Fletcher considered these thoughts in silence, his sliding sack the only noise between us for several minutes.
“Mr. Kern likes you,” he said. “Why?”
“He tolerates my care,” I said. “But he likes no one.”
“Especially not me,” Fletcher acknowledged. “He saw me the other day for the first time and was so sick he couldn’t stand upright. And when I tried to help him, he yelled and shooed me away like I was a dog or worse. But somehow it was like he didn’t even see me, and his hands could never reach me so he just stood there swinging as if he had seen a ghost, and so I left him just the way he was.”
“He’s a man who’s spent his entire life out here amongst the fields,” I said. “He’s entitled to a few gripes every now and then. Would you say?”
“But he loves Floyd and you and Mama too, but not me.”
“His heart is heavy and bears a weight neither you or I can understand,” I said. “Old age comes with many prices, and we all have to pay for the sins of our youth. You can live your whole life as a wolf, I swear, but one day you’ll be a sheep, I promise you.”
“So, you don’t hate it here?” he asked.
“No,” I replied. “But my time here isn’t forever, and neither is yours. It’s all but a season, my dear, and then we move on. You see, Fletcher, while Floyd and I are of the same spirit, we’re still different people and as such he’ll likely stay, although I won’t, at least not forever. Same can be said of you. You’ll do your time, learn what this place has to offer, and use that knowledge and strength when the time comes for you to move on. But you’ll never forget what you’ve been taught. Remember, only children sulk in their condition and don’t see the promise that lies ahead, and it’s only because they know no better.”
“But I can’t go back to school,” he said.
“And you won’t need to,” I promised. “You’re stronger now and smarter and that comes from your circumstance. No amount of education can teach you to be a man.”
It was with this conversation that I knew Fletcher’s life would not be as easy as I’d once imagined when he was a child, watching him run amongst the cotton in those days, as if that crop were not the poisonous slayer of his dreams, as if it did not wait for him so patiently as he grew to lure him back so deceitfully into its trust with those white blossoms that appeared so harmless before. How in those days he drew closer to the stalks with childlike curiosity and discerned no more danger in their charm than he would a rose, so delicately meek, failing to notice the thorny bristles that now left his fingers scarred and rough from picking. I now knew he would struggle and suffer like everyone else, a pain I never wished for him, merely because he was so special and kind and giving and sweet—yet none of that mattered, as it would not spare him from the harms of this world. He could be as bright and talented as I’d imagined all those years before and possess that spirit that invited people into his arms without reservation, yet he was still a negro and, as such, would face the same challenges we all bore. And indeed, his road would be tougher, for it was always that way for wayward souls, those gifted ones amongst us, as we saw it, those ones with a mark upon their lives placed there by God’s hands alone.
“Some men were just made to work,” I later told him. “And some were not.”
CHAPTER 22
“The stages of life are simple,” someone once told me in a place I can’t quite remember. “It’s just the in-between that mucks it up.”
True words, if ever I’d heard them spoken a day in my life, words that I attributed to Fletcher and his youth.
The young man was alone now, his thoughts kept mostly to himself, those weighty concerns worked out amongst the fields in silence while he pounded the rusty hoe. Maybe Jesse still blamed himself for Fletcher’s return and the boy’s loss of his former life, but either way Jesse had grown increasingly distant during those years, and indeed that time after his marriage to Elise, no longer laughing and wrestling with Fletcher as they’d done in those shaded areas out by the backhouse. They didn’t talk or tease one another, finding their time on the plantation a beckon for work only. Still, Floyd and Jesse remained close, similar spirits of similar ambitions, in agreement that a decent life for themselves and their families was all they could ever hope for and that hard work made it so. But Fletcher wanted more than a life on that plantation—he’d made that clear to me. He desired more than the toils it demanded and that routine cycle ingrained in our bones.
Miss Lula had her good days and bad days too. For that bit of pleasure she gained in Fletcher’s constant anguish, which he never showed and she never looked too far to see, she also lived with its downfalls, for her spirit grew weaker each time she spotted him there and saw young Elizabeth in his eyes. Fletcher’s presence had indeed brought about nightmares for the Missus and her screams could be heard throughout the house at night when the silence was a sea and we all adrift in it. Her mind was some days with her and some days not. She would be spotted out by the peat soil and soft-stemmed marsh, only to be led back by Floyd or myself and placed in her room like a child who’d been put down for a nap.
“I remember it all seemed like a game,” she once told me before that illness took over and maddened thoughts became all she ever saw. “All us parents and friends and family sitting in that waiting area together as one by one they’d call our names, and we’d walk into that side room where the doctors were waiting. Each family jumped up when their names were called as if they had won something—some type of prize, you know—and I’ll tell you, I did the same thing when they called ours. Elizabeth was in that corner room by herself, but they didn’t take us to her. No, you had to go to that side room first. I swear I could tell you every crack and every smudge, every misaligned tile on that discolored floor. It was so dirty, like they never mopped the thing a day in its life. Elizabeth had started to breathe in that labored manner and that mask was constantly slipping from her nose. She was too small for all this, and I wondered how her body even knew how to fight so hard. But, Bernie, she tried, I can say that. I knew what that side room meant. It meant we had to make a decision about whether she lived or died. George made the call. They said we could sit with her, and we did until the end. I let her know her mama was there, but I swear, when she went a part of me went with her. Hell, maybe all of me left this world, although I never quite made it there to the other side. But I left this earth, that’s for damn sure.”
These were her thoughts for days and weeks and months before she went down, stuck in that purgatory limbo, yet just like before, that vengeance would come roaring back and she would look around with renewed vigor to ensure her world was the same as it had been before her absence. For indeed, she was a strange presence around the house, either a contributor to its harshness or a soul lost to its brutality, I could never tell. Nonetheless, Silva and I made a promise that we would keep that house going for our own sakes and not that of Mister or Miss Lula. They could rot away for all we cared. Through their insolence they had brought the rain that now descended in buckets and just like the land that sat saturated by its intemperance, it was the best we could do in our situation to keep afloat.
This pact was essential for me to make, as I was to leave Greenwood for one month and travel east to Norfolk where my sister, Gloria, was raising Janice and Steven. Surely, if I did not make this arrangement I was certain to return and find the Mister and Missus both dead.
I left on the early bus from the city, my first bus ride since coming to Greenwood in 1966. There was always that gut feeling that came with going somewhere, that feeling of nerves and excitement and just wanting to get there already, yet this journey resonated quite differently within me, as I cared very little for the destination and more for the actual journey I took. The city was just waking as the bus jerked to a start and immediately met the countryside after that narrow row of downtown shops. I remembered those same cotton fields from my arrival in Gre
enwood as they now passed outside the window, and it was indeed good to see them go.
When the light cast through the window, how it did bend and break and spread itself over us and make us warm. America appeared to be someplace special when viewed through passing windows, as if anything could be claimed or owned or built or done here if you really wanted it. Yet only when you finally settled in one spot did you see quite clearly that things were not as simple as they’d seemed, that the land and opportunity you saw was not as vast, and that the earth you passed belonged to someone else, and even if it didn’t, you were never going to own it, not as a negro. Not in this country.
For the long part of the ride, I thought of the house and of Floyd and Jesse and wondered if Silva had killed anyone by now. I thought of Mr. Kern and Miss Lula’s antics and pondered what quarrel they might have next, maybe an incident involving a flattened fork that the Missus would surely never use, as it had lost its curve and wasn’t suitable to serve a dog with. I clocked when breakfast was served and the dishes washed, when lunch was prepared and appeared on the table, and when dinner was all but left on the Missus’s side, as Miss Lula took pride in picking over her food then retiring to her upstairs quarters with barely a bite in her stomach (unless it was one of her off nights, when she was enraged and ate like a fiend). I wondered if anyone missed my presence, then hoped they didn’t as I questioned if I would not stay away forever, thinking of only Fletcher as a reason to return.
Gloria awaited me when I arrived in Virginia. Glori-Mae had been that one beam of light who’d shown all of us girls growing up how to be dignified young women, even if she was fast herself. Norfolk was asleep when I stepped from the bus, a dismal picture of lights here and there with wet streets and a continued threat of rain throughout the night. It was this talk of the weather and conditions where I’d come from that we started with first as Gloria loaded my bag into the car. From there, we made brief conversation of Floyd, whom we both adored as much as one could an older sibling, and then it was a retelling, although much shorter than this current rendition, of my time in Greenwood and the mess that had brewed, simmered, and now overflowed. Gloria demanded we both get out of there as soon as possible, or at least that I leave and come live with her in Virginia if Floyd would have no sense. I would be lying to God Himself if I said those thoughts did not stay with me the entirety of my trip, and especially during those quiet times when there was little to do but think about my situation and the relief I found had settled in my bones from being far away from that place.
Still, only home feels right, where even the dysfunction is somehow familiar enough to make you want or prefer it over the prickliness of a stranger’s bed, that coldness that never quite fades or those sheets that never fully soften throughout the night. Even the nighttime sounds seem increasingly haunting far from home, where a floorboard wears at some outlandish hour from a stranger’s foot, a light creeps in from the bottom of the door from God knows where, and all of a sudden you’re worried about who’s coming in and who’s going out. Then odd voices filter into the room by morning and you’re still not awake, that bed somehow gentle enough now to warrant another round in it. Then smells of breakfast, and not just any breakfast but a good southern meal, invade the room to inform you that you’ve slept in too long and that everyone else is awake and stirring about the house. And so you exit the room to find that reheated plate of food and feel ashamed and lazy, even if it is your vacation. No, I was just fine where I was, I assured myself.
That month was a blessing and a curse as I considered the Kern house almost daily. I would often wake convinced that I was in my bed in Greenwood under that stained ceiling until my eyes opened to the foursquare window at the foot of the bed, white and bare, the green leaves outside glossy with rain and the glass streaked from the tree’s passing touch. The air sat thin and harsh to breathe as if no air was actually there at all, and I felt this was indeed how I would die. Even my shadows stood as nubby strangers, since there was little chance of sun in the coming days or weeks of my time in Norfolk.
If the clouds cleared even once, I swore I would leave that front porch and go for a walk, fleeing the confines of that twelve-foot expanse where I had remained for several days now in observance of what little happened on those back roads of Virginia. I swore not to be one of those people who was said to have visited a place yet only saw the inside of a house or the seat on someone’s porch. The neighbors had each come and gone, ventured off to work and to school then returned, creating a bit of routine that I easily fell into as they’d wave each time they passed, and I would wave back. Still, when the sun did appear on that sixth day and there were birds circling the front yard, I found myself too tired, or my mind too preoccupied, to stir from the state I was in and move about the brief pleasantness, instead choosing to wallow in my condition like those silly adolescents who found love to be a curse that struck daily and crippled their every move. For in truth, young Fletcher had prevailed in my thoughts that entire morning, his life a tragedy I watched play out each day, a casting of lots dictated by those who sought to have their way for good or bad, leaving him trapped by the restraints they’d created, his life a whisper stopped short of heaven’s door, arriving to find the mat rolled up, swept, and having been beaten by that broom out on the lawn.
Gloria sat for a few hours and the children as well, once they returned from school, taking my mind briefly away from the thoughts of Greenwood and Fletcher. There was a naturalness to their lives in Norfolk that I hadn’t experienced in years, that now made me feel unmannered and ill-suited for a place like this or, indeed, any place outside of Mississippi. I had no words to offer most times, sitting quietly as the family chatted away. I felt that when I chewed I smacked and when I spoke it was too loud for everyday conversation. I smiled when I noticed their attention on me, but it was nothing more than obligation, as those innate feelings had long perished from my being.
“You find some peace today?” Gloria asked once the children were off and dreaming.
I shrugged shamefully.
“Well tomorrow’s just as good as today,” she insisted. “This your vacation, child. Do with it what you please. It’ll come. Just remember Daddy didn’t find it till the grave. Don’t wait that long.”
I knew she was right, yet I still spent the remaining weeks of my vacation in similar fashion, each day seated on the front porch with time a slow trickle of cool breezes and walks to the refrigerator for ice water. In the afternoons, I played games with Janice and Steven who were oblivious to a single thought outside of Norfolk and their home and their aunt who had finally come to visit. They behaved as children often do with that idea that everything in this life was made to please them, and Gloria did her very best to ensure this continued, for when Janice cried from having received a smaller slice of cake than Steven one night during dinner, Gloria promised the girl she’d receive a bigger slice the next night. And when Steven found himself alone and pouting over a mean thing Janice had said, Gloria swore the little girl would never say it again. And when the boogieman threatened to come from their closets at night to eat each of their toes and they came running to our bedsides for protection, Gloria swore she would chase him away each time.
A sense of fairness resided in this world, a feeling of order and decency, even if that concept existed nowhere outside of these walls and somehow prepared those children for many disappointments once they’d ventured out into this place called America. After so many years in Mississippi, I could not help but willingly accept this lie, even if it was manufactured for only our enjoyment in this one home alone, as nowhere else did that type of love exist, even if Gloria and I hoped it would be so.
CHAPTER 23
My return to Greenwood was met by signs of trouble. The loud whines of the cicadas raised and lowered under the deep stretch of midnight. The rains left a slow and crackling flow, forming streams that reached the stables just past the garden. The house relinqu
ished its color and faded from snow to old lace. While inside the house, I arrived to a sight that no time in that home or time away had ever prepared me to witness, as Miss Lula lay near death with the Reaper standing above her.
I gasped when I saw her, feeling that weight fall from my throat into my chest, where it burned like some scalding item I’d eaten. Floyd drew me into his quarters and described to me the events surrounding the Missus’s downfall, stating it occurred on that third day following my departure when Mr. Kern wandered off by himself. He’d made it as far as the Missus’s garden before suffering a nasty fall and, according to Floyd, he remained there helpless for hours, although no one knew the exact time before someone finally noticed him, and it just so happened to be the boy. A scuffle ensued as Mr. Kern figured that kind hand belonged to a worker and as such the old man rebuked the boy’s efforts, putting up a fight his feeble arms could not win.
“Get ’way from me, boy!” Mr. Kern was said to have yelled. “Stay back, you hear? Don’t touch me!”
This noise was so loud that it drew Silva from indoors and even attracted the Missus from her seat on that porch as both women rounded the corner to find the old man securely fastened within the boy’s grip.
“He fell!” Fletcher said when he saw them. “I don’t know how long he been here. He was here when I found him.”
“Your imagination, boy,” Miss Lula demanded as she rushed to Mr. Kern’s side and stole the old man from Fletcher’s arms.
She cradled him like a baby, soothing and whispering in his ear like some doll she had groomed and pampered into some extravagant fashion. She scoffed at the three faces staring back at her, rolling her eyes so much Floyd feared they’d become stuck that way.
“If he fell, then you should’ve left him,” she said nastily. “Last I checked your duties were in the fields and not here causing trouble. If he’s broken something, you’ve only made it worse.”
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