by Lee Thompson
The Lesser People
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Lee Thompson
Copyright © 2015 by Lee Thompson
Digital Edition License Notes
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Lee Thompson is the bestselling author of the Suspense novels A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS (August 2014), IT’S ONLY DEATH (January 2015), and WITH FURY IN HAND (May 2015). The dominating threads weaved throughout his work are love, loss, and learning how to live again. A firm believer in the enduring power of the human spirit, Lee believes that stories, no matter their format, set us on the path of transformation. Visit Lee’s website to discover more: www.leethompsonfiction.com
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The Lesser People
By
Lee Thompson
Prologue
Out of all my grandchildren, I think you need this story most, Samuel. I’m sure you’re the one who deserves it, who can appreciate it. I know those few spoonfuls of dirt I sent along with this package seem ordinary. But I hope that by the time you finish reading this you’ll know the weight that black earth possesses, that it is something more real than color, more sustaining than kingdoms, and more sacred than religions. It's a gift. One I hope you will share with your own children, and that you'll hold each other close even in the darkest times when anger and different opinions and clashing beliefs try to drive a wedge between you.
Go on and pick it up.
That dirt is light in your hand, like dark air an angel has snatched from a sky stabbed full of starlight. It is coarse from a century of river friction. It is soft from pocket lint. And each grain is like people and snowflakes, unique unto itself.
When Mr. Irons first brought the soil into the hospital, I had no idea what it represented, and how important it was to him, or how difficult it must have been for him to carry it all those years. He was a brave man who thought himself a coward, and he opened his heart to me, a stranger. And until then I’d forgotten how hard it is to listen to a stranger when they’re telling you their secrets and the shames they’ve carried quietly for decades.
I may make a mess of what he said. God knows I ain’t perfect. But I’ll do my best.
Remember this... We all people. We all make horrible mistakes. But there’s good in us when we reach out beyond ourselves, even if we don’t know exactly what we’re reaching for.
Chapter One
Mr. Elijah Irons came into my hospital on a snowy Detroit night as cars slid about in the streets, and pedestrians, bundled tight, hobbled up and down the cracked sidewalk. At first he appeared like any other old white man—quiet, scared, reserved—when wrestling with death on the brink of his third heart attack. The lights were low when I first stepped into his room. I thought he was sleeping, his head turned away toward the window, gaze locked on the worn buildings that had been rotting for decades along Woodward Avenue. I pulled his chart, determined to make my nightly rounds, praying to the Lord that my shift would go smoothly, thinking about my own troubles the way people do until someone else gets up in your face and gives you something else to think about, something to consider, and you find that pain is lasting, universal, and random.
He turned his head slowly, a tuft of white hair standing straight up above his rheumy eyes. He tried hard to focus on my face the way some of them do, searching for an anchor in what their tremulous lives, and last few moments, have so boldly illuminated. He knew his chances of leaving here were slim and I’d heard all their complaints and all their fears a million times, so I smiled my best smile, and asked him how he was feeling.
“I’m dying,” he said, blinking. His eyes focused slowly and he smiled a little himself for a moment before some great and heavy sadness grabbed him and tugged the corners of his mouth down like somebody had released the drapes and erased the sunlight.
He gave me a small nod. “Dying, and I have a black nurse.”
He trembled, tried to scoot up the bed, one claw of a hand flopping and searching for the button to incline the mattress. I waited for him to get comfortable, not rushing forward to help him like maybe I should have, since he went and pointed out my skin color as if that made any difference about my ability to do my job. I forced myself to take a breath, a slow one. The old white men were the worst, stuck in their old ways. I scratched the back of my hand and asked him if he knew where he was. He bit his lip, shook his head, said that it didn’t matter. He said, “All that matters is you’re here.”
I blushed despite myself because there was so much tenderness in his voice. I tried to reappraise this wrinkled, scrawny old white man, and gave up, realizing like I had to several times every week that people are so much more than they appear.
I asked him softly, “Is there anything I can get for you, Mr. Irons?”
He tapped the blanket next to his thigh. He said, “If you could stay a while and hear me out.”
I glanced over my shoulder, thought about my rounds, the other patients to check up on, the way the night stretched out into an endless clatter of beeping boxes, snoring and farting, rubber soles on tile and my own age getting to the point where I felt it in my bones.
“I’ll have to find someone to cover my rounds for a bit,” I said, the tone of my voice firm to prevent him misunderstanding that I had more responsibilities than just him. “One moment,” I told him. I left him there on the white bed with his parchment-like skin riddled with veins, that nervous shake of his hand but the stubborn slant of his mouth and eyes hard on me like he knew in his heart I wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.
It took me ten minutes to find Tina, the night shift coordinator, and another five minutes to practically beg her to take over my rounds for a bit. Her eyes were condescending, above me, disappointed and annoyed that I’d ask her such a thing and seeing her like that made my blood boil since I’d never asked her a favor before. I shuffled back into Mr. Iron’s room, my hip hurting, my mind abuzz with anger and me trying to distract it with thoughts of the coming Christmas, of blinking colored lights, of shiny wrapping paper, of my grandsons and granddaughters on my knees and about my feet with their bright shining faces.
Mr. Irons smiled sadly upon noticing I was back. He tapped the mattress next to him again. I sat there, studying him, wondering what in the world because his eyes were filling with tears, and I knew he was going
to tell me a story about the love that got away, for as strong as men try to appear, it’s love like that and all the questions it brings, that hounds them until their final day.
His voice was barely a rasp. I had to lean forward to hear him. He wanted water. I pulled a Styrofoam cup from the cart and helped him take several sips, his warm, dry fingers brushing my wrist. He smacked his lips, whispered, “Thank you.” His gaze traveled back to the window. He said, “Everybody I could have told this to are long gone.” He waved that claw in the air as if it didn’t matter, said, “To wherever.”
I waited, sitting straight, glancing at the window myself and the snow falling soft and white beneath the street lights and making the concrete glimmer below.
He said, “Detroit is a hell of a place.”
“It’s my home,” I said.
He waved that hand again. “When I first came here it was against my will.”
A criminal, I thought, imagining him in prison orange, a bent young man, sly, cold but able to act like he cared, able to act like he was your best friend.
I cleared my throat, said, “Where are you from originally?”
His eyes flicked toward my face, then away, back to the window, looking out into the past, and decades of winters. He said, “Forksville. It’s in the Mississippi Delta.” He rubbed his knuckles, bony and broken as they were, as if for strength before he said, “When I was a boy things were so different than they are now. We played, we explored, the world was ours for the taking and we made mistakes and we got scraped up and we got disciplined. The moon landing, the entertainment industry, the internet, they weren’t even dreamed yet. There was nothing but each precious summer moment. All we had to entertain ourselves and keep from going stir-crazy was our imaginations and our courage and our instincts. Back then, at ten years old, I thought I knew what love was, as well as so many other things boys see in their fathers and wish to emulate. Things like duty, hope, sacrifice, surrender, pragmatism, acceptance, and forgiveness. But I didn’t know anything except what I saw and failed to understand. I’m still not sure I know anything that’s worth a nickel to another living soul, or even a dead one.”
Mr. Irons stared at the ceiling a while. He said, “I knew a young black boy named Isaiah a very long time ago. He was blind, and since I was so young I didn’t understand why he couldn’t see, so I asked him. Do you know what he told me?”
He glanced at me, his eyes intense for a moment before they softened. I told him I had no idea what the young black boy had told him about being blind.
“He told me that sometimes, on the right kind of night, in the right place, a spider comes into a still and unholy house, and it searches among the damned until it finds the one whom it shall gift.” He smiled but it looked forced. He said, “Do you want to know what it gifted?”
No, I thought. But I said, “Yes,” because it was easier for them, always easier, whether they had a point to their stories or not, if I just gave the poor souls a moment to let it all out.
He said, “The spider would find its precious little child and it would sneak upon the child’s face while the child’s parents slept in a nearby room, and the house would be dark and peaceful and the spider would do what spiders must do and spin a web, only this spider was special and the webs it spun sealed little children’s eyes shut forever. It welcomed them into the darkness upon waking with the soft brush of its legs on their foreheads, as the sun rose in the gray and unseen east.”
Clothing rustled in the hall, past the door, us stuck in the middle between the night and snow and past and present.
“That’s an interesting story,” I said, not thinking it interesting at all. He scared me then, the way people sometimes do when they’re talking about unreal or unnatural things. It reminded me of my mother upon her death bed and a similar story she’d told about being a child in Jamaica and how the banana spiders would sit on her shoulder and sing a dirge every time a family member was about to pass on.
He cleared his throat, searched for my hand, found it and I wanted to pull away but he asked me, “Do you mind?”
I shook my head. “No, it’s okay. What was it you wanted to tell me?”
“I’m afraid.”
I wanted to tell him that being afraid of dying was normal, but before I could, he said, “Afraid of telling you this story, afraid you’ll hate me when I finish. Maybe before. And even though I don’t know you or you me, I’m afraid, and I’m ashamed.”
I squeezed his bony fingers gently. “It can’t be that bad, Mr. Irons.”
For a second I felt him trying to draw away, his face hard and blank but his eyes burning in their sockets. He said, “We’ll see.” He stared at the ceiling while he gathered his thoughts, perhaps looking for the proper place to start. At last he said, “When I was ten years old my uncle Tommy was supposed to go to prison…”
He stopped there, squeezed my hand, said, “This isn’t going to be easy.”
“It’s okay,” I assured him, convinced it wasn’t going to be okay at all from the little he’d told me and the little I assumed. We waited there with the snow falling until he lifted his hand over the table next to his bed and grains of dirt fell free of his palm.
I waited until he started speaking again, his eyes locked on mine but seeing through me, seeing back to all those years ago when he was just a helpless boy in a world of mad men…
*****
I was a fat and tan ten year old when my uncle Tommy stole M-1 rifles from dusty National Guard storage bins in Jackson and brought them back up to Forksville. He did it without much guilt since he planned to distribute the weapons to the KKK.
Mississippi was in upheaval. The Council had their hands full, their minds set, their beliefs in superiority to uphold at all costs. It infected the rich, the middle-class, almost everybody. Although Daddy arrested Uncle Tommy, their father—the mayor of Forksville—and the police let him go. Uncle Tommy laid low for a while; he stayed behind the local bar in a trailer that looked like a silver bullet. Daddy was angry with all of them, even Momma, but most of all he was angry with himself because he couldn’t fight the whole town let alone make them see that the Negroes were people too and deserved to be treated better than simple-minded children.
Right or wrong, that’s the kind of family I grew up in, the place I grew up in, and at the age I was then I didn’t know anything but what my family told me and my friends’ families told them. It’s not an excuse, just the way of things, ugly things, shameful things, the weight and colors and convictions of our family history.
Many said we had a tradition to uphold and we’d do it, or we’d die trying.
The air was hot, the sun bleached, and all the colors but red washed out of the Mississippi mud when I found the first black boy somebody had left carved up in the thick of the woods behind our neighbor’s house.
My tongue felt as if it stuck to the roof of my mouth that July 3rd in 1960, and I hate to admit that I was more intrigued than I was frightened. I hate to admit that I stared for a long time on that body before running home to get my father. He brought out others, all of them talking quietly as they investigated, taking pictures of the tracks in the river bank and the dark soil of the delta, spotting dabs of blood on broken twigs, dots of red against the bright green foliage like the plants bled, the kid laying there in his ruined flesh, with his dead, white eyes.
I knew him, which may have made it harder but it didn’t feel like it at the time. Death, even violent death, was a way of life and my father and his family were violent men.
The boy bleeding into the delta dirt was one of the local preacher’s servants by the name of Isaiah. A blind boy that laughed easily and seemed to move around with an uncanny agility and he’d been able to pick cotton as fast as anybody. It was strange to see him on the river bank, still and quiet, and motionless, and gone.
Preacher stood off to the side, his hands stuffed stiffly in his trouser pockets, his gaze locked on the boy and the men. He was a kind and tall ma
n, a head taller than my father, though his head was bent now, and his black suit clean and pressed the night before, and I wondered if it was not because of the sermon he’d spoken this morning, but for this moment when he stood by helplessly staring at a boy he loved like a son.
His gray eyes shone with hatred for what they’d done, only he couldn’t say nothing because word would get back to whoever had done the deed, and they’d come for him next. He was a hardworking and honest man who studied the word of God and aimed to live by it even though he was as prone to fail in that endeavor as anyone else was. But he told me once, me and Isaiah and my brother Ben, that it was the trying that mattered, the caring enough to at least try.
Other than my father, no one spoke to or even looked at him. Daddy stood next to him for a while, the gold star bright on his chest, both of them silent, staring, until my father pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from his breast pocket and offered Preacher one. The older man hesitated for a moment, looking crestfallen, before he fumbled a cigarette free of the pack, lit up, and held the cigarette loosely between his fingers as smoke curled about his waist and up around his eyes. I wanted to tell him I was sorry because the anger on his face melted away to compassion as the men drifted off to one side and nothing stood between him and Isaiah. But I held my tongue, knowing that if they thought I sympathized they’d ignore me too and I didn’t want to be ignored. It made me feel like a coward. A little ashamed.
My dad, a slim, tough man that I admired, and who looked a lot like Uncle Tommy, approached, placed his hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently before he turned me away toward his car. Our mother didn’t come down to see what it was all about and I really didn’t expect her too since she kept her nose out of other people’s business and had her hands full of her own troubles. My older brother Ben was in the passenger seat though, staring with an odd smile on his face at the men working beyond me and Dad, the sound of the river loud as it rolled on but not loud enough to conceal the tick in my throat. One of the men behind us said in a deep, gravelly voice, “Goes to show you that the Klan don’t need guns to do their job.”