Belle City

by Penny Mickelbury

  They were startled by a sound from Pa. They all turned in time to see him grab his left arm with his right hand, then slide out of his chair on to the floor. The two Macks got to him before his head hit the floor, and with James and Aaron's help, they lifted him on to the sofa. Beau knelt beside the sofa and rested his head on his father's chest and wept like a little child.

  Silas Thatcher's funeral was held on his seventieth birthday. Every inch of every pew in the Friendship Baptist Church was occupied. Dr. Silas Thatcher from Chicago delivered his father's eulogy and wept when he said his one regret was that Big Si—that's what he called him—would never know the grandchild that his wife, Catherine, was carrying. And to honor him, Little Si said, they would remain in Belle City until the child was born, and if it happened to be a boy, his name would be Silas Thatcher the Third. There were more tears and lots of laughter before the service was over as people shared their remembrances, which Big Si would have applauded and approved. But it was the tears shed by the tall, thin white man sitting in the front row with the family that the congregation found most wrenching, for when the choir sang, Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me find my strength in thee, Jonas broke and wept for every person he'd ever loved. JJ tried to comfort his father, but there was no comforting Jonas Farley Thatcher that day. And as Beau and Mack had supported Big Si on the day of his wife's funeral as the choir sang Rock of Ages, they supported their friend, Jonas, on that day, and Ruth Thatcher McGinnis's two youngest children, Jack and Nellie, held the hands of young Jonas Farley Thatcher Jr. as they left the church.

  From the Recorded Memories of Ruth Thatcher McGinnis

  There was a schedule for servicemen returning home after the war. A hierarchy: Those who'd been in the army longest and in combat longest came home first, especially those with children. The war didn't end and everybody came home—it wasn't that simple, so I stopped trying to calculate the likely date that Mackie and Wil would come home. I just waited and knew that Thatch would follow eventually. We had hoped otherwise, but even though the war was over, Jack still was deployed after he registered, and we still had to worry because there were those who didn't trust the Russians. Turned out they were right. But it just meant that our days and nights of worrying weren't completely over. Mackie and Wil were home for Christmas and two skinnier things you've never seen. We hadn't told them about Pa, and they cried like little babies. We also didn't tell them how he died; that would have made them feel even worse, if they thought that telling us they'd found Eubie led to Pa's death. What odd and difficult feelings. The joy of finding Eubie, of having our sons returned to us whole and healthy, opposite the pain of losing Pa. There was a huge hole in all of our hearts and minds, and nobody expected that it would or could be filled any time soon. Having Pa present was like taking a breath—it was a necessary thing. Not having him present was like choking, suffocating. Trying to catch a breath and being unable. You'd think that his being in North Carolina would have prepared us, but it didn't. And to make matters worse, both Big Mack and Clara were ailing, and losing Pa sank them both into a deep depression. Not only had they lost a friend as close as a brother, they'd witnessed their own mortality. They never recovered.

  From the Diary of Jonas Farley Thatcher

  New Year's Day 1946. My Audrey has been gone from me for two years. It feels like 20 sometimes, and then it feels like just yesterday she and Allie were here and my house and my life were full of love and life. But I am alive and my son is alive and for the first time in my life I have friends and family—real family. It would hurt Rachel to read that. She is my family and she is a good sister and I love her very much and she loves me. But no matter how much we both try, we cannot change the part of ourselves that was raised by Zeb, and those parts do not know how to love people or let people love you. Mack and Ruthie and Beau let me and JJ celebrate with them—the boys coming home from the war, finding their long-lost Eubie—and they let me be sad with them. But it seems that whatever happens to them, they draw closer together. Maybe that's what life is all about; it's how you are no matter what things happen, good things or bad things. This is something I would never say to them, but when I am with them I forget that they are Colored or that I am White. I forget that we are different and I still don't understand or like why that is. Si still won't have much to do with me. He does not have any white friends in Chicago and he does not like white people. He is polite to me but that is all. Funny thing is, I understand. But I do wonder if this will ever change or if my pa was right: It's how things are and how they will always be. I hope he's wrong about that like he was wrong about everything he said and did.

  ***

  Part Three

  Belle City

  and

  Carrie's Crossing

  2005

  ***

  – 1 –

  It was raining sideways, the kind of change-of-season storm as peculiar to the Deep South as a drawl. The water came down in sheets instead of individual droplets, as if it were being sloshed from a million mighty washtubs. As if Grandma were sloshing out the water, Sissy thought, lending a helping hand to the forces of nature.

  Until, at age seventy-five, she succumbed to familial pressure and began using the long-ignored washing machine inside the pantry, Grandma washed her own clothes by hand in a twenty-gallon galvanized steel tub, using a huge cake of Octagon soap and a ribbed metal washboard, and nobody could convince her that her clothes weren't the cleanest in town. From April through November she washed on the screened-in back porch; in the winter months she worked in a corner of the kitchen between the stove and the pantry. Always she sat on a low, three-legged stool and hummed low-down-dirty blues tunes as she scrubbed the garments against the washboard, her foot and the tune she was humming and the scratch of the fabric against the metal-sided board joining in melodic syncopation. When she was finished, she would scoop up the huge tub as easily as if it were one of her grandchildren and heave the dirty soapy water over the porch railing, and the water would gush out in a wide, flat wall and hit the brick walkway with a smack. That's how the rain was coming down now, and the wind accentuated that impression, for it was blowing hard and cold like it thought it was in big, wild Montana or Wyoming, instead of in little, peaceful Georgia.

  Pretty soon, Grandma would be in the ground, the hard-driving rainwater seeping at her through the dirt. How far down could it go? All the way down to Grandma and into her state-of-the-art, guaranteed waterproof box? Sissy enjoyed the thought and impatiently wiped away the tears sliding down her cheeks. Hard rain was Grandma's favorite weather. She'd like the idea of getting wet much better than she'd like the idea of the ten thousand dollar casket designed to keep her dry for eternity. But Sissy's mother—Grandma's youngest child and only daughter—also owned the biggest Black mortuary chain in three states, so she naturally had the last word on the matter of the casket.

  Quickly, and with a low howl, the wind shifted direction, and before Sissy could save herself, she was bathed by the water rushing in through the screen door. It was such a shock, and it was so cold, that she opened her mouth in a great intake of breath, but no sound came from her for several seconds. Then she laughed out loud. It was too late to do anything else. She already was wet, so it made no sense to close the door. So she did what Grandma would have done: She walked out into the storm and let herself cry for her grandmother, her hot tears mingling with the cold rain, her wail harmonizing with the windstorm's song.

  She was her grandmother's favorite and she knew it, had always known it, but she'd merely enjoyed the knowledge, had never taken advantage of it, so her brothers and cousins had never felt slighted or cheated. It was Sissy the old woman had sent for when she'd known her time was coming to an end. They all were there when Ruth Thatcher McGinnis inhaled for the final time—three of her five surviving children, twenty grandchildren, a half-dozen great-grandchildren, three great-great-grands, more nieces, nephews, cousins and other kin than anybody but Grandma could keep track of—but Si
ssy had been there for eleven days, holding the old woman's hand and listening to her memory travel back almost one hundred years with almost frightening detail, receiving the burden and the blessing of long-held secrets. Ruthie McGinnis was three months shy of her one hundred and first birthday when she died, and though her body had failed, her mind and memory remained lithe and agile and dependable.

  "That camera recorder thing. Go get it. You won't remember all I say. I'll be gone and so will these words if you don't get a machine to keep them," Grandma said. Sissy had given the old woman a cockeyed glance that had produced a surprisingly hearty chuckle. "Machines have their uses," she'd said, adding the reminder that she had, eventually, used the washing machine—and the telephone answering machine and the VCR, though she'd drawn the line at the cell phone—and had conceded their usefulness. So, Sissy had recorded her grandmother's memories of a life and a way of living foreign to Sissy, though somehow strangely comforting despite the layers of pain, humiliation, degradation, and angst that draped Colored life in the time and place of Ruthie's coming of age. And then there were the secrets. Sissy was a lawyer and knew about secrets—and she knew what to do with them. Grandma's recorded secrets were in a safety deposit box at a bank on the other side of town. The knowledge of them rattled around inside Sissy, along with the sorrow of loss, like small stones in a tin can, alternating with each other for a place of prominence within her emptiness.

  Sissy knew she should go inside and change and dress and get over to her mother's house, but this was the last chance for her and Grandma to share their love of rain in all its many forms. And who but her Grandma had ever defined kinds of rain? Hurried, downpour rain; gentle, sweet rain; steady, driving, crop-growing rain; and, like now, sideways rain, the kind that gets started and seems like it'll keep going until there's no more wind and water left. The kind of rain blues singers write songs about. As Brook Benton sang, "When it's raining in Georgia, it seems like it's raining all over the world."

  Sissy turned and sloshed up the walkway to the porch and into the kitchen, puddling with every step. She stripped where she stood and tossed the drenched garments back out onto the porch. She'd wash them later—tomorrow, perhaps, or the next day, or after the funeral. Wash them in the good-as-new Montgomery Ward machine in the pantry. Now, she needed to hurry to her mother's house where the pre-funeral celebration would be in full swing, but she'd had to come here, to Grandma's house first. Somebody had to come here, on this first day that Ruth Thatcher McGinnis herself would not come home to the house built, more than half a century earlier, by her husband's hands. Now Sissy could go to her mother's and enjoy the party. Grandma never believed in crying for the dead and had elicited promises that her friends and family would celebrate her life rather than mourn her death. And a hell of a party it would be.

  ***

  – 2 –

  JayFar shifted his butt around on the Naugahyde chair, trying for something close to comfort. Only his oversized leather club chair and matching ottoman at home could provide true comfort, but he wasn't at home; he was in a private room in County Baptist Hospital, keeping vigil over the comatose form of his grandfather. Not that Grandpa knew, and certainly he wouldn't care if, by some miracle of creation, he should awaken and see JayFar there. Grandpa, JayFar thought, had never liked him, and JayFar was terrified of his grandfather. But it was his duty to be here. He could not, in good conscience, let the old man die alone, even though the old man would have preferred it. He'd always preferred being alone. His memories kept him company, he liked to say.

  "I spoiled your daddy until he was worse than rotten. Smart as a whip—three graduate degrees—but never held a steady job. But it was my fault and I know that, and truth be told, I didn't begrudge him his life. JJ brought me a lot of joy, and so did your mama. I loved her like she was my own blood. Then your fool daddy kills her trying to fly an airplane. Kills her and your sister. Second time that happened to me. But that was my fault too 'cause I'm the one who bought him the airplane."

  JayFar shivered. He'd heard the old man's raspy baritone as clearly as if the words had been spoken for the first time instead of remembered. He was a hundred years old and had the voice of a young fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. The voice didn't leave him until consciousness did. One moment he was sitting on his wide-planked front porch drinking iced tea and reading the poetry of Walt Whitman out loud. The next moment, he was on the floor, still and silent, his starched white shirt and creased navy gabardine pants stained by spilled tea and released pee. And still and silent he had been for the past three weeks.

  JayFar gave up trying to get comfortable in the ugly chair and stood up. He looked down at his grandfather, at the sunken chest beneath the dark blue Brooks Brother's pajama top rising and falling with weak but steady motion, assuring himself that death hadn't snuck in and snatched the old man away. The heart monitor still beeped softly—the doctor said it would scream like a banshee if something went wrong—but JayFar checked his chest anyway. Then he went to the window.

  The wind howled and slammed the rain against the glass like it was mad about something, pounded the glass like it wanted to get in. This was the second full day of rain, and it could rain just as hard for another two or three days. He'd heard on the news that there was a blizzard raging out west somewhere; out there, that's how winter held on, refusing to give in to spring. In Georgia, it rained like a sumbitch; and in Carrie's Crossing, where Grandpa lived, Carrie's Creek soon would overflow its banks and, if the rain didn't stop, would flood the basements and ruin the expensive landscaping of the expensive homes in the neighborhood.

  JayFar checked his watch, then returned to the hard chair, took up the remote control, and switched on the television. He'd watch Antiques Roadshow and then whatever was on the Travel or Food Channel until visiting hours were over and he could leave.

  "You can leave now, boy. I don't need you. Don't need anybody."

  JayFar shivered again. Why was this happening? Why was he hearing his grandfather? The old man was as good as dead; the doctor said so, though JayFar didn't put a lot of stock in the good doctor's opinion. The doctor had no idea what to do with a hundred-year-old stroke victim still breathing on his own with good vital signs. He'd never seen such a thing, he told JayFar. He was certain only that the stroke was deep and irreversible. Jonas Farley Thatcher could lie in this bed, deeply comatose, for years, and there was nothing that Jonas Farley Thatcher the Third could do but sit in the hard, awful chair and wait. And wait he would. He was the sole heir to the Thatcher estate and fortune, but what he wanted was Grandpa's house. Or, more accurately, the land on which the hundred-year-old house sat. Land that had been in the Thatcher family for close to a hundred and fifty years. Land that was worth untold millions to JayFar and his real estate development and investment group.

  He punched the remote control searching through the endless channels for the public television station. How could there be so much nothing on TV? And the news was the worst of the nothing, but that's all there was for the next few moments. He looked at his watch again, sighed deeply, and raised the volume. The camera was tight on the face of the perky blond female news reader wearing a sincere smile.

  "And finally this evening, what perhaps would be a sad story for any other family, is a joyous one for the family of Ruth Thatcher McGinnis, who died yesterday at the age of one hundred, several months shy of her one hundred and first birthday. Her large, extended family was at her side when she died, and they are ready to keep the promise they made to her on her one hundredth birthday."

  JayFar craned his neck to look at the wall-mounted screen. He saw a tiny, pecan-brown woman blowing out the candles on a huge cake. She blew and blew, then laughed, then blew some more. Finally, several people helped her, and finally all the candles were extinguished. "If I live to be a hundred and one," she said, "we'll start all over with just one candle. But if I don't make it, I want you all to have a party anyway, not a funeral. Celebrate my life, don't mourn
my death."

  The happy-faced television lady was back, smiling her happiness, but JayFar didn't hear what she said this time. The uncomfortable Naugahyde chair was upended, and he was standing across the room, staring at his grandfather, who was sitting upright in bed, his eyes wide open.

  "Ruthie is that you? Yeah, I'm ready. Here I come. Wait for me!"

  The old man flopped back on his pillows. The heart monitor screamed like a banshee. JayFar ran into the bathroom and threw up his steak, baked potato and five-year-old Merlot supper.

  ***

  – 3 –

  Sissy's mother was surprisingly calm and wonderfully, though uncharacteristically, gracious and magnanimous to the unending stream of distant relatives, acquaintances, and flat-out unknowns who continued to stream through her house a full day and a half after her mother's funeral. Ruth Thatcher McGinnis had been known, loved and revered by many hundreds of people of all ages and classes and races and persuasions. She was an equal-opportunity human being long before that catch phrase possessed any cultural or colloquial relevance. Ruthie's last-born child and only daughter, Nellie McGinnis Nelson, did not share her mother's view of the world and those who populated it, human or beast. "You mother's a snob," Sissy's father would announce to his children whenever he felt his wife's behavior needed defining or explaining, and since he never smiled when he said it, and since his wife never denied the accusation, it was accepted within the family as truth. Outside the family, too. But this was the final celebration of her mother's life and Nellie, dutiful daughter to the end, would do her duty.