Nine Nights on the Windy Tree

by Martha Miller

  “Oh, baby,” Grandma said. “Don’t you worry about me. That store is less than a mile from here. I walked it plenty of times. I only have to get a few things. I can take my cart with wheels. You go back to bed and I’ll talk to you later.”

  Grandma was eighty-one years old and had broken a hip three years ago. Until that time no one ever had to take her anywhere. “On second thought,” Bertha said. “I’m awake and probably won’t be able to go back to sleep. I have a few things I need to get from the store too.”

  “No, no,” said Grandma. “You go back to bed. Tell me what you need. I got a pencil right here.”

  “Don’t you go anywhere. I’ll see you in less than half an hour.”

  “But.” Grandma hesitated. “I don’t like to be so much trouble.”

  “You’re no trouble at all. You know I look forward to our weekly trips,” Bertha said. “Now I’ve got to get off the phone and brush my teeth.”

  Bertha flopped back across the bed. Her body felt weighted. Her eyes fell shut. The phone rang. She reached for the nightstand, knocked the phone off and struggled to catch it, but missed. In a chain reaction, a bottle of Tylenol hit the floor and gel caps exploded across the carpet.

  Bertha gathered up the receiver and said, “I’m on my way out the door.”

  “Where ya going?” It was Alvin.

  “Do you know what time it is?” Bertha demanded.

  “About six thirty,” Alvin said. “Sorry. I only wanted to tell you about the newspaper before someone else did.”

  “You’re too late. I just got off the phone with my grandma.”

  “She must be the first house on the kid’s route,” said Alvin. “The story doesn’t say who was murdered. The police are withholding that information, pending notification of the relatives.”

  “Joe Morescki was murdered in my office last night,” Bertha said.

  “Jesus.” Alvin whistled. “The police call you?”

  “I went there on the way home from dinner,” Bertha said. “I practically walked in on it.”

  “Morescki. That’s the name of the new client.”

  “Yeah. Look. I can’t talk right now. I’ve got to pick up Grandma.”

  “Is there anything I should do?” Alvin asked quickly.

  “I’ll call you when I get back. Maybe we can meet for breakfast or something in a couple of hours.”

  “Why don’t you come by here when you’re done? I’ll put on a pot of coffee. Randy has a cut and color at eight. We’ll be alone—us and the dogs.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll see you later.”

  Bertha hung up, stepped over the Tylenol, and headed for the bathroom. Within five minutes she’d pulled on yesterday’s cutoff jeans, laced up a pair of high-topped tennis shoes, sniffed the underarms of three T-shirts, and selected one. As she brushed her teeth, she checked the mirror. Her short, yellow hair was sticking out in all directions. She looked longingly at the Sulfur 8, decided she didn’t have time for anything major, and grabbed the baseball cap on the way out the door.

  The sun hung low on the horizon behind wispy, gray clouds that were trimmed in coral and gave the eastern sky a colorful, ruffled effect. The temperature was cooler this morning. Bertha backed out the rutted gravel driveway, narrowly missing her own paperboy, and sped away. There was never much traffic before seven on Saturday morning. She made four rolling stops and pulled onto the Madison Street thruway. The only traffic she saw was near the hospital, where it was close to shift change. She turned onto Grandma’s street in less than ten minutes.

  Grandma and Grandpa had bought the house in 1934, shortly before Bertha’s father was born. It had been a quiet working-class neighborhood then, with a corner grocery store. The street had been lined with tiny, well-kept bungalows. Most of the neighbors had been feeling the effects of the depression, but Bertha’s grandfather had a job as a porter for the GM&O Railroad. He worked in the local train station, pushing heavy luggage trucks and helping white women with their hatboxes for nickel tips. He was also a musician and played on Saturday nights in a juke joint on the outskirts of town. Bertha remembered as a little girl, Grandpa, who was by then retired from the railroad, giving lessons to Aunt Lucy’s older kids. He couldn’t read music, yet there was no instrument, no music that he couldn’t play. By the time Bertha was big enough to hold a trumpet, Grandpa was gone, and Grandma supplemented the railroad pension by doing alterations. In the same way the focal point of some rooms is the T.V. or the fireplace, in Grandma’s living room it had been the sewing machine.

  The neighborhood was rundown now. Grandma had always said the way you could tell the poor from the very poor was that grass never grew in the very poor people’s yards. There were gang symbols painted on the abandoned corner building that had been Latch’s Grocery Store when Bertha was a little girl.

  As Bertha pulled into Grandma’s driveway, she noticed that her grass needed cutting. Most of the houses on the street were covered with shingle siding or chipped paint. Grandma’s house was avocado. A salesman had sold Grandma aluminum siding several years ago, for three sides of the house. He’d convinced her to keep the cost down by not doing the west side, since the neighbor’s house was across the narrow driveway, and no one could see the siding in the shade.

  The old woman was sitting on the front-porch swing, looking over the chrome handles of her walker toward the driveway. She pulled herself to a standing position when Bertha’s Jeep screeched to a stop. Today, like most days, she wore a homemade, cotton housedress.

  Bertha swung out of the Jeep and in a couple of long strides was on the front porch.

  “I don’t need no help.” Grandma was already arguing.

  Bertha steadied the walker on the concrete steps. Sometimes Grandma forgot whether she was supposed to tip the walker toward herself or away when going down. She had a red bicycle basket hooked to the front of her walker, which contained Grandma’s wallet, her grocery list, and three empty plastic grocery bags.

  Bertha boosted Grandma into the passenger seat and helped her with the seat belt. She then wrestled the walker into the back. Because of the basket, the thing wouldn’t fold. Grandma waited patiently, looking across the Jeep’s dusty hood.

  “Want to hear Billie Holiday?” Bertha asked as she scooted behind the steering wheel.

  “You got Bessie Smith?”

  “No.”

  Grandma rolled her eyes and sighed. “Oh, all right.”

  Bertha squinted at the CD. She wanted to make sure she didn’t play “Strange Fruit.” That song always set Grandma off. First thing you know, she’d be carrying on about Great-uncle Homer, who had his house burned down in the race riots of 1908 because folks thought Uncle Homer’s light-skinned wife Moselle was a white woman. As a little girl Bertha used to dream about Aunt Moselle, visiting a country house with Uncle Homer, Aunt Moselle, and their old hunting dog. A screened-in side porch and a glider with a red Indian blanket was where Aunt Moselle would rock her to sleep to the sounds of the insects. Of course, that couldn’t be true, them being dead long before she was even thought of. Bertha’s former lover, Colleen, had been white. Grandma hated her the first time they met and hadn’t changed her mind in the three years Bertha and Colleen lived together.

  “Remember Uncle Homer,” Grandma said over and over again. “And Aunt Moselle was a colored woman, like you and me.”

  This morning Grandma talked about when Billie Holiday sang at the juke joint where Grandpa played the trumpet in Leroy Fountain’s band. Bertha had heard the story a hundred times and relaxed. “And your Grandpa got so drunk they had to carry him home,” Grandma said as Bertha pulled the Jeep to a stop in the store’s parking lot. Grandma pushed a quarter toward Bertha. “Get a cart and we’ll leave that damn walker in the car.”

  Bertha pushed the quarter in the red plastic slot, untangled the cart from the others, and guided it back toward the Jeep. She transferred the wallet, grocery list, and plastic bags into the cart’s kid seat and opened the passenger
door.

  “You look tired, honey,” Grandma said as Bertha helped her with the seat belt. “You ain’t drinking again, are you?”

  “No, ma’am.” Grandma was the only one allowed to ask that question because Bertha’d never figured out how to stop her. “I got my coin. I been sober eighteen months.”

  The old woman’s dark, wrinkled face turned up toward Bertha. Her gold-rimmed glasses had slid down on her broad nose. Sun glinted in her eye and a tear sparkled like a jewel.

  “You the only one in this family ever quit drinking,” Grandma said. “You can be proud.”

  “Yes’m, I know.” Grandma was referring to Grandpa, who ended up in jail from time to time, and Bertha’s father, who died, when he wasn’t much older than Bertha was now, of cirrhosis.

  The automatic doors whooshed open, and they entered the store. A dank, musty smell wafted toward them.

  “Baby, you do look tired,” Grandma said again as they stopped in front of the crackers.

  “I was up late, Grandma,” Bertha said, looking down at the part in the old woman’s silver hair. Evidently Grandma had forgotten about the story in the newspaper.

  “They gonna put in one of those supermarket malls someday,” Grandma said.

  Thinking one of Grandma’s sermons about the neighborhood had begun, Bertha nodded and picked up a box of bran flakes.

  “They talking about buying Latch’s Grocery Store,” said Grandma.

  “That’s not big enough for a mall.”

  “The man in charge told me hisself,” Grandma insisted.

  Bertha dismissed the comment. Grandma got things confused sometimes.

  “He told Edith Latch that she could sell outright, or they could do one of them reverse mortgages and remodel,” Grandma said.

  “Are they interested in buying her house too?”

  Grandma nodded. “If I needed money, I could get one of those backwards mortgages. So, if there’s anything you need, Bertha, just let me know. I could get five thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t need money, Grandma.” Bertha remembered the avocado siding and said, “Promise me before you sign anything, you’ll let me look at it first.”

  Grandma walked on, pushing the grocery cart. Bertha wasn’t sure if Grandma heard her. As usual, they were the first Saturday customers. They’d stopped at the far end of the store, by the milk cooler, when Tommy Jackson came in with his chubby white wife and their mixed baby girl. Bertha waved at Tommy. She’d known him since grade school. The redheaded wife looked at Bertha suspiciously when Tommy called “Hello” to her. Bertha braced herself for the mixed-race lecture, but Grandma didn’t notice them. Bertha watched her and worried. Grandma seemed to have aged a great deal lately.

  They came around the end of one aisle and turned up the next. Someone had dropped a bottle of ketchup on the floor. Grandma stepped around it, and Bertha stared. Images of the blood the night before flashed in her mind. She tried to shake them off, but a feeling haunted her, a congested sensation she’d known all the way back to childhood. She was certain she’d done something wrong. Somehow she should have seen, should have prevented whatever it was that happened. After all, it was her office, her client.

  Grandma stopped by the Little Debbie Snack Cakes, looked around, and dropped a box in her cart.

  “Grandma,” Bertha said. “I don’t need those. I didn’t eat the ones I got last week yet.”

  “These are for me,” Grandma insisted. “What on earth happened to your hair?”

  Bertha touched the ends of her hair that protruded from the ball cap. Sometimes Grandma remembered. Sometimes she didn’t. “I had it colored.”

  “Well, it looks like hell.” Grandma frowned.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bertha said softly.

  “That Thomas Jackson over there with that white girl?”

  Grandma didn’t wait for an answer. The lecture started. “Your Great-uncle Homer...” It went on down the next aisle and while Bertha set the groceries on the counter. The checkout girl got to hear it while Grandma dug out $36.59.

  When Bertha put the last item in the last plastic bag, Grandma finished with, “The ones you got to watch out for are the ones who are nice to your face. At least when others call you names, they being honest. You got to work harder and be better because they’ll judge you by different standards.”

  The mistake was trying to argue. But Bertha was tired. She set the bags in the grocery cart and said, “Grandma, some black people are bad, and some white people are good.”

  Glaring at her, Grandma said, “You mean like Colleen?”

  They’d started toward the door, but Bertha stopped and looked at the old woman wearily. “Okay, stop right now,” she said. “I was wrong, and Colleen was right. She should have left me, and she did.”

  “If you’d been white—”

  “I was a drunk, Grandma. I was spending our money on drugs. I was screwing up at work. I hit her.”

  Grandma closed her eyes as if she’d taken the blow, and Bertha knew instantly she’d see that image over and over in her sleep.

  In a softer tone Bertha said, “I was wrong, and she was right to leave me. It’s not a black-and-white thing. It’s a wrong-and-right thing.”

  The groceries were in the back seat wedged under the walker, Grandma was buckled into the passenger seat, and the grocery cart was back in the rack. Grandma looked straight ahead and was quiet as Bertha slipped the quarter into the pocket of the old woman’s sweater. Bertha gripped the steering wheel and sighed. They sat quietly for a minute.

  Finally Grandma said, “You got a hard life, honey. You been going uphill since you was a baby. Your mama run off like she did, leaving you alone. How many your friends went to college on they daddy’s insurance money, cause he drunk hisself to death? Then you being different like you are and having the AA sickness too.”

  Bertha placed her hand over the old woman’s. “I had some problems, but you taught me to be strong.”

  Bertha felt Grandma relax. She wanted to hug her but was busy swallowing the burning knot in her throat. She would be glad to get to Alvin’s place. She’d done the whole morning without coffee.

  They drove back to the avocado bungalow in silence. The house wasn’t air conditioned, but was always dark and cool. Bertha helped the old woman into the house, then carried in two bags of groceries.

  Bertha unpacked the plastic bags. The kitchen hadn’t changed since she was small, but Bertha let Grandma tell her where things went anyway.

  “Can you stay a while?” Grandma asked at last.

  “I will next week,” Bertha promised her. “I have a lot to do today.”

  Grandma pushed a wilted dollar bill toward her. “Now, take this for the gas.”

  “I’m not taking your money,” Bertha insisted.

  “Here.” Grandma pushed it at her.

  Bertha shook her head and smiled, then brushed her lips against the old woman’s dry forehead. “You call me if you need anything else.”

  Grandma gave her a squeeze. “Maybe Colleen come back now that you changed.”

  Bertha was weighted with sudden sadness. “No, Grandma. She won’t be back.”

  “I don’t mean to tread on your soft places, Bee.” Grandma used the name she’d called Bertha as a little girl. “I’m an old woman. Sometimes I forget about the power of feelings. Not the family kind of feelings. I don’t forget that. But the Colleen kind of feelings. It’s been a long time since Grandpa and I was young.”

  Bertha sighed. “Let it go. Okay?”

  Grandma nodded.

  Bertha let the screen door bang shut and headed for the black Jeep and Alvin’s coffee. As she worked the clutch, pulling out of the driveway, her tennis shoes brushed against something. Bertha reached down and retrieved her favorite Little Debbie’s Snack Cakes from the floorboard.

  Chapter Five

  Bertha rang the bell, the dogs started barking, and Alvin yelled at them. Bertha knew from other visits that the long-haired Chihuahua w
as the ring leader. The pink-and-white powder puff always started and the other two chimed in. The little one had moved in when Randy did. The chocolate Lab was Alvin’s. The two men got the cocker as a pup and raised her together.

  As Alvin swung the door open, the fierce barking pounded in Bertha’s head like a hammer. If only the two bigger dogs had been involved, the noise would have stopped when they saw Bertha because they knew her. But the miniature family watchdog kept barking, so the others did too.

  “No bark!” Alvin tried the command he’d learned in puppy school. Unfortunately, he was the only one who learned it. “Shut the fuck up!”

  Bertha stepped inside the immaculate bungalow and inhaled the odor of coffee. She tossed the Little Debbie Snack Cakes on the counter and picked up one of the two empty mugs that were ready at the breakfast bar. Alvin didn’t mess around with special blends. No hazelnut or cinnamon-vanilla for him. That was one of the many things Bertha liked about him. He also claimed to be the last person left in the state of Illinois who still used real cream. Even Grandma had given it up in favor of skimmed milk. It was his last holdout from Randy and the health kick.

  Alvin looked pale. Bertha remembered the excessive beer at dinner. He didn’t usually drink, at least not in front of her. Bertha chalked the drinking up to the trip to the dentist and Randy’s somewhat pissy mood. The dogs quieted down and sat next to her feet, staring up and begging shamelessly. They knew that Bertha frequently gave in and tossed them tidbits.

  Alvin wore a white T-shirt tucked into a pair of aqua shorts that were as tight as swim trunks and bulged between his legs in what must be sexy—to other gay men anyway. His curly, thin-on-top, dark-blond hair was still wet, as if he’d just gotten out of the shower. He crossed the kitchen barefoot and handed Bertha the newspaper.

  She pulled out a chair, sat at the tiny kitchen table, and unfolded it. The headlines read MURDER AT THE LAMBERT BUILDING. A photo of the building taken shortly after Bertha left the night before showed the ambulance parked between two police cars. The article didn’t say much. No names. An apparent murder victim had been discovered in one of the offices by an employee. The police were investigating. Names were being withheld, pending notification of the relatives.