It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  But with Calvin each of these traits struck her as endearing. She found herself questioning her own pessimism. The more she questioned, the more she felt herself to be pale next to his color, tired where he was energized, dull while he was inspired. She began to wonder why he liked her and if he would continue to. Each passing moment made the evening more difficult for her.

  After the movie they went to a nightclub nearby. Once settled at the bar, Calvin turned to Joyce and smiled. The blue light that lit up the back of the bar reflected off his teeth and sparkled in the liquid of his eyes, tainting the whites with a warm indigo. Joyce realized she didn't know the exact color of his eyes, even though she'd spent so long looking at them.

  “I don't know why people complained about the movie being too drab,” Calvin said. “I mean, it's kind of gray, but then when there is color, it's like, bam! The whole world just burst out in flowers. I like that. I like it when things hit you by surprise. I do fault the man for cheating on his wife, though. I understand what it means to have passion, but you gotta do right by the ones you commit to.” He paused and studied Joyce for a moment.

  She knew he was waiting for her to say something. “So you're claiming your eye doesn't wander?”

  “Well … You can't tell where an eye may move, but it's not the eye that matters. It's the heart. An eye just looks at the world. It's the person behind it that has to decide what to do with what it sees. On that you can always trust me.”

  “How do you know you can always trust me?”

  Calvin grinned. “Girl, once you've swum in this sea you won't want to go anyplace else. This here's deep water, and you're a fish that likes to swim.” Joyce began to laugh. “I'm serious. I am, even if it's a fucked-up line. Don't laugh. Joyce … Can't you see a brother's trying? But anyway, I'm talking too much. Now it's your turn. Let's have the full history of Joyce Johnston, starting with day one. Gimme all of it.”

  Joyce looked over and nodded at the bartender, who was strolling toward them. “How about we get a drink first?”

  For the rest of the evening, Calvin continued asking questions, and Joyce kept deflecting them. As they talked, Joyce put down drink after drink. She drank hoping that alcohol would relieve her nervousness and allow her to loosen up. She actually wanted to be honest with him about the pain in her past, wanted to explain herself to him. But before long she lost—along with her nervousness—most of her inhibitions, her motor functions, and, eventually, a chunk of the evening's memories.

  A few hours later she awoke from a rambling, fluid dream of twirling ceilings. She opened her eyes and realized that she was lying stretched across her couch, with a towel tucked under her chin, a low stream of tomato-based drool dribbling from the corner of her mouth. Calvin sat at her side, wiping her vomit clean with his handkerchief.

  “Hey, baby,” he said, with a familiarity she had not heard before. “How about that? We've gone and spent the night together.”

  “What?”

  Calvin leaned in and whispered, as if sharing a secret, “Well, I guess you had a little too much to drink. I walked you home. I helped you change your clothes. And then I just took care of you. I just sat here and memorized your face.”

  Joyce closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands. Her head still swam and sloshed as if it were full of liquid. She could only half put meaning to his words, but she understood enough to feel shame creeping into her crowded thoughts. “I just wanted to talk,” she mumbled.

  Calvin smiled. “You did talk, Joyce. You told me everything. We've got no secrets anymore. You even convinced me to go home and introduce you to Momma.”

  It took a few moments for Joyce to respond. She cautiously pulled her hands away from her face. Calvin's smile was still there, his teeth as bright as ever, and his face still held that childish enthusiasm. But it seemed to Joyce that something about him looked different. She couldn't be sure whether the expression on his face had changed or whether the way she looked at it had changed, but she did know without a doubt that he had seen her at her worst, must have heard the things that pained her, must have pushed her limbs through the motions of life—all this, and still he looked upon her and smiled. He never told her exactly what she said that evening, but he also never spoke of it with anything but fondness.

  The following evening Joyce accepted this man into her bed. She wouldn't remember later just how it happened. She didn't know which of them initiated it, whether they spoke about it first or if they acted without words. But none of this mattered. Once together, it felt to her that it had always been this way. He had always been there above her, inside her. She knew every portion of his body, every swell and depression, the curve of his muscles and the softness of his backside. With her arms cinched around his back she took in the whole of him. She felt each contour of his penis inside her, gripped so tightly she committed it to memory in the very first moments. She pressed her palms against his sweaty skin and brushed her lips across his shoulders, tasting the salt scent of him, knowing in those moments no sweeter scent, nothing more right.

  She had a strange thought then. She remembered reading once that by comparison to the possible variety of organisms in the universe, all of the earth's living creatures were quite similar, made of the same simple elements. She'd never given this much thought before because the world seemed so full of difference. But with his flesh gripped between her teeth she knew that on this one thing science was right. The two of them were of the same material.

  And Lord, it was good to finally realize it.

  “JESUS …” JOYCE SAID. “How far back here do you-all live?”

  “It's not far now,” Calvin said. “It's just starting to look like home.”

  They had been driving for the past four hours. First down the interstate, then onto increasingly smaller and smaller roads. For the last several miles their rental car bounced along a dirt road, beneath bare trees, through a countryside of farms and rolling hills. They hadn't actually needed to come down this road, but Calvin chose it for scenic value, what he called “the complete country-fide experience.” He spoke almost nonstop throughout the trip, recounting his youth in the country. He tended to exaggerate the backwardness of country people. He claimed that none of them had figured out how to keep their teeth and urged Joyce to pretend she didn't notice. He argued the virtues of inbred marriages, focusing on how simple it made inheritance. And he told the tale of some local man who, in old age, took to exposing his erect penis in public, apparently proud that the years had not weakened the flow of blood to this vital organ.

  He joked, but often Joyce caught a deeper tone to his voice, some pain in his remembrances that his laughter couldn't disguise. This was his first trip home since he ran away three years before, and she could tell that the call, and the cries, of home weighed more heavily on him with each passing mile. She began to wonder why they were here. Hadn't this trip been her idea? Hadn't she proposed that she meet his family? The idea had seemed novel, almost brave, in the safety of her apartment. Now she felt her fear growing at this endless list of names that Calvin produced, the strangeness of his stories, the tone of his voice, and the image she had conjured up of his mother, a woman who seemed as hard and cold as steel, who towered, in Joyce's mind, like the great trees they drove under.

  Joyce grimaced with each jolt of the car. “How hard is it to pave a road?”

  “No harder than plucking a chicken,” Calvin said, grinning.

  Joyce looked askance at him. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.” Calvin shrugged. “Just, you ever pluck a chicken?”

  “No, I never plucked a chicken.”

  “Well, plucking a chicken ain't easy. Matter of fact the whole chicken killing thing'll mess you up. Grams only tried to make me kill a chicken once. I must have been about seven—

  “ Seven?

  “That's old enough to kill a chicken, if you have the stomach for it. We always used a hatchet. Just lay its little neck across the chopping bloc
k and—” He chopped precisely at the dashboard. “Thing is it scared me to death because sometimes the chicken would get up and run around the yard headless. And there was this one rooster, Mr. Charlie, that I used to have nightmares about. We called him Mr. Charlie ‘cause he was so evil. Fact is that Mr. Charlie spent too long watching us kill his hens. That would have to get on your nerves, all them plump thighs …” Calvin glanced over at Joyce. “Anyway, I didn't do it. I broke down crying. Grams had to take the hatchet from me and do it herself. I just knew that if I did it, I'd never stop dreaming that Mr. Charlie and a flock of headless hens were coming after me.”

  They eventually stopped on a hill overlooking the valley that the Carter family owned. They walked a short distance through the tall grass and climbed up onto the stump of a large tree. The valley that spread out before them seemed as dry and barren as the winter air. The hills rolled off as far as the eye could see, cut up into geometric plots, with different shadings of brown, yellow, and gray One dirt road carved its way hesitantly through the valley A lone hawk floated high above.

  “You should see it in the spring,” Calvin said. He wrapped his arms around Joyce from behind. “It's so green you wouldn't believe it. Imagine all those trees in full bloom, and the fields bursting with little shoots. Look there, I think that's my uncle Pete's place.” Joyce followed Calvin's finger to where a thin stream of smoke trailed up. She could just make out the roof of the house through the trees. “We'll need to stop there on the way in. That's the way people always did it when they visited—stopped first at Uncle Pete's, then Uncle Levert's and on down the line to my momma's house. By the time they got there word had already been sent down and Momma would be out in the yard waiting. I suppose that might happen today. It's hard to sneak up on my mother.”

  “Calvin, you make it sound so … nice, I guess. All that family. All those stories. I don't really know why you left. I mean, you told me, but… I don't know.”

  Calvin ran his tongue across his teeth and thought for a few moments. “It was just too small a world, with too much in it. Everything that happened seemed right up in your face, cramping you. I saw my father just a couple hours before—” He drew his shoulders together like he was shivering, then relaxed them and looked out over the valley. His eyes settled on the hawk. “Do you know sometimes I used to wish him dead? When I was young, I used to think how different it would have been if he were gone. He wouldn't be around to get at us the way he did, and Momma would be different. She had to carry so much because of him. He lost half the land she owned, gambling, I guess. Things just went through his fingers.”

  The hawk suddenly dipped and dropped downward for several seconds, only to check and rise again.

  “It was a Saturday night, late in the summer. Me and some friends had gone into town to one of the little joints they had. I walked in there all ready for a night out and guess who I see? My father, acting like a man half his age, with his mouth all over some woman that sure as hell was not my mother. I froze dead in the doorway. Everybody in the place stopped and stared at me, hoping there'd be some sort of scene. I just stared at him. I could see he was stumbling drunk. I can still picture it now: the grin across his face, the way his hands were groping over her, all of it. I just had to turn around and leave. I remember my friend James said I should go in there and grab him and take him home so he didn't end up driving like that, but I didn't care. Right then he could drive himself straight off a cliff for all I cared. And that's just about what he did. Just what he did …”

  Joyce turned and slid one arm inside his jacket. She laid her cheek against his chest.

  “They found him the next morning, about a half mile from the house. There's this turn in the road … Always was a treacherous turn. He drove straight off into the field and drove the car up the base of a big old tree. It looked like he was trying to ride over it, like he thought, I'll just take a shortcut over this tree here … So then there's that to mess around in my head as well. And then Marshall gets killed the way he does. All that stuff just starts crowding you. Like the hills keep it in, like family never really leaves. Either dead or alive, they're all here, buried over on that hill, rambling around in this valley. How could I stay when I had to see that tree every day and wonder why God had given me the choice to save his life? It felt like James had whispered right into my ear. He said, ‘You shouldn't let him drive like that.’ But I did. I sure enough did.” He sniffled and stroked Joyce's hair. “Anyway, I had to leave to find you. That's all I really wanted.”

  Joyce listened to his story and recognized the pain that it caused him and wished it weren't so. But still—selfishly, hungrily—she wanted nothing else at that moment but for him to truly find her. She understood that you never know a person completely at any one moment. She didn't need to have all of him at once, and she didn't have to tell him everything from her own life today, or tomorrow, or at any specific moment. The sharing between two people could go on always, evolving each day as the world pressed against you with different currents, as they grew more confident with each other, as their eyes learned to look ever deeper into each other. She believed that she'd finally found the other person in front of whom she could slowly strip piece by painful piece her facade away. She would one day stand naked before this man, her true self exposed, as he would before her.

  At that moment, feeling the chill rushing up from the valley of South Hill, hearing the whispers of the ghosts that haunted Calvin, Joyce signed her name on some imaginary dotted line. She agreed to take a journey, to accept the slow revelations that, she hoped, would stretch into two long lifetimes. It was a gesture as great as if she'd lifted her arms and thrown herself into flight like that hawk. An act of faith.

  Outwardly, she said only, “Then let's go home.” She whispered it into the collar of his coat.

  Calvin stood silent. His nose was running, but for a few moments he stopped sniffling. Joyce kept her cheek pressed to his chest. A truck passed on the road behind them. Something rustled in the grass.

  “Okay,” Calvin said, and without another word they drove the five hours back to the District.

  Barking in Tongues

  KENNETH CARROLL

  I

  “Man, don't be ah fool.” Melba snatched the letter from Ezra's hand and bounded playfully across the carpeted bedroom. She drew deeply on the cigarette dangling loosely from the corner of her mouth. The blue light from an early-morning sky gave the ascending smoke an ethereal quality as it drifted hazily around her naked body. “You look like an angel standing there in the light,” said Ezra, his voice low with desire.

  “Ain't no Black angels, Ezra, a good Christian like you should know that; now be quiet while I'm reading.” Melba laughed, her stomach convulsing in amusement. Ezra stared at Melba with what she scornfully called his “let's get married eyes.”

  “I got the letter right after I finished praying,” said Ezra, his voice revealing his Carolina origins. “I've memorized every word of it. Some people who saw him last time he was here said he truly is a blessing prophet, just like he say.” Ezra's voice was an annoying buzz in Melba's ear. She cut him off by reading the letter aloud, drowning out his words.

  My Dear Christian Friend:

  This letter may come as a suprise to you but it is a blessing straight from Heaven because I am on my way back to Washington, D. C. for another very special Deliverance, Blessing and Healing service on this Sunday night coming and every living soul what sees me will get a straight oneway blessing for Monday so help me God in Heaven.

  “You can't be taking this letter seriously,” said Melba. Ezra grabbed his robe from the headboard, carefully concealing his naked body He tied the robe so tight that Melba thought he would slice himself in half “You afraid your mama goin’ walk in,” said Melba, shaking her head and looking out the window at the sun rising from the bottom of the avenue.

  Melba loved her body and enjoyed parading around her apartment in the nude. Her body was thirty-nine years old now
and round and soft in places where it used to be flat and tight, but it still turned heads and could even make this preacher's son forget his religion. Melba looked down at the letter again.

  I am that great Prophet that people is talking about all over the country because I gives out two and three straight blessings everywhere I go. As you know they call me the all seeing Prophet from Texas and I now have headquarters in Baltimore, Md. plus I have branch offices in many areas and thousands of folk is being healed and many folks is getting rich off of Gods blessings so if you want help in a hurry see me this Sunday night coming and I double guarantee you that you can be blessed in one day only.

  Ezra moved in measured steps toward Melba. Despite his expanding waistline and his thinning hair, he excited her with his unselfish gentleness and an almost manic desire to please her. But like any good medicine, Melba could only take Ezra in small doses. She did not doubt his proclamations of love for her; he was always caring and, so far, trustworthy. But Ezra's love was a box where he would keep her in comfortable nothingness. She wanted to live, and living didn't have nothing to do with marrying a born-again square like Ezra.

  He stood behind Melba and stroked her shoulders. “I know it ain't your way to believe in things, but people told me they've seen the Prophet perform miracles,” Ezra said.

  “I know he perform miracles, he got you fools coming to hear him.” Melba laughed. “Ezra, if he so blessed, why can't he get a decent secretary or some spell-checker software?”

  “Melba, you got to believe in something or someone eventually—we all do,” said Ezra, his voice calm and soothing— very deaconlike, Melba thought.

  “I believe in me—period. No men, no gods, no gimmicks. That's why I ain't getting married and having kids. I've seen what a ball and chain men and babies can be.” Melba, resurrecting a deep and bitter hurt as she talked, crushed out her cigarette butt in the Jesus Saves ashtray that Ezra had given her. “I wanta have the good things that my mama didn't have. She waited for Jesus. Every minute—waiting on the Lord to deliver her out of Egypt, which was my father's house.” Melba stood naked in the window; she cupped her hands in a mock prayer. “Oh, Lord, deliver my black ass; deliver me, great savior of Jerusalem—” Melba stopped abruptly to view Ezra's frowning face.