Over and Under (26 page)

My father drove away soon after that, some plant business to attend to. A few minutes later, Mom knocked on my bedroom door and walked in.

“Put on something respectable,” she said. “You’re coming with me.”

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“It’s a secret,” she said seriously. I started to laugh. “No, really,” she said. “It’s secret. I wouldn’t bring you if I didn’t have to, but there’s no way I’m going to leave you here alone with all this craziness going on. Have I got your attention?” she asked.

I nodded.

“You have to promise me that you won’t tell anyone what you see today.”

“Not even Dad?” I said.

“He knows all about it.”

“Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”

She hesitated. “Jeffersonville.”

The yards got smaller with each mile as we drove toward the city on Highway 60. The undefined property lines around the houses in Borden gave way to the large fenced yards in Sellersburg, and finally to the small industrial city of Jeffersonville, where dreary split-levels and duplexes sat next to each other on identical rectangular lots, each surrounded by chain link to protect the
integrity of a microscopic yard. I was certain that from one of those front yards I could hurl a baseball over three complete houses. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live within those kinds of constraints, and I couldn’t. On some blocks, black kids ran around, much less fascinated by me than I was by them. Each time Mom slowed the car for a red light or a stop sign, my heart raced, certain that I was about to pull into the driveway of my secret cousins. I hoped there were dozens.

My mother steadfastly refused to tell me why we were going to Jeffersonville. My wildest hopes were confirmed, however, when we passed by Jeffboat, her brother’s employer according to Dad, and
THE WORLD’S LARGEST INLAND SHIPBUILDER
, according to their huge sign. I saw the skeletons of giant coal barges inside the fence as laborers crawled like ants along their ribs, showers of sparks occasionally flying from their welding rods. Green glimpses of the Ohio and the Louisville riverfront skyline flashed between buildings: Kingfish, the Galt House, the ornate Belknap Hardware warehouses. I tried to spot the
Belle of Louisville
, the steam-powered paddle wheeler that took tourists up and down the river.

Rolling past the shipyard, we entered Jeffersonville’s oldest neighborhood, a row of old mansions facing the river, homes that had once belonged to riverboat captains back when captains were treated like astronauts, the masters of the most expensive and powerful technology of the day. Conspicuous wrought-iron balconies and widow’s walks seemed to indicate that many of the captains had grown fond of New Orleans’s architecture during their long voyages downriver. Some of the mansions
showed every day of their age, with peeling paint and bowed roofs. Others had been lovingly restored to their full glory.

We pulled into the driveway of a house that was somewhere in between. While some of the paint was peeling, and many of the shingles needed replacing, there was a solid-looking new front door, and a freshly planted flower bed around an unlabeled mailbox. New young trees had been planted in the yard, tiny seedlings in a neat row along the street. There was a gate at the end of the driveway, too, the only one I’d seen on the street, and that excited me more. I wondered why my cousins would need it. Was Uncle Russell still in danger because he crossed that picket line all those years ago? My mother put the car in park, and turned to face me.

“Promise me again that you’ll never tell anyone about this place,” she said.

“I promise.”

“It’s incredibly important that you keep this a secret,” she said.

I nodded my head, so excited I could no longer speak.

My mother left the car running and got out. I was surprised to see that she had her own key to the padlock on the gate. No one came out to greet us. After she pushed the gate open, she pulled the car through, got out, and then re-locked the gate behind us.

Mom held my hand as we walked to the front door, a move that would normally have mortified me, but seemed somehow appropriate given the seriousness of what we were about to do. I wondered how my cousins would see me, what we would talk about. Could they come out to
Borden sometime and run around with me and Tom? Surely they would now that we knew each other, all the time probably. Tom and I could teach them how to shoot and fish, and they could teach us whatever it is that city kids know how to do. I wondered if one of the johnboats tied up at the pier across the street belonged to them.

A sophisticated-looking intercom box was installed near the front door. Mom pushed a button, got an immediate response from within, and said her name. After a slight delay, I heard the clicking and sliding of a series of locks and latches being undone.

The door came open and a ruddy, solid-looking woman hugged my mother dramatically in the foyer. She had the straight hair, no makeup, and earnest face that were the telltale characteristics of my mother’s feminist friends. “Hello, sister,” she said. But I knew she wasn’t the kind of sister I was looking for.

“You must be Andrew,” she said to me as she released my mother from her clinch.

“Andy,” I said, trying to look beyond her into the house. It was almost devoid of furniture. It was unmistakably old, but the place had a fresh-scrubbed, dust-free cleanliness to it.

“Andy, we’re glad you could come.”

We walked inside.

Past the front room, we entered a spacious kitchen. Two women sat silently at a card table and smoked, a communal pack of Parliaments and a Bic between them. One had a relatively fresh black eye, an eye that was still vibrantly bloodshot from the blow. Neither woman said
anything to us as we walked in. They didn’t have the swaggering, theatrical toughness of my mother’s friends on their way to a protest march. When my mom went out of the house without makeup, she had to announce to us that she was making a political statement, because her skin was so fair on its own we could never tell otherwise. The women at the card table had bags under their eyes, wrinkles, and hair that had been brushed back just enough to keep it out of the way of their smoking. They wore baggy T-shirts, old jeans, and house slippers. Their tough stares looked completely earned to me as they looked up, knowingly evaluated the fading wounds on my face, and then dismissed me with taps of their cigarettes on the edge of the clay ashtray. My mother nodded at them.

She then enthusiastically grabbed a yellow bucket from under the sink and a large green sponge—in her eagerness, she seemed to have almost forgotten that I was in the room. She talked with the woman who had answered the door about what she was going to accomplish that day: clean and line the cupboards, and cook a turkey noodle casserole before leaving. I had noticed this internal conflict before in my mother, the battle between her studied feminism and her native southern genius for cooking and cleaning. She was a virtuoso in the kitchen, as well as a tireless scrubber and organizer. While she reminded my father frequently that she shouldn’t be required to do all the cooking, she couldn’t even let him toast his own Pop-Tart, so painful was it for her to watch him fumble around in the kitchen. As she turned on the faucet and began running steaming water into the bucket, she suddenly remembered that she had to do something
with me. Our hostess recognized the problem at the same time.

“I’ll take him upstairs, with the other kids,” she said. She put a hand on my shoulder and we walked together up a creaking grand staircase.

She led me to a cavernous room on the third floor, and then with a pat on my shoulder abandoned me. A few toys were scattered across the vast floor. An old chandelier hung from the middle of the high ceiling, a chandelier so old that it had actually used candles for light—a telltale black smear on the ceiling above it reminded me of the Indian fire pits we’d seen in caves. The chandelier, the vast size of the room, and the smooth wood floor made me think it might have been a ballroom in its glory days, with musicians in the corner and an armada of steamboats moored just outside the window. Some modern educational posters had been tacked to the wall: the letters of the alphabet, Spanish numbers
uno
through
diez
, cartoonish portraits of the thirty-nine presidents.

There were three other kids in the room, looking just as out of place as the posters. One was a little blond girl who turned toward me with a big pretty smile. A slightly chunky boy in the middle of the room ignored me as he energetically rolled Matchbox cars across the floor and into the far wall. The third girl, the oldest, had her arm in a cast and straight straw-colored hair that fell across her face. She looked down at the floor. Even if she hadn’t been wearing the Pink Floyd T-shirt, I would have recognized her immediately. I’d spent hours studying her photograph.

“Hi, Taffy,” I said.

She didn’t say anything back.

“What’s your name?” asked the little girl. She seemed excited to have company. I realized that the pretty, cheerful little girl was Taffy’s younger sister—she looked just like her.

“Andy,” I said. “Andy Jackson Gray. What’s your name?”

“Becky.”

“Becky Judd, right?”

“We’re not supposed to say,” she said, still cheerful. I couldn’t take my eyes off Taffy and her stark white plaster cast. The other boy, ignoring us all, was now trying to roll a car into the one he had already crashed across the room, a difficult shot from that distance. “Why are you here?” Becky asked.

I was still trying to figure that out myself. “My mom’s downstairs cleaning,” I said, as close as I could come to an explanation.

“So your mom’s a helper,” Becky said brightly.

“Sure. Why are you here?”

“We’re here because my daddy smacks us.”

Taffy glared at her sister, the first I’d seen of her face, and then looked back at the ground, bright shame in her eyes. “We’re not supposed to talk about it, Becky.” She almost whispered.

“I can talk about it if I want,” she replied. They stared at each other, the other boy crashed his cars, and I continued to wonder where my mother had brought me.

After a while I thought I heard a steam whistle in the distance, and walked over to the window to take a look while the sisters continued their stare down. The tall window reminded me of the one Tom and I had climbed through at the Borden Institute. It was slightly warped
with age, with tiny bubbles entrained inside the glass. I hoped to catch a glimpse of the
Belle
outside, taking a sightseeing cruise past the house. Taffy walked up and stood beside me, making my heart race. Her good elbow rubbed against my arm.

“We’re not supposed to stand by the window like that,” said Becky, in the background and as chipper as ever.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a rule.” She paused. “Because if my daddy’s out there driving around looking for us, he might see us in the window and come in here and kill everybody.”

I heard a strange wet tapping sound, like raindrops on mud, and looked over to Taffy. She was crying silently. The tapping was the sound of fat tears falling on her cast. I had never in my life wanted to do something so badly while feeling so completely clueless about what to do. So I stood there, for what seemed like hours, staring out the window, trying to think of something useful to say.

Gradually, Taffy stopped crying. When it seemed it might be okay, I got down on the floor and started playing cars with Becky and the boy. I kept low and away from the big front windows, telling myself that it was just to keep Becky happy, and not because I was afraid of Orpod Judd. Occasionally a car would pass the house, and I breathed easier whenever it continued on down the road.

I spent the rest of the day with them in the ballroom. After a while, Taffy joined in, sniffling slightly, but ready. She soon became just as friendly and outgoing as her sister. We joined the boy in his game, trying to crash Matchbox cars together from gradually increasing distances, each of us winning a round in turn. When we got tired of that, we
slid across the wood floor in our sock feet, pretending to skate and surf as we whooped and hollered and crashed into each other, all of us being careful not to run into Taffy’s wounded arm. I was at an age when I still had a big time playing with toys and pretending, even though I couldn’t possibly act that way with most of my friends. The rest of the afternoon flew by.

Just as the warm orange sun began going down, we heard the steam whistle again and all of us went to the window, all of us for a moment forgetting the rule and the danger.

This time we saw it.
The Belle of Louisville
came paddling into view, its red stern wheel propelling it slowly upstream, churning the muddy water behind it to the muted tune of its steam calliope.

“Look at that,” I said. We watched for a few minutes.

“Cool,” said Taffy, brushing her long straight hair out of her face with her left hand. But she wasn’t looking out the window. She was looking at me. I was more paralyzed than when I’d been trapped in the cave.

She suddenly leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, as I watched the sun set and the big steamboat move imperceptibly upstream. With girlfriends later, in high school, college, and the real life after, I would sometimes try to slow the moment down, as I wish I could have that day in Jeffersonville. I wish I would have taken stock of every detail that made it perfect, the old ballroom, the way calliope music always sounds sad, Taffy’s hair falling in front of her face. A more perceptive girlfriend in Bloomington, sensing my remoteness, once begged me so earnestly to tell my
story that I almost gave in. But I have inherited my mother’s great ability to keep secrets.

“Andy!” she called from downstairs. “Stop playing, time to go!”

“See you around,” I said to Taffy with a scratchy voice.

“Yeah,” she said, “see you around, Andy.”

Mom called me again and I went downstairs, feeling Taffy’s eyes on my back as I went.

Mom was putting a large casserole in the oven when I got to the kitchen, and then she stood and clapped her hands in a way that announced the completion of our day. The two other women were still at the card table, still smoking, still silent. I tried briefly to figure out which was Taffy’s mom, based on my memory of a family photo in the Judd home. Cigarette butts had mounded in the center of the big clay ashtray. They didn’t say a word as we left.