The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (96 page)

It was after the dream. The dream I wrote about in the story, I was sitting in your hospital room and I fell asleep and I dreamed you were reading
Madeline
to Iona. When I woke, I thought you were gone. Your chest wasn't rising anymore. I thought you were gone.

She waits for me to respond. I don't, but my gaze encourages her to continue.

I brought the notebook with me to the hospital that day. I don't know why, I had a feeling. I woke up that morning with the feeling that it would be your last day.
Our
last day. I wanted to bring it.

But I didn't die.

I thought I'd lost you. But then you began to breathe, shallow breaths. And I sat down and wrote it. Our lives. I wrote everything, up to my dream. And then, I guess. I guess I needed to go through it. Your passing. I needed to go through it so I would be ready when it happened. So I imagined it. I imagined it and I'd just finished writing it when I looked up. A woman standing in the doorway. A strong-looking woman, staring at you. Then she turned to me. She walked in the room and handed me a note: I'm Deb Ellen, B.J.'s cousin.

For a moment our hands were still.

You need to submit it. It's a good story, my love. You need to send it out.

She was agape. I never intended to submit it! I just. I wrote it because. Because—

My right fingers softly touching her hair.

You need to submit it.

She looked down, unsure.

Just please, please, don't write about Randall and Mr. Campbell. You have a wondrous imagination. You can invent something else.

Of course! she had said, upset I would suggest such a thing, I would
never
. She didn't finish the sentence, but gently repeated: Of course. A tear rolling down her lovely cheek.

We were living in the church then. It took a long time for me to convalesce after my leukemia, the rigors of tending to the needs of a six-floor walk-up and all its residents beyond my capacity for quite some time, so we weren't surprised when the president of the co-op board came to our door, delicately expressing the necessity to replace me. By the greatest stroke of luck, an old Gallaudet acquaintance of my wife's told her he had an uncle in Harlem, the minister of a Baptist congregation, and connected to the pastor's church was a two-bedroom apartment reserved for the church's caretaker: once again a janitorial position in exchange for free rent! I'd just started getting up and around by then, and the three of us went to be interviewed by the preacher. He seemed most interested in having people he liked living in the church, my experience as a superintendent merely being a plus. As an employee of a nonprofit organization my pay was minimal, as was the workload: no longer constantly on-call as in a residential building. April May June continued with her part-time proofreading during Iona's school days, and when I grew stonger I contacted Joy, the principal from the private school, to ask if I might have my old job back. She was delighted, and while her curtailed budget allowed for only one class, within two years finances had been restored and I was able to teach a second.

In our interview with Reverend Shriver, he admitted that our deafness was an advantage: previous custodians had trouble adjusting to the noise—choir practice, Wednesday evening services and twice on Sundays. He was concerned about Iona, however, as were her mother and I, but our daughter loved the apartment (as we did) as well as the enticing idea of living in some hidden cranny of a church, and she begged us to accept the position. Mercifully the worship activities neither disturbed her sleep nor her homework. On the contrary, the sweet sounds she absorbed sparked my child's love of music. For a while she sang with the children's choir, and April May June and I would attend services when they performed, sitting close to observe the joy in our daughter as her mouth made huge forms around the words. By her teenage years she'd quit, not being about to reconcile her love of the hymns with her doubts regarding the church's political conservatism, but ever-generous Reverend Shriver allowed her access to a piano when it was not employed by the congregants. She taught herself to play.

My daughter was gifted, and this is not just her father's opinion. She was giving a full scholarship, all expenses covered, to Spelman College. And she excelled until her last semester, her mother passing on two months shy of her graduation. She was given incompletes in all her courses, ultimately passing her exams in the fall, but she declined to participate in the closing exercises the following spring, having missed the chance to walk with her own classmates and feeling heartbroken that her mother would not be there. I respected her wishes but my own heart was broken, not to see the dean hand her that degree. I, with not a day of former schooling and my daughter a college graduate! So for me she rented the cap and gown, and when I came to Atlanta to pick her up I took photos of her all over campus. I snapped dozens, and this before the days of digital cameras.

I was fond of Dex Ryland, whom she'd been dating since she was a sophomore and he a Morehouse junior. Dex had grown up in the Georgia countryside but was committed enough to their relationship to move with her back to New York. An economics major, he landed a job at the United Nations that he loved while Iona struggled with temp jobs. When she became pregnant at twenty-three, I worried whether it was the right choice to have the baby as they were barely making rent on their tiny Queens studio, then I worried about their choice to jump into marriage, so many huge life decisions at once! But they did it, a courthouse ceremony with me as sole witness in the tradition of her mother's and my wedding (though, at the insistence of Dex's family, they wound up flying to Georgia for a second more elaborate observance). Fifteen years later my daughter and son-in-law are still very good friends, the only displeasure I ever hear from Iona related to the bit of weight she gained with the babies, and even then she usually laughs about it, occasionally starting a day with a diet that lasts until after-dinner dessert.

When Fela April was two, the family moved out to the grass of New Jersey. Iona began teaching music part-time in the secondary schools, and she still composes and occasionally performs in small venues. Her vocal specialty is jazz, and I can see it in the way she forms her lips around the notes, though she likes to play around with traditional African rhythms as well, and has experimented with all sorts of indigenous sounds, Mayan flutes and Tuvan throat singing. She sees how I've aged—so much weight of a tall man on these old bones (I take the bus now rather than attempt those subway steps), a bit of arthritis in the legs (but mercifully not the hands, my language) as well as the backaches after decades of leaning over to converse with the shorter rest of the population—and she's told me she would happily present for me private recitals in my home but I haven't yet been able to give in to this, not when I see her face beaming at me with every public performance. She's recorded four CDs with a small independent label and I play them frequently, my hands on the speaker to feel the beautiful vibrations of my daughter's creativity.

In 1993 as I was turning seventy and April May June was just beginning to take ill, I decided it was time to retire, to stay home full-time to care for my wife, to nurse her back to health. I'd been lucky so many times in my life: the superintendent job, the teaching job, the church caretaker position, and now a couple at the church who'd always been fond of us offered a one-bedroom at the top of their Harlem brownstone at a very reduced rent. Of course most lucky of all was my running into April May June on the subway platform so long ago, and her choosing to ask
me
for directions! So perhaps I'd gotten cocky about my fortune and heartily believed my wife would kick the diabetes, even as it had already claimed the lives of her father and three siblings, including Ramona, the sister she most cherished. A year later when Iona was twenty-one, the amputation of her mother's right leg still very fresh for all of us, April May June's condition suddenly took a crucial turn and she was gone. It was without a doubt the most devastating day of my life, and it had had some pretty stiff competition for that inimitable spot. I was fourteen years older than my wife. How could she possibly have gone before me?
I should have died in '78!
I bitterly cried,
If only Deb Ellen hadn't come through with the bone marrow!
The thought of enduring life without April May June was unbearable, and I seriously and selfishly considered not. Then I looked into the eyes of my barely grown daughter and was reminded that I wasn't the only one broken. And joylessly forced myself to carry on.

At the funeral one of April May June's longtime Gallaudet friends took me aside to express her condolences. I remembered the woman had had her own share of grief: three weeks after her teenage son earned his driver's license, he was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. The woman wanted to express that she understood what I was going through, the utter pain of their absence from this earth, the frightening mystery of where they are now, if anywhere. I nodded my empathy, but in truth I was perplexed by her feelings of some sort of limbo regarding her son's essence, or his complete oblivion. Other than Iona's children's choir concerts, I haven't sat through a church service since I was expelled after singing too loudly and too deafly as a child, yet I've always believed in an afterlife, this Christian conviction reinforced by April May June's readings on traditional African spirituality, the faith that our ancestors are active, watching over us. In that respect my young wife is now my ancestor. I speak with her often.

Standing outside the hospital this bright, crisp October Sunday, I'm surprised to see the van pull up as I'd expected Iona would have come alone in her Prius. The doors open and the gang pours out. Nine-year-old Maurie and seven-year-old Ernest running to me, “Paw-Paw!” on their lips, their hands moving rapidly, each of them telling me so much I can't keep up. Next to my grandson is his best buddy Vincent Cho, moving his own hands in wild imitation and desperately hoping they might mean something. Vincent has taught Ernest a few Korean words he learned from his grandparents, so perhaps I'll suggest to Ernest that he return the favor in ASL. Fela walks over too, smiling broadly but hanging back with Scott, her fifteen-year-old boyfriend. They've been together a few months. What does a fourteen-year-old girl need with a boyfriend? I'd asked Iona as she folded laundry one afternoon. Oh, they're not doing anything, Dad. Yet! I countered. She put the clean towels into a pile. I watched her, debating whether I should continue with what was really on my mind. And then I did: And
must
he be a
white
boy? I had had to put my hands in her eyeview as she was bent over away from me, and then I witnessed her entire body shaking in response. What? I demanded,
What's so funny!
And now the hearing boy nervously signs his respectful greetings, trying to impress me. Well I do remember a few Sundays ago, when the younger children dragged him away from an NFL game on which he and Dex had been intently focused so he could play Chutes and Ladders with them. I was in the kitchen, Iona washing the dishes and me drying, and Scott didn't know I was watching. Hard as it was to pull himself away from the fourth-quarter action, I could see he was willing to make the sacrifice because it made the children happy. I was touched, this white boy. Guess I'm getting liberal in my old age.

Now Maurie takes my cane and grabs my right arm while Ernest clutches my left, marching me to the van, Vincent skipping beside us. Fela's yelling something about not pulling too hard on Paw-Paw. Iona is outside the front passenger side of the vehicle, clearing the space for me, the inside always chaotic with the various discarded items of four kids. My daughter looks up and smiles, kisses her father. I'm a lucky, lucky man.

We cross town, Iona expertly navigating the capricious Manhattan traffic. Just behind me Ernest and Vincent wrestle and laugh, I imagine a hearing person would say
squeal,
Iona periodically hollering at them to stop, which they always do for several seconds, a look of shock on their faces as if they had no idea they were being disruptive, before resuming the brawl. Next to them and behind Iona, Maurie reads a book. No one will ever know, but of the three older children she's my favorite. A darker complexion, and she wears glasses while Iona never did, but otherwise the spitting image of her mother at her age. She comes to me often, initiating long manual conversations, but with verbal speech she's reticent. She reads a children's novel I gave her,
The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963,
a wonderful story about a black family from Michigan who eventually travel to my birth state in a volatile era. There was a time when I didn't even want to talk about where I came from, but those days are long past. While Iona was still small, I'd even started accompanying my wife and daughter on their trips South to April May June's family, having finally decided there was nothing healthy in my holding a grudge against my home region forever.

Now my granddaughter looks up and, seeing me smiling at her, grins ear to ear. Someday I'll take her to the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham which we visited after one of those South Carolina visits, a stunning museum built right across from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where the four little girls died in the bombing. I was overcome with emotion. Yes, Alabama has changed, and perhaps, in a small way, redeemed itself. I've never been back to Prayer Ridge.

In the far backseat, Fela and Scott pass an MP3 player back and forth, discussing the songs and giggling. And I am reminded of when I first held her, a tiny infant in my hands, her mother telling me she shared her name with a Nigerian recording artist. And then Iona granting me the privilege of giving my firstborn grandchild her sign name: a variation of the sign for “music” with my moving right hand an
F
.