Slow Way Home

by Michael Morris

  When the minister began to talk about waiting on God, my attention drifted to the stained-glass windows and high ceilings. Organ pipes stretched above the altar and at the very top hung a gold crucifix. From where I sat, Jesus looked pitiful hanging on that cross with thorns on his head. He was much skinnier than the Jesus I had seen. Looking up at Him, all I could think about were the words Mama had shared before she set out for her destiny. “Every day we got a choice to be pitiful or powerful.”

  After the service Aunty Gina stood under a magnolia tree and fanned herself with the church bulletin while Esther pulled the car around. All different sizes of women came by to kiss her cheek and pat my head. Just as we were getting into the car, a man with square glasses with gold frames came towards us. He stepped high like a horse and waved a paper in the air. Seeing him wear the same pokka-dotted bow tie I had on made me want to jump in the car.

  “Hold on, Gina.”

  Aunty Gina laughed the same way I’d seen my cousin Mary Madonna do in beauty pageants. “Jackson. You’re going to have a heatstroke carrying on so.”

  “Have you seen the paper this morning?”

  “Do you ever stop with all your foolishness? Right here at church, mind you.”

  The man popped the paper open and pointed at one of the stories. “He is doing his best to stop that session. I went over this with him just yesterday, and he told me he would not interfere. Now look here.”

  “Jackson, he is the Senate president. There are a few decisions the man can make without consulting you. Besides, as I told you before, whatever he wants to do is fine with me. I’m not bucking him.”

  The man shook his head. “Gina, I’m telling you right now, we’re in a fix. If we lined them up, we’d have cases stretching from here to Charlotte. We’re bogged down. That courthouse annex best get funded—now this is our best shot.”

  Aunty Gina fanned and pulled me closer all at the same time. “Enough of such talk on Sunday. Brandon, I want you to meet one of my oldest friends, Judge Jackson Avery. Judge Jackson is one of the finest superior court judges in the state of North Carolina.”

  “You can only flatter for just so long.” The judge smiled at Aunty Gina before looking at me. “Pleased to know you. Put it there, young man.” His wide hand stretched down, and all I could think of was the Santa Claus–looking judge that caused Nana and Poppy to go to jail.

  “Well go on, honey. Don’t be bashful. Go on and shake his hand.”

  As I stuck my palm in his, I looked down. An edge of cement had cracked away from the street drain. I could hear Aunty Gina and Judge Jackson chuckle. Their voices were in time with the organ music that spilled from the church doors. Kicking a chipped piece of concrete, I wanted to slide down the drain with it. No matter what Aunty Gina said, in my book judges were the same as government women with clipboards who show up at your house to cause problems but never solve anything.

  After Sunday lunch the house grew still. Chimes from the clocks and creaks from settling floors were the only sounds I heard. Aunty Gina and Esther had settled in for their afternoon naps. They walked up to their bedrooms at the same time, but went to opposite ends of the house. Aunty Gina took the main staircase with its marbled steps, while Esther walked up the pine stairs tucked in the kitchen corner.

  The main staircase swept down into the foyer. One of those big chandeliers hung right in the middle. Rubbing the slick marble railing, I walked up the stairs twice before getting up my courage. A whistling snore came from the end of the house where Esther slept. Straddling the marble railing, I was just about to slide down when a small door down below caught my eye. It was as tall as me and tucked in the space between the end of the stairs and the downstairs bathroom.

  When I pulled the handle, the creaking door made me stop and count to twenty. Visions of a disfigured monster came to mind. Probably a tortured child that Esther kept chained to the steps. A long rope dangled, and when I pulled it a lightbulb swung back and forth.

  Concrete steps led down to a slab floor. The smell of preserves and dampened dust filled the room. Jars with tomatoes and pickles were scattered across a table that looked like it might have once been in a dining room. The room was small, with a ceiling so low that it blanketed me. Instead of torturing children, I pictured Esther canning just like Nana. In that room their way of living didn’t seem as strange. Crates and a cabinet filled with wine bottles were the only things that were different than in the farmhouse. After I ran my finger over the jars of tomatoes, peaches, and pickled cucumbers, I felt as if I had brushed against my past. Running up the steps, I decided it was time to find my own destiny.

  The library was right next to the sunroom. Photos in color and black and white lined the dark shelves. Books as big as family Bibles filled the built-in cases. I used the fancy ladder that leaned against the wall to get a better look at the photographs. Stepping up to the highest point, I saw photos of Aunty Gina as a younger woman with a fur wrapper around her bare shoulders. There were pictures of her husband posed at a desk with the state flag draped behind him. Climbing down the steps, I missed one and regained control by gripping the railing tighter. The ladder tilted to the left and I held my breath, praying that it wouldn’t topple over. I’d be back at the feeble-minded home for sure.

  Steadying myself, I reached out and lightly touched a silver frame. A color picture of Aunty Gina in a ball gown with her husband. On either side were President and Mrs. Nixon. I looked closer, wondering if the faces had been glued on the same way Mary Madonna had done with a picture of Miss America. But there were no cut lines or glue marks. Just the smiles of people who looked like they were as close as family.

  Twenty-one

  It was the word “pecan” that made me serve time in Miss Helda’s White Gloves and Party Manners School. I was in the TV room minding my own business when Aunty Gina called out from the library, “Sugarfoot, why don’t you come in here and try one of these chocolate squares.”

  “Now, Gina, they’re swirl bars. My girl Corinth finally managed to copy the ones they have down at the bakery. I told her I might just keep her on my payroll after all.” Mrs. McMasters fanned her red winged hair with the cards and kept a steady gaze on me.

  Through a fog of cigarette smoke, the glistening desserts were scattered on silver trays. Aunty Gina got up to fix me a plate of the swirl bars. “How many do you want?”

  At the end of the table my eyes landed on the pecan pie, its edges dusted in brown sugar. A twin to the pie that had sat on Nana’s kitchen counter before the Thanksgiving meal was served. The sound of cackling women could have been the laughter of Aunt Loraine and Mary Madonna. The words flowing around the table changed from those of fashion shows or men who ran around, and became the words of Poppy and Uncle Cecil talking about a tractor that was for sale.

  “Brandon, how many, honey?”

  “I’d rather have some of that peecan pie.”

  Their laughter chased the memory away. Mrs. McMasters kept fanning herself with the cards while the big-chinned woman next to her held her chest and leaned forward. The heat of embarrassment ran up to my forehead.

  “It doesn’t matter how you pronounce it, it still tastes good.” Aunty Gina put an extra big piece of pie on my plate and sent me back to the TV and the world I knew best. I had just made it past the bookshelves and the painting of the man in an army uniform when Mrs. McMasters led the assault.

  “Sweetheart, a peecan is something our mammies placed underneath their beds. A pecan is something we eat.” I heard them laugh again, and I moved so fast that the pie slid sideways on the plate.

  In the hallway, I pressed my head against the door, both wanting to hear what was being said and trying to pull myself away all at the same time. “Bless his sweet little heart,” Mrs. McMasters said. “No telling what sort of rearing the poor thing has had. Proper training, I tell you, that’s what he needs.”

  “Oh, my little grandbaby, you know Nell’s daughter, anyway she just started party school. O
ld lady Helda Kipshaw’s training them how to be proper little ladies and gentleman. Just as cute as can be.”

  “Lucille, you might just be onto something with that school,” Mrs. McMasters said. “Gina, I’d register that boy before he ends up embarrassing you to death out in public somewhere.”

  “Honey, if you kept your mind on this game as much as you do on everybody else’s business, maybe we wouldn’t lose all the time.”

  But Mrs. McMasters did win that night. By the end of the week, I was dressed in my church suit and sitting at a long dining-room table learning how to be one of Raleigh’s finest.

  Miss Helda was more ancient than I had imagined. Watching her shuffle across the dining room, I figured that she had probably trained all of the women in Aunty Gina’s bridge club. A gold bumblebee guarded the back of the white hair as if it was the bee’s very own hive. Skin hung from her neck the same way pearls dangled from the socialites she trained.

  I kept my distance from the four girls and three boys who joined me at Miss Helda’s table the same way she said we should keep our distance from complaining about a bad dinner party. At the beginning my fellow travelers on this pristine journey looked at me with the curiosity reserved for a new kid at school. But by the time we were learning how to stir our tea without making the spoon clank against the cup, they were more interested in the boy at the end of the table. He wore glasses and had hair the color of cornstalks. But it was his hands that made them all stare. Even I found myself watching him clutch a spoon in his webbed hand. Four fingers moved together in such a perfect unison that only God could have glued them together.

  “Now boys and girls, it’s time for us to practice our formal introductions,” Miss Helda said. A trickle of sweat ran down my neck and was captured by the starched collar. When it came my turn, the chandelier dangling above us might as well have been a spotlight. Questions that would follow blared in my mind: Why are you staying with Gina Strickland? Where is your own mama? The past had been washed away the day Mama was taken away in handcuffs at Woolworth’s. Now I was going to have to come up with a whole new story. Maybe this was what movie stars meant when they talked about having to wing it.

  “Thank you, Master Brandon Willard. Master Willard is a summer guest of Mrs. Preston Strickland. She reports that his visit has been a ray of sunshine. Welcome, welcome.” The way Miss Helda dressed up my mumbling, even I was beginning to believe that I was a rich nephew who had arrived by train with a cartful of bags, ready to entertain the lonely aunt.

  By the time we had made it to the boy with webbed hands, Miss Helda had moved to the opposite end of the table. From certain parts of the room her hearing was as faded as the gold drapes that hung in the window.

  The boy pushed up his glasses and looked at Miss Helda, who was nodding even though he had not spoken. “Hello, I’m Winston Rickards. I was born in Trenton, New Jersey. My family moved to Raleigh three years ago. I’m very pleased to be here…and oh yeah, pleased to meet you.”

  Miss Helda continued to nod as the boy across from me leaned over and smirked at us. “He means, he moved here from the ocean. Didn’t you Lobster Boy?”

  Giggles from the others became a piercing alarm to Miss Helda, a type of high-pitched noise that not even dogs can tolerate. “Silence. This is a dinner party, not a circus.”

  “Oh, yeah? Just look at the freak show at the end of the table,” the boy whispered.

  Although Miss Helda had already moved on to the importance of writing thank-you notes, I could tell that Winston stayed behind. His eyes cast across the table but never landed on any dish. When he caught my eye, I held his gaze, but only for a second. Pity was as ugly as the way Miss Helda described eating with your fingers.

  With the legislature moving forward with a special session, I saw less of Aunty Gina and more of Esther. She would pick me up after Miss Helda’s school and drop me off at the park once a week, where I’d meet some of the other kids Nairobi was helping for what Aunty Gina called “recreation.” But the recreation was limited to our tongues. When the pretty girl who usually answered the phone had us sit in a circle and talk about our feelings, my inclination was to go jump on a swing. I’d swing higher and higher until I landed right in the middle of the farmhouse porch marked with the year my family had built it.

  When the session was over and everyone was brushing grass from their pants, the pretty girl walked towards me with a paper sack. She bent down and tousled my hair the same way she did with the little kids. “Nairobi wanted me to give you these. They found them when they cleaned out your mom’s apartment.”

  While my mind wanted to dig right in and pull out the past, my heart wanted to toss it in the trash barrel. The girl’s smile faded a notch when I didn’t open the bag.

  “Don’t you want to open it?” She reached in and pulled out a stack of envelopes tied together with a ratty string. “Letters from your grandparents.” She laughed and ran her finger over the edges the way you might expect someone to shuffle cards. “All of these are letters just for you.”

  Riding in the backseat of the car staring at Esther’s short gray hair, I tried to convince myself that, like Nana, Poppy, and Mama, I too was in prison. Esther was my warden and the state was giving me three meals a day. I stuck my hand in the bag and secretly ran my fingers across the sharp edges of the envelopes. I pictured Nana and Poppy riding in the backseat with me. Poppy would be asking all kinds of questions about the car engine, and Nana would be ordering him to keep quiet with a shake of her head. Watching the big two-story homes pass by, I tucked the bag behind my back. The letters, like my past, were secrets that Esther had no business knowing.

  It wasn’t until we were a block away that the anger managed to find my new address. Mama had hidden the letters just like she had the letter from Nairobi. She had kept them away on purpose just so she could keep on hating Nana and Poppy.

  Back home Esther sent me outside and then proceeded to lock all of the doors. She peered through the sheer curtain of the patio entrance. “I don’t need you tracking up my waxed floor. Keep outside until I call you.”

  A familiar sound of water rolling over the rocks by the creek back at the farm caused me to turn. A statue of a little boy peeing into a big pit filled a side of the backyard. Trees as tall as the ones at the farm towered over me and shadowed patches of the grass. A backyard so neatly trimmed and decorated that it didn’t even seem like real life. A tall hedge of shrubbery made a fence that divided the property. Over the top of the shrub I could make out the roofline of one home. At the end of the shrub, I squeezed through the prickly branches. Behind the hedge, communities of trees surrounded a swimming pool and tennis court. A tall brick house with a glassed patio stood guard.

  Leaning against the back of a tree, I opened the first letter as if it might disintegrate right in my hands. Each syllable and pitch of their voices sank deeper into my being. Poppy was taking classes and liked science the best. He wanted to take a bet on who could make the best score, him or me. His tiny words told me that he was working with the dairy cows and for me not to worry about him. “Worry” was the word both of them used over and over, as if their sentences would protect against it. Nana’s swirled words updated me on all the news from Abbeville. Sister Delores kept in regular contact and had even sent a fruitcake for Christmas. Bonita had married Parker, the highway patrolman, and Beau seemed to be liking him better. Nana was even leading Bible study at the “place,” as she called prison. While I was reading the last letter, a tear fell on top of the blue ink, and I carefully tilted the paper so that it would roll away from the rest of her words. “You’ve got a whole lot of people who love you and don’t forget I’m at the top of that list.”

  Packing the letters back into the bag, I felt emptiness circling around me, but I wouldn’t let it in. Peace was the gift their words had given me. Hope was found inside those stained envelopes, just as it had been the day I first walked the aisle at God’s Hospital.

  The voices of Nana a
nd Poppy were back in my mind to encourage me not to worry, to keep me plugging along, to remind me that tomorrow is a better day. While dragging a stick down the hedge the way I had seen prisoners rattle cups on cell bars, in old movies, I discovered the oasis of my former life.

  Nestled at the far end of the hedge was a small garden. Splinters of wood framed the tilled dirt, and a line of string secured vines of the tomato plants. The dirt was warm to the touch, and the damp scent of the earth transported me. Some of the leaves of the tomato plants were cut with perfect circles. “Dad-gum bugs,” Poppy would surely say. All of the plants had the signs of unwelcome guests. Rows of cucumbers and squash looked just as bad, but I kept telling myself that they weren’t down for the count just yet.

  A squirrel jumped from a tree branch. The shaking leaves caused me to turn, and when I did, a tennis court was in full view. The boy from Miss Helda’s class clutched a racket in his webbed hand. He swung the racket so hard that I figured he was picturing the ball as the face of his tormentors. It was that same determination that drew me closer. Dead leaves and sticks crackled until I was just feet away from his afflicted hands.

  “Brandon. Brandon Willard.” Esther’s voice rang out. I raced back through the hedge, hoping that the boy would not hear the warden calling my name.

  “What are you doing back there?” Esther’s hands were planted on the wide hips, and for good measure she curled her lip.