A Matter of Souls (15 page)

“They took him from me!” she shouted. “And I had to go back! Then you come, and every time—every day—I looked at you, I saw him! I couldn't
stand
you.” She began to sob, and her cries became great, heaving gasps. Son mechanically took her hand and led her inside, where she hung onto the edge of her bed, shaking.

He leaned against the wall, sure that he would fall otherwise. She never said that if his father had lived, everything would have just been all right. She wasn't crying for the baby, the little piece of love that she could have even right now.

He wondered if Papa—Booker—had known the truth, but he didn't ask.

“I'll … take … you,” she panted. “First thing tomorrow. First thing. I want you the hell out of my house.” She looked at the floor.

Son pulled himself up straight. Even if she backed out of it, he would have to leave here. There was no way he could stay in sight of this woman and manage it; he knew that soon the fury would come exploding out, and something bad would happen when it did.

He wanted to hate her, but she had loved his father. He wanted to hate the man who'd raised him, but he had loved him. The world was cruel, the way it twisted regular people into monsters.

He walked past her to the front bedroom, began to throw all his belongings into a bag, and then thought: what do I really have? What do I own?

Nothing.

He went back to Trina's door.

“What was his name?”

“Absalom,” she said.

T
he bus doors wheezed open in front of a dilapidated gas station and Son stepped out, wearing his crisp soldier's uniform. After ten years, he was seeing this world through a stranger's eyes. He began to sweat in the scorching sun, but he remained erect, bronzed, and proud and out of place in this Mississippi hamlet.

The few White people on the street stared through him. He was a nobody, even with the Purple Heart casting a glare and his shrapnel-shattered arm cradled in a sling underneath it. A Black man passing in a beat-up Ford honked and waved, but Son had never seen him before.

He shifted his duffel on his good shoulder as he walked,
noticing that the street was paved now. He squinted at a supermarket that seemed to have sprung up just to confuse him; a few strides more and he stumbled. A sidewalk had materialized. He glanced down in annoyance at his scuffed boot, and when he raised his head to the shimmer of heat surrounding the red brick building across the street, some of the first memories that he'd sent to hell materialized too.

He was standing right in front of the library. He looked immediately to his left for the live oak he'd climbed, but it was no longer there.

The library had expanded, and connected to the original building was a low-built concrete and glass wing with a sunny-looking entrance. He blinked at the old brick structure again and saw that it had been disfigured: the original awful steps had vanished; there was a series of windows in place of the wide wooden doors, and the grass and shrubs looked like they'd been growing there forever.

No sign of the murders remained. His brain understood it, coming fresh from killing fields as he had, but his being did not. If he hadn't been a man, he would have screamed. What had they done here?

He forced himself to cross toward the two slim young trees flanking the walk up to the addition. Each tree shaded a cast iron bench. As he approached, he looked inside the huge windows to see a group of very young children in a reading circle. Their cherubic faces were animated as they listened to the woman with cat eyeglasses and soft blonde hair. A few yards past them, half-hidden behind
a row of books, he could see the dark figure of a young woman, her head cocked as if she was listening, too. Her mop and bucket were still, and Son wondered if she was frowning in concentration so that she could hear the whole story word-for-word, the better to go back and tell her own children. Certainly, they would never be allowed in this wonderful place.

He blinked his eyes against the scene and sat down on one of the benches. Newness could never hide the truth, or hide evil, could it? He slipped the duffel off his shoulder.

This was all old, so old. The men who had died here, men that he'd adored, had fears and failings and secrets that hurt him to the quick. But that pain was old now too; only a nagging ache remained. And though since his discharge a part of him missed the ever-present danger and the explosive relief he'd found in killing, living such a life had grown old as well.

He was back to nothing.

Trina was dead. Her downstairs neighbor knew he had gone into the service and took it upon herself to inform the US Army. In a cruel twist, Trina Bayonne had been found stabbed. He didn't know any details; he didn't want to know. He had refused the leave they offered him and gone on to rout a nest of Viet Cong that night. He'd killed them all.

Willa had dutifully answered the half-dozen letters he'd written over the five years, but he could tell she was trying not to promise him anything, and he understood.
Bernadette had colored a picture of herself and sent it once; he'd worn it inside his helmet and now carried it in his wallet. One of his buddies had joked about it being a love letter, and maybe it was.

What had Papa said one time? “You deserve to get as good as you give.” Well, had Papa deserved Trina? Had he deserved to be shot like a rabid dog in this street? Son clasped his hands between his knees, not intending to pray, only to search himself. And what have I ever given anybody? Maybe that's why I haven't got a thing right now. Nobody and nothing to come home to. What did I give, except for arrogance—yes, arrogance, like everybody said over and over—and anger that bordered on crazy?

He had been washed in blood his entire life. He had survived all of it. So he must have a purpose. Maybe newness couldn't hide the truth, but what if the truth was faced up to? What then? Couldn't he be born again?

The real truth was that nobody in his life had ever had a fair chance. Maybe he hadn't either. It was time to stop running from that. Time to leave the bloodshed behind.

He spread his hands out to look at them. They were big, suntanned, strong. With those hands he could wrestle evil. In that moment of clarity, Son knew that from now on he would fight for anybody who wasn't strong enough or loud enough or mean enough to grab what the world owed them. He would give his whole self to this new fight, and he was determined that he would win. He could win. Son felt sure that he could fight for everything the men
he'd loved had died for. They'd never had a chance. Son suddenly realized that Jimmy Lee had been the same age as he was now, twenty-one. He smiled to himself and sat back, reaching into his breast pocket for the bus schedule.

The buddy who'd laughed at Bernadette's crayon drawing, Joe Timmons, had actually been a cool kind of cat, from some little Louisiana town that sounded like a sneeze—Chabot. And he was going on about the Negro college his father had attended, some place called Gram-bling. “Coach Rob would lose his mind to get a bear like you on defense, man!” he'd said.

There was a bus to Shreveport. From there he had to transfer: Grambling was a town all by itself. Imagine that, he thought. A college town made up of Black folk!

He looked at his wristwatch. He had bided his time.

With his head held high, he got up to take a walk. Beyond the four main blocks the road forked. He didn't know where the right ribbon of dark asphalt led—but he knew the hill to his left. He strode over it, passing the ghostly lumber mill. The faded black and white sign hung crookedly on the padlocked gate. He wondered briefly if the politicians had succeeded in moving it, or if it had simply failed.

He continued slowly downhill. The remains of this deserted community were vaguely familiar. To one side was a weedy lot. The house where he'd been raised had once stood there. Nearby had been Willa and Jimmy Lee's place. It seemed there had been a fire, and only the ruins
of the crumbling brick chimney crouched in the undergrowth, Jimmy Lee's shed having long ago tumbled down. The other shotgun houses on the row were only skeletons of their former selves, abandoned by the other broken people who must have left after Willa did. There was nothing here. Even the houses were dead.

He walked briskly back through his past, marking nothing to memory. His starched uniform and medals allowed him to step into the tiny store attached to the gas station to buy a sandwich and soft drink without incident.

He stood alone in the sun as the dusty bus screeched to a stop. The driver nodded at his uniform, then at him.

“Welcome back, son.”

Immediately, the young man reminded himself that he had chosen to step into a new world. He had chosen to begin.

“The name's Absalom,” he said smoothly, glancing down at the black block letters on his nametag. “Absalom Collins.”

He would keep the fathers—the one he'd never known, and the one he hadn't known long enough. They were a truth he could never deny.

The driver smiled and accepted his ticket. Absalom Collins shook the clay dust from his boots before he dropped his duffel in the front seat facing the windshield and sat down, his eyes wide open for his new self.

T
he brown child squirmed in the hard wooden chair, trying not to look into the nun's disapproving face. She tried staring at her own black and white oxford shoes, with their double-tied laces that she had done herself. She tried a darting glance out of the big open window, but there wasn't even a cawing blue jay in the trees to hold her attention. Somehow, Pamela Ann couldn't help it. Her eyes were drawn back to Sister Formidable's eyes; they were angry dark beads.

“Sit up straight!” Sister Formidable barked in strangely accented English as she scowled over her eyeglasses. She rifled through the papers on her desk. The sound of the rustling pages swelled to fill the empty air, then stopped. For five long minutes, she pretended to read.

Across the desk, Pamela Ann became still. Calm. Sister Formidable wanted her to be afraid, but without the nun's
words squeezing her heart, the child relaxed. She breathed slowly and easily along with her own
thump, thump, thumpety thump
. She wanted to smile, but didn't dare. Noise was the enemy, but silence? Silence was her best friend. That was why she liked to pray inside her head,
Blessed Mother, watch over me
.

Pamela Ann thought about Sister Formidable and her sister sisters. They didn't appreciate any honor to God that could not be heard echoing off the vaulted ceiling of the chapel or seen in the bent and scraped knees peeking out from the hems of navy pleated skirts—and if knees could be seen, that was another problem altogether.

Clearing her throat, Sister Formidable signaled that this particular period of punishment was over.

Pamela Ann allowed herself to sigh, acknowledging that her precious little spell of peace had ended. She waited.

“If the pagans were not in your home, you would behave like a good girl,” the nun said carefully. Still, to Pamela's ten-year-old ears, she sounded as if she'd pronounced
g–i–r–l
as “gehl.” And the pagans … Well. The pagans were Pamela Ann's grandparents and her father, who were Baptist. They were the ones who owned the business that paid the tuition for her to attend St. Benedict the Moor School, because her frail, “not quite right” mother had been a devout Roman Catholic before she got sent to the asylum in Pineville.