by Richard Dry
The river roared as he reached its side, the swift water splashing against the larger rocks that still peeked above the surface. This was by no means a rapid, but the swollen tide ate away at the dirt banks and revealed the roots of trees dangling at its edges. The other side of the river was a stone’s throw, perhaps thirty feet across, yet the sheer force and volume of water made the distance seem untraversable.
The bridge to town was a quarter mile downstream on an inland path cut by the schoolchildren and laborers from the surrounding farms, but the spot he used to go to with Ronald was upstream, not nearly as far but less well traveled, on the edge of the river, lined by blackberry vines entangled with poison ivy.
Easton walked carefully along the muddy shore until he found the spot, a fallen log covered by moss, just large enough for two, and a large rock, waist-high, perfect for resting fishing rods against to let the lines dangle into the carved inlet. He leaned himself over the rock and looked down into the water, searching for catfish or trout. But nothing below the surface was clear. The water was too wild in the main part of the river, and even the depth of this private alcove churned with soil and sand.
He sat on the damp log and put his feet up on a shelf of the rock—his legs used to stretch straight out across, but now he bent them at the knees as Ronald used to do, sitting forward with his elbows on his thighs. Finally at rest, he let the sound of the river fully engulf him. Ronald said the river was a healing force: the loud, steady sound cleaned out the noise in your own mind. But now the rushing river brought with it memories.
“Why is he so mad at me?” Easton once asked Ronald after the required moments of cleansing had passed.
“He’s just mad. He’s not mad at you. Some people get mad at so many things that happen in their lives that they forget what they’re mad at and just take it out on anyone they can. And Samuel is a person like that.”
“When I’m mad, I know who I’m mad at.”
“And who are you mad at?”
“I’m mad at him.”
“Anyone else?”
“And I’m mad at them Palmer boys. They the ones who done something to me.”
“They’re the ones who did…”
“They’re the ones who did something to me. And my papa. He can’t just beat on me like I was his mule. I ain’t his mule. I ain’t nobody’s mule.”
“You sure you aren’t mad at anyone else?”
“I told you I’m not.”
“Tremendous. I just thought you might be—but as long as you don’t forget who you’re mad at, then you’re all right.”
“He’s stupid if he doesn’t know who he’s mad at.”
Ronald nodded. They fished in silence for a while, and just after letting enough time go by so that Easton knew he’d been heard and respected, Ronald gave him a little more to consider.
“Sometimes it takes longer before things get more complicated. Sometimes you get less sure of yourself with age.”
Easton nodded his head, sitting alone, older now, listening to the river. He was mad at everyone it seemed, and no one in particular. He felt the anger in his belly and his chest. He was mad at himself the most, for all the things he’d done and hadn’t done. How had Ronald been so wise? Or did he just know what everyone knows when they get older but doesn’t do them any good to know: that it all gets more complicated as time passes.
The sun was setting and it was beginning to get cold. There was a snap of twigs and Easton looked up to see his mother staring at him with a smile. Elise hadn’t changed all that much; she looked like Ruby wearing a pair of black plastic-rimmed glasses. Her head was wrapped in a red bandanna, and her body sagged under the weight of her thick wool coat.
“Look at you,” she said. “Look at you. You a man now.” Easton stood but did not go to her, and she did not go to him.
“I’m not a man, Mama. I’m just your little boy grown bigger.”
“You got a nice car. Is dat your own car?”
“I built it.”
Elise shook her head. “I went to de house and saw it and wondered who was out here. But here you is. Your sister say you might be comin, but I didn think so soon. Not before Sunday. I’m so glad to see you. Why didn you call and I could a fixed somethin for you?”
“I didn’t want you going to all that trouble.”
“Well, come on and we’ll have cake. You hungry?”
“Let’s just sit here a minute.”
“In dis cole?”
“Just a minute.”
Easton sat back down on the log. He patted the space next to him. “You come sit here next to me and listen, Mama. I want you to hear this.”
“I’ll jus meet you back at de house when you get done.” She turned away and began to edge back along the path.
“All I’m asking for is one little minute. Can’t you give me one minute after all this time? And I come all this way. Shit.”
She stopped and looked at him. He turned away.
“I guess I could stay if it mean dat much to you,” she said.
She moved cautiously, turning her large body sideways between the vines and the river. She brushed off the log next to him and sat. He didn’t move to touch her or even look at her.
“Just listen,” he said. The water rippled over rocks and around snags into small falls. But the rush of the river did not feel calming to him anymore. He felt her impatience, and the roar of the water only seemed to push them further apart.
“What you want me to hear?” she asked after a few moments.
“Just listen. Listen to the water.”
“What about it?”
“Mama, you’re not giving it a chance. The water’s supposed to take all your thoughts away, all your worries.”
“I don’t have no worries, chile. You have worries, June Bug?”
“No, Mama.” He shook his head. “No. I just meant it’s peaceful here.”
“Well, it’s peaceful and warm back at de house. We can get de stove burnin. I worked hard all day and I need to res my feet. You come along when you feel de need.” She got up and brushed off the bottom of her coat.
She walked up the path, but Love didn’t watch her. He sat for a minute more, staring at the river until he could no longer hear her push aside the branches, until he saw that she really wasn’t going to wait for him.
* * *
THERE WERE NO piles of clothing on the dining table, no pieces of broken thread by the sewing machine, and no needles stuck in a bar of soap like there used to be. Elise had a job as a textile worker. “Now I just makes de fabric and imagines de clothes,” she told Easton.
That night he told her about his life in Oakland, and she fell asleep right after supper. He went with her to the mill the next day and got hired on for temporary work so he could make enough money to get back to California. The work was tiring, and again they talked little at night before falling asleep.
At five A.M. the next morning, before work, Easton stood in the kitchen by the wood-burning stove, rubbing his hands together while his mother patted down rice cakes to take for lunch. Then they ate breakfast in silence, as they had for the last two mornings. They were heading into a ten-hour day of clattering machinery, so deafening that it stayed in their heads long into the night and entered their dreams as waterfalls and trains rushing down tracks, so in that way it was nice to have the silence. Yet it was uncomfortable, as if they were pulling on each other with invisible threads. Every once in a while Easton looked at Elise as if he expected her to say something, ask him something about his life, though he’d already told her everything he could think of that first night.
After breakfast, they left the house and crossed the field toward the shortcut to town by the river. Easton didn’t want to drive and use up any of the gas. He thought about his finances as he swiped away branches. At a dollar-fifteen an hour, he’d earn enough money for the trip in a few more days.
He turned around and noticed that he’d lost sight of his mother. She walked
more slowly than he but at a steady pace, with a more forceful consistency, her eyes lowered and her feet moving in equally spaced steps, landing on whatever flower or vine happened beneath them. He waited for her to catch up, and without looking at him, she continued past, as if her feet couldn’t stop once in motion.
They reached the river path while the sun was still below the horizon, and the sky turned a light gray, almost blue, in the east. The opposite bank overflowed with a tangle of pink and white flowers from which sprouted a live oak, one of its green arms arching over the water toward them. All the colorful growth was mirrored at the water’s edge so clearly that there was no distinguishable boundary between the plants and their reflections.
Easton hurried his step, in part because he was cold, and in part because his mind kept wandering into the past. This was the way he’d walked to school most mornings when the river hadn’t flooded. Even without a heavy rain, the path turned to marsh in unexpected places, and many days his feet were wet and muddy, the water leaking into his shoes where Elise had sewn the soles back on. Remembering his mother, Easton stopped himself on the trail and waited for her again. When she came astride him, he put his arm in hers, so that he would not move away from her so quickly this time. As he did so, he looked at her face for some reciprocation of his affection, but her face remained unchanged and she plodded forward. Before long, he unhooked his arm and walked ahead of her once again.
After walking a quarter of a mile, they reached the bridge to town. Easton looked around, half expecting to see the Palmer boys. But they worked on their farm now, his mother had told him, except for Kalvin, who was in jail for beating up a police officer. Others joined them, though, adults and children, bundled in their coats and scarves, coming from the main road.
The water ran swiftly under the bridge, and Easton shook his head watching it, to think that he’d ever jumped in from there. That river never seemed as dangerous as he knew it to be now, and never as beautiful either, surrounded by lush cypress and azalea, the smell of narcissus floating up to him on the morning breeze—all those times fishing and fighting on that bridge.
He’d lost track of his mother again, ahead of him this time, and he jogged to catch up. Once over the bridge, they were nearly to the Negro school. The Negro school, farther outside town than the White school, had been held in a converted brick storehouse that had been used for keeping cotton before the boll-weevil pestilence destroyed the harvest in 1921, when many of the farms switched to growing soybeans and peaches. He remembered how the Palmer boys laughed at him and told him to go off to his nigger school and learn to talk nigger, even though he couldn’t hear any difference between the way he spoke and the way they spoke. He remembered how he longed to keep walking into town, how he longed to have a school with a chalkboard and a White teacher who dressed in a pink dress, and separate grades for older kids, and books he could write his name in.
“Why are you so black?” he had asked Ronald once as they were fishing at their private spot. Easton was eight then and liked to think of Ronald’s skin as Negro compared to his own, which he considered ginger.
“Because I’m not part White, like you.”
“I’m part White?” He remembered the feeling at this revelation, as if he’d found out about some secret fortune he was due to inherit; he stood up against the rock but turned away from Ronald, knowing already that there was something shameful in that ecstatic hope he felt. “I’m not White,” he said delicately.
“Sure. Your great-great-grandfather was White. He owned this land. You and Mr. Marlboro are related.”
Easton walked to a bush and picked off some wild blackberries to toss in the water, to keep his smile hidden from Ronald. “You mean,” he asked, “if my mama had married a White man instead of Papa Samuel, I’d be even Whiter?”
“It sometimes works out that way and sometimes doesn’t.”
That next week at school, he stood up in class to inform Miss Moore that from now on she had to call him “sir” because he was White, and all the other kids laughed; but many in turn came up to him privately and asked how it might be true. At home he asked Elise if it was true that they were related to Mr. Marlboro, and she told him, “We all brothers and sisters under de eyes of de Lawd.”
On the way to the mill, Easton and his mother passed the Negro church. It was a small brick building with a steeple, and on the doors, Minister Aimes had painted the words Let the heavens be glad, and let men rejoice: and let men say among the nations, the Lord reigneth. These were the first words Miss Moore had taught them to read—standing out in the cold morning, a morning very much like the one Easton was walking through now, the whole class, ages five through thirteen, came to read those words on the first day of every year.
The edge of town was now clearly in sight; the big white mansions stood back on the side of the road, some three stories high, with columns and porches that wrapped all the way around and palmetto trees in the yards. The main crossing downtown was Longstreet—named for James Longstreet, the Confederate general—and Doby, renamed so in 1948 for a local Negro boy who helped the Cleveland Indians win the World Series, the same year Negroes got to vote for the first time in the Democratic primary. Shops stretched out for half a block each way at this crossing. In the last ten years, Norma had almost doubled in population to a town of three thousand, due to the new mill built next door to the old one. The clothing store at which Ruby and Elise used to sell their dresses was on Longstreet, attached to Laurel’s five-and-dime, and across the street from Carol’s, a combined grocery and restaurant, from which they had bought most of their goods all their lives. Elise had been allowed to eat there for the first time in just the last year. The Tri-County Times West River office, where Ronald used to work, was an office on top of the tire company. Its press was in a brick building four blocks away on the Negro side of town, connected to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which sometimes paid for the paper’s printing with community donations.
They reached the mill at seven. It was across town, away from the shops and residential area. Elise and Easton worked in a large room spinning yarn out of cotton. The room was as large as the plantation it had been built on, a hundred yards in each direction, with the spinning machines, each fifteen feet long, lined up end to end, row after row. Each steel pillar holding up the ceiling had a yellow circle taped to it with a smiley face that Jane Sloan, the spinner behind Elise, had made to brighten up the place. This was a newer facility, and now that everyone was allowed to work there, White and Black worked side by side in their departments.
Easton worked a number of rows away from his mother, but close enough that he could see her face between the pillars. It struck him as funny and absurd that here they were once again in Norma, and now they worked together in the same building. Every few minutes he would think about her and look to see if she was looking at him, but she never looked, not that he could see.
* * *
EASTON STAYED FOR a week. After working at the mill, Elise walked straight home. Easton took his walk home through Norma, stopping on the way to stretch his back a few times and say hello to some of his old friends who worked at the shops in town. He’d saved enough money to get back to California, but he didn’t feel ready to leave, like he hadn’t gotten what he came for.
When he arrived back at the house, it was already dark. Easton took his sketchbook from the car and joined his mother inside. He sat at the dining table where Elise and Ruby used to sew, and he watched his mother under the naked yellow bulb as she prepared a loaf of corn bread. He kept his stick of charcoal poised over the page, hoping for that moment when she would reveal herself to him. She patted the dough with her hands, almost unconsciously, her eyes staring forward into nothing. She had a persistent gloss in her eyes, like a shell over her soul. There had been something impassable between them since he’d arrived, and though they’d been physically closer to each other than they had been in five years, he felt like they were standing on opposite
sides of a glass wall. Much in Norma felt that way to him, his old friends, the river, the house and farm, but most of all his mother.
Part of it was the silence. Most of the day they were away from each other in the mill, and at home Elise seemed to be closed up in her own world. She was happy to see him, she’d said that enough times. They’d done some catching up since he’d been there, but they’d never talked about the past, as if nothing of substance had happened between them before this visit.
Elise bent down slowly to put the bread pan into the oven, extending her other hand against her knee to keep her legs from giving out: that was how he would sketch her, although it still was not exactly right.
“How old are you, Mama? You seem like a hundred-year-old woman.”
“Truth be tole, chile, I feel like a hundred-year-old woman.” But even in that very breath, she firmed herself up, straightened her hair, and pulled back her shoulders.
As he watched, Easton let his fingers trace the charcoal over the page, the slight friction of the textured paper vibrating in his fingers.
“You didn’t say how old you really are.”
