Father was standing in the dining room door, looking like a ghost. A skinny ghost with a plate in his hand.
Mother said, “Roscoe Malone! What on earth are you doing? You should’ve asked. We’d’ve helped you down.”
We all rushed to him and guided him to his seat at the table.
He said, “Thank you, I jutht needed to get back where I belong.”
Jimmie said, “Great, Daddy, you had perfect timing! It’s your turn to tell about your day.”
Me and Mother gave Jimmie a dirty look.
But Father said, “What did I do today? Firth I thlept, then I thlept thome more, then I got up to take my nap, then I ended up the day by thleeping a little more before I finally went to thleep for the night!”
We all laughed.
“I’ve got to let you know what happened on Lake Myth Again.”
“Roscoe, don’t you think you should just relax and have your—”
Father said, “All I know ith that I have to tell what happened out there.”
“Roscoe. Maybe you’re—”
“Peg, I really need to talk.”
Mother looked at him hard. “Children, go outside until your father and I are done talking.”
Father stood up. “No! I need to tell all of you.”
Mother stood up and put her hand on his arm. “Roscoe, you’re just going to—”
Father snatched his arm away. “Don’t worry, Peg, I’m going to tell the truth, I won’t lie.”
Mother’s 1-1-1 lines popped up and she sat very slowly back in her chair.
She picked up her fork and started pushing around the carrots Jimmie’d brought home.
Father said, “No one’th to blame, we had bad luck from the jump. It went wrong right away but we couldn’t do anything about it, how can you thay who did what wrong?”
He stared down at his plate.
I looked over at Jimmie. He was just as scared as me.
Mother pointed at us, then the door.
We were happy to leave. Seeing Father like this was worse than seeing him out cold in bed.
I got up, leaned down. “Kisses … kisses … kisses make you stronger.”
He wrapped his arms around me and Jimmie. “Thank you, Detha, Jimmie. Thank all of you for everything. I apologithe, Peg.”
We went into the living room and Mother helped Father up. As she passed us on the couch she told Father, “Back to bed for you, buthter. Kids, I’ll be right back.”
Jimmie reached over and held my hand. “Lockjaw. He’s got to fight off lockjaw.…”
“No, Jimmie, Father doesn’t have tetanus, it’s something else.”
“Naw, sis, I didn’t mean he has lockjaw for real. It’s like what Daddy told me. Remember? He said that some of the time you get through whatever hurt you and you think you’re all healed up, but there’s still something inside that can come back and kill you. Daddy beat Lake Michigan but now there’s something inside he’s still got to beat. He’s not done fighting yet. Almost like he’s got lockjaw.”
I didn’t know whether to be scared about what Jimmie said, or amazed that he was making so much sense.
Chapter Fourteen
The Sad Truth About Jokes
Clarice was early. I was sitting on the couch reading when she tapped on the door.
“You ready?” She had her books in her arms.
We hugged and I said, “Just a second, Clarice.”
“Take your time, I want to read this last chapter once more anyway.”
I ran up the steps to my room to get the books I had to return to the library.
Me and Jimmie had started taking turns staying with Father.
I’d go to the library with Clarice every other day and Jimmie would go over to Dr. Bracy’s and out to the fields to get wild vegetables on the days it wasn’t his turn to watch Father.
I started to stick my head into Mother and Father’s room to say goodbye.
Jimmie and Father were whispering. Whispers grab hold of your attention like nothing else.
Me and Father never talked about what happened on the lake, so I was surprised to hear him say, “There we were on Lake Myth Again, pulling in fith right and left.”
Jimmie said, “Perch?”
“Perch, walleye and bluegillth. We notithed a fog bank further out on the lake and thomeone thought we thould head back, but we thtayed a little longer.” He stopped.
I held my breath waiting for what he was about to say, but Jimmie said, “Why’s it called a fog bank, Pa? It’s not like you could get a loan there, or like you could rob it or nothing.”
Father said, “Not a bank in that way, Jim, more like a mound, an area higher than what’th around it.”
I bet he was staring over Jimmie’s shoulder, trying to get deep into his story. I stuck my head into the room. I didn’t really want to hear this.
“Goodbye, Father, I’m off to the library.”
“No! Detha, you come in and lithen too.”
Jimmie said, “Pa’s telling what happened out on the lake.”
Father said, “We weren’t out there for half an hour before the fog rolled in.”
Father was talking, but he wasn’t talking to us.
“I’d never thought about what a thtrange phrathe ‘pea thoup’ ith, but when that fog covered our boat I got it. The fog felt like it had weight, that you had to puth it away to even breathe.”
There was a long pause and I held my breath, hoping that Jimmie would be quiet too.
“We dethided to get back to thore, but when we pulled on the anchor rope we found the anchor wath gone and we’d been drifting. No one knew for how long.
“Then the thip came. Then everything happened.”
His voice changed, sounding like he was fighting to catch his breath, sounding wild and scary. “We’d drifted into the thipping laneth and the wake from a huge freighter hit uth and knocked everyone out of the boat.
“I was in such a thtate of thock that I didn’t even realithe I’d been hit in the mouth and all of my front teeth were gone, or how badly I’d been cut. Fear will do that to you, it will make you think about only what’th important, and all that wath important to me wath to get back to my family. That’th all I could think of. Truly.”
Most times when Father tells about how his day went he talks like he’s painting a picture, but this time there was no picture, just fog. If he was himself, Father would’ve said something like, “The fog was so thick it should’ve been spelled with two ‘G’s!”
But there was something more missing.
Father can’t open his mouth without a joke falling out and this story didn’t have any.
Maybe it’s because the story is so sad. But Father always tells us, “There’s a thin, blurry line between humor and tragedy.” When he was working regular at the mill he’d told me and Jimmie, “I’ll give each of you one whole nickel for every joke you find that isn’t cloaked in pain or tragedy.”
We’d tried as hard as we could to earn that nickel but couldn’t come up with a single joke that didn’t have someone getting killed or hurt or made fun of or embarrassed or mocked.
Father told us, “And the more tragic something is, the more jokes you’ll find about it.”
I couldn’t think of anything more tragic than what happened to those poor men out on Lake Michigan, yet Father’s story didn’t have one smile or laugh in it.
And no alliteration. Something wasn’t right.
Father said, “The boat wath upthide down and they all were gone. I tied my writht to the boat with the anchor rope and hung on. That’th the way that thip found me and took me to the hothpital in Thicago. When I came to, they brought me to Gary. That’th the whole truth.”
There was another long pause. “That’th everything.”
Jimmie leaned his head on Father’s chest. “It’s OK, Pa, we’re all together now.”
Father didn’t sound like his heart was in it when he said, “You know, Jimmie, when it looked like I woul
dn’t live, the thing other than my family that I thought about mithing would be theeing Joe Louith knock Max Thmeling back to the fatherland!”
That stupid fight! Father started blabbing about Joe Louis, and Jimmie blabbed right along with him.
I said, “Yuck!” And left them laughing and joking.
Chapter Fifteen
The Brown Bomber Hits Home
Finally Father made the bug about the fight grab hold of my heart. The big day had been postponed to the nineteenth because of rain and that made everything even more exciting.
Since the lake, Father had acted like he was listening when we’d talk about our days during Chow Chat, but we knew his mind wasn’t all the way with us. Just two days before the fight, something came alive in him.
We looked at Father to see if he was up to talking. Jimmie saw something that me and Mother didn’t. He said, “And what about your day, my Fine Friendly Father Figure?”
Father seemed surprised. “Not much happened.” Then he gave us his scary jack-o’-lantern smile. “But I have noticed my Dar Dawt, the Gorgeous, Gregarious, Glamorous Deza, hasn’t found fit to form the flimsiest conversation concerning the coming fisticuffs.”
Alliteration! A ton of alliteration! It was like all of the consonants he hadn’t used for the past weeks were exploding out of him.
Jimmie laughed. “Wow, Daddy!”
Father said, “So, if none of you mind, I think I’ll use my time to explain to the Mighty Miss Malone what’s going on that she has so little interest in.”
He looked right at me. The first time in a long time he looked any of us in the eye!
“So, Dar Dawt, why aren’t you on the bandwagon about Joe Louis?”
“Clarice and me—”
Mother said, “I, Deza.”
“I and Clarice—”
“Not funny, Deza,” Mother said.
“Clarice and I don’t think there’s anything about two grown, old, bumpy-muscled men in their underwear trying to kill each other with big, fat, puffy, ridiculous red mittens that’s good or important or even worth talking about.”
Father put his face in his hand and shook his head.
Jimmie said, “And I thought you were smart, Deza. Even white people are saying they’d vote for the Brown Bomber to be king of the world after he whips Smelling.”
Father moved his hand from his face and stared over Mother’s shoulder, another real good sign because that meant he was settling into a story or a lesson.
“Deza, this is so much more than just a fight, this is one of those rare occasions where we’ll be alive to witness history.”
He smiled at me and stuck his left hand out. I put both of mine in it and he covered my hands with his right one. I was surprised at how soft Father’s hands felt. They used to be rough like sandpaper or even a hunk of wood, but since the lake they’d got soft as mine.
Father looked real close at our hands and said, “My, my, my. Wasn’t it only yesterday that I could close my fingers on yours like this and your whole hand would disappear?”
He was right, my fingers were poking out of the other side of his hands. He brought our hands to his face and kissed my fingertips.
“Dar Dawt, you know you and I are different, right?”
“Of course, Father, you’re a man, I’m a girl, you’re old and I’m young.”
Jimmie said, “Yeah, Pa, plus Deza’s got regular teeth and you got them summer teeth. Some are in your mouth, some are on the bottom of Lake Michigan, some are still in the hospital!”
Mother said, “Jimmie!”
Father said, “Ah, I see both of my children are reading from that book about disrespecting and abusing a good man. Deza, I meant to say you and I are alike because we’re different than most other people.”
“Yes, Father, we know the Malones aren’t like any other family in the world.”
“True, but even within the Malone family you and I look at the world in a way that your mother and brother don’t.”
Jimmie, Mother and me all said, “Thank goodness for that!”
Father laughed. “Good, we’re agreed. I hope we can also agree that people tend to leave a trail as to where they’ve been and from that trail you can tell where they’re going, right?”
“Yes, Father.”
“All right,” Father said. “Another thing we need to get by is faith in one another. Over time we can tell if someone is reliable or not, if we can count on their word or not, right?”
Father was starting to come back, this was the way he used to talk, and what he was doing was something he’d taught us to be suspicious of.
He said that people use tricks to get you to think the way they do or to take away something you have that they want. One way they do that is to interrupt your normal way of thinking and take you by the hand and guide you down the path they want you to take.
Father says they make you take a teeny-weeny step in their direction, and then they start to nudge you a little further down the path and before you know it, you’re running full speed with them in a direction that you probably wouldn’t have gone all alone.
If someone was trying to pull that trick on one of us, Father had come up with a signal. We would take both hands and pretend they were on a steering wheel and move them back and forth like we were driving.
It was called being a passenger in the Manipula-Mobile, and it let all the other Malones know someone was trying to take us for a ride.
I said, “Father …” and put my hands on the pretend steering wheel.
He laughed. “Very good, Dar Dawt, I was waiting for you to do that, which is why I prefaced this by telling you that, over time, you know whom you can have faith in, right?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Because I want you to consider the source here. Keep in mind that I’m the one trying to educate you on why this fight is so important. There’s no Manipula-Mobile on the road here. Are we reading from the same book?”
We were! It was so good to hear Father explaining something to me again!
“And it’s a fact, Deza, Jimmie, sometimes getting educated on a subject has a lot in common with being manipulated. The main difference is that you know to trust who’s guiding you.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Great. Here’s why this is more than just a fight. Sad to say, the boxing ring is one of the few places in America where your skin color doesn’t play a huge role. When you’ve got two men going against each other wearing a pair of ridiculous puffy mittens, most of the time, it’s a reasonably fair fight.”
Father looked over Jimmie’s shoulder.
“Steel Lung used to say it was the only place where a black man could hit a white man and not get lynched for it.”
We all held our breaths to see if talking about Mr. Steel Lung was going to make him stop or take him back out on that lake.
He looked at Mother and said, “Hitler and his boys have said this fight will prove that no black man can ever beat a white man, that we”—Father pointed at each Malone—“and all our neighbors are where we are because we deserve to be here.”
Jimmie said, “Yeah, Pops, I can’t wait, Joe’s gonna show ’em a thing or two!”
Father said, “That’s what we’re hoping for, James. Joe knows he’s got to win this fight, he knows how important it is, he’ll come through.
“Some of the time life boils down to some pretty ridiculous things, Deza. This is one of them. I agree, it’s silly to put so much importance on one fight, but you have to keep in mind that this fight is the one chance we have to show the Nazis, and some of our white brethren here in America as well, that we are people too. It’s ironic, but Joe will show we’re human by savagely beating the stuffing out of someone.”
I would have believed anything my father was saying because it was in his own strong voice. I was going to have faith in Father’s word. I was going to try to make a light come on for Clarice, because the more I thought about it the madder I got at myself fo
r not seeing this on my own.
The man on the radio screamed, “The greatest upset in the history of the world! The greatest upset in the history of the world! The greatest upset in the history of the world!” Mr. Bobbin reached over and turned off his radio.
No one in the barbershop moved or talked or even breathed for what felt like a hour.
No one looked at anyone else.
The most interesting thing in Mr. Bobbin’s barbershop was the floor, ’cause as I looked around that was where everybody’s eyes were pointing.
The only thing making a sound or moving was the fan as it swept from side to side.
The bell over Mr. Bobbin’s door gave that gentle ting-a-ling as people started leaving. Mother grabbed Father’s arm, tapped Jimmie and Clarice on the shoulder and nodded at me. The bell tinkled again and we followed Mother and Father outside.
I hope to never see anything else as terrible as that walk home.
Grown men and women were sitting on the curb crying like babies, every light in every store and house we passed was still on, but now they threw jaggedy, sharp shadows onto the street.
Father’s lisp was back. “I can’t believe it, Peg. It’th like that fog on the lake, I never thought I’d thee or feel anything like it again, but here it ith. Thith ith jutht ath heavy on my heart. Thith ith the thame feeling. Oh, God, Peg, won’t I ever get rid of thith? Ith thomething wrong with me?”
Mother wrapped her arm around Father’s shoulder.
Clarice was squeezing my left hand and Jimmie was squeezing my right as we walked.
Father said, “What ith going—”
I looked back and Mother shushed Father. “Wait till we get home, it will be OK.”
We walked in silence for a couple of blocks and saw a huge bottle that someone had dropped or slammed onto the sidewalk. It had broke into a thousand little puddles of light. The only way you could tell it had been a bottle was because the label was still whole, still hanging on to a few sharp jags of glass.
Jimmie pointed and said, “Look out.”
Father scooped me into his arms. “Detha, you know how you are with broken glath.”
The Mighty Miss Malone Page 9