Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  “His wife come downstairs and he said to her, ‘Give that lady one hundred dollars.’

  “I said, ‘I don’t want your money, mister. I’m going home. I ain’t seen nothing.’

  “He said, ‘What can I do for you? I have to do something for you.’

  “I said, ‘You ain’t got to do a thing. I done what God has told me to do. I prayed before I done what you asked and God said He would hold me in the palm of His hand. I hope He holds you the same. And your wife too. Just please don’t tell nobody what I has done—not even my husband if you is to meet him, for I lives over in the Cause Houses and you might see him about, preaching in the streets.’ And I left out. His wife did not say a mumbling word to me. Not a word. If she did say a word, I can’t call it. I was gone.

  “Well, I didn’t see him no more till we was building the church. See, we couldn’t find nobody wanted to sell us the land. We had saved up our money, the church did, but them Italians didn’t want us out there. Every time we’d offer to buy a building someplace, we’d look here or there in the paper, we’d call and they’d say it’s for sale and soon as they’d see us they’d say, ‘No, we changed our mind. We ain’t selling.’ And the thing is, whoever was running them docks was closing them down and them Italians was moving out fast as they could. But they still wouldn’t sell to us. Every one of ’em was selling what they could, the devil keeping score. But our money was no good. Well, we kept asking around, asking around, and finally somebody said, ‘There’s a fella over yonder on Silver Street who’s selling some land. He’s over there on the dock in that old railroad car.’ So me and my husband went over there and knocked. And who should answer the door but this fella.

  “That just knocked me out. I didn’t say a mumbling word. I acted like I never seen him before. He done the same. He didn’t make no fuss about it. He said to my husband, ‘I’ll sell you that lot over yonder. I’m building a storage house on one side of the lot. You can build your church on the other.’

  “And that’s how Five Ends got there.”

  Sportcoat listened, his eye squinting in concentration. “You reckon you still remember that fella’s name?” he asked.

  Sister Paul drew a shallow breath and leaned her head back in the wheelchair. “I remember his name rightly. One of the finest men I ever knowed. Old Guido Elefante.”

  “The Elephant?”

  “No. The Elephant’s daddy.”

  * * *

  Sportcoat felt thirsty again. He rose from his chair at the window, picked up the empty water pitcher, and went to the bathroom, where he filled it up again, drank it down, then returned and sat by the window.

  “Honest to my savior, if it wasn’t you telling it, I’d say you was stretching my blanket. That’s the strangest thing I ever heard,” he said.

  “It’s the God’s truth. And that ain’t all of it. Not only did old man Guido let us have our lot for six thousand dollars. No bank would loan us nothing. We took out a mortgage with him. We stepped on that lot without spending a penny to nobody’s bank. We gave him four hundred dollars and got to digging: me and my husband done a little, but it was mostly my Edie, Rufus, and Hettie. Sister Gee’s parents, and the Cousins’ parents, they come along later. In the beginning it was mostly us. We didn’t get far. We didn’t have no machines nor money for none. We dug by shovel. We done what we could.

  “One afternoon Mr. Guido seen us digging and came by with one of them big tractor things and dug out the entire foundation, including the basement. He done it in three days. Didn’t say a mumbling word. He never did talk much. Never said much to nobody but me, and he didn’t waste too many words on me neither. But we was grateful for him.

  “After we started bricking up the walls with cinder block, he stopped by again and pulled me aside and said, ‘I wants to repay you for what you done.’

  “I says, ‘You done it. We building a church.’

  “He says, ‘You got a mortgage on that church with me. I will give you the land if you let me set a gift inside the church.’

  “I said, ‘You don’t have to do nothing. We gonna buy the land over time.’

  “He said, ‘You don’t have to. I will give it to you. Take the note and burn it if you want.’

  “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know nothing about burning no notes, Mr. Guido. We owes you fifty-six hundred dollars on a straight mortgage to you. We’ll pay you free and clear in a few years.’

  “He says, ‘I ain’t got a few years. I will tear the mortgage up right now if you let me put something beautiful on the back wall of the church.’

  “I said, ‘Is you saved to Jesus?’

  “That tied him up. He said, ‘I can’t lie. I am not. But I got a friend who is. I got to save something for him. I made a promise to him to keep something for him. I plan to keep that promise. I wanna get somebody to draw a picture on the back wall of the church where he can see it, so that when he comes by this church someday, or his children, or his children’s children come by, they’ll look at it and know it’s there on account of me and that I kept my word.’ He said wouldn’t nobody know about it but us—me and him.

  “Well, I talked about it with my husband, for he was the pastor of the church. He tried to talk to old Guido hisself, but the old Italian wouldn’t say a word to him. Not a mumbling word did he say to my husband or nobody else at Five Ends. I seen him talk to the building inspector from the city who came around saying you have to do thus and so when we was getting ready to build. I don’t know what was said there, but that inspector needed talking to ’cause you just can’t build nothing in New York by saying it, not even back in them days. You had to go through the city. Well, Mr. Guido talked to him. But not a word did he waste on nobody colored but me, to my knowing. So my husband finally said, ‘If it’s okay by you, it’s okay by me, since you is the only one he talks to.’

  “So I went to Mr. Elefante and said, ‘Okay, do what you want.’

  “A couple of days later he come by with three of his Italian men and them fellas got to work bricking that cinder block. They knowed their business, so we left them to it and worked the inside. We put down the floor and finished the roof. That’s how it went. They worked the outside. We worked the inside. Colored and white working together.

  “After Mr. Elefante’s men built the walls about waist high, he come to me at lunch—” She paused and then corrected herself. “Well, that ain’t right. I came to him at lunch. See, those days when we broke for lunch, the Italians went one way to eat at home and the colored went the other. But I always made Mr. Guido a little something for lunch ’cause he didn’t eat much, and I’d bring it back to him a few minutes early because he hardly didn’t go to lunch. I come back early one afternoon and found him working as usual, bricking up that back wall. When I walked up on him, he says, ‘Is you alone?’

  “I said, ‘I just brought you some vittles ’cause I know you don’t eat.’

  “He looked around to make sure nobody was about, then said, ‘I got something to show you. It’s a good-luck charm.’

  “He brung this little metal box and opened it. He said, ‘This is the thing that bought your church land.’”

  “What was it?” Sportcoat asked.

  “It wasn’t nothing,” Sister Paul said. “It looked like a piece of soap shaped like a fat girl. ’Bout the color of an old trumpet. A little colored lady, is what it looked like. He closed that soap thing in the metal box, set that box inside the hollow part of a cinder block, put his concrete and mortar on it, done something to the bottom so it could set in there good, and set another cinder block over it. You couldn’t tell one from the other.

  “Then he says to me, ‘You the only one that knows. Even my wife don’t know.’

  “I said, ‘Why you trust me?’

  “He said, ‘A person who trusts can be trusted.’

  “I said, ‘Well, I ain’t got nothing to do
with where you puts your soap, Mr. Guido. I keeps my soap in the bathroom. But you a grown man, and it’s your soap. It ain’t gonna do you no good where it’s at, but I reckon you got more soap at home.’

  “I do believe that’s one of the few times I seen that man laugh. He was a serious man, see.

  “When his men come back, they built that wall up before the day was done. The next day he had another Italian feller came by with a black-and-white picture of a painting. He called it a Jell-O or some kind of painting. That feller copied that painting exactly as it was, right to the back wall of the church. It took him two days. The first day he drawed a big circle and colored it in some. Framed it out some, I guess. The second day he drawed Jesus in his robes right in the middle circle—with Jesus’s hands outspread. Them hands touch the outside of that circle he drawed. One of them hands, Jesus’s left hand, is right on the cinder block where that soap is. Right on top of it.”

  She paused and nodded.

  “And that thing is in there yet today.”

  “You sure?” Sportcoat asked.

  “Sure as I’m sitting here. Unless the building fell down to dust. Then they finished bricking the other walls, helped us finish the inside, do the floors and such. And at the end, that same painter came back and put up the lettering on the back wall over Jesus’s head that says ‘May God Hold You in the Palm of His Hand.’ It was the prettiest thing.”

  She yawned, her story finished.

  “That’s how the church come to have that motto.”

  Sportcoat scratched his jaw, perplexed. “But you didn’t tell me about the cheese,” he said.

  “What about it? I done told you,” she said.

  “No you didn’t.”

  “I told you about the truck, didn’t I?”

  “What do a truck got to do with it?”

  She shook her old head. “Son, you so old your mind has shrunk to the size of a full-grown pea. What do a truck carry? The truck I drove for Mr. Guido was full of cheese. Stolen cheese, I reckon. Old Guido started sending me that cheese five minutes after we opened the church doors. After I let him stick that good-luck soap box with the colored doll in it or whatever it was in that wall, I could do no wrong for him. I asked him many a day to stop sending that cheese, for it was good cheese. Expensive cheese. Too much for our little church. But he said, ‘I wanna send it. People need food.’ So after a while I told him to send it to Building Seventeen in the Cause, for Hot Sausage come to run that building after a time, and Sausage is honest, and I knowed he’d give it out in the Cause to them who could use it. Mr. Guido sent that cheese for years and years. After he died, it still come. When I come here to this old folks’ home, it was yet coming. It comes to this day.”

  “So who’s sending it now?”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “Oh hush!” Sportcoat hissed. “You sound like Hettie. That cheese got to come from someplace!”

  Sister Paul shrugged. “Genesis twenty-seven twenty-eight says, ‘May God give you heaven’s dew and earth’s richness—an abundance of grain and new wine.’”

  “This is cheese.”

  “Son, a blessing favors them that needs it. Don’t matter how it comes. It just matters that it does.”

  25

  DO

  It was a dream so alive—and so many of them seemed dead before they started—that at times Elefante felt he had to keep himself from levitating when he thought about it. He gripped the steering wheel of his Lincoln tightly as he considered it. Melissa, the Governor’s daughter, rode beside him in silence. It was four a.m. He was happy. It wasn’t so much that Melissa had accepted his invitation to “look into her father’s affairs,” but rather the way she handled her own affairs—and his.

  He’d never met anyone like her before. She was, as they say in Italian, a stellina, a star, a most beautiful one. From the first, she was shy and reticent, as he’d seen. But beneath the reserve was a sureness of manner, a certainty that belied deep confidence and engendered trust. Over the weeks as they courted, he saw how she was with her employees at her bagel shop and factory, the way she figured out important problems for them without making them feel stupid, the politeness she showed them, her respect and deference for older people in general, including the old deacon, the rummy who’d worked for his mother, whom she’d finally met just a month ago. She didn’t refer to him as “colored,” or “Negro.” She called him “Mister” and referred to him as “Afro-American,” which, to Elefante, sounded dangerous, odd, and foreign. That was hippie talk. It reminded him of Bunch Moon, the colored bastard. He’d heard through the grapevine that Peck had dispatched Bunch—badly. There was danger everywhere now, full-out shooting coming because of the whites, the blacks, the Spanish, the Irish cops, the Italian families, the drug wars. It wouldn’t stop. Yet despite the dark days ahead he felt himself moving into a light of a different kind. The wonderful, bursting, gorgeous, eye-opening panorama of light that love can bring into a lonely man’s life.

  The romance was new territory for them both. A couple of lunches and a quick dinner at a Bronx diner had dissolved into long, peaceful dinners at the Peter Luger Steak House in Williamsburg, then lovely walks along the Brooklyn Esplanade as the cocoon of affection and lust blossomed into the kaleidoscope of bursting, passionate, gorgeous love.

  Even so, he thought, as he steered the car down the FDR Drive, the Chrysler Building at Forty-Second Street receding in the distance, to love a man by the light of day when the sun is shining and there is a promise of love is one thing. But to rumble into the housing projects of Brooklyn in his Lincoln to pick up the old deacon in the dead of night was quite another.

  He pondered it as he spun the Lincoln into the Battery Tunnel, the fluorescent lights along its ceiling glinting across Melissa’s face as she sat next to him. Until then he’d always believed a partner brought worry, fear, and weakness to a man, especially one in his business. But Melissa brought courage and humility and humor to places he’d never known existed. He’d never partnered with a woman before, if you didn’t include his mother, but Melissa’s quiet sincerity was a weapon of a new kind. It drew people in, disarmed them. It made them friends—and that was a weapon too. He’d seen that happen with the old colored woman in the Bensonhurst nursing home who called herself Sister Paul.

  He thanked God he’d brought Melissa to the old folks’ home the week before. He almost didn’t do it. He took her along as an afterthought, to show his sincerity and openness. She’d turned matters in his favor.

  The old deacon had assured him that he’d told Sister Paul all about him. But when he walked into the room, the old biddy, wrinkled and covered in a gray blanket, gave him the malocchio, the evil eye. She ignored his greeting and, without a word, extended an old claw, pointing at an old tin coffee can near her bed. He reached for it and handed it to her. She spat in it.

  “You look like your daddy but fatter,” she said.

  He placed a chair close to her wheelchair and sat in it facing her, trying to smile. Melissa sat on the bed behind him. “I ate more peanuts than he did.” He said it as a joke, to loosen things.

  She waved that off with an ancient, wrinkled hand. “Your daddy didn’t eat no peanuts to my recollection. And he didn’t say but four or five words a day. Which means you is not only fatter, but you uses your talking hole more.”

  He felt the color moving into his face. “Didn’t the deacon talk to you?”

  “Don’t be coming in here sassifying and frying up air castles ’bout some old deacon! Do you do?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you do?”

  “Do what?”

  “I asked you a question, mister. Do you do?”

  “Listen, miss—”

  “Don’t sass me,” she barked. “I’m asking you a question. Yes or no. Do you do?”

  He raised his finger to make a point, to try to slow her down.
“I’m only here bec—”

  “Put that finger in your pocket and listen, sonny! You walk in here without a can of sardines, nor gift, nor bowl of beans, not even a glass of water to offer somebody who is aiming to give you a free hand to the thing you come for. And you don’t even know if you gonna hit the bull’s-eye on that or not. You is like most white men. You believes you is entitled to something you ain’t got no hand in. Everything in the world got a price, mister. Well now, the bottom rail’s on top, sir, for I has been walked on all my life, and I don’t know you from Adam. You could be Italian, being that the old suit you wearing has got wine stains all over it. On the other hand, you could be some fancy-figuring devil-may-care wino pretending to be Mr. Guido’s son. I don’t know why you is here in the first place, mister. I don’t know the deacon that good. He didn’t explain nothing to me about you. Like most mens, he don’t feel he got to explain nothing to a woman, including his own wife, who did all the frying and cooking and hair straightening while he rumbled ’round throwing joy juice down his throat for all them long years he done it. I been around the sun one hundred four whole times and nobody’s explained nothing to me. I read the book on not being explained to. That’s called being an old colored woman, sir. Now I ask it again. For the last time—and if you don’t show your points here, then you can slip your corns inside them little Hush Puppy shoes of yours with the little quarters inside ’em and git on down the road. Do you do?”

  He blinked, exasperated, and glanced at Melissa, who—thank God—said softly, “Mrs. Paul, he does do.”

  The old lady’s shriveled face, a mass of wrinkled, angry rivers, loosened as she turned her ancient head to look at Melissa. “Is you his wife, miss?”