Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  Our uniforms reeked when we left the mill. My mother made us take them off before we walked in the kitchen. While our clothes soaked in a bucket of water and ammonia, Paul stood in the middle of the kitchen, in Scout socks and drawers, recounting in dramatic fashion the motions of the combine.

  “Mama, do you know why it stanks so bad?”

  “Stinks, Paul,” she said, grading a stack of composition papers on the kitchen table. “Stanks is not a word.”

  “Sulfur,” he said. “It smells like the whole world farted at once.”

  “Paul, do you want a spanking?” she said. She wanted to laugh, though. I could tell.

  “You mean a spinking?”

  “Oh, so you do want a spanking?”

  “No, ma'am,” he said. “But, Mama, do you know what else?”

  “What else, Paul?”

  “I'm gonna work at the mill.”

  “Going to,” she said. “Going to work at the mill. You aren't going to do anything until you go upstairs and take a bath like your brother.”

  “Yeah. You smell funky,” I said.

  “Roy you know I don't like that kind of talk. I have told both of you about being so mannish. When your father gets home . . .”

  When our father got home that evening, Paul told his story again during dinner. He reenacted the motions of the combines and the men who tended them. When he got to the part about the sulfur, he said, “It stinks tremendously,” and waited for our parents to laugh, and they did. He had a way of making them laugh with the things he said. He had talked himself out of a few spankings, but he had talked himself into some, too.

  Before our evening dinner conversation, we carried out the nightly tradition of blessing the food and reciting Bible verses. I would say, “Jesus wept,” the shortest verse in the Bible, and be done with it. Paul would go on forever. With one eye open, I would watch the steam rise off the food while Paul recited. Sometimes his eyes were open, too. We'd make faces at one another across the vegetables when no one else was looking. I never remember Paul saying the same verse twice. He was good at remembering.

  Paul asked Mr. Lewis when he could have a job at the mill. Mr. Lewis told Paul to ask when he turned fifteen. Shortly after his fifteenth birthday, he started working in the office, filing time sheets, moving boxes, running errands. Paul worked in the office for the rest of that summer and after school during the year. The summer he turned eighteen, he applied for a processing job on the floor, working with the same machines that as children we watched turn trees to pulp.

  Once he graduated from high school and started college, Paul worked the night shift, ten-to-six three days a week, and went to class in the afternoons. My father wasn't sure what to make of it at first, but he had always believed in good money and hard work, which is what the mill offered. Paul was serious about it. He worked his shifts on time and when he got home, he soaked his work clothes before washing, drying, and ironing them. My parents were impressed, but they considered the job a temporary pursuit until he was old enough to fulfill his calling.

  Paul, champion of Sunday school memory competitions, oratorical contests, and composition prizes, was going to go to be a preacher. He had decided that he would go to the seminary once he finished college. My father accepted the fact that Paul had never been interested in working in the funeral home. But on occasion my father would ask him to eulogize those who had no close family or no minister to bury them properly. We would be their family, and sit in the pews of the mortuary chapel, listening to Paul's words.

  From the few comments he gathered from the one or two people who knew the departed, or from the unclaimed things that they left behind, Paul would piece together a message, warm words that seemed so familiar it was hard to imagine that the two people—the one in the pulpit and the departed—were strangers.

  People in Mobile knew my father. They knew us all. They had seen our family photo on the church fans parishioners waved on hot days, trying to cool down the humidity or the Holy Ghost. Among the black funeral homes in Mobile, ours was one of the oldest and considered the best. In the picture, my grandfather, my parents, Paul, and I stood on the front steps of the funeral home. In black script beneath our feet, “Deacon Benevolent: Three Generations in the Service.”

  My mother held on to that family photo in an album she keeps. She also saved our team sports pictures. Flanked by backboards and bleachers, we wore sponsored uniforms and the mean-mug faces of adolescent boys trying to be men. Michael Donald was in some of these, one of the tall boys who stood along back rows, or the kneeling captain who held team trophies. Other pictures she kept as well. Color versions of the school day portraits that appeared on the black-and-white pages of our collected yearbooks. Portraits of Michael Donald and Paul Deacon often shared pages or faced across the fold.

  In their senior yearbook, they were five classmates removed from one another. That same photo of Michael appeared in the newspaper and in the pages of the glossy magazines that mentioned his name. These magazines my mother saved in a small twine-bound pile on her bookcase, below our trophies and the diplomas on the wall.

  Mobile is bright at night, the lights from the bay bridge, the spotlights on the old battleship, the shipyard beacons. Here it's dark. But the eastern shore darkness is familiar. It took a few minutes for my eyes to get accustomed, but now I can see the shades of dark, the outlines that separate the water, the tree line, and the overcast sky.

  The only lights that connect the east and west shores are those suspended above the bay bridge. When Paul and I were young, riding in the back of my father's truck, we lay on our backs and counted them, 240 each way. Beyond the main roads, only a few dim lampposts light the Baldwin County woods.

  When my father brought us over to the eastern shore on Jubilee nights, it took a while to reach the place we like to claim. People would stop us and speak. My father would stand for a while and talk to those who greeted him. He stopped and listened as long as they had something to say. He remembered everyone. He said it was his business to remember.

  I didn't remember the faces of the people who spoke to us then, but some of the voices were familiar. When I answered the phone during my cartoons some early Saturday mornings, when no one else was awake, the sad, polite voices would ask me how I was doing before they asked me to put my father on the phone. I was old enough to know by the soothing tone of my father's voice—the tone I emulate now—that someone had died and there would be work to do. As he talked to them, my father ran his fingers along the carvings on the edge of his desk and looked out the window to where the ginkgoes grew.

  After his night shift, Paul would stop by the Krispy Kreme on the corner of Chastain and Carlisle streets and pick up a dozen glazed doughnuts. When he got home, Paul would sit on the edge of my bed, and we'd eat them while I told him what happened on the late episode of Sanford & Son on Channel 44. The day before he found Michael, I told Paul about the episode where Fred and Lamonte went to the junkmen's convention in Hawaii.

  “Shit. I've seen that one.”

  “You've seen them all. They're reruns.”

  “I just hate it how on the reruns how they show part one of the ‘To Be Continued' and never show the part two in the right order. I bet you a dollar they show something entirely different tonight. Watch and see.”

  “You know what happens anyway.”

  “It's the principle, brother,” he said, mouth full of a Krispy Kreme and digging in the box for another one.

  “You wash your hands before you handled my food?”

  “I washed my hands at your lady's house.”

  “I'm just saying you smell like the mill. Before you sit on my bed, you need to wash your stankin' ass.”

  “Speaking of stankin' ass, your lady told me to tell you hello.”

  If I was asleep when he came in, he would leave my half of the box on my dresser. He'd bring in the paper from the front steps and leave it on the kitchen table for my parents. On March 8, there were no doughnuts waiti
ng. The morning edition of the Press Register was not on the table when I ran downstairs to answer the phone. It was Sgt. Kincaid, his voice familiar from our church choir. The strong, smooth tenor that would lead songs, the rock-steady voice expected of police officers. His voice was shaking somewhat when he asked for my father.

  My father didn't say much in the car on the way over. He said as much as he had to: Michael Donald had been killed. My brother had found the body, and we had to go see about Paul.

  A crowd had already gathered on Carlisle Street when we arrived. Before we could get over there, an elderly woman who was crying stopped my father. He put his arm around her and told me to go find Paul. I saw Sgt. Kincaid moving a barricade trying to clear the people standing in the street.

  “Sergeant Kincaid, where is he?”

  “He's still hanging. They won't let us cut him down until the coroner gets here.”

  “My brother, Mr. Kincaid. Where is he?”

  “Oh, I'm sorry. He's in my cruiser.” He pointed to the police car parked at the far end of the block.

  “Is he alright?”

  “He's shaken up. He was holding the Donald boy when I got to the scene. Trying to put some slack in the rope. It was already too late. You look out for your brother—he'll be alright.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kincaid.”

  I had to walk past that tree to get to my brother. I didn't look. I didn't want to see Michael there. I looked instead for the blue lights of the squad car and I saw my brother sitting on the passenger side.

  When I opened the door, he was sitting with his hands folded in his lap. Mud was all over his work shirt.

  “I'm sorry, Roy. The doughnuts,” he said, looking over my shoulder to where the crowd stood. “Roy, I left your doughnuts under that tree. I'm sorry.”

  “Don't worry about it, Paul.”

  “I'll go get you some more. I can get you some fresh ones.”

  “Paul, it's alright.”

  “No. No it's not.”

  I didn't walk him past the tree and the crowd. We took the long way around the block to where my father had parked.

  Our father was standing there with Sgt. Kincaid. Mr. Kincaid had asked my father to ride with him over to Mrs. Donald's house. She didn't know yet. Daddy put his arm on Paul's shoulder and asked him if he was all right.

  “No sir,” he said, picking the dirt off the name patch on his shirt. “Not yet.” That was the last thing he said before I put him in his truck and drove him home.

  The next day, the Donald family asked us to prepare Michael's body. My father told me I didn't have to be there when they worked on him.

  “I'll understand,” he told me. “He was your friend.”

  He didn't mean that. He wanted me there. Before I started working full-time with my father, we talked about times like these. He reminded me of the people I might see on the table. Friends and family. If this were to be my profession, he would tell me, I would have to be ready for them.

  “No one dies before their time,” he would say. “The call comes when it's meant to. It's not for us to question.”

  So I stayed and helped him prepare Michael Donald. There on the table, his face was so swollen that he looked like a stranger. My father addressed the swelling and bruises. I washed his hands and cleared his fingernails of the blood, gravel, and mud. My father stood over me as I cleared the scrapes and cuts on his knuckles.

  “He put up a fight,” he said.

  Seeing Michael, his hands and his face, I thought of my schoolyard fights and neighborhood brawls. I thought of the fights I'd won, remembering how the rush of victory dulls the pain of taken blows. I thought of the fights I had lost, when I felt the full force of heavy fists on my face. Hard blows, knuckle on bone, followed by the hot rush of blood to the surface. These blows would take the fight out of me.

  Turning Michael's hands, there were more cuts and bruises. “Defensive wounds,” they call these.

  My grandfather was in the room. Long retired, he had come to help prepare the body. He knew how to dress rope-burned skin. He knew how to wire the broken bones of a neck and make it straight again. He knew how to arrange the high, starched collar and necktie so they hid the marks that makeup could not conceal. I watched him as he worked, cradling Michael's head in his hands.

  He held it like he held mine in the waters here along the bay, on the summer afternoon he tried to teach me to float. I floated for a while, but when I opened my eyes and realized his hands were gone, and what I felt along my neck and back was just a memory of his fingers, I sank like a rock.

  On the morning of the funeral Paul came downstairs in reeking work clothes that he must have slept in. Mr. Lewis told him to take some leave time, but he went to work anyway.

  “Do you want some breakfast, Paul?” Mama asked. We had started talking to Paul in questions. Sometimes he would answer.

  “No, ma'am.”

  “You don't have much time, sweetheart. Don't you think you should be getting dressed?”

  “I'm already dressed. I got some overtime this morning.”

  “Aren't you going to go pay your respects to your friend?”

  “I already did. I talked to him when he was in that tree. We talked for a good while.” That was the last thing he said before he went out the door. As we pulled out of our driveway, my mother tried to dab away the redness in her eyes.

  “Talk to your brother, Roy,” she said.

  “I'll talk to him, Mama. He's going to be alright.” This was the assurance I made to my mother as we drove to the funeral.

  The sanctuary of New Canaan Baptist Church was filled that day. Hundreds more waited outside for the funeral procession. The pulpit overflowed with the reverend doctors of the world, known and unknown.

  After the service, I stood in the vestibule with my father as the pallbearers carried Michael's casket down the aisle. On the wall behind them, in stained glass, Jesus stumbled on the road to Calvary. Next to him stood Simon of Cyrene, the man who helped him carry his load. As Simon reaches down over Jesus, his mouth is near the ear of Christ. Whenever I am in New Canaan, whenever I am burying one of their own, I look at that wall and wonder about the Cyrenean. I wonder what he said.

  The pallbearers reached the door and met the sunlight of the March afternoon. The man at the front right looked down as he walked over the threshold. He looked back to the others and whispered. They nodded and lowered their heads as they crossed over. They looked down as they left the church, careful of the spot he warned them of—where the carpet had rolled away from the tacks—careful not to stumble.

  Paul had been a heavy sleeper before Michael Donald died. In the weeks after Michael's death, his sleep was uneasy. I could hear him through the walls, saying the same words over and over, words I tried in vain to understand. Then he stopped sleeping altogether.

  He stopped eating with us, and I would miss him for days at a time. Some mornings I'd wake up hoping to see him on the edge of the bed, hoping to smell the stench of sulfur that filled the room when he entered and lingered, refusing to let me get back to sleep. I started to miss that. But the only sign of him was the piles of work clothes that built up in the washroom until my mother soaked them, cleaned them, and hung them neatly in his closet.

  He worked when he should have been sleeping and when he should have been at school. With only a few weeks left in the semester, he stopped going to his classes altogether. He worked double shifts and overtime whenever he could get it. He had that tiredness about him that eight hours of sleep couldn't shake. My mother believed the tiredness caused what happened. It was the tiredness, she said, that caused him to fall asleep at his machine.

  “Hello? Deacon residence.”

  “Mr. Deacon, I'm so sorry to—”

  “Mr. Lewis? It's me, Roy.”

  “You sound more and more—Is he home? I need to speak to him.”

  “He's out of town. What's wrong?”

  He said nothing, but there was no silence. I heard commo
tion over the hum of the combines at the mill.

  “Can I speak to your mother?”

  “I'm the only one here, Mr. Lewis. Tell me what's wrong.”

  “It's Paul. He had an accident—”

  The combine had sliced through the bone and tendons just below his right wrist. It could have been much worse, Mr. Lewis said. Paul's hand could have been caught between the teeth of the blades, and his entire arm could have been pulled through on the intake. I've heard the stories of men whose arms were pulled from the socket. They die sometimes from blood clots or trauma. They said Paul was calm. They said he kept his head about him. I slept at the hospital with him for those first few days. Paul got out of the hospital a few days before Memorial Day.

  The investigators said the same thing my mother and Mr. Lewis believed, that it was an accident caused by fatigue. When he came home, he slept more than he was awake, and the medication kept him drowsy. Outside of doctor's appointments, he rarely left the house. I would take his dinner to him in his room, and try to talk to him while he ate, but would only speak when you asked him a question. And then in one word answers most times. Yes. No. Fine.

  My mother wanted him to talk to someone, a doctor or maybe someone from the church. But he never did. Mama asked me to talk to him. I tried. When he did start to talk more, it was always about the pain in his arm.

  “You know it still hurts, my hand. Nothing even there and I can still feel it hurting. The nerves don't know the difference.”

  “Do you want me to get your medicine?”

  “Pills don't work on something that's not there. It's in my head.”

  He lifted his bandaged arm, turning his forearm and staring where his hand should have been. He never looked at me when he talked like this.

  “I'm sitting right here, looking at it, knowing damn well that it's gone, but I can feel it just the same. If I close my eyes I can wiggle the fingers. See? I'm doing it right now.”