Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  I don’t want no (huh!)

  Cornbread, no molasses (huh!) They hurts my pride (huh!) They hurts my pride.

  To the child, she looked like a gnome from a fairy tale, bent over her treasure hoard of silvery rings.

  After another verse, about “cold iron shackles,” Raleigh said, “Excuse me, Flonnie. I want to get insurance. You could give my money to that man that comes to get yours for your burial.”

  Apparently unsurprised by his continuing a conversation begun the previous summer, the old woman scratched at her head through her knotted handkerchief and replied, “Chillen can’t get it.”

  “Can just Negro people?”

  She spat at a ring and rubbed it. “I could tell you some white folks right close by that ought to have got it and they wouldn’t be so hard up now.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Don’t you spill that milk. I got to go see my sister this evening. You can come if you don’t act up.”

  Raleigh was astonished. “I didn’t know you had a sister! I didn’t know you had anybody but us.”

  “Us!” Flonnie dropped a ring onto each bony finger and held her hand up to the overhead light. “You think I belong to you? Huh? I don’t got to stay here one minute past I want to. You think you going to boss me like that sugarcane master and haul me up on the block? Huh!”

  “No! Honest.” Raleigh had conflated the “block” to which Flonnie kept mysteriously referring and the stump on which he’d seen her decapitating chickens, and he feared she suspected him of plotting her murder. “I didn’t mean that. I was only asking about your family. I was just wondering if you were married.”

  “Hush.” She shook her hand into the cabinet’s open drawer. The silver slid sparkling down. “I’m not studying to marry no aggravating fool and raise no pack of wild shirttail niggers to drive me crazy with the police knocking on the door.”

  Raleigh swallowed too large a lump of cantaloupe, which squeezed its way coldly down his throat. “Is that what your sister did?”

  “Never mind.”

  “My daddy had another wife but she died before I was born. Her name was Grace Louise, did you know her? She got dip-something. I hope my mama doesn’t get it.”

  “Diphtheria. Eat that okra.”

  “I’m full.”

  “You don’t eat right I’ll be laying you out the way I did your daddy’s little wife.” Flonnie began roughly stacking dishes on a wide wood tray. “Here. Help me clear this table, you want to come.”

  “Does lay her out mean put her in a coffin?” With plate and glass, Raleigh followed Flonnie into the kitchen. “Flonnie? Did you put her in the coffin?”

  Covering food with wax paper, Flonnie told him that laying-out meant dressing the dead in nice clothes and arranging them attractively in the parlor for visitors to see. “When Grace Louise passed, it was the day but one your poor old grandma lost her twins.”

  “You mean my uncles?” Raleigh had heard stories of the sudden deaths, at four, of his grandmother’s “babies,” the twins Thaddeus and Gayle. And he had seriously studied, for clues to their fates, the photograph in which they were seated together in a wicker armchair, both wearing sailor shirts, with their hair parted in the middle and wet-combed. They looked exactly alike, except one was squinting.

  “I laid the boys out in the front parlor and I had to put Grace Louise in the back. She wasn’t more than a child herself. Earley carried on so, they thought he’d lost his mind for good. Here, take this rag and dry those plates off, and don’t drop them.”

  “Do you know why people die, Flonnie?”

  “You getting ready to tell me you got it all figured out? They die when it’s time.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Flonnie shook her hands in the scalding water, dried them on Raleigh’s cloth, and put a pinch of snuff in her mouth. “You think God Almighty cares what you think about it, a skinny little six-yearold boy?”

  “I’m already seven. I don’t think it’s fair for God to fix it so He’s the only one that doesn’t have to die.”

  “Don’t poison your stomach with so much chewing gum and you won’t have to either.”

  Raleigh’s grandmother now entered the kitchen, making the low clucking noise of a worried pigeon that always announced her presence. “Flonnie, don’t you be talking to Raleigh about dying. He’ll be having nightmares again.”

  “Yes’m, Miz Hayes,” muttered the old, tiny woman, and she said not another word until she and Raleigh climbed up into the bus to ride to Darktown to visit her sister—who was actually the widow of Flonnie’s brother. Having dropped in the dimes she’d been tightly holding in her fist, Flonnie walked Raleigh to the first seat, sat him down, and said, “Stay put.”

  He clutched at her hand. “Where are you going?” There were no other passengers near him.

  “Back here.”

  “Why can’t I come? I’m scared up here.”

  “I thought I heard you bragging how you could read.”

  Trembling, Raleigh shook his head yes. Flonnie lifted her hand with its shopping bag toward a sign above the driver’s head. “WHITES SEAT FROM FRONT. COLOREDS SEAT FROM REAR.” By the time Raleigh had deciphered, though not understood, this notice, Flonnie had gone to the crowded back section, where she was poking furiously with her patent-leather shoe (which was no larger than a child’s) at the foot of a seated young black man three times her size. “Get up out of there, ’fore I take hold of your hair and pull you up. Where’s your manners, trash, you sitting like you can’t even see me!”

  His ears fiery, Raleigh watched horrified to see if the young man was going to pick Flonnie up and snap her like a twig, or if the bus driver was going to go back there and have her put in jail for acting up. But the black man only grinned, murmuring, “Now, granny, now, granny,” and stretched up out of the seat, and let her take it. All through the trip, Raleigh craned his neck back, whenever the bus stopped, to make sure Flonnie didn’t get off at the rear door and leave him alone in an alien world. But the straw hat, red as a revolutionary flag, never moved.

  And now, decades later (while driving to Betty Hemans’s house with Mingo’s gun to his head), the memory of that first trip to Darktown suddenly flashed as fully in Raleigh’s mind as if he still stood shyly beside Flonnie in the small, dim room, walled with magazine pictures, while she kept shouting at her sister-in-law, an overweight, tearful woman who wore a nubbed bathrobe over her clothes. Suddenly, he could remember the room, the church calendar on the wall beside the hat and coat, the steel drum of water by the sink, the blanket thrown over an old couch and tucked into the corners. Suddenly, all these years later, he could again see the woman sobbing, could again hear Flonnie saying things about the woman’s son. He could hear them call the son “Jubal.” Yes, Flonnie was saying that Jubal was always sassing and wild with his music-playing and his socializing with trash in bars and his fast talk about what was wrong with America; and he was too full of himself and too good-looking for his own good. She was saying that Jubal’s going up North had just made it worse, and that going to war probably hadn’t helped either, because war was full of fools just like him. She was saying that the last thing Jubal needed to do was come home to Thermopylae, where it was as true now as it had been back when he first took up with “her” that “nobody was going to put up with a colored boy messing with a white woman.” Saying, besides, “she” was never coming home either, and had gone all the way to the other side of the world, and Jubal had better get it out of his mind once and for all. Saying maybe an army camp in Germany was as good a place as any for Jubal to figure out how to use his head.

  This memory curled over Raleigh like a wave, completely enveloping him. Then it receded as quickly as it had come, carrying all the small bits of words and pictures back into the past. On the narrow wood shelf beside Flonnie’s sister’s rocking chair had been a white plaster statue of Christ, which the sobbing woman had picked up and hugged to her bosom, talking
to it softly as she swayed in the chair. No doubt, it was the plastic Christ on Vera’s dashboard that had brought this scene so vividly back to Raleigh Hayes. For he was keeping his eye fixed on the little figure as he drove, as if it might pass him a warning, if necessary, that Mingo (who’d allowed him to run his errands as long as he remembered his “life was on the line”) was about to go entirely berserk and shoot him. Hayes kept checking back on Christ through the horrible endless hour it took him and Mingo to move into his office his old secretary, Betty Hemans, with her grocery box filled with coffeepot, bedroom slippers, cigarette cartons, thesaurus, and the 900-page manuscript of Remember Me; the horrible endless time it took to carry PeeWee Jimson’s bust back down through the lobby and into the Pinto’s trunk. He kept glancing in on Christ as he strapped to the Pinto’s luggage rack his greatgrandmother Tiny’s little black trunk, as he tried to explain to his suspicious Aunt Victoria why Mingo Sheffield was following them from room to room through the lonely old house. Raleigh Hayes kept his skeptical eye on Christ, who smiled back, the whole while he drove out of town, past the Civitans sign that he himself had taken charge of installing, back in the days when he’d been silly enough to believe the world made sense, back when he would never have thought the words on that sign could apply to him:

  YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THERMOPYLAE. WE HOPE YOU’LL COME BACK.

  The Quest

  Chapter 11

  In Which Our Hero Attends a Surprise Party THE PINE-LINED, unshouldered two-lane highway to Cowstream had a bad reputation. The curves were cheaply banked, the hills steep and sudden, the yellow line faded. Over the years in the night, hundreds of Carolinean drivers (as Nemours Kettell annually reminded the state highway commission, when encouraging them to give him a contract to rebuild Old 52), hundreds, or at least dozens, of drivers had flown off into darkness and sometimes death. Night or day, the hazard was impatience. Imperturbable tractors would creep onto the road out of a scraggly soybean or cotton field. Behind the tractor, six furious cars would weave for a passing view, until somebody, horn in a rage, would slam out into the other lane, meet an eighteen-wheeler coming the opposite way at seventy miles an hour, and would sail over a red clay gully into a pine barren or a tobacco crop or a roadside shack selling tomatoes.

  Raleigh Hayes had now been trapped behind a log truck for five miles. On the downgrades, this sadistic vehicle barreled away, straddling the middle of the road; on the upgrades, it slowed to a crawl, and half its pile of twenty-foot logs began jiggling loosely, convincing Raleigh that one of them was going to slide off, shoot through the windshield, and remove his head. Aunt Victoria snapped, “Pass him, pass him! We’ll be here all day!” and Mingo squealed, “Don’t do it, Raleigh, Vera’s got no acceleration at all.”

  An hour earlier, when Raleigh had found his aunt pacing her porch with her pocketbook under her arm and her overnight case already on the steps beside her, he’d tried to explain that Aura had borrowed his Fiesta and that therefore he had borrowed Mingo’s Pinto, and that coincidentally Mingo would be coming along, on affairs of his own. “And I’m sorry, Aunt Vicky, but I’m going to head straight on down to New Orleans on this business of Daddy’s, so do you think you could get Lovie to bring you back home from Cowstream? I really apologize.” Raleigh grimaced, the gun jabbing at his spine.

  Victoria had opened her saddlebag of a purse and carefully counted the bills in a wallet leather-tooled with coconut trees. She snapped it shut. “I guess if I could get a Bugis smuggler to take me, along with forty illegal elephant tusks and three live panthers, across the Sarawak River into Kuching, I can get my own sister to drive me fifty miles over a paved road back to Thermopylae. Though the fact Senior Clay ever got Lovie to move out that far in the first place is a miracle.”

  “Excuse me, Aunt Vicky—”

  “Hayeses never move. None of them would ever leave off jabbering in Papa’s dining room to look out the window at an eight-car crackup. Granny Tiny herself lying propped up in the goosedown bed right in the room where people had to see her while they were eating, scared she’d miss something, licking on peppermint sticks, day in, day out, until one Sunday she was dead. What Earley wants with Granny’s trunk, we’ll never—”

  “Excuse me, Aunt Vicky—”

  “Don’t dawdle, Raleigh. It’s down in the cellar. Go get it.”

  So deep ran the strain of Hayes garrulity in Raleigh’s eldest aunt, even when her theme was her relentless dissatisfaction with the rest of the family for “gabbing their lives away,” that once the three travelers finally got on the road, Mingo (who’d become strangely eager to talk about matters that he had just threatened to shoot Raleigh for revealing) could scarcely get in a word of confession.

  “Are you going to New Orleans on business or pleasure, Mr. Sheffield?” the old saleswoman had finally asked, at the end of a prolonged monologue on the poor habits and consequential poor health of her grandmother, her father, her brothers, and her sisters; by the end of which catalogue, Raleigh had already turned off the beltway, leaving behind the little six-spoked skyline of Thermopylae, with the Forbes Building at the Crossways glistening high above the rest. “Maybe you’re attending a convention?” Victoria suggested to Mingo, as the fat man appeared to be at a loss for words. “Will she tell?” Mingo whispered in Raleigh’s ear.

  “Tell what?” She turned to the backseat. “It’s none of my business.”

  “I’m going to South America.”

  “Whereabouts?” She waved away his smoke with her whitegloved hand.

  Disappointed that the announcement itself had not fazed her, Sheffield admitted, “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you better find out before you get there.” The elderly woman prodded Raleigh in the ribs, raised her eyebrows at him, and murmured sotto voce, “You don’t have to hang from a tree to be a nut.”

  “What was that?” Mingo lurched forward.

  “I said it’s a lot bigger than Thermopylae. I never covered that territory myself, but I’ve met folks that wouldn’t go back to South America if you paid them.”

  “Where’s a good place to get a job there?” Sheffield asked her.

  “Depends on what you do. If you shoot people for a living, you ought to try Chile or Nicaragua or maybe just go straight to El Salvador.”

  Eyelids narrowed, Sheffield leaned, panting, halfway over the front seat. “Why’d you say that? Did Raleigh tell you I shoot people? That’s a lie. Just ’cause I lost my job…”

  Raleigh flung out his arm and shoved Sheffield back. “Mingo, she was just joking. Now be quiet.”

  But Victoria was curious. “What did you do for a living, Mr. Sheffield? And could I ask you to please stop dropping your ashes in my hairdo?”

  The fat man sighed as he unpeeled a banana. He had a whole shopping bag of food that Vera had obviously slipped into the car along with her husband and her cast-off clothes. For ten long miles, Sheffield smoked and ate as he outlined his lost career at Knox-Bury’s Clothing Store, highlighted by detailed descriptions of his most successful window displays. “Can you believe Billy Knox wouldn’t want me at the mall, when the Charlotte Observer came and took a picture of my Christmas window for their Sunday supplement? I had all the reindeer in the new style sweaters at a disco, and Santa Claus wearing a double-breasted London Fog with a zip-in liner, and…”

  Raleigh, whose eyes were tearing from the smoke (if not his life), rolled down his window, and stared morosely at the tractor-drawn plow in front of him, whose driver looked to be taking a nap.

  The next ten miles went to Victoria Anna’s rendition of how, half a century ago, her father had lost control of both his furniture store and his butcher business. “Well, Mr. Sheffield, that hog PeeWee Jimson had bought up Papa’s loans behind his back and next thing we knew, the Hayes name was chiseled right off the building where it’d been since 1885. After he was told he was sick, and kept on living as he pleased, lost one leg, and still kept on—six or more Coca-Colas every day of his life—and
lost the other leg too before they wired me to come home—after Papa was gone, I got all his account books out of the cellar where they were gathering nothing but mold in an ice chest, and I totaled up $53,540 in uncollected bills over the years. Time’s expired on them now, and it’s money we’ll never see. Everybody in Thermopylae owed him, and I remember plain as yesterday how he’d cross over the street to keep from reminding them of that fact. Raleigh, pass that tractor before I lose my mind!”

  “Don’t do it, Raleigh!”

  “Mama couldn’t do a thing with him. I remember she’d say, ‘Mr. Hayes, I don’t believe the neighbors are all that ashamed of not paying their debts as you keep worrying they are.’ Poor Mama.”

  “My mama’s dead,” said Mingo. “She died two years ago February.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Sheffield, but you are sticking that lollipop right on my suit jacket. I don’t believe I ever knew an adult who ate as much candy as you do, except a Hayes. It always amazed me how any of them had a single tooth left to show up in their high school graduation photos. Well, we’re almost there.”

  “Thank God,” said Raleigh sincerely.

  “Last time I came out to Lovie’s, I was flying home for Big Em’s funeral. No, it was Furbus’s. Came from Kuala Lumpur.”

  Sheffield laughed. “That’s the funniest name I ever heard.”

  “Not to them.”

  “Boy, you sure have been a lot of places, and had a lot of adventures, Miss Hayes. I wish I could have had your life instead of mine, except of course for Vera and all. But I guess I would have been too chicken. I’d be scared of live panthers. You must be pretty brave.”