Autumn Street

by Lois Lowry

  Gordon, the baby, had grown two new front teeth in exactly the same place where mine were missing, during the month that I was sick. And he could stand by himself, startled and wobbly, for a few seconds before he fell. Jess brought him to my room to show me, and she was kind to me, glad I was well. She had a bedroom of her own now, because I'd been sick; but it was not for that reason that she was kind, I knew.

  Grandmother appeared in my doorway now and then, with her stiff face, to inquire how I felt. I answered her politely, but I didn't think she really cared. All of her time was still spent with Grandfather; when she came to my doorway, it was always with his medicine, or the book that she was reading to him, in one hand.

  Finally I was allowed to go downstairs alone. I put on my bathrobe and my pink slippers of soft fur and went to visit Tatie in the kitchen. I vowed that I would never speak to her, or anyone, of Charles.

  She welcomed me with a hug, oatmeal cookies, and tears that she thought I didn't see in her dark eyes.

  "Child," she said, "I was so worried about you."

  There was in having been sick a wonderful status that I had never enjoyed before. "Everyone was worried about me," I said proudly.

  "Lord, that's true all right. Your mama, she was up nights pacing the floor..."

  "Really?" I was delighted.

  "Really. Course, she was worried about your daddy, too, when he got hisself injured..."

  "But it was just his leg. Mine was my whole body that was sick."

  "That's surely true, Elizabeth."

  "And Jessica was worried too, I bet."

  "My goodness, that Jessica, she up in her room every ' night, making get-well cards, and then you too sick to look at them, sometimes she cried."

  "Oh, yes, Jessica must have been very upset." I savored it all, along with the oatmeal cookies.

  "And your grandma..."

  "Ha," I interrupted. "Grandmother doesn't care about anybody, except Grandfather."

  There was a silence, and then Tatie turned on me furiously, something she had never done before.

  "Don't you speak of your grandma that way, Elizabeth."

  "But she doesn't, Tatie. She..."

  "Let me just tell you something. And then I don't want to talk of it no more, do you understand?"

  I nodded.

  "Your grandma, on the day that we bury Charles ..."

  "Oh, Tatie, I don't want to talk about that. I really don't."

  "Then you just listen. You don't have to do no talking. Your grandma, on that day, she go up to her room and she puts on her black coat and her black hat with them feathers, and she calls her a taxi, and she tells the taxi to take her to the Full Gospel Church.

  "Now you don't know this, Elizabeth, 'cause you too little, but in this town there ain't a cab driver that's gonna take a white lady to the Full Gospel without arguing. And I know this happened, because the cab driver, he told Gwendolyn. He told Gwendolyn that he try to talk your grandma out of going to the Full Gospel Church on the day we buried Charles, and your grandma, she put on that mad face she gets sometimes, and she tell that cabbie to shut his mouth and start driving.

  "Me, I'm sitting in the Full Gospel sanctuary, already starting my grieving, and the whole church full by then, and in walks your grandma, Elizabeth, in her black feathered hat, and she the only white person in that whole place. Your grandma in her whole life, child, never been the only white person in a room. But she walks right up that aisle and she sees there's a place right near to me, and she sits herself down in it, sitting just as straight as she sits at that dinner table when I'm passing the meal around.

  "And when we singing 'Sweet Child Jesus' I looks over at your grandma, sitting right there amidst all the Hallelujahs and the Praise Lords—and they don't have none of those at that church your grandma goes to every Sunday; I know that for a real fact, Elizabeth—and she's sitting there singing the words right out of the book. And there are tears coming down your grandma's cheeks, just the same as there are tears coming down all the colored cheeks in that church, for Charles, and she no more care, right then, what color she is, or I am."

  I was watching Tatie, but she wasn't looking at me. She was looking somewhere inside her own head.

  "You," she said suddenly, scornfully, "tears come easy to you, Elizabeth. You cry when you get into trouble and get caught. You cry when you stub your toe.

  "And me—well, tears come easy to me, too.

  "But for your grandma to come to the Full Gospel Church and weep for Charles: that didn't come easy for her. And your mama don't know that she did that. Your daddy don't know it, and your sister don't know it. The only reason I'm telling you is because you got a hateful kind of bigotry for your grandma, and I don't want to hear no more of it."

  She was correct, that tears came easily to me. I began to cry then. It was not for my grandmother that I cried, or even for Charles; it was for me and Tatie, and that there was anger between us for the first time.

  "I don't have a hateful bigotry, Tatie," I sobbed. "Really, I don't."

  "Your grandma don't know how to show her heart is all," Tatie said. "Do you understand that?"

  "Yes," I wept. "But I know how. And you do."

  She relented, then, and took me into her lap. My legs had grown longer, it seemed, while I was sick; they were in the way, suddenly, outgrowing Tatie, and I sat awkwardly, my backside still bruised and aching from the needles. But my arms felt their familiar way around her wide bosom, and I put my head against her shoulder while I cried. She rocked me back and forth, forgiving me, and through the starched clean cotton of her uniform I could feel the strong arid stable rhythm of her heart.

  ***

  It was such a long time ago. Probably my father and I both knew, even then, that it was not true, what we told each other, that bad things would never happen again. But we needed that lie, that pretending, the spring that I was seven. We had both lost so much. He had told me his secret: that sometimes, in the night, he felt a deep, unassuageable pain in the place where his leg had been; and I had whispered to him of mine, of the hollow place inside me where I ached with memory and with fear. We told each other, promised each other, that the pain and the fear would go away. It was not ever to be true. But there are times—times of anguish—when an impossible promise to someone you love is as sweet as a cinnamon-smudged fingertip, as nourishing and necessary as the sunlight that comes, still, to consecrate Autumn Street in summer.