Such Sweet Thunder

by Vincent O. Carter

  “Tommy! William! Lemuel! Git to bed — all a you. You, too, Dorothy!” The children all went into the house.

  By now Gloomy Gus and Aunt Tish were at the bottom of the alley. Only her voice could be heard. “Pretty things for a pretty penny! Sweet ladies! Gallant gentlemen!” All the people stole quietly into their houses.

  “Let’s git upstairs,” said Rutherford.

  “I aaain’ ain’ gggoin’ no-wh-wh-wheres!” Unc stammered. “Th-th-th-this is my-my porch an’-an’-an’ I’m gonna-gonna set on it or bbbe damned!”

  “Shoot yourself!” said Rutherford with a grin. “G’night, Mrs. Derby.”

  “G’night, Mister Rutherford, Mrs. Jones, Tony,” said Mrs. Derby. “Hope Mister Derby don’ have no trouble gittin’ home. That man would be gone when somethin’ like this happens.”

  “Go to bed, Amerigo,” said Rutherford curtly as soon as they were in the house. “You, too,” turning to Viola.

  “What you gonna do?” she asked, breathing rapidly.

  “Mind your own business.” He went into the middle room, opened the bottom drawer of the vanity dresser, and withdrew a small twenty-two revolver. He broke it down and spun the chambers around.

  “My brother was shot to death with that gun!” cried Viola, “an’ for nothin’!”

  “What’s that gotta do with me?”

  “What kin you do with that, that, bean shooter! Against machine guns, Rutherford?”

  “Go to bed!” He shut the door so that the child couldn’t hear, and he took this opportunity to go to the window and peep down into the alley. All was quiet. The alley was darker now and the street lamp shone brightly. He tried to catch a glimpse of Tom Johnson sitting on his porch, but the glare of the light was too bright.

  Suddenly, mysteriously, he heard the crickets singing again. He wondered if they had been singing all the while and he hadn’t heard them. And while he wondered, he suddenly realized that he heard them no more:

  “Tom,” said Miss Myrt from the window upstairs.

  Silence.

  “Tom?”

  “What?”

  “I’m your momma. Listen to me.”

  “Git back out a that window, damnit!”

  “You don’ tell me what to do, boy! I raised you! An’ I’m gonna sit in this window just as long as you set on those steps!”

  “Well, you’ll just git your damned fool head blowed off if you do ’cause I ain’ goin’ nowhere.”

  Silence.

  The crickets began to sing. He got in bed and closed his eyes and listened. He felt something crawling over his chest. He slapped at it with the palm of his hand. Sweat!

  Boom! Boom! Boom! His heart pounded quietly. He opened his eyes and looked out the window. He gazed above the shade of the ringed lamplight.

  “Tom?”

  Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! One-two-three-four stars … five-six-seven-eight … the sky’s full of stars!

  Half asleep.

  A car sped down the alley. A storm! Glass shattering, empty cans flying noisily over the cobblestones. A whining shriek from the avenue!

  He opened his eyes. The storm was silent. He looked at the sky. The stars were still there!

  Sparrow-twitter! He sat up in bed with a start. He pulled on his pants and tipped into the middle room. Viola lay sleeping — alone.

  “He’s gone! MOM! He’s gone!”

  Viola jumped up in bed.

  “What time is it?”

  He held up the clock before her face. She lay back in the bed and turned to the wall. “Go to bed, boy!”

  “He’s GONE!”

  “Who’s gone? What are you —” She felt the empty space beside her. “RUTHERFORD!” She bolted upright. “THE GUN!” She sprang out of bed and raced into the kitchen with Amerigo on her heels. She stopped in front of the screen door, placed her hands on her hips, and grinned: “There’s your father!”

  Rutherford was sitting on the orange crate, asleep. The twenty-two revolver lay near his foot. Viola stepped out onto the porch and looked over toward Tom Johnson’s house. “Look! Ain’ that a sight!” pointing to Tom who sat sleeping on his steps and Miss Myrt sleeping in the window above. “If ol’ Pete was comin’ he coulda blowed ’um to kingdom come — an’ they wouldn’ a even knowed it!”

  “Rutherford. Rutherford …” She tugged gently at his arm.

  He started. “What! —What’s happenin’?” He yawned.

  “Ain’ nothin’ happenin’ ’ceptin’ you catchin’ your death a cold out there on that cold porch! Come on in the house, boy!” He looked over at Tom Johnson. “If they was comin’, they’d a been here before now!”

  He stood up, stretched himself, and rubbed his arms. Then he smiled a silly smile.

  “An’ bring that pop gun with you!” said Viola over her shoulder.

  He stood at the backyard gate fumbling in the shallow pocket of his green velvet breeches, waiting for his mother to come. Presently she appeared on the porch all dressed up in a Sunday dress, her hair freshly straightened and curled, the tiny mole on her chin darkened with the wetted tip of a lead pencil, perfumed, diamond rings glistening.

  Sharp as a tack! he thought.

  “You have to pee, Amerigo?” she asked, noticing that he was fumbling in his pocket.

  “No’m.”

  “What you got in your pocket?” She quickly descended the back steps and approached the gate, taking one last look in the little hand mirror she withdrew from her purse. He pulled out his glass star.

  “Where’d you git that?”

  “Mister Jake.”

  She opened the gate and stood waiting for him to step into the shoot.

  “That’s nice, but be careful you don’ cut yourself, those points look mighty sharp.”

  “My, my! Don’ Tony look sweet!” cried Miss Sadie from the porch.

  “Oh! Eh, hello, Miss Sadie. I woulda called you, Miss Sadie, but it sounded so quiet over there. I, I thought maybe you wasn’ up yet!”

  “Aw, that’s all right. I just came out to say good-bye to my baby. Couldn’ let my boy go to school without seein’ ’im off!

  “Here, honey!” to the child, “I got somethin’ for you.”

  “You kin go git it,” said Viola.

  He ran up on the porch and Miss Sadie handed him a big round silver coin.

  “Thanks,” he said. Miss Sadie kissed him before he could turn away, and his face got all wet. She’s crying, he said to himself. Women! Tearing himself from her embrace and running down to his mother. She looked at the coin, which he held up for her inspection.

  “Oh! That’s too much, Miss Sadie. A whole dollar, for a baby!”

  “I ain’ no baby!”

  “He’ll just lose it. Here. I’ll keep it for you,” Viola took the silver dollar and put it into her purse, giving him a nickel in return. Then she said to Miss Sadie, who was drying her eyes on the hem of her housecoat: “That’s awfully sweet of you, Miss Sadie. Much obliged.”

  “That — that ain’ nothin’, Miss Jones.”

  “Well,” Viola began, taking his hand.

  “Hi, Tony!” Miss Derby, smiling from behind her screen door. “I see you on your way sho’ ’nuff!”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Mornin’, Mrs. Derby,” said Viola.

  “Mornin’, Mrs. Jones. My, you two sho’ look nice! My boy’s gonna be a fine-lookin’ man when he grows up. I kin just see ’im now! You do what they tell you, an’ learn all you kin, ’Mer’go, you heah me? Never had the opportunity you gittin’ to git some schoolin’ an’ amount to somethin’. Got my schoolin’ in the cotton fields down —”

  “Hi, ’Mer’go!”

  “Hi, ’Mer’go!”

  “Hi, ’Mer’go!”

  “Hi, ’Mer’go!”

  “Tee hee hee!”

  “Mornin’, Mrs. Jones!” exclaimed a knot of children who were just crossing the yard behind Miss Ada’s apartment.

  “Hi,” he said shyly to Tommy, Turner, Carl, Sammy, a
nd Etta.

  “Hello there!” said Viola, smiling at them, waving at the same time to Miss Sadie and Mrs. Derby who were waving back. Viola and the children started through the shoot. Mrs. Crippa came out on the back porch to shake out the tablecloth.

  “Eh! You taka Tony to school?… That eez gud. Ina the olda country I no go to school, buta my Karl, Frank, Johnathan, they havey money to go to school, but they no wanna, only Tina. She’s a go to college — an’ for what? To gita married an’ hava baby? What for? I have a baby — two, three, four babies an’ no go to college! Tony do the right thing. He go to school an’ grow up to be a biga fina man. Keep out a trouble. No run after the girls an’ buy beeg cars an’ never come home to their momma!” She waved them away with a disparaging sweep of her free hand, and waved good-bye to Viola and the child at the same time, mumbling words in Italian to herself as she stepped back into the kitchen. Meanwhile Viola and the child made their way through the shoot, followed by the chattering bunch of children.

  “Phew-whee! What’s that stinkin’?” cried Sammy.

  “Smells like a turd!” exclaimed William.

  “You gonna git a knot on your head if I hear you say that word agin in front a Mrs. Jones!” said Tommy. “Now say ’scuse me, niggah, ’fore I git you now!”

  “ ’Scuse me,” said William, his big eyes clouded with shame.

  “It does smell bad!” said Viola. “I wonder where it could be comin’ from?”

  “I smelled it comin’ through the lot!” said Sammy mysteriously. “I bet it’s somethin’ in the empty house!”

  “A rotten ghost!” said Carl.

  “Aw ghosts don’ stink, niggah!” said Sammy.

  “Well, it’s somethin’ stinkin’ ’round here!” Carl retorted.

  “Whew! This is better!” said Viola as they came out on the Campbell Street side. They crossed the little grassy yard in front of Miss Ada’s house and descended to the sidewalk. Miss McMahon was on her porch, talking to her brother, Officer McMahon. He was in uniform, with a silver star with numbers on it on his chest and a gun belt with real bullets in it and a gun. He smiled and waved at them. The sunlight shining on the lenses of his glasses obscured his eyes.

  “Blue,” Amerigo thought, waving back. “Hi, Miss McMahon! Hi, Mr. McMahon!”

  “You an’ your momma lookin’ mighty slicked up there. Where you off to, all dolled up like that so early in the mornin’?”

  “To the kinnygarden!”

  “Mornin’, Mrs. Jones,” she said, while Officer McMahon nodded a greeting and smiled. “Why it seems only yesterday,” she continued, “that you weren’ no bigger’n that!” snapping her fingers.

  “No’m,” he said, as they turned down Campbell Street.

  “You gonna come over an’ clean out the shoot Sad’dy?”

  “Kin I, Mom?”

  “I reckon so,” said Viola.

  “Yes’m!”

  “All right, then, I’ll be waitin’ for you!”

  “Yes’m.”

  They passed Mrs. Crippa’s house. It was fronted by a little flower garden with a trellis that covered the steps leading to the broad shaded front porch.

  This is a pretty street, he thought, allowing his gaze to take in its quiet cleanness, enhanced by flowers and trees. Opposite Mrs. Crippa’s house was an apartment building where white people lived: I-talians. Next to that was an empty lot that gave onto a hill covered with grass and weeds and wildflowers and bushes. His back to the hill, he took mental note of the fact that next to the hill, on the corner, was a big unpainted wooden house where colored people lived, opposite which was another vacant lot with an even higher hill covered with weeds fronted by a big billboard facing the boulevard. A string of tumbling houses slanted back down the hill where Mr. Mose, an old iceman, lived with his daughter Freda who was black and ugly and mean. Next to Mr. Mose lived the Chauncys, a skinny yellow man with a fat yellow wife, both over fifty, with their son, Bud, of whom all the little kids were afraid because he was mean, too. “That niggah’ll kill you!” he had heard Sammy exclaim. He squeezed his mother’s hand a little tighter, diverting his attention to the man who lived next door. Old man Barnes. Suddenly he saw a tall black gray-headed man with bluish brown eyes and yellow teeth. He used to work on the railroad but he was retired now.

  Irish! he thought suddenly, for no accountable reason. Yesterday … Miss McMahon was saying, You were no bigger’n that! The sound of her fingers snapping exploded in his ears.

  And then there was the violent clanging of a trolley bell, followed by the loud irritating blast of a honking horn. A big truck backed out of the spaghetti factory on the corner of Independence and Campbell, blocking the streetcar tracks. The streetcar looked like a strange toy. He tried to coordinate the image of it with the sound of it heard from afar, from the back porch, in the dark, just before he fell asleep. He listened to the strange and not unpleasant sound of its motor, a quivering rhythmical sound that made him want to tap his foot and hum a tune to match it. Just as they reached the foot of the hill the truck emitted a loud belch and jerked down the avenue, and then the streetcar conductor clanged the bell a few times more, turned the stirring knob in a circular orbit and the streetcar, half filled with black, beige, brown, yellow, and one white man, rattled clumsily down the avenue, past the spaghetti factory.

  “Come on, here, boy!” said Viola.

  “Yes’m.”

  Past Goldberg’s ice cream parlor, Magedy’s grocery store, past the mouth of the alley, imagining it as he usually saw it from the front porch, a low streak of sunburned orange by day and a flash of pumpkin-orange perforated with squares of candle-flame yellow by night.

  Viola tightened her grip on his hand as they crossed Campbell Street and proceeded up the avenue, east.

  “Tomorrow you’ll be goin’ to school with Tommy an’ you’ll have to learn to cross the streets by yourself. All you have to do is stop at the corners, look both ways, and wait till you don’ see no cars coming! An’ then cross. But don’ run! You don’ have to run. If you have to run to make it, don’ try. That’s the way you git killed. But you don’ have to crawl, neither. Just take your time an’ cross as quick as you kin, without breakin’ your neck you hear?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “I’ll show ’im, Mrs. Jones,” said Tommy, keeping pace with them. Viola smiled at him tenderly.

  Miss Leona’s dead, he thought, seeing Tommy’s mother, sitting in the kitchen door, the sun cutting her bare legs just below the knees — just before … Miss Gert’s his momma now. Viola took out her purse and took out a dime and gave it to Tommy.

  “Here. You kin buy some candy at the drugstore. An’ give the rest of the kids some.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Tommy said with a broad smile.

  Meanwhile cars and trucks ground their greasy, smoky, paper-littered way up and down the avenue, through the lane of big brick buildings with wooden porches, interrupted here and there by storefronts filled with fruit and groceries, or signs (in big colored letters that you couldn’t rub off with your fingers) indicating places to eat or drink, with people sitting inside. All the appropriate smells within the dominant smell of humid autumnal heat were cooled by evaporating dew, which was beginning to mingle with the dust of the streets, the topsoil of hundreds of miles of prairies. The smell of sweat and bottled liquor, fish grease, barbecue and beer, was agitated by the penetrating odor of sour wine and meat markets; of spices and fresh and cured meat; of cheeses, sour cream in wooden buckets, and big dill pickles reposing in huge glass jars of briny water spiced with little black peppers and red peppers and bay leaves; of hard candies in jars and in boxes; bread and cakes, canned goods, dry and leather goods exposed in dank gray shops; of shoes and glue and little old men with dirty hands and mouths full of nails; of pollinating trees — cottonwood, maple, walnut, oak, fruit trees, tomato vines, grapevines.

  Smells attacked his sensibility firing the objects to which they adhered with myriad colors, while the sounds jolt
ed him with the force of lightning heralding thunder before rain!

  Suddenly he pressed his face against his mother’s hip in a wave of passion that made him want to cry. But Viola did not notice. “There’s where your Aunt Edna usta live,” she was saying, pointing to a shabby frame house near the corner of the cobblestone alley they were now crossing. He looked warily at the house. “An’ there’s where they found your Aunt Ruby — lousy with T.B.” He looked obediently in the direction indicated, but just then a passing streetcar and a transfer truck, cutting in behind it, plus the now upsurging thought of Aunt Edna’s alley, which “Ain’ as pretty as our’n,” along with the image of Aunt Ruby when she was eighteen, so pretty and smiling, distracted his attention.

  “Do you see?”

  “Yes’m.”

  They passed in front of a place with pictures stuck on boards propped up by sticks standing out on the sidewalk and pasted on the windows and doors. On either side of the entrance was a big double door and between them a window with two holes in it, a round one in the middle and a longer narrow one at the bottom.

  That’s the show! He remembered that was where Viola had gone, but not to this one, to the other one on Eighteenth Street, to see Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, four nights ago, after the day he had killed the cat and threw it in the empty house where Old Jake had poked with his stick before he had given him the star that morning. He touched the star within the darkness of his pocket: The cat! hearing Carl’s voice when they passed through the shoot: Somethin’s stinkin’ ’round here! “Kitty-kittykitty,” called Aunt Lily, and the cat crawled along the row of shadowed heads in the soup line, as the redness of the sky had threatened him with five o’clock — So soon! — and night and day three times, until he looked at the pictures stuck on the boards and on the windows and thought: That’s the show and a feeling of wonder came over him.