October Suite

by Maxine Clair

  Vergie tried to stuff her handkerchief under David’s sweaty head, and David opened his eyes, sat up. “Where are we?” he said.

  “Lay on down, we’re in Arkansas,” she told him. He took the pillow she had brought for the ride, and leaned against the window, closing his eyes again. Vergie dug in her pocketbook for a Life Saver, and pulled out a chunk of peppermint cane in waxed paper.

  She hadn’t lied—not really. Amos had invited them, and it was August. They wouldn’t be gone but a week, but October didn’t have to know that. In her mind Vergie went over all the reasons she’d given herself if October should ever accuse her of not thinking about David: going-on-eight couldn’t be too soon for a boy to ride on a train again. Gene’s people were David’s people, too. David needed a reward for passing third grade.

  Deep down Vergie had it straight but she went over it anyway. If October was determined to call herself David’s mother, she would always be sprinkling hints here and there. She couldn’t be trusted. Before Vergie knew it all their lives would be ruined. David would know that his mother had given him away, and that could never be all right. It would hurt him too much. And even if, by some miracle, he got over it, he was bound to ask about his father—the man whom, luckily, October had forgotten. A married man running around on his wife couldn’t be but so decent. David didn’t need to live with that when he had her and Gene. And besides all of that, October had a way of making sure everybody knew she was Miss Big City, with her job and her big car, and now her new house. Vergie wouldn’t put it past her to try to turn David’s head. What would she and Gene do if October ever turned his head? If October couldn’t see things her way, then she shouldn’t be around David at all. Period.

  Briscoe. A steel water tower. And there was the problem of his grades. She would never be able to explain to October about rewarding David just for passing third grade. B-r-i-s-c-o-e.

  When she woke up again, Gene sat gnawing on a chicken wing. Something to do.

  “You want something to drink?” she asked him and he shook his head no.

  Ubiquitous water towers, this one like a slatted wooden tub set on lattice stilts. “Shepp,” it said.

  “Tennessee,” Gene said softly. On the trip out to Oklahoma, Vergie had listened to Gene telling David about Pap Singleton from Tennessee. How in the late 1870s the man had led thirty-some thousand Negroes—Exodusters—from the Deep South to Canaan land. Kansas, they hoped. It had never been a slave state. “That’s probably how we all got to Ohio,” Gene had told David.

  Now something about the night, the darkness, the rumble of the train packed with sleeping people crowded on top of one another, she and Gene and David like a secret stealing through unheard-of places—it made her thoughts melt together, like she didn’t have to sort them out right now. Like she couldn’t keep them in any order. And she heard “Tennessee” repeated so clear it could have been her own voice.

  Franklin Brown had been from Tennessee—probably his people, too. Exodusters. Men and women tramping with everything they owned on their backs, catching steamboats on the Mississippi.

  And memories filter in: she sits on Poppa’s knee. Tobacco and whiskey. The upright piano has curlicues carved into its face. A crimson fringe hangs around the top. Poppa shows her how to play with two hands, boogie-woogie, while he plays something else on the high keys.

  One thing about secrets—once they’d been shook out and aired, there was no stuffing them back into that same little box. Once she had let the Lillian secret pop out of her thirteen-year-old mouth, anything was up for airing.

  Sometimes it had been safe. Like the time at home once, when October had asked Auntie to tell her how Carrie talked, and what she used to say. And Aunt Frances had surprised them, smiling and saying, “She sounded like music when she called my name.”

  Mostly it wasn’t so safe. “When did our mother get married?” Vergie had asked Aunt Maude once. Aunt Maude had looked at Aunt Frances like she was the living Bible.

  Aunt Frances had answered with her own question: “What do you want to know that for?”

  October had been shredding cabbage for coleslaw, and when she heard the subject opened so free, she chimed in on Vergie’s side. “Dag,” she said. “Why is it a secret?”

  Frances had been rolling catfish in cornmeal and didn’t answer right away. She stooped to get the iron skillet from under the sink.

  “Nothing about your mother is a secret,” she said. “We just don’t talk about terrible things.” She rattled around in the cupboard. “She’s gone forever, and no amount of talk about dates and times can ever change that. It’s something best let alone.”

  But Vergie remembered too much. She remembered the time in the yard when her mother had leaned over the fence, talking to Mr. Bailey. Vergie had stood beside Poppa at the door and watched. It would have been all right if Momma had stopped when she turned and saw them—Vergie would have sworn she saw them standing at the screen door, her and Poppa—but Momma just laughed and kept on with Mr. Bailey. And Vergie never said what she knew was true. Poppa was mad. Another day, another night and Momma was dead.

  And there, in the kitchen that day, had been a chance to find out once and for all. Vergie had asked, “Did Poppa ever say why?”

  Aunt Frances, still stooping turned to give her the evil eye. Vergie pressed. “How did you find out that he died?”

  Frances stood up. “I know you girls are growing up now, and you’re curious. But believe me, you are better off not worrying about this. First thing you know, you’ll be telling it to everybody and giving them something to hurt you with.”

  That was history. Frances was stalling.

  Vergie watched her aunt go to the stove, pause, and let the heavy skillet dangle. Then she must have thought better of the question.

  “The lady next door who kept you-all, she wrote and told me.”

  October said, “Did she know Poppa that well?”

  “How did she know?” Vergie asked.

  She could see Frances’s jaw tightening.

  “You weren’t hardly past being a baby when she died,” Frances said to October.

  And to Vergie she said, “You were older, and that was too bad. You didn’t have it so easy, but that’s not reason enough for us to keep it going. Your poppa went to prison and he died there, a long time ago—I had my ways of finding out. Now, both of you just let it rest. It’s the past and believe me I would’ve changed it if I could’ve, but I couldn’t. Now get out the applesauce and help me get dinner on the table.”

  Vergie, though, had felt like she had to make one thing clear. “We saw her on the bed, Aunt Frances.”

  And October said, “I wasn’t that young.”

  “Hush up,” Frances said. “You didn’t do no such thing. Don’t go makin up stories. You were at Cordelia Butler’s house next door.” Frances still held the skillet by its long handle, but now she waved it like a feather. “Your mama didn’t die in that house—she died in Briar Memorial Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio.”

  “We did see her,” Vergie said softly. “We both did.”

  Wham! Frances banged the iron skillet down so hard on the stovetop that the teakettle jumped off the burner.

  “I’ve said it before,” she said. “That’s enough! He killed her, and he’s dead. She should have never laid eyes on him. Right out of the gutter, him and his people. Didn’t have sense enough to do something decent with his life, so he just messed up hers. You-all’s too.”

  Her face had then relaxed a little. “Took her up there with him to the city, up there and ... just took her life. Neither one of you should’ve ever had to look into his face, and you won’t ever have to again.”

  Then Frances got a hold of herself and lit the gas jet. “It’s a big enough burden to last a lifetime. Now let it alone.”

  They had let it alone.
<
br />   Vergie peered out into the darkness of the Tennessee night. She thought she could make out white blossoms of magnanimous magnolia trees. Imagined a swamp, people tramping. Three generations of Coopers had come from North Carolina. Who were the Browns?

  She had never given much thought to this other side—who they might have been. Worthless wanderers who mooched off other people. Yes, probably. But some of them had lived in that brave time. Some of them had waited at the docks for the steamboat to Canaan land; had ridden up the Mississippi, gotten off the boat at Illinois, and taken another boat up the Ohio. Those barely a generation after them would have scouted out the same territory, and left behind the woman who would someday give birth to Franklin Brown. And one day he would go searching for his kin in Cleveland, Ohio.

  And even if things hadn’t happened that way, any way she looked at it, some of the Browns must have wanted something decent, and some of them must have had guts enough to try to find it.

  Burwood. B-u-r-w-o-o-d.

  Sometime in the night, Vergie woke to the conductor calling, “Nashville! Next stop Nashville, Tennessee!” like a wake-up call, and Gene and David both jumped wide-eyed. Vergie looked at David yawning and stretching in the dim, city light. Dark, big-eyed, he looked enough like her to be hers. Short, but that would never come up, because Gene was short. There was a time he would have yawned and stretched and she would have tickled him under his arms. These days he didn’t like her tickling him anymore; he thought he was too grown.

  “Can we get off and get some pop?” David asked her. Gene had already stood up to stuff his shirt into his pants and put on his shoes again. Other people around them stirred.

  “No,” Vergie said. “There’s lemonade in the thermos.”

  “The ice melted, and it’s all water,” David said.

  Gene tied his shoes. “We’ll be here at least a half hour. I’m going in to get a Hershey bar. You want anything?”

  David buttoned his shirt and started going on about Hershey bars and Butterfingers and Nehi strawberry pop.

  If it had been daylight, she might have let David off the train to buy soda pop or to use the restroom. Fisk University was there. Well-to-do Negroes lived in Nashville. Martin Luther King had just been through there organizing for more boycotts. Things were changing that was true. Before she knew it, David would be going to school with white kids. But this was still the South, and though there was no sign posted, they were still in a Negroes-only car in that train. A year ago Ike had had to send troops to Little Rock. It was night, and they were in Tennessee. Hershey bars or no, David wasn’t getting off that train.

  “Nobody’s getting off,” Vergie said to Gene. He stopped tying his shoes.

  “It’s nighttime,” she said. “We’re in Tennessee. No need to go out looking for trouble.”

  Gene seemed to understand. He looked past her to David. “We’ll get off in the morning and get breakfast in Kentucky.”

  David slumped back down in his seat and popped the stopper on the thermos. “Can I drink out of the bottle?”

  “No,” Vergie said. “Somebody else might want some.” She gave him a paper cup out of her basket.

  Sometimes months would go by when she didn’t have a single thought about losing him. And then something would happen, somebody would ask about October, or October would call wanting to speak to him, or she would see some strange expression on David’s face, and a slow panic would start. What if? They had built a good life, she and Gene. They had done the best they could by David. The best they could. And still, sometimes the best wasn’t enough.

  When he was four, he could count to ten and recite A to Z. Right now, if she asked him, he could probably tell her how water towers worked. Gene had explained it to him once, and David could remember anything. At Amos and Helen’s one morning, when Vergie had talked about how she got carsick, David had gone on and on about the new Interstate Highway System, which she didn’t know he knew. “It’s a cross between the kind of roads the Romans built for war a long time ago and the new kind of highway the Germans have where you can speed all the time as fast as the car will go,” he told them. “And guess how they’re going to number it,” he had said.

  And when Gene had taken over, bragging that he knew all about the odd and the even numbers and all, David couldn’t let Gene have the last word. He spelled out the how and the where and the why. And when Helen asked him, “How do you know, David?” David had smarted off, “I go to school,” for which Vergie almost smacked him. He got himself straight and told them that a boy in his class had done a report on the civil defense. But David was a smart boy.

  First grade had been tough, but wasn’t the first year always hard? Second grade had been worse. U in reading. Unsatisfactory. 5+ in art, music, health, all that other stuff. S- in arithmetic, S- and U in spelling. And third grade, they had barely passed him, and passed him then only because Vergie had gone to school every week. Sat in the classroom all day and worked with the teacher after school. David just didn’t try hard enough. No matter how she punished him, he didn’t seem to want to do better.

  His teacher would say, for instance, “What new meaning did you learn for the word ‘through’?”

  And David would whine to Vergie that the teacher always picked out the hardest words for him.

  When Vergie asked him to pick out a certain word among similar words, he would gripe that if he got it right, she would make him do a harder one, and if he got it wrong he’d have to read it a hundred times.

  She would smack his bottom and make him choose. He would tune up to cry, and once the tears started they were through.

  One minute she was, “Boy, sit down and write those sentences out. Don’t think you’re too big for a switch.” The next minute she was, “Just read one sentence and you can have another piece of cake.” Bad, she knew.

  And Gene. “Why don’t you listen to your mother? Can’t you see she’s trying to help you?”

  And then, “Why don’t you leave the boy alone—can’t you see he just don’t know?”

  Gene would tell Vergie, “He’s been over that enough.”

  And Vergie would tell him, “You stay out of this. If it was left up to you, he’d still be learning how to count to ten.”

  Stayed on David about paying attention and doing his homework. She just couldn’t figure it out. She and Gene spent every single night reading to him, making him spell and write so that he could get the connection, but nothing they did seemed to work.

  As the train pulled out of the light of Nashville and into the dark again, David laid his pillow on her lap and laid his head on the pillow. “I’ll be glad when we get to Kentucky,” he said, yawning.

  N-a-s-h-v-i-l-l-e. As far as Vergie could see, there was no water tower for Nashville. Even if there had been one, spelling it out wouldn’t have made any difference. The fact was, David had never learned how to read.

  chapter 23

  They made a deal.Leon would go to the record shop with her if she would go with him to Sears (kitchen stuff wasn’t his thing). A little narrow record shop on Twenty-seventh Street had the best labels, so Leon said, and just by the looks they got, October knew this was the place jazz folks flocked to. They all recognized him; he ignored them.

  “Women usually like this,” he said, pushing a Modem Jazz Quartet LP under her nose. She had heard of the group, and they looked spiffy in their tuxedos around the shiny Steinway. But she waved him away and chose some others she liked—Ella Fitzgerald and Red Garland—while Leon stood back, smirking.

  When he saw her choices, he said, “It’s almost the sixties, and you’re coming into the fifties with those,” trying to be cute.

  He hadn’t seen the ace she held, but she gladly flashed it in his face—another LP she had chosen, Lonny Haskins Plus Four.

  “Powerhouse,” he said, grinning. “A woman will
fool you every time.” He told her a story about “my man Foots” and Foots’s woman, Sylvia—how she never minded dotting Foots’s i’s and crossing his t’s and was always one up on him. Listening to Leon’s story, October thought she heard him yearning for something out of reach.

  “I think I remember your friend Foots,” she said. “Wasn’t he with you when he came to the Blue Room that time?”

  “He thought he was,” Leon said.

  “We took him to the hotel on The Paseo, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Leon said.

  “You miss him?”

  “Nah,” Leon said, and he went on thumbing through “West Coast Jazz.”

  When they went to Sears, Leon refused to buy anything more than dishes for four, knives and forks and spoons for four, a pot and a skillet. She made him go with her to look at furniture she couldn’t afford, and while they were downtown, she dragged him into the fabric shop, where he stood like a mannequin while she got material for her new suit. Later, in the Healy, pot trembling against skillet in the slot behind her seat, she got a chance to crow. “Speaking of the fifties,” she said, “they have these things called toasters now, and steak knives, and can openers and egg beaters. You ought to think about trying them.”

  He smiled. “What I got was cool,” he said. “I don’t plan to get much beyond bacon and eggs.”

  The car hugged a corner too tightly and the tires made a little whine. Leon continued to tell her, “At my place...” and he stopped.

  “You have a place in New York?”

  “Had.”

  “I’ll bet you never cooked.”

  “A little.”

  “Women there just to peel your grapes.”

  He laughed “Something like that.”