by C. E. Morgan
He poked Allmon in the shoulder blades until the boy stood there half-lidded with his shoulders sagging. He looked as if someone had poured half the spirit out of him, like the flies were about to settle on him. He’d grown quite a bit since the last time the Reverend had seen him, which was just two months. Was he ten now? Within a few years of looking like a teenager, and that filled the old man with an apprehension born of things he remembered all too well. He wouldn’t ever forget that bleak and confusing time, when the world began to see a colored man in the body where a child still resided. And the child begins to feel the change—not in himself so much as in the very air around him.
“Come on now,” the Reverend said gruffly. “Let’s get out the house.”
The pair walked through the city as the afternoon began its languid westward slide, a small breeze boring up toward the east. With the hills on three sides, the city rose around them—brownstones and tenements replaced by the towering heights of skyscrapers, their mirrored windows reflecting only one another. As they were crossing Main and Ninth, where traffic grew heavier, the Reverend took up the boy’s hand and held it. They were two tiny figures walking on an ancient floodplain, though the river was obscured. They meandered past cars with horns blaring, men in suits, women steering shopping carts, watchful police. There was a ball game in progress and occasionally they could hear the roar of the crowd in the coliseum. At one point, the Reverend bought Allmon a bag of roasted peanuts and said, “Now don’t ask for nothing else. I ain’t got no more money on me.” Then they were passing the old fountain with her white hands frozen in welcome, and the river was imminent, they could smell it. The riverboats were honking, that fetish from the last century, chugging through the spooling eddies, old figures of expansion and promise.
When the pair arrived, they saw the river was gray and plain and polluted, greased with oil rainbows.
They walked the Serpentine Wall, the terraced concrete path that wended past the muddy shallows and the trash-strewn banks. The Reverend cracked the peanuts, and Allmon plucked the meat of the nuts carefully from the shell. He was livening up a bit, there was some blood in his cheeks. Every now and again, Allmon stooped down and placed a halved shell on the concrete like in the fairy tale.
When he grew tired, the Reverend seated himself slowly on a concrete step, his knees cracking. “You probably ain’t gonna believe this,” he said, patting the concrete for Allmon to sit, “but when I was your age, I got the gift for mimicry. I could do black folk and fancy white folk—just about anybody. Still can. But I choose to talk with the Lord’s talk, because the Lord made me, and I ain’t aspiring to nothing in this world.” He cleared his throat. “I tell you what, though, I could make my momma laugh so hard she was fit to bust. She was always going on, how I was gonna end up onstage. In a manner, I suppose.”
Allmon wasn’t really paying him mind as he rooted in a peanut shell and crossed his legs Indian-style. He said absently, “This one time Daddy said that we was gonna—” But he felt the sudden stiffening of the Reverend beside him and promptly clamped his lips together. He drew his father back into him, as if sucking in a white smoke.
They both looked out across the river now, where the late sun was flinging glass shards of light, all spangling briskly. Light popping here and there without sound. Waves swinging.
Allmon said, “The river’s like a big piano playing itself.”
“Huh,” said the Reverend, peering into the distance. He thought of Scipio, wishing he could picture his forefather’s face, but there was nothing to picture. He felt a flash of the old anger. Nobody talks about a suicide; it grinds generations into the soil of time. That kind of dying tells a tale bigger than one man, and people ought to talk about the how and the why.
Across the river stood the historic rows of Covington and Newport, the staunch antebellum houses glowing in the coming evening. They were proud and stately and serene. White as eyeballs rolled back in the head.
“Who lives in those houses?” Allmon said.
“Funny,” said the Reverend, not really answering, “how the best homes, they’re always on the bloodiest ground. But then if your body’s all covered with ugly scars, I guess you’re gonna put on fancy clothes and try to fool everybody.”
“You ever been over there?”
“I ain’t been across that river in over ten years.”
“’Cause you scared?”
“Huh?” said the Reverend with disdain, and looked at Allmon like he’d lost his mind. “I ain’t scared! It’s the principle of the thing. Lord have mercy.” He wiped the offended lines from his forehead and said, “When I was just a tad bit older than you, I was coming up from Arkansas. I was already knowing a thing or two, so when I crossed that river, I just said, ‘Devil, get behind me.’ I’m talking about the principle of the thing.”
Allmon said, “A bunch of white folks live over there, huh.” Mike Shaughnessy was heavy in his mind, and the sudden surge of longing was overpowering. He looked down as though searching the ground for something.
The Reverend was watching his face, he saw the slide into memory written all over it—the minute lift of his brows, the way a face looks when it’s reaching.
“You know how I know God exists?” said the Reverend suddenly. “Because I need him bad even though he ain’t around to see.” Allmon looked up sharply. The old man had struck a blow to his private heart. He blinked rapidly.
“See, the human, he knows what perfect is even though he ain’t never gonna find a perfect thing on this earth. Now, understand, I done spent my whole life chasing justice. But you think justice is here on earth? Child, I don’t see no justice.” He swept one hand before him, as if he were putting those fancy white houses on display. “But I know justice is real and perfect, and it’s another name for Jesus, and I give my whole life to him.”
“But Grandpa,” said Allmon slowly and with misgiving, “then how come Jesus let all the bad situations happen?”
“Justice ain’t done that.”
“But how come Jesus ain’t never stopped it?”
“’Cause justice, that’s a perfect thing, but justice can’t make a human being do something or not do something. Jesus ain’t gonna force your hand. He just lives in you like a hope and shows you what he looks like every day, and you get to decide if you’re gonna make your life look like justice, even though you can’t see him nowhere, or if you’re gonna make your life look like fame or fancy things or money and whatnot. Now most people, they choose fancy things and money, because you can see all them, you can hold all them in your hand. But all them things you can’t see is what matters most. They live in the mind and the heart. The perfect things, like justice.”
“But if it ain’t even here, then how you know it exists?”
“Because the lack, child! Lack’s the most real thing there is! My wife is dead, but she’s real, and don’t you know I feel the lack!” He struck his chest with his fist. “You ain’t gonna miss something that don’t matter or ain’t never had the possibility of existing in this world.”
Allmon turned his questioning face away from the river flirting with light, his eyes stinging with unsummoned tears. When he closed them, he saw worse things, much worse, than he wanted to see. He opened his eyes and said, from a wound more powerful than longing, “I don’t like Jesus. He don’t care about nothing.”
“Hush!” said the Reverend disdainfully. “You ain’t even listened to a word I said.”
Allmon glowered.
Then, without warning, the Reverend was praying. “Dear God, look at this child growing. Being a man is a heavy, heavy burden. Help his heart, Lord Jesus. Help him be not afraid. Help his heart to justice, even if the road gets rough and he’s got to drag a cross to Calvary. Bless all the little children, even the ones that don’t know you yet, Jesus. Amen.”
Without opening his eyes, he nudged Allmon. “Say a prayer.”
Allmon said, “Who—what? Me?”
“Who else you think
I’m talking to?”
“I thought you was talking to Jesus!”
“I’m done talking to Jesus! Now I’m talking to you!”
“Oh.”
“So say a prayer.”
“Oh! Uh…,” said Allmon, and after a considerable pause, he said, “Thank you for the peanuts and the river. Thank you, God, thank you, Jesus, thank you, Martin Luther King.”
“Ha!” cried the Reverend, and coughed down a laugh. “Yes, thank you for the river! Long as you living, Lord, the river ain’t never gonna dry up, ’cause the river of justice always flows. Amen … Say Amen.”
Instead, Allmon said, “Grandpa, I don’t want to grow up.”
What could the man say? With Kentucky before them and the city behind them, he couldn’t find consolation. His heart was full. “Just say Amen,” he said gruffly.
“Amen,” said Allmon dutifully, but his eyes were open, and he was already looking behind him for his trail of peanuts.
* * *
Back through the city they came without a word. It seemed an even longer walk on their return trip, or perhaps the Reverend was simply tired from the long day, from too many long days. His footfalls, usually so martial and direct, were heavy and slow, and Allmon found himself slowing his own tempo to match. Now and again, the Reverend would stop entirely and gaze up into the flagging sky, where tiny flecks of unmoored cloud skittered here and there. Dirty night was on the eastern sky like soot on the hem of a blue skirt. The easterly breeze was gaining strength now, ushering the day’s odors out of the city and sending bits of litter kiting along the pavement.
The Reverend passed a faltering hand down his shirtfront. “Them peanuts made you sick?” he said.
“Naw,” said Allmon, squinting up at him.
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
They passed municipal buildings, parking lots empty of the day’s cars, and buildings built just before the Civil War. Allmon peered into the bars and storefronts they passed, but the people inside didn’t notice him or his grandfather, because the evening light made a dazzling show on the plate glass, rendering them invisible.
When they had walked up the length of Sycamore and neared the rec center across from the School for Creative and Performing Arts, the Reverend suddenly said, “Let’s sit,” and eased his body down with an unsteady motion onto a low concrete wall. He leaned his dry, ashened elbows onto his knees. His thighs were thick and round like tree trunks, but the trees were shaking. Allmon saw this and it struck him severely, suddenly, filling him with alarm; it was like watching a grown man cry. He immediately sat down beside the Reverend, closer than he normally would have, so close he could smell the coconut oil in the man’s hair.
“Reverend,” a voice said, “how you doing? You all right?”
They both looked up into a face as round as a moon. It belonged to a young man with a livid white scar that ran from the corner of his left eye all the way down to his mouth, bifurcating the lip. His lashes were spiky and glossy and made a charming show of his chestnut eyes. He was leaning down toward the Reverend’s face.
“Tired, young man,” said the Reverend.
“Aw, all right,” the man said, straightening up again. “I was thinking you was ill, the way you was sitting there.”
The Reverend reared back in indignation. “I ain’t been sick since 1973!”
“All right, Reverend, all right.” The man laughed and offered his hand. The Reverend reached out—Allmon saw his hand shake too as if from shyness—and grasped up the man’s hand in greeting. But he didn’t let go. Looking up, the Reverend said, “Young man, I ever tell you guilt’s something much, much worse than being under somebody’s boot? I ever tell you that?”
With his hand held prisoner in the Reverend’s, the man glanced up the busy street toward Liberty, then down toward the river, and grinned softly. He didn’t attempt to extricate his hand. “Yeah, seems like I heard that from you before.”
“And?”
The man sighed. “And you know I got to do what I got to do.”
“Really, now?”
“And you know where I’m about to go soon’s you let go my hand. If you ever gonna let go my hand.”
They laughed, and the Reverend released him.
Those slightly wary eyes were warm when they settled on him again. “But you praying for me, Reverend.”
“Of course.”
“And I thank you for that. ’Cause I ain’t got my mama to watch out for me no more.”
“Don’t thank me with words,” said the Reverend. “Thank me by quitting all this. You know you’re just playing right into their trap. You think this ghetto happened by accident? They use this ghetto like they use the police and the prison.”
“Oh, I know they use the prison, right.” The man chuckled ruefully.
“So, quit this then! Make your mama proud! Your mama walked with Jesus till the day her shoes wore out, and you know that’s the truth.”
But the man was just shaking his head gently. “Reverend, ain’t you never heard you can’t never go home again?” He smiled and then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he looked at Allmon and said, “Take care of this old man here. He all sorts of trouble.”
“I am trouble,” said the Reverend.
“See y’all later,” and the young man moved on down Sycamore, limping slightly, adjusting his pale blue drawers, which peeked out from his jeans, but not looking back.
The Reverend watched him go, and when the man turned left into the heart of Pendleton, he said, “God bless and keep him, that man’s already spent half his life on the new plantation. Unless he changes his ways, he’s gonna spend his whole entire life under state control. Kids with nothing got nothing to lose.” He looked hard at the four-story terracotta building across the street. His hand shook when he pointed. “You see that school right there? You know how many brothers was hiding themselves in tunnels under there trying to escape Kentucky? Levi Coffin lived right there, that’s right. Tunnels and cellars all over this neighborhood. We figured how to get out the South, but we can’t figure out how to get out their ghettos and prisons. But what you gonna do? If you can’t burn this whole country down and start over, what you gonna do?”
He sighed and rubbed his brow. “Child, don’t grow up and be no white man’s black man. Don’t grow up to be no … stereotype. God’s given you all the raw materials, and I gave you all my tools.”
“Come on, Grandpa,” said Allmon, and he stood and tugged on the man’s shoulder. The Reverend rose slowly, unsteadily, and when he reached out suddenly to right himself on Allmon’s shoulder, his weight was a grievous thing the boy almost stumbled under. He looked terrible and drawn, almost unsightly. Not how a man would ever want to look on a public street.
“You gonna be sick?” said Allmon, trying to urge him along.
The man shook his head silently, but with a vaporous look in his eye, as though he wasn’t really listening. They crossed the street but were moving slowly. When they were ten feet from the stoop, the Reverend said breathlessly, “Lord, I pray … ceaselessly.”
Allmon was trying to be patient, trying not to drag him forcibly up the stairs and into the house. He said, distractedly, “How you do that when you talking and walking and stuff?”
“Because,” said the Reverend, “I pray … with my body every minute … the day. How you treat the least … that’s how you pray … Jesus’ name…”
His voice drifted, and he stared down at the steps of his stoop pensively, as though they were a problem of philosophy he was trying to solve. He looked angrily at them, then longingly, then emptily. Then he proceeded to ascend them with a long moment spent on each. He leaned painfully on Allmon and panted audibly.
When they came into the dining room off the parlor, they startled the group of eight men who were current residents of the Reverend’s halfway house.
“Hey!” said one from the midst of the group, rising from his chair, a napkin tucked into the collar of his T-shirt.
“We wasn’t intending to eat without you, but— Hey, Reverend, you all right? You sick?”
Allmon stood between his grandfather and the men around the table, and he held up one hand, even as he struggled to hold up the Reverend, barking in a voice he barely recognized, “Can’t you see the man’s tired?”
“But—”
“Y’all eat! Just leave him be!”
Whether stunned, or amused into silence by the little boy acting the man, they did as they were told, standing by as he hobbled the Reverend from the room. Someone said, “Well, goddamn.”
They passed the tiny bedroom, where Allmon and his mother slept on an air mattress when they spent the night, they passed the pink-tiled bathroom, they passed under the hall bulb, which had not had a fixture since the 1960s. But just before the bedroom door, the Reverend faltered, then stopped altogether and leaned away from Allmon against the cool, uncompromising wall. “I just figured it,” he said, and he placed both his hands gently on the wall as if it were a soft and lovely thing and not grimy from years of neglect.
“What?”
“God is love … and when you worship love, you worship God.”
Allmon reached out and drew him forcibly away from the wall and said, “You got to keep moving. The bed’s right here.”
It was like leading a blind man. Allmon could barely walk under the grievous weight of the old man’s life, but he felt strangely emboldened and strong too. He was growing inches taller in his mind, even as the man was shrinking before his eyes, the thick knees buckling so he keeled sideways onto the bed. He sighed a sigh that sounded like crying and rolled over onto his back. “I ain’t good,” he said. His hand reached out. “Never a good man by nature.”
He looked up at the dim ceiling, seemed confused, and then looked around, almost fearfully, as if he no longer recognized the room, until finally he found the anchor of the boy’s wide-eyed gaze. “But the Lord … he used me anyhow,” he said. “That’s the miracle.”