by Kia Corthron
Nothinness. I wonder: I’m dead? If B.J. dead, that make me dead. Right? I’m fine with dead but I jus like clarification on the matter.
Then the chair scrapin, movin close. Beside me. An oh God: his right han touchin mine! I clutch it!
“B.J.! B.J.!” My tears streamin.
But gentle he loose my grip, start to move his hans, lemme feel my han on his: the words.
I’m here.
“I thought you was gone, brother! I thought I lost ya!”
No. I’m here.
“Oh my God. Oh my God sweet Jesus!” Gotta catch my voice fore I go on. “I was gonna be the donor. I was gonna give ya my bone marrow but we moved. I didn’t get the letter your wife sent till a year later, it said you don’t have the bone marrow soon you be gone. I thought. I tried to reach ya, I called but they said nobody your family at your apartment no more, I thought.”
He study on it fore he answer.
My recuperation took a long time. They had to replace me with another super. We had to leave.
“Aw, sorry to hear that.” When he bring his hans close to his face for the signs I feel his cheek, lips, yeah. My brother. My brother! “Where yaw go?”
Harlem.
“Harlem?” I cain’t help but grin. “Well how yaw like it down air?”
Up there. One hundred Twenty-seventh Street.
“It nice?”
He wait again, thinkin fore he reply. Guess I jus have to get use to the hesitations.
It was. Too many white people moving in now.
I gotta laugh out loud! In a single lifetime my brother gone from Klan to colored! But wait a minute.
“Brother, I called. Your buildin, somebody tole me they heard you died. Now who gonna start a rumor like that?”
Again he wait.
They said the super died?
“That’s what he heard.”
He must have been talking about Lloyd. The super before me. After I recovered, news came that Lloyd who’d retired a few years before had passed on. The person you spoke to must have confused the supers.
I grin. “Guess so, Who’s on first. B.J. B.J.!” I jus like sayin his name! “But hold on. How you survive without that bone marrow?”
He spell it out. Deb Ellen.
“Deb Ellen?” I gotta rack my brain for that, some file a whole pile a decades old. “Deb Ellen? Our cousin?”
His han don’t move. Why he bringin her up. Then I get it.
“Deb Ellen donated the bone marrow?”
Yes.
“Oh my God. You still been in touch?”
I’d been in touch with Leslie Jo, Benja’s oldest. When I got sick, my wife wrote to Leslie Jo, asking if anyone in the family could help.
“An ole Deb Ellen stepped up huh. Well! How’s she? An all them badass kids God, they muss have their own gran-brats by now!”
She lives with a woman. Joyce.
“A woman?” My forehead furrowin. “You mean she ain’t with Calvin no more? She got herself a roommate?”
I mean she’s not with Calvin and she lives with a woman.
It take me a sec. Then I get it! “Deb Ellen! Why didn’t I figure that out before?” I gotta chuckle over that! “Now tell me boutcher daughter, that Iona. See, I remember her name! April sent me her little kindergarten picture, it been settin on the mantelpiece all these years with resta the family. What she doin? You turned out to be the bookworm a the Evanses, bet you sent your daughter on to college.”
Now his hans take to flyin.
“Slow down!” I say, laughin. “This is new, brother, feelin your hans, not seein em. An been a long while since I engaged in a signin conversation, take it easy on me.” But I’m happy! I’m happy!
She graduated from her public high school with honors. She went to college in Atlanta and majored in music composition. She sings and plays the piano and the guitar and the accordion and various African flutes and harps and drums and assorted percussions. She spent six months in Vienna on a fellowship. She’s married with children and still composes and occasionally performs.
“Well whadda ya thinka that.” I’m all wonder, what B.J. the head saw operator from the mill done brought out into the world.
“B.J. He Iona’s? Your granbaby?”
His hans don’t move at firs.
Yes, this is Ernest. He’s seven.
“Ernest! You gonna come say hi to your great-uncle Randall?”
Somethin goin on, I know Ernest an his granpaw signin back an forth. Arguin, I guess. Finally the boy, “Hello” from where he standin.
“You gotta come closer! I’m a ole bline man, I got to touch you.”
Their hans goin wild.
Then B.J. come back to me. He doesn’t want to.
The water in my eyes. “Please, B.J.?”
I shouldn’t have brought him. He’s staying with me tonight because he has a dentist appointment tomorrow, his dentist is in Harlem.
“Jus this once! Promise I won’t never ask again.”
Somethin goin on. Then I hear the boy sigh, drag hisself near me, but leanin his body gainst his granddaddy for protection.
“Well hello there, Ernest. You gonna lemme touch your face?” I reach out for it. I feel him turn away, not obstinate but like he lookin up at his granpaw, This okay? I reach, get a good feel. I see him.
You said his face, not his hair.
“I know, I jus wanted—”
Yes, he’s black.
“I don’t care, I love him! He’s my blood. All the same.”
Ernest signin to B.J., pretty sure he askin can he go now. “Ernest, you go on back to playin.” He still don’t move, guess seein if it okay with his granpaw. Then he quick run off. “What are ya doin? Drawin?”
“Colorin.”
Well! He answer me without checkin in with his grandfather firs. “I used to like doin at! Your age.” An it occur to me I ain’t feelin no pain, an painless is somethin I ain’t felt in months. An happy like this somethin I don’t remember since my Randy a little boy, great day!
“Hey B.J. How you find out I’m here? New York?”
Leslie Jo texted me.
I sigh, hospital musta called her after I give em her name. And guess she did care, a little. Now I feel his han lettin go, maybe he afraid I gone to sleep, I snatch it back!
“You ain’t said. How’s that wife a yers?” He don’t answer. “Well. I loss my Erma. ’Eighty-nine. And Randy, my boy. He was jus nineteen, he died in the military trainin exercises.”
I didn’t know. I’m sorry, Randall.
“Yeah, well.” I sigh. But also I notice B.J. signed my name for the firs time. I swallow, I cain’t say nothin for a little bit, an jus when I think B.J. no intention a ever sharin any pain with me, he do.
She’s gone. My wife. Seven years ago.
“Oh. Oh I’m sorry too, brother, I truly am. Lord, she musta been young?”
Fifty-seven. His hans still a while. Diabetes. Her family.
“Aw. Your little girl. How ole was she then?”
Twenty-one.
“Well. Guess if it ain’t one thing it’s the other. Our family, we had the cancer curse. Cep Pa. That damn head saw blade.”
Somethin distractin him.
The nurse says I have to go.
“What? What! You jus got here!”
You were asleep a long time. She’d come in with a note saying she needed to examine you when visiting hours were over, that I would have to leave, that she would let me know when.
“But cain’tcha stay till after she done?”
Visiting hours are over.
“I bet they make an exception I ask em! B.J.! You the onliest visitor I ever had!”
His hans is still a second.
I have to go.
I hear
him bringin his chair back to the corner, I hear the boy puttin his crayons together, movin toward the door.
“B.J.!” My hans wild. “Please come back tomarra! Please come back see me!” Nothin. “Ernest! Ernest, your granpaw don’t hear me, turn him roun! I’m beggin he come back, turn him roun so he can see me, see I’m talkin to him. Please! I need to tell him Come back tomarra!”
“He’s lookin right atcha,” says Ernest. Then their footsteppin away.
**
I place the freshly printed photos neatly into the album: Dawit and Safiya preparing the Ethiopian meal; Eloise on Rett’s lap, both beaming. I don’t touch computers of any kind, which is just as well given the arthritis in my hands, but Lem went picture-crazy after acquiring that digital camera. Christmases and birthdays and Pride Weekends and of course our world tour. We’d been saving and last year, after Dawit graduated from college and moved out, and with Lem retired, my husband and I spent six months traveling the globe. The first order of business had been to get me a passport. Eighty years old and I’d never been out of the country.
Rett left this morning, his usual Friday-to-Sunday visitation with his daughter adjusted to Thursday-to-Saturday so he could be here for my homecoming. I’m tired, an old man recovering from surgery, and thus my adieus to Eliot’s son and granddaughter aroused in me mixed feelings of melancholy and relief. Lem just left on a few shopping errands, which means for an hour I have the quiet apartment to myself. It’s nearly two and, as the Saturday postman should have come by now, for a little exercise I walk down the steps to retrieve the mail.
Three handwritten envelopes addressed to me. I’ve received so many well-wishes, Lem must’ve called everyone in my address book! The first is a card from the household of my old San Francisco sponsor Miguel. We stayed in communication twenty-two years until his death in ’03, and I’m touched that his widow still sends an annual Christmas card, and now this.
After all the time and distance, it takes me only a moment to recognize the name in the return address of the second item. My cousin Liddie! A get-well card, and slipped inside an old black-and-white, she and Eliot standing next to each other, grinning, he holding Parker the Cat. On the back: “August 1942.” It must’ve been their visit for Ramonlee’s funeral, shortly before Parker’s death. It’s a copy, a scan, but clean and clear. I stare at it a very long time before realizing the tissue paper beneath was separating it from another photo from the same time: me at thirteen and a half, a touch of the pubescent complications I was going through afflicting my expression, standing next to seven-and-a-half-year-old Eliot, my baby brother’s smile brighter than the sun. When at last I can turn my eyes away, to see through my blurred vision, I pick up the Hallmark, reading the note beneath the store-bought sentiment.
I need a rest, a glass of water, and then I remember the third envelope. I don’t recognize the return though it’s local, uptown Manhattan, postmarked yesterday. I can tell it’s a letter rather than a card, and I take it out. The printing is very neat.
The note is crackling old and yellow. I unfold it gingerly.
Steady. Yes, now I remember the visitor. But the two words I keep staring at, what has me closing my eyes: before today. Because that would mean. That would mean my roommate, my breath coming deep, fast, fast.
A shriveled-up old man, nothing of his former self, unlike his brother who still carried something of his youth, enough for me to find him familiar. And yet: How could I not have known? Why hadn’t I sensed it? Smelled the stench of him? the monster
The particulars of Eliot’s gruesome and torturous demise as repeatedly detailed by the prosecutor to the jurors (the latter eventually crossing their arms and frowning in their determined desensitization) began to play out in a loop in my head, and after the verdict my former dreams of legal justice had metamorphosed into visions of fierce revenge: inflicting every pain Eliot had suffered onto Randall Evans Francis Veter, those four words incessant in my head Randall Evans Francis Veter. I’m a bull, murder now in my heart, I vow to destroy Randall Evans Francis Veter I would consider the fate of Veter’s nephews later plans. I visualize their dying breaths their mutilated corpses and dare not speak which might dilute my rage, I strategize and tell no one. I go through the motions of caring for my grieving father, staying with him at the house but my head elsewhere plans, if Eliot no longer walked this earth then neither do Randall Evans Francis Veter I am methodical. Days after returning to Humble that lump of wrath in me growing, hardening I call the Prayer Ridge phone company. I inform the woman I’ve just moved, all my family and friends still there, it would be useful to have a phone book to stay in touch, I make sure my voice is white white. She’s politely efficient, writing my address on the directory herself, she might have recognized Humble, Maryland from the newspaper but Lewis, West Virginia would mean nothing to her, I change my name but I’ll take care of that when the package arrives, I’m a goddamn mailman after all. “Oh Mr. Perkins, I went to school with Lenora Perkins, she relation to you?” “Distant.” I receive the directory five days later, the street addresses I need, then a week goes by. Three. This is good, I think, all this time since the trial they’ll never suspect me I purchase a gun I purchase a dagger, I will do to them everything that was done to Eliot no mercy.
I’ve plotted everything but the when, like Nat Turner I wait for a sign from God and it comes. Dad tells me Aunt Beck called. She’d like to stay with him through the Christmas holidays. I’d just gone back to Lewis but still phoning my father every day, seeing him every other day I tell him Aunt Beck’s visit has come at a good time as I have some out-of-town business with the post office. I’d never had any business trips before and in his right mind my father would have questioned this, but he’d lost much of himself after my mother’s death and what happened to Eliot left him barely the shell of a man, nodding, agreeing.
So two days after Christmas, five weeks to the day that Randall Evans Francis Veter are pronounced not guilty I’m crossing into Alabama, the revolver within easy reach in the glove compartment in case there’s trouble early on. I’d debated, pistol versus the shotgun, the latter being more precise eye-for-an-eye. But I could be tempted then to shoot from afar. A pistol is up close and personal and would provide many options for maiming, then torturing, then killing. I’m careful not to take unnecessary risks, to die before my mission is complete. I devise a two-day journey, staying overnight on the way in a North Carolina colored hotel, paying cash so there will be no record of my stay should it come up in a court of law later. This is how I cover my tracks, even while knowing I’ll never get out of this alive. How my father will survive the third and last family member gone all in the course of two and a half months I selfishly don’t think about I’m focused Randall Evans Francis Veter
Half-moon. Light, but Francis Veter’s house is in a wooded area, I’m concealed by the trees. Voices. I’m shaking and this catches me unawares. I never once reconsidered, why tremble now? Bunch of kids running around. They’re out late, I think, carrying little guns and shooting at small animals. Well why should I be surprised that piece of trash lets his offspring run wild? His wife comes out, yells for them, bedtime. They groan and she yells more and they come in. I circle the house, nearly fall in a trench, my mind thinks my grave’s already dug for me. Then see the ditch is dug for an outdoor pool, though seems the workmen gave up halfway through the job. The window. Him and her in the living room, eating something, watching the news. Finally they turn in, lights out. A long dead quiet. I pick up a pebble. Throw it at the wall near the bedroom window. Nothing. Another. She wakes first, saying something to him. He clutches the pillow, waves her off. I hurl a bunch of stones and he snaps up, comes to the glass, looks out, the pitch-black. Must’ve woken up one of their brats, I hear crying from another room. Puts on his pants, snatches his rifle. I cock my pistol. He moves toward the back door and so do I. Francis Veter comes out of his house. I stand ten yards in front of him. This wo
uld be the moment for a clean, accurate shot, but unless I just want to kill him and run, if I want to follow through with the plan to make him know me, feel me, beg for the mercy he won’t get, then I can’t kill just yet. I have to get him into the woods. How? I could shoot to wound but I don’t have a silencer, his wife would get on the phone to the police and the gig would be up fast. I can’t die yet, not until I get to Randall Evans’s to also make him beg for his life in vain. I study Francis Veter. Well. If I’m meant to die now, I’ll take him with me. And he will see me, he’s not going to think I’m just some damn burglar. I want to say my name. And who my brother was, there will be no confusion. I’m just about to step into his line of vision when a blond child comes running out of the house and into her father’s arms. She’s crying, and he speaks to her softly, comforting. She’s a baby, no more than three. Why’s she out here? Why didn’t she just go to her mother? Francis Veter holds that shotgun in his right hand, moderately vigilant to any sign of an intruder, his left arm around his clinging daughter, her back to me, arms clamped around his neck. Eventually he’ll send her back to bed, I’m patient, patient.
Wait. Francis Veter’s asleep! Out in the chill December night holding his girl, dozing. Both of them still, dreaming.
I creep closer. When I look back on it, I guess this was the moment I was most pleading for suicide, for Francis Veter to help me to it, end the hurt. I get right up on Francis Veter. He doesn’t budge, his mouth slightly open. And I smell it. Goddamn whiskey, the piece of trash bastard passed out! I could slice his throat. I could rip open his white neck while his child sleeps on his chest and no one would know till morning.
And then she lifts her head and looks at me. Oh my God! she wasn’t asleep at all. Might she scream? Oh sweet Jesus I did not plan on killing a child!
But she doesn’t scream. She smiles and speaks, all Alabama rural. “You Birdy’s brother?”
I wait for her father to stir awake now but Francis Veter hasn’t batted an eyelash. Who the hell’s Birdy? The maid? I shake my head.