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by Toni Morrison

  “Say hello to my wife, Arlene, and this is our little man, Thomas.”

  Frank thought Arlene pretty enough for the stage. Her pompadour crowned a high, smooth forehead over fierce brown eyes.

  “You all want supper?” Arlene asked.

  “No,” Billy said. “We ate already.”

  “Good.” Arlene was getting ready for her night shift at the metal factory. She kissed Thomas on the top of his head as he sat at the kitchen table reading a book.

  Billy and Frank leaned over the coffee table, rearranging its doodads for space to play tonk, talk, and nurse beer.

  “What work you do?” asked Frank.

  “Steel,” said Billy. “But we on strike now, so I join the line at the agency and take any daywork I can get.”

  Earlier, when Billy introduced his son to Frank, the boy had lifted his left arm to shake hands. Frank noticed the right one sagging at his side. Now, shuffling the deck, he asked what happened to his son’s arm. Billy arranged his hands in rifle position. “Drive-by cop,” he said. “He had a cap pistol. Eight years old, running up and down the sidewalk pointing it. Some redneck rookie thought his dick was underappreciated by his brother cops.”

  “You can’t just shoot a kid,” said Frank.

  “Cops shoot anything they want. This here’s a mob city. Arlene went a little crazy in the emergency room. They threw her out twice. But it turned out all right in the end. The bad arm kept him off the streets and in the classroom. He’s a math whiz. Wins competitions all over. Scholarships pouring in.”

  “So the boy cop did him a favor.”

  “No. No, no, no. Jesus stepped in and did that. He said, ‘Hold on there, Mr. Police Guy. Don’t hurt the least of mine. He who harms the least of mine disturbs the tranquillity of my mind.’ ”

  Beautiful, thought Frank. Bible stuff works every time every place—except the fire zone. “Jesus. Jesus!” That’s what Mike said. Stuff yelled it too. “Jesus, God Almighty, I’m fucked, Frank, Jesus, help me.”

  The math whiz had no objection to sleeping on the sofa and letting his father’s new friend have his bed. Frank approached him in the boy’s bedroom, saying, “Thanks, buddy.”

  “My name is Thomas,” said the boy.

  “Oh, okay, Thomas. I hear you good at math.”

  “I’m good at everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Civics, geography, English …” His voice trailed off as though he could have cited many more subjects he was good at.

  “You’ll go far, son.”

  “And I’ll go deep.”

  Frank laughed at the impudence of the eleven-year-old. “What sport you play?” he asked, thinking maybe the boy needed a little humility. But Thomas gave him a look so cold Frank was embarrassed. “I mean …”

  “I know what you mean,” he said and, as a counterpoint or afterthought, he looked Frank up and down and said, “You shouldn’t drink.”

  “Got that right.”

  A short silence followed while Thomas placed a folded blanket on top of a pillow, tucking both under his dead arm. At the bedroom door he turned to Frank. “Were you in the war?”

  “I was.”

  “Did you kill anybody?”

  “Had to.”

  “How did it feel?”

  “Bad. Real bad.”

  “That’s good. That it made you feel bad. I’m glad.”

  “How come?”

  “It means you’re not a liar.”

  “You are deep, Thomas.” Frank smiled. “What you want to be when you grow up?”

  Thomas turned the knob with his left hand and opened the door. “A man,” he said and left.

  SETTLING DOWN INTO darkness shaped by the moonlit edges of the window shades, Frank hoped this fragile sobriety, maintained so far without Lily, would not subject him to those same dreams. But the mare always showed up at night, never beating her hooves in daylight. The taste of Scotch on the train, two beers hours later—he’d had no problem limiting himself. Sleep came fairly soon, with only one image of fingered feet—or was it toe-tipped hands? But after a few hours of dreamlessness, he woke to the sound of a click like the squeeze of a trigger from a gun minus ammo. Frank sat up. Nothing stirred. Then he saw the outline of the small man, the one from the train, his wide-brimmed hat unmistakable in the frame of light at the window. Frank reached for the bedside lamp. Its glow revealed the same little man in the pale blue zoot suit.

  “Hey! Who the hell are you? What you want?” Frank rose from the bed and moved toward the figure. After three steps the zoot-suited man disappeared.

  Frank went back to bed, thinking that particular living dream was not all that bad compared to others he’d had. No dogs or birds eating the remains of his comrades, like the hallucination he’d had once while sitting on a bench in the city park’s rose garden. This one was comic, in a way. He had heard about those suits, but never saw anybody wearing one. If they were the signals of manhood, he would have preferred a loincloth and some white paint artfully smeared on forehead and cheeks. Holding a spear, of course. But the zoot-suiters chose another costume: wide shoulders, wide-brimmed hats, watch chains, pants ballooned up from narrow cuffs beyond the waist to the chest. It had been enough of a fashion statement to interest riot cops on each coast.

  Damn! He didn’t want some new dream ghost for company. Unless it was a sign trying to tell him something. Was it about his sister? The letter said, “She be dead.” Meaning she’s alive but sick, very sick, and obviously there was no one to help her. If the letter writer, Sarah, couldn’t help nor her boss either, well, she must be withering away far from home. Parents dead, one of lung disease, another of a stroke. Strike the grandparents, Salem and Lenore. Neither one was capable of travel, assuming they’d even be interested. Maybe that was the reason no Russian-made bullet had blown his head off while everybody else he was close to died over there. Maybe his life had been preserved for Cee, which was only fair since she had been his original caring-for, a selflessness without gain or emotional profit. Even before she could walk he’d taken care of her. The first word she spoke was “Fwank.” Two of her baby teeth were hidden in the kitchen matchbox along with his lucky marbles and the broken watch they had found on the riverbank. Cee suffered no bruise or cut he had not tended. The only thing he could not do for her was wipe the sorrow, or was it panic, from her eyes when he enlisted. He tried to tell her the army was the only solution. Lotus was suffocating, killing him and his two best friends. They all agreed. Frank assured himself Cee would be okay.

  She wasn’t.

  ARLENE WAS STILL asleep, so Billy cooked breakfast for the three of them.

  “What time is her shift over?”

  Billy poured pancake batter into a hot frying pan. “She is on the eleven to seven. She’ll be up soon, but I won’t see her until evening.”

  “How come?” Frank was curious. The rules and accommodations normal families made were a fascination that did not rise to the level of envy.

  “After I walk Thomas to school, I’ll be late in line at the agency because you and me going shopping. By that time all the best day jobs will be taken already. I’ll see what leavings I can get. But shopping first. You look like …”

  “Don’t say it.”

  He didn’t have to. And the woman at the Goodwill store didn’t either. She led them to a table of folded clothes and nodded toward a rack of hanging coats and jackets. Choosing was quick. Every item was clean, pressed and organized for size. Even the body odor of the previous owner was mild. The store had a dressing room where a bum or a respectable family man could change clothes and toss the worn ones in a bin. Suitably dressed, Frank felt proud enough to take his medal from his army pants and pin it to his breast pocket.

  “Okay,” said Billy. “Now for some grown man’s shoes. Thom McAn or do you want Florsheim?”

  “Neither. I ain’t going to a dance. Work shoes.”

  “Got it. You got enough money?”

  “Yep.” />
  The police would have thought so too, but during the random search outside the shoe store they just patted pockets, not the inside of work boots. Of the two other men facing the wall, one had his switchblade confiscated, the other a dollar bill. All four lay their hands on the hood of the patrol car parked at the curb. The younger officer noticed Frank’s medal.

  “Korea?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hey, Dick. They’re vets.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Look.” The officer pointed to Frank’s service medal.

  “Go on. Get lost, pal.”

  The police incident was not worth comment so Frank and Billy walked off in silence. Then they stopped at a street vendor’s tray to buy a wallet.

  “You wearing a suit now. You can’t be reaching in your shoe like a kid every time you want a pack of gum.” Billy punched Frank’s arm.

  “How much?” Billy examined the wallets on display.

  “A quarter.”

  “What? A loaf of bread ain’t but fifteen cents.”

  “So?” The vendor stared at his customer. “Wallets last longer. You in or you out?”

  Following the purchase Billy accompanied Frank all the way to Booker’s diner, where they leaned against the plate glass, shook hands, promised to visit each other, and parted.

  Frank had coffee and flirted with the counter waitress from Macon until it was time to board the southbound rails that would take him to Georgia and Cee and who knew what else.

  THREE

  Mama was pregnant when we walked out of Bandera County, Texas. Three or maybe four families had trucks or cars and loaded all they could. But remember, nobody could load their land, their crops, their stock. Is somebody going to feed the hogs or let them go wild? What about that patch behind the shed? It needs tilling in case it rains. Most families, like mine, walked for miles until Mr. Gardener came back for a few more of us after dropping his own people at the state line. We had to leave our wheelbarrow full of stuff in order to pile into his car, trading goods for speed. Mama cried, but the baby she carried was more important than kettles, canning jars, and bedding. She contented herself with a basket of clothes held on her knees. Pap carried a few tools in a sack and the reins of Stella, our horse that we would never see again. After Mr. Gardener took us as far as he could we walked some more. The sole of my shoe flapped until Pap tied it up with his own shoelace. Twice, draymen let us ride in their wagon bed. Talk about tired. Talk about hungry. I have eaten trash in jail, Korea, hospitals, at table, and from certain garbage cans. Nothing, however, compares to the leftovers at food pantries. Write about that, why don’t you? I remember standing in line at Church of the Redeemer waiting for a tin plate of dry, hard cheese already showing green, pickled pigs’ feet—its vinegar soaking stale biscuits.

  It was there that Mama heard the woman ahead of her explain to the volunteer how to spell and pronounce her name. Mama said it was the sweetest thing and the sound of the name was like music amid the argue and heat of the crowd. Weeks later, when her baby, delivered on a mattress in Reverend Bailey’s church basement, turned out to be a girl, mama named her Ycidra, taking care to pronounce all three syllables. Of course, she waited the nine days before naming, lest death notice fresh life and eat it. Everybody but Mama calls her “Cee.” I always thought it was nice, how she thought about the name, treasured it. As for me, no such memories. I am named Frank after my father’s brother. Luther is my father’s name, Ida my mother’s. The crazy part is our last name. Money. Of which we had none.

  You don’t know what heat is until you cross the border from Texas to Louisiana in the summer. You can’t come up with words that catch it.

  Trees give up. Turtles cook in their shells. Describe that if you know how.

  FOUR

  A mean grandmother is one of the worst things a girl could have. Mamas are supposed to spank and rule you so you grow up knowing right from wrong. Grandmothers, even when they’ve been hard on their own children, are forgiving and generous to the grandchildren. Ain’t that so?

  Cee stood up in the zinc tub and took a few dripping steps to the sink. She filled a bucket from the faucet, poured it into the warming tub water, and sat back down in it. She wanted to linger in cool water while a softly suffering afternoon light encouraged her thoughts to tumble. Regrets, excuses, righteousness, false memory, and future plans mixed together or stood like soldiers in line. Well, that’s the way grandmothers should be, she thought, but for little Ycidra Money it wasn’t like that at all. Because Mama and Pap worked from before sunrise until dark, they never knew that Miss Lenore poured water instead of milk over the shredded wheat Cee and her brother ate for breakfast. Nor that when they had stripes and welts on their legs they were cautioned to lie, to say they got them by playing out by the stream where brambles and huckleberry thorns grew. Even their grandfather Salem was silent. Frank said it was because he was scared Miss Lenore would leave him the way his first two wives did. Lenore, who had collected a five-hundred-dollar life-insurance payment upon her first husband’s death, was a serious catch for an old, unemployable man. Besides, she had a Ford and owned her house. She was so valuable to Salem Money he never made a sound when the salt pork was halved for the two of them and all the children got was its flavor. Well, yes, the grandparents were doing them a big favor letting some homeless relatives live in their house after the family got run out of Texas. Lenore took it as a very bad sign for Cee’s future that she was born on the road. Decent women, she said, delivered babies at home, in a bed attended to by good Christian women who knew what to do. Although only street women, prostitutes, went to hospitals when they got pregnant, at least they had a roof overhead when their baby came. Being born in the street—or the gutter, as she usually put it—was prelude to a sinful, worthless life.

  Lenore’s house was big enough for two, maybe three, but not for grandparents plus Pap, Mama, Uncle Frank and two children—one a howling baby. Over the years, the discomfort of the crowded house increased, and Lenore, who believed herself superior to everybody else in Lotus, chose to focus her resentment on the little girl born “in the street.” A frown creased her every glance when the girl entered, her lips turned down at every drop of a spoon, trip on the door saddle, a loosening braid. Most of all was the murmur of “gutter child” as she walked away from a failing that was always on display from her step-granddaughter. During those years Cee slept with her parents on the floor, on a thin pallet hardly better than the pine slats underneath. Uncle Frank used two chairs put together; young Frank slept on the back porch, on the slanty wooden swing, even when it rained. Her parents, Luther and Ida, worked two jobs each—Ida picking cotton or working other crops in the day and sweeping lumber shacks in the evening; Luther and Uncle Frank were field-workers for two planters in nearby Jeffrey and very happy to have the jobs other men had abandoned. Most of the young ones had enlisted in the war and when it was over didn’t come back to work cotton, peanuts, or lumber. Then Uncle Frank enlisted too. He got in the navy as a cook and was glad about that because he didn’t have to handle explosives. But his ship sank anyway and Miss Lenore hung the gold star in the window as though she, and not one of Salem’s ex-wives, was the honorable, patriotic mother who had lost a son. Ida’s job at the lumberyard gave her a lethal asthma but it paid off because at the end of those three years with Lenore they were able to rent a place from Old Man Shepherd, who drove in from Jeffrey every Saturday morning to collect the rent.

  Cee remembered the relief and the pride they all took in having their own garden and their own laying hens. The Moneys had enough of it to feel at home in this place where neighbors could finally offer friendship instead of pity. Everybody in the neighborhood, except Lenore, was stern but quickly open-handed. If someone had an abundance of peppers or collards, they insisted Ida take them. There was okra, fish fresh from the creek, a bushel of corn, all kinds of food that should not go to waste. One woman sent her husband over to shore up their slanted porch steps.
They were generous to strangers. An outsider passing through was welcomed—even, or especially, if he was running from the law. Like that man, bloody and scared, the one they washed up, fed and led away on a mule. It was nice having their own house where they could let Mr. Haywood put them on his monthly list of people who needed supplies from the general store in Jeffrey. Sometimes he would bring back comic books, bubblegum and peppermint balls free, for the children. Jeffrey had sidewalks, running water, stores, a post office, a bank and a school. Lotus was separate, with no sidewalks or indoor plumbing, just fifty or so houses and two churches, one of which churchwomen used for teaching reading and arithmetic. Cee thought it would have been better if there were more books to read—not just Aesop’s Fables and a book of Bible passages for young people—and much much better if she had been permitted to attend the school in Jeffrey.

  That, she believed, was the reason she ran off with a rat. If she hadn’t been so ignorant living in a no-count, not-even-a-town place with only chores, church-school, and nothing else to do, she would have known better. Watched, watched, watched by every grown-up from sunrise to sunset and ordered about by not only Lenore but every adult in town. Come here, girl, didn’t nobody teach you how to sew? Yes, ma’am. Then why is your hem hanging like that? Yes, ma’am. I mean no, ma’am. Is that lipstick on your mouth? No, ma’am. What then? Cherries, ma’am, I mean blackberries. I ate some. Cherries, my foot. Wipe your mouth. Come down from that tree, you hear me? Tie your shoes put down that rag doll and pick up a broom uncross your legs go weed that garden stand up straight don’t you talk back to me. When Cee and a few other girls reached fourteen and started talking about boys, she was prevented from any real flirtation because of her big brother, Frank. The boys knew she was off-limits because of him. That’s why when Frank and his two best friends enlisted and left town, she fell for what Lenore called the first thing she saw wearing belted trousers instead of overalls.