by Robert Inman
She finished, breathless. Then she seemed to come to herself. She stared at her hands as if they belonged to someone else, then pressed them quickly together in her lap, capturing them. It was a painful thing to see and Bright felt something very close to tears. But what to do? How to answer? Bright prayed for wisdom, found none. So she tried to buy time. She said, “Fitz asked me to lend it to him.”
“Fitz!” An angry explosion of sound. “His mess is all over the papers and the television news at the beach. You can’t get away from it.”
“No, I suppose not. He needs help, Roseann.”
“What he needs,” she snapped, “is to keep his pants zipped up.”
“Roseann!”
“It’s always Fitz, Mama. Why?”
And Bright thought suddenly again of their childhood: Roseann’s small hand reaching across the table to her brother’s plate, snatching a piece of bread, a drumstick. Nothing she truly wanted, just something to make him bellow with the indignity of invasion. And Bright, striking out with a stinging pop to her hand. Don’t grab!
“Honey, it’s not …”
“Yes, Mama. With you, it’s always been Fitz.”
Bright held her tongue, waited. She didn’t want to fight. “He’s in a fix right now.”
Roseann shook her head violently. “Politics!”
“Yes.” Bright nodded sadly. “Politics.”
Roseann didn’t say anything for a moment. She looked away and Bright could see her lips moving ever so slightly. Words unformed, things unsaid. A wrestling there. Then she seemed to make up her mind, taking a long breath, reaching down deep. She turned back to Bright. “You should know.”
This time, she could not turn away. “What do you mean?”
“You were always up to your neck in it. The school board, all that mess. Always going to council meeting. This issue and that.” She was trying very hard to keep her voice low and calm, but there was something hard and insistent there. Now they were on the old, familiar, poisoned ground. And despite herself, Bright could feel her hackles rising.
“I’m out of politics now,” Bright said firmly. She started to tell Roseann about the town council meeting, then thought better of it. No need to go into that.
“It’s a little late,” Roseann said tightly. There was a long silence, and then Roseann seemed to gather herself, to make a last stab at conciliation. “If you give the money to Fitz, you will never see it again. It will be throwing good money after bad.”
“That may be,” Bright said.
“But you’re going to do it anyway.”
Bright threw up her hands. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the money, Roseann!” She stood suddenly, riven with frustration. “Damn the money! It’s nothing but trouble. People pulling and tugging on me! Fitz and Harley Gibbons. And now you! I don’t even have time to think! So you’ll all just have to be patient!”
Then Roseann was on her feet too. “Patient? PATIENT? I’ve been patient all my life!”
The air in the room was electric now, popping and crackling between them.
“What do you mean? You’ve never been patient about a thing!” Bright’s hands slashed the air. She felt a great fury taking hold of her, was powerless to stop it. All the old poisons, loose in the air, acrid and choking.
Roseann took a step toward Bright, eyes flashing, color high in her cheeks. “I waited all my life for things to be normal, Mama! But they never were! I wanted to be like everybody else! But I never could!”
“No, you couldn’t. You were always busy being impatient and angry and hard to manage! No matter what I tried, it wasn’t enough, Roseann!”
They glared at each other across the great gulf of their separateness. Finally Roseann’s eyes broke away. “You kept me from Papa.”
Yes. That’s it, of course. That’s been it from the beginning. “I did the best I could! We both had to choose, and I chose what I thought was best for you and Fitz. Growing up here, where people cared about you! But now,” she spat bitterly, “I’m the only one left to blame. Well, I won’t have it!”
“Oh, yes, you will. You’ve always had it. Always had it your way.”
“Your father —“
“Begged you!” Roseann cried, her voice breaking now, the glint of tears in her eyes. “He begged you!”
Enough! “Stop it, Roseann!”
Roseann thrust her face forward, very close to Bright, menacing, her voice a growl. “Well, to hell with all that, Mama. One thing about you, you were never sorry for a damn thing you said or did. So I shouldn’t expect it now. All I want is the money.”
“Well, you can’t have it!” Bright flashed. “I won’t buy your approval, Roseann!”
“Damn you!” Roseann cried out. “You owe it to me!”
Bright clamped her hands over her ears, and her voice was hollow and far away as she shouted, “Don’t you damn me! I owe you nothing!”
Roseann grabbed Bright’s hands then, her face full of fury, and pulled them roughly away from Bright’s head. “You killed him!”
Bright lashed out before she could stop herself, her hand a swift weapon. The force of the blow snapped Roseann’s head back and left the flaming imprint of Bright’s hand across her cheek. Roseann rocked back on her heels and stood there, frozen, eyes wide with shock and hurt. Then her hand went to her face and she gave a short, vicious cry and rushed past Bright, into the bedroom. Bright heard the bathroom door slam with bone-rattling force.
Bright stood, hardly breathing, horrified. All this time, all that rancor and conflict, and it never quite came to this. Then she thought, It’s the money! It’s like a beast, gnawing at me! It will consume me if I don’t do something! Now! Bright stood there for a moment, trying to gather her wits. Then she went quickly to the bathroom door, listened to the anguished sobs, tapped lightly. “Roseann, honey, I’m sorry. Come on out now. We’ve got to talk about this.”
“Go away!” Roseann screamed. “Just leave me alone! Don’t ever speak to me again! I’ll take Jimbo away from here and we’ll never come back!”
Bright blanched, the anger suddenly alive in her again. “The hell you will!”
Roseann screamed and the door handle rattled violently. Bright stepped back, suddenly afraid. Such raw, hateful fury! The door rattled again and then shook as Roseann tried harder to open it. “Let me out, damn you!” She raged at it with her fist and her cries were incoherent now, the awful noise pounding at Bright, driving her away. Then the breaking of glass, jars and bottles swept from the vanity top and sent crashing to the tile floor.
“No!” Bright cried. She imagined blood, suddenly saw her father splayed across the front steps of the camp house, blood everywhere, flowing bright red and dripping off the wooden steps onto the hot sandy ground. She backed away from the bathroom door with terror stalking her, stumbling, reaching to steady herself on the bedpost, the doorframe, until she was into the living room with the awful noise following her, beating at her ears. And then suddenly it ceased and Bright stopped, stunned now by dread silence. She took a step toward the bathroom, then she heard Roseann again, quietly sobbing. She turned away and opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch, staggered over to one of the wicker chairs. She collapsed into it, shaking uncontrollably, her heart beating wildly. My God, I’m going to have a heart attack! Then the pounding from the bathroom started again, measured and powerful now, like a battering ram. Then silence again. I can’t face this! I can’t face her if she gets loose! And she fled, down the steps into the yard, just as Jimbo rounded the corner of the house. He stopped, stared at her.
“Mama Bright! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she choked out. Then she looked down, saw the big cardboard check propped against the steps. The money. The damned money! And the idea struck her, powerful and consuming. She knew what she had to do, and do right now.
“Get in the car,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“To the bank. With this.” She
picked up the check and stuck it through the open back window of the Plymouth. It protruded a foot or so, but it would have to do. She opened the door. Jimbo stood staring at her. “Get in!” she commanded, and there was something in her voice that propelled him. He blinked once at her, then climbed in on the passenger side and closed the door, sat watching her curiously. Then she remembered her purse. It had her driver’s license in it. “Don’t move,” she ordered, and she went back in the house and got her purse from the table by the sofa. It was quiet now, but as she turned to go, the bathroom door rattled again. “Mama!” Roseann yelled. “You let me out of here!” She pounded on the door, making it dance with the force of her blows. She might hurt herself. I don’t want that. Bright picked up the telephone, dialed the police station.
“PO-leese,” said the young voice on the other end.
“Tell Homer Sipsey to send the Rescue Squad quick,” Bright said. “There’s somebody trapped in Bright Birdsong’s house.”
Then she closed the screen door softly behind her and went to the car, where Jimbo was waiting, looking hard at her, his face a mask of suspicion.
“What’s that noise in the house?” Jimbo asked.
“Not a thing.” Bright started the car, put it into reverse, backed out of the driveway into Birdsong Boulevard. Then she turned onto Claxton, headed toward the River Bridge. As the Plymouth topped the rise over the bridge, she could hear the siren on top of the fire station downtown, summoning the Rescue Squad. And she could hear too Roseann’s anguished voice flailing away at her. “You killed him!” Bright stomped hard on the accelerator and bluish-gray smoke belched in a great cloud from the rear of the old car as it struggled away from the pursuing furies.
16
She had not been to the state capital in more than three years, not since Little Fitz’s inauguration. That had been a blustery January day with the wind whipping the state flag atop the Capitol and chilling the crowd gathered in front of the big platform built over the wide Capitol steps. The cold and wind had reddened their faces, and so, a bit, had Bright Birdsong.
She had created quite a stir when she stepped out of the car with Flavo Richardson at her side. Fitzhugh had sent a nice young highway patrolman to fetch her early in the morning, and she had directed him first to Flavo’s house, where she badgered Flavo until he finally put on a suit and went with her, grumbling about uppity white folks. The highway patrolman pulled up to the edge of the platform a few minutes before the inaugural parade began, and when she and Flavo alighted from the car, she could hear the astonished buzz from the crowd, could feel their gape-jawed stares. Then Fitz was there, eyebrows at full mast. What will you do next, old girl? He handled the surprise nicely, enveloped her in a big hug and his huge warm smile and gave Flavo a hearty handshake. Then he escorted them up to the platform, where they made a place beside her in the front row for Flavo. The next day, the newspapers wrote about how he was the first black man to sit on an inaugural reviewing stand since Reconstruction. “It broke the ice,” Fitz said later. He liked to put the best face on things. He was at heart an optimist, as she had intended he be. She had also raised him a progressive, as her father had been. Like most politicians, she thought, he just needed an occasional nudge in the right direction.
Bright thought about all that as she and Jimbo approached the capital in the fierce humid heat of the June midafternoon, coming up from the south across the broad flat plain of the river.
She was calm now, in control of herself and very sure of what she wanted to do, at least in the short run. Beyond that, she couldn’t think just yet. She would get her money and give Roseann time to calm down and then she would deal with the rest of it. It would be easier with cash. She could give it away, throw it in the river, bury it. Whatever. But she would deal with it. She and Jimbo. She felt fiercely protective of him now. They had stopped in Columbus for hamburgers and chocolate malts. Then they had had a rambling conversation as she drove on, not about anything in particular, and he had loosened up a good bit. He sat up straight in the front seat now, right elbow propped on the open window, overall-clad, hair a bit tousled by the wind.
“Is that the capital up there?” he asked as they crept along the four-lane, traffic swooshing by on their left. She had been driving slowly and carefully, trying to avoid vapor lock, and it had taken them most of the afternoon to make the trip.
“The seat of power,” she said. “Big government and big banks.”
He turned, looked back at the big cardboard check sticking out the rear window. “Nobody’s gonna cash that thing,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too big.”
“It’s a perfectly good check,” she said. “Harley Gibbons said so.”
“Then why didn’t he cash it? He has a bank.”
Questions. He has that much of his mother in him. “A little bitty bank. We’re going to a big bank.”
“Are you sure it’s all right with Mama?”
“I’m in perfect control of the situation,” she answered.
He fell silent as the city grew larger in the windshield, watching the road and the river that ran alongside, dark green and sluggish. Ahead, the capital shimmered in the heat like a desert outpost.
It was a middling city, nothing like Atlanta or Nashville, where government coexisted with bustling commerce. The downtown was a low cluster of buildings, dominated by the white-domed Capitol set on a slight rise in the middle with the chunky buildings of the various state agencies splayed around the base like matrons-in-waiting. Where Bright came from, folks had always considered the capital a bit pretentious, full of its own social self-importance, when in fact without the presence of state officialdom it would have barely existed. As it was, the capital had sort of created itself with wide tree-lined boulevards and a good number of presentable homes and, in later years, ribbons of concrete expressway to whisk you from the countryside.
The expressway widened to six lanes as it eased toward the city and soared up and across the river on a towering bridge. There had been some sort of scandal about the construction of it in the administration before Fitz took office. There was always some sort of scandal or another. Contractors rigging bids, lobbyists delivering caseloads of whiskey, men making fools of themselves over women half their age. Politics, Dorsey Bascombe had once said to her, was a genteel front for the violation of the Commandments. All of them. Of course he considered local politics quite apart, more a matter of stewardship. A mayor wasn’t really a politician. And Fitzhugh Birdsong had looked at it from a quite different perspective too. He disdained what he considered the mean and grubby business that went on in the state capital and practiced a far different art and craft at the congressional level. Bright, for her part, didn’t make much distinction. Politicians, she thought, didn’t so much fool other folks as they fooled themselves.
The first thing she did was to find a policeman. And that happened just after she exited the interstate onto the broad, tree-lined avenue that led uphill to the Capitol, all white-columned and majestic with the late-afternoon sun full on its face and dome. She saw a police car in front of her and she pulled right up behind it and mashed down on the horn.
“Jeezus!” Jimbo yelped, startled. “You’re gonna get us arrested!”
The policeman behind the wheel jerked with surprise and snapped his head around to look in his rearview mirror. Then he turned on his blue light, slowed, and eased against the curb with Bright at his bumper. They both stopped and Bright put the Plymouth in park and turned off the ignition. They all sat there for a moment, marinating, and then the police officer opened his door and climbed out, putting on his blue cap and hitching up his britches. He walked back to Bright’s car, the heel of one hand resting lightly against the butt of his big pistol, leaned over and peered inside at her. Then he straightened and looked at the big cardboard check sticking out the rear window, a bit wind-tattered at the edges from the trip.
“Ma’am?” he said finally.
“I’m looking for a bank.”
“Any particular bank, ma’am?” the officer asked. He pushed his cap to the back of his head and squinted at her.
“A big bank,” she said, “to cash a big check.”
The policeman looked again at the check, examined it closely, tilting his head to read it. She could see him mouthing the words: FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. “Is that a real check?” he asked.
“Perfectly legal,” she said. “Signed personally by the treasurer of the Dixie Vittles Supermarket chain.”
He nodded. “For fifty thousand dollars.”
“That’s right.”
He looked again, read silently: MRS. BRIGHT BIRDSONG.
“My son is the governor,” she said, helping him.
“Little Fitz?”
“Yes.”
He lifted his cap all the way off his head now, scratched at his hair for a moment, plopped it back on. “Just any old big bank?”
“Right again,” she said pleasantly.
“Uh-huh.” He blinked, looked the check over for a final time. Then he wiggled his finger at her. “Follow me.” And he walked back to his car and climbed in and pulled away from the curb. As he did, he turned on his siren.
“Hey!” Jimbo cried. “That’s neat, Mama Bright!”
Bright flushed with embarrassment, but she followed him as they moved slowly up the boulevard toward the Capitol past gawking knots of people on the sidewalks. My Lord, I hope he’s not taking me to Fitz’s office. I don’t want to see Fitz. But a couple of blocks short of the Capitol he pulled over again and stopped in front of a big office building, and the siren whined to a halt. Bright eased her own car over behind him at the curb. He got out and came back to them. “Well” —he pointed to the building —“there’s your big old bank.” The big brass letters on the granite face of the building read OLDSOUTH TRUST.