by Lewis Shiner
Late that night she called Lincoln Hospital, the Negro hospital, and said she was Mercy’s sister. The desk nurse was very sweet and found out for her that Mercy was still in labor.
Ruth slept fitfully and was wide awake again at 5 a.m. This time when she called, the desk nurse already had the information. “Baby Malcolm was born at 1:39 this morning. Nine pounds and healthy as a horse.”
Malcolm, Ruth thought. How many more insults could she possibly bear?
In the grip of an impulse she could not resist, she put on her oldest gardening clothes and tied a drab scarf over her hair. With a pair of old sunglasses, and with her shoulders slumped to minimize her figure, she barely recognized herself. The address for Lincoln Hospital was in the book, and it was easy enough to find.
She went straight past the nurse at the front desk and took the stairs down a flight. A janitor there sent her to the second-floor maternity ward. She took the stairs, moving slowly, on the alert in case Robert should appear. The building was old, the paint on the walls yellowed and peeling, the linoleum worn through in places. It didn’t feel clean enough to be a hospital.
The nursery was across from the nurses’ station, illuminated only by a few night-lights. Fifteen or so babies lay in bassinettes, one in an incubator, another strapped to a kind of platform with an IV drip. After looking both ways, Ruth took off her dark glasses and peered through the plate glass window between cupped hands.
A nurse paused next to her, a middle-aged Negro woman. Of course they were all Negroes here. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“Do you know which one is Mercy Richards’ baby?” It cost her extra effort to say the name. “Malcolm?”
“There in front. Third from the right.”
Now Ruth saw the handwritten name stuck to the foot of the bassinette with masking tape. “Could I…could I see him?” she asked. “I just got in town, and I don’t want to wake Mercy up. I know she must be exhausted.”
The nurse now took her own look around and nodded. “I don’t see why not, hon. Come on in.”
The nurse lifted Robert’s baby and offered it to Ruth, who took it awkwardly in her arms. She opened the blanket to get a good look at the face, then checked out the hands and feet. Her heart filled with unbearable regret. The baby was white, as white as she was. How could God have permitted this? Why was this baby not hers?
She tried to imagine herself taking the baby, running with it down to the parking lot and spiriting it away. Wouldn’t Robert be surprised to find his baby gone? To come home to Ruth and find the baby there?
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “I need to put him back now. I get in trouble if the Head Nurse see this.”
The baby had started to squirm and Ruth was afraid it was going to start crying, so she didn’t argue. She handed it back, nodded a thank-you, and left.
She returned the next night, and the night after, and stood at the window as long as she dared, watching the baby sleep. By her third visit the nurses were watching her suspiciously; she knew she couldn’t risk coming again. Mercy would be taking it home soon, in any case.
That third night she felt a protective presence near her. It was the archangel Michael, she thought, the warrior angel who fought for the righteous. “I would name you Michael,” she whispered to the child, and to the angel as well, an offer and a promise. “If you were mine, Michael would be your name.”
*
When Robert came home on a Wednesday night, Ruth knew that something had happened. When he was home again the next night, she knew her prayers had been answered. Whether he had finished with his harlot or not, she had been given her opportunity, and she did not intend to waste it.
Ruth had heard stories about pregnancy, how women who normally took pleasure in marital relations lost interest during the last months, how it got even worse in the first months after the baby was born. Robert was not a difficult man to read, and she could see that he had been suffering for months.
She knew what to do, and she did it gladly. They were man and wife, after all, and it gave her pleasure, just as it had in Jamaica, to give so much pleasure to him.
Even then he tried to walk away from her; but the Lord had passed judgment on Mercy Richards, and at a single stroke, Robert and Michael were delivered unto her for good.
*
Her father was not pleased.
“You want to raise that pickaninny as your own?”
It was Wednesday, the day after they’d found Mercy’s body, and they sat in his office with the door closed. The older he got, the fewer social niceties he bothered to observe, making Ruth pull back even further.
“Daddy, it’s Robert’s child. And you know I can’t ever have a baby myself.”
His eyes narrowed. He had clearly taken the words as an accusation. “How on earth are you going to explain suddenly showing up with a child?”
“I won’t have to explain it. We’re moving to Texas.”
“Leaving North Carolina.” Now he was the one withdrawing, settling back in his chair. “Same as your sisters.”
“Not like my sisters. I love you, Daddy, and I always will.” As she said the words, she wondered how true they still were. “This is the best for everyone,” she said, and gave him the smile he had never been able to resist. “A fresh start.”
*
In the end he gave her what she wanted. He made the adoption happen without a hearing, Mercy’s death fade away without an inquest, even provided a doctor to prescribe the pills that let Robert sleep at night.
Yet he did it grudgingly, with poor grace, and so he quietly unraveled the last strands of love that bound her to him.
*
Ruth would never forget her first sight of Dallas. The moving company had already brought all their furniture and belongings and put them in storage. The movers had also towed Robert’s car behind the van, so he and Ruth could make the drive together in her Buick. They’d done it in just over two days, much of it over stretches of Interstate 40 in Tennessee and Arkansas, and then on I-30 from Little Rock into Dallas.
Ruth was at the wheel, and Robert was dozing with his car coat folded up between his head and the bitter chill outside the window. Michael was stretched out on the back seat, wrapped entirely in blankets except for his head. They’d gotten up at dawn to make this last leg, and it was still early morning, the sun low in the sky behind them.
They topped a low rise and suddenly the city was before her, stretching further than her eyes could see, fading finally at the horizon. They had just passed between the gigantic columns of an overpass, and it seemed to her that the city was a gift to Robert, tied up in ribbons of concrete.
She let the car drift gently onto the shoulder in order to savor the moment, here, alone, in the very first seconds of her new beginning, before Robert or Michael could awaken to distract her, where she could savor at last the fruits of God’s goodness, and let her heart fill with the love that belonged to no one in the world but these two fragile creatures that she had taken into her care.
MICHAEL
2004
Friday, November 5
At first Michael prodded her with questions, but as they went on she needed less and less encouragement. He took her out for Mexican food that night—there was precious little authentic Tex-Mex in North Carolina—and they finally broke off after 11.
Michael spent the night on an inflatable mattress in his father’s office. He left one window open an inch to hear water running in the creek. His father was in all his dreams these days, not saying anything, watching from the passenger seat as Michael drove around an unfamiliar city, or standing behind him as he sketched what appeared to be random assemblages of old clothes and appliances.
He talked to Denise for half an hour before bed, small talk, mostly. He hadn’t wanted to get into the revelations from his mother, and Denise in turn hadn’t mentioned being on the run, other than to reassure Michael that she and Rachid were safe. The conversation was comfortable, even intimate. Both
of them, Michael thought, teetered on the edge of saying more.
In the kitchen the next morning Ruth was dressed and waiting for him at the breakfast table, one of his father’s graph paper pads in front of her, covered in her prim longhand. “I made a few notes to help my memory,” she said.
She repeated herself more than a few times, made corrections, and jumped around in time. Still, by the end, Michael was able to make a coherent whole from it.
Some questions had to wait until she was through.
“You do understand,” he said carefully, “that you were pregnant when your father took you to that doctor in Smithfield.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. How could I have been pregnant? My periods were just irregular.”
They stared at each other across the table. He was not sure what he saw in her eyes. It felt like a warning, telling him not to pursue this. He wondered if her denial could survive the words for what had happened to her—incest, molestation, rape, abortion. What certainly could not survive was the feeling he and Ruth had created in their pursuit of family history, the tenuous but nonetheless real openness it had brought them. At that moment he felt closer to her than he ever had, and he was not willing to throw it away.
There were other questions he did manage to ask. “So my father lived and died without ever knowing that Wilmer Bynum was the Grand Dragon of the Night Riders of the Confederacy?”
“What good would it have done—for anyone—if he’d known?”
“It’s part of who you are. That’s a huge secret to keep in a marriage.”
“Michael, you’ve never been married. Believe me, it’s smaller than you think. Honesty is not always the best policy, no matter what I told you when you were little.”
“Is that why you never went to the police when you had knowledge of a murder?”
“I was not going to choose Barrett Howard over my own flesh and blood. Greg was my brother. I deeply regret that you never had a brother or sister, that you can’t know how that feels.”
“You know the rumors went around that Howard had run away to Mexico and betrayed his movement.”
“Howard and his movement were nothing to me.” She was drinking her fourth or fifth cup of coffee, and her tone was matter-of-fact. She seemed distant from her earlier life, distant from everything. “I was brought up to see Barrett Howard as slightly worse than the Devil himself. I was breaking loose from Daddy’s ideas, but I was far from free of them yet.”
It was after 2 and his flight left at 4. He had to change in Houston, and wouldn’t get to Durham until after 10. “I have to go,” he said, pushing his chair back from the table. His bag was packed and sitting by the door. “Thank you. Thank you for talking to me.”
“Are you still planning to go to the papers about my father?”
“No,” Michael said. “All that’s over.”
“And Greg?”
“Greg’s another story. Greg is still dangerous.”
“The poor man,” she said. “He never had a chance.”
“Your father gave him every chance.”
“My father couldn’t change the way he was inside, change the childhood he had.”
Apparently Ruth’s thoughts had gone the same place that Michael’s had, because she said, “Was I really such a terrible mother?”
“I don’t think I can do this right now,” Michael said.
“Try. I think you owe me that much.”
“Not terrible,” Michael said. “It just never felt…right.”
“I would look at you and I would see that woman,” Ruth said. “I tried so hard to pretend you were mine, and sometimes I would believe it. And then…” She shook her head. “I loved him so much. He was everything to me. And now he’s gone.”
Michael drew her into a careful hug, and for a second she surrendered. Her arms tightened around his neck, and she pressed fully against him. Then, in the space of another second she stiffened and pulled back into herself.
He let her go.
“You look so like him, sometimes,” she said.
“I’ll call you,” Michael said.
“Will you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”
*
When he got to the gate he called Detective Bishop. “It was Greg Vaughan,” Michael told him. “He killed Barrett Howard and he firebombed Service Printing and the Carolina Times. Whatever’s going to happen tomorrow, he’s the one that’s going to do it.”
“The last time I talked to you,” Bishop said, “you were sure that it was Congressman Fogg killed Howard. Before that it was your father.”
“That was speculation. This is fact. I’m in Dallas, and I’ve been talking to my father’s widow. Vaughan confessed to her.”
“All right. We have Vaughan under surveillance anyway, but I’ll double it. We’ll be all over him tomorrow. If he makes a move toward the ATC, I’ll bring him in.”
Michael let out a long sigh. “Thank you.”
“I’m glad to hear you’re in Dallas. Staying there for a while?”
“I’m at the airport. About to catch a plane back.”
“Michael. Don’t do anything stupid, okay? We have this under control.”
“I hope you do. I need to see Vaughan locked up. He would probably kill me if he got the chance.”
“You shouldn’t have left your burglar tools behind.” Bishop’s voice was more mocking than annoyed.
“Maybe I’m not the hero type. But I have information you need. Vaughan killed Howard in a shoe shop in Hayti, and he used a cobbler’s awl to do it. It’s in the living room of the Bynum house right now, in a glass case. Along with souvenirs from his torch jobs.”
“Holy shit.”
“You have to nail this guy.”
“We’ll get him. But we have to do this properly. We can’t go on hearsay. If we’re going to get a conviction, we have to build up the chain of evidence, one link at a time. That’s going to take a while, unless we get really lucky.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that he may screw up tomorrow and we’ll have him. He may pull back and wait, and if that happens we have to wait too. In the meantime, you’d be better off canceling that flight and staying in Texas.”
“I can’t,” Michael said. “My life is in Durham now.”
*
As soon as the plane touched down at RDU, Michael called Denise. The flight had made good time, and it was not quite 10 p.m. Michael felt drained. “I’m home,” he told her.
“Home as in Durham?”
“Yeah, the airport, anyway.”
“That sounds promising. When do I get to see you?”
“When do you want to see me?”
“Tonight,” she said. It was a whisper and a promise.
“Why not?” he said. Hope, desire, and excitement closed his throat, and he could barely talk. “It’ll be late, though. I have something to do first.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I can stay up late.” Then she hesitated. “You’re not going back out to the farm.”
“No, nothing like that. I have to see Harriman. It won’t take long.”
*
His echo was gone, and he ended up in a red Mitsubishi Lancer. As he handed over his credit card at the rental desk, he remembered that he was out of work. His savings would not last forever, especially at the rate he was going.
Not the time to be worrying about that, he told himself.
By the time he got to Chapel Hill it was 11 o’clock. Two cars filled Harriman’s driveway and Michael had to park behind the house next door.
He rang Harriman's bell and then, just before it opened, he felt a chill of premonition. The door swung back into the house and Charles was on the other side. Michael's response was physical and instantaneous. A jolt of pain went through his ribs and head, so strong it was all he could do not to raise his arms to protect himself. He was sick to his stomach, icy cold, and at least as angry as he was afraid.
“Michael,
” Charles said.
Michael couldn't speak. He was torn between the need to hide and the desire to hurt.
“Yo, man, Harriman told me you were here the other night. Listen…” He struggled for words. “I'm sorry, all right? I'm sorry for what happened.”
“It didn't just ‘happen,’ ” Michael managed to say.
“No. No, you're right.” He reached out toward Michael's chin, where the scabs had dried hard and dark.
Michael flinched and pulled away. “Don't,” he said.
Charles withdrew his hand. “Damn, this was wrong. Harriman keeps trying to school me, but I never listen. I'm a hothead, and I screw things up. I can't seem to help it. My temper comes up and it's, like, right there, you know what I'm saying?”
Michael was not ready to make peace. It was not yet an option.
“Anyway,” Charles said, “C'mon, get inside, it's November out there.”
Michael walked past him, trying not to let his emotions show. In the living room, Harriman was standing with three other men. Two of them Michael didn’t know; they were young and dressed in nondescript middle-class casual clothes: Dockers, polo shirts, sport coats. The third, balding and heavyset in a brown pinstripe suit, Michael was sure he had seen on the local TV news, somebody high up in Durham city government. That man looked at Harriman nervously as Michael said, “Meeting of the executive committee?”
“You should have called first, Michael,” Harriman said. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t introduce you.”
“This is important,” Michael said. “Can I talk about…that business I was here about before?”
“Yes,” Harriman said.
“It’s Greg Vaughan after all,” Michael said. “His army dates were faked. He killed Barrett Howard before he went to Vietnam, and he burned down the Times and Service Printing when he got home. He’ll be the one tomorrow. Whatever happens, it’ll involve fire.”
