A Red Death (10 page)

As I watched her progress I noticed a large young man watching me from across the aisle. He was wearing a decent brown suit that had widely spaced goldenrod stripes. His broad-rimmed fedora was in his lap. His stony dull eyes were on me.

Jackie took his place as lead singer of the choir, and Melvin stood before the group with his hands upraised. Then he looked down behind him, and for the first time I saw a small woman sitting at a large organ just below the podium.

Then there was music. The deep strains of the organ and Jackie’s high tenor voice. The choir sang in back of that.

“Angels,” Etta muttered. “Just angels.”

They sang “A Prayer to Sweet Baby Jesus.” After Melvin was sure he’d guided them into harmony he turned to add his bass to Jackie’s high voice.

Melvin was Jackie’s height, but he was black and craggy. When he sang he grimaced as if in pain. Jackie seemed more like a suitor trying to talk his way into the bedroom.

The song filled the church and I loved it even though I was there for something else. Even though I was going to go against a member, or at least a helper, of that flock, still the love of God filled me. And that was strange, because I had stopped believing in God on the day my father left me as a child in poverty and pain.

“Brothers and sisters!” Reverend Towne shouted. I hadn’t been looking when he came to the dais. He was a very tall man with a big belly that bulged out from his deep blue robes. He was dark brown with strong African features and dense, straightened hair that was greased and combed back away from his forehead.

He ran his left hand over his hair as the last members of the crowd went silent, then he looked out over the faces and grinned and shook his head slowly as if he had seen someone who had been missing for years.

“I’m happy to see you all here this Sunday morning. Yes I am.”

No one spoke but there was a kind of shudder in the room.

He held his big open hands out toward us, relishing our human warmth as if he stood before a fire.

“Was a time once when I saw a lotta empty chairs out there.”

“Amen,” one of the elder deacons intoned.

“Was a time,” the minister said, and then he paused. “Yes. Was a time that we didn’t have no peanut gallery in the back. Was a time ev’rybody could sit and listen to the word of the Lord. They could sit and meditate on his spirit.

“But no more.”

He looked around the room, and I did too. Everyone else had their eyes on him. The women had a kind of stunned look on the whole, their heads tilted upward in order to bask in the peculiar and cool light that flowed from the stained-glass windows. The men were serious, by and large. They were concentrating every fiber of their wills to understand the ways of righteousness and the Lord in their everyday lives. All except the man in the brown suit. His stony glare was still on my profile, and I was wondering about him.

“No, no more,” the minister almost sang. “Because now He is marching.”

“Yes, Lord!” an old woman shouted from down front.

“That’s right,” the minister spoke. “We are going to have to go to the church council to expand the roof of the Lord. Because you know he wants all of you in his flock. He wants all of you to praise his name. Say it. Say, yes Je-sus.”

We did, and the sermon started in earnest.

Towne didn’t quote from the Bible or talk about salvation. The whole sermon was aimed at the dead and maimed boys coming back home from Korea. Reverend Towne worked in a special clinic that tended to the severely wounded. He spoke especially long and poignantly about Wendell Boggs, a young man who’d lost his legs, most of his fingers, one eye, the other eyelid, and his lips in the service of America. Bethesda Boggs, a member of the congregation, wailed as if to underscore his terrible litany.

Together they, mother and minister, had us all squirming in our chairs.

After a while he started talking about how war was a product of man and of Satan, not God. It was Satan who waged war against God in his own home. It was Satan who had men kill when they could turn the other cheek. And it was Satan who led us in war against the Koreans and the Chinese.

“Satan will take on the guise of a good man,” Reverend Towne intoned. “He will appear as a great leader, and you will be blinded by what looks like the fireworks of glory. But when the smoke clears and you squint around to see, you will be surrounded by the wages of sin. Dead men will be your steppingstones and blood will be your water. Your sons will be wounded and dead, and where will God be?”

He had me back on the front lines. I was choking the life out of a blond teenage boy and crying and laughing, and ready for a woman too.

He ended the sermon like this:

“My question to you is, what are you going to do about Wendell Boggs? What can you do?” Then he made a gesture toward the choir, and Melvin lifted his hands again. The organ started up and the choir rose in song. The music was still beautiful but the sermon had turned it sour. There was a collection by the deacons, but many people left even before the plate got to them.

Everywhere people were grumbling.

“What do he mean? What can I do?”

“A minister ain’t no politician, that’s illegal.”

“We cain’t hep it.”

“Communists are against God. We gotta fight ’em.”

Etta turned to me and took hold of my hand. She said, “Take me home, Easy.”

— 13 —

T
OWNE WAS OUT IN FRONT of the church with Winona, Melvin, Jackie, and a couple I didn’t know. The couple were older and they looked uncomfortable. They’d probably shaken the minister’s hand every Sunday for twenty or more years and they weren’t going to stop just because Towne gave one sour sermon.

“Easy,” Melvin said. We knew each other from the old days back in the fifth ward, in Houston, Texas.

“Melvin.”

Jackie was wringing his hands. Winona was gazing at Reverend Towne. It was only then that I noticed Shep, Winona’s little husband, standing in the doorway. I hadn’t seen him in church.

“That was a powerful and brave sermon, minister,” Etta said. She walked up to him and shook his hand so hard that his jowls shook.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” he replied. “It’s good t’have you up here, Sister Alexander. I hope you’re planning to stay for a while.”

“That all depends,” Etta said, and then she stole a quick glance at me.

Winona stepped up and said something to Towne, I couldn’t make out what, then Etta asked, “How is that boy’s folks? You think I could he’p ’em?”

I had to laugh at those women fighting over the minister. I think Etta was doing it just because she didn’t like to see Winona flirting there in front of her own husband.

I saw Jackie and Melvin move to the bottom of the stairway. There they began to argue. Jackie was waving his hands in the air and Melvin was making placating gestures, holding his palms toward the handsome man as if he were trying to press Jackie’s anger down.

I would have liked to know what they were fighting about, but that was merely curiosity, so I turned back to EttaMae.

She had linked arms with the minister and they were walking away. Etta was saying, “Why don’t you introduce me to the poor woman, I could maybe do the cooking on some days.”

I got to look over my shoulder to see Melvin and Jackie still arguing at the bottom of the stair. Melvin was stealing glances up at me.

“Go get the car, Shep,” Winona said, casual and cruel.

“Okay,” he answered. Then little brown Shep, in his rayon red-brown suit, went away to the parking lot.

“Etta with you, Easy?” Winona asked before Shep disappeared around the building.

“Say what?”

“You heard me, Easy Rawlins. Is EttaMae your woman?”

“Etta ain’t rightly nobody’s, Winona. She don’t hardly even like t’think she belongs t’Jesus.”

“Don’t fool with me,” she warned. “That bitch is givin’ the minister the eye, an’ if she free it’s gonna have t’stop.”

“He married?” I asked, shocked.

“ ’Course not!”

“Well, Etta ain’t neither.”

I shrugged and Winona gnashed her teeth. She went down the stairway in a huff.

I looked down at the bottom of the stairs, but Jackie and Melvin were gone, so I turned to enter the church. I found myself at about chest level with a brown suit that had goldenrod stripes. He was standing on a higher stair but even if we stood toe to toe he would have towered over me.

“You Rawlins, ain’t you?” he asked in a voice that was either naturally rough or husky with emotion.

“That’s right,” I said, taking a step backward so I could see his face and move out of range.

His brown face, which clashed with his suit, was smallish, perfectly round, childlike and mean.

“I want you t’take me to yo’ boss.”

“And why is that?” I asked.

“I got business with’im.”

“This is Sunday, son. On today we s’posed t’rest.”

“Listen, man,” he threatened. His voice cracked. “I know all about you …”

“Yeah?”

“You di’n’t lift a finger.” He was quoting someone. “She tole me ’bout how he used her, how he took her fo’ money an’ then he just let her slide when she got sick. She could just die an’ all you care ’bout was yo’self.”

“What’s your name, man?”

“I’m Willie Sacks.” He puffed up his shoulders. “Now let’s go.” He put his hand on my shoulder but I brushed it off.

“You Poinsettia’s boyfriend?” I asked. I wasn’t going anywhere.

He threw a punch at me that would have put a hole in a brick wall. I crouched down under it though, grabbing his wrist as I did, and came up behind him twisting his arm and wrenching his giant thumb.

Willie said, “Oh!” and knelt on the stair.

“I don’t wanna hurt ya, boy,” I whispered in Willie’s ear. “But you make me damage this suit an’ I’m a do some damage on you.”

“I kill you!” he shouted. “I kill all’a you!”

I let him go and moved down a few stairs.

“What’s your problem, Willie?”

“Take me t’Mofass!”

He stood up. In that shade I felt like David without his slingshot.

It’s hard for a big man to throw a punch downward. I let his fist snap somewhere off to the west and then I gave him one and two in the lower gut. Willie folded like a peel bug and rolled down the stairs.

He got right up though, so I ran down and hit him again, on the side of his head that time. I hit him hard enough to hurt a normal man, but Willie was more like a buffalo. I hit him as hard as I could and all he did was sit down.

“I don’t wanna hurt you, Willie,” I said, more to distract me from the pain in my hand than to worry him.

“When I get up from here we gonna see who gonna be hurt.” There were patches of bloody flesh on his face, scrapes from the granite stairs.

“Poinsettia ain’t nobody’s fault, Willie,” I said. “Let it go.”

But he lurched to his feet and came shambling up the stair. I lost patience and broke his nose. I could feel the bone give under my knuckle. I was considering his left ear when I felt a blow to my back. It wasn’t hard, but I was tensed for a fight, so I swung around, only to be hit in the face with something like a pillow. A tiny woman in a frilly pink dress was swinging her woven string purse at my head. She didn’t say a word, saving all of her energy for the fight.

She might have kept it up, but when Willie yelled, “Momma!” she forgot about me and ran to his side.

He was cupping his hands under the bloody faucet of his nose.

“Willie! Willie!”

“Momma!”

“Willie!”

She pushed him until he was up off his knees and then dragged him away, down the street.

Twice the pink-and-brown woman glared at me. She was tiny and wore white-rimmed glasses. Her lips caved inward where teeth once held them firm. Mrs. Sacks couldn’t lift her son’s arm, but I was more frightened of those killer stares than I would have been of a whole platoon of Willies.

“S
IT DOWN ON THE COUCH here next to me, honey, not way over there.” Etta patted the green fabric next to her.

We were in her new apartment on Sixty-fourth Street. It was a nice six-unit apartment building. Her place had two bedrooms, a shower, and blue wall-to-wall shag carpets. LaMarque was with Lucy Rideau and her two girls. They had all gone to Bible school and now they were having Sunday supper.

“I should really get on to work, Etta.”

“On Sunday?”

“I’ma be doin’ some extra work fo’ the church so I gotta make up my time on the weekend.”

“Now what you gonna be doin’ fo’ the Lord, Easy Rawlins?”

“We all do our li’l piece, Etta. We all do our li’l piece.”

“Like you makin’ so LaMarque an’ me ain’t gotta pay no rent to that terrible man?”

“Mofass ain’t so bad. He lettin’ you stay here, ain’t he?”

“He give me this furniture too?”

“We had an eviction last year an’ this stuff been in my garage. I tole’im I’d haul it off to the dump.”