by Mary Monroe
“I had a rough night. Cramps,” I lied.
Viola held her cup up to her lips but didn’t drink. She just looked at me and stared. Other coworkers had come into the breakroom and by now the place was crowded but unusually quiet. “I was talkin’ about Cynthia Costello.”
“What about Cynthia?”
“Girl, you didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?” I didn’t think I could stand to hear any more bad news. “She got fired didn’t she? I saw it comin’. We tried to get her to leave that beast she married. We tried to tell her to get some help.” I sighed, feeling a sharp pain in my chest and thinking that there were some people that simply couldn’t be helped.
Viola shook her head and let out a long deep breath. “She won’t be needin’ no help now,” she told me.
I froze, staring at Viola with my mouth open and my hand in midair. “He finally killed her, didn’t he?” I asked softly, tears forming in my eyes.
Viola shook her head again. “She put a pistol in her mouth last night and blew her brains out.”
CHAPTER 52
I didn’t go to Cynthia’s funeral. Not because I didn’t care but because I had received too much disturbing news all within a couple of days, and it was too much for me. I was afraid for Rhoda’s brother, I was angry with Levi, and I was thoroughly saddened about Cynthia’s suicide.
The funeral was the following Wednesday. I still had not heard from Levi, and I was too overwhelmed to call his house again. We had a brief memorial service for Cynthia at work in our breakroom the day after her funeral, and I attended. Viola had taken her friend’s death so hard, she had to take off the rest of the week. Just seeing all the grief Cynthia’s suicide had caused made me recall the night I almost ended my life. I could not imagine the pain the people who loved her were in. For the first time I tried to imagine the pain my suicide would have caused the people who loved me. I called in sick that Friday. I spent the day going through my apartment gathering up everything Levi had given to me, a cheap clock radio, a few articles of clothing, some Mahalia Jackson albums, a prayer cloth he had ordered from Reverend Ike, and a few other odds and ends. Instead of putting the items in boxes, I stuffed everything into large trash bags. We had taken a picture together at the Blue Note one night. First I tore the portion off with him in it. After thinking about it for a second I tossed the whole thing into the trash, frame and all. Saturday morning I took a cab across town to Seventh Street and left the trash bags at the Salvation Army donation drop-off. After doing that, I rode cabs all over town looking for sales to replace everything that I had just gotten rid of. Before I got into another cab to go home, I went to Kroger’s to pick up some greens. I already had a chicken in the freezer. Levi or no Levi, I was still going to enjoy my favorite Saturday night dinner.
Minutes after I had sat down to enjoy my dinner, the doorbell rang. “What the hell are you doing here?” I snapped, my mouth full of food. It was Levi clutching a bottle of wine.
He gasped and gave me an incredulous look before speaking. “What’s wrong with you, girl? I come every Saturday,” he said seriously, waving the bottle so hard the red ribbon around its neck came undone.
“Except last Saturday when you were off getting married,” I seethed, shaking my finger in his face.
He dropped his head and scratched the side of his face. “Oh,” he muttered.
“Is that all you have to say?” I swallowed my food and slapped my hands on my hips. “How come you didn’t tell me you were getting married, Levi? How come you didn’t tell me you were seeing another woman?”
He shrugged. “That didn’t have nothin’ to do with me and you,” he said, shaking his head and shifting his deceitful eyes.
Mr. Boatwright was the last person I’d given the cold mean look I gave to Levi. It was a look that was so intense, he flinched and moved back a step.
“I was goin’ to invite you to the weddin’,” he said contritely. I continued to stare at his face in stunned disbelief.
“How could you do this to me, Levi?”
“Well”—he shrugged casually—“my son needed me.”
“Son? What son?”
“I got a boy a year old.”
“You mean to tell me a full year into our relationship you started up with this other woman and had a baby?” I screamed.
“Somethin’…somethin’…like…like that,” he told me.
“You son of a bitch,” I said evenly, stumbling against the doorway. I slapped his hand when he reached out to grab my arm. “You better get home to your wife and your son!” I barked, already attempting to close the door.
“I guess that mean we won’t be eatin’ our Saturday night collard green dinner I can smell all the way outside?” he asked with a surprised look on his face.
“You won’t! The only way you’ll ever get back into this apartment will be if you break in!” I slammed the door and locked it while he was still standing on the steps. I stood with my back against it until I heard his car leave. If there was ever a time I needed to get away it was right then. I called Muh’Dear. “I’m going to go up to New Jersey to visit Aunt Berneice for a week or two,” I announced.
I had accrued lots of vacation time. But a week was about all I thought I could stand with my aunt. The day and one-half bus ride was comfortable and it seemed longer, but it gave me time away from everybody to go over things in my head. My job at Erie Manufacturing was comfortable, and I was now making good money, but it was a dead-end situation if ever there was one. The only place left to go at the factory was out the door. Most of my coworkers had made it clear that death or mandatory retirement were the only two things that would make them leave. Once I had asked Viola if she ever considered another job. “It’s the same all over,” she indicated. Well, I didn’t believe that. In my heart I knew it was time for me to leave the new life I had made for myself in Erie.
I had never heard of Englishtown, New Jersey, and I didn’t know what to expect. But when my aunt met me at the bus station with a mule-wagon I was horrified. “You live way out in the country?” I asked after she hugged and kissed me for two minutes and told me how wide my hips had gotten since the last time she had seen me.
“Yep. I’m a country girl to the bone. I ain’t never lived in no city, and I ain’t never goin’ to,” Aunt Berneice told me. I hadn’t seen her since I was a child. Her hair was completely gray, and that pretty lemon-yellow face with its sparkling brown eyes and small, upturned nose I remembered was nothing more than a lot of loose skin and wrinkles. She had on a stiff flowered dress over a pair of jeans. The knee-high, thick-heeled black boots she had on looked several sizes too large. Riding next to her on the mule-wagon reminded me so much of the many times Muh’Dear and Daddy and I had hitched rides in Florida with people driving mule-wagons. “How many kids you got by now?”
“Oh, I’m not married yet,” I said, shaking my head. After finding out what Levi had done to me, I felt sorry for the woman who had married him. It could have been me.
“I didn’t ask you that. You ain’t got to be married to have no kids. If I hadn’t fell out a tree and ruined myself when I was a girl, I’d have me at least a dozen by now. Giddy-up, mule!” Aunt Berneice yanked the reins but the mule ignored her and kept lumbering along at the same pace.
It took more than an hour for us to reach my aunt’s small, red-shingled house off the side of a dirt road. The inside of her house was better than I had expected. A lot of nice but cheap furniture had been strategically placed throughout the small rooms, and the smell of freshly baked bread filled the air. A thick-bodied man with a bald head and a long, sad face was lying on the living-room couch snoring. Aunt Berneice led me past the man into a side room, where I left my suitcase and coat on the small, neatly made bed I was assigned to. “The bathroom is on the other side of the kitchen,” she told me, leading me back to the living room. “Get up, Harry James. My niece is here!” Aunt Berneice slapped the man across the top of his head. He let out a sharp, loud
yip and sat up real fast.
“Hello,” I said.
First he sucked in his breath and swallowed hard. Then he grabbed a Maxwell House coffee can off the floor he was using as a spittoon and coughed spit into it. He leaped up and shook my hand. “How you doin’, how you doin’?” He grinned. His thick paw was sweaty and almost covered with hair. “So you the smart young’n I done heard so much about? I hope you stay for a few weeks. We gwine to slaughter two hogs next month.” He grinned again, snapping his suspenders. He had on a pair of jeans with patches on both knees and a blue-flannel shirt. There was a pipe sticking out of his shirt pocket.
“I’m sorry. I’m only staying a couple of days,” I apologized. I heard my aunt gasp. I turned to her with a weak smile. “I have to get back to my job. We’ve been real busy lately.”
“Maybe you can come back for Christmas,” Harry James suggested. “We gwine to put up a live tree and everything. I’m gwine to let you chop one down on Buddy Spool’s property.”
“When you get tired of that Erie, you oughta move up here so you can keep me and Harry James company since we ain’t got no kids,” Aunt Berneice mouthed, rubbing her husband’s shoulder and drooling at him like he was Mr. Universe.
“I’ll think about it,” I lied. I was ready to turn around and go back to the bus station on foot. It was time to leave Erie, but I didn’t want to move to New Jersey. By leaving Richland I had found what I was looking for in Erie, the real me. I was strong, independent, and no matter what I looked like, I was a beautiful person. The ghost of Mr. Boatwright would follow me no matter where I went even if I moved back to Richland. So that’s what I was going to do.
The problems that had sent me running to New Jersey kept me up most of that first night in Aunt Berneice’s house. When I got up the next morning, Harry James and Aunt Berneice had dressed and eaten breakfast. Harry James was stretched out on the couch. His spit can was on the floor in front of him, and he was already snoring by 9 A.M. Aunt Berneice fixed me a plate of grits and sausages and sat across from me at the table and watched me eat.
“Tell me all about that Erie,” she insisted. Between swallows, I gave her a vague picture of my life in Erie. She didn’t seem at all impressed with my job and the nice apartment I described, but she smiled when I told her about Levi. I only told her about our dinners, nights out, and how we spent our Sundays in church. “If he was all that, how come you let him go?” Aunt Berniece leaned across the table and shook her finger in my face. “Men like that hard to come by. I never thought I’d find a man like Harry James.”
“He…he got a job offer in Texas, and I didn’t want to go,” I lied.
Aunt Berneice shook her head and looked at me with pity. “Texas. That’s where your daddy run off to that time.”
I lost my appetite. It had been years since Muh’Dear mentioned my daddy, but I thought about him almost every day. I still missed him. I looked off sadly, chewing slowly and blinking my eyes hard so I wouldn’t cry. “I hope he’s happy in Texas,” I muttered. I truly meant it. No matter where my wayward daddy was, I hoped that he was having a good life.
“Oh he ain’t in Texas no more,” Aunt Berneice informed me. She got up to get a cup of coffee.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked, following her as she moved around the kitchen to get sugar and cream.
“He back in Florida with them half-breed kids that white woman left him with,” she said, returning to her seat.
“You’ve talked to him?”
“I talk to Frank all the time. He called to wish me happy birthday last week.”
“Where’s the white woman?” I said, clearing my throat and blinking hard. My aunt didn’t see the tears in my eyes.
“Only God knows. Her runnin’ off desertin’ them kids the way she did broke Frank down to a frazzle.” Aunt Berneice drank from her cup and shook her head at the same time.
“Now he knows how Muh’Dear and I felt when he left us,” I said nastily.
My aunt set her cup down and gave me a look of pity. “I wish you could see him now. He the most repentant man alive. That savage South can be such a jungle for Black folks, especially them that speak they mind like Frank. That woman lured him away with her daddy’s money and a promise of a better life. I always said he was gwine to pay in his heart for what he done to y’all. He come draggin’ back to Florida lookin’ for y’all and started buggin’ me day and night tryin’ to get me to give him y’all’s phone number and address. Your mama told me she’d break my neck if I did. She don’t never want to see him again. When he got a job at a sawmill, I kept them young’ns for him for free until he got on his feet and could afford a baby-sitter.”
“How many kids?”
“Well there’s that Lillimae, the oldest. She twenty-three and got two boys of her own. There’s that Sondra.” Aunt Berneice paused and scratched her head. “Sondra…she around twenty I think. Then there’s that boy Amos. He oughta be outta high school by now.”
I looked at what was left on my plate. “Do they know about me?” I asked quietly, still looking at my plate, stirring the grits around with my fork.
“Sure they do. I sent ’em pictures. Them girls look just like you.” Aunt Berneice laughed. “And is just as fat!”
“Does Muh’Dear know any of this?” I croaked. I was so overwhelmed, I experienced a hot flash knowing I did have a family.
“Naw.” Aunt Berneice shook her head hard and fast. “She don’t allow me to mention nothin’ about Frank even though I told her God was goin’ to chastise Frank for runnin’ off and God did by not lettin’ him find y’all. How come you stopped eatin’?”
“I’m not as hungry as I thought I was,” I mumbled, pushing the plate away.
“I like Frank even after what he done to y’all. Like I said, he repented. When I was between husbands and was tryin’ to get well from knee surgery, him and them kids saw after me. He such a determined man, always have been.” A dreamy-eyed look appeared on my aunt’s face. “The way he marched with all them civil rights people back in the sixties was righteous. He even went to Alabama to show support when the Klan bombed that church and killed them little girls.” Aunt Berneice wiped a tear from her eye.
“In Birmingham?” I asked.
“Bombin’ham is what we called it then. His only regret was he never got to meet Dr. King or Medgar Evers or none of the rest of the ones doin’ all the important protestin’. His brother St. Louis, him and his wife and them six young’ns they got livin’ in Florida right outside Miami too, now.”
More tears welled up in my eyes. I had a real uncle and real cousins.
“I never met any of Daddy’s people. At least I don’t remember,” I managed.
“Well St. Louis used to come around when you was one, two years old. Then he signed up with the military. Y’all was gone when he got out. It’s a shame how families lose touch. Me and your mama, we ain’t got nobody left now but a cousin that went to Canada before you was born. Last letter I got from him, he was talkin’ about movin’ back to Florida when he retire this year.”
“I didn’t think I had any other family,” I said sadly, looking my aunt in her crinkled eyes.
“Well you do. Hmmm. Look like it might rain,” Aunt Berneice said, looking out the window at the gray sky. “I better go get them clothes off the line.”
“Do you want me to help?” I offered, rising.
“Naw, you finish your breakfast. Men like a little meat on they women.” She grinned and winked. I was glad that she had declined my offer to help take the clothes off the line. Being alone for a few moments gave me time to think about what I had just learned.
My daddy was still alive and had been trying to get in touch with me. I had siblings who wanted to meet me. For years I had felt like I had no history and a family tree that was almost naked. My world had started with Muh’Dear and my daddy and ended with me. I didn’t think that now.
Behind my aunt’s house, separated by a field, were two other shacks occu
pied by friends of hers. One man was off visiting relatives in Newark. The other one, Clyde Proctor, a stout, slovenly, divorced man in his late thirties, had dinner with us later the day after my arrival. “You ever seen New York City?” Clyde asked with his mouth full of pinto beans and ham hocks.
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“Clyde goes to New York to party all the time,” Harry James told me. “He’ll carry you over there before you leave.”
“She’ll love that place in Harlem where they sell them candied ribs,” Aunt Berneice insisted, spooning more beans onto my plate. “You gwine to New York this evenin’, ain’t you, Clyde?”
“Uh-huh,” Clyde replied, blinking at me. “I’ll pick you up at six o’clock. We’ll have to stay over there all night ’cause my truck ain’t got but one headlight, and I can’t drive it after dark. And dress warm, my truck ain’t got no heater neither.”
“I can’t go. I’m only going to be here another day or so,” I said quickly. I really wanted to spend that time with my aunt.” I finished dinner as fast as I could, then I ran. I left my aunt, her husband, and Clyde at the kitchen table enjoying peach cobbler, and I went to bed and tried to imagine what my sisters, my brother, and the rest of my relatives were like.
Before she went to bed, Aunt Berneice came into the bedroom, flipped on the light, and sat at the foot of the bed. “You sleep?” She had on a stocking cap that almost covered her face.
“No, Ma’am,” I said sitting up.
“Ain’t Clyde somethin?” She grinned and winked.
“He sure is,” I agreed.
“He likes you. He done had a lot of experience with women, so he gwine to make some woman a good husband. He been married four times. You sure you don’t want to stay and get to know him? He just itchin’ to take you out. You oughta see him in his blue suit.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head hard and long.
I had no interest in seeing any more of Englishtown, what little there was. Other than going to a nearby farmers’ market with Harry James, I didn’t leave my aunt’s house during the rest of my short visit. I spent most of that time in the bedroom with bogus cramps to avoid Clyde. He spent more time in Aunt Berneice’s house than he spent in his own.