“You’re Earley’s boy.”
“That’s right. Flonnie, you took me once to meet your sister? Was
she Jubal’s mother?”
Her eyes squinted hard behind the thick lenses. “You’re Raleigh.
All the time pestering me ’bout my burial ’surance. Your mama died
of the diphtheria. Nothing but a child.”
“No, that was my father’s first wife. Grace Louise. My mother was
Sarah. Somebody told me Jubal might have moved to Chicago?” “I’m not studying Jubal. You the police?”
“No, I’m in insurance. I’m trying to find Jubal to give him some
money.”
“I’m all paid up, my funeral’s paid in full.”
“That’s good.” Hayes tried to smile. “But you don’t look like
you’ll be needing a funeral any time soon.”
The old look withered him. “I don’t truck with a lie. I’m going
over Jordan. Sooner the better. This world and me don’t get on and
never did. It’s not worth nuthin’.”
Raleigh was stung by her retort about his polite lie, stung into
honesty. “You’re right, it’s not. So what does that make of the Lord
you were always snapping at me to respect more? You think it’s
‘smart’ to respect whoever made such a shabby mess?”
“You bring me some snuff?”
To Raleigh’s astonishment, the salt of tears stung his eyes. He
couldn’t see the woman in the wheelchair. He saw decades back, the
woman with her hoe, angrily stabbing weeds and flinging them over
her shoulder out of her careful garden. That woman, her thin strong
arms bright in the summer heat, was saying, “You think God
Almighty cares how much you respect Him, a skinny little boy like
you? He don’t care what the President thinks.”
“Well, I don’t care about Him either. I think He’s stupid,” said
the small boy behind her, the wicker basket so laden with soft red
tomatoes, he had to loop both elbows under the handle. The woman spun around, clinched his chin in her dark hand,
and jerked his head straight up at the hot, unclouded sky. “You make
you one of those,” she snapped. “You fixing to try it, you so smart? Or
one of these.” She yanked a long crooked carrot sliding out of the
earth. “See this little finger? Look here! You see this little nail on it?”
she clicked the tiny nail, clogged with dirt, rough-edged, on her small
moving finger. “That’s just a little ugly thing. It ain’t nuthin’. Well,
little boy, you make me one, and bring it on here to me, and then
maybe I listen to you telling me how you just as smart as the
Almighty Lord.”
The glass door to the sun porch of the Woodrow Wilson Nursing
Home shuddered open, startling Raleigh Hayes, and he kept blinking until the past went away. An overweight nurse in a dingy uniform called, “Ten-thirty. She’s got to go to P.T. now.” Flonnie growled as
the woman came closer.
What, at this point, physical therapy was supposed to do for
Flonnie Rogers except cause her discomfort, Hayes couldn’t imagine.
He stopped the wheelchair with his hand. “Okay. Just one second.
Flonnie, please, I’d really appreciate it if you’d help me find Jubal. I’m
scared Daddy is going to, I’m scared he may die before I can get there,
and do this for him, I guess.” Stooping down, Hayes rewrapped the
package in her lap, and slid one of the snuff cans into her bathrobe
pocket. “Please. Do you know where Jubal is? Flonnie?” Flonnie put her thin dry finger to his mouth. “Hush,” she whispered. “Don’t you tell anybody, you hear me? Jubal’s still down in
Charleston, Earley. Still working at the Bayou Lounge. But don’t
mess with him. Leave it lie. Just leave it lie.”
“Pardon?” Raleigh’s legs were cramping as he stayed bent down
beside her.
“Hold still,” she told him. She roughly brushed his hair back with
her fingers. “I don’t want to catch y’all down in Darktown again,
messing with those jugband niggers. They going no place but Hell.
The Lord’s got His special mark on you, Earley. I can feel it. I got the
power to feel it. He’s chose you. If the law don’t hang you first.” Raleigh lost his footing when the impatient nurse nudged the
wheelchair forward. “Poor old thing,” she said briskly. “She doesn’t
know where she is, nine days out of ten.”
“I hope that’s true,” he replied.
So disturbed was Hayes by the old woman’s confusing him with
his father—as if he’d intruded on the most intimate moments in the
man’s life and so gained knowledge he shouldn’t have, and didn’t
want—so shaken was he by Flonnie’s strange elision of all the past
and all the people in it, that he walked right past Mingo Sheffield in
the lobby. Sheffield was trying to bring in the picture on an ancient
television set by twisting the aluminum foil atop its rabbit ears. The
two old men, still seated together on the vinyl couch, watched him. “Hey, Raleigh, where’re you going? Raleigh, wait!…Well, so
long, you two. I can’t fix it any better. Y’all sure could use a new set.
Bye-bye. RALEIGH! Wait up! Where’re we going? You find that mental patient your daddy wants to marry? That wasn’t her in the
wheelchair, was it?”
Mingo kept talking as Hayes drove angrily back to the intersection of stores he’d noticed coming in, the huddled cluster of
McDonald’s, Kmarts, and Pizza Huts that were now nourished by
even the small Southern hamlets. “Everybody in that place,” Mingo
was saying, “was so old it was sad, wasn’t it? Didn’t you think so? If
my mama hadn’t died, I sure wouldn’t put her in a place like that,
and neither would Vera. I don’t mean ’cause they were Negroes. I
wouldn’t put her in there ’cause it was sad. Ned Ware did. Put his
mother in one. Just because she wrapped up the garbage in Christmas
paper. Do you think that’s fair? And she got killed, too, because they
didn’t have a rubber mat in the bathtub.”
“Stay in the car, Mingo, I’ll be right back.”
But when Raleigh returned with his package from the discount
appliance store, Sheffield had disappeared. Finally Hayes found the
fat man in line at the counter of Kentucky Fried Chicken, where he
was ordering biscuits, corn on the cob, and a bucket of Extra Crispy. “Mingo, for God’s sake! It’s not even eleven-thirty!” Eleven-thirty! Aura! Wasn’t she supposed to be on television at
eleven? “Mingo, quick, I’ve got to go back to the appliance store.
Quick. Pay.”
Flushed, Sheffield turned around to whisper, “Can you lend me
twelve dollars? I just remembered they took my money, the drug
gang.”
“They took mine, too,” snapped Hayes. “You’ve got money in
your shoes.”
“That’s for emergencies.”
“Look, you’ve got fifties, Mingo. All I’ve got is hundreds. Use
your damn shoes. Come on!”
The teenagers serving Sheffield were now staring openly at the
two men, one thin, one fat, both in flowered Hawaiian shirts, both
with black eyes, the fat one groaning as he squatted to remove his
wide suede oxford and shake a folded bill from its toe.
It was 11:23 when Hayes made
it back to the double row of television sets lining the back wall of the appliance store, a cavernous,
nearly deserted place.
“Gollee! Raleigh, it’s AURA! Isn’t it? That’s Aura! Look at her,
she’s all over. Here. And here. There must be fifteen of her. She’s on
every set! Aura! She’s famous!” Sheffield, with a red-and-white bag
of food under each huge arm, bobbed his head joyfully at the long
row of televisions, where, indeed, Aura Hayes smiled in all shades of
color and focus. She smiled, in full close-up, and said, “Let me answer
your question this way. What Congressman Lukes doesn’t seem to
understand is, we already have enough nuclear weapons to blow up
the entire world thirty times over. Instead of spending trillions of our
taxpayers’ dollars on missile shields that don’t work, why don’t we
take care of some real problems, like health care. If we’re all floating
on a sea of gasoline, do we really want to play macho games about
who can stockpile the most matches?” Applause rattled the sets. Raleigh’s heart was thudding. Here was his wife, sounding so
poised, looking so crisp in a blue blouse and beige suit he didn’t think
he’d ever seen. He was angry and proud and mesmerized. “It’s Mothers for Peace!” shouted Mingo. “Hot damn!” “Shut up, I can’t hear.”
Congressman Lukes was saying something about wanting to prevent America from enemy attack, and when we fight, fight to win.
Aura was saying, “That sounds like teenaged locker-room talk to me.
This country is not a football game. We don’t need a congressman
trying to prove his masculinity by shooting off bigger and bigger
rockets. We need a congressman trying to help us save the human
race.”
“Oh shit,” Raleigh groaned. “Aura, you’re going to get us sued!” Shouts of “NO MORE LUKES. NO MORE NUKES” had burst
out, and the screens switched to the poster-waving studio audience.
It was mostly female, mostly shouting, and some of it was familiar.
“Mingo, there’s VERA. Good God, there’s Barbara Kettell and
Wayne Sparks and NEMOURS!”
Sheffield pulled the chicken leg out of his open mouth to shout,
“VERA! You’re supposed to be in hiding!”
The hostess of Woman Alive!, a young handsome woman with
tawny streaked hair, paced the aisles with her microphone. “Please,
ladies, let’s keep it down, and try to get in one more question!” Barbara Kettell leaped to her feet, swatting at her livid husband’s flattop beside her as he grabbed at her poncho in an effort to pull her down. “Yes,” she panted nervously. “I have a question for Mr. Lukes. Yes. Well, it’s this. He says he wants to get the government off our backs and out of our lives, and I agree, and then he says it ought to be against the law for any woman to have an abortion even if she’s
raped because it’s the same as murder. So that’s my question.” “What’s your question?” asked the hostess. But Mrs. Kettell had
abruptly disappeared from the screen, presumably jerked back into
her seat by her spouse, the apoplectic president of the Civitans Club
and chairman of the Re-Elect Charlie Lukes Committee. As the camera turned back to Aura, she was seated in a swivel
chair across a coffee table from the congressman. “Perhaps,” she
smiled (and the smile made Raleigh whisper, “Uh oh”), “perhaps,
Mrs. Kettell’s question is to ask Mr. Lukes whether he’s ever been
raped.”
“Now, hold on, Mrs. Hayes.” Charlie Lukes held up a hand. He
was a thickset, jowly man in his late fifties, whose fluffy hair looked
like a wig and whose gray polyester suit looked too tight. He gave
Aura a smile as specious as her own. “I may not be a murderer or a
murder victim, but I sure as shooting can make the judgment that
murder’s a crime.” The Lukes faction clapped.
Aura leaned forward. “Why is abortion murder, and the deaths of
those millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children,
those ‘acceptable losses’ killed in your ‘winnable’ wars not murder?”
She sat back to applause from her faction.
Lukes held the hand up again. “I know Barbara Kettell personally,” he told the camera. “Known and admired her for years. I know
she’s a fine mother and a fine wife and just a darn sweet gal, and I’m
certain her friend here, Mrs. Hayes, is just the same. So I don’t mind
taking the time to come try to shed some light on these vital issues
with the public and with these ladies, whose interests couldn’t be
more sincere I don’t have a doubt in the world. But, ladies, pardon
me, the topic here today is our struggle to rebuild our military
strength in order to insure a lasting peace and honor throughout the
globe, and I’ll be danged if I see what that’s got to do with abortion,
which is a profound and sacred issue too, but as these ladies are not
lawyers or doctors—”
Aura snapped, “First, Mr. Lukes, how dare you assume we aren’t!
Second, you are not, and never have been, a doctor, a lawyer, or for
that matter, a professional anything except a professional bigot and a
warmonger, whose only political experience prior to your regrettable
election to Congress was using the Thermopylae zoning board to
keep African-Americans out of decent housing!”
“WHY DON’T YOU GO HOME WHERE YOU BELONG?”
yelled a male voice, and shouts of “Yeahs!” and “Boos!” fought
through the television speakers.
“Was that Nemours yelled that?” whispered Mingo, the chicken
leg still poised at his mouth.
“Sir, no food allowed in this store!” A prissy salesman pushed
himself between the Thermopyleans and the televisions. “You’ll
have to take that outside. We have a rule that—”
“Will you please be quiet!” Hayes shouted at him. “I’m trying to
watch this!” He craned to see around the man. Aura, Lukes, the
audience, and the hostess all seemed to be talking at once. “You can’t shout at me like that, sir.” The clerk now started turning off all the sets. “And you two can’t stand around watching TV for
free either.”
“Free?” Hayes, losing his temper, thrust a stapled bag in the salesman’s prunish face. “I just bought a $49.95 radio in here not ten minutes ago! And frankly, there’s not another goddamn soul in your
whole goddamn stupid store, so what’s it to you?!”
“That’s true,” said Mingo wistfully. “It’s just like Knox-Bury’s. I’m
glad I’m gone.”
The clerk, still clicking off sets as fast as he could, asked Hayes
to take his profanity elsewhere and asked Sheffield to just take a look
at the chicken litter all over the floor. And as Woman Alive! appeared
to be off the air and the few remaining screens were now filled with
cats doing the mambo, the Civitans didn’t argue with the seething
clerk but left.
“If I’d known a radio meant so much to you, Raleigh, I wouldn’t
have given ours to the nuns. Can you believe that was Aura?” “Frankly no.”
“She’s real photogenic. Didn’t you think she was as good as
Ingrid Bergman when she talks back to her judges in Joan of Arc?” Raleigh passed two cars at once. “That seems to me an ominous,
if not a prescient, comparison.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Mingo, since Vera is obviously not in hiding, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me why you thought she was?” Sheffield nibbled his corn on the cob, sometimes rotating the
ear, sometimes shooting his teeth down the cob like a typewriter
return. “Well, she can’t tell a lie.”
“Oh?”
“So we decided she ought to go to her sister’s.” The teeth gnawed
to the end of a row, and reversed. “If the police had really gotten to
her, it’d have been all over for me.”
Raleigh swung the white Cadillac into the driveway that led to
Woodrow Wilson Nursing Home. “Please try to remember, Mingo,
you didn’t murder anybody. You aren’t guilty. There’s nothing to hide.
Except throwing all that paint on Knox-Bury’s merchandise.” He
parked the car.
“I wouldn’t go back to work for Billy Knox for love or money.” “I doubt he’s going to offer you much of either. Excuse me a
minute.”
“Where are you going? Hey, we just left here. Raleigh? Raleigh!” When Hayes asked to speak to Flonnie Rogers, he was told that
she was still in physical therapy and couldn’t be disturbed. And so he
left the radio for her at the reception desk. He wrote her a note,
which he pinned to the bag.
Dear Flonnie.
Enjoy the games. Take care of yourself. Yours, Raleigh (Earley’s son)
He straightened the piece of paper, wondering again, for the first time in more than thirty years, how Flonnie Rogers—who claimed she’d never been to school—had learned to read; wondering, for the first time, why his grandmother—in those decades of evenings alone together with the black woman—had been too proud to ask Flonnie to teach her.
Chapter 16
In Which Raleigh and Mingo Fall into a Swamp OUR TRAVELERS headed away from Mount Olive and the high tangled cliffs of the Neuse River, headed deeper into Carolina’s flat coastal plain. In Calypso, they stopped for Mingo to buy a liter of Pepsi and use the bathroom. Raleigh called Aura. No answer. He called the realtor who managed “Peace and Quiet,” his Kure Beach cottage, but she didn’t answer either. There was no phone in the cottage; there was no choice but to drive there. It would be infuriating if his half-brother Gates really were hiding out (and from what?) in Raleigh’s property. It would also be infuriating if he had disappeared. Since first grade, when he’d stolen Raleigh’s meticulous model airplanes and sold them at recess for a quarter apiece, Gates had never done anything but cause trouble.
Handling Sin Page 24