Audrey told me, just like Sims’d told her mama—back in Lexington, when he got the Army’s telegram, Sims had actually fainted. He’d done a little work on Lindell’s case, he had, and it turnt out the Army radio service was putting Jubilee! back on the air and they needed a piano player, and it was a letter saying so chasing Lindell all around the country. The letter’d get to Korea, but too late, and Lindell’d never know why he went off to war without even the regular week off to go see his family.
Now it was a man by the name of Paul Sacks, what came down to Mt. Sterling from Cleveland one day not long after Danaitha got her telegram. Said he reckoned he was the last person who seent Lindell alive, said he wanted to share Lindell’s last thoughts. He’d been in the unit all the way from Keesler, and he said Lindell told him it was a minute or two, when they was all about to get on that transport plane to Kadena, he thought he might jump off and run. Desert, he kept saying. Go AWOL. Even when they stopped to refuel at Pearl Harbor, Paul Sacks could see Lindell looking round at doors, maybe thinking he might hide in the men’s room until the plane gassed up and left, make his way through the Hawaiian jungle and get hisself a little hut with a hula dancer inside peeling pineapples. He ain’t seen his babygirl ’fore he left, he done told them over and over, and he wanted to just stop everthing and get on a boat back to the mainland. He wondered if God was trying to tell him something by him not having seen his baby girl: either he’d make it for sure, or he for sure wouldn’t. Either way, he said he wouldn’t let God beat him with signs—he needed to get off that big jet plane and go home to his Audrey, spoonfeed her oatmeal and tuck her into bed just one last time. But when he smelled the gas burning off the engine, and he looked down the tarmac at the new friends he’d made, boys as young and silly and scared as he was, he told Paul Sacks he knew he wouldn’t let the rest of the company down. “He was a man like any other man,” Paul Sacks told Danaitha and Audrey, “and I guess he loved being a man more’n he loved anything else.”
And so he found hisself not even one day later, dying in Kunsan, his head in Paul Sacks’s hot lap, his burned skin flaking up and peeling off his meat like he was an onion. He still ain’t seen the ocean, he told Paul Sacks, on account of he’d kept his eyes closed getting on the transport, and while he was laying there dying, another bomb blew up, right across the airfield from him and Paul, and he should’ve screamed but he didn’t. Fire was everwhere, eating up the high grass, crawling up the trees, rolling across the sky, but when Paul asked him Lindell said he wasn’t even hurting. And not afraid of what might happen next, either. More’n anything, he said, he was surprised. Surprised his life wasn’t flashing backwards before his eyes, but going around in circles in his ears. Maybe it was because his ears was so big that they was how he’d lived all of his life, but Lindell said he was hearing everthing, from the coughing fit his mama had right before she died to Audrey’s first words (“dog dog”) to the very last chord he’d played on his daddy’s piano. He heard the clack clack clack of a little monkey on a string he got for his sixth Christmas, and he heard the water dripping in his mama’s bedroom ceiling while he held her hands and cried. He heard the terrible empty crash of the bomb that threw him eight feet in the air, and he heard Danaitha’s low laugh when he slid off her stockings. He heard the taps on the new shoes he got when he started high school and he heard his mama’s heart beating while he sat in her belly and sucked his toe.
It all went round and round, he was telling Paul, in no order a tall, until finally something did come to his eyes, and the fire all round him seemed to be dying out in a driving rain but nothing got dimmer. ’Stead, things got brighter, he said, and he was seeing minutes and hours he’d never see, Negro men and women wading in the beach at Biloxi while White men swung tire chains. The Negroes singing, their children flinching, photographers from up North snapping pictures, all them Negroes looking pleased to be beat. And living—living, living—on their feet. Said he saw Danaitha drinking whiskey over his remains and he saw his babygirl running into the sunflowers, and then he said everthing did get brighter and brighter, until the light was so bright it hurt to look at his babygirl’s face.
“He was whispering by then,” Paul Sacks told them, “and I could barely decide what he was saying, but he said he did look. He said he looked right into the middle of Audrey’s pretty brown eyes until the light didn’t hurt him no more, and then he said he felt his nose against her smooth little gumdrop nose and saw the corners of her eyes turn up in smiling.”
“ ‘Mother’s going to be so angry with us,’ ” she was saying. Lindell took a shallow breath and said his babygirl had fallen down in the field of blackberries, and her white dress was stained blue at the knees.
“Don’t matter, babygirl,” Lindell said, and Paul Sacks said he eased his head off’n his lap so he could run hisself into the retreat. “Don’t matter one bit,” Lindell kept whispering. “Turns out almost nothing does.”
Paul leaned over for one last listen before running.
“I love you too, babygirl,” Lindell was whispering. “More’n anything. Forever and ever.”
PART THREE
Audrey
MR. BARBOUR
Mother received the telegram on the fifth of July, but on the third, I woke up tasting blackberries. Fat, knobby, indigo blackberries, leaking juice so tart they made me get out of bed and check in the mirror that my tongue wasn’t blue. I dressed and ran up the mountain to our secret hill, the one where Daddy had found the blackberry patch. I picked enough to fill both skirt pockets: Mother and Grandpap and I ate blackberries with cream all day on the Fourth, and I was baking a cobbler when Mr. Sims knocked on the door. Mother screamed. She ripped the buttons off her blouse.
“My father,” I told Sergeant Sims, as I stepped in front of her to the door, “isn’t dead. He’s coming back to pick blackberries.”
Grandpap came crying with his eyes closed, a wet cloth for Mother’s face draped over his arm, but I returned to the kitchen and finished sugaring my crust. Mother stayed between her bedsheets for the two weeks of waiting for his body, but I kept riding my bicycle to the Colored store for Coca-Cola and reading my Langston Hughes at the kitchen table through lunchtime, and I didn’t believe Daddy was dead until the Army shipped his teeth. Some kind of ignorant, childish grief, folks thought, but I just knew there would be another day on the hill—that’s all. When Mr. Pinchback let me hold the box full of Daddy’s teeth, when that box weighed nothing and rattled hollow, then all the pain of a lifetime came crushing down upon me like a mountain. It’s pinned me down ever since.
Before my father died, Mother hadn’t believed in dressing to blend into the shadows. She’d never owned a simple black dress, and since she was abed with misery all those weeks after she got the telegram, it fell to me to go to Taylor’s and buy a mourning dress in a ladies’ size four. The first one on the rack had a butterfly collar. Too modern, all wrong for someone with Mother’s constitution, but the White saleslady with no other customers smiled too lazily at me, and the girl working the register frowned with too much energy, and I got nervous and paid for it. Mother didn’t even open the bag until the day of the funeral, and even then she dressed without protesting the collar. But it was the last time she dressed easily, because after Daddy’s funeral, she stopped being able to decide on a simple thing like which clothes to wear. She accidentally set the mantel clock for two minutes late and then decided she liked it that way. If those two minutes hadn’t yet happened, she told me, then perhaps the month preceding it hadn’t, either. She was exactly two minutes late everywhere she went, and she often smelled of bourbon when she arrived, and if you watched closely as she walked down the street, you’d see how much slower was her gait. Sometimes, she cried as she walked. But the doctors at the city clinic kept her on out of sympathy, and Miss Ora Ray’s daughter gave her night ironing to make up for our household’s lost income, and Mother started drinking Early Times as if it had been prescribed. She’d always been a bea
utiful woman, my mother, but she swept the porch and canned the tomatoes and kept her business so well, she didn’t appear to need a new man to take care of it for her. Folks around here thought she was too strong to make room for a man, so she didn’t find one until Mr. Barbour decided he was even stronger than she was.
He’s not stronger than me. He can’t even pronounce the word “piano” properly. “Stop banging on that pinetta,” he’d say when I was still under his roof. “People are trying to think.” He makes Mother open every piece of mail that comes to the house, and I wonder if he can even read. He thinks Mother is standing in the garden enjoying his conversation, when really, she’s standing there waiting for my daddy to come back from Korea and take her dancing. Her mouth is moving, launching words she thinks Mr. Barbour will like, stringing phrases along so that they sound like some kind of future for them both, but all the while she’s talking, her hands are getting ever stronger with bringing my father back. She’s cross-breeding and cultivating and tending her blooms to grow a fragrance that will reach him wherever he is. Mr. Barbour thinks my mother is sitting on the sofa enjoying the feel of his hand on her thigh as they listen to Backstage Wife on the radio, but all the time they’re listening, Mother is watching out the window for Daddy. She’s listening to the radio for the sound of crackling as she remembers it coming out of my father’s little 1937 Magnavox, listening for my father to laugh even outside of the right places. Where my daddy was an ocean, Mr. Barbour is a raindrop. Still, I thank God for him, because he’s the one who pushed me out of town.
Mt. Sterling was growing tinier and tinier, even if nobody else could see it shrinking, and I’d made up my mind to leave before it winnowed away to nothing. But lightning has to strike ground before it can burn up the sky, and that little town loaded me down with a lot more misery before it would let me go. First, my soul began to hollow, until it emptied so fully that you could knock on my back and hear an echo. Missing Daddy was only half of it: the other half was that God left me, eventually, with nobody. Grandpap had always thought his son was the very axis on which the world spun, and Daddy’s death only made him believe it that much more. After we got the telegram, Grandpap searched in vain for a watch identical to one he’d lost when Daddy first left for the Air Force, a silver Hamilton with a tessellated weave engraved on the back where Grandpap might look and find his happy memories. Grandpap took out a duster each morning and cleaned the three gilded frames that held Daddy frozen in time—one around a painting of Daddy as a little boy in knickers, one around a Herald Leader photo from the 1936 basketball season, and one around a shot of my parents in front of the house that Dr. French had taken to christen his new camera. To keep the moths out, Grandpap folded and refolded Daddy’s shirts, as if Daddy were going to come back to life and need to wear them. Of course dusting and folding wasn’t living: Grandpap just wasn’t there anymore. He waded through his days patting indigestion back down into his gullet and misting his dry eyes with a spray bottle. Watching the checkers in my hand without noticing the girl moving them down the board.
My mother had cleaved tight to my father since the day she met him, and for some time after he died, she did nothing and said nothing, and I wondered if she might discover me. She didn’t. She found Early Times down at the Tin Cup, and then she found Mr. Barbour at a dance over in Hope. God galled me. I stopped praying. Stopped reading my grandmama’s leather-bound Bible, and left the ribbon marking my place in the book of Ruth. I still attended services, because the A.M.E. paid me fifty cents a Sunday for playing, but I didn’t believe a word that dropped out of Reverend Graves’s mouth. When the old ladies down front got happy, I felt sorry for them. The usher would hand me my communion wafer, and I’d slide it between the sixth C and D on the piano.
Then, as if to show me how much power He actually had, God took away Pookie, who had been as close to me as my own brown skin. She was falling in love with Ralph, and I had nothing, not anyone or anything. Just a bunch of books I’d already read. I had music, but it felt formless. I didn’t know enough yet to love it the most.
The Saturday before the Sunday our church went visiting in Versailles, Mr. Barbour drove up to the house and interrupted my porch reading. He was slouched on the wheel in arrogance, and his cap rode low over his eyes. “Your mama misses you,” he said. He had a fresh cut to his hair and mustache, but he looked every bit as foul as I remembered. “Come on out to the house and have dinner, what say? I’ll ride you back to town in the morning.”
Grandpap asked, “Let’s say she wants to come back this very night. You going to carry her back?”
Surprise sat Mr. Barbour straight up behind the steering wheel, because he hadn’t seen Grandpap sitting behind the screen door.
“Let’s say Audrey wants to come back home after dinner, even. You going to carry her on back?”
“Yes sir. I will.”
“All right, then. Audrey, do you want to go with the gentleman?”
I didn’t. But I hadn’t received a new book in the mail for two weeks, and I’d been sitting on the porch rereading the first six chapters of Quicksand, letting Grandpap win at checkers, listening to the same Dinah Washington song on the radio four times a day. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll go.”
Mother was surprised to see me walk through her front door, even if she did hand me a bowl of cornmeal and put me straight to work. After dinner, she insisted on washing my hair, and then she pressed it and marcelled curls for the first time all year. “Got a long head, girl,” she said, as she clicked the bumpers from one clip of hair to the other. “Such a long head.” She hooted laughter over the kicking furnace. It was August, and starting to get cold in the night. “I’d forgotten how long your head is. Just like your daddy’s. Long as a peanut.”
She was seven months gone, and her body had grown soft and enormous, as if it were holding a large, gassy planet instead of a small, thin-limbed baby. She sliced parts down my scalp to the nape of my neck, and when she bent me over to do the crown of my head, her belly was so close that its warmth pressed against my face. “Hear tell Ralph gave Pookie a promise ring,” she said.
“Where’d you hear something like that?”
“Mr. Barnett. Said Miss Myrtle told him.”
“Well, there’s a piece a news. I wouldn’t know nothing about it.”
Mother dipped the bumpers into the lard, then brought them out and cooled them in the hair-stained towel. “Something happen ’tween you and Pookie?” she asked. “Ain’t like y’all not to be speaking.” She rubbed grease onto my scalp, more gently than she had before.
“I’m just busy, Mother. I’m more serious about life than she is.”
“You think?” she asked, but it wasn’t a question. She took the back of my neck in her hands and pressed my whole face to her belly, and my throat started to ache with wanting to cry. “You and Pookie are too much alike to ever, ever lose each other. You both just got to do some growing up for a minute.” She rubbed my neck with the tips of her fingers. From the living room, Nina Simone sang “I Loves You Porgy.” Mother asked, “What you so busy with you can’t keep friends?”
“Me and Mr. Baldwin Upright,” I said, getting myself out from under her fingers. “Practicing. For when I get out of this no-horse town.”
“Just like your old daddy,” she said, in a manner that suggested she’d found a way to let him become a simple nodule of her memory. She thumped the comb against the side she needed to part, then marcelled my hair all the way down to the roots, like I was never able to do by myself. I still needed her, but I didn’t want to. “Why don’t you stay the night with us? Jonas’ll get you back in time to leave with the church, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Nope. Got nowhere to sleep. You put my bed in the barn. Or don’t you remember?”
“Got a nice new sofa down there, softer than that bed ever was. Your daddy got that bed on credit at Taylor’s. It was springs poking through the mattress ’fore he’d even paid it off.”
<
br /> “Yet and still, it was my bed.”
She thumped me again with the comb and finished my hair so we could go sit down in the living room with Mr. Barbour and listen to the news from out of Lexington. Senator McCarthy’s voice echoed off the walls: Point of Order! He talked through his nose at cool old Joseph Welch, and I knew that every Communist in our country could feel his heart clenching. Barry Bingham, the Louisville millionaire, had been visited by Lee Remick the actress. Miss Remick and I had a fine time at the Downs, he told the radio announcer, and the lady certainly does know how to pick a horse! All of Louisville was honored by her presence.
“Whyn’t you come on and stay the night?” Mother asked again, but already, she was sitting on the sofa holding Mr. Barbour’s hand.
Mr. Barbour was sunk in the boxing scores. He picked his nose with his free hand and frowned.
“I’m ready for you to carry me back,” I said to him, but his mind stayed wherever it was: he might just as well have been flying across the sea. “I’m ready for you to carry me back,” I said louder and he made a big show of rising to his height and drawing his pant legs up at the knees before he stood. I caught a look on Mother’s face, a quick scrunching of the bridge of her nose that I’d seen two thousand times when she was about to take a swig of whiskey, and I had to look away because I didn’t want to read her face further.
Mr. Barbour made all kinds of noise putting on his coat, groaning as though his sleeves were biting his arms. “Alrighty then,” he said, and I got up and left my mother sitting on her brand-new cherry-legged sofa. On the way to town, Mr. Barbour made certain to swing his 210 through every rut in the county. He turned his radio to the worst station, and we drove through the four paved blocks of town listening to “Buttons and Bows.” WLEX. Soulless treble. Simple manna. Mr. Barbour even had the nerve to sing along. “Don’t be a stranger,” he said when he drove up in front of Grandpap’s house. “When you think you might be out our way next?”
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