Feathers (10 page)

Jesus hurt somebody.

And the hurting proved to all of us that the Jesus Boy was just a boy. A white-black boy. A human boy all complicated and crazy as the rest of us.

He wasn’t no Wilt Chamberlain or Cleveland Cavalier or Neil Armstrong taking the first step on the moon.

And all the other kids had seen it. Had seen the way Trevor fell. Had seen the tears. Had seen, in that quick, quick moment, how small we all could be.

Jesus Boy held the door open for me and I let him. When we were inside, we headed to Ms. Johnson’s class just as the bell rang, signaling the beginning of another day.

16

Most of the way home that afternoon, me and Samantha were quiet. The snow was coming down in heavy white flakes and the snow on the ground came up past my ankles. We walked slowly through it, afraid of slipping on the patches of ice beneath the snow. That afternoon in geography, we had talked about weather in different parts of the world. It was hard to think that in some places, the sun was shining and people were walking half-naked along beaches. Because even though Ms. Johnson said that in other places crocuses were blooming and kids were jumping into bright blue swimming pools, right here, where we were, it was still winter. It felt like it would always be.

“You ever think spring’s gonna come?”

Samantha shrugged. She looked down as she walked, taking high careful steps through the snow. “It always did before, didn’t it?”

We walked awhile longer without talking. When we finally got to where we went in different directions, Samantha turned to me.

“He’s just a regular old boy, isn’t he?” she said. “The Jesus Boy. He’s just regular.”

I nodded. “But he seems nice, right?”

“He would have hit Trevor if it had come to that,” Samantha said. She took a deep breath and looked out past me to where the highway was. The cars moved slowly along, the snow muffling the sound. Far off, I could hear a low whistle—like wind moving toward us from somewhere far away.

“Strange,” Samantha said. “How one day you can believe in something. And the next day you don’t anymore.” She shivered. There was a hole in one of her mittens. When she saw me looking at it, she put her hand in her pocket.

“And then, when you don’t have that thing to believe in anymore, you don’t have
anything.
”

Then, without saying anything else, she turned and started walking away from me. I watched her go, not knowing what to say.

PART FOUR

17

By the time I got home on Monday, it was snowing again, coming down in big, wet flakes. The heat was blasting when I opened the front door of our apartment and I rushed inside. I could smell something good cooking and ran into the kitchen without even taking my shoes off. Mama was standing at the stove, chicken grease popping loud and heating up the kitchen.

“Girl, you must have lost your mind,” Mama said. “If you don’t get back out there and take off those boots, you better! And get some paper towels and wipe up that trail you trying to leave through my house.”

I smiled, hugged her and went back down the hall.

“You feeling all better, Ma?”

Mama didn’t say anything. I got my boots and coat off quick as anything and ran back into the kitchen, then grabbed some paper towels and started wiping. “You look all better. Huh, Mama? You feeling all better, because you look—”

“I’m standing here making this chicken, right?”

I nodded, looking up at her and smiling.

“Well, that must account for something, huh?”

“Accounts for Mr. Hungry calling that chicken’s name.”

Mama smiled and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. “Remember when Mr. Hungry moved into your brain, girl?”

I thought about it and frowned. “I don’t even remember,” I said. “I’ve always said that.”

“Since you were about five—the first time you saw a commercial for those biscuits. The one that said,
There’s a hungry man inside of everyone!
” Mama laughed. “You got so scared that there was some man living inside of you. It took me and your father about an hour to calm you down. That’s when Mr. Hungry moved into this apartment.”

I tried to remember the commercial she was talking about but couldn’t remember a single minute of it.

Mama had the radio on. A group called the 5
^th
Dimension was singing,
“Then peace will guide the planets. And love will steer the stars . . .”

I leaned against the counter. “Mama . . .”

Mama was reaching up to get some plates down. Her belly was tiny and round now.

She stopped reaching and turned to me. “What, honey,” she asked, her eyes looking all worried. Maybe it was the way I’d called her.

“It’s so strange, isn’t it? The way some things stay in our memory and other things don’t. Like I don’t remember any of that—not even the commercial. Where does all that memory go to?”

Mama checked her chicken, then turned the heat down underneath the pan.

She folded her arms and leaned against the sink. “It’s there inside of us somewhere. It comes up in other ways, I guess. Like even though you don’t have the memory, you got Mr. Hungry.” She smiled.

I thought about how hurt Sean had looked this morning.

“Does stuff go away?”

Mama sighed and turned back to her chicken. “I don’t think the important stuff does,” she said. “You know—the stuff that really makes an impression. I don’t think you remember it just as it happened—but you remember the feelings you had. Good ones. And bad ones too, unfortunately.”

“Hmmm . . .”

Mama looked over her shoulder at me. “How about we make a good memory right now and you get those potatoes mashed, baby girl.” She pointed to the bowl of potatoes on the table. I threw the paper towels away, got a fork from the drawer and started pressing it into the potatoes.

“How about giving those hands a quick washing?”

“I was wearing gloves, Ma!”

“Not when you were wiping up that snow water, you weren’t.”

Our old mama’s returned,
I signed behind her back, then headed to the bathroom.

The minute I started working the potatoes, the door slammed. After a few minutes, Sean was standing there watching us, his face broken out in this huge smile. I tried to see some memory of those dumb girls and found it—just a little bit, right around his eyes, they weren’t real bright, even though he was smiling.

We’re having chickennnnnnn, we’ve having chickennnnn,
I signed, moving my hand slowly at the end of the word
chicken
and doing a little dance. Sean’s smile got a little bigger.

What’d the doctor say?
Sean asked. He sure knew how to kill a moment!

Took some tests,
Mama signed. She pulled some chicken thighs out of the hot oil with a fork and laid them on a flattened paper bag she had put next to the stove.
Said the baby’s looking just fine.

And she’s feeling good right now,
I signed, glaring at Sean.
That’s what matters.

Sean tapped his head with his hand and made a face at me, which basically translated into
I see that, stupid.

I didn’t care. Mama was cooking, we were having chicken and mashed potatoes and greens and Mr. Hungry was gonna be packing his bags
to-night!

18

The next morning, the Jesus Boy came up to me just as we were lining up to go inside. He looked like he wanted to say something, then just looked down at the ground. After a moment, he raised his head again.

“I probably shouldn’t have talked about his daddy, huh?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, he was saying stuff about you. I never understood why you let him say and do all those mean things to you in the first place. Didn’t make any sense.”

We stood there. Somebody had a transistor radio going and I could hear little pieces of the Jackson 5 song “I’ll Be There.” Across the school yard, I could see a group of girls moving slowly to the music.

On the news that morning, they’d talked about a draft lottery to get more guys signed up for the war that was going on and Mama had stopped frying bacon and kissed
both
of Sean’s ears.

Jesus Boy looked at me. Some days, he looked real beautiful—the way the bones in his face kinda pushed out against his pale skin, the way his gray eyes looked all these other colors when the sun came near them.

“It frees him,” he said. “All that stuff that makes him mad and mean and ugly leaves him when he does stuff to other people.”

“Until the next time,” I said. “Then it all just comes right back.”

The sun went behind some clouds and the wind picked up. I shivered.

“But maybe the next time, it’ll be a little bit less and a little bit less and a little bit less until it’s finally all gone.” He looked up at the sky—like he was trying to see the wind. I looked up too—trying to see what he saw. Just the graying sky. Just the snow starting to come down again.

Trevor came up behind the Jesus Boy and made a face at his back. Then he moved between us.

“I want to introduce y’all,” Trevor said, pointing at me. “To Mrs. Jesus.” Some kids laughed. I saw Rayray flick his eyes at Trevor.

“Come on off it already, Trev,” I heard him say. “It’s getting tired. That boy ain’t doing nothing to you. Frannie ain’t either.”

“Jesus loves me, this I know,”
Trev sang softly as he started walking away again.

Rayray just turned away from him and headed inside the building.

A little bit less and a little bit less.
I guess calling me Mrs. Jesus wasn’t the meanest thing Trevor could say.

 

 

When we got inside the school, Ms. Johnson was in the hallway, talking to another teacher. As we walked quietly into the classroom, I saw her looking at Jesus Boy.

“Let’s start with some writing this morning,” she said. Most of the class groaned. I just took out my notebook and let it make a loud slap on my desk, liking the sound it made.

“No slamming books,” Ms. Johnson said, looking at me. “We write in books, we read books—we don’t slam books. If you’re mad, go home and slam a door, please.”

The sun was out and melting snow dripped down over the windows.

“Now what we’re going to do this morning,” she said, her voice becoming all bright again. “Is write down the things we all have in common. I love this exercise because the lists are always so different, which means”—she stopped and looked around the room—“this is not the time to discuss your list with each other. Just write.”

She was wearing a pretty blue dress with black platform boots that came just below her knee. Ms. Johnson always looked like she’d spent the whole weekend looking through fashion magazines, then going out and buying whatever was in style. Samantha would probably grow up to be like Ms. Johnson because she dressed nice too. I usually put on whatever was clean and sometimes that didn’t amount to much. Mama said one day I’d care a little more about how I looked, but I didn’t see that day coming in the near future.

“Rayray, Trevor, Maribel and Chris,” Ms. Johnson said. “The answers aren’t outside that window.”

Maribel rolled her eyes like she was insulted that Ms. Johnson had the nerve to say something to her. Everybody else just faced front.

I stared down at my blank notebook page, wondering what to write. Here’s the list I came up with.

 

I looked around the classroom. Rayray was slumped down in his chair. Trevor had gone back to staring out the window. The Jesus Boy’s pen was moving real slow over his paper. I thought about the way all of our mamas and daddies must have looked at us when we were babies—all new to the world, all squishy-faced and spider-fingered, and them loving us anyway. I thought about my own mama—the way she smiled at me sometimes like she couldn’t believe I was her daughter.

• We were all little babies one time.

19

On Wednesday morning, Maribel was absent, so Samantha and me got to sit alone at lunchtime. The cafeteria was loud and hot. We were having that goulash thing for lunch again.

“Frannie,” Samantha said. “I got something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

I looked up at her.

“That day—when Trevor and Jesus Boy had that fight? How come you went over to him?”

Samantha was wearing a blue suede vest over a turtleneck. She had dangly earrings in her ears and had gotten her hair cornrowed. I leaned on my fist and stared at her. We’d been friends for so many years, I’d stopped counting. She was one of the few people outside my family who knew about the pock scars on my hand. When I’d showed them to her, all those years ago, she was the one who’d said, “Those could be nail holes.”

“It was the right thing,” I said softly.

Samantha took a small bite of the cracker that came with the goulash and kept looking at me.

“You know—Trevor was on the ground, looking like he was going to cry. And then, maybe you couldn’t see it, but he
was
crying. And he was having a hard time getting up with his arm and all . . .” I stopped talking because I realized I was talking real fast. Until that moment, I hadn’t really understood why I went over to him.

“But Trevor’s always been so mean,” Samantha said.

Now I just looked at her.

“I don’t know why you’d help someone so mean like that,” she said.

“Because he needed it,” I said. “I don’t know. I’d even help Maribel get up if she fell down. I don’t really like her but—I don’t know. It’s what you
do.
”

“But you don’t even hardly go to church,” Samantha said.

I picked up one of the crackers, then put it down again. Mr. Hungry wasn’t anywhere to be found anymore. I couldn’t believe I had to explain what I didn’t know how to explain. I’d figured Samantha would just understand—deep inside. Of all people.