by Lorene Cary
Lillie said the way trauma packed itself into their community this last week reminded her of how she’d been taught to pack gauze into a wound. That’s why so many people couldn’t feel much of anything, but only watch one another as if on a video. This week Lillie called, delivered food and cards, and said the words; and when they did feel it, she asked him, how would they know? Rayne answered simply that he’d shouted at a bike messenger who had come too close, but that so far, neither of them had shot up their TV. They laughed sadly.
Rayne could feel the sex, that he could feel. He could feel the music, but only if it was natty dread and loud. He could feel how the surprising flushes of irritation threatened to derail him: right now, it was with his mother for calling at a bad time; and with Khalil for cavorting on the side of the highway while he was on the phone. The irritation was out of proportion to the offenses; he knew it, and yet, hey, there it was, threatening. Like Lillie, he had thought he’d be happy to hear from his mother. He’d assumed he’d be relieved, satisfied. Instead, he was dragging up the week’s tragedies, as if to confirm what he already knew: that she’d gone somewhere a long damn time ago and had nothing to do with his present life; the time Lillie shaved off her heavy black hair for kids with cancer; the restaurant job when he cut through ten pitas at once with a cleaver and took off the tip of his finger; the first time he plowed Selma’s corn and soybean fields by himself; the time when Magic let him go three rounds with the giant Panamanian who everyone said would kill him—and Rayne won.
Why would his mother up in cushy Bucks County, or wherever she was, call on a weekday afternoon as if he were sitting by the phone, unless she knew nothing about anything in his life? “Voice like honey” was the last thing he wanted to hear.
He dragged every grievance, every sadness, out of the drawer, spread them out, and examined them for an hour until Khalil pulled him out of his head.
“Dad?”
“What is it?”
“Look.”
“I’m driving.”
“Just for a minute, look.”
Rayne’s countenance was more severe than he meant it to be when he turned. The boy flinched slightly. Without words, obviously scared, he held up hands to his face. Light traces of red were forming. His eyes were swollen. Rayne swiveled his eyes back and forth between the boy’s reddened, puffy face and the highway.
“When you walked into the bushes, did anything hit your face?”
Khalil nodded. Tears had collected in the corner of his eyes.
“Does it itch?”
He nodded again.
“Fuck.” Rayne knew that they were just five or ten miles past the last rest stop, but maybe twenty or thirty miles from the next. He maneuvered the truck into the left lane, hoping against hope, and made a U-turn in the next opening in the median. No state trooper. He aimed the truck in the other direction, waited for an opening, then jammed the pedal to get them up off the grass and into the left lane.
“Don’t touch your face, hear me?” he kept saying. “I know it’s hard, but do not touch your face.”
When they drove into the rest area parking lot, Rayne grabbed Khalil’s duffel bag, shouted to him again not to touch anything, and walked him into the men’s room. There he stripped Khalil’s clothes down to his underwear, wrapped them inside out in his coat, and threw them away. Khalil was too afraid to say anything. Rayne leaned him over the sink, first washing his hands and arms with what seemed like a hundred squirts of pink bathroom soap, then his forehead, cheeks, and chin, each area separately, with soap. He tipped Khalil’s head different ways to keep the soapy water, carrying the poison ivy oil, from running into his eyes. Khalil tried not to cry, because Rayne told him that the tears could conduct the oil back into his eyes. He shivered, because without his clothes he was cold, and tried as hard as he could to follow Rayne’s directions.
Rayne left him in the handicapped stall to dress while he went out to try to buy calamine lotion. The cashier flirted with him, bending low to give him an eyeful of tattooed cleavage as she reached beneath the counter. She had a little boy, too, she said. He had been a beautiful baby. “I make pretty babies,” she added, giving him this as a special assurance with his change.
“Yeah, I bet you do.”
Then Rayne went back for Khalil, draped his big coat over him, and bought five giant cups of boiling water at coffee/tea prices at the Roy Rogers, one cup of ice for Khalil’s face, and a twenty-five-cent courtesy cup, which he instructed Khalil to fill with pink liquid soap. They walked to the car, and Rayne told the boy he was to stand with him, watch, help, and touch nothing. Still damp, Khalil began to shiver.
It went on for half an hour, what felt to Rayne like a ridiculous cleanup, with big-gulp containers as buckets and paper towels as rags. Finally, so that he could really scrub down into the plastic upholstery, Rayne sacrificed a T-shirt from his own bag. He recalled bitterly the exact location of his buckets and Pine-Sol at the shop and, in fact, all his supplies: rags, scrub brushes, even Lava soap for the boy. Khalil helped as best he could, mutely, guiltily, truly chastened.
“Put the ice on your face,” Rayne said, and Khalil obliged, though the weather was cold and he was still shivering.
Rayne bagged up the T-shirt, cups, and paper towels to throw them away, draped his extra hoodie on the seat, and went back inside to wash his hands and arms again. Khalil started to climb into the truck, but Rayne wanted to keep him where he could see him. “Come in with me,” he said.
When they came out of the men’s room the last time, the flirtatious clerk was standing there. She said: “My little boy did the same thing last summer. You from around here?”
Rayne started to step. “No, baby, I’m on my way to South Carolina.”
“Well, here,” she said, holding out two individual packs of Benadryl. She looked over her shoulder. “Take ’em.”
“I don’t need to do that,” he said, reaching into his pocket to pay.
She made a pushing motion with one hand. “Just give ’im some. It’ll keep down the swelling.”
“Thanks a lot. I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
“I know.” She flashed him a dimpled grin and turned away with a bounce.
Khalil was happy to take the pills, submit to the calamine lotion, and lie quietly, no video game, faceup, on the backseat. Rayne adjusted the heat, so that the cab felt warm and intimate. After a little while Khalil was hungry again. They drove together and ate, under the influence of the music. Then, pronouncing it a “really long ride,” Khalil slept soundly.
Yellow jessamine and forsythia began to appear here and there along the roadsides, and sprayed yellow in luxurious profusion in the last light of sunshine that began to slant through the atmosphere. Solid cloud cover in the north now opened up to big white cumulus clouds with dusky rose bellies rubbing the stubbly tree line.
Once over the South Carolina line, Rayne regained his equanimity. He bought four bags of spiced pecans from a stand outside a rest stop, dropped one in Khalil’s duffel bag, and ate two as he drove. He swigged the last swallows of lukewarm coffee and hoped that Selma had cooked for them.
———
Once upon a time a boy just like you was sent to find something for the family to eat in the place where the woods met the water. He was getting big, and it was time that he learned how men take care of their families. Because, as his mother said, That’s the way of the world.
He laid a trap and caught a rabbit, but the rabbit said to him: “If you let me go, I’ll show you where a big old crocodile is stuck in the swamp nearby. He’ll be a much bigger, and, might I add, a much tastier, meal than I.”
The boy said to him: “I will not go back to my village empty-handed. If you are lying to me, and there is no crocodile, I will catch you again and kill you.”
With such rough bargaining, they struck a deal.
“That’s not how Grandma Bett would say it,” says King, “but go on. Bett said whoever tells it tells it.”
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“I like it this way, too,” Selma says. “Kinda fancy. Go on.”
The rabbit was indeed as good as his word. He led the boy to a place in the swamp where a jagged tree stump, felled by lightning, had created a natural trap. The big crocodile had waddled into it and was jammed fast, so that he could not pull through or back out.
That’s the way of the world.
“Too bad for you, Mr. Crocodile,” said the boy, and before anyone could say another word, that fast boy took off running to get the men of his village to help him kill the great beast and carry him home.
They could not believe it, but they followed the boy to humor him, and when they saw the huge animal, they killed him and, using heavy rope, strung the croc on two poles stretched across four men’s shoulders to spread the weight. They would eat his meat and tan his leather.
“That’s the way of the world.” The family says it with Rayne-bo. He stops, smiles, and looks from one face to another.
“Go on,” Selma says. “Keep reading. We know the story, too, you know.”
The men sang as they walked with the beast swinging. They sang an old song and put in new words: about the clever boy, and how he’d been sent for a rabbit to feed his family and returned with a crocodile to feed the village. Oh, he was part of their history now.
The vain little rabbit, hearing their song, came out from the bush to remind the boy that it was he, Rabbit, who’d shown the crocodile’s position. Rabbit wanted the boy to tell the men so that they’d sing about Rabbit and immortalize Rabbit in their history of great feats in the village hunting life. One of the younger men who was not carrying the crocodile was watching the edge of the bush intently, as he always did, for movement of prey. When Rabbit stood on his hind legs, the hunter raised his bow and arrow and— zzzzzing-pfft! —shot him dead. Then he picked up the rabbit and gave it to the boy to take home to his mother.
Because (and here the family joins in) that’s the way of the world.
CHAPTER 9
“We home!”
Rayne yelled out the traditional Needham family hallo as he stepped out of the truck and into the mild South Carolina spring night. A discreet moon shone just enough light to reveal the weedy gravel and a whole front yard overgrown.
Selma could see them from the old house, where she’d gone in the late afternoon to make the bed and try to freshen the place a little. The girl she paid to help her had promised to come, but hadn’t shown up. So Selma had tried to clean and cook, but it had been too much for her. It was ten o’clock, and she could barely stand. And now she saw that he’d brought the boy, too. She wondered if she had another set of sheets. People had been going into the house for months since she’d gotten ill last year. Every time she looked for something, she discovered something else lost.
Oh, well, she thought. Nothing she could do about it now. She could just try to enjoy him while she had him. Was a time when she would have run around fussing about the sheets. She reached into the cupboard for a second glass. Like everything else in the place, it no doubt needed washing. So she filled a little bowl with hot, soapy water, and plunged in a juice glass for the boy. It was hard to see into the dark, but she could tell Rayne’s jacketless outline in the moonlight: the familiar big, thick body rocking with remarkable lightness on the balls of his feet, Jesus, so like his great-grandfather King. For a moment she felt disoriented, as if weather had settled on the estuary and she were fogged in, alone.
Rayne was showing the boy the trailer that Jones had purchased with 50 percent down, and Selma had insisted on finishing paying for. He didn’t stay in the trailer after he moved in with the man named Jared who had been his boss with the horses, but whom he now called his partner. Selma had never met Jared, and she doubted she would. In any event, she didn’t ask. She couldn’t see over to the trailer, but she waved two or three times anyway, thinking maybe Rayne would look her way.
He called again, “Aw, c’mon, Nana Selma. You gonna make me come find you? Where you at?”
She felt giddy. It might as well have been his great-grandfather’s teasing, serrated voice that snagged her memory.
———
You don’t know how beautiful you are, do you?
No. What she knew was that she was black and skinny.
C’mon, Smoky, lemme show you.
———
Others had said it was weird, how her eyes, the color of brown beer bottles, matched her skin, like a snake or a witch. King called them smoky eyes, and she loved him for it. Well, Smoke, look like we the only ones to raise this little fella.
He’d said it about Bobo, but she’d thought it to herself two short generations later when Bobo’s daughter sent Rayne to her. And now she’d done it, she thought to herself; she’d won out over Rayne’s feckless mother and grandfather and made him into the man he was born to be.
She remembered how she’d sat him down on the porch when he was a boy, and told him that one day he’d be a big man, and nobody could take anything away from him, and that, out of the kindness of his heart, he’d come over on Sunday afternoons and take her for a drive in the country. One day, when she died, the land would be his.
And here he was.
She knew, now that he was back, that she should have told him about her fall. It had seemed right just to keep going and not worry him when he was on the phone, twelve hours’ drive away, but now she knew he’d be hurt to know she’d kept it from him. This trip, they’d have to have a sit-down, she told herself. Talk business. The place was coming apart around her ears. Most times she made sure not to notice, but at bottom, now that he was here, she knew how it would look through his sharp eyes.
Just one more thing. That’s how to stay ahead.
Okay, she said to herself, just set the table for another place, so you can feed the boy, too. One thing at a time.
But she was so tired, she could hardly even face going across the room to fetch another plate. And she’d been too proud to ask the girl to bring over the little wheelchair she mostly lived in over in the trailer. Then she corrected herself: the trifling, lazy-behind girl hadn’t come; that’s why she was so tired.
So, a little more work.
More work, never less, had been King’s answer to what he joked was the “ongoing inconvenience” of being black. As a seventeen-year-old sharecropper’s daughter, Selma might not have understood the words and phrases he used, but she did know how to work right along with him: two-man days, he called them, hard, long days that few people could sustain. She kept up with him through heat and cold and rain, focused like prayer on doing his will. And then she kept up with him at night, too, happily, in an outsize desire unlike anything she’d ever known before or since. She did everything with him. She could still hear his contented breathing as he slipped into sleep, when she could admire and adore the mountain of him lying next to her, and stay awake to absorb the last warm embers of pleasure. Which may have been why God took him away.
———
Selma tried to watch where Rayne was going. It was dark, but she thought she saw them aim east, toward the raised beds where she’d taught him to tend tobacco as a boy.
And hadn’t he fought her all the way? Starting with suckering the plants. In the first few weeks, she’d take him out to work with her. She showed him how to reach down at the bottom and snap off the suckers. The plant oozed sticky tar, so he had to work carefully. But fresh from New York, and never having done a lick of labor, he made sloppy grabs at the bottom leaves and ripped them off. After an hour, he had himself covered in tar. He sulked, stopping finally to try to pull the goo off his eyebrows.
Selma slowed down to coax him to move on to the next plant. The hired men passed them. Their children stayed in a pack with the new boy, encouraging for a while, until their fathers barked at them to move on. Selma remembered wondering why King’s nieces and nephews could not be counted on to help raise the boy in Philadelphia, where most of them lived, but the fact was that they didn’t. They had sto
pped coming down, stopped sending their children for the summer to learn the land, stopped sending money to help with taxes. Bobo helped when he was home, but he was heavy-handed and bitter, and drove trucks across the country most of the time anyway. Like it or not, it was her job to bring the boy along.
C’mon, baby, we ain’t milking the plant; we gotta sucker it.
Rayne wiped his hand and wasted more time observing the jagged edge where the suckers had been and trying, it seemed, to decide whether any others were the right size to be torn off.
Selma hissed with frustration. I tol’ you like this. Just snap it and move.
He reached out a limp hand.
Snap and move. Snap, doggone it. Like this! The others turned the row and were gone. It was as if Selma were alone with the lazy boy on a jetty of won’t-do. She had told herself that he had never been taught to work, and that God only knew how his mother had failed him. Selma wanted very much to beat him, but she had vowed to King that she would not beat his children. This boy, the spit and image of her husband born years after his death, and with no idea how to live up to his legacy, was indeed still one of his children.
“Pig won’t jump the stile, and I’ll never get home tonight,” she said. It gave her a minute to collect herself, and stop her palms from itching to smack him.
“Ooh, tell me the story. Please.”
“Well, when we gonna work? We sit out here telling stories, we can’t bring in a crop. Don’t make a crop, we don’t eat.”
“Like the story. Please. I’ll work if you tell me.”
“I got news for you, Lazyboy: you gonna work either way.”
Selma secretly suspected that the children in this family would have done better with a few more whippings, but King’s word ruled. Black people had been whipped enough without doing it to their own, he said. Why do you think we stand for it, Smoky? Why? Because our parents teach us firs’ thing: Bam! And then we say to ’em: See there? That’s whatchoo get. When Selma had argued that the children were arrogant, he snorted. White people were arrogant, he said, but we don’t begrudge them their children’s freedom, just our own.
