The Turner House (35 page)

Troy slumped in his chair, lightheaded with relief. For the past four hours dread had nearly choked him. Dread that something was really wrong with Cha-Cha, that he'd caused irreparable harm. The dread had not even circled back to thoughts of what it might mean for him should Cha-Cha be sick; it had stayed at Cha-Cha being hurt, and that was dread enough. It was Cha-Cha who had filled those gaps left by Francis's dodgy ways when it came to talking about love, sex, and friendship, Troy remembered. Cha-Cha who had taken him to buy condoms before junior prom (he'd already lost his virginity by then, but the gesture still mattered). Cha-Cha who had advised him not to fight for custody when Cara wanted to take Camille to Germany, that it was better for her to be with her mother, and he'd been right.

Troy had never received anything and felt satisfied with having it—not a job, not a gift, not a woman. Nothing save for his daughter, Camille, and this news that Cha-Cha was okay. Everything else he'd always turned over in his mind too many times to actually enjoy, zeroed in on the ways that a gift or an accomplishment was lacking. He felt a sudden need to be with Camille. She was his best accomplishment. He couldn't bear to face his other siblings at Viola's party, not so soon. He would go home, look online for flights, and leave for Germany as soon as he could.

At around 5:30
A.M.
the nurse brought Cha-Cha out in a wheelchair; they wouldn't let him walk to the car because he had no cane.

Troy drove back to Yarrow slowly. The early-morning streets were deserted, and the first light of the day crept in from the east.

“You don't have to drive like this, Troy. I'm fine.”

Troy pressed on the gas a little harder, but not much. He and Cha-Cha met eyes in the rearview.

“Cha,” he said. “I'm not happy. That's it. I'm just not happy. Lelah said I blame you for stuff, and she's right. I don't even know why I came over there like that last night, knocking stuff over. I was drunk, mad from fighting with David earlier. I think me and Jillian are gonna break up.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Cha-Cha said.

Troy slowed to turn onto Yarrow.

“I'm tryna say, Cha. I'm tryna say . . . I shoulda never blamed you, I shoulda never acted a fool out on the porch. I definitely shoulda never pinned you to the ground like that. I was stupid. Especially for trying to sell the house from underneath you.”

He parked in front of the house.

“I'm sorry, Cha. I
apologize
for all of it.”

There it was, finally.

“Thank you, Troy,” Cha-Cha said. “Thank you for saying that.”

At the house Troy swept the porch clear of broken pottery, while Lelah brought her things down from the big room. She would stay with Cha-Cha for now.

SPRING
1945

Eight months into Francis's heathen period, the war in Europe ended and lo, Odella Withers, the wide-mouthed mistress of his boardinghouse, had been married all along. Francis came up the walkway after a long day at the stamping plant on Jefferson and saw Odella sitting on the sagging porch next to a uniformed man with hollowed-out cheeks and curly coppery hair. Private Dennis Withers had returned from Italy a hero in the black community, if not the nation at large. Odella introduced her lover to her husband as casually as one might introduce any two men at a party, or even church.

“Arkansas? You came up here all alone?” Dennis's accent reminded Francis of a baseball broadcaster's—clipped, energetic, decidedly un-southern. “Boy, you don't look a day older than sixteen.”

Francis slept in his half room for the first time in weeks.

Faced with the loss of her, Francis saw that aside from Norman McNair, Odella had been his only consistent friend. Her infidelity depressed him. He hadn't imagined a woman capable of doing that, folding up the love she felt for a man, tucking it away, and never mentioning his name. A week after Dennis's homecoming, when Francis was once again just the renter of a half room retrieving his bedding from his boardinghouse mistress, he asked her when she had stopped waiting for her husband.

“Soon as you knocked on my door,” Odella said. “It was almost a year and a half by then. He never wrote me. Not one time the two years he was gone, not even when he was just Down South training. I thought he was either dead or done with me. You do something like that, you can't blame a woman for getting on with her life.”

“But you takin him back just the same,” Francis said.

“That doesn't mean I forgive him.”

He thought he understood why Dennis Withers had never written to Odella. What was there to tell a woman if the life you ended up with was harder than you thought it would be? After a few thrilling binges of liquor and nightlife, Francis had learned that Detroit, with its overcrowded tenements and crooked bosses and exclusive restaurants downtown, was a lonely, backbreaking city. It took courage to let a woman in on one's disappointment, one's fear. Francis thought about his own wife, a willful woman who may have not been as open to second chances as Odella Withers. He knew his heathen period had to end.

SPRING
1945

Harold Joggets fell from his highchair one Thursday morning in May. Ethel Joggets rarely ate more than toast for breakfast, but that morning she had said, “Why not biscuits, Viola? I don't think you've made biscuits the whole time you've been here.” So Viola was in the pantry, looking for flour. It had taken Viola several weeks to get into the habit of putting things back in the pantry where Ethel wanted them instead of where she thought best. She'd started keeping scraps of recipes scribbled down impatiently by her sisters in her apron pocket for all of the things she did not know how to cook. Biscuits, luckily, Viola could make without thinking. Just a little flour, shortening, baking powder, and salt. She had just found the sack of flour and wrapped her fingers around the handle of the sifter when she heard the dull thud. Ethel was at the counter, finishing the last of her coffee, her back turned to her son. In the seconds it took for Viola to trace the sound and stand up straight enough to move toward Harold, Ethel had moved faster, and reached her child first. This was all it had taken. A dull thud, then a hard slap on the face. The mother had reached her child first, and this made Viola guilty. Well, she fought the urge to slap Ethel back, but she did not help the woman in the midst of that crisis, the baby wailing at the top of his lungs, a trickle of blood sliding down from his temple. She collected her hand-me-down coat and pocketbook and walked out.

The first bus that came stopped for her. Midday drivers apparently had seats to spare for colored maids. Viola sat up very straight in the back, searching for the relief she had imagined feeling when she finally quit Ethel Joggets. Instead her thoughts skipped between hurt babies and raw fear. She had to leave, go to Omaha or Cleveland, where one of her brothers would have to help her make a way. Arkansas was over. Yes. She would call Clyde or James or Josiah, and one of them could come get her, or she would use the little she'd saved on train fare to go. She'd never had a wedding ring. Seemed a pity now. There would be no proof of her good intentions, no proof that she'd been a wife before a mother, and that she'd tried to be obedient and wait for her husband's word. She looked through the bus windows at this place, not the Virginia where her grandparents were buried but closer to it than wherever she imagined she would end up. The rich earth, the boisterous trees. The ditches already flooded with wildflowers.

Viola waited at the side of the road for the second bus. She'd never left the Joggetses' house early before and had no idea if the second bus even ran all day, or only during those hours necessary to cart Negroes back and forth to work. She needed to pee but feared the bus would drive by as soon as she sought out a suitable tree. After twenty minutes no bus had come, so she hustled behind a big hickory about thirty yards off the road and tried to prevent her stockings from getting wet.

Back at the road a Packard waited where she had been standing. Viola hesitated to approach it, thinking Ethel Joggets had sent her husband—a man Viola had never seen—to fetch their housekeeper and prosecute her. If the baby was hurt badly or dead, something could be pinned on her. Neglect, or a more malicious charge. Who would believe that a young colored woman just wasn't any good at being a maid? That her only crime was not knowing how to locate things in a crowded pantry quickly enough?

She couldn't run; it was seven miles to her parents' shotgun house, and there was no other road to take her there. Viola trudged through the dewy buffalo grass back to the road. A black man sat behind the wheel of the Packard. He had no passengers. It was Reverend Charles William Tufts, her missing husband's former benefactor and her only son's namesake. He rolled down the passenger window. He wore a black hat with a narrow brim and a gray wool coat over his suit.

“Ah, the young Mrs. Turner,” he said. “It would appear that you are in fervent need of conveyance.”

Viola nodded. She would gladly put up with the reverend's speechifying as long as he took her home.

The reverend drove as if they had nowhere in particular to go, both gloved hands planted on the wheel and never over twenty miles an hour. Viola thought he might be trying to protect his fancy vehicle from dips in the road.

“I assume you've been discharged by your employer,” he said. “I'm sorry. That is always unfortunate.”

“Discharged,” she said. “What gives you that idea?”

“The welts on your face. The same number as fingers on a hand, Mrs. Turner.” He brought his own gloved palm briefly to his stubbly face. Viola was surprised that he hadn't shaved this morning. “Red marks may not show on complexions like ours, but the raised skin can still tell quite a story.”

Viola said nothing. The sooner she could forget Ethel Joggets, the better. She made a promise to herself right there to keep that vignette of humiliation to herself. And she would, for her entire life. They passed the filling station that marked the halfway point to the shotgun house.

“You don't have to explain for my sake,” Tufts said, and then after a moment of thought: “Anyhow, you should be going north soon, shouldn't you? I imagine Francis has devised a timeline for you and the little one's departure.”

“I ain't heard from Francis, Reverend. He mailed once, but I ain't heard since.”

Was he making fun of her? No way Tufts hadn't heard the town gossip. He'd clearly heard enough to know that she had a job to get
discharged
from in the first place.

“And with all respect due to you, Reverend, Francis would still be here with me and the baby if you hadn't put it in his mind to leave.”

Tufts smiled his patient, I'm-going-to-teach-you-something smile, eyes deliberately bright. The smile he used right before he drove his message home at church.

“Fair and true,” he said. “But I never advised him to go and cease contacting his wife. You must remember I wrote a letter of introduction for him. Had he utilized it, I have no doubt your young family would be together now.”

A good point. Viola's mind wandered back to her three older brothers, to which one might facilitate her escape. It infuriated her to have to put her fate in the hands of men once more. She wanted out of this life. More immediately, she wanted out of this car.

She turned to the reverend again.

“But why'd he have to leave, huh? His mama sent you what little money she had, and you took it for half his life—”

“Now, Viola, I don't think fiduciary matters should be your concern.”

“My
concern
is that I married a man who had a call to be a preacher, and then outta nowhere he talkin bout goin up north to be a . . . I don't even know what! You had him up under you, tendin to your church, runnin your services, for what? You oughta be ashamed.”

Other than a quick nostril twitch, the reverend's face was still. He considered a large part of his own calling to be to help his people conquer their emotions, to channel their volatile feelings into structured Missionary Baptist works. To make spiritual pillars of the race out of them, if not intellectual ones. He had been one of the first black preachers in that part of Arkansas to add the word
missionary
to his church's name. He prided himself on conducting his congregation just as well as any of the white Missionary Baptist churches in the region. He waited until his heartbeat felt familiar to him once again, until he could trust his voice to come out even, and not as angry as he felt. Then he asked Viola Turner whether she believed in ghosts.

SPRING 2008

A young fool was much more forgivable than an old one. Tina feared she had been a fool for too long. Pastor Mike would have prescribed forgiveness, would have reminded her that no man on this earth was without fault, that marriage was built on understanding. Tina wasn't sure if she believed all of that anymore. Infidelity was heartbreaking, but the unprecedented changes in Cha-Cha's day-to-day behavior were worse. It was too late for him to require so many adjustments from her. Had he done this when she was thirty, forty-seven, even five years ago at fifty-five, she might have been able to forgive and adjust, do her best to forget. But at sixty Tina found it all too disruptive; an unwanted hiccup in her otherwise satisfactory life.

The news at Viola's doctor visit the morning before had been alarming, downright distressing, so Tina called Cha-Cha's job to relay it to him immediately. He wasn't there. He hadn't even called out sick. Hours passed and he didn't come home, sent her phone calls straight to voicemail. At dusk she snatched the piece of paper with Alice Rothman's office number from out the kitchen junk drawer. Tina dialed with no real plan of what she'd say. Maybe recite the lyrics from that Shirley Brown song?
Woman to woman, if you've
ever
been in love . . .
She had counseled plenty of friends over the years in this position: on the trail for proof of what they already knew in their guts to be true. She'd always advised them against confronting the other woman. She'd said ridiculous, pious, turn-the-other-cheek things like “God will deal with her in His own time.” How idiotic. The other women deserved to get cursed out, at the very least. Alice's phone rang and rang and rang until Tina finally put the receiver down. She checked the time on the clock over the kitchen sink. If she and Cha-Cha were together, then Alice clearly wouldn't be at work at 7
P.M.