Four Spirits (33 page)

WHAT LIONEL PARRISH THOUGHT WHILE HE WAITED FOR
the white girls was: (1) they both had B.A.s and one was Phi Beta Kappa and (2) they were from here, and what did that mean? Not like white Judy Cohen from Berkeley, California, whose smile was…strained, should he say? Couldn't be
friendly,
since she didn't know anybody down here and there hadn't been time to make friends, but maybe
hopeful
of making friends, yes, call it hopeful. Hope was something he could relate to. It stood for what he was trying to do:
H
elp;
O
pportunity;
P
otential
E
nergy—the capital letters spelled out the word.

Lionel Parrish had talked it over with Mr. Bones, and when Mr. Bones sneered in derision, then Mr. Parrish knew it was the right name, just what the community needed: hope. Right on cue, yes, he could expect Mr. Bones often these days, and here he was!

With a skittering and a crash, a scrolled-up drawing of the human skeleton rolled down behind Lionel Parrish's desk. The bottom pole of the wall diagram dropped right into the chalk tray like the sharp rap of a ruler. When he was a boy, teacher had laid the ruler cross the palm of little Lionel's hands many a time like that.

Mr. Parrish sighed. “What you want to say this time, Mr. Bones?” he said, addressing the chart of the skeleton.

Trouble coming. That's all.

“Uh-uh. Future coming. Let the means reflect the ends. That's what I say. That's what Martin says Gandhi says. That's what Fred Shuttlesworth says. Now let's see what Joe Rumore says. You hush.”

Mr. Parrish flicked on his small radio.
And now the weather, brought to you by Golden Eagle Table Syrup, Pride of Alabam. Temperatures soared to ninety-nine degrees today in Birmingham, and now at five o'clock in the evening, the thermometer reads ninety-eight degrees in the downtown area. Relative humidity ninety-eight percent. Zero chance of precipitation, and folks, it looks like it's going to be another scorcher tomorrow in Birmingham, your Magic City. Predicted high of a hundred degrees in our sizzling Magic City
….

The sound of the phone pierced the radio patter. Well, he'd answer it. Maybe the white girls were canceling. He answered cheerfully, “
H-O-P-E,
Help Opportunity Potential Energy here.”

A stream of white-voice obscenities machine-gunned into his ear. Mr. Parrish gently set the receiver back in its cradle. He hummed a little church tune to himself. He picked up a pencil to be busy.

Push it out of your mind with a pencil
. Might of been Mr. Bones; might of been his own good voice giving him good advice. But the gray pencil lead, sharp above the yellow pad of paper, did its own little nervous dance. He glanced over his shoulder at the grinning skeleton on the wall.
Now the Lord said to Lot's wife, Don't you look back.

Okay. That was what he, Lionel Parrish, should have told himself about Matilda, what with Jenny and the children so good at home. But he had gone back to Matilda, and she had heated him up till blood boiled in his veins. Mr. Parrish rose from his chair and looked out the window across the city to see Vulcan standing on Red Mountain.
Help me, Iron Man!
He ought not pray to a pagan god, he knew that. You'd burn in hell for that.

Timid knock, timid white voice: “Mr. Parrish, Mr. Parrish.”

And there was one: slender as a willow switch.

“There're too many steps.”

What did that crazy white girl mean?

One in a wheelchair! Hey, come on! And she mad as a hornet, sitting in her chariot at the bottom of the steps.

“You said your office was street level,” the crippled one said.

“Well, more or less. It is.”

The standing one (hair straight and smooth, almost to her shoulders, then flip!) said her name,
Stella Silver,
and that she could get Catherine's chair up one step but not three, and he said that wouldn't be any problem for him, and when he reached out to pull her up, that Catherine commanded
Wait!
And then explained she had to release the brakes first (looked like her hands,
too, were weak, kind of flipped back at the knuckles). She released the brake very slowly; he could have done that in half a second. Her hands moved like they
owned
the brakes, like they were little flesh clouds hovering over their own territory, but after she'd done it, she smiled up at him and wasn't any doubt: she liked him and wanted him to like her. Just as natural as could be.

It was heavy, chair and all, and he understood why that willow switch was smart not to try to pull wheelchair and passenger up three steps. He'd supposed all along they
were
smart, well educated, but turned out, after they got settled inside, and the phone rang and he ignored it, and the radio turned on by itself, and he laughed and said
Haints, I reckon
and they laughed, too, and they had got each other's names straight, turned out it was the crippled one who was the Phi Beta Kappa and she was also the one he'd talked to on the phone. Her voice was a little bit impaired, too, but that was faint.

“My name's Catherine,” she said, “but everybody calls me Cat. 'Cause I'm so light on my feet.” When she smiled, so slow, then he got it, her joke, and they all laughed together. Well, they'd swapped jokes, and right off the bat, too.

But they wanted to know what they'd be paid. He pussyfooted around a little, but he knew they could tell, and yes he had advertised in the
Birmingham News
like he was up and running, but…Truth was, H.O.P.E. was not yet funded.

“Matter of time,” he added. “Washington knows about us.”

“Federal funding?” Stella's voice near 'bout as full of doubt as Mr. Bones's.

“I
do
have a friend in Washington, D.C., and he has talked to a congress-man, and there
was
reassurances. I assure you there were reassurances. See, we have a
better
chance we be actually operating. They look at deeds, not words. Not what we
planning
to do, what we
are
doing.”

“Mr. Parrish,” Cat said in her slow, thoughtful way, “is it the same for your other teachers. They're not being paid yet either?”

“They are volunteers. But see, they still college students at Miles. They still working on their B.A.s.” He looked her square in the eyes. “I know it's different for you and Miss Silver.” Suddenly the skeleton flew up, rolled itself up and shut. “ 'Nother haint,” he said, but this time nobody laughed.

“No.” Cat spoke so slowly. “I reckon it's not different for us. We want to help.” Then she quickly added, “Don't we, Stella?” like a burst of energy came down her nerve line.

Stella reached over on his desk and picked up the little Vulcan paperweight as though she owned it.

“Sure,” Stella said, but she didn't look at him.

“There's something else I want.” Cat waited before she went on. She swallowed like her tongue might be a little bit too big to manage.

“What's that?” he asked.

“When it's over, I want you to write a letter of recommendation to the Birmingham Board of Education saying I did a fine job and I managed my students by myself and never had a bit of trouble.”

“Suppose you do have trouble?”

Now Stella had more to say: “They won't hire her. She's Phi Beta Kappa, but they won't take her. She did her practice teaching. The regular teacher was out sick two weeks, and Cat managed by herself entirely. She was fine. But the board said it didn't count because the teacher didn't
observe
Cat's teaching. And if somebody was in there observing, then Cat wouldn't be alone with the students, and they'd never know if she could do the job.”

“They said it would make the insurance go up to have a teacher in a wheelchair,” the crippled girl explained.

“Suppose you do have trouble, Cat?”

“I won't,” she said.

(Boy Howdy! Like his Texas grandpa used to say. Her eyes bored at you like two pistol barrels.) “Yes, I'll write for you. Be glad to.” The words just popped out. You didn't say no to pistols.

(No white Birmingham Board of Education cared what a black man said anyway.)

They were all sweating. He felt a great gush come out of his right armpit, and Stella had a little sweat-bead mustache. Cat's glasses having slid down the slick slant of her nose, she pushed them back to the bridge. (Her finger, like her hand, had a strange swayback appearance.)

“Mighty hot night,” Mr. Parrish mumbled, “just like the radio say.”

The white women looked at each other, settling it without speaking that they would volunteer, expect pay if it came down from Washington.

Mr. Parrish heard a mosquito at his ear.

“How safe is it for us to come out here?” Stella asked.

“What place
is
this?” he asked them. No evasion; his voice was hard, direct.

Cat chuckled. “Bombingham.”

WHILE STELLA DROVE MR. CARTWRIGHT'S LUMBERING OLD
car back toward Norwood, she thought about what Mr. Parrish had gone on to say about safety. That his life was in the Lord's hands, and he supposed everybody else's was, too. That was all the insurance he needed. And Cat had asked him if he ever did any preaching. Mr. Parrish had said sure he was a preacher, sold funeral insurance, too, on weekends, since even those in the hands of the Lord would need it sooner or later. (That was the way A. G. Gaston got to be a millionaire, wasn't it?)

During the day Mr. Parrish taught math at Parker High School. Stella interrupted to say her Aunt Krit taught math at Phillips High. And Cat boldly asked Mr. Parrish if Parker was still the largest all-black school in the world, and they had all felt a kind of triumph over the whole continent of Africa, which, after all, could have been expected to have the largest all-black high school. Cat had said the word
black,
not
colored
or
Negro,
to a black man, and she had said it like it meant nothing in the world except the word she needed to use to ask her question.

But Stella liked remembering the interview better than she had liked being at Miles.

The car moved a lot like Mr. Cartwright, looked like him, too. Kind of a wreck. Had seen better days. Don was too urbane to drive such a car; he preferred the bus. In Tonga, he walked. He'd written that the king of Tonga—too heavy to walk, his subjects were proud to say—was carried everywhere on a litter.

When they drove by the Municipal Auditorium, Stella's knees felt empty; she remembered playing the cello there in the Christmas Festival, in the youth
orchestra with five hundred high school singers on the risers, pastel puffs of yellow, minty green, blue, cotton-candy pink amid the boys' dark suits. None of them were Negroes. She hoped they had had their own music festival at least. How would they have dressed?

She herself had worn a hoopskirt under her white net evening dress for the first time—she'd just entered high school—and the curve of the hoop had to be bashed in so she could get the cello between her knees. During the “Hallelujah Chorus,” it had sprung out and zoomed the cello forward, but she had caught it by the scroll while it flew away and reeled it back in.

“Right when the basses come in,” Stella told Cat, “in the ascending four-note scale.” She sang it for Cat, pulsing the gas pedal with each word. “That's when the cello boinged out and skittered into the music stand.”

Stella liked to tell Cat about ridiculous situations she'd gotten herself into. She thought it might console Cat a little, make her feel less bad that she couldn't walk. The large illuminated star was shining over Carraway Methodist Hospital, on the edge of Norwood.

 

(CAT IMAGINED THEY ILLUMINATED
the star so ambulances could find their way to the hospital more easily.) But Cat was remembering how she'd met Stella at Phillips. It was a fire drill, and she'd still been able to get around on crutches then. The students all thought she'd had polio because her crutches were the metal type that didn't come all the way up under the armpit, the type you saw on posters. But she'd lost her balance and fallen in the crowded, rushing hall. She had been afraid of being trampled, but somebody (Stella) had stopped and stood in front of her, facing the stream of students. “Go round, go round,” Stella had said over and over, quietly, but in the face of the oncoming students.

When the hall was empty, the fire drill an apparent success, Stella had sat down on the floor with Cat, and they had talked until the custodian happened by and said he'd just carry Cat out, though she hadn't wanted him to. Stella went out first to hold open one of the massive front doors of Phillips High School. When Mr. Wingard stepped out with Cat draped in his arms like a res-cued princess, somebody saw them, and 1,700 students set up a mighty sentimental roar of approval. But the building hadn't been on fire.

Cat felt her own cheeks burn pink, but Cat saw that this new girl, Stella,
could hardly keep back the tears that sprang to her eyes when they cheered. Stella was one of them and moved by their approval; she had had to wipe her runny nose with the back of her hand. For a moment Cat knew Stella was brimming with it:
We're all good people
.

It was the week after the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had been beaten with chains and brass knuckles in front of the school.

It turned out Stella was not exactly one of them: the
normals.
She was an orphan. Cat discovered Stella believed naively in being good and following the rules, as though that compliance would be a shield against the injustice of the universe. As the car moved toward home, Cat remembered her mother's laughter, a quiet cackle, almost delightfully out of control. Cat missed her mother, who was always amused by Stella.

After Stella's visits that first year to Cat's home, back in Phillips High School days, either Cat or her mother would laugh and say, “Well, she did it again.” They meant Stella had eaten all of the baked apple, core and seeds, to be polite.

That was the past, when they first met in high school. Cat was tired now. Both she and Stella felt flat as pancakes, united in their fatigue.
Our essential sameness,
Cat thought comfortably. Together.

Good night.

Good night.

After Stella helped her out of the car, Cat insisted on wheeling herself up the ramp onto the porch. When she looked over her shoulder, Stella was already half a block away, walking into the night shadows toward home, some twelve blocks away. The door was unlocked—her father and his gun slept inside, waiting for the graveyard shift—and Cat entered the dark living room. His toenails clicking on the bare hardwood floor, Goliath came to greet her. He leapt into her lap before she had time to set the brakes. The chair rolled back a little.

 

AT MIDNIGHT, MR. CARTWRIGHT
rose, listened to his daughter snoring in the next room, the dog snoring, too. At least the midget dog had a loud yapper. Mr. Cartwright strapped on his holster. Well, the timing worked out just like she'd said—getting the car back, he meant. Tomorrow when he went off to work, there'd still be some real protection in the house.