Two Rivers

by T. Greenwood

  I looked out the window, and then forced myself to look at her.

  “He took me outside, to the back where we got this chicken coop. He takes me in there, I’m guessin’ ’cause it’s so loud nobody might hear me if I screamed. But I didn’t scream.” She shook her head. “I knew it wouldn’t help nothin’ anyway.” She bit her lip and looked past me out the window. “He kept me in there for two hours. Two whole hours, and the chickens were flying around everywhere. And it smelled so terrible. I still can’t get that stink out of my head.”

  She looked back at me again and smiled, threw her shoulders back. “Well, anyway , after everybody found out I was havin’ a baby, like I told you …I knew I couldn’t be stayin’ there. My daddy already been through so much disgrace and all. Plus, I know he woulda blamed himself. He likes to think he be keepin’ me safe, first movin’ me away from Mississippi. Raisin’ me up in the church. He’s my daddy . He’d a wanted to die if he knew what really happened. So I let him think it was just a regular boy that I got with. That it was my fault. He wanted me to go to Baton Rouge, stay with my auntie until the baby was born and then give it up. But this baby ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody. It ain’t his fault how he com’d to be. I knew I couldn’t keep him, but I also couldn’t dream of givin’ him to a stranger. So I decided to come here. I didn’t tell nobody where I gone. I left a note for Daddy sayin’ I gone to Mississippi with the baby’s daddy. I knew he wouldn’t come lookin’ for me there, an’ if he did, he wouldn’t find me.”

  “But why me?” I asked, my chest tight.

  “Well, your daddy always been so kind to us, sending money even after she got killed. He sent me other stuff too, you know? Pictures of her, some of her special things.” She reached over into the box and pulled out the piece of sea glass. “Her books and things she wrote. It was almost like I knew her, ’cause of him. So I wrote to him first, told him about the baby. I knew he wouldn’t judge me, and I thought maybe I could go stay with him for a bit. But he sent me a letter back, sayin’ he was real sick. He said he might not be around much longer, but he wanted me to know I had a brother and that he had a little girl too. That you was raising her all by yourself, up here in Vermont. He said you were a good man.”

  I put my face in my hands, my chest heaving. When I looked up, Maggie was softly stroking her belly.

  “What made you think I’d take you in?” I asked.

  Maggie shrugged again. “I don’t know. I guess I took my chances. But when I found you sitting by the river, after the train wrecked, you looked like you were somebody with some pretty big sorrow. And I may not know much about babies, but I do know one thing. There ain’t no way to be sad when you’re holding a brand new baby in your arms.”

  I looked back down at the photo I’d been clutching in my hand. At my mother beaming at Maggie.

  Bat in the Owl House

  I took the train by myself to Boston. Outside my window, the leaves had peaked. By the following week, they would litter the roads and streets, but for now, they held on. Orange and gold. Purple and red. It felt like the train was rushing through a tunnel of fire. I brought only a small bag; I wouldn’t be staying long. Brenda said she’d come over to help out with the girls while I was gone, but I wanted to get home as soon as I could.

  I took a taxi from the train station to Cambridge, and the cabbie dropped me off down the street from my father’s house in front of a deli. It was one of those paradoxical autumn days: blue sky, bright sun, but vividly cold. Crisp , that’s what most people call it. But to me it just felt like obstinacy. Like a struggle. As if summer itself was refusing to let go of its hold. I put my sunglasses on against its stubborn glare, and tightened my scarf against the equally determined chill. I ordered a cup of coffee from the old man working behind the counter and took it to a bench in front of the shop, trying to warm myself from the inside out.

  When I called my father to tell him I was coming, he didn’t seem surprised. He only said, “Good, good. I hope you plan to bring that sweet granddaughter of mine.”

  I shook my head.

  “Harper?” he asked when I still hadn’t answered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did she find you?” His voice sounded like bones rattling in a bag. “Margaret Jones?”

  “Yes.”

  When the coffee had turned cold, I walked up the steps to my parents’ house, aware of the warm sun, the chilly breeze. He opened the door before I had a chance to knock.

  He was so thin, a sliver of himself. The cane had been replaced by a walker, which he maneuvered across the kitchen floor and then relinquished in favor of a seat at the kitchen table. His breathing was labored, his face and chest so thin. “Sit down,” he said, motioning to the other chair.

  I sat down across from him. The vinyl tablecloth was covered with crumbs. Papers.

  “How’s Shelly?” he asked, his lips cracking as he smiled.

  “Good, good.” I nodded.

  “Work? The train wreck was all over the news. Even down here.”

  I reached for the saltshaker in the center of the table. A pink ceramic poodle, one of the few relics from the fire that had been spared. The peppershaker had not survived.

  “Can I get you something? To drink? Eat? I don’t keep much in the fridge these days.”

  “Dad?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  I set the shaker down in front of him, took a deep breath. “Did she love him?”

  My father picked the saltshaker up and held it in the palm of his hand. He turned it over and over, as if the answer to my question was inside. He set it down again and looked at me. He looked so old, so tired. The past three years could have been thirty. His milky eyes filled with tears. I felt my stomach tighten.

  “You have to understand,” he said softly. “It was bigger than that. More complicated.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Do you remember the owl house I built out back?” he asked.

  I nodded. He had spent a whole weekend one summer building a house aimed at attracting the owl population of Two Rivers. But not long after the owl family arrived, a bat took up residence inside the owl house, and all of the owls left. The lone bat stayed in the owl house all summer; you could hear its wings flapping against the sides of the house. Finally, when my father realized the bat had no intention of leaving, and that the owls would not return until the bat was gone, he set out poison to get rid of it.

  “His family took her in. He took her in. They worked together , doing the kind of work she was born to do. And he fell in love with her. Despite everything she was, because of everything she was.” He winced and reached for his back. He rubbed it methodically, closing his eyes.

  “Why did she come home then?” I asked. “Why didn’t she just stay there?”

  “Most folks don’t want bats in the owl house.” His voice was thin and weak.

  “But she had a baby ,” I said. “How could she leave a baby behind?”

  “They would have killed her if she’d stayed. They almost did. You know that.”

  “The fire,” I said, remembering. NIGGERLOVER , scrawled across the pavement. “How did they find he
r?”

  “The Klan had people everywhere then. Even in Two Rivers. They weren’t always dressed up in hoods and robes, you know. And word spread quickly. About where she’d gone.”

  “She couldn’t go back,” I said, for the first time feeling sadness for my mother. The grief she must have felt leaving her baby behind.

  “She stayed in touch with him, but only to talk about the baby. She did that out of respect for me, I suppose, but I knew she would go back someday, to be with them, where she felt she belonged. And then she never got a chance.”

  “But after she came home, you both seemed so happy. Was she happy?”

  He nodded. “Sometimes, there’s room for more than one real love. I know it doesn’t seem possible, couldn’t seem possible to you after Betsy.”

  I thought about the way it felt when Brenda kissed me, that terrible combination of desire and remorse. A wave of sadness rolled under my skin.

  “Most people find love where they can. Your mother found it here first, and then down there. It wasn’t something she went looking for.”

  “Why did you take her back?” I asked. “Most people would think you were crazy.”

  “When she came home, it was like I got a second chance. And I made it my job to make up for all of the years I wasted trying to turn her into something she wasn’t. I owed her that. But none of what happened was because she didn’t love us . It wasn’t that at all.”

  “She loved us?” I asked, suddenly a child again. This was the only question I really needed answered.

  He nodded.

  “She’s my sister ,” I said. It was the first time I had said this. Felt this.

  “Yes.” He smiled. “She is.”

  I called the cab from my father’s house, and he sat with me outside on the steps until it arrived. He lit a cigar, and the smoke smelled sweet.

  “When did you start smoking?” I asked. He had always hated my mother’s cigarettes.

  “Last week.” He smiled. “Josephine bought these for me. To celebrate.” Josephine was the widow who lived next door. “I got a patent,” he said.

  “You did ? For what?”

  “The weather predictor,” he said. “I finally got the bugs worked out. Only took me twenty-five years.” He laughed, a big happy laugh, and it made me smile.

  “What does it say today?” I asked.

  “Looks like fall’s almost over,” he said. “It’ll snow before long. But today, just sunshine.”

  The cabbie shook his head when we got to Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury. We were parked in front of a whole block of vacant buildings. The storefront windows were broken. Only the painted signs remained. “I ain’t droppin’ you off here,” he said.

  “Isn’t that your job?” I asked.

  “Sorry, man. I can’t be responsible for that.” He shook his head again.

  “Just tell me my fare and let me out,” I said, irritated.

  “How long you gonna be?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll turn off my meter and wait for you. If you don’t plan on being gone too long.”

  “Go,” I said, paying him, and then stepped out of the cab.

  The cabbie pulled away slowly, and I started down the street. There was a vacant barbershop: a red, white and blue barber pole out front, rusted and immobile. I peered in the window of the shop, shielding my eyes from the sun’s glare on the glass. Inside, the barber chairs were prone, empty. I smiled when I saw the poster illustrating the official hairstyles for boys and men. I could almost smell the sweet familiar scent of Barbasol. Of soap and aftershave.

  I pulled the napkin my father had scribbled on out of my pocket and walked to the place where my mother had parked her Buick that day. There was a dirt lot, a brick building covered with graffiti, a few cars parked on the street and trash everywhere. When I got to the corner, I sat down on the curb. I’m not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t this. There was nothing here to explain what had happened. No ghosts.

  “Better get a move on there,” someone behind me said, startling me. I felt something hard nudging me in the back.

  “Excuse me?” I said, looking up.

  A policeman was standing above me. A big man, with skin the color of paper. His billy club was still poking into me.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “No loitering,” he said. “Up.”

  “Jesus,” I said as he lifted me by the elbows.

  “You’d be smart to get yourself back to Harvard,” he said.

  “I said, ‘ I’m fine .’”

  The policeman put his billy club back into its holster and pretended to wash his hands. “No blood on these,” he said, and then he walked back down the street.

  I stood up and started walking down the sidewalk again. I felt my pace quicken, suddenly anxious. I thought about my mother delivering the Freedom Press to the barbers and jewelers and grocers that must have once occupied these empty spaces. I could almost picture her, bracelets jingling, heels clacking on the pavement. A big smile and the wave of her hand. I wondered if she ever felt afraid.

  A few men were gathered on the corner, talking loudly and laughing. When I crossed the street, they hollered after me. “Hey, college boy!”

  When I didn’t respond, they shouted louder. It didn’t seem to matter to anybody here that I was thirty-four years old and that I hadn’t been on a college campus in over a decade. Thankfully, they returned to their conversation and I kept walking. I was moving pretty quickly when a small voice behind me said, “You lost?”

  My heart quickened again, but when I turned around, it was only a child looking up at me. The whites of his eyes were bright against his dark skin. He was chewing gum, smacking it hard. He couldn’t have been more than six or seven.

  I shook my head.

  “You ain’t from here,” he said.

  This more than anything made me feel like I was an intruder. A bat in the owl house. “No.” I shook my head and then, as if there were a way to explain, I started, “I used to know somebody…” But my voice trailed off.

  “You give me a dollar and I’ll walk you back to your car.”

  “What’s with everyone wanting to be my escort today?” I laughed nervously, and then I reached into my pocket and grabbed a dollar. “I will give you a dollar if you tell me where I can find a church though.”

  The little boy grinned and grabbed the dollar out of my hand. He examined it as if checking to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. Then he pointed across the street to an old movie theater. The marquis said OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL SORROW , and the windows were boarded up. “Ain’t no sermon today,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “You sure you don’t want me to walk you?” he asked.

  “Will it cost me?”

  “Complimentary.”

  I smiled, and he skipped along next to me as I made my way to the church.

  “Where do you live?” I asked him.

  “Right here,” he said. “My whole lif
e.”

  “That’s a good long time.”

  He nodded and cracked his gum.

  “You like it here?”

  He looked at me dumbly. “Roxbury’s my home. Course I like it.”

  This, I understood.

  “Malcolm X from here too.”

  “You don’t say,” I said.

  When we got to the church, he said, “Now, I got business on the other side of town, but you should be okay as long as you don’t take no alleys. And keep your head up.”

  I nodded, lifted my head. “No alleys.” And then he was gone.

  Inside Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, the concession area had been converted into a vestibule. I dropped two quarters in the slot of a wooden box and lit two candles. Then I went down the carpeted hallway to the converted theater. Inside, I sat in one of the rickety seats. The springs were shot, the upholstery threadbare. Where the screen used to be was a large wooden cross. A pulpit on the stage. I was alone here.

  After a while, I knelt down on my knees, the cement floor cold and sticky. I rested my elbows on the back of the seat in front of me and clasped my hands together. I closed my eyes and said two prayers: one for Betsy, and one for my mother. And then, I said one for the man I left behind.

  Night-blooming Cereus