After the news, she showed him to what she called the guest room—actually the attic—by pulling down the staircase from the ceiling with a rope and urging him up without going in herself.
A former student in need of sanctuary was my last guest, she told him. About a year ago. A few months before Fremont passed.
Eddie flinched.
Right, I guess you didn’t hear that Fremont passed. She sighed. Since your mother dragged you off to God knows where.
Eddie shook his head and stared at her dumbly. I reckoned he was working, he said.
You know he had a bad heart. I mean a good heart, but it didn’t work so well. Plus the hypertension. And hard as I tried, I could not get that man to eat right. It happened at work. Bethella paused, her eyes glistening. February seventeenth last year, she whispered.
He was a good man, Eddie managed to say as he turned to climb the stairs. He loved music.
Lit by a single bulb, a twin-size mattress, neatly dressed with striped bedclothes faintly burned by the old dryer, created a small oasis in the middle of a disorderly storage space. A pilly orange blanket lay on top. Gradually disintegrating piles of dusty jazz albums, carefully folded woolen blankets, a broken decades-old vacuum cleaner, and an antique fan clogged the periphery of the room. A long box that looked like an old suitcase caught Eddie’s attention, but when he unsnapped its clasps, with some difficulty, to discover a shining brass trombone inside, nestled in red velveteen, the sight put him in mind of both Fremont and a body lying in a coffin and he flipped the case shut. Eddie stared around the dim room, doubtful that he could sleep well there. He pictured nights of watching for unpleasant signs in the inky crevice where the halves of the roof came together.
In less than an hour Bethella changed her mind and insisted that Eddie see a doctor. My doctor, she said, she’s a Chinese, perhaps assuming that her nephew would not accept a white physician. Eddie wasn’t immediately swayed, though, and Bethella gave him a lecture on the stubbornness of certain black men in the family, like his grandfather P. T. Randolph and his uncle Gunther. You’re acting just like your granddad. He enjoyed sitting in his pain and just wallowing, she said. Well, Gunther’s got all the time in the world to feel sorry for himself now in prison. All of you are smart enough to know exactly how the world screwed you, and the Man screwed you, and that there’s no hope to change it. Your daddy wasn’t like that. See, he was on the Hardison side. A fine man. He tried to change things!
Eddie shot a weary look at his aunt.
Oh, they got him, she continued proudly, but at least he died fighting. She scratched her biceps and continued. Fine. Be hardheaded. But I don’t have any time for a young man who loses his phalanges and won’t see a doctor. And you’re going to tell me how this happened and who is responsible ASAP so help me God.
At first Eddie resented Bethella’s involvement and resisted going to a doctor merely for the sake of resisting, but after a while he admitted the stupidity of his stubbornness, and weighing it against the possibility of gangrene, the workings of which Bethella explained to him in detail, he agreed to go. She offered to pay half or figure out how to put him on her insurance. I’ll say you’re my son, she promised. Quietly, he enjoyed that idea.
Dr. Fiona Hong had a clever face and an easy, staccato laugh. Her limbs seemed loose for someone in medicine, someone who had to jab folks with needles. Her swooping arms won Eddie over. It didn’t bother him that she called him by his first name. When she unwrapped his bandages, she did not register very much shock, or even curiosity. Instead she seemed impressed, almost thrilled. Maybe doctors liked unusual cases.
We’re going to need to get you to the OR, Eddie. Pretty much right now. Her bright, possibly nervous laugh sounded like a bark. You’ll also need antibiotics and painkillers, she informed him. And we’ll see each other again soon. Okay?
Several days and doctors later, as the two of them rode back to Bethella’s house, his aunt’s thin patience disappeared. Her head flicking toward him like a bird’s, her eyes reddish and intent and halfway off the road, she said, You’re not telling me what happened because you don’t want me to know what your mother did. When are you planning to stop protecting her? Stop protecting her. What, did she do it herself?
Eddie did not agree with Bethella, but he knew better than to sass the most responsible member of the older generation, especially when he needed to sleep in her attic. If he argued, she would pull rank and stick to her version anyway. Mostly he wanted to make sure his aunt knew that Darlene was not to blame.
A few weeks after arriving in St. Cloud, Eddie started to pick up jobs here and there. He randomly encountered Sandy, the waitress from the Hungry Haven, at a drugstore and she told him that an overworked construction guy who didn’t do concrete had heard about a divorcée in a Victorian outside Pierz who needed a whole pool patio and front walkway done. Pouring concrete didn’t require much finesse, and the construction guy could handle anything Eddie couldn’t. When Eddie met with him, the guy made the call while Eddie sat right there. People did favors for strangers here, Eddie noted, without exactly being friendly. Nevertheless, he felt like he had a reprieve. Bethella had mixed feelings about his decision to work. Sometimes she warned him to get a diploma, other times she openly wished for solitude, seeming to imply that he should get a steady job and get gone.
Eventually Bethella stopped tolerating Eddie’s announcements about going to find Darlene. Your mother and I—she would begin, always neglecting to finish the thought. Then she’d say, Just don’t. You have to have a bottom line.
Darlene had called the house, begging him to return, but it soon dawned on Eddie that she hadn’t quit drugs. Their conversations splintered into anger and incoherence, and while brooding over their relationship in his workspace—aka Bethella’s basement—one day, he admitted to himself that some problems—and some people—can never get fixed, even by a skilled handyman.
After that, Eddie might speak abstractly about going to rescue his mother, but he said very little to his aunt about the exploitation and injury he’d suffered at Delicious Foods. She never encouraged him to return for Darlene, and she never asked for details. The more time went by, the more ashamed he grew about taking Darlene’s side, and the more he saw the sense in Bethella’s dispassionate, rational decision to cut her off.
In the meantime, good luck at work made hedging easier for him. His one job grew other jobs, then an apprenticeship, and soon a regular business sprouted up around him. That September Eddie turned eighteen and moved from Bethella’s to an apartment just down the street, so they could still look out for each other. Sometimes Eddie would go over to her house to watch her new favorite TV show, a sentimental series featuring a black woman angel. She would rub his shoulder blade and describe her pride in him, but he could still hear the undertones of her relief that he’d left. She might come over with a piled-up plate sometimes—no sweet potato pies, but juicy greens that made the breading flop off her overcooked fried chicken; mashed potatoes in a tinfoil pouch, soaking up its metallic taste; undercooked pig feet. He ate only enough to be polite. He never complained—he knew that good intentions always trumped bad soul food, and he grew as comfortable with the surrogate motherhood she provided as she did with the way that he partially filled the space left by Fremont’s death.
In due time, Eddie learned to stick a pen in his mouth and write again, and once he gained some skill, he sketched out a device: Two short cups, each with a pair of pincers attached, a simpler model of a prosthetic hook he’d studied in a trade magazine. The carpenter to whom he’d become apprenticed helped him make a version out of wood—cheaper that way. Together they perfected it, a custom fit for the end of his right arm. They smoothed and finished it, covered it in a lightweight polymer, and when that one worked, they made another for his left, attached it to a harness with catgut strings, and looped it around his back.
Wearing the contraption felt as grand to him as putting on an expensive new suit. Eddie stretched his arms and elb
ows, testing out the potential for movement, for subtle inflections in each pincer, for a lifelike bend in the wrist. The prosthesis seemed to wipe out the past and stretch the future into infinity. Eddie began to hope ferociously. Perhaps he would go back south after all and get Darlene to leave Delicious whether she wanted to or not.
He spent eight months or so gaining dexterity. Mornings and late nights, he’d practice picking up grains of rice, turning doorknobs, spigots, and pages, holding utensils, raising glasses. As he grew more confident, he tried juggling two eggs, but after covering his kitchen table in goo, he switched to small rocks.
The range and subtlety of motion Eddie’s invention offered him expanded his abilities well beyond what he’d hoped. Pouring concrete and tarring roofs no longer made up his entire work schedule. After being in St. Cloud for a year and a half, he returned to doing electrical wiring and repairing appliances, as he had done at the farm, though it took longer to overhaul a radio than before. He had trouble managing the tiny screwdrivers, the intricate circuitry. But soon.
To the clients he started attracting, Eddie became something of a curiosity. They would come in to watch him work in his garage, behind a house he now rented, and he would sit intently on his high wobbly stool, lit by a bright fluorescent desk lamp, amid oily file cabinets and plastic drawers full of washers, lug nuts, screws, nails, and grommets. They would stay sometimes until it seemed rude—fascinated, he assumed, by the fact that a physically disabled man could make a profession of such precise work, by the added hardship brought on by his color, and eventually by the minute detail he could accomplish using only the curved wooden hooks of his prosthetic hands.
Eddie knew that they viewed him as a novelty, but he didn’t have the luxury of begrudging them their reactions. Instead he sought to translate the amazement in their faces into a stable income. If he could’ve pulled coins directly out of their mouths, he would have. He’d meet the men’s sheepish gawking with technical conversation: These here wires—This darn microchip—Did you ever see a circuit board this—Your screen has blown out. Or if they showed no interest in the gadgets or home repairs he hunched over, he’d start with the weather. You could nearly always complain about the cold in Minnesota, and if you couldn’t, you could marvel that for once it wasn’t cold, or about the strange summer heat. You could then graduate to the Twins or the Vikings. Somebody who brought a child or a dog into his garage hardly had a choice about whether to become a regular customer; when the pressure to seem compassionate and good in Eddie’s presence intersected with the cuteness of animals and children, the resulting atmosphere could probably have made a bedridden hermit throw a dance party. Only the kids ever asked about his condition, though, and, provided the adults didn’t hush them, he’d speak frankly and jovially.
One day a red-haired girl asked, Hey, mister, how come you have claws?
I had an accident, he told her calmly, though at the same time he remembered every second—the blindfold made with a sweatshirt, the tension in his clenched teeth, the moment when he blacked out from the pain.
Her father stroked the nape of her neck. Don’t bother the handyman when he’s busy, Viv.
He’s a handyman without hands, Viv observed.
Her father let out a loud, anxious laugh, Viv giggled, and Eddie turned away from his work for a moment to share their laughter. As the father laughed, Eddie wondered if the man would hold the comment against his child. But the tension ebbed, and Eddie leaned down until some flyaway strands of her hair tickled his nose.
You know, that’s exactly right, Miss Wilson. I never thought of it in that way.
Her father made an apologetic mouth. She’s darn plucky, my Vivian. I’m sorry, Mr. Hardison.
No need, Eddie said. That’s a great saying. I’m gonna put that on my business card. He turned to the girl. How would you like that?
I guess that would be fine, Vivian said demurely.
Be careful, her father warned him. This one will want royalties down the line.
The following week, Eddie visited the printer and offset a run of small stiff cards emblazoned with his name and contact information, carrying the girl’s description above it in red, curved like a rainbow over a landscape, with a river zigzagging through the center.
HANDYMAN WITHOUT HANDS
When he thought of the phrase, Eddie didn’t mind that it reduced his troubles to a friendly, manageable quirk. The funny, contradictory label covered up all the loss and the pain and made it so that customers could approach him with a feeling of comfort and friendliness. People didn’t recoil or start anymore when their eyes traveled to the ends of his wrists. He’s the Handyman Without Hands, they’d say. How cool is that?
The St. Cloud Times wrote an article about him and his business; in the photo, he grinned, holding his prostheses up, a hammer balanced in the right one. The headline described him as a local John Henry—as if you could find that many John Henrys in Minnesota, he snickered to himself. Eddie saved twenty-five copies of the article, and though he gave most of them away, he hung one above his workspace inside a plastic sheath.
Soon a flood of customers sought out Eddie’s services, people who had seen the article or the card or heard about him through friends and relatives. He welcomed the mild amusement spread across their creamy complexions, the nervous questions pumping through their blue veins. He preferred curiosity to derision, so he controlled his impatience because the discomfort came with a bag of gold attached. Some of the white folks brought items to him that they wouldn’t otherwise have bothered to get fixed, just to meet Eddie Hardison, the Handyman Without Hands.
The superior quality of his work, however, brought a large percentage of the gawkers back with more serious issues—prewar homes begging for rewiring, bathtub reglazing, wood-paneling installation or removal, patio design and reconstruction. He saved for and bought a more up-to-date prosthesis—stainless steel this time—but he preferred the comfort and facility of the earlier model, wearing the newer one mostly for public appearances: socials at the Nu Way Missionary Baptist Church, business meetings, visits with friends.
Two and a half years after arriving in St. Cloud, Eddie opened a bona fide shop downtown, Hardison’s, selling hardware, fixing appliances, organizing home repairs. When the florist next door went out of business, he expanded into that space. The shop thrived, and the novelty of the Handyman Without Hands wore off, but Eddie never removed the phrase from his business card.
Eddie didn’t let his disability get in the way of an active life, and that attitude paid off in many ways. On an ice-skating outing to St. Paul, he met a paralegal named Ruth, four years his senior. Ruth was the only woman he’d met in Minnesota who remained unfazed by his missing hands, though she did prefer to remove or warm up his metal prosthesis with her cardigan before lovemaking. After eight months of dating, which Bethella considered too short a time, Ruth moved in with him and became his fiancée. They had a son out of wedlock whom they named Nathaniel. The boy seemed to inherit his father’s tenacity and his grandfather’s charisma.
Eddie presumed that by drafting and adhering to such an average blueprint for a life, he could overcome his misfortunes and shake off all the agonizing memories of Delicious Foods, but they never left him, nor did the urge to return to Louisiana and set things right disappear completely. Sometimes he snapped awake in the earliest-morning hours, convinced that he was back at the farm. Shrouded in pitch-black, the memories would return, alighting on his bed like dark birds poised to attack him. Inevitably, they seemed to say, someone will reveal everything that happened on that farm, and you will have to go back.
1.
Braindancing
Lazy? That fool done zipped off in his black sedan and the taillights getting all mixed up with the traffic signs, and Darlene thought hard ’bout that word. Out all the stuff a motherfucker could say, not realizing he had spoke to somebody who gone to college. You could use other words for her activity at that moment, maybe some of em not s
o nice, but lazy? She had to laugh behind that, hard as she out there working for a couple ducats. The nerve of this man! He ain’t know her life. She had a son to feed, eleven years old, had to get out there walking in some bad shoes, humidity frizzing the heck outta her perm. This whole damn June, sun been beating down so hot the roads be looking blurry up ahead, all kinda mirages happening up the highway. Look like a truckload of mercury done had a accident.
Seem to Darlene that everything she strove for turned out as a hot mirage. Probably folks oughta blame that on the dude in the sedan or that dumbass self-help book she read; can’t nobody pin what happened to Darlene on me. Can’t nobody make you love em, make you look for em all the time. Maybe I attract a certain kinda person. Folks always saying that I do. Doctors talking now ’bout how people brain chemistry make some of em fall in love harder with codependent types. But I feel a obligation to Darlene. Out all my friends—and, baby, I got millions—she make me wonder the most if I done right by her. Sometimes I think to myself that maybe she shouldna met me. But then again, can’t nobody else tell her side of things but Yours Truly, Scotty. I’m the only one who stuck by her the whole time.
Nine months out on the street and she still had a meek little attitude ’bout doin’ the do, you know? She ain’t had the look down at all. My girl had on flats and a skirt that went below the knee—no lie! Instead of going down to the edge of the road to look in them cars, she be hanging back, almost in the hedges or whatever, hoping some car gonna slow down and stop. She reckoned she get in and get cool in the vehicle. Solve two problem at one time.
Across that double yellow line over at Hinman’s Aquatic World, it was some giant Plexiglas pools resting on they sides, looking like God’s bedpans. The owners had just turnt on them plastic palm trees with the lights all in em. Pickup trucks parked at steak houses, broken neon trim blinking on the wall of the porno store. Forlorn-ass Mexican folks be chilling at the bus stop.
Delicious Foods: A Novel Page 2