“I stand corrected.” She paused, looking about. “Well, I can fry you a pork chop. Got some lima beans and tomatoes, and a right good piece of cornbread.”
“That’ll be fine.”
She slipped to the edge of the seat, but didn’t leave. “I suppose you’ll miss your girl. She was with you such a long time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, she’s leaving, if she ain’t already left—”
He slipped forward in the seat. “What do you mean?”
“Just that my new girl said that your girl has people up North. Chicago, I think. And that today or tomorrow, she was leaving for up there. Couldn’t take it here anymore, they say, since … you know, the—”
“Nonsense. I just left her.” His body stiffened. He felt it acutely in the small of his back and his neck. He didn’t believe that Milledge would leave him, much less that she could have stood in front of him, not thirty minutes earlier, and given him no hint that she was leaving.
“Oh. I’ll have to have a talk with my new girl. I hope I didn’t get a loose mouth. Beah, my old girl, was quiet. Couldn’t get much out of her, but if she told you something, you could depend on it. But this girl I got now, I don’t know her.”
“It’s that son of hers.” He thought that he should go back and stop her.
“Pardon?” Maribelle cocked her head.
“She had a boy with her. Light-skinned boy. Said he was her son. The other son.”
“Yes. That’ll be the one, I hear. I never saw him to know him.” Maribelle slipped back into the middle of the booth, placed her hands on the table, and leaned on her elbows. “They come and go. You hate to lose a good one and you do try to keep them. I’ve lost a-many to the factories over in Atlanta, when they started taking colored. Hurt business, here. This one has been with you many years, I know, even before I moved here, and I’ve been here twenty-some years. But you’ll find another one, probably one just as good—don’t look so glum—after all, it’s not like you were married to her.”
The comment stung him and he felt his face redden. “Like you say,” he said after a pause, “I can find another one.”
Cook and his deputies got up from their table and started toward the door. “See y’all for breakfast,” Maribelle said cheerfully. When they were out of the door, she turned to Jacks. “It’s a wonder I can stay in business with that bunch of free-loaders.” She looked out of the window as Cook and the deputies got into their cars. “How he got into his position, I’ll never know. Just low class. He doesn’t think but one way. His way.” Jacks watched the tip of her nose pull up and down as she talked. “You and I are different, you know. We have been places and seen things. We read about things. We have broader minds than people like Cook. We are more sensitive. I know he killed my girl as sure as I know anything. She was innocent and pregnant, too. He didn’t have to kill the baby—and it was almost due. No room for mercy, or kindness. I don’t know about the other woman, but I know my girl was sweet. She might have been tangled up with that rascal, but that wasn’t entirely her fault. You and I understand these things, but someone like Cook, he never will. He doesn’t see circumstances. For all he knew that rascal may have raped my girl, too. I don’t blame him for the men. They got what was coming to them. We do have a right to protect ourselves, women, as well as, men. And there’s just no justice in the law, anymore, with these smart aleck Northern lawyers twisting the law all about. A man has a right to protect himself and his women. Why, it’s getting so a white woman can’t walk down the street without attracting the leer of one of these black lunatics. Lunatics, they are, too—most everyone, revved up on liquor or cocaine or something. And they are born oversexed, especially these light-skinned ones. They got a little Caucasian blood in them and that emboldens them to think they are just like white people. It used to be that just the communists encouraged them, but now, the government encourages them, too. Not to mention their own churches. In a way, they can’t help it, I suppose. You and I understand that.” Suddenly, she turned to him, touching his hand. She had tears in her eyes. “I miss my girl so. I do. And not just because she worked for me. She was a sweet, sweet girl.” Suddenly he, too, had a swell of emotion, but he couldn’t say for what. He squeezed her hand lightly, and then, feeling ashamed put his hand on his lap. “I’m so silly,” she said. “Let me cook you your pork chop.”
When the pork chop came, it was a little raw around the bone. He ate what he could of it. She returned to the table and ate cake and drank coffee with him. It was the last of the cakes for a while, she said, until she found a new cake maker. The next evening he came again, and the next, until it was habit for him to take his supper with Maribelle. She talked a lot, most of which he could tune out. But he enjoyed when she talked of travel. She wanted to visit Paris and Rome. They could go together, she said. He imagined that they could, and so, one day after about six months of suppers, he proposed to her, and they married the next day.
PART FOUR
THE REDEEMER
NINETEEN
When he had driven beyond Atlanta’s suburbs along US Route 29, he felt certain that he knew what he must do. He must kill Jacks, and the why of that was clear: It was his destiny. The idea had come to him gradually as he tried to explain to himself why he was driving to see Jacks. It was not what Jacks knew about the murders that mattered. It was what he, himself, knew. He had been running from it and yet had carried it in his head—the memory of the bloody thighs; Venable’s smug face; Bertrand’s dancing. And the snake-like look in Jacks’s eyes. Having seen it all, it had called to him. It had clouded his mind, dragged him down all of his life. In the muddy alleyways of Cabbagetown. In the greasy galley of the USS Bennington. In smoke-filled cafes in Frisco—and dog collared to Aza X—they exterminate little pups like you! He had said many times that he ought to kill Jacks, but then the realization struck him, sharp, hard as a chunk of quartzite, that he actually was on his way to kill Jacks, and he laughed out loud. It was no longer a speculation, but an action underway. Suddenly, he became aware that he had placed the Colt M1911, his father’s service revolver, beside him on the passenger seat.
But why kill? Daddy killed the German boy. He didn’t like it. Bertrand saw the camp of Jews! There is no need to kill … except, Jacks has to die. He has to die because I want to live! Lonnie knew what to call it. Redemption! That’s what Momma meant! He laughed short, hard chuckles. On her dying bed, that’s what Momma meant. His stomach cramped. I am a redeemer! He barely held the car, a battered Volkswagen, in its lane. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. But Jacks has to die. To see evil, to be a witness to evil was a blessing for he knew now what evil was. To kill Jacks was not evil. It was redemptive. Redemptive for Jacks? Goddamn Jacks. Jacks has to die so I can live! I have been dead. I am dead. I will be dead again. But will be alive when Jacks is dead. He stopped laughing. His body slackened. He sweated profusely. Nothing made sense to him. The universe was all too big and too subtle, but yet he felt energized and directed by his new purpose. I am a redeemer! But what does it mean to redeem?
As he drove into the country, the hills, fields, and forests rolled up on either side of the road and moved from the windshield to the rear, and as he turned onto State Route 11 and then 15, then onto smaller and smaller roads, the sky became stormy and the landscape darkened, and the thickets–honeysuckle and kudzu—rose up like ogres along the road banks. Now he grew more and more uncertain of his purpose. He felt he was reverting to a boy, ignorant of everything and innocent of nothing.
In the week following the murders, Lonnie and his mother packed their belongings and moved to Atlanta. Neither wanted to go, and at the time, Lonnie didn’t fully understand why they had to. He explained to Aileen that he hadn’t been the only one to witness the murders. He counted on his fingers, naming the boys from his school whom he had seen on the bridge. They had even a better view than he, he supposed. Aileen responded angrily at first, then sullenly, spending most
of their last day in Talmaedge County uttering no more than a few words to her son. When their fat cousin came, driving the Tudor Deluxe, they climbed in, Aileen in the front and Lonnie in his old place in the back. Though the car seemed familiar, its smell had become foreign, a mixture of stale smoke and sweat that even the breeze roiling through the windows could not dissipate. Behind them followed a pickup truck loaded with what furniture they could fit on it and driven by one of Jacks’ workers. Their new home was on Short Street in Cabbagetown, a tenant’s community for Appalachians who worked in Atlanta’s declining textile mills. The brick smokestacks of the mills cast long shadows on the tiny bungalows and shotguns.
In the years that followed, Aileen worked hard at a mill, making feed bags and enough money to pay the rent and buy food for the two of them, but never enough for anything more than an occasional new dress. She was drawn into the congregation of a small church, where she became known as Mother Henson, just as Lonnie, like many boys in Cabbagetown, was drawn into experimentation with marijuana and petty crime. When he was old enough, he joined the service, but unlike most of the Cabbagetown boys who went into the Army or the Marines, Lonnie, remembering the sailors from Savannah, chose the Navy.
When he went to the base in Great Lakes, he imagined he would become an airman, a boatswain’s mate, or even an ordnance man, positions that would take him far abroad. But before he could go into apprentice training, he fell into conversation with a cook who convinced him to become a commissary man. The cook was sitting on the concrete steps behind the mess hall smoking a cigarette. He was a fit-looking, brown-skinned man with a closely trimmed, balding head and a razor-thin mustache ridfing the sphincter of his lip. Lonnie thought the man winked at him as he passed, and wanting a cigarette, he told his fellow seamen to go ahead of him while he talked to the man. The cook was originally from Wilmington, North Carolina, he said, and had visited Georgia many times; so while they smoked, the cook asked about places in Atlanta, places unfamiliar to Lonnie. They were most likely in the Negro areas, the cook surmised, and there would have been no reason for Lonnie to have known them. Lonnie had heard of colored neighborhoods like Summerhill, Peoplestown, and Sweet Auburn, but had never been to them. In fact, he knew little of Atlanta outside of Cabbagetown, where the bright line of narrow Pearl Street separated the white neighborhood from colored Reynoldstown. The Reynoldstown people worked for the railroad and were said to have thought themselves better than those in Cabbagetown, so growing up Lonnie had learned to harbor resentment against them.
“Ahh, now,” the cook disagreed. “They probably weren’t any better off than you were.” He smiled widely, flashing a gold incisor. “Think about it. If the work paid all that well, why was it work for Negroes?” The cook nodded with certainty and winked. Lonnie admitted the cook made sense and he felt a vague familiarity talking so frankly with the man. But the man was nothing like Bertrand. Even when he smiled, Bertrand carried a heavy sobriety, whereas the cook seemed light-hearted through and through. When they had finished their cigarettes, the cook advised him to scurry along lest he miss his supper. Inside, as he went through the mess line, he saw the cook, standing behind a pass-through that opened to the galley. The cook looked out and winked and whispered something to the line server, a colored boy about Lonnie’s age. The server ladled heaping helpings of meat pie and fried potatoes on Lonnie’s tray.
On subsequent evenings, Lonnie smoked and chatted again with the cook. They were careful that the drill instructor did not see them, and one evening they stepped inside the galley where Lonnie saw firsthand the food’s preparation. It seemed an easy job to him, and the cook confirmed that not only was it easy, it was interesting—creative. He made up new recipes, and there was great satisfaction in seeing people enjoy the food he cooked. Further, the cook explained, he would never go hungry. Working as an airman or an ordnance man, you were always in danger and always hungry. But as a commissary man, you were down below deck, safe from bullets or crashing jet planes. You could still travel to all the ports, all over the world, but without the same level of risk. Further, you had access to all the food. The cook remembered growing up in Wilmington, always being hungry. He recalled that when the Americans started to airlift food to West Berlin, how he, nearly a grown man, wished the United States would airlift food to his neighborhood in Wilmington. “Times were rough,” he said. He concluded by saying that once he left the Navy, he would have a skill. He would be able to get a cooking job in any city in the country.
“That’s good advice,” said Lonnie and nodded his head. “But let me ask you a question.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “How come there ain’t no white boys working in the kitchen? How come you are all colored?”
The cook grinned. “Colored boys think about their stomachs, first. We ain’t so interested in taking over the world.”
“But what about the Russians?”
“What about them? Russians ain’t do nothing to the colored man.”
“The Russians are trying to take over the United States, ain’t they?”
The cook handed Lonnie a piece of ham from a pan that sat on the counter. “That’s pure Virginia-cured ham. We just served it to the officers. All I can say is that the Russians never lynched a colored man.” The comment struck Lonnie like a slap and he froze, holding the ham in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “What’s the matter?” the cook said, and then cocked his head suspiciously. “I don’t mean anything. I don’t mean to cast any aspersions.” Lonnie didn’t know what “aspersions” meant, and the cook seemed to have read it on his face. “Blame. I ain’t blaming you for nothing.” He winked. “Well, I guess I got nothing to blame you for.” He shifted back and forth uneasily and took a step back from Lonnie. “How’s the ham?”
Lonnie tasted the ham. It tasted of salt. “Good.” He felt his face flush and he thought that the cook would now consider him a lyncher. “I.…” He looked around at the young colored men, busy with cooking and cleaning pots. “I saw one once, that’s all.”
The cook nodded and put his hand on Lonnie’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “It’s okay. Now, eat your ham and scoot on through here to the mess line before you get into trouble.”
That night in his rack, Lonnie thought a long time about the cook patting him on the shoulder and saying, “It’s okay.” In the dim light, he could make out the bedsprings of the rack above him. Around him he heard the easy breathing and occasional snores of the other seamen. When he closed his eyes, he saw the face of the cook, with his gold tooth and winking eye. But rather than thinking of the cook as the cook, he thought of him as Bertrand. He thought of Bertrand sitting with him in the lamplight on the night that his parents went to the hospital. He thought about the small talk they had made that night and how, in spite of his father’s apparent trust of Bertrand, he and his mother held onto their suspicions. How wrong he had been about Bertrand. He thought of Bertrand dancing in the church, how faraway his face looked and how his face had started to fill up with the faces of other people. It was more than his imagination, he thought. Bertrand was like an angel, and this kind man, the cook, was like Bertrand coming back to him. The thought should have comforted him, but then he saw the crumpled flower-print dress of Bertrand’s wife, and her fat, bloodied thighs.
For several weeks he avoided the cook. He was coming to the end of his basic training, deciding on which apprentice school to attend. The apprentice schools were in places all over the country, and he thought he might try to go back to the South. After all, as autumn came to the Midwest, he realized that the winters might be far too cold for him.
One evening, as he went through the mess line, the server slipped a note onto his tray. It was from the cook, and it asked him to come to the back door of the mess hall just after the beginning of middle watch, at midnight. His stomach churned when he read the note. He couldn’t imagine what the cook wanted. As he lay in his bunk waiting for the sound of the eight bells, his mind raced, one moment th
inking that the cook would give him a going away present, or some helpful advice, and the next that he would chastise him for not coming around again. As he approached the back of the mess hall, the galley door opened, and he saw the cook wave eagerly to him.
“You came!” the cook whispered and pulled Lonnie by the arm into the dark galley. “Watch out for the pans.” The cook led him through the galley into an office, where he shut the door and turned on a desk lamp. The office was small and cluttered, just big enough for a desk and chair. Papers were stacked on the desk and pinned to cork boards all around. “This is where I do my real work,” the cook said with a wave of his hand. “You see, it ain’t just the cooking; you’ve got to plan the meals and order the food, too.”
“I see,” Lonnie said, looking at the cook, who was not wearing his cook’s jacket or apron. The men stood just a couple of feet apart in the office. Lonnie was taller than the cook and looked down on his head and the tight balls of hair around the top of his strap shirt. The cook’s odor was sweet and spicy, and in the closed room, Lonnie could feel the heat of his body.
“You all right?” the cook asked.
“Yes.”
“I was beginning to worry. I thought I might have upset you. Me, shooting off about lynching and all. I apologize if I upset you. I want you to know that I put a great deal of respect in our friendship. And I hope you feel the same way about me.”
Lonnie thought a minute. He did like the man, but he was afraid of something about him that he couldn’t name. “I do like you. But …”
“But what? Why did you stop coming to talk to me?”
“But … you remind me of somebody.”
The cook laughed. His breath brushed against Lonnie’s neck and Lonnie stepped back, his heels bumping the door. The cook laughed again. “Don’t be afraid. If you fixin’ to be a sailor, you have to get used to close quarters. Besides, I ain’t fixin’ to hurt you in any way. Now, who this I remind you of?”
The Vain Conversation Page 23