The Turner House (40 page)

A month after she quit the Joggetses, Francis stood at the door of the shotgun house. Pounds thinner, dirty. Dressed even poorer than when he left. It was the middle of the day. Viola was home alone with Cha-Cha.

“I've done wrong,” he said. “But I got a good job lined up and I'm here for my family. I'm gonna be here for now on.”

I've done wrong, too! Viola had wanted to shout, but she did not. Nothing good could have come of telling her husband this. She let Francis into the house, handed him his child. He had ridden buses and hitched rides back south so that the three of them—husband, wife, and son—could afford train rides north. She pumped and heated water for her road-weary husband, bathed him, and set their baby down for a nap. Then Viola and Francis made slow, quiet love in the front room of the shotgun house.

They forgave each other without sharing the details of their betrayals. They would spend the rest of their lives atoning for those months when they had not only forsaken their marriage but given up hope. Each child became a consecration, further commitment to stay put and be happy. And they often were.

A boy like Francis had reason to see ghosts. A father in the ground so young from a poor man's ailment. A mother away. Shortly after he lost them both, a haint visited him. A man with pale skin, hitched-up trousers, and bare feet. Francis had no picture of his own father, so he could not say for sure if this was him, but he had no reason to think it was anyone else. His yearning for his father had been so deep that he did not dare question how the man had found a way back to him. If haints could be conjured, called forth from the hereafter, then young Francis had accomplished it. The haint returned every subsequent Arkansas night, not always as a man, sometimes just as a light in the darkness of a room. For years he told no one because he did not want intercession. One man's haunting is another man's hallowed guest.

At twenty, married and father to one, Francis wanted a place in church leadership. Reverend Tufts, the man who considered himself a scholar, pushing his church toward pragmatism, fashioning a model, modern congregation, and above the need of even three old deacons, doubted his ward's worthiness. Francis had received little formal education, after all.

“How do I know that you've truly received the call as opposed to doing what you think I expect of you?”

A simple enough question, and Francis could have answered with a verbose citation of scripture or a simple, fervent oath, but he spoke about the haint that had visited him for ten years right under the reverend's roof. He likened it to the angel Gabriel, counsel to Daniel and comforter of Mary. He said he knew his place was in the church, helping to shepherd their humble congregation however he could.

It was the wrong answer. Reverend Tufts did not take kindly to superstition or root work, and claims of otherwordly visitations fell under that umbrella for him. Never mind the ghosts in the Bible. The reverend detested the tendency of Negro churches to prize the sensational at the expense of more complex concepts. He said he would consider what Francis wanted, but he did not. The next week he gave Francis a letter of introduction to a Detroit pastor and advised him to shoot for a better life up north.

Starting his first evening in Detroit, and every night for the rest of his life, Francis saw nothing. Not hide nor hair of the haint that had helped give his life purpose. He spent no small amount of time pondering why. Could have been that his father's spirit, if the haint was indeed his father's spirit, was unable to travel so far away from where its earthly body lay. Or maybe Francis, finally grown and gone for good from the sort of poor, sharecropping life that had killed Francis Sr., no longer needed protection. Either way, his conclusion was the same: there ain't no haints in Detroit. When his firstborn son claimed to have seen a ghost, to have fought with it, Francis refused to believe. His haint had been a blessing, nothing to fear.

Francis never returned to Arkansas after collecting his family. And the call to something greater—to preach, to lead, to be anything other than a man who worked too much and made too little—either had stayed in Arkansas with his haint or had never really been within him. For funerals and summer trips he would drive Viola and the children as far as her brothers in Cleveland, and as they made the journey south, Francis would turn back to Detroit. He would continue to take things that happened in the city personally—white flight, the government-sponsored demolition of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, plants closing, drugs arriving—but he would love the city just the same, even if he did not love who he had become within it.

There truly ain't no party like a Turner house party. Like a single-celled organism, it can change shape and reproduce itself with little fuel. The food runs out by 9
P.M.
, no matter how much they make, but the booze never ends. The children, in a pop- and candy-fueled ecstasy, will do doughnuts on their Big Wheels in the basement. Or, minus miniature vehicles, they'll play video games on the old big screen down there, standing up, jostling one another, fighting the big screen's static, and only stopping for Faygo and pee breaks. In the absence of any toys at all—which is unlikely because Cha-Cha's basement doubles as a toy graveyard—Turners under the age of twelve may resort to old school play, linking arms and running as fast as they can in a circle until someone vomits, playing tag in the dark until someone gets a minor concussion, or simply screaming at the top of their prepubescent lungs until an adult comes down and threatens them into silence. The adults will play dominoes, bid whist, and Po-Ke-No. They tell the same embarrassing stories about one another and guffaw as if they're new. They make liquor runs; they make new boyfriends uncomfortable; they make neighbors consider calling the police. They will eventually kick the children out of the basement, tuck them away upstairs, and dance in the belly of Cha-Cha's house to classics from the disparate decades of their youths.

But first: preparation. Quincy gathered his brothers and their adult children in Cha-Cha's living room, put his sisters on speakerphone, and devised a game plan. Tina's absence necessitated this pre-party huddle. Cha-Cha went along with the plans as if it wasn't his house and he wasn't supposed to be hosting. He couldn't face the day, with its marathon drinking and joking and inevitable arguments, without Tina. What he needed was solitude to think about the mess he'd willingly made of his marriage. A Turner house party had no room for solitude.

Quincy, Russell, Miles, and Duke left the house and came back with enough farm-animal limbs to start their own butcher shop. Then Miles and Duke, the Californians, marinated beef for carne asada and brined their chicken in lime juice and beer. Quincy and Russell, the southerners, changed into short sets and Panama hats, puffed on cigars, and began the complicated process of concocting rubs for their ribs. Lonnie foraged through the house for music. The nieces and nephews staked their claim on adulthood by going out to buy the first haul of booze.

Cha-Cha hosed out old moldy coolers in the driveway and wondered how long he could get away with going back to bed before someone noticed. Lonnie opened the garage door, presumably for more light to help him as he sifted through the boxes of cassette tapes and records stacked behind a tangle of rusty bikes. He didn't speak to Cha-Cha, and Cha-Cha was grateful to him. He felt like a hostage in his own house. He saw now that these parties were larger than him and Tina, and even Viola. That his family could go on party prepping in Cha-Cha's house when his home life was an obvious wreck indicated of a lack of respect. This was what happened when an open-door policy—something Cha and Tina had prided themselves on—ran amok. When
mi casa es su casa
was taken literally. His house had become an extension of the Brotherly Banquet Hall of their youths, except his siblings slept here too, and paid no security deposit for damage. In exchange, Turners thought their presence was expression of love enough; that they'd booked flights and crossed state lines to invade Cha-Cha's space was supposed to be some sort of gift to him. It felt more like an ambush.

Miles came around the side of the house with two hot links on a skewer and a Corona in each shirt pocket.

“Early spoils of the war,” he said, and pulled off a link for Cha-Cha. Cha-Cha found no joy in the taught, salty skin of the link, nor in the spicy, juicy meat inside, but he ate it anyway, because historically he loved hot links. He put the Corona in his own shirt pocket for later use.

“So,” Miles said. “I looked into tearing down the house. Not to sell it, but I figure we could tear it down and keep the grass mown till we wanna rebuild or whatever. Less hassle. Plus it wouldn't be uglying up the block.”

“Let's just focus on getting ready for the party,” Cha-Cha said. “So everybody can have a good time.”

“Shit, I'm already having a good time. I got a link and brew, don't I? I'm just sayin I
get
it, is all. Turns out it'll cost at least eight thousand to tear that sucker down and haul the junk away. And then we'd still have to renegotiate the loan. It ain't an easy decision.”

“Who's tearing what sucker down?” Duke said. He sauntered over from the side of the house, beer gut first. “The house?”

Miles and Duke had always been a package deal, so inseparable that folks on Yarrow thought they were twins instead of a year apart. Cha-Cha vacillated between envying their built-in friendship and being suspicious of it. He now saw it as a way for neither brother to truly grow up, an annoying Frick and Frack routine they'd never stopped performing.

Duke stared at Cha-Cha, waiting for an answer.

“Nobody's tearing anything down,” he said.

“Good,” Duke said. “Cause I been doin some math.” He mimed punching numbers into his calculator palm.

“Me too,” said Miles. “That's what I was just sayin. It costs at least eight thousand—”

“Three thousand seventy-six a piece!” Duke yelled over him. “That's all it is per child to get the loan paid up. Don't try to tell me that all a these
grown-ass people
can't come up with three thousand. Three Gs, as the young folks say.”

“That's a lot of money for me,” Lonnie said. “I'm on a fixed income.” He did not look up from his boxes of music.

Miles and Duke exchanged quizzical looks and snickered.

“Well, according to Russell, that's money down the toilet,” Miles said. “He won't pay it cause a what already happened to the garage.”

“We might as well hash all this out before the party starts,” Duke said. “Before folks get that liquor in them, and the girls come over and get emotional.”

“Marlene gonna kick your behind if y'all do this without her,” Lonnie said, walking toward them.

“Ain't nobody scared of Marlene,” Duke and Miles said in unison. This was a lie.

“I'ma go get Russ and Quince,” Duke said.

Cha-Cha could not stay for this. He didn't care that this was his house, and that he was the one who would have to sign for any final decision. He saw why Troy, wrong-headed as he'd been, thought it was easier to just do what he wanted and fill in his siblings later. Nothing would be decided in this driveway roundtable, with his sisters excluded and meat still grilling in the backyard. He walked past his brothers to the front door, set down his Corona on the entryway table, and picked up his keys. He turned up the radio as he sped away, and only faintly heard his brothers calling after him.

W
ORD SPREAD THAT
Cha-Cha had taken off, and while Miles, Duke, and Russell wanted to call him, drag him back against his will, Lelah and Lonnie convinced everyone that the show had to go on. It was for Viola that they had come, after all. Shortly after Cha-Cha left, Marlene came over to help get Viola ready. She and Lelah bathed their mother, dressed her in her favorite color. Yellow muumuu, yellow slippers, yellow pillbox hat to crown a shiny brown bob wig. “Y'all don't have to do all this,” Viola repeated as Marlene painted her nails pink, as Lelah lotioned her feet. “We just goin to the living room.” When she saw the finished product in the mirror she smiled, showing off strong teeth that were mostly still hers.

Marlene stopped Lelah in the hallway, held her by the elbow.

“How much medication she take today, Lelah? She can't even keep eye contact. You think you gave her the wrong amount? We can call Tina and check.”

“She's got cancer, Marla. And it's at the point where she gets whatever she wants whenever she wants.”

“Oh. Well. Oh.”

“Cha-Cha isn't ready to tell people, and I guess Mama isn't either or she would've told you.”

Marlene pulled her into a hug.

“If she doesn't wanna tell anybody, that's her choice,” she said.

“But don't you think the outta-town folks should be able to say goodbye?”

“Maybe she don't want goodbyes. Trust me, you start to feel a lot more dead when other people find out you're dying. That's how I felt when I got sick.”

“But you didn't die.”

“Nope. But I wasn't eighty-two years old.”

Lelah slipped the $950 Marlene had loaned her into her purse when she wasn't looking.

The other sisters arrived with foil trays and ceramic boats of food. Without Tina, the menu lacked the cohesion of a usual Turner party spread. Francey brought vegetarian lasagna with an unappetizing white cream sauce and bread crumbs sprinkled on top. Sandra and Berniece brought potato salad, macaroni salad, and deviled eggs. Netti brought chicken biryani that she'd just learned how to make in India. The rice looked too dry. Henna still decorated her hands. “It was like a honeymoon, but it was so hot! I had a flash about every five minutes, and had to buy water on the street. Rahul was scared but I
never
got sick.” Marlene's son, Antoine, arrived with his wife, their new baby girl, and banana pudding. A chorus of coos filled the foyer for several more doorbell rings. Lelah stood in the entryway, feeling pressure to greet these arrivals in the absence of the homeowners. She kept hoping that the next people through the door would be Brianne and Bobbie, or even Rob. She'd told Brianne everything she could remember about Vernon, and that had been enough to get her to take $300. She knew it had not been enough to get Brianne to trust her again, to get her to stop thinking of her as a problem that she should either fix or avoid. Only time would change that.