And All Our Wounds Forgiven (25 page)

Eventually he quieted. We noticed at about the same time that the water in the tub was cold. I opened the drain and we stepped out and dried each other with the large, fluffy towels. His penis was rigid and I took the head of it between the palms of my hands and rolled it back and forth and listening to his breathing get more and more shallow, I took his penis into my mouth and sucked on it hard as if I were trying to suck all the color from a popsicle without taking a breath and he came, his body twitching with spasms as scream after scream tore from his throat and I drank the thick semen hungrily.

We slept and I do not know for how long because neither of us was looking at clocks or watches but it was light when we awoke and he put his hand on my vagina and it was still wet and he pulled me atop him and I slipped his penis into me and so deeply was he inside me I wanted to ask him if he could feel the beating of my heart and because death was waiting impatiently now I came more quickly than I ever had and it was my turn to cry and be held and I felt so secure with his arms around me his penis inside me and me spread over him like a benediction.

When we finally dressed we were surprised to glance at the clock radio and see that it was one o’clock in the afternoon. I called down to the desk and told them we were checking out. I had signed the charge card slip the night before but the manager told me that everything would be taken care of by the hotel and a bellman would be up to get our bags.

When we got off the elevator in the lobby people were there with video cameras, which were new then, and still cameras. Ignoring them we followed the bellman to a side exit and to the parking lot.

“Dr. Marshall?”

The voice came from behind us. We turned and not until I saw the gun, saw the flash and heard the dull pop did I realize it was happening. I never saw the man, just the gun, the flash, the dull pop, and Cal fell against me and I caught him and we went down. As we did a second bullet passed where I had been and, not finding me, struck the old bellman whose grandchildren would not remember him as the man who had carried the bags and shook the hand of John Calvin Marshall but as the man who died with him.

Cal lay across my lap and I gathered him in my arms and held him against my breasts and I could feel his warm blood, his life, leaking onto my clothes. I thought he was dead already but his eyes opened and we stared at each other and he pulled me near and whispered in my ear. My heart froze.

Then he tried to raise his arm and I took his hand and placed it inside my blouse against my breast

and he died.

the voice was a nasal one and i could hear the evil in it as it spoke my name and i thought “now?” not in surprise or protest as much as wanting to recognize the moment and i turned and i saw a small balding head atop a pudgy body he wore wire rim glasses and his face was beatifically calm and i tried to reconcile the evil i heard in the way he called my name and the peace on his face but there was not time and spark of detonation sound of propulsion and meeting of steel and flesh were almost simultaneous and the bullet plunged into my chest and i thought i saw the gun in his outstretched hands move to the left and take aim at elizabeth and i fell against her pushing her to the ground for an instant it was dark and i wondered if this were death and then i felt her arms around me her breasts against my face and i opened my eyes and i could feel the frantic fluttering of my heart as it struggled to maintain its life knowing it could not and i hoped that she would understand and she would trust and she would know the need and i opened my mouth and she leaned over to hear me whisper “tell andrea i never stopped loving her” and i looked into elizabeth’s face again and saw that she did not understand and i wanted to say and could not and i tried to raise my hand to place behind her head and draw her lips onto mine but she took it and placed it inside her blouse against her bare skin and onto her naked breast and she understood and

I still have the dress.

x.

we met once, two months before he was killed. he spoke at fisk and afterwards came to the house to see me. this was after his break with the nation of islam. he was reaching out, seeking allies among those of us he had just months before called “uncle toms” and “handkerchief heads” and “house niggers.” i wanted to ask him how many times he had been beaten, how many nights he had spent in southern jail cells, how many times he had stared at death.

he was tall, taller than i expected, and earnest. his sincerity was unleavened by doubts or questions or musings. he
knew
the truth. that frightened me.

we did not have much to say to each other. he said that despite our differences, we had the same goals — the freedom of our people. i wanted to ask him what freedom was. i was not sure i knew anymore. i was not sure that freedom was a condition that could be attained by an entire people but only by isolated and very solitary individuals who had submitted.

he did most of the talking. i doubt that had been his intent, but i sensed he was nervous. people often were when they met me. perhaps it was the disparity between what i looked like physically and what i had done. our culture has its images of courage as it does of beauty and courage dresses in biceps. i had none. yet, in their minds were the pictures of me being beaten at the bus station in birmingham, me standing before the quarter of a million that august day in washington, me leading a march along mississippi highways.

x talked about our mutual love for our people. he acknowledged the risks i had taken, the sacrifices i had made, but he never apologized for all the times he had derided and mocked me and called me odious names, implying that i was a traitor to the very people he now claimed we both loved.

i said nothing, and after a while his words sputtered to a period and there was silence. he looked at me expectantly. i looked at him, the close-cropped hair, the dark necktie, white shirt and suit.

he did not like the silence and he sputtered back into language, telling me just how much i was doing for the cause of black identity. it was then i understood that i was confronting the future. he was seeking his identity and thought it could be found in the public arena. he was on a personal quest for salvation.

“i love white people, too,” i interrupted him.

he was startled. “i beg your pardon.”

“you said we both loved black people. i love white people, too. whatever i have done has been for them, too.”

“but white people don’t love
you,
my brother.”

“and why do you think love must be reciprocated to be love?”

he laughed nervously. “this is getting a little philosophical for me.” he stood up and extended his hand. I stood up and grasped his and we were aware that we had nothing more to say to each other — ever. and i think he knew that, if necessary, i would speak out against him with all the power and influence i could muster. not that it would do any good. history is as likely to side with those who are mistaken as the rest of us.

it does not surprise me that it is he who is loved and remembered now. i have a holiday and a stamp but i am not loved. i am not missed. the changes for which i was the catalyst are dismissed as unimportant or taken for granted. and he who wrought no changes is enshrined in the hearts of a new generation.

lyndon would understand.

even though he never called me after i spoke out against the vietnam war, we understand this about the other: we had a vision of what america could be and it was not a vision of white against black and black against white. it was an ethic which had at its center a hatred of suffering.

few care about suffering anymore. they merely want to prove themselves right and everyone else wrong.

if only we knew how wrong we all are.

When the moment came, it was almost too late. She did not want to open her eyes because she was afraid they would not shut again, and what she wanted most of all now was that peace awaiting her behind the closed lids. But she had to open her eyes so Lisa would know that she had heard and in the hearing was the atonement and in the atonement was her humanity.

Lisa had been talking, but Andrea could no longer concentrate on the words, heard not meaning but only sound like a solitary chant on the other side of a hill, and that was enough now. The words did not matter. Only the chant.

Slowly, she forced the lids apart. Her gaze was met by a pair of startled blue eyes and Andrea’s eyes filled with tears as she looked at the white woman and she wished she could say and say and she hoped Lisa understood but she did not want to keep her eyes open anymore could not stay here any longer and the lids came together — for the last time.

As Robert drove into the cemetery that Saturday afternoon he was not surprised to see, in the distance, the figure of Lisa lying atop Cal’s grave. He had gone by the Holiday Inn and not finding her, did not know where else she would be.

He would have come here in any event — to see the dug grave and scratch from his list one more item he would not have to worry about. Kathy and Adisa were taking care of hotel reservations for those staying over, arranging catering for the reception after the funeral. He parked the car some distance from the graves that were his destination, not wanting to startle Lisa by entering her silence too abruptly.

Although it was late afternoon, and the sun was dropping quickly, there was a warmth in the air still. For reasons that were not at all clear, Robert felt young. He wanted to add “again” but couldn’t remember when he had ever felt young. This sense of youthfulness was not coltish, however. If anything he felt more stolid than ever and in command, and that was something he had never experienced. Perhaps authentic youth was earned and came when one had survived the worst and knew he could survive even worse. Not only was there no more self-doubt about the quality of who he was, neither were there recriminations for all he was not.

As he walked toward the gravesites of John Calvin Marshall and Andrea Williams Marshall, he looked idly at the names on tombstones and tried to imagine a day when someone would walk through a cemetery and read his name — Robert Charles Card. Would there be a Saturday afternoon when Amy would lie atop his grave and make love to him even in death?

He doubted it.

(“Oh, God, no! Oh, God, no! I’m so sorry! I am so sorry for you,” she exclaimed that morning on West End Avenue.

He had expected she would take him in her arms, had expected her to say something about how awful he must be feeling and was he all right and what could she do, but she was silent.

He looked at her. Her eyes were clear, expressing an objective concern, the kind she would have shown for anyone who had just heard of the death of a friend.

Finally, she smiled sadly. “I’m very sorry, but I’m tired of your emotions. I’m emotionally worn out. I have nothing more to give you and my capacity to receive your pain has been exhausted.”

“You don’t understand. You don’t know what it was like.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t know what it is like for someone in the jungles of Vietnam who screams out in his sleep. I don’t know what it was like for someone in the jungles of Mississippi. All I know is that I tried to make it better and I ended up feeling worse. There comes a time, Bobby, when you have to take responsibility for your own pain, regardless of who inflicted it on you. It seems like a lot of blacks in America are trying to avoid that truth these days and think that if they blame white people long enough and loudly enough, they will be healed. We tried that, Bobby.”

“Fuck you, bitch!”

She laughed. “Not anymore. You can’t fuck me or fuck me over. Amy! You just might be growing up, girl. You just might!” She waved good-bye and as the light changed yellow, ran across the avenue and continued toward Broadway.)

He was closer now and could see Lisa lying with her eyes closed, cheek pressed to the earth over Cal’s grave. For an instant, Robert was saddened that so much love and so much devotion was not being given to someone living, and for once, he did not think of himself.

But who was he to say that the dead did not need love, also. And maybe a special kind of love was required for the dead, a love that did not need love in return, a love whose reward was in loving.

As he moved closer, she felt the tremor of his weight upon the earth, opened her eyes and raised her head. When she saw who it was, she sat up and rested her back against the massive headstone marking the resting place of John Calvin Marshall.

“I hoped I would find you here,” he greeted her, sitting in the grass at the edge of the grave. “Kathy told me you had called and said you were leaving. I stopped by the Holiday Inn and you weren’t there. I couldn’t think of any other place you would be.”

“I could’ve been in Centennial Park.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Centennial Park.”

“I know where Centennial Park is. Why would you go there?”

“Because I’d never been.”

“All the years you lived in Nashville, you never went to Centennial Park?”

“Uh-uh. It was segregated. Remember?”

“Sure, but it was desegregated a year or two after the sit-ins.”

“I know, Bobby. I know. But I’ve been angry all these years because it
had been
segregated, and I hated it that people acted like nothing had ever happened. Well, this afternoon I went and sat on the steps of the Parthenon and felt so foolish. It was nice sitting there in the afternoon sun and I thought about all the afternoons I could have sat there and felt the sun and didn’t.”

He nodded. “I know what you mean. Maybe that has something to do with why I wanted to see you before you left. I wanted to thank you.”

“For what?”

“For telling me to call Kathy and Adisa.”

“It worked out all right?”

“I could’ve been sitting on the steps of the temple and soaking up the sun for the past twenty years.”

“Well, maybe it’s not important when you sit on the steps but that you do.”

She smiled. There was now an ease between them, an ease available only to those who have accepted that they are simultaneously less than they ever thought they were and more than they can ever know.