by Daniel Black
Lazarus walked away as the children watched from separate bedroom windows. “I’ll take care of my kids!” he screamed into the night. “I’ve always done that.” But he didn’t mean what she meant. He didn’t mean what he’d once meant. Not anymore.
Lazarus, oh, Lazarus! Are you sure about this, dear Lazarus?
There was enough money in the family account to cover the children’s needs until they were grown, if Deborah didn’t blow it. Lazarus didn’t worry. She wasn’t a fool. She’d been a good mother, except for the pretense, so he assumed she’d ration what was left and keep them provided for. She did. What he didn’t imagine was how his absence would make her bitter and sullen, so much so that the children avoided her most days and let her brood in silence before the TV, changing channels constantly although rarely watching anything. Not being the crying type, she emptied wine bottles instead, careful not to get too drunk in case the children needed her. Yet unable to articulate their precise need, Lizzie and Quad worked privately to construct worlds in which they were special. Quad found solace in Nintendo Game Boy, shouting at figures and cursing under his breath whenever he lost. The thrill of competition kept him motivated while he dreamed, day after day, of beating his father until the old man’s blood came streaming down. Down the hallway, Lizzie sat before a vanity mirror, working hair and makeup until convinced she couldn’t be more gorgeous. Then she’d shower, wash it all away, and start all over again.
The shelter wasn’t so bad, Lazarus thought. Of course he could’ve gone to a hotel, but that was the exact life he’d sought to escape. For two weeks, he said nothing to a living soul. The world went silent. It was as if he were watching the universe from some ethereal place. Each day, he went by the house and sat among the trees across the street, watching his family’s movements and praying they’d one day understand. Only Lizzie smiled at him, waving from her bedroom window like a prisoner hoping he’d barge in and set her free, but Lazarus simply waved in return. Every hour or so, they’d repeat the ritual, staring hard, trying to see into each other’s eyes, hoping to be convinced that their love could survive this. Then, as always, Lizzie would turn away sadly and return at dusk and wave, only to realize that Daddy wasn’t there. She’d continue waving nonetheless, seeing his form in her head and believing in her heart that he felt her. No one could tell her otherwise. This went on for several months until Quad convinced her Lazarus wasn’t coming back. Not to stay. Not to touch or tickle her again. So, one day, Lazarus sat among the trees and waited, but Lizzie never came. That’s the day he discovered the pain of unrequited love. Or dwindled hope. Shivering in the rain, he wept the gloomy afternoon away.
As part of his daily routine, he visited their schools, but only from a distance. Musty and unshaven, he decided to save the children the embarrassment of a father who had nothing and, now, looked like it. They saw him, too, slightly outside the fence, milling about casually, and Quad reported that a strange man lingered nearby who might be dangerous. When officials investigated, they found no one. “He was there! Right there!” the boy insisted, but the assistant principal patted his head and told him there was nothing to worry about. “If you did see someone, he’s probably just a stray old man with nothing else in the world to do. I’m sure he’s harmless.” Quad seethed with rage and promised in his heart to kill the bastard one day.
When Lizzie saw him, her wilted hope revived. Even if he wasn’t coming home, and clearly he wasn’t, he was at least coming to her and that was enough. It made her smile. She never questioned whether he loved her; she wondered why he’d stopped loving himself. Who in the world wanted to live that way? He’d had the best of everything—house, BMW, expensive food, cable TV in every room—and now he was content with nothing? It didn’t make sense. Maybe, she considered, he was looking for something she couldn’t see. Perhaps all his life he’d longed for one precious thing, one tiny significant moment, which now he couldn’t live without.
Of course Lizzie didn’t know that Lazarus hadn’t always been privileged. As a boy, he’d spent summers in Arkansas, deep in the woods, with a grandfather, the first Lazarus, who couldn’t have cared less about material things. The man lived in a shack in the truest sense of the word—a four-room structure he’d built himself with discarded two-by-fours from the local lumberyard. He’d never bothered painting it and never knew why he should. “A house ain’t got to be pretty,” he’d told his wife. “It’s just got to be lived in.” Certainly he’d done that. Vowing never to leave the land, he was content to drink beer and smoke a pipe every evening until someone came and carried his lifeless body away.
His son, the second Lazarus, whom everyone called Junior, left apprehensively. He loved the land and its tranquility as much as his father, promising himself and God to return one day, but the father convinced him that there was something in the world, something out there, that belonged to him and he’d be wrong to leave it unclaimed, so at twenty-one he left in search of this obscure thing. He never found it. By thirty, he decided his father was a liar who simply wanted the homestead to himself. So Junior let him have it. Yet, for the sake of familial bonding, he sent his son, the third Lazarus, to dwell with the first, in hopes that Grandpa’s work ethic might take root in what appeared to be a lazy child in the making. By age five, Trey, as Granddaddy called him, so adored the old man the child could hardly stand to be without him. He’d built a small rocking chair, an exact replica of the larger one in which he lounged, and given it to the boy wherein to sit with him on the porch. Trey thought of the chair as a kind of throne, commissioned by the first Lazarus, the King of Lazaruses, from which he, as a child, could help keep guard over the kingdom, watching rabbits and possums scurry about the yard carelessly.
His favorite thing about the country was Granddaddy’s sheep. No one else had sheep, and Trey thought of the meek, quiet beasts as the chosen lambs of God. That’s how Granddaddy had described them. He hadn’t raised them for food or wool; he simply loved their demeanor, their slow, kind, simple nature. So he fed them and watched them grow. Whenever one died or was killed by a fox, Granddaddy buried it on a hill in the distance, weeping and singing the while, “Surely he died on Calvary!” Each lamb was named for a biblical prophet: Isaiah, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Haggai, Zechariah, Simeon, Jahaziel. Then there was Elijah, Grandaddy’s favorite. His wool was thicker than the others’ and white as field cotton. Sometimes Elijah would look at his comrades as if he were their protector, their bestial savior, and they’d nod slightly and follow him. When he died, folks in Swamp Creek said the heavens went dark and wind blew like a monsoon. Granddaddy buried him, along with the others, on the hill now called Golgotha and posted placards on each grave, complete with names and epithets: “Joel, the one who sees what others have missed” and “Obadiah, the great negotiator.” Folks thought Lazarus I was crazy, raising sheep for no good reason, then burying them like decent, Christian people, but what Granddaddy thought of other folks’ opinion could’ve danced on the head of a needle. “They my people,” he told Trey, and the boy accepted the beasts into his heart simply because Granddaddy had done so. Trey loved feeding them and rubbing their soft, thick wool. They never seemed to mind. After a while, he, too, could distinguish one from the other, Joel from Obadiah, Haggai from Simeon, but Trey could not solicit their obedience like Granddaddy could. Kindly and sweetly, the old man would call their names, not beseeching their approach, but reminding them who they were, and they’d lift their heads and come. Just like that. As if Granddaddy were one of them. Perhaps they knew how much he loved them. Whenever Trey called their names, the sheep looked up, but they wouldn’t come. They knew their master’s voice, and although Trey was a Lazarus, he didn’t possess the power of the first.
Junior regretted leaving Swamp Creek. Or perhaps he regretted never returning. He started college at NYU but dropped out a year later. Smart as a whip, he could’ve been anything he’d desired, Granddaddy had said, but Junior didn’t desire anything. He just wanted to com
e home and live the way his folks lived—simply and without debt. He wasn’t lazy—Granddaddy had assured that—but without nurturing him Granddaddy had also assured Junior’s eventual rejection of him so that by the boy’s twenty-fifth birthday he was lost in drugs and desperate, diseased women. Pride blocked his way home, so he suffered alone on the streets of New York, working at CVS during the day and Pizza Hut part-time at night. Ends never met, so he shacked with the one woman who could tolerate him, and, in their haste, they created the third Lazarus. Junior loved the boy from the start, but he wasn’t good at showing it, so Trey grew up believing his father didn’t want him. From Junior, Trey inherited an uncanny ability to grasp complex concepts and translate them into practical reality. From Zeporah, his mother, he learned humility and grace and how to forgive a man who, on occasion, stayed out all night, fighting himself and his own personal demons. Trey never saw his mother bitter. Usually she left his father’s dinner simmering on the stove or wrapped neatly in foil next to it, a kind of gesture of love, Trey thought, reminding Junior that he was always welcome in her heart. In his teens, Trey asked why she stayed with the man, and she answered, very softly, “Because I promised God I would. And I keep my promises.”
She’d wanted to be a doctor but settled for being a nurse-practitioner. Helping people get well made her happy. Born and raised in the Bronx, she knew about death and dying and, even as a child, she wondered why someone couldn’t stop it. She didn’t know any doctors personally, but she saw them on TV, healing the sick and transplanting organs like car parts, and she believed she could do it. Her parents confirmed it. They weren’t rich, but they were full of faith, and all she had to do, they said, was study hard and do well in school and one day she, too, could be a healer. The plan worked meticulously—until she met Lazarus II, the disgruntled son of the King, and decided she wanted him more than the health of the world. When, at twenty-four, she discovered her pregnancy, she knew the rest of her life would be consumed with trying to stabilize one Lazarus while raising another.
Trey graduated from high school three days before his mother’s fatal heart attack. She’d wrestled throughout his senior year with his father’s addictions, manifested in abuse, theft, and eloquently rendered promises that he never fulfilled. Only at the moment of death did she realize she’d loved a man with no mission. Though he was great at starting things, his quintessential weakness, she discovered, was not finishing them, so depression and self-loathing consumed his life like a sluggish, all-consuming cancer. He’d stopped coming home most nights, although he would drop by occasionally during the day and leave money or simple notes, like the one that read: Don’t give up on me. I’m trying. Zeporah kept the notes in a shoe box beneath her bed. Sometimes she’d leave notes, too, which Junior kept in a leather pouch hanging over his heart. Hers read like scripture: A man cannot live by bread alone. Or Junior’s personal favorite: I await your resurrection. The day he saw the ambulance at the house, he ran and burst through the front door, reeking of Corona and KOOL menthols, only to encounter the stiff, ice-cold expression of the only woman he’d ever truly loved. In his son’s arms, Junior wept and moaned with pain too intense to describe until collapsing onto the living room floor, sure that, without Zeporah, he and Trey would be lost. Junior had fought the good fight only because of the woman who’d supported him. Now, with her gone, he was sure he’d lose the battle. And he did.
Throughout the summer of 1972, Trey packed up the apartment, giving his mother’s things to Goodwill and his father’s to the dumpster. Junior came by only once. He told his son that he had too many burdens to bear and he didn’t know how to be free of them. Trey suggested he seek refuge in his own father’s bosom, the first Lazarus, but Junior refused. When Trey asked why, Junior shook his head violently.
“You don’t know the man. Not the one I knew.”
“People change, Daddy.”
“I know. That’s the problem. Why couldn’t he have changed for me?”
Trey had no answer. All he knew was that Granddaddy loved him, in his own stoic, non-expressive way, so he couldn’t imagine why the old man wouldn’t have loved his own son. What Trey really wanted to ask was why, if Junior couldn’t bear the presence of his father, he had sent him south each summer? There must’ve been something redeemable about the old guy, right? Something Junior wanted his son to emulate? Only now did Trey consider that maybe something had happened between the first two Lazaruses that made their coexistence impossible, something that might’ve caused even God to tremble.
On August 20, Trey locked the apartment for the last time and carried his bags to the subway. Within two hours, he was on a Greyhound bus destined for Morehouse College in Atlanta. He said a prayer aloud for his father, asking his mother to guard him. Tears came, but they didn’t dissuade Trey. He had to go. Where Junior would live Trey didn’t know, but he guessed he’d stay somewhere. Like where he’d been staying. Trey’s plan was to finish school and return to New York and, he hoped, find a healed, renewed, resurrected father. Over the years, however, Junior’s attempts failed and upon Trey’s return his father was lost in thick, smoky crack houses too nasty and vile to enter. Trey’s love simply couldn’t save him. Trey worked on Wall Street for two years while accompanying his father from one rehabilitation center to another, only to give up the day Junior looked deeply into his son’s eyes and said, “I’m done. I can’t fight anymore. I’m tired o’ losin’. Nothin’ and nobody’s gonna beat me again.” Then he whispered, “Tell Daddy I never forgot.”
Trey returned to Atlanta and worked for Deloitte and Touche. The money was good, but the hours were long. Still, for the sake of success, he endured. Never having had much, he saved money easily and quickly. From each check three or four hundred dollars went directly into a savings account, and usually annual bonuses left him with more than twenty or thirty thousand at year’s end. Friends called him cheap, but he thought of himself as wise since, like his grandfather, Trey loved the freedom of doing whatever he wanted. After five focused years, his stash was just shy of $150,000 and all he thought about was buying more land to add to the fifty acres Granddaddy owned. Maybe then Junior would move home, since he wouldn’t have to be all that close to his father, and maybe then he could get himself together. But even if he didn’t, just being there would be better than loitering in New York City. Being poor and destitute in the country is far better than being broke and alone in the city. In the city people look at you and judge you and make you feel like God gave up on you, but deep in the woods no one really sees your struggles and the few who do usually feel sorry enough to help. It’s funny, really, but country folks know how to struggle and live well. They pride themselves on giving even when they don’t have much. Granddaddy always said that if he were going to be hungry he’d rather be in the country. “Food all around you, boy. Bound to be somethin’ you can find on a vine or a tree. If you hungry in the city, you’re liable to starve before someone gives you a piece of bread.”
Deborah had just finished Spelman in May of 1977, when she and a girlfriend first double-dated Lazarus and an office mate. They went to a movie, then to Paschal’s on MLK. While the others chatted and giggled, Deborah and Lazarus hardly spoke a word, glancing back and forth and smiling politely. The thing Deborah remembered most from the evening was Lazarus’s name. Of course she’d heard it before—wasn’t he Jesus’s best friend or something?—but she’d never met anyone with the name. And, anyway, who actually names a child Lazarus? When he told her he was the third, she was even more perplexed. Generations of Lazaruses? Trey relayed the story Granddaddy told him about how and why Granddaddy had gotten the name.
“I ’a year old, damn near talkin’ in sentences, but I hadn’t walked yet. Wunnit nothin’ wrong wit’ my legs, ’cordin’ to the doctor, so Momma couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t taken my first step. One day, she got fed up and said, ‘You gon’ walk today, goddammit! I’m tired o’ this shit!’ So she laid me on the flo’ and shouted, ‘Rise up and w
alk!’”
“Granddaddy, stop it!”
“I’m tellin’ you what she told me. I didn’t move at first. Just laid there cryin’, reachin’ out for her to pick me up. But she wouldn’t do it. If I was gon’ be lame, I was gon’ start gettin’ used to it that day, she decided, so she went about her work as I screamed my head off. When she couldn’t take it no more, she went out in the yard and got a little green switch and threatened to whoop me good if I didn’t stand up and walk.”
“Whip you? Who whips a baby?”
“My folks! Shit! They didn’t play. They didn’t have time fo’ this modern-day bullshit you kids puttin’ down. When they said somethin’, they meant it. Don’t care how old you was!
“Momma stood flat-footed, hands on her thick hips, and repeated, ‘I said, Rise up and walk!’ I still didn’t move. She marched over to me and put that saplin’ twig across my back like I was a runaway slave. Then she shouted louder, ‘Rise up and walk!’ And all of a sudden, according to her, I pulled myself up, trembling like a newborn calf. She called, ‘Come forth!’ and, to let her tell it, I let go of the coffee table and started walkin’ like a natural man.”
“Granddaddy!”
“That’s what she said! So she called me Lazarus. Said she knew the Word would bring me forth if nothin’ else did.”