Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Raleigh had between his legs the map Sister Joe had drawn him to the Woodrow Wilson Nursing Home; he was glancing from that to the rattling truck in front of the Cadillac, an old truck heaped with swaying crates of noisy, crowded chickens. White feathers whirled out in a trail, as if the birds were frantically attempting to lead some rescuer down the route of their kidnappers. Raleigh said, “We just ate. I thought that novice was supposed to be keeping a silent vigil. How come she was out there telling you her entire life story?”

  “I guess she forgot while we were fixing the car. Listen, Raleigh, lucky Mary Theresa noticed we had dealer plates. She says cops will pull you right over if you’re using them at night. She showed me a lot of tricks, too, to get away from the highway patrol. So, I start telling her about the first time Vera and I were born again right after my mama died, and I was having the worst spell of those dark impulses, you know, to just shoot myself or something, and so Mary Theresa starts telling me about this priest that taught the poetry class at her prison, and so we start exchanging our lives, you know how it is. ‘FIVE HUNDRED YARDS TO CHILL’S CHILIDOGS.’ ”

  Oh, yes, Raleigh remembered the Sheffields’ summer of salvation; he’d been the one forced by the Starry Haven Residents Rules Committee to call upon his neighbors and make clear to them that their evangelistic assaults on the subdivision had to stop. They were ringing doorbells at dinnertime, pretending to borrow a cup of sugar or a pint of milk, and then, once in the kitchen, pulling out their Bibles on unsuspecting acquaintances, whom they attempted to redeem then and there. Raleigh remembered how they would even bring their Bibles to the Starry Haven pool, and how as soon as they were spotted in their bright gigantic beach robes, the whole crowd would duck under water and frog-kick furiously to the far end.

  “Raleigh, you’re passing Chill’s. Oh, well, it’s gone out of business anyhow, poor thing.”

  Hayes caught a peripheral glimpse of stained stucco, smashed windows, and dangling sideways from the roof a washed-out sign in the shape of a hotdog with human arms and legs. “What a world of trash,” sighed Raleigh Hayes, who had no idea that he was repeating a phrase he had often heard in childhood, when he had already begun, young as he was, to share with the old black woman washing his grandmother’s porch her contempt for folly and her intolerance of what she called—although Flonnie Rogers had never read Nietzsche—“God’s first mess-up, this old world of trash.”

  Chapter 15

  In Which Is Continued a Conversation Begun Thirty Years Ago NOT EVEN RALEIGH’S FATHER could remember a time when Flonnie Rogers had not lived in the old sprawling house on East Main. She’d simply shown up one day a short, wiry, sharp-tongued young woman, to begin a job no one had quite realized they were offering her, had moved into her cubicle at the back of the stairs, hung up her blue quilts and her string of red pepper charms, and had stayed, terrifying generations of Hayes children with her tales of bogeymen and bobcats and monstrous slave masters. Raleigh’s first frightened memory of Flonnie was watching her throw aside her mop, haul his cousin Paschal up the porch steps by his hair, push him down beside her on the stoop, and shockingly force the boy’s hand to close around her big toe. Paschal had been choosing “It” in a Kickthe-Can game by the old rhyme:

  Eenie meenie meinie moe. Catch a nigger by his toe. If he hollers, let him go. Eenie meenie meinie moe.

  Flonnie gripped Paschal’s hand. “You hear me holler? You the one hollering now. Now, you cotch my toe, and now I let you go right over my knee, I hear you say that again!”

  Paschal had run, and Raleigh had run after his older cousin into the side yard, where he found Paschal kicking in a rage at the trunk of the crabapple tree, and cursing, “Damn stupid old nigger, damn her, stupid old, stupid old nigger.” That evening Raleigh’s father had instructed them to change the rhyme word to “tiger.” He said Flonnie had raised him and all Raleigh’s aunts and uncles, and if the two of them couldn’t see what was wrong with their game song in general, remember in particular that Flonnie was a member of their family.

  Flonnie often said that the new generation of Hayeses was an even worse batch than the first had been, more evidence that the world was racing to its trashy conclusion. She had no use for the new. As late as the 1950s, she’d kept her chickens in the backyard and her chamber pot under her bed, would not eat canned vegetables unless she’d “put them up” herself and would not cook on an electric stove. She was a Tory and a moral aristocrat, she would have no truck with loud-mouthing trash, white or black, George Wallace or Little Richard. She was a reactionary and a radical.

  The young child Raleigh had thought that Flonnie’s refusals to drink from a particular water cooler or eat at a particular lunch counter were her own idiosyncratic, ornery rules, imposed for the incomprehensible reasons that all adults gave whenever they said, “No.” Soon enough, his father made it clear to him that the rules were idiosyncrasies of the town, of the South, and of the nation, and that Flonnie’s pride lay in her choosing to go into the rest room for “Women” not “Ladies,” so that she never gave the world a chance to make her acknowledge that she had no choice but to obey their rules. As a young teenager, Raleigh had tried once to let her know that he understood her stance and wished to congratulate her on her contempt for the South. She called him trash for bad-mouthing his homeland.

  By then, not only had Raleigh’s grandfather Clayton died, but several of Clayton’s many children had died too, and the rest had started their own homes, so that no one lived in the big house but Raleigh’s grandmother, Ada, and Flonnie Rogers. In the end, the two women were closer to each other than to anyone else. They tormented one another as only the intimate can. On visits, Raleigh would sit with them in the back parlor at night, close to the kerosene stove whose long twisting pipe disappeared into blue flowers on the wallpaper. Every night, Flonnie would slowly place on her nose the gold-framed spectacles that were looped by a piece of twine to the thin plastic belt on her dress. Slowly, she’d unfold the Thermopylae Evening Star and begin silently to read, the paper held in front of her face. “My my my,” she’d mutter in a loud whisper. And, “That’s pitiful.” And, “What’s happening to this world?”

  Flonnie could read and Ada Hayes could not. Raleigh had often been told that his grandmother had never had the opportunity for the education he was (supposedly) enjoying, that she’d worked on the line at the textiles factory from the time she was eight until the day his grandfather (a Thermopylae college boy and a dandy) had seen her, at sixteen, walking with a friend along the industrial railroad tracks and, then and there, had told his brother, “I’m going to marry that girl with the ribbon in her braid.” That was the family story. As to how Flonnie Rogers had learned to read, no one knew; she’d said it was none of Raleigh’s business when he’d asked her.

  On visits to the old house, lying on the hook rug, reading his own book, Raleigh would listen to the metallic tick of the brass-bell clock, and the rustle of the paper bag on his grandmother’s lap as she shelled butter beans, and the flurried shake of Flonnie’s newspaper as she deliberately rattled in the other woman’s face a mysterious world of printed pathos and catastrophe. “Good Lord amercy!” Flonnie would gasp, as if she’d just read that Mars was going to crash into downtown Thermopylae in the morning.

  “What?” Raleigh would ask, but the tiny black woman would shake her head. The sound of the clock would come back until in a while a low snuffling sound seemed to escape Flonnie against her will.

  “What’s so funny?” Raleigh would ask. “Nothing funny,” she’d reply, the whites of her eyes elaborate with a pretense of innocence.

  And Ada Hayes just as ostentatiously pretended to be oblivious of the turning pages. She took her revenge by changing the radio stations to soap operas or news programs while Flonnie was listening to one of her baseball games, a love of which sport she shared with (or had acquired from) the rest of the Hayeses, some of whom had played semiprofessionally, one of whom (Hackney) had died in the outfield
during the eighth inning of a hot summer’s game. That radio’s lethargic litany of balls called, strikes swung on and missed, was the sound that the Hayes house always made in Raleigh’s memory. “It’s a long drive…up…up…up…Willie Mays is going over, he’s back…He’s… GOT IT! An unbelievable catch!” During such rising static of activity, Ida Hayes would reach out and turn the dial. Flonnie never looked up, but soon the newspaper would start to flutter again and its reader to sigh or chuckle or mutter, “Well, I never!”

  On the “sun porch” of the Woodrow Wilson Nursing Home, at the far end of a small rectangular slab of dirty gray concrete, Flonnie Rogers sat in a wheelchair, reading a newspaper.

  “I’m sure you won’t recognize me, Flonnie, but I’m Raleigh Hayes. Hayes? My grandfather was—”

  “Don’t you shout at me, Earley. It aggravates through my ear

  machine like a pig squealing.”

  “Earley’s my father, Flonnie.”

  “You bring me some snuff?”

  “I’m Raleigh, Earley’s son.”

  “Humph. You look just like Earley, but not so good.” In Hayes’s opinion, Flonnie Rogers did not look so good either.

  She’d faded to a sooty gray, skin, lips, and nails; her feet and hands

  were gray gnarled little roots. Her white icicle hair had thinned to

  limp wisps; her snarl had thinned to a whine. Everything had shrunk

  except the bright false teeth. Nevertheless, Raleigh had known the

  minute the nurse opened the glass door to the sun porch who that

  shriveled creature was, hunched over in the metal wheelchair.

  Magnified now by enormously thick lenses, her eyes were as angry as

  ever. The eyes and the stooped hump of her shoulders gave her the

  look of a small old hawk.

  “Who’s that fat grinning man behind the window?” she asked

  Hayes testily. “That Furbus? Why y’all wearing those ugly shirts? You

  back in that band?”

  “No. Furbus is dead, I’m afraid. That’s my neighbor, Mr.

  Sheffield. We wanted to see how you were doing.”

  The look of contempt with which the old woman greeted this bit

  of politesse set Raleigh’s ears on fire, while he stammered on, “And

  to bring you this package from Aunt Lovie.”

  “I had a squirrel cross my path first thing this morning. That’s a

  bad sign. Looked up, saw a flock of sparrows head by. That’s a good

  sign. Now which brings you? You was a little boy, you didn’t believe

  in my signs. You worried at me all the time how you had the answer

  for everything smarter than me.”

  “I didn’t think you’d remember me, Flonnie.”

  “ ’Member how you pestered. Let me see your hands.” Hers were

  crooked, rough, light as bird bones. Then, before Hayes could pull

  away, she spit into her palm, robbed her saliva over his swollen wrist

  and over his knuckles (still cut from last night’s fight with the Hell’s

  Angels).

  Raleigh stammered, “What are you doing?”

  “No warts. You get you a piece of liver on that eye.” Staring appalled at his sticky hands, Hayes said, “How are you

  doing, Flonnie? Everything okay?”

  “I’m a hundred and one.”

  “That’s just amazing. How do you feel?”

  “How you think? Axe yourself how you feel when you get this

  old. It’s all hurt and it’s nuthin’ works. Cain’t do nuthin’ no more.”

  She leaned to look out at a yard of small sparse garden plots, two-foot

  squares of a few weedy flowers, a few limp vegetable seedlings. “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Hayes. He thought of Flonnie’s old

  garden, behind the big house, stretching on forever down the block,

  great green trees of tomatoes and corn, great leaves like fans shading

  squash too heavy to carry, high nets hung with long peas and fat

  cucumbers, and all the dark brown earth magically full of carrots and

  radishes, onions and yams. He thought of the big mahogany table in

  the dining room, crowded with butter beans and okra and turnips

  and melons. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “I’m on my way and cain’t turn back, spite of all the world. I’m

  waiting for the word.” Frowning, Flonnie shifted her slight weight in

  the wheelchair. Despite the warm morning sun, she was heavily

  padded round with thin, cheap blankets, and her arms trembled

  when she tried to undo all the tape haphazardly wound about Lovie’s

  gift. Raleigh helped her tear it open. Cans of Tuberose snuff rolled

  out. A red, marked-down, heart-shaped box of Valentine candy was

  there, with three pairs of white socks, a comb, a boy’s cardigan

  sweater with with the letter “C” sewn on it, and two tabloid newspapers like the one Flonnie already had in her lap: the sort that told

  of the seventy-year-old Liverpool woman who’d been raped by Satan

  and given birth to triplets with hooves; of the Iowa man who’d buried twenty-eight bodies in his backyard without his neighbors noticing; of the Brooklyn wife who’d had her husband’s ashes (at his request) made into an egg timer; of the night of shame Liz Taylor could never forget; and in general, of the world of trash Flonnie

  Rogers knew she’d been obliged to live in.

  The old woman held up a gaudy bottle of inexpensive cologne.

  “What’s that fool Lovie think I want with this? She think I’m fixing

  to jump up and go someplace I need to smell like this? I wisht she’d

  send me a radio, that be something I could use.”

  Raleigh picked up the snuff cans that had fallen to the floor.

  “Lovie wants you to come home, Flonnie, and live with them. This

  place…” Hayes shook his head at the Woodrow Wilson Nursing

  Home. It was grimy and dim and cheap and mean. The furniture was

  spare and graceless; so was the building, so was the staff. In the

  lounge he had seen two very old ill black men sitting side by side on

  a cracked vinyl couch. Their hands rested loosely in their laps. Their

  heads never moved, their eyes were glazed and patient, except when

  a doctor walked by. Then they flinched, hands tightening, eyes

  widening, until the white person had passed them. “Lovie really—” Flonnie opened a snuff can. “Lovie don’t own me. Y’all not my

  home. I’m beholden to nobody.”

  “Well, gosh, Flonnie, you lived at Grandpa’s more than fifty

  years.”

  “I earned my pay.” She pushed snuff up in her gums. “Miz Hayes

  had her day’s work.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I meant the family naturally feels—” “I laid Miz Hayes out in her rose-print dress. That was her particular favorite. With her white earbobs belonged to Serene ’fore she

  passed. Reba come in and ask me, ‘Which you think Mama looks

  best in?’ Her roseprint’s what I said, ’cause I knew how it was her

  favorite. Vicky Anna didn’t know, been gone so long, couldn’t tell

  her own mama from a dead catfish in a mudhole. I tole her and tole

  her, ‘Miz Hayes, don’t you try to rake in those leaves, you stay in that

  bed.’ ”

  Flonnie Rogers had hired her own limousine to ride to Ida

  Hayes’s funeral. She’d sat alone in the backseat of the long black

  Cadillac, her head just visible in the rear window, her red straw hat a flag of mourning and defiance. Then, she’d moved without explanation out of the Hayes house before Victoria Anna moved in, abruptly left as mysteriously as she’d arrived, taking with her the tin />
  trunk she’d kept half a century under her goosedown mattress. “Aunt Vicky says hello,” Hayes lied.

  “Humph.”

  “And, well, the truth is, Flonnie, I’m looking for Jubal Rogers.” She looked at him sharply. “For her?”

  “Her?” Raleigh took a breath and looked up at the sky. “Daddy’s

  sick, Flonnie. My daddy, Earley. He wants to see Jubal Rogers, and he

  wants me to find him and give him some money, and bring him to

  New Orleans. I don’t know, I mean, were they friends or something?

  He’s your relative, isn’t he?”

  Flonnie spat out a dark squirt of snuff.

  “The point is, Flonnie, Daddy is seriously endangering his health

  by checking out of the hospital and leaving town, and what he wants

  is for me to bring him this person named Jubal Rogers.…Well, Lovie

  said to ask you.”

  Flonnie leaned over with a painful slowness and spat again into

  the scraggly grass. “Where’s Hackney?”

  “You mean Bassie? Hackney died a long time ago, Flonnie.

  Remember? Before Grandma died.”

  “I laid her out.”

  “Yes. I know. Bassie’s not well, he had a stroke.”

  “Miz Hayes sent me out to the woods with his suitcase. She said,

  tell him, quit those cards and come home with me, or she be gone

  when he get back. I set that suitcase down in the middle of all those

  white men. Pack of fools. I set it down right smack on top of the

  cards. Back he come laughing, swinging that bag.”

  “Are you talking about Grandpa?”