Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Therefore, the evening after his first communion, at the surprise party for his aunt Victoria, while all the Hayeses, singing, “Rye whiskey rye whiskey rye whiskey I cry, If I don’t get rye whiskey, I swear I will die,” lounged in the green rockers and swings and along the white rails and wood steps of his grandfather’s porch; while his cousins were screaming, “Red Rover,” off in the dusky side yard; Raleigh slipped away. He went to the cavernous basement, walled with all the vegetables Flonnie Rogers had “put up” in her war against the trashy modern world. There he removed his confirmation suit with ritualistic precision. He wrapped about his loins a large white pillowcase, modeling the folds on biblical movies. Then, with a long clothesline tied at one end to the front bumper of his uncle Hackney’s new blue Nash, and the other end tied tightly around his waist, Raleigh Hayes brought to trial the power of God. He was scrupulously fair. He picked the Nash, not only because it was half a block away from the porch, but because it was on absolutely level ground. He wouldn’t require that God enable him to pull the car uphill. He even finally found and managed to release the emergency brake. He gave God every chance. While Raleigh strained against the rope, his bare feet stinging as they pushed into the gravely asphalt, he chanted aloud the Lord’s Prayer. He said it ten times while he jerked and pulled and leaned and panted. He squatted on his haunches, waited for breath to return, then—scrupulously fair— he tried again; this time, Christ’s two commandments, which, like the Pledge of Allegiance (with which he sometimes started by mistake), he could race through with only three gulps of air. “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

  Nothing happened.

  “All right,” warned Raleigh, and gave God a final, third chance. He started to sing the Creed he had struggled so proudly to memorize. “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.…”

  He felt something! A tiny lessening of the tension in the rope! “Heaven and earth…Heaven and earth…” Frantically, he tried to remember what came next in the Creed then skipped rushing ahead, guessing at words he didn’t know. “And of all things visional and invisible and in one Lord Jesus Christ, forgotten not made, being of one supper with the Father by whom all things were made.” He felt it again! The slack in the rope. He could take a step. Another step. The car was moving. Raleigh strained until his neck ached and blood ran from the corner of his lip. He had pulled the blue Nash ten feet forward when he heard the hideous sound whose remembrance, even thirty years later, sweated his hands and face.

  It was the sound of half a dozen of his cousins kicking leaves as they ran up the deep-shadowed sidewalk. It was the sound of laughter. They crowded around him, knocking into each other with mirth. Then Butch Clay and Tildy Leacock both shouted in his face, “It’s Uncle Hackney! It’s Uncle Hackney!” Sickened, Raleigh rushed, tripping over his rope, to the sidewalk. And there, rising from the rear of the Nash like a giant, stood his twenty-year-old uncle Hackney, cigarette glowing in his wide handsome face, Coca-Cola bottle in his hand, painted tie with a palm tree billowing out from his stupendous chest. “You little shits!” Hackney thundered at the skipping circle of Raleigh’s tormenters, and they scattered in a flurry of leaves. Then he leaned down to the boy. “Hey, Raleigh, hey little buddy, I’m sorry. I just wanted to give you a hand.”

  His nephew, enraged at the knotted rope he was desperately yanking free, said nothing until he could fling it to the sidewalk. Then he snarled, “I’m not your buddy. And I won’t ever be!”

  “Listen, hold up. Hold up. You just needed just a little bit of help, that’s all. You had it going, little buddy.”

  Already at the corner, already in tears, Raleigh shrieked, “I don’t need any help!” And by the time he had run the long way around the block to the basement, Raleigh Hayes had become the cynical agnostic he was to remain until the present day; his atheism tempered only by the necessity to posit a God in order to despise Him. Slamming the cellar door twice, he stood beating on it until a voice came out of the dank musty shadows.

  “You, Bassie! You stop banging on that door! Miz Hayes trying to nap!”

  “I’M NOT BASSIE.”

  Flonnie Rogers, her round gold-framed glasses glinting, moved into the light of the bare bulb that swing from the beam where strings of gourds and peppers also hung. “You the boy left his good clothes on that barrel over there where spiders fixing to lay their eggs in them and eat you alive?”

  Silent and sullen, Raleigh rubbed his arm over his eyes, then he picked up his trousers from his neat stack.

  “What you doing with that good pillowcase? You think nobody had to bend over with sciatica so bad they can’t do nothing, and wash and iron that pillowcase?”

  “I HATE EVERYBODY.” Raleigh flung off the loincloth and pulled on his blue pants. “They’re all fat stupid dopeheads!”

  Flonnie yanked him into the shirt. “How come your stomach all scratched up and blood spotted? You gonna mess up this new shirt. Stand still.” She spat on the edge of her apron and blotted the raw rope burn that circled his waist, then brusquely started buttoning.

  “Ouch. I wish the A-Bomb would blow them up. I wish they’d all drop dead a million million times.”

  “You better not let the Lord hear you talking like that.”

  “I hate Him too!”

  Stuffing the shirt into the pants, the wiry black arms spun him in a circle. “You think He cares? Hunh? He’s not studying some puny little skinny white boy’s sass.”

  Raleigh shouted, “Shut up!” and instantly felt the hot slap of her hand through his trousers.

  “Don’t you never tell me shut up again, you hear me!” Her small hand squeezed around his wrist and the glasses glittered close to his face. “I had about all I can take of fool Hayeses for one day.”

  Raleigh pulled his hand away from her to wipe his nose.

  “That’s right. Act like trash, wiping buggers on yourself and talking ugly to old people. Use this handkerchief like you was raised.” She yanked the neatly folded triangle from his jacket pocket. “Now. Help me carry this kindling to the kitchen. I got to bake my biscuits for tomorrow. None of them going home tonight, the way it sounds. Hold your arms out. You can carry more’n that, big as you are. All right. Go on.”

  Raleigh stuck his chin out over the top hickory branch. “If you’d just use the gas stove, Flonnie, Grandma says, then you wouldn’t have to tote this wood so much.”

  “Open that door so I can shut off this light. That’s right,” she continued, behind him on the steps, “and if everybody just ate potato chips and trash like they do, we wouldn’t need to grow no vegetables neither.”

  After three trips up and down the back porch stairs to stack the wood pile, Raleigh left Flonnie viciously jabbing with a poker at the bowels of her immense black stove. As she stabbed it, she sang, “I’m going down the road feeling bad. Yes Lord. And I ain’t gonna be treated this way,” adding, “Pack of fools!” at the end of each verse.

  Unable to face the detestable crowd on the porch, who were, Raleigh was certain, all making jokes about him, he stayed in the house. Tiptoeing past his grandmother’s room, he climbed the dark mahogany stairs and stopped at the turn of each landing to lean on the crudely carved newel post and listen to the clear sharp notes of his father’s trumpet below, piercing through the familiar voices harmonizing, “And love can come to anyone. Bee-cause the best things in life aaare freeeee.”

  “Fat old stupid dumbheads.”

  On the third floor, he saw a light under one of the long row of rooms, and he thought he heard the sound of crying, but when his aunt Victoria came out into the hall and said, “Who is it?” there were no tears in the vivid blue eyes.

  Raleigh was kept speechless by fears that this strange uniformed woman suspected he was spying on her. However, all she said was, “Would you like you
r present now?”

  Relieved, he nodded and followed her back into the room. Very much like the other, now usually empty, third-floor bedrooms, this one had a wide bed with a white fringed bedspread, a tall dresser with a white doily hanging over the edges of the top, a plain table with a cane-bottomed chair, and pale rugs on the floor. But it was a room that Raleigh had never wanted to sleep in because on the wall was a framed print of a wolf in a snow blizzard, standing all alone on the edge of a jagged bluff. He was afraid to sleep with that wolf’s remorseless eyes on him.

  “I brought this a long way,” Aunt Victoria said. In the middle of the floor was a large scarred steamer trunk covered with fraying stickers and tags. It stood on its end, taller than Raleigh, and opened in the middle. Everything inside was folded or rolled precisely. “There’s my whole life,” she told him. “I got chased with this from Singapore to New Guinea to Samoa and Fiji. Then I decided to turn around and fight back.” She unsnapped a canvas section and pulled out a large flat package wrapped in burlap. “Here.”

  “Thank you. Were you scared?”

  She redid the compartment’s snaps and belts. “Unless you’ve been washing your hair in a helmet and had it blown out of your hands by pieces of a building that was right in back of you a second ago, Raleigh, you don’t know what scared is. But the thing is, when the really scary things happen, you don’t have time to get scared.”

  By now, Raleigh had unwrapped the burlap from what he realized at once, from pictures and movies, was a small oblong shield, its handhold carved out of the single hollowed piece of ebony wood. The raised design on the face of the shield was a serpentine pattern of twisted lines. He put his fingers through the handle and raised it.

  “Little boys,” she said, “get these when they have their confirmations. When they’re old enough to take spears and hunt wild pigs.”

  “They do? Why?”

  “To eat.”

  Raleigh moved his arm back and forth. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Resting his shield on his lap, the boy ran both his hands over its mysterious design. Finally, he spoke again without looking up. “I don’t think I’d be strong enough to hunt wild pigs.”

  “Have you ever been on a train?”

  Raleigh looked up. “One time.”

  “Were you scared?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, those little boys in New Guinea would run like crazy from a train.”

  Raleigh sat quietly on the bed as his aunt Victoria arranged a few objects from her trunk onto the dresser top. A brush, a comb, a bronze plaque with, as she showed him, her name engraved on it. When she removed her jacket and hung it neatly over the chairback, he was surprised to see she had breasts like other women. Winding her watch, she said, “Have you ever been to Richmond?”

  Raleigh had never even heard of Richmond. “Not really,” he replied.

  “Tomorrow, would you like to go with me?”

  Adrenaline raced up his chest. “I have to go to school.”

  “You can learn more going places. I’ll ask your mother.” She rolled her sleeves up her brown arms. “Now, excuse me. I need to wash up.”

  Raleigh stood, but at the door he turned back. “Do you think… Can I ask you something…Aunt Victoria?”

  She crossed her arms and waited.

  “Do you think, if you made a deal with God and He broke it and you didn’t get what you wanted, then do you think you should still have to believe in Him?”

  “I think you don’t always get what you want.”

  “My daddy says you can’t make deals with God.”

  “He ought to know.”

  “But if God doesn’t keep His promise, do you think that’s fair?”

  “No.” She closed her trunk and locked it.

  So Raleigh went to Richmond. At Thanksgiving he went with his aunt to Asheville. Right after Christmas, when his father and mother were separating, Victoria took him all the way to the top of the Empire State Building in New York City, where she said, “I don’t believe a Hayes would climb these stairs unless they heard somebody was playing baseball or canasta on the roof.” By spring, she was gone again, and the first packet of stamps to arrive for him in Thermopylae was postmarked Rangoon.

  On their trips together, Raleigh never told his godmother how all that winter he’d slept with his shield on the floor by his bed, and that it had proved a more powerful talisman against fear than the weekly communion wafer that was now dust in his mouth. No, he didn’t share his secrets with his aunt Victoria, and she didn’t share hers with him, not then, and not in the following decades when she would return to Thermopylae for the long succession of funerals. Nor was anything said between them in all the evenings the adult Raleigh spent with her, after World Missions finally coerced the traveler into semiretirement, and she moved into the big empty house on East Main Street.

  No one but Victoria’s brother Earley and her mother’s cleaning lady Flonnie Rogers knew why she had first left home, gone to the other side of the world, and not come back for twelve years. And she had never forgiven Earley for persuading her to leave, and Flonnie Rogers had never forgiven her for going.

  As it happened, our hero had been given in these past two wandering weeks of trying to carry out his father’s quest all the clues to Victoria Anna Hayes’s past. But, like everyone else, he saw and heard only what had been filtered and funneled into the narrow frame of his preoccupations. There was another reason, too, why he had made no connections. He was white. Now, Raleigh Hayes would have vehemently protested any suggestion that he was to the slightest degree blinkered by racial prejudice. Hadn’t he, upon reaching his teens, taken some retroactive pride in his father’s failed effort to integrate St. Thomas? Hadn’t he been embarrassed not by where his father taught, but by that frivolous marching in the streets, whatever the color of the band behind him? Hadn’t Raleigh himself (leading his aunts Reba and Big Em to accuse him of Communism) joined three sit-down strikes in college, and hadn’t he severely reprimanded a soldier in his unit for racial slurs about a black bunkmate? Hadn’t he and Aura fallen in love in a bus half-filled with blacks on the way to Robert Kennedy’s funeral? Hadn’t he thrown down his napkin and left the Civitans luncheon at the Lotus House when Nemours Kettell proposed a toast celebrating the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Hadn’t he encouraged Holly and Caroline to make the little Miller children up on Strawberry Court feel at home at the Starry Haven pool? No, he did not think he was a bigot. Nonetheless, it never once occurred to Raleigh Hayes that there could possibly be connections between his family and the family of Flonnie Rogers other than those of service and compensation, by which he meant the obligations and, yes, the affections that long service earns. He had never, for example, considered that he had been far more deeply formed by Flonnie’s tutelage than by that of his grandmother. He had never thought, when instructed to “find Jubal Rogers,” that Flonnie’s nephew was more than such an obligation.

  Had our hero’s view not been so filtered, so constricted, all the bits of glass that seemed to him meaningless would have fallen into their pattern. He would have noticed sooner that foremost in his father’s mind was an effort to make some kind of restitution to Jubal Rogers, with whom he’d obviously shared a past so profoundly intimate that even now the wounds weren’t healed. He would have heard Flonnie say at the nursing home that the two men had once been musicians together and he would have realized that the trumpet and the trip to New Orleans (news that had not surprised but only angered Rogers) were tied to that shared musical past. Had he not been deafened, Raleigh would have listened to the fact that no one—his father, Flonnie, Lovie—wanted Jubal Rogers’s name mentioned to Victoria Anna. And having heard that fact, Raleigh would have paid attention to Jubal’s and Victoria’s faces when each was talking to him about the other. Then perhaps his own childhood memory of Flonnie’s furious anger the day she’d taken him with her to visit Jubal’s mot
her’s house would have made sense. Because he would have agreed with what Flonnie had said then: for it was as true now as it had been then that nobody in Thermopylae was going to “put up with a black boy messing with a white woman,” so it was just as well that “She’d” gone halfway around the world, and “He” was in a German prison camp, where he would be better off staying, until he came to his senses.

  Now, there were some things about Jubal Rogers that either Lovie or Reba could have told Raleigh, and probably would have, if he’d asked them directly. This much they thought they knew:

  Jubal Rogers had been coming to the East Main house for years, to help his aunt Flonnie in her garden. In that way, he’d earned the money to buy a clarinet. People said he was a smart, handsome boy, but not a comfortable one to have around, for he was conceited, and suspiciously sarcastic-sounding, and argumentative, and, well, not really respectful. Still, Earley had befriended him, and was always going on about how talented Jubal was, and soon had him joining the nightly music on the Hayes porch. When Jubal was sixteen and Earley was eighteen (the eldest son, already in college, just married to Grace Louise, but still living at home), the two young men had started playing over in Darktown for a few dollars or a few drinks, playing and consorting with people Flonnie condemned as trash jugband niggers.

  When Jubal was eighteen, he began visiting the house even when Earley wasn’t there. He began sitting at night on the porch with Victoria Anna, who was then twenty-two, unmarried, and still living at home. She drove her own car to her own job (a very good job, everybody said, considering her age and sex and the Depression) as the secretary to Zebulon Forbes, Jr. Her job was to try to sort out the mess that Zeb Jr.’s father had left when he’d jumped out the window of the Forbes Building. And Zeb Jr.’s job was trying to get Victoria to marry him. Instead, she started to sit on the porch with Jubal Rogers. She started to bring home from the library stacks of political books and to sit in the parlor reading them with an eighteen-year-old black man, and she continued to do so for a year, and no one noticed what was really happening. In Big Em’s opinion, thirty years later (she was fifteen at the time): “You know how Vicky was, fired up over all these Communist-type ideas, and I don’t think black people could use the library back then, could they?, and you know how she was about doing the Lord’s work all the way to China and back; well, she was that way with Jubal, too, when she saw he liked to talk talk talk those same nutty ideas of hers. And he was Flonnie’s kin, even if he was awful full of himself.” In Lovie’s opinion (she was nine at the time): “Oh, Vicky Anna, she always wanted people to do things if they had some talent, you know, like asking me why I didn’t go to New York, Lord love us, instead of marrying Senior; and she and Earley just thought Jubal was the cat’s pajamas. He was always hanging around the house, and I don’t care if he was purple or green, he sure could play that clarinet. I guess she sort of adopted him, you know how these things happen.”