The Mighty Miss Malone

by Christopher Paul Curtis

  “I’d thought about that.…”

  “And how does a carpenter make a living with a hand so badly injured he can’t hold a pen?”

  “But—”

  “And besides, Miss Malone, who on earth has ever heard of something called a traveling carpenter?”

  “Well—”

  “There wasn’t one bit of your father in those letters. It’s just like that letter to Mrs. Carsdale’s friend in Flint, why do you think I never used it?”

  “You didn’t?”

  Mother said, “Jimmie opened it for me, and once I read it I saw that letter was pure Deza Malone, not Mrs. Carsdale.”

  Mother is so smart!

  “You and I know Roscoe Malone, we know him. We both know that wasn’t his writing in those letters.”

  “No, it had to—”

  She gently squeezed my cheek. “You knew, Deza, you wanted so desperately for them to be from your father that you just couldn’t admit they weren’t. But you knew.”

  “But why didn’t he write to us? Father would never have let us worry so long. And who wrote—”

  “Something must have happened, Deza. Something terrible.”

  She looked out the window. “I thought about bringing Mrs. Kenworthy. I couldn’t do this alone. But you’ve grown so much lately, and there’s no one else who understands this like you, Deza. No one.”

  Mother was right, I felt so proud that I could really do something to help.

  Mother asked the taxicab driver, “Ten dollars flat, right? Round trip.”

  We started driving back to Michigan.

  If hospitals took that horrible smell they have, bottled it up and mailed it away, this poorhouse in Lansing, Michigan, must have been where the postman had been delivering the bottles.

  Mother is much more used to bad odors than I am, and as we stepped onto the porch even she took a surprised quick breath. My hand flew up and pinched my nose shut.

  She said, “Breathe out of your mouth, Deza, we can’t be rude.”

  She took a letter out of her purse and knocked on the front door. After her second knock a man in a white uniform answered. “Yes?”

  “Hello. I’ve been writing to a Mr. Jackson, he said there’s a possibility my husband is here.”

  “I’m Mr. Jackson.”

  “Fine, I’d like to get some information on the man you call Jonah Blackbeard.”

  “Oh, yes, you’re the lady who wrote looking for her husband. But, ma’am, I told you I don’t think Jonah is him. You said your husband was a carpenter. We don’t know much about old Jonah, but we’re pretty sure he was a sailor or in the merchant marine.”

  “Mr. Jackson, I have absolutely no clues where my husband is. I’d like to see this Jonah Blackbeard, the things you wrote about him made me wonder.”

  “Come to the office, let me get his file. I’m sorry, but I think this is wasting your time.”

  Mother grabbed my wrist and we walked into the house.

  Breathing out of your mouth was worthless once you got inside. The smell was like a living animal, it clawed at your nostrils and rubbed against your legs like a overfriendly cat. Rotten meat and leaking toilets and perspiration were bad enough, but what made it worse was it seemed like someone had sloshed a bucketful of strong cleaning fluid all over everything to fight the bad odor.

  My eyes watered but I kept breathing out of my mouth.

  In his office, Mr. Jackson opened a drawer that was choked with files. After thumbing through them, he took one out. There was one piece of paper in it.

  “It says some hobo brought him into the colored hospital in Lansing. He was barely conscious, trouble breathing, high fever, they thought he was going to pass but he just kept hanging on.” He read, “ ‘Name: Unknown. Age: Unknown. Occupation: Thought to be a sailor. No known next of kin, no identification.’ After while the hospital figured he’d had some kind of attack. Maybe asthma. Whatever it was might have triggered a small stroke too. He was confused, but he’s shown real improvement over the months.”

  As he talked Mother twisted the strap of her purse.

  “He talks so little about himself that we thought he was on the run from the law, but once you spend time with him you see that’s not likely. He’s a smart man but he doesn’t talk much. Won’t tell anyone his name. There’s five or six others here with stories like his, we don’t try to push them to talk about the past. If they want to talk they do. If not, who am I to say they should? There’s lots of folks who want to forget or be forgotten.

  “He was brought here on July seventeenth of last year.” He sighed. “ ’Bout a month after Joe got beat.”

  Mother said, “Where is he?”

  “Everyone’s in the backyard getting some air.”

  All three of us stood up.

  Mother said, “Deza, you wait here.”

  “But—”

  “Deza!”

  I sat back down … and waited long enough for Mother to follow the man out of the room. I was right behind them. Mother went with him through a long dark hallway toward the back of the house. She said, “If this man won’t say his name, why are you calling him Jonah Blackbeard?”

  Mr. Jackson laughed. “We had to call him something. He only talks about two things. We call him Jonah because the first thing he started talking about was getting swallowed up in the belly of a fire-breathing dragon. We call him Blackbeard ’cause he claims he fought off a ship on the ocean.”

  Mother stopped at the back door. The man went through and I could hear him say, “Jonah, you awake? Come on, Jonah, you got visitors.”

  Mother opened the screen door and stood on the back porch. I walked out behind her.

  There were eight or nine men in the backyard, and they looked like a collection of thrown-out rag dolls. Long skinny arms were flopped into their laps, heads hung like they had no neck bones, and legs were crossed or dangling from the arms of chairs like they were filled with sawdust.

  Mr. Jackson’s words about Joe Louis had me thinking about that horrible fight. If anyone painted a picture about how Gary,

  Indiana, felt after Joe Louis got beat, this backyard of poor men in Lansing, Michigan, would be it.

  Mr. Jackson went to one of the men who had his back turned to us. He was wrapped in a yellow-stained sheet so that only his head was showing.

  “Jonah, are you all right?”

  The man’s head was slumped to the side.

  “Jonah?”

  Mr. Jackson looked at us and shrugged.

  Mother stepped off the porch. I was too afraid to follow.

  She walked to the man’s chair. Her hand went to her mouth and she softly asked, “Roscoe?”

  The head came up. And slowly twisted to look at her. After a second the man’s bony hands covered his face.

  And, just like Mother said, we know Roscoe Malone.

  It seems like if you had nearly a year to concentrate on something and wonder about it and dream and worry about it day and night, that with all that time you’d be able to get at least part of it right if it ever came true. But not one thing I’d imagined happened.

  I didn’t rush to Father and hug him and scold him and cry on his chest.

  I didn’t tell him how much I’d missed him.

  I didn’t gut-punch him for being gone.

  I didn’t talk or even move.

  Mother knelt and put her left hand out. “Roscoe? Sweetheart?”

  The man brought his hands down and a skinny arm came from under the sheet and trembled as it reached toward Mother’s hand. Father said, “Peg?”

  Their shaking fingers joined together like something Mrs. Henderson had knitted. They stared at each other before Father turned Mother’s hand to look at her fingers. “Peg? Your ring?”

  Mother wiped her eyes and pulled the string from around her neck.

  “Here, Roscoe, it’s right here. And I could ask you the same thing.”

  Father’s claw of a hand went to his neck. He pulled out a tired stri
ng that had his wedding band on it.

  “I knew you’d never give up on me, Peg.”

  “Never, Roscoe Malone, never.” She patted his beard. “How could I give up on you? How could I give up on my whole life?”

  Father said, “You found me. How? I thought I’d never see you again.”

  “Sweetheart”—Mother held her face against Father’s—“do you know I’ve spent the last year writing to every police station and hospital, every boardinghouse and funeral home, and even every morgue between Gary and Flint? I know you, Roscoe. I knew if you were alive and all right there was no way you’d not write. I knew something had gone horribly wrong. Why didn’t you write, dear? Why didn’t you let us know you were here?”

  “Peg, Peg, Peg. I never even made it to Flint, I woke up in the hospital again. It was too much. I thought I was dying. I couldn’t figure out who I was for the longest time. Once things started clearing up I did write. The letters all came back.”

  He put his hands back over his face. “I’m so sorry. When I couldn’t get in touch with you, when I thought I’d lost you and the kids, I just didn’t care anymore. I’m afraid I gave up, Peg.”

  Mother sighed. “Sweetheart, you’re coming home. We have a lot to talk about, Mr. Malone.”

  “Yes, we do. How’re the babies?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  He shifted in the chair to look at me.

  His hair was long and dirty and snarled, he had a twisted beard that had bits of food in it, and his eyes burned at me. He sobbed and smiled his jack-o’-lantern smile.

  And he was still the handsomest man I’d ever seen.

  I rushed to hug him and could feel his shoulder blades poking from beneath the sheet. I fell into his open arms.

  “The Mighty Miss Malone.”

  I could hear how hard his heart hit against his ribs.

  There was so much I wanted to say. But everything I’d rehearsed for this moment was forgotten. The only thing I could think of, the thing I wanted to tell him most of all, was “Look, Father, Jimmie got my teeth fixed.” I wanted him to know he didn’t have to breathe out of his mouth when he was near me.

  He choked and covered his mouth with his hand.

  “Oh, sweetheart. My Darling Daughter Deza. I’m so happy. It’s so good to see you.”

  Father twisted to look at the house. “Where’s Jimmie?”

  “He’s doing real good, Father, he’s all grown up now, you’re not going to believe—”

  Mother snapped at Mr. Jackson, “How dare you? How dare you treat any human being like this? Do you know who this man is?”

  “Mrs. Blackbeard, look, I—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, my name is Mrs. Malone, and this is Roscoe Malone. My husband! Her father! How can you allow someone to wallow in their own filth like this? Get me some soap, a washcloth, a towel, some scissors, a razor, a toothbrush, baking soda and Vaseline.”

  “Ma’am, we do the best we can on what we have, there’s barely money to feed the men.”

  Mother calmed down. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jackson. Is there a pharmacy around here? Deza, write this list down.”

  Mr. Jackson said, “Hold on, Mrs. Malone, I’ve got some of my own things you can use to clean him up.”

  Mother said, “Thank you very much. Could you help me get him to a bathroom?”

  I started to help Father up and the sheet fell away from his legs. They were nothing but bones covered in tight, ashy-brown skin.

  Mother covered him and said, “Deza, take a dollar from my purse and tell the cabdriver he needs to wait another hour before we go back. Then go wait in the cab to make sure he doesn’t leave.”

  “But, Mother, I want to—”

  “Deza!”

  I sat in the taxicab. I was happy Mother had shooed me off, it would’ve been really hard to watch Father being led around like a baby. Plus sitting like this gave me time to figure some things out.

  Like the letters.

  Mother was right, I think I did know they couldn’t have been from Father, but they were real and they were there and it was like Mother says, “Any port in a storm.”

  Father never would’ve forgotten to put Jimmie’s name on the letters, that should’ve been my first clue.

  But who would send the Malones that much money every two weeks, who was that kind? And that rich?

  Mrs. Needham? She has a wonderful heart and a good character. But she’s a teacher, and teachers are poor as church mice.

  My heart skipped a beat. Dr. Bracy made a whole lot more sense!

  She was a doctor, had a telephone right in her house and baked pies all of the time, she must be very, very rich. And she had been very kind!

  But that didn’t make sense either, how would she know to send letters to us at general delivery in Flint?

  I was stumped.

  Then a epiphany hit me in the head as hard as Dolly Peaches had!

  It was Jimmie! No one else could have known where to write us, no one else would have cared enough to do it, no one else was making that much money. And most of all, no one else would have forgotten to put their own name on the letters!

  That was why he didn’t get excited when I told him Father was OK.

  I cried so hard the cabdriver said, “I told you I’d wait, miss, don’t cry.”

  I said, “I’m not crying for that, I’m crying because I have the best brother in the world and I am so proud of him that I could bust.”

  The door of the horrible-smelling house came open and Mother and Mr. Jackson slowly walked Father to the taxicab. I opened the back door for them.

  I thought he looked skinny before, but now, with his hair cut short and his beard shaved off and his hideous sheet traded for a white set of clothes like Mr. Jackson’s, it looked like they’d cut thirty more pounds off of him.

  Mr. Jackson said, “Hold on, Mrs. Malone, there’s something of his in the office.”

  Me and Mother helped Father into the seat between us. He smiled, then shut his eyes and leaned his head on Mother’s shoulder.

  Mr. Jackson came back holding a shoe box.

  He said, “These are the letters he sent. After the first five or so came back marked ‘Return to Sender’ we stopped mailing them for him. We didn’t tell him, but there just wasn’t money for stamps. I apologize, Mrs. Malone. When you wrote me, your name should’ve rung a bell, but it didn’t. There are so many people in and out of here that I just didn’t put two and two together. When these letters started coming back, I do remember asking him who the Malones were, and he’d never answer.”

  “Thank you.” Mother handed me the box.

  Mr. Jackson said, “I’m so glad something good finally happened to one of the men, Mrs. Malone. This place is the end of the road for so many dreams.”

  He tapped the top of the cab. “Drive safe.”

  We began the ride back to Gary. Father fell right to sleep.

  It was so hard to look at him. He seemed so tiny.

  I pulled the lid off of the shoe box. It was filled with envelopes. The first one I pulled out was addressed:

  Mrs. Margaret Malone, Master James Malone and Miss Deza Malone

  Someone had stamped on the envelope in big blue letters:

  RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN.

  The next five envelopes were marked the same way. Every envelope afterward just had Father’s handwriting, no big blue stamp and no postage stamps.

  I saw why none of the letters had gotten through. Father had put the wrong address on them. They all were sent to 4309 North Street, Flint, Michigan.

  “Mother, Father sent them all to the wrong place.”

  I showed her one of the envelopes.

  “He was confused, Deza. This is our old apartment in Flint, where we lived when we were first married.”

  I put the lid back on the box. I would never read these letters. Never. They would be filled with nothing but pain.

  Mother laid her arm on Father’s chest and cuddled him
to her. He looked terrible, like all the strength and happiness had been drained out of him.

  “Mother? Is he going to be all right?”

  “Deza, we don’t know how this is going to turn out. You have to be prepared. You have to look at this clearly. We’ve got him back and no one can care for him like we will. But this will be hard. He might be very different.”

  “He’s coming home, I don’t care.”

  She squeezed my cheek. “I don’t care either, dear.”

  As we drove, Father would wake up every once in a while, see me or Mother and smile, then go back to sleep.

  We were a hour past Lansing and Father had been awake for a while when I said, “Look, Mother, Burma-Shave signs! Have you ever seen these, Father?”

  I read to her and Father,

  “Ol’ Franky Jones ran and drove really fast,

  Known as a true football hero.

  Challenged a tree at sixty miles per hour—

  Final score: maple, one; Franky, zero!”

  Me, the taxicab driver, and Mother yelled out the last sign, “Burma-Shave!”

  There were two more sets of signs and they got a smile out of Father.

  He fell back asleep until about twenty miles outside of Gary.

  His eyes came open and he pointed his bony finger out the window and said, “Look, more signs!”

  We were passing a field. There were no signs, only a fence and fat white-and-black cows.

  Mother pulled his hand down and said, “Why don’t you try to sleep, dear?”

  Father pointed again. “No, don’t you see them? Deza, how ’bout you?”

  My heart sank. I lied, “Yes, Father, I see them.”

  His eyes sparkled when he said, “Great! Read them with me.”

  I looked at Mother. Her 1-1-1 lines were back. She gave me a sad smile.

  Before I could say anything, Father cleared his throat and started reading the signs only he could see:

  “He had heard that hope has wings

  But never believed such lofty things.

  It took time to set him straight,

  To learn hope was an open gate.

  Try as he might, he didn’t see