The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (68 page)

He said. He brought it up, murder. She swallows. But then he said he didn't do it. So did he—

Yes.

She is violently shaking everywhere, and he puts his arms around her, gently caressing her, and she's gradually calmed but also knows his comfort will not go so far as to speak any more on the subject. In that rare moment when it was briefly on the table, in B.J.'s
Yes,
she had glimpsed something in his eyes she'd never seen before. She remembers Randall's word: bitterness.

In the afternoon, B.J. goes downstairs to repair the building entrance door. April May June tidies the living room. She wipes the coffee table, then opens the drawer. Inside is the photocopied funeral bulletin. She reads the citation of descendants with its mention of her husband, not being able to tear her eyes from the final word.

Roberta (“Bobbie”) Evans is survived by three children and seven grandchildren: her daughter Benja Sprigg, husband Aaron and their children Leslie Jo, Todd, Eliza May, Tessa, Kip and Beattie of Prayer Ridge; son Randall Evans and wife Monique and their son Randall (“Randy”) Jr., various parts of Texas; and son Benjamin (“B.J.”) Evans Jr. (unknown).

 

8

On the corner television eight feet off the floor, the returns are starting to come in, but for those in the hospital waiting room, the election results seem distant and insignificant. B.J. is standing, not looking at the set. He had wanted to be with April May June every step of the way, but there were complications, he was confused and frustrated that they weren't being explained to him properly, none of the hospital personnel knew the sign language, and around seven he was handed a note:
Cesarean,
which he knew was major surgery with general anesthesia. Near midnight he's tapped on the shoulder, and he swerves around wildly in his anxiety to face the Jamaican nurse. She knows her manual letters: G – I – R – L. And just as he is about to inquire as to his wife, the smiling RN hands him the note:
Mother and daughter are fine.

He's eager to see his child but there's some delay, and after all the fierce and fluctuating emotions of the last several hours he is unexpectedly fatigued, dropping into a chair, instantly asleep. He snaps awake an hour later, and the nurse, passing by and noticing he's sitting up, indicates for him to follow her. She goes inside the nursery, picks up an infant, and brings her to her father waiting on the other side of the glass. B.J. nervously holds his daughter, barely bigger than his hand. Black hair and plenty of it, rosy cheeks, her coloring halfway between her mother's and his own.

The next morning April May June is beginning to come more clearly out of her post-op daze.

Iona. It came to me when I woke, I just made it up. Do you like it?

B.J. smiles.
I–O–N–A,
he feels it in his fingers, over and over, the beauty of it. He wonders when he and April May June will give her a sign name and what it will be.

How'd McGovern do?

It takes him a moment to remember the election was yesterday and not months ago. He and April May June had had high hopes for fellow New Yorker Shirley Chisholm, and when the first black female American presidential candidate didn't receive the Democratic nomination, the comparably less inspiring McGovern had secured their votes against Nixon. B.J. shakes his head. Oh well, the new mother sighs. I admit it wasn't my biggest prayer the last twenty-four.

April May June sleeps much of the day while B.J. runs around the city, an industrious consumer: body suits, bibs, bassinet, blankets, bottles so he can feed his breast-fed baby too. When he returns to the hospital in the evening April May June is nursing. B.J. touches the tiny fingers. Iona. November 7th, 1972.

Watch, April May June says. She picks up a rattle, a gift from the hospital, holds it four inches above Iona's head, above the infant's ears, and gives the toy a shake.

The baby flinches.

**

The April rains and sunshine bring

The birds and bees and flow'rs and spring.

Iona's parents arrived an hour early to guarantee front-row seats, but had they been further back in the packed auditorium they still would have found it easy to read their daughter's lips, having rehearsed the lines with her dozens of times. For the school spring pageant, Iona was one of twelve kindergarteners chosen to recite a verse related to a month of the year, and she begged the teacher to be assigned April, her mother's name. (Had it already been taken, she would have settled for May or June.)

B.J. and April May June stroll home, arms around each other's waist in the warmth of mid-May, Iona two feet in front and walking backward, talking excitedly with her hands, apprising her parents of all the program's backstage gossip. Her eyes are very large and very dark, her deep brown hair wavy, dimples deep as her Aunt Ramona's. A happy child, rarely sullen, and those periodic foul moods dissipating only minutes after their debut. When the school year finishes in June, her father has promised to paint her room, and the color she has chosen is purple. B.J. hopes that choice can be clarified as something soft akin to a lavender rather than in the black-light arena.

They'd adored their daughter from the start, but April May June had appeared somewhat apprehensive and, B.J. suspected, remotely disappointed, to have had a hearing child, a baby born handicapped by a lack of deafness. For him it hadn't mattered, deaf or hearing, so long as his daughter was healthy. But April May June had grown up in a deaf family, gone to deaf schools. Her natural impulse to raise her child as her own mother had raised her would not be wholly applicable here, but more unsettling: the wonderful deaf public school they'd visited, where the class sizes were small and the teachers spoke to the prospective parents in sign, would now have to be abandoned for the overcrowded, chaotic, and perhaps dangerous mainstream public school. Though private school was well beyond their means, as Iona matured it became apparent she was an extraordinarily bright child, reading before kindergarten (owing to the influence of her well-read parents), and could conceivably earn a scholarship. But was that what they wanted? One of the major contributors to the breakdown of the public school system, they believed, was the proclivity of parents with the privileged advantage of supplemental time and energy (generally coinciding with supplemental income), those parents who
could
demand better public schools opting instead to send their children to private institutions. So Iona's parents ambivalently enrolled her in the neighborhood public school with hitherto good results: their five-year-old already reading third-grade books. B.J. and April May June were gratified when the new president, upon relocating to Washington, chose to register his own young daughter in a D.C. public school. (The irony of any elected public servant eschewing free taxpayer-supported education for their own children in favor of elite private schools is not lost on B.J. and April May June.) Thus far B.J. very much likes President Carter. He never thought he would vote for a Southerner.

Iona's godmother and favorite aunt Ramona visits frequently, and when her niece was three, Ramona had complained to her sister and brother-in-law that, while Iona's hands were a chatterbox, it would be like pulling teeth to get her to speak, a skill that would certainly come in handy in her mainstream school. And while she had been very happy at home, on the playground Ramona had bloodied the nose of more than one hearing boy who mocked her for speaking like a deaf kid. She had no regrets there, but saw no reason Iona need waste her childhood in comparable brawls. Iona's parents thus began taking her to a jungle gym in Central Park to interact with other children there, who by odds were hearing and garrulous. The plan nearly backfired when Iona began teaching her playmates ASL, but in the end the peer pressure sometimes to sign and other times to speak resulted in all the kids enjoying a rich bilingualism.

Iona plops herself in front of the television as soon as the family walks in their door after the pageant. Ordinarily the rule is homework first, but Fridays she has a reprieve. And April May June has her own homework. After a five-year maternity hiatus, B.J. has convinced her to go back to writing her stories. A revision of the billy goat piece that had so moved him was published in the
North American Review,
the couple receiving the happy news when Iona was two months old, but since then, despite her husband's gentle cajoling, there had been no sign of April May June putting pen to paper. Then last October, six weeks since Iona's entrance into the public school system, B.J. had come home one afternoon after checking on the building boiler in preparation for the coming winter. The apartment was empty, and he went into their bedroom to undress for a bath. On his desk lay a newish composition book, a note attached:
Read at your leisure.
He sat down to read immediately, her first story in five years! They had had a lively feedback session after she brought Iona home from school, and without discussing the matter, it became their routine for her to leave her notebook out for him whenever she'd finished a new story. In the last year she has written three and started a fourth. No luck with her submissions yet but she's not discouraged.

Four months ago B.J. received a letter from Leslie Jo, Benja's oldest, saying her mother had passed on. His niece wrote that she unfortunately did not have B.J.'s address at the time of the December funeral, five weeks prior, but had found it later as she was going through her mother's things. B.J. and his sister had kept up a sporadic correspondence after that first letter back in '71, seven years ago. And her tone did soften over time, the siblings coming in the ballpark, he felt, to being as they once were. But she had never mentioned a recurrence of the cancer. His eyes moist, he wrote back to Leslie Jo, telling her how sorry he was and asking if there was anything he could do. She responded the moment she'd received his correspondence, updating him for twenty pages. Details of the illness, her own feelings that her mother's hard life was a contributing factor to the disease. While at the time of her death at fifty-two Aaron had not beaten Benja in more than a decade, Leslie Jo had never forgiven her father, and had even spearheaded a family boycott at Christmas, only the baby Beattie showing up with his wife and toddler, leaving the patriarch devastated. Leslie Jo's remorseless comment: “He
oughta
cry.” In the letter she also mentioned fond childhood memories of Uncle B.J., her favorite uncle, a fact that took him by surprise and he wiped his eyes.

In the days following Randall's long-ago visit, B.J. decided it was at last time to talk with his wife about the circumstances that led to his estrangement from his brother. He couldn't burden her while she was still pregnant but promised himself he would sit down with her soon after the baby was born, and when Iona was three months old he had gazed long at April May June one evening in their living room, and when she looked up his hands began to move and they did not stop, he knew they could not stop or he would never get out the whole truth, his childhood, his young manhood, his mother and father and sister and brother, the library and the Klan robe turned pink, long hot days at the sawmill and the cross-burner he and his brother attended, Sunday dinners with his brother and sister-in-law and the awful school desegregation day and the awful day he saw his sister's face beaten to a pulp and his confrontation with his brother-in-law
and
. He had taken a breath to prepare himself to tell the worst, and in that pause her hands finally began to cautiously move, to convey the terror she had been carrying, so profound she couldn't broach the subject: the specifics of her private conference with Randall. B.J. was stunned, as her understanding of the events that culminated in his alienation from his brother differed radically from the facts. And then he was telling her,
the
episode that led him to betray his brother and flee Prayer Ridge, Alabama, and the South forever. And afterward B.J. and April May June had cried all night. Over the years Randall has never written, despite his intimation to his brother during his one and only visit that he would.

Every summer April May June and Iona spend at least a week in South Carolina, Iona always excited to see her doting grandmother and aunts and uncles, to play with her cousins and there seemed to always be a new one. Someday she would ask her father about his family. He didn't know how he would answer but he'd cross that bridge when he came to it. He goes to the kitchen now for a little boost—he imagines he's getting old, fatigued often, and these days coffee has proven a stronger stimulant than his formerly preferred tea—and from his standpoint he has a perfect view of April May June writing in her notebook, of Iona laughing at the Cookie Monster. He and his family have been very happy in this Hell's Kitchen two-bedroom, and after B.J.'s participation in Local 32B's seventeen-day strike a year ago, he was gratified to be bringing home higher wages and an extended healthcare package. He marvels on the changes of time. Once he had a family—parents, a sister, a brother, all obliterated in a crushing denouement. And now he has another family. He wonders if Iona would ever abandon him as he had done his mother. He shudders at the thought. Then again in two months he'll turn fifty-four, and by the time she would be at an age to even consider such a thing he'd be an old man, perhaps so irrelevant to her life there would be no dramatic departure but rather a natural and gradual falling away from each other, though she would be the one to initiate that gentle separation as he would certainly cling to his child with every fiber of his being. Well, such was life. He would be utterly grateful for what he had had while he had had it.

B.J. takes out the unopened can of coffee grounds. Now April May June and Iona are bickering, their hands rapidly fluttering, assuredly the same dispute they always have related to Iona's one-hour television limit. He watches amused, paying more attention to the drama in the living room than to his own task and thus accidentally cuts his right index finger with the can opener, drawing a few drops of blood. He washes the tiny wound and interrupts the living room debate by summoning his daughter, who loves to play physician. She puts the antiseptic
on the Band-Aid and smooths the compress over her father's injury. After dinner B.J. is surprised to see the bleeding has persisted, and Dr. Iona replaces the bandage. After she's in bed, April May June frowns to see the blood has soaked through again, and this time she wraps her husband's entire finger in gauze.

When B.J. wakes the next morning the dressing is saturated bright red, surrounded by a circle of blood on the sheet, the circumference of a 45 rpm record.