“I don’t know.” House’s voice was a whisper.
“Maybe he stood up for himself,” said Pip. “Think about it. Maybe he stood up for all of us. Look here.”
Pip illuminated photograph after dusty photograph with the flashlight and House took them all in for the first time. Here was young Norwood Boyd, older Norwood Boyd, Norwood Boyd with Parting Schotz, Norwood Boyd with people House didn’t know—so many people.
“And when he grew up he joined the Merchant Marines,” said Pip. “Just look at everywhere he traveled, at everything he did! Then he ended up in this house alone these past many years, for reasons of his own.”
And that was when Pip surprised House: “I loved Norwood Boyd for that one act of friendship. Why did you love him?”
14
I always enjoyed playing ball, and it didn’t matter to me whether I played with white kids or black. I never understood why an issue was made of who I played with.
—WILLIE MAYS, CENTER FIELDER, SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS
House’s heartbeat thumped in his ears. “I didn’t . . . love him! I didn’t know anything about him.”
“You visited him every day for one whole year!” said Pip. “And you never found out nuthin’ about him?”
“I . . . I didn’t ask him questions.”
“Why didn’t you, House?”
House thought about it. “Well . . . he was sick.”
Pip nodded his old gray head and stroked his chin with two fingers. “I see. Yes, he was sick. But his mind was good. Where is your sense of wonder, House? You missed the opportunity to know a great man.”
They stood in the great man’s house in the dark, the silence between them.
House tried to think of a reply. “He scared me at first.”
“Folks are scared of what they don’t know,” said Pip. “What else?”
“My father told me to come,” said House. “He said I could be useful to an old man who was going to die soon.”
“I know what you did,” Pip said. “I set it up with Norwood and then with your daddy.”
“You did?”
“I did.” The flashlight bobbled along the wall with no particular aim, bouncing like a spotlight on Norwood Boyd’s life in pictures as Pip talked. “Doc MacRee spoke with your daddy about it a year ago, when we lost some of our help—my granddaughter Gladys and her family moved to Jackson—you know that story. Doc MacRee and I knew Norwood was going to need more watching over in that gloaming hour before supper and bedtime. Norwood told us you’d be perfect for the job.”
“He did?” House fidgeted.
“You’re wonderin’ why, ain’t ya?”
“He didn’t even know me.”
“He knew you.”
“How?”
“Now you got questions!” said Pip. “Now, when it’s too late to ask Norwood about ’em!”
“He knew my mother,” said House. He’d show Pip he knew something.
“Yes, he did,” said Pip. “We all knew your mama. Very well.”
The answer surprised him. In the shadowy hallway House blinked back tears. Everyone knew his mama but him. But of course they would have known her.
“Your mama was special,” Pip said.
Hearing his mother was special to someone else was more than House was ready for. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. His nose began to drip.
“Sorry by itself doesn’t do anybody any good, son. You got to open your mind, House Jackson. You got to wonder. You got to open your heart.” Pip aimed the flashlight beam at the library door. “You got business in there?”
House shoved his hands in his pockets and shook his head no.
“I think you do,” said Pip. “Norwood said you’d be here the night he passed. He said to wait for you. Now I have.” He handed House the flashlight. “’Lectric was canceled today—they cut off the juice.” He walked to the front door, where his figure was an inky spot in the darkness.
“I told you that baseball story for a reason, son. It’s up to you to figure out the meaning of it. So I’ll leave you to your business. Good night.” He turned to go, hesitated, and then spoke one more time. He kept his back to House.
“I know you don’t like my girl right now. I know she made it hard for you last year.”
“Yessir.”
“She didn’t mean to.”
And with that, Parting Schotz walked out the front door of Mr. Norwood Boyd’s home and shut the door behind him, leaving House alone with only Eudora Welty and a hallway of old photographs for company.
15
Produce great Persons, the rest follows.
—WALT WHITMAN
House shone his light on the photograph of Pip in the baseball uniform. He could see the resemblance to Pip the old man. It was in the eyes, in the smile. Aurora Angels. “How about that?” he whispered.
The Aurora County All-Stars weren’t organized, they had no uniforms, and they played only one official game a season, but it didn’t matter what color you were—if you were a boy living in Aurora County and you loved the crack of the bat or the feel of the ball, or the sound of the wind in your ears as you ran the bases, you could play ball.
He stared at all the photographs. Maybe he was looking right at his mother, somewhere on this wall. What would she have looked like as a girl? Norwood Boyd was so much older than his mother would have been. How did she know him? Questions. He had questions.
He opened the tall door to the library and stepped in, the flashlight beam lighting his way. It was an enormous room with high windows facing the front of the house and a long sofa in the middle of the room, facing the far wall. The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with books. In the past year House had read seventeen books to Norwood Boyd, all of them from this library. Every afternoon when House arrived, he’d pick up the current book from the nightstand, open it to the ribboned bookmark that saved their place, and Mr. Norwood would sigh. “Let’s see what Long John Silver is up to today,” he might say. He would smile when he said it. Then he would settle in and be silent, and House would read for almost an hour, until Mr. Norwood Boyd fell asleep. Then he was free to go. Sometimes Pip would arrive when he was reading. Sometimes it would be Miss Mattie. Someone would take his place, and he would go home with the latest chapter of a story in his head. He had begun to look forward to the next chapters as much as Mr. Norwood did. He and Norwood Boyd had shared an unspoken camaraderie in those late-afternoon hours.
House counted bookcases until he came to the fifth bookcase to the right of the door. He stood on a step stool to reach the seventh shelf. He shone the flashlight across the row of old books until he came to the only green spine. He pulled the book off the shelf and saw that it had fancy scrollwork on the cover. He climbed off the step stool before he would allow himself to read the title by flashlight: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. It looked familiar, but he couldn’t place where he might have seen it before.
He fished the note out of his pocket and reread the words Mr. Norwood Boyd wrote:
After the dazzle of day is gone,
Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars.
After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Your mother gave these words to me;
Now I give them to you as treasure for the days ahead.
Look for me in every atom that you see.
House opened the book and looked at the inside front cover. Written in a beautiful, careful script were the words Eizabeth Jackson. House stared at the signature until he couldn’t see it anymore. He rubbed his eyes with weariness. It didn’t make sense. “Symphony true,” his mother had said in his dream. She had sung the song to House when he was little. Moves the symphony true. “Listen for that symphony, House,” she had said.
He listened. He heard nothing.
And what should he do now?
He considered
the situation. An old pug-dog slept next to House in Mr. Norwood Boyd’s library. An old man had told House a story about baseball that was supposed to mean something—but what? Another old man had died and left House a treasure—a symphony true. And his mother . . . how did she figure in?
A mockingbird sang an insistent song in a tree outside the library windows. House had a half-mile walk back home. And, as he got to his feet clutching his incomprehensible treasure, he realized something: It would soon be exactly twenty-four hours to the minute since he had come to Mr. Norwood Boyd’s ghostly home in the almost light of yesterday, when he had been awakened by Eudora Welty. He had followed the dog back to Mr. Norwood Boyd’s and had found the man almost dead.
He had followed the instructions his father had given him many times, to call Doc MacRee if there was ever a problem. And he had taken one last look at Mr. Norwood Boyd. There had been a book at the end of his bed. He’d made note of it when he came into the bedroom but had forgotten about it until now. It had been green with fancy scrollwork on the cover. It was the same book he was now holding. Leaves of Grass. A long shiver grabbed House by the shoulders.
He looked at the book, and he looked at Eudora. Had she been wearing the note in her collar when she first came to get him? He couldn’t remember. He only remembered seeing it when he crouched inside the honeysuckle bush. So how did Eudora get the note in her collar?
Like an answer to his question, a body rose from the couch.
16
I hated to bat against Drysdale. After he hit you he’d come around, look at the bruise on your arm and say, “Do you want me to sign it?”
—MICKEY MANTLE, CENTER FIELDER, NEW YORK YANKEES
House dropped the book and the flashlight; they clattered to the floor like tiny firecrackers exploding in a shower of light. Eudora yelped and plastered herself to the rug. House tried to run but his legs were rubber. He willed his heart to keep beating.
Bathed in the moonlight coming through the tall front windows, the body rising from the couch was no more than a soft shadow. And its voice, it turned out, was a whisper. “House?”
Cleebo! The blood rushed back to House’s head along with his breath. In two seconds he was on top of Cleebo, throttling him like he was wrestling a chicken to the ground to cut off its head. “You!”
Cleebo’s body went soft like a floppy doll but still House couldn’t stop pummeling his friend. Cleebo began to cry. “I thought you was a ghost!”
House shook Cleebo by the shoulders and shouted at him. “What are you doing here?”
Cleebo cried harder. “Stop it, House!”
House released his friend and Cleebo mopped at his face. “I told my mama I was spendin’ the night with you,” he sobbed. “I snuck in here . . . hours ago! . . . got scared . . . climbed up in this old couch . . . musta fell asleep! Next thing I know I hear . . . I hear . . .” Cleebo hiccuped a huge breath and kept going. “. . . something in this room—I knew it was a ghost—I knew it—I was a goner, for sure!”
House shoved Cleebo back into the couch. “You sleep like the dead, Cleebo,” he said. He tried to keep the shake out of his voice. “I’ve been here for ages!”
Cleebo wiped at his eyes while he cried some more. “All I wanted was to find the treasure—just like you!”
“There ain’t no treasure, Cleebo!”
Cleebo’s face wore the look of a little boy who’d just been told there were no more ice pops in the freezer. “You already looked?”
House didn’t hesitate. “No! Yes!”
Cleebo sniffed through his tears and tried to stop crying. He wiped his nose with his T-shirt. “You ain’t gonna tell nobody I cried, are you?”
House’s anger fizzled as his fear dissolved. The room was quiet again. He watched a spider skittle away from the cone of yellow light on the floor. Eudora Welty trembled next to the couch.
“Swear you won’t tell.” Cleebo scrambled to his feet in the soft dark and stepped in place, side to side, toe to toe, hugging himself.
House picked up the flashlight and played it across the floor until he found Leaves of Grass. He picked it up with one hand while he gave Eudora a slow stroke with the other. The dog snuffled a sigh and closed her eyes.
“I’m dyin’ here, House!” said Cleebo. “Swear you won’t tell!”
House slumped into an armchair and settled into it like he was an old bag of beans filling in all the crevices. He switched off the flashlight. The room lost any yellow light it had possessed; the far walls of books shimmered in a dim silvery glow from beyond the windows where the world was stretching out in the darkness to nowhere, never ending.
“Be still!” House commanded. Cleebo stood as still as a stick.
House’s insides were full to bursting. He’d held his secrets inside for such a long time. He looked at Cleebo’s desperate face and made a decision. “I’ll tell you somethin’ I won’t tell anybody else,” he said, “and if you don’t tell, I won’t tell anybody about you crying.”
Cleebo sank back on the couch with a grateful thump. “Done,” he said wearily, relief spreading over him like soft butter on hot toast. “It’s a deal.”
And so, enveloped in the light from the morning moon, House unburdened himself to his friend. He told him what he’d been doing every afternoon for almost a year. He told him everything but the story of finding Mr. Norwood Boyd on his deathbed. He hadn’t been able to tell his father about it, and now he found he couldn’t tell Cleebo, either. The very act of dying was so precious, so private. And, truth to tell, a part of House wondered if he had somehow been summoned to keep watch with Norwood Boyd as the angels came to take him to heaven, in the same way that he’d watched the angels come for his mother, six years ago. Surely, those who were summoned to attend the dying were charged with holding that moment sacred. He would keep it to himself. He would keep his note to himself as well. But everything else, the whole year of coming and coming to Mr. Norwood Boyd’s house and of reading and reading book after book, he shared this story.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming over here every day? I coulda come with you!” Cleebo wore his disappointment like his wrinkled clothes, slopping all over the place.
“I didn’t tell anybody, Cleebo!”
“But I’m your best friend!”
“I didn’t even think to ask!”
“What did he look like?”
“He was old and wrinkled, like Pip.”
“Was he always in bed?”
“When I got here he was.”
“Did he talk?”
“Sure he talked.”
“What did he say?”
“Not a lot. ‘How are you, House? Thanks for coming, House . . .’” He stopped himself as he remembered.
“What?”
House bit his lip.
“What was the last thing he said to you?”
House heard it. The morning that he had been summoned by Eudora Welty, the last time he had sat next to the rosewood bed, Mr. Norwood had closed his eyes and spoken his last words on this earth: I have enjoyed your company, House.
House swallowed around a lump in his throat. “I don’t remember.”
“Can I see his room? Can I see where he died?”
“No!”
“Did you check the freezer for babies?”
“Stop it! I read seventeen books cover to cover while you were having fun catching pop flies and running the bases. And I can tell you: Mr. Norwood Boyd isn’t a circus sideshow, he’s a person. Or . . . he was.”
“Why did he shut himself up in this house all these years?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.”
“The guys ain’t never gonna believe you did this . . .”
“You ain’t gonna tell ’em!”
“Oh. Right.” Cleebo scratched his head. “Why not?”
“They believe those stories about babies and ghosts and killings. And they’ll call me as crazy as they called Norwood Boyd.”
; “Well, I feel sorry for you,” said Cleebo. “Why would your daddy want to punish you like that? You couldn’t play ball, but you could have come and watched.”
House shook his head. “Watching’s like torture when you can’t play. And besides, Mr. Norwood . . .” House hesitated.
“What?”
House’s face flushed. “He was a friend of the family.”
Cleebo’s eyes bugged wide. “How so!”
“I don’t know.” House was not willing to go further. “That’s what my dad said.”
“Wonder what’s his connection to Frances.”
“I can tell you that,” said House. “If you’re brave enough to walk into that hallway.”
17
I think of few heroic actions which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.
—WALT WHITMAN
The flashlight made a puddle of light bobbling on the pictures in the hallway.
“Pip’s like Jackie Robinson!” whispered Cleebo after House told him the story. “Did he play second base like Jackie?”
“I don’t know . . . I didn’t ask him,” said House.
“And Mean-Man—just like Pee Wee Reese!”
House shook his head. “Pee Wee was a shortstop. Mr. Norwood was a catcher.”
Cleebo shook his head. “That’s not what I’m talkin’ about. Nineteen forty-seven Brooklyn Dodgers. First season a black man played in the major leagues. There were folks in the stands—even in the dugouts!—who screamed at Jackie to go back to Africa—and worse—when he came onto the field to play. They screamed at Jackie Robinson! Jackie Robinson, who made six All-Star teams in a row! Jackie Robinson, who was National League MVP in 1949! And nobody has stole more bases than Jackie Robinson!”
The Aurora County All-Stars Page 7