A Song for Carmine

by M Spio

  * * *

  I finally open that studio Pa always wanted; and soon for intrepid southerners, for whom tradition, comfort, and pride were foremost, the House of SinClair is the only way to go—comfy sofas covered in velvet, walnut consoles, and anything made of wood left au naturel, all carved and blessed by a hardworking man’s hands, pieces that begin a heritage, befitting for parents to pass on to their children. Pa knew very little about bergères or marquises, yet many of his customers swore his pieces could be in any drawing room in Paris or Rome—rich hand-carved pieces with padded linen or leather upholstery, comfy sofas with floral fabrics, red velvet fabric chairs.

  During my summers I worked alongside Pa, and I’d picked up more than I’d realized. Pa’s tools called me daily.

  Before he got sick, Pa was finishing a large order from the church, a dozen pieces, celebrant chairs, pulpit chairs, Christian crosses, high-back chairs, piano casters and credence tables. On the pastor’s insistence, he had ordered heavenly red oak from up north. From the lumber to the kilns used in crafting the pieces, Pa took exceptional care to ensure everything was perfect. He worked on the pieces night and day; all there was left to do were the finishing touches.

  I put the pieces in the showroom during the grand opening prior to shipping them off, along with other crisply carved pieces upholstered in satin and swish silk fabrics that Pa had named after Confederate generals; the Lee, the Stonewall, and the Mosby represented the virtues of southern nobility. Whether it was kitchen cupboard or sturdy mahogany tables for serving roasted pheasant or mantels for mounting wild boar and other game, Pa promised southern charm and delivered. There was so much more to that man than I realized.

  In many ways, I had become him. I rose by five o’clock and worked till my body gave up. I was completely engrossed. Every now and then I’d be visited by Z in the workshop; I’d take a break, talk, laugh, caress my unborn, and go back to work.

  There were days that we fell asleep on the old couch in my workshop watching the old fifties’ TV. I’d place my head on Z’s belly and feel our baby move over to where my hands were. I’d been praying for a son, and with the way Z’s belly hung low, everyone swore my prayers had been answered.

  * * *

  “Life is funny, Carmine, ain’t it?” Ma fills my cup up with coffee, and we sit together at the same old Formica table. I stare at the old knife lines in it, follow them as though I’m reading my own palm, predicting the future, seeing how and when and if one line will lead to another.

  “I think life is simpler than we realize.” I smile at her from across the table, reach for her hand.

  “Yes, son, that’s how it should be. I always used to tell your pa that, and I think he believed it in his own way. I think he just felt kinda like he needed to get things just so before they could be easy. Kinda backwards, don’t you think?” She laughs, sits up straight. She’s doing better than ever these days; she’s got more life left in her than most. She’s gained a little weight and cut her long hair short, and the kitchen smells like fried chicken again most days. She hangs laundry on the line. She even got herself a pair of new tennis shoes for taking walks at the park. I have never seen her this energetic.

  “I never thought I’d get you back, Carmine; I thought I’d lost you forever. And now I got a grandbaby coming…” She puts her face in her hands and starts to cry softly. I get up from the table and hug her from behind.

  “Yeah, it’s like part two for us St. Clairs, isn’t it? I think Pa would’ve liked sharing it with us.”

  “I know he would have. I know it.”

  * * *

  Pastor Stanley walks into the room wearing a mustache and his same old broad smile.

  “Haven’t see you in a while, son. What’s the occasion? Did someone die?” He laughs, pulls up a chair beside me.

  “Not that I know of.” I laugh and reach out to shake his hand. We sit down in our usual spots, as though no time has passed. He pours himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the table and pushes a cup toward me.

  “I just wanted to tell you how much you’ve helped me, pastor. I mean, how you’ve helped me see how a person can cross the bridge between one big thing to another and get the whole picture.”

  “It’s easier than you thought it would be, isn’t it?” He crosses one leg over the other.

  “I don’t know why I fought it so long. The light, I mean. I don’t know why I chose the path I did for so long. I mean, when I think about all the time I’ve wasted…”

  “Stop there. Don’t waste any of your time on that sort of thinking either, son. It doesn’t pay. Not in any currency.”

  “I met this woman, this incredible woman, see? And we’re going to have a baby…” I am talking so fast that I lose my breath.

  “We’re married now and my ma is better than I’ve ever seen her, and I realize how it all adds up to this now and I just want to feel worthy of it, you know, to trust it. I’m so worried that I’ll mess up, that I’ll mess this up.”

  “See? That’s the thing right there. Where’s your heart? What do you believe? If you only believe in the one thing—in the love, the life, the man you’ve become—you’ll be okay. You don’t believe in the other stuff anymore, right?”

  I shake my head back and forth, look out the window and see the trees shake a few leaves off.

  “Well, then, that’s all that matters. Stay focused on the prize, Carmine, and you’ll be all right. But remember that life has its own twists and turns, out of our control, and we have to go with them; we have to keep believing and creating and accepting.” He smiles, drinks the last of his coffee, and stands up.

  “I hate to cut our meeting short, but I’ve got some family business of my own to preserve. Come back and see me, though, whenever you’d like. Ya hear?”

  I stand up and shake his hand, watch as he leaves the room, look out at the tree again. When I leave the room, I put my hand on my heart and smile.

  CHAPTER 23

  IT IS THREE IN the morning when the pains come, but her water doesn’t break right away. I awake to her screaming, and for a fast second, I think it is Pa.

  “Carmine, Carmine, something is happening, something has changed.” She tells me this as she holds her stomach tightly, and when we stand up, we can see that he’s dropped significantly and that he is ready, even if we are not.

  “Just hold on, baby, just hold on. It’s going to be okay.” I turn on the bedroom light and throw on some clothes. She sits on the edge of the bed breathing heavily. I sit beside her and hold her hand.

  “Where’s your bag? Is it in the hall closet?”

  She nods. Her face is so pale, I feel adrenaline pulse through my body.

  I rush out of the room and look for her bag, turning on all the lights in the house in a panic. When I get back, she’s laying on her side.

  “Baby, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I remember scenes from movies, women in labor, the regularity of contractions; I can’t place any of it now. Z’s face is covered in sweat.

  “It hurts so much, Carmine, so bad. Worse than anything I’ve ever felt, and something doesn’t feel right… I don’t know if…” She’s crying so hard she loses her breath, begins to hyperventilate and scream.

  That is the last that I remember, other than bits and pieces of ambulance lights and paramedics pushing into our bedroom, the big pool of blood on our baby blue sheets. The rest is a big red blur that stretches across my mind in vibrant circles that I try to catch with my hands because I think if I can catch them, I can change their shape, change history.

  * * *

  I am sitting in the waiting room with its pale walls and difficult furniture and lonely air when the doctor comes in to talk to me. He is older and gray, and his mustache stretches to the edge of his lips in black and gray; I am afraid of him in a way that fear has not shown me.

  I know what he’ll tell me. I was there, of course, for the biggest part of it. I watched her writhe and twist as Samuel tried to leave her body
. I saw the beautiful brown leave her face in blotches, and I felt her grip loosen on my hand. The part that won’t leave my mind is all the red, all the bleeding, all the crying, all the helplessness—and then the cries of my son as he left her womb. He didn’t want to go.

  I sit in that stale waiting room and I wait for him to tell me how we’ve lost her, and I want to scream how can that be because I had just found her and life couldn’t possibly be that rotten and how am I supposed to raise a colored son with only white memories? I think about what Pastor Stanley’s told me just a few days before, how I need to believe, keep my eye on the prize, and I want to scream.

  “It’s a rare bleeding disorder that we couldn’t have known about before, son.” He’s talking and I hear the words, but they refuse to stick in my head; they’re pounding on me, trying to get in. I feel as though I will explode.

  “Your boy is healthy and strong, there’s nothing you need to worry about there,” he continues, and now he’s sitting beside me on the pale sofa and his hand burns on my shoulder. I get up and walk around the small room. Overhead I hear people being paged on the intercom system.

  “How could this have happened today? You could have done something, you should have done something!” I am screaming and my hands are on top of my head, and I am nearly running around the small room now in small, crazy circles.

  “The problem is that her blood wouldn’t clot and there was nothing…” I kick the small television stand in the corner and yell for him to shut up. He’s telling me to calm down. I want to go back to the edge of our bed and hold her hand again and we’ll rewrite it from there. Instead of driving to the hospital in Eton, we’ll go to the big one in Atlanta and we’ll pray; we’d forgotten to pray, and there, everything will be okay and we’ll raise our son the way she wanted. And we’ll teach him to honor both the light and dark within him, the way she’d taught me, and when we grow old together, our color will merge the way old paint does in a room of an old house.

  I sit down and the doctor keeps watching me. In his eyes, there is pity, and it is looming and so sad that I have to look away.

  “Where is she? Where is she right now?”

  He tells me that she’s still in her room, the one where she’d labored and delivered just moments before.

  When I get back to the bright room, there is a curtain drawn around her bed and her hands have been folded on her empty stomach; there’s a slight smile on her face, and I can’t understand who put it there. She is a shade lighter, and the red of struggle has left her face. I fold both of her hands in mine, and they are still warm. Outside the day goes on as though nothing in the world has changed; I don’t understand how the earth keeps on spinning.

  It takes all my effort to keep breathing, in and out—I can’t do it. I lay my head on her chest and beg her to come back. Z… my darling… baby, I can’t do any of this without you. Baby, come back for me; we’ll leave this world together, baby. I think I hear her heart beating beneath her skin, and I sit up straight and look at her. Her eyes are closed and she is so still, and I can’t believe how something so big can pass so quietly.

  The hours before come back to me, and I crawl over them inch by inch, looking for a reason, a way to change things, a clue. The labor pains were hard and they came fast and close together as we drove the few miles to the hospital. I’d even forgot to turn on the headlights, the night so dark, the cab of the truck so hot with our breathing.

  “Carmine, make it stop; it hurts so much.” She’s holding her stomach, and I have her hand in mine and I drive as fast as the old truck will allow me.

  I rush her into the front doors of the hospital, and I am nearly carrying her. “Make it stop hurting,” I yell through the hallways. “Give her something now; she’s hurting too much. Now, people, now!” The urgency reminds me of sailors on sinking ships, trying to ward off their fate and the water and the fear of their fellow men.

  Once we are settled into her room, we are both calmer, but the medicine is not working and the labor is coming faster than expected and our baby is inching down the birth canal. The screams begin when the pills wear off, and they tell us it’s too late for an epidural and that she’ll have to continue natural because he’s coming too fast. She screams into the early morning hours, and I cry and I sweat but I never stop holding her. And then the doctors realize she’s bleeding too much and that her body isn’t stopping it and our baby is almost here but she is growing weaker.

  By the time they use the big metal forceps to pull him from her, she has lost consciousness and the room is so eerily quiet before his cries come. There is life. When I look at him, I see Z’s black hair in large curls all over his head. They take him away, she stops breathing, and they make me leave the room.

  * * *

  I remember life in fragments after that: the way her hand gradually went from warm to cold, the way I gripped it in an effort to keep her from going to the other side, and finally, the way my baby boy looked from the outside of the nursery glass. He is swollen, tender, already so full of his mother’s light, his skin the faintest of browns, his eyes wide-open while all the other babies cry with closed eyes. I watch him from the glass for hours, don’t take him when the nurses offer him bundled to me, cry when I think about going home alone. Ma came up to the hospital after Z had been gone for hours. I don’t know who called her, but someone did.

  “Carmine, show me your son. She’s gone, I know, but your son is here. He’s here and waiting.” I take her to the edge of the nursery glass, to my post, and I watch as the nurses feed him and change him and place a soft blue hat on his round head. I won’t let Ma go in to him. I don’t want to jar anything out of place, make it permanent; if I hold still long enough, things can go back to the way they were.

  * * *

  When midnight comes and Samuel enters his second day of life, Z’s second day of death, I go back to her room and stare out the window at the moon. My son has been alive twelve hours, and I haven’t put him in my arms or allowed my mother to do so. I am so afraid the St. Clairs will curse him, ruin him with our touch.

  I leave the hospital the next morning and go back to our small, country house. When I come through the front door, I fall to my knees: she is there, I can feel it. The house smells of her, contains her, contains us; and without her, I know it is on its way to decay. I cry into my hands as I walk from room to room, taking her all in: the nursery she’d prepared in blues and yellows, the books that line the hallway: African literature and Victorian novels and long hardbacks of poetry and sonnets and songs she’d sing to me in the night.

  For the first few minutes, it is easy for me to forget about our baby boy, to forget that my beloved is laying in a dark, cold room in the basement of the hospital, to not realize anything has changed at all. The sun still reaches into the tall windows of our house and stretches across the sofa and the hardwood floors; the coffee, set to brew the night before, is cold in its full carafe; snapshots are still in magnets on the refrigerator. Nothing has changed at all. Z would be coming back in from her walk any moment now that she’d quit jogging, and she’d bring fruit from the old man’s stand: pineapple and mangos and avocados for lunch, and all of this would let me forget that the past I’d lived didn’t matter at all now that I had a future with her.

  My son’s face comes back to me as I caress her dress that is stretched across the bed in a patch of sunlight. My baby’s skin, the very perfect nuance of color, the big round circles so perfectly formed in his hair, the puffiness of my nose on his face, her chin, the almond of her eyes, my forehead, and the creation that couldn’t have been completed without us. I want to hold him, to love him, but I don’t know that it’s possible without her; I don’t know that life can go forward without her, without her love, without Pa to hate, without something to have and to hold, to cherish or despise.

  I leave the house and start walking until I get to Main Street. I find a café next to the old bank building and go in and sit down. I order a grilled cheese an
d watch people as they pass the large window in front. The world looks so very different to me, all of it, the lines and the morphing, even the way my sandwich, the bread and the cheese, are melted together; everything is suddenly so separate and so isolated. I feel alone, so alone, so heavy, and I try to forget my boy for just a few moments at a time because seeing him, realizing him, is knowing that she is gone, and I refuse to accept it.

  I eat the sandwich and drink the cold coffee and get up again to walk the streets, to notice people’s colors and habits and clothing and how many of them might be dead tomorrow. I want to stop to yell this in their faces: “Don’t get too comfortable, people,” I’d say, “it could all be fucking gone before you know it.” My pace quickens as I think of the confrontation and how resistance comes so easily to me. I walk and walk, past the railroad tracks again, past the restaurant where we ate dinner on our wedding night, and then suddenly I stop walking and look to the sky because I’m so tired and feel as though I don’t know how my legs work anymore or how my heart will continue to pump blood or how my hands will feed my mouth or how I’ll ever be able to see anything again.

  I can’t walk hard or long enough. I can’t get away from what is true, no matter how hard I try. I beg the sky for relief: God, I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. I’m not that man.

  * * *

  When I walk into Ma’s house, she is on the sofa smoking; the smell of the menthol air is comforting to me, and I take two big lungfuls of it before sitting down on my end of the couch. I can feel her looking at me, but I don’t speak. I don’t think I remember how to form words, and I don’t even know if there are really thoughts occupying spaces in my head.

  “Where’s your baby, son?” One of her legs rests over the other, and her foot bounces and she takes long drags off her cigarette, the inhale and the exhale, two separate things.

  “He’s not my baby, Ma; he was hers. I don’t think I can do it.” Ma comes up beside me. I want Z back.