Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  EARLY MORNING, AND the small coal was rolling out of the scuttle like little bells and my mama was saying, “Ain’t nobody in this house interested in Christmas?”

  Then my pappie was climbing up the porch steps and he fell heavy against the door.

  “Hey, woman, lemme in this house!”

  In three mean steps Mama crossed the room. Alfie was sitting up, but Margaret Rose had sense enough just to hang her head over the side of the bed to watch. Because my big brother had already moved out, and my father didn’t count, I was the man of the house. Not him, me, I’m the man. I anointed myself, and prayed, “The Lord is my Shepherd; / I shall not want.”

  “Whatcha mean come dragging in this house on Christmas morning?” Like a pan of dishwater, Mama’s wrath flung out the door on him.

  “Now, I done bought a little tree.”

  Mama cracked open the door.

  “Why, sure enough.” My mama’s voice sung on open—wide and warm. And my sister whipped out of bed and ran calling, “Daddy’s got us a tree!” and so did Alfie, and Willy babbled, and finally I thought it was safe, and I raised up in bed.

  Then I saw packages! On the breakfast table, after all. We shall not want. I zipped over the linoleum floor like it was hot. I lifted my box and it was heavy with metal heaviness. Then I walked on over to the rest of the family. Against the tree, I measured myself taller than Daddy’s little green tree.

  THAT AFTERNOON ON CHRISTMAS Day, some of us skated backward and some danced and clapped. Some skated in a circle round the whole drove. For blocks and blocks and miles and miles. Our sound was big like airplanes. I could keep up good even if I was little, and they wouldn’t leave me up there alone on white folks’ streets anyway. Not on Christmas. Then, all at once, I found a dime. Perfect, slender, weightless, it slid into my pocket.

  And that’s the happy part of a story that I hoped could start happy and end happy, but this world cannot be represented by the happiness of a poor boy finding a dime. I had much to learn of the ways of God and man before I found my calling, which was to follow Reverend Shuttlesworth, to become a minister as he was in the days of my boyhood and continues to this day. Not so long ago, I went to the trials in Birmingham (yes, Mama, there have been Trials as well as tribulations) of those who killed my little friends, and after the last aging white man was convicted, there was Reverend Shuttlesworth, age eighty himself, singing for all of us “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” And his picture on the front page of the Birmingham News, triumphant.

  BUT CHRISTMAS, 1963,WAS the next to the last day that I ever saw my physical father.

  On December 26, Pappie got up cussing and puking. After he’d stirred up the air, our whole cabin smelled like Christmas gift whiskey, spoiled and rotted and puked up. At the steel mill Pappie was grabbed up by Big Man—that’s what they called it then. I don’t know what piece of equipment in the foundry killed him. I guess he was hungover, drugged with booze, careless for the first and last day in his life. They said to me “Can’t nobody, not even the preacher, look in his box ’cause he don’t look like hisself no more.”

  For a while, I didn’t much miss my father—I hate to say that, but it’s true. He was hardly ever in the cabin. That was Mama’s domain. And besides, I still had my big brother, Charles, and Reverend Shuttlesworth was my spiritual father. But sometimes at night I could hear Margaret Rose snuffling for our father. Twice Alfie cried out “Daddy” in his sleep. Willy was too young to have any sense.

  Sometimes I tried to think of my paw. “Paw, he dead,” I would whisper to myself.

  But I had a dream that spring, and it woke me up to reality.

  It was starting to warm up and forsythia had already bloomed when I found my sister, Margaret Rose, talking to my school shoes on a crate beside my cot.

  “You is a nigger and don’t you forget it.”

  “Margaret Rose!” I said. “What you mean talking at them shoes like that for?”

  She whirled around, very angry at me, and hissed that I was stuck-up. But I knew that wasn’t true, and I took up for myself. “You’re a lie.”

  Then Margaret Rose said something that I knew immediately to be wicked. She said, “If I want to, when I get big, I can sleep with any white man I wants to. But you ain’t never gonna have a white woman, nigger boy.” She began to cry but she went right on talking. “I is glad I’m gonna be a woman and not no worthless man.”

  “You’re a lie,” I repeated weakly.

  “Ask Mama. If you know where she at. She gone off with Mr. Stoner.”

  I said that his wife was sick and that Mama was helping to care for the sick, like the Bible said she ought.

  “It ain’t in the Bible to take money. She takes his money.”

  “For working in the grocery store. We paid to work.”

  “For swelling?” she asked. “Ain’t you looked at her?”

  And I wondered, was Mama swelling? Like before Willy and Alfie? Speech-less, my jaw dropped open and Margaret Rose walked out the door.

  That night I dreamed President Kennedy, half his head missing, took my hand and led me up the mountain to look down an open hole in its peak. A long ladder led down there. At the bottom, a human-size metal Vulcan was making steel, and the cauldron was bubbling and spitting. I went down the ladder with the president, and there was my mutilated father tending the flames, his hands just raw flesh. Oh, he was dead! All at once the ladder was pulled up. Flames bubbled out of the melting pot and spilled on the floor and spread like water toward me, burned off my shoes and lapped up my legs. There wasn’t any leaving that place.

  Till the rooster crowed, my father, the president, and I burned in the furnace, and the veins inside our bodies ran with molten steel.

  Four

  The Oven, Summer 1964

  New Work, New Life

  WHEN SHE STOOD ON THE FRONT PORCH OF HER FIANCÉ’S sister’s house—Boy Howdy! It was hot today—and rang the bell, Stella thought of gunfire—the sound was that penetrant. It was as though she, Stella, had pulled a trigger by poking the doorbell button with a fingertip. No, Cat Cartwright actually was shooting. Cat was target practicing with her father’s gun in the indoor shooting gallery that Mr. Cartwright had built. When Don left for the Peace Corps—some six months earlier—his sister had taken up shooting, aided and abetted by their father.

  NOT A RICH MAN, a night watchman, Mr. Cartwright had brought home old sofa cushions from the junkyard, had straightened out quart tomato juice cans and quart grapefruit juice cans; he had cut thicker steel out of wrecked cars. With the old cushions and the metal he had lined the shooting gallery, a square tube, two foot by two foot. Cat sat in the pantry to shoot; the tube supported by stilts, jutted straight into the backyard for thirty feet.

  She’s a pretty good shot, Harvey Cartwright often told himself, but even if her little hands was to tremble, the bullet likely couldn’t get out of the tube. In any case, by the time a stray bullet got through all his cushion-and-metal linings it would near ’bout be harmless.

  From the time of his own hardscrabble boyhood, he had trained himself to accept and not to test out any idea that offered comfort. It gave Mr. Cartwright satisfaction to believe in the efficacy of his shooting contraption. Being a night watchman, he slept with earplugs so Cat could practice during the day when he had to get his rest. ’Course when he worked, he had to have the gun back in its black leather holster (he wished the holster were bigger; that might be safer if somebody ever tried to grab it away from him).

  There wasn’t no safety from germs. That’s what Harvey Cartwright had told himself when his daughter, who used to run down the dirt road to meet him when they lived in the country, before they had to move to Birmingham, lay in her iron lung. There was no way I could of protected her from germs. The doctors had said it wasn’t polio, and then it was polio, and then it wasn’t polio and she could certainly come out of the iron lung for most of the rest of her life, till all systems would one by one shut down; it was degenerative w
hat she had, somebody’s ataxia. These days you could vaccinate against polio, if it had been that.

  His daddy had given Harvey an air rifle when he was ten. Yes, Cartwright was comfortable with a gun: he’d grown up in the country after all. At his job interview in the city, they’d asked two questions—“Are you comfortable with a gun?” and “Can you walk all night?” Yes, he could walk all night.

  With his next paycheck he would buy Cat her own weapon so she wouldn’t be scared—he imagined his daughter’s terror all too easily and had to imagine it, since she had never uttered a word of fear—her unprotected alone in the house at night, the world coming to what it had. His son gone, not to the army but to the Peace Corps.

  His crippled daughter needed a gun. Especially since she was determined to do what she said she was going to do, starting tonight, and who could know what colored boy might track her home, break in, seeing how she was nearly helpless. Tomorrow, he’d visit the pawnshop, this time to buy, not to sell. At least she could still use her hands some. He had to take his gun to work, and Catherine needed one of her own.

  The shriek of Stella’s doorbell penetrated even new rubber earplugs, though gunfire did not, and Mr. Cartwright wished he’d hung out the sign Just come on in, Stella. He shambled toward the front door, zipping his pants;she’d seen him in his strap undershirt before.

  And now Stella and Don were engaged. Mr. Cartwright shook his head—why would his son get engaged and then go off to an island in the Pacific Ocean? Maybe Don thought he needed some home tie to keep him off the native women. Well, being engaged or even married didn’t stop most men—he could have told Don that. But Don never had seemed to be wild that way.

  Harvey Cartwright had come to like Stella, at least to like that she visited. When Don was around, she’d been friendly, but Mr. Cartwright never noticed any spark between Don and Stella. She had been a faithful friend to Cat from high school on into college and all the way through college. Last May, she’d pushed Cat in her wheelchair up to get the bachelor of arts diploma. Mr. Cartwright would have liked to have done that part himself.

  Now he rubbed sleep out of his eyes, looked through the sheer curtain over the front door at Stella’s slender form. Like a good ghost, he thought and remembered he’d been dreaming of his dead wife. In the dream, she was scolding him when the doorbell drilled his mind. Yes, he believed in ghosts. His wife’s ghost had visited him many times to give him good advice.

  “Come on in, Stella.”

  “I’m sorry. I woke you up.”

  “That’s all right.” He turned away, padded barefoot back toward his bedroom. Then he remembered he ought to have confronted this able-bodied girl about where she was intending to take his handicapped daughter tonight, but he was too tired.

  Climbing back into his bed, he thought, Poor little thing, lost all her family in that car wreck, lives with those two old aunts, one of them crippled up ’bout bad as Catherine. He liked to sleep under a sheet, even in the summer. Him a doctor, first to die. One, two, three, four. Father, mother, two brothers, all four in her family—dead.

  Mr. Cartwright pictured the car rolling over: like a single dice. People tumbling like clothes in a dryer at the Laundromat. In bed, he rolled onto his shoulder, pulled the sheet with him. Five people rolled around inside, damaged to death. Only one lucky little girl climbed out the window, car lying on its side. She had told Cat and Cat had told him. Stella was covered with blood; her whole skin was red with it.

  WHEN STELLA STEPPED INSIDE, she felt the blessed coolness of the room air conditioner. She walked through the house and stopped in the kitchen to cup her hands over her ears. In the pantry, Cat sat sideways, sighting down the jerry-built shooting gallery; she was going to squeeze off another shot. Goliath, sitting in Cat’s lap, looked at Stella with large, longsuffering eyes. Cat fired the gun, and as soon as the noise was over, Goliath leapt down from Cat’s lap and rushed Stella. The little dog’s barking exploded in jealous rage.

  “Goliath! Goliath,” Cat said sternly, but the little dog barked till he was satisfied. Cat left the gun in its short stand (a reclaimed wig stand from the junkyard) and turned her wheelchair. As she repositioned, sunlight glanced from the spokes, threw a spoked wheel of light toward Stella.

  “Baked apples in the oven,” Cat said.

  Stella’s nose told her it was true.

  “Dad said we could take his car. But he doesn’t like it. Here are the car keys.” Haltingly, Cat groped in her lap, held out the necessary key ring to Stella.

  The keys were still warm, Stella noticed, from Cat’s lap and from Goliath sitting on them. Cat’s short hair was newly washed—she didn’t wash it often enough and it tended to get greasy and stringy (funny, Stella thought, how dirty hair made a person look poor), but today it was a light brown haystack capping Cat’s head.

  “Your hair looks pretty,” Stella said. “So we’ve got the car.”

  Although Stella’s Aunt Krit owned a car, she took it to school with her every day. She’d taught Stella to drive, and she let her use the car once a week.

  “Dad said to get to Miles we go out Eighth Avenue.”

  “So you told him where.”

  “Seemed best.”

  “I’m not going to tell the aunts.” Stella knelt before the hot stove to take out the baked apples, something Cat couldn’t manage. “At least not till we’ve got the jobs.”

  H.O.P.E.

  WHAT LIONEL PARRISH THOUGHT WHILE HE WAITED FOR the white girls was: (1) they both had B.A.s and one was Phi Beta Kappa and (2) they were from here, and what did that mean? Not like white Judy Cohen from Berkeley, California, whose smile was…strained, should he say? Couldn’t be friendly, since she didn’t know anybody down here and there hadn’t been time to make friends, but maybe hopeful of making friends, yes, call it hopeful. Hope was something he could relate to. It stood for what he was trying to do:H elp; O pportunity;P otential E nergy—the capital letters spelled out the word.

  Lionel Parrish had talked it over with Mr. Bones, and when Mr. Bones sneered in derision, then Mr. Parrish knew it was the right name, just what the community needed: hope. Right on cue, yes, he could expect Mr. Bones often these days, and here he was!

  With a skittering and a crash, a scrolled-up drawing of the human skeleton rolled down behind Lionel Parrish’s desk. The bottom pole of the wall diagram dropped right into the chalk tray like the sharp rap of a ruler. When he was a boy, teacher had laid the ruler cross the palm of little Lionel’s hands many a time like that.

  Mr. Parrish sighed. “What you want to say this time, Mr. Bones?” he said, addressing the chart of the skeleton.

  Trouble coming. That’s all.

  “Uh-uh. Future coming. Let the means reflect the ends. That’s what I say. That’s what Martin says Gandhi says. That’s what Fred Shuttlesworth says. Now let’s see what Joe Rumore says. You hush.”

  Mr. Parrish flicked on his small radio. And now the weather, brought to you by Golden Eagle Table Syrup, Pride of Alabam. Temperatures soared to ninety-nine degrees today in Birmingham, and now at five o’clock in the evening, the thermometer reads ninety-eight degrees in the downtown area. Relative humidity ninety-eight percent. Zero chance of precipitation, and folks, it looks like it’s going to be another scorcher tomorrow in Birmingham, your Magic City. Predicted high of a hundred degrees in our sizzling Magic City….

  The sound of the phone pierced the radio patter. Well, he’d answer it. Maybe the white girls were canceling. He answered cheerfully, “H-O-P-E, Help Opportunity Potential Energy here.”

  A stream of white-voice obscenities machine-gunned into his ear. Mr. Parrish gently set the receiver back in its cradle. He hummed a little church tune to himself. He picked up a pencil to be busy.

  Push it out of your mind with a pencil. Might of been Mr. Bones; might of been his own good voice giving him good advice. But the gray pencil lead, sharp above the yellow pad of paper, did its own little nervous dance. He glanced over his shoulder at t
he grinning skeleton on the wall. Now the Lord said to Lot’s wife, Don’t you look back.

  Okay. That was what he, Lionel Parrish, should have told himself about Matilda, what with Jenny and the children so good at home. But he had gone back to Matilda, and she had heated him up till blood boiled in his veins. Mr. Parrish rose from his chair and looked out the window across the city to see Vulcan standing on Red Mountain. Help me, Iron Man! He ought not pray to a pagan god, he knew that. You’d burn in hell for that.

  Timid knock, timid white voice: “Mr. Parrish, Mr. Parrish.”

  And there was one: slender as a willow switch.

  “There’re too many steps.”

  What did that crazy white girl mean?

  One in a wheelchair! Hey, come on! And she mad as a hornet, sitting in her chariot at the bottom of the steps.

  “You said your office was street level,” the crippled one said.

  “Well, more or less. It is.”

  The standing one (hair straight and smooth, almost to her shoulders, then flip!) said her name, Stella Silver, and that she could get Catherine’s chair up one step but not three, and he said that wouldn’t be any problem for him, and when he reached out to pull her up, that Catherine commanded Wait! And then explained she had to release the brakes first (looked like her hands, too, were weak, kind of flipped back at the knuckles). She released the brake very slowly; he could have done that in half a second. Her hands moved like they owned the brakes, like they were little flesh clouds hovering over their own territory, but after she’d done it, she smiled up at him and wasn’t any doubt: she liked him and wanted him to like her. Just as natural as could be.

  It was heavy, chair and all, and he understood why that willow switch was smart not to try to pull wheelchair and passenger up three steps. He’d supposed all along they were smart, well educated, but turned out, after they got settled inside, and the phone rang and he ignored it, and the radio turned on by itself, and he laughed and said Haints, I reckon and they laughed, too, and they had got each other’s names straight, turned out it was the crippled one who was the Phi Beta Kappa and she was also the one he’d talked to on the phone. Her voice was a little bit impaired, too, but that was faint.