“I’ll be up and moving around Tuesday,” he said.
“And what the doctor say don’t mean a thing?”
“I’m tired hearing about that doctor,” Phillip said. “Right now I’m stronger than that little Cajun ever was or ever will be.”
“That little Cajun didn’t fall in front of a house full of people yesterday,” Alma said.
“How do you know?” Phillip asked her. “He mighta fell a dozen times ’fore he got here. He didn’t look too strong to me.”
Alma stared at Phillip across the room. The longer she looked at him, the angrier she got. She started to speak, but she changed her mind and left the room. Phillip and Elijah heard her slam the bedroom door down the hall.
“She’ll get over it,” Phillip said. “Listen, I want you to get me two bottles of wine.”
“Wine?” Elijah said, looking at Phillip as if he couldn’t believe what Phillip was telling him to do. “Alma’s already mad at me, Reverend Martin.”
“I can handle Alma,” Phillip said. “Two bottles of good wine. Sherry. Your friend is right. The rest of them ought to get off that hard stuff. No good for your liver. Turn it green. What they sell that stuff now? That good stuff?”
“I don’t know,” Elijah said. “Five, six dollars, I reckon.”
“I want the best,” Phillip said. He was elated with the thought that he would see the boy on Tuesday. “Go up to Lorio’s,” he said. “I’m sure he has some good stuff up there. Tell him you want the best. Tell him it’s for me. Tell him I want the same kind he sell them priests when they having a party.”
Elijah lowered his head. Phillip sounded to him as if he had had a few drinks already.
Phillip raised the coffee cup to his mouth, while thinking about the boy. In his mind’s eye he already saw him sitting there on the couch. He would let him sit there a while with his glass of wine, then he would get him to follow him to another part of the house. There, alone, they would talk. They might even go in the yard and walk across the lawn, or they might even go for a ride in the car.
But talk about what? Talk about what? Phillip asked himself. They were total strangers. The boy was his son by blood only. How many times had he held him in his arms? How many times had he ridden him on his back? He couldn’t recall now if he ever did. He couldn’t even recall his true name.
Talk about what then?
He would ask about Johanna. Yes. Yes. He would ask about Johanna. He would ask about her.
She was a beauty, that woman, when she was young. That good, light-brown café-au-lait color. She never had to put makeup on that face; no iron in that hair. No, not with that skin and that hair. Hair like silk. Yes. Natural. Natural as any flower, any rose. She was a natural. That’s what she was, a natural, a natural beauty. So different from all the others, so much better than all the others. Yes, he could still remember her. After all these years, he could still remember her.
“Sir?” he heard Elijah saying.
Phillip looked at him. He didn’t know he was still there.
“What?” he asked.
“You want me to take these things in the back?” Elijah said, as if he had asked the same question some time ago.
Phillip nodded his head. “Sure, you can take them back. Good night, Elijah.”
After Elijah had gone with the tray, he sat there another ten or fifteen minutes drinking his coffee, which was cold now. Finally, he got up, turned out the lights, and went down the hall to the bedroom. Alma sat on the side of the bed looking down at the floor. He sat down on the bed beside her, but he didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he asked, “You mad ’cause I invited Elijah’s friends to the house?”
“You coulda asked me,” she said.
“I was go’n tell you when you came in the front. You didn’t give me time.”
Alma turned on him. She was still angry. “Not tell me,” she said. “Not tell me, Phillip. Ask me. This is my house too. Ask me sometime, Phillip.”
“You want me to go in there and tell Elijah not to bring his friends to the house? I’ll go in there right now if that’s what you want.”
He knew she would say no, even when he was saying it. She shook her head and looked down at the floor again.
“Why don’t you get in bed,” he told her. “I’ll look after the children.”
He went to both rooms. Patrick slept alone. The girls had single beds in another room. Everyone was asleep. Phillip tucked the covers well, kissed each child, and left. He went back to the front door and pulled the curtains to the side, but it was too dark now to see anything out there. When he came back into the bedroom he found Alma still sitting on the bed.
“If you go’n sit up, I might as well stay up with you,” he told her.
She undressed, then got into bed, facing the wall. He lay down beside her and tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t answer. After a while she fell off to sleep. But for hours he lay there as wide awake as he had been all day.
Between one and two o’clock he got up again, went into his office, and pulled back the curtains. The lawn was white with frost. The pecan tree in the open pasture across the street stood bare and alone. But no one stood out in front of the house, and no one was passing by. He turned from the window and knelt down beside his desk to pray. But when he got up off his knees he felt as if he had not prayed at all. He looked out of the window again, then he went back to bed, but knowing very well that he would not sleep.
When Alma took the children to school the next morning, he went back into his office again. Elijah had gone, and he had the entire house to himself. Before kneeling, he opened the Bible to the book of Psalms and read one verse from the one hundred second chapter. “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me.” He stopped here, reread the words silently to himself, thought about them a moment, then knelt beside the desk facing the picture of the crucifixion. But he didn’t begin with the Lord’s Prayer as he usually did each day, and neither did he say any of the things that he had said daily since his conversion. Instead, he asked the same question over and over: “Why? Why? Why? Is this punishment for my past? Is that why he’s here, to remind me? But I asked forgiveness for my past. And You’ve forgiven me for my past.”
He sat back on his legs, facing the crucifixion.
“Why, Father?” Phillip Martin asked. “Why? I think I’ve served You well; I think I’ve served my people well. Why?” he asked. “Why?”
The thorn-crowned, twisted, bleeding body of Christ hung on the cross, mute.
“Turn not thine ear from me in the day that I am troubled,” Phillip Martin prayed.
He was in the kitchen when Alma came back to the house. He had just set a kettle of water over one of the front burners, and he was still at the stove when Alma came in with the newspapers.
“How long you been up?” she asked him.
“I’m just getting up,” he said.
She gave him the papers, then she went to the stove to cook his breakfast. He sat at the table reading quietly to himself. He had gone through half of the papers when he came upon a very short story that he read out loud to her. Two white boys hunting rabbits had found the corpse of a black boy in a ditch of water between New Orleans and Laplace. The boy had been dead several days and his body frozen. The police didn’t find any identification on the body, and nobody knew who he was.
Alma shook her head, sadly, but didn’t say anything. Phillip read the story again. When Alma brought his breakfast to the table he was staring at the paper but not reading.
“He’s just another X,” he said, looking up at Alma. “He’s just another X, that’s all.”
He ate his breakfast without wanting it. He took a pill from each bottle, hating the pills, and hating himself for taking them. After a while he went into the living room and looked out on the street. He wanted to go into his office, but he knew Alma would come in there and get him out.
He sat down in the big leather chair with his pipe. The pipe was a birthday present from his children a year ago. He had smoked it a few times the first week and hadn’t picked it up again for a month. Even now he sucked on the pipe without lighting it.
Alma had been singing in the kitchen while she worked, but suddenly the singing stopped, and Phillip knew why. She thought he had gone into his office, and now she was listening. A moment later he heard her coming up to the front.
“No, I’m not in there,” he told her. “But I need to get out of here, if just out there in the yard.”
“I don’t want you catching cold out there,” she said.
“I won’t catch cold. I’ll wear my overcoat,” he told her.
He went into the bedroom and dressed. He still had the pipe when he came back into the kitchen. He used the end of a matchstick to light the pipe from a burner on the stove.
“Don’t be out there too long,” she said.
“I won’t.”
Before going out the door he reached over and patted her twice on the butt.
“Doctor said a week,” she said.
“What?”
“A week.”
“I didn’t hear him say that.”
“He whispered in my ear. Said none for a week. I might give you a relapse.”
“That doctor must think you pretty wild,” Phillip said.
“I do all right,” Alma said.
Phillip grinned at her. “You do better than all right, Little Mama,” he told her. “But we cutting that time in half. I hope you ready. You go’n have a lot of work to do.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“I will too,” he said.
He started out of the door again.
“Phillip?” she said.
He looked back at her.
“I want you to come to me sometime, Phillip,” she said. She had been playing before, but she was serious now.
“Don’t I come to you?” he said.
“Not just for that, Phillip.”
“I don’t want you mixed up out there,” he said.
“That’s my job, too, Phillip.”
“I want you in here,” he said.
“I’m in here all the time,” she said. “But you don’t come to me. You go in that room. You go out there in the yard. I’m in here—but you never come to me.”
He didn’t know how to answer her. He didn’t even try. He nodded his head and went out.
The back yard was surrounded by a tall cypress fence. Small maple and elm trees had been planted inside the fence all the way round the yard. The top of the trees, two or three feet above the pickets, waved softly from a slight wind off the St. Charles River. Phillip fastened the top button of his coat, not because he was cold, but because Alma might look outside and tell him to do so. Walking across the yard, with one hand in his coat pocket and the other holding the pipe in his mouth, he could feel the thick, springy St. Augustine grass under his shoes. When he came up to the back fence he turned and looked at the house again. He was proud of this house. He had worked hard for his family, his church, the people and the movement, and he had been proud of that hard work. He thought he had done a good job, at least both black and white had told him so. But now, after seeing the boy in the house, after falling and not getting up, he had begun to question himself; Who really was Phillip Martin, and what, if anything, had he really done?
He stood there looking at the house and thinking about the boy. The cold wind off the river burning his face didn’t matter. He probably would have stood there an hour if he had not seen Alma pull back the curtain and look out of the window at him. He started walking again. The pipe had gone out, but that didn’t matter either.
Out of all the things I’ve come up against these past few years—this one, this one, this one, Phillip Martin thought as he walked across the yard. Where do I start? he asked himself. What do I do? Go up to Virginia? Say what when I get up there? I demand to know why you here? Demand? Demand? After twenty years—more than twenty years—what give me the right to demand? Ignore him like I did in the past? Pretend he’s not even there? If that was possible, I never woulda fell. No, no, something is happening in me. Something is challenging me. Why? Why?
When Phillip came to the other end of the yard at the side of the house, he looked out toward the street. But a tall cypress gate between the house and the fence blocked the street from him. He stared at the gate now as if someone or something had put it there that very moment to keep him from seeing the boy.
Alma, who had been watching him through the window all the time, saw him standing there looking toward the street. When he didn’t move after a few minutes, she left the window and went to the door to call him. He didn’t answer her. She called him again. But instead of answering he started walking toward the front of the house. When she caught up with him he was standing at the gate gripping it with both hands.
“Didn’t you hear me calling you?” she asked. “Phillip? Phillip?”
“I heard you,” he said.
“Why didn’t you answer me?”
“I was thinking. I can think, can’t I?”
“Come on inside,” she said. “It’s getting cold out here.”
He shook the gate hard with both hands. But the gate of cypress was too solidly built to rattle.
“Phillip?” Alma said. “Phillip?”
He slammed his weight against it, then turned quickly away.
“First thing I do when I start moving round is take that thing down,” he said.
“Take it down for what?” she asked him.
“ ’Cause I put it there,” he said.
6
Tuesday after school, Shepherd and Elijah went uptown to get two bottles of wine. On their way back, they went by Virginia’s boardinghouse. When Elijah asked her if her new tenant was in his room, she said she didn’t know because she hadn’t seen him in two days, but she did know one thing, he had a gun up there, a .38 revolver, wrapped in a brown paper bag.
They stood just inside the door. Both Shepherd and Elijah wore overcoats and hats. Virginia wore a sweater over her dress and a bandanna on her head. The ends of the bandanna were tied into a tight little knot over her forehead.
“That person he come here to meet he come here to kill,” she said, speaking low and nodding her head for emphasis. She looked at Shepherd, then Elijah, nodding to both of them. “That,” she said, “or there ain’t nobody else, and he come here to kill himself.”
“I don’t believe that,” Shepherd said.
But he could remember their talking in the room last Saturday, and if he was serious about half of the things he said, then Shepherd believed he could do almost anything.
“Then what’s he doing here?” Virginia asked Shepherd. “Tell me that.”
“Maybe he just come here to see somebody like he said.”
He didn’t believe this either. And Virginia looking in his face could see he didn’t believe it.
“Me and you both know better than that,” she said.
“I don’t know no more than what he said,” Shepherd said. “He said he come here to meet somebody, that’s what I believe.”
Virginia nodded her head. She knew he was lying. She could tell by his face, his eyes, he was lying. He tried not looking directly at her, but she watched him all the time.
“I told him when he first got here I didn’t want no trouble in my place,” she said. “I sure don’t want no killing up there—himself or nobody else.”
“Nobody’s going to get killed, Virginia,” Shepherd said.
“How do you know?”
He wouldn’t look at her. He didn’t know how to answer her. He could still remember the conversation in the room last Saturday. He was still asking himself how he had got caught up in it in the first place.
“Lot of people go around with guns,” Elijah said. “What does that prove?”
“Lot of people go around with guns, yes,” Virginia said. “I got
mine under my pillow right now. But lot of people don’t walk the street for nothing with ice all over the ground. Lot of people don’t lay up in their room and scream at night. Sunday night he did it again.”
“What time Sunday night?” Shepherd asked.
“Do it matter what time?” Virginia asked him.
“We were all drinking together Sunday night,” Shepherd said. “He was sitting there with a bunch of us—between eight and nine o’clock.”
“He never scream that early, not him,” Virginia said. “He likes to wait till everybody’s asleep, or fixing to go to sleep, then he starts. I can’t see how come he don’t do his screaming back there in that graveyard or down that riverbank. I don’t know why he’s got to bring it here. I don’t like it.”
“You can put him out,” Shepherd said.
“Can I?” Virginia said. “Can I? You and me both know I just can’t put him out.”
“And why not?”
“If it was that easy, you think I woulda let him in here in the first place?”
“Maybe he’ll leave soon,” Elijah said.
“No,” Virginia said, shaking her head. “He ain’t go’n leave soon. He ain’t go’n leave soon at all. He come here for something—something we can’t do nothing about. And he ain’t go’n leave till that thing’s done.” She looked over her shoulder toward the door. “I knowed that bad weather was go’n bring trouble. Weather like that always bring trouble. I knowed it from the start.”
“You’re imagining things,” Shepherd said.
“Sure,” Virginia said, looking up at him. In his face she could see that he believed everything she was saying. “Sure,” she said again.
“Let’s check upstairs,” Elijah said to Shepherd.
They went up to his room and knocked at the door. When he didn’t answer, they pushed the door open and went in. The room was extremely cold, the bed unmade, with half of the covers on the floor. Elijah, using just the tips of his fingers, picked up the covers and dropped them on the bed.
“What d’you think?” he asked Shepherd.
Shepherd stood at the window looking down at the alley below. He remembered that Virginia’s tenant had described his soul as being much like the alley, cluttered with trash. Elijah came to the window where he was.