Four Spirits (32 page)
Authors: Sena Jeter Naslund
BECAUSE IT IS THE CHRISTMAS SEASON WHEN FAMILIES
draw near to one another, I am thinking of you & of the missing member of your families. If I had the power to undo what has been done to your loved one, or to undo your own grieving & the vacancy in your heart, I would do so.
But my power is small. In my kitchen, my wife & our four children have gathered to make five loaf fruitcakes, which I am sending you with this letter, & one to Mrs. Kennedy. Do not be afraid to eat them. They are stuffed with goodness. We have folded both pecans & walnuts, citron & dates into the batter. Each one has done their part, even my youngest, little Andy. He has taken the paring knife & the cherries & held a candied cherry down on the cook-top & carefully sliced it in two, time after time.
May your hurt hearts be mended as you celebrate the child God sent at Christmastime to make us whole and free of sin through his sacrifice if we but believe and trust in him.
Please enjoy these good cakes we have baked. God is serving his own cakes in heaven where all the family eats at one table.
With Christian Love and Hope,
Lionel & Jenny Parrish. Children George, Lizzie, Vicky &
Andy (his mark)
CHRISTMAS EVE AND I REMEMBER WATCHING MY MAMA
sit up in the bed; the light from the fireplace caught the oil on her high cheekbone. Papa's place was still empty. Mama was going to look round now. Yes, she did. I saw the whites of her eyes move round, and I closed my eyes loosely, not screwed up tight like I did when I was five.
Was brother Alfie asleep? And Sis Margaret Rose and little Willy? Their knees were pulled up and they lay rounded and natural. The quilts were up to their ears. Would my big brother Charles come visit for Christmas? Mama walked barefooted to the fireplace. Her white soles flickered under her feet like she was walking on light. She picked up a lump of big coal and laid it down into the glow. The embers shifted, breathed, and poo-pooed ashes. Mama looked round mean, scowling, right at me. But I didn't show any life.
She went back toward her bed and I thought,
Where's my Christmas roller skates? Gimme my skates. Mama! Mama!
She lifted back the quilts and got into her hollow. She was pulling the covers over her shoulder and then she was turning over, facing the wall and the space where my daddy should have been. I exhorted her to get up and find my skates. And Margaret Rose's white majorette boots. And Alfieâhe's old enough to know. Never mind about Willy.
I didn't ask for no bicycle.
Nothing but roller skates. Bright and shining. When you hold a skate on its back and turn a wheel with your finger, click-click-click, it's got tiny little balls inside.
I dreamed that my mama was an angel that Christmas Eve long ago, an angel walking on light, her feet glittering, and then I saw it was because she
was riding my skates. She skated all night; sometimes I said,
Watch out, Mama, watch out. White man's gonna get you.
I was prescient in my dream, like a prophet of old.
Finally Mama fell, and her stumbling was like the little bells when you walk in the grocery store to buy a Moon Pie, like when you used to walk into Stoner's store on Vanderbilt Road and could walk into now, if the store were still there, after all this time.
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EARLY MORNING, AND
the small coal was rolling out of the scuttle like little bells and my mama was saying, “Ain't nobody in this house interested in Christmas?”
Then my pappie was climbing up the porch steps and he fell heavy against the door.
“Hey, woman, lemme in this house!”
In three mean steps Mama crossed the room. Alfie was sitting up, but Margaret Rose had sense enough just to hang her head over the side of the bed to watch. Because my big brother had already moved out, and my father didn't count, I was the man of the house.
Not him, me, I'm the man.
I anointed myself, and prayed, “The Lord is my Shepherd; / I shall not want.”
“Whatcha mean come dragging in this house on Christmas morning?” Like a pan of dishwater, Mama's wrath flung out the door on him.
“Now, I done bought a little tree.”
Mama cracked open the door.
“Why, sure enough.” My mama's voice sung on openâwide and warm. And my sister whipped out of bed and ran calling, “Daddy's got us a tree!” and so did Alfie, and Willy babbled, and finally I thought it was safe, and I raised up in bed.
Then I saw packages! On the breakfast table, after all.
We shall not want.
I zipped over the linoleum floor like it was hot. I lifted my box and it was heavy with metal heaviness. Then I walked on over to the rest of the family. Against the tree, I measured myself taller than Daddy's little green tree.
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THAT AFTERNOON ON CHRISTMAS
Day, some of us skated backward and some danced and clapped. Some skated in a circle round the whole drove. For blocks and blocks and miles and miles. Our sound was big like airplanes.
I could keep up good even if I was little, and they wouldn't leave me up there alone on white folks' streets anyway. Not on Christmas. Then, all at once, I found a dime. Perfect, slender, weightless, it slid into my pocket.
And that's the happy part of a story that I hoped could start happy and end happy, but this world cannot be represented by the happiness of a poor boy finding a dime. I had much to learn of the ways of God and man before I found my calling, which was to follow Reverend Shuttlesworth, to become a minister as he was in the days of my boyhood and continues to this day. Not so long ago, I went to the trials in Birmingham (yes, Mama, there have been Trials as well as tribulations) of those who killed my little friends, and after the last aging white man was convicted,
there
was Reverend Shuttlesworth, age eighty himself, singing for all of us “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” And his picture on the front page of the
Birmingham News,
triumphant.
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BUT CHRISTMAS,
1963,
WAS
the next to the last day that I ever saw my physical father.
On December 26, Pappie got up cussing and puking. After he'd stirred up the air, our whole cabin smelled like Christmas gift whiskey, spoiled and rotted and puked up. At the steel mill Pappie was grabbed up by Big Manâthat's what they called it then. I don't know what piece of equipment in the foundry killed him. I guess he was hungover, drugged with booze, careless for the first and last day in his life. They said to me “Can't nobody, not even the preacher, look in his box 'cause he don't look like hisself no more.”
For a while, I didn't much miss my fatherâI hate to say that, but it's true. He was hardly ever in the cabin. That was Mama's domain. And besides, I still had my big brother, Charles, and Reverend Shuttlesworth was my spiritual father. But sometimes at night I could hear Margaret Rose snuffling for our father. Twice Alfie cried out “Daddy” in his sleep. Willy was too young to have any sense.
Sometimes I tried to think of my paw. “Paw, he dead,” I would whisper to myself.
But I had a dream that spring, and it woke me up to reality.
It was starting to warm up and forsythia had already bloomed when I found my sister, Margaret Rose, talking to my school shoes on a crate beside my cot.
“You is a nigger and don't you forget it.”
“Margaret Rose!” I said. “What you mean talking at them shoes like that for?”
She whirled around, very angry at me, and hissed that I was stuck-up. But I knew that wasn't true, and I took up for myself. “You're a lie.”
Then Margaret Rose said something that I knew immediately to be wicked. She said, “If I want to, when I get big, I can sleep with any white man I wants to. But you ain't never gonna have a white woman, nigger boy.” She began to cry but she went right on talking. “I is
glad
I'm gonna be a woman and not no worthless man.”
“You're a lie,” I repeated weakly.
“Ask Mama. If you know where she at. She gone off with Mr. Stoner.”
I said that his wife was sick and that Mama was helping to care for the sick, like the Bible said she ought.
“It ain't in the Bible to take money. She takes his money.”
“For working in the grocery store. We paid to work.”
“For swelling?” she asked. “Ain't you looked at her?”
And I wondered, was Mama swelling? Like before Willy and Alfie? Speech-less, my jaw dropped open and Margaret Rose walked out the door.
That night I dreamed President Kennedy, half his head missing, took my hand and led me up the mountain to look down an open hole in its peak. A long ladder led down there. At the bottom, a human-size metal Vulcan was making steel, and the cauldron was bubbling and spitting. I went down the ladder with the president, and there was my mutilated father tending the flames, his hands just raw flesh. Oh, he was dead! All at once the ladder was pulled up. Flames bubbled out of the melting pot and spilled on the floor and spread like water toward me, burned off my shoes and lapped up my legs. There wasn't any leaving that place.
Till the rooster crowed, my father, the president, and I burned in the furnace, and the veins inside our bodies ran with molten steel.
WHEN SHE STOOD ON THE FRONT PORCH OF HER FIANCÃ'S
sister's houseâBoy Howdy! It was hot todayâand rang the bell, Stella thought of gunfireâthe sound was that penetrant. It was as though she, Stella, had pulled a trigger by poking the doorbell button with a fingertip.
No,
Cat Cartwright actually
was
shooting. Cat was target practicing with her father's gun in the indoor shooting gallery that Mr. Cartwright had built. When Don left for the Peace Corpsâsome six months earlierâhis sister had taken up shooting, aided and abetted by their father.
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NOT A RICH MAN,
a night watchman, Mr. Cartwright had brought home old sofa cushions from the junkyard, had straightened out quart tomato juice cans and quart grapefruit juice cans; he had cut thicker steel out of wrecked cars. With the old cushions and the metal he had lined the shooting gallery, a square tube, two foot by two foot. Cat sat in the pantry to shoot; the tube supported by stilts, jutted straight into the backyard for thirty feet.
She's a pretty good shot,
Harvey Cartwright often told himself,
but even if her little hands was to tremble, the bullet likely couldn't get out of the tube.
In any case, by the time a stray bullet got through all his cushion-and-metal linings it would near 'bout be harmless.
From the time of his own hardscrabble boyhood, he had trained himself to accept and not to test out any idea that offered comfort. It gave Mr. Cartwright satisfaction to believe in the efficacy of his shooting contraption. Being a night
watchman, he slept with earplugs so Cat could practice during the day when he had to get his rest. 'Course when he worked, he had to have the gun back in its black leather holster (he wished the holster were bigger; that might be safer if somebody ever tried to grab it away from him).
There wasn't no safety from germs.
That's what Harvey Cartwright had told himself when his daughter, who used to run down the dirt road to meet him when they lived in the country, before they had to move to Birmingham, lay in her iron lung.
There was no way I could of protected her from germs.
The doctors had said it wasn't polio, and then it was polio, and then it wasn't polio and she could certainly come out of the iron lung for most of the rest of her life, till all systems would one by one shut down; it was degenerative what she had, somebody's
ataxia.
These days you could vaccinate against polio, if it had been that.
His daddy had given Harvey an air rifle when he was ten. Yes, Cartwright was comfortable with a gun: he'd grown up in the country after all. At his job interview in the city, they'd asked two questionsâ“Are you comfortable with a gun?” and “Can you walk all night?” Yes, he could walk all night.
With his next paycheck he would buy Cat her own weapon so she wouldn't be scaredâhe imagined his daughter's terror all too easily and had to imagine it, since she had never uttered a word of fearâher unprotected alone in the house at night, the world coming to what it had. His son gone, not to the army but to the Peace Corps.
His crippled daughter needed a gun. Especially since she was determined to do what she said she was going to do, starting tonight, and who could know what colored boy might track her home, break in, seeing how she was nearly helpless. Tomorrow, he'd visit the pawnshop, this time to buy, not to sell. At least she could still use her hands some. He had to take his gun to work, and Catherine needed one of her own.
The shriek of Stella's doorbell penetrated even new rubber earplugs, though gunfire did not, and Mr. Cartwright wished he'd hung out the sign
Just come on in, Stella.
He shambled toward the front door, zipping his pants;she'd seen him in his strap undershirt before.
And now Stella and Don were engaged. Mr. Cartwright shook his headâwhy would his son get engaged and then go off to an island in the Pacific Ocean? Maybe Don thought he needed some home tie to keep him off the native women. Well, being engaged or even married didn't stop
most menâhe could have told Don that. But Don never had seemed to be wild that way.
Harvey Cartwright had come to like Stella, at least to like that she visited. When Don was around, she'd been friendly, but Mr. Cartwright never noticed any spark between Don and Stella. She had been a faithful friend to Cat from high school on into college and all the way through college. Last May, she'd pushed Cat in her wheelchair up to get the bachelor of arts diploma. Mr. Cartwright would have liked to have done that part himself.
Now he rubbed sleep out of his eyes, looked through the sheer curtain over the front door at Stella's slender form.
Like a good ghost,
he thought and remembered he'd been dreaming of his dead wife. In the dream, she was scolding him when the doorbell drilled his mind. Yes, he believed in ghosts. His wife's ghost had visited him many times to give him good advice.
“Come on in, Stella.”
“I'm sorry. I woke you up.”
“That's all right.” He turned away, padded barefoot back toward his bedroom. Then he remembered he ought to have confronted this able-bodied girl about where she was intending to take his handicapped daughter tonight, but he was too tired.
Climbing back into his bed, he thought,
Poor little thing, lost all her family in that car wreck, lives with those two old aunts, one of them crippled up 'bout bad as Catherine.
He liked to sleep under a sheet, even in the summer.
Him a doctor, first to die. One, two, three, four. Father, mother, two brothers, all four in her familyâdead.
Mr. Cartwright pictured the car rolling over: like a single dice. People tumbling like clothes in a dryer at the Laundromat. In bed, he rolled onto his shoulder, pulled the sheet with him. Five people rolled around inside, damaged to death. Only one lucky little girl climbed out the window, car lying on its side. She had told Cat and Cat had told him. Stella was covered with blood; her whole skin was red with it.
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WHEN STELLA STEPPED INSIDE,
she felt the blessed coolness of the room air conditioner. She walked through the house and stopped in the kitchen to cup her hands over her ears. In the pantry, Cat sat sideways, sighting down the jerry-built shooting gallery; she was going to squeeze off another shot. Goliath, sitting in Cat's lap, looked at Stella with large, longsuffering
eyes. Cat fired the gun, and as soon as the noise was over, Goliath leapt down from Cat's lap and rushed Stella. The little dog's barking exploded in jealous rage.
“Goliath! Goliath,” Cat said sternly, but the little dog barked till he was satisfied. Cat left the gun in its short stand (a reclaimed wig stand from the junkyard) and turned her wheelchair. As she repositioned, sunlight glanced from the spokes, threw a spoked wheel of light toward Stella.
“Baked apples in the oven,” Cat said.
Stella's nose told her it was true.
“Dad said we could take his car. But he doesn't like it. Here are the car keys.” Haltingly, Cat groped in her lap, held out the necessary key ring to Stella.
The keys were still warm, Stella noticed, from Cat's lap and from Goliath sitting on them. Cat's short hair was newly washedâshe didn't wash it often enough and it tended to get greasy and stringy (funny, Stella thought, how dirty hair made a person look poor), but today it was a light brown haystack capping Cat's head.
“Your hair looks pretty,” Stella said. “So we've got the car.”
Although Stella's Aunt Krit owned a car, she took it to school with her every day. She'd taught Stella to drive, and she let her use the car once a week.
“Dad said to get to Miles we go out Eighth Avenue.”
“So you told him where.”
“Seemed best.”
“I'm not going to tell the aunts.” Stella knelt before the hot stove to take out the baked apples, something Cat couldn't manage. “At least not till we've got the jobs.”
