Venita told Gloria about Miguel’s ability to find things when Gloria unexpectedly picked up the baby herself one afternoon.
“I told you he wasn’t an angel,” Gloria said.
“Yeah he is, and he fast. You got to watch him like a hawk. I don’t let him get into nothing. Where your husband?”
“He didn’t wake up. I hope it wasn’t a problem, me getting here later,” Gloria said.
“It wasn’t no problem. Don’t feel like ya’ll got to rush to come get him.”
Gloria did not fully understand what Venita had said. For, though Orlando was supposed to pick up Miguel at noon, sometimes he would come before then, as early as nine or ten, cutting short his morning’s sleep to spend extra time with the baby.
Venita did not go to Mary Kate’s house when she was watching Miguel. She did not want to share the little time she had to spend with him. Miguel was too busy exploring his new world to pay much attention to the woman who had mistaken him for an angel. But Venita did not notice. She was content to follow him through the living room and kitchen, snatching danger from his hands until he began slowing down. Miguel seemed to have a clock in his stomach. He knew he had a ten o’clock bottle. Sometimes, before Venita took it from the refrigerator he was there trying to open the door.
This was the only time Miguel would let Venita hold him. She would sit on the couch, rocking back and forth, pressing him to her breast, playing with his curly hair, singing to him.
She had tried singing “Mockingbird,” but she wasn’t sure of the words. “If that diamond ring don’t shine, Mama going to buy you a bottle of wine . . . A bottle of wine? That can’t be right,” she had said. “What mama would buy her baby a bottle of wine?” She could not think of anything to rhyme with “shine,” so she sang “This Old Man” and “Old MacDonald.”
Mary Kate did not say anything, but she missed Venita, wanted her to come over for starch and gossip. She would look out the window of the back door, lifting the curtain.
“Who you looking for?” Dorene had asked her one day when she had come home for lunch.
“Nobody,” Mary Kate had told her. “I was just looking.”
“She coveting that child,” Mary Kate told Samuel one day.
The morning before Thanksgiving, Orlando picked up Miguel at Venita’s at ten, took the baby home, and then lay on the couch while Miguel played with blocks. Though Orlando had had a short nap, he was exhausted. The long bus rides, the staying up nights, the work, and the cold were all wearing on him. Orlando’s eyes closed.
Miguel crawled away from the blocks and headed for the kitchen. He stopped along the way to put a piece of string in his mouth. In the kitchen, he opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out two cans of food. Behind them was a bag of beans.
They were fava beans. The plastic bag was torn open and the beans had spilled onto the shelf. Miguel sat before the cabinet and picked up one of the tan, pebblelike beans. Gathering beans in both hands, he stuffed his mouth until it could hold no more. Then he swallowed. Three beans fell from his mouth. Two slipped down his throat.
As he began to gag, his tongue shot out, sending another bean falling to the floor. But the two beans were still caught in his throat. Unable to make a sound, he fell over on his side, a bean still clasped in one hand. He curled up, just as if he were asleep.
Orlando awoke to Gloria’s screams, but it was too late. The baby was dead. Before the ambulance came, Orlando shook Miguel so hard to try to wake him, he broke his neck.
Mary Kate called Venita, and without a coat, Venita ran out of the house. She and Mary Kate were among the crowd that stood in Gloria’s front yard. When Venita saw the baby’s body carried out of the house, covered in a sheet, she sank to the ground. Mary Kate tried to pick her up, but she couldn’t. A man from a few rows over carried her to Mary Kate’s house as Gloria was being brought out on a stretcher. Orlando followed behind, no longer a man, barely a statue.
Venita blamed herself. Gloria blamed herself. Orlando blamed himself. Gloria’s mother blamed him too. She accused him to his face. “If it wasn’t for you, mi nieto would be living. I hate you. You killed Miguel. Asesino. Asesino. I’ll see you in hell before I send my Gloria back to you.”
Mary Kate later told Samuel, “A flavor bean, favor bean. I ain’t never hear tell of such a bean the baby choked on. Gloria fell out, and Venita, she fell out, like somebody struck her with a bolt of lightning. She blamed herself. But it ain’t nobody fault.”
“Naw, it ain’t nobody fault,” Samuel said.
“Venita was the one all the time carrying on like that baby was hers,” Mary Kate said. “You don’t run ’round getting attached to other people kids. Don’t nothing good come of it.”
19
Collecting
MIKEY could see the man’s breath cloud and dissipate before him in the night air. He could feel it and smell it. Warm, almost hot, and redolent of oranges. The man wore a black ski mask. As he held a gun to the side of Mikey’s head, he said, “I should kill you. You think you somebody, don’t you?”
Mikey did not know if he should answer. He thought it was a rhetorical question. “You think you somebody?” the man asked. “Answer me, paperboy.”
“No, I don’t think I’m somebody,” Mikey said.
“Good. ’Cause you ain’t nobody. You ain’t nothing. Hear me? You not shit, boy,” the man said. “You been collecting for your papers. Well, I’m collecting too.” He ripped the full coin changer from Mikey’s belt and stuffed it under his jacket. With one big, shaking hand, he searched through Mikey’s pockets.
The sweet smell of the man’s breath was making Mikey sick. He tried to block it out, tried to block out what was happening to him by forcing the scene out of his mind. He ground his thoughts to dust.
From the dust came a vision of the man with the gun as he came toward him through the field. He was walking left of the narrow path of packed snow. His head was bowed and his hands were in his jacket pockets. He kicked up the deep snow as he walked, and as he silently passed, Mikey thought, I know this guy. That was—But a gun at his temple interrupted his thoughts. The man’s fragrant voice said, “I should kill you.”
And there was a summer field of dandelion and Queen Anne’s lace. Mikey and his father were crossing the field. He was only three, and they were eating Popsicles from the Red Store. Orange-colored sweet juice dripped from one of his father’s blackened hands and into the dirt along the dusty path. Mikey could see the orange drops leaving brown dots as they fell in the dust. And from the dust rose the man’s sweet voice. “Get out of here,” he said. But Mikey stood and looked at the man. “If you tell, I’ll kill you,” the man said, his voice echoing in the thin winter air.
Mikey took off along the slippery path. Running toward home, he thought, I know him. That was Isaac. Then he fell, the ground seeming to come up to meet him. He tumbled into the whiteness of the field, coming to rest face down in the snow, its coldness numbing him. He expected to escape the terror of this nightmare and find himself in the warmth of his bed. But he was awake in the bed of cold whiteness, and he did not know where Isaac was. Mikey leapt up from where he lay, expecting the gun to reappear. His foot became tangled in the buried weeds as he started running. He stumbled, but kept his balance.
As Mikey ran, kicking up clouds of snow, Isaac’s words came back to him. “If you tell, I’ll kill you.” With each stride he moved farther and farther from the field, grinding Isaac’s sweet words to dust. By the time he rounded the row to 18, there was nothing left for him to tell. He had ground Isaac’s words to a fine powder that blew away in the wind. There was no robbery, no gun. There was not even Isaac.
20
Hoodoo
IN THE CLOSET under the stairs at 79, the albino girl lay and dreamed. She dreamed there was a door at the end of the sloping closet, a small door. Through the door came a black boy. He was small when he came through the door, but once in the closet he was big and he sat with his knees
to his chest. The boy had come to bring the albino girl color. He had come with a small tin of watercolors.
He opened the tin and painted her soft, fat, white body. The boy painted with short, quick strokes that felt like the licking of a cat’s tongue. He mixed the colors and painted her black. He used them all up to make her black.
The girl was allowed outside then. She could be seen. The wind blew on her and the sun shined. Its light did not hurt her eyes. She was loved. Her mother and father loved her. The boy loved her, and she and the boy danced. There was something in the dance that summoned rain. It fell like a punishment and washed the color away. The rain made her ugly again, and she ran back inside. She hid in the closet, and the boy followed her. He told her he would bring color again. He would go home for crayons. “They won’t wash away,” he said.
And the boy made himself small again and went back through the small door. But before the boy could come back, the colorless girl awakened.
She awakened to find the door at the end of the closet had disappeared, and she had been sleeping. She had been hiding and dreaming in the closet because she was not loved. Her parents believed this child was punishment. She was a spell worked up by her grandmother.
“She working a spell,” Zena’s mother said when Zena told her of Greene’s kindness.
“She never even talked to you before. Why should she start now?” her mother asked.
“Because I’m having Karo baby. It’s her grandchild,” Zena said.
“I’m not sure that’s not a spell too.”
“Oh, Mama,” Zena said.
“Don’t you ‘oh, Mama’ me. You was too young to remember when Greene first come up here. That was the summer them bats came. She was country, country, had them funky asafetida tied ’round them kids’ necks.”
“I remember that Karo used to wear one,” Zena said.
No one could ever remember Greene’s children being sick. They never got chicken pox, measles, whooping cough, mumps, not even a cold. Most children stayed away from them because the bags gave off such an odor, but Zena did not.
It was Zena who convinced Karo to take the stinking, dirty bag from his neck back in 1966.
She came near Karo. She danced the Willoughby with him. She held his hands for pop the whip.
“It’s stupid,” Zena said to him. “It don’t really protect you from germs. That’s country. You know the school nurse say ya’ll don’t get sick ’cause don’t nobody come in breathing distance of ya’ll. Why don’t you just take it off?”
This and Zena’s smile were all it took for Karo to break the string and throw the bag away.
He told his mother the string had broken and he had lost the bag in the field. Greene said nothing. Karo was almost twelve anyway. He didn’t need it anymore. But when he went to sleep, Greene sat on the edge of his bed and raised the lids of his eyes to find Zena dancing in the back of them.
Greene never disliked Zena. She was never nasty to her, but she was not nice either. Sometimes Zena would appear in Greene’s house, just like air, just like she had always been there. Greene never spoke to her. How could she speak to air?
Zena’s mother could not keep her away from Karo, so she warned her about Greene.
“You stay from out her house, you hear?” her mother said. “And don’t be eating nothing she cook. I mean nothing. Ain’t telling what she might cook up in it.” Zena’s mother said Greene cast the evil eye. Greene caused the sewers to back up, caused the winters to be harsher and the rivers to rise higher in the spring. She could raise ringworms and mange on children’s scalps. She could even make husbands cleave to her and not to their wives. The men came to her seeking treasure. And the bats had come with Greene’s arrival. They had come only that one night, and they had never returned. That could not be ignored.
Zena and Karo married in 1972. She was pregnant, and though Karo was only eighteen, Greene signed for him to marry. He went off and joined the navy.
In Zena’s fifth month she became sick. Her stomach was upset and her urine turned dark. There was a milkiness, a whiteness, that passed across her irises. It drifted slowly, like a thin cloud against a windless night sky. After two days of sickness, Zena admitted to her mother she had eaten at Greene’s. She’d had some potato salad and collards.
“She working a spell. I’m telling you, she working something on the baby. She done something to mark the baby,” Zena’s mother said.
“That’s crazy, Mama. That’s just a bunch of country talk.”
But Zena never felt right after her dinner at Greene’s. She was always tired, and there was an uneasiness inside her, a cold whiteness that moved from Zena’s eyes and into her womb. The baby seemed to pick it up. It made the baby still.
The doctor at the clinic said there was nothing wrong, but the birth of the baby proved the doctor wrong.
She was a fat white baby with white hair and pink lips. All of the color had been washed from her.
Karo had been out to sea when the baby was born, and when he came home and saw her, he refused to hold her. He did not even want to touch her. The baby was ugly, Karo said, and Zena kept her hidden in the house. Both of their families shunned the child, but Greene had come over to see her once.
She came to bring an asafetida bag for the child. She tied it around the baby’s neck, and told Zena, “I knows what these people be saying about me, but it ain’t true. I ain’t no conjure woman. But how can you tell people that? People believes what they want to.” That was the most Greene had ever said to her, and before she left Zena’s house, she repeated, “People believes what they want to.”
Zena took the bag from the baby’s neck and threw it away, and for five years she kept the child hidden.
Mikey had managed to see this all-white child, though. He had seen her far off in the darkness of the afternoon house, her milky blue eyes staring at him as he opened the screen door and placed the newspaper on the floor inside.
After her nap on this day, after the colorless girl awakened to find the door at the end of the closet had disappeared, she went and sat in the cool darkness of the living room. When she heard the paperboy coming up the porch stairs, she went to the screen door.
He opened the door and stared at the child’s white skin, her woolly white hair, her full pink lips. He smiled at her and handed her the newspaper.
Though he had not come from the closet, she thought he was the black boy from her dreams. Her milky blue eyes moved rapidly as she tried to focus on the boy. But the brightness of the afternoon sun took her vision away, and the boy became a shadow.
“Do you have the crayons?”
The boy was confused, and before he could answer, the girl’s mother was there. She was floating above her, just like air. She struck the child, knocked her to the floor. The sheets of the paper spilled over her, and the screen door slammed.
“I told you to stay away from the door. No one want to see you. Don’t nobody come here to see you,” her mother said.
It seemed as though talking to this child hurt Zena, as if with each word she were spitting sand.
Mikey saw the girl get up, her mother’s hand printed pink across her face. Before he left the porch, he saw the girl run from the door and disappear into the closet under the stairs.
21
Little Snow, Big Snow
“LITTLE SNOW, big snow. Big snow, little snow.” This was what people said of winter storms. It was a way to gauge the strength of the storms, to predict the change they would bring.
Big snow fell in large, wet flakes. There was an openness, a boldness to it. And the snow fell slowly, floating down lazily from the fast-moving clouds overhead. It could fall all night, but by morning the storm would have waned, and there would be little snow on the ground. A snow that brought about a change just small enough to be beautiful, just big enough to be an improvement. A trace covered the dead grass, a dusting covered the naked branches of the trees.
Little snow could fall for days. It fell in
tiny, light flakes driven by strong winds and brought big amounts of snow. It was the subtleness, the diminutiveness of these flakes that could deceive. Storms that carried them could start with a disinterested flurry slipping in from the lake. And at first, they too brought beauty, a softness. But when the snow didn’t stop, the beauty was destroyed. As the snow rose, it began covering up, obscuring, hiding. The kind of change that came with little snow had been working in Mikey since he had begun attending Essex.
Early on, what Mikey was learning seemed to bring about a beauty in him, a softness. He was put in a speech class where he was taught formal conversation. He listened to tapes entitled “Verb Tense,” “Possession,” “Agreement.” He learned to release his vowels, to round them and pop them out of his mouth. It seemed unnatural to him at first, and he felt almost a little guilty, a little embarrassed when he practiced retaining his -ing’s.
“Think of it as a game, like juggling eggs,” Mikey’s speech teacher had said. “If you keep them all in the air, you’ll dazzle the audience, but if you drop one, you’ll make a mess.”
Mikey kept his teacher’s analogy in mind, and practiced not dropping his -ing’s.
No one at school dropped them. None of the boys were constantly making messes of themselves. Mikey listened to them speak in class. He heard the joking in the cafeteria and the locker room. In these two places it seemed a boy could make a mess, a boy might be expected to make a mess. But the other boys never dropped their eggs. The two older black boys he had seen never dropped their eggs either, even when Mikey saw them speaking to each other.
Mikey wondered at them, he wondered about them. He wondered if they had ever spoken like him, and where it was they came from, and how it was they looked so comfortable. They spoke with no effort, it seemed, when he had to think about everything he said. Mikey wanted to sound like them, to look like them, to walk up and down the halls with the white boys and talk about skiing and sleep-overs. But both of these boys were in the seventh grade, while he was in the fourth, and they appeared each day with short, neatly brushed hair that had very little grease. And they showed a remarkable talent for juggling.
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