by Kia Corthron
THE
CASTLE
CROSS
THE
MAGNET
CARTER
THE
CASTLE
CROSS
THE
MAGNET
CARTER
A Novel
Kia Corthron
Seven Stories Press
New York - Oakland
Copyright © 2016 by Kia Corthron
A Seven Stories Press First Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Excerpt from The Story of My Life by Hellen Keller. Used by permission, W. W. Norton & Co., 2003 [originally 1903], New York.
Excerpt from Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, copyright 1939 by Ludwig Bemelmans; copyright renewed © 1967 by Madeleine Bemelmans and Barbara Bemelmans Marciano. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Excerpt from Pittsburgh Courier archives, January 31, 1942, James G. Thompson, Letter to the Editor.
Excerpt from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, used by permission, Penguin Random House LLC.
Excerpt from Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years by Philip S. Foner, used with permission from International Publishers Co., Inc., New York.
Excerpt from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, copyright 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed 1957 by Ernest Hemingway. Used with permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corthron, Kia.
The castle cross the magnet carter : a novel / by Kia Corthron. -- Seven Stories Press first edition.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-60980-657-6 (hardback)
1. Brothers--Fiction. 2. African Americans--Fiction. 3. United States--Race relations--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.O724C37 2016
813’.54--dc23
2015029672
Printed in the United States of America
987654321
In memory of my parents
Shirley Elaine Beckwith Corthron
and James Leroye Corthron
1941–42
Prayer Ridge
RANDALL
1
I got the world.
My family and the trees, the library, picture shows, history and geography and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Longfellow and in the advanced class Mr. Faulkner. I got Prayer Ridge and Lefferd County and the state of Alabama and the United States of America. I got the future: college, law school, med school. Or businessman, choices. And ocean liners to Europe, China: all waiting.
B.J.’s world is smaller. The family, and the trees. Some days it’s smaller still, all inside himself. He’s my little brother. He’s eighteen. I’m thirteen.
I sit with him on the rug between our twin beds. A’s a fist, B.J., see? And B’s four fingers up. And let’s see, C, you just cup your hand like C, see? Then D oh wait. S is the fist, A’s sort of a fist but thumb points up. Then E—wait, that’s trickier. Shoot, I missed D. Guess if I were a better teacher, I’d’ve learned em myself before trying to teach him but I’m short on time, algebra exam tomorrow. I come across the drawings at the front of this book I borrowed from the school library, the “Manual-Finger Alphabet.” The book is The Story of My Life by Miss Helen Keller, which she wrote while still at Radcliffe. Barely anything been translated into Braille back then, yet Helen at fourteen knew Latin, devouring books in German and French and I don’t mean “See Jack run.” Grown-up books, literature!
A few verses of Omar Khayyám’s poetry have just been read to me, and I feel as if I had spent the last half-hour in a magnificent sepulcher. Yes, it is a tomb in which hope, joy and the power of acting nobly lie buried. Every beautiful description, every deep thought glides insensibly into the same mournful chant of the brevity of life, of the slow decay and dissolution of all earthly things.
Essay she wrote, and only a freshman! Well here’s my point: If Helen Keller could do all that in a world of total darkness and silence, why can’t B.J. read when all he is is deaf?
Next day I breeze through the test, 3y + 34 = 2y + 89 easy, finish five minutes early and turn it over in the avoidance of copycats which provokes a few glares in my general direction. Late September, the year barely begun but my reputation’s long been sealed: smartest in the class which is not exactly the golden path to eighth-grade popularity. Lunch I always eat alone which is fine—gives me good time to think. And today what crosses my mind: How’m I supposed to teach B.J. letters when he can’t hear the sound they make, words when he doesn’t understand what language is? Suddenly this whole teaching thing seems way too big, I better just return that Helen Keller book. Then again Helen had her breakthrough, right? Didn’t her teacher help her into the social world? Then again Helen was toddling, already a vocabulary when the sickness stole her senses, so was it that foundation of speech what sprungboard her into communal consciousness? I sip my milk pondering it all as Earl Mattingly pulls my seat out from under me, sticky white all over my shirt, my ass on the floor and half the school laughing.
When I get home the book is not top drawer of my dresser where I know damn well I left it, where the hell? Now B.J. at the doorway holding it, looking at me all eager for the next drill. I take lesson time down to the kitchen, ginger snaps my mother baked, and usually B.J.’d indulge with me but today too raring to learn. Or play, a game to him, like it was to Miss Keller at first.
Two Saturdays back he threw a fit. My mother: “This mighta been cute when you were a baby, but it is not cute anymore,” like he would have any idea, like her trying to reason with a cat. He only pulls that stuff when my father’s not home because Pa’d take the belt to him, “I don’t care how big you are,” though long ago he’d stopped whooping me and Benja. B.J.’s tantrum all about I wasn’t taking him to the park with me. Used to every couple weeks but then, July, there we are, the blanket all laid out, food my mother made for us and I saw em. Kids from my class, coming out the woods and spy B.J. and me. Even with the distance I can make out their smirks.
So lately when I go to the park I go alone, and here’s B.J. home by himself, nobody to play with, and this I think is related to how he’s such an attentive student now: got his playmate back. I dip cookie into milk and say the letters real exaggerated as I hand-show em. He’s all delighted with cross-fingers R, and when I accidentally confuse G for Q he looks in the book and corrects me. I I show him, J. He stares at J, making that hook with his pinkie over and over, then he big-time catches me unawares. B he spells and speaks it, pretty distorted but not out of the ballpark, then J, then points to himself. I smile. He figured that out without me telling him, my big little brother B.J. got his Helen-eureka fast. I spell him the rest of the family: Mother, Father, Benja, Randall and, smart again, he knows with the last one to point to me. When the lesson’s over I close the book. He snatches it and takes it back with him to our room. Oh Lord, how’m I gonna explain to him it’s borrowed and due back less than a week?
The next day’s Friday and by some miracle Mrs. Goodman’s already checked the algebra tests, and I’m pleased and unsurprised at my big fat A though perturbed her nitpicking brought me
down to 96 even if it’s still the class high. When I get home B.J. and Ma are all into it. She doesn’t understand what kind of game he’s playing with his hands, with her hands, is beside herself with his frustrated conniptions. I give her the news flash: B.J.’s spelling “Mother.” She gets this dazed look like she can’t hardly believe it, and B.J. looks at me grinning, spelling “Randall” over and over so fast, faster even than fourth-period Madame Everhart’s spoken French so takes me till the third time before I get it.
2
Mr. Roosevelt said, “I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.”
He’s the only person I ever heard was for it.
Reverend Pitsfield to the congregation: “A hundred and seventeen thousand Americans lost in the Great War, now they think they gonna drag us into another?”
My parents: “We barely makin it with this New Deal, now Roosevelt threatenin to give us a raw deal.”
U.S. History Mr. Holcomb: “You know how many soldiers Japan’s got? Million and a half! You know how many soldiers Germany’s got? Three million! You know how many we got? A hundred twenty thousand, they’d pulverize us! Just eked ourselves outa the Depression, what we got to think about is giving every family bread before we ever ask them to give their sons. Isolationism!”
And then Pearl Harbor. And then half of last year’s high school football team headed to Europe or the Pacific whilst the Evanses in pj’s unwrapping presents. Benja gets some nice stationery which was what she wanted, plus a jewelry box, B.J. gets three big coloring books and crayons. Watching him rip them open in the sleepy fog of predawn Christmas, I take a rare step back, seeing my family. My blond mother, hair just past her shoulders. My reddish pa, spose I got my strawberry blondness from the both of them. My very blond sister with the thick wavy hair falling a few inches below her shoulders, and B.J., that darker sandy blond color to him. And tall as hell, already looking down at Pa and Pa’s tall, and B.J. doesn’t seem ready to stop growing. Later in the day, while the rest of us running around past him living our lives, he just sits quietly shading in Santa and those elves.
What I get is binoculars which is not what I wanted but I know better than to show a speck of disappointment. All smiles, “Thank you,” and anyhow I have since come up with a plan. In the park in the woods there’s this particular oak. I figured out every knob and hole so I’m to the top no time, and from there you can see everything, the picnickers and revelers in the open fields out to the left, and just below to the right you got the clearing, this very clandestine space where once I spied a couple teenagers making out, thinking nobody watching. I couldn’t quite catch all that was going on so my spyglasses’ll definitely enhance my treetop eye view.
What I wanted: a War to End All Wars Sopwith model, which I saw in the window of Gephart’s Athletic Gear and Footwear, 98¢. Real rubber tires and leather seat, tan body and the gold parallel wings with the targets on the top wing, red circle inside white circle inside blue circle. The colors is England, not America, the Sopwith Camel was a British flyer. (Have to say, I did always wonder why in the heck a fighter plane would be decorated with targets.) I’d hinted about it on more than one occasion to my mother, but I guess with her having served in the War to End All Wars that didn’t, she couldn’t wrap her mind around my wanting a part of it for my personal amusement.
She was a nurse in France, 1918. She knew my father before, from growing up, but those days to her he weren’t nothing more than the landscape. Then off to Europe they both go, fairy-tale castles and blitzkriegs and come back, he offered her the ring.
Walking home from church Sunday before Christmas, she told us her prayer: “That this war be over quick, the boys and girls brought home.” (The pastor led the prayer for the “boys in uniform” but my mother lets people know “Not all of us girls came back neither.”) She goes on: “And I thank You Lord my children are all spared: my oldest deaf, my middle a girl, my youngest too young.” Only Benja and me with her. Pa’s technically Baptist like us but never was much of a churchgoer, and B.J. no longer. When we were younger, B.J.’d sit in the pew singing even while the kids made fun, till one Sunday the choir director turned around from the loft, not to chew out those brats but staring right at B.J., finger to her lips. Back home he cried, and she held him, Ma reading from the nursery rhyme book he loved, staring at the pictures, staring at her moving lips. That was B.J.’s last day in church, and took two years and a change of choir directors for my mother and sister and me to go back.
Ma and her sisters trade off the holidays, and it’s my mother’s turn for Christmas. Pa is no drunk but holidays with company he might tie-on with his brother-in-laws. This year he’s smashed before dinner, glowering at my cousin Ty. Ty’s twenty-two, works at the sawmill with my father, and Pa goes, “The chicken pox! The goddamned chicken pox.” When that subject comes up, the extended family know it’s time to grab their coats. So nobody left to eat dinner enough for an army but us, turkey and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes we got for the duration.
On the 29th my father decides to check the temperature. “What’s for supper?” from his soft chair as my mother passes by with the dirty laundry she just collected. I’m sitting on the floor by the tree, my mind all in The Sun Also Rises which I have a report due on after New Year’s, but now I look up. Ma stops, glares at him, moves on through. Thus he knows the degree’s still below freezing and goes back to his newspaper.
JAPANESE LEAND ON SUMATRA
More trouble in Pacific after Hong Kong Christmas Day surrender to Axis
“I guess we’ll be havin turkey till Valentine’s Day,” says Benja on her way through the room, hurling a meaningful glance at my father who pretends he doesn’t see her, and I remember this years-ago Christmas Eve, me five and Benja eight and B.J. ten, and Benja comes to the boys’ room so my father can tell us the manger tale. Benja and I liked when my father told stories, and B.J. liked it most of all. All through it he’d be bouncing, uttering sounds he couldn’t hear and that made no sense to us. My father paid him as much mind as the furniture, my father’s narrating eyes fixed on Benja and me.
“Come ere.” I’d just gone back to my American Lit assignment, but now I put the book down and walk over to him, sit cross-legged by his chair. I know by the tone of “Come ere” he plans to talk longer than I’d like to stand. “I tell you about bein in the infirmary in France when the influenza went flyin through?” Now the Christmas music loud from the kitchen radio, my mother making a point that for the time being my father’s voice is still off-limits to her ears.
“Veterans always wanna talk about the bunkers. Oh I got the bunker stories, like when me an my buddies three days, no food, no water, the bombin all aroun. I probably already told you that one.”
“I think so.” Hundreds of times.
“People wanna romanticize it, the bombs burstin in air. But how about jus the sickness? What, less honorable a boy leave his house an home, go other side a the world to fight for freedom an die a the flu? Robbie’s fever through the roof. And there mutterin the times a his life he remember the girl he leff behind, last fight with his daddy, flunkin the math test.” Pa chuckles. “That his right leg below the knee been blowed off seem to slip his mind while he countin off his life’s miseries.” In the hallway beyond us Benja flies past, a direct trajectory to the front door. “Where you think you goin?”
She stops, stands at the living room entrance, arms crossed. “Party.”
“What the hell kinda party?”
“Sherry’s birthday.”
“Not before supper.”
“Food at the party. Frankfurters.” Bang! bang! bang! from the kitchen. My mother stomping. Calling B.J.
“You can eat a real supper right here first.”
“At Sherry’s they’re done eatin turkey.” Her eyes ice.
My father gives her brazenness a good look before he says it. “No.” B.J. bounding down the steps.
“It’s a supper party!”
“It’s a hot dog party. You’ll eat supper here.”
“I’ll be full when I get there! Know how rude it is to go to a party and not eat?”
“I should say no to the whole damn thing. An I know you jus goin to see that boy, piece a trash.”
They bicker, and I think on how my father tells his Great War stories frequently and my mother tells hers never, even with the picture of her in navy nurse’s uniform stuck on their bedroom vanity mirror. But once I overheard one. Fifth grade, I threw up in social studies and they sent me home. My mother wasn’t here, B.J. wasn’t here so I go up, fall asleep on my bed. Something wakes me. I creep out of my room, top of the steps where I look down but they don’t see me, Ma wailing and Mrs. Watkins speaking comfort from the other chair cross the room, and B.J. not knowing what’s going on bawling in sympathy, making his deaf sounds, patting her, soothing her.
“It woulda been my first baby!”
“I know. I know.”
“I done it. I kilt it. Throwin myself down them steps.”
“What was you sposed to do? Not married.”
“Coulda give it up for adoption!”
“Waaaah! Waaaah!” B.J.’s sympathy wails.
“That’s jus why I say women shouldn’t go into the military.”
“I was a nurse! I saved lives!”
“And what’s your payback? How many of em? A woman can’t fight off one man, let alone—How many of em? You wouldn’ta even knowed who was the father.”
“They made me. I didn’t want it.”
“I know.”
“They made me! I didn’t want it!”
“Baby made from that much meanness, it don’t need to be out in the world.”
“I was a sergeant. One of the privates salutes me before.”
