Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  “You’re Earley’s boy.”

  “That’s right. Flonnie, you took me once to meet your sister? Was

  she Jubal’s mother?”

  Her eyes squinted hard behind the thick lenses. “You’re Raleigh.

  All the time pestering me ’bout my burial ’surance. Your mama died

  of the diphtheria. Nothing but a child.”

  “No, that was my father’s first wife. Grace Louise. My mother was

  Sarah. Somebody told me Jubal might have moved to Chicago?” “I’m not studying Jubal. You the police?”

  “No, I’m in insurance. I’m trying to find Jubal to give him some

  money.”

  “I’m all paid up, my funeral’s paid in full.”

  “That’s good.” Hayes tried to smile. “But you don’t look like

  you’ll be needing a funeral any time soon.”

  The old look withered him. “I don’t truck with a lie. I’m going

  over Jordan. Sooner the better. This world and me don’t get on and

  never did. It’s not worth nuthin’.”

  Raleigh was stung by her retort about his polite lie, stung into

  honesty. “You’re right, it’s not. So what does that make of the Lord

  you were always snapping at me to respect more? You think it’s

  ‘smart’ to respect whoever made such a shabby mess?”

  “You bring me some snuff?”

  To Raleigh’s astonishment, the salt of tears stung his eyes. He

  couldn’t see the woman in the wheelchair. He saw decades back, the

  woman with her hoe, angrily stabbing weeds and flinging them over

  her shoulder out of her careful garden. That woman, her thin strong

  arms bright in the summer heat, was saying, “You think God

  Almighty cares how much you respect Him, a skinny little boy like

  you? He don’t care what the President thinks.”

  “Well, I don’t care about Him either. I think He’s stupid,” said

  the small boy behind her, the wicker basket so laden with soft red

  tomatoes, he had to loop both elbows under the handle. The woman spun around, clinched his chin in her dark hand,

  and jerked his head straight up at the hot, unclouded sky. “You make

  you one of those,” she snapped. “You fixing to try it, you so smart? Or

  one of these.” She yanked a long crooked carrot sliding out of the

  earth. “See this little finger? Look here! You see this little nail on it?”

  she clicked the tiny nail, clogged with dirt, rough-edged, on her small

  moving finger. “That’s just a little ugly thing. It ain’t nuthin’. Well,

  little boy, you make me one, and bring it on here to me, and then

  maybe I listen to you telling me how you just as smart as the

  Almighty Lord.”

  The glass door to the sun porch of the Woodrow Wilson Nursing

  Home shuddered open, startling Raleigh Hayes, and he kept blinking until the past went away. An overweight nurse in a dingy uniform called, “Ten-thirty. She’s got to go to P.T. now.” Flonnie growled as

  the woman came closer.

  What, at this point, physical therapy was supposed to do for

  Flonnie Rogers except cause her discomfort, Hayes couldn’t imagine.

  He stopped the wheelchair with his hand. “Okay. Just one second.

  Flonnie, please, I’d really appreciate it if you’d help me find Jubal. I’m

  scared Daddy is going to, I’m scared he may die before I can get there,

  and do this for him, I guess.” Stooping down, Hayes rewrapped the

  package in her lap, and slid one of the snuff cans into her bathrobe

  pocket. “Please. Do you know where Jubal is? Flonnie?” Flonnie put her thin dry finger to his mouth. “Hush,” she whispered. “Don’t you tell anybody, you hear me? Jubal’s still down in

  Charleston, Earley. Still working at the Bayou Lounge. But don’t

  mess with him. Leave it lie. Just leave it lie.”

  “Pardon?” Raleigh’s legs were cramping as he stayed bent down

  beside her.

  “Hold still,” she told him. She roughly brushed his hair back with

  her fingers. “I don’t want to catch y’all down in Darktown again,

  messing with those jugband niggers. They going no place but Hell.

  The Lord’s got His special mark on you, Earley. I can feel it. I got the

  power to feel it. He’s chose you. If the law don’t hang you first.” Raleigh lost his footing when the impatient nurse nudged the

  wheelchair forward. “Poor old thing,” she said briskly. “She doesn’t

  know where she is, nine days out of ten.”

  “I hope that’s true,” he replied.

  So disturbed was Hayes by the old woman’s confusing him with

  his father—as if he’d intruded on the most intimate moments in the

  man’s life and so gained knowledge he shouldn’t have, and didn’t

  want—so shaken was he by Flonnie’s strange elision of all the past

  and all the people in it, that he walked right past Mingo Sheffield in

  the lobby. Sheffield was trying to bring in the picture on an ancient

  television set by twisting the aluminum foil atop its rabbit ears. The

  two old men, still seated together on the vinyl couch, watched him. “Hey, Raleigh, where’re you going? Raleigh, wait!…Well, so

  long, you two. I can’t fix it any better. Y’all sure could use a new set.

  Bye-bye. RALEIGH! Wait up! Where’re we going? You find that mental patient your daddy wants to marry? That wasn’t her in the

  wheelchair, was it?”

  Mingo kept talking as Hayes drove angrily back to the intersection of stores he’d noticed coming in, the huddled cluster of

  McDonald’s, Kmarts, and Pizza Huts that were now nourished by

  even the small Southern hamlets. “Everybody in that place,” Mingo

  was saying, “was so old it was sad, wasn’t it? Didn’t you think so? If

  my mama hadn’t died, I sure wouldn’t put her in a place like that,

  and neither would Vera. I don’t mean ’cause they were Negroes. I

  wouldn’t put her in there ’cause it was sad. Ned Ware did. Put his

  mother in one. Just because she wrapped up the garbage in Christmas

  paper. Do you think that’s fair? And she got killed, too, because they

  didn’t have a rubber mat in the bathtub.”

  “Stay in the car, Mingo, I’ll be right back.”

  But when Raleigh returned with his package from the discount

  appliance store, Sheffield had disappeared. Finally Hayes found the

  fat man in line at the counter of Kentucky Fried Chicken, where he

  was ordering biscuits, corn on the cob, and a bucket of Extra Crispy. “Mingo, for God’s sake! It’s not even eleven-thirty!” Eleven-thirty! Aura! Wasn’t she supposed to be on television at

  eleven? “Mingo, quick, I’ve got to go back to the appliance store.

  Quick. Pay.”

  Flushed, Sheffield turned around to whisper, “Can you lend me

  twelve dollars? I just remembered they took my money, the drug

  gang.”

  “They took mine, too,” snapped Hayes. “You’ve got money in

  your shoes.”

  “That’s for emergencies.”

  “Look, you’ve got fifties, Mingo. All I’ve got is hundreds. Use

  your damn shoes. Come on!”

  The teenagers serving Sheffield were now staring openly at the

  two men, one thin, one fat, both in flowered Hawaiian shirts, both

  with black eyes, the fat one groaning as he squatted to remove his

  wide suede oxford and shake a folded bill from its toe.

  It was 11:23 when Hayes made
it back to the double row of television sets lining the back wall of the appliance store, a cavernous,

  nearly deserted place.

  “Gollee! Raleigh, it’s AURA! Isn’t it? That’s Aura! Look at her,

  she’s all over. Here. And here. There must be fifteen of her. She’s on

  every set! Aura! She’s famous!” Sheffield, with a red-and-white bag

  of food under each huge arm, bobbed his head joyfully at the long

  row of televisions, where, indeed, Aura Hayes smiled in all shades of

  color and focus. She smiled, in full close-up, and said, “Let me answer

  your question this way. What Congressman Lukes doesn’t seem to

  understand is, we already have enough nuclear weapons to blow up

  the entire world thirty times over. Instead of spending trillions of our

  taxpayers’ dollars on missile shields that don’t work, why don’t we

  take care of some real problems, like health care. If we’re all floating

  on a sea of gasoline, do we really want to play macho games about

  who can stockpile the most matches?” Applause rattled the sets. Raleigh’s heart was thudding. Here was his wife, sounding so

  poised, looking so crisp in a blue blouse and beige suit he didn’t think

  he’d ever seen. He was angry and proud and mesmerized. “It’s Mothers for Peace!” shouted Mingo. “Hot damn!” “Shut up, I can’t hear.”

  Congressman Lukes was saying something about wanting to prevent America from enemy attack, and when we fight, fight to win.

  Aura was saying, “That sounds like teenaged locker-room talk to me.

  This country is not a football game. We don’t need a congressman

  trying to prove his masculinity by shooting off bigger and bigger

  rockets. We need a congressman trying to help us save the human

  race.”

  “Oh shit,” Raleigh groaned. “Aura, you’re going to get us sued!” Shouts of “NO MORE LUKES. NO MORE NUKES” had burst

  out, and the screens switched to the poster-waving studio audience.

  It was mostly female, mostly shouting, and some of it was familiar.

  “Mingo, there’s VERA. Good God, there’s Barbara Kettell and

  Wayne Sparks and NEMOURS!”

  Sheffield pulled the chicken leg out of his open mouth to shout,

  “VERA! You’re supposed to be in hiding!”

  The hostess of Woman Alive!, a young handsome woman with

  tawny streaked hair, paced the aisles with her microphone. “Please,

  ladies, let’s keep it down, and try to get in one more question!” Barbara Kettell leaped to her feet, swatting at her livid husband’s flattop beside her as he grabbed at her poncho in an effort to pull her down. “Yes,” she panted nervously. “I have a question for Mr. Lukes. Yes. Well, it’s this. He says he wants to get the government off our backs and out of our lives, and I agree, and then he says it ought to be against the law for any woman to have an abortion even if she’s

  raped because it’s the same as murder. So that’s my question.” “What’s your question?” asked the hostess. But Mrs. Kettell had

  abruptly disappeared from the screen, presumably jerked back into

  her seat by her spouse, the apoplectic president of the Civitans Club

  and chairman of the Re-Elect Charlie Lukes Committee. As the camera turned back to Aura, she was seated in a swivel

  chair across a coffee table from the congressman. “Perhaps,” she

  smiled (and the smile made Raleigh whisper, “Uh oh”), “perhaps,

  Mrs. Kettell’s question is to ask Mr. Lukes whether he’s ever been

  raped.”

  “Now, hold on, Mrs. Hayes.” Charlie Lukes held up a hand. He

  was a thickset, jowly man in his late fifties, whose fluffy hair looked

  like a wig and whose gray polyester suit looked too tight. He gave

  Aura a smile as specious as her own. “I may not be a murderer or a

  murder victim, but I sure as shooting can make the judgment that

  murder’s a crime.” The Lukes faction clapped.

  Aura leaned forward. “Why is abortion murder, and the deaths of

  those millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children,

  those ‘acceptable losses’ killed in your ‘winnable’ wars not murder?”

  She sat back to applause from her faction.

  Lukes held the hand up again. “I know Barbara Kettell personally,” he told the camera. “Known and admired her for years. I know

  she’s a fine mother and a fine wife and just a darn sweet gal, and I’m

  certain her friend here, Mrs. Hayes, is just the same. So I don’t mind

  taking the time to come try to shed some light on these vital issues

  with the public and with these ladies, whose interests couldn’t be

  more sincere I don’t have a doubt in the world. But, ladies, pardon

  me, the topic here today is our struggle to rebuild our military

  strength in order to insure a lasting peace and honor throughout the

  globe, and I’ll be danged if I see what that’s got to do with abortion,

  which is a profound and sacred issue too, but as these ladies are not

  lawyers or doctors—”

  Aura snapped, “First, Mr. Lukes, how dare you assume we aren’t!

  Second, you are not, and never have been, a doctor, a lawyer, or for

  that matter, a professional anything except a professional bigot and a

  warmonger, whose only political experience prior to your regrettable

  election to Congress was using the Thermopylae zoning board to

  keep African-Americans out of decent housing!”

  “WHY DON’T YOU GO HOME WHERE YOU BELONG?”

  yelled a male voice, and shouts of “Yeahs!” and “Boos!” fought

  through the television speakers.

  “Was that Nemours yelled that?” whispered Mingo, the chicken

  leg still poised at his mouth.

  “Sir, no food allowed in this store!” A prissy salesman pushed

  himself between the Thermopyleans and the televisions. “You’ll

  have to take that outside. We have a rule that—”

  “Will you please be quiet!” Hayes shouted at him. “I’m trying to

  watch this!” He craned to see around the man. Aura, Lukes, the

  audience, and the hostess all seemed to be talking at once. “You can’t shout at me like that, sir.” The clerk now started turning off all the sets. “And you two can’t stand around watching TV for

  free either.”

  “Free?” Hayes, losing his temper, thrust a stapled bag in the salesman’s prunish face. “I just bought a $49.95 radio in here not ten minutes ago! And frankly, there’s not another goddamn soul in your

  whole goddamn stupid store, so what’s it to you?!”

  “That’s true,” said Mingo wistfully. “It’s just like Knox-Bury’s. I’m

  glad I’m gone.”

  The clerk, still clicking off sets as fast as he could, asked Hayes

  to take his profanity elsewhere and asked Sheffield to just take a look

  at the chicken litter all over the floor. And as Woman Alive! appeared

  to be off the air and the few remaining screens were now filled with

  cats doing the mambo, the Civitans didn’t argue with the seething

  clerk but left.

  “If I’d known a radio meant so much to you, Raleigh, I wouldn’t

  have given ours to the nuns. Can you believe that was Aura?” “Frankly no.”

  “She’s real photogenic. Didn’t you think she was as good as

  Ingrid Bergman when she talks back to her judges in Joan of Arc?” Raleigh passed two cars at once. “That seems to me an ominous,

  if not a prescient, comparison.”

  “What?”


  “Never mind. Mingo, since Vera is obviously not in hiding, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me why you thought she was?” Sheffield nibbled his corn on the cob, sometimes rotating the

  ear, sometimes shooting his teeth down the cob like a typewriter

  return. “Well, she can’t tell a lie.”

  “Oh?”

  “So we decided she ought to go to her sister’s.” The teeth gnawed

  to the end of a row, and reversed. “If the police had really gotten to

  her, it’d have been all over for me.”

  Raleigh swung the white Cadillac into the driveway that led to

  Woodrow Wilson Nursing Home. “Please try to remember, Mingo,

  you didn’t murder anybody. You aren’t guilty. There’s nothing to hide.

  Except throwing all that paint on Knox-Bury’s merchandise.” He

  parked the car.

  “I wouldn’t go back to work for Billy Knox for love or money.” “I doubt he’s going to offer you much of either. Excuse me a

  minute.”

  “Where are you going? Hey, we just left here. Raleigh? Raleigh!” When Hayes asked to speak to Flonnie Rogers, he was told that

  she was still in physical therapy and couldn’t be disturbed. And so he

  left the radio for her at the reception desk. He wrote her a note,

  which he pinned to the bag.

  Dear Flonnie.

  Enjoy the games. Take care of yourself. Yours, Raleigh (Earley’s son)

  He straightened the piece of paper, wondering again, for the first time in more than thirty years, how Flonnie Rogers—who claimed she’d never been to school—had learned to read; wondering, for the first time, why his grandmother—in those decades of evenings alone together with the black woman—had been too proud to ask Flonnie to teach her.

  Chapter 16

  In Which Raleigh and Mingo Fall into a Swamp OUR TRAVELERS headed away from Mount Olive and the high tangled cliffs of the Neuse River, headed deeper into Carolina’s flat coastal plain. In Calypso, they stopped for Mingo to buy a liter of Pepsi and use the bathroom. Raleigh called Aura. No answer. He called the realtor who managed “Peace and Quiet,” his Kure Beach cottage, but she didn’t answer either. There was no phone in the cottage; there was no choice but to drive there. It would be infuriating if his half-brother Gates really were hiding out (and from what?) in Raleigh’s property. It would also be infuriating if he had disappeared. Since first grade, when he’d stolen Raleigh’s meticulous model airplanes and sold them at recess for a quarter apiece, Gates had never done anything but cause trouble.