The Kindest Lie

by Nancy Johnson

  The pain medicine kept Midnight too groggy to tell Daddy any different. Word of what happened spread around town, and so did Daddy’s accusation. Eli Tuttle kept defending Corey even from behind bars. He’d gone to jail for shooting that gun in the air when the white boys attacked Corey the day before. Maybe he stood up for Corey because they were both Black. People in Ganton chose sides, lining up behind whomever they believed.

  A week later, doctors told Midnight the skin on his arm would heal, but the burns had snapped his nerve endings and it was possible he would never regain feeling in his arm. The thought of never swimming or playing baseball or tossing a Frisbee made him want to die.

  Only when he slept could he forget about everything he’d miss out on forever. And whenever he was awake, he and Daddy argued about what had really happened.

  “Those boys had been saying mean things to Corey that day, and I was just helping him.” Corey had been too traumatized to identify the boys and none came forward, so no one got in trouble for setting Midnight on fire.

  “You should never have gotten mixed up in that in the first place.”

  At night, when Daddy’s plant shift ended, he came home and washed Midnight’s arm with mild soap and then rubbed on antibiotic ointment. Sometimes he felt a slight sensation in his arm, but most of the time, nothing. But strangely, Midnight instantly felt closer to his father than he ever had since Mom died. He smelled the cigarette smoke on Daddy’s breath, the chemicals from the plant on his clothes. Lying on the bed, his arm stayed numb, but his heart vibrated with feelings he couldn’t explain.

  When Daddy changed his dressing, he told him he forgave him. It was absolution Midnight hadn’t asked for. He said, “It’s okay, son. You’re still young, don’t know any better.”

  He wrapped a gauze roll around Midnight’s arm and held the ends down with tape. “You didn’t have a clue you were fighting on the wrong side of the war.”

  Eighteen

  Ruth

  On the drive back home after dinner at Lena’s, they passed the fence of the old Fernwood plant. In the glow of their headlights, she read the sign: This facility is closed. NO TRESPASSING. She could still picture Papa and Eli walking out at the end of their shifts carrying their lunch pails, their hands leathery, dirt under their fingernails.

  Eli didn’t come home with them. He wanted to be alone. There were so many questions she needed to ask him. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Butch Boyd had said at dinner about him stealing and her grandfather cutting corners at the plant. Eli had fired back at Butch but hadn’t refuted any of the man’s accusations.

  Ruth took a detour and stopped the car when they got to the Wabash River, the one place where she most felt Papa’s presence. Here, she could think and wait for her grandfather’s spirit to make everything clear again. A sheet of ice covered the river. Snow dusted the windshield. Mama sat next to her, quietly wringing her gloved hands. Ruth couldn’t ply her grandmother with questions without the old woman taking it as a personal affront, a dagger straight through the dignity of their family. Pulling as close as she could get to the river’s edge, Ruth put the car in park and let the motor idle.

  She pulled out her phone to see if she had any messages or missed calls from Xavier. After a stressful day at the office, he often played racquetball at the East Bank Club, where he could yell and whack the ball loudly to let off steam. He hadn’t tried to reach her, so that’s probably where he was. She knew she could just call him, but she wanted him to get in touch with her first.

  “I’m tired. Why did you stop here?” Mama asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess because this is where Papa took me fishing every summer. I just started thinking about all the memories here and of him working at Fernwood, too.”

  “Sure are. So many good ones, too. Baby girl?”

  “Yes, Mama?”

  She lifted Ruth’s hand from the steering wheel and squeezed it hard. “You know your grandfather and your brother. You’ve known them all your life. They’re good men. Trust in that.”

  Fernwood had provided jobs for most of the men in the Tuttle family. The plant did the same for those living in other midwestern cities who came to Ganton, alone at first, without their wives and children. Once they got hired on, they stayed with relatives, sleeping on rollaway beds, cots, couches, and even floors. Then, when they had worked enough shifts to save money, they bought or rented shotgun houses of their own and sent for the rest of the family to join them.

  Every morning, Papa rose before the sun came up to press his shirt and pants, even though the dress code allowed for latitude, with some workers wearing wrinkled T-shirts and raggedy jeans. Adorning her grandfather’s head like a crown, that Fernwood cap, even on his days off.

  Sitting at the kitchen table eating her Cheerios, Ruth would sometimes snatch his hat and try it on. The cap swallowed her tiny head, its brim falling to her nose. He’d lift it gingerly, just enough to see her eyes, and they’d both laugh. She missed their game of peekaboo.

  Sobering, Papa would impart some life lesson. A man’s got to take pride in his work. Do a good job. Do right by the company and that company will do right by you.

  That’s why Ruth couldn’t reconcile that steward of values and virtue with someone who would cut corners and put people’s lives at risk. It didn’t add up.

  Back at the house, Ruth sat in Papa’s recliner, turned the pages of one of the old photo albums, and handed a loose photo to Mama on the couch next to her.

  Mama squinted as if the sun were in her eyes. She peered at the image of her late husband as a young man in overalls, looking cool as a summer breeze.

  “I know you miss Papa and that you were always faithful to him. But I’ve noticed that you’re getting close to Dino.” Ruth stopped there and studied Mama’s face to gauge whether she’d gone too far.

  “Dino’s a nice friend to have, but he’s no Hezekiah.”

  “I know. I wasn’t comparing.”

  Ruth was certain that if Papa had lived, Mama would have smiled more, had a reason to fix her hair, polish her nails, and wear the dried-out foundation that Ruth had stumbled upon in the medicine cabinet.

  Turning the pages of the album, Ruth stopped at a photo she’d never seen before, of a little girl around eight years old with two pigtails on either side of her head, in a plaid dress with bobby socks and scuffed Mary Janes. She turned it over and read what was scrawled on the back. Ernestine, 1938.

  “Now, that was a long time ago.” Mama took the photo from Ruth and pulled the album onto her lap. She ran her pruned fingers over the plastic covering. “Seems like another lifetime.”

  “Where was this taken?”

  “In Mississippi. McComb. That’s me in front of my school. One room for all the grades. It was segregated, nothing but colored.”

  Mama often talked about the Jersey cows and the butterfat milk they produced and how they endured scorching hot days. She relayed tales about her father readying bales of cotton for the textile mills, coming home with stories of how it was so hot he felt his skin melting, sliding right off his body. Just a new kind of slavery, he’d said.

  “Look at you,” Ruth said, a bubble of affection for Mama rising inside her. Just thinking of her grandmother as a little girl, innocent and full of wonder, made her whole body warm. “I know you were ready to get out of that dress, so you could go play.”

  “I jumped rope half the day in that outfit. There’s one song I made up actually from stories I heard the old folks telling,” Mama said.

  “Do you still remember it?”

  They brought us here on ships . . .

  Then tore us up with whips.

  God say nothing to fear . . .

  But cotton still king here.

  Ruth imagined her grandmother’s voice vibrating in her throat and slicing right through the thick Mississippi air.

  “I know times were hard for Black people in those days, but at least you had some fun,” Ruth said.

  �
�Yes, we had good times all right. But all good things come to an end, as they say. I don’t think I ever told you about my cousin Alfonso. He was just like a firefly. Alfonso moved so fast you had to catch him before he lit someplace else.” Mama slid her hand between the pages of the photo album and pulled apart the ones that stuck together. She pointed to a boy about twelve or thirteen, in tan overalls and a brown derby hat pulled low over his eyes.

  “He was a pretty boy. He’d be right there when we jumped rope and all the girls would chase him around. One day he was showing off for us and jumped in the air, clapping his shoes together. I tell you he was a mess. This one time he lost his balance and fell in the dirt and it caked to his backside. But he got up dancing and the girls ate it up.” Mama laughed while gazing at the photo of her cousin.

  “I bet he was something else. I wish I’d known him,” Ruth said.

  “He would’ve gotten a kick out of you and your brother. Sometimes, I wish he would have made less of a scene, less of a spectacle, you know. Anyway, that day, the girls were cackling and screaming when Alfonso went to the bathroom at the general store to clean himself up. He wasn’t paying any mind to what he was doing, and he started to open the wrong door. He realized his mistake quick and headed for the colored bathroom. But by then these three white men had walked up. I’ll never forget that one who said, ‘Did I see your nigger hands touch that door?’”

  Mama spat the n-word like it had a sour taste. Ruth had grown up hearing from her grandparents about whips and police dogs and fire hoses spraying Black folks, but it always felt like an ancient tale. Like something she had read about in history books or watched in documentaries. Something older people used as leverage to prove that people her age had it easy. Or rhetoric they hoped would motivate them to take advantage of opportunities that had been hard won. Ruth didn’t know if she could bear hearing more of the story, as she felt like a child inching closer to a flame, not sure if she should touch it or not.

  “Those men kicked dirt in Alfonso’s face and walked away laughing about it. He stood there and took it. What else could he do? That night he was supposed to come over to our house for supper. He loved Ma’s greens and cold-water corn bread. We were all sitting around the table talking about Sunday school lessons and the price of lumber coming down. But Alfonso never showed up.”

  Mama tilted her head up to the ceiling and closed her eyes. The living room felt small and tight, with a pall of melancholy covering it.

  She went on with her story. “Then we heard some commotion outside, and my father went out to check. There was Alfonso running fast, zigzag-like, with these white men chasing him. Then he just turned in circles, his hands stretched out, his eyes glowing in the dark. Those men were everywhere, and he was trapped. Pa walked right out there and stood in front of Alfonso and told those men to take him, do what they needed to do to him instead of his nephew. But they didn’t pay that no mind. They said this was the little nigger that tried to use the white bathroom and he needed to learn a lesson.”

  “I can’t imagine.” Ruth rested her hand on Mama’s thigh.

  Papa used to tell stories about the civil rights marches decades later that moved through Chicago to support the striking Memphis sanitation workers. He said he drove up there to march with them holding a sign that screamed in bold letters I AM A MAN. Every time he talked about it, Ruth thought there was something screwed up about a world where a man needed to carry a sign to remind the world and maybe even himself that he was indeed a man. She honestly couldn’t fathom what they’d endured in Mississippi in the 1930s.

  Mama continued. “They wrapped a long rope around the tree where we had just picked walnuts the week before. It had rained not too long before. You know, one of those summer showers that’s over before you know it. So the ground was wet. All those men made a big circle around Alfonso. He’d turn one way to try to run and then the other. Every time, he’d kick up mud and it would splash on his pants. He reminded me of a caged animal, and I figure that’s how they saw him. It’s about what they thought of him. You can’t think nobody’s human and do that to them. I stood in the doorway with Ma and Mitch and we watched them hang Alfonso.”

  Ruth’s breath caught in her throat and she looked down at her hands, which were clenched in fists. “Dear God. I don’t know what to say.”

  Watching her grandmother, she imagined that little girl in pigtails from the picture, and anger welled inside her until it spilled from her face in hot tears.

  “What did you do?” Ruth said, her voice barely a whisper.

  Mama’s mouth twitched, and her words emerged hard and gravelly. “What could we do? Not a damn thing right then unless we wanted to be hung next. We just stood there real still until it was over. I’m telling you this story because of your son and what I said to you when you brought him into the world.” She leaned back in her chair.

  Ruth wondered how that lynching long ago could be connected to her child. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “That next morning after they hung Alfonso, my folks made your uncle and me pack our suitcases and we all headed to the train station. They’d had enough. You hear the old folks who used to say they were sick and tired of being sick and tired? We left Mississippi and came here to Indiana and stayed with family that had come before us. We didn’t have much else but a hope and a prayer. And each other. But it was a fresh start, and that’s what we needed.”

  Mama looked around the dimly lit room as if she were appraising the value of everything in it and had settled on a low figure. “Sometimes leaving is the best way. The only way.”

  What could Ruth say to that? Surviving Yale and Langham seemed small and inconsequential compared to what Mama had seen and endured. There were so many unanswered questions that Ruth needed her grandmother to answer.

  She went to her bedroom to get her purse and returned to sit beside Mama again. “That breaks my heart, and I get why you had to leave. I even understand why you wanted me to leave Ganton without my baby. You wanted what was best for me. But now, I’m back. I’m here. I need you to help me with this.”

  Pulling the crumpled paper from her purse, she handed her the registry consent form. Mama stared at the paper but didn’t move.

  “Here. Take it.”

  “What is this?”

  “Just read it, please.”

  Hesitantly, Mama took the form. Fear crossed her face as she read.

  “What is it? Tell me what’s got you so spooked right now.”

  “Where did you get this rubbish?” Mama threw the form on the floor.

  Taking a deep breath, Ruth said, “The county clerk’s office. I need to fill it out if I have any hope of reconnecting with my son.”

  The way her grandmother looked at her, Ruth wouldn’t have been surprised if Mama had gone outside and yanked a switch from a tree to whip her, had it not been such a bone-chilling winter day. Even as full-grown as Ruth was.

  “Mama. Please. That day, when you left with the baby, where did you go? Nowadays you can drop a baby off at the hospital or fire station, no questions asked. But there was no safe haven law back then. You had to take him somewhere.” Ruth moved close enough to smell the Jergens lotion her grandmother lathered on her arms and legs after her nighttime bath. “Where, Mama?”

  Her eyes glazed over, unreadable. “I took him to Jesus. He’s with good, God-fearing people. That’s all that matters.”

  Ruth swallowed past a hard lump at the base of her throat and tried to ignore what sounded like mockery from her grandmother. “This whole thing was off the books, wasn’t it? There were no adoption papers, were there?”

  Mama didn’t answer, and Ruth took her silence as confirmation.

  Nineteen

  Midnight

  Izzy bummed loosies off people and she usually scored a whole pack of cigarettes by nightfall. Her blue-gray eyes crossed each other and sometimes she stumbled over her own feet. That’s how she got the name Dizzy Izzy. And when she opened her mouth to
talk to you, her tongue poked through the gaps where her missing teeth should have been. Pancho said people with no teeth gummed the inside of their jaws, and he knew this since his great-grandpa did it.

  Every other Friday, Izzy camped out in front of the gas station. It stayed busy on Fridays. Granny always said the money from payday must be burning holes in people’s pockets.

  “Can you help me out? I just need a couple dollars to get me something to eat,” she said, telling a lie, since everybody knew she only wanted cash for cigarettes.

  They didn’t like to get close to Izzy because she smelled like rotten meat left out in the hot sun for weeks. But that didn’t stop Corey from moving closer and saying, “I’ll get something for you to eat. Be right back.” He had money because he still earned a weekly allowance for doing chores around the house and sometimes just for bringing home good grades.

  Two guys in red bandannas leaned against the outside wall of the gas station, one of them pouring Red Hots in his mouth. Midnight recognized them as local gang members, or at least that’s what people said. And he knew people could be wrong. The one who wasn’t eating elbowed his friend and pointed to the boys. They moved in front of the door, blocking the entrance. When Pancho tried to push his way between them, the taller one stood with his legs spread wide and said, “Hey now, where are your manners?”

  Both men wore Air Jordans that looked new enough to have just come out of the box. Red with chunky white soles and thick tongues. Their matching red laces undone.

  Once the guys tired of taunting them, they stepped aside and even opened the door for the boys to walk inside. That small gesture of civility resembled respect, and it made Midnight and his friends walk taller, maybe even strut into the gas station.

  Greasy hot dogs rolled on a grimy rack and nachos covered in orange cheese sauce sat under the harsh glare of a heat lamp. A thrill surged through Midnight as they bumped into each other in the narrow aisles. Just the mere anticipation of the mischief they could find here made his blood jitter even before he knew what form it might take.