Always

by Timmothy B. Mccann

  They’ve vehemently tried to stay above the fray in regard to personal attacks and they believe that character does count. That’s why they have taken the high road tonight and throughout this campaign. But there comes a time, Butch, when you must pull off the gloves and defend your name, and that’s why I am down here this morning.”

  “Mrs. Richardson, Nate Earl, Atlanta Constitution! So what-’cha saying is they are not preparing for a divorce? That they are not in separate suites as has been reported earlier? Marvin Mitchelson’s office has not confirmed or denied that Mrs. Davis is on retainer. Can you comment on that story as well?”

  “Guys, take out your pens and turn up the volume on the recorders for this quote, because it’s something you can take to the bank and deposit. Are you ready? The answer is, no! Did you get that? They have absolutely no plans to end their marriage in spite of any unfounded rumors you may have heard. There was no stress from the campaign on their marriage, and before you ask again, there are no photos. In fact, the campaign has actually brought them closer together, I personally think. They are people just like you and me trying their best to make it through the day, and they are looking forward to moving to Pennsylvania Avenue and being the moral and loving example of all that is good about this country of ours.”

  Carol City, Florida

  The Allen Residence

  “She lying like a sack of shit, Momma.”

  “Sarah, stop it!” Cheryl said to her still-wet daughter, who was drying her Jherri curls while sitting on the couch and occasionally dribbling her ball on the hardwood floor. Sarah had grown up fast. She’d worked for a pillow factory since dropping out of college, and now in her mid-twenties, she had a daughter of her own and visited her mom daily.

  “You can tell that ho lying. All them Butlers full of stuff. I wouldn’t believe a thing that came out of any of their mouths. They all about straight up flow. Henry getting ready to dump that ho Leslie. As soon as the election is over, he gonna handle his bid’ness, watch and see. Now, what you gonna do about that ignorant Negro of yours?”

  Cheryl looked at her daughter with unrevealing eyes. She did not want to lie about her feelings and what she and hopefully the next president of the United States had shared, but this was her daughter and there were some things she did not feel comfortable talking about with her. “Sarah, I’ve told you a hundred times. I love Brandon. Okay? I really do.”

  “Cheryl, please,” Sarah said, getting up and heading toward the kitchen. “Don’t even fake the funk like that. I mean Brandon’s cool sometimes, but damn, he ain’t like that pretty red nigga on TV.”

  “Sarah!”

  “Wud-eva,” she said, opening the oven door and allowing it to “pop” to a close loudly. “Listen, you want me to heat up some popcorn or a lil’ sumptin?”

  Still staring at her daughter in the kitchen looking for food, Cheryl said, “No,” and turned her attention back to the television.

  When she’d married Brandon, he was a little younger than her daughter was now. She’d known there would be friction, because Sarah never gave him a chance, but she’d never anticipated this much antagonism.

  Walking back into the living room, Sarah looked for somewhere to sit with the bowl of fruit and a bag of miniature Snickers bars from the cabinet. “Cheryl, I’m, umm, sorry for cursing and disrespecting your house and all, I just—”

  “Don’t sit in that chair!” Cheryl yelled as her rotund daughter began to squat. “I gotta take it to the shop. Come sit on the couch . . . by me.”

  “Damn, when I make my comeback,” Sarah said, returning with her ball in her food-free hand, “the first thing I’m gonna do is buy you a whole house full of furniture and get rid of these sticks!”

  As her daughter sat beside her, Cheryl looked at her lovingly as she ripped open the Snickers bag with her teeth. “You want me to cook you something? You shouldn’t be eating all that junk while you’re in training.”

  “Naw, that’s okay. I got a call,” she said, looking at the television, “from a general manager in Italy first thing this morning. They want me to come over there and try out in Madrid.”

  “Wow. That wonderful! Madrid, Spain?”

  “Naw, a Madrid, Italy. At least I think that’s what she said. I told them about Greece and that was where I really wanted to play ball, but she seemed to think I’d have a better chance of making it in the WNBA if I spent a couple of years in Italy like Kym Williams and Tammy Jackson did.”

  “You told her how many years you’ve been out of sports?” Cheryl asked as she wrapped her daughter’s hair around her finger.

  “Yeah, they know. They wanted me, remember, when I left TSU, but I wasn’t ready for it then. Now with the WNBA kicking, I’m all for it. You got any Red Devil?”

  “For what, Sarah?” her mother asked as she looked at what she was eating.

  “Dag, Cheryl, you know I put sauce on everything.”

  “But, Sarah. You’re eating candy . . . and fruit.”

  Stopping in midchew, Sarah looked at her mother as her basketball rolled away, and said, “And your point would be . . . ?”

  Cheryl got up and went into the kitchen as Dan Rather came on the screen and said, “Okay, America, these are the numbers you have been waiting for.” Cheryl sprinted in from the kitchen, handed her daughter a box of cold leftover chicken and a bottle of hot sauce, and turned up the volume of the TV in almost one motion.

  “CBS News is now projecting that the following states will be won by Senator Henry Louis Davis the Second: New Jersey, Michigan, and a big surprise, Minnesota and her ten electoral votes, as well as a state they were doing very badly in, Wisconsin. So let’s look at our up-to-the-minute results as they stand now.”

  DAVIS 127

  STEINER 135

  BALDWIN 112

  “Damn, Cheryl, this shit is tight.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I thought it would be over by now. Wasn’t it two, three weeks ago they were saying he had a shot at a landslide or sumptin?”

  “I didn’t hear that one.”

  “Well, I’m sure I heard it on Dateline or 20/20 or something. Maybe it was on Rikki Lake.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cheryl said, running her fingers through her hair and leaning back on her sofa.

  “So tell me,” Sarah asked as Cheryl watched her put a chicken thigh in her mouth and pull out a bone. “How does it feel to have your name in the history books and shit?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “C’mon, Cheryl. We both know you slept with the brother, and it’s bound to get out when he wins tonight. You got a million-dollar book staring you right smack dab in the face. I got a title for you. How’s this? Henry’s Hootchie. Get it? If you don’t sell the shit to the press, I will. I’ll call Jerry Springer at his mammy’s house and tell ev’ythang for enough money.”

  Cheryl turned up the volume to block out her daughter’s voice, switched to C-SPAN as she wondered where her husband could be, then said, “I didn’t sleep with him.”

  As she dropped the empty chicken box on the hardwood floor, Sarah spread her legs, put several dashes of hot sauce on her Snickers bar, and replied, “Like I said before . . . wud-eva.”

  CHERYL

  Nineteen eighty-three seems like a million years ago, but it still stands out in my mind. It took me about three years to really get over Henry. The only man I had ever been with was Darius, and for three years I constantly, unbeknownst to him, compared him to Henry Louis Davis the Second. The myth moreso than the man. He didn’t walk like Henry. He wasn’t as motivated as Henry. He didn’t dance like Henry. Although Darius actually danced better, I preferred the herky-jerky way Henry danced. For three years I put him through that hell, and seeing Henry when we visited Florida didn’t help. But soon the wounds healed, as wounds sometimes do, and I was only thinking of Henry two or three times an hour. At that point I felt I could get on with my life.

  Darius and I were wed on my twent
y-fourth birthday. We were married on my aunt’s farm in Hope, Arkansas. We had about ten people, thirty or forty goats, and four pigs in attendance. As long as we were standing downwind, we would get a gust of fragrance from the numerous miniature rosebushes she had planted all over the farm in her youth. Unfortunately, for the few seconds when the wind shifted we encountered a not-so-special smell from the pigpen. As the sun set over the mountains on the cool spring afternoon, I looked at Darius. Dressed head to toe in white, he smiled his cute gapped-tooth Huckleberry Finn smile at me, and I felt lucky to have him. Yes, I wore white as my child cried in the background, because I couldn’t imagine getting married in any other color. If I could change anything, about that day looking back, I wouldn’t.

  My aunt, who was almost one hundred at this time, was not able to attend the wedding. She could be so funny at times. Once I asked her about getting a dog and she said no. I asked her a few weeks later about getting a cat and she said hell no. Then I asked her if I could get a parakeet and she asked if I was out of my mind. I asked her what she had against pets. She said she loved pets, but the pets she loved were pigs, goats, possums, coons, and rabbits. She said a pet wasn’t a pet unless you could eat it when you got sick of it.

  So we had the wedding in the back of the farm, not far from her bedroom so she could be with us. She wore cream and had on these white lace gloves which I kept after the ceremony. She even asked me to “paint her face.” So I put on her the same shade of auburn lipstick I was wearing, a dab of rouge, placed a few snips of baby’s breath in her hair, and she looked pretty as a picture.

  She died three months after my wedding.

  After Auntie Eunice died, I found out that she left me the farm and over seventy thousand dollars in her will. Her four children, who lived in the area, divided up about eight thousand dollars. The reason she did that, her neighbor told me, is because I came up from Florida to help her, and they were living in the area and rarely even visited. It was funny—at her funeral, the ones who had seen her the least were the ones who hollered and screamed the most. I didn’t cry one tear, because I had already given her my baby’s breath while she could enjoy it.

  She had one son she did not have to leave anything to. His name was Jesse, but we always called him Jesse James. If Jesse visited the house, we almost had to do a cavity search before he could leave. When I say he would steal anything I mean just that. There was a guy in town who had no teeth. All of the kids called him sock puppet and he bought Auntie Eunice’s dentures from Jesse.

  At sixty years old, Jesse was the family drug addict. Once he and Darius came close to fighting because Darius caught him stealing eggs out of the farmhouse. Jesse finally left and went to New Orleans, and we never heard from him since. We tried to track him down but came up empty, so everyone assumed he’d ended up a John Doe.

  Jesse had a son by the name of Jesse Jr. who was the spitting image of his father and about a year younger than Sarah. Since Jesse’s girlfriend, for lack of a better word, was no more than twenty and was not able to support their child, I took him in and raised him along with three other foster children. I just felt so uncomfortable with all that money and that big old farm for just the three of us, so I thought I could help others in a way. I always wanted to have playmates for Sarah, but who did she play with? Jesse “Future Felon” James Jr.

  I had always wanted a daughter. I always enjoyed wearing pastel colors and doing my hair and wearing makeup, and since Darius was painting his nails when we met, you would imagine that we would have a prissy little daughter. Wrong. She used to whip little Jesse’s butt coming and going. She was climbing trees faster than any boys in the area. She could run farther and jump higher. All she wanted to wear was these cut off dungarees and an Ohio Players T-shirt. Every day, all day.

  I was concerned about her being so rough and tough, so I talked to her school psychologist. He said not to worry, that a lot of girls just go through this phase in life. So I decided not to worry about her and let her do her thing while I made clothes for the foster children and fixed their hair.

  In late ’79 Darius quit his job. He’d worked at this job for over eight months, and I thought he would at least get his year in before stopping. In actuality we didn’t need the money, because we had no bills and grew a lot of our food right there on the farm. But he came home one Sunday afternoon, dirty as a pig, and walked upstairs. I was sewing and Jesse and Sarah were lying down in front of the TV watching the Cowboys and Redskins game. When he walked in, I said hello, but he kept walking. I thought that was a little strange, even for a sometimes quiet guy like Darius. So I followed behind him upstairs and found him sitting on one of the foster children’s bed. As he sat his jaw moved up and down, yet he wasn’t chewing on anything.

  “Darius, what’s wrong?” I asked, standing in the doorway of the room as he sat quietly. He said nothing. So I walked up to him and asked, “Had a rough day? Why are you home so . . .” As soon as I said the words, he stopped chewing and glazed at me and I knew he was unemployed . . . again. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, because I knew it was the last thing he needed. I reached down to unlace his work boots, and in the blink of an eye Darius kicked me under my chin and knocked me across the room.

  I grabbed my jaw hoping it was not broken, and he just looked at me and said nothing as I crumpled to the floor. I didn’t want to cry because of the kids downstairs, but the pain radiated in my face like a neon light. Darius tied his boots up and walked back downstairs, and I didn’t see him again for two days.

  I didn’t know how to handle this situation. I wavered between wanting to call to report the assault to wanting to call to file a missing person’s report. Believe it or not, Darius and I had never had a real argument. Did we have differences? Of course, but we never flared up at each other. I guess we’d had a way of stifling it until it was all over, and it worked for us. We had been together by this time over eight years, had been married for three, and there was absolutely nothing in this man’s character that could have prepared me for what he did. My dad, bless his heart, and mom used to get into it all the time. They would fight with verbal switchblades, which in a way was worse than physical fights, because my dad could sometimes get brutal and left emotional scars that took years to close, not to heal but just close.

  One morning at about 4:00 A.M. I felt Darius slide into bed. I didn’t know what to do or think. I wanted to kick him back or at least give him a nice, stiff elbow to the ear. And I also wanted to hug him, cry on his shoulder, and tell him how scared I’d been. Looking back, I think I was closer to the stiff elbow than the tears. But the swelling had gone down and I did neither.

  The next morning I got out of bed and fixed the kids breakfast at 6:00 A.M. like always, and before I was finished, I saw him walking out the door. This was the month of November and we had a few inches of snow on the ground. Suddenly I realized he’d walked out without a hat or coat or anything. Just walked out in his long johns. All the kids, except Sarah, saw him and burst out laughing as I ran to the window to see what the hell he was doing. I heard Sarah, who was not the oldest or even the largest, stand up and say, “Y’awl best’a shut up before I stick ya with dis ere’ fork.” Darius walked out past his truck and my car toward the mailbox and started peeing. As he relieved himself, he put his hand on the mailbox, held his head back and really got into it. I went out on the porch without my shoes, and yelled, “Darius, what’s wrong with you? Get back in this house!” He looked at me as if he were in a trance as steam came from the earth, finished his business, shook and tucked himself in and came back to the house.

  A week later I did the shopping, and when I returned the phone was ringing. I dropped my bags and ran to the house because we didn’t get many calls out there in the middle of nowhere. It was the police department. Darius had gone into the department store, pulled off his clothes, and started walking around buck naked wearing a pair of Stacy Adams and a cowboy hat. That’s what the policeman told me. He didn’t
use an official-sounding term like indecent exposure or anything. He said, “Ma’am, your husband was in Wal-Mart buck naked.” Or was it “bare-ass necked”?

  Anyway, I jumped in the pick-up and sped down to the police department, assuming that since he did not have a record of any nature, I could bring him home. After evaluating him, they sent him to the psych ward at the hospital for observation.

  I found out later that the reason Darius had not spoken much to me was because he had an aneurysm in his brain, which was affecting his speech as well as his thought process. The doctor told me it could have been dormant for ten years or more. That would explain why he was not too bright. He was a nice guy and all, but sometimes you would look at him and you could see that all the lights were not turned on.

  The operation on the aneurysm left us almost broke. I had to pay cash for it since he had quit his job and had no health benefits. So after he was feeling better, I sold the farm that had been in our family since the 1800’s and moved back to Miami with my husband, daughter, Jesse James Junior, and the foster children.

  After returning to South Florida, I was constantly reminded of Henry. There was no way to avoid him. His face was on buses and cabs and he was in my bedroom on TV. At night Darius and I would sit there and I would feed him a little peach sherbet because he’d lost the use of his arms, and whenever the “Henry Davis for Congress” commercial would come on I could see my husband almost cry. Like I said, Darius was always a decent man.

  It was about this time I started gaining weight. From stress and excuses, I blew up four dress sizes almost overnight. I could feel rolls on my stomach, the upper portion of my thighs started to turn black, and when I walked a flight of stairs, it felt as if I’d worked out in the gym for an hour. But in spite of all of my physical changes, Darius always looked at me when I undressed like he had the first day he had walked me to class in high school.