by Lewis Nordan
Wanda, the teenaged daughter, was still paralyzed with fright, where she stood. The broom still lay on the floor where it had fallen.
Solon did not know how to ask forgiveness.
He said, “Where’s Glenn?”
The question was so innocent that choirs of angels in heaven must have begun to sing when he asked it. He knew nothing of his son’s terrible injuries.
Solon’s wife and daughter, and even his two infant sons now looked at him as if he might be a man from Mars.
Where’s Glenn? they seemed to say. Did you actually say that? Where’s Glenn? Are you serious?
Solon said, “I ain’t mad. I deserved it.”
He ran his hand once through his hair, to make a small joke about his burns, the fire-fed and sudden baldness he had experienced as he flew through a closed window.
He tried to make his voice sound light and friendly, despite the attempted murder and the violence that led up to it.
Every word out of Solon’s mouth produced on the faces of his wife and children a profounder expression of disbelief.
He said, “I reckon I do got me a little bone to pick with him.”
Mrs. Gregg said, “Y-y-you don’t know, you really don’t know, do you?”
Solon stood up in the middle of the floor, with a little smile on his face, like a dim bulb. As he stood, he picked up the two children in diapers and held them, one on each hip.
He said, “Know what?”
He looked first at his wife and then at each of the children in his arms. He tried to keep his dim-bulb smile from fading away altogether.
Mrs. Gregg said, “Oh, Solon, what has become of us?”
Slowly, he squatted and set the two children in diapers down on the floor. He could not hold them any longer, he was afraid he might faint and drop them.
When the children were on the floor, they did not move away, but only held to their daddy’s legs without speaking.
Solon said, “He’s not, I mean, is he …?”
Mrs. Gregg said, “No, he’s alive.”
For the first time, she came near to Solon, and took his hand.
Glenn was in the next room, she said.
Solon was like a man waking up after long sleep. He recognized now the clean, fresh aroma of paint in his nostrils. The rooms had been painted, since the fire. In his mind’s eye he saw geese running across a yard and beneath clean linen on a clothesline, he saw himself as a boy, whistling in the pale moonlight past the graveyard.
Mrs. Gregg led her husband in the direction of the dying child.
The whole family went into Glenn’s room and stood beside his sickbed. He was propped up against two pillows, lying on a clean mattress with crisp white sheets in an iron bedframe.
Oh, Lord. Solon had no idea. Oh, my Lord.
For a long time they only stood there, looking at the dying child. Solon was grateful his wife did not kill him on sight. He looked at the child’s scars, the lidless eyes.
From a corner of the room, Solon took up the tattered, cheap-ass, cardboard case that held his Sears and Roebuck guitar, the instrument that had first belonged to his rapist father, and then to himself.
Solon held the guitar across his knees, secured around his neck by a heavy, old, sweat-stained leather strap, which Solon’s father had used to beat Solon when he was a child. He sat in a straight-back chair.
Solon’s clumsy left hand went up and down the frets of the guitar neck, seeking the few simple chords of the Blue John Jackson song that Glenn had once loved. His right hand, which for six months had become more accustomed to holding a pistol than a guitar, strummed and picked at the wire strings across the hole of the guitar.
In her lap, propped at a forty-five degree angle, Mrs. Gregg held a zinc washboard. She had brought it in from the kitchen. It was the same scrubboard, with dried soap scum in the runners, that she used with a bar of hard soap to scrub her family’s clothes clean of dirt and color in a Number 2 washtub.
On each of the fingers of her right hand, like five strange and dangerous wedding bands, were affixed the washboard picks, with which she transformed the appliance of her kitchen and back porch and aching back into a musical instrument. When she drew a pick sideways along the runners in a certain way, it emitted hornlike song and tone.
Wanda, the beautiful daughter wearing her daddy’s shirt, held her strange instrument between her spread-out legs, where she sat, flat-footed, in her chair. It was a wash-tub from off the back porch, no different from the one that her mother leaned over on washdays, in the kitchen in the winter, on the back porch in the summer, round, zinc, with handles on either side, except that between Wanda’s feet it was turned upside down and some additions had been made to it.
A wooden broomstick had been sawed off to half its original length. A strand of piano wire was affixed by a steel staple to the top of the shortened broomstick, and the other end of the wire ran through a hole in the center of the washtub and fastened to a ten-penny nail on the other side. This was a one-string bass.
Wanda propped the free end of the broomstick against the raised rim on the bottom of the washtub. She could tauten or loosen the length of piano wire by raising or lowering the broom handle, and when she plucked the wire with her fingers, she made a deep and rich and metallic music of thoom thoom thoom thoom, to accompany her father’s guitar.
And so that is what they did now, the three of them, while the babies watched, this family together for the next to last time. They played “Bo Peep,” the music of a black man named Blue John Jackson, who lived just a mile down the road.
Solon started pumping his knee and stomping his foot, “One and a-two and a—” Wanda and Mrs. Gregg usually came in somewhere around seven or eight, and so now that is what they did, sooner or later, as the spirit moved them, and as Solon picked through the first high notes on the terrible old rattletrap guitar, and then countered them on the bottom end with strumming.
He said, sang, “Bo Peep …”
The guitar went plink plink, up high, went glum glum, down low.
The washboard went a-rattle-bing-bap.
The washtub and broomstick went thoom thoom thoom.
Solon said, sang, “Done lost her sheep …”
Rattle-bing-bap.
Thoom.
“Done lost her sheep …”
Plink.
“So she come trucking
Bing.
“Back on down the line.”
“Bo Peep. Done lost her sheep. Done lost her sheep. So she come trucking. Back on down the line.”
The Greggs played and sang in this way for an hour before they quit. It was the only verse they knew, maybe the only one there was.
4
OUTSIDE THE window of the schoolhouse, the rain tap-tap-tap-tapped on the metal slide out on the playground and moistened the dust, which, through the open window, smelled like a fragrance of the sea. The children were gone now. Alice was alone in the schoolroom.
On the metal slide the rain was jungle drums. In the trees it was incantations in foreign tongues.
Alice considered that she had never heard anybody talk about their sad life before. She admired Mrs. Gregg for this, and for not complaining.
Alice put on her raincoat, a clear plastic number she had picked up at the Low Price Store, the latest thing, Mr. Kamp told her.
This would be the last big rain of the summer. The big rivers, the Yazoo and the Tallahatchie, would turn red with the iron oxide of the clay that washed down from the hills in the adjoining counties.
The smaller rivers, Quiver and Bear Creek and Big Sand and Fear God and Yallobusha, would turn black and boil up over their banks and flood the chicken houses and the Negroes’ cabins and maybe a cotton gin or two and send water moccasins out of the swamp shallows and up the sewers. Daddies would go off and drink whiskey in the turkey woods, and mothers would say to their children, “Run to the Frigidaire, sugar, and get your ole mama a cold Falstaff, and don’t forget to open it, dumplin, they’s a church key i
n the knife drawer, Law, this rain is working on my last nerve, I swan.”
Alice walked out of the schoolhouse. She was living with Uncle Runt, looking after the children, since Fortunata left. She pretended like it was a real home.
She wished she was married to Dr. Dust. What good would that do? She didn’t know, it might be an answer.
She was walking now, past the big field where the high school arrow-catching team practiced in better weather. Her nephew Roy Dale, Runt’s oldest son, was on the team this year.
Raindrops formed on the clear-plastic raincoat and rain bonnet. Some of the water ran off her coat in little streams, and other drops only hung in their places against the plastic, like fat, puffed-out, transparent little crystal sparrows on a limb.
Alice walked past the crabapple tree on the corner, the chinaberry tree on the next, the backyard where Mrs. Stowers had kept a cow when Alice was a child, and where Alice walked for glass bottles of raw milk for her daddy, after her mama left town, and before Alice went to live with her grandmama. She walked past the fishhouse.
Alice didn’t see much of anything today, until she passed by the house of Lord and Lady Montberclair.
And even then it was not the stucco house she saw, or the trees or the fountain.
In one of the little crystal balls of rainwater on her sleeve, just as she passed this fine house, she did see something, though.
Alice hadn’t even meant to be looking at the drop of rain, let alone looking into it. It only lay there before her, on her sleeve, perched like a million other drops of rain. In it, Alice saw the image of a child in the river, some river, running water, anyway. She thought the child must have drowned.
Her eyes would not hold to the spot. She looked away quickly, and then, when she looked back, she couldn’t locate that particular raindrop again.
Water collected in the little, turned-up bill of her rain bonnet, and the bill flipped down and emptied a small splash of water into her face.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
When she got home, Runt’s parrot was making its ringing sound, a big African, with green feathers and a yellow beak and a bright red throat and tail.
She checked the parrot’s feeder pan and removed the soiled newspaper from the bottom of the cage and put in new.
She put her face up to the parrot’s cage and said, “I love you, I love you, I love you” several times, but the parrot ignored her, he would not learn to talk, so she gave up.
Alice imagined Dr. Dust now, at home with his wife. She saw him in a big cracked-leather chair, with his feet propped up on a leather ottoman, his wife near him in a rocking chair. They were surrounded by books, up to the ceiling. She saw that Dr. Dust’s wife loved him and so this made Alice sad.
The first of Uncle Runt’s children arrived home from school then.
Roy Dale was fourteen. His skin was very white, with big copper-penny freckles.
He walked up to the parrot’s cage and put his face up to the bars. He said, “Pussy is good, pussy is good.”
Roy Dale missed his mama, he would never say so. He resented Alice.
Alice said, “If you’re doing that to get my goat, it’s not working.”
Roy Dale kept his face in the bird’s cage. He said, “Pussy is good, pussy is good.”
Roy Dale was wearing a strung bow across his chest and back and a small quiver of arrows on his hip.
Roy Dale said, “I wish we had a cat, so it would eat this parrot.”
Alice said, “You are so mean.”
Roy Dale said, “I one time heard about a cat that ate a parakeet and then after it did, the cat could talk.”
Alice said, “A cat that could talk?”
Roy Dale said, “All right, don’t believe me, then.”
Alice said, “Screamer McGee, out on Scratch Ankle, came home from the war with a steel plate in his head and got struck by lightning and could get TV on his glasses.”
Roy Dale said, “That’s not true.”
Alice said, “It’s as true as a cat that can talk.”
Roy Dale said, “Which war?”
Alice said, “Hitler.”
Roy Dale said, “They wont no television after that war.”
Alice said, “Maybe it was Korea.”
Roy Dale said, “Screamer McGee don’t wear glasses.”
How did Alice get herself into this fool conversation, anyway?
Roy Dale gave her a look, like: duh. He turned back to the parrot.
He said, “Pussy is good.”
Alice said, “Roy Dale, you wouldn’t know what to do with a piece of pussy if it flew up and hit you in the face.”
She was sorry she had said it the minute it was out of her mouth.
Roy Dale looked up at her, hurt and surprised. He turned away from the parrot’s cage and walked past Alice without speaking, on his way back to his own room. He had to straighten the bow slightly so it would go through the hall door without hitting.
Alice called to him, “Roy Dale, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
He didn’t answer, he only closed the door of his room and stayed inside.
After a while, Alice heard a hard, hollow sound of thunk on the inside of Roy Dale’s door. She was scared to look. She hoped the arrow wasn’t sticking all the way through the door.
She hollered down the hall. “Roy Dale, you could put somebody’s eye out!”
The rain was still falling.
Runt came home, then, a little drunk. He was wet and smelled like chicken houses. With him, out of the meat case at Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro., he had brought a scrawny little naked chicken, wrapped up in white butcher paper and tied with a string.
Alice kissed Uncle Runt on the cheek and took the wrapped-up chicken from him. It wasn’t much of a home, but it was a home. Alice was grateful.
Uncle Runt walked over to the parrot’s cage and stuck his face up to the bars.
He said, “We are all alone, we are all alone, we are all alone, we are all alone.”
Alice took the fryer to the kitchen and cut it up into pieces and dropped it in a pot of water to boil. She took celery and onions out of the refrigerator. She checked the flour bin. Maybe she would make biscuits, too.
Then the other children started to come home, too. Cloyce and Joyce, the twins, were ten, two little blondes. They had a trick of speaking in unison.
They spoke at the same time into the parrot’s cage. “Eugene Brister kissed his sister, kissed so hard he kissed a blister,” they said to the parrot many times, then giggled their heads off. Eugene Brister was a boy in their class that they were both in love with and who could play the piano.
In unison they said, “Hey, Alice.”
Alice said, “Hey, Cloyce and Joyce.”
Together they said, “Did Mama come home yet?”
Alice said, “No, honey.”
Alice gave Cloyce and Joyce sharp knives and they chopped up celery and onions.
Douglas came in, too. He was six and always wanted to cook. Alice tied a cup towel around his waist for an apron and let him crack an egg for the biscuit dough. Douglas said, “Hey, parrot.”
Dora Ethel came in, finally. She was a senior in high school. She made good grades and wore makeup. She took one look at the parrot and said, “Re-pul-seevo!” and went back in the house somewhere to do her nails. Sometimes when Dora Ethel came in and looked at the parrot she said, “Caramba!” or “Basta!” or sometimes “Out, out, damn spot!” It all depended on her mood.
Runt was reading the newspaper. In the dim winter light he looked almost like Dr. Dust, not like the town drunk.
He was wearing eyeglasses that he had bought for a dollar out of a bin at the Arrow Drug Store. He was reading the obituaries, it was the only part of the paper he ever bothered to look at.
Alice said, “Uncle Runt, do you reckon I could talk to you for a minute?”
Runt looked up.
He said, “First thing I do, see, is run
through the column”—which Runt pronounced col-yewm—“and check all their ages, nothing else, not even the names.”
Runt was talking about the names in the obituaries.
Alice said, “Something happened today, I don’t know what to make of it.”
Alice imagined that this was the way that wives and husbands talked after supper. She thought this was the way she would have confided in Dr. Dust, if they were married, if something had scared her.
Runt said, “Like tonight, for example. Seventy-one, eighty-seven, sixty-three—it sounds a little bit like football, don’t it?”
Alice said, “Well, it does sound like football, a little bit.”
Runt said, “Here’s another seventy-one, see, it’s like a pattern might be developing. I watch out for things like that.”
She said, “I never thought about there being a certain technique to reading the obituaries.”
Runt said, “Now here’s a seventy-nine, and here’s a seventy-four. Lots of seventies tonight. It’s looking pretty good.”
Alice said, “I took my class to visit a sick child today—”
“They’re tricky, an obituary,” Runt told Alice. “It’s not as easy as it looks, reading one, if you do it right.”
Alice said, “Uncle Runt, have you got a minute to talk to me?”
Runt looked up from his newspaper, over the top of his glasses.
Runt said, “It ain’t too long, I hope, is it, peaches, I got me a business appointment I don’t want to miss.”
Alice knew that her uncle was not through drinking for the night, and then there was this whole obituaries business that had to be attended to.
She said, “After school, when I was walking home, I thought I saw a child. In a raindrop.”
Runt said, “Well, I guess I don’t know nothing about a child in a raindrop.”
She said, “You’re going to be seeing this one in the obituaries. The one in the raindrop was dead.”
Runt looked at Alice as if he might be seeing her for the first time. Runt’s face looked like, Did you say dead?
He said, “What child was this you say you seen?”
She said, “I’m not sure. Maybe the Gregg child, the one that got burned. But the child in the raindrop was dead in a river, somewhere, seemed like he got drowned.”