by Kim McCoy
Dad, who has been looking at Aunt, turns his eyes down toward his knees.
“Ahem,” Counselor said. “Why don’t you tell her how much you love her?”
“She’s a fool alright. But I think she’s smart enough to know that already. Will you do the right thing and accept Jesus Christ as your Savior?”
Impressive. One of her better performances, for sure. I never said that I was an atheist. But Aunt might be onto something. If atheists don’t go to hell, sign me up. Or maybe they do go to hell because they have the gall to think they’re not going.
“No.”
Aunt finally jumps out of Uncle’s lap and heads into the kitchen. Probably for some Scotch.
Looks like Dad will have the last word. He stands up. No one else has stood up to talk to me. It takes me by surprise.
“How’s it going?” I say.
“Not too bad,” he says.
“Where did you end up?”
“That’s a long story involving an even longer bus ride. Ba dump dump. Seriously, I’m just wandering, wandering, wandering. One day, I jogged up and down the Himalayas ten times. Another day, I walked 400 laps around the Mall of America. I stood on one leg on Stonehenge for a whole week. I don’t tire out these days. I don’t know what is. It sucks. I’m not going to lie.
But I’ve met them both. God and the Devil. Neither one of them seem to want me. I didn’t do right by them, they say. But I went along, minding my own business, I said. Not impressed, they said. It’s the darndest thing. I didn’t know that could happen. I’m frustrated. I’m thinking about starting my own thing, a club or something for beings like me. Maybe I’ll start a religious movement and people will aspire to get to where I am. I don’t know. I haven’t worked the whole thing out.”
Mom pats Dad’s hand this time. I wonder if it’s cold or if it feels like air. Poor Dad. Everybody’s looking at me. I sit there, waiting for him to ask the question that everybody else has asked. I count to 10 in my head. He doesn’t say anything else.
“What did you do wrong, Dad? Not enough Hail Mary’s? Too much booze?”
“Choices. It all comes down to choices.”
Aunt nods her head. Counselor leans forward in his chair. Grandma nods off.
“They think I’ve made the wrong choices. I don’t think I’m so bad,” I say.
“So maybe you don’t have anything to worry about, then,” he says.
I don’t know what to believe. Maybe their god will strike me down. Maybe mine won’t. Maybe we’ve got the same god. Maybe we don’t.
Hey, heart, don’t stop ticking. Hey, brain, don’t clonk out. Hey, lungs, keep pumping. I can’t die now.
The House at the End
of the Weeping Willows
It seemed too pretty to rain. But a light drizzle managed to speckle the boys’ faces despite the sunny sky. The old folks said the devil beat his wife on days like that.
Johnny adjusted his father’s old necktie, which fell against the front of his overalls, and ran several yards ahead of Walter. He liked to look serious at all times. It’s not where you come from, it’s where you’re going, his father always said. He stopped when he came across a large crack in the sidewalk that would serve as a pitching mound. He aimed the ball toward Walter, who scrutinized it with the same intensity that he imagined Hank Aaron would give a curve ball.
But this ball was wild. It traveled completely off course as if it had a plan for where it was going. The boys watched it veer south into the yard of a large plantation home before it dropped out of sight.
They ran toward each other, meeting in front of the path that led to the front door.
“Did you feel a wind?” Walter said.
Johnny didn’t answer right away. He was still getting used to Walter’s new look. He had taken to wearing all black including a black beret and combat boots.
“No. Did you?” Johnny said.
“No. See, I told you,” Walter said. “You can’t throw worth nothing.”
“Man, please.”
“We need to find that ball or I’ll be in trouble.”
Walter’s mother had just bought him that ball yesterday for the completion of another successful school year. His mother had run into Mrs. Adelaide Williams at the bus stop the previous day, and she had called Walter “the smartest boy” in her fifth-grade class. But Walter had no choice in the matter. If he earned an A, his father said nothing. If he earned an A-, he was drilled about why he hadn’t studied harder. He wanted that ball back because it reminded him of his successes, not his so-called failures.
“I don’t know if we should go in that yard,” Johnny said. “We might get in trouble.”
“Oh, so you scared? I got to do everything myself.”
“I’m just saying. Maybe you ought to think something through for once.”
Since Walter started dressing in black, he’d become more confident and feistier. On the last day of school, he broke up a fight between two older boys even though he was two heads shorter than one, and three heads shorter than the other.
Johnny let Walter walk ahead while he analyzed the situation. Someone could come yelling at them to get off their property. They might even have a gun or a knife. Or they might not. They might welcome them inside to enjoy a bottle of Coca-Cola. Johnny decided he might as well follow Walter in. If they came face to face with some madman, Johnny figured he’d be better at doing the reasoning than Walter.
A breeze circled the boys, gently nudging them toward the house. The boys walked down a straw-covered path lined with so many weeping willows that Walter, a whiz at math, lost count. The trees did such a good job blocking the sun that it started to look like evening instead of mid-day. As Johnny studied their shaggy branches, he thought he heard the faint hum of a sad song.
He nearly fell backward when he neared the front porch and came eye to eye with the smallest man he’d ever seen. Much darker than Johnny, he wore a red jacket and red cap that matched the color of his bubble lips. White pants hugged his muscular frame. He didn’t say anything, and remained perfectly still as he grinned at the boys.
Johnny realized that an army of little men in matching outfits stood in the lawn along the front porch. Some clutched lanterns, some just looked old and weathered. Johnny swore silently to the Lord, something he never did, that from the corner of his eye he had seen one move just slightly. He was half-expecting the rest of them to march forward, but convinced himself that wouldn’t be possible.
Walter’s laugh tore into the silence.
“Man, don’t pay them any attention,” he said. “You know they ain’t real.”
“But I never seen so many jockeys in one place.”
It didn’t make sense to Johnny. He never understood why white people wanted little frozen black figures in their yard. Johnny was sure someone crazy lived beyond those walls, and he said a quick prayer for the person. He had learned you were supposed to pray for your neighbors, not just yourself and he took it seriously.
“You know white people. They don’t have anything else to do with their money.”
Walter didn’t like how the place made him feel. It reminded him of the time he was alone in the house with his grandmother’s bell collection. One day when the entire family was over at Walter’s house, his grandmother had sent him to her home to retrieve a batch of cornbread she had left on the counter. Not long after Walter entered the house, all the bells started ringing loud enough to be heard throughout the neighborhood. Walter didn’t even make it into the kitchen. He ran out the house without the cornbread and was accused of eating it all when he returned to his home empty-handed. Since that day, he’s refused to go to his grandmother’s house alone.
The boys were surprised they had never seen this house because it was so big. But it was too far from the street. Its white walls sprung from the green grass like a fancy tombstone
. Johnny thought its large columns were surely whittled by someone big—maybe John Henry or God Himself. And the door, the mighty mouth, was wide enough to swallow Walter’s modest home and everyone in it.
Johnny spotted the ball square on the front porch, and was pleased that he noticed it before Walter.
“Got it!” he said, raising it above his head as if it were a trophy.
“Well, alright,” Walter said scanning the little men. “No use sticking around here.”
The boys turned and ran, each wondering who had been watching.
That night on the news, white people dumped canisters of sugar on the heads of black people and even some white people who sat together at a counter at Woolworth’s. Johnny figured that that much sugar in your hair would make your head itch, and he was impressed that they didn’t move. Turning the other cheek just like Jesus.
The boys were restless already. School had been out for the summer for just two days. And they couldn’t help but return to the big house even though it made them nervous. Walter thought going to the house was like riding the Ferris wheel at the fair on the one day Negroes were allowed to go. You had to take advantage of the ride when you could, no matter how scary it was. The house seemed to just appear one day, it could just as easily be gone the next. Walter mustered strength from deep within his body and threw the ball down the path.
“We better go after that ball,” Johnny said.
Johnny wasn’t sure if he wanted to know more about the house, or if the house wanted to know more about him. He sensed he was meant to be there to solve whatever mysteries lay inside it.
“You know it,” Walter agreed.
This time they rushed down the path, ignoring the weeping willows. The little men were waiting, as if they knew they would have visitors again.
Walter pointed at one of them.
“That ain’t what I think it is.”
Johnny looked at a little man who had clutched a lantern yesterday. Today he held Walter’s baseball. Johnny gritted his teeth. He didn’t know what to make of this place. It needed a blessing like a newborn baby or an adult going through trials and tribulations. Walter was starting to believe that someone was playing tricks on them and he didn’t think it was funny.
“Well, we’re here,” Johnny said. “Get your stupid ball.”
Walter stared at the little man, and then circled around him to try and peep into a window. Heavy curtains blocked his view.
“What are you doing? The police are going to come out here and spray us with a hose,” Johnny said.
Secretly, Johnny wouldn’t have minded that. He hoped to one day be on the news, taking a stand. Making everyone listen.
“No, they put dogs on you. Then they spray you with the hose. Everybody knows that.”
Walter stepped off the porch and looked at the little man who held his baseball. Johnny started tapping his foot, torn between running and staying.
“We have to be brave,” Walter said. “Some lawn jockeys ain’t nothing to be worried about. We shall overcome, man.”
He adjusted his beret and looked around, chin high, as if he dared someone to approach him and his friend. Walter looked at the massive black door, painted to match the shutters on the house’s many windows. The black and white seemed ordinary enough. There was no reason to make a fuss.
At the door’s crown was a stained glass window shaped like a shell. Walter wasn’t used to seeing stained glass anywhere except church. He scrutinized it almost as closely as Johnny did.
“It says something,” he said.
Johnny looked at the window, and turned his head right then left. He squinted his eyes, as he had seen the adults do when trying to make out something far away. Johnny pointed at each clear, black letter that popped against rich reds, blues and purples.
“K…K…K,” he whispered.
The boys looked at each other, tapping into the other’s soul. It wasn’t possible. They couldn’t have been standing on the porch of a Klan house. They were too young to hang from the weeping willows. Too innocent to be cursed and hated.
They wanted to scream. They wanted to run. But they did neither. A snap, like a breaking twig, came from somewhere behind them. Johnny didn’t say anything, but later he swore one more time to Jesus that one of the little grinning men had inched a bit closer.
The boys did what they never thought two boys should do. They clasped each other by the hand and ran from the yard, faster than they’d ever run before. And they heard it. The weeping willows singing a sad aria. Their ears popped and their hearts jumped. When they reached the sidewalk, they didn’t stop running. Johnny recited The Lord’s Prayer, and Walter was grateful for the distraction.
That night on the news, a big crowd marched down the street holding hands. Then they were sprayed with water. Walter imagined being knocked over by the cold water, and feeling it clog up his nose, making him worry that he would drown. He blew the water out of his nose, stood up, and kept marching.
Johnny spent the night with Walter. Sometimes he preferred Walter’s place to his own because Walter was one of the few people he knew with no siblings. Johnny, on the other hand, had four younger sisters that annoyed him more than anything in life.
They lay on top of sheets on the back porch, their usual overnight routine, so they could have their privacy.
“We have to go back,” Johnny said.
Walter was surprised that this announcement was coming from scaredy cat Johnny. He would have preferred to be the one to say it.
“We should try to negotiate with them,” Johnny said. “Or organize a peaceful protest.”
“There’s no negotiating with the Klan. We have to use force,” Walter said.
“You don’t know that. We’ve never tried talking with them.”
Walter could see the TV glowing from inside the living room.
“We need a plan of attack,” Walter said.
“I say we just walk right in the yard like we been doing, grab your ball, and leave,” Johnny said.
“But that’s not teaching the Klan a lesson. We have to make our mark,” Walter said.
“What do you mean?” Johnny said.
“We got to show them they don’t have any business doing what they’re doing.”
Walter imagined himself and Johnny dressed in all black, right fists raised, left hands wrapped around rifles.
“You must want to get us killed.”
“I just want to show them who’s who around here.”
The boys drifted to sleep where they were heroes of war. Fighting for their neighborhood.
The next morning they quickly ate the grits, eggs and bacon served by Walter’s mother. She didn’t ask them where they were going. “Try not to come home until the street lights go on” was all she said.
It wasn’t long before they were standing on the familiar sidewalk leading to the now familiar straw-covered path.
“So what now?” Johnny said.
“We get that ball, and that’s it.”
The two looked at each other, wondering if they should hold hands, but they decided against it.
They walked fast, past the weeping willows that were loud and chaotic like an untuned piano. The boys started to think the trees were capable of anything. If they had started speaking or walking across the lawn, the boys wouldn’t have been surprised. Johnny tried to block out the noise by covering his ears with his hands and humming to himself. Walter’s heart thumped like it was trying to dart out of his chest, but his eyes moved from tree to tree so that he wouldn’t miss anything.
The little men, all except for one, were in place. The one that had held Walter’s baseball peered out the front window still clutching the ball.
“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…” Johnny said.
“Time for revolution,” Walter said.
Johnny thought about leaving but he knew it wouldn’t look right. It seemed like he and Walter had been through a lot together in the last two days. And there were the people on TV, the ones holding the signs as they marched down the streets. He knew they wouldn’t leave. Johnny stared at his friend, worried about their fate.
“We haven’t even seen anyone here before,” Johnny whispered. “I guess it’ll be alright. Let’s just go in real quiet, take the ball, and go.”
Walter took a deep breath and placed his hand on the knob and turned. When the door opened he got the feeling it’d be the last time he’d ever enter a house. Johnny looked behind him down the path of weeping willows. As much as he wanted to make a run for it, he followed his friend inside.
The door opened into a formal sitting room with an ordinary green sofa, matching chair and dark coffee table. Heavy drapes hung from the windows. To the right, stood the little man with Walter’s ball. Now that they were in the house, Johnny wanted to be the first to grab it. He wanted the glory of saying he rescued a precious item from the clutches of the Klan. But Walter grabbed Johnny’s elbow and raised a finger to his lips.
He heard voices in the room through the next door. Johnny yanked his elbow from Walter and turned toward the front door. Walter grabbed him and shook his head. Walter didn’t know what was driving him to stay. He looked at the little man who had been peering out the window when they arrived. He was now staring in the other direction, toward the voices. Walter started a slow march, careful not to make any noise. Johnny followed, reciting The Lord’s Prayer.
Walter opened the next door as if he lived there and performed this action all the time. And there they were. Five white-robed men in white pointy hoods in a tidy kitchen. They all turned their heads when the door opened. They sat around a small, round table--a bottle of beer in front of each man.
Walter and Johnny couldn’t move. They thought they’d been hypnotized by the Klansmen. The one with the reddest face reached into his robe, and pulled out a pistol that he laid on the table and stroked.
“Look here,” he said. “More lawn jockeys.”