Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  She was a person like nobody he’d ever known before, is what he told Tyrone, and all them years he’d been thinking she was an impossible dream. And so when he put his hand on her hip in bed and she flinched, it like to make his stomach drop clear out of his body. “I’m sorry, baby,” he said, taking them two hunderd-dollar bills out his wallet and snapping them to attention, “but you do realize you could put a down payment on a car, just off this one night?”

  Audrey didn’t say nothing.

  If he’d put his arms round the back of her and kissed her neck just then, he might’ve saved everthing, but instead he said, “Well, you could.”

  “You go on then,” Audrey said into the pillow, so Ralph couldn’t even make out what she was saying. “You take that two hundred dollars and buy yourself a car. Like it’s the most important thing in the world.”

  DADDY

  Next time Audrey even got near a piano was at her granddaddy’s funeral. We was all there, the whole town, seem like. Wasn’t on account of the deceased, ’cause old Grandpap Martin just been sitting around in that old musty closed-up house for the last three years of his life, not ever coming past the porch to say how do nor go-to-hell, his Christmas tree still standing with popcorn and tinsel come July. We wasn’t at the funeral, neither, on account of the tragedy of his son, since that done happened seven years prior and people done largely forgot about Lindell. We wasn’t even there on account of us all wanting to see that bulldagger Ida Mae Harris what Juanita done took up with, ’cause it warn’t never a secret noways that they was sweet on each other. No, I’d say if anything drew that crowd to fill up Queen Street Second Baptist, it was us all wanting to see the tragedy of Audrey Martin herself.

  She ain’t let us down, neither, playing and crying and snotting and humming to make us think we was watching something supernatural. She made the high notes on that piano sing, and when she hit the low notes, seem like they done some of her crying for her. With lightning killing the sky outside, making it look like the earth done died at one o’clock in the afternoon, and Reverend Owington going on about how the wrath of Jehovah extends from the lone sinner to his entire family, the whole service was like God speaking to us directly. Even so, I wasn’t listening right much. Just thinking about Grandmama’s funeral, and how all the other ladies her age was tipping around that casket thinking they was too fancy to die. Grandmama, laying there in the casket with them cat-eyed glasses with the rhinestones what she loved so much, and me wondering what’d happen in fifty years when they was out of style and she was still sitting in some easy chair in heaven, pushing them back up her nose. At Grandpap Martin’s funeral wasn’t nobody whispering, or writing notes back and forth on the funeral program, or even chewing gum—we was all scared to even so much as look anywhere but at that body in the casket. It was like Grandpap was presiding over us all in his death the way he never could control anybody in life. Just then, looking at him all laid out like that, his eyes closed against ever knowing anything else, I remembered when he yelled at me for cutting my hair, that time me and Ralph been trying to sell him some coal, and I felt ashamed that I done cut it all off again, over some man.

  Seem like Audrey was a little shamed about Grandpap looking down from heaven and seeing her with Ralph, ’cause right before everthing started, when Ralph came to the piano and tried to talk to her, she just sat there stiff as a board and wouldn’t so much as look at him. “Baby—” he started to say, but the way she closed her eyes into whatever she was playing said it all, how she was disgusted at herself for ever even looking at some county mope like him in the first place. The nerve. I wanted to kiss him on his baby soft ears and tell him it was all right ’cause she always been something different anyways. He was my first love and I’d never be shamed of him, I wanted to tell him, but seem like that would of been the entirely wrong thing to do right then at a funeral. Audrey’s mama and Mr. Barbour was there, with Baby Nate, and she did let them hug her some, even held Baby Nate in her lap up on the piano bench and let him plunk a few notes in the time when folks was getting seated. She got up and passed Nate on back to her mama when it was time for her to start playing. Ralph was one of the folks had to hand the boy back through the pews, but Audrey ain’t seen it.

  My daddy was there. I still ain’t talked to him but I’d seen him in town, putting his money in the bank right at eight in the morning when wasn’t nobody there but the bankers, getting his shoes shined in the square like he couldn’t do it hisself at home. He stayed out the Tin Cup, I guess out of respect for the owner, but he did go down to Mr. Barnett’s regular, to play some numbers, and didn’t none of Barnett’s customers so much as bat an eye at him. He was back, and it wasn’t what I’d expected. Women loved him. Look like they just wanted theyselves a wife-killer, wanted him to do them in too, maybe, make them invisible to everbody else what was hurting them everday in ten million other ways. They wanted him to kill them back to their true selves, maybe, ’cause in the one year he been back, he done had a chain of ’em, one kind after another, from Versailles to Shakey Farmers, until he got to be responsible for the melancholies of half the women in eastern Kentucky. They loved him and they fed him, and the paunch he come home from the pen with got to be the size of a Teddy bear’s, and that made him even more irresistible, seem like. He’d got gray in the five years he been locked up, and you might think it’d make him look older and sadder but really it just made him look distinguished, and in his church clothes, he looked like any other man in Mt. Sterling baling tobacco and feeding his family, and maybe that’s what made folks just plumb forget, forget that Mama ain’t done nothing, that he done kilt her just like you’d butcher a hog. Down to the Tin Cup, the story even got to be that it was Mama who done this or that, that Mama was getting ready to run off with some man, that Mama done took Daddy’s money and lost it playing the numbers.

  Well, there he was at Grandpap Martin’s funeral, looking all respectable, and he went up to Audrey and give her a big hug afterward, and I didn’t make nothing of it at the time, but then, but then, but then. One night at the county fair, the strangest thing. Imagene run over saying she seen Audrey with Daddy at the cotton candy stand, and damn if she ain’t had one a them big stuffed turtles, the kind your man wins you when he shoots three balloons in a row. “He ain’t never won me no turtle,” Imagene said, and she poked out her little lip the way she done when she was a little bitty baby, and I had to tell her he ain’t never won me no turtle at the fair neither, and with me, he done had an eight-year head start. But there, with Daddy and a prize, was skinny little Audrey Martin, Audrey Martin who you’d never catch no more without her black city clothes, Audrey Martin who sat closed up in that house playing piano just like her granddaddy and her daddy before her, Audrey Martin who done got so afraid of the world by then that she wasn’t even living in it. Not a week after Grandpap’s funeral, she moved out his house and into No. 211, and you’d see the two of them out in the mornings ’fore Daddy went to work down to the ice plant. Talking to each other on the front porch, Audrey leaning over the rail just like Mama used to do, watching the flowers she done planted. Sometimes her mama would even let her babysit Little Nate over at No. 211, and the three of them’d be walking down the street holding on to each other’s hands: after all his chain of women, Daddy done clipped it off at the end with Audrey.

  And then I was the only one I had to share the outrage with, ’cause Imagene been too little to remember what happened to Mama, and Grandmama done passed. In a way, I’d always thought it was some all right Grandmama passed, ’cause she couldn’t never get used to what was going on in the world, the girls with their afros and halter tops riding through town on their way up to Lexington, and them White boys with sandals come down from UK, all keen on the Colored girls sometimes, talking ’bout how amazed they was that it was plenty of Black peoples in Appalachia. Grandmama’d stand on the porch, crying tears big as money, ’cause she done outlived her daughter and then outlived herself. She’d walk b
ack in and rub that little pit in the wall where I threw the poker at Daddy and say, “Just left a little mark, that’s all.” Well, it’s a bunch of little marks what kill us all in the end. And when I see Audrey walking down the street between Little Nate and Daddy, I’m awful glad Grandmama ain’t lived to see that. I still remember how she begged God right before she died, and I hated her house then, ’cause all that was really left in it was me. Her ashcans was so clean and so nice I didn’t want to throw nothing in ’em.

  And I remembered back when I’d of had Audrey to come over and share this all with, all my grief and all my wanting, and you know I’d never tell Audrey this now, but it was a time I loved her something terrible. She would of come over to the house and thrown my grandmama’s false teeth in one of them ashcans and got us both to laughing something awful about it, and just thinking about her doing some such thing, I knew I’d loved her better than I’d loved my own self. But she grew off and left me. I’d always be poor old Caroline Wallace, what stayed in Mt. Sterling and watched all the men go off and leave her, and Audrey’d be the smart one who kept finding Love, even if Love was some old piece a thing what done been to the pen and got old and gray and fat around the middle. August is her tragedy, but it’s me who ain’t never been loved, not even by my own daddy. There’s something in her heart what’s still alive, something my heart ain’t never had in the first place.

  I saw her in Mr. Barnett’s this morning. I cut her off in the cleaner aisle, but she just pushed into my arm and walked around me, so I called her a bitch. She probably thinks it’s on account of her being with Daddy, but it ain’t. She don’t know me no more, and I don’t know her. And even though it’s been a long time happening, she’s such a force she done broke my heart without even meaning to. Seventy times seventy the Bible says you must forgive, and we even got baptized together, but I can’t forgive her even once. That girl was a diamond, here in the middle of all this coal.

  PART EIGHT

  Audrey

  SUMMER

  Of all my days in Harlem, there is one that has lodged itself like a poor, trapped bird in my memory, throwing itself constantly at the borders of my mind, trying to get out and make itself happy, and that’s the day August hauled me out of my little room on 116th Street—away from my landlady still shaking her curlers—in the name of taking me to a better life. Even then, I knew better, knew better even as I hauled that poor dented lime green suitcase down the steps by myself, even when I sat down in the taxi and August didn’t so much as hold my hand. I’d ripped down all my Life photos but one: a shot of a man and a woman dancing across a beautiful hardwood floor, the woman’s stockings glowing, through some trick of lighting, as if her legs were candles. I left that for the next young, dreaming girl to live in Edith’s room: August and I had never danced. We never would.

  Down Beat called once, in 1963. August was on tour in the Netherlands, the reporter said, and the magazine wanted to do a pictorial. His mother had told the reporter that Elizabeth Johnson Barnes was August’s first wife, but Elizabeth Johnson Barnes had pointed the reporter in my direction. “How did she know where I lived?” I asked him, but there was one piece of information he was without. He asked me what it was like, being with August during the early years of his career, but I couldn’t tell him. “I no longer know that form of music,” I told him instead. “You may find this incredible, but a whole language can disappear.” He just breathed into his mouthpiece—thrown, no doubt, by my answer—and as a train rumbled past in the distance, so long it was beginning to sound like a river, I tried to come up with something conciliatory, something that sounded like an answer, even if it was untrue. “You can love the music without loving the men who go with it,” I told him. “A lot of people are good at a lot of things, but not many of them are good at love.” I told him goodbye, and asked him please not to call me again.

  What else could I say? “We never danced,” I might have told him. But then, I’d never danced with a man—not ever. My clunky youth had been full of boys who saw only the thickness of my glasses, boys who heard only the words that owned more syllables than their own. Now, I’ve danced, and danced again and again and again. I didn’t know, the first two songs, that he was Stanton Wallace. His body had become powered so slowly with regret that you didn’t even notice his height until you stood next to him. I only knew, at that Blackberry Festival dance in Hope, that he was someone who had traveled away like me and come back the better for it, someone who felt stronger, when he held me, than anyone else in two counties. He was everything I needed and didn’t need. To someone less melancholy, he’d have been a marvel.

  Because Mauris exists only in his memory, she’s a saint, and I can’t compete with her. I haven’t raised two of his babies, and I can’t weave yarn together to make beautiful patchwork shawls for them come the fall. I can’t even sit quietly in pink lipstick. And I can never again be a young wife, full of hope. What I do now is play at the A.M.E. church for ten dollars on Sundays and teach the little girls who come to my house straight from school on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, that and try to stay out of Grandpap’s house and away from Daddy’s ghost. At home, Stanton teaches me things, like how to survive getting to know yourself, and how he stayed in solitary for three days and came out knowing he’d never need anyone else. Solitary is pitch-dark, he told me, like being lain in a grave with the continued burden of breathing. The room is cleaned once a month when the warden takes pity on the guards who must walk by and smell it, and the corner toilet smells so awful already that you hold your bladder so as not to make it worse. First, in the darkness, you see people you love, then people you know, then the ancestors. Food comes in through a slot at the bottom of the door and you see the animals it was before it was on the stove. You see the guards you can’t see, and the warden you’ll never see, and his ancestors, and his poor great-great-great-grandmother who died of consumption in the middle of a Dutch forest. Then, Stanton says, you see yourself. You see yourself ugly first, and then you see yourself beautiful. But you understand that both selves are all the reality there is.

  An answer I wasn’t even looking for, but one I’ve always needed. We’re born alone and we die alone, Stanton says, and everything between is an illusion. I think he’s right. All this time I thought I was supposed to be out finding something special in this world, but these days that have come, these days when I welcome little Olive Gaye into Grandpap’s parlor and ask her to please not swing her legs while she plays “Alouette,” I wonder if maybe Auchidie and Caroline were right: Special is not how we were raised. I remember how Pookie and I climbed the roof the night of the enormous moon of 1955, how we held hands and supposed we’d never again see such a big, red moon, how we wondered whether it wasn’t the end of the world and we were the only two people who knew.

  Now, I know it was just a blood moon, a trick of atmosphere and humidity, a simple message to sailors and farmers that it’s going to rain come the morrow. Every adult the world over, from the mango seller in India to the milliner in Poughkeepsie, has seen one. Even little Olive Gaye, sitting there swinging her legs, thinking none of the other girls in her grade have pink and purple polka dot bows brought specially down by their daddies from Cincinnati, oblivious to the fact that her very own seventh birthday party was really an affair thrown for the entertainment of others, even Olive Gaye will see a blood moon. Maybe on a roof.

  Still, my daddy’s in that house, trying to tell me something. He doesn’t rattle windows, or make signs on walls, or walk the floor in the night to make the hairs on my neck stand on end. Instead, he whispers me this story, every time:

  Your granddaddy spent the whole nine months before you were born hunched in suspense, folding and unfolding the things he’d bought for his first grandson. There was even a pair of breeches he bought from a store in Lexington, a store he’d heard of from the White people he delivered to, a store he’d got lost on Limestone trying to find. “Y’all buck up now,” he said to me, the day you were born, “
the next one’ll be a boy.” But when I bent over that crib and studied the fine hair on your ears and the mottled red on the soles of your feet, I knew there could never be another child. There isn’t another child in all the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  At some point, early in the first draft of this novel, the late fifties became my life. It was not a place that was initially comfortable for me, and I want to thank everyone who gave me the creative space I needed to see the remarkable complexity that was there under the sepia-toned, unexamined surface, all the folks who helped make these characters and this world come into being.

  I am grateful to Jesse Lee Kercheval for her guidance during my year at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing, where I wrote the short story that later grew into this novel. I’d like to thank Crystal Wilkinson, Lindsay Shadwell, John Branscum, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who published pieces of this novel in Mythium Journal, WomenArts Quarterly, Red Holler, and poemmemoirstory, respectively.

  Tamara Fish, Andrew Lewellen, and Dalton McGee all read early drafts of this book and deserve a thank-you for their insightful comments. I am eternally grateful to my marvelous agent, Gail Hochman, who had faith in me for many years, and I’d like to thank Melanie Tortoroli at W. W. Norton for all her assistance. My brilliant editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, has my undying love for all the patience and tenderness she gave this book. Maria offered me so many gifts, not least of which was the many one-sentence questions that generated a hundred pages of revision, and her ability to see the castle in all of my sand. If there is a mystical dimension to the religion of editing, Maria Guarnaschelli is its spiritual leader.

  Thank you to God for all the amazing. Thank you to my mother, Angela Townsend, for being my first, best teacher, and for blessing me with the gift of literacy. Thank you to my father, Wendell Townsend, for offering me the story of resistance that became the backbone of this novel. Thank you to both my parents, and all the other baby boomers who patiently answered my questions about the past. Thank you to David Gides for believing I would do this even before I quite believed I would do it, and for showing our children so much love while I was chained to coffeeshop tables. Finally, a huge thank-you to my children, who slept while I dreamed, who, with their breathtaking sweetness, give me more joy than I ever imagined possible, and who dazzle me on a daily basis into seeing what lies beyond the visible.