When I put my arms around her, it was like she was in a little cocoon, all wrapped up and safe. I even patted her back. It felt like the right thing to do.
As I held Rosie, feeling her warmth and her shaking sobs, I wondered what was going to happen to her. She was nothing like Darrell, but still, being treated bad had to do something to you. Something had to give. Just like with cars. You could drive a car while the radiator got hotter and hotter and keep ignoring it for a while, but all of a sudden, one steamy day, it would blow up in your face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
J
I told Mama what had happened and even though her face went white, including her lips, all she said was she’d tell the sheriff what I’d heard but we didn’t know for sure what was happening and all we could do, really, was be the best friends to Rosie that we could. It made me mad, but she reminded me about what Daddy always said, that a man’s home is his castle and you can’t interfere with someone else’s family. Still I think even Daddy would’ve interfered at this point.
I went over there after school on Friday and several times Saturday morning, spying, but Rosie always seemed somewhere else. Mama went over, too, coming up with all kinds of dumb reasons, like bringing Mrs Dunlop a magazine article about quilting or asking to borrow cake decorations when she wasn’t even baking a cake.
By Saturday afternoon Mama said I’d best concentrate on my Foxfire paper because our first draft was due Monday. I wondered if Miss Miller had told Mama what she told me, that my English grade “couldn’t withstand another poor mark”. I was so mad at Mr Dunlop and everything he stood for that I had a lot to say about the Freedom Church. First about what Old Man Porter did to help George Freeman and his congregation, then about everything that the Dunlops did to destroy it. J was distracting me, though, because he was outside crying. At first I ignored him because if he wasn’t bawling for Mama, then he wasn’t really hurt, but after a while it got plain annoying.
“What’s wrong, J?” I called out my window as I kept writing.
He quit crying and his gravelly footsteps came as close as the pine tree by my window would allow, before I heard him slide down against the side of the house. His crying started up again, louder this time.
“Will you quit your boo-hooing?”
“I c-cain’t.”
“Yes, you can. Just shut your mouth.”
“It won’t stick,” he moaned.
“I’ll give you some glue.”
“It won’t work.” He started wailing.
“Shoot, J! What is your problem?”
“My – my – Band-Aid won’t stiiiiiick.”
I let out a big sigh. “Aw, for heaven’s sake!”
I got up and leaned out my window. J was sitting against the house, trying to put a ratty old Band-Aid on his knee.
“Of course it won’t stick! You need a fresh Band-Aid.”
“I don’t want a fresh Band-Aid. I’m saving this one.” He dropped his head to his knee and cried such big sobs I even started feeling bad for him. I pulled myself out of my window, scratching myself on the pine, as usual, and dropped onto the gravel next to him.
“Come on, J, it couldn’t hurt that much.” I looked at his knee. “You don’t even have a cut!”
He started bawling so loud it hurt my ear.
I stood up to get away from the noise. “I’ll get you a new Band-Aid, even though you don’t need one.” I tried to take the old Band-Aid away from him, but he wouldn’t let go of the dirty used-up wad.
“Nooooooo! It’s mine! Daddy put it on me the day he died!”
I stared at him and slid down the side of the house to the ground. He kept crying, and I put my arm around him. I didn’t know what to say, but he spoke first.
“How come he did more stuff with you than with me?”
“Well – because – for one thing, I liked to hang out in the shop and you didn’t.”
J stopped snivelling and looked at me. “Yeah…” he said slowly.
“And maybe because I was older there was just more stuff I could do with him, more things to talk about, since I’m practically a grown man myself.”
J wiped his eyes and stared off into the distance like he was trying to take it all in.
“He did stuff with you, too, right?” I went on. “He took you to get ice cream since you were both so fond of it.”
“Rocky Road,” he said.
“Right. And how about piggyback rides? He didn’t give me piggyback rides.”
J grinned. “You’re too big, Red!”
“See, that’s what I mean. He did different stuff with us because we’re different.” I remembered something that I’d never felt like telling J, until now. “You know something else?”
“What?”
“Daddy said you’re smart and tough and fearless. He said you can tackle anything. And if you don’t get to college on a sports scholarship it doesn’t matter, because you’re smart enough to get in without it.”
“He said all that?”
“Yup. He thought the world of you…Bamm-Bamm.”
J smirked and stared at the shop for a while. He was fingering his Band-Aid, and I guess he saw me looking at it because, real quick, he said, “I’m still keeping this.”
“You should.”
“Don’t tell Mama about it because she’d probably throw it out.”
I nodded. “Tell you what, you need a good place to keep that. I’ve got an idea.”
I led him into the shop. “Give me your Band-Aid.”
He hung onto it.
“You’ll get it back in a minute, I promise.”
Slowly, he handed it over.
I went up the steps to the back of the shop and opened up the first-aid kit. I remembered a tiny little tin that had aspirins in it, because once in a long while Daddy had a headache and would grab a couple of pills. I found the tin and lifted its lid. There were about half a dozen aspirin left, which I threw in the trash.
I put J’s Band-Aid inside and was just snapping the lid shut when he asked, “What’s this?”
I turned around and J had come up the stairs and was looking at my map on Old Man Porter’s desk, the one I’d made to keep track of where I’d looked for Freedom Church. Normally I wouldn’t share anything with J, mostly on account of he has a big mouth. But I figured it was up to me to teach him about real life, since Daddy wasn’t around. So I told him that I was looking around the Dunlops’ property for where Freedom Church used to be, and I showed him which part of the map was ours, which was the Dunlops’, and which was Miss Georgia’s.
I handed him the little tin with his Band-Aid in it.
He shoved it deep in the pocket of his shorts. “How come Miss Georgia’s part is so small?”
“Because a long time ago Mr Dunlop’s great-grandaddy stole some of her land.”
“How?”
“He shot Miss Georgia’s grandaddy in the back when he was walking into church and took it from him.”
J’s dark eyes flared at me. “No! No way!”
I nodded. “That’s why we don’t get along with Mr Dunlop.”
“Oh,” he said, turning back to stare at the map. “I thought it was because he’s an asshole.”
He said it so seriously, I busted out laughing.
“Well, he is!” J protested.
I couldn’t stop laughing, which started J laughing, too, and we made our way back to the house, weaving across the gravel, hanging onto each other just to stay up.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Mama
Even if Mr Dunlop never gave back the land he stole from Miss Georgia’s family, I still felt like I had to find that Freedom Church. For her. For Daddy. For me. If J could hang on to an old Band-Aid for months like it was something holy, I ought to be able to find the church. On Sunday I got a shovel from the shop because I figured it was time to start digging for that thing. In a hundred years, the rock they used as an altar must’ve gotten covered up with dirt or bushes or something.
It sure wasn’t in plain sight.
I wished for about the hundredth time that me and Thomas were friends. He’d probably have some good ideas about where to find the altar stone. Plus, I kind of wanted him to know that I was trying to do something good, to unbury the past and find the land that belonged to black people since long ago. I dug hard and long in the woods, everywhere there was a hump that might be covering a rock that was supposedly so huge you couldn’t miss it. I didn’t find a thing.
When it got so dark I couldn’t tell the difference between dirt, rocks, and leaves, I dragged my shovel home. Beau was sitting on the front steps of the What-U-Want, even though it was closed, tugging his hair.
“What’s wrong, Beau?” I put the tools on the porch and sat down next to him.
“It’s the strangest thing, Red.”
“What?”
“Your mama. I wanted to work on a couple of oil changes, but she’s all dressed up and she said she wants to be all alone in the shop.”
“The shop?” I stood up. What was she doing in there? Packing?
“See, ain’t that strange?”
I flew across the gravel, even though Beau was calling out to me about how Mama wanted to be alone, and I burst into the shop like a hurricane.
It was so cold in the shop that I could see my breath and dark enough that Mama looked like a ghost standing at the top of the stairs in the office. Slowly she turned and I saw her face all puffy and red and streaked with tears. I’d never seen Mama in the middle of crying before. When she saw me she whipped her head back around to face the wall.
I saw what she was staring at. The wedding photo. I walked up the stairs and looked at it, too. Mama and Daddy looked so happy and real young. Then I noticed the frame. It was one of those that had the wedding date on it, OCTOBER 22, 1958. October 22? Today!
I stood there staring at the picture now, too, remembering how they always went somewhere special on their anniversary every year. They closed up shop for the day and didn’t get home until real late. It was after midnight, last year, which was the first year they left me in charge, since I was eleven. I know because I woke up and couldn’t believe it was so late. I even went out and asked them where they’d been and why they came back so late. They said I made them feel like a couple of teenagers being grilled by their daddy, and they stood there giggling like a couple of teenagers, too.
Thinking of Mama giggling made it hard to listen to her sniffling and gulping.
When she turned around again she whispered, “I really miss him.”
My voice was quiet, too. “Then why do you want to move and leave him behind?”
She looked at the photo and spun her wedding ring around and around her finger. “Because if I can’t have him any more I don’t want to have pieces of him all around me.” She took a step back from the picture. “If I can’t hear his voice I don’t want to hear him everywhere I go.” She turned away from the wall. “If I can’t see him I don’t want to look at everything that was his.” She wiped the tears from her eyes.
That’s when I realized that me and Mama had opposite ways of grieving. She loved Daddy so much that, without him, she was like the shell of a snail that’d lost its living-inside part. Like a shell you’d put on your nightstand, sitting there doing nothing until it got covered with gum wrappers and a busted whistle and the baseball cards that aren’t worth putting in the album, and your mama would come in your room and say, “Boys. I just don’t understand them,” and throw it all out, even the shell. Unless she was one of those mamas who’d turned into a shell herself and given up on cleaning and cooking and just about everything else. For Mama it hurt too much to be reminded of him. For me it hurt too much not to have everything of Daddy all around me.
“I can’t leave until I find Freedom Church,” I said, as much to myself as to her.
Mama did a double take and spun her ring again. “What do you mean?”
“Daddy was looking for it.”
She swallowed and nodded but didn’t look at me.
“I want to find it for Miss Georgia. I have to find it for Miss Georgia.”
Mama put her hands on Old Man Porter’s desk, leaned over it, and let her head drop down. I held my breath, knowing that she could see the sign I wrote, ON PAIN OF DEATH THIS DESK HAS TO BE MOVED! staring her in the face.
But she didn’t seem to see anything. Her eyes were glazed over.
“It’s Porter’s Shop Road, Mama. Our name is here. What kind of place would it be if Mr Dunlop was the one representing it? We owe it to this place. We owe it to Daddy.”
Finally she nodded, sniffing. “Well, Mr Harrison said it’s harder to find a buyer in the fall and winter, so nothing’s going to happen right away.” She gave me a little smile. “Let’s try to make the best of the time while we have it.”
She hugged me, and I’d forgotten what that felt like. She wiped her eyes again, and it was hard to be too mad at her. I even gave her a hug back.
That night, Mama had me pick out my favourite ice cream from the store – mint chocolate chip, of course – along with Hershey’s syrup and even sprinkles, so we could make sundaes for dessert. J whined so much that it wasn’t Rocky Road, and how come I got to pick the flavour, that Mama told him he had to wash the ice-cream bowls. When he moaned about that, she added in the supper dishes.
“You should’ve kept your mouth shut,” I told him.
Mama put her hand on her forehead and sighed, waiting for us to start fighting, I guess.
When I picked up a towel and said, “I’ll dry,” she about fell out of her chair.
Doing dishes together wasn’t bad. We had sword fights with the peanut butter and jelly knives and used the Melmac plastic plates as shields when the fighting got too tough. We played Clint Eastwood and the bad guy because J loved saying, “Do you feel lucky, punk?” over and over, and flicking water at me until Mama told us to stop dripping soapy water all over the kitchen floor. Then we had a towel race to mop up the mess, scuffing along the linoleum, until Mama came in and said we’d done enough and it was J’s bedtime.
J immediately whined about it, but I got a smile out of him when I said, “Come on, punk, don’t you feel lucky?” By the time I’d chased him around the house a few times and gave him a piggyback ride to his bedroom, he was having an all-out laugh attack.
Mama smiled. “Thank you, Red. Would you like to watch this new TV show with me?”
Mama had never asked me to watch a TV show with her before, and I thought it was going to be some sissy show but it turned out to be the complete opposite.
It was called M*A*S*H, which stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, about a bunch of U.S. Army doctors and nurses who live in tents near the fighting during the Korean War and patch up all the wounded guys. It was a serious idea, but mostly the show was real funny.
In the opening credits there was this scene where all the nurses are running over to the helicopter to get the wounded guy out. Mama said to the TV, “That’s what I like to see, women doing something constructive with their lives.” It sounded funny, her talking to the TV like that, but it was also good to see some life come back into her eyes.
The next day, I went up to Miss Georgia’s with Daddy’s shoebox full of photos me and Mama had looked at after we watched M*A*S*H. They were all black-and-white instant pictures from Daddy’s Polaroid Swinger. He took so many photos because they spat right out of the camera as soon as you took them and you didn’t have to wait. Mama said we should own stock in the company, seeing as how Daddy spent so much money on their film.
I knelt down next to Miss Georgia’s glider on the front porch as we went through the pictures. She chuckled at the photo of me when I was five, sitting in the front seat of her Rambler, pretending like I was driving. “You always did like cars.”
We both laughed at the photo of J naked in his crib. That kid had always had too much energy. When he was a baby he used to wriggle clear out of his diaper.
“There’s you and Tho
mas,” Miss Georgia said quietly, picking up a photo I hadn’t seen when I was going through the box with Mama the night before.
Thomas and I were standing bare-chested in front of the fort we’d made out of car parts. Our arms were stuck up in the air like Vs for victory, Thomas’s right hand holding up my left. And we were smiling fit to bust. I sure didn’t feel like smiling now.
I heard a sniffle and thought for a second it might’ve come out of me before I saw the tears in Miss Georgia’s eyes. She’d picked up a photo of Daddy standing there smiling into the camera, one arm around Mama and the other around Miss Georgia.
“You can have that one if you want, to remember him by,” I said. I didn’t think Mama would mind too much. She had a lot of other pictures of Daddy.
She sniffed a few times. “Oh, Lordy, I’ll always remember him.” She handed the photo back to me. “You keep it so you have somethin’ to remember me by.”
“Oh, Lordy, I’ll always remember you,” I said, and that got her laughing again.
After we went through all the photos, I asked to take a photo of her.
“Why you want a picture of a wrinkled-up old lady?”
“I don’t,” I said, “I want a picture of you.”
“Oh, you is your daddy’s son, all right! You goin’ to be a charmer, you are. Still, you got a picture of me right there.”
I told her it was for my Foxfire project, and she said she didn’t want to get in the way of my education, so she smiled for the camera. I also took photos of her house, which she was okay with, but when I opened the freezer, she stopped me.
“What in the world are you doin’?”
“Taking a picture of mint chocolate chip ice cream.”
“Why you want to take a photo of a carton of ice cream?”
“It’s history, too,” I said. “It’s to remember my favourite ice cream when I’m old.”
She laughed. “Red, I don’t think you’ll ever outgrow that.”
I figured she was probably right, but she still gave me a bowl of ice cream.
When I got home, Beau came out on the front steps of the What-U-Want, one hand tugging his hair and the other one beckoning to me.