Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “My name’s Catherine,” she said, “but everybody calls me Cat. ’Cause I’m so light on my feet.” When she smiled, so slow, then he got it, her joke, and they all laughed together. Well, they’d swapped jokes, and right off the bat, too.

  But they wanted to know what they’d be paid. He pussyfooted around a little, but he knew they could tell, and yes he had advertised in the Birmingham News like he was up and running, but…Truth was, H.O.P.E. was not yet funded.

  “Matter of time,” he added. “Washington knows about us.”

  “Federal funding?” Stella’s voice near ’bout as full of doubt as Mr. Bones’s.

  “I do have a friend in Washington, D.C., and he has talked to a congress-man, and there was reassurances. I assure you there were reassurances. See, we have a better chance we be actually operating. They look at deeds, not words. Not what we planning to do, what we are doing.”

  “Mr. Parrish,” Cat said in her slow, thoughtful way, “is it the same for your other teachers. They’re not being paid yet either?”

  “They are volunteers. But see, they still college students at Miles. They still working on their B.A.s.” He looked her square in the eyes. “I know it’s different for you and Miss Silver.” Suddenly the skeleton flew up, rolled itself up and shut. “ ’Nother haint,” he said, but this time nobody laughed.

  “No.” Cat spoke so slowly. “I reckon it’s not different for us. We want to help.” Then she quickly added, “Don’t we, Stella?” like a burst of energy came down her nerve line.

  Stella reached over on his desk and picked up the little Vulcan paperweight as though she owned it.

  “Sure,” Stella said, but she didn’t look at him.

  “There’s something else I want.” Cat waited before she went on. She swallowed like her tongue might be a little bit too big to manage.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “When it’s over, I want you to write a letter of recommendation to the Birmingham Board of Education saying I did a fine job and I managed my students by myself and never had a bit of trouble.”

  “Suppose you do have trouble?”

  Now Stella had more to say: “They won’t hire her. She’s Phi Beta Kappa, but they won’t take her. She did her practice teaching. The regular teacher was out sick two weeks, and Cat managed by herself entirely. She was fine. But the board said it didn’t count because the teacher didn’t observe Cat’s teaching. And if somebody was in there observing, then Cat wouldn’t be alone with the students, and they’d never know if she could do the job.”

  “They said it would make the insurance go up to have a teacher in a wheelchair,” the crippled girl explained.

  “Suppose you do have trouble, Cat?”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  (Boy Howdy! Like his Texas grandpa used to say. Her eyes bored at you like two pistol barrels.) “Yes, I’ll write for you. Be glad to.” The words just popped out. You didn’t say no to pistols.

  (No white Birmingham Board of Education cared what a black man said anyway.)

  They were all sweating. He felt a great gush come out of his right armpit, and Stella had a little sweat-bead mustache. Cat’s glasses having slid down the slick slant of her nose, she pushed them back to the bridge. (Her finger, like her hand, had a strange swayback appearance.)

  “Mighty hot night,” Mr. Parrish mumbled, “just like the radio say.”

  The white women looked at each other, settling it without speaking that they would volunteer, expect pay if it came down from Washington.

  Mr. Parrish heard a mosquito at his ear.

  “How safe is it for us to come out here?” Stella asked.

  “What place is this?” he asked them. No evasion; his voice was hard, direct.

  Cat chuckled. “Bombingham.”

  Driving Home

  WHILE STELLA DROVE MR. CARTWRIGHT’S LUMBERING OLD car back toward Norwood, she thought about what Mr. Parrish had gone on to say about safety. That his life was in the Lord’s hands, and he supposed everybody else’s was, too. That was all the insurance he needed. And Cat had asked him if he ever did any preaching. Mr. Parrish had said sure he was a preacher, sold funeral insurance, too, on weekends, since even those in the hands of the Lord would need it sooner or later. (That was the way A. G. Gaston got to be a millionaire, wasn’t it?)

  During the day Mr. Parrish taught math at Parker High School. Stella interrupted to say her Aunt Krit taught math at Phillips High. And Cat boldly asked Mr. Parrish if Parker was still the largest all-black school in the world, and they had all felt a kind of triumph over the whole continent of Africa, which, after all, could have been expected to have the largest all-black high school. Cat had said the word black, not colored or Negro, to a black man, and she had said it like it meant nothing in the world except the word she needed to use to ask her question.

  But Stella liked remembering the interview better than she had liked being at Miles.

  The car moved a lot like Mr. Cartwright, looked like him, too. Kind of a wreck. Had seen better days. Don was too urbane to drive such a car; he preferred the bus. In Tonga, he walked. He’d written that the king of Tonga—too heavy to walk, his subjects were proud to say—was carried everywhere on a litter.

  When they drove by the Municipal Auditorium, Stella’s knees felt empty; she remembered playing the cello there in the Christmas Festival, in the youth orchestra with five hundred high school singers on the risers, pastel puffs of yellow, minty green, blue, cotton-candy pink amid the boys’ dark suits. None of them were Negroes. She hoped they had had their own music festival at least. How would they have dressed?

  She herself had worn a hoopskirt under her white net evening dress for the first time—she’d just entered high school—and the curve of the hoop had to be bashed in so she could get the cello between her knees. During the “Hallelujah Chorus,” it had sprung out and zoomed the cello forward, but she had caught it by the scroll while it flew away and reeled it back in.

  “Right when the basses come in,” Stella told Cat, “in the ascending four-note scale.” She sang it for Cat, pulsing the gas pedal with each word. “That’s when the cello boinged out and skittered into the music stand.”

  Stella liked to tell Cat about ridiculous situations she’d gotten herself into. She thought it might console Cat a little, make her feel less bad that she couldn’t walk. The large illuminated star was shining over Carraway Methodist Hospital, on the edge of Norwood.

  (CAT IMAGINED THEY ILLUMINATED the star so ambulances could find their way to the hospital more easily.) But Cat was remembering how she’d met Stella at Phillips. It was a fire drill, and she’d still been able to get around on crutches then. The students all thought she’d had polio because her crutches were the metal type that didn’t come all the way up under the armpit, the type you saw on posters. But she’d lost her balance and fallen in the crowded, rushing hall. She had been afraid of being trampled, but somebody (Stella) had stopped and stood in front of her, facing the stream of students. “Go round, go round,” Stella had said over and over, quietly, but in the face of the oncoming students.

  When the hall was empty, the fire drill an apparent success, Stella had sat down on the floor with Cat, and they had talked until the custodian happened by and said he’d just carry Cat out, though she hadn’t wanted him to. Stella went out first to hold open one of the massive front doors of Phillips High School. When Mr. Wingard stepped out with Cat draped in his arms like a res-cued princess, somebody saw them, and 1,700 students set up a mighty sentimental roar of approval. But the building hadn’t been on fire.

  Cat felt her own cheeks burn pink, but Cat saw that this new girl, Stella, could hardly keep back the tears that sprang to her eyes when they cheered. Stella was one of them and moved by their approval; she had had to wipe her runny nose with the back of her hand. For a moment Cat knew Stella was brimming with it:We’re all good people.

  It was the week after the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had been beat
en with chains and brass knuckles in front of the school.

  It turned out Stella was not exactly one of them: the normals. She was an orphan. Cat discovered Stella believed naively in being good and following the rules, as though that compliance would be a shield against the injustice of the universe. As the car moved toward home, Cat remembered her mother’s laughter, a quiet cackle, almost delightfully out of control. Cat missed her mother, who was always amused by Stella.

  After Stella’s visits that first year to Cat’s home, back in Phillips High School days, either Cat or her mother would laugh and say, “Well, she did it again.” They meant Stella had eaten all of the baked apple, core and seeds, to be polite.

  That was the past, when they first met in high school. Cat was tired now. Both she and Stella felt flat as pancakes, united in their fatigue. Our essential sameness, Cat thought comfortably. Together.

  Good night.

  Good night.

  After Stella helped her out of the car, Cat insisted on wheeling herself up the ramp onto the porch. When she looked over her shoulder, Stella was already half a block away, walking into the night shadows toward home, some twelve blocks away. The door was unlocked—her father and his gun slept inside, waiting for the graveyard shift—and Cat entered the dark living room. His toenails clicking on the bare hardwood floor, Goliath came to greet her. He leapt into her lap before she had time to set the brakes. The chair rolled back a little.

  AT MIDNIGHT, MR. CARTWRIGHT rose, listened to his daughter snoring in the next room, the dog snoring, too. At least the midget dog had a loud yapper. Mr. Cartwright strapped on his holster. Well, the timing worked out just like she’d said—getting the car back, he meant. Tomorrow when he went off to work, there’d still be some real protection in the house.

  Stella’s Aunts

  AS STELLA WALKED UP THE RED CLAY, STONE-STUDDED driveway to the back door of her aunts’ home, Pal let out one deep bark from the shadows, recognized her, snuffed her leg, wagged his tail. Stella always spoke to nice dogs as if they were people—“How you?”—and ignored rude ones, like Goliath, as much as she could without seeming rude herself. When she went through the kitchen door, Pal slipped in with her.

  Her aunt greeted the dog first. “I’m in here, Pal.”

  Aunt Krit sat grading math papers at the dining room table, but she laid down the pencil, red on one end and blue on the other, to claim Pal. She stroked his head with both hands, slender beautiful hands (Stella had inherited her hands from her Aunt Krit), saying over and over, “Poor Pal, poor Pal. You like to been brown, didn’t you?”Like to been? She meant the dog only lacked a little bit of being brown. Actually Pal was pure white. He had an indistinct shading of pale tan over the top of his head.

  To Stella, Krit said, “I don’t like you out walking the street so late at night.”

  “It’s summer. Lots of people are out late. It’s only a mile.”

  “They’ve gone to bed.” She nodded her head at the parallel house across the driveway.

  The Gulf of Driveway! When Stella was little, it had been scary to cross the driveway at night; her father used to send her over with codeine tablets wrapped in a Kleenex to calm the nerves of Aunt Pratt. As soon as Stella entered the kitchen, Aunt Krit intercepted Aunt Pratt’s medicine. A razor blade lay on the kitchen table. Aunt Krit sat down, unwrapped the tablets, and shaved off their sides. One whole tablet was confiscated. She doesn’t need all this. It had never occurred to Stella to tell her father that Aunt Krit always reduced Pratt’s dosage. Maybe he had guessed it. Maybe he sent too much because he knew Krit would interfere.

  “Over there, they all went to bed an hour ago.”They were the new owners who had bought Stella’s home.

  As though to contradict Aunt Krit, the kitchen light came on in the bedded-down house.

  “It’s a nice summer night,” Stella said. “Except for the heat. I didn’t feel a bit afraid.”

  “Boodle-worm.”

  Stella lifted out the chair at the end of the table—You lift, don’t drag, fine furniture—and sat down companionably. Sometimes, truth told, Stella did feel afraid alone at night, but not after she’d acted righteously or done a good deed. Not after she’d been with Cat;after that, as she walked away, she stretched and luxuriated in her mobility. It felt so fine to walk that sometimes, when she was out of sight, she flew down the sidewalk. How would it be to work at Miles?

  Pal sat down between Krit and Stella; he panted and stuck his penis out of its white furry sheath. The dog’s penis fascinated Stella: bright pink, a distinct tip, tiny red blood vessels visible along its sides. Pal was bored. He nudged his chin onto her thigh, and she dutifully petted him. He wanted attention; affection was superfluous. Pal had short legs but a long back with a part down the middle and wiry white hair falling to either side. Stella ran her finger down the part to make his skin flicker and shudder.

  “You want to help me grade a set?” Aunt Krit slid a rubber band off a stack of papers folded lengthwise; she stored the thin rubber band with two others on her wrist, like bangle bracelets. This was the first summer Aunt Krit had taught summer school. I want to see what it’s like, she’d said, for the money.

  She’d quickly decided she didn’t like it.

  They graded quietly. Aunt Krit’s eyes could glance at a math paper and flag the slightest error; she didn’t need to think about it;her eyes just lighted on the flaws:I’m like a duck on a june bug, she had said once to Stella, and Krit had smiled a wry, shy, crooked smile, her face shining with pride. Stella loved that rare smile: Aunt Krit pleased.

  “ ’Nother goose egg!” Aunt Krit drew the red zero and sighed. “They’re all nothing but failures and future criminals!”

  If Aunt Krit liked a student, she marked his paper in blue; if she didn’t, she used red; both colors were available at opposite ends of the pencil. For summer school students, she used only the red end of the pencil. After algebra, they began to grade geometry papers. “They’re all headed for the penitentiary,” Aunt Krit said indignantly.

  Krit was thin and frail, always tired, never seemed strong or thoroughly happy. She disapproved of Aunt Pratt, blessedly asleep in her own bedroom, an invalid to arthritis and an accident that had ruined her knee. But Pratt had been derailed earlier; when Son—Pratt’s grown boy—had been drafted into World War II and then had gone AWOL, Pratt lived with the constant fear he’d be caught and shot as a deserter. Her work was to worry, but she did it in solitude. Her deceased husband’s pension supplied her few needs—for nail polish and perfume. When she had company, she sociably attended to her guest, offered gum or hard candy.

  Krit couldn’t stand Pratt’s perfumes and powders and eyebrow pencils; her gaudy earrings, necklaces, and bracelets; her box of silly flowered scarfs, her endless packs of chewing gum (for Stella), her bright red belts and matching shoes. All day Pratt drew pictures, crocheted, and told stories to whoever came through the door. Didn’t earn a dime.

  Aunt Krit’s favorite color was blue. She only wore skirts in shades of blue and beige, topped by a neat white blouse, sometimes with a little embroidery on the collar. The blouses hung straight from her shoulders to her waist. Even in her nightgown—sheer red nylon—Aunt Pratt, thin as Aunt Krit, sometimes wore her brassiere plumped up with thick sponge breasts.

  Krit tossed down her grading pencil and declared, “Even if Don is Cat’s brother, it would ruin the wedding to have her in it.”

  Stella said nothing.

  “You don’t have to have her.”

  “But Don wants her to stand up for us.”

  “Stand up!”

  “Be in the wedding.”

  “At a wedding everything’s got to be perfect. They delivered the rosebushes today. I’ll have Old Uncle put them in tomorrow.”

  “They’ll look great.”

  “I want it to be perfect. I’m inviting all the teachers.”

  Krit envisioned the whole backyard walled with white climbing roses in full bloom. The new rosebushe
s had two seasons to grow because Don had postponed everything and gone off to some dark island for the Peace Corps. “Boodle-worm,” Aunt Krit muttered under her breath. She knew Don might never come back to marry her niece. Like that Darl. Out of the picture. Krit had never trusted Darl, his face hidden under all those specks. But Don was as fair and unblemished as somebody you could see on the screen. She liked him. He was like Alan Ladd crossed with Rock Hudson. Why did young people go off in the Peace Corps unless they were running away from something at home?

  For a while, Krit and Stella returned to their grading. Finally Aunt Krit threw down her pencil again, took off her pale-rimmed glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t believe I can grade another paper.”

  Stella looked at her and smiled. “Let’s hit the hay.”

  Krit wished her niece wouldn’t use slang. “Let me show you something.”

  Aunt Krit picked up a sheet of graph paper. With the straight edge and blue pencil, she divided it into quadrants. In two opposing quadrants, she drew opposing hyperboles till the widening flanges fell off the page. The blue-line hyperboles looked like two fish, nose to nose. “Now this one,” Krit said, “is really the same as this one. It’s gone through all time and space and come back.” Her voice choked on the enormity of it. “While it travels, it gets closer and closer to the straight lines, but the hyperbola’s lines will never become straight and never touch the asymptotes. The hyperbola draws infinitely closer.” She sighed and touched the crosspoint of the coordinates with her blue pencil lead. “This spot, this place is God.”

  Then she set down the pencil, shot a meaningful glance at her niece, and went to bed. Aunt Pratt had been snoring from her bedroom all evening. Not a care or a question in her head.