At home, green-kneed and ashy-elbowed, Nate was still angry, even though the Cougars had won, 14–0. “I could play quarterback better. Baby Poppa always talk bout the coach right, I should play defense. I could throw, Mama.”
Calvin said, “Huh-uh. You too nervous, always jump like a puppet when you looking to throw.”
“Shut up.”
“Mama,” Calvin said sharply. “Baby Poppa say he our daddy when he sign us up.”
She looked at him. “That okay.”
“He ain’t.”
“No. He you poppa, been you poppa. Not you daddy. You daddy die. You know that.”
“Where he bury?” Nate stared at her too, the way they fell in together sometimes like spoons in the drawer.
“I don’t know. Don’t know how he go either,” she said, uncomfortable. “It don’t matter. Baby Poppa like you gran.”
“Well, he don’t listen when I say tell the coach let me play offense,” Nate grumbled. “Don’t even want me play wide receiver. Want me play defense.”
“Let me tell you something,” she said. “You pay more attention to them game on TV, like I do. You gon see who in the action every play. And Nate, you crazy. You got a talent for see a shift and know how to get around somebody. I seen you all them time in the field and when coach try you on defense. Everybody think defense boring, but it the best part of the game.”
“Mamas ain’t suppose to know bout no football,” he mumbled under his breath, turning to the refrigerator.
She let that pass. “You be fine on defense you give it a chance. Watch, sweetheart, like I tell you.”
“Mama, what you know?” Calvin said. “You never play.”
“If I did, I could whup you both,” she said, laughing, picking up the light jerseys. After they were clean, Calvin came back out to the living room, saying, “But our daddy was big, huh? Bigger than you?”
She was surprised. “Yeah, taller, but he ain’t fat.”
“I thought he die,” Nate said, behind Calvin, and she corrected herself.
“He wasn’t fat before he gone,” she said, carefully.
“We gon be taller than you,” Calvin said.
“We gon be bigger, too, cause we men and you ain’t fat.” Nate nodded triumphantly and got a glass of milk. His feet were long and slanted on the floor in front of the refrigerator when he studied the leftovers.
“Our daddy skinny?” Calvin asked, staying in the doorway.
“No. Ain’t been fat or skinny. Just regular.” She folded her arms.
“What he like for eat?” Calvin kept on.
“Hamburgers,” she said without thinking.
“Where he get hamburgers at home? I don’t remember,” Nate said. “I thought you said we have fish all the time.”
She breathed in hard. “He don’t get hamburger very much. We all eat fish at home, in Pine Garden. This you home—that my home long time ago.”
“Our daddy catch fish?” Nate said.
“He work with fish,” she said, remembering one of the ladies whose kitchen she cleaned, saying on the phone to someone, “Dan works with phosphates.” She looked at the clock. “Go on, get to bed. Time.”
She had not thought of taking them to visit Pine Gardens for many years, since she had decided she was a haint. But they had never asked about their father—if they went and saw the bury yard, they wouldn’t find Sinbad. She thought of the stone with MARY carved into the face, wondered if someone had moved it, or put pieces of shell and glass around it. Haint move it there, that what they think. I just a haint for Pine Garden.
Nate and Calvin didn’t ask her anything else, but she heard them say the word “Daddy” sometimes when they talked, and she knew they were comparing their arms and feet to hers, to other people’s; she knew they looked in the mirror over the bathroom sink now and studied their faces.
The junior league season was short, and Nate stayed unhappy, but he tried to battle Calvin in the street and on the field. They were in junior high before Calvin talked him into trying defense, and Nate resigned himself to listening to Baby Poppa and the junior high coach. Then she watched from the sidelines when he played against another school in the city, in the still-hot fall air and the gray haze of afternoon.
Nate began to tackle like an alligator rising out of the water, clamping onto runners, slanting up from the line to crash through the offense like the other boys were reeds. He scissored his arms around the quarterback and fell on top of him. When he got up, Calvin slapped his hand on the sidelines, and Marietta knew he liked the feel of hitting and moving.
And Calvin stayed opposite Nate, as he had in the field. He was a pushing, nudging tree, a hundred trees in the forest when you were running and wanted to get through, he stopped the boys like Nate who came at him again and again, immovable in front of his quarterback or falling on top of a tackle just as the running back flashed past.
They were so much bigger than the other players that she saw boys cry when they left the field after playing against Nate and Calvin. Their mouths wouldn’t open, but she and Baby Poppa saw their eyes red and cheeks wet.
“My wife deserves some of the credit,” Baby Poppa said proudly. “She feeds them, too.”
Marietta said, “I scared of em, myself.” The school weighed and measured them when they began the eighth grade—they were both six feet two, 190 pounds.
Suddenly she smelled Sinbad when they came in at night, and she circled close to them where they put their plates in the sink. Before she went to work, she sniffed. Where was the sour, leaf-and-grass sweat that had risen from their scalps all these years? Was it floating above her now that they were taller than she was? They sat on the couch—no, she stood over them and smelled man sweat, a film of hard work and salt, dried and sharpened by the day until now it was Sinbad when he reached for something above her. She looked at Calvin’s huge knees, wide as plates, and thought of those tiny knees that had dragged through the mud when they began to crawl. She had made rings around their bellies with her arms and carried them back to where she wanted them, while they spit and blinked and swam in the air.
She dipped her head into the washer and smelled the bleach in the tangles of long, white socks. She looked into the tub, where there was no haze of dirt, and she sat in the water, watching her knees dry, imagining them. They had played in the tub together, then grown so big they had to take baths one at a time. She imagined their knees high and always cold. Now they showered at the high school every day after practice.
“Did you notice that they’re growing differently?” Baby Poppa asked one night when they all sat at the kitchen table before work.
“What you talking bout?” Tiny Momma said. “They eat the same thing—ten times much as anybody else.”
Marietta said, “I see Calvin getting bigger, when I see him. They go to school early, got practice, till I only see em on the weekend.” She finished her coffee. “But Calvin say Nate don’t have the patience to sit at the weight bench like the coach want him to. Don’t want to lay under that bar for the military press.”
“Military?” Tiny Momma said.
“Calvin say Nate don’t even want to interrupt the running of his mouth long enough to breathe,” Marietta said. “He talking bout, ‘I don’t need as much bulk like Calvin do, Mama. I got the speed and I know where they going.’” Baby Poppa laughed at her imitation.
“As if he never thought of playing anything but defense,” Baby Poppa said.
“I don’t know why y’all always laughing bout football,” Tiny Momma said grumpily. “Wait till one a them boys gets hurt and then you see what I been warning you bout all these year. That too dangerous no matter how big they get.”
She wouldn’t go to the games with Marietta and Baby Poppa. “I ain’t gon watch em get hit. I stay home,” she said.
When Nate and Calvin were sophomores, they both started on the varsity team, and Marietta and Baby Poppa went to the first game—September, 1976. Nate and Calvin’s high school was
playing a crosstown school, and all the arms and legs sticking out from the uniforms were dark. The Charleston schools were almost completely black, since after integration most of the white parents had sent their kids to private school or moved away. She always thought of the boys she saw during Christmas holidays, the ones in military school or boarding school.
If they get to some playoffs, they gon play outside the city, she thought. What gon happen when they hit a white boy? They hit somebody like Mr. Ray boy? Well, I done done it. Tell em it okay to pound somebody, encourage them for hit hard as they can. She watched the quarterback turn his head left and right like a turtle, Calvin bent over. No. I done done it.
The running back was slightly off center, poised, and the tight end was wide. Both receivers wide, but they bluffing. Marietta couldn’t say how she knew, how she could usually feel the play, but this time, something about the way the tight end and receiver held their heads on their necks, the set of their shoulders, told her they were the boys to get your attention away from the real culprit. Just like Calvin, trying to distract her from something Nate had done—it was in his eyes and careful mouth, his planned shoulders.
“Watch for run,” she said. “Calvin gon open it up.” The wide receiver dashed hard, drawing the defensive back, and the quarterback handed off. The fullback, thick-legged and short, passed inside and got seven on the run.
“Go head on, boy!” Baby Poppa shouted. Marietta clapped, thinking that nobody ever cheered for Calvin like they did for Nate, nobody ever stood up and shouted, “Great block!” except her and Baby Poppa. Everyone hollered, “What a tackle!” for Nate. She watched Calvin’s chest and arms grow like the hood of a cobra she had seen on TV, expanding to shield the quarterback, and then Calvin planted his feet and pushed. The quarterback’s wrist flicked beautifully, his socks sagged down his spindle calves, and the ball sailed through the air.
When the other team’s quarterback threw a pass late in the game, a desperation bomb, Nate reached up from where he had run to cover the play, and like a magical fish, the ball kissed his chest. Then everyone screamed.
She studied their playbooks at home, fascinated by the arrows and X’s, and she smiled at the typed rules and instructions from the coach, who was a round, graying man with light skin, always wearing a rustling, plastic-like jacket. “No girls. Remember, girls are DISTRACTIONS that will hurt your PERFORMANCE. Sex bleeds away STRENGTH and STAMINA you need for each game.”
Nate told Baby Poppa, “Man, girls help me. I like for em to see me out there, it makes me work harder. Serious.”
“Nobody said they couldn’t watch you from the stands, boy,” Baby Poppa said. “I don’t think Coach Terrell limited that.”
“Aw, man, girls don’t hurt nobody.”
“Babies do. You saw Carmen’s boy, Robert, had to get married.” Baby Poppa frowned at Nate. “You’re sixteen—you aren’t old enough for a baby. Ask your mother.”
She sucked her teeth at him. “I was old enough. But you ain’t,” she said, looking hard at Baby Poppa. “You got enough trouble in school, Nate. Calvin doing much better than you in everything.”
“Everything except girls,” he mumbled, and looked up. “Everything except math. Calvin just like to read—that’s how come he get through all that other stuff. But he can’t add nothing.”
“Good. The two of you will have to live together all your lives, since you insist on being two halves of a coin,” Baby Poppa said. “And then you won’t have to worry about girls.”
They came around, though, girls with hair puffed out in beautiful clouds, their eyelashes curling, their feet in wedge shoes that still didn’t lift them to the boys’ shoulders. Marietta saw them on the stairs in the evenings—with their full hair and the huge bell-bottomed pants around their ankles, the girls looked like people from another country. They smiled and blinked at Nate and Calvin, and Calvin listened while Nate said, “Oh, baby, you know I didn’t see you in the hall today.” Marietta heard them through the screen and smiled, too.
She and Baby Poppa saw two more games, but the school lost in the playoffs, and Nate and Calvin were angry. “Man, coach need to get a new fullback,” they said. “Brian ain’t getting it. He need to let Ronnie in there. Just cause he a sophomore, like us. We gon be champs next year.”
She still felt nervous, especially in the spring when a friend of the coach hired them at the icehouse. They worked all weekends, after school, and then in the moist heat of summer they started practice again during the mornings. Nate drank pitchers of Kool-Aid, but Calvin had a strange passion for iced tea with a certain number of ice cubes. She and Tiny Momma sat at the table for hours, worrying about the possibility of broken bones, which Tiny Momma predicted as inevitable between the blocks of ice and the coming season. “See? You and Poppa raise em only for play some game, and what if they leg break? What they gon do? No—you better tell em work hard at the icehouse, cause maybe they can find steady work there when they finish school. Big boys like that be fine at the ice house.”
The cuts on Nate’s knuckles swelled with infection from the mud, and she poured sugar on them like always, packed in the spiderwebs. “Mama, what you gon do when I go to college—pack me some spiders in a jar?” Nate laughed.
College. She pressed the webs into a sticky ball between her fingers. Broken bone—Aint Sister always bathed the limb in vinegar and water, packed creek mud around it for a week or two. Whooping cough—the fiddler crabs, boiled to die for their liquid. Fever, toothache, worms. All the medicines she had forced into their mouths, rubbed on their skins. But their knees, no matter how wide—she thought of cleats flying sideways into the soft inner knees and cracking the kneecaps.
What would happen to them if they couldn’t play football? She had kept busy these last two years, trying to keep from thinking about the fact that she had raised two men, huge and fearless, who smiled and waved at white men in cars now and then, who smashed white boys into the grass and raised their fists.
She so big, so black—they huge, they arms blacker from the field. At the icehouse, she had seen an older man, almost as big as the boys, with a drooping stomach and slack jaw. He sat in the shade on the wooden loading dock. Baby Poppa told her the man had spent ten years in prison for rape; he was slow, and somehow a white woman had been in the icehouse alone with him, back in 1938, after which she told her father he had attacked her. He was lucky only to be jailed, not killed. He was even slower when he got out, and he lumbered around the loading area like a shadow, his shoulders so soft and down-slanted next to Calvin’s straight, wide ones that she bit her lip.
College. She was already poring over the Street and Smith, which listed all the colleges and universities and ranked their football teams. She and Baby Poppa sifted through the Sports Illustrated college issues, debating about coaches and strategies and powerhouses. They didn’t mention to Tiny Momma that they looked at any schools outside the state.
“But this is all based on our hopes that they do well in their last two years,” Baby Poppa said in the fall, before the season began. “We have no money—we have no say. I think we should keep this quiet for a while, even from the boys.”
Marietta nodded. Maybe they would get tired of football, of all the work and practice, and maybe their size wouldn’t be enough once their team competed against better squads.
But they came around even that year, just like the girls—a few coaches from Clemson and South Carolina State and Auburn, the schools close by. They had slicked-back hair, large flat ears with long lobes, the grooves of practice in their foreheads and deep creases of sun in the arms and necks. “Nathaniel and Calvin are being watched closely,” said the coach from South Carolina State, a light-skinned black man who looked somehow like the white coaches. “They’re outstanding, and I’d like to express my interest early. South Carolina State has a tradition of…”
She didn’t listen. She nodded politely, watched them talk to the boys on the piazza, saw them come to the games; but sh
e didn’t really listen. The girls and coaches gathered around the yard where the steps began, where the boys sat sometimes, Nate talking, Calvin watching. She didn’t hear anymore, because she thought she had already made up her mind about the college she wanted. Now she had to wait.
They played well all year. Nate broke a city record for intercepted passes, broke another record for tackles. Calvin kept James, the thin quarterback, protected for touchdown throws, but no one kept those records. Marietta told him, “I seen you out there. Baby Poppa did. Them scouts did. Don’t worry.”
He said nothing about Nate’s name and picture everywhere, and she asked him over and over, “You sorry you chose offensive line?”
“Uh-uh,” he said. “I’ma get mine later.”
Get mine? They had even begun to talk differently, one way around her and each other, another way around the girls and teammates. Another way around Jesse and Joe and the men who always cornered them to talk about the games.
For the state championship, they played a white school. She and Baby Poppa rode with Jesse and Joe in Jesse’s long Buick. Columbia—she had never been so far. The windows smeared with the passing scenery, and Joe said, “Man, I use to hate this run when I drove it in the truck. Nothing but crackers on this run.”
Baby Poppa said, “This reminds me of how little I leave Charleston. I recognize how varied the scenery is outside the city—but I try to forget Bamberg.”
“That where you and your wife come from?” Joe said.
“And where we’ve never returned,” Baby Poppa said.
“What about you, Big Ma?” Joe said. “Where you come from? Jesse told me once you from the islands.”
“Uh-uh,” she said. “From Pine Garden—not a island, just a stop off the road. But it near the water.”
“Oh, yeah, I been there on a run, too,” Joe said. “Just a little store, huh, and all kinda fish in there. I bought some shrimp.”
“Buy shrimp anywhere, man,” Jesse said.
“You ever go back there?” Joe kept on.
Marietta shook her head, and he turned to look at her in the back seat. “Nothing I ain’t already see,” she said so that he would stop asking. He and Jesse and Baby Poppa started to talk about highways, and she turned to the window to look at the trees whip past. Pine Garden. She let the trees blur into a wall and thought instead about California. University of Southern California. It was so far. It was the best one. How could she send them all that way—what would Tiny Momma say? Baby Poppa would agree—it had the best offensive line in the country, the best place for Calvin to shine. Nate would shine anywhere. She had to wait.
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