by Randy Alcorn
“O God,” Clarence said. It was Dani.
He watched Ollie pointing to something, talking with Manuel. To the right he saw blood-soaked sheets on one of the two little beds tucked next to each other. It was Felicia’s. There by her bed sat her little lunch bucket with zoo animals and that big smiling-face giraffe. Clarence stared at the twisted and misshapen box. He noticed the giraffe had a strange black spot on his head. No, it was a hole. A bullet hole.
Clarence buckled, falling to the floor of the porch, knocking aside three of the yellow evidence markers.
“Take me, God, but not Dani. And not Felicia. You can’t have them. You can’t!”
Officer Ken stood uncertainly over Clarence, then put his hand on his shoulder and led him back to the stairs. Clarence sat down, oblivious to the raindrops now pelting him.
A tall middle-aged woman walked out Dani’s front door, gazing uncomfortably at Clarence. She wore a badge that said “Deputy Medical Examiner.” She gestured down toward the man smoking a cigarette outside the beige paneled van. The man stomped out his cigarette, wheeled a collapsible gurney out of the van, lifted the outer yellow tape, pushed the gurney under it, and made his way to the front steps.
Everything moved quickly now. Clarence heard sounds of lifting in the bedroom. Then the gurney came out, covered with a white sheet, crimson stains already soaking through. The medical examiner led the way, peering nervously at Clarence.
He got up and walked alongside the gurney, ducking under the police tape, until it was at the back of the van.
The man attempted to lift part of Dani’s body to better position it on the gurney before wheeling it up into the wagon.
“Let me move her,” Clarence said.
“No, I got it. Do this all the time.”
“She’s my sister.”
The man shrugged, looking at the medical examiner. “Okay.”
Clarence lifted his baby sister. As an eighteen-year-old she had been barely 100 pounds, now perhaps 140, but still a light load for arms so big. He remembered as a ten-year-old lifting six-year-old Dani in his arms and carrying her across that little creek off the Strong River near their home in Puckett, Mississippi. She was so vulnerable. She always needed him to watch out for her, just as he needed her to watch out for.
“You can put her down now.” The man’s voice intruded, scattering the memories to the wind.
Clarence lowered the body slowly, moved to the side, and watched the man wheel the gurney up the ramp into the van. He and the medical examiner got in. The van rode off into the darkness.
Another uniformed officer came to Clarence and without a word escorted him across the cordoned-off area to his car. The driver’s side window was still open. The soaking wet seat would normally have bothered him. He would have been concerned that the water might damage the plush champagne leather. Now it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He sat down in the car. The heavy smell of wet leather assaulted him. He watched the water drops on the windshield join together and gather momentum, creating a hint of a rainbow from the streetlights. A cheap imitation of a real rainbow, with none of the hope.
Got to get back to the hospital. Got to see Felicia. Got to call Geneva. Got to tell Daddy.
How would he tell them? What would he say? He stared at his fingers, which felt strangely numb and, despite the moist air, dry like chalk. He studied them as if what he saw might bring an explanation, might bring order to a universe gone mad.
He remembered the timid young girl in her pink and yellow dresses, the diminutive sister, always his little shadow. She was as short and skinny as he was tall and stocky, as though they couldn’t have come from the same genes. But one look at the face and everyone knew they did.
He remembered after they moved from Chicago to Portland, how he drove her to that party at Jefferson High when she was a freshman. How she peeked inside the doorway on her tiptoes to be sure there was someone she knew. How she looked back at him and said she’d decided not to go in. And how he made her go in because he knew that’s what she wanted. She’d thanked him later. She’d been such a little mouse back then. And he had been her lion, her protector.
He relived the moments on that old Mississippi road where those white boys had thrown the broken beer bottles at him and Dani. He’d wrapped his arms around her to protect her, but it was an instant too late. One of them hit her and cut open her throat. He remembered her blood flowing out on his hands. Every time he’d seen that scar since, every time he’d looked at her, he’d wished he could get his hands on the ones who hurt her.
Suddenly a loud tortured voice erupted from within. “I’m sorry, Sis. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you.”
The early September day, unusually hot and humid, felt more like Jackson, Mississippi than Portland, Oregon. The white-hot sun focused down relentlessly, as if some cosmic naughty boy held a giant magnifying glass to torment the dumb creatures below. The anticipation of relief that came with the previous week’s milder weather turned out to be still another broken promise.
Clarence stepped into air-conditioned Emanuel Hospital, feeling physical relief but mental torment. He made his way to ICU. After an interminable wait, they finally let him in to see Felicia. He bent over the tiny girl, casting a shadow on her as he eclipsed the overhead light. He looked at her pint-size body, lying there defenselessly. Intrusive tubes ran into her. A white skullcap covered her head where surgery had been performed. She held to life by the slimmest thread.
Why did this happen? How can people hurt children like this? Why do you let them? Let her live. You have to let her live.
Clarence bargained with God repeatedly, as he had the last four days. He cited his books on God’s promises of health and healing. He grabbed a Bible from the hospital chapel and turned from passage to passage, claiming every promise he liked and skipping over those he didn’t.
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”
“If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”
He recited the passages as if they were mantras, as if every repetition might be the one to finally convince himself and God of what the Almighty must do. Clarence pushed aside every thought of the worst. He asked everyone he knew to pray. He claimed God’s healing for Felicia.
“I’ll let you have Dani as long as you let Felicia live. Don’t let her die.” He tried to cut a deal with God, speaking out loud, as if the one he addressed had turned hard of hearing and needed to be roused from slumber by a louder, more insistent voice.
The nurse came in, intending to tell him he should leave. She could see his eyes, smoldering coals ready to burst into flames. This man frightened her. She stepped forward, bracing herself, then whispered to him, “It’s time to go.”
He left the room feeling defeated, having no more power over life and death than did the little girl on the bed.
Geneva greeted Clarence with a hug in the intensive care waiting room. She held onto him as onto a redwood tree in a windstorm, but he gave under her embrace. He felt less like a towering redwood than a weak sapling, leaning in the breeze, tilting so far his wife wondered if his roots would hold.
A few feet away on a waiting room chair, stoop shouldered and leaning forward, sat Obadiah Abernathy, staring off into nowhere. Eighty-seven years old, he was the son of a sharecropper, the grandson of a Mississippi slave. He’d lived in Clarence’s house the last two years, as mind and body had begun failing him. Clarence sat down next to him and looked into his father’s deep-set eyes, eyes that had seen incredible changes and endured unforgettable conflict. Clarence wasn’t sure if he should interrupt the wanderings of his daddy’s mind. Any alternative to the present reality seemed welcome. He said nothing.
Clarence recalled the stories Daddy would read to him and Dani and their family, with the quaint vocabulary and beautiful inflections o
f a man who’d dropped out of school in third grade to pick cotton, and as a thirty-year-old had taught himself to read. He was the youngest of eleven children, he and his brother Elijah now being the last survivors of the brood. He’d played for the Indianapolis Clowns and nine other Negro League teams in the late twenties to late forties. At the age of thirty-three, he’d enlisted and served his country in World War II. He’d put his life on the line for a nation that wouldn’t let him eat in most restaurants or sleep in most hotels or use the same drinking fountains or restrooms as white folk. He’d taken a bullet in his shoulder for a country that wouldn’t print his birth announcement or wedding notice in its newspapers.
During and after his baseball years, to put food on the table this man had worked in mills, on assembly lines, as a library custodian, and a Pullman porter. He’d moved his family of eight from Mississippi to Chicago and finally to Portland in search of a better place, like Moses leading his people out of the wilderness in search of the Promised Land. This man who’d seemed so big to Clarence as a child had lost inches over the years, some because of the stoop of his shoulders and hunch of his back. His body had sagged, time and gravity digging the crags in his face ever deeper. But they had done nothing to remove his contagious smile and the sparkle of his eyes. It was as if his eyes and mouth drew their strength not from this world but another.
“We need to get to the funeral, baby,” Geneva whispered to Clarence. “Harley picked up the kids fifteen minutes ago. They’ll already be there.”
Funeral. The word cut into him. He sternly reminded God of his bargain: “You can’t have Felicia.”
Clarence gently stirred his father and escorted him toward the car. Daddy was wearing his funeral suit, Clarence his short-sleeved white dress shirt, having kept his suit coat in the car. The air was so thick on his sweaty arms it felt like long flannel sleeves. He got in the Bonneville, which still smelled of wet leather, the scent reminding him of the nightmare that began four days ago and from which he had not yet awakened.
As he drove, Clarence prepared himself for a black funeral. With white funerals you’d get back to the office in an hour, in time to return your calls. With black funerals you were gone for the day. The white funeral preacher’s job was to take away the grief. The black funeral preacher’s job was to stretch it out. Right now he’d rather be going to a white funeral than a black one.
They drove up to Ebenezer Temple in North Portland, three miles north of the hospital and a mile from Dani’s home, in the heart of “the black part of town.” It was his third visit to the church. Twice he’d come with Dani, at her insistence. Today once more he’d come because of her, but this time without her. This time she was gone. Perhaps if he’d agreed to come to church she wouldn’t have died. These and a hundred other irrational thoughts plagued him like bats swarming through the attics of his mind. He braced himself as he got out of the car in the church parking lot bustling with mourners.
“Clarence, oh my Lawd, Clarence.”
“We gonna miss her so. Ohhh…”
Hugs and tears swarmed him from all directions. This wasn’t a shake hands occasion, but a time for lingering embrace. Nobody could weep like black folk— they’d had centuries of practice. Clarence waded through the sea of people to the church entrance, not even seeing some who comforted him from the sides and behind.
“Hello, Clarence. I’m terribly sorry.” This approach was different, a handshake, not a hug, surprisingly controlled. Clarence looked into the eyes of Reginald Norcoast, the popular councilman whose district included North Portland. Though he was white, he was known as a cutting-edge advocate of black concerns.
Clarence nodded to Norcoast, choosing not to say anything but wondering, What are you doing at my sister’s funeral?
Like most in North Portland, Dani had trusted Norcoast. Clarence, on the other hand, saw him as a pretentious bureaucrat, self-packaged as Mother Teresa in a business suit. Except Mother Teresa didn’t wear a Rolex, drive a Beemer, or smoke fancy cigars to celebrate political victories.
“Look at all these people whose lives your sister touched,” Norcoast said. “You should be very proud of her.”
“I am,” Clarence said.
“Councilman Norcoast!” An excited commoner greeted the royalty. Clarence watched the public servant glad-hand the crowd. Of course. The explanation was obvious. This was a campaign appearance. Norcoast, the consummate opportunist. No wonder he was already the heavy favorite for Portland’s mayoral race next year. At only forty-four and immensely popular, he had a likely future as senator or governor.
In tow behind Norcoast came his wife, Esther, a stately woman, prematurely gray but well preserved, with a few cosmetic tucks and rolls. A personal and political asset to her husband, ever graceful and elegant, she wore stunning jewelry, including the gold guardian angel pin always prominent on her ensemble.
Dani could have used a guardian angel.
Geneva turned just then and saw her. “Esther!”
“Oh, Geneva!” Esther Norcoast threw her arms around Geneva Abernathy. The two had met several times before and felt a kinship.
“How kind of you to come, Esther. Thank you.”
She came because her husband came, that’s why, and he came as a campaign tactic.
Clarence watched the two women and saw tears flow from both of them. He felt a tinge of guilt, realizing this woman might be entirely sincere after all. Perhaps he had judged both the councilman and her too harshly. Geneva always said he was cynical.
A dark-skinned, white-gloved usher in a tuxedo presented himself with aplomb and seated Clarence and his family in the front row of Ebenezer Temple.
A passionate choir, rocking back and forth, sang an old slave song—“Soon I will be donna wid da troubles of da world, da troubles of da world; I’m goin’ home to live wid God!” They built up to the chorus: “No more weepin’ and wailin’, no more weepin’ and wailin’, no more weepin’ and a wailin’, I’m goin’ to live wid God!”
“I’m goin’ to live wid God” sounded like a triumphant declaration rather than an unwilling acquiescence, and the apparent inconsistency bothered Clarence. Maybe that’s why he never really liked the slave songs Daddy always sang under his breath. He couldn’t be romantic about slavery, sharecropping, separate drinking fountains, beatings, hangings, hatred, and injustice. You don’t look for the good in things like that. Clarence wasn’t one to whine about it, never one to use it as an excuse. But he certainly wasn’t going to pretend it was all some blessing in disguise. Like the brutality of slavery itself, Dani’s death was a horrible tragedy, pure and simple. Nobody should try to make it anything else.
The pastor’s wife led the choir in “Amazing Grace.” They sang that song most Sundays in the black churches Clarence had been part of. The three white churches he’d been to out in Gresham sang it once in a while too, but never like this. In white churches you sang it quickly, crisply, without much emotion, and you always knew when the song was over. Here it was long and drawn out, half dirge and half joyous rapture, as if it had a life of its own. Black folk never sang it twice the same way, never knew when the song leader would stop until he did. Often it would last three times longer than in a white church.
Clarence didn’t sing. He didn’t want to sing.
“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.”
I won’t sing your praises for letting Dani die.
Clarence heard the sobbing all around him, the shaking, the low mournful wailing. It was a black funeral all right. He felt his father’s hand on him. The old man’s immense deep-set eyes watered, changing slightly their deep brown color, making them shine like polished rocks. The eyes held more tears than they should have been able to.
“Dani loved that ol’ song,” he whispered to Clarence. “Written by the old slave-ship captain, you know. God got hold of that boy, he did. Yessuh, Dani loved it wid all
her heart. She there now, Son. Singin’ God’s praises. Wid yo’ mama.”
Those great eyes could no longer contain the water, which spilled down on the front of his old brown polyester church suit, purchased in the seventies.
Clarence put his right arm around his papa and his left hand on the patriarch’s left hand. It felt something like it did when he touched it as a boy, callused and leathery from years of toiling at every form of work coloreds ever did in the South, from picking cotton to milling grain to shoeing horses to scrubbing floors. Except then it was so strong. Now it was so weak.
“A man shouldn’t have to see his baby die,” Obadiah whispered.
“I know, Papa. I know.”
“Lord Almighty,” Obadiah continued to whisper, “he know the pain of his child dyin’ though. He had a reason for Jesus dyin’. Powerful reason. And he gots a reason for this too. I knows he does.”
Daddy, stop looking for the best in the worst. It’s not to be found.
Clarence remembered sitting out on their Puckett, Mississippi, porch as an eight-year-old, his father looking up at the sky and talking on and on about the man in the moon. “Yessuh, I see you’s smilin’ again tonight, ol’ friend. What you got up yo’ sleeve? What you know we don’t? Look like you’s ready to burst, ol’ man.” He’d laugh and laugh.
Young Clarence would ask him to point out all these happy features on the moon’s face. But no matter how much his daddy pointed, all he could see was the craggy, lifeless desolation, a scarred and beaten surface on a tedious repetitive journey across the sky. It bothered him then and it bothered him now that his father saw with such different eyes than he.
“I gonna miss her, Son. Gonna miss my Dani terrible. Already do. Already do.”
The congregation sang two songs about crossing Jordan. They sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Comin’ fo’ to Carry Me Home.” These songs blended pain and joy in the strangest ways, as if written by those who knew one because they had seen so much of the other, as if the hope they expressed somehow meant much more because of the suffering that preceded it.