The Sweet By and By

by Todd Johnson

  That’s all the prayin I feel like I can do right now. If Jacob could fight all night with an angel and still get a blessing, then I think you can handle me speakin my mind for five minutes. I know it don’t bother you, me askin the same questions all the time. Just give me sense enough to see whatever you show me. That’s what I pray. That’s all I pray. And I know I will again so you might as well be ready for me. Until then, bless me however I need it. And everybody else who needs a blessing. I will try to be grateful, I ought to at least be able to do that. Amen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  APRIL

  We live in a country where politicians talk as much about God and sin as preachers do. I have spent my life in church and as far as I can tell there are really only two unforgivable sins. Killing, stealing, lust, greed, gluttony—none of them are on the list. In our pitiful need to absolve each other and be absolved of anything that serves our purposes, those particular wrongs are at best temporary stains, like chocolate on a white blouse. The only exceptions for which we turn our heads, offer no understanding, and willingly excommunicate all offenders are sickness and aging. We can tolerate neither so we do our best to obliterate both. Poverty could also be on that list, although at least money and resources can remedy that. But as Mama always says, “I don’t care who you are, Sick and Old are comin to see you whether you invite em or not.” Being a doctor is a way for me to check myself, to remind myself that my salvation does not lie in miracles or Jesus’ atonement as much as it does in my conscious, active choice to embrace the marginalized and try to love them, which, for me, is nothing short of Sisyphean. When I feel I’ve begun to rise to the challenge, the boulder of new responsibility rolls back over the top of me, dragging me with it, straight down to the bottom of their needs, where I start over again, with, for a time, a redefined if unnamed sense of humility.

  In the fall of my third year of medical school at Chapel Hill, my mother came to spend Thanksgiving Day. She had arranged for weeks to be off work and also that her cousin Melvin check out the insides of her ancient Impala to verify that it was up to the trek. Mama had it all planned, she would drive into Raleigh and have Melvin give the car the once over, she would spend the night there with him and his wife Mary Alice, then she would get up early on Thanksgiving morning and drive to Chapel Hill. The whole drive was less than a couple hours, but when I asked Mama why she didn’t want to come on to my apartment the night before, she said, “April, you know I don’t like a long drive, I need to break it up. Don’t you be studyin me anyway, you put that turkey in at the crack of dawn like I told you and I’ll take care of the rest when I get there.” The authoritative sound of Mama’s voice warmed me, which was comforting, given what I wanted to say to her when she arrived. I had had plenty of opportunities over the last few weeks, but I hadn’t wanted to say it over the phone.

  Mama’s car pulled into the parking lot the next morning before I had finished a cup of coffee, much less showered. My roommates were still asleep, tired from a late night of dancing the night before, kicking off the holiday weekend which would be our last chance to do anything but study until the end of the term. At Mama’s insistence I had invited them to stay for her Thanksgiving dinner, to which, surprisingly, they had agreed. Notwithstanding the fact that students of any kind are usually starving, my roommates were both rich by our standards and also from big northern cities, and I had assumed that the idea of my mama driving up from the North Carolina Sandhills to bring Thanksgiving to her daughter would strike them as provincial beyond words. I was wrong. They were as excited as if they had been invited to the Dean’s house.

  “Anybody here?” Mama had already opened the door without knocking. I didn’t mind. It would never occur to her that she might intrude on anything. She spends her days and nights looking in on people who sometimes couldn’t verbally invite her to come into their rooms if their lives depended on it. She has become a priestess of instinct, a religion all its own and one deserving of the utmost respect.

  “Come in, Mama. Corey and Jasmine are still asleep I think.”

  “That’s all right. Put on some shoes, child, and come on to the car with me. I’ve got a load out there and it’s gon rain or miss a good chance.”

  I started for the door, and Mama evaluated my thin sweater and pajama bottoms. “Girl, you’re gon freeze, but I ain’t gon tell a grown woman what to put on.”

  “Let’s hurry and I’ll be fine.” I physically maneuvered her out the door. Mama’s car was piled with Tupperware, Teflon, aluminum, and every other kind of food container imaginable. “Mama, you brought too much,” I said.

  “Hush and carry these pans inside. The Lord has blessed me with a daughter who’s gon be a doctor, least I can do is make sure y’all don’t go hungry.”

  “We’ll never eat all this.”

  “Hush and go on.” Mama had piled a stack of four pans onto my outstretched arms and I turned to go up the outdoor stairs to the second floor apartment.

  “Keep em level now,” she called behind me. The car door slammed and she followed with a huge picnic basket in one hand and a cardboard box of glass serving bowls balanced on the other arm.

  I had had the good sense to clear the kitchen counter of the coffee pot, toaster, blender, and microwave, which Mama refused to use for anything except making popcorn, because she thought it was the most clever way to do it. We unpacked containers and lifted the covers off pots and pans to make sure everything had survived the treacherous journey from Raleigh. Four glass bowls held field peas, sweet corn, butterbeans, and greens. A large flat rectangular pan contained dressing, which neither my Mama nor anybody she knew would even think of cooking inside the bird, so it was a separate and unrelated dish. Another pan contained sliced honey baked ham, covered in foil, and in another, moist sourdough ready to be patted out into biscuits and put into a hot 500-degree oven for a few minutes, then smothered in butter and molasses, or her homemade fig preserves. Mama said the secret to making biscuits was a hot, hot oven for a short time. There were also two pies, pecan and sweet potato, and a coconut cake, which was her specialty because it was so moist that it sort of rolled around in your mouth without falling apart. You didn’t want to chew and you didn’t want to swallow, you wanted to taste the butter, coconut, cream, and vanilla, until finally they melted away and you were dying to raise your fork for another bite.

  “I was goin to fry a chicken,” she said, “but I don’t like chicken sittin overnight unless you’re gon eat it for a cold snack, then it’s all right.”

  “When did you have time to do all this when you had to work yesterday?”

  “Most of it last night at Melvin and Mary Alice’s, they’re old and they don’t care if I come in and take over their kitchen once in a while. I left them enough to have a Thanksgiving feast today, but they don’t eat nothing much, like little birds, both of em. Do Corey and Jasmine like fried chicken?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t need any more food, Mama.”

  “I don’t eat much fried food anymore either. It’s the one thing I can think of I don’t like about modern medicine, when they told us we couldn’t eat anything fried. A piece of chicken or fish fried right, I mean by somebody who knows what they’re doin, is the best thing you’ve ever put in your mouth, and anybody who says different ain’t tasted what I have.”

  “Good morning, you must be April’s mother.” Jasmine, already showered and dressed, reached out her hand to Mama. I could tell by the way Mama’s eyes widened that she didn’t expect Jasmine to be black. Two black women doctors might be more than her pride could hold. I had purposely not told her so I could witness this moment, my mother’s own experience-formed, hard-understood world changing in front of her eyes. Mama excitedly grabbed Jasmine’s hand with both of hers and pulled her off balance. It was clear she liked her on sight. Mama’s work had given her a keen sense of sizing people up, regardless of what was on the surface. Once when I asked her how she kept her sanity being in that nursing home ever
y day, she said in a serious whisper, “Honey, if all I saw was what’s right on top, they would all look the same to me. All of em old and can’t do nothin, some can’t even talk. No, you got to look harder than that.”

  Jasmine laughed as she regained her footing, and Mama spoke in a low baritone. “I hope we didn’t wake y’all up banging around up in here.” She looked at me in a pretend-mad way like it was my fault.

  “No, no, we were all up late,” Jasmine replied. “You should know how much we’ve been looking forward to today. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Not one thing, child,” Mama answered before I had a chance.

  “Thanks, Jas,” I added. “Just relax. We might go for a walk after we get everything ready to go.”

  Mama jumped in. “Oh it’s ready. All we got to do is heat up some of these here pans and we can eat whenever y’all want to.”

  “I’m gonna wake up Corey.” Jasmine sounded determined. “He’s slept long enough.” She picked up her coffee mug and walked down the hall barefoot. We could hear her knock lightly on Corey’s door.

  “She ought not to wake him up, April. Not on account of me.”

  “She’s not on account of you, Mama. But let’s give them both some privacy ’til they’re up and going. We can take a quick walk to stretch our legs and then come on back and finish putting together dinner.”

  The walk from the med school to what I call the pretty part of campus is far, so I decided to drive, telling Mama I needed to get some milk anyway. “Who’s gon be open on Thanksgiving, April? This ain’t Raleigh.”

  “I know, Mama. All the more reason that there’ll be a store open, students are always running out of something, holiday or not.”

  I parked on Franklin Street near the post office. “Have you been there before?” Mama pointed from her window to the Morehead Planetarium across the street.

  “Not since a field trip in third grade. But I remember it very well. Someone threw up when the galaxy started spinning and they had to turn on all the lights.”

  “I sure would like to go there one time before I die.”

  “First of all, when are you dying, and second, why do you want to go to a planetarium?”

  “Because I would like to look up in that dome and see how they show the universe. I like thinkin about something so big I can’t imagine the end of it. I feel like I’m livin tall when my mind is flyin like that, tryin to find someplace to land. I feel lightened up inside, maybe it’s my heart, I don’t know exactly.”

  Mama could always surprise me, and I stopped short, not getting out of the car, momentarily forgetting my own purpose in taking her away from the others. “I wish we could go right now, Mama, but they’re closed.”

  “Honey, we’ve got Thanksgiving dinner to put on the table, we’re not gon look at stars now.” She opened the door on her side. “Come on, let’s go get your milk or whatever it is you need.”

  “I like having time to talk by ourselves.” I started gently, but she was already getting out of the car. I threw my words like a dart, it was the only way I could get them out. “Mama, I’m pregnant.”

  “Come on and let’s go,” she barked, standing outside. “It’s cold.”

  How could she not have heard? “Listen,” I said, talking across the roof of the car.

  “I heard you, April.” Her voice was flat. “That don’t mean I know what to say.”

  I didn’t know how to engage her. She wasn’t moving, so I moved toward her. “You’re going to meet the father in a few minutes.”

  “On Franklin Street?”

  “At the apartment. Corey.”

  “You told me you didn’t have no boyfriend cause you don’t have time.”

  “I didn’t. I don’t. I’m not going to go into the details, but…”

  “I know the details, I had you, didn’t I?”

  “I didn’t think you’d be mad. I didn’t know what you’d be, and now I feel like an idiot for not knowing you’d be mad.”

  “I ain’t mad.” Mama walked away from me, and I followed not quite beside her, giving her a little space because that’s the clear message I was getting. She was honest when she said she wasn’t mad, but she wanted distance all the same. She talked without looking at me.

  “I can see you sittin at the table in your pajamas, about six years old, starin at your breakfast cause your grandma made you oatmeal, and me knowin you hated the taste of oatmeal, always have. Used to throw it up against the wall and scream your head off when you was a baby. You looked me in the eye that mornin and said, ‘I’m gon be a doctor when I get big.’ I laughed, Lord I laughed. We were barely hanging on. Me with no husband, and my mama takin care of you so I could keep a job. I laughed, I didn’t know what else to do. That mighta been the first time I hurt your feelings, and you no more than a baby.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “It’s a blessing children don’t remember their hurts.”

  “What’s got you thinking about this?”

  “Are you gon give up school to raise your baby?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “I thought you’d say that. I know your heart, April, but I don’t know how you’re gon do a residency, not to mention if you specialize, when that baby’s not even two years old.”

  “I’ll do whatever I need to do, same as you did.”

  “Same as I did.” She made a snorting sound before stopping to look me dead in the face. “I’m gon tell you something and you might hate me for never tellin you ’til now. I can’t do nothing ’bout that. I’m tellin you now, that’s all I know to do.”

  “Are you going to make a confession here in the street?” I laughed awkwardly.

  “As a matter of fact I am,” Mama said, and her hushed tone made me know she was more somber than I had ever seen her. “I’ve asked myself ’bout a thousand times if you need to know this, and right now, I believe it’s more for me than it is for you. But this feels like a day for honesty to me. It’s in the air.”

  I didn’t respond. I was cautious.

  “April…” She stopped herself momentarily and looked at the ground before resuming. “You had a brother. Thomas. Born and died in the same month, two years before you were born.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” I felt strangely angry with her. Not for what she had said, but because I must have decided at some point in my life that my mother was forbidden to have secrets.

  “It’s your turn to be mad,” she said, willing to leave off there.

  “I’m listening to you.” I wanted more.

  “I left Thomas with your daddy one afternoon, your grandma was supposed to come. I wasn’t gone but an hour. When I came back, he was dead in his crib.”

  “Was he sick?”

  “No. I don’t know. I never will. Your father was there. Sittin on the porch asleep.”

  “Drunk,” I snapped, seeing myself at five, hiding under the bed with my hands over my ears. Drunk. I had never used the word to describe my father to my mama. But the anger of years can live on its own, and it reared up, serpentlike and punishing.

  “He probably had some beers, maybe more than that. He usually did. I knew that about your daddy when I married him, only I didn’t know it was stronger than both of us put together.”

  “He killed his own child.”

  “Honey, don’t you know that me hatin your daddy would have been the easiest thing in the world? If I wanted to, I could have stoked that fire enough all this time that it would be burning right now, and burn me up with it. Listen to me. I left my baby in the hands of a person I knew full well couldn’t take care of him. If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine.”

  “That’s not true. You said Grandma was coming.”

  “She was, she did. But I was that baby’s mother. I was the one…” Mama choked on her words.

  We held each other while she cried. For the first time ever, I felt I might be a small comfort to the woman who had spent her life comforting everyone e
lse. There was a long space, space for breath, space to regain footing once we had hit the solid ground of revelation.

  “I can be a mother to my baby, Mama.”

  “Can you?” Mama looked up with bloodred eyes. I didn’t know then that I would hear that question often, inside my head, posed by myself, to myself, whenever the choice for motherhood required me to answer yes, even if I didn’t necessarily feel it. It was Mama’s own constant, never-ending “yes” that forged my life, and my own “yes” would have to be every bit as strong, resilient, and long-suffering.

  “Yes, Mama, yes.” I kissed her, and she touched my cheek, moist with a mixture of her tears and mine.

  She pulled back from me, relieved by a promise that I had hurled into the future with all my strength. “There’s something else,” she said.

  “Now? I think I need a break.”

  “That was about me. This is about you.”

  “You’re going to tell me something I don’t already know?”

  “Do you know where your name come from?”

  “The month I was born in, that’s what Grandma said.”

  “Well that ain’t right. There’s another reason, and the only other person who knows it is Margaret Clayton.”

  “Why?”

  “She was the only one ever asked me, including your Grandma.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “When I was a girl and your Granddaddy was alive and well, I loved to go to his store. All of life was in that store, comings and goings all the time, seemed like it to me anyway. I might as well have been in New York City.”

  “It was torn down before I ever saw it.”

  “Well it was something, and he was proud of it, I tell you that. One day in spring, before Easter, I stopped on the way home, but Daddy wasn’t inside. The boy that helped him said he didn’t know where he was, but he left me a note. When I opened it there was a map inside, not a real map, but one he had drawn with thick crayons, giving me directions. I followed that map all over the yard and finally to the back of the store, and there was a long box lying in a wheelbarrow with my name on it. Daddy jumped out of the storage room and scared me so bad I screamed. He said, ‘Girl, go ahead and open it, can’t you see it’s got your name on it?’ He never could keep a surprise, no tellin how long he was hiding back there waitin for me to find my way with that homemade treasure map. I’ve never been no good at directions.”