“You don’t remember what you were like? That’s ridiculous, Ava.”
“I guess it is, but it’s the truth. Why would I say it if it wasn’t true?”
“To remind me.”
“Of what?”
“Of how great you was. Of how everybody loved you best, even Mama and Daddy. Of how nobody ever knew I was even there—”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” Ava said.
Sarah’s face turned suddenly worried and sad. “Ava, please let me have this. I need this.”
“Sarah, I don’t know what you’re talking about! I am not trying to take anything away from you!”
Both women were startled by the force in Ava’s voice. Some people turned and looked at them. Some of the fear in Sarah’s face disappeared, but she still looked unsure.
“I think something happened to me, maybe after Geo died, maybe because he died. And I changed,” Ava said, her voice calmer now. “Did I?”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
“Right after he died?”
Sarah thought about it. “No. Right after he died, you were like you always were. Except that you didn’t cry. You started painting more. All the time, all day long sometimes. Grandma yelled at you for hanging the dirty ones up everywhere.”
“The dirty ones?” Ava had a flash of herself, naked on canvas.
“And then you stopped.”
“Painting?”
“Yes. And after that you started acting different. The pain of what happened caught up with you.” Sarah frowned. “You saying you don’t remember all that?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Ava said.
Sarah stared at her for a long moment, then said, “Well, what happened to him changed all of us. You was the closest to him, so it was bound to effect you the worst. After mama, I guess.” She shrugged. “Why should you want to remember any of it? I wish I could forget.” She sighed, and held out her hand. “Give me half of that list, so we can get out of here.”
Ava tore the grocery list in half, and gave Sarah the half without the drawing. Sarah walked off towards the back of the store and Ava continued adding produce to her basket. When she was done, she headed for the dairy section and saw Helena coming up the aisle towards her, carrying a brown-paper-wrapped package. Her skin looked even blacker in the fluorescent lighting and the contrast of her eyes was even more stark. A trace of the fascination that had been there that morning was still in her eyes as she looked at Ava, together with the worry that was there again, too, and seemed even more pronounced than before. “Your sister is around here somewhere,” she said.
“I know, I just saw her. Crab legs?” Ava asked, pointing to the wrapped bundle.
Helena nodded. “I wanted to make something special for dinner. Sarah’s upset with your mother, and I feel it’s my fault.”
Ava shook her head. “You only asked Mama a question. You couldn’t know she’d been lying to us about her father.”
“No, I couldn’t have known that,” Helena said, “but I did know there was something.”
“How could you have?”
“I saw the look in your mother’s eyes when she talked about her father. I saw the pain, tucked way up underneath the smile. I tend to notice things like that.”
Ava nodded.
“Where’s Sarah now?” Helena asked.
“She took half the grocery list.”
“Oh. Well, then I’ll help you with this half.” She placed the crab legs in Ava’s basket and they walked together down the aisles of the store, getting butter and eggs and pork chops, Helena holding the list and reading things off. When they’d got everything on the list, they found Sarah waiting in line and they bought their food and left the store, walking home together in the late daylight.
They cooked the crab legs in the broiler and Regina fried the okra. Sarah found some old nutcrackers and they used those to crack open the crustaceans. Paul was working late and George hadn’t gotten home from work, so the women sat around the table together, with napkins tucked into their collars like bibs and a growing mass of shell remnants around them. There was something about breaking open the crab legs that made them all feel lively. Sarah seemed to especially like it, sometimes reaching over and cracking Regina’s or Ava’s food, and Ava saw Helena smiling, looking pleased with herself.
When George came in and saw them all around the table, laughing and looking happy, he frowned. “Y’all know I don’t like seafood,” he said, when Sarah suggested he join them.
“We didn’t think you’d be home for dinner,” Regina said.
“Mama fried some okra, too,” Sarah said.
“And it’s a couple leftover drumsticks from last night,” Regina told him.
George nodded. “Alright, I’ll have those.”
Sarah got up to heat the chicken for her father and George took a seat at the table. He was aware of a slightly different energy in the house. Some of the heaviness that always lingered in the corners, no matter what they were doing, was a little bit less heavy. Not only did no one talk about the long-dead, but no one not-talked about them, either. The oiliness of unsaid things, which usually hung over them all like particles of cooking grease in the just-used kitchen, seemed lessened.
“This reminds me of the time we went to Savannah, not that long after we was first married,” Regina said. “We went out and ate at one of them places by the water, the only one that had a colored section in the back. Way in the back, past the kitchen, almost outside, but that was alright, ‘cause we could see the water from there. You remember that, George?”
“I remember I had the chicken then, too,” he said.
“Savannah is a beautiful city,” Helena said.
“Oh, it’s pretty,” Regina said. “That’s for sure.”
“Y’all ever been?” Helena asked Ava and Sarah, who both shook their heads. “You’d love it, Ava,” Helena said. “It’s an artist’s dream. The old churches, the tree-lined avenues. I read somewhere that during the Civil War, the Union army surged into Savannah, intending to blow it to smithereens, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, because it was so beautiful.” She shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s true or not.”
“Ava don’t do art anymore,” Sarah said.
“Well,” Helena said, looking suddenly self-conscious. “If she ever decided to again.” She looked at George. “You still have family down south?”
“No,” he said. He was the only person in his family ever to move north. His father was already dead when he left, the victim of an aneurysm caused by high blood pressure that had plagued him for nearly a decade before he died. In those years his father had been a tense, worried person. He worked from morning until night in cotton and tobacco fields, and when he came home he shut himself up alone in the shed where he built his strange sculptures. But years earlier, when George was a small boy, his father had been different, happier. He’d worked just as hard and long in the fields, but when he came home he did so whistling, and George, sitting and waiting for him on the porch, could hear that sound coming up the road ahead of him. When he went to the shed, he always let George come with him, and he sat and watched his father making art from old tractor parts, or scraps of wood, or whatever else he’d scrounged in and around Hayden. George kept him company by singing him songs and, later, from the time he was seven or so, telling him stories he made up as he went along, about heroes and monsters and the occasional distressed damsel, while his father laughed and kidded him about his inconsistencies, saying, “Hold on, I thought the knight was Barry. Where the hell Gary come from?” George would fall over giggling. Now he took a sip of water, trying to wash down the fried okra that was sticking in his throat. He didn’t like thinking about his father.
Regina was saying, “All my brothers and sisters who living is still down Georgia. They used to come and visit every few years, before it got to be a hassle.”
Sarah frowned. “Aint nobody else got lynched we don’t know about?”
�
��Girl, you better watch your mouth,” Regina said. “You better remember who you talking to, and quick. Now, I told you, y’all was too young to know about that.”
“We aint been kids in a long time,” Sarah said. “How come you didn’t tell us when we got older?”
Now Regina looked livid. “Why didn’t I tell you? I aint tell you, because aint nobody asked me nothing in seventeen years. Everybody around here act like saying one wrong thing to me is gone send me into a fit, and I’m gone start clucking like a chicken or something.”
“Saturday mornings—”
“I aint talking about Saturday mornings!” Regina said. “It aint just then. It’s all the time. Y’all tiptoe around me every day of the week. Y’all talk to me just enough to make sure I don’t babble back. So, why I’m supposed to think you wanna know something about me? About something terrible that happened to me four decades back, when y’all can’t barely look me in the eye because if the terrible thing that happened to me seventeen years ago?”
“It happened to all of us, Mama,” Sarah said. “Not just you.”
“It did not happen to all of us!” Regina said, rising from her chair. “It didn’t happen to nobody the way it happened to me. That was my son. I carried that boy in my body. Unless you have your own child and have him taken from you, you won’t never know what happened to me.”
“It’s alright, Mama,” Ava said, putting her hand on Regina’s.
Regina pulled the napkin from her collar and dropped it on her plate, and walked out of the kitchen.
George sighed. “I guess y’all found out about your grandfather.”
Ava nodded.
“How? I aint think Regina was ever gone tell you.”
“We was showing Helena old pictures,” Sarah said, “and she asked Mama about him.”
George looked at Helena. “Boy, it aint no end to your curiosity, is it?”
“I don’t see anything wrong with asking questions, Mr. Delaney.”
“It don’t seem right to me,” he said, “coming into somebody’s house and getting all in they business.”
Helena frowned. “I don’t think I’m doing that. I’m interested in your family. Not just in how they seem, but in how they are, and that means asking questions.”
“Why the hell you so interested?”
“Because you’re my brother’s family now, and I’m interested in knowing the people in his life. If that offends you for some reason, then I’m sorry.”
She was looking at him, in that way he hated, her light eyes searching his. He looked away from her, not wanting her to see anything that was inside him.
“Daddy, stop it,” Ava said. “Helena didn’t mean any harm.”
“Mama the one lied to us,” Sarah said.
“Well, so did I, if you gone look at it that way,” George said, surprised to find himself defending Regina. “Neither one of us thought y’all should know. So, I guess you pissed at me, too?”
Sarah shook her head. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Why not?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“Because we don’t expect the truth from you, Daddy,” Ava said.
George felt a tightening in his gut, a squeezing. He saw contempt in his daughter’s face, loathing, disgust. He blinked and it was gone, and for a moment he wondered if he’d imagined it.
“But we do expect it from Mama,” Ava said.
Helena’s eyes were on him and he avoided them, looking from Ava to Sarah. “That’s what y’all think about me?” he asked, trying to sound amused, as if it were silly.
Neither of them looked the least amused. Sarah picked at some crabmeat on her plate. Ava just looked at him, and though he did not see loathing in her eyes, he also did not see her usual indifference there. Instead, he saw the fiery eyes of the child he remembered from long ago, back before death had changed her, had changed all of them—not Southern death, not like Regina’s father, but death particularly Northern, made of hope and possibilities—and he felt weak in her gaze, and undone.
The fried okra on his plate smelled suddenly sickening, but he did not want to appear guilty of anything, so he fought the urge to get up from the table, and sat there with the nasty smell in his nose, while the others finished their dinner in silence.
***
George sat shirtless on the end of his bed, the cigarette in his hand half-burned-away while he neglected to smoke it, the ash dropping near his feet on the wood floor. He wondered when he had grown old. As a man who avoided looking at his own reflection, he had missed the first appearance of so many of the lines around his eyes, and so much of the graying hair at his temples and in the stubble on his face. He had never been fully aware of the softening of his chest and arm muscles and the slight yellowing of the whites of his eyes. He had become an old man without realizing it and not just on the outside. On the inside, too. At some moment—he did not know when—he had grown weary, exhausted with secrets, and all the minutes of his life had become tired lies. He remembered a time when he was not this man, when he did not sneak and lurk in shadow, when he could look his children in the eyes and not wonder what they suspected about him.
Getting up off the bed, George put his cigarette out in the ashtray on the side table and pulled on the shirt he had taken off less than an hour before. He stepped into his shoes and left his bedroom again, heading down the stairs and through the foyer, and he could hear the television set playing in the living room as he went out the front door.
Sunday evenings in the city always sound the same. Everything is hushed and slow and the faint tunes of radios create an underhum in the air, especially in summer. George walked the length of the block with his head down, as always. He did not like to look directly at his neighbors, could not bear the whispers, or the stares they still gave him even after all these years. But there were few people outside, and when he got to the corner and crossed the street, he slipped unseen, he thought, behind the church. There was a short alleyway that led along the side of the building, and George walked along it, concealed in the falling night, and came out by the back door of Blessed Chapel, in the small parking lot, and stood staring up at the church.
George had been a different man when he was part of the church, a stronger man, a man who could resist the devil because he lived so close to God, because the Lord knew him and watched over him, and helped him. When he had lost that, he believed, he had lost himself.
First checking to see that there were no lights on inside the church, George tried the back door and, just as he thought it probably would be, it was locked. He crouched down and peered into the lowest windows, the ones that led into the church’s basement, where, long years ago, his children had sat through Sunday school classes, and found each one locked as well. He frowned and squinted up at the next-highest windows, the ones that illuminated the main sanctuary. There were times, in summer, when one or more of them would be left open a crack at night, for ventilation, because Pastor Goode hated the stale smell of the place when it was kept completely closed up overnight. Looking up at the windows, though, George saw not one of them ajar. He climbed up the back stairs and tried the door that led into the sanctuary, but no luck. Holding the railing, he leaned over and pressed him palm against the glass of the nearest window, but it did not give.
“They all locked,” he heard a voice saying from behind him.
George turned. Standing there in the low glow from the half-dark sky was Chuck Ellis.
“I know, ‘cause I locked them all myself,” Chuck said.
It had been years since George had seen Chuck up close. He and Lena had moved off Radnor Street back in 1965. Since then, George had only caught glimpses of him on his way into or out of Blessed Chapel on Sundays. Up close, George could see how much Chuck had changed. He had gotten fatter, particularly around the middle, and his belly, once flat beneath his Sunday dress shirts, now strained against his leather belt. The hair at his temples was graying, as was his moustache,
and his once boyish face looked pudgy and weathered. But his eyes were the same, deep brown and kind, as he looked at George.
“Something in there you need?” he asked.
George walked back down the stairs, holding on to the railing because he felt unsteady. He wanted to appear sure of himself, unbothered by Chuck’s presence, but his head felt heavy on his shoulders, and he watched the ground as he walked past Chuck, and out through the parking lot, back to the street.
When Paul got home, near eleven that night, he found his sister-in-law curled up on the sofa, the light from the television set flickering along the walls of the room.
“What you doing down here?” he asked her, standing in the doorway. “I thought you was sleeping in Regina’s room.”
“Me and Mama had a fight,” she said.
“About what?”
“You know her father, me and Ava’s grandfather, the one she said died in a farm accident?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he didn’t. He got shot by some white men.”
“Lynched?”
She nodded.
“Jesus,” Paul said. He came inside the room and sat down on the arm of the sofa, by Sarah’s feet.
“She been lying to us about it all this time,” Sarah said.
“Well, I can see why,” said Paul. “That aint nothing you want to tell to children.”
“We aint children no more, Paul.”
“You still her children.”
“That aint no excuse.”
“You really that upset about it?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Why? I mean, okay, she lied—that aint never good. But you aint even know the man, did you? He died long before you was born, right? So, I don’t understand why you this upset about it.”
“Because it makes me feel like I don’t know my mother, not knowing something that important about her. It makes me feel like I don’t know her at all. I sure don’t know my father. Where he goes all the time, what he does. I don’t know my sister, either. You know today she told me that she can’t remember what she was like when she was a child, that she can’t remember changing? If that’s true, then I damn sure don’t know her, because I thought all this time she had changed on purpose, out of grief.” She shrugged. “And I don’t know you, either, Paul. We might as well be strangers in this house, all of us. Living this way, cut off from people is bad enough. But cut off from each other is…well, it just makes me angry. And sad. We used to be a real family. We really did. But we stopped caring whether we knew each other or not. And I hate that. I resent it.”
The Summer We Got Free Page 11