Kingdom of Heaven (The Ravenstock Ascension)

 

 Kingdom of Heaven (The Ravenstock Ascension)
By Allison Schnobrich

Preface with a little Spoiler Alert:  I was introduced to Tennesee Williams’ play Kingdom Of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle) after listening to a spicy audio version of an adaptation read by Tom Hiddleston in the Criterion Theater’s Stories Before Bedtime: Twisted Tales of Love, recorded on February 10, 2010.  Hiddlestoners were drawn it because, well, it was Tom Hiddleston and it was spicy. But in all honesty, I found the story itself more fascinating than the spicy parts.  I got a copy of the actual play from my local library and discovered it was very different than the Stories Before Bedtime version.  I kept going over in my mind how the two stories should fit together.  And a few details from the story out of both versions kept coming back to me…Chicken’s spiritual struggle, the fact that despite the animosity between them, Chicken and Myrtle end up together and the impending birth of a child from their union.  Given these three variables, I couldn’t help but think that if you were to visit the Ravenstock family several years down the road, their outlook on life would be quite different from the way it was at the end of the plays as they were written.  This is the story I felt I needed to tell.

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Hello, Honey! ‘llow me to introduce myself.  My name is Myrtle Ravenstock.  I got a story to tell ya’ about my life. It ain’t exactly a pretty fairytale like my momma used to tell me when I was a little girl.  But all in all, I gotta say, I ended up with a pretty sqare deal outta life, as my husband always says.  

 

 It says in the Good Book that the Lord’s gonna make up for the years the locusts have eaten.  Now I don’t know much about locusts, but I know from all the years I been livin’ here in the Delta what damage and devastation a flood can bring. So much damage that you feel like you ain’t never gonna recover.  Bit by bit, you do, but it’s a darn hard struggle to come back from it all.  An’ yet, my husband says that them floods is what makes the soil so good ‘round these parts, which comes in real handy when you’re farmin’ sugar cane.  The Word says in the book of Joel that God will make up for all them bad years and then some.  Well, I seen how He took the mess I made of my own life and turned it into somethin’ real wonderful. That’s for sure.

 I was born and raised in Biloxi. I come from a good family.  We was poor folks, but good folks, and my daddy expected us to have good morals. My folks brought me up right and they didn’t take kindly to no sort of rebellion, neither.   That didn’t bode well for me as a young girl of 15, ‘specially after that business with Charlie Porter, my boss at the dry goods store.  Seemed he took a shine to me, even though he was about 25 years older’n I was.  Bein’ just a girl, I was swept off my feet.  Now that I am a full grown woman, I can see that what happened wasn’t love at all. All that touchin’ he done wasn’t flirting.  It was harassment.  And that late Saturday afternoon when I tried to talk to him about it and he just helped himself to my cherry there on that rollertop desk, that wasn’t desire. That was rape.  I was just too young and naïve to know the difference.  I thought I was in love with him.  But by the time he got tired of me, I had already sullied my family name with all the carryin’ on we done around town.  My folks weren’t havin’ none of it and I had nowhere to go.  I was too proud to stick around after bein’ rejected like that anyway, so I just up and left town.

I hopped around from place to place for awhile.  I went to Pensacola, New Orleans and Memphis, and all over the South. I done what I had to do to survive. I worked in show business for a bit. I was the Headless Woman in a carnival show and I was part of the Four Hot Shots from Mobile. I was the one known as the Petite Personality Kid.  I also won a TV show contest.  I was crowned the “Take Life Easy Queen”, by tellin’ my hard life story, kinda like I’m doin’ for ya’ now. 

I guess that’s how I met Lot.  He come up to me after the show and asked for my autograph.  Nobody ever asked me for my autograph before. We spent all our time together after that.  He was the most refined man I’d ever met, and Honey, I met a lot of men in my day.  He was so young and pretty and I was kinda surprised he showed any interest in me at all, what with me bein’ about 10 years older’n him.  He just seemed so lonely when he come up to me an’ he made me feel so special and needed.  He made me want to take care of him like a momma.  For a while there, he wanted to spend every night with me, but we never really done much more’n talk.  He talked a lot about this place he had and how he needed a good woman to live there with him and run the place…a woman to be his wife.  I was taken aback a bit at first, but truth be told, the thing a girl like me dreams of most is just to belong to someone, to be cherished by someone.  In all my experiences so far with men, I’ve just been a throw-away girl. Just a cheap piece of tail n’ worse, I’ve heard said by one who ought not to have said it at all, in hindsight. I always knew I was more than that, but after awhile, a girl begins to believe she ain’t much neither, when that’s the way she’s always been treated by the opposite sex.  So when Lot came to me with all these white picket fence fantasies, why, I bought into ‘em, hook, line and sinker.  I even called the TV show to tell ‘em about our fairy tale story and don’t you know, they gave us a real tv weddin’.  I became Mrs. Lot Ravenstock right there on the air.  It was real quality entertainment!

We came back here to this place for our “honeymoon”.  That’s when my eyes really began to be open. I shoulda known then that throw away girls like me don’t get to have no white picket fence dreams like I grew up with.  There was a whole lotta things that Lot never bothered to tell me about. 

The first thing he never bothered to tell me about was his crazy brother that lived here to work the land as a hired man.   This Chicken was in no way a gentleman!  He acted like he was disgusted with me, even though we’d just met.  But there was somethin’ about the big bad wolf way he kept glaring at me that told me he had somethin’ else on his mind.   He was kinda like a wolf, too…big, dark and scary, but also so very stunnin’ and exotic to look at, with his big powerful body, his raven hair, his ice blue eyes and his milk n’ coffee complexion,

 The second thing Lot forgot to tell me about was that he never really was all that big on the whole white picket fence thing like he lead me to believe.  He married me and made it sound like we’d live happily ever after.  But once we got here, things got stranger and more messed up than I ever could have imagined things could get.  He kept on talkin’ bout his dead momma like she was queen of the world.  She sounded like a hoity-toity witch, if you asked me, but I wasn’t about to go trashin’ no one’s dead momma to they face.

Another thing, we was on our honeymoon, but he didn’t even want to touch me.  Yet he wanted to give that brother of his the impression that we was celebrating our union every chance we got.  He kept on sayin’, “Come on, my dear, you’re a television actress. Let’s give my brother something to think about.”  But it was all playactin’.  Now I played along because he didn’t seem to be feelin’ too well, but it seemed real important to him to have his brother think things was amazing between us in the bedroom.  And I wanted it to be that way, too.  We was newlyweds, so I really wanted it to be more than a just play. I really wanted it to be as good with me and my new husband as we was playin’ it was.  But I seemed to be the only one thinkin’ that. 

The fact we really was only playin’ was the third thing that Lot forgot to mention.  I guess I just wanted to be loved and belong and escape from the hand to mouth way I’d been livin’ for so long that I didn’t even think to question why he’d want to marry me so quickly.  It turned out that he really did want something from me, but not what you’d expect a newly married man to want from his bride.  What he wanted from me was for me to distract that crazy brother a his with liquor and my womanly ways and find the written will they’d made between each other that would give Chicken the land when the fourth thing Lot forgot to mention finally happened.

I found out about that fourth thing during one of my conversations with Chicken later that night when Lot had took sick.  I called out to Chicken for help, but he never bothered to come.  No small wonder. Chicken didn’t seem to care about much.  I wanted to call the doctor, but Lot refused to let me.  Later in the kitchen, I called Chicken out for his lack of concern for his sickly brother.  He told me straight out what Lot forgot to mention. My new husband had TB and he’d be dyin’ right soon. 

It became clear to me then that ol’ Myrtle had been used again.  Lot kept on talkin’ bout how he and his momma hated Chicken, on accounta him  bein’ a wood’s colt, as they say.  His momma had, in fact, thrown Chicken out right away after they father had died.  Chicken went away to work in the mills in Meridian, but there was a lot of work to be done there on the land. Once his momma died, Lot could hardly take care of it all by himself in his condition.  That’s how it come to be that Chicken had come back home to work the land under the agreement that he would own the land once Lot died.   Seems that as Lot got sicker, he could hardly stand the thought of Chicken endin’ up with the place on accounta how his momma would feel about it if she were still alive, him bein’ a wood’s colt and all, and one with a bit of colored blood in him on top of that.  

  

I guess that’s where I come into the picture.  If I could get that document from Chicken, he’d have no claim to the land; none that any court in these parts would believe anyway.  And I’d get a place to be out of the deal. But this ain’t at all the way I dreamed things should go.  I really didn’t want to be in charge of anyone’s land all on my own.  I never saw myself as a farmer or a businesswoman.  I had enough on my plate just tryin’ to survive from day to day. 

Then there was this business of the floods. This ol’ beat down house sits on the bank of the Mississippi. Chicken kept on sayin’ that a bad flood was comin’ but Lot kept on ignoring him. I just didn’t know what to think. My very life could have been in danger and my new husband didn’t seem in the least bit concerned, not even ‘bout the fact that I cain’t swim or that I’m terrified of water.  I heard that Chicken got his name because when the floods come, he goes and sits up on the roof with the chickens till the waters go down. That’s kinda crazy if ya’ ask me.  It seems to me like it would make more sense to just leave.  But he said he wanted to stick around to protect the place, such as it was.

 Now I can just tell what you’re thinkin’, “Myrtle, why didn’tcha just pack up and have nothin’ to do with this mess?”  And to tell you the truth, I don’t rightly know myself.  I guess I was partly real confused by it all.  And partly, I just didn’t know where to go next.  I was just real tired of tryin’ to figure it all out for myself.  Them flood waters comin’ had me so out of my mind with fear I could hardly think straight.  And I must confess, right or wrong, there was somethin’  real exciting about the thought of usin’ my womanly ways towards Chicken, regardless of what the reason was. I was on my honeymoon, for goodness sake! At least someone was lookin’ at me with hungry eyes. It wasn’t my own husband, that’s for sure.  A woman like me likes a little appreciation once in a while…’specially on her honeymoon.

 So that last time I went into the kitchen, the night Chicken told me about Lot, I just laid my cards on the table.  Not all of ‘em, mind you.  I sure didn’t tell him about Lot’s plot against him or my part in it, which was to get him so drunk he passed out and lift that paper offa him….a plan I’d later learn had no chance in hell of actually workin’. That Chicken can really hold his liquor. I told him all about myself…where I’d come from and stuff like that.  I don’t really know why. He just made me so nervous in a way that was good and bad at the same time.  He just kept looking at me with those icy eyes of his, like he was looking right through me, or through my clothes anyway.  Next thing I knew, without even givin’ it any thought, I was tellin’ him how the first time I’d laid eyes on him, I said to myself, “Uh-oh! Your goose is cooked, Myrtle.” Where did that even come from? A Southern lady with a proper upbringin’ just don’t say that sort of thing!

He just set his mug of whiskey on the kitchen table and leaned back in his chair. “Well,” he sorta growled, “when somebody’s goose is cooked, the best way to have it cooked is with plenty of gravy.” And with that, he got up, scooped up the lamp and strolled out of the kitchen and up the stairs, leavin’ me in the dark, on account of the storm havin’ cut the electricity in the house. I was terrified settin’ there in the dark with that flood comin’ in at any time.  Also, I was transfixed. I couldn’t do nothin’ but follow him up the stairs.

I kinda hesitated when I passed the bedroom I was to share with my husband.  But there wasn’t much good that was gonna come of all of that anyway.  And those flood waters was comin’!  It was all so confusing.  Do I stay with my dyin’ husband, and possibly follow with him in death as I drown in the comin’ flood waters?  Nothin’ doin’! I didn’t know what to expect upstairs with Chicken, but I decided my odds was better up there with him than with Lot. And those flood waters was comin’! So I went on up the stairs.

And I had my honeymoon that night.  Oh, did I ever! Just not with my husband.  And by mornin’ time, I was a widow.

I kinda felt bad for my former husband, but not real bad.  After all, he didn’t exactly cherish or warrant all this love and affection I’d had for him.  Plus, the picture seemed to have changed a bit for ol’ Myrtle.  Seems to me a man ought to be strong and maybe a little hard.  My former husband had been none of these things.  A woman needs to feel like she is safe and protected under her man.  Now, maybe in this day and age, that notion is a bit old fashioned.  But lookin’ back, I could see that I had picked a man who, refined as he was, had looked to everyone else to take care of him. But a woman wants a man to take care of her…especially when the flood waters is comin’ and she cain’t swim!  And protection is exactly what Chicken was putting out on the table for me. 

Now as I listen to myself tell this part of the story, it all sounds a bit shallow.  But I am lookin’ at things as they are now, never mind what happened to make ‘em come about.  After all, in the Good Book, Lot’s wife looked back, and a whole lotta good it done her.  She ended up becomin’ a pillar of salt.  I ain’t makin’ the same mistake.  I’ve always been one to press on forward.

I don’t remember a whole lot about that night, outta of my mind with fear as I was.  It wasn’t long after we realized that Lot had died when Chicken come back in the house from checkin’ on the levee.  “UP! QUICK!”  he shouted. And up to the roof we went! 

I tried really hard to remain calm up there on that roof, but it wasn’t easy.  Chicken had told me earlier that he knew of two ways to stop a woman’s hysterics, to slap her or to lay her.  As I said in the beginning, Chicken wasn’t ever much of a gentleman.  Let’s just say we relied more on the second way up there on that roof.  It seemed to help.  That, and the sound of his deep and powerful voice in my ear seemed to bring about in me a calm feelin’ that caused me to not even hear that river ragin’ around the house durin’ our time on the roof. 

I remember at one point, just after he “calmed me” that he lit the lantern and said, “Let there be light.  That’s what they said God said on the first day of creation.”  It’s quite possible those words of his was prophecy, because it wasn’t too many weeks later that I turned up pregnant.  When I told him, he said, “Well, I suppose we ought to get hitched up then.”  And soon after that, I became Mrs. Ravenstock for the second time. 

 I was so sure he’d be angry when I told him, but he seemed strangely pleased.  He told me he’d always wanted a child from an all white woman.  Okay, well, that ain’t the most romantic thing I’d ever heard, not by a long shot.  But then again, I ain’t really lookin’ back except to say that this was the early sixties in Mississippi and he was a man with a bit of colored blood in him. And now he was my beautiful man.  Truth is, I ain’t never had any trouble falling in love with almost any man.  Anyway, up till now, he’d been treated horribly by everyone in this community.  But we had somethin’ we could give each other.  I made it okay for him to be who he was in this place and he gave me my white picket fence dream.  And we found in each other someone who was just as lonely and as hot blooded as we ourselves were.   Neither of us was the other’s dream come true, but we needed each other. We knew we could be a lot happier together than we’d been apart.  But our biggest happiness was to come with the birth of our little Lottie.

Chicken said he wanted a son. But the Good Lord saw fit to give us a girl instead.  I think it was to show him ‘bout love. He once told me that he didn’t hate nobody and he didn’t love nobody either.  He cain’t say that no more, because when she was born that radiant mid-August mornin’, he fell in love for the first time in his life.  Most babies is born all red, wrinkly and squinty.  Not our Lottie! She looked like the babies you see on tv commercials.  She wasn’t red, wrinkly or squinty at all! She was tan and smooth and she had her beautiful blue eyes wide open, just checkin’ out her new world…and her new Daddy.  His deep powerful voice seemed to calm her too, as she faced this scary new world that sends most newborn babies into a screamin’ panic.  They just seemed to drown in each other’s eyes, Lottie and Chicken.  And I watched my hard Chicken’s heart melt right before my very eyes that day. 

Sometimes it ain’t nothing but love to lead you back to Love.  Sometimes you gotta know what it is to love a child to understand what God goes through as He sets about loving us.   A child helps you see that powerful sort of love that makes you ready to lay down your life and not give a second thought about it.  Chicken and I would do anything to give Lottie the best sort of life we possibly can.  I expect that helped to show us the way God feels about us as His children.  Was He okay with the fact I slept with my brother in law before my husband was even dead? No – I know He wasn’t!  But like I said in the beginnin’ – sometimes He takes them locusts, the messes we make of our lives and turns them into something’ really beautiful.  You’d do the same for your girl, if you was God! You know you would!

 

And I can see it in Chicken’s eyes – in who he’s become over these last seven years – that he knows it ‘bout God too.  ‘Cause his eyes never had that shine to ‘em before Lottie was born.  Like I said, he fell in love for the first time in his life.  And for the first time in his life, he had flesh and blood that loved him back with a pure love, purified of any of the evil notions this cruel world uses to stop love from flowin’ like it should…things like whether you was got in marriage or whether or not your blood was all white.  Such evil notions deprive a child of the love he needs to become a vital and lovin’ man when he grows up, and it ain’t fair!  

Now I could be sad that my husband’s first love was his daughter and not me, his wife.  But I ain’t gonna begrudge my girl her daddy’s love. Aint a better gift a girl can have in all this world than a daddy that loves her with all his heart! I know I sure could have used it! My own daddy loved me, but only when I was a good girl. And I wasn’t all that good of a girl, to tell you the truth.  

  

My Chicken is so different from the seemingly crazy man I met that first day when Lot brought me home.  That’s not to say that he wouldn’t protect this family with all the fierceness of a crazed alpha wolf if the need arose.  But when I first met him, there was no love in him at all. Now he loves me okay, I guess. But I know that the apple of his eye is that girl of ours.  You can just see it in the way his face lights up when she walks into the room.  And he knows where his blessings come from, ‘cause now he is so fond of telling me that God is good - all the time! 

Lottie is his little shadow…his little stick-tight.  She follows him all around the farm.  Every chance she gets, she is at his side.  She loves to pester him about his name.  It’s been kind of a sore spot with him because folks have called him crazy for waitin’ out the flood waters up on that roof with the chickens.  He’s a bit of a legend around these parts.  People were especially scandalized by the fact that he was known, when necessary, to grab a chicken by the neck, break it and drink its blood, if that was what he needed to do to survive up there as he waited for the waters to go down.  Fortunately it never came to that the time I was up there waitin’ with him.  Anyway, he aint’ told her nothin’ about how he got his name. She kept on asking him, “Daddy, why they call you Chicken?”  He just ignored her at first, but she just kept on askin’, wearin’ him down.  He loves her with every bit of himself, so he ain’t about to tell her to back off or shut up, like he might say to me.  A few weeks ago, I heard him tell her with a twinkle in his eye, “I’ll tell you on your seventh birthday.”

And that day finally came! Our Lottie, our little sandy haired, blue eyed, olive skinned imp of a girl turns seven.  The day started out like any other day. After breakfast, I done the wash and took it out to hang it on the line.  I do my best thinkin’ and rememberin’ when I hang the wash.  There’s just somethin’ about hanging up all that laundry, once dirty but now made clean, out to dry in the sunlight that does a soul good deep down inside.  

He was just goin’ on about his business, pretendin’ they wasn’t anything special about the day. I heard her ask the question she asked him every day, “Daddy, why they call you Chicken?”  He just smiled and winked at her and walked away.  And a little bit like I done seven and three quarter years ago, she couldn’t do nothin’ but follow him. 

He took the ladder from the shed and leaned it up against the house.  He gestured to the ladder as if to say, “After you, Mademoiselle!”   Now the momma part of me wanted to stop them. A seven year old girl just ain’t got no business climbing a ladder up to the roof of the house!  But I pretended not to notice.  Somethin’ special was about to happen and I didn’t want to wreck it with momma fluster.  He’d never do anything to put her in harm’s way anyway.

Next thing I see is the two of them settin’ up on the roof of the house.  He was whispering something into her ear and I seen the two of them smiling with their matching radiant blue smiles.  It was a smile I never seen in him before she hit the scene.  Only time I ever saw that man smile before she was born was a wicked smile that never really meant anything good. Okay, well sometimes it meant somethin’ good in a wicked sort of way, but a Southern lady with a proper upbringin’ just don’t talk about such things. Anyway, this was a completely different sort of smile…a smile on both of they faces that spoke a’ heaven on earth.  She was listening to what he was tellin’ her like he was tellin’ her all the secrets of life.  Suddenly they both begin to crow like a pair of roosters at sun up, and they laughed so hard, I feared that they’d both fall off the roof.   Then he reached around and pulled out the picnic basket from behind the chimney. He served his girl a birthday picnic on the roof of our house – just Chicken and his girl having chicken salad sandwiches on the roof of our little farmhouse.  Yep! It was just a father-daughter, rooftop birthday picnic of chicken salad sandwiches, but to look at how happy they was, you’d a thought they was having a whole Thanksgiving turkey dinner...served up with plenty of gravy!

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