The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (89 page)

Having lost his entire family, B.J. found the Klan-endorsed warning a dog with minimal bite. He'd been determined to live long enough to testify, and now there was nothing else left. Which isn't to say he would wait around for those fools to come after him, especially if they were to send that incompetent crowbar clown again who would probably not kill but merely maim his victim in some irritating way that B.J. would then have to lug around for the rest of his days. He tosses the note in the fire.

The other note, like the Klan memorandum, had not come via the post but rather had been placed through the front door mail slot, no return information.

 

He would have known it was from his mother even if it weren't so obviously her distinctive cursive. He'd planned to incinerate it as well, but for now, he slips it into the inside top pocket of his suitcase. Glancing out the window he notices people racing back in the direction of the municipal building, just two hours after deliberations began.

In the overflowing courtroom, B.J. stands downstairs against the right wall, nearest the door. It's on the other side of the room from the jury but he wants to be able to leave quickly and, anyway, he will easily be able to tell from the crowd reaction what the verdict is. From where he's situated he can see up into the colored balcony. He glimpses the man named Douglas and the other lawyer from the victim's firm sitting next to three local NAACP men and two round middle-aged women. In the second row are the only whites, a young man and woman from Georgia with whom Eliot Campbell had been working, and directly in front of them in the first row center are the father and brother of the deceased as well as two women friends. B.J. remembers it being briefly mentioned in the paper that the young attorney's mother had died just two and a half weeks before he had. He beholds the staggering exhaustion and horror in the faces of the survivors, especially those in the front, looking as though they have been through grief ten times over. When the foreman stands to read the verdict, they as one lean forward.

B.J.'s coach to Birmingham to Atlanta to Washington to New York City is not scheduled to depart until 8:33 tonight, and the bus terminal's enormous round Roman numeral clock reads 4:16. The proceeds from the sale of his truck had covered his ticket and then some. Most of the surplus cash he had left in an envelope in his mother's mailbox, no note. He's brought with him
Go Tell It on the Mountain,
which he hears is a story of New York, but he can't bring himself to take it out yet. He worries about Benja. The day after she tossed him out Aaron had materialized, moved back in. He remembers how his mother would hold him and sing to him and in his head he would hear her. He remembers walking around the yard holding Randall's hand, little Randall grinning up at his twelve-year old big brother and suddenly B.J. is sick, races to the water fountain. After he has taken several drinks to clear his head, he stands up straight to read
WHITE ONLY
. He wants to rip the fountain out of the wall. He tells himself from here on out he will only drink from the colored fountain, but he doesn't see any.

A Negro who had been sweeping comes up to him, looking right into his face and enunciating clearly. How does he know I'm deaf? “You alright?” B.J. nods. Then the janitor hands him a note. B.J. looks at it, then up at the man. “We all knew it be ‘not guilty.' You did your best.” B.J. stares, and the man speaks again.
“Thank you,”
shaking B.J.'s hand before walking away.

He walks back to the bench near his luggage and sits. He reads the note a second time, then opens his suitcase, placing the paper safely into the pocket. In doing so he glimpses the message from his mother and, for reasons he's unsure of, takes the Bible quote out and subtly leaves it folded on another bench, away from him, for someone else to find and ponder. His chest begins to rise and fall heavily. He takes out the New York novel, the book trembling violently in his hands as he glances at the mercilessly slow hands of the station clock.

 

 

2010

 

 

I am wide awake.

The heavy nurse with the honey-tinted hair pops her head in. “Everything okay, papi?” I hold out the drawing I have made of her, and she's surprised and delighted. In my five days here I've sketched all the nurses and orderlies who have attended me, even the grouches, and when I hand them their portraits they are all touched.

I was not in any denial regarding the risks of surgery at my advanced age—even the simple removal of my kidney stones exposing me to perilous complications—nor was I afraid. Others may lament
If only I had more time!
and I'll certainly take it if it's offered, but I have been very happy for twenty-four years! so when my day comes: no regrets. Having said that, I'll admit that in the past the various procedures of my senior citizenry—the hip replacement, the bladder tumor mercifully caught early, the triple bypass—have engendered something of a panic in me: not the fear of death, but of painkillers. The junkie's nightmare! But by being up-front that I am an addict and demanding the bare minimal dosage (and often taking less), I have never become attached to any prescription medication. I still go to meetings though only on Wednesdays, and if I'm tired I skip them, no longer feeling undying commitment is my thin thread barrier between sobriety and the gutter. And many years ago I finally took the Twelfth Step: I'm a sponsor. Ira, the most troubled of my sponsees, has been clean six months now. Milestone.

Three days post-op, a crisp beautiful mid-October Thursday, I'm feeling like my old self and eager for my release this afternoon. I glance at the journal on my table. Book 102: a lot of words since my first composition book back in '82! I've been reflecting on my life since I woke this morning and, feeling rather contentedly lazy, have not been in the mood to write it down. Besides, these memories I needn't document to keep.

After that trip back to Humble, I did phone Roof three times over the next month. Nurse Lem was there for the first two calls to hold the receiver up to the patient's ear. I couldn't help but be aware of how my heart pounded in the brief moments I spoke with the RN before and after my conversations with Roof, and my disappointment when he wasn't there for the third call, though the female attendant was very courteous. The fourth, in early August, was from Lem to me, to let me know that the best friend of my boyhood had passed. I told Lem how much I appreciated his kindness. He replied that he had met many lovely people in Humble, myself included, but that it was time he was moving on: in September he would begin a nine-month commitment to Médecins Sans Frontières in Sudan. At the time I hadn't heard of the organization and, as a matter of fact, since official U.S. participation didn't commence until 1990 (when the NGO became known in English as Doctors Without Borders), Lem was an early-birder. I told him how I frequently had longed to see Africa and that I remembered his photographs of the Ethiopian orphans and asked him if he had specifically requested Sudan and if he would work in other African nations and what had inspired him to become a health provider and before I knew it we had been on the phone an hour, then two, and I gradually came to realize that this was not an official business call, that Lem was speaking to me from his home and that, though I shuddered to imagine something so miraculous, he was being generous with his time not merely because he was a sympathetic nurse but because he
wanted
to talk to me. And when three hours had passed and it had become late on the East Coast (I would have to wait until the next day to call Roof's sister Lucy with my condolences) and I could hear Lem fading a bit—in that moment I quietly took a breath before asking if he would write me from Africa. He said Yes.

That summer was good for Rett and me. Eventually we did see the redwoods, did take a drive down the Coast. Three months after his May 31st arrival, I accompanied him back to the airport, and we checked in the kitten in her kennel. He and his mother would have a lot of time to talk over the fall, and in January he'd begin his full load at IUPUI in Indianapolis, living at home this time, receiving his B.A. at the end of the year. But on that late August afternoon, just before he boarded the plane, I kissed my brother's son, fighting tears, and he smiled and surprised me by saying, “Hope it works out with Lem.” How did he know? Well. I suppose I had casually brought up the nurse's name a few times. This would have to be the explanation as Rett had promised me the days of his eavesdropping on my handwritten innermost thoughts were over and, at any rate, Lem would not be suitable in my memory book as he was not a memory. Living in the present was something I had not done in a very long time.

The first letter came in late September, after Lem was settled and, I presumed, he had deemed an appropriate number of days so as not to appear overeager. I wrote back the same day, setting a precedent so that from then on our exchanges were frequent and increasingly longer. Following the stint in Sudan, Lem did some continent-hopping, fulfilling his duties as a nurse in one place for a few months before moving on: Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Ethiopia. He elegantly described to me the places and the people. And eventually he told me about growing up in Detroit, the fourth of five children. His father was an autoworker and Sunday lay preacher: Bathsheba, Abraham, Isaac, Jerusalem, Rebecka. Lem never understood why he was the only child named for a city but he never questioned it, appreciating both his given name and its diminutive. The classic story: Lem's expulsion from the family on the grounds of his sexual orientation, his mother and sister Sheba continuing to exchange letters with him on the sly. And eventually I told Lem about Keith, and about my mother and father, and about my addictions, and about Eliot.

I used to wonder if my own loving parents, like Lem's, like Keith's, would have disowned me had they been aware. And one day it occurred to me: They
must
have known, even if they never spoke it. It would explain why I was in my thirties and my mother never asked me about marriage, never questioned my preference for male friends. It would explain why my father was so accepting of Keith as a pallbearer for Mom, and then for Eliot. My dearest friend wasn't sure when I'd broached him about my brother's casket, if it was something Eliot would have wanted, and then I wasn't sure myself, as I wasn't sure of anything in those awful, awful days after that horrifying thing that was once Eliot had been dredged from that Alabama river. I finally called Andi over at the colored hotel near Benjamin Banneker School—she and Didi, in town for the funeral, were sharing a room there—and she said through a choked voice that in his last days Eliot had expressed to her how utterly grateful he was to Keith for granting him the privilege of his goodbye to our mother, that she believed if Eliot were here he would
insist
on Keith as one of his pallbearers. And so it was.

After four years of correspondence, of Lem living outside the country, one day I received a letter informing me that when his current assignment concluded at the end of the year he would be ready to settle in one place. Despite the very personal revelations in our missives, we'd never expressed any romantic attachment to one another, and of course had met only the one time at the hospital in Humble. But in reading this announcement, his desire at last to root himself, I wondered where in the world that might occur, on what continent, and how far from San Francisco, my heart beating a bit faster. As I read further, I garnered the answer was New York City, and then: “Would you consider living there?”

He met me at JFK. It was the spring of '88, and he had been living in the city a few months. I was fifty-nine, seven years clean, he a fit forty-seven. I was there for a visit. I may have nurtured all manner of fantasies but I was no naïve kid, to think this was for keeps. It was in fact our first date. We were both nervous, initially shaking each other's hands, then he effecting an awkward hug. Reticent in the taxi after the loquaciousness of our letters that would sometimes run on to twenty pages. Then the cabbie dropped us off in his quiet Brooklyn neighborhood. His home was the third floor of a four-story brick townhouse he called a “brownstone.” There were many of these on his street, and although they reminded me of the undesirable row houses of Baltimore, I came quickly to learn that in New York they were quite coveted. He paused a few moments before going inside, then said softly, “I brought something back with me from Ethiopia.”

We entered, climbing the stairs. A very dark woman in her thirties sat in Lem's living room reading a book. She looked up at us and smiled. For a moment I thought I'd misinterpreted everything! That he had brought back a wife from Africa, and had asked me about living in New York because, what. He had wanted a little something on the side?

“This is my friend Grace. She lives downstairs. And this is my friend Dwight.” It was strange to hear him introduce me this way, we who barely knew each other and who knew
everything
about each other.

“He's sleeping,” Grace said. I detected no accent but perhaps a little Brooklynese. We quietly stepped into a bedroom. An infant of about a year old lay asleep in his crib. “This,” said Lem, “is Dawit. My son.”

It was my first true glimpse of Lem the Negotiator, Lem the Tactician. How he, a single middle-aged gay man, somehow managed to talk his way into the authorization of this legal adoption by both countries. His committed work certainly must have proved a factor with the African documentation. The baby woke then, staring up at us, especially at Lem, and began waving his arms and legs, his dark eyes twinkling, wonder and pleasure.

I was welcome to stay as long as I liked, and two weeks later I moved from the guestroom to Lem's room, and three months after that, throwing all mature caution to the wind, he asked me to stay and I said yes. The toddler called us both “Daddy” from the start, but it took seven years to make Dawit legally
our
son.

Though I was conflicted in a thousand ways, I decided without consulting Lem to sell Keith's wonderful San Francisco apartment. We flew to the Bay Area where I rented a van, and as Lem and I were filling it I became emotional, as if I were saying goodbye to my first love again. Then I got behind the wheel of the vehicle, seated next to my second love, and was suddenly nervous that the cross-country drive back might reveal that we weren't quite so compatible after all. On the contrary: the trip sealed the deal.

So we had money in the bank, and Lem continued working in a Brooklyn clinic. And how would I spend my days? Soon I found myself on the corner of 55th and Madison or 125th and Malcolm X sketching the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Apollo Theater, Times Square. But usually, and most gratifying for me, my clients, strolling folks impulsively drawn to a street artist, ask me to portray themselves. Their nervousness, wondering how I may caricature them, then their relief and delight in seeing how I could create something that is both flattering and true. Allowing them to see their own beauty.

In thinking of this, I can't help but gaze upon my roommate here in the hospital. Asleep, as he often is, breathing uneasily. A very old white man in such bad shape that I don't know how I could illustrate him in any way that would be both pleasing and honest. Too weak to walk to the bathroom, the nurses having to change his bedpans. He pushes the button often for this service, and the responses aren't always prompt. His liver spots are multitudinous, only two or three white hairs left on his pink scalp. What teeth he still has are mostly rotten, and he is blind from age. A couple of times he's cried out for relief, and once when the nurse came with “Feelin some pain now?” he replied, “I feel pain constant, jus now it's unbearable.” Moreover he seems to be prone to elder confusion. Two days ago when my friends from the senior swim stopped by, we all laughed so heartily once that we startled him awake. I apologized. He had barely uttered a word to me before and I assumed he would be irritable, but he surprised me by saying, “No, go ahead. Yaw seem to be havin a good ole time.” He has a down-home quality to his voice that I like, much like my own before the decades with my educated and well-traveled spouse prompted the colorful character of my dialect to recede. I mention all this to say that, after seventeen years as a professional junkie, when I look at him I feel I've narrowly escaped looking in the mirror. I wasted my youth as an old man, and as an oldster I am finally young.

At three on the nose, I hear Lem greeting the staff at the nurses' station. Regular visiting hours are 3 to 5 and 7 to 9, and my husband (if not yet recognized by law then by all else) doesn't miss a minute. But I'm surprised to see Dawit walk in with him! “Hi, Dad.” Kissing me on the cheek.

“How'd you get off work so early?” He's had a 9-to-5 in the East 60s on and off since earning his B.A. a year and a half ago, a state college three hours' north. His major was French with independent study in Swahili, Somali, and of course Ethiopian Amharic, his sights set on extensive visits to his birth continent.

“I
took
off.” It's good to see them both beaming, my first day fully “back.” I remember their shining frightened eyes the night before the procedure, but wanting to keep up my spirits. And I tried to convey to them, My spirits
are
up! What
ever
happens tomorrow, the two of you have made the last quarter-century heaven on earth for me!

“But you already took off the day of my surgery.”

“Dad, it's a temp job. I'm not risking my dream career here.”

“How're ya feeling?” asks Lem, kissing me on the lips, and in reply I smile and nod. Sometimes I ponder whether this would bother my neighbor if he could see us. On the other hand, when Lem and I have been alone it would be clear by our intimate talk what the score is, and I've sensed no distaste from the bed near the window.