Time of the Locust (13 page)

Heart and Mind

B
eginning with the coldness of his uncle's basement when he was seven years old, Horus had the eerie sense that the heart could make a decision long before the mind had realized it. This feeling, which dwelled somewhere in the ether of his subconscious, grew stronger as he grew older. He had the sense that the heart, with its own barometer of scope and impact, could experience something and make a choice that the mind would be helpless in resisting. The mind, in its arrogance of understanding and control of matters it has neither understanding of nor control over, could preach long and hard to the heart about what was and what wasn't—never once realizing (until it was too late) that the heart has already decided.

Secreted in Horus's subconscious was the truth that no two hearts process anything in the same way. The tree limb from which two birds take their first flight does not wonder what is to become of them. It does not ask the questions: Where will one of them go? Which path will the other one take? No. It bears witness only to their departure and the wind left in their wake. And even if Horus and his brother had been through what they went through as twins, there was always the reality that each of their hearts would have had its own voice, its own calling. As it was, he and Manden, although they were from the same nest, felt what was to be felt differently. Two hearts made different decisions.

For Horus, this dynamic seemed at first to be sparked by happenstance. Later, it seemed to him that it had all been mystic, almost destiny. He was at work, making his usual security guard rounds inside the Martin Luther King Library on Ninth Street. With his usual precision, he was checking that the employee-access areas were locked and securing the conference rooms. He headed to the library archives, which were always immaculate and empty. On a great wooden table were huge leather-bound books that had been left out, big black serious timeless books that held the recorded history of the world.

Horus went over to the table and began thumbing through them. One of them held the entire
New York Times
newspaper printings starting with the year 1940. His eyes roved the pages, looking for nothing in particular. There were stories about the war. There were stories about the presidential election of Franklin D. Roo­sevelt. There was an article about the wave of black tenants in the New York rent districts that the Jews had abandoned. Then he came across an article about the first Negro Day Parade on August 16, 1940. There was a list of some of the participants. And there it was: “Nola M. Pierce.”

At first, Horus wondered what the M stood for without realizing why. He stared and stared at the name, as if circling the rim of something. “There could be a million women with the same middle initial,” his mind said. But only one awakened his heart: Nola Mae Pierce. She was the old woman who had spoken boldly to the police, who said that Jack Thompson's killer was a member of their fraternal order. They brushed her aside as if she was raving mad. Her name was one of the few his mother had murmured before the time of her leaving. Horus wondered how it could have been possible, how it was that he went to work on that day of the year, at that library, and picked up that big black serious timeless book and turned to the name of Nola Mae Pierce. And then the question floated up through the blackness of stealth, and Horus did not feel it bursting through the surface of his mind until it was too late:
Who killed my father?

It was twenty years after the fact. He was a grown man now, with responsibilities. But over the weeks and months since the name of Nola Mae Pierce reappeared in Horus's mind, he tried unsuccessfully to brace the gate against the memories the name would trigger, the thoughts he had put away in a box in the cellar of an abandoned place, far away from his mind so he wouldn't have to think about it while the rest of it happened. Because to remember her name meant remembering what she said. Had he imagined it all? He was only a child at the time. He was no longer sure. Memory had become a clever chameleon, changing colors and hiding in plain view, in the light of what he did not want to see.

Whether or not it was the same woman became irrelevant as his agitation, restlessness, and insomnia grew. In the daytime, he was stricken with fits of mania and could not calm himself unless he was constantly in motion. He walked flights of steps. He took circuitous routes everywhere. When he looked at the simplest of things, even something as ordinary as the kitchen stove, his mind ran long lists of strange details: the six seconds that the electronic wick clicked before the blue flame jumped, the lone elbow macaroni trapped just under the range cover, the pottery-kiln look of the inside of the oven, the mixture of sauce and cheese and gravy drippings fire-glazed onto the aluminum, the engaging smell of the gas.

Anxiety coated him like a film. He began to worry over the smallest things: whether or not it would rain or if he had locked the upstairs windows, whether there would be Saturday mail, how many times the electric company sent someone to read the meter (did the man who came really work for the electric company?). In the nighttime, Horus would wake up after only a few hours to stare up from his pillow. In those endless trances, the ceiling became a fifth wall that held a giant screen. There he saw flashes: his mother's smile, his father's shoulders, his brother's eyes, his uncle's basement. Horus lay there next to Brenda as he struggled to blink away the wisps of light and memory, the moving figures, the undulating mouths. He often got up to roam the house. Things in the night seemed to take on different shapes and significance: the paintings with faces that looked back at him in the dimness, the little sculptures on the bookcase that seemed fixed in macabre contortions, the condensation on the windows that ran down the panes like black tears.

Horus told Brenda that lower back strains were keeping him awake (he was walking and standing on the job too much), promising that he would have it checked out by a doctor. After she fell back asleep, he would stare into her velvet skin and wonder how long he would be able to deflect the few questions she was starting to ask. Was he sick? Did he need her to get him something? She was asking questions and she might ask more. Until now, Brenda's lack of questions about his past, about what he might be thinking when he was suddenly very quiet, was one of the reasons he had married her.

He had also figured out when he first met Brenda that she was of a rare breed, one who could look at something that was damaged and still hope for the best. She could look at him when he wore an unexplained scowl, when silence settled over him like a thick blanket, and still smile. She could rearrange a bouquet of dying flowers, picking off the crinkled brown leaves and the wilted petals, and reposition them in a vase of fresh water. She could look at a rowhouse, its windows hollowed out by crackheads, its walls defaced by squatters, and see a home that could be yellow with hope, green with prosperity. He had watched her sleep in those ­insomniatic nights, thinking of the time when he used to believe that perhaps one day, she could repair him too. That she could wash the melancholy, the memories, the history away. But that was something he no longer believed. In those weeks and months, Horus learned (or, rather, he remembered from watching his mother) that self-destruction, that slow, lumbering roll toward death, was an all-consuming process. It was a thing that happened in stages, a series of essentials falling away. Nola Mae Pierce's name became lodged in Horus's mind like an aneurysm, a gnashing parasite in the silence of his head. Years later, Horus would come to understand that a memory exists always behind the doors of the mind, to be pulled like a file by some seemingly small thing.

Horus remembered when the old woman came to their apartment the day of his father's funeral. “My name is Nola Mae Pierce. Sorry for your loss,” she said when she arrived at their door. His mother invited her in, saying, “Thank you,” in that robotic, unfeeling way that shock brings to the voice. Horus and Manden hovered in doorways and corners, in the shadows that their father's death had cast. Horus came out to look at the visitor, before returning to his solitude on the floor of the next room. Like the others who came to pay their respects to Jack Thompson, the old woman sat down on the little sofa next to his crumpled mother. The elderly lady was small and shriveled, her gnarled hands betraying the decades of hard labor that had been the whole of her world. All of the years and experiences of her life seemed to gather in the deep lines that creased her walnut-colored face. She wore a blue cotton scarf about her head and a long, sweeping housedress with the faint markings of a flower print. She smelled of the black cake and blood sausage that she had been up most of the night preparing, which she brought to Maria Thompson as gifts for her grief.

Talking incessantly as soon as she was seated in the living room, Nola Mae Pierce began a litany of condolences and confessionals about knowing Maria Thompson's unique pain, looking meaningfully about the room at the lit candles and flowers and trays of food. She continued on with proclamations about the hurt she had known all of her life. “Ah, New York. This country. This world. Look like there ain't no end to despair, Ms. Maria,” said Nola Mae Pierce. Her voice leaned like a coconut tree, and remnants of her Trinidadian roots were like flashes that appeared and disappeared as she spoke in her quick-tempo manner. “I know it seem like the Lord God Almighty decided to strike you down. I mean, it seem like a curse been put 'pon you, and He grinding you down into the good, dark earth with His great foot. But I seen a lot in my day, and I'm tellin' you to hold fast. Hold strong, chile. There gonna be many a day and night when you feel like your heart won't never be healed, and maybe I think that there ain't no healin' to some things—take the loss of my boy, for instance—but if you can hold on a day, and then that night, and then hold on till the morning, and so on, you gonna carry on, chile. You got them two chil'run to look after—two boys, at that—and Lord, I know it is awful hard to think about how you gonna raise 'em up now, but you got to. You got to. This ain't no promised land, like they say, like they tellin' and givin' over to everybody else. We know the look and ways of the hard, hard, road, don't we?”

Maria Thompson nodded, her eyes blank.

“We got to carry on with babies, anyway. And even then . . .” And here the old woman's face closed up like a door, and her soft, watery eyes hardened to a high sheen. “They slaughter our boys, and snuff 'em out like candles. Yes, indeed, they do. They ran my boy in the ground. Had him cornered in the ally, they tell me—Ms. Robinson's little niece Sunnie run to my house and told me—and I run as fast as these legs could carry me, like I was a schoolgirl, chile. I run and run, and when I got there, they was like a pack of wolves on him. Little Sunnie screamin' behind me and the sight of my boy on the ground, beaten, mashed down like a breadfruit, took my breath. I mean, the savagery struck me dumb. Now, you tell me. What did he do to deserve that? What kind of sin can lead to that from a hand that ain't God's? And then them cops—God, strike me down if I'm lying, they was cops with badges shining—they scattered like a pack that got finished with a meal, drippin' blood and spit, and they got to scampering away. I wanted to die that instant. And I got sight of one of 'em. Yes, he looked me dead in my eyes. And all I could do was look at them eyes and then look at my boy. Ain't no words. Ain't no words for certain things, certain sights and feelings and such. Just like you ain't got no words now, chile, I couldn't think a single sound in the queen's English what could be spoken. And the police didn't want to hear nothin' about it later. But how could they? It was them that did it.”

A fresh tear dropped from Maria Thompson's yellowish face, which had lost its buttery tone and had given over to the look of brittle leaves in autumn. Her trembling hand held a cup of coffee teetering between her fingers.

“And I took sick many days long after that. Just keeping to myself and waiting on the Lord to call me home . . .” The old woman let out a sigh that seemed to expel all of the air inside of her that had been keeping her alive. “Well, I know who done it,” she said at last, straightening her dress and clutching the handkerchief in her lap. “Just as sure as I know my own birth name is Nola Mae Pierce.”

And here the old woman set her cup down and took Maria Thompson's lifeless hand. “Can't forget eyes like that, chile. Cold and blue. Wolf eyes, they were. The same eyes that ruined my boy in that alley. And they was the same eyes I seen at that basketball court. Near that big tree. Yes, he was there, standin' in his clothes, plain as day. The devil walking 'pon the earth. He didn't have no uniform, but it was him. I learned his name and where he worked and what else he done in the ten years of digging to the bottom of my boy's terrible end. I tried to report it, for the sake of you, a young mother with two baby boys. But who will listen to an old, angry woman? But I know, as God is my witness, if Sam Teak was there when your good man Jack Thompson was speaking the truth, wasn't no good come of it.”

Sam Teak's name fell from Nola Mae Pierce's lips and filled the air and Maria Thompson's mind like a poisonous gas. What no one knew in the subsequent seconds, including Nola Mae Pierce as she talked on and on in outrage, and as Manden stood dazed in the doorway frame, and as Horus slumped in a nearby room, was that a split occurred within Maria Thompson at the exact moment the totality of her husband's death came into being in her mind. She thought,
How will I . . . ?
(for she was no longer listening to anyone and was talking to her two selves now as if in private conversation, split versions of herself seated across from each other in a parlor). The two Marias (the wife Maria Thompson and the maiden Maria Goodwin) talked quietly in her head like two old enemies forced together to discuss a common threat, each questioning the other.
Who will protect me and the boys now?
Was there ever any real protection in this world?
How can such evil exist?
Wasn't it always so?
Can I bear this?
Shouldn't you know what you can stand?
What will I do?
Don't you know?
I am alone now.
Weren't you always?