Slow Way Home (36 page)

“Well let’s see . . . The girl is sitting over in jail for shoplifting.

Not a soul in the world to even bail her out.”

“Gina, I’m sorry. It’s just not ethical for me to reduce sentences

. . . Now for the sake of justice . . .”

“If you’d just look at the case instead of having your law clerk flip through it, then maybe you’d see what’s best for the sake of this child.”

“Now, Gina, you simply don’t understand all of the procedures involved, but I always . . .”

“I understand enough to know you’ve done it before, Jackson.

How about Doug Sippling’s boy? The one caught embezzling . . .”

“Now that was a . . . who told you about . . .”

“And Jackson, you mentioned ethics. Well, it just seems to me that if an authority figure were to hear about this case and that authority figure didn’t step up to the plate . . . well, I’d question what sort of ethics he had to start with.”

“These are rather harsh statements, Gina.”

“I’ve made up my mind about this thing. If you don’t step up and do something, that precious little courthouse annex of yours won’t see the light of day.”

Judge Jackson laughed in a gurgled tone. “Gina, I’m impressed with how fond you’ve become of the boy. Really I am, but this little game of cat and mouse . . .”

“Honey, there’s no playing to it. I’ve got the votes and that colored woman you saw at my party is working it too.”

The music floated out again, and I pictured Aunty Gina dressed in a wrestling cape with the judge pinned beneath her.

“Now hold on, Gina . . .”

“Jackson, by the time we’re through slicing up your precious budget, the only thing anybody will be holding will be your testicles. The
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Senate president will hold them out for all North Carolina to see.

Every day he’s adding up the dollars this special session is costing taxpayers. He’ll be more than glad to blame you for every bit of it. And do you really think that your buddy the governor will stand up for your little courthouse then?”

The sound of a fork tapping a plate cut the air like a radio weather advisory.

“I seem to have found an ice queen this evening.”

“No, Jackson. I just found my voice is all.”

Stillness settled over the house in those early days of August; anticipation brewed with the heat. Each evening I waited up for Aunty Gina, and each night she’d come in with her pocketbook and briefcase in tow. I kept expecting her to come in with a big smile and maybe a cake decorated with the words “Welcome Home, Nana and Poppy.”

But each night her smile seemed weary and her eyes a little sadder. For the first time I recognized the eyes as those of the little girl in the yellowed photographs. As she hugged me and kissed my head, I realized that I knew more about her than she did about me. I wanted to hug her tighter or pat her back. Wondering if this was how people felt when they found out about my past, I fought the urge to squeeze back and instead carried her briefcase into the library.

At night she would continue to work at the desk with legs shaped like eagles. Her words of steel and sugar floated up to the staircase where I waited. Perfume-laced battle strategies that sounded like secret codes in a World War II movie.

While the news anchors talked about the long special session moving forward, I moved forward with a make-believe life. Esther enrolled me at the private school downtown where Winston had signed up. Two weeks before school was scheduled to start, we completed our tennis lessons and for once I was able to beat Winston. The ac-complishment was hard to accept. The entire time we swam in his pool that afternoon, all I could think was that he let me win out of 260

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sympathy over my dead mother. I was just beginning to make a dive when Esther’s voice roared out from over the tall hedge. “Brandon.

Brandon Willard.”

Winston’s webbed fingers brushed water from his eyes. He treaded water and stared as if my name had been called out from the intercom at school. Such a call could only mean trouble. I ran barefoot towards the hedge and nicked my leg jumping a fallen limb. Branches raked across my side the way that bad memories tried to yank me back to the past. I fought the image of Aunty Gina killed in some car wreck or worse yet, dead from a heartache caused by work on my behalf.

Esther was standing on the patio steps shielding her eyes from the sun. “You’re scratched to pieces.”

My breath was as tangled as the dishrag she held. “What’s the matter?”

“Mrs. Strickland just called. She had to go in for a vote. But anyway, they’re coming home. Your grandpop and grandma are coming home.” Esther smiled as best she could and reached for my shoulder.

Her pat was swift but her words were as sweet as Aunty Gina’s.

“They’re coming home.”

I rose with the sun the day Nana and Poppy walked out of my memories and back into my life. The morning paper lay on the brick driveway. Clutching it, I wondered if delivering the paper would be the last thing I would ever do for Aunty Gina. When I saw her picture on the bottom of the paper, I took off running towards the kitchen table.

“What in the world . . .” she asked.

“You’re in the paper.” I waved the paper like a flag of victory.

When I flipped the paper open, her picture looked even bigger.

She was shown with her head turned smiling at Judge Jackson. The headline read “Special Session Over: Budget Passes.” It was set right below the fat banner that declared the end of the Nixon adminis-tration.

After breakfast I changed into the shirt and pants I had hidden in
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the bottom part of the dresser. They were the clothes I had shown up wearing, and they would be the clothes I would leave with. Sitting on the bed, I studied the room and tried to sketch the objects in my memory, the same way someone might do in an art museum.

“Honey, you better start packing up your things.” Aunty Gina stood at the door fastening her watch.

“Uh . . . I already have.”

She searched the room with her eyes. “What about your tennis outfit and your church suit?”

I hated to tell her that Nana and Poppy couldn’t pay for any of those things, so I just sat there. Aunty Gina began pulling everything out in the drawers in a frenzy suitable for spring cleaning. She saw shirts and shoes that morning, but all I saw were mounting dollar signs. “We don’t have the money to pay for all this stuff, okay.”

She stood there holding my underwear and looking as if I had slapped her. “Honey, these are your things now. I gave them to you.”

Sitting down on the bed, she outlined what else she was giving me.

The tuition to school was paid in full for the year; so were next summer’s tennis lessons that she convinced me would offer companionship for Winston. Nana and Poppy didn’t take to charity, I could’ve told her that much. “Oh, it’s just a loan here and there,” Aunty Gina said with a toss of the hand. “An agreement between the three of us.”

Before I left, Esther handed me a bag full of vegetables. “Until your grandpop can set out a garden.” She used the back of her hand to iron a wrinkle out of her uniform. “Now you keep working on your tennis. You’re a real natural.”

Riding past the fountain, I looked over at the driver’s seat. It was the first time Aunty Gina had driven me anywhere. She smiled and nodded as if to acknowledge the milestone.

As I watched the mansion grow smaller in the side mirror, it began to look like something out of make-believe. A miniature castle made out of blocks. And a piece of me had been left in that castle.

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Down in the cellar tucked deep inside the crate of photographs of Ginny Mae were the letters Nana and Poppy had written me. Sacred memories tossed together in strips of faded tissue.

We drove through downtown Raleigh and then headed south.

“The farm’s back the other way.”

Aunty Gina pulled tighter on the steering wheel. “You’ve got a new place now. It’s just as cute as it can be. You’ll have all sorts of neighbor children around.”

“Why aren’t we going back to the farm?”

“Honey, now I don’t know all the details. Your aunt has her mother or somebody living there now. I’m talking behind Nairobi, so I think it’s best you ask your grandparents about all that.” She turned and looked at me with all the seriousness that I pictured her giving Judge Jackson. “But just remember a home is wherever your people are. Boards rot and concrete cracks, but it’s the people inside that really matter.”

When I saw Nairobi and the pretty government lady standing on the concrete porch, a familiar feeling swept over me. It was not the farmhouse. The tiny brick house had just one tree in the yard, and the neighbor was so close I could see the glow of the TV. But the corner fern that dangled from the wrought-iron post was what I focused on.

I pinned my hands under the seat so I wouldn’t jump out before the car had stopped. When they saw us, Nairobi turned, and Poppy stepped from behind her. He was a little heavier, but the John Deere cap was the same. Nana came out of the house patting the sides of her hair. It gathered like white yarn at her shoulders. The way she balled her fist and covered her mouth, I knew she was fixing to cry. Before Aunty Gina could turn off the engine, I opened the door. They were all looking at me—Aunty Gina, Nairobi, and the government lady. As much as I knew they expected me to cry, I fought to keep any tears pushed down.

Poppy lost his fight. “Hey there.” The words had hardly gotten out of his mouth before he chewed them back with emotion.

Nana’s soft green eyes searched me in a way that only Jesus had
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managed to do. A breeze swept across the yard and when her hair blew up, she began to look even more like an angel. I buried my head against the doughy part of her stomach and held tight trying to keep her from being lifted away. Poppy’s arm helped anchor us as he snaked it around us. Her words were stable and rolled out in the whisper of an ordinary afternoon. “I got you a Pepsi. And you might even find a piece of pound cake on the kitchen counter. Come on, let’s go on inside. Let’s go inside.”

That evening we sat in the cramped kitchen with the refrigerator that jerked each time it defrosted, and I baked in their warmth. The food opened a door to the familiar: a plate of fried chicken that bubbled up at the bone, a skillet of cornbread baked until the edges crackled with sweetness. Even the card table and used folding chairs had a comfort to them.

As easy as the wind shifted outside the cracked window, our words floated back and forth from a censored past to a promising future.

“It was all Aunty Gina’s idea for me to take tennis lessons.” The word Aunty had not yet left the air before Nana looked at Poppy.

“She’s a good woman,” Poppy said. He clutched his fork like a baton and told how Aunty Gina had secured a job for him at the vet school taking care of the livestock. While he went on about a new breed of cattle they were studying, Nana cleared the supper dishes like she had all the times before.

Livestock was the perfect lead to ask when we would be moving back to the farm. Clutching plates, Nana moved back to the table. She and Poppy glanced at each other in a way that always made me think they could read minds. Reaching for my glass, Nana spoke as if she was learning a new language.

“Maybe one day we’ll go back, but right now Aunt Loraine has her mama there. She’s been having those ministrokes and with Uncle Cecil being in the shape he’s in . . . Well, it might just be for the best right now.”

“How come she gets to let her mama live there?”

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“Son, she owns the place now.” Poppy leaned forward and pointed his fork. “We just gotta remember if it wasn’t for Loraine stepping in the way she did when Cecil got mangled up on the job, the place might not even be in the family a’tall.”

“After her mama gets to feeling stronger, Loraine said we could talk about buying it back,” Nana said.

“She did keep up with the mortgage note and all the taxes,”

Poppy said. “I keep trying to tell myself that it’s only fair that . . .”

“It’s not fair,” I yelled. Before Poppy could reach my arm, I jumped from the chair. Screeching metal cried as loud as my voice. “I hate her. I hate her!” When I snatched the plate of sliced tomatoes, Nana touched my shoulder.

“Watch yourself,” she whispered. “Now, we don’t hate nobody in this house. We might not like their ways, but we don’t hate. You’re mad and you have ever right to be. Poppy and me felt the same way.

But the thing that I know from living this long . . . Well, I know that it all comes clean come wash day.” She grabbed the other end of the plate and I let it slip through my fingers. “It all comes clean come wash day.”

Mama only filtered through the conversation one time. It was that first night when Nana stopped by my room to check on me.

When the door creaked open, I jumped up and reached for my shoes. Nana clutched the top of her robe, the one with Aunty Gina’s initials stitched on the pocket. “Son, why’re you dressed?”

She stared at the jeans and shirt I had on. The worn-out box springs whined when she sat next to me. “What’s behind this?”

“I thought somebody might . . . I thought we might have to leave.”

She pulled me against the fleshy part of her arm. “There won’t be any more leaving at this place.” Slamming car doors and laughter rolled in from the street. A car cranked and then drove away. “Is this about your mama?”

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Never answering, I chose instead to concentrate on the tiny hole and wood shavings in the corner. But there was no escaping. Words spewed out of Nana like a handful of nails too hot to handle. “Sophie’s good-hearted. Real good-hearted. She just got into some messes along the way.”

I wanted to pull away and become one of the spiders from Aunty Gina’s cellar. Racing across the floor, I’d jump right in the hole head first.

“Just some people can’t see Sophie’s heart. I guess neither could I.