An accountant at a small tax service across the river in Anacostia, Uncle Randy lived alone in a three-story rowhouse painted white, the windows framed with black shutters. His wife had left him years before any children could be born between them, and so he had filled his house with antiques picked up from Eastern Market, garage and estate sales, and junkyards. It smelled of mothballs and Jade East cologne, and everything was layered in dust. At the dining-room table, there was one chair, with others stacked in the corner, which he took out when the mailman or his old friend from the Washington Gas Company wanted to stop by for a “little nip” in the middle of his shift.
Looking into Uncle Randy’s hard face, clutching a little bag of marbles in his pocket, Manden could not have known that there was such rancidness between his mother and her brother, much of it from the fact that Uncle Randy had not liked Jack Thompson from the start. In the first place, he was dark, an immediate demerit. And although Randy Goodwin was certain their family (the Goodwins) had not carried the preservation of status and skin color (or lack thereof) to the heights of vigilant families like the Proctors of Maryland, he had nevertheless been disappointed when he first laid eyes on Jack Thompson. Although Jack’s eyes held the amber light of a lantern behind them, he was as dark as a bitter nut. More than that, Randy knew nothing of his family, these Thompsons. What kind of people were they? When he quizzed Jack Thompson at the first visit with his sister, Maria, he’d said that he came from a family of old farmers and dog breeders in Louisiana. That most of them were gone now, and he came up North to start fresh. That was all.
But Randy thought that there was something in the hoods of Jack’s eyes, which made him uneasy. Later, he and Jack had words when he pressed the issue about Jack’s background again. “There ain’t nothin’ virtuous about wanting to be the white man’s pet,” Jack Thompson had said. “See, I look at you, Randy Goodwin, with your high-riding ways and your high-yellow skin. You think it’s the most precious thing you have. And I seen millions before you, all of you mimes to who always hated you and always will. I know you think I ain’t nothin’, but you’re wrong. Your sister knows that. Maria’s got a good mind and a good heart, you know. But then, it don’t look like you ever noticed that.” Then, after a silence: “A man’s will can’t go but one way. Let it be of your own choosin’.”
That was the last straw for Randy Goodwin from his sister’s beau. But most worrisome of all, even after they quarreled, was what he believed to be the slow, wholesale theft of his sister’s mind by Jack Thompson. She had stopped going to the family church and switched to another that was, according to her, more “progressive.” She was forever spewing commentary about what was in the papers. The racial mayhem in the South seemed to consume her, and there came about her a graveness that never subsided. All of this, Randy Goodwin felt, betrayed his unspoken belief that he alone was responsible for his sister’s safe delivery to a reputable family and life through marriage. He knew that their parents would have seen to her having a different life, if they had not been in the bus accident that had killed them both. The hooligan, Randy Goodwin surmised, had poisoned his sister’s mind, already bursting with wild dabbles into the political escapades of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Howard University where she was a student, where she’d met Jack Thompson at some rally he’d come down from New York to stir up.
And Randy had been proud of his sister until that point, his ward, whom he alone had been responsible for, even though they were both young adults when they lost their parents. With her fine features and good education, he had hoped—no, expected—that she would marry one of his accountant colleagues and move into a quiet house somewhere as a Goodwin should. They would carry on, he and his sister, as the good family their parents had forged, in their clear diction, culture and manners, and the high-yellow pallor of their skin.
But all of this Maria had thrown away on Jack Thompson, a man from Nowhere, Louisiana. A man with no past and no future, who would lead his sister into the destitution that his sort of social protest guaranteed. It was not that Randy Goodwin was blind to the turmoil of events. Rather, it was that he was incapable of looking beyond the colored glass of his upbringing, where Goodwins were favored by the gods and by the status and connections that years of guarding their lightness and brightness had wrought. He couldn’t let his sister throw it all away in a temporary passion of the heart. He forbade her to marry in an explosive argument that would be the last time they saw or spoke to each other again. She had shouted back that she and Jack Thompson were marrying, that she was going back to New York with him. And if she were to strike out on her own, if she were to make a decision that was entirely hers, then what business of her brother’s was that? In any case, he was not her father, and she didn’t care how dark Jack Thompson was or what kind of family he came from, he was more of a man than her own brother would ever be.
So no one knew that Uncle Randy felt all of this at the doorstep years later, when the caseworker came with Manden and Horus. He first noticed the darkness of his nephews, then looked into their faces and saw Jack Thompson living there still—him, the reason for his sister’s demise, the end of his parents’ muted hopes, the dilution of the family line that had taken generations to build, now changed forever. And in the two boys, Manden and Horus, he did not see his sister or the Goodwins at all and only saw the dark unknown of their father. And thinking of this in those seconds when he shook his nephews’ hands was much easier than thinking of his own empty life, which, save for his tax-accountant job, had been unremarkable, a failure in some ways, even, in its ordinariness. And that was when he had the thought that at last, he would have the chance to stomp out what was left of that black hooligan.
But Manden, standing with his brother and the caseworker, shivering in the cold of their spectacular loss, could not have known about any of this on that first day in front of his uncle’s house. After the caseworker shook Uncle Randy’s hand, told him how the Lord would bless him, and left, Randy installed Manden and Horus in the basement, where there was no heat in the winter and no air-conditioning in the summer. A thin metal stair rail, which wobbled in its concrete pegs if pushed or pulled too much, lined the narrow steps. Entering the basement had reminded Manden of when his father once took him and Horus to the caverns in Virginia, and from the top of the basement steps he almost expected to see an expanse of luminescent stalagmites and mirrored pools of water at the bottom.
But it had not been so. His eyes, blinking in the dark as his uncle told him to take the first step down, had been unbelieving at first. Then, slowly, he began to understand. In the gloom, on the third step down, with Horus close behind him, Manden heard the creaking noise of the dry, rotting wood, which would be forever imprinted on his mind. The sound of the third step would stay with him always. It marked Uncle Randy’s daily approach to bark an order, to remind them not to be like their misguided father and their fragile mother, to say that he was making men of them. The creaking third step was perceptible from every other sound in the world. It was the signal of descent into a long and uncomfortable night. The sound, too, was the trumpet of their daytime escape from their uncle’s manhood-training tyranny, for its sound meant two steps to the unlocked door, to the outside, to school, however demoralizing or boring it had sometimes been.
There was a separate entrance in the basement, now bricked over. Two slender windows near the ceiling were frosted and fitted with iron bars. He and Horus spent the rest of their childhood there, sleeping on a worn mattress piled high with blankets or stripped to the bone. Every meal (whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner) was a sandwich: baloney and a thick slab of cheese with a glass of water, or tuna fish and a glass of milk. To pass the time when they were not in school, he and Horus would look through the tiny windows and watch the shadowed feet go by outside and the squirrels that stopped in front of the glass. At night, the door at the top of the steps was locked. In secret, they kept an empty milk bottle to relieve themselves if they couldn’t wait
until morning. From below, they listened to Uncle Randy’s television upstairs, blaring a sports game or the news. Some nights, when they couldn’t sleep for the cold or the heat, he and Horus lay on the floor along the wall, listening to the rats living behind the crumbling plaster crawl in and out of the tunnels they had made. They could feel the air moving through the cracks of their tiny halls, hear the freedom they were living.
Manden was fireside to a burning rage back then, when he wished their father would rise from the grave and choke Uncle Randy for his cruelty, when he tried to conjure their mother and have her take wing from Utica to rescue them. “Mama is coming back,” he would say over and over, like a chant. Like a prayer. “Soon,” he’d say. After a while. One day. Had Horus wished for her too? Had he cried himself to sleep? He did not know, and in his own basement torments in their uncle’s house, a world away on the other side of the mattress, he did not cross the icy divide between them to ask. In the slow drip of helplessness, Manden came to view the world as an old house with many rooms, with many happenings behind closed doors. There were events in the common areas for all to see. And there was just as much wonder and spectacle in the time-stilled attic as in the decaying basement. God and the devil dwelled under the same roof, feet apart. Each listening to the other pad the hallways and creep up the steps.
Manden walked on. The Autism Center wasn’t very far now. At that hour, store managers were still rolling back awnings, hosing down sidewalks, and putting out signs announcing the lunch special of the day. Walking the last block, Manden could see Brenda clearly on his approach, the center behind her, a box of mystery filled with children like Sephiri, yet all of them different in infinite, unfathomable ways. Without being conscious of it, he slowed his gait as he crossed the street and neared the entrance.
“Hello, Brenda,” he said when he got to the curb.
Brenda nodded without speaking, distracted, Manden assumed, by Sephiri spinning nearby. He looked at her in the awkward pause. She was even bigger and heavier than she was when he saw her six months ago. A shiny brown wig sat atop her head like a mop. When she offered a thin smile, he could see her full cheeks push against the deep circles under her eyes. He was newly amazed at how different she was from the vibrant young woman he remembered. She was once a shapely thing, with a glorious smile and an air of vitality. Manden sometimes thought that had he been a different man, he might have reached out to Brenda now. But he was unreachable even to himself, and he felt incapable of helping her in spite of bearing witness to her self-destruction.
Not that any of it mattered now. They had let the past be what it was. He and Brenda did not speak much, although they lived in the same city. They knew very little about each other’s adult life, other than the surface of things. Maybe because they knew too much of what lay beneath. Out of a vague sense of familial obligation, perhaps out of some subconscious desire to cobble together some closeness between brothers, Manden once took Horus and Brenda out to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant as a gesture of goodwill after the sudden news of the engagement, as a gesture to celebrate something he had no plans of ever experiencing. Ethiopian was her favorite, Brenda had said, pulling pieces of injera bread apart and dipping it into heaps of spiced peas and tomatoes.
Manden remembered how she talked incessantly at the awkward engagement dinner like a bird tweeting in the trees—about her new job at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about all the wonderful things Horus had done for her since they met, about the rowhouse they were buying together and how it had exposed brick with the original molding, about all the money they would be saving for the honeymoon by going to the justice of the peace. It had been a long time since he and Horus had sat together with a woman who was smiling. Her skin glowed in the candlelit room. They were both speechless in its presence, gathered around her like a warm fire.
And Manden had wanted Brenda then, although he would never have touched her. He wanted his brother’s woman. But it was not because of her pretty legs or the soft halo that framed her beautiful face. Or how well versed she seemed to be in literature and politics. It was her regal ways. Her sweet charm. It was a loveliness that reminded him of their mother, before her voyage. Before their father’s blood had seeped down under Manden’s fingernails. The redness that stayed long after he locked himself in the bathroom and washed his hands with bleach, long after he scrubbed them with steel wool, so that he could no longer tell whose blood was running down the sink.
Horus was only seven when their father was murdered. Did he remember Mama the way she was before all of that? Before what came after it, the staring out the window and the house visitors and the white robes and the institution she died in? He wondered if Horus remembered the big, fluffy pancakes she made for them on Saturday mornings. The steel-drum sound of her voice that filled the house. The way she laughed at his tenth birthday party that January. How she sang when she was cooking dinner and set the dishes on the table as if each one was a crystal chalice.
Manden remembered watching Brenda pick up the restaurant goblet at their little engagement dinner party and how he thought of venetian glass and sterling silver. In the presence of her svelte skin, all butterscotch and creamed caramel, he thought of neat plates of chocolates arranged on a coffee table. Of steaming coffee and gingerbread. Of the comfort and order that used to be. These feelings had always made Manden uncomfortable in Brenda’s presence. He couldn’t stand the sense that he was trying to hold on to something pure under dirty circumstances. And for years, it was this feeling that kept him distant from Brenda when she could have used his sympathy and understanding the most, even when she called him with a secret too heavy to carry alone.
She called a few weeks after the verdict to say that she was pregnant. In the silence, they listened to each other breathe through the phone. “Remains,” she’d said at first. That was how she first described the unborn child. Like a fossil of some fantastic creature known only in mythical lore. Manden had wanted to contest Brenda’s choice of silence, but he could not think of any reason telling Horus about his child would be better than keeping it from him. And he was plagued by a new kind of guilt atop the burden of knowing his brother had taken revenge for their father’s death and he had not. It lodged itself in his heart like botfly larvae, growing ever larger through the nine months of Brenda’s pregnancy, bursting through him when she called to say that it was a boy.
“Hello, Manden,” Brenda said now, with a thin smile, a fruitless gesture born from the beast of habit. Then, looking at the boy, she said, “Look who is here, Sephiri.”
The child did not respond.
Manden looked at Sephiri. He had stopped spinning and was on his knees, staring intently, as if his life depended on it, at the grooves in the sidewalk. He let out a screech.
“Hello, Sephiri,” said Manden, knowing there would be no response. Looking at the deep expression on the boy’s face, he was reminded of how Horus looked when they shot marbles together as children.
Sephiri did not respond.
Manden reached into his pocket and pulled out a small velvet sack of glass balls. It was an impulsive buy. He had walked past a little novelty shop on Wisconsin Avenue and saw the marbles shimmering in the window display on a bed of black velvet. He did not think of the possibility that Brenda would object to such a gift, that Sephiri might swallow them, that he could launch them through window panes once he had them in his hands. He had thought only of Sephiri’s innocent look of concentration. So much like his brother’s face all those years ago when they played the game.
Manden knelt down to Sephiri and sat the marbles on the ground next to him.
“Good to see you again, little man,” he said.
The boy did not react.
It seemed to Manden that each of Sephiri’s birthdays marked the completion of a deeper, more complicated chamber. The boy sat silently for long stretches of time, pondering a spoon or the buttons on the telephone. Static flickers in the television seemed to mesmerize him. M
anden wondered what Horus would have done had he known all of this, had he known of Sephiri’s existence. Manden had felt it when his mother died, even before he got word from the psychiatric facility hundreds of miles away. He woke up in a cold sweat, clutching his chest, and saw her waxen doll face. He wondered if Horus felt her go, too, and if he felt Sephiri come into the world.
Later, Manden learned that Sephiri was born with both his eyes and his mind tightly shut, which filled him with a peculiar relief. Sephiri was blocked from it all, as far as he knew. And because the mysterious wall behind which the boy lived was soundproof, the reasons for his father’s absence would never have to be explained to him, and he would never pierce the barrier to ask why his father was not there, why he was in a cage beneath the mountains. The ghosts haunting his family would never have to be discussed with him.
Manden watched Sephiri finger the bag of marbles as he sat on the sidewalk. He was fascinated by the velvet sack, not its contents.
Brenda looked at her watch. “I guess we’d better head into the center now,” she said. “The appointment is at nine.”
“I guess we should,” said Manden.
Manden watched Brenda lift Sephiri from the ground like a suitcase. The boy whimpered and kicked, clutching the bag of marbles. The last discussion about Sephiri’s state still loomed in Manden’s mind. There was always the summary of his condition: behavior mimicking deafness, little or no eye contact, sustained odd play, obsessions with sameness, refusal to accept changes in routine, extreme distress for unexplained reasons, tantrums, bouts of overactivity or lethargy, nonresponsiveness to verbal cues. It was true that all of these things applied to Sephiri. But Manden had only ever wanted to know what was wrong with him—or what was right with him that made him able to sweep a tiring world away.
Time of the Locust Page 6
