But one morning, not long before he turned six, Eddie awoke to find that his father hadn’t come home. He fixated on Darlene as she spoke into the phone, her face pinched with fear and anger, paying him no mind, one fingernail scraping at the corner of a corkboard stuck to the refrigerator, dislodging the brown flakes as her calls to neighbors went unanswered and she grew frantic. Her determination and pessimism came out in tiny fragments: I just know! Lord, how could you let it? Please don’t let him be.
Ma, let’s go to the store and see if he’s there, Eddie insisted.
I called, she said. He didn’t pick up.
Maybe the phone is not working.
Maybe, she responded. Maybe…
Darlene turned her attention back to making phone calls and remained focused on that activity even when Eddie stomped on the floor in front of her and insisted. She wouldn’t leave the house or let him go out by himself. Eventually she agreed to let him go down the street to a friend’s house while she watched from a window.
In the early afternoon, just after Eddie came back, several policemen strode into the house. They’d never come inside on earlier visits, and they seemed to want to say serious things; Eddie knew because they removed their hats. White men nearly as tall as his father crowded around the kitchen table; it was a novelty to have white people in this small space, let alone these authoritative, beefy guys with their safety-goggle glasses, short, cornhusk-colored hair, and tight speech. His mother, who enforced hospitality under all circumstances, offered them coffee and warmed biscuits for them as if they paid house calls every day and insisted that they sit. He hoped a couple of them might be astronauts. When they started talking about identifying something they called it and the body, he did not recognize at first that they meant his father. His mother registered shock, and after a few moments, she collapsed into her own arms, fell to her knees beside the table, and, following an uncomfortable pause, ran outside to the clothesline, where she dashed between the ropes, yanking the laundry down and hollering something that did not sound like language. The men were still talking, to one another now.
After the screen door banged shut, Eddie went to the doorjamb and watched Darlene’s path. He couldn’t see behind the sheets, but he followed the clothespins with his eyes as they snapped and flew off in all directions. Soon the policemen came to the door behind him and stood solemnly, heads bowed the way they might do while saying grace, and his mother tumbled from behind a fitted sheet, clutching a pair of his father’s dungarees, embracing them as if his legs were still in them, smearing them against her face, stifling her cries, dampening the fabric with tears. Eddie ran out to her, but she didn’t seem to see him through her grief.
Days later, something like a party followed. All his relatives had been invited except his father. When he asked his aunt Bethella why they had forgotten to invite him, she thwacked him sharply on the behind, glared, and raised her index finger to a point between his eyes, the way a robber might hold a switchblade.
Don’t you ever, she said. Ever!
His mother, uncommonly silent and numb, in a pillbox hat, her face veiled, dressed him in a black jacket and itchy pants from the local thrift store and held his hand in the front row of the church as everybody sang and wept before a shiny oblong box draped in flowers that people now said contained his father. How did they know? Nobody could see inside.
Later Eddie stood perspiring in his jacket but not daring to remove it as they lowered the box they claimed contained his father into a hill, and men shoveled dirt on top of it. When would they stop the circus act and let Daddy out of that thing? He had read picture books about Harry Houdini. Maybe he’d tell them, he thought. But he had started learning not to say the majority of what he thought.
In the rainy days that followed, seemingly related to the events of his life, he would beg his mother to go visit the hill and bring extra umbrellas. We can’t let Daddy get wet, he’d protest.
Friends came to the house, shaking their heads and saying, Mph, mph, mph. Well, you know if he’d a been white they’d have a suspect by now.
Over time, Eddie came to understand the part of dead that means never. That is to say, the whole thing. Never coming back, never going to swing you upside down, never taking you to school, never giving you presents, never coming to the holidays. But the finality of it didn’t upset him the way it should have. For the most part he didn’t believe it, so he tried to turn never into someday with the usual tools: ideas he heard in hymns, tinglings he felt while soloists cried during Sunday services at Ebenezer Baptist. Notions of angels, of heaven. Of ancestors gazing down, pride and anger wrinkling their foreheads. Of the sun and wind tickling the tassels of ripe corn in a wide field. Of pious deeds and of Jesus Christ levitating above an empty cave.
In contrast, his mother started to demand something impossible, maybe indescribable, something he didn’t understand until much later—she needed for time to reverse itself. Gradually her posture slumped, her chest became heavier. She stopped having anybody over, she rarely called anyone, the phone didn’t ring anymore, she became quiet and unresponsive, her moods enveloped her.
For a long time, Eddie thought only about adjusting to the loss of his father, and the loss of the grocery store, not about seeking the cause of those losses, and no one pointed him in that direction—in fact, his relatives diverted his attention away from it. He would ask a direct question of a random cousin or of Bethella during her sporadic visits—How did my father die? They’d stare into a corner of the room and feed him a noble abstraction—He died fighting for your rights. The follow-up question seemed ridiculous, unaskable—I mean, what killed his body?—and would linger in the air.
You need to find out, press charges, and sue, everybody would say to Darlene, sometimes even to him, at six years old. Eddie, your mother needs to bring these people to justice. What’s she scared of? She has a thousand percent of our support.
But he watched his mother during these days, and he sensed, without actually knowing, that something unnameable had curled itself, snakelike, around her leg, then bound her torso; her breathing got more strained, her eyes bloodshot and sunken. He’d overhear the things she’d mutter to photographs of his father—I never should have asked. I shouldn’t have worn those shoes. Forgive me. How can you forgive me?
Then a whole bunch of folks from up north came down asking questions about what happened, and Eddie spent even more time than previously in the confusing world of people talking over his head, primarily about politics. As he grew, reluctantly, to accept his father’s absence, the path of his grief and his mother’s reached a fork and then the two diverged. Once the house quieted down again, she began to neglect everyday life and allow a tide of chaos to rush into the house: a cascade of filthy dresses, wire hangers, pizza boxes, cigarette butts, and eventually vermin. She left their new television on at all times, usually playing to an empty couch, so that it seemed the advertisements begged no one to buy their products and evangelists prayed with nobody.
Toward the end of their days in Ovis, Darlene started to run with a different crowd—no more politics people anymore. These were men Eddie might see only once, men who smoked unpleasant cigars, who drove rust-caked Lincoln Continentals, who had filled the graying white leather interiors of their cars with discarded newspapers, who left their toenail clippings on the coffee table. Her moods became unpredictable. Once he brought a half-inflated basketball into the house, and she hurled it at his face for no reason he could figure out. He turned so that the rough ball hit him in the flank, leaving a cloudy bruise. The impact stunned her into regret, as if it had hit her instead of him, and she kissed the space below his arm over the next few days as it took on the color of an eggplant. Their trust throbbed and disappeared as the border of the injury grew sharper.
A year after his father died, Eddie’s mother hadn’t moved his father’s clothes out of the bedroom. She stopped speaking to a friend who’d tried to set her up with a man. She hadn’t gotten a jo
b. Mommy’s running low on savings, Mommy’s having trouble finding work, she’d tell him, and he’d have to move a pile of half-finished cover letters from the kitchen counter when he ate breakfast. But he would leap off the school bus and return home in the afternoon to find her in the same tattered bathrobe, spooning thick brown liquid from a bucket-shaped container of ice cream in the kitchen, her eyes glazed and underlined, transfixed by daytime-TV shows where staged fights would break out. Mom Stole My Boyfriend! Empty beer cans studded the coffee table, corkless bottles of discount wine lolled on their sides, sometimes falling to the carpet. She stopped going to the courthouse and locked herself in her room, often weeping, sometimes for an entire day. During that time, Eddie taught himself how to hard-boil an egg and follow directions on the back of a frozen-food box. She started to ration his breakfast bars, she stopped buying him new clothes, the pencils she bought him for school all snapped or were lost within two or three weeks.
Six months after all the northerners left, Darlene finally found a job at a convenience store, and Eddie assumed that her new job would open up a new life: Her mood would brighten, she would stop biting her nails, she would finally make it to Parents’ Day. But none of that happened. Somehow, things got worse.
When he found the pipe that summer, he did not know what it was at first, but it made a cool toy spaceship, since it looked a little like the starship Enterprise, round at one end and skinny at the other, and he flew it through the apartment between his fingers. He flew it across the universe of the living room repeatedly, trying to reach warp speed. The first time Darlene saw him playing with the pipe, she plucked it out of his hand without explanation, only curses—curses he’d rarely heard her speak before, and that change felt more ominous to him than the pipe.
One afternoon he came home to find her, hair disheveled, one pink roller in, nearly passed out across the card table they used for meals. He pulled out the chair beside her to discover one of his father’s shoe trees lying sideways on the seat cushion, and the combination of these sights made him aware of everything he had pretended not to understand about his mother. In the past, he had walked in on her intensely caressing or staring at photographs of his father or objects he had owned, but this time he felt as if he had interrupted some deeply shameful activity between his mother and the shoe tree, perhaps the aftermath of a voodoo spell meant to transplant his father’s soul into the shoe tree and resurrect him. The absurdity of the situation gave Eddie the courage to ask a question so outlandish, insulting, and terrifying that every other time his tongue had tried to form it, the query had evaporated.
Did somebody kill my dad? he asked.
Yes, she said from under a canopy of her hair, like he’d asked if the sun rose in the east. Then, more ferociously, raising her head, she added, They killed him hard, so he would stay dead.
Who did?
They don’t know, Darlene said.
It didn’t cross Eddie’s mind until several days later that she could have meant more than one group of people by the word they. By then, the subject had disappeared. He kept trying to figure out what she’d meant, but during the rest of the year, all through second grade, he couldn’t find a gentle path to bring her back to talking about his father’s death and discover what she’d had in mind. First of all, whom she’d meant by they. The police? The people in town? She’d said it like she meant the detectives who had failed to get enough evidence to convict the suspects, but she’d also said it scornfully, as if she didn’t believe that the detectives didn’t know. Or did his mother mean that she knew, but nobody would listen? His eight-year-old brain tried to unscramble the mystery, until a final possibility emerged like a poisonous toad from a bog, shaking mud off, and this option proved ugly enough to weigh as much as the truth. That they knew, but pretended not to know. That one of them might have helped or covered up the evidence.
That summer, right before he died of pancreatic cancer, Sparkplug told him how they killed somebody they wanted to stay dead. Darlene and Eddie had traveled to the closest hospital, in Delhi, Louisiana, to pay their last respects.
You bind his hands behind his back with twine, Sparkplug confided while Darlene used the bathroom. You break his legs. You bash him in the mouth with a tire iron so that he swallows the majority of his teeth and the fragments scatter. You stab him eighteen times. You set his body on fire in his own store. You shoot him with his own gun. I’m telling you this because you ought to know, he wheezed. And bless her heart, your mama ain’t gonna say.
Eddie was too stunned to believe what this guy, a known oddball he hardly remembered, told him—it would take another five years to sink in.
Sparkplug passed away, and that November Darlene and Eddie moved to Texas, into a small apartment in the Fifth Ward. Eddie had screamed and wept that they would have to leave his father there, and everything associated with him, including the Mount Hope Grocery, but his mother explained, holding in her own tears, that they could come back anytime, and they’d also leave behind many painful memories. The store’s just an empty lot now, she said.
When they moved into the new place, she called to him from the vacant living room before her friend arrived with the rental truck full of their possessions. This will be better, she said, her voice reverberating through the space. We’ll be closer to family, I’ll be further away from temptation.
It was not better.
Temptation came with them. A few months after he and Darlene moved to Houston, creditors started calling. His mother, often some combination of drugged, absent, and sleeping, could not usually answer, and Eddie learned to recognize the calls whenever he heard several seconds of dead air after picking up. Or a machine would say, Please hold. The calls started coming several times a day; he’d hear their robot voices on the answering machine when he came back from school, or they would call in the evening. If he picked up, he would try to sound younger. Sometimes a utility would get shut off. He took to boiling water on the electric stove to wash himself. He would open the oven for warmth during that string of chilly nights in January and February that passed for winter in Texas, do his homework by the range light.
Talking to his mother stopped working. She no longer paid attention to the world or to time. She acted like someone wrapped in a gauze of happiness, but a fake happiness that to Eddie suggested that she didn’t care about him. A year later, Aunt Bethella came over for Thanksgiving dinner, but she turned around and left. Eddie didn’t think she would have liked the dry, donated turkey or the generic cranberry sauce anyway. They couldn’t eat the sweet potato pie she’d brought, and he was angrier at his aunt for hurling the pie down on the stoop in her fury at Darlene than for leaving.
He decided not to go to school some days, choosing instead to wander around the perimeter, seeing his friends at video arcades on their lunch breaks. He borrowed what he considered a lot of money; other times he slipped coins and bills out of his mother’s purse in order to support his diet of one-dollar tacos and Bubble Yum. On days when he did go to school, he’d do stupid things like perform a mocking impression of his science teacher to her face or pick a fight with a dirty kid who had dark circles under his eyes. Each time Eddie landed in detention he thought that they would bring his mother into school. Darlene did show up a few times, only to deny her drug use to the administrators, who acted like they believed her more than they seemed to actually believe her, but eventually his mother stopped showing up altogether. The school nurse told Eddie that she had addicts in her family too, and to remember that no matter how much he misbehaved, he would never divert his mother’s attention away from the drugs. Don’t take it personally, she said. It’s a disease. Sometimes she would give him five or ten dollars. It made a difference.
One October night, Darlene put on one of her late husband’s hats, a fedora that seemed new, and sat at the table across from Eddie, maybe pretending to be a businessman. He had taken to shutting her out, because making eye contact would provoke a confrontation or make an upsetti
ng episode worse. But when he didn’t acknowledge her this time, she dropped her head to the table, despite the clutter there, and peeped at him from under the hat brim, making owl noises. She tried other animals. Cats, goats. Then she saluted him, raised her voice, insisted they were somewhere else—on a boat, it seemed.
We’ve got to get at the emergencies, sir, she demanded. The other people need to see if it isn’t correctly so that a reaction can’t do it! Show us the planets.
Ma? he asked, hoping that speaking to her directly would shatter the pane of craziness she’d pulled up between them. He posed the question again—Ma?—wrapping his fingers around her forearm as if he meant to tug her into reality.
Show us the planets! she repeated, and slammed her hand on the table, slightly lifting the cards, pennies, and dominoes, nearly knocking over a tiny vase designed for a single flower.
Eddie peeled her hot hand off the table, threaded his smaller fingers between her rough ones, the nail polish now candy-apple red and flaking off, and led her to the balding patch of soil just outside, the size of a carpet, where a few sprigs of clover hugged the sides. Distant dogs barked and trucks rumbled down the highway, wailing like giants in pain.
She followed him, stumbling, and when he’d adjusted to the beauty of the cooler evening air and the spectacular array of pink and blue clouds in the immense sky, he pointed to a bright dot near the moon and said, There.
Calm settled on her shoulders, randomly. The sight of Venus might have had nothing to do with the shift in her mood. It seemed that as far as she was concerned, Venus could have been a flashlight, a motorcycle careening down a one-lane highway, a match losing its fire. Even so, they sat spellbound. She kicked off a sandal and absentmindedly drew circles in the dust with her toe, not looking down. In that moment of peace, he put his face between his knees so she wouldn’t see, and rubbed it there silently, his cheek against his leg, letting numb tears fall from his eyes.
Delicious Foods: A Novel Page 8
