“Daddy was telling me about the house he’s building this afternoon . . . It’s gonna be white.”
Silla’s hand flew up. “Stop ’bout the foolish man. He ain the only one got plans.”
“I know. You have,” she said quietly.
“But . . . but . . .”
“I remember what you said in the kitchen. And you don’t have any right to do whatever you’re planning . . .”
“You mean to say you been thinking ’bout what I said all this time?” She leaned over, amazed.
“Yes.”
“But what is this a-tall?” she drawled in a heavy Barbadian accent and, leaning back, suddenly laughed—a full robust sound that rang through the car, and she did not stop even when the other passengers looked up.
“I’ve told everybody too what you said . . .” Selina cried in shrill anger against her laughter. “And I don’t care if you do kill me. I’ve told everyone.”
“Told them what?” The mother sobered.
“What you said that day in the kitchen about selling Daddy’s land.”
“Who you was telling?”
“Miss Mary . . .”
“Wha’lah, you might as well tell the dead.”
“And Miss Suggie and Ina and Miss Thompson. And I told Daddy.”
The last shred of Silla’s laugh died at that. A portentous silence gathered, and for a time they stared quietly at each other until suddenly Silla grasped Selina’s coat collar and brought her close. Silla’s breath broke in harsh gusts over her terrified face. “What he said? What they said?”
Caught in the vise of the mother’s eyes and breath and the hand tightening the collar around her throat, Selina fumbled. “He . . . he . . . They said . . . they said . . .” She struggled to find the words but fear crowded them out in her mind. Fear that the mother would keep her word and kill her, boldly, right there on the trolley. “Nothing. They said nothing,” she cried weakly. “Nobody paid me any attention.”
Silla flung her back against the window. “They wus right not to listen. Don’t think I din figure you’d be spilling your guts. But what you could tell, first off? And who gon believe a child that does talk to sheself, second? You see, that’s what you get for putting yourself up in things before you know what you’re up against. I tell you, you’s like David without a sling!”
The mother was still laughing to herself as they walked down Chauncey Street from the trolley. It had stopped snowing now and the wind was perched high in the trees. The air had been cleansed by the snowfall so that the winter scene was clearly defined: the bare trees standing like tall lonely men along the white walk, the lamps casting bright circles of cold light. The mother paused under each lamp, lifted her face into the light and, with the wind tugging at her coat, laughed—each derisive outburst echoing down the cavernous street.
Selina, behind the mother, paused each time she paused to laugh and waited for the wind to bring the sound back to her. And when it struck it was more penetrating than the cold and filled her with a dread darker than the night.
IV
The year passed through its round of spring and summer, a chill mellow autumn, and it was winter again. Along with it, the war swept through its round of death, and Selina, resigned to defeat, moved with them both through her uneventful round of school.
She spent that summer in the library and in Prospect Park with Beryl to avoid the house. At night, her body held the pleasurable feel of their long walks, her mind the image of the green tremulous heat amid the leaves, and Beryl’s cool touch as they talked and slept behind the rock. But after each day with Beryl she was glad to be alone in the library. She had found a place behind the stacks on the balcony where she could read undisturbed. The sun always slanted through the high windows, stirring the dust and laying a yellow finger across the page. But she never noticed it. It was as nonexistent as the mother’s vow and her own suppressed anxiety during those hours. Only the words and the scenes they shaped existed.
Over the months, the memory of the mother’s mocking laugh and the machines’ roar dulled and she began telling herself that she might be wrong. Perhaps, as the others had said, there was nothing the mother could do. Certainly there was no sign. The thought was comforting and she had almost come to believe it when she saw the brown envelope protruding from the mailbox one Saturday in March. She glanced at it with a fleeting interest and slammed the gate. Only when she stood on the sidewalk squinting up at the hard sky did something formless and heavy stir inside her. Quickly Chauncey Street and the park dropped away, leaving her alone in a desolate place with the mailbox looming behind her. Slowly she retraced her steps along the slate walk between the stoop and the barren front yard.
She saw it, the large brown envelope, the stamps with the king’s profile, the official handwriting. Why hadn’t the plane bringing it crashed into the sea? Why didn’t she, now, pull it out of the box, tear it up and walk through Fulton Park scattering the pieces behind her?
It was no use. The mother would know. As soon as Selina returned, those eyes would search out the secret; the mother would shout, “Where the letter you just took out the box . . . ?”
“There’s a brown envelope from home in the mailbox,” Selina announced from the kitchen doorway.
The mother was at the table kneading the dough for the coconut bread as though it was a world without form and she the god shaping it. Over in the corner Ina sat grating coconut. There was a certain peace in the kitchen shaped by the steam from the pots, the humming refrigerator and the remote surge of the March wind outside. The peace crumpled now, and the mother’s broad spatulate hands searched for something more substantial than the dough to hold to. Her face took up the confused play of her hands and her mouth opened, shaping a soundless word.
“The key . . .” she managed finally, her hands still ruffling the air. When they were still she looked bewilderedly at them and began rubbing off the dough clogging her fingers. “I got . . . the key . . . someplace ’bout here. Get my pocketbook!” she commanded Selina, and when Selina did not move, she turned to Ina. “Ina, wipe yuh hands and get the key from my pocketbook. This one like she can’t hear all of a sudden.”
Ina cowered, her stricken eyes expressed her wish to be forgotten in the corner.
“Come,” the mother cried, “don sit there with your face like a down-fall. Get the key and bring the envelope.”
When Ina left, the kitchen shrank, so that Selina and the mother were brought closer to each other, so close that they saw the thoughts in each other’s eyes. Silla flustered, muttering, “I tell you, if looks was to kill, I’d be dead-dead.”
When Ina returned with the envelope she sprang for it and then hesitated only inches away. An odd expression tightened her face and shaded her eyes. She almost shied away from it. Ina pushed it into her hand and turned from the room.
“Ina, where you going?” The mother’s voice was frightened.
Ina was halfway through the dining room before she answered, “I gotta practice. I finished my share of the grating and I want to practice.”
The mother started to call her back, then looked down at the envelope in her hand and was suddenly absorbed in it. She went to the window and there, within a prism of hard sunlight, sat with the envelope lying unopened on her lap and her breathing stilled. Her silence flowed into the larger silence of the kitchen and both washed up against Selina in a chill wave.
“It done now,” Silla said, searching the room for her invisible listener. “And it can’t be undone.” She snatched the letter up then and tore it open. Her nervous fingers clumsily sifted the many papers, and as she read a bitterly triumphant smile slowly formed.
Selina, standing shattered in the doorway, watched those hands, and the night at the factory rushed back, vivid, as though a year had not passed. That night was part of this cold windy day, just as this day had been contained in that night, and they would both reach with long arms into every day to come . . .
The mother’s smile
had burgeoned into a laugh by now and she sat there holding a slip of paper and laughing with hollow, frightening triumph. But then she must have remembered Selina behind her, for the laugh snapped into silence and she turned.
Her hand lifted in a gesture that pleaded for understanding and even forgiveness. But at Selina’s venomous gaze, her hand faltered down and she ordered her sharply, “Go there and tell your father to come here. Tell him it’s business.” And she turned back to the cold March sunlight, muttering, “Land lying there doing nothing and we here need the money. As God is my witness I did right.”
Selina stumbled up into the sound of Ina’s piano and for the first time wished that she were Ina and could drown out the noise of life with the piano. As she slid open the bedroom door she wished it, even as she stood there watching her father dress within the orbit of light from the pink-shaded lamp, she wished it.
He saw her in the mirror and winked. “What, lady-folks, you on yuh Sat’day prowl already?”
“Mother wants to see you downstairs.”
“What now? Tell she I can’t stop. I got my lessons to go to.”
“She says it’s business.”
“Tell she I ain got time.” He tugged open his tie and began knotting it again.
“She got a letter from home.”
“What that got to do with me?”
“It’s about your land.”
His hands paused on the tie. “What you talking ’bout?”
Oddly, she felt a sullen satisfaction. She had tried to warn him, to protect him, and he had not wanted it. “I’m talking about your land,” she said and walked out of the room.
Quickly he was behind her and she knew that his fingers were still fumbling with the tie. “Wha’s this ’bout the piece of ground, lady-folks? What you saying, nuh?”
His bewilderment, the innocence of his question, drained her satisfaction and she wanted only to shield him, to tell him that it was nothing and lead him back into the bedroom. “I dunno,” she said brokenly. “She got a letter and told me to call you.”
He said nothing more until he reached the kitchen doorway and stood there blinking in its stiff white light. “Silla, what’s this ’bout some letter from home?” he asked evenly.
She was at the table again, kneading the dough, her brown arms flecked with flour and her body one taut, inaccessible piece.
They waited in a silence filled with dissonance.
“Now, Silla, you know if it’s a letter ’bout my land you ain had no right opening it,” he said strongly.
Her hands paused on the dough and she slowly lifted her head. Her eyes were calm, her voice soft as she said, “I has made it my business. I has sold the piece of ground.”
“You has done what?” He started toward her and she raised a hand stopping him. “I has sold it.”
“Silla, this ain no time to joke.”
“Joke! Ha! I has sold it, I tell yuh.”
Upstairs Ina suddenly began aloud lush piece by Rachmaninoff. At the sound, Deighton’s doubt seemed to vanish and he laughed, a high outburst which rose with the music and warmed the kitchen. “Lord-today, you and all making jokes.” He fanned her down and smiled at Selina over his shoulder. “Lady-folks, you hear this? Yuh mother and all making jokes. Here it is early Sat’day morning and she making jokes.” He turned back to his wife. “What, this is April Fool Day or something so?”
She didn’t answer, and his voice trailed into a silence which slowly clenched the air. As the silence held, his jaunty smile waned, then died, and as it died, a faint knowing smile shaped Silla’s lips.
At last he whispered, “Woman, don make sport, I say!”
“I ain making sport.”
“There’s no way in this Christ world . . .”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
“Neither name of yours ’pon a paper . . .”
“I has sold it without muh name being on any paper.”
“No . . .” He drew back. “No . . .”
“Yes.”
“You cun do that,” he shouted, and whirled, searching for Selina. “She cun do that, lady-folks.”
Silla spun him to her with an exultant laugh. “I not only did it but I’d do it tomorrow-self if I had to.”
“There ain no way . . .”
“I gon show you the way just-now,” she nodded. Slowly she rubbed the dough from her hands, untied her apron and laid it aside. Then with her mouth fixed in a hard line and her back rigid she strode from the room, past him, past Selina. They heard the cellar door open and the weak wooden steps straining loud under her weight. Then there was only the remote sound of Ina’s piano.
The strands of sunlight impaled Deighton in the middle of the bright-patterned linoleum. He passed one hand across his eyes, fending off the glare, while the other still fumbled with his tie. “Selina,” he called, without turning to her, “you think she could of done it some kind of way . . . ?”
“I tried to tell you,” she said, aching with each word. “I tried to tell you she was gonna do something. Remember that day you were telling me about the house home? I tried then. I tried to tell everybody that day but nobody listened . . .”
“Oh God, I remember,” he groaned, covering his face with his hands. Suddenly, standing there with his face hidden behind his hands he was transformed. His body seemed to shrink so that he was merely a stick figure upon which his clothes were draped; his burnished skin became ashen. He staggered to the table and sank down; his head dropped to his arms and he didn’t even notice that his sleeves were in the flour.
His anguish was too much for him alone and it reached out, claiming Selina, so that she also stumbled to the table in the corner and sank down.
He did not rouse when Silla returned with a green metal box or even when she shouted, “You wanna know how I did it? Well, look then,” and banged the box on the table. The dust on it sifted down on the mound of dough. Staring at his bowed head she unfastened a small key pinned to her slip. “Come, look,” she cried, inserting the key, “I been saving it to show you all this year!”
Slowly, painfully, he lifted his head and stared, dazed, at the box as though he could not quite bring it into focus.
It was filled with letters, all written in the same fine script and all beginning with “My dear brother Deighton.” Silla snatched up a letter and held it close to his stunned face. “Yuh see! I has figured for you good. Be-Jees, I figure this thing out day and night. While you was running with your concubine and taking trumpet lessons I was figuring how to do this thing. I say to myself that you don write to the sister so I gon write for you. I sat at this kitchen table late ’pon a night practicing to write your name till I had it down pat. Then I write the first letter. One like a brother would write to a sister—friendly and so and only asking ’bout the land in passing. I take it to a place near my job that does type out letters for people and pay to have it type and then all I had to do was sign yuh name. Yuh even tell she in the first letter that you was taking up typewriting. Ah yes, I figure for you good.”
Deighton slowly drifted up into the sound of her voice, and as she saw understanding stir in his eyes, her voice rose, “Yes, I figure for you good. The poor sister was glad enough to hear from you and I begin writing her regular.”
She scooped up the letters suddenly and scattered them with a cry over the table, on top of the dough, on the floor, on his limp outstretched arms. “Yes, you tell she some of everything in these letters. ’Bout the children, the job, the war, the trumpet lessons . . . yuh plans ’bout the piece of ground . . . some of everything . . .” She tossed one at him and it struck his face.
“Then three months ago you write and tell she you lose the job and was having it very hard and needed money bad and beg she to sell the land for you. She went to a solicitor and he tell she that you must sign over the power of attorney to she. She send the papers and I sign your name to every last one them. She sell the land and today-self I got over nine hundred odd dollars
for it. Yes,” she concluded triumphantly, taking the brown envelope from her pocket and slapping the air, “nine hundred odd dollars waiting in a bank in New York and yuh piece of ground that you could throw down anything and it would grow, gone!”
His vacant eyes followed the envelope’s flight in her hand. “Silla . . .” his lips fumbled her name. “Silla . . .” he repeated as though struck with amnesia and this was all he could remember out of the obliterated past. “Silla . . .”
“Cry Silla,” she said. “Yes, Silla has done it. She has lied and feigned and forged. She has damned her soul but she did it!”
He turned to Selina, reaching out with a helpless gesture, murmuring in a hollow voice, “Look, Selina, how yuh mother has sold the piece of ground behind my back . . .”
But Selina didn’t see his hand and hardly heard his voice, for her own tears were too loud inside her.
His hand dropped but he still called to her, “Look, Selina, how she has gone . . . and sold the land . . .”
“Yes, your piece of ground where you was gon build all this fancy house like white people,” Silla said.
“But what kind of woman is you?” he whispered and swayed up, staggering toward her as if he could only answer the question by touching her.
Silla retreated in disdainful triumph. Silently they paced each other around the table. Deighton reached for her as though, like Brutus standing in the dead-strewn field with night closing in around him and his defeat certain, he had given Silla a knife to hold, as Brutus had his retainer, so that he might run on it and die. Now that it was time the mother had lost heart and backed away, the unsheathed knife still pointed at him. And he pursued her, pleading, like Brutus, for that agonized embrace, longing to rest his dead dark face on her breast.
It was not a knife but the bank draft which Silla held as she retreated from him.
“Silla,” he cried, faltering toward her, reaching, “Silla.”
“Yes, Silla. You gon have me arrested? I’s a criminal? Go ahead. What jury would say I did wrong? Not even God in his heaven would side with you.”
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