She was careful of the amount of paper she used. Ream wouldn’t last forever. Who knew when someone would remember to get her another? M’Vy got it somewhere. Who knew what Saturday Muh would come home and be in the right mood for Tree to ask for more paper. One of the pictures she drew was for herself, alone, and the rest for whoever had to see what she was up to in the room. She didn’t talk about her drawings—who could she talk to about them? They weren’t anything too special. Just people and houses and trees. Windows with curtains. Lots of space. Families.
She forgot most of the drawings as soon as she’d done them. The one for herself she dated and put her name at the top. Put it away in her room. Didn’t even think about it. But she had a record of many months of pictures.
Sometimes Dab came in the little room. He would pull at his hair and his skin. He would be looking at everything in the house. When there was nothing left for him to see, he would come into the walk-in closet little room. He would look at it. This happened, too, when there were no girls in bed. Standing there looking all around at the stacks and stacks of junk, like he had lost something. Then he would actually feel the absence of something the way Tree did, as if the painful lack were a living, breathing force.
So it was the two of them had cleaned off the table for her. And that was why she had found out. The cleaned table. Brother Rush.
She came home from school. Dab came home and quietly went to his room; closed the door. Maybe he was by himself. Tree wasn’t about to go knocking on his door to find out. She was home, safe; it was Friday. They said in school it was going to rain the whole weekend. It was raining outside now. She was wet. She felt tired, fagged out, with jumps of nerves up her arms and down the backs of her legs. Back muscles so tight and jittery.
Gone split myself down the middle, feel like, Tree thought. M’Vy, when!
She hung up her raincoat. She wore a sweater under it with blue jeans. Now she took off the sweater, put her books down on the floor and wiped them with the sweater.
The house was so quiet. She was in the foyer, which was narrow and dim. She hadn’t bothered to turn on a light. She was bent over her books in her bra and jeans. She pressed the sweater on her books, and it absorbed most of the wet from her return-papers.
Good grades. One of her teachers wanted her to take tests for Black Achievement. Tree wasn’t too sure about that. She had this conversation with her, Mrs. Noirrette, the English teacher. Black woman, at least sixty. From the Islands. Different, but nice.
“I’m telling you truth, deah, Teresah. Yah could be getting full scholarship monies for deh entire college program when you graduate. Yah have dat ability, chad. Now is deh time to begin taking tests, don’t yah see. All what is needed is deh cone-fee-dahnse, deah, in yah-self.”
Tree had stared at the woman long and hard. Mrs. Cerise Noirrette. You couldn’t tell about teachers.
Think they class, Tree thought. Then they dog you down.
She didn’t know. Maybe she would start taking some tests. Usually she skipped school when they scheduled those all-day scholastic-average tests.
Who need ’em?
She thought about doing her homework. But if M’Vy didn’t come on Saturday, she would have the whole weekend to face.
Save the homework, be safe, like most times, she thought.
She went to the little room to draw, to relax herself and maybe fall asleep until either she or Dab got hungry and they decided to fix something; or she would hurry with Dab out into the rain for some fast food. There was a “Colonel” just a block or so on the avenue. She was getting low on cash. She had small bills hidden all over the house, case somebody break in.
Tree sometimes fell asleep on the floor. It was warm in the little room, like a hot box. It didn’t have a radiator but it had steam pipes. The whole building had steam, which was unusual, Tree had heard. For her, the little room was about the most comfortable, private place in the whole house. If she ever got it cleaned out of stuff on the table and junk all around, she could put a sleeping bag in it and live in it. That’s what she would do one time, if she and Dab ever found a way to get rid of the junk. They needed to pool their energy to do the hard, dusty work of it.
And paint the little room. Tree knew a paint color that was really tough. It was the palest, creamiest chocolate. And an antique white ceiling. Then she would have the room for good. Have the big, round table and a sleeping bag, and herself.
Maybe a small fridge, like they say in Seventeen some best girls had in their college dorms.
Not like her own bedroom. She knew about college, shoot. She knew nobody was gone give it to you, she didn’t think. But she might take the tests. She’d have to see.
Feeling almost important from a teacher taking time with her. Standing out in the hall. Classes changing. Where everybody could see a busy teacher taking time with a special student.
It was Friday. Rain. Wind. Outside was dark and stormy.
Think nothin to it.
She came in the little room to peel away her worries. She came to draw.
She saw the strangest light. And Brother Rush. The way he had been in the street, although Tree hadn’t seen him today on her way home.
It shocked her, seeing him.
Haven’t seen you all week!
But she wasn’t scared.
Dude! You beautiful!
There, dressed so fine, with one gloved hand up to his ear and the other supporting his elbow. His legs were crossed at the ankles. Dressed to kill.
She was about to say to him, What you doin in here—how you get in here! So full of happiness at seeing him again, so much she wanted to tell him, if she just could have a chance to talk to him. But without coming on to him first. She’d come on first if she had to, though. Yes, she would, too.
But then she saw. Saw and couldn’t help seeing; couldn’t keep herself from believing.
Brother was in the middle of the table. Not standing on the top of it in the middle, but through the middle. He was standing in …
In it? In it!
… in the table.
The door closed behind Tree. She leaned for it; then fell against it as it shut. Brother Rush was smack through the hard wood of the round table of the little room. She knew, all right.
Be a damned ghost.
Chapter 3
TREE STOOD FOR A long time. She heard the rain outside dripping from the top of the window frame onto the cement sill of the window. She heard cars sounding sleek, and the hollow rumble as they passed over manhole covers in the street. She couldn’t tear her eyes from what had to be a ghost through the table.
Fear crawled up her legs. Cold flopped in her stomach like a dying fish. The fish froze solid, flaking scales of ice slivers that made her shiver violently. She was shaking so hard she thought the teeth would shake out of her mouth. She realized that the shaking and the cold were not the same things. The shaking was fear at what she was seeing. The cold came from the thing before her.
Say ghost brang cold, she thought fleetingly. How you know it be in the room.
Suddenly she noticed herself. Standing there the whole time in her bra. Pink and new, it covered her neatly; yet it was a bra, and she was modest.
“Wait I get my sweater,” she told the ghost through the table. “Be right back.” Murmuring through clenched teeth.
She got out of there fast. Her head felt like someone had filled it with air. It would float away. Only her neck held it in place. She found the sweater on top of her books in the foyer where she had left it. It smelled wet. It was a beige sweater, soggy and musty with the rain she had wiped from her books. She hurried on to her room then and clenched her jaw to keep it still. She threw the wet sweater in a corner and found a faded sweatshirt; a dull, pink color. Moving silently, she pulled on the shirt as she headed back to the little room. Tree didn’t know whether Dab was listening to the sounds of the house. She hoped he wouldn’t come out to see her and talk to her now.
And back again, stan
ding against the door. No need to switch on a light. The little room had its own light. It was a dim light.
Came from what be a ghost.
Tree could see what she had to perfectly well. The table, and the good-looking dude through it. He was still there. Rush.
Tree had the vague notion that she had run out and come back again. She had done this so swiftly, with such a torment of nerves, she hardly realized she had left the room. She had been absolutely afraid; even so, she hadn’t wanted the ghost to leave.
It was not so much the idea of a ghost that scared Tree. Not so much the word ghost and having to use it for the best-looking dude she had ever seen. Not what she pictured in her mind, floating down a staircase, or out in the fields floating. Not a nice cartoon of Casper Ghost on a Halloween. It was being there through the hard wood of the table, as solid as a rock. There, through the natural wood, with the hard wood in her mind, the ghost terrified her out of her mind. She would never have dreamed such a thing could happen in real life.
Brother Rush stood his ground. The hand that had been cupped around his ear now held something. It looked like an oval mirror, but it was not a mirror. What Rush held was an oval space shaped like a mirror, and it glinted at her. In it was a scene of life going on. Rush held the oval space wrapped in a sheet from her ream of paper, as if he thought he might cut himself on the space’s edges if he didn’t hold it in the paper.
Come from what I use to draw, she thought.
Rush stood there, not looking at her or anything else. Just looking.
Dreamy. You the sweetest dude ever I did see.
He looked as solid as she must look to him, if he’d been looking at her. He would have to know she was not a ghost—did he know that?
I know I’m not, the same as I know he be one, she thought.
Rush looked so real, he looked as if he’d been planted. It was then she wondered how she knew his name.
In the mind, she realized. Just there. Brother the prime name of his as Sweet be mine. Sweet Teresa.
There was a tired, old look in Brother Rush’s eyes. Not oldness like a hundred-year-old man. But tiredness of a grown man of forty-five, like her neighbor, Mr. Simms, had.
Simms lost his wife and two sons in a car wreck all over the interstate. Simms hadn’t been in the car. Just Bea, his wife, in the backseat with Gerald, asleep. Dennis, the other son, had been driving. And something had gone wrong. The mother probably never woke up before she went to heaven, was Tree’s opinion.
Simms’s eyes told everybody that nothing was ever going to get any better. He would never move any faster than he could move now. He would be no richer or poorer, he would not care more or less for anyone or anything than he cared at the moment Bea Simms crossed over into the realm of God.
That the kind of old be in Brother Rush’s eyes, Tree thought.
She guessed Rush was nineteen or twenty. It would have pleased her if she could know he had just turned eighteen. She kept in mind to ask his age one time as she kept in mind that he was a ghost. He was still quite solid, though, still the one and only dude to her.
The sweatshirt she had on couldn’t keep her warm. Yet she was aware of the moment when the cold turned into something she could live with. Fear was sealed inside her, like a tatter of paper from her ream. And if you opened the tatter, it would read: This is all the scared I can get.
Tree moved away from the door, closer to Rush. She lifted her hand to him and extended her arm. She had put herself in the way of Rush’s gaze at nothing. Her arm was straight out to him—she was scared. Being sure not to touch him or the table. The space shaped like an oval mirror was right there almost in her hand. She could see her hand in it.
Thinking, if he be a ghost, that paper be one, too, and that space-mirror.
She saw her eyes in the space. She was looking down into the space and seeing herself. But it was not herself, not really.
Be a ghost in the mirror-place, she thought.
She was looking in and seeing herself walk away. She heard leaves crunch under her feet. Tree was in a place she did not know. It was so warm, and she could feel the water in the air. There was a road going off through open spaces. Warm and sunny out. Then, shade she could walk through. But if it was a hard-surfaced road, where did the sound of dry leaves come from?
Oh, I see, thought Tree, leaves at the side of the road. Is it fall?
Next she was in a house. She had a plump child in her arms. Tree didn’t feel much like herself. For one thing, she was too tall and she was plump, too, as though she’d had the baby-child maybe two years ago and hadn’t taken off the weight.
That babe was so beautiful and was her second child. All she wanted to do all day long was ride with it in the porch swang, too. And she did, early in the morning. And even in the afternoon. The baby-child was a big doll. A girl, and wouldn’t cry a lick as long as she held it.
Then Brother Rush had dropped by again. He had taken the baby-child and the first child, a boy, for a ride much earlier. And he had promised the baby girl he would be back.
The woman heard his car coming a mile and a half away, that’s how quiet the day was out here in this country town. She just kept swinging on the swang, holding the clean baby girl. She had on a clean house dress of plaid—green and rust and yellow. The house dress smelled fresh and was comfortable. She hadn’t made it. If you made dresses, they lasted longer. But none she made were so fresh or smelled so different as this one she had bought in the department store nine miles away. The Wrens’ Department Store would put your purchase in a box with white tissue paper. And tie it up with a long piece of string.
As soon as she felt up to it and lost some weight, she would put a bonnet on the baby-girl and take her on a bus through Sunnyland with the new houses and all the white folks looking pleasant. And on through Housten and up on through Greenville Street into the city. And she would tell the child, Just look at all the cars! And the baby would laugh; she’d be eating ice cream. She and the baby would walk around and look for the Peanut Man.
This really tall man dressed up like a Planter’s Peanut. She always stopped to pass the time of day with him. He would give her fresh roasted peanuts, maybe two teaspoons of them. If she wanted more, she would stroll around the corner; sometimes she would hold her big baby comfortably in her arms. Still in diapers—just those and rubber pants and the new pink bonnet. And go on in the Planter’s Peanut store. Lord, it did smell good of peanuts in there! She’d buy a big bag, still hot, of peanuts with the shells on them. And eat them all the way back home on the bus. That baby-child would fall sound asleep smelling the new peanut smell. Ever after loving the smell of fresh, hot-roasted peanuts. And the baby-girl loved the smell of them the rest of her life, just as her mother did.
Tree was the woman, the baby-child’s mother, and felt only a bit like her real self. She had no recollection of having had the baby. Yet she knew she had. Now she sat on the porch swang, bringing to mind that wondrous, fresh, hot-roasted-peanut smell.
And heard Brother’s car coming on fast. It made the day shake down to utter stillness. Nothing moved or seemed to breathe as the car raced down Paxton Road at seventy-nine miles an hour. That was what Chin, her older brother across the road, used to say Rush was doing. The next thing she knew, Rush was parking in the driveway in a screech of his tires. He leaped out of the car and landed lightly on the grass. He stood in the shade a moment; then bounded up the steps. She smelled his Burma Shave as he sat down beside her and the baby in the swang.
She, smiling at him, and the child, holding out her arms to Brother the way she always did. Brother was the child’s favorite daytime companion, as her father was her favorite evening one. The baby-child’s father had a good, steady job. Rush, of course, had no ordinary work. He was the Numbers Man, known for his fast car and daring ways. He made out better than three men holding down steady jobs and all their money put together.
How I know this? thought Tree, seeing herself hidden inside the woman.
It was the last time Tree thought outside of the oval mirror space for a while.
She was the woman with the baby. She was on a porch of a house she did not know and had never seen. She was having some fun, enjoying talking with this fellow whose name was Brother—Rush was his last name—who was the woman’s brother, just as Chinnie and Challie and Willie had been.
Brother had the child bouncing on his knee. The woman went in the house and got her numbers. She had them ready for the neighborhood. Had them added up and the names of everybody and how much by each name and each number on a white sheet of paper. She had a good feeling today. She hoped for hits to make her commission. She’d had a dream last night. All dark and weary dream, something flying. She woke up in a sweat. Even as she was waking up, she was hearing something flying through the dark. She’d stifled a scream for fear of waking her good husband. But she did say to him the next day, Did you hear something in the night? And he said, No, nothing. She put a dollar on 823 and boxed it to trap it to her, to keep it from coming out in any form she hadn’t covered.
Brother bounced the baby-girl. Tree-sa Belle, Tree-sa Belle, Brother called the baby, although that wasn’t her true name. Her true name was Sweet Teresa Pratt after her own mother, Viola Sweet Rush Pratt.
Soon Brother had to leave.
Got my booking to do, he told the woman who was Vy Sweet and did not look at all like Sweet Tree.
Vy Sweet asked Brother to run a quick errand for her.
You’ll make me late, he told her. But he could never turn her down. He did have to collect the numbers money and slips from all the runners, most of whom were his relatives. There was Binnie, his and Vy’s sister. Binnie was a runner and had the neighborhood next to Vy’s. Binnie was always late getting her numbers route complete because of her dog, Ashland, Ken., named for Ashland, Kentucky. The dog had been run down by a car. He dragged his hind legs, poor dog, following Binnie around her route until the hair and skin of the hind legs rubbed off and the creature’s hind quarters were raw, bleeding meat.
Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush Page 2