Singing Hands (16 page)

Abe ran up to grab my father's hand as we got out of the car. "Well, I declare," Daddy said out loud. "Don't you look fine?" Daddy hooked his thumbs into imaginary suspenders and struck a dandified pose. Abe squawked with laughter. As soon as he turned to me, though, he scowled and forced his mouth into a fierce frown. I could tell he was mimicking the grumpy expression he had seen on my face the first day we met. He frowned a little more, then burst into his heehaw again and trotted around to the driver's side of the Packard, where Daddy had left the door open.

While Abe slipped behind the wheel and pretended to steer, Mrs. Johnson hurried over to talk to Daddy. She made small, worried noises as she struggled to tell him something important. Her signs were makeshift, half proper and half her own invention. She fingerspelled to fill in the rest. Gradually, I realized what she was trying to say. Abe thought he was only going on a short trip with Daddy, for a visit to see a school for other children just like him. He didn't know he was going to be staying at ASD, away from home and his mother until his first vacation at Christmas.

"If he knows," Mrs. Johnson told my father, "he won't go. He'll be scared." Her dark face filled with fear as she tried to explain.

Daddy seemed concerned, but not as anxious about the situation as I expected him to be. He kept nodding calmly to Mrs. Johnson, and several times he skimmed the edge of his right hand across his left palm, like a boat gliding through water. "It's all right," he was saying. "It's all right. He'll be fine."

I eyed Abe doubtfully. He rammed his fist against the horn in the middle of the Packard's steering wheel, making me jump at the sudden blast of noise. When he saw my surprised reaction, he laughed and honked again, then a few more times for good measure. A woman passing by on the sidewalk shook her head in disapproval.

Oh, brother. What was my father thinking? Obviously, Abe had never been in a car before, never left Birmingham or his mother's side, never attended even a single day of school. How was he supposed to fit in at ASD among all those strange new people and rules and signs he couldn't understand?

But it didn't matter what I thought. Soon Daddy had stowed the lumpy duffel bag in the car and Mrs. Johnson was holding her little boy's face between her hands. She stared for several long seconds, as if she was soaking up his funny grin—missing teeth and all. Then she kissed him hard on his forehead and pushed him toward the back seat, to a spot next to his satchel. She shook her finger and smiled at her son before she shut the door, probably telling him to be a good boy.

Abe didn't wave goodbye. He was too excited about fiddling with the door lock and the handle for rolling his window up and down. It was a good thing he was distracted, because when I turned back to look, Mrs. Johnson was standing in the middle of the gravel parking lot with her face buried in her red handkerchief.

Within five minutes, I realized what a long ride it was going to be to Talladega. Daddy didn't drive faster than thirty-five miles an hour. As we snaked through the scrubby pine forests and rundown farms on the outskirts of town, there was barely enough breeze to blow my sweaty hair off the back of my neck. And cars began to back up behind us on the old two-lane highway heading east, their impatient drivers probably itching for a rare chance to pass on the winding road.

To make matters worse, something smelled. At first I thought it was just a swamp smell rising off the marshes as we neared the Cahaba River. Then I realized the odor was coming from the back seat, from Abe's duffel bag—something mysterious and sour that I couldn't identify. Maybe dirty socks, maybe a musty old stuffed animal that needed tossing...

Neither Daddy or Abe seemed to notice. Abe was busy gazing out his half-open window, soaking up the sights. He pointed and laughed and even kicked the back of Daddy's seat whenever he saw something the least bit interesting. A muddy pen full of snuffling hogs, the long drop down from the bridge over the river, a skinny-legged crane fishing in the cattails—all of it tickled him silly.

Daddy ignored the kicking for a while. But after ten minutes of the bumps against his seat growing more lively, he slowly braked and pulled over on the shoulder of the road. A half-dozen cars roared past us.

I was surprised when he turned to me. "Augusta, I want you to get in the back seat with Abe." I felt my mouth dropping open.

Daddy went on, unmoved by my vexation. "Whenever you see something special," he instructed me, "show Abe the sign for it. He needs to start learning. And maybe this will help keep him occupied."

"Jeeeeeeez," I grumbled through my teeth as I heaved myself out of the car and climbed in back next to Abe and his smelly satchel. His brown eyes lit up as Daddy pulled onto the highway again and he realized I was going to be his traveling companion.

I jabbed my finger at a lone cow in a passing field. "Cow," I signed angrily.

Abe let out a guffaw, then copied me. With a big scowl, he held his thumb to his temple and extended his pinky like a cow's horn.

From then on, he would probably think an outraged expression was a basic part of signing, but I didn't care. I frowned harder and pointed at a giant oak in the middle of a pasture. "Tree!" I signed, with my arm held up like a sturdy trunk and my fingers wiggling like leaves.

Abe grimaced back and made his own tree.

"Truck!" "Dog!" "House!" "Man!" "Mailbox!" "Flowers!"

For the next twenty miles, past Leeds and Cook Springs and Chula Vista, past acres of nothing but kudzu, I glared and made angry signs. Abe would have gone on imitating me forever if my father hadn't decided to stop at a roadside station to get gas. Once we were parked next to the pump, a scruffy attendant sauntered over to fill our tank. I sighed with relief as Abe turned away to watch.

But then he was facing me again. "Man!" he signed excitedly. "Man! Man!"

I knew I should smile and congratulate him for being such a quick learner. I could hardly believe he had managed to recall that single sign from all the others I had flung at him. But it was so hot, and I felt sick to my stomach from breathing in the fumes of gasoline along with the nauseating smells from the duffel bag. The most I could do was give Abe a curt nod.

At least Daddy was bringing us two Coca-Colas from the drink machine in front of the station. "How much farther?" I signed when he leaned down to hand our Cokes through my open window. Abe gripped the cold glass bottle with both hands and bounced up and down in his seat.

"About another hour," Daddy said. "But I'm
sleepy.
I didn't get to bed until after midnight. Before we head on, I need to pull over there and close my eyes for a little bit." He waved his hand toward a scraggly grove of cottonwoods at the far corner of the dusty lot. "Just fifteen minutes or so. You can practice signing with Abe."

Daddy didn't wait for me to reply. I gaped at the back of his head in disbelief as he slid into the driver's seat again and maneuvered the Packard into his chosen napping spot.

This was it! The last straw! Margaret and Nell were probably diving into the Cascade Plunge at Aunt Glo's club this very minute. In utter misery, I flopped my head back against the scratchy upholstered seat. Beside me, Abe was smacking his lips against the mouth of his soda bottle, taking one sloppy swig after another. Daddy took off his glasses and laid them on the dashboard, then wearily rubbed the bridge of his nose. In five minutes, he was snoring softly.

I closed my eyes, pretending to sleep, too. If I could just get through the next hour and fifteen minutes without exploding ... just an hour and a quarter ... I could hear Abe beside me rummaging in his duffel bag: there was an unzipping sound and a rustle of a paper sack, and in the next few seconds, a fresh wave of that same nauseating, vinegary odor filled my nostrils. I was afraid to look. I sucked in my breath and held it.

I felt Abe tap me lightly on the knee. I didn't move a muscle.

He only tapped harder. Cringing, I opened one eye. He was holding it out to me proudly—a pickled hard-boiled egg, glistening and glowing greenish yellow in the sunlight filtering into the car. A slice of mushy white bread and a slab of ham lay on a grease-spotted piece of waxed paper in his lap. Mrs. Johnson must have been worried that her son might get hungry on the drive to Talladega.

Abe nudged the egg closer to my face, sweetly offering me the first bite.

"Ugghhh!" I declared, and shrank back until I was wedged against the car door. I squeezed my nostrils shut between two fingers and with all the dramatic flare of a stage actress, cried out, "Peeee-ewwwww!" making sure my mouth was in full view for lip reading.

Abe got the picture. His eyes darkened and his lower lip drooped. Then he bent over his lap, carefully wrapping his pickled egg and his ham sandwich back in the waxed paper. He shoved the parcel in his duffel bag and quietly turned to look out at a bean field shimmering in the distance.

"Ignominy." I still remembered the strange word and its definition from the first list Mrs. Fernley had assigned me. "Disgraceful or dishonorable conduct, quality or action." Clearly, dishonorable conduct was the only way to describe what I had just done to Abe. Wasn't my nonstop ignominy lately the reason I was being punished and sent on this trip in the first place? My parents had realized how mean-spirited and full of ignominy I was. Mrs. Fernley and Miss Grace knew it, and now even silly little Abe knew it. Now maybe he would understand that I didn't want to be his friend or his sign-language teacher or anything else. Now maybe he would leave me alone.

Abe did leave me alone—all during the rest of Daddy's nap and the rest of our drive to Talladega. Even as we rode through the lovely front gates of the Alabama School for the Deaf and past the tall brick buildings with their stately white columns, Abe barely moved. He stared out the window at the towering trees and green stretches of lawn and clusters of signing students, never pointing or kicking the back of Daddy's seat with his feet.... Nothing.

As my father cruised along the shady avenues of ASD, giving us our first tour of the campus, I could see him watching Abe in his rearview mirror. Daddy finally pulled to a stop in front of one of the grandest buildings. He fished his gold watch out of his pocket and snapped open the lid, then twisted around in his seat. "Right on time," he signed, and leaned over to dangle the watch in front of Abe's face. Abe didn't reach for it. He didn't even crack a smile, just kept blinking up at those massive columns and the formal wrought-iron balcony running the length of the building's second floor.

After studying him thoughtfully for a minute, Daddy turned to put his watch away and then followed Abe's gaze to the curlicued tops of the columns. He sighed. "I was just as scared when I first saw Manning Hall," he said. His voice was faint and wispy. I hung over the front seat so that I could hear.

"I still remember my mother walking me through those front doors when we came to enroll," he went on. "They looked so big to me then. We met the principal and my mother made me shake his hand." He let out a chuckle. "We had just gotten a new puppy before I left home. He was furry all over. When I shook that principal's hand and saw how hairy his wrist was, I pointed and said, 'Puppy.'"

Daddy's shoulders shook as he laughed over the memory. "My mother was
so
humiliated. She had been working with me on my speaking voice, trying to get me to talk more clearly. 'Puppy' was a word I could always say perfectly."

Some sort of foolish instinct made me glance back to see if Abe was laughing along with us. But of course he was only gawking in bewilderment.

"We better get him checked in," Daddy said, adjusting his glasses and reaching for the key in the ignition.

I touched him on the elbow. "I thought you said new students check in here, at Manning Hall."

"Not the colored students," he told me. "They have a separate school over on Fort Lashley Avenue."

Daddy started the car then, and we rode back through the fancy gates, over a set of railroad tracks, and along a country road. It was no surprise to me that the colored school and the white school were separate, but I never imagined that two or three miles of pastureland and pine thickets would divide them. The farther we drove, the guiltier I began to feel about how I had treated Abe. I sneaked another look at him. He was still pressed into the corner, staring out the window in a daze.

There was no gate or sign to mark the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf—just a long, straight gravel driveway leading to a collection of official-looking brick buildings planted oddly among the flat spread of farm fields. While the main campus had been bustling, there wasn't a soul around the colored school. It was so quiet when Daddy turned off the engine, I could hear a flock of blackbirds fussing in a far-off treetop.

Daddy and I climbed from the car, stretching our cramped muscles. Abe didn't get out behind us. He stayed rooted to his spot in the sweltering back seat until Daddy opened the door and coaxed him out with a beckoning hand.

"Come," he signed cheerfully. "Come and see!"

"Where is everybody?" I asked once the three of us were standing on the walkway facing a large center building flanked by two matching smaller ones. Rows of blank windows yawned back at us.

"The students and teachers here won't arrive for another few days, after Miss Benton's retirement celebration is over."

I lifted my hand to ask what Abe was supposed to do until then, but Daddy was already leading us over to admire the sturdy construction of the boys' dormitory. He pointed out the fine brickwork and stone trim, then knocked his fist against the closest brick and made a show of flexing his biceps. "Strong," he signed to Abe. "Like you."

Daddy turned to me. "He's lucky," he told me. "This is all brand-new, finished about a year ago. Fireproofed and steam heated. Until now, all the Negroes—both blind and deaf—used to be crowded together in the old institution over on MacFarland, sometimes two or three to a bunk."

I pressed my face against a windowpane in the dormitory door, trying to peer past the dim foyer and imagine Abe spending the next ten years of his life there. But all I could see was a mop propped in an old scrub bucket and a forgotten pair of galoshes. "It's locked," I told Daddy.