Time of the Locust

by Morowa Yejidé

  Horus remembered when the old woman came to their apartment the day of his father’s funeral. “My name is Nola Mae Pierce. Sorry for your loss,” she said when she arrived at their door. His mother invited her in, saying, “Thank you,” in that robotic, unfeeling way that shock brings to the voice. Horus and Manden hovered in doorways and corners, in the shadows that their father’s death had cast. Horus came out to look at the visitor, before returning to his solitude on the floor of the next room. Like the others who came to pay their respects to Jack Thompson, the old woman sat down on the little sofa next to his crumpled mother. The elderly lady was small and shriveled, her gnarled hands betraying the decades of hard labor that had been the whole of her world. All of the years and experiences of her life seemed to gather in the deep lines that creased her walnut-colored face. She wore a blue cotton scarf about her head and a long, sweeping housedress with the faint markings of a flower print. She smelled of the black cake and blood sausage that she had been up most of the night preparing, which she brought to Maria Thompson as gifts for her grief.

  Talking incessantly as soon as she was seated in the living room, Nola Mae Pierce began a litany of condolences and confessionals about knowing Maria Thompson’s unique pain, looking meaningfully about the room at the lit candles and flowers and trays of food. She continued on with proclamations about the hurt she had known all of her life. “Ah, New York. This country. This world. Look like there ain’t no end to despair, Ms. Maria,” said Nola Mae Pierce. Her voice leaned like a coconut tree, and remnants of her Trinidadian roots were like flashes that appeared and disappeared as she spoke in her quick-tempo manner. “I know it seem like the Lord God Almighty decided to strike you down. I mean, it seem like a curse been put ’pon you, and He grinding you down into the good, dark earth with His great foot. But I seen a lot in my day, and I’m tellin’ you to hold fast. Hold strong, chile. There gonna be many a day and night when you feel like your heart won’t never be healed, and maybe I think that there ain’t no healin’ to some things—take the loss of my boy, for instance—but if you can hold on a day, and then that night, and then hold on till the morning, and so on, you gonna carry on, chile. You got them two chil’run to look after—two boys, at that—and Lord, I know it is awful hard to think about how you gonna raise ’em up now, but you got to. You got to. This ain’t no promised land, like they say, like they tellin’ and givin’ over to everybody else. We know the look and ways of the hard, hard, road, don’t we?”

  Maria Thompson nodded, her eyes blank.

  “We got to carry on with babies, anyway. And even then . . .” And here the old woman’s face closed up like a door, and her soft, watery eyes hardened to a high sheen. “They slaughter our boys, and snuff ’em out like candles. Yes, indeed, they do. They ran my boy in the ground. Had him cornered in the ally, they tell me—Ms. Robinson’s little niece Sunnie run to my house and told me—and I run as fast as these legs could carry me, like I was a schoolgirl, chile. I run and run, and when I got there, they was like a pack of wolves on him. Little Sunnie screamin’ behind me and the sight of my boy on the ground, beaten, mashed down like a breadfruit, took my breath. I mean, the savagery struck me dumb. Now, you tell me. What did he do to deserve that? What kind of sin can lead to that from a hand that ain’t God’s? And then them cops—God, strike me down if I’m lying, they was cops with badges shining—they scattered like a pack that got finished with a meal, drippin’ blood and spit, and they got to scampering away. I wanted to die that instant. And I got sight of one of ’em. Yes, he looked me dead in my eyes. And all I could do was look at them eyes and then look at my boy. Ain’t no words. Ain’t no words for certain things, certain sights and feelings and such. Just like you ain’t got no words now, chile, I couldn’t think a single sound in the queen’s English what could be spoken. And the police didn’t want to hear nothin’ about it later. But how could they? It was them that did it.”

  A fresh tear dropped from Maria Thompson’s yellowish face, which had lost its buttery tone and had given over to the look of brittle leaves in autumn. Her trembling hand held a cup of coffee teetering between her fingers.

  “And I took sick many days long after that. Just keeping to myself and waiting on the Lord to call me home . . .” The old woman let out a sigh that seemed to expel all of the air inside of her that had been keeping her alive. “Well, I know who done it,” she said at last, straightening her dress and clutching the handkerchief in her lap. “Just as sure as I know my own birth name is Nola Mae Pierce.”

  And here the old woman set her cup down and took Maria Thompson’s lifeless hand. “Can’t forget eyes like that, chile. Cold and blue. Wolf eyes, they were. The same eyes that ruined my boy in that alley. And they was the same eyes I seen at that basketball court. Near that big tree. Yes, he was there, standin’ in his clothes, plain as day. The devil walking ’pon the earth. He didn’t have no uniform, but it was him. I learned his name and where he worked and what else he done in the ten years of digging to the bottom of my boy’s terrible end. I tried to report it, for the sake of you, a young mother with two baby boys. But who will listen to an old, angry woman? But I know, as God is my witness, if Sam Teak was there when your good man Jack Thompson was speaking the truth, wasn’t no good come of it.”

  Sam Teak’s name fell from Nola Mae Pierce’s lips and filled the air and Maria Thompson’s mind like a poisonous gas. What no one knew in the subsequent seconds, including Nola Mae Pierce as she talked on and on in outrage, and as Manden stood dazed in the doorway frame, and as Horus slumped in a nearby room, was that a split occurred within Maria Thompson at the exact moment the totality of her husband’s death came into being in her mind. She thought, How will I . . . ? (for she was no longer listening to anyone and was talking to her two selves now as if in private conversation, split versions of herself seated across from each other in a parlor). The two Marias (the wife Maria Thompson and the maiden Maria Goodwin) talked quietly in her head like two old enemies forced together to discuss a common threat, each questioning the other. Who will protect me and the boys now? Was there ever any real protection in this world? How can such evil exist? Wasn’t it always so? Can I bear this? Shouldn’t you know what you can stand? What will I do? Don’t you know? I am alone now. Weren’t you always?

  The two voices—the two Marias—grew louder and louder in her head, and the sensation faintly reminded her of the day her mother confessed (in a moment of weakness, undiagnosed ovarian cancer can soften the edges of the mind) that in truth, the Goodwins had not a drop of prominent white Goodwin blood in them. There had been no freedman’s contracts or latter-day marriage, as each generation had been telling the next. Rather, the highly prized blood of the Goodwins (according to the oral stories of the eldest women in the family) was merely, and unremarkably, the result of plantation rapes. Maria (as Maria Goodwin) remembered the sensation of that split feeling then and pondered the question of whether she should plant her sense of self in the bit of news her mother disclosed to her or the more familiar, comfortable lie.

  And there again, as Maria Thompson sat on the couch while old Nola Mae Pierce talked, was the feeling between the two minds that one self would have to be chosen over the other. And in those moments when the two Marias yammered on about what was and what was not to be, she thought that she was again at a split, that she would have to choose, yet again, the Maria Goodwin she had never really known or the Maria Thompson she had not had the chance to fully be.

  In the mocking voices of both sides of her was another lingering question. Now that she and her brother had disowned each other and now that she’d made her own way and had begun a life that had already been ended, what was she going to do? Now that she had dropped out of college and was a revolutionary homemaker, a role she’d fashioned out of thin air, out of what she thought might be needed without being certain of what was necessary, what role was she to play in her own life—Maria Goodwin or Maria Thompson—now? And sitting in her apartment with a dea
d husband and two children, she wondered (both Marias wondered) how it was that at the age of twenty-nine, she still did not know.

  The old woman was finishing now. “He’s a cop, you know. In this here precinct. The devil’s name is Sam Teak, chile. I know ’cause I seen him come up from the fires of hell myself. Run our men into the ground. That’s what they do. ’Specially those that got something to say, that stand up for something. Well, well and so, Ms. Maria,” and here at last the old woman rose slowly in preparation to depart. “God hears the child who cry out and is prepared to receive and keep us all in the by-and-by.”

  And it was at that moment, when the front door was closed and Nola Mae Pierce was gone and Maria Thompson was again seated on the couch in the quiet, that there was the spigot sound of coffee spilling from the cup that she let drop onto her lap and run down to the floor. She let go of more than just the coffee cup, something bigger.

  But sitting on the floor by the bed, crying intermittently and listening in the nearby room, Horus could not have known about the two Marias or what had finally slipped away. In the weeks and months to follow, he pondered how the gunshot, the man named Sam Teak, and his dead father connected. And in his seven-year-old mind, he tried to summon the logic of the combination. But before he had the chance to understand the horror in its entirety, the worst part of the family’s descent began. Someone had called about the “changed” condition of Maria Thompson, how her mind had seemed to shift from clear, distinguishable colors to gray. Years later, what Horus would remember the most was the scent of the spilled coffee, which seemed to last forever in the carpet and hung in the air of the apartment long after his mother drifted away.

  Nightmares served as caretakers of the seen and unforgotten. He sometimes dreamed of the drive down from New York to Washington, he and Manden in the car with the caseworker taking them to another place, where they were put in the miserable care of Uncle Randy. Horus watched Manden shrink down into someone else in those days. His brother, too, Horus had always supposed, watched him drown in his own rancor. It was this feeling of watching, of being in a constant state of powerlessness, that made Horus despise Manden somewhere inside.

  Once, in the early-morning stillness of the basement, with the periwinkle of dawn spilling though the tiny windows, Horus got the courage to ask Manden if he had heard their father’s voice the day of the funeral. Did he hear what their father said from the coffin too? “Our father . . .” Horus began, unsure of how to ask such a question. It sounded almost like a prayer, the beginnings of a catechism. “Our father . . . Manny, did you hear what Papa said?” he asked. Manden did not respond. “Tell me,” Horus demanded. In fear of what he thought he heard at the funeral, wondrous and so impossible, Horus wanted a yes or a no from his brother. Manden stirred, betraying that he was awake and listening, but he did not answer the question.

  Perhaps that was why, years later, Horus worked with doors and locks. Security. An artificial realm in which at least he had the key. His mind compartmentalized and warehoused his life. And somehow, without his mind knowing it, his heart decided that the annihilation of Sam Teak could wash away his father’s blood and resurrect his dignity, and he could reclaim his mother’s wandering soul and bury his uncle in a great black pit. With the removal of the source of the sorrow, he could preserve the children he and Manden were before it all happened, untarnished in time.

  And wandering about the sullen library shelves at his place of work, Horus reasoned simply (his mind fast at work) that he just wanted to see where this man Sam Teak lived and how he had gone on living after his father was dead. And he was not hard to find. A retired police officer listed in the directory. Horus wrote the address down neatly on a little white piece of paper. His heart played along while he did his research, waiting for the opportunity to reveal the truth, feigning agreement with justifications for satisfying curiosities. Such tricks! Such mastery of line of sight! And Horus might have been able to go on like that for many more weeks and months and years, with his heart and mind looking at different parts of the whole, if it wasn’t for the marbles.

  Coming home from a long day of locks and doors at the library, his polyester uniform stuck to his overheated body in all of the most uncomfortable places, Horus parked his car on the crowded street and walked to his house. There was a group of children playing on the sidewalk in front of his rowhouse when he arrived. They were huddled like a mound of Neapolitan ice cream, laughing, colorful in their play clothes. The soft chatter of childish concerns flittered through the air.

  Horus stopped to look at them. To his surprise, there were two little boys in the center with a cluster of marbles. They glittered in the honey sun of late afternoon like semiprecious gems. An older boy heckled about the marbles not being as great as street tag or Hot Wheels cars or basketball. “Sell ’em for snack money,” said one boy. “Who cares about some stupid old marbles, anyway?” said another boy. These boys reminded Horus of how the children in his second-grade class teased him about his “African-booty-scratching father and his African ways.” They did not understand Jack Thompson’s talk of a history that extended thousands of years before the four hundred years of slavery drilled into their heads. They did not understand his “outfits” and the slow, deliberate way he talked of the lynchings and atrocities of the South, of taking a stand, of power and destiny. They called him and his brother “Sons of the African Booty Scratcher,” until Manden punched the biggest boy in the face.

  “Sell ’em for treats,” the boy said again. But all of the children looked on still, the little solar system of glass holding their gazes in varying degrees of wonder and delight. Horus had not seen such a sight since the summer day of his father’s murder. It was the last day his universe had held intact, the last time he had a brother and a mother and a father and a family. Sam Teak exploded all of them apart and spread them to different parts of space to disintegrate, where they were unable to find their origins or evolve into anything else.

  On the sidewalk, Horus looked at the twinkle in the boys’ eyes, the concentration, the purity, and saw himself and Manden as children, bickering and smiling, oblivious to the horrors that awaited them later that day. He saw his favorite marble, the cat’s eye, which he later gripped in his pocket at the funeral. In the light and magic of the choir and the shadow of the coffin, he dropped it. He never found that cat’s eye and supposed it dropped into the hole where sorrows went. And twenty years later, on a sidewalk in front of his house, he was watching the dazzle of the glass balls again. And somewhere, between the glittering glass and the dripping honey sunlight, his heart decided that he would kill Sam Teak for what he took, for what he destroyed, for the people his people had not been able to become.

  Horus took Sam Teak’s address out of the bottom of his dresser drawer, where he had stuffed it weeks before, and put it in his pocket. He told Brenda his story (his mind still culpable in the half-lie) about going up to New York with Manden to revisit the past. He would leave early that Saturday morning. He would go up there to see, as a scientist able to travel back in time to witness a catastrophic event would wish to see it and prove how it happened, to prove that it actually occurred. Oh, the mysteries that could be solved, the destruction that could be explained, just by going to see how a man who murdered lived.

  Later, when Horus was able to think of it, he would take that moment on the sidewalk from a sealed Mason jar on the highest shelf of his mind. He would take out that moment of watching the children play as he would a preserved peach. And he would hear a clicking sound in his mind, but he could not tell if it was something locking or unlocking. The little slip of paper on which he wrote the name and address of his father’s murderer called loudly to his heart. “Come and see for yourself,” it said. And the swell of all that had been destroyed and could never be regained welled up inside of him, until his heart trembled and could not hold it any longer.

  And then there were the locusts. Loud they were, like a million little sirens, trumpeti
ng a day filled with something he would not be able to fathom until later, when the fathoming of the thing itself spread before him on the highway with Sam Teak in the car. With the gun in the glove compartment. He rose at four o’clock in the morning that Saturday. Brenda slept soundly. The air seemed heavy with a dew that dripped from everything. In the subway-tiled vestibule of the rowhouse, his hands slipped on the knob when he opened the front door.

  Later he would think of that early dawn, when he stepped out of the house and smelled the exhaust-filled air, stood looking at the mulched tree boxes and dead grass in the shadowy light, and heard the locusts. It was a wonder, an omen, that such a sound of Southern, swamp-hot night air should be heard in the early morning of the city, a place of car horns and buses and traffic-jammed streets. Even at that hour, the pigeons were already about, picking up stale McDonald’s french fries and bits of candy on the sidewalk. The locusts droned on, brazen in the bluish light, preening from wherever they were. Countless and unseen in the dimness, the darkeners of the sun.

  But on the early morning that Horus headed for New York and heard the locusts, sudden and unannounced but for the sirens with which they greeted him, his heart knew that one door had been locked and another opened. And his mind looked on helplessly. For it could only marvel at the means and speed of his falling, and ponder what “Promise me” meant.