Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  “What about the cheese?” Sausage asked.

  “That was the Elephant’s daddy who did that.”

  “His daddy’s been dead longer than Moses. It’s been twenty years, at least.”

  “Honest to God, Sausage, I don’t know where it came from,” Sister Gee said. “Sportcoat knew. When I asked him where the cheese was from, all he said was, ‘Jesus sent it,’ and not a word more.”

  Sausage nodded thoughtfully, and Sister Gee continued. “The only other time he ever referred to it was when the Elephant drove me and Sportcoat to visit Sister Paul out in the old folks’ home in Bensonhurst that time. Turns out Sister Paul and the Elephant’s daddy was old friends, was all I could make of it. How that happened, I don’t know. What the Elephant and Sister Paul spoke about, well, that too was private. I wasn’t in the room. I did overhear Sister Paul say something to the Elephant about a hundred dollars and driving a truck. I overheard ’em laughing about it. But I didn’t see no money change hands. And I seen them shake hands. Sportcoat and the Elephant.”

  “Bless me! The Elephant and Sportcoat shook hands?” Hot Sausage said.

  “Hand to God,” Sister Gee said. “They shook hands. And when the Elephant was digging out the back of the church in the dead of the night without our permission—though you and I know he had plenty permission, in fact he had all the permission he wanted—Sportcoat was the only one from our congregation he’d let help him. I seen it, too, of course. Wasn’t supposed to. But Deacon told me they was coming, so I hid behind the choir pew and saw the whole thing. They was together on it, them two. But after they lifted that little doll thing from the wall, I never saw ’em together again.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then Sportcoat dropped clean out of sight. And I didn’t see him no more. Ever more. Now you tell me the rest, Sausage, for I done told you everything I know.”

  Sausage nodded. “Okay.”

  And then he told it. Told what he knew and what he’d seen. And when he was done, Sister Gee stared at him in awe, then reached over her chair and hugged him where he sat.

  “Hot Sausage,” she said softly. “You’re a man and a half.”

  * * *

  The Staten Island Ferry docked lazily into Whitehall Terminal at South Ferry and the riders clambered aboard. Among them was a dark, handsome woman in a bowknot bowler cloche hat tied with a ribbon atop her neatly combed hair who stood at the railing, her hand covering half her face. Not that Sister Gee thought that she’d be recognized. Who from the Cause Houses ever took the Staten Island Ferry? Nobody she knew. But you never know. Half the people in the Cause, she remembered, seemed to work for Transit. If anybody saw her, she’d have a hard time explaining why she was on the boat. You can’t be too careful.

  She was dressed for summer pleasure, clad in a cool blue dress, with azaleas stitched across the side and hips and with a casual open back, revealing brown, slender arms. She had turned fifty the day before. She had lived in New York for thirty-three of her fifty years, yet had not once ridden the Staten Island Ferry.

  As the ferry pulled away from the dock and arced into New York Harbor, heading due southwest, it offered her a clear view of the redbrick Cause housing projects on one side, and the Statue of Liberty and Staten Island on the other. One side represented the certainty of the past. The other side the uncertainty of the future. She felt suddenly nervous. All she had was an address. And a letter. And a promise. From a newly retired, newly divorced sixty-one-year-old white man who had spent most of his life, like her, cleaning up the mess of others and doing for everyone but himself. I don’t even have a phone number for him, she thought anxiously. It was just as well, she decided. If she wanted to back out, it would be easy.

  As the weather-beaten boat eased across the harbor, she stood on the deck, glancing at the Cause Houses disappearing in the distance, and at the Statue of Liberty floating by on the right, then mused as a seagull rode the wind near her, skimming the water at eye height, gliding effortlessly alongside the deck before pulling away and rising. She watched it pump its wings and move higher into the air, then turn back toward the Cause Houses. Only then did her mind click back over the past week to Sportcoat, and the conversation she’d had with Hot Sausage. As Sausage recounted it in the basement that night, it was as if her own future were being revealed, unrolling itself before her like a carpet, one whose design and weave changed as it stretched out ahead. She recalled every word he said clearly:

  When they was building the garden in back of the church, Sport come to me. He said, “Sausage, there’s something you ought to know about that Jesus picture out yonder in the back of the church. I got to tell somebody.”

  I said, “What is it?”

  Sport said, “I don’t quite know what to call that thing. And I don’t wanna know. But whatever it was, it belonged to the Elephant. He found it in that wall and paid the church a whole truckload of money to reclaim it—more money than any Christmas box could hold. So you don’t have to worry about Deems no more. Or none of his people. Or the Christmas money. The Elephant done took care of it.”

  I said, “What about the policeman?”

  “What the Elephant got to do with the police? That’s his business.”

  I said, “Sport, I ain’t studying the Elephant. I’m talking about the police. They still looking for you.”

  He said, “Let ’em look. I been talking to Hettie.”

  I said, “You been drinking?”’Cause he was always mostly drunk when he talked to Hettie. He said, “No. I don’t need to drink to see her, Sausage. I see her clear as day now. We gets along like when we was young. I was a better man back then. I miss drinking. But I like being a man with my wife now. We don’t fight now. We talks like the old days.”

  “What y’all talk about now?”

  “Mostly Five Ends. She loves that old church, Sausage. She wants it to grow. She wanted me to fix that garden behind the church and grow moonflowers for the longest time. I married a good woman, Sausage. But I made some bad choices.”

  “Well, that’s all behind you,” I said. “You done cleaned up.”

  “Naw,” he said. “I ain’t cleaned up. The Lord might not give me redemption, Sausage. I can’t stop drinking. I ain’t drunk a drop yet, but I wanna drink again. I’m gonna drink again.”

  And here he pulled a bottle of King Kong out his pocket. The good stuff. Rufus’s homemade.

  I said, “You don’t wanna do that, Sport.”

  “Yes I do. And I’m gonna. But I’mma tell you this, Sausage. Hettie was so happy when I got to do the garden over behind the church. That was something she always dreamed about. Not for herself. She wanted them moonflowers and the big garden with all them plants and things behind the church not for herself—but for me. And when I got the church to agree on it, I told her, ‘Hettie, them moonflowers is coming soon.’

  “But instead of being happy, she growed sad and said, ‘I’mma tell you something, darling, that I shouldn’t tell you. When you finish that garden, you won’t see me no more.’

  “I said, ‘What you mean?’

  “She said, ‘Once it’s done. Once them moonflowers is in, I’m gone to glory.’ Then before I could kick at it, she said, ‘What’s gonna become of Pudgy Fingers?’

  “I told her, ‘Well, Hettie, it approaches my mind like this. What is a woman but her labor and her children? God put us all here to work. You was a Christian gal when I married you. And all the forty years I carried on drinking and making a fool of myself, there wasn’t a lazy bone in your body. You raised Pudgy Fingers good. You was strict to yourself and true to me and to Pudgy Fingers, and he will be strong in his life for it.’

  “Truth be told, Sausage, Hettie couldn’t bear no children. Pudgy Fingers wasn’t hers. He come to her before I come to New York. I was still back home in South Carolina. She was in New York by herself waiting for me in Building Nine. Sh
e opened the apartment door one morning and seen Pudgy Fingers roaming the hallway. He wasn’t but five or six, wandering around, trying to get downstairs to the blind children’s bus. She knocked on the lady’s door where he lived and the lady said, ‘Can you keep him till Monday? I got to go to my brother’s in the Bronx.’ She ain’t seen hide nor hair of that woman since.

  “When I come here, Hettie already had herself a child. I never made no bones about it. I loved Pudgy Fingers. I didn’t know how he come. For all I know, Pudgy Fingers could’ve been Hettie’s blood from some other man. But I trusted her, and she knowed my heart. So I said to her, ‘The Cousins is gonna take Pudgy Fingers. I can’t care for him.’

  “She said, ‘All right.’

  “I said, ‘Is you worried about him? Is that why you hung about?’

  “She said, ‘I ain’t worried about him. I’m worried about you. Because I was born again unto the Word, and that gives me strength. Has you got that?’

  “I says, ‘I has got it. Been born again to the Word for a whole year and then some. I said I was before, but I wasn’t. But I am now.’

  “‘Then I’m finished here. I loves you for God’s sake, Cuffy Lambkin. Not for my sake. Not for your sake. But for God’s sake.’ And then she was gone. And I ain’t seen her since.”

  He was still holding that bottle of Kong when he told me this, and here he uncorked it. Didn’t sip it. Just unscrewed the cap and said, “I wanna drink this whole thing down.” Then he said to me, “Walk with me, Sausage.”

  He was acting funny, so I went on, and we walked down to Vitali Pier, the same spot where he pulled Deems out the harbor. We walked down to the water, and standing on the sand there, I gived him the news on Deems. I said, “Sport, Deems called me. He’s doing good in triple-A ball. Said he’s gonna make it to the big leagues in about a month or so.”

  Sportcoat said, “I told you he can still pitch with one ear.”

  Then he patted me on the back and said, “Look after them moonflowers behind the church for my Hettie.” Then he walked into the water. Walked right into the harbor holding that bottle of King Kong. I said, “Wait a minute, Sport, that water’s cold.” But he went on ahead.

  First it come up to his hips, then to his waist, then to the top of his arms, then to his neck. When it got to his neck he turned around to me and said, “Sausage, the water is so warm! It’s beautiful.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the humble Redeemer who gives us the rain, the snow, and all the things in between.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  James McBride is an accomplished musician and the author of the National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird, the bestselling American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill 'Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal, McBride is also a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.