Time of the Locust (14 page)

The two voices—the two Marias—grew louder and louder in her head, and the sensation faintly reminded her of the day her mother confessed (in a moment of weakness, undiagnosed ovarian cancer can soften the edges of the mind) that in truth, the Goodwins had not a drop of prominent white Goodwin blood in them. There had been no freedman's contracts or latter-day marriage, as each generation had been telling the next. Rather, the highly prized blood of the Goodwins (according to the oral stories of the eldest women in the family) was merely, and unremarkably, the result of plantation rapes. Maria (as Maria Goodwin) remembered the sensation of that split feeling then and pondered the question of whether she should plant her sense of self in the bit of news her mother disclosed to her or the more familiar, comfortable lie.

And there again, as Maria Thompson sat on the couch while old Nola Mae Pierce talked, was the feeling between the two minds that one self would have to be chosen over the other. And in those moments when the two Marias yammered on about what was and what was not to be, she thought that she was again at a split, that she would have to choose, yet again, the Maria Goodwin she had never really known or the Maria Thompson she had not had the chance to fully be.

In the mocking voices of both sides of her was another lingering question. Now that she and her brother had disowned each other and now that she'd made her own way and had begun a life that had already been ended, what was she going to do? Now that she had dropped out of college and was a revolutionary homemaker, a role she'd fashioned out of thin air, out of what she thought might be needed without being certain of what was necessary, what role was she to play in her own life—Maria Goodwin or Maria Thompson—now? And sitting in her apartment with a dead husband and two children, she wondered (both Marias wondered) how it was that at the age of twenty-nine, she still did not know.

The old woman was finishing now. “He's a cop, you know. In this here precinct. The devil's name is Sam Teak, chile. I know 'cause I seen him come up from the fires of hell myself. Run our men into the ground. That's what they do. 'Specially those that got something to say, that stand up for something. Well, well and so, Ms. Maria,” and here at last the old woman rose slowly in preparation to depart. “God hears the child who cry out and is prepared to receive and keep us all in the by-and-by.”

And it was at that moment, when the front door was closed and Nola Mae Pierce was gone and Maria Thompson was again seated on the couch in the quiet, that there was the spigot sound of coffee spilling from the cup that she let drop onto her lap and run down to the floor. She let go of more than just the coffee cup, something bigger.

But sitting on the floor by the bed, crying intermittently and listening in the nearby room, Horus could not have known about the two Marias or what had finally slipped away. In the weeks and months to follow, he pondered how the gunshot, the man named Sam Teak, and his dead father connected. And in his seven-year-old mind, he tried to summon the logic of the combination. But before he had the chance to understand the horror in its entirety, the worst part of the family's descent began. Someone had called about the “changed” condition of Maria Thompson, how her mind had seemed to shift from clear, distinguishable colors to gray. Years later, what Horus would remember the most was the scent of the spilled coffee, which seemed to last forever in the carpet and hung in the air of the apartment long after his mother drifted away.

Nightmares served as caretakers of the seen and unforgotten. He sometimes dreamed of the drive down from New York to Washington, he and Manden in the car with the caseworker taking them to another place, where they were put in the miserable care of Uncle Randy. Horus watched Manden shrink down into someone else in those days. His brother, too, Horus had always supposed, watched him drown in his own rancor. It was this feeling of watching, of being in a constant state of powerlessness, that made Horus despise Manden somewhere inside.

Once, in the early-morning stillness of the basement, with the periwinkle of dawn spilling though the tiny windows, Horus got the courage to ask Manden if he had heard their father's voice the day of the funeral. Did he hear what their father said from the coffin too? “Our father . . .” Horus began, unsure of how to ask such a question. It sounded almost like a prayer, the beginnings of a catechism. “Our father . . . Manny, did you hear what Papa said?” he asked. Manden did not respond. “Tell me,” Horus demanded. In fear of what he thought he heard at the funeral, wondrous and so impossible, Horus wanted a yes or a no from his brother. Manden stirred, betraying that he was awake and listening, but he did not answer the question.

Perhaps that was why, years later, Horus worked with doors and locks. Security. An artificial realm in which at least he had the key. His mind compartmentalized and warehoused his life. And somehow, without his mind knowing it, his heart decided that the annihilation of Sam Teak could wash away his father's blood and resurrect his dignity, and he could reclaim his mother's wandering soul and bury his uncle in a great black pit. With the removal of the source of the sorrow, he could preserve the children he and Manden were before it all happened, untarnished in time.

And wandering about the sullen library shelves at his place of work, Horus reasoned simply (his mind fast at work) that he just wanted to see where this man Sam Teak lived and how he had gone on living after his father was dead. And he was not hard to find. A retired police officer listed in the directory. Horus wrote the address down neatly on a little white piece of paper. His heart played along while he did his research, waiting for the opportunity to reveal the truth, feigning agreement with justifications for satisfying curiosities. Such tricks! Such mastery of line of sight! And Horus might have been able to go on like that for many more weeks and months and years, with his heart and mind looking at different parts of the whole, if it wasn't for the marbles.

Coming home from a long day of locks and doors at the library, his polyester uniform stuck to his overheated body in all of the most uncomfortable places, Horus parked his car on the crowded street and walked to his house. There was a group of children playing on the sidewalk in front of his rowhouse when he arrived. They were huddled like a mound of Neapolitan ice cream, laughing, colorful in their play clothes. The soft chatter of childish concerns flittered through the air.

Horus stopped to look at them. To his surprise, there were two little boys in the center with a cluster of marbles. They glittered in the honey sun of late afternoon like semiprecious gems. An older boy heckled about the marbles not being as great as street tag or Hot Wheels cars or basketball. “Sell 'em for snack money,” said one boy. “Who cares about some stupid old marbles, anyway?” said another boy. These boys reminded Horus of how the children in his second-grade class teased him about his “African-booty-scratching father and his African ways.” They did not understand Jack Thompson's talk of a history that extended thousands of years before the four hundred years of slavery drilled into their heads. They did not understand his “outfits” and the slow, deliberate way he talked of the lynchings and atrocities of the South, of taking a stand, of power and destiny. They called him and his brother “Sons of the African Booty Scratcher,” until Manden punched the biggest boy in the face.

“Sell 'em for treats,” the boy said again. But all of the children looked on still, the little solar system of glass holding their gazes in varying degrees of wonder and delight. Horus had not seen such a sight since the summer day of his father's murder. It was the last day his universe had held intact, the last time he had a brother and a mother and a father and a family. Sam Teak exploded all of them apart and spread them to different parts of space to disintegrate, where they were unable to find their origins or evolve into anything else.

On the sidewalk, Horus looked at the twinkle in the boys' eyes, the concentration, the purity, and saw himself and Manden as children, bickering and smiling, oblivious to the horrors that awaited them later that day. He saw his favorite marble, the cat's eye, which he later gripped in his pocket at the funeral. In the light and magic of the choir and the shadow of the coffin, he dropped it. He never found that cat's eye and supposed it dropped into the hole where sorrows went. And twenty years later, on a sidewalk in front of his house, he was watching the dazzle of the glass balls again. And somewhere, between the glittering glass and the dripping honey sunlight, his heart decided that he would kill Sam Teak for what he took, for what he destroyed, for the people his people had not been able to become.

Horus took Sam Teak's address out of the bottom of his dresser drawer, where he had stuffed it weeks before, and put it in his pocket. He told Brenda his story (his mind still culpable in the half-lie) about going up to New York with Manden to revisit the past. He would leave early that Saturday morning. He would go up there to see, as a scientist able to travel back in time to witness a catastrophic event would wish to see it and prove how it happened, to prove that it actually occurred. Oh, the mysteries that could be solved, the destruction that could be explained, just by going to see how a man who murdered lived.

Later, when Horus was able to think of it, he would take that moment on the sidewalk from a sealed Mason jar on the highest shelf of his mind. He would take out that moment of watching the children play as he would a preserved peach. And he would hear a clicking sound in his mind, but he could not tell if it was something locking or unlocking. The little slip of paper on which he wrote the name and address of his father's murderer called loudly to his heart. “Come and see for yourself,” it said. And the swell of all that had been destroyed and could never be regained welled up inside of him, until his heart trembled and could not hold it any longer.

And then there were the locusts. Loud they were, like a million little sirens, trumpeting a day filled with something he would not be able to fathom until later, when the fathoming of the thing itself spread before him on the highway with Sam Teak in the car. With the gun in the glove compartment. He rose at four o'clock in the morning that Saturday. Brenda slept soundly. The air seemed heavy with a dew that dripped from everything. In the subway-tiled vestibule of the rowhouse, his hands slipped on the knob when he opened the front door.

Later he would think of that early dawn, when he stepped out of the house and smelled the exhaust-filled air, stood looking at the mulched tree boxes and dead grass in the shadowy light, and heard the locusts. It was a wonder, an omen, that such a sound of Southern, swamp-hot night air should be heard in the early morning of the city, a place of car horns and buses and traffic-jammed streets. Even at that hour, the pigeons were already about, picking up stale McDonald's french fries and bits of candy on the sidewalk. The locusts droned on, brazen in the bluish light, preening from wherever they were. Countless and unseen in the dimness, the darkeners of the sun.

But on the early morning that Horus headed for New York and heard the locusts, sudden and unannounced but for the sirens with which they greeted him, his heart knew that one door had been locked and another opened. And his mind looked on helplessly. For it could only marvel at the means and speed of his falling, and ponder what “Promise me” meant.

Mama

O
n the morning Horus left for New York, Brenda pretended to be asleep. Earlier that week, he told her he was going to meet his brother, Manden. And as Brenda lay in the bed listening to Horus go out the front door, she tried to convince herself that he told her the truth, even though deep inside, she knew that there was something else. Something was wrong. She had noticed changes in him that she kept sweeping to the back of her mind—his irregular sleeping, his obsessions with things being locked, his tendency to eat large plates of food or nothing at all. In bed, he reached for her with a desperation she hadn't felt from him before. Days before that morning he left for New York, their conversations had become exchanges of minutiae: what they might have for dinner, whether or not there were any more clean undershirts, when the Blockbuster movies needed to be returned. Sometimes she would wake in the night and discover that he was downstairs in the kitchen. When she asked him what he was doing, he gave the strangest responses.

“Brenda?”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever gotten something back that you thought was gone forever?”

“Like what?”

“Just gone.”

“Like a lost ring?”

“No, a person.”

“What do you mean, Horus?”

“Nothing, baby.”

He became more and more quiet, and there were days when they hardly talked at all. “See a doctor,” she wanted to say. But she had learned from her father that men handle things, and she had learned from her mother that to say too much to a man was to interfere with what he had to handle. She wanted to believe that the silence was Horus working things through, that her love for him and plans for their life would keep him grounded. Suggesting that he see a doctor meant that she had missed something.

Now the only evidence that Horus had ever lived in the house was his large black umbrella. It was still in the vestibule corner, bent and dusty. Brenda sometimes thought she heard the doorbell ring and imagined that it was Horus wanting to come home. He was sorry about all the pain he caused her. What the courts said he had done never happened. He had stayed away to work things through, and now he was back. But she knew that no one would be standing there if she opened the door. His car would still be absent from the street, his side of the closet still empty. In those early months after the verdict—pregnant and miserable—she could not sleep in the bed they had shared, and she would get up and move to the bedroom chaise and then finally the couch downstairs. After Sephiri was born, she returned to the bed, and they cuddled there together on a fragile island of comfort. When he got older and she started struggling with him through the night, she was back on the living-room sofa. Staring into the shadows, her strained eyes had learned the shades of things, how light and gloom made war, how the living-room carpet moved in the dimness, ebbing and flowing in tides of indigo. Restlessness and exhaustion stalked her through a fog of fits and distractions that did not lift in the day. She tried everything to calm her nerves: chamomile tea, deep breathing, relaxation tapes, warm milk. Nothing helped.

Brenda struggled up from the couch and adjusted the wig she'd fallen asleep in. Sephiri had been awake most of the night, and she'd drifted off there. Horus had liked the soft, free-flowing natural she once wore. Her hair had long since thinned, and small patches had fallen out in some areas. The sides had already begun to gray. She looked on the floor and found that Sephiri was asleep where she'd spread his pillow and blanket. The television crackled with the static that had been playing on a channel all night. She stood up stiffly, her back aching, and opened the window curtain. She could see the perennial flowers she had planted in the small fenced front yard when she and Horus first bought the house. She hadn't gardened in years, and the bright patches of black-eyed Susan and butterfly weed came up on their own now. In the months after the verdict, she thought about selling the house and moving. She felt it no longer housed the life it was meant for. But the rowhouse had been an abandoned crack den they bought for a song and renovated beautifully, and now she could not afford to live anywhere else so nice for the cost.

Brenda lumbered to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. It would take three cups to get through the morning and have Sephiri ready to go to the center on the van. There would be the long process of getting him upstairs and into the bathroom to help him use the toilet (if he had not already relieved himself on the bed or the floor), brush his teeth, and wash his face. She expected him to fuss through that. Then dressing him and fixing his hair. There would be some game he would start in between that involved him running through the house or hiding or climbing up and down the steps. Then there would be the ritual of making scrambled eggs and putting a plate of them in front of him so he would eat his breakfast cereal. She would eat them later, when they were stale and cold. Then there would be the rush to get herself together in the bathroom, all the while wondering what Sephiri was doing, listening for any sound that he might be in trouble or some other disaster he had caused. She would have to make sure his shoes were by the front door, so he would step into them when she opened it.

The thought of having to stop and speak to neighbors who were also starting their day when she came out of the house sickened her. The nosiness and insincerity was obvious in their veiled greetings. “Good morning, and how have you been, Ms. Brenda?” they would ask. Most of them knew all about Horus, having heard about the murder in the local news reports and discussed it with one another. Then they'd ask how Sephiri was coming along, all of them having watched his meltdowns in front of the house or heard him screaming through the windows. They knew that their children laughed and pointed and made jokes about Sephiri. Brenda would respond with bullshit, how she was well and couldn't complain, how her boy was growing faster than wildfire, how she'd been working and getting on with everything. “Well, I've just been busy, you know, what with Sephiri and work and running the house,” she would say. It was all a beautiful lie, as iridescent as the Coral Paradise polish she brushed over her chipped nails at two o'clock in the morning.

The coffeemaker beeped, and Brenda poured a cup. She didn't worry about what the neighbors said or thought anymore. But sometimes, in the brief pauses of the craze and haze of her life, she could feel the isolation. She could feel the loneliness. The marital bed remained in the room she once shared with Horus like an altar. She wondered if she ever would or could be with a man again, if she could feel desire and be desirable again. Sometimes she tired of that empty feeling and padded into the dark kitchen in search of mercy and grace from Häagen-Dazs. She stood in the light and frosty freeze of the opened refrigerator door, contemplating Rocky Road or Fudge Truffle.

Brenda took out a bottle of ibuprofen she kept in the locked kitchen-sink cabinet and swallowed three. A boom shook the ceiling, and she heard Sephiri shriek somewhere upstairs. She listened closer. There was silence for a moment, and then she heard him walking up and down the steps. She had learned to tell the difference between the sounds he made when he was upset, hurt, or occupied. When something did upset him, she would not know why, and he would not be able to tell her. Sometimes, when she looked into the bright little faces of other children, eyes so full of the wonder of bubbles and cartoons and laughter, she wished such joys for her boy. She had begun to fixate on the small things she felt she could offer him, although she had no way of knowing if what she did could ever make him happy: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, daily baths, cake once a month, television at four o'clock in the morning. She went over to the kitchen pantry and opened the door, studying the cereal boxes on the shelves.

Brenda heard another shriek, this one distressed, and she left the kitchen to find him. He was not on the stairs. She climbed the steps to see what was going on.

“Sephiri,” she called, now just a maternal reflex that held no purpose other than to announce that she was approaching.

She heard banging and then another shriek. She hurried up the last of the steps.

“Sephiri,” Brenda called again. She went to his room and scanned the floor: a few scattered toy cars turned upside down, bits of paper, broken crayons, a row of blocks down the center of the room, picture books stacked according to size. On the windowsill was a neat line of marbles. She pushed the bed aside to see if Sephiri was under it. Nothing. She was about to check the hallway bathroom when she heard him scream. It was coming from her room, and she rushed down the hallway.

He was in her bedroom closet, jumping up and down and flailing his arms. When Brenda tried to come near him, he only screamed louder. “What is it?” she asked, more of herself. Many of her things were disheveled. A blouse sleeve was ripped. Scarves were pulled from a basket. She saw that the blanket she had taken out of the storage bag in the closet the day before was on the floor. She'd been meaning to wash it later and hung it along the empty pole on the other side of the closet until she could get to it.

“Come out of there, Sephiri. It's time to get ready to go to the center.”

The boy shrilled, violently beating his fists about his face.

Brenda was afraid he would injure himself and reached for his hands.

Sephiri picked up a shoe box and threw it. When she tried to take it from him, he grabbed one of the shoes and threw it at her, hitting her on the forehead.

“Dammit!” Brenda cried. “Stop, Sephiri.” She held his hands down to restrain him.

Sephiri screamed louder and louder, and Brenda felt a stabbing pain go through her head like a bolt of lightning. She thought of the day she knew something was different about Sephiri. When he was two years old, she took him to the National Zoo. She thought he would be thrilled to see the giraffes and the tigers. All through the outing, she tried to get his attention as he sat in his little stroller. “Look, Sephiri,” she said. But he kept staring down at a string he was fingering. She took him very close to the elephant habitat, and he did not look up once. Children holding ice cream cones and balloons walked by unnoticed. A little boy of about five years old proudly held his stuffed gorilla toy out to Sephiri, but he did not even glance at it. “Look, Sephiri,” she said. Her boy did not respond.

Now Sephiri struggled to break free of Brenda's grasp, kicking at her legs as she tried to hold him still. When he kicked her in the stomach, she lost her grip on him.

It was at times like this that she thought it was all her fault. Somehow she caused the autism. She made it happen by hiding Sephiri's existence from his father. God said that Horus had a right to know, and she ignored a law of nature. And this was her punishment: a child who was hidden from all reason, from his family, from the world.

Brenda went numb while Sephiri's meltdown raged. By the time he was finished, he had pulled down all her clothes from the hangers, taken out every last shoe, and torn many of the shoe boxes to pieces. Then he shrank down on the blanket he had pulled to the floor and stared up at the empty pole, panting heavily.

“It's OK, Sephiri,” Brenda said in a cracked whisper. “Mama's here.” She touched his hand, unsure of what her words meant.

The boy did not move.

After Brenda got Sephiri on to the van to the Autism Center, she went back into the house. She called her job to let them know that she was going to be late. She went to the kitchen to get more coffee, sat down at the table, and held her head in her hands. Her temples throbbed with pain, and her backache had become more severe. A welt had formed on her forehead where Sephiri hit her with the shoe. She felt she couldn't manage anything more this morning.

Brenda finished her coffee and headed upstairs to take a bath. She turned on the gushing water and looked at the wall behind the tub. There once was a panel of mirrors there. She and Horus used to stand together naked in front of it, his arms around her waist. She had talked of having children someday, and he had nodded. She used to consider herself lucky to have married Horus, a man far away from the Uncle Daddy her mother warned her about as a girl and the railroad man they never discussed.

Brenda had the mirror panels taken down and the wall painted white. They were in the basement now, a graveyard of things. The divorce papers were down there, too, decomposing with ­everything else. Her mother once told her that a good woman is a married woman. “In my day, vows wasn't nothin' to play with,” her mother said. Divorce was the way of the coward. “Husband and wife should hang in there,” she said. But when the verdict was proclaimed and the divorce papers from her husband came and she saw his signature on the line, she did not know what hanging in there meant. “He doesn't want you to see him like that,” her husband's attorney said over the phone. “Believe me, it is better this way.” She held on to the papers for months, anyway—wondering what was better—all through the morning sickness and the prenatal visits, the nights of turning on her side, and the baby's delivery. But as time ground on, she couldn't understand what she was holding on to. So she signed them and felt angry for years about it, until she was too exhausted to carry the outrage. She needed her strength for Sephiri.

Brenda turned off the tub faucet and undressed. It was a beautiful and deep claw-foot antique tub. It no longer held her comfortably, but she could at least sit down in it.

In those first days after the verdict, she submerged herself in it, trying to drown her sadness. She pressed her back against the rubber mat at the bottom of the tub, melting into the heat, plunging her head deeper under the water. And she thought, just for a second, about staying down in the water. Staying and never coming up. But the life inside her beat with her heart, and she could hear her mother's voice. “A woman's got to carry on,” she would say when times were tough. “What are we gonna do, Mama?” Brenda would ask. “I ain't startin' to quit now,” her mother would answer. But Brenda wondered if she had ever wanted to.