Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands

by Susan Carol McCarthy

  Daddy sits silently, thinking.

  Yes! I think. You must say yes!

  “We don’t usually hire help this time of year, except for Robert, who sweeps up a couple times a week. But . . . it has been several seasons since the showroom had a thorough cleaning. We could keep Armetta busy for a week or so, maybe two. That help?”

  Luther’s and my shoulders sag in relief. “Bless you, Mist’Warren. Thank you. Can she start tomorrow?”

  “Eight o’clock, before it gets too hot.”

  Luther looks down at the keyboard, then back at Daddy.

  “They’s something else . . .”

  Daddy’s nod tells him to continue.

  “Ah had a visit from Mistuh Harry T. Moore. You know who he is?”

  “Leads the N-double A-C-P over in Brevard County, doesn’t he?” Daddy says. “Helped the Negro teachers get a bigger paycheck?”

  N.A.A.C.P.? Marvin used to joke that those letters meant Negroes Annoyed by the Abuse of Colored People.

  “That’s him, ’cept he’s the State leader now. Mr. Moore heard ’bout Marvin and come to see me and Armetta, asking what the authorities been doing ’bout it. Ah told him Constable Watts says he’s ‘looking into it,’ which is ’bout like a diamondback wonderin’ where that rattlin’ noise come from.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So Mistuh Harry T. Moore say he talk to Mistuh Thurgood Marshall ’bout what happened. You know him? Head lawyer for the national N-double A-C-P in New York City?”

  “Know of him.”

  “Mistuh Moore say since we was together when we found Marvin, Mistuh Marshall be wanting to talk to you, Mist’ Warren. Mistuh Moore say Ah need to ask if you’d be willing to talk to them.”

  “Of course, Luther. I’d welcome the opportunity to speak with either of those gentlemen.”

  “Mistuh Moore say Mistuh Marshall been a good friend of the coloreds in Florida. He say Mistuh Marshall has big friends in Washington, D.C., might be able to get the local authorities to pay more attention to this.”

  “Tell Mr. Moore I’ll be happy to help, any way I can.”

  “The hang of it is,” Luther says, his voice all of a sudden choked, and his eyes glimmer, “Jerry Tee heard some of those ol’ Crackers talkin’ at the gas station. They say the Klan wasn’t even after Marvin. They just confused him with somebody else in a white Cadillac with New York plates.”

  Luther’s head drops, his shoulders fold in on it as he begins to sob. Daddy’s eyes are watery as he puts his arm around Luther’s bent-over back. I feel hot tears rising, their wetness racing down my cheeks.

  “I heard that, too,” Daddy tells Luther softly.

  Luther tugs a large plaid handkerchief out of his pants pocket and wipes his eyes and his nose.

  “Mist’Warren, the Klan done kilt-dead our boy for nothin’.”

  Daddy takes a shuddery breath. “I know, Luther, and I can’t even begin to tell you how bad I feel about it.”

  “Thank you,” Luther says, blowing his nose and wiping his eyes again. “Ah couldn’t tell Armetta ’bout that, and Ah warned Jerry Tee he better be muffle-jawed in her direction; her heart’s done broke enough already. Ah ’pologize for spoiling your evening. It’s just been a rope . . .”

  God! How did You let this happen?

  “No apologies, Luther. Armetta’s isn’t the only heart that’s hurting around here,” Daddy says sadly, catching my eye across the room.

  “Folks in The Quarters are scared outta they wits; most of ’em grabbin’ they chil’ren off the street at the least li’l noise or the motor-by of a white man’s truck. The chil’ren are having night terrors, too. Hardly a night goes by that Ah don’t hear a couple of ’em, up and down the way, waking up screaming in they beds.”

  “Luther, these people must be stopped. There has to be a way.”

  “Ah wish they was, Mist’Warren. Ah sincerely wish they was.”

  But who? my heart cries. How?

  Chapter 8

  I’m running through the dark grove to keep up with the others. Just ahead of me, a woman hoists a boy roughly to her hip. I watch him bury wide, frightened eyes into her bony shoulder. Just behind me, the voice of one man urges on another, in words I don’t understand. On both sides, trees like fountains tunnel the row; their leaves too long and too thin to be citrus, with round red fruit I think may be pomegranates.

  The way is steeply uphill. I’d like to stop and catch my breath, but I’m afraid of getting trampled by the heavy feet hammering the hard ground behind me. Chest heaving, back wet with sweat, finally I reach the tree break.

  A crowd surrounds the hill’s rocky crest. Without stopping, I squirm my way into them, past rough elbows and dark, cutting eyes, desperate to reach the center. I know this scene by heart. I’ve flipped past it a million times, green section, middle of the book, above small block letters that spell GOLGOTHA. Except—and the shock of this hits me like a fist—on the towering, rough-hewn cross, red neon lights flash JESUS SAVES. At the base of the cross, a circle of angry men are kicking and hitting the man on the ground; horrible movements made spastic by the pulsing red lights. “Somebody! Help him!” I scream, outraged at the strangers craning their necks to see. “Marvin!” I cry, pushing, kicking, clawing through the crowd, “Marvin, it’s me, Reesa!”

  “Reesa, wake up! You’re all right, honey, wake up!”

  In the small constellation of our family, Daddy may be the sun, but Mother is our moon. Hers is the face that lights the night’s shadows.

  “You were dreaming. What happened?” Mother asks, the sound of her voice and scent of her hair proof that the nightmare is over.

  “I was trying . . .” I sob into the softness of her shoulder. “Trying so hard to save Marvin. But they wouldn’t . . . I couldn’t get to him.”

  “Nobody could, honey. I’m sorry.”

  “Jesus couldn’t save him. And neither could I,” I tell her darkly.

  “It was a dream, Reesa. Nothing but a bad dream,” she says, smoothing my hair. “Poor thing, you’re all right now. Lay down. I’ll stay here for a while and rub your back. Go to sleep now, honey. Good night, sweet girl.” Under Mother’s soothing lunar light, I drift back into shallow sleep.

  The mid-morning light paints the white walls of my bedroom silvery. Outside, a breeze threads the needles of the pine tree by the car barn. A lone bird calls loudly from the top of it.

  That bird sure wants somebody’s attention, I think. Whip-Poor-Will , he cries again and my eyes fly open. Somewhere, off in the direction of Lake Opalakee, another sound seems to answer him, low, rolling like thunder but more alive, the bellowing of the lake’s notoriously big bull ’gator.

  It’s officially spring, I remember. Oh, Marvin, I heard it! I listened and I heard. Can you hear it, too, wherever you are?

  The house is uncommonly still. This late, Mother and Daddy are long gone to the packinghouse. The boys are off, too, on a field trip with Doto to the plane show at Orlando’s airport.

  In the kitchen I see Mother’s left a place mat, napkin and bowl in front of the Shredded Wheat. I eat my breakfast in the sunny kitchen, listening again for the whippoorwill, wondering who taught Marvin all the things that he taught me. Maybe I’ll ask Armetta, I think as I head out the door. She’ll be at the packinghouse today. Maybe not, I reason, remembering Luther’s visit. Apparently, unless they bring it up directly, care for a grieving person is best done sideways.

  Outside, under a bright bowl of spring blue, the world seems soaked with color. Green grass laps like a river around Mother’s island of rosebushes. Pink, coral and scarlet blooms cast a net of fragrance over bright orange butterflies that dip and bob as if tied by an invisible tether.

  Across the street, a pair of redbirds hop along the pitched roofline of the Turnbulls’ old house, the crested male singing bravely to his mate. That house is rented to the Carmichaels: Miz Evelyn Carmichael sings alto in Daddy’s choir and, a lot of folks say, is a dead ringer for Ava Gardne
r. But her husband, poor pale-faced Mr. Frank Carmichael, they say, doesn’t look a thing like Frank Sinatra. Their teenaged son Robert works for us part-time at the packinghouse. He calls my parents Mr. and Miz Mac, and me Macarooni. Robert wears white, rolled-sleeve T-shirts, like Marlon Brando on the movie posters for Streetcar Named Desire. He has a motorcycle which he’s forever riding or working on in the Carmichaels’ garage.

  Next door, in front of the Turnbulls’ new house, modern concrete block with shiny terrazzo, a pair of scrub jays complain bitterly to Miz Sooky Turnbull and I don’t blame them. Miz Sooky stands with her back to me surveying the all-white Easter garden that’s been the talk of the town for weeks. White azalea bushes, in full flower, flank the sides of a giant magnolia tree serving up milky blooms the size of soup bowls. In front, a stand of pearly Easter lilies trumpet behind the row of white-starred bushes Miz Sooky calls cape jasmine. Mother calls them gardenias.

  On Easter Sunday, Mother and I were standing in a circle of ladies outside the church when Miz Esther Hall raved, “Sooky, your Easter garden is to die for! Whatever made you think of an all-white display?”

  “You’ll probably laugh,” Miz Sooky trilled, “but I was at the station, taking Fred his lunch, when a carload of Nigras pulled in for gas. It was hot, so they piled out of the car thirsty, but, of course, none of them had enough money for Coke-Cola so they headed for the water fountain. Fred pointed out the sign, and of course, you never know if they can read, so he told them ‘Whites Only, No Coloreds!’ Well, that’s when it came to me . . . a white-only garden without a stitch of color!”

  As the rest of them tittered on about how lovely the whole thing looked and smelled, Mother and I left in search of Daddy. Truth is, I was mad at Miss Sooky, at all of them, for shoveling out their comments like a bunch of garbage on Marvin’s grave.

  In her new henna rinse and green gardening smock, Miz Sooky looks like an overgrown stamen in the heart of a fat white swamp flower, its scent impossibly concocted. To me, the whole white garden thing’s unnatural and that’s what the squawking blue jays are trying to tell her.

  Fortunately, she doesn’t see me. I stick to my side of the street until I’m past her—I do not want to talk to her, I do not trust what I might say—then sprint into the Turnbull orange grove. There’s a dirt road running across it that we call “Fred’s shortcut” because it connects the Turnbull house on Old Dixie Highway to the Turnbull station next to our business on the Trail. I’ve used it forever to walk between home and the packinghouse.

  Like most of the groves around here, the Turnbulls’ navel trees are trailing late bloom from treetop to grove floor, like a bride’s veil. Gratefully, I slip away from Miz Sooky into the close, sweetly scented passageway.

  “Ah heard our preacher waxing on poetical ’bout ‘the lilies of the field,’ ” Marvin said once. “Personally, Ah hain’t never seen no field full of lilies but Ah shore do love a grove in Blossom Time. Ol’ King Solomon hisself wudn’t ’rayed such as these!”

  The leaves on the trees are full and richly green, lighter and finer than they’ll be later, in the high heat of summer. Soon, I think, sniffing blossoms, the last of the bright white petals will fall, taking their heavenly scent with them. The little green vases inside will swell in Green Time, from pea-sized globes to full-size fruit, golden and juicy at Orange Time. That won’t happen until November. And it wouldn’t happen at all, I remember, if Mistuh Bee and Miss Angel Blossom didn’t do their part.

  At the end of Fred’s shortcut, the scent of orange blossoms gives way to the reek of high octane and hot asphalt at Turnbull’s Standard Oil. Just inside the work bay, next to the Coke cooler, I see the cold-water fountain and notice, for the first time in my life, the sign Miz Sooky talked about. It hangs, fat black letters on white cardboard, a good head higher than me, at adult eye level.

  Is it new? I wonder. The curling edges of the cardboard, a diagonal smear of old grease give me my answer. Without stopping, as I always have before, I wave politely to old Mr. Fred, who nods above his newspaper, feet up on his desk, in front of the electric fan. Seeing that sign, realizing it’s been there forever, I feel suddenly embarrassed. Like I’ve been an ignorant player in an awful game. Shame on you, I tell myself, resolving never to drink from that fountain again. And I feel it, the bee sting of shame on me.

  At the highway, I quicken my pace. In the fall and winter, when our navel trees are heavy with fruit, the big billboards invite the snowbirds to “Pick An Orange Free!” and “Send Some Florida Sunshine To The Folks Back Home!” Earlier this month, Daddy and Robert changed the panels to pull in the warm weather folks with “Ice-cold Orange Juice, Fresh-squeezed,” “All-You-Can-Drink For A Dime! (Limit 3).” Nobody in their right mind has any business drinking more than three glasses of orange juice. If the bulk of it doesn’t make you sick, the acid will.

  Across from me, the tall gray tanks and buildings of Mayflower Citrus climb like turrets of some medieval castle, quiet this time of year, after winter’s roar of fruit juice processing. At its highest peak, like an eagle’s nest, is the room with windows all around and a clear view of every operation: the private office of Mr. Emmett Casselton. You can’t see him from here, but everyone knows he’s there—pulling all the strings in town. Emmett Casselton is head of Mayflower Citrus, king of Casbah Groves, and, no doubt, chief of the Klan that murdered Marvin.

  My thoughts, like arrows, fly at Casselton’s wide-open windows: A truckload of shame on you, too.

  Chapter 9

  There you are!” Mother dimples as I enter our showroom. She sits on her stool behind the register, paperwork piled neatly in front of her. “Find your breakfast?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  “Armetta brought you something today,” she tells me in a voice that says mind your manners.

  I follow her gaze to the back of the showroom where Armetta Cully, Luther’s wife, my friend Marvin’s grieving mother, stands at the top of our stepladder. White cloth and spray bottle in hand, she’s tackling the high glass shelves of the marmalade section, dressed in the white uniform and thick-soled shoes she used to wear at May Carol’s house in Opalakee. It’s the first time I’ve seen her, since Marvin and all, and I approach her, fearful of saying the wrong thing.

  “Hey, Armetta,” I call softly, shyness suddenly clogging my throat.

  “ReesaRoo,” she croons, setting aside her cloth and climbing quickly down. “Gotta getta a look at you!”

  I can’t help but smile, reminded that “Ol’ Gonna-Gotta-Getta” was one of Marvin’s pet names for her.

  “Girl! You weren’t no bigger than a minute when you was born . . . you a pretty half-hour now!” Armetta exclaims, a grin brightening her face, tiny gold tendrils curling around her teeth.

  Maybe it’s her smiling eyes, so like Marvin’s but not exactly, her teasing tone, or the gentleness with which she places her palm under my chin and lifts it to look at me; all of a sudden, an ocean of sorrow slams over me, stealing my breath away. Worse yet, the four terrible words that have bashed against my brain, beat like wild birds caged inside my chest, fly out my mouth. “Oh, Armetta,” I cry, before I can stop myself, “Marvin’s dead, gone forever!”

  All at once, I fall and am pulled sobbing into the wide, warm circle of her arms. Armetta’s twice the size of Mother. In the soft talcum-scented saddle between her breasts, I feel, rather than hear, the beat of her great heart.

  Behind us, crunching gravel, car doors open and slam, signaling the arrival of a carload of customers.

  Armetta walks me quickly into the cool quiet of my parents’ office, hidden in the crook of the L-shaped showroom.

  “Oh, child,” she says, stroking my hair, softly weeping. “Mah boy, he loved you like a sister.”

  “He was my best friend,” I sob. “He was the best friend in the whole world and, and . . .” I try to stop crying but I can’t. “Everything seems all upside down without him.”

  Armetta holds me, anchors m
e, as my head spins with the awful truth that the world I knew, bright and warm and fun, has spun and quaked and fallen away to reveal something infinitely less simple, more dangerous and complicated than I ever imagined.

  She holds me close, then, after a time, she pushes me just far enough away to see my face. Sternly, she says, “Reesa, lemme tell you somethin’. When Ah was ’bout your age, Ah lost someone, too. My old grandmamma told me somethin’ Ah’ve never forgot. God is the potter, she said, and we clay in his hands, soft and weak which don’t do at all. It’s our time in the fire, don’t y’see, that gives us strength and shows His purpose. Without that, we couldn’t hold water. Y’understand?”

  I bite my lip, unsure. God and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms these days.

  “God has His plans, honey, for all of us—you, Marvin, me, your mamma and daddy, everybody. And, He gotta prepare us. Time in the fire don’t burn us, y’see, it helps us be ready for whatever’s ahead.”

  “But Marvin’s gone forever,” I wail in protest.

  “His work was done, Reesa. His time come.”

  “But why couldn’t he just die natural? Why’d it have to be so awful?” I want to know as the terrible memory of him groaning, bleeding in the truck bed flashes through my mind.

  “Oh, child, there’s no explainin’ the meanness in this world.” Armetta shakes her head, wipes wetness off her cheek, then cradles my hands in her palms. “But there’s goodness here, too. You can’t never lose sight of that, hold on to it. It’s the goodness that gets us through.”