“I want to see Daddy.”
Zera closed the Bible and glanced toward the hallway, where her white lawyer was chatting with the white guard. When she reached across the divider and touched Omar’s plaid shirt, the guard came to the doorway. She quickly drew her arm back.
“I doubt your grandparents wanted to buy you that new shirt,” Zera told Omar. “They’re not willing to raise you. That’s why you’re going to Nova Scotia.”
Omar boarded the bus in Jackson, angry with his mother for sending him north. Why had she been so mean? he asked himself on the long bus ride through Atlanta and Washington and New York. And why had he not been able to see his father? The day the bus pulled into Augusta, Maine, Omar hoped the doctor who came to the terminal to examine him would pronounce him too sick to be let into Canada.
Omar did as his mother told him and kept quiet about being colored. In Halifax he remained at the terminal until his great-uncle, Chevy Platt, came to meet him. His mother had said relatives in Halifax were going to drive him farther north, to live with relatives in Glace Bay. But leaving the bus terminal with his great-uncle, Omar learned that he was staying in Halifax.
Are you going down to Mississippi soon?” Kath Ella asks Omar.
“I’d go next month,” Omar says, “but I want to stay for Kiendra’s party.”
They are in the Lincoln on the way to the hospital. For ten or so blocks Kath Ella—whether staring at the floorboard or out the windshield at the thin traffic—has been thinking about Kiendra.
“Do you think she’ll be well enough for a party?”
“Hope so. I’m rigging some rockets. That girl loves herself some fireworks.”
Talking about rigging fireworks for Kiendra seems to put Omar in a good mood. But the more Kath Ella hears about this party, the less she likes the idea. “I should remind you about the rocket the boys fired two years ago out on Nobody’s Acre,” she says. “One of those fool rockets made a U-turn and scraped the side of the schoolhouse.”
“That was Kiendra’s brother Dominion’s blunder,” Omar says with a chuckle. “What you get when you use store-bought pyro. I’m a working professional. Nothing will skid off course if I’m rigging.”
“Fireworks are still illegal in Halifax.”
“It’s also illegal to shoot an unarmed girl.”
“Do you want to go to prison, too?”
“You mean, like my father?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
Omar looks like he accepts her explanation. Still, Kath Ella regrets her offhand comment. In her lap is a bouquet of gardenias Shirley sent. If Shirley had woken her the other day, Omar would not have wandered down to the Bowl and let the young men bend his ear with party foolishness. Chevy Platt brought Omar into the business several years ago, hoping he would quit his job at the fireworks company and focus on his studies. But Omar skipped classes for a full semester to continue working with the fireworks. Well, at least Omar and the other young men were doing something. Not one of the girls accompanied Kath Ella around the village to collect more money for Kiendra.
During Omar’s first years in Canada, the children of Woods Bluff shunned him. It was to be expected, given all the bragging he did about how the appeals court had overturned the death sentences of his parents, and how the judges knew his parents were right in wanting to do good in Mississippi. The year Omar turned twelve, the boys he played softball with on Saturday afternoons seemed to enjoy listening to him brag about how his parents would be out of jail before his fourteenth birthday. Yet those boys rarely brought Omar along with them to participate in mischief after the games.
But attitudes changed after the dispute Omar got into one day with Bullyboy Griffin. At fourteen, Omar was already nearly six feet tall. Still, Bullyboy towered over him. After striking Omar across the head with his baseball glove, Bullyboy pushed him to the ground. Omar sprang up and tackled Bullyboy. On the grass, Omar gripped Bullyboy’s head in the crook of his arm. Bullyboy struggled a while before clutching his chest. “He’s got your breath cut,” one of the boys yelled. “Raise your hand, Bullyboy. Give up.”
But Bullyboy did not raise his hands, Kath Ella recalls, as Omar turns off Robie Street and into the parking lot at Halifax Regional Hospital. Omar later said that if he had not held his grip, Bullyboy would have attacked him again. Was that true? During the two weeks Bullyboy was in a coma, Omar came to the hospital every day. And for every boy who walked out of the hospital room when Omar entered, two or three stayed and wanted to be his friend. And how did Omar respond? Instead of enjoying the company of new friends, he began instigating fights—fights that got him several nose fractures. Chevy says it’s a miracle Omar enrolled in the technical college with all his brains intact. Those young men who say they are Omar’s friends are not impressed by his plan to join the civil engineer service, Kath Ella believes. They only respect Omar’s ability to rig up devilment. And they take advantage of the fact that while he has outgrown the fighting, he has not outgrown his desire to fit in.
Room 200 at Halifax Regional Hospital has an imposing, wide entrance, which affords a view into the noisy ward. From the hallway Kath Ella can see the three long aisles that run to the back wall, where a row of high windows lets in the last rays of early evening sunlight. Light-green curtains hide many of the narrow cots, which the kids in Woods Bluff call loony boats.
“Couldn’t we just go down and take a quick peek?” Kath Ella asks the two men in matching pullover sweaters blocking her path.
When the men say no, Kath Ella marches toward the freckle-faced woman seated at the attendant’s desk. “Please let us see Kiendra,” she tells the woman. “We promise we’ll be quiet.”
The attendant directs Kath Ella and Omar toward two chairs near the wall. Seated, Kath Ella hears a woman down one aisle calling “Attention, everyone. Attention, everyone.” In one corner, a man bursts into song. The shouts and antiseptic smells don’t bother Kath Ella as much as the sight of the green curtains. Rosa said there is a gash on Kiendra’s forehead. Is her head swollen? Is that why the attendants are not allowing visitors?
Several minutes later, noticing a tall, brown-skinned woman coming up the hallway, Kath Ella sits up rigidly in the chair. Yesterday, walking the Hindquarter collecting money for Kiendra, Kath Ella had gotten an earful from several neighbors about her bad behavior. Seeing the hard look on Windsome Taylor’s face as she approaches now, Kath Ella suspects she will probably get another lecture, this time for acting out at the hospital. But that can’t be helped. She wants to see Kiendra.
Windsome Taylor is quick to tell anyone who asks that, of course, she knows who started calling her the American Nurse—a name she hates. The name makes no sense, Windsome often points out. For one thing, any sensible person seeing her full figure in her blue-and-red-striped uniform would recognize that Windsome Taylor is a nurse’s aide, not a nurse. No hospital in Nova Scotia or anywhere else in Canada would hire a colored nurse. Secondly, Clem Sasser knows full well that the only reason she was born in Ohio was because her parents were attending a funeral there. She is Canadian through and through. And though she now lives in Simms Corner, she grew up in Woods Bluff. Her father’s relatives came to Nova Scotia in 1811. Later than the Jamaicans, but still. Her mother is descended from blacks who have lived across the basin in Hammond Plains since 1790. She is a distant cousin of Sadie Caulden, for heaven’s sake.
Windsome walks past Kath Ella and Omar to the attendant’s desk. When she turns from the desk, Kath Ella rushes to her. Windsome is as dark as Kiendra. She smiles slightly, exposing the small gap between her front teeth. “You must listen, dear,” she says, running a hand down Kath Ella’s hair. “The doctor sedated Kiendra. Her relatives went home for a meal and a change of clothing.”
Kath Ella raises the bouquet of gardenias. “I’m not leaving until I see her.”
Windsome takes off her glasses and lets them hang on the string around her neck. “A hospital is a place for civility, young lady. You
will do as you are told.”
Windsome grips Kath Ella’s elbow and leads her into the hallway. “Kiendra has a high fever,” she whispers. “She’s being moved to the critical care unit. The doctors have called the family back.”
Kath Ella opens her mouth to speak, but instead of words she bursts into tears. When Omar steps forward, Windsome motions for him to step back. “Let her cry,” Windsome says. “Then take her home. And put those flowers in some water. They’ll smell as sweet tomorrow.”
The next day, sitting between her parents in the back seat of the jitney as it drives away from the bluff, Kath Ella sees an unfamiliar black Chrysler idling beside the road in Centervillage. On the return home after another visit to the hospital, she sees the car again. This time it is parked on the road in front of her house.
Could it be Oscar Mislick? Kath Ella wonders. As she gets out of the car, she feels her chest swelling. It is.
Inside the house, Kath Ella carries several shopping bags into the bedroom. She remains there a moment, waiting for the energy she needs to return to where the others are talking. It was a disappointing visit to the hospital—again she was refused a visit with Kiendra. And now this. When the energy comes, Kath Ella marches into the living room. She halts by the arm of the sofa, where Oscar sits telling George about his line of work. Even in her agitation she has the presence of mind to study Oscar well. With the weight he has put on, he hasn’t so much sat down on the sofa as fallen into it. When she first saw him get out of the car, she couldn’t imagine why he had come. Now, as she watches him nervously smooth the front of his necktie, she recalls the letters.
“You came all this way to see me?” Kath Ella says. “Why?”
Oscar takes a handkerchief from the pocket of his suit jacket. He looks as if he is about to address Kath Ella. Instead, he turns to George. “Kath Ella told me she wants to teach,” he says. “I offered to help her. I told her that teaching is God’s work.” Oscar’s face stiffens. “But she has repaid my generosity by writing inappropriate letters.”
George lights a cigarette, looking confused. “What did our daughter write that was inappropriate?”
“Things my wife would rather not read,” Oscar says, wiping his neck with the handkerchief. “I’ve been nothing but honorable toward your daughter. That is why it comes as such a surprise that she would write to my wife and suggest otherwise.”
Shirley enters with a glass of water. She hands it to Oscar and then remains by the sofa, gripping Kath Ella’s arm. Before going to the hospital, it was Shirley’s idea to shop for another charm bracelet to replace the one Kiendra lost at the apartment building.
“Have you been writing to this man’s wife?” she asks Kath Ella.
When Kath Ella does not answer, Shirley shakes her head.
“Kath Ella’s a nice young woman,” Oscar says. “I believe she wanted more help from me than I could give. So she got angry.”
“That’s not true,” Kath Ella says.
“Did you write to his wife?” Shirley asks.
“Yes.”
“Tell us why you wrote the letters.”
Feeling Shirley’s grip tighten on her arm, watching Oscar unbutton the jacket of his suit, Kath Ella wants to insist she put nothing inappropriate in the letter. She wants to say Oscar has come here to spread lies. But she can only manage to look down at her feet.
The room is quiet for a long while. Kath Ella remains seated on the sofa arm, but when Oscar clears his throat, she bounds up and hurries out of the room.
“Please forgive our daughter,” George tells Oscar. “One of her girlfriends is doing badly in the hospital.”
“Would you go after her?” Shirley asks George. “I’ll finish the talk we’re having here.”
After George leaves the room, Shirley stands by the sofa, looking at Oscar.
“George seems reasonable,” Oscar says. “I figure he can fix matters before they get too bad.”
“George may be a while,” Shirley says, picking up Oscar’s hat. “I’ll say your goodbyes.”
Outside, as they cross the yard, Oscar steals glances at Shirley, who has not yet handed over his hat. “I see that Kath Ella comes from a decent family,” he says at the car. “I’m not here for trouble, not here to blame.”
Shirley opens the car door and flings Oscar’s hat inside. “I’m glad to hear that you’re not here to blame,” she says. “Because my daughter is not accepting any.”
Shirley is on the porch when she hears a noise behind her on the front steps. She turns to see Lick-the-Bottom run up onto the porch, trip, and fall.
“Get you skinny body up from there, boy,” Shirley says. “What is the hurry?”
“I’m suppose to tell you about Kiendra.”
“What about Kiendra?”
“She passing.”
“Passing what?”
“She died.”
Honoring Kiendra
Among the young men in Woods Bluff, friendship is a tempered thing, hardened as much by a shared laugh as a slap to a shoulder blade. It is the remedy for a sputtering alternator. It is a conversation, sometimes taut and unbending, other times loose and yielding. Sometimes the pauses are thin as worms’ silk, other times they are frozen and split with a crackle, like ice thawing in the waters way north in the bays of Labrador. And when a friendship wavers or becomes unwieldy, young men know it’s sometimes wise to leave it alone, as a woman might leave alone a loose braid on her way to the hairdresser. Every young man in Woods Bluff surrenders to a need for friendship—except perhaps Willard Teakill. But a twenty-year-old man with a girl’s voice who keeps to himself doesn’t count anyway, does he? What other choice is there for most young men living on the bluff in 1936, cordoned off from Halifax proper?
But the bluff itself also surrenders, especially to the shifting Canadian elements, the icy-warm autumn wind followed by the long winter of covering snow. The snow sometimes hides what the bluff has accumulated, including the billion-year-old outcropping—a long ridge of gray-green rock that reminds the villagers of the limits of how far west they were allowed to build. Geologists tell the schoolchildren that the composition of the outcropping is unusual for eastern Canada, that it took tremendous heat, pressure, and the intrusion of special minerals to compress ancient sand and lava into this great arm of stone as hard as iron and deeper than any well.
Though boulders rise out of the long stretch of rock in places, the center is mostly flat, with a slight depression, as if the heel of a large, powerful hand had pressed gently there. Small children, when teenagers do not chase them off, sometimes kneel on the floor of the Bowl, examining the tiny claw prints of a skittering sandpiper or the iridescent shards of a clamshell dropped by a feeding gull. One teenager, before he was chased off by a group of young men, left the Bowl holding a fallen starling chick, panting in his hands as he searched the tree line for the nest. Today the young men who will gather in the Bowl know they might be chased off by one of the constable cars that have been drifting through the bluff since Kiendra’s shooting.
This afternoon, Clemmond Green lounges on a flat boulder, watching Kiendra’s boyfriend, Buddy Taylor, cross the Bowl with his arm extended. “What the devil is that?” Clemmond Green asks, staring at the small mangle of gold and blue in Buddy’s palm.
“One of those doohickeys from Kiendra’s bracelet,” Buddy says. “What’s left of it. That girl of mine gets crazy about the littlest things. I hear when she woke up she asked about this doohickey before she asked about me. Found it inside the building.”
“You broke in?”
“How else?” Buddy climbs onto a nearby boulder. “Guivalier told me a redheaded fella pulled the trigger. I went to the constable station. When the constable came outside, I threw a brick at him.” Buddy frowns. “The son of a bitch ducked. Then I hightailed it. If I see him again, I’ll throw something else at him.”
Buddy’s mood seems to sour as he puts the mangled trinket back into his pocket. But he and Clemmond Gr
een are laughing again a few minutes later, when Kiendra’s brother Dominion arrives carrying a sack.
Dominion takes a single rocket out of the sack and stands it on three spindly legs. The lettering down the side of the rocket says RED BEAUTY. The apex of the rocket reaches Dominion’s waist. “This baby gives plenty of flash,” he says.
“But none of the tit-rattling noise like the rockets Omar’s getting,” Buddy says.
Dominion frowns. “We’ve heard plenty about Omar’s plans,” he says to Clemmond Green. “But I ain’t heard the country boy give no particulars. Is you?”
While Dominion refolds the legs on the rocket, Clemmond Green and Buddy look up the hill, where Omar has made it halfway down the path. Lick-the-Bottom is calling down from the road, but Omar keeps walking.
“Whatcha getting for us?” Clemmond Green asks before Omar has even stepped into the Bowl.
Omar, wearing a very nice shirt, saunters across the Bowl and takes a seat on the boulder next to Buddy. “I’m no longer employed with the rocket company,” he says. “But if Lady Luck is with us, we’ll get a flight of Big Stellars. You’ll have to cover your ears when they explode. Red and yellow, boys, red and yellow. We’ll use them as the finale.”
Clemmond Green gives an approving smile and then turns to Dominion. “Where’s the money the girls collected?”
“Donnita had it,” Dominion says. “But then Rosa took it.”
“Well, go get it back.”
“Has Omar brought any money?” Dominion asks. “Old man Chevy Platt has plenty.”
“He doesn’t give it to me,” Omar says.
“You could ask Kath Ella to get some from him,” Buddy says. “I hear he’s keen on her. I’ll bet she could get us as much as forty dollars.”
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