Solemn

by Kalisha Buckhanon

  “What’d you think, sir?” ‘Jason’ asked him. Redvine noticed his many freckles.

  “Sound all right, just fine,” Redvine said. ‘Connor’ waved “Howdy” to him.

  “You meet Walter?” ‘Jason’ asked, motioning behind to the back of the room. The look-alike couple cornered ‘Walter’. They wanted directions to the nearest bus stop.

  “Yes, sir. He helped me in,” Redvine told ‘Jason’.

  “Well, this was our last presentation here for now. We getting on to Mobile. But Walter’d come to your house. You live round here?”

  “Yes. Well, no.”

  “Kosciusko?”

  “Little bit further out. Take me ’bout twenty minutes to drive in if I’m lucky.”

  “Not too far. Trust me, you get deep in this business, digging up your territory, you gonna be driving for days. I mean, we’ve sold tens of thousands of these things.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Really,” ‘Connor’ echoed, as he set the instruments into a nifty leather box. Every part fit in just right. “Big ole clunky home computers a thing of the past, man. Laptops still got a chance, though. In the future, people gonna wanna be on the go. But I gotta tell you, the World Wide Web hit its prime few years ago.”

  “I thought everybody had the World Wide Web now. I keep hearin’ ’bout it…”

  “Oh, they do all right,” ‘Jason’ said. “But so do the advertisers and marketers and corporations turning it worse than television. I mean, come on, least on your favorite shows, you know when to take a break for commercials, right?”

  “True.” Redvine chuckled. “Except for the Super Bowl. I like those a lot.”

  “Exactly,” ‘Connor’ continued. “You have a choice. That’s all gone online.”

  “World Wide Web is one long big commercial, trust me.” Jason laughed.

  “So,” Connor went on (Redvine wondered if they were brothers sawed apart at a past point), “DigiCate is gonna give people an electronic device with encyclopediac information pretty stock and set, like a book you pull off the shelf. But it’s free and clear of drama. A booklike search engine. It’s portable, electronic, easy to read, fun, and sound-enhanced. It makes you feel like you’re online when you’re not. And you can even set it up to separate information and save entries into special folders you control.”

  “We got the edges of America up and running on board with this,” ‘Jason’ said. “New York is on it hard. California too. Chicago’s coming along. Seattle’s our biggest territory. Heather there’s my wife. She shot through Seattle like a racehorse.”

  “It’s kind of the innards of America we lacking now,” ‘Connor’ said. “Trust me, Mister Earl, a year with this and, seriously, you could be just like Walter. He’s on salary.”

  On salary. On salary. This meant guaranteed, sick or on vacation or no matter what. It was all so promising.

  ‘Jason’ and ‘Connor’ took Redvine back to ‘Walter.’ They shook hands again, to make plans. ‘Heather’ and ‘Maggie’ smiled back at him, Cheshire cat grins, while they swept up crumbs left near missing doughnuts and spilt coffee dots. ‘Walter’ confirmed Redvine’s number. He paused. But luckily all the men had business cards with near-matching information. Redvine was going to stop at Alice Taylor’s house straightaway to use the phone, let her know to expect an important call for him. He wasn’t worried about the money to get started. He would find it, from somewhere.

  Redvine strutted out of the Days Inn lobby and took note it had been okay, after all, to pay for Landon’s honeymoon there. The front desk manager even smiled at him on the way out, so a first impression was reversed. He couldn’t wait to get home to tell Bev. Or, maybe he would keep it close to his vest for a while, wait until he sold a thing or two for her to jump up and down for. They didn’t even say anything about the background check that kept him from other work—that little obstruction-of-justice thing back in the day, really just mouthing off to white cops. He wondered if his sisters would lend him some dough, snap out of superstition he was so bad for not visiting his parents more while they went down. He couldn’t say he blamed them. He had been a standard baby of the family, incapable of babying anyone else. But he cried the most. Didn’t that count? How long could they hold it all over his head? It was bygone, just like his part of the little life insurance he was actually happy they used up for the funerals and the debt. He would have made a business with it, had they not been so ornery and handed him some. One monkey, even two, don’t stop no show. He’d get money somewhere else. He had more on his mind than mending fences with a family he might have to put a fence up to once he made six figures. Beggars they’d become. He didn’t have time or mind to think of the naysayers and critics.

  And also because, well, anyway … the Malibu was out of gas.

  * * *

  On the favored lift to a bowl of gas at the nearest gas station and back to the Malibu, Alice Taylor let Redvine in on boys she knew in Jackson. They were into “that stuff,” but hey, they had kept her trailer out of foreclosure and got one of her son’s trucks out of repossession and calmed Rent-A-Center bounty hunters for her. They wouldn’t pass up a little interest for a short-term loan. Redvine could go ahead and give her number out, for good cause. She’d take his calls, plus make a few others of her own for him.

  With instant coffee and sweet potato pie waiting, ‘Walter’ drove a leased burgundy Lexus out to Singer’s to break everything down better than Solemn could manage, once she and Bev pushed through all the papers. The women cleared away the random seasonings, bills, junk mail, Solemn’s homework, and all the unfinished paperwork for the Tudor home bid. It was actually a very good and workable table.

  ‘Walter’s’ pen was gold, real. Redvine could tell. He ran his fingers along the DigiCate Classic Volume for six hundred dollars to him and twelve hundred dollars to his clients, an authenticity certificate, and a frame. But, ‘Walter’ said, the catalog was vast. For the reluctant customers, there was the bonus of a DigiCate Standard Desk Dictionary and Geography Catalog. Only a few hundred. Said they sold those most often.

  Bev glowed up to serve the men more throughout it all, but she was concerned. “You think we can afford all this?” she asked, furrowed and peckish, a last smile to ‘Walter’ before he pulled out their plot.

  “It’s for the future,” Solemn heard Redvine say.

  The future sounded greedy.

  Alice Taylor had driven Redvine up to meet boys in Jackson already. He could do the interest, the deadline, and the terms. Explained it off to Bev as a bank loan. ‘Walter’ would bring by DigiCates, personally, for Redvine to start. He was ready. The future had to come along now. It was the past that was too unaffordable.

  TWENTY

  The Weathers’ wood-paned, wall-length mural to Pearletta—their “challenging” one—performed its function and made its case: she hasn’t always been this way. The wall testified she selected light-pink Mother’s Day cards with flower vases on the front. She went to prom, boy ’cross the avenue. Content in braces. Wondrous onstage. Gentle with a violin. At home in velvet. Enamoring even in chunky heels. She was pretty but not photogenic, a miscommunication that may have twisted if not sealed her fate. Her face on news bits or five thousand flyers printed on bank paper, driven throughout 39090 and surrounding bayous, provoked people to glance once. Just once, because she was dark.

  Viola Weathers used to pride herself on toughing with no AC and now she kept it cold. Too cold. But no one had heart to say. She preferred to serve only green dinner mints with mint green tea, as much for everyone’s nerves as to match the color of her housepaint newly refreshed. “He did it just for me,” she smiled, after church, on Saturday she believed was best. She said she read somewhere that green communicated “life.” Without base and lashes and rouge, she looked sane. Upon a second Easter past the last one anybody could say they saw Pearletta, Viola ascended herself from rumor slayer and battle-axe to the one who would have rolled the stone to find Jesu
s’ tomb empty. Apropos. Seamless comparison. A good dream at night.

  The Magnolia State and its timber-hushed lands were nowhere near as fussy as their mystique led on. The terrain was friendly, amidst cypress swamps with no tides and packets of thicket in black holes on any map, and exceptional woods. It made up for the haunting antebellum homes and quite courageous Confederate flag posters. Short of randomly digging holes in the ground through it or tracing every single hole in the wall where no one blanketed anonymity for too long, Justin Bolden was at a loss of answers to truly condole himelf, let alone the Weathers. As with very few before. And all, no matter their age, were children. Pearletta’s mother called him. So he answered. It went this way sometimes, he was learning: blasts from the past, unlikely friendships, a constellation of names, sedimentation to knights in closed position for life. Thank God he had stayed near his parents, his daughter. How many more could there have been, here and there, farther away, and up or down, to the cities? Even now, as he knocked on forty’s door, the brain picking and names and all of it clicked his clock into worry about dementia, enough to speed it up. Now, he stood in a stranger’s living room in a circle of prayer before talk.

  When she had called him this time it was really for the company and no news. For, two years later of little sleep and strident crying spells and emergency room doctors coming up with little but heartbreak, Viola Weathers sat down. They were going to move. Like most victims would, if only they could. Mr. Bolden must come to say good-bye.

  “Pearly played the violin in school for me. I started viola when I was five. I was named to go to conservatory, but, well, I met Father. No regrets. Pearly liked to read on the porch. It’s why Father put in that swing. She brought the baby up here a few times. Oh, the baby just loved that swing. Thank God she left that nigger home. Heathen, he was. And, you know, kids won’t come round you when they’re on the crooked and broad. But anyway. That sofa chair you sitting in there? I caught her playing with herself in it one night, watching this late mess on cable. TV’s gonna be the death of us. I keep it off. Now, that picture there we took on break to the north, Kansas City. Father’s people there. Say they got miles of new white houses on long drives. Black folks in ’em, too. And, still warm. Snow even, but warm. Oh, Pearly liked that cup. She liked the little blue lattice on the edges, gold on the rim. Pearly loved anything at all complicated. The handle ain’t as round as it seems though. Nope. Little more creative. Little ridges on the inside if you wanna scratch your finger or readjust without setting down the cup. Nice shape. Like Pearly’s … So, Mr. Bolden, you want some fried green tomatoes and pot liquor?”

  “Well, um. Sure.”

  “Come with me.”

  She walked Bolden to the kitchen in back through two halls of what she called her “manor,” sliding her fingers along the lid of an upright piano and straightening shoulder-brushed wooden picture frames. Pearletta would show again one day, like a cat shot off in heat rushed back to have the litter. Itinerant—so all the more capable of exhaustion, hunger, and destitution. They’d take her back any way she came. They would leave a forwarding address with the neighbors and one of the new young tellers still at the bank Mr. Weathers left. He couldn’t add or subtract well since Pearletta’s disappearance. Viola never mentioned her other boy and girl, just holes in a doughnut they were now. The stricken siblings had first escorted Bolden through Pearletta’s third-floor back bedroom, since Viola couldn’t make it up the stairs in her non-public condition. A shame, the bedroom was. Department store perfume and makeup hoarded in such telling piles as to adjourn the concept of brand. A has-been’s overstuffed and tantrum-battered closet. School projects and notebooks and college textbooks crying for help from sunken shelves. The dresser top was greasy; the mirror was smudged and flecked with nail polish. Shame. He could tell it cost good money. Like with any girl, the off-tune music boxes and tangles of common jewelry remained, stuffed animals in astonished poses in the corners. Magazine covers taped to the walls. Posters; Pearletta once adored Britney Spears and U2. Condoms and a league of the one shoe missing spread under her bulky queen bed. Yet the sheets stayed stretched, undefamable, and white. Pearletta had always known it was there, perhaps, for little to nothing to do, to just climb on in it at time to use her key again there.

  Viola had allowed him and him alone—“the black fella”—trust to pinpoint defamations. Him and only him. Just tell her, first, what fault he found. Now, Viola said, room was cleaned ’cause she had a little grandson who grew to like it, for the view of the backyard swing set and sound of the bird feeders, woodpeckers and mourning doves drawn. Bolden could see the room’s windows, heavy white drapes starched and panes down, when he stood in the former root-vegetable garden now entombed by disdain.

  “All things change, as you know,” Viola explained. She was thinner. Her lessened dreadlocks swung back inside, for her to cook and serve her husband first, drowsy in his La-Z-Boy. Then, she would get the good policeman’s plate ready. Out back in the gazebo, Bolden slipped back the mosquito net and made himself comfortable in a wrought-iron chair at a matching table teetered out of balance. A monarch let itself in.

  Out of the sun, away from the station and his precinct grounds and with perspective to go along with the Buick, Bolden noticed different things from time to time. There is a breeze. Shade is the noblest mercy. The sky ain’t always blue. Leaves ain’t all the same. Ants are quite the characters. Day or night, the wildlife camouflage among it all, to guard the living from the reproach of dead silence. He saw a squirrel round off for what may, even lower critters cut through grass and silt loam. The swing set and slide were scratched and scraped from good use. Pearletta had to be dead. So long as a door to a home like the Weathers’ was open and a four-poster bed overlooked a swing set stayed set, even the most committed junkie would have sulked home by now. Mr. Weathers’ fishing poles drooped and his bait pails tipped against a wood chalet shed, the door cracked with the ins-and-outs of inventorying life, prepping to relocate a lifetime. Its witty, sand-dusted mementos stacked atop shelves and tables and racks Bolden wanted to get to know. With Viola scatterbrained inside, and Bolden too polite to rush her, he went alone.

  A crow faceup and wings spread lay at the edge of it. Probably warm. Bolden nudged it with side of his Doc Marten behind sprouts of maidenhair at side of the shed. Besides tougher signs of the industry a banker was not known for but relished nonetheless—a leaf blower, a push lawn mower, axes and saws—the shed stored the runoff of a family clearly once intact and going places. An ivory crib and rocking horse, practice basketball hoops, three matching ten-speeds, a ruffled and collapsed above-ground pool, an old Easy Bake Oven set, golf clubs, and marked boxes of clothes meant for donation. A construction of antique hard drives, computer screens, scanners, typewriters, and even a floor-model Xerox machine sat covered by painter’s plastic. Atop a carpenter’s table were paint pans and cans. The mint-green color Viola pointed out seemed to be the only color used from the many there, all mild. If only he had met Pearletta here and not there. If only there had been no Singer’s Trailer Park awaiting her … or if Pearletta had waited here, longer, in colors of life and with sound of bird feeders, on porch swings.

  Viola tapped Bolden on his neck and he shivered.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” Viola said. “I gotta start on this shed soon.”

  “No,” Bolden told her. “A nice one. I’m curious ’bout the size. It hold so much.”

  “We had it custom-built,” Viola told him. “Expected more grandkids … Pearly wanted to hog this on up, too.”

  “Oh?”

  “That girl wanted it all. Before we could crack champagne on the side or cut a ribbon to it she already thought it was hers. It was gonna be her little art studio.”

  “I ain’t know Pearletta was an artist.”

  “She wasn’t. Could’ve been though. It was just excuse to run on off from us and do things in secret and keep folks guessing, like now, I guess.”

 
“Oh, well, okay.”

  “She was impatient with painting. So we bought her the stuff to start that pottery bit, ’fore she went off to Oakwood. Actually used it all, too. Still, when she showed up from time to time these last few years. ’Bout a year after all the mess in that there park.”

  “Yes, Singer’s,” Bolden said. “There’s good people there, despite…”

  “Keep dreaming,” Viola said. “The pottery appealed to her nature a bit more than the painting, you know. It was dirtier. Tough to handle. Business, we told her. We was paying. Black child in Mississippi ain’t got no business thinking ’bout majoring in no art. Or black child in all America for that matter. But you’ve done mighty well for yourself, Mr. Bolden. You wanna see some of the stuff she made? It really is pretty.”

  Bolden followed Viola to a spacious dugout behind the toys. He saw an electric potter’s wheel and stone slab table, unopened bins of clay, and sealed tins of glaze.

  “This little pug mill last thing we bought Pearly,” Viola said. “Cost a fortunte nearly. When she lost the baby. Divorced that dopehead we told her not to marry. Cost us another fortune to untangle that braid. But the pug mill was my gift. To cheer her up.”

  Bolden looked at the stacks and stacks of clay circles and glazed vases belonged to Pearletta. He moved near them. Viola skipped past him to resituate the dozens of sturdy works, as she really had only been doing in the shed at times she intended to start purging it. There was music behind the labor; depending on the shape and the glaze, a different sound came when any of it touched. Some pieces had broken, in clumsiness and poor judgment more so than incoherence or rage. However, since she had an audience, Viola was much more careful and systematic about her fiddling. This-away and that-away some needed to be, looked better as, matched colors better, sized up closer … the touching of it all and the sounds. Even the dirt it uncovered added to the melody.