but when he comes to, he’s back in the hallway, hunched forward with his head pressed against the wall. 

It’s been a long time since this has happened, fading out in one place and then coming to somewhere else. This time, he manages not to lose his dinner. He remembers the lessons he’s learned from his little sister and breathes slowly, willing the churning contents of his stomach back to safer levels. 

The sound of sloshing waters perks him to attention. He staggers back to the bathroom. Water pools around the tub. Parts of Jude seem to have returned. She’s dipped her head under the water. Her hair hangs around her shoulders in a dark, drenched curtain. She looks up at him as he steps over the threshold.

“You killed him,” he says. 

Nothing on her face changes. “I did.” 

He doesn’t feel sorry for the bastard. Not one bit. The fleck of empathy he tries to find is missing, and then becomes nonexistent when he remembers the black and purple encircling her eye the first time they met. 

Who he does feel sorry for is her. How can he whisk her away now? A decapitated white man with a missing colored wife would set news stations across the United States on fire. Whites would be too busy hunting Jude down to give a damn about the likes of Ralph David Abernathy or Martin Luther King, Jr. It makes Michael ill just thinking about it, and yet the wheels in his head are already turning, fighting to identify their next move.

“You gotta get out of here,” she says. 

His face twists in disbelief. He crouches to his knees and takes her hand. “I ain’t going anywhere.” 

“You’ve been treading water long enough. I won’t let you drown on account of me.” 

“What if I wanna drown?”

“I won’t let you.”

Michael knows who to call. Nancy, the daughter of one of the best lawyers in Illinois, and now a well-accomplished lawyer all her own. Calling her a friend felt like a misnomer, but as children, they had been attached to the hip, the little boy of the help forming an unlikely friendship with the flaxen-haired daughter of the house. The Websters had been a benevolent bunch, granting his mother extra wages, and offering shelter and protection upon her untimely death. 

Unprecedented circumstances of the love kind had sent his relationship with Nancy and her family to a screeching halt, but he knows she is Jude’s only hope. He also knows it's a long shot, but he has to at least try.

He is about to explain the whole thing to Jude until she says, “I called the police.”

His heart drops. “Why?”

“I knew you would come.” She smiles softly, sadly. “Didn’t I tell you? That I won’t let you drown on account of me?”

“We could have gotten away from all this, from him. Jude—”

Her voice is low and slow. “And he’d only hurt someone else. I wasn’t gonna let that happen, not if I could help it.” 

“You playin’ God in a godless country is only gonna get you killed, Jude.” Everything is blurry. The tears slipping down his cheeks itch, but he doesn’t wipe them away. He never wants to let go of her hand. “Jude, why? Why?”

She squeezes his hand. “Go. Go before they come. Throw out your shoes. Burn your clothes. Don’t let them know you were here. Please.” 

His head is spinning. She’s grabbing at his hands, clenching his arms, trying to will him away. It takes him a moment, but he scrambles to his feet, slipping on the tile as he retreats. 

Michael is a mile out from her house, his shoes and socks in the trunk, when he sees a squad of police cars racing by. He grips the steering wheel but keeps his eyes fixed on the road ahead. 

At home, he discards his clothes in the sink, scrubs himself raw, and in a fresh shirt and pair of slacks, he travels outside of the city and into the country, leaving physical evidence of the day’s events in scattered, ashen fragments across miles and miles of woods. 

He had it in his mind to listen, but as he’s sitting at home, digging his nails into the arm of the couch, avoiding the radio and television, he defies her. The last remaining rungs of the sun pour across the countertop as he scours the contents of the kitchen. 

By the time Michael finds it, the house is dark. Without a second thought, he walks out the door and toward Jude’s only hope: Nancy Webster.