by Nick White
It was Tuesday, and the place was almost empty save for the table by the cash register. Henry sat there holding his baby in his lap and blowing raspberries on her cheeks and neck. The baby’s name was Stacey, and she had enough hair to wear pigtails now. Ginger sat beside them, her daughter’s pudgy hand gripping her finger, but when Ginger saw me, she stood. “You fall, Will?” You never know how bad you look until you see yourself in the eyes of other people. I nodded and told them how I wasn’t watching where I was going and tripped into a ditch. “Just kept rolling,” I said. The lie came so easily to me it was a wonder I didn’t tell more of them. She grabbed some napkins from the metal dispenser on the table. “Sit,” she instructed, waving me to their table. Still holding the baby, Henry had managed to produce, as if from nowhere, a glass of water and crushed ice. Ginger dipped the edge of a napkin into the glass. “Looks like you caught the wrong end of a fist,” Henry was saying as Ginger touched the cool wet to places on my forehead where the skin had broken open. After wiping my face, which had more blood on it than I’d realized, Ginger used cotton balls to dab the cuts with hydrogen peroxide, causing them to froth and bubble. “You need us to call somebody?” she asked. “Your dad?”
I shook my head. “Suzette around?”
“Not until May—unless Mama lets her stay in Memphis for the summer, too.” She smiled. “Next time you fall, honey, I might be a nurse and have to charge you for the cleanup.” Baby Stacey squealed as if she understood her mother’s joke and approved. It had been almost six months since I’d set foot in the restaurant. I wanted to say, “Well, of course,” because I wasn’t surprised at all, really, by Suzette’s hightailing it to Memphis, though it stung she hadn’t said good-bye. Maybe it had been easier not to face me again, or maybe she hadn’t cared enough one way or the other. I never could tell how much or how little she felt about something until it was too late. Mrs. Jin came out from the kitchen and spoke to her daughter in Chinese. Ginger said something back and then tossed the used cotton balls into the trash bin. “My mother says you should stay for supper.” I tried to say thank you to Mrs. Jin, but she had already disappeared back through the swinging kitchen doors. Thirty minutes later, she brought out steamed buns stuffed with pork and sliced cucumbers. Mr. Jin was out of town, and Henry and Ginger sat at one end of the table tending to their daughter, leaving Mrs. Jin and me to make conversation. She had never spoken to me directly. Now we sat across from each other in silence while her daughter and son-in-law cooed with baby Stacey, who they’d squeezed into a wooden high chair. Henry was feeding her banana-flavored baby food, the yellow mush finding its way onto the baby’s clothes more than in her mouth. Mrs. Jin and I locked eyes several times, and once she gave me one of Suzette’s smirks. I asked her how her daughter was doing in Memphis, and she gestured vaguely. “Away,” she said, and shrugged. I wondered if she would have said the same thing had I asked her about the people who were in the pictures on the wall in the back office. Away. As in better off? Or, simply, not here? Outside, it was dark now: The streetlight in the parking lot had flickered on, and I dreaded the trek back to the parsonage. Most likely, my father would already be in bed, not wanting to face me. At some point during the meal, Mrs. Jin sat back in her chair, closed her eyes, and began to snore lightly. Ginger heard it, and said, “Don’t mind her—she lives tired.”
“No,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
And this made Henry stop feeding his daughter and grin—first at Ginger, then at me. His grin turned into a chuckle. “You, Will, say the strangest things,” he said. “You almost make me look normal.” Ginger cocked her head at him. She laughed now, too, the sound jerking Mrs. Jin awake, which tickled all of us, even baby Stacey.
—
A toe. A leg. Then all of her. My mother left this world a little at a time.
When I was nine, a spider—we never found out what kind—made a home in the warmth of one of her slippers cast under her bed. She claimed to have felt nothing when she put them on in the morning and went about her day and wouldn’t have noticed anything out of order if the blood hadn’t begun to leak through her cloth shoe, leaving a trail of red behind her. By then she was already a diabetic, and a poorly managed one, too, often missing her insulin injections and failing to check her glucose levels. When she had first been diagnosed, the doctor told her to change her habits, and she’d thought that meant eating less instead of eating differently. The same starchy casseroles and breaded desserts appeared on our dinner table. My father complained, but it did no good. She said she did the best she could with the small budget we lived on. The bite never completely healed, and she began to limp and then, the pain too much for her, rarely stood at all. She became bedridden not long after that. The toe was removed the December before Henry and Ginger’s wedding. Then the whole leg came off, and she stopped leaving the house for good. The infection persisted—coming back in bedsores that festered on her back end. The doctors were amazed at how fast she went. “Usually,” one of them said to my father, “a person just hangs on suffering, but it’s like she made up her mind about it and that’s all she wrote.” At my mother’s request, the casket was closed. “I don’t want people gawking at me,” my father had remembered her saying. Surrounding the casket were peace lilies, gerbera daisies, violets. It was springtime and people were generous. All of Hawshaw came to the funeral home to pay their respects. My father and I stood at the foot of her casket to receive them, both of us too dazed to be sad, not quite believing she wouldn’t be there lumbering around the kitchen when we got home. My father didn’t give the eulogy, he claimed he was too emotional, and so the task fell to Brother Mims, who screamed the whole way through it, which was comforting in that it was, at least, expected. After we’d put her in the ground, my father went to his bedroom, and I went to the kitchen. In the refrigerator and the cabinets were all the ingredients I needed: milk, crescent rolls, sugar. It took an hour or so to make, and I didn’t wait for the squares to cool before I began to eat them. I shoveled them into my face, chewing and swallowing all that flakey sweetness, the very food that had a hand, I knew, in killing my mother. I ate every single square of the Sugar Dump. Later that night, I vomited them all back up, making it outside in time to do it quietly in the monkey grass so as not to wake up my father.
—
Since our confrontation in the sanctuary, my father and I had spoken only a handful of words to each other, and the Sunday the baptistery had been completed was no different. He rose before the sun and was already in his office at Second Baptist before I finally woke up around nine. My mother had taught me how to iron my dress shirts and slacks and how to fix my necktie into a double Windsor. Today I wore a blue coat and a red tie—clothes I had inherited from a cousin in the Musclewhite family who had outgrown them. I sat in the back row, arriving just before service began so I wouldn’t have to speak to anybody. My mother liked to sit there, so she told me, because it allowed her to read the crowd. She judged how my father’s message landed with them. If she ever saw the congregation slumping in their seats or fidgeting or doing anything that made them appear restless, she would signal my father to hurry up and get on to the important part of the message already because he was losing them.
On this Sunday, with the baptistery behind him, my father opened the service by calling on Becky Dickerson’s father to lead us in prayer. Hubert Dickerson thanked the Lord for giving us the funds and the patience to complete the project and then he asked that the baptistery might be used “to save souls, far and wide.” At this, my father cried “Amen,” and mumblings of agreement drifted through the pews. During announcements, one of the Woods reminded everyone that after service a lunch had been prepared in the fellowship hall for everyone. The lunches and the dinners at Second Baptist were always the hardest because my mother had played such a vital role in them. I dreaded the casseroles and the desserts that awaited me. Some of the women had taken to cooking my mother’s dishes, but their variat
ions on them were never good enough, always off in some way. Often I left resentful for their attempts and guilty for not trying hard enough to like them.
We had finished with the offertory hymn, and it was a quarter past twelve. After the song leader took his seat, my father returned to the pulpit and was reading from scripture in his quiet, melodic way, the words becoming almost a song in his mouth. One of the double front doors clicked open, and I turned around. A family of four shuffled in: a mother and father, followed by their two sons. They paused in the back by my pew and surveyed the scene before them. The mother pointed to the middle pews, to one that was empty. The father nodded, and then they walked down the big aisle in single file. The congregation didn’t pay them much mind at first. But slowly and surely, I noted the turn of heads. The whispers came next. An old Musclewhite woman sitting up front turned all the way around shaking her head in her seat to glare at the family before turning back around.
As for me, I was flooded with the insane giddiness that comes from watching the slow-motion buildup to a disaster. My father hadn’t noticed them yet. He had his eyes trained on the verses he was reading aloud from his ratty leather Bible. His sermon centered on some words from the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians about spiritual growth. When the song leader returned to lead the congregation in “Count Your Blessings,” my father stepped aside and glanced out to his flock—his head jerking in a double take when he saw the family for himself. I tried so hard not to hate him in this moment. Not to hate the way his eyes widened or how his mouth curled into a big goofy smile. When the song was over, he said, “Can I hear an amen?” and nobody spoke for the longest time. He was forced to repeat the question, his smile never wavering. Jim Musclewhite—perhaps my father’s lone ally in the church—gave a weak amen and dipped his head.
Anger bubbled up from the pews like heat. Only a fool could have missed it, but maybe my father was such a fool. The family kept their eyes straight ahead, as if they had rehearsed it, studying the pulpit, my father, the baptistery. My mother would have given him a signal to hurry the sermon along before there was an outburst. But I was not my mother. The wave of anger moving through the churchgoers and washing over me was more satisfying than I expected. I wanted my father to feel the full wrath of his congregation, his bigoted worshipers he’d wasted his life on trying to enlighten. Oblivious, he preached. The joy on his face was so pure I wanted to claw my eyes out. A black family had wandered into his church at long last, and my father had no idea that this would be, in fact, his last sermon at Second Baptist—but I did, and I took no pleasure in, for once, knowing more than he did.
—
Mother Maude and Father Drake entered our lives two years later, in the winter of 1998. Neither had come to my mother’s funeral. To be honest, I didn’t even think of the possibility. If my father had notified Mother Maude of her sister’s passing, he didn’t share the information with me. Which was nothing new, since he rarely shared anything with me. Now their arrival in town was a surprise. I was walking home from the library and had taken the long way, going up the main road that curved beside First Baptist and my mother’s grave. My father never included me in his decisions for the flowers he put out on her tombstone, so I liked to go by every now and then, and appraise his choices. He kept daisies on there in summers and poinsettias for wintertime. The poinsettia for this year had already gone green and was too heavy for its plastic pot. It was constantly tipping over only to be righted again when I came by. It was a stormy day, and I should have gone the shorter route home. I’d brought a raincoat, but the rain fell slantwise, blurring my vision as I trudged on through puddles and mud.
My father and I had moved out of the parsonage after he was voted out of Second Baptist, and we now lived in a one-bedroom apartment above a barbecue restaurant called Missy’s. The place would have been too cramped for us if my father wasn’t gone most of the time. All his driving to proselytize to neighboring communities had prepared him for a profession in truck driving. He carried galvanized metalwork in the back of an eighteen-wheeler for a company out of Memphis. He spent two weeks at a time out on the road, but when he was home, he might as well have been gone. Our silence had persisted after he left the church. Now it felt almost ridiculous for us to carry on a conversation with each other beyond the pleasantries you would offer a stranger. How are you? Fine. Good.
The best part about moving was the apartment’s proximity to the library. I was still homeschooled and did most of my studying there. I had befriended a young woman named Erin, the children’s librarian, and she served as proctor for when I had to be tested. The Jins had sold their restaurant and moved to a suburb of Memphis by then, so Erin was the closest thing I had to a friend now that Suzette was permanently out of the picture. Erin checked off many firsts for me: She was the first adult to insist I call her by her first name, the first person I knew who had a tattoo (a four-leaf clover on her wrist), and the first to tell me about the charter school in Jackson. She taught a class in publishing there every summer, she said. She had noticed my reading habits, and knew my test scores, and said I should be in a school that challenged me. “You keep reading Trollope,” she told me. “And everybody who reads Trollope is a genius in my book.” But I did more than read at the library. There was a bank of desktop computers near the entrance, and because I was older than twelve, I could use them for as long as I wanted, all by my lonesome. Erin said the rules stipulated that since I was under eighteen I would need a parent to sign for me, but she waived the requirement since she knew my father was a busy man and usually out of town. The computers were closely monitored by the other librarians and by a strict website blocker, so I never ventured to any of those sites Suzette had shown me. There were other avenues, however. I frequently visited the fine art websites, always finding my way to the nude male form. Caravaggio’s John the Baptist in the Wilderness was a particular favorite—I’d stare and stare at the shirtless torso and the way the lit skin shimmered. Then, when I got home, I would shut my eyes and there the portrait would be, burned into my brain like Brother Mims’s Jesus portrait had been all those years ago. My lust, an old nagging friend of mine, was just as feverish and cloying as the night I was baptized by the Holy Warrior, and I’d spend whole nights rubbing myself raw in service to it.
Before leaving for home that rainy day, I had been working through one of the SAT-prep books out of the reference section. After going over the entrance exam for the charter school, Erin had decided that boning up on my vocabulary and basic algebra was my surest way of doing well. I was set to take the test in April, and if I was admitted into the school, I would let my father know then, though I was hopeful he wouldn’t mind since he barely noticed me when he was home and probably wouldn’t mind my absence. At five o’clock, I put the SAT-prep book on the returned-books shelf and told Erin good-bye. She was on the phone—engaged in some dispute over a lost book—and rolled her eyes as I drifted by the front desk. Once I was outside, I had to hold the front of the hood of my raincoat to keep it from blowing back in the wind.
Entering the cemetery lawn, I noticed a figure by my mother’s grave. Most days the cemetery was empty of the living, and at first I thought I was hallucinating. I blinked. I wiped the water from my face—and, still, there she was, for it was a she. I saw that now. I circled around and was taken aback. This woman was clearly not my mother—she was fifty pounds lighter, wore heavy makeup and a sparkly jumpsuit—but there was a slight resemblance nonetheless to Debra Rose around the edges. She looked up from the tombstone and appeared stricken by the sight of me.
“My God,” she said. “You do look just like him, don’t you?”
“Who?”
She ignored my question and crossed the space between us to embrace me. Her voice sounded like my mother’s—deep but feminine. I’d never seen any pictures of my mother’s sister, and the times I’d heard her on the radio, I hadn’t cared enough to visualize what she might look like. “I�
�m Maudie,” she said, still holding me close, as if I might try to run away if she released me. She told me the Lord had brought her to Hawshaw. “When I called your daddy last week,” she said, “to ask for a donation and he told me of all your troubles—I had no idea.” The ground got muddier as she spoke, and our feet were sinking into the wet suck of earth. “When I told the good Dr. Dillard about the camp, he couldn’t believe it—he started to weep right there on the line, honey. And you know why?” She squeezed me hard and didn’t give me enough time to answer. “Because the Lord had a plan to bring us together.” I noticed that her hair was synthetic—the kind you see on dolls. A wig. “Oh, the plans,” she was saying now. “The plans I have for you!”
I asked her what she was talking about, but instead of answering, she gave a command: “Come on. We’ll give you a ride home.” I remained silent as we walked out of the cemetery. She seemed too cartoonish to be a real adult. More like a child’s conception of a what an adult woman should look like. Curls of hair were piled on top of her head, every strand of it teased and stiffened by hair spray, immovable even in the stormy wind. Once we were on the sidewalk, I scraped my sneakers along the concrete to get rid of the mud on them. She wore rubber boots—nice ones that were as shiny and black as a seal’s skin—and her stride was wide and fast, making it a challenge for me to keep up with her. I followed her to the parking lot, to a beige RV with a blue line running down the side. The door on the driver’s side was popped open, and a man with a crooked face climbed down to greet us. And when we got closer, I realized his face only looked crooked because he kept a wad of tobacco in the side of his mouth. He spat on the ground. He was built like the Holy Warrior who had baptized me: wiry and muscled but with a face that was meaner and more suspicious.
