by Cheryl Reid
From the kitchen doorway, I watched Louise move a dishrag in long, quiet strokes, stopping only to shift canisters from one spot to the next.
Nelly had stopped her carrying on. With only me and her sister here, she had no easy audience. Her wrinkled face and dour eyes were hard like stone.
“Why don’t you go home, Nelly?” I tried to speak kindly. She was suffering the loss of her child.
“This is my son’s house.” Her tone was sour. Her glasses slipped down her nose. “I am home.”
“Go to your house,” I said as charitably as I could. “Marina will call you when she gets back.”
With her crooked index finger, she pushed her glasses to the bridge of her nose. Her eyes grew in size. “If Marina had a decent mother, she’d be resting.”
I ignored her insult and went to the pantry for raisins to feed the mockingbird. I would not be cooped up in the house with Nelly.
As I passed, she sucked her dentures. “Ivie’s gone to speak to your father.” Her magnified eyes looked like black marbles. What image she saw of me I did not know—if my nose, eyes, mouth appeared clearly, or if I was patches of light and dark.
“Why?” I suspected she sent Ivie to deal for her, so worried was she about Elias’s store, about this house, so afraid I might have something she thought belonged to her. Nelly was a shrewd businesswoman. Neither she nor my father had left the clannish ways of the Old World. Her son’s property she claimed as her own, and because I was her son’s wife, she wanted to rule over me. In the old country, they hoarded what they earned. They held it close and guarded its safekeeping. At times I had to remind myself how Nelly had begun life, a poor farmer’s daughter who, as soon as she could carry a bucket of mulberry leaves, fed the silkworms in the morning, and for the rest of the day gorged the spring lambs, leaf by leaf, fattening them for fall slaughter. Everything she had was fruit of her toil, and I knew the memory of poverty haunted her. She would not allow me or any interloper to take what she believed was hers or her children’s.
Louise placed a cup of hot coffee in front of her sister. Louise gestured, asking silently if I wanted one.
I held the box of raisins against my chest. I shook my head no.
“If you killed him, I will find out.” Nelly’s shriveled lips moved with calm, not with the hysterics of the morning. Her large, dark eyes, behind the thick glasses, bored into me. If she knew Mr. Washington had come inside, she kept it to herself. I would not be surprised if she were keeping quiet now to hurt me later. Nelly curled over the cup and it steamed her glasses. “You were never good for him. You disobeyed him. You broke him with your misery, and I blame you that he’s gone. I don’t want you here.”
“Nelly, my father built this house for me.” She had stirred my anger, and I could hear it in my voice. “Leave, if you want to.”
Louise was on her hands and knees, her head down, scrubbing the black marks left by Ivie’s boots.
“You let that man come here, and Elias told you no.” Nelly blew the black coffee to cool it. Her glasses fogged. “I think you killed my son, and when I tell the children, they will have nothing to do with you.”
“You have lost your mind.” I sounded indignant, but her words crept across my skin like a cold wind.
“You can leave on your own, or I can tell the sheriff what you did and you can rot in jail, or they can string you up in a tree.” Nelly slurped from the cup. “Makes no difference to me.”
“You’re an old fool.” I tried to sound calm, to call her bluff, but my voice broke. She could raise doubt in Marina’s mind. I felt as if Elias’s knee were pressing into my chest again, squeezing the breath out of me. She could do what she threatened, but then the same ayb she threatened for me would fall on her. The store would fail. Eli and Marina would be shunned. She loved them too much to hurt them.
She spoke solemnly. “In the old country, when the town must rid itself of evil, they take a she-goat and put a silver ring around her neck. They pray and confess and then chase her into the wilderness to carry away all the sins. You are the she-goat that must go.”
“You are a crazy old bat.” I clamped the raisin box to my chest as if it were a Bible, and I headed to the front door.
Her words followed me outside. “Maybe your papa will send you someplace nice.”
The bright sun burned my eyes, and I blinked until they adjusted to the white glare. The heat had risen and the cicadas’ high-pitched hum droned on.
Elias had worked here, the same as me. This garden was our one thing together. Ivie was right about that. Outside, the world had seemed big and open, with no roof over our heads trapping us in our misery and mistakes. Elias pruned vines and rosebushes, plowed the garden in the spring. He and my father had planted the fig tree before Marina was born. Now it was ten feet wide and taller, shoots coming up all around. In the shade of the cedars grew our snowball hydrangeas, Marina’s favorite. Elias cut back the deadwood in the spring, and we had planted a new one each year on her birthday. The day Elias died, the heart-shaped leaves were singed by the August heat.
We had won a beautification prize from the city for our garden. Our picture was on the front page of the People section of the Riverton paper. His arm wrapped around my shoulder and both of us smiled. I wore the three pearl necklaces he had given me over the years and the navy-blue dress Marina had spoken of. My arms looked thin and strong. I held a spade and he a rake. He wore his usual starched shirt and tie, the sleeves rolled to the elbows. The headline, Bringing the Plants of the Holy Land to Riverton. The article took half the page, detailing our sunny front lawn with its roses, the fig and lavenders, the rows of cedars to the east and west. I planted swaths of low-growing purple queen, also called “wandering Jew.” The name reminded me of my parents, how they had come from that far-off Holy Land and spread across America. “In the backyard near the river,” the article went on, “the garden winds with grapevines and sumac trees, with lovely rhododendrons and large ferns toward a trail of white mulberry that ends by the water.”
The mockingbird settled in the fig tree. I flung a handful of raisins into the air. The bird glided above the green grass. He flew high and dove down. He found one, flew up again, and screeched, as if to tell other birds to stay away. Maybe he was thanking me, even though the daily ritual was long in coming. “Sorry I’m late, old bird,” I said. I watched him peck the grass with his wings open. He flicked his tail and then flew up into the pecan tree. A hot breeze blew from the river.
For a moment, in the shade of the tree, my eyes burned with sweat or tears. I was not sure which. I wasn’t sure of anything but the pressure in my chest. Orlando Washington would not dare deliver our mail that day. Then, a shrill ring pierced the air. I wiped my eyes. The ringing did not relent. I remembered Marina’s state, that she might need me at the hospital, and I hurried inside.
I ran the length of the house to get it. It was Papa. He said to come immediately. “Immediately,” he repeated.
“Are you sick?” I asked.
Nelly cupped her hand to her ear. I turned my back and said little.
Papa swore, a mixture of English and Arabic. He said the word ayb, and I knew Nelly had made good with her threat. Ivie had been to see him.
The Path
I wanted to walk the two miles to Papa’s house on the path along the river that connected his home to mine. Walking it promised to calm me, better than driving through town, where I felt out of place. On the path, there was the water, the cover of trees, the birdsong and the dusty red earth, and I could forget Elias while I walked. The path was a place that comforted me—no dividing line between white and black, only a line between land and water. But Papa had said immediately, so there was no time to walk the path.
The first time I had walked it was a Christmas morning when Papa told us, “Bundle up. We’re going on a long walk through the trees.” Gus was toddling around and likely to head for the cold water, so Mama strapped him to her chest with a long piece of material. He sq
uirmed and cried to be put down, but she shushed him, wrapped herself and him in a heavy shawl, and placed a rose-colored hat, a treasure from her old shop, neatly on her head.
We stepped out into the winter morning, and Gus settled his cheek against her chest and his black hair peeked from beneath his cap.
Mama moved slow and I ran after Papa, already halfway to the water.
“Binti,” Mama called. Binti was my daughter in Arabic. “Faris, slow down.” But we could not be harnessed, and I rushed to him by the steel-blue river.
Papa and I could walk side by side on the path that led into what seemed like a thick and dense forest. I had never followed the path into the canopy of trees. “Where does this go?” I asked.
He said, “This path goes east toward town. They tell me this was once an Indian highway.” He pointed ahead through the trees. “We will pass the bridges and then the big courthouse and a little bit farther we will come to my surprise.”
The bare trees were alive with a thousand birds, and the branches were like black lines drawn against the gray winter sky. Ducks and geese floated across the water. So many I could not count. Papa stopped and pointed to the cranes and the herons, their long legs like stilts rising out of the shallows. A tree full of black birds rustled as our steps approached. Papa made a sign for me to be still, and when the birds settled, he clapped his hands together and the slap of his leather gloves echoed like a shotgun. A curtain of black whirled out of the trees and a hundred black wings fluttered and rippled into the air like a heart beating.
When we arrived at an empty lot on the water, Papa told Mama he had bought this land and showed her the house plans. She held them like a fragile piece of glass and stared at the rendering of a brick house with a green tiled roof. She did not disappoint him, for she laughed and smiled. “Oh, Faris,” she said over and over. “It is all so fine.”
Mama loved the water. That was why Papa built the store on the river. That was why he bought the property where my house stood. She wanted to live where she could see any water—a river, a lake, or the sea. In her childhood village, a river ran down from the mountains and through the center of town. “Water is life,” she liked to say. “It reminds us we are always moving, that we are alive.”
She walked every inch of the lot, with Papa talking in her ear and baby Gus sleeping against her chest, his legs hanging like deadweight, her arms wrapped protectively around him. Down the path on the way home, with the cold air on our faces, the winter birds and black tree limbs that seemed to touch the sky above us, I felt content and thought that no matter where we lived, if we were together, we would be happy.
After Mama died, Thea knew to get me outside, where Mama had loved to be with me and where I had loved to be with her. Thea knew what to do, because she had been my mother’s friend, the woman to whom my mother spoke her last words.
It felt good to be outside beneath the blue sky and away from my brokenhearted father and our sad Aunt Elsa, my mother’s sister who had come to care for us after Mama died.
Elsa never married, she said, because she did not like children, or the noises they made, but she tolerated Gus and me for the love of my mother. Nor did Elsa like outsiders or Negroes in her home, and because Papa was in his mournful state, he did not argue when Elsa relegated Thea to the store, the garden, and the wash. But because Elsa could only take so much of Gus’s energy and noise, she allowed Thea to take us outside.
The four of us—Thea, her son Orlando, Gus, and I—took long walks down the path. Orlando was a few months younger than Gus. They played and ran, and Thea prodded me to run with them. On our walks, Thea took us to the river bridges to watch the cars and trains go over. It was great entertainment for the boys, and I liked it too, because when the trains rumbled over the steel frame, the vibrations filled me, and the shaking and the blare of the horn would make the grief inside me recede. The boys would scream at the tops of their lungs, and I would too, and at the end of the screaming, I felt purged of sadness, at least for a while.
Thea did not feel safe walking us into town, and so we turned back west at the bridges and headed toward home. If there was still daylight, Thea would pass Papa’s store and we would head to the Indian mounds.
Each of the mounds was about ten feet tall with gently sloped sides. I could make fifty large steps across the grassy, level top. Mama had told me ancient people had built the mounds by bringing baskets of dirt, one by one. The three of us children scrambled up the steep edge and looked out over the river. Thea stood halfway up the slope as Gus and Orlando rolled their bodies down. They scrambled back up, laughing, and slid down again. Thea stayed put in case she needed to reach out and slow their descent. They rolled until they were too dizzy to climb again. When the boys began to dig by the trail in search of an arrowhead, Thea climbed up to me.
I stared off at Riverton Bridge and the rail bridge beside it. I could see the river shore by Papa’s store and the old courthouse rooftop just beyond. Thea pointed off in the distance, across the water to the line of trees on the southern shore. “Look how small those trees are,” she said. The river was wide and deep, and across the way the trees were miniature lines of bark and leaves. She held her thumb up and took mine to do the same. She squinted, showing me how to measure the size of the trees. “See how small they look,” she said. “But they’re as big as these.” She pointed to the trees, the tulip poplars and grand old oaks, one hundred feet tall, growing near the trail, and I could see perspective, how something so large looked smaller the farther away you got from it.
“That feeling you have, how sad you are about your mama, won’t ever go away,” she said. “It’s not supposed to. But one day it’ll be like those trees over there, not like these here.”
I pulled my knees to my chest and hid my face. The hot tears streamed down my cheeks. She placed her warm hand on my back. The hand steadying me was the same one that had touched Mama. Thea’s hands had brushed the hair from Mama’s face and washed her body when she was gone. Thea didn’t hurry me or shush me but sat quietly, calm and patient, as my mother would have done.
When my face was dry and my breathing still, I looked again at the water, the trees, the sky. I could take comfort in the view I had shared with Mama. Thea and I walked down the mound and gathered the boys to go back home.
Orlando Washington
Five days before Elias died, the name of Thea’s son, Orlando Washington, was in the Riverton Daily. I was in the store, wrapping a loaf of bread for a customer. The lunch rush had begun. Businessmen and secretaries bought a Coke and a pack of peanuts, or cheese and crackers, or a flatbread rolled with meat. The aisles were busy with housewives and maids in uniform buying groceries for the week.
The bell above the door tinkled. A man from Rotary Club, who liked to talk numbers with Elias, walked in with an air of disgruntlement around him. “I told you, Elias. It was bound to happen.” He slapped a paper on the counter by the register. “Civil rights has come to Riverton.” He spoke loud and clear, so that the whole room of people turned their heads.
I picked up the paper and read the offending piece.
On August 1, Orlando Washington, decorated war veteran of the Tuskegee Airmen, son of Thea and Odell Washington from Mounds, will be the first black postman to deliver mail to white residents in Riverton, Alabama. Mr. Washington, who has worked for the United States Post Office since 1947, will be transferring from his route in Brooklyn, New York, to a carrier position in Riverton.
The article went on to say that Poplar Street and the Negro section of town were to be his route and gave instructions to concerned citizens to file a form if they preferred to pick up their mail at the post office in person.
“Reads like an obituary to me,” someone said, and all day long, the conversations went on and on, the complaints in the aisles and at the counter—the boycotts in Montgomery, King and Parks in the newspaper every day. It will not happen here, they said. We’ll tape our boxes shut and walk to the post office, by G
od.
I kept the paper near my counter the rest of the day. I read his name a hundred times. I wondered why he wanted to put himself in harm’s way.
I listened to the ramblings of customers. They’re taking over . . . Goddamn boycotts . . . instigators . . . They can deliver their own mail in Mounds . . . Separate but equal . . . Have to deport them before we get any peace . . . Poplar Street, that’s your street, ain’t it?
Elias’s back stiffened with all the talk and stirring of emotions in his store, yet he nodded and grunted in affirmation. He rolled his eyes when he turned his back to one old lady saying over and over, “What will we do? Oh, what will we do?” He didn’t want to be in the middle of it or make any claims that could be used against him, one way or another.
I saw no harm in Orlando Washington doing the job. The complaints made no sense to me—many white people in town had Negro maids raising their children, dealing in intimate parts of their private lives, cooking meals, cleaning their houses, some of them running their households. White people bought the same foods in Elias’s store as black people bought in Papa’s store. Hams at Christmas, black-eyed peas and turnip greens for New Year’s Day, chicken to fry and watermelon to cut on Fourth of July. What harm was there in a war veteran, a law-abiding man, bringing their mail? When Thea had died ten years before, my father and my brother had shaken Orlando Washington’s hand at her funeral.
I clipped the article and took it home, as if I had someone to save it for, but Thea was gone and I did not know who else would want it, maybe Gus. I laid the clipping on the piano.
That night at dinner, I told Elias, “We should let him deliver.” I expected him to say no. I expected some rumbling, but he had been reasonable with me for months, since Marina had given us the news of her expectancy. I thought if I gave him my reasoning, he might agree.