Gloryland (5 page)

“I appreciate that, Sheriff,” said Daddy. “I know you want to do what’s right, and I appreciate your hospitality, invitin me to stay with you and all, but I slept plenty last night. I’m rested and I got somethin to do right here, somethin I been meanin to do for a long time.”

And right then Daddy jumped down from the wagon, landing not two feet from the sheriff. Sheriff Reynolds jumped back a little and gripped his stick harder and put his left hand on his pistol, but he didn’t seem scared. If anything he seemed anxious for something to start.

“Daniel,” said the sheriff, louder now so the people around could hear, “it would be a pity to leave this fine boy of yours without a father, or such a good-lookin woman here without a husband.
Course, me bein the sheriff, I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t check on ’em from time to time, just to see if they all right. But we can avoid all that if you come with me to jail right now, or turn that wagon round and get yourself home, cause you sure as hell not goin up these courthouse steps.”

Daddy took a step toward the courthouse. The crowd stepped back a bit, but Sheriff Reynolds didn’t move, standing less than a foot away from Daddy. The sheriff was an inch or so shorter, but he was even heavier. I noticed my father’s hands at his sides. They were opening and closing but there was nothing inside them. I could see the veins on his hands slipping round under the skin, and the veins in his neck were full as he bent toward the sheriff like a big old tree leaning into the wind.

“Nigger, you take one more step, I’ll bust yo head wide open!” Sheriff Reynolds announced. He was done pretending to be Daddy’s friend.

I thought my daddy would explode like a bucket of water left out in the night when the temperature drops below freezing. It wasn’t heat he was giving off no more but cold, cold like I ain’t never seen in a living man before. The coldness of death must’ve been inside him trying to get out, and the sheriff had the key in the door, turning it this way and that.

I watched Daddy slowly shift from his right foot to his left. He was about to walk and I couldn’t think of any way to stop him, and I didn’t know for sure if I should stop him. That’s when Mama got down from the wagon. Nobody seemed to see her do it, but somehow she was standing next to my father. She looked so small beside him.

Mama paid no attention to the sheriff. As Daddy leaned his body forward to start walking, Mama hooked the little finger of her right hand squarely into the crook of his left elbow. That’s all. No strain, no sweat. Just her little finger on Daddy’s arm.

And I watched my daddy, all six foot six inches and two hundred and fifty pounds of him, stop completely under the weight of that
finger. I mean, he was moving toward the sheriff till he felt a pressure on him that no one could see but me, and no one could feel but him.

Then my father broke somewhere inside. It was a break you couldn’t see on the outside, but he was like an old tree that’s finally tired of bending, knows it’s been done in by the wind and is just marking time till the next breeze comes up, and down it goes. I watched him die some right there, even though he was still standing, still breathing. I don’t know if the sheriff or my mother killed him, or if it was suicide, but a man died in front of that courthouse and the killer got away.

What was left of Daddy turned and got up into the wagon. Mama followed him, but then she stopped and looked back at Sheriff Reynolds. I couldn’t clearly see her face, but I could see the sheriff’s. It was red like a tomato. The sheriff scratched his neck and looked away. Mama climbed up and sat down next to Daddy, who sat stiff as a corpse. It shocked me to see him shake the reins and get the mules moving away down the street. The crowd that had gathered parted to let the wagon through. Those white people were whispering but saying nothing out loud, and their silence was more frightening than any yelled curses. I lay my head in my mother’s lap and tried to forget their eyes.

After the wagon had pulled away, I raised my head and looked back at the sheriff, who was looking down at the ground where my father had stood, as if something should have been there, something he could’ve picked up and carried away. I couldn’t see anything except the strength that had been my daddy lying there in the road. Sheriff Reynolds never moved, like he wasn’t even breathing. But then I saw his chest begin to go out and in as we rode away. It must’ve been hard for that man to go so long without taking a breath.

I didn’t breathe too much either till we got home.

Later I found out that even if Daddy had been allowed into that courthouse, it wouldn’t have mattered. He didn’t have the money to pay the poll tax or the book learning to pass the literacy test.

The sheriff knew that. All those white people gathered on the steps of the courthouse knew it. For Daddy it wasn’t about paying for something. He figured he’d already paid. And it wasn’t about whether he could read or write. It was about justice. He once told me that if you had to ask for something that was already yours, then you’d given it up. Up to that day Daddy behaved as if he believed he had rights, but he died outside that courthouse trying to claim what nobody should have to ask for.

There’s one thing colored people in the South have in common with the dead. The dead have no rights. Maybe Daddy knew that all along.

O
ld. Young. The way a river is old and young. Grandma Sara had eyes like that. Eyes that looked through you like you were a window and she could plainly see what was on the other side, even if you couldn’t see a thing. You had to ask her about yourself, cause sooner or later you realized you didn’t know yourself till she began talking to you. You were a language she used to speak to the dead. How far away her eyes, like stars at night, like the moon in daylight. Always smoking tobacco, I remember smoke round her head. She was always in a cloud sitting there in her rocking chair.

I got so’s I knew what was coming when she chose to talk to me, and it was never easy. She was old and bent like an oak’s old and bent. She still had grit enough to kill me dead, but she said she loved me, which was why she so hard. Like one time when I was maybe fifteen years old, and she woke up to find me sitting on the floor a few feet away from her chair. My chin was buried in my hands, and I probably looked like I was praying. Anyone talking to God was bound to raise Grandma Sara’s interest.

When I peered up at her, the morning sun shone behind her head. She looked like God, if God had been a Black Seminole woman, but when Grandma asked you a question, well, there wasn’t much difference between the two.

“What you doin, boy?” she said.

“Nothin, ma’am,” I murmured.

“Don’t ‘nothin’ me, boy,” she spat back. “You fifteen years old now, and that’s old enough for all kinds of trouble.” She paused briefly. “Maybe you workin yourself up to go back to that courthouse and finish what your daddy started?”

I wondered how that woman could see my heart so clearly when sometimes I couldn’t even feel it.

“No, ma’am,” I muttered through my fingers. “I mean, I know I should get that out of my head, but I can’t forget how that sheriff looked at Daddy. What he did should be against the law, and Sheriff Reynolds oughtta throw himself in jail for breakin the law!” My voice dropped down then like a bird that forgot what it was singing. I was also thinking bout Grandma Sara, how she’d been around even longer than Daddy and what kinda things must’ve happened to her, but I didn’t know how to say that.

Grandma Sara peered down at me with the look you get when you’re eyeing a worm you just put on a hook, wondering if that worm is just the right worm to catch that fish you’re after.

“So what else you thinkin bout, young as you is?” she kept on.

I paused before answering cause I didn’t want to sound like a fool, but I knew it was hopeless.

“I’m thinkin bout how old you must be,” I said then. “How old are you, Grandma Sara?”

She laughed, though there was nothing funny in her eyes. “I’m old enough to remember way back to the beginnin of things, when children knew their manners and were respectful!”

I felt cold like ice had been dropped down my back.

“I’m sorry, Grandma, I didn’t mean to be—”

“Course you didn’t
mean
,” she broke in. “Children nowadays never mean nothin, that’s why I don’t listen to you most of the time, cause you ain’t sayin nothin!”

I squeezed up into myself and got so small that I was gone, right there in front of her, scared to gone like gone was a place on a map. My grandma could make me go there even quicker than my daddy.

“Why you always so mean to me?” I finally asked.

“I figure you might as well get used to it.” She looked sad then, like she’d been wanting to cry all her life and finally had the chance but wouldn’t take it. Instead, she raised up in her chair, leaned her forearms on her knees, and bent toward me like a tree in the wind.

“Build up callus on your soul, just like on your hands,” she said. “Come over here and let me see your hands, boy!”

I was afraid to move but I didn’t have a choice. I got up and went over to where she was sitting in her tobacco cloud, and sat down by her feet, so close I could smell the lye soap in her dress.

I reached out my hands and she took them in hers. Her hands felt like something you use to polish wood or stone. They were reddish brown, like sun was in them or too many wood fires. Her hands held memories of fierce daylight and pain. The palms were creased the way ground gets creased by creeks and gullies. Something flowed there that wasn’t water, too dry to have ever been touched by rain. She was so dry, maybe the cloud was a part of her turning into air, and me there breathing her in.

“Boy,” she said, staring at my hands, “some people work like dogs and you can see it in their hands. If it’s good work it’s just in the hands, but if it’s bad work then it gets in the eyes, and you can see what’s rotten when they’s lookin at you. Some people, the work they do ain’t in the hands or the eyes, it’s in the breath, and if it’s sweet then they doin somethin right, but if it’s sour you can smell the rot.

“You ain’t got nothin in you but sweet right now, and I’m tellin you to hold on to it like a secret and don’t let the sweet out. You hear what I’m sayin, boy?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, but she came back, “Don’t ‘yes ma’am’ me, boy, you ain’t understood a word I say. But that don’t matter, cause I’m puttin it all into your hands right now.”

She spat in my hands and said something soft and squeezed them so hard I thought my fingers would snap like kindling. When she let go, there wasn’t any spit in my hands. She pressed that spittle into me, into my hands, as if what she was whispering wasn’t meant for my ears but for my hands, like hands were supposed to be talked to. She was talking all right, by holding, squeezing, and pressing what she knew about the world into me, like she was kneading bread and I was the dough.

Sometimes Grandma Sara didn’t have no use for words at all.
“Don’t trust what people say, boy,” she’d tell me. “Folks’ll say anythin if they want somethin from you, so pay more mind to what they do with their hands. Hands don’t lie.”

Now she started talking again so I could hear. “Hands don’t lie,” she said again. “Everything been done to someone is in their hands, so you got to learn how to read hands, cause the truth is in scars and scabs, not in words. Words are nothin but lies, but hands speak truth. You hear me, Elijah?”

“Yes’m,” I said, cause it was the only thing I could say to Grandma Sara if I didn’t want to hear something all over again.