Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  Well, Daddy’s letter pretty much ended there, but I got the rest of the story from Ida Mae Harris, when I went across the street to get a hula hoop Imagene’d left on the edge of her yard. Ida Mae was a tall, big-boned, red-skinned lady who dressed all her days in blue jeans, and she had a dog named Shep what was part German shepherd and part chow, and even though he ran with a limp, and Ida Mae tended to set there on her porch with his leash pulled up short and wrapped around her wrist, I could see how Imagene’d probably dropped her hula hoop and ran off scared when he barked—even Ruth Simmons’s mama didn’t want to get too close to him, so she pitched Ida Mae her mail from the road.

  “It was a starless night when Lindell told us all,” she said, “a night the whole county’d remember come a long time afterwards.” Shep was setting between her legs, and he shifted hisself around so his shoulders was poking up behind his head. His chain clicked against the edge of Ida Mae’s porch, and she petted him behind the ears and kept on talking. “Weird thing was, warn’t no moon outshining the stars, and warn’t no clouds hiding them neither—it just warn’t any stars.” Ida Mae told me Lindell’s big sister Juanita was in town for church revival, though Grandpap Martin nor nobody else knew she’d really packed herself up on the bus from Knoxville College in order she’d get to see Ida Mae.

  “Lindell, you think they’d let me on up at the filling station?” Ida Mae’d asked him across the dinner table. Her and Juanita’d made sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, just like Juanita’s mama taught her before she died. Grandpap Martin kept leaving the kitchen to go move the knobs on the radio, and ever time he did Juanita kissed Ida Mae, each time swallowing more of the girl’s lips with her own, Juanita’s lipsticked heart mashed against Ida Mae’s plain one.

  “A gal at the filling station?” Lindell asked. He never seent Ida Mae knife a cow’s neck while it mooed, nor slide lard up a mare’s private parts to get it to foal, nor shovel shit onto an entire three acres worth of soy. But he told them all then at the dinner table that he had seent Mr. Combs reslide the creases down his shirtsleeves when he thought no one else was looking, and he done seent him carry money to the bank folded over in a money clip inside a leather pocket inside a steel case. He said he done seent Mr. Combs eat his fried potatoes with a fork and knife, and otherwise announce the limits of his mind to the world. “Mr. Combs would never let a girl do that work, not even a Negro girl in blue jeans. For one thing, it wouldn’t sit right with the customers. Lexington people are city folk.”

  “What about another Negro man, then?” asked Grandpap Martin. “They say Preacher Fletcher’s son Priddy back from Chicago looking for a job.”

  “Well, he can have mine.”

  “Lindell,” Danaitha said. She said it surprised-like, Ida Mae told me, but then she chewed her roast slow and let the rest of the table wait for her to say any more. Ida Mae said she figured Danaitha’s mind was an exclamation point looking for more whiskey to calm itself down, but she always did try to hold it together in front of Lindell’s daddy. “Lindell,” she said again. She smiled like she done ate him. “You going to get a job here in town?”

  “No. I’m going into the service,” he said, and two pairs of silver rang against two tin plates. Danaitha’d gotten the plates from the dime store over by Rickles Pharmacy, so even though the tin was painted over bright yellow, the forks made the sound of cheapness, and in Ida Mae’s ear they sounded like everthing that was wrong in all their lives.

  “Lindell,” Grandpap Martin said, meaning to set him straight. “You ain’t going in no White man’s service.” He folded his napkin and smacked it on his plate for the last word.

  “What this country ever do for you,” said Juanita, “you got to go off and get kilt for it?”

  “G.I. Bill, my dear. This country is going to give me a college education.”

  “Gonna get you kilt, nigger, that’s what,” said Danaitha. She didn’t seem to know she done got up from the table, and she shook some on her feet.

  “Uncle Sam is going to give me a loan from the bank to buy a dairy farm when I get back. Send me to a Negro medical school with five hundred dollars a year to spare.”

  Ida Mae laughed then in her telling, told me that when Lindell said that about the five hundred dollars, everbody else round the table calmed down and put their eyes back to normal size. But Danaitha laughed. “You come back to America with one arm and a pinned-up shirtsleeve, how you going to milk cows?”

  “ ’Naitha, it ain’t been a war in five years. And whether I come back with one arm or two, you’re going to sit around this house turning your liver into soup, so it seems to me it’s none of your concern.”

  Right about then, Ida Mae said, Danaitha coughed like something done caught in her throat and she run on into the living room. Grandpap Martin looked on after her, but Ida Mae said her and Juanita kept on eating like ain’t nothing been said.

  “What’s your opinion, Ida Mae?” Lindell asked. “I know you to be a wise person. Would you be willing to stay here in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, when the Army wanted you to play piano all over the world?”

  “Piano!” Juanita said.

  “They going to let you play piano?” asked his daddy. “You ain’t got to twirl no rifles nor nothing?”

  “The Army has a band. I can audition.”

  “Audition,” said his daddy. “Audition don’t mean play.”

  Lindell sighed. “Being in Mt. Sterling is like being on a ship sailing to nowhere.”

  “Well, it was a good enough place to raise you up in,” said his daddy. “Good enough for my daddy to raise me up in, and for his daddy to raise him up in, and good enough for all us Martins for as long as I can carry it back. You tell me one thing wrong with this town. Or one thing wrong with this house. One thing wrong with your wife and child, who you want to leave.”

  “What’s wrong with my daughter,” Lindell said, tapping his glass of water so rings jiggled out on top of it, “is that she has to watch her daddy go off and pour grease fourteen hours a day and have nothing but a messed-up piece of car to show for it. What’s wrong with this house is that I could be going away from it to make something of myself.” He lowered his voice some. “And I know you didn’t raise me up just to go pump whitefolks’ gas. To be grinning at Mr. Combs when I’m a fifty-year-old man going bald. I know, Father, you didn’t raise me for that.”

  Ida Mae said it all sounded right nice to her, and she done moved on anyway to eating her chess pie. She was thinking about Audrey, she said, thinking that the child’s very own daddy could go all round the world playing his piano and then come home to wear suits every day, like Dr. French, ’stead of just on Sundays like all the other Negroes in town. She thought about Audrey with a powder blue sweater and a satin bow for a belt, and all them furry soft flamingoes on the bottom of her long skirt, and she felt warm to the bone, like Juanita was sharing hot apple cider with her during a kiss. ’Course Danaitha was still setting in the living room crying puddles, but when she overheard Lindell talking about making a doctor, seem like she stopped some, and Ida Mae said the way Danaitha was, she bet she was feeling a mink stole creeping round her neck, and the bomber seats of a brand-new Merc fitting to her bottom. Said she bet Danaitha was setting there already looking out over her new French headlights while she drove up to the first house they didn’t have to share with Lindell’s daddy.

  Ida Mae thought about how Juanita was down in Knoxville on scholarship, and how that meant she had to wash dishes at the girls’ dormitory while her girlfriends got their lessons. She thought about how, for want of money to go to Kentucky State, Juanita was living on scholarship in the worn-out dirt of Tennessee, going on dates with boys for the sake of appearances. She thought on a day when they were all three just kids, when Lindell tackled her to the floor and tickled her with one hand while he played Hot Biscuits with the other, and she knew he didn’t deserve to be cooped up like a dog in Mt. Sterling. Ida Mae said Grandpap Martin, who’d been planning on bul
lying Lindell into the bushels of grandbabies he wanted, had cheeks red with heat. Somehow along the way, his son done become a man.

  But then again, when she excused herself to the bathroom, it come to Ida Mae that maybe the stars’d hidden away that night so they wouldn’t have to hear what Lindell done gone and decided. Ida Mae didn’t love men, but on her way to the bathroom, when the uncooked air in the hallway shifted to coolness and a screech owl rattled his call through the open back door, she felt a peculiar sadness in her heart for Lindell. But he ain’t my brother, and not my son, not my husband or my daddy, she said in her head. When she was finished with the toilet she washed her hands and then said it out loud, answering the question Lindell done asked, way long after he done forgot it. “Ain’t none of my concern,” she said. She walked back to the dining room, and started to clear plates.

  SAVED

  Boys, you know, they don’t notice my teeth so much when I got lipstick on. I make sure to keep them brushed clean so the lipstick don’t stick, and I don’t take coffee nor tea nor soda. I blot my lips with Kleenex ever so often to make sure I ain’t smeared, and I say to my mind over and over again to keep that mouth closed. Shut your trap, shut it, just shut it, I tell myself, and sometimes I tell it until I’m almost humming it, and my lips are sore from being pressed so tight against each other, but it works. When I smile at boys now, they look at my eyes.

  ’Course, in private it’s a different matter altogether, but that ain’t about my teeth. The surprise of it all, when I finally let Ralph, is that he doesn’t even kiss my mouth while we’re doing it. It’s the end of lunch recess, and Imagene done already hopped herself back to school, and it’s cold against the wall on account of it being the dead of February, but Ralph pushes me up next to Grandmama’s front window and squeezes my bosom, and then he pulls my skirt up and I let him. He turns me around and backs me up against him. He says, “Put your hands against the wall,” and I lean over and do that too, on account of he quit me last October and this is the first time he’s been in Grandmama’s house since, and I’ll do anything he says long as he never leaves, and then he’s got both hands around my waist with my long skirt piled up on my back, and last year at the soda counter I overheard Colette Smith telling Pauline Burke that the first time hurt her something terrible but Ralph’s inside me and making a sound like it’s over before I’m even able to decide whether it does. My panties are draped over my shoes but I still turn around and move up close to kiss Ralph, and the thing is, even though I’m holding my mouth closed, he looks right at my lips and then drops his eyes like he’s just now remembering who he’s with. His eyes land on the scar on my arm, that damn thing, and then he catches himself right quick and winks at me like he’s just trying to be fresh, but we still end up not kissing, and I pull my panties up and move away from him.

  We set there on Grandmama’s couch after, and he holds my hand but he holds it loose, like he’s holding a piece of his scarf or a cartoon ticket or something else he don’t care too much about, and I keep squeezing his hand to get warm but it’s just from my end, all that squeezing, and he don’t squeeze back not once, and just about the time he’s starting to look sleepy, and I’ve decided we probably ain’t going back to school this afternoon, somebody knocks on the door.

  I put a finger to my lips to tell Ralph to be quiet, and I go answer it and it turns out it’s Ruth Simmons’s mama with a letter from Daddy. “I thought you might want it soon as you could have it, ’stead of out the box,” she says, and she moves her thumb from where she’s put it on purpose over the return address, and now I know the bitch can read.

  “Thank you,” I say, just because it’s what Mama always used to tell us to do whenever somebody handed us a piece of paper. But I snatch it from her, just quick enough to let her know.

  “What’s that?” Ralph asks, when I close the door on her.

  “A letter.”

  “I can see that.”

  And then I’m stuck, frozen right to the floor in Grandmama’s front hall. I want Ralph to stay and then I don’t, and I want him to know the letter but I don’t know how to say it, and I sure as Sam don’t know how to say that the letter’s from the very last person it ought to be from, and that I’m embarrassed to even be reading it. I could tell him how I’ma throw it in the fire right after I do, but that ain’t any kind of redemption. Even when Ralph buttons his coat, which he never even pulled off in the first place, I can’t say it. Even as ever little part of my tongue wants to move and ask him to stay put just a spell, even as he makes for the door, I’m frozen.

  “All right. Bye,” he says, and I guess that’s the end again. To get out the door, he has to push me aside with his shoulder.

  Well, once I open that letter and start reading I’m too mad to cry, because here come Daddy again asking for Lindell’s old story reel, on account of they got a new reel player at the penitentiary for the inmates to play things. He’s been writing and asking and asking and writing for that reel, and I just keep throwing them letters right in the fire. He ain’t asked for nothing normal—not the one photograph of all us girls together, standing on the porch at Christmas, smiling in our gowns at Mama’s little Kodak Brownie even though we was just about froze to death. Not even any of the pictures he had of Mama—not the one from before she ever kissed him, when she was seventeen and grinning secret wishes into the Woolworth’s Photomatic, and not the one she took the day she got married, when she was nineteen and had to take both her fists to bunch up the sweep of her wedding dress. He ain’t asked for a bit of that. Just that old story reel, the one Lindell sent up from Mississippi right before he got shipped off, with him speaking all them big words like they done made him the general. This time, when he asked, Daddy done at least got polite about it. “Please,” he wrote. “If you got any remembrance of your father at all.”

  I guess he thinks maybe I done forgot him on account of I ain’t answered a single one of his letters, and I ain’t intending to, and I damn skippy ain’t fixing on walking down to no White people’s post office to mail any package full of a reel-to-reel to State Penitentiary, Eddyville. But it’s something about the way Daddy wants just that one thing so bad what makes me want the thing too, so since I ain’t going back to school I carry myself down the street to our old house.

  When I turn the key in the lock I hear something scramble across the living-room floor, and whatever it is must have sense enough to run off into the kitchen, because I hear the old cast iron pot fall to the floor. I open the door and it’s two dead birds in the corner of the living room and one more in the hallway, and the roof over the furnace is hanging right into the room. I don’t really want to see more but I keep walking, to the middle of the house where I can look in on four different rooms: the floor in the kitchen is bucked and cracked so bad I can see clear down to the foundation, and the outside wall in Mama and Daddy’s bedroom is covered in black mold. I know that reel-to-reel is down in the drawer where Daddy kept his special things, and I don’t fool around getting it. It ain’t all the little rats rustling around behind the walls, and it ain’t the mold neither—it’s that all of a sudden, it feels like my mama’s standing right there looking at me, and I want to get away from her. ’Course, it feels a little funny, being afraid of my own mama like that, but well. No matter how much you love somebody, once they’re dead you want them to stay put. I run out the house without even locking the door back, and Ida Mae’s dog is barking at me like he knows I ain’t supposed to be there. I want to bite his tail and pull the hair out of the little mole on his snout. I want to send that big happy dog running crazy.

  I still remember the day Daddy got Lindell’s story in the mail—he took it out the box and stacked the two reels on top of each other so he could turn them round and round on his finger. ’Course we all knew what a reel-to-reel was, even though ain’t too many people what had them when we was little, but it seem like right then Daddy ain’t understood how he was supposed to listen to something that small and g
et something as big as his best friend’s heart. He took it down to WCFL to see if they might let him play it on their reel, and suggested to the manager that he might be interested in running a regular program of reels from men in the service. According to Daddy, the station manager was all excited until he took a hearing of it with Daddy, and then all of a sudden he went sour. Said that tape wasn’t even fit to listen to.

  Well, Daddy told Mama it was on account of what Lindell said wasn’t at all complimentary to White people, and when I bring it back to Grandmama’s and put it on her player, there’s Lindell, proper as usual, telling his story, something about a man named Sims:

  “ ‘You will take the test again,’ the man told me, ‘in my presence.’ Asked him why, he said, ‘Because I’m saying so, son, and this is the armed service of the United States, and if you want to join up, you’d do well to become accustomed to taking orders.’ ”

  Lindell went on, on the tape, said it warn’t like him to question much noways, and I figured that was on account of he was so used to taking orders from his daddy. But Lindell did say he was powerful mad, in the moment, at this Sims feller. Said he’d made the trip all the way cross Lexington to take the Army test the first time, and now this second time was going to take up all the half hour in pretty weather that he’d wanted to spend getting his shoes shined up for Lyric night. It was two sets at the theater: Freddie Ferguson and His Hot Peppercorns, who played like they done paid the devil for music, and Valerie Wilson the singer, who had a twenty-inch waist and legs like Coke-Cola bottles. Look like them shoes’d have to stay muddy, though, ’cause Sims flipped a sheet of paper out at Lindell, and Lindell sat hisself down in the same chair he’d sat in the month previous. Sims rolled a pencil cross the table. “You got two hours, son. Never met a Negro ’fore you,” he told Lindell, “but I figured I done listened enough on the radio to know plenty about them. So when your test came back and the service said you got only one out of a hundred questions wrong, I reckoned there was something awful strange.”