Four Spirits (3 page)

IN THE WOODS, A CHILD IS FIRING A PISTOL.

“Aim at the trees,” her father tells her because she is five years old.

She must shoot the trees, but it doesn't make sense, because her father is the one who says he will die, and soon. Maybe death is hiding in the trees, the little girl thinks, and what if she kills death? Then it can't get her father.
Aim at the trees,
yes, he surely said to do that, and she would do anything for him, and never be disobedient again.

Since her parents and two brothers are standing behind, Stella sees nothing but trees, their slender pine bodies upright and endless as the soldiers marching down Twentieth Street in the Birmingham Armistice Day parade.

In the piney forest, Stella holds the heavy, grown-up gun in her hand; she must lift the barrel to aim, and that tiny blade, like a fragment of razor blade on the end of the barrel, is called the
sight.
But will she become a soldier, if she fires a gun? And what if someone fires back at her?
What if?

During the parade, her mother pointed up to the balcony of the Tutwiler Hotel. “The reviewing stand”—Mama said—“General Omar Bradley.”

“Now fire,” Stella's father murmurs to his five-year-old daughter in his liquid-kind doctor voice. She knows the instruction is for her finger. Just her finger should ever so slightly pull the trigger toward her, toward them, but what if
if if if if if if if
the pistol has its own will and the barrel looks up above the green woods, up toward the sky that has turned pale, hardly blue at all anymore, and if the pistol continues to rear up like a stallion but instead of the must-be
return of hoofs to the earth, what if the stallion rears past return, arcs backward till the horse is going to land on its own back, and then the stallion-gun fires, and it's
us
all soft in our skin bags with hair on our heads and
us
limber jointed (with blood inside!),
us
in the gun's sights and we are the target when the bullet races down the barrel?

Because of death, Daddy reminds, “Aim at the trees!”

Because Stella is hesitating in pulling the trigger, his voice comes booming now from the bedrock bottom beneath the sand beneath the sea: command: “Fire!”

Her father's voice roars like a cannon. Stella remembers the cannon roar and recoil not from the parade but from the movies of World War II, and she remembers Carlotta Shirley's father and her mother's explanation of shell-shocked Mr. Shirley:
the toll of war.

In the woods, her mother is wearing bright red lipstick, fresh, but Stella wears her faded overalls with the bib over her chest that always makes her feel safe. Perhaps (Stella imagines) the bullet she has fired dodges all the tree trunks in the woods before her; perhaps the bullet takes no toll but slips harmlessly like a snake between slender trunks, forever. Or, perhaps the bullet has hit a young pine, entering the bark lovingly like a ghost leaving not so much as a kiss-mark of lipstick on the flinty brown scales encircling a trunk just the size of your wrist. What happens to a bullet fired?

And how could the repercussion of that shot be in the woods, when it rings in Stella's own head? The sound of pistol fire big as apocalypse has entered Stella's brain.

(She has kept the barrel from rearing back.) “That's right,” her father says. It's his kind, lapping-waves doctor voice again. His face is pale and scrubbed so clean she can see the delicate red veins beside the flange of his nose.

His blood is inside those vessels, and he is fully and completely alive. Is it possible that today while he was driving the car, he said, “I have lung cancer. That's why I spit all the time,” and the car just kept going south? “You've seen me spitting. And I'll die of it.” But his hair is still thick and gray, beautifully brushed. She loves his big nose and thinks him handsome as a hawk.

 

ON THE DRIVE DOWN
Highway 31, which links Birmingham to Montgomery and beyond to the even deeper rural South of virtually forgotten places
like Helicon, Dr. Silver had spoken solemnly to his family. When he was a boy at Helicon, he loved Sunday school and squirrel hunting equally, he told his two sons and daughter as they drove south, back toward his old home—he'd never lost touch—where he had picked cotton alongside the colored folks. And then while he drove the car toward Helicon, he sang his children his favorite Methodist Sunday school song: “Jesus loves the little children, / all the children of the world; / red and yellow, black and white, / they are precious in his sight. / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Because she is Jewish, Stella's mother never sang a word about Jesus.

Before he dies,
Mama had explained to the children in the car, but the children are not to tell anybody at Helicon,
he wants to visit
. He wants to see again the woman he always called Old Aunt Charlotte, but Mama said only “Charlotte” and she explained that Daddy meant “honor” not “kin” when he said “Aunt” and that when he said “Old,” he meant respect for her years.

When they first piled out of the car, they stopped at the little hut-house at Helicon, but Daddy had said, “Let her sleep. We'll go fire the pistol.”

But Stella and her brothers peeked and saw her sleeping—Old Aunt Charlotte, the one Who-Was-Born-into-Slavery. Not her son Christopher Columbus Jones, whose hair was cotton-boll white on his dark head, not her gaunt-cheeked daughter Queen Victoria Jones, whose head was crowned not by precious metal studded with gems but by a faded bandanna. Though ancient, Christopher Columbus Jones and Queen Victoria Jones are too young to have been slaves. It is their mother, Old Aunt Charlotte, who survived both before and after the time when the world convulsed in civil war to set her free. And Daddy wants his three children to know her. “It's important to Daddy. He grew up at Helicon,” Mama, who grew up in Chicago, said in her special deep voice while they were in the car. Mama's voice meant
you have got to understand, or act as if you understand, and obey.

Stella, of course, has always understood that Helicon was the place where the true South was. To her country-bred father, industrial Birmingham was an impostor place, not the real South at all, and so—is Stella herself real? Probably not. If her father denies the reality of Birmingham (or is it the importance of the place that he refuses to embrace?) and if, to Stella, no place is so real as the neighborhood of Norwood, or their red clay driveway, then are her feet real? And if not her feet, what of her legs? Bit by bit, when she tries to understand,
she dissolves into unreality. She has come into a world that may never be real, and she and it are always going to be almost as nothing as ghosts or maybe, at best, spirits.

 

NOW THEY'VE ALL SHOT
the trees, except Mama who says, “Oh, I don't want to do that,” and dismisses the whole issue. It seems to Stella that Mama has no use for guns.

But during the parade, Stella had heard her murmur, “Blessed guns, blessed boys.”

Stella had gotten bored; there were so many soldiers, all dressed in brown; one block after another, then a few tanks, more blocks of soldiers, all their legs waving forward together. “Stand up straight, children,” Mama had murmured in a voice that sounded like crying. And Stella and her brothers had lifted and squared their shoulders. Just like a flatiron, Mama's hand had pressed right up Stella's spine to straighten it.

Now while the pistol bullets wander forever in the wilderness of woods, Stella and her family must go back to the small old Helicon house, two rooms and a dogtrot between. Shooting trees in the woods was just to pass the time till Old Aunt Charlotte, the spirit of the house, awakens.

Shooting, down in the woods,
Charlotte thinks.
Yes, that was the real world Charlotte was waking to, not heaven, just like—was it almost a hundred years ago, the musket fire—when Charlotte heard it first? The shooting?

Stella raises her arms in a wide
V
and shakes her hands at the ends of her arms and yells, “Whooooo!” just like a ghost as she runs ahead of all of them, out of the woods.

Five-year-old Stella believes the house reappearing through the trunks of the trees is a ghost, something like a hallucination, something at least more real in her father's memory than
that
—a feeble shack—standing now among the little sharp-edged stones, existing really not just in
his
but also in
their
memories. When she looks at these people, the Negroes of rural south Alabama, this world, she sees it through the lens of memory, not sharp and clear, but with a blurry uncertainty, as though she has been made to wear her daddy's spectacles. Stella stops running;she wishes to loiter at the edge of the clearing and to think.

Charlotte raises herself on her elbows on her bed and hunches toward the headboard to be sitting up when Doctor comes in.

Stella has no doubt Old Aunt Charlotte, dark as wet coffee grounds in the percolator basket, is awake now because those four explosions in the woods were a mighty alarm clock not to be denied, though Daddy seems to think it is simply time for an old person's nap to end, and time is something he knows all about. He keeps it in his pocket. He winds it up on the mantel.

Slowly Stella crosses the raked yard to check the dreamy structure—weak, it leans—a dwelling envisioned but possibly insubstantial. The house should stand up straight, square its shoulders. She reaches out and touches the corner of the two-room dwelling while she waits for her family to catch up.

Stella believes she could shake this house right off the stacks of rocks that hold it up at each corner. Perhaps she could pick up the little house, with them inside, and carry it to Birmingham.

But Stella does not want to stop at Birmingham where, they say, in a few months, after she starts first grade, Daddy will die; she thinks
I will go to Chicago.
Already she plays the cello, and in Chicago her mother learned to play the violin and the piano. Stella could ride her pint-size cello, like a horsey, all the way to Chicago.
Back to Chicago,
she thinks, though she has never been there. But her bones know, if Chicago was the origin of her mother's music, then Chicago is hers as well. She can ride almost straight north—Huntsville, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis: Chicago.

At home, in Birmingham, if the piano part is ever pitched too high to sing, then down, down, down, Mama skillfully makes the piano go as low as she likes but it is always the same tune.
Transposition,
her mother says when her two sons and her daughter stand around the piano in the living room, and she smiles because she does it so easily. Her fingers touch the black keys as readily as the white ones, but Stella plays the piano only in the key of C and Stella uses only the level white notes.

Touching the corner of the old house, Stella's fingertips learn that this house is surely not made of wood but cloth, soft as worn denim with a nap.
First you shoot a tree,
Stella decides,
then the sawing across the fibers and the piercing by nails don't hurt.
It's Time that transforms boards into cloth. When Daddy approaches the tall mantel clock, he holds a brass key: one end of the long key is crenellated like a bit of castle wall, the other end is two stiff lobes, wings from a brass butterfly. Daddy's clock contains time, but Mama's music always floats free. Wisps of her mother's music, like clouds, often float through Stella's mind and the air around her.

One glass window, swung open like a gate by hinges on its side, exposes a square hole leading to the inside of the Helicon house. No window screen bars the entrance to flying insects or the meandering of air. In the backyard in Birmingham, Stella has a playhouse with just such a window attached only to its frame by hinges on one side. Inside the playhouse, Stella and Nancy, her beautiful best friend, pretend that dirt is flour and mix their mud pies. Stella wonders if she has remembered to hook the eye to lock the window to secure the playhouse. Do people eat mud pies here in Helicon? Once, when Nancy wasn't looking, Stella tasted a crumb of Birmingham mud.

Now her brothers and parents have caught up with her, and the little Silver family clomps into the shanty. A faint ambiance of pride moves along with them, above their noisy feet, because her father's people had been small land-owners, not tenants, after the war (which still means, in 1948, to many southern people the Civil War, not the recent one of Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley).

Doctor and Mrs., two boys and the little girl, Stella, hear the voice born into slavery quavering like the rattle of oak leaves refusing to let go even in winter, the voice rattling inchoate till Old Aunt Charlotte's eyes focus on Dr. Silver-come-home, and Charlotte forces the throe of nature into words: “These hands, these were the ones, these were the first to touch him when he came into this world.”

Stella sees the hands are two-toned, like the latest cars, the palms held up, as though a young woman, not an ancient, were presenting a ghost baby, as though in her upturned palms the young woman could feel the weight of him who would become Doctor and Daddy.

Those pale palms (Stella imagines) have caught the light streaming through the little window she had noticed while she stood outside stroking the corner of the house, its colorless wood transmogrified into colorless denim. Without benefit or hindrance of wire screen or venetian blind and definitely not double-hung window frames, the open square in the wall admits light, and the light replaces the ghost baby in the palms of the old slave's hands.

“This your wife? Lord, so pretty and stout. These children! Lord, let me touch these babies.”

Say your names
. Having already instructed the children while they traveled
south inside the car like a blue egg, her mother doesn't need to repeat instructions now. Though youngest, Stella steps forward. Curious, she wants to examine Old Aunt Charlotte more closely. This woman could be the one who will die, not Daddy.