Rob returned, holding Bobbie.
“I’m sorry,” Rob said. “I just, I’m gonna pack up more stuff in the room so we can make time. Sorry.” He shuffled through the living room and shut the bedroom door.
Brianne stood up, picked up the cash, and held it out to Lelah.
“You want me to be codependent with you. That’s what you want. Codependence. But I won’t, Mommy. I can’t. I can’t take this money. I know where you got it from.”
These practiced lines—perhaps Googled, perhaps fed to her by that Tawny person she kept mentioning the other day, or Rob himself—didn’t sound right coming out of Brianne’s mouth. Lelah split the money in half, put one stack of bills in her purse and held the other stack back out.
“Just take a few hundred. Gas alone for that van, plus your car is gonna be a couple hundred. I don’t want nothing for it. I swear.”
Brianne dumped the papers from the overflowing wastebasket into a big black trash bag. She stopped a few times to fish out certain slips of paper and tear them into smaller pieces.
“I am sorry, Brianne, genuinely sorry for the other morning. I came at you all wrong, cause I was embarrassed to have lost everything. But I’m okay now, money-wise, for a little while. And I didn’t mean what I said about . . . about anything I said.”
It was very hard to say. Evidently Troy wasn’t the only one who was out of practice with apologies.
“How about this?” Brianne said. “I’ll take the money if you promise to go to GA.”
Lelah could picture her searching online for such a solution. Brianne had always been solution-oriented; a list maker, a task manager. Lelah tried to focus on the obvious love behind an action like that, but it was humiliating. How did Brianne have all of the bargaining chips? She was giving the child money, damn near throwing it at her, and still she had no leverage. No leverage at all.
“GA stands for Gamblers Anonymous, Mommy.”
“I know what it stands for. I been there before. I don’t know. I gotta keep looking, maybe something else besides GA is for me. I’m not gonna sit here and promise to go do something, and then maybe not go. I’m done lying to folks.”
Brianne shook her head and laughed, incredulous.
“Okay,” she said. “Well. Here’s what you can do for me. This is about the only thing you can do for me at this point, so if you say no, then I guess it just is what it is. You tell me everything, from beginning to end, about Vernon Greene, and you and me, and Missouri. Everything you can remember, and I’ll take that money.”
A not unreasonable request. It troubled her that her daughter might consider this the hardest thing she could ever ask her for. What sort of person denied her child such basic information? And how had Lelah convinced herself that Brianne would be fine without having it? Flawed as it had been, it wasn’t a fling that conceived Brianne but an actual marriage to a person whose last name Brianne still carried. The things we do in the name of protecting others are so often attempts to spare some part of ourselves.
It took nearly three hours for Lelah to re-create Vernon for her daughter, starting from the very first time she’d seen him jumping hurdles at a track meet at Cass, to that final afternoon she’d seen him nodding off in the freezing rain. Lelah filled the stories with details she hadn’t thought about in decades, like his first car, a 1980 Cutlass Supreme, and what she’d worn to their courthouse marriage (a baby-pink knee-length dress with aggressive shoulder pads). She took her time, because she never wanted to repeat these stories again. The two of them folded clothes into bags, packed boxes, and sorted through piles and piles of junk. By three o’clock they’d gotten Brianne in good shape to leave her mother and Detroit behind.
To Let Go or to Hang On
Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone. Cha-Cha knew his family was no different. The house on Yarrow Street was their sedentary mascot, its crumbling façade the Turner coat of arms. But it disintegrated by the hour. Mold in the basement, asbestos hiding in the walls, a garage stolen. He understood these things pointed to abandonment. He knew he should walk away from the place, let it become one more blasted-out house in a city plagued by them. But what to do with the house and what to do about his mother’s sickness were problems to which Cha-Cha possessed no simple solution. In both cases his impulse leaned toward preservation, but at what cost? If Viola wanted to die, who was he to stop her? If the house was destined for atrophy, why fight it? What he’d felt in that backyard with Lonnie was helplessness; it had only looked like rage. What happened to control? Control used to come effortlessly to Cha-Cha, and not because he was power-hungry or ego-starved. A pack of wolves. A murder of crows. All groups needed order. He felt the loss of control like a loss of basic reason. A dark splotch on his frontal lobe. Why not give in to every impulse, break free and go insane, if he lived in a world where people made structures disappear overnight?
On Thursday morning Russell arrived, as did Sandra and Berniece. The former claimed the second guest room. His sisters went to Francey’s. That evening Miles, Duke, Quincy, a passel of nieces who were improbably womanly, and nephews newly graduated from knuckleheads to respectable young men descended. A full house if Tina wasn’t missing.
The visiting Turners filed into his mother’s room one by one or in pairs. They sat and watched TV with her, brought her food, and filled her in on what the beings that had sprung from her being were doing out in the wide world. Everyone wanted to go to Yarrow and inspect the scene of the garage heist. Cha-Cha let them take his car. He didn’t join them. On Friday night, the eve of the party, the out-of-towners met up at Cha-Cha’s and piled into cars for a casino buffet. Cha-Cha begged off, as did Lelah, for obvious reasons. She claimed to be exhausted and went to bed early, without checking on Viola or saying good night. Cha-Cha inflated all of the air mattresses and left a heap of comforters on the couches for pallets on the floor. It was 8 P.M.
OLD FOLKS WERE supposed to be accustomed to suffering. Viola knew this. No one wanted to hear an old lady complain about aches in her chest, or throbs under her armpits, or stinging, scalding sensations in her disobedient legs. The young couldn’t keep an old lady from hurting, so they’d rather think that there existed a threshold one crossed where it ceased to matter. Selfishness. Viola counted getting the doctors to prescribe her stronger medication as her last significant victory on this earth. She was proud of speaking up for herself and claiming what little say-so she could about what happened to her body. For saying no more of this, but I do need more of that. The only drawback was the fog. When she felt the least amount of pain her thoughts became the most jumbled. Following a single thought to its logical end was like trying to catch a fish with bare hands. But when the drugs subsided, and the hurt hammered down, her mind was as clear as ever. Right now she could feel every part of herself. The pain had yanked her awake, if she had indeed been asleep. She had stopped keeping strict track of time when she moved off of Yarrow and into this room, but she estimated that if no one brought her any pills, she had half an hour before the truly crushing, vision-blurring pain began. She couldn’t remember when her fear of pain had first started trumping her fear of death.
To her relief, someone was in the room. A son sat in her armchair. Dozing with his chin on his chest. Looking as old as his daddy when he died. Viola remembered something.
“You got three years, Cha.”
“What’s that?” He wiped his mouth w
ith his hand.
“Your daddy died at sixty-six. Three years and you got him beat. Your granddaddy, too. Both granddaddies.”
She kept track of no child’s age except Cha-Cha’s. Her age minus eighteen. She could never forget that she had been eighteen, she and Cha-Cha sleeping in one bed in the living room of the shotgun house while Olivia and Lucille slept in another bed. She had been eighteen during those long months when she thought her husband was gone for good.
Cha-Cha shook out her pills, already sorted, into her hand. He picked up a glass of water from the nightstand and positioned the straw close to her lips. She looked him in the eyes, grateful, but he looked away. Viola remembered something else. A question he’d asked that she had not felt brave enough to answer. Sending him away with doubt in his heart. She kept the pills in her hand.
“Tina’s asleep?”
“Gone,” Cha-Cha said. “At Chucky’s. Not talking to me.”
“Oh.” She was afraid to ask anything else. She should just take her pills and banish her aches and let her mind float off, she knew, but guilt wouldn’t let her.
“She’s gonna be back,” she said after some time.
“Mama, maybe she shouldn’t come back. I don’t know.”
It was difficult, talking like this. They were not built for these roles.
“You remember that little farm your auntie Lucille and Olivia had back home? How we used to go down there in the summer sometimes?”
“Uh-huh,” Cha-Cha said. “I always tried to milk the male cows. Lucky I never got kicked in the head.”
Viola smiled. She would have liked to sit up high in the bed, but she couldn’t manage it. Keeping a tight grip on the pills in her hand took all of her strength.
“I want you to know that I never seen no haints, Cha,” she said. “Never in my whole life, but I do know folks see them.”
Her son looked doubtful, crestfallen.
“It was your daddy that seen them,” she added. “Not me.”
She considered telling him how she knew this. About her ride with Reverend Tufts the day she’d walked out of Ethel Joggets’s house and decided to be done with Arkansas. But she couldn’t tell him that story.
“If Daddy saw haints, why’d he say he didn’t?” Cha-Cha asked. “Why’d he look me in the face and lie?”
“Cause he wanted you to be satisfied. Your daddy tried to be satisfied his whole life. Oh, he was happy. He had all you children and him an only child. But somethin bout that haint messed up his spirit, Cha.”
Viola’s mouth felt dry. The pills in her damp palm stuck to one another. If she didn’t take them soon, Cha-Cha would have to throw them away. A waste she couldn’t bear.
“Your daddy loved everybody but himself. Never was content with his own self.”
She watched Cha-Cha’s face as he turned what she’d said over in his mind. If anyone besides her knew of Francis Turner’s melancholy ways, it would be her eldest son.
“You know I had an uncle named Friend?” she said. “That was his real name. You never met him. I never even met him. Folks say he had a haint follow him from Virginia before I was born. He was supposed to be riding his horse to Arkansas cause my daddy had a job lined up for him layin bricks someplace. Well, Friend must’ve owed the haint somethin when it was alive, like some work, or maybe he done somebody wrong back in Virginia and tried to run from it. They found him in a hole somewhere between Memphis and Pine Bluff. Deep as a grave. Looked like a horse had kicked his skull in, but his own horse was tied up a ways away.
“That’s the kinda haint to be worried about, Cha. I think you and your daddy, whatever kind y’all got can’t hurt you unless you let it.”
Cha-Cha tapped the side of the glass of water and looked down at his lap. Viola knew he was deciding whether to let go, to let his haint continue to be a mystery but no longer a preoccupation, or to hang on. After about a minute of this he positioned the straw close to Viola’s mouth once more, and she swallowed her pills. There was always a period of anticipation before the medication hit Viola’s bloodstream, when the pain felt more akin to pleasure, because she knew it would soon be gone.
An Old Man in Faded Slacks
Cha-Cha left Viola’s room determined to hold one final vigil for his haint. He would not be its unwitting victim, as his great-uncle Friend had been, nor would he spend the rest of his life taking sleeping pills, or denying its existence as he believed his father had done. He would stay awake and demand to know what it wanted. Both Lonnie and Alice had suggested confronting it; Cha-Cha finally felt ready to do just that, without any beer muddling his perception. He adjusted the pillows on his side of the bed until he sat upright, turned off the lights, and waited, nodding in and out of sleep, for the blue light to appear around its usual time.
Two A.M. The man did not glow blue this time. It was very close to Cha-Cha, less than four feet away. Up close, Cha-Cha could see its features better. Its mustache extended past the corners of its mouth. It looked at Cha-Cha and showed teeth, but was it a smile? There was a gap between the front two. A confirmation.
“You’re not real, Daddy,” Cha-Cha said. “You’re not alive.” It was a statement for a third party. Surely the haint knew what it was and wasn’t.
The haint did not wear what Francis was buried in—an old blue pinstripe suit from Hudson’s with a garnet necktie and pocket square. He wore clothes that Cha-Cha did not associate with his father at all. A white T-shirt, an undershirt, really, which was tucked into his hitched-up, faded brown slacks. His chest sagged as an old man’s is wont to do, concave and thin, the shadows of his nipples visible through the cotton.
“Get out from under there,” the haint said. “You think you hidin, but I know you down there. I don’t never hide.”
Its voice was quiet but stern, more country than Cha-Cha remembered it. Its eyes focused below Cha-Cha, under the bed. Cha-Cha wondered what might be under there, but he once again had trouble moving.
“I need to know what you want,” Cha-Cha managed to get out. He thought the question silly now that he faced this man, a haint who looked as flesh-and-blood as he did, but he had no other plan for what to say.
The haint did not answer him. Cha-Cha noticed that it wore no shoes or socks.
“Come on out, now,” the haint said. “Don’t you have no pride? Look at you, down there like a possum. That’s what you doing, huh? Playin possum? I bet you is.”
The haint laughed and laughed, and for a moment Cha-Cha felt angry. Was it laughing at him? The face resembled his father’s, but Cha-Cha didn’t recognize the laugh at all. High-pitched and nasal. The haint leaned against the wall to steady itself and laughed some more.
“See now, I know you’re not real,” Cha-Cha said. “You’re saying what I wished you’d have said when I was up under that house.” He didn’t realize this was what he thought until the words were out.
“You knew I was down there, didn’t you?” Cha-Cha said. “You knew I was down up under that house, and you made a fool of me. Why?”
The haint reached down and scratched the bottom of its left foot. Its toenails were filthy. Its chest still heaved from laughing. Its eyes still focused under the bed.
“Boy, ain’t nobody thinkin bout you,” the haint said, almost tenderly. It shook its head. “Folks got their own business to tend to. So you just come on outta there like I say. It’s late.”
Cha-Cha watched the haint watch whatever it saw under the bed. He realized he was holding his breath and tried to take a deep one to make up for it. He was suddenly worried about his health. Perhaps the haint was here to collect him, take him to heaven or hell. He had no intention of dying so young, not even outliving his father. He thought maybe he should tell the haint that it wasn’t welcome here, that it should go toward the light, or some other variant of things people in movies say. But Cha-Cha didn’t feel he had a right to say such a thing, not even if the haint was just something he’d made up.
“Well, do what you want then,” t
he haint said. It spat, but no liquid reached Cha-Cha’s carpet. “I never knowed you to be no coward.”
The door opened, and Cha-Cha turned to look at it. It was Lonnie, come so late to look for extra pillows, and when Cha-Cha turned back to the windowsill, the haint was gone. For the first time ever, he wished it would return.
How Three Went North
SUMMER 1945
On the ride back to her parents’ shotgun house that morning, Reverend Tufts told Viola there was something heathen and hysterical in Francis. That her husband had claimed to see haints, and worse, that he claimed they were from God. It was not surprising Francis had gone north and turned feckless, he said; he likely succumbed to depravity shortly after stepping off the train. Tufts tried to console Viola. “You shouldn’t be overly upset,” he said. “A practical, good-looking girl like yourself will find an honest man to take care of you.” Viola hoped more than she’d ever hoped for anything that Tufts was right. She didn’t care much about haints; she just knew she couldn’t wait anymore. It wasn’t fair. And just as she refused to ever recount the story of her short stint as a white woman’s help, she told no one what happened in that car next. She watched the reverend remove his glove from his right hand and reach for her thigh. On the surface it might have looked innocent, a comforting pat, but Viola felt the warmth of his palm and the need in his fingers. Push that hand away, she thought, but she did nothing. She let his fingers settle there, and with a slight shift of her thighs she gave him permission to connect with what he wanted. With only one hand on the wheel the reverend pulled the car onto a gravel road flanked by oaks. Then he took off his other glove and put his hat on the dashboard. She did not wait for him to move toward her. She went to him, slid over to his side of the wide Packard. Viola did not know what she expected to happen afterward; she was not naïve enough to think the reverend would be the “honest man” to take care of her. The best he could possibly do was give her money to get to one of her brothers Up North, but Viola knew she would never ask him for it. She simply felt alone, and trapped in a life that should not have been hers. Francis had betrayed and abandoned her; she would betray him as well. She was eighteen years old. She thought it would be the lowest day of her life.
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