Reach the Shining River (8 page)

14.

The night sky was the color of a bruise. Pillars of dark cloud bunched along its starless edges. The cab driver talked throughout the journey. Sharecropper from Dekalb County he was, still city-struck. Could have been a distraction, but his history was too close to her own.

They stopped at Alice’s to pick up Wardell. He lolled beside her in the back seat as they bounced up Olive Street. The weather threatened. The wind rose. Thunder rumbled from the west. At the house she paid the man with two dollars Piney had thrust into her hand when she left the club. She slid the key into the front-door lock and held her breath.

She took Wardell to her bed. In the sound of his slow breathing she could hear the voices stir. Hadn’t heard them in a long while, but no mistaking that sound. The storm grew closer and louder, but the voices rose right along with it. She lay face up, arm around her boy, while lightning flashes revealed a shadfly bumping randomly against the stained ceiling. Sweat dripped from her temples to the pillowcase.

At ten years of age she had woken in the middle of a July night much like this one and instead of the sounds of locusts and wind heard drunken voices and the whinnying of horses. She shared a bed with her two younger sisters at the rear of their dirt-floor shack a mile outside of Chilhowee. Their mama dragged the three of them from the room and hustled them out the back door. Breaking glass, shouts, a pistol shot.

“Goddamn nigger shacks.”

“Throw it over, throw it over!”

Mama whimpered.

“Where’s Papa?” Arlene asked.

The night crackled and glowed. From the edge of the aspen grove they saw the sparks stream towards heaven as the men threw anything they could find onto the blaze: farm implements, saddlery, fencing. Their guns flashed in the firelight. Mama prayed.

Papa returned in the morning, his arm broken, his front teeth knocked out, his face badly bloodied. Through drifting smoke and light rain the family trudged across Johnson County fields, past scorched earth and abandoned shacks. At Warrensburg a colored doctor set her father’s arm, fed them, and arranged for nighttime transport to Independence. Chilhowee and several other towns, he whispered, had been purged. Homeless for a while, they eventually settled in Raytown. She and Mama worked as domestics and Papa stared at the fire. The war came and with it decent work for colored folk. He got a job in a packing plant but was dead within a month. He was thirty-six years old.

It was a number of years before Arlene learned that her Uncle Selden had been lynched that fiery night for knocking a white man off his horse.

Arlene married Spencer Gray in 1922, in the Baptist church in his home town of Shawnee, Kansas. He played second base for the Monarchs and shoveled coal three days a week in Merriam. Wardell was born two years later. His daddy was proud, hard-working.

When Wardell was a year old, Spencer came home from a road game so badly beaten that she did not recognize his slumped figure, carried to her doorway by two teammates almost as bad themselves. Their bus took a wrong turn south of Independence and stumbled across a Thursday-night Klan meeting. Didn’t know what hit them. Three months it took her to nurse him back to health. His body recovered but not his spirit. He stopped working. Often went missing. His mother looked after Wardell so Arlene could clean offices and the grocery store in Shawnee. Good times for the country, she kept hearing, but bad times for her family. She kept waiting for the voices to return.

Spencer played some pick-up ball and tried out for his old position on the Monarchs. Didn’t make the cut. Finally he latched on to a traveling club based out of Omaha and stayed away for longer and longer stretches.

By 1930 she reckoned he was gone for good. Wardell needed schooling, so she moved to the city. Slum life was bad, but she was among those like herself. Safety in numbers.

Until now. The man named Richie, and others like him, were out there. With knowledge of her son and his movements. And whether it was him or other white men who had killed Eddie, who wanted to kill Virgil, it didn’t matter. They were all the enemy. Even the investigator down from Chicago was a danger. If Richie or Mr. Lococo found out that he was poking around, it was Arlene who would pay.

The voices hissed. She held Wardell close to her and softly sang:

And
though
this
world
,
with
devils
filled
,

Should
threaten
to
undo
us
,

We
will
not
fear
,
for
God
hath
willed

His
truth
to
triumph
through
us
.

Forgiveness? It didn’t come into things. Justice? Only a fool would hope for it.

Simply escape. To be left alone, to be granted peace, would be enough. Though she would fight if she had to. They had taken from her all the men in her life. They would take Wardell over her dead body.

15.

At lunchtime on Friday Emmett told his secretary that he would not be back that day. After a shave and a trim at the hotel barbershop, he bought a bouquet of zinnias and took a Monarch Cab to the top of Hickory Street in West Bottoms. Stepping around pools of mud and sludge, he walked past the cement factory and down the street to his parents’ house. The crash of shunting boxcars came from the switching yard behind the factory. The stink of the stockyards was everywhere.

When his mother answered the door, she stared at him for a moment as if she didn’t recognize him and then pulled him into the kitchen by his sleeve.

He kissed her and gave her the flowers. She bunched them in an old coffee can and put the kettle on the stove; took scones and tea from the pantry and butter from the icebox. Every movement was familiar from the days when he sat at this same deal table and ate his porridge before school. Except slower.

“Your arthritis acting up?”

She waved away his question.

He had not visited since early in the summer. The kitchen was stifling. The linoleum was streaked with grease and a broken window above the sink had been covered with torn oilcloth. Flies hovered around the butter. Emmett tugged at his suit cuffs and wrestled with his disgust.

“Has the help been here today?”

She pretended she hadn’t heard. He asked again.

“Sure, she was only getting in the way.”

“Ma. I went to a lot of trouble to find that woman. She came highly recommended.”

“Came highly paid.”

“
I
was paying her.”

She poured the tea. He refused a scone.

“How long’s that window been busted?”

“Not long.”

“How come Da hasn’t fixed it?”

“Your father has enough to worry about.”

They drank their tea and made small talk. It took her a while to remember details. He waited for questions or comments about Fay, but none came.

“I need to look through my old stuff,” he said when he was finished. “My books.”

“Your what?”

“My books from law school. I put them in boxes and stored them under the stairs.”

“That’s all cleared out.”

“You threw away my
books
?”

“There might be some out back. In the shed.”

The back yard was a dump: broken whiskey bottles, rusted bicycle parts, scraps of wood, weeds waist-high. As a kid, he and his older brother Harry had played stickball out here. His dad had kept the place spotless, the ground swept and graveled, his woodworking tools hung on the shed wall as if on store display. Harry had been in Chicago for ten years. He did not come home anymore.

As he searched for his books, he heard the creak of the back door.

“His highness pays a call.”

His father’s voice was a little too loud, the diction a little too precise. A bad sign.

Emmett stepped from the shed, brushing dust from his suit jacket. “How come you’re not at work?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

“Half day at the factory?”

His dad went into the house. Emmett followed, and his mother pleaded for peace with her eyes. He had taken a bottle from the cupboard and was pouring whiskey into a teacup. His overalls were stained with dried sweat and old grease.

“You’ll join me.”

“It’s two in the afternoon, Da.”

“You know me, son. Never one for watching clocks.” He drank the whiskey in a single gulp. “And never one,” he croaked, “for letting anyone tell me what to do.”

He wiped his mouth and rapped the table with the cup.

“Have a cup of tea, Ned. There’s a fresh pot.”

He ignored her, staring at Emmett. “Jack Harte told me you were at Billy’s. Some big case by the look of it.”

“You know, I can’t figure out what Fat Jack likes more, drinking himself silly or poking his nose into other people’s business.”

“He’s honest company. Sticks by his friends.”

“He hasn’t had an honest moment since he got off the boat.”

His dad poured another shot. “You have a fucking nerve.”

“That so?”

His mother squirmed, fretted with her cardigan.

“You’d think you’d have the decency to let us know.”

This comment threw Emmett. His dad had changed the subject mid-conversation. An old ploy.

“Know what?”

His father drank the shot and smiled at Emmett’s mother. “Lettin’ on he hasn’t a clue,” he said. “Your mother rang that woman of yours two weeks ago. Invited the pair of you to dinner. Said she’d get back to us and we haven’t heard a word since.
That’s
what.”

Emmett looked at his mother’s stricken face. It was true. “Fay hasn’t been herself. Since losing the baby.”

Nodding righteously, his dad said, “The offer still stands. If she can hold her nose long enough.”

“Ned!”

Emmett patted his mother’s arm and left. The books could wait.

When he got home, an unfamiliar woman was vacuuming the hallway. He stood in front of her until she turned off the machine.

“Where’s Hattie?”

The woman was older, in her fifties at least, with a sad cast of face and a sagging body. She had no idea what he was asking.

“Mrs. Whelan?”

“She upstairs, sir. Dressin’ for the party.”

It was after seven. Roddy’s Mission Hills bash started at eight.

The house had an alien feel, as if he had returned after a long absence. The air had been soured by cigarette smoke and the oak floorboards and newels were dull with French polish and unreflected light. On his way upstairs he heard the clock chime the half hour, eclipsed by the vacuum cleaner restarting. He walked into their bedroom as if onto a stage set.

Fay was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed and made up, emptying onto the coverlet the contents of a beaded bag and redistributing them among the pockets of a leather clutch.

“You’re cutting it a little close, aren’t you, darling?” she said without looking at him.

“Who’s that downstairs?” he said.

She snapped shut the bag’s flap and stood up, smoothing her dress.

“Ophelia,” she said.

“Ophelia?”

She examined herself in the full-length mirror. “Ophelia Jackson. Hattie’s replacement.”

As she spoke she lifted her shoulders, already heightened by the butterfly sleeves of her party dress.

“Hattie’s gone?”

“Long gone.”

Through the window was the patterned green of their back yard, shaded by black walnut and cherry trees, bordered by clumps of gardenias and irises that were tended Saturdays on Lloyd’s nickel.

“I visited my mother this afternoon.”

She kept her eyes on her image in the mirror. “Oh? How is she?”

“Same as ever. She told me – actually, my dad told me that they had invited us to dinner. Two weeks ago?”

“Your father was there?”

“I wasn’t expecting to see him, but yes, he was.”

She moved past him. He caught her arm. She pushed his hand away.

“Did she call you and ask us to dinner?”

“I vaguely recall something like that.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Emmett, do you really think we’re going to go to your parents for dinner, all things considered? How
was
your father, by the way?”

“It’s not a question of whether we go or not. You didn’t even tell me. I was embarrassed in front of my mother.”

Rubbing her hands briskly, as if ridding them of crumbs, she said, “I’m sure you’ll get over it.”

She left the room. The vacuum cleaner had been turned off and he heard the tap of her heels on the stairs.

Halfway down she stopped and said in a sing-song voice, “Are we going to this party or aren’t we?”