Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  She stared at the blank space under the four lines. She wanted to say something about Mattie's hair, which was a thick bushy brown, or her eyes, which were dark dark brown and always alert, but she couldn't think of any rhymes for hair or eyes, or any adjectives to go with them. Why couldn't she just sit at the back of the church like she wanted to? She hated the idea of everyone staring at her while she read her poem. Lily knew she was what was called a funny-looking child. She looked like both her mother and her father, but all mixed up in a jumble. She had her father's nice full lips, broad nose, and thick kinky hair. But she'd also gotten her mother's fair skin and light hair, and together she knew she looked a little like a duckling, awkward and ungainly. The only feature that was truly hers were her eyes, which were wide and round and sparkling brown, and drew people to her. Lily knew, however, that up on the podium, raised above the pews, she would only look yellow and strange.

  She shifted her gaze out the window, hoping to find an adjective to describe Mattie's hair. Why couldn't she just show one of the pictures she had sketched of Mattie? There was the one of Mattie sitting on the steps of her front porch, with acorns in her mouth. Or the one of the baptism, where she had drawn Mattie, Edie Senate, and Floyd Turner all sitting in a row at the back of the church altar, waiting for the preacher to call them down into the pool of water, where he would rest his hand over their noses and mouths and dunk them, fully dressed, in the water. Or even the one she had drawn of Mattie today, of the two of them, sitting on Mattie's front porch the night before she died. They put up flowers at funerals, so why couldn't they put up one of her pictures, like a little flower? And that could be that. It would mean telling about the drawings, of course, and if she did that, her mother would want to see them all. Maybe it would be easier to read the poem; at least it would be over quickly. If she told about the drawings, there'd be no end to it.

  There was a quick rap on the door, and as soon as she slid a piece of paper over what she was writing, her mother was in the room.

  “Oh, Lily, I'm so disgusted,” her mother said, huffing from the flight of stairs. She dropped onto the edge of Lily's bed and immediately began picking at a loose thread on the bedspread.

  Lily watched her mother's eyes frenetically sweep around the room.

  “Really, I can't even begin to tell you,” Mrs. Baldridge continued. “No one seems to have the vaguest notion of how to behave tonight.” She stared at a pile of books on top of Lily's dresser and read the title of each one. She focused on Lily's shoes and then at the hem of Lily's dress. “And do you know what I saw today as I drove past the McDougalds'? No, of course you don't know. You couldn't even begin to guess.” Her gaze at last rested on Lily's face. “Guess,” she said sharply.

  “I don't know, Mother. What?” Lily answered.

  “A skate,” she announced. “Do you hear what I'm saying? A skate.”

  Lily was puzzled. She was sure her mother could read her expression.

  “You don't understand what I'm saying, do you?”

  Lily shook her head slowly.

  “It was her skate,” her mother elaborated. “Right under the front bush.”

  Lily's eyes widened.

  “Right,” replied her mother; “that's just what I'm saying. It was as plain as day. I'm surprised Sirus hasn't seen it. But he hasn't. His mind has been too busy, I expect. But there it was and, I imagine, still is. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Lily said quietly.

  “I mean, anyone could see it tonight. Sirus. Oh, God, poor Aileen. What a shock that would be.”

  Lily tried to imagine how the skate had gotten there. Had Mattie fallen, flung it there in anger, and then clumped into the house on only one skate? Or had she put it there on purpose; was there something wrong with the skate that she wanted to hide?

  “I'm at a loss,” continued her mother. “Completely. I can't very well go over there and pick it up myself. What if someone saw me in the bushes, for goodness' sake? And it can't be left there. What a cruel thing that would be.”

  Lily suddenly imagined running over to Mattie's house right now to pick it up, not so that it would be gone, but to make it hers.

  “Well,” Mrs. Baldridge said, leaning toward Lily. “Do you think I'm just talking to hear myself speak? What do you think we should do?”

  Lily wished she had seen the skate first and had it now, under her bed, safely wrapped in a blanket.

  “Can you really see it from the road?” she asked.

  “Like buckshot in a deer's eye.”

  Lily winced. “Then I guess someone should pick it up.” Her voice trailed off at the end of her sentence.

  “Do what?” her mother fairly yelled. “Speak up.”

  “Pick it up,” Lily said louder.

  “Well, what do you think I've been saying? I mean, have you been listening to a word I've said?”

  “Yes, ma'am, I'm listening.” Lily made an effort to sit straighter in her chair and bring her eyes to her mother's.

  “What have you been doing up here all this time, anyway?”

  Lily wished they could return to the skate, but she knew her mother would not be satisfied with that.

  “I cleaned my room,” she answered, “and ironed my dress for tonight.”

  “Oh, really? Let me see it.”

  Lily took her dress from the closet and held it up to herself, holding it out at the hem so that the skirt flared.

  “There's a wrinkle there, on the left side,” her mother said, taking the material in her hand and balling it lightly. Lily knew that this would not only mark the spot that needed ironing, but make a new wrinkle as well.

  “And your ears? Let me see them,” she continued as Lily hung the dress back in her closet.

  “Yes, ma'am.” Lily returned and leaned forward so that her head hung just within reach of her mother's hands. Her mother took her chin in one hand and turned it first to one side, where she inspected one ear, and then to the other. “There's wax at the back of both of your ears,” she concluded.

  Lily backed her head away, willing herself to move it slowly. What was it her mother was moving toward?

  “You might as well know, I'm worried about this whole thing.”

  “You mean about the skate?” Lily asked.

  “That, and the whole thing.” Her mother waved her hand listlessly in the air.

  Lily wasn't at all sure what her mother meant. “You mean about the funeral tomorrow? What you're going to say?”

  “No, not that . . . You think I'm worried about something so minor when this house, our car, all those fine things you wear, your whole future and mine is what's at stake?”

  “No, I guess not,” Lily ventured.

  “No, of course not. Do I look like somebody's fool?”

  “No, Momma, of course you don't.”

  “Oh, if your father were alive, it would be different. He'd still have his job, his position, and we'd have our place from his, but since he died, it's all dependent on everyone else. Did you know we get an allowance from the bank every month, something the bank board voted on after he died? Well, what do you think would happen if Sirus McDougald were not heading up that board? Do you think those others would be so generous? No, I don't think so. They'd just as soon forget we even exist; that's what I think. I wouldn't trust a one of them. And what about this house? Who do you think owns it? Do you think there's a deed with my name on it? Of course there isn't. And do you think it's anyone else down at the bank that argues for us to stay? Not for a minute. The rest of them don't think of anyone but themselves.”

  Lily had had no idea of any of this. It was the first she knew that everything they had wasn't really theirs.

  “I don't understand, Mother,” she began. “Why would anything change now? Is Mr. McDougald going somewhere?”

  Her mother groaned loudly. “Don't you know anything? Must I spell everything out for you? Things change. Death changes things.”

  Lily still didn't u
nderstand. Of course death changes things. It meant she and Mattie would never go to the beach together again, or ride in the McDougalds' car. It meant there'd be no one sitting on the porch or standing in the yard that she could yell hey to when she rode past on her bike. Oh, a hundred and one things would change. But nowhere was there the kind of change her mother was talking about, and she couldn't see, even for a moment, why it should be so.

  “Why am I talking to a child?” Her mother looked around the room as if there were someone else to talk to. “I mean, here is a child who doesn't have the sense the good Lord gave her at birth, and I'm expecting her to understand something as vital as her own future? The good Lord must think I've lost my mind.”

  Lily lowered her head. She knew her mother would be through soon—she always was when the good Lord began to have an opinion.

  “Be downstairs and dressed in an hour,” her mother added as she left the room.

  “Yes, ma'am,” she said quickly. But her mother was already down the stairs by the time she got the words out.

  Just down the street from Sirus, Jason Morgan, Sirus's friend and the leading colored undertaker, climbed behind the wheel of his hearse. His two young assistants, Lucas and Earl, were in the seat behind him, and the small coffin that held Mattie lay in the cabin beyond them. Jason pulled the car smoothly out of the driveway and into the right lane. It would not take long to drive Mattie's body the five short blocks from the funeral parlor to Sirus's house. When he and Sirus were boys, back in Carr, the distance between their farms had been nearly two miles along a pounded dirt road. But back then, even that distance had flowed like water. Back and forth, back and forth, one or the other of them made the journey. Those two miles seemed no more than these five blocks did now.

  Throughout their childhood, they had been best friends. Jason was more uniformly muscled than Sirus, with knobby wrists that sprouted from the cuffs of his cotton shirts, large, knuckled hands, small flat ears, and a long skull that curved back and away, giving his head an elfin look that matched the sinewy shape of his body. Sirus, by contrast, was made of pieces that seemed not quite whole; his feet were too large, his legs thin and muscled only in the thighs, his chest narrow and sloping inward, his light skin delicate and easily bruised.

  Jason was the one who played softball well, who won when they raced each other, who vaulted over any chairs and logs in his way. Sirus was uneven and distracted at sports, lost his train of thought when something upset him. At school Jason was considered the regular fellow, jovial and good-humored, emotional but unaffected, so quick to recover from easy tears that by the time anyone might have begun a jeer he was all smiles and jokes again. Sirus was more likely to be confused, to cry and fall silent, or to feign indifference and then brood over an event long after it was finished for everybody else. Sirus enjoyed Jason's easy fit with others, his sincerity, his uncomplicated response to things; Jason enjoyed Sirus's curiosity, quiet intensity, and his energy, which easily matched Jason's own.

  Whenever they were together as boys, it was as if there were no space between them, until that time when it changed. One late July day, the air thick with wet heat, he and Sirus had lain in the tall grass behind Sirus's house, beyond the four stripping barns, next to the woods that ran the length of the road. Their heads were cushioned by the matted grass; their sneakered feet rested in the red dirt path. Sirus had brought with him his collection of dried skins: a copperhead, a flat mouth, an Indian moccasin, and a tiny field mouse, treasures he had found in the fields or woods and carefully placed on a broken stripping shelf in a barn to dry. Jason had brought his new Sears, Roebuck softball, a present for his birthday; his hand-stitched glove, made by the tanner in town, was propped under his knees like the bump in an old sofa. They had had a game of catch and searched fruitlessly for more skins, and then lay nearly stuporous in the shade.

  It was Sirus who decided it was too hot for clothes. He jumped to his feet and peeled away his socks and overalls and tightly buttoned cotton shirt with one unexpectedly graceful motion, as if he were shedding his skin. It was just the kind of surprising thing, back then, that Sirus would do. He stood in the path next to Jason's feet, the sun bouncing off the right side of his body, casting a shadow on the ground between them. As he stood there, naked, the skin under his clothes paper white, he looked not so much like a boy of ten as like a newly hatched creature that had been deposited on the narrow path. Jason was too lazy to stand, but he kicked off first one sneaker and then the other as he randomly unsnapped and unbuttoned his clothes. While Jason undressed, Sirus seemed suddenly set free. Pretending to be a Cherokee warrior, he pranced in the path and the grass, waving his arms, hooting, cawing like a crow, kicking his legs and flapping his arms.

  He carried on for five minutes, a mist of sweat covering his body. “You going to catch the grass on fire, you keep rubbing those stick legs of yours together like that,” Jason said, laughing, still not undressed. Then he heard a crackling in the pine underbrush. He sat up and hooked his arms around his knees, squinting into the dappled woods. He searched the path that wound between a stand of cedars, but he didn't see the two men until the moment they emerged from the woods, their rifles nosed toward the ground. Startled at first, he was quickly relieved to see they were men he and Sirus both knew.

  Ezra Carter, short and the color of cocoa, owned a small dry-goods store and was a fanatical hunter. Hank Prinde worked in Ezra's store. Ezra wore a brown felt hat with the brim rolled up on one side, pushed back on his head. His mouth worked furiously on a large piece of chew. “Fool boy” was all he said as he gaped at Sirus, who stood frozen, his chest neither rising nor falling, his hands at his sides as if they were plumbed. Ezra spat on the path and shifted the heft of his gun.

  “Looks like a bird; think I'll shoot it,” Hank Prinde said, coming up behind him and laughing in three short bursts that sounded like a small dog barking. He raised his rifle from the ground, leveled it directly at the center of Sirus's thin chest, and cocked the trigger. He moved the barrel up toward Sirus's eyes, then down to his Adam's apple, which seemed to be shriveling in the boy's throat, and next to his private parts, which were indeed no bigger than a small bird. They stood like that for a full minute.

  “Boy, put your clothes on,” Ezra said finally. “You look like some goddamn savage.” He motioned to Hank, who barked his laugh again, and they both turned, making their way back across the field, swaying with the weight of the rows of rabbits slung across their backs.

  “Damn, nearly scared me,” Jason said, turning to Sirus. Sirus stood without moving; the quiver in his lips had spread to his arms and legs, like a giant chill coursing from one end of his body to the other.

  “That Hank's the one who's a savage,” Jason said, “pointing his gun like that.” He wiped his hands on his coveralls. “You'd think a grown man would have more sense than that.”

  Sirus continued to stare after the two men.

  “C'mon, Sirus, let's start back.” Jason stood and reached forward to swipe at Sirus's leg with his hand. Sirus jerked away.

  “Don't,” he said quietly.

  “Well, okay.” Jason let his hands fall beside him. He wished that he could just tell Sirus again that it was Hank who was the fool, but Sirus's stillness inspired his own. He felt uncomfortable in his own skin. A second ago, Sirus's dancing had made him glad, and now the men had taken that away. It was as if some rule had been broken, but neither of them could say what it was. He fumbled with his own clothes, buttoning and snapping what he had undone. A chasm had suddenly opened between them, and he felt himself on one side, with Sirus on the other. Ah, just forget them, he tried to say with his hands, willing the gesture to be nonchalant, but Sirus wasn't listening. He harshly forced his legs and arms back into his clothes, as if he might tear off his skin with the rough corduroy and cotton. Those men, Jason thought as he watched Sirus dress, have snatched something away from us.

  He and Sirus didn't talk about what happened, but the two boys were
never again so free with each other. A stiffness, a small measure of furtiveness insinuated itself into their physical selves. Jason sometimes looked back and wondered how it was that that had happened. And whether there was anything he could have done to make it different. And what about now? What special part of his friend would death chase away? Would he fail Sirus now as, he felt, he had failed him then?

  He thought about the work he had just completed on Mattie's body, which lay nestled inside the molded pink couch of her coffin, underneath a spray of yellow roses, at the back of the hearse. The hands that gripped the wheel—a little more tensely than he would have liked—were the same large and knuckled hands he had had as a boy. He had a mustache now, thin but nicely curved, and sideburns, which came to the middle of his sloping ears. Though he did not cry quite as frequently as he had as a child, he still cried easily.

  Despite the smell of formaldehyde that clung to him like burdock, and the sometimes quizzical looks he got from someone new when he identified his profession, Jason enjoyed his work as an undertaker. He liked working with his hands, liked to be as respectful and gentle to the bodies as his work allowed, liked particularly to let his own deep capacity for tenderness and empathy find a rightful and appropriate home. Unlike some undertakers, who needed to conjure up a display of sorrow, Jason had sympathy that flowed as naturally as his love for his wife and three children. He loved them and his work freely, simply, without reserve or conflict. And because he loved so freely, there was nothing to hold back his grief.

  When he first heard the news about Mattie, he was at the drugstore, talking to the pharmacist, Dr. Gerard, about the smelling salts he thought he might need for an upcoming funeral. In the middle of their conversation, Dr. Gerard got the call. Jason left everything just where it lay on the counter: the box of salts, aspirin for his wife, Edith, and two comics for the girls. He rushed from the store and drove without stopping. When he pulled into the driveway at Sirus's house, the sight of Sirus's own car in the garage seemed suddenly to make the tragedy real. He jumped out of his car, ran up the steps of the porch, and rushed into the house. Dr. Gant sat in the foyer, his large leather bag at his feet, filling out the death certificate. Sirus sat opposite him in a high-backed leather chair, his head frozen to one side, his shoulders hunched forward. Jason had never seen Sirus look so small or so pale.