In the Shadow of Alabama

by Judy Reene Singer

  Take the “A” train.

  He concentrated on the words to mask the polite conversation, to contain himself, to keep himself from screaming out that it was all motherfucking bullshit.

  “I wanted to talk to you about something else, sir,” Fleischer finally said. “The sacks.”

  The general looked puzzled. “The—what?”

  “The sacks, sir,” Fleischer said, with a little more courage. “You know, the new addition to the wash rack cleaning protocol. To keep the planes from crashing.”

  General Markham squinted his eyes, trying to remember, then nodded wearily. “Oh yes, seems Colonel Fairchild mentioned something about capping the wires. I believe he and Sergeant Hogarth came up with that solution. Brilliant idea. You’re both from the wash rack, aren’t you? What do you think about them?”

  “It was my idea,” Fleischer said. “And it’s working very well.”

  The general stared at him. “Your idea?”

  Fleischer drew himself up and glanced over at Willie.

  Willie met his eyes. I’m not backing you on this, motherfucker.

  “I kept all the records, sir,” Fleischer said. “I have all the records. I discovered the wires were getting corroded by the chemicals, so my wife and I made these sacks—”

  “Your wife, Sergeant?”

  Fleischer nodded, then finished eagerly. “Yes, sir. To cover the ends of the wires. I mentioned it to the colonel, sir, and he ordered me to turn them over to Sergeant Hogarth.”

  “You were ordered to turn what over to Sergeant Hogarth?” the general asked patiently.

  “All my notes, sir,” Fleischer replied. “How we made them. I still have the original notes.” He explained how he had mailed himself copies of his notes, and how the United States Post Office could serve as his witness because the dates on the envelopes, along with the daily newspaper clippings tucked inside, would document that his idea was formulated long before Hogarth had claimed it for his own.

  “My men worked hard on it, too, sir,” Fleischer added. “They had to put them on the wires without losing production time. They even suggested some modifications so it worked better.” He turned to Willie. “Isn’t that right, Private Jackson?”

  Willie looked at him coldly, and barely assented.

  General Markham leaned back in his leather chair and made a bridge with his fingers as he reflected on Fleischer’s words. “Bring those records to me, Sergeant,” he said. “Bring them to me immediately. I would very much like to see them.”

  * * *

  It created a small stir on base when Hogarth was issued an official reprimand. Fleischer had presented all his notes and self-addressed envelopes, his sketches, a few samples of the original sacks done in the white oilcloth with pink roses, convincing the general that Hogarth had pirated the idea. An official warning was put in both Hogarth’s and Colonel Fairchild’s permanent records, and Hogarth was demoted to corporal. The one-hundred-dollars-in-twenty-five-years savings bond was cancelled and reissued to Fleischer, though as far as Willie knew, he never received it. All the men in the 823rd Quartermaster Squadron were issued commendations, that, in the privacy of their barracks, were joked about and demoted to the status of toilet paper. Fleischer received no other recognition for his efforts. What he did receive, though, were a lot of new enemies who felt he had done both Hogarth and Fairchild a major disservice.

  * * *

  It had all come to nothing, Willie thought with some measure of satisfaction. Screw him! All Fleischer’s efforts had come to nothing. Today had been another long, hard, sweaty day in the wash rack and it was over. He sat on his bunk and took a deep breath. The fury he felt for Fleischer wore like a gall, like a rock in his shoe. How could he ever have thought there could be a friendship between them? How could he have been so stupid, so fucking stupid, as to think they could be anything? They were living in two different countries. They would always be living in two different countries: the United States for White People, and the United States for Colored. He stood up, ready to take a shower, when he remembered Fleischer’s ring. He felt around, deep inside his pocket. It was still there. He took it out and looked at it. The stone was hard and cold under his fingertips; the gold band sparkled in the light. His first impulse was to toss it in the trash, but he felt funny about that. He walked to his locker and pulled the door open, and stood in front of it for a long time, turning the ring over and over in his fingers. He went off to the latrine to get a wad of toilet paper and returned, wrapping it around the ring and stuffing it into his shaving kit, right under the brush with the mother-of-pearl handle. When the time was right, he might return it. It just wouldn’t be right now.

  Chapter 36

  Cruelty is so simple, really. You just turn your back on your own humanity. It’s a blindness of the soul, really. You see symbols instead of the life in front of you. The pastor saw the chance to bring a Jew into the fold instead of a man simply repairing broken items to supplement a meager army pay. The bus driver saw a big black man looming toward him, instead of a confused and flustered young soldier trying to figure out the right thing to do. Willie had seen a white man who screwed over his men, instead of a man so indignant over their treatment that he was misguidedly driven to do something about it.

  You have to look with your heart. It is really the vision from the heart that matters. After Willie told me this part of his story, he had to rest a bit; the story took a piece out of him. There was nothing I could give him, no exoneration that he could accept from me, that would make it all right.

  * * *

  For days after Willie told me about the bus incident, I saw nothing except the slow-motion fall of a gentle giant, clutching his chest, his face puzzled, his last moments spent trying to understand an unspeakable act. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore with Willie after he told me the story; his eyes had taken on a glitter of rage and then inexpressible sadness when he spoke and it worried me. I didn’t want to lose him as a friend, but I didn’t want to listen to my father get maligned. He was still my father. I didn’t mention it to Rowena. I played it over and over in my mind, like a private horror movie. I hear the vitriol in Willie’s voice when he spoke about the bus, the bitterness he harbored toward my father, and I am flustered. I didn’t know what to say to him, since I see both sides. I know my father and I know he never had a prejudiced bone in his body. He was just trying to do the right thing, but it was at the wrong time.

  Willie and I spend the rest of the day playing checkers and talking about the weather and my farm and general things, avoiding the pain and hate and plunging remorse that had once filled Willie’s heart.

  * * *

  “You like music?” Rowena asks me after dinner. We are relaxing in her living room, talking politics and religion, agreeing and disagreeing, enjoying a bottle of white wine and each other’s opinions.

  “I used to play the piano,” I tell her and regret it immediately. I never tell anyone that I used to play the piano. She glances over at the piano, black ebony elegantly draped with a green, yellow, and ocher dashiki, then walks over to it, slides the robe away, and opens the cover to reveal the orderly array of black and white keys.

  “Please play something,” she says. “I haven’t played in years, but I would love to hear something.” She steps away from it expectantly, her hand still resting on the robe.

  My heart pounds with embarrassment. “Oh no, I haven’t played since I was sixteen. I taught myself to play, so I don’t really have any technique.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she coaxes. “My father taught himself to play, too. Won’t you just play something?”

  I approach the piano like it’s a place of worship. The keys are cool under my fingers, familiar as if they were my own children. I sit down and close my eyes. I know what I crave to play, something I used to play from memory, “Les Preludes, Part Two,” by Liszt, an exquisite symphonic poem. I start, and at first get only a few hesitant notes, dysrhythmic, quarreling with each oth
er about who goes first, who will take a turn. I am impatient with my hands, clumsy, awkward, there is no music in them at all. Then slowly, like a fawn approaching from the woods, the music comes; I hear it, my fingers summon it, notes fall upon themselves, upright and triumphant, it flows, it flows and I can only listen, as much a bystander as Rowena and Willie. I know it without thinking; my fingers play like they were sixteen years old again, lyrically, ferociously, the way they played before my father gave my piano away, right before I ran away forever. I play it with anger, remorse pushing away the broken phrases and sour chords. I play with fury, fury over a young black man who died for nothing, fury for the hollowness that I carry; my father never stopped once, to listen to me play. I play for my heart, which beats in agony, struggling to help me find a way to tell David that he is loved, loved, loved. I play until my arms burn and my fingers ache and I have to stop, breathless.

  I look up at Rowena. “Oh my,” she says, comes over, and kisses me on my cheek. I excuse myself and go to bed.

  * * *

  The moon is full, iridescent white in a black sky, an alien pearl lighting the room. I slip from bed and take the carton of pictures from the closet and carry a handful to the window. I find the one that matches August Woodrow Randolph. He has a round, good-natured face, with eyes that remind me of a deer, dark and dreamy. I can envision the look of surprise that crosses his face as the bullet tears into his heart, the light fading from his eyes, the full lips grimacing in pain before going slack. A cloud crosses the moon and the room darkens. I need to cry. I want so much to untie all the strings and let the knots fall away, but I am like the earth in the winter. Dead. Covered in a mulch of memories. I slip back to bed and quietly grieve for the music I had lost, for the love I might lose, for my ancient piano, and a young black man I have never met.

  * * *

  “I am sorry,” I tell Willie the next morning. “I’m sorry that August died. I’m sorry that my father was involved with it. I guess that’s why you never returned his ring.”

  Willie looks surprised and holds up his hands to stop me. “Oh no!” he says. “You don’t understand at all. I was angry with him. But then, as time passed, I realized he couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”

  “He should have known,” I say. “Those were bad times. He should have known that it was going to lead to something bad.”

  I had fought this journey.

  I had just wanted to pay my respects to Willie, pick up a sound bite, and move on. I knew my father was a smart man. He could reinvent electricity, if he had to. He was flawed. But was he redeemable?

  Willie puts his hand on mine. “Only the good Lord knows what is going to happen.”

  I look away from him. If the good Lord knew what was going to happen, why couldn’t He have stepped in and prevented August’s death? Willie and I sip our coffee in silence, thinking. Finally, I stand up.

  “I have to go home soon,” I tell him and lean down to kiss his cheek. “I’m needed at home.”

  “You have to come back again,” he says. “You know, you have to hear the end of the story to understand any of it, at all.”

  * * *

  “Call Mom,” Sandra says. She had called me almost as soon as I walked in the door, home from Boston. There is something in her voice, and so I immediately call my mother. She answers on the thirtieth ring.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she says in a low, defeated voice. “If I knew it was you, I wouldn’t have answered. I was expecting Sandra.” I’m not sure what to say, but I know I won’t apologize for not being my sister.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I don’t know what to do with myself,” she answers. I don’t know what to advise. I know so little about her. After I left home as a child, we barely saw each other. She was not a nurturer; every bit of her maternal energy had been directed at my father to keep him calm.

  What might she like to do? Travel? Join some kind of widows’ group and make friends and do crafts?

  “Are you eating? Make sure you eat.” It sounds lame and shallow right after I say it.

  “Not much. I miss your father,” she says. “I think about what his voice sounded like and I miss him.”

  “He screamed at you all the time,” I feel compelled to point out. “How can you miss that?”

  “You don’t remember him the way I do,” she replies. “He used to make me laugh. He was always being silly.”

  I can’t imagine my father making anyone laugh. I’m trying to summon a picture of him being silly; it doesn’t come.

  “Don’t you remember the little poems he used to write?” she asks.

  No.

  “He used to write me little poems,” she says dreamily. “With little drawings. Don’t you remember those little pictures?”

  No.

  “I don’t remember anything like that,” I say. “All I remember is his anger.”

  “Oh, that was after he got out of the army,” she says. “The army did that to him. He was different before.” I don’t say anything for a while, letting her remember.

  “Do you remember the sacks he made?” I ask. “For the planes?”

  She is quiet for a moment. “We sat up every night for weeks, making them,” she finally replies. “I didn’t have a sewing machine. Made them by hand out of oilcloth. My fingers got all raw.”

  “What ever happened?” I ask. “When Dad showed his report to the colonel?”

  She doesn’t seem the least bit surprised that I am familiar with a story my father never told us; she shows no curiosity, no interest. “Oh, I don’t know,” she replies, dropping her voice on “know.” “He had been all excited at first, and then never mentioned it again. I don’t remember if those things happened before or after.”

  “After what?”

  “That explosion,” she says. “When they all got killed.”

  My heart slams to a halt from the shock that jolts through my body. I take a sharp breath. “When who all got killed?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She drops her voice on the last word again, and I know it’ll be useless to try to push her for more information. “It’s all in the past. I’m tired of talking.” There is a pause, then she adds softly, “In fact, I’m tired of living.”

  * * *

  When you look into a mirror, you are not seeing things as they truly are. The reflection is backward. A parallel vision perhaps, but it is all reversed.

  I didn’t like at all the way my mother ended our conversation, and I call Sandra right away. She and I have never seen the same thing, even in the same situation. We see mirror images. I see my mother secretive and stubbornly rejecting help, insisting that she wants to stay in Arizona; Sandra sees an elderly woman failing in health and memory who needs someone to step in. I see my mother trivializing the ravaging damage done by my father; Sandra sees a normal family with a few issues. But my mother’s last words have stayed with me. I don’t want her to feel that way. My heart breaks from those words.

  “I think I’ll just fly out there, pack her up, and bring her here to live with me,” Sandra announces after we talk for a few minutes. “She needs to be supervised.”

  “You’re probably right,” I say unhelpfully.

  “She is frail. And I don’t think she’s taking care of herself,” Sandra continues. “We need to step in.”

  “I don’t think she wants us to.” But I am thinking, she doesn’t want me to.

  “It isn’t right to let her live alone like that.”

  I am immediately stricken with guilt. Sandra is the good daughter. The good daughter for thinking of my mother’s welfare, for making sure my mother spends her last years being taken care of by family, for taking over the reins. And she is a very good daughter. I would have dutifully obeyed my mother’s wishes and left her in Arizona and called her once a week, worried about her. Discouraged and hurt by her constant rejection, I wouldn’t have even thought to bring her to my home.

  “No, no,” I begin to insist, in a
redemptive bid. “Why don’t we bring her to New York? She can live with me.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit strenuous to bring her to New York?” Sandra asks.

  “She isn’t going to be flapping her arms to fly the plane,” I retort. “And it’s just about as far as flying to Georgia.”

  Sandra pauses. “Are you sure you want to do it?” she says. “I know you don’t feel very close to her.”

  And I realized this. Cruelty is turning your back on those who, even though they have rejected you, need you for their survival.

  “I’ll take her,” I tell my sister. “It’s my last chance with her.”

  Chapter 37

  Malachi’s bag is still packed and standing outside his front door. While I was gone, he restrung ropes in another area of my yard. They are very tenuous; all Lisbon has to do is push against them with his chest and down they’ll go.

  “Order fencing,” he tells me. “Before there’s a catastrophe.”

  Danielle has pretty much taken his place as barn manager, but she doesn’t actually manage anyone. I have promised to find someone to help her, because she is doing all the stalls now, plus stacking hay and grain and taking care of the horses. She is competent and pleasant. More than competent, she is highly efficient. She feeds the horses breakfast, pulls out a few bales of hay and spreads the flakes around the paddocks, cleans out the buckets and fills them with fresh water, then leads out the horses, and mucks out the stalls, all before ten in the morning. I realize, with a wrench, that Malachi would have gotten half of it done around noon. Maybe 2 p.m. After his second nap. She gives me a cheerful wave as she pushes the wheelbarrow past me.

  “I put Lisbon in his new paddock,” she says. “So he and Toby don’t fight.”