Disgruntled (26 page)

“Baba didn’t say?”

“Not really.”

“It’s a long story,” she said. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was a short story that was too petty to tell, but it was still breaking her heart. She imagined herself having dinner with her mother and the awful Teddy Jaffrey every night. It made her want to howl with misery. But she couldn’t stay here.

“When are you leaving?” Amandla asked.

“Tomorrow,” said Kenya. Earlier, she had hatched, and then quickly abandoned, a plan where she left the house in the dark. She liked the idea of scaring her father, who had breezily mentioned a Klan stronghold to the west of the farm. Let them find her, she’d thought then. Let them string her up.

“I wish I could go with you,” said Amandla.

“You really don’t.”

*   *   *

The next day, after a round of hugs ranging from stiff to hostile (except for the embrace of a quietly weeping Amandla), Johnbrown took Kenya to the bus station. They said little. She didn’t discover until he was gone that he’d put a manila envelope containing a sheaf of papers in her backpack. By then it was too late to rip them to pieces and let them fly out of the window in his face.

Disgruntled

Draft #1, Part 2, “The Martyr’s Tale”

Perhaps it began when I was born black on that island across the sea. Perhaps it began when my father dropped dead and my grandparents told me that soon I’d have to leave school and join them in the fields. Perhaps the thing was well under way when the mistress told me that my services were no longer needed. This seems like years ago; it was merely this morning.

“We are grateful for the service you have given us,” she said. “But we are going to have to let you go.”

I knew if I asked why she would only tell a falsehood, and I did not want to say anything that could be mistaken for begging. I wondered idly also if she had talked to the Architect about this decision. He was out of town and I wondered if he would feel differently. Not fully wanting to, I asked, “Is there anything I can do?”

We were in the large, square room where they entertain. She sat on the couch that was her favorite place to sit and I stood in front of her, the sun spilling in on all sides. She was waiting for me to say “ma’am.”

We looked at each other.

“No,” she said finally. “There’s nothing you can do. We will pay your passage back to New York. We are happy to provide letters of reference,” she said.

“I will pack my things,” I said, thinking that I would not trust those letters. I’d once heard a story about a young, educated Negro searching for a job in New York who was chased around by letters informing people that they should not hire him and that they should not tell him about the content of the letters.

“There’s no rush,” she said. “The new man doesn’t arrive until later in the week. We could use your help for several dinners before then. The furniture needs one more polishing, the rugs one last cleaning. You’ll need to train the new man as well. Of course you will receive your final wages and then some.”

“Of course,” I said, bowing like an idiot. As I was walking away, she called me back.

“Julian,” the cow said. “I’d like a word with Elizabeth. I’d like to explain.”

“That won’t be necessary,” I said, taking a tone with her that I now felt free to take.

“I’d prefer to,” she said, forcing her thin, pale lips into a hard smile.

I went to the kitchen in search of Elizabeth, feeling violence in my hands. When she was not there, I went downstairs and groped my way to our room. As I entered the room, dark in the daylight, I heard the sound of someone retching. I, too, nearly became sick as I heard liquid hit the pail we used at night.

“Elizabeth?” I said.

“Yes,” she said in a small voice.

“I have to tell you something.”

“And I you,” she said. That was how I found out about you.

*   *   *

You will not believe this, but in that moment, it was I who was happy. A child! Your mother’s voice was sodden with despair. And so I was even more sorry then, to tell what I had to tell her. I did not light a lantern so I would not have to see her face. I could hear the look in her voice.

“Oh, Julian,” she said. “What will we do?”

“She says she’ll pay our passage back to New York.”

“And then what will we do?”

“She says,” I began with a smirk no one could see, “that she’ll provide letters of reference.”

“Does this amuse you?” Elizabeth snapped. “Are you pleased?”

A familiar and unpleasant jolt went through my frame as I wondered if this woman to whom I had sworn myself would ever understand me. “No,” I said simply. “I’m not pleased, but…”

“But. What?” she said, each word a small harsh sentence.

“But perhaps this is not what I’m meant to do.”

“And what are you meant to do? And how are we meant to live?”

“I know we are not meant to live like this. I know that I was not meant to live like this.”

I heard her snort in the darkness. Then we heard the sound of a large stick hit the floor above us. This was how they summoned us if we were downstairs.

“She wants a word with you,” I said.

My wife took one look at me, gathered her skirts, and walked up the rickety stairs. I paused alone in the dark. Then I went up as well. It was getting on time to prepare for the afternoon meal.

I could tell the Irish housemaid knew, though she said nothing about it. I knew she was hoping now to work with more grimy white people like herself and her bedraggled compatriots, the hired men.

Elizabeth came into the kitchen and set about rinsing vegetables. I looked at her back, which was slightly stooped, and I loved her. I felt comforted that though we might travel the whole earth, we would travel it together.

“Do you know how many are eating?” I asked. I realized I had forgotten to ask the cow if there would be others besides herself and her horrible children. Well, it was not true that both were horrible; the girl was a shy child with a sad expression. But knowing her mother, I felt I knew what she would become. I thought, as I looked at Elizabeth, about parents and children. She had stopped her work to look out of the window. She glanced at me as if still looking through the clouds. “Seven.”

“Are you well?”

“I’m fine. And you can set the regular plate. The other guests are just the men.”

Sometimes the cow, in the absence of the Architect, dined with the white groundskeepers. She had never extended this wretched courtesy to Elizabeth and myself, the excuse being that we were always required to serve. This was well and good; I never wanted to break bread with any of these people. I have to admit, however, that it galled me to have to gently place plates before men with barely a tooth between them, who had to be reminded by the housemaid to wash the grime from their faces and hands before they sat down to the Architect’s table. In these people’s eyes, I would never be as good as these men, who were not much more sentient than the horses and cows they watered and fed.

I was not thinking much of them then, this morning when the day began. I was thinking of Elizabeth and our child as the kitchen clouded with Lucifer’s sweat. She was making the hot soup that the mistress required, even in August. She had confided in my wife that it was part of a regimen she followed hoping it would help her conceive a child, though she was past natural childbearing years.

I leaned in close to your mother and made a motion as if to wring my handkerchief into the soup. She said my name sternly.

“What can they do?” I asked her. “Dismiss us?”

I sought a smile, but she began to weep!

“I know this is hard,” I said. “But you must trust me. If this woman doesn’t want us in her—”

“It’s you, Julian, she doesn’t want in her house. She does not think you fit here,” Elizabeth whispered harshly, tears streaming down her face. “She has asked me to stay on and I have said yes.”

I am not sure, but I think I staggered back onto my heels. I remembered once when I was quite small and knocked over a bowl of dry beans through which my mother was sorting. She was very angry. As I was on my hands and knees, picking up the beans, she kicked me. Though she had been in a rage when I turned the bowl over, I could tell that the kick was casual, an afterthought.

I loved your mother, but I could see behind her eyes. Though her cheeks were streaked with tears, I could tell that she had said yes quickly. While I was down there groveling among beans, she had kicked me. Or perhaps the groveling among beans was what I was doing with my days and nights in the service of the Architect, and the mistress’s firing me was the kick.

“Does she know you are carrying a child?” I asked in a hoarse voice.

“She has offered to help.”

“She has offered to help
my
child?”

The housemaid was in the kitchen wiping sweat from her frizzy brow. “Julian Curtis, the table is waiting,” she announced. She then looked at Elizabeth with an expression I could not quite read, but it had the feel of a conspiracy.

“Please go,” said Elizabeth.

I hit my head on the way out of the kitchen.

*   *   *

A thought occurred to me while I stood in my usual position on hand as the mistress, her children, and the Cro-Magnons scratched their fleas and ate their dinner. I thought that before I left I would burn the Architect’s blanket, and instead of waiting until I was meant to leave, I would do it today. I would say it was an accident. It was as if the mistress heard my thought, for she looked at me strangely.

“That will be all for the moment, Julian,” she said. “Please come back in a quarter of an hour.”

“If you please, ma’am,” I said. “I will start on the rugs.”

“Very well.”

In the shed, I found the gasoline that we used to clean the rugs. Then the ax caught my eye, and I imagined breaking up the Architect’s precious chaise longue. The place where a person like him could lie down in the daytime. When I walked back through the kitchen, Elizabeth was there alone, icing the small cakes beloved by the little girl. I watched her lovely profile for a minute. I was speaking before I could catch myself.

“You must not do this,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and out of the dining room. “You must not leave me.”

“I am carrying a child,” she said, her voice even lower. “I cannot leave here right now.”

“My child. That is why you must come with me.”

“I’m sorry, Julian,” she said. She looked around the kitchen, as if she’d find something to say there amid the clutter of cooking. Then her eyes rested on the gas can and the ax. “What are you going to do?”

“Clean the rugs,” I said.

“What are you going to do, Julian?” Elizabeth asked again, her eyes getting wide.

I looked at her. And then I saw myself take shape in her eyes as someone terrifying.

“Please,” she said.

In a way, then, it was her idea. In a way, it was your mother who pushed me to do it. Because as I looked at and smelled her fear, I suddenly knew that I would not only burn up the blanket but burn this house to the ground. I also knew that because of you, I would spare her.

“I cannot forgive you, Elizabeth. But if you leave this house immediately, you and the child will live.”

I clamped a hand on her mouth before she could scream. I hated to touch her like that. The dining room bell rang again, making a tinny, impatient sound. I felt her go slack in my arms. And then I pulled her to me for the last time in this life. Our clothes and skin stuck to us unpleasantly in the steaming kitchen on that August day.

It was the instinct of an ignorant animal that made me go back into the dining room at the sound of the bell. The mistress spoke sharply to her son, for singing at the table. I could see from my position all of the crumbs that the dairyman had dropped at his place and the nails of his nephew, which were ringed black with manure.

“Julian,” said the mistress, “it has been nearly an hour. I know Elizabeth made something special for A—. If you would please clear the table and bring it. The men need to get back to work.”

I did not trust myself to speak. I picked up an armload of plates and took them into the kitchen. I heard the little girl’s voice: “Mama, why is he so mad?”

The kitchen was empty.

Elizabeth.

I stood at the window, straining to see the receding figure. But the waves of grass were still and empty. She had disappeared, leaving behind the tray of iced cakes, which I brought to the dining room.

I pictured it before I did it, pouring a thin trail of the gasoline along the bottom of the study wall, and from there throughout the house. Then it was happening. I threw a match and the flames answered. Through the smoke I made my way back to the door out of which your mother had fled. I posted myself sentry with the ax. Those who made it through the smoke and flames at the front of the house would try to get out of the back. But none would make it past me and the ax.

There was nothing to do now but wait.

*   *   *

Commodore had been admitted to Tyler for his realistic, colorful paintings of the people in the neighborhood where he grew up. Despite his obsession with the Eakins painting, he made pretty pictures of black folk: churchy grandmothers, empty-eyed men on the corner, drug dealers dripping in gold. All of them had similarly haunted eyes. The one his teacher labeled his “statement piece” was a glum-looking baby who wore a heavy gold chain and an equally heavy-looking diaper. He grasped a gun in his little brown fist.

Once in art school, after he’d seen the ironic pornography his classmates were making, he’d become mortified by his portfolio. (“I wanted to take that gun and shoot the baby.”) He dedicated himself to a series of charcoal drawings of stick figures being executed that he called the Hangman Series. This change in direction was underappreciated, as were the harangues against his classmates’ work in his obscenity-laced open letter to the faculty at Tyler titled “A Plea for Black Complexity.” He lost his scholarship.

According to Commodore, this was the best thing that could have happened to him. Now he could truly be an artist. “Studying and doing are
not
the same thing,” he declared. Of course, after a few days of staying with him, it became clear to Kenya that he was doing neither. If he wasn’t toiling at the Green Apple:
a healthy cafeteria
, he was either smoking pot or making plans to smoke. Occasionally he thumbed through a book.