October Suite

by Maxine Clair

  Leon spent hours helping Sylvia and Delores. When he came back to Holly House each time, he wrapped himself in October, sad and amazed at the same time. Delores was all right, he told her.

  “She’s singing with a gospel group, and they’ve cut a demo already. She told me she read my letters, but it takes time to let it all go. Some people hold out for a whole lifetime. I don’t think Delores will just forget everything that happened, but at least she knows I tried to tell her I’m sorry.”

  With Franklin Brown found and gone, though October couldn’t say that she had lost anything, she was beginning to feel lighter, like a weight had been lifted. A match had been struck in the dark. Not quite a candle burning, though.

  On the day before the funeral, Leon came back late to Holly House with a pawnshop horn. Sylvia wanted him to play a song for Foots at the funeral, and he hadn’t brought his horn with him to New York.

  The small chapel of the Davis Funeral Home had room for only about fifty chairs, twenty-five on each side of the aisle. Once “the family” took their seats at the front, all the chairs were taken. Sylvia had insisted that October and Vergie and David and Gene sit in the front row, but that wasn’t to be. The funeral director had placed only four chairs in front—room enough for Sylvia, Moses, Leon, and Delores.

  When Sylvia insisted that the chairs be rearranged, October said no. She was happy to sit with her real family in the second row. The closed casket with a blanket of red carnations stood on a bier at the front. A preacher friend of Sylvia’s conducted everything.

  Simple. The organist played. The preacher read “I am the Resurrection ...” from the Bible and said a prayer. Delores read out the names of everyone who had sent cards and made phone calls. Moses said he wouldn’t apologize for what he wanted to say about his friend. Said they had met in the penitentiary. They had kept each other from going crazy. Vowed to stay friends on the outside, and had kept their word. Honest, he used. And kindly. A tough old hide and a big heart. The preacher read the obituary, which mentioned survivors: along with Sylvia, Leon, and Delores, two daughters and a grandson, but it did not mention their names.

  As she sat listening, October tried not to fill in the part of the story she and Vergie knew—the part that nobody else could ever know. As far as she was concerned, nothing anybody said would change the fact that she and Vergie had lived a whole life with some dark things. How could the split of the two men who had been Franklin Brown be fixed?

  Weren’t funerals supposed to put everything to rest? She had finally come face to face with the man who had set the course of her life. There was justice in the fact that on his deathbed, he had been beyond seeing, and his last wish hadn’t been granted.

  When Moses sat down, Leon stood up. Instead of facing them, he stood in front of the casket, back turned, and began to blow. Later he would tell her that the only part he had thought out was that he would begin with “Footsloose.” A clear and simple melody, phrasing it like he was horn-talking to Foots. And did the melody again, as if to say, You got it? Then he broke into something that he knew Foots would understand, then swung into the hard and gutsy wail that must have been in the old man’s ear for his whole life. The blues.

  Leon told October later that he had done his best to be piano, harmonica, and the blues women and men who had kept it going. He played for an old man in a dark cell, his old man submitting to the knife one last time, his Foots, gone.

  The scene at Sylvia’s could only be described as a party. Fifty people at the funeral turned into a hundred people spilling out of Sylvia’s one-bedroom apartment. Tons of food and drink and no space and October and Vergie pitching in with Delores to get things organized.

  David. October watched him mix in with the people from Franklin Brown’s life like he had always been a part of it, and asking for details, too. Listening to the stories, laughing like he caught on to the jokes even in pig Latin. What a difference a generation made.

  October saw Leon looking around for her, and waved her fork in the air.

  “I was wondering where you disappeared to,” he said. “That looks good.”

  She told him that the song sounded different from the record, and he explained what he had tried to do.

  “It was about him and me,” he said. “I think he got it.”

  Vergie and Gene came and stood with them, all four lined up against the wall watching David.

  Sylvia came up finally to talk to Leon.

  “I guess you-all will be going back to Kansas City soon?”

  October waited to hear his answer.

  “I’ll stay for a while if you want me to,” he said.

  “Dee’s gonna move in with me now, so I’ll be all right,” Sylvia said. She looked at October. “Take care of him,” she said.

  “I’m glad I got the chance to meet you,” October said.

  And Vergie spoke up, too. “In a way,” she said, “this closes a door that we didn’t even know was open.”

  Sylvia lit a cigarette. “Foots appreciates you all coming and not making a commotion,” she said. “I know he does. I just wish he could have seen you for real. But life is like that—full of things we’ll never understand.”

  The five of them stood quietly, watching people come and go.

  Then Vergie said, “Miss Sylvia—”

  “Just call me Sylvia.”

  “I just need to ask you one thing. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Sure, honey,” Sylvia said. “Come on back here where we can talk.” She took Vergie by the hand, and Vergie motioned for October to follow, and she dragged Leon with her to a corner of the kitchen.

  Sylvia turned to Vergie. “He’s gone now. Anything I can tell you, I don’t think he’ll mind.”

  Vergie looked at October. “I want to know why,” she said to her. “Don’t you?”

  October told her, “Um-hmm,” and Vergie asked Sylvia if Franklin Brown ever said why he killed Carrie.

  It was clear Leon didn’t want to hear that part. “I’ll be out in the living room with Gene,” he said.

  Sylvia reached over and stubbed her cigarette in the sink. “You already know he had a quick temper,” she said. “That was part of it.” And she sighed.

  “I think he thought he was going to be a big-time blues player someday. It was all he wanted. He did what men do—he ran around a lot. Drank. Gambled.

  “Anyway, it was one of those things. She found out that he was going to leave her for another woman, and she burned up all his money. I don’t know how much it was, but it was a lot to him. I think that would’ve been all right—he would’ve just left. But then he found out that she had set all his songs on fire, too. Burned up everything he ever wrote. They got to fussin and fightin and he just struck out at her with the first thing he laid his hands on.

  “It just happened,” Sylvia said, and took a breath. “He never meant to kill her.”

  Vergie had clamped her hand over her mouth, and tears ran down her cheeks.

  “He was leaving us?” Vergie said. “He was leaving?”

  “Some woman in Chicago,” Sylvia said. “He knew he was wrong. They always know when they’re wrong.”

  October had never known the story, but Franklin’s part didn’t surprise her. Nobody kills anybody in such a flash unless they’ve got a quick temper. And Auntie had always said he was no good, meaning that he ran around. But what struck October now was Franklin’s decision to leave his family for the other woman. And Carrie’s suffering, trying to make him stay. She flashed on James and shuddered.

  “All this time,” Vergie said, “I always thought Momma was leaving.” And she went on to October about what she had always suspected of Carrie and why Carrie had died. How she had always believed she, herself, had had a part in it, too.

  Vergie’s secret guilt came as a surprise to October. An
d now here was the truth, springing Vergie free.

  She watched Vergie cry all over again—“He was leaving!”—and begin to laugh a little. “Will wonders never cease?”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” Sylvia said. “I almost forgot. I’ve been waiting for today to divvy up Foots’s things.”

  She told them to come on and pushed through the crowd, looking for Leon.

  He and Gene stood together, looking lost.

  “Come on, it ain’t much. To tell the truth, he didn’t leave but one box, and it’s for you, mister,” she said to Leon.

  They followed Sylvia to the bedroom, just as crowded as any other part of the house.

  Sylvia clapped her hands. “Okay, okay! Y’all have to clear out of here for a minute, I’ve got business.”

  The people sauntered out; eating and talking still.

  Sylvia went to the closet. Leon said he remembered the tin box from years earlier, “One night before I left for a tour, Foots tried to give it to me.”

  “I remember,” Sylvia said. She jerked on the chain and the light came on. October saw all the clothes and cartons, books and boxes jamming the closet.

  “Tilt that down for me, will you?” Sylvia said to Leon, and he tipped the square tin box, caught it as it fell.

  “I ’spect you know what’s in here. It wasn’t no secret. This was what he always wanted you to have from day one.”

  She handed it to Leon. October was curious, and Vergie, too, looked like she wanted to see.

  “Open it,” Sylvia said.

  But before he could get the top off, Sylvia said, “Now I know this was between you and Foots—I mean, he sure wanted you to have it. But I know if he was here, he would tell you to let his blood relatives in on it too—you know what I mean?”

  Leon had no problem with that—he smiled at October. “You want to open it? I think I’ve already seen a lot of what’s in here.”

  She couldn’t get over the fact that somebody could put a lifetime of anything into one tin box.

  “No, that’s all right,” she said, “unless you do, Vergie.”

  “No,” Vergie said. “You can go ahead.”

  Leon worked the top off and handed it to Sylvia. “Yes,” he said, and he pulled out a wad of folded papers, handed them to October. “This is his handwriting,” he said.

  She took the little bundle of scrappy papers and gave Vergie half of them, then sat down on the bed. As she unfolded them, she saw scribblings of a crippled hand, pencil marks on yellowed paper, lines of songs. Blues songs.

  “Look,” Vergie said. She held up some of them.

  One by one, they unfolded them and read out loud what they could of his thoughts set down in rhyme and rhythm.

  After October had read several, she came upon a small envelope addressed in faded blue ink to Franklin Brown at a route number in Joliet, Illinois. The envelope had no return address, but the fading postmark seemed to be Cleveland, Ohio. Inside the envelope, a small pamphlet and a folded note. The pamphlet was a pocket version of the Twenty-third Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd ...” At the bottom, someone had written, “I still pray for you,” and it was signed “Miss C. Butler.”

  The name meant nothing to October. She showed it to Vergie.

  “That’s Miss Cordelia,” Vergie said. “The lady next door—remember?”

  And then the briefest image of a face with a gold tooth and dimples flashed in October’s mind.

  “What’s that note say?” Vergie asked.

  October unfolded the note to see handwriting she would know anywhere. “Dear Cordelia,” it said. “I know you mean well. I have appreciated getting your letters, but this is the last letter you will get from me. You can tell Franklin Brown that if you give him this address, we will move away. Tell him if he ever cared anything about the girls, just let them be. They have suffered enough. Sincerely, Frances Cooper.”

  She handed it to Vergie to read. For all those years, Aunt Frances had shielded them, kept them safe. To Frances and Maude Cooper, Franklin Brown had died the moment the knife had cut through Carrie Cooper’s flesh. They had given October and Vergie a life without his cursed existence.

  Then Leon fairly yelled, “I don’t believe this, I don’t believe it!”

  “Isn’t it something?” Sylvia said. “Show it to them.”

  “What?” October asked.

  Leon held up a photograph and turned it over. “It says 1908,” he said.

  “That’s really something, isn’t it?” Sylvia said.

  Leon sat down beside October on the bed and shoved it on top of all the bits of paper in her lap.

  The half-torn, sepia-tone picture of the woman was crinkled and creased, but October could see that the woman was blackberry dark, with nappy hair parted in the middle and pulled back into little knots on the sides of her head. She looked the slightest bit like somebody October ought to know. The woman wore a long, long-sleeved, cottonish dress and a full apron. She sat on a chair in a yard. Behind her only half of a ramshackle little house was showing, because the rest of the picture was missing.

  Part of a front porch and a window was still there. In the window on a hand-printed sign, October could make out the words Lillian Brown, Dressmaker.

  Just in that flash, she knew exactly how it had felt to be this woman. In some part of her, she was this woman, and this woman was her. And she could no more change that part of herself than she could change her breath. She was linked by blood to Lillian Brown just like leaves pop out on tree branches. And October knew that that was a good thing.

  chapter 27

  October, Leon, Vergie, Gene, and David were all sitting in Wells Famous Chicken and Waffles Restaurant with enough food on the table to feed the whole place.

  Since they were there, Leon thought they might as well see New York; he had taken them to the Empire State Building, the United Nations, Times Square, and the Statue of Liberty—all of that. He took them to the East Village and showed October his old apartment house, showed her Minton’s and Monroe’s, clubs where he’d played. He talked about how different they all looked to him, and not once did he want to venture across their thresholds at night. Not yet, anyway.

  Marquees and showcases had announced musicians he might play with sooner or later, but none of it seemed to touch him. Making the rounds, David had caught on to who Leon was and had begun walking beside him on the street, hands in his pockets.

  At Wells, Gene was working his way through a platter of pigs’ feet and sauerkraut when he put down his fork.

  He wiped his hands on his napkin, and said to Vergie, “We may as well get this out now—what do you say?”

  She smiled like a girl and hunched her shoulders. “I guess so,” she said.

  Gene said to David, “How would you like to go to Kansas City with your Aunt October for a week or so?”

  David had a mouth full of chicken, but he grinned. “On the plane?”

  “Not now,” Vergie said. “School starts next week. We’re talking about in June.”

  “Yeah!” David said.

  October’s mouth dropped open on its own. She hadn’t even wished for it yet.

  “Alone?” she asked.

  Vergie nodded. “Gene wants me and him to have a trip on our own. We’ll bring David to stay with you for a week.”

  And so, by grace, my girls were getting there.

  One thing I knew for sure then, and know for sure now: grace just is. Nobody can explain it, and it’s not something you can deserve. Whether you recognize it or not, whether you feel grateful for it or not, it just is. Guilty or innocent, condemned or redeemed, when you think that you can’t go on, and when you think that you’ve already gone on, grace is wider and deeper than you think, and it can change far more than you ever imagined.

  There is no
place where anything begins or ends, but by grace, everything comes in its time.

  chapter 28

  October let them sleep—the three Parkers dead to the world from the twelve-hour drive. They had come the night before, with Vergie all of a sudden thinking they should have taken an airplane trip instead of suffering Gene’s careless driving and a whole day of being carsick.

  October plugged in the coffeepot and stood at her kitchen sink—too, too tickled. When it had percolated enough, she poured herself a cup and headed for the porch. At that hour, the sun had broken the horizon, but the air outside was still cool. She tied on her patience bonnet and sat her coffee on the floor beside the chaise on her screened-in porch. Time to give God what was God’s.

  Gratitude. She felt thankful, yes, even for the little detail of Ed bringing over two-by-fours for her basement. A dress shop should start small, and she had already applied for a loan.

  A deeper sense of gratitude came, though, because Vergie was beginning to trust her again. They were here; by this time tomorrow morning, Vergie and Gene would be on their way to St. Louis, and David would be hers for a week. Vergie didn’t have to worry; October would take him on any terms.

  Added to that, since their days in New York, Leon had been making noises about spending the rest of their lives together, and then he had stopped making noises, but she had been still hoping.

  It was a cloudy, cold Saturday when she had refused to believe that it could snow in April and was in the backyard, hanging out laundry on her new carousel clothesline. She had just stuck a clothespin on the fold of a towel across the line, when she heard the back door close and turned to see Leon. He had come through the house.

  “What are you doing out here with no coat on?” he said. “It’s freezing.”

  “No, it’s not,” she told him, fingers stinging cold. “It’s spring. Look,” and she pointed to the brush tips of green shooting out of the ground along the back of her house.

  “Daffodils.”

  “And they’ll be dead by tomorrow.” He took off his overcoat and tried to put it around her shoulders. “Come on inside.”