by T. Greenwood
The ceremony was brief, solemn. There couldn’t have been more than thirty people in the church. No one offered a eulogy, and only Brenda cried. There was no reception in the church basement afterward, no dry sandwiches and bitter coffee. The attendees offered rushed condolences to Brenda and then moved together out of the church, a whispering swarm. I was familiar with this buzz, this threatening hum. Had it coming…good for nothing…lunatic . If he didn’t do it himself, somebody else sure… Watching Brenda’s small shoulders trembling with grief, I felt the momentary impulse to go to her, to tell her that, no matter what anyone said, Brooder had been a good friend. A loyal friend.
In the window next to me, bright autumn sunlight shone through a stained glass Jesus who had just been condemned. Pontius Pilate was pointing at Him in accusation, Jesus’ face sadly defiant. I waited until everyone had left the church, avoiding looking at anyone, especially Ray and his family, and then I escaped out into the cold fall day.
I should have gone straight back to work. Orders were backed up, shipments had been delayed, people, including Lenny, were angry. But I couldn’t get that buzz out of my ears. And so instead of returning to work, I got on my bicycle and pedaled down the steep hill away from St. Elizabeth’s, through town, and then out toward the river. I didn’t stop until my legs as well as my chest were burning. It was cold but bright in the woods, fallen red and gold leaves an autumnal pyre. When I got to the place where the two rivers meet, I threw my bike down to the ground, knelt on the cold damp earth, and wept.
1968: Fall
W hen Brooder comes out of the trailer, the man is following him, carrying a pair of jumper cables. Harper watches as they walk toward Brooder’s truck. The man seems smaller than Harper remembered. Thinner. For a moment there is doubt. Just the slightest uncertainty. But when the man turns toward them, Harper is sure again. Anger rises up into his shoulders. It spreads to his jaw; he feels his teeth grinding.
The moon is swollen now, rising impossibly bright and orange over the horizon. Harper has never seen anything so ominous, or so beautiful. It is nearly as bright as the sun, casting strange shadows as Brooder pops the hood .
Ray turns the key, revving the engine. Harper feels like he is watching this from somewhere far away, a Ferris wheel view, as if he were watching these events unfold from the moon itself. Ray shifts the car into first gear and steps on the gas. Gravel and grass crush underneath the slow tires. He pulls the car up next to Brooder’s truck and rolls down the window. “Find some cables?” Ray asks.
“Yeah,” Brooder says, and then, nodding at the man, “mind hooking these up? I’ve got a flashlight in the car.”
Harper is aware suddenly of a hangnail that he has been gnawing on. His finger is sore, the pain deep and sharp, yet he can’t resist pulling at it with his teeth. Harper swallows loudly, wipes sweat away from his forehead with the back of his wrist.
As the man leans under Brooder’s hood, Harper watches his back, studies the curve of his shoulders. The slope of his neck, the angles of his elbows. But when Brooder comes out of the car, Harper’s eyes are drawn away from the man to the object in Brooder’s hand.
Harper studies the tire iron with the same mathematical curiosity. He considers the perfect perpendicular metal bars, Brooder’s hand grasping the point of intersection. But when Brooder stands behind the man and raises the tire iron over his head, the geometry shifts. Against the harvest moon, everything changes. Harper looks away from the weapon to the shadow cast beneath, and sees on the ground below a giant, elongated cross.
T HREE
Freedom School
M y father had a friend from college who worked for Honeywell—making electronics, including computers. When he told my father about a top secret work-in-progress, a “Kitchen Computer,” designed to help busy housewives store and retrieve recipes, my father became obsessed. Apparently, this home computer would come fully equipped with a cutting board, so that the woman of the house could chop vegetables while reading a recipe from the computer screen. He rubbed his hands together, in his gleeful, mad-scientist way as he described it to me. You can’t tell your mother , he said, conspiratorially. It’s an anniversary gift . (In May they would be married twenty years.) The Honeywell version would eventually sell for just over $10,000, and so my father, ever industrious and frugal, disappeared into the basement the winter of ’63, like a hibernating bear, only to emerge the following spring giddy and triumphant.
But while my father was wintering in his subterranean laboratory, my mother was entertaining aspirations more lofty than his electronic cookbook could ever fulfill. Still incensed by the atrocity of the Alabama church bombing the previous fall, she decided to join a group of volunteers to teach in a “Freedom School” in Mississippi for the summer. As my father tinkered and programmed below us, my mother confided in me, “My friend Susan, from Middlebury, has gotten involved with the SNCC, the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee,” she said, her eyes bright. She was at the kitchen table with paperwork spread before her. “They’re recruiting volunteers to go to Mississippi to help register blacks to vote and to teach in special schools set up to give Negroes a place to learn how to read, write. Music . French . About their rights. About their history.”
“You’re moving ?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Not moving,” she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses. In the last year or so she’d started wearing glasses to read. It had made me feel for the first time like she was getting old. “Just working, for the summer. You and your father can fend for yourselves, I’m sure.”
Though my mother disappeared inside her study for hours, even days on end, she was a fixture in our house. Like the Windsor chimes that announced each quarter hour. The worn velvet couch. I tried to imagine her absence and it felt like stepping into a hole.
She would have to interview in Boston first, a formality, she said. Then in late June ( after my graduation, she assured me) she would take a bus to Oxford, Ohio, where she would attend an orientation at the Western College for Women. From there, she would make her way to Palmer’s Crossing, Mississippi, where she would start teaching just after the Fourth of July at the Priest Creek Baptist Church.
“At a church?” I asked in disbelief.
“That’s where most of the schools have been set up. In the South, the churches are the hubs for the black communities.”
“Where will you live?”
“There’s a family,” she said, “from the church. They have two children who will be attending the school. A grown son who is a minister. He will teach at the school as well.”
“What does Dad think?” I asked.
“About the Freedom School?”
“About your leaving us,” I said.
“I’m not leaving you. This is one summer,” she said, exasperated. She removed her glasses then, and I could see how tired she was. “Can’t you understand that I need to do something with my life? Something important? I’m forty-two years old, and what have I done?” Her face was red, like a child’s about to cry. It embarrassed me.
I thought about Betsy’s mother. About her soufflés and cupcakes and the snowman she built inside their kitchen. I thought about Betsy’s face when she told me her mother was dead. I nodded. And then I remembered my father’s grand surprise in the basement.
“I need this,” she said softly.
On my parents’ anniversary, while my mother was at the library, my father recruited me to help him move his homemade computer upstairs. It had to have weighed two hundred pounds. I tweaked my back as we turned the contraption on its side to get it through the narrow doorway.
“Hold on a second,” I said, adjusting my arms to avoid further damage.
“Got it?”
“Yep.”
Somehow we managed to get it into the living room and set it down. I flopped onto the couch and really looked at it for the first time. It was a monstrosity.
“So what can it do?” I asked.
My father grinned. “Let me show you.”
He proceeded to explain that, like its commercial counterpart, it was designed to store recipes in an electronic format. That he had taken my mother’s battered box of recipe cards and programmed the recipes into the computer.
“But here’s the best part,” he said, beaming. “The Honeywell will have a cutting board built in—so does this one.” He gestured toward the wooden butcher block situated below the computer screen. “But the Honeywell won’t have this .” He reached for a door, a converted glove box, in the front of the console and pulled it down, revealing a full set of kitchen knives, all tucked tidily into another wooden block. “Or this!” he said, opening a cupboard door on the far side of the console that revealed a brand new set of pots hanging from a rotating lazy Susan.
“Wow, Dad,” I said.
He stood back and admired his invention. He was sweating; there were beads of condensation on his glasses. “What do you think Mom will think? Will she like it?” he asked, running a hand over his thinning hair.
I looked at the computer because I couldn’t look at him. It was a cookbook . A two-hundred-pound cookbook. “Sure, Dad.”
“Twenty years,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s a good, long time.”
I nodded.
He was quiet then, as he circled the console. He put his hands on his hips. My mother was leaving in three days for her interview in Boston. “I figure we can break it in for her this summer, while she’s gone. Work some of the bugs out.”
My mother’s eyes were huge when she came into the living room that afternoon. She was carrying an armload of books, which she set down on the coffee table without looking away from the machine. “What is this ?” she asked softly.
As my father explained it to her, dizzily demonstrating how my grandmother’s recipe for clam chowder could be conjured in only moments with the careful manipulation of a series of buttons and switches, my mother watched him. He had even brought an onion in from the kitchen, which he chopped into smithereens using the knives and the cutting board. When he had completed his demonstration, he stood back and looked proudly at the computer, and then anxiously at my mother.
I was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, eating a sandwich. I could barely swallow.
“Happy anniversary!” he said.
My mother’s eyes were rimmed red. She removed her glasses and rubbed them with one weary hand. After an excruciating silence, she said, “Thank you,” and reached the other hand out for my father.
He took her hand, kissed her palm gently and then swept her up in his arms, hugging her tightly. Proud. Triumphant. “Onions getting to you?” He laughed, releasing her, holding her at arm’s length, and wiping awkwardly at a tear.
“Sure,” she said, smiling. “Onions.”
Alteration
I gave Maggie my room. It didn’t seem right to make Shelly share the first bedroom she’d ever had to herself, and I was sleeping so little, I figured I hardly needed my bed anyway. She arranged the few things she’d brought with her on the top of my dresser (which I emptied for her): a photo of herself and two other girls, leaning against a red Chevy Monte Carlo. There was a giant willow tree in the background, a gray house. A clothesline with white sheets. The girls were all wearing short shorts and halter tops, posing, puckering their lips. There was a small painted wooden box with a gold clasp and tiny padlock, a bleached sand dollar, and a pack of matches from some place called Joe’s. I didn’t look inside the box, but I did strike one match. Just one, and held it until the flame tickled the tip of my thumb.
All week, I tried my best to pretend that none of this was out of the ordinary, secretly hoping the problem would somehow take care of itself. I kept waiting for her father to show up at my doorstep and just take her home. At work when Henry said that Stan told him I’d hired some help for Shelly, I stuttered but stuck to my story about my mother’s college roommate’s daughter. And each night as I fought my futile battle against insomnia, I vowed that I would contact Maggie’s father. When dawn broke each morning, I rolled off the couch, resolute in my decision to send her home, and then I’d make my way to the kitchen, where she had already fixed bacon and eggs, ironed my clothes, and packed Shelly’s lunch. The smell of starch and freshly squeezed orange juice worked like some sort of magic antidote to my resolve, making all of my late night ruminations seem somehow ludicrous. It also didn’t help that Shelly had fallen head over heels for Maggie. Several times I had to shoo her out of Maggie’s room at night, where she sat cross-legged at the edge of the bed, chattering on and on as Maggie painted her nails or braided her hair. This was the true rub. Just when I felt confident in my decision to turn her in, to throw her back into the water so to speak, I’d see the joy in Shelly’s face. This child-woman with confused eyes, this stranger, had something to offer Shelly that I simply didn’t.
“Can I go to the fall dance at school on Friday?” Shelly asked.
We were eating dinner. Maggie had made homemade macaroni and cheese, fried chicken. Biscuits that melted buttery on my tongue. My fingers were slick with grease, my stomach grateful.
“Aren’t you a little young for dances? We didn’t have dances in school when I was a kid.”
Shelly rolled her eyes and speared a pile of macaroni with her fork.
“In my town, we started having dances in the fifth grade,” Maggie offered.
I had to bite my tongue to keep something mean-spirited from coming out, willing myself to look away from her belly, which seemed to be growing exponentially each day.
“Do you have a date ?” I asked, chuckling a little without intending to.
“Yes,” Shelly said, exasperated.
I lost my grasp on the piece of chicken I was holding, and it flew onto the table. “I’m sorry, that’s out of the question. You’re twelve years old.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I’m not a baby.”
“I didn’t say you were a baby. I said you were twelve . How old is your ‘date’?”
“He’s thirteen,” she said softly. “In the eighth grade.”
“Yep. Sorry. Forget it. Out of the question.”
“What if she goes to the dance without a date?” Maggie asked, spooning another helping of macaroni and
cheese on my plate.
I glared at her.
“Please, please?” Shelly asked. “I’ll call him right now and tell him I can’t go with him. I’ll let you listen. You can tell him yourself.”
“What’s his number?” Maggie asked excitedly. She stood up and went to the phone.
I felt duped. I hadn’t wanted Shelly to go to the dance at all. Now here I was, backed into a corner.
“Sit down, Maggie. And Shelly, you listen,” I said, realizing that I had never ever talked like this to her before. Like somebody with rules to enforce. Like the father of a twelve-year-old girl. “I don’t like this, but I suppose I don’t have much of a choice. I trust you. That’s all I’m going to say. Please don’t disappoint me.” I felt like a fraud.
Maggie told me that she and Shelly would clean up, sent me to the living room to watch the news with a bowl of hot peach cobbler in one hand and a cold glass of milk in the other. In the kitchen, their whispers and giggles mixed with the tinkling of dishes and water, and I knew I’d only been politely dismissed.
The wreck had created all sorts of havoc not only in my personal life but at my job as well. In addition to my normal workload, I’d had to act as a human shield protecting Lenny from the media, the railroad, and the victims’ families—fielding calls from newsmen and TV stations, negotiating my way through the literal mountains of legal paperwork from the railroad, and intercepting angry phone calls from grieving family members. I spent most of each day convinced that Maggie’s father would be the next voice I heard on the other end of the line. I figured that by now someone from her family must have gathered that she didn’t make it to Canada. The train wreck had been on the national news. I knew that somebody would be looking for her. Soon. And that I’d better be prepared to explain how a fifteen-year-old girl wound up living in my house, pressing my clothes and taking care of a child only a few years younger than herself. It wouldn’t look good. I was sure of that.