The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter

by Kia Corthron

  That boy’s just as dead.

  Yes, he’s just as dead. Then I stop moving my hands, wishing we hadn’t paid already so I could ask for the check now and signal our departure, the end of this “date,” as I can’t bring myself to just stand up and walk out. Our first argument. She’s from Dixie, she knows exactly what I’m talking about and yet she’s determined to be stubborn.

  You’ve never been back South since you left?

  No.

  When will you go?

  Never.

  Because of everything you just said?

  Yes.

  She salts her food liberally and unnecessarily, then moves her hands, still looking at her plate. Is that why you’re with me? And now she looks up. Because I’m black?

  My eyes narrow. I will be forty-eight in a week. I waited my entire life to be close to someone in the way I’m close to you and now you dare ask me that?

  Three young men are suddenly at our table snarling. They all talk at once so reading their lips is even more confusing than usual, but from scattered words and the looks of disgust I get the gist: What’s a pretty black girl like you doing with that old white man? It is only now that I realize I’m the only white person in the restaurant. I turn away, wondering if April May June in her present mood will be inclined to agree with them.

  She begins to sign to them. Not only is the idea ridiculous, the chances of them knowing the sign language slim to none, but her hands form complete nonsense: father, run, say, D, hate, ball, M, Y.

  “Hey,” they’re obviously saying through their laughter, “we don’t know any sign language,” at which point she gives them the middle finger. They are taken aback, a huge laugh but it’s now a bit nervous, confused, embarrassed, and they leave.

  She turns to me with a smirk, finally picking up her fork to eat and with her left hand she speaks: The universal sign.

  **

  Sunday, June 6th, I’m home on-call all day, but Lloyd has kindly given me the evening off so that April May June may take me out to celebrate. She enters my apartment at seven as planned.

  Ready? She smiles but her cheer seems forced.

  Are you alright?

  I’m fine. She kisses me. Happy Birthday.

  She takes me to a new restaurant in my neighborhood, brightly lit the way we like it so as to read each other’s signs, and to that end as soon as we sit we move the centerpiece to the side. I’ve never had French food before, presuming it to be beyond my budget (and usually lit atmospherically darker), but the prices here are reasonable, the salmon melt-in-your-mouth. My companion is trying to be happy for me but I see her mind is elsewhere. I know there’s no sense prodding her, she’ll never tell me what’s wrong until she’s ready.

  During dessert she hands me a book she constructed herself, colored paper and yarn, her own calligraphy: poems by Loy E. Golladay. She’s told me about the writer’s style, often applying sign-language syntax to his English verse, the pieces frequently droll, always surprising. Deaf authors being discriminated against in the mainstream, he has not yet been published in book form so she has anthologized the work herself. I am, as a hearer would put it, speechless.

  I need to use the bathroom. There’s only one toilet, which I prefer as multi-stall situations can be embarrassing to the deaf. (It took several red-faced episodes for me to determine that the odd, and sometimes glaring, looks I received from other men was related to my aiming for the pool of water in the urinal bottom rather than quietly against the urinal wall.) The door is closed so I wait. I don’t like trying the knob which may disturb an occupant. If no one comes out in a few minutes, I’ll assume it’s empty.

  A white man, about six feet tall so several inches shorter than I, stands behind me. Less patient, after about five seconds he gives me a look before walking ahead, knocking harsh and brief, turning the knob and, scowling in my direction, stepping into the empty lavatory. As he starts to close the door I’m stunned to see April May June suddenly appear to hold it open against his strength and say, as I read her lips, He’s deaf, you moron.

  The man is startled and vaguely frightened. But he quickly recovers, then laughs, and to himself, though we can clearly see it, he mocks her enunciation as he turns away and starts to close the door again. April May June smacks the back of his head, hard. Instinctively he rears around, pulling back his fist, and I quickly insert myself between her and the bastard. He stomps away, leaving the commode free.

  I turn, my eyes hard on her.

  I had to come and find you. They were clearing away our dishes and I needed to know if you wanted to take some of that fondue home.

  Are you insane?

  Fuck him. And she swerves around and exits. I follow her, the toilet remaining unused.

  We head back, her gait rushed, her hands uncharacteristically still.

  When do you plan on telling me what’s wrong.

  I hate hearies! Skipping ahead of you! Making fun of my speech!

  Rude people. Then I think better of it, the image of that monster rearing his fist back at her. Ugly people. You mean you hate ugly people.

  I know what I mean!

  I think, Do you hate Ramona? but know better than to be reasonable right now. We get to my building and she flies in, running up the stairs ahead of me.

  I walk up the two flights. When I get to my apartment, I use the toilet before heading back to my bedroom. She is sitting on my bed and already seems to have done a bit of crying, something I’ve never seen from her, and force-stopped it. Next to her is the current New Yorker, open to a short story.

  Read it.

  I take the magazine and sit in my desk chair rather than on the bed, to give her space. “72 Hours” by John B. Caulfield. As I read, I periodically sneak glances at my guest who had eventually lain down on her back, staring at the lighting fixture on the ceiling.

  When I’m finished, I toss the weekly on the bed near her. She sits up.

  So?

  The writing’s fine but the plot’s not to my tastes.

  Notice anything familiar?

  I frown. The tale of a junkie in withdrawal who murders a man, and no one I know fits that description. Before I can reply she answers for me.

  John Caulfield was at my birthday party! I met him at some temp job, and we were having all these conversations because we’re both writers. He was that white guy with the reddish hair, a hearer. No, nothing happened, we were just friends, I asked him to my birthday last year too and that’s when he must have written that, how about that part with the silent party? Being at a party with all these deaf people, and how can they call it a party with no music? I guess he used my party for his damn research, jackass! She opens the magazine and rips it in half, longwise from the mid right page to mid left, which is impressive, then flings it. Don’t tell me I don’t hate hearies, how about your wonderful hearing boss, the one whose deaf assistant gives free labor in exchange for favors. How many favors has he granted? I bet he doesn’t even have a plan for you if there was a fire. You couldn’t hear the fire alarm! My lights are attached to the fire alarm, what about you? Your skinflint boss would just run out and forget you!

  One of your stories was just rejected?

  And she cries and cries and I go and hold her. When her sobs subside, she shows me the letter which she has crumpled into her handbag, addressed “Dear Fiction Submitter.” Then she reaches into the bag again, pulling out three well-used composition books.

  Wanna see them?

  I sit beside her and read. Many stories: she’s quite prolific. After a while she tries to put The New Yorker back together and read other articles. Eventually she falls asleep. I wake her gently.

  The billy goat tale made me want to weep.

  She tentatively smiles. Really?

  I tell her what I liked, which was plenty, and what I didn’t like, which was rare. Which
stories had great beginnings but endings that left me unfulfilled, which stories had ingenious endings but seemed slow to start. I’m initially hesitant to say anything less than upbeat, not only because of her sensitivity but because of my own insecurities as I am no writer, but she encourages all the criticism, excited at long last to be discussing her work, thrilled for my praise and intrigued when I am less satisfied, which she seems to eagerly incorporate into her plans for revisions.

  Two hours into the discussion she sighs. The problem is they’re all autobiographical. And sometimes life is boring.

  Then you can embellish. It’s fiction. Which leads her to ask more questions in this vein, and I smile answering, between the poetry book and the stories her two “homemade” gifts of literature have made my forty-eighth the happiest birthday I’ve ever had.

  At 2 a.m. she decides she’ll make us omelets. I see her searching through my neatly stacked pots and pans for a fryer, the whole assemblage tumbling out. I imagine it has caused quite a racket, which I hope hasn’t awakened the neighbors.

  She takes the round alarm clock she’s brought in her bag and sets it for 7:30, then puts it under her pillow where she’ll feel the vibrations of the ring. She needs to be at work by nine. The worst thing about being deaf, she remarks, is that you can’t just pick up the telephone and call in sick. It’s close to five and she has lain down on top of the bedspread, still asking me questions but her voice is fading, when her eyes fly open in a panic: We forgot to have sex! and the next moment she’s gone for what’s left of the night.

  I come to a groggy arousal at 8:35. Since I’ve been with April May June, my chronic insomnia seems to have all but vanished, but I’m still hard pressed to ever sleep in. She has not stirred. I gingerly remove the clock from under her pillow. In her middle-of-the-night fog she had set the time but forgot to turn the alarm on. I gently rise and go into the kitchen. Put on the teapot, then open my pots and pans door to see what damage she has done to my order. As soon as I pull the knob the cookware flies out again, covering the floor. I glance at her under the blanket I had laid on her before turning out the light a few hours ago. The crashing vessels have not caused her to bat an eyelash, her deafness apparently as total as mine. I consider what she said about the fire alarm. I know the system—any fire in any apartment, including mine, would set off the alarm for the entire building—and while I’ve always been aware this would do me little good, I’d just accepted the risk. But it’s no longer only me. In case of emergency two lives would be at stake.

  At nine I knock on Lloyd’s door. He answers with bed hair and stubble. Technically his workday also begins now, but as long as he gets his job done the tenants don’t complain about his taking liberties with the schedule.

  Lloyd, I need you to do me a FAVOR. April June needs you to call in sick to work for her.

  He chuckles at the note, the import of favor clear. He is lazy about notes, but has learned to enunciate clearly toward my lip-reading efforts.

  “Well, Mr. Evans, I can’t just say she’s calling in sick. What should I say she has. Flu?”

  I shrug, nod, and show him the number in her address book which I’d retrieved from her bag. He makes the call while I watch him from the doorway.

  “Anything else?” I know from his expression this is sarcasm, and yet I jot another memo.

  As a matter of fact, I have been wondering about the fire safety plan. As you know, I cannot hear the alarm.

  There is the trace of a smile on Lloyd’s face as he motions for me to step inside. On the back of his door is a paper on which he has neatly written SUPER’S PROCEDURES IN CASE OF FIRE. A list of eight steps in order of priority. Number 1: Wake Benjamin.

  **

  Deaf who grew up in a deaf family or deaf schools tend to be more physically demonstrative than hearing people, something I first observed at April May June’s birthday party. She and I are private people, or perhaps more accurately I’m a private person and April May June has taken my cue, or perhaps more accurately April May June and I would just as soon not have an afternoon stroll ruined by a stranger’s scowl at an interracial couple holding hands—but even our minimal show of public affection is reduced to nil once we cross the Mason-Dixon. Just our sitting together on the bus has garnered enough glares, though we are cut some slack as deaf people: not knowing any better.

  Over the summer she had made monthly trips to South Carolina to be close to her rapidly declining father. On Wednesday, September 8th, Ramona called the textbook publishing house. April May June was summoned by the receptionist, a woman she barely knew, who jotted down Ramona’s news that their father had passed on. When she came to me an hour later, her eyes so full of profound shock and grief, I betrayed my vow to myself and, without her asking first, told her if she wished for me to accompany her South for the funeral, I would.

  The Junes live in an eight-room house, the largest dwelling on their street, an all-black (here they still say “colored”) lower-middle-class neighborhood. The immediate family is very warm to me, the extended family polite, if guarded. It’s obvious that of all her siblings April May June is closest to Ramona, and we spend a lot of time in her room, formerly the one she shared with April May June. Ramona had been living an hour away, but moved back home to help her mother care for her father the last several months. April May June will sleep in this room with her sister, and I’ll be on a couch in the basement. Ramona has a small television, the only one in the house. On the news is a report of a mass riot at Attica, a New York state prison near Buffalo which, as near as we can piece it together, seems to be related to inhumane conditions at the penitentiary. Momentarily we are removed from our immediate tragedy as we stare at the disaster unfolding.

  Dinner around the big table is a mishmash of bereavement food left by friends and extended family. Only the immediate family, spouses and children, and I are here now, and there’s bittersweet laughter, everyone having an anecdote about the recently passed patriarch. And other family lore: firstborn Cecil ribbing April May June for her annoying childhood habit of facing one of her siblings while shutting her eyes in the midst of a squabble, thus closing off the other’s manual arguments. In time the conversation quiets to a more serious tone, and April May June and her three brothers and three sisters begin their gentle persuasion of their mother to have the funeral conducted in the sign language. It would seem an obvious choice given the deceased’s closest relatives would miss half the service were it in spoken English, yet it takes some convincing since many hearing relatives will be in attendance and Mrs. June is naturally accommodating. In the end she concedes, and the next day a multi-page bulletin is printed, translating for those who don’t communicate in sign.

  The funeral takes place the subsequent morning, Saturday, and everyone has been forewarned, but it’s as if the hearing did not imagine the minister really would be deaf, that the entire service would be silent, and many are miffed as this reality gradually sinks in. I’m the only white person present. There’s one white in the family, married to a cousin in Philadelphia, but while the cousin is here he had cautioned his wife, for both their sakes, to stay home.

  As we walk up the hill for the interment, a woman passes a note to April May June. I had noticed her in the church. She didn’t seem perturbed by the quiet but rather had closed her eyes, seeming to have gone to a meditative place. April May June reads the message, smiles at the woman and nods. A minute later she subtly slips the paper to me, telling me the woman is her father’s sister.

  At the coffin’s descending, a glassy-eyed April May June smiles at her aunt. The elder begins the song, and the hearing, surprised and happy through their tears to finally take part, join in.

  April May June wishes to stay an extra day to see what needs to be done, so we plan to take the bus back Monday. Sunday I wake earlier than everyone else and walk just outside the front door, gazing around at the early morning stillness, my first moments al
one with the Cotton Belt in over a decade. A police car appears, slowly patrolling the neighborhood. The two white officers seem flabbergasted to find a white man here. I wait for their expressions to metamorphose into some judgment, suspicion and disgust, but it’s worse: they smirk, leering, as if I’m here for easy sex, and we three white men are all in on the joke. I stare at the vehicle as it vanishes around the corner, my body hot in its fury, and I turn back into the house to cool down.

  There are few bright spots over the long weekend, but Sunday night Ramona invites us into her room. She directs me to sit in front of her two-foot-tall left stereo speaker, April May June in front of the right, having us each place our hands on our respective sound box. She flips on the turntable. We are delighted by the vibrations seeping through our fingers, our bodies. Ramona begins to dance and sing: I want to thank you falettinme be mice elf agin.

  **

  In the fall my classes fill to twenty capacity with waiting lists. I’m pleased the sign language is so popular but I also need to work harder to ensure every student is getting the necessary individual attention. As autumn passes, April May June makes her holiday travel plans, wishing I could join her in South Carolina, but I couldn’t possibly ask Lloyd for more time off after the days he allowed me for the funeral in September. She’ll take a predawn bus Christmas Eve, and the evening before we have dinner in my neighborhood, then head back to my apartment, walking distance to the bus depot. I present to her Custer Died for Your Sins, a book she’d heard about and had been eager to read, and a kente cloth scarf I’d purchased from an outdoor table in Harlem. She gives me Nobody Knows My Name, a book of essays by James Baldwin, the author whose novel had mesmerized me on my original long bus ride out of Prayer Ridge to New York, then she goes into my closet—how did she hide something there without my knowing?—returning with a surprisingly large box. A beautiful new winter coat. She has clearly splurged and I’m thinking I’ll save it for special occasions, which she apparently intuits because she snatches my consignment shop frock, that raggedy old thing as she puts it, exits my apartment, and dumps it in the shoot for the building incinerator. After sex and very little sleep, I in my new coat walk her, her suitcase, and her big bag of gifts to Port Authority. When the coach pulls up we kiss goodbye, with the promise that I’ll come see her the evening of her return, Sunday the 2nd.