I’m telling you, her voice coulda brought the dead back to life. As if her screams weren’t jolting enough, she began beating on something metallic—a cooking pan maybe—as if the entire German army was coming down the street. Clangclangclang.
Peaches’s head snapped up from her chest and her wild eyes started searching around for Cal, who was yanking on his pair of pants backward and hunting around for his boots.
“What in the world’s happened?” Peaches’s voice was breathless, and her hands pressed against both sides of her round stomach as if that baby might come flying out next.
“Don’t know. Don’t know.” Cal kept on repeating those same two words as we followed him. Limping down the hallway, he headed out the kitchen door with his cane and his one good foot stuck in a jump boot with its laces loose and dangling. In the distance, you could hear more pots banging. Seemed like folks up and down the street were picking up the warning.
Me and Peaches stood helpless by the door, knowing the flimsy screen full of holes couldn’t protect us from anything when it didn’t even keep out flies. I was afraid maybe the Japs had invaded the country. Or the Germans had planned one last surprise attack. Maybe the rumors of the war ending soon had been a trap and a secret air attack was on its way. What if Hitler wasn’t dead? It was a crystal-clear day. You could almost picture dark waves of German bombers winging their way across the Atlantic right then, loaded with bombs, ready to level North Carolina. Or Chicago. Or who knows what.
Peaches reached over and squeezed my arm as if she was thinking the exact same things. But I don’t think half a minute passed before Cal came hobbling toward the house, a huge grin running from ear to ear.
“The radio,” he hollered at Peaches before he even hit the porch steps. Everybody in the neighborhood was hollering about something right then, it seemed like. He had to repeat “radio” twice before we understood what in the world he was shouting. Then the three of us nearly fell over one another as we reached for the little Emerson radio sitting in the middle of the kitchen table like an innocent box.
We got it warmed up and tuned in just as President Truman was speaking.
Now, this was the first time I’d heard President Truman talk. He’d only been president for a few short weeks since our brave President Roosevelt had passed on so suddenly, after collapsing one afternoon and never waking up. It was a tragedy most people still couldn’t bring themselves to talk about without fresh tears springing up in their eyes. I gotta confess, the new president’s weak-sounding voice sure was a letdown. He seemed like somebody who could use a few lessons from Aunt Odella.
When he started out his radio speech by saying something about it being a solemn but glorious hour—heck, we didn’t know what to think. How could something be solemn but glorious at the same time? Had some war miracle happened for the Allies? Had President Roosevelt somehow come back to life? You never knew what to believe during the war since things changed so fast. Peaches glanced over at Cal with a puzzled look and he held up one finger, still grinning from ear to ear.
When President Truman got to the next part about the German forces finally surrendering and the flags of freedom flying over Europe, a joyous whoop burst out from the whole neighborhood. I’m telling you, every person in town must’ve leaped up from their chairs at the exact same time and shouted with joy. You woulda thought Louis Armstrong had suddenly blasted the world’s biggest trumpet into the sky. Even Peaches did a little hotfoot dance around the kitchen table.
Only thing was, it wasn’t over.
That’s what we found out next. Cal flapped his arms trying to silence us. “Hush up. He’s still talking.”
The three of us leaned closer to hear the next crackling words, almost nose to nose with the radio, and that’s when we found out the Germans might’ve surrendered, but the Japanese didn’t intend to budge an inch. They refused to lay down their arms and give up the fight. “Our victory is but half won,” the president continued in his weakly way. “And every American must stick to his post and keep working to finish it … the whole world must be cleansed of evil—”
“Well, you shoulda just waited until all the evil was gone to tell us about it,” Peaches interrupted, her dark eyes turning stony. “Why’d I get up from my nice sleep if that’s all the president was gonna say? Don’t need to hear no more of that nonsense.” She reached out and switched off the radio right in the middle of the president’s sentence. “Don’t need to listen to another word,” she said.
Pressing her fingertips against her closed eyelids, Peaches let out a slow breath of air. Sitting there so still, she reminded me of a flower that had suddenly gone all wilted and droopy in the sun. Outside, the whole neighborhood fell silent. Everybody else must’ve been as disappointed as us. Honestly, it kinda took the wind out of the celebration, hearing how the Japs weren’t giving up yet.
But I don’t think me or Cal was expecting Peaches to lay her head down on the table and start crying about the news we’d just heard. Without any warning at all, that’s what she did. She leaned over and started sobbing as if her heart had shattered like a plate. It took me by surprise, that’s for sure.
Cal leaped up. “Good gracious, sugar honey, what’s wrong?” One arm swooped around her shoulders as his other hand waved me toward the door.
Let me tell you, I didn’t waste any time getting myself out of there.
Even sitting at the far end of the porch, I could still hear a good bit of what was being said. It was impossible not to. From what I could put together, Peaches was scared to death about Cal getting called up to fight next. “I thought everything would be over by now and you and me could stay right here together.” Her voice rose to a wail. “I don’t want you leaving to fight in the war, Cal. What if something happens to you over there in the Pacific? Why couldn’t the Japs have surrendered, same as the Germans? Who’s gonna help me with the baby coming and all?” Her voice went on and on, rising and falling, repeating the same things over and over.
It started to make my stomach ache, listening to how sad she was. Probably this is wrong to admit, but I hadn’t been too worried about my father being sent to the war until that very moment. Guess I figured him being in the army wasn’t much different than when he was away selling encyclopedias, or hitting baseballs, or what have you. Yet hearing the president talk about all the evil that still lurked around us and seeing how afraid Peaches was about being left alone in the world had turned on the worry spigot in my brain. All kinds of dire thoughts were pouring out.
Not much later, Cal came out and slouched down on the porch steps next to me. I could hear Peaches scorching up a late breakfast in the kitchen, pans clanging around, bacon crackling in the fat.
“Holy smokes,” he said, rubbing his hand over his close-shaved head and giving me a sideways look of frustration. “She’s in a mood this morning.” He leaned back, elbows resting on the top step, staring silently at the yard.
“So you think the Japs will keep on fighting?”
Cal’s voice was flat. “Like white on rice. They’re never gonna give up.”
“Is that where everybody’ll be going now?” Meaning my father, of course.
Cal shrugged. “Hard to say. Most likely.” He reached for a stem of dry grass next to the porch, broke off a piece, and stuck the end in his mouth. It was quiet for a while and the air felt heavy with all these things not being said. Finally I got up the nerve to ask Cal what he’d do if he got ordered to the front lines.
He pretended to give me a deadly serious look. “Well, Legs, I didn’t practice jumping outta airplanes to spend the whole war sitting here, shaking gold teeth outta rich folks’ lip nappies.” Then he busted up laughing. “Me and your daddy and the other fellows, we got more training than the entire U.S. Army put together. The Japs won’t stand a chance when we hit the ground. They’ll see our brown faces coming down under those chutes, and they’ll wish they’d surrendered when they had the chance.”
You couldn’t help
feeling better about the whole sorry world when you were around Cal, even if there wasn’t much in life he took seriously. Wished I’d grown up around somebody like him. Not being disrespectful of my own father, of course—but it woulda been nice to have a brother or an uncle like Cal to talk to once in a while. Archie had two older brothers. The one who was missing in action had been his favorite.
“Son of a darned gun,” Cal sighed, turning back to glance through the screen door at Peaches, who was making an awful loud racket with her cooking. “I hope that baby’s born soon.”
Turns out we didn’t have too long to wait.
18. Victory
Peaches’s baby came into the world a few days later, right in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer at Our Lady of Victory Church. Even though Peaches had been feeling sharper pains in her stomach and was sweating so much she looked like a glazed donut, she still insisted on going to church for Sunday services because President Truman had declared Sunday to be a day of prayer for the war.
Me and Cal told her she should stay home. We told her we’d go in her place and promised to pray extra hard, but she wouldn’t listen. I think she felt not going woulda meant bad luck for Cal. Maybe the Lord wouldn’t watch over him in the war if she didn’t show up to pray.
So we got ourselves all shined up for Jesus, as Aunt Odella would say.
I pulled on a pair of my miserable school pants and the only starched shirt I had left that was still clean. Cal loaned me one of the civilian ties he hadn’t worn since joining up. It was striped, blue and green, and about four inches short of my belt. Good thing I didn’t know many people down there because I looked like some kinda comedy act.
Both me and Cal got a little carried away with the aftershave too. I’d never worn it before, but Cal slapped a cool palmful on my neck from a bottle he had on the bathroom shelf, and then I couldn’t help sneaking more when he wasn’t looking and patting it all over the front of my shirt because I smelled like the inside of Aunt Odella’s musty suitcase walking around. Wasn’t long before all the wasps in the neighborhood were after me, I stank so bad.
Peaches took the longest getting ready, but you couldn’t miss her when she finally made her way gingerly down the front steps toward the gate where me and Cal had been waiting on her for about an hour, it seemed like, swatting at the dive-bombing wasps.
She was wearing a yellow dress and looked like a drunken sun as she came toward us, swaying heavily from side to side. A wide-brimmed straw hat was balanced unevenly on her head, with a loose ribbon dangling off of it, and her fingers were stuffed into a pair of white gloves like a set of sausages. Don’t think she could bend a single one of them. Even her red lipstick was too bright and had smeared a little on her teeth. She was a mess, although I knew how hard she’d tried to look pretty that morning.
“Y’all waiting on me?” she said, flashing a droopy smile.
Cal reached out to give her his arm. “I been waiting for you my whole life, sugar pie,” he said. With the wasps trailing us like a choir procession, we joined the rest of the world heading to church that Sunday. You could hear church bells jangling all over town. I walked alongside Peaches and Cal, keeping a wide berth between them and me—as if I knew the two of them but wasn’t close family. Couldn’t keep my eyes from drifting over their way every once in a while, though. Like I said, love ain’t something I been around much, so I was curious. But not too curious.
I wondered if Queen Bee Walker and my daddy ever strolled to church arm in arm like Peaches and Cal. Likely not. Aunt Odella always said they argued worse than two alley tomcats. Fur would fly, she said, whenever they were together. Still, it surprised me that Cal didn’t fix the loose ribbon on Peaches’s hat or tell her she had lipstick smeared on her teeth before we got to the church and everybody saw her. I know Aunt Odella woulda said something. When Uncle Otis’s third wife wore a moth-eaten wool jacket to Granny’s funeral, my aunt asked her, right to her face, if she lived in a house without mirrors. “Or did the moths eat up your jacket on the way here?”
Trouble was, everybody else heard Aunt Odella too. That chewed-up jacket was the talk of the funeral. Which was part of the reason why Uncle Otis eventually had to marry again, I think.
Maybe love was keeping your mouth shut.
* * *
We passed by MawMaw Sands’s house and the BASKETS FOR SALE sign was off the gate. “Looks like she’s got the place all closed up this morning,” Cal said to Peaches, nodding in the direction of the overgrown house.
I hadn’t dug up much useful information about MawMaw Sands. When I’d told Cal and Peaches about meeting her on my way to the creek and how she seemed to know an awful lot about me for being a complete stranger, Peaches had just smiled and nodded, saying, “She always knows everybody’s business around here.”
Cal told me there were rumors the lady was the straight bloodline descendent of an old African healer who’d lived in the Georgia swamps for years after jumping off a slave ship. “You can believe what you want,” he’d said, grinning. “But I’m always real careful to say good morning to her. Don’t want her putting the voodoo eye on me.”
Tell you the truth, MawMaw Sands’s house didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary that morning. You wouldn’t have guessed anyone special lived there, just by seeing the outside of it. The baskets seemed as if they were part of the scenery, as if they’d grown from the porch vines by themselves. I thought about the Keeper of Secrets basket sitting up there. Guess it wasn’t much of a secret anymore where all our country’s soldiers would be heading next.
As we got closer to the church, we joined a lively parade of colors. Big hats and flowered dresses trailed into the building from all directions. The ladies outnumbered the men by a long shot, but it seemed as if every man who wasn’t in uniform had on those fancy two-tone shoes you see a lot of the jazz cats wearing, and neckties in patterns that woulda made a blind man dizzy. I saw one fellow strutting up the church steps in lime-green shoes—swear to you, I did.
Our Lady of Victory Church wasn’t what I was expecting for a house of worship either. The building was made of wood shingles instead of brick like Aunt Odella’s church, and it was painted barn red. White steps led up to the door and two long white crosses hung on either side of the entrance. It seemed kinda strange to me that a house of worship would be painted red, but you know, the South was different.
Our Lady of Victory Church was Catholic, Peaches told me. I didn’t know a thing about Catholics. We were Baptists going way back. Maybe being Catholic was the reason the church had a big statue outside it of a white lady holding a baby. Honestly, you couldn’t help gawking at the sculpture because it looked like a woman who’d been turned to stone as she was running barefoot with a small child. I mean, it was that real-looking. You could almost hear her saying “I Am Levin” as she took off. Later on, somebody told me the statue was supposed to be Mary and baby Jesus. Still don’t know what she was running from, though.
Inside the church, there were more white statues—smaller ones—and rows of lit candles, their smoke curling into the stifling air. With no warning at all, Peaches and Cal both kneeled down one knee as we were heading toward some open seats. It startled me so bad, I jumped toward Peaches to help out, like the gentleman I been raised to be, until I saw everyone else kneeling down and pointing to their foreheads too. Feeling real uneasy, I began to regret coming along. I’d figured every church was the same as Aunt Odella’s in Chicago. But it was clear they weren’t.
Once we got to our seats, I kept my hands shoved in my pockets and my eyes glued on the brown neck of the middle-aged man in front of me. It was covered in shaving bumps, so I could tell he didn’t go to a barber as good as Uncle Otis. After a while I began to nod off, what with the heat and the smell from the candles. The prayers for the war and our soldiers seemed to go on forever. Up front, the white minister who they called Father John—even though it was pretty clear he was nobody’s father in that congregation—had just
started the Lord’s Prayer and everybody had finished repeating “Thy kingdom come” when Peaches let out an unearthly shriek next to me and sank down on her chair as if she’d fainted.
The whole kingdom came to us right after that, I’m telling you.
Cal started hollering something about the baby and all the women standing nearby pushed toward Peaches, some of them scrambling over the rows in their Sunday dresses, Bibles still in their hands, purses hooked over their arms, hats tumbling off—while the men and children fled in the opposite direction, toward the double doors at the entrance, like sailors jumping off the decks of a torpedoed ship. It was pure pandemonium, let me tell you.
I was caught up in the crowd heading out. Somebody put their hand on my shoulder and pushed me forward into the aisle with everybody else. In no time at all I was outside, blinking in the painful sunshine. Around me, the hum of excited voices sounded like an Allied radio broadcast.
Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to me, so I eased myself over to the statue of the white woman and leaned in the small slice of shade in front of her. Pretended to be studying something on the sandy ground by my shoes. Heck, I didn’t know what else to do. Should I be fetching a doctor? Seeing if Cal needed help? Sending up a quick prayer for Peaches and the baby? Nobody else around me seemed to be fretting one little bit. A few were even taking bets. Nearby, a group of men collected money on the sly, keeping their voices low.
“Fifty cents says baby girl,” I heard one of them say.
“Seventy-five says baby boy.”
“Dollar says twins.”
“I ain’t betting on no twins.”
A sharp female voice cut in loudly. “Y’all oughta be ashamed of yourselves, this being Sunday and a churchyard and all. Can’t believe y’all are taking bets on Peaches’s baby. Shame on y’all.”
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