Let the Circle Be Unbroken (33 page)

“I’m gonna try, son. I’m gonna try.”

Uncle Hammer arrived that same evening, and without taking time to rest he and Papa climbed into the Ford and left again. We watched as the car sped away, the autumn sunset casting a pale glow upon it. We watched and waited.

*   *   *

“Cassie . . . where you going?”

I didn’t answer Christopher-John as I plunged into the forest.

“Wait up, Cassie!” he hollered, following with Little Man.

I ran faster, past the gray-bark sweet gums and the wintery-smelling pines, past the stately black oaks and the nutladen hickories. Near the pond, I stopped and flung my arms
around a massive pine, needing its comfort. I felt the rough of its bark against my skin and I wanted to wail out my sorrow to it, but hearing Christopher-John and Little Man, I tore away from the tree, and ran on. By the time Christopher-John and Little Man reached me, I was sitting on the bank of the pond. They looked at me in silence and collapsed beside me.

For a while we all were quiet, then Little Man said, “Why’d he go, huh? That’s what I wanna know.” He took a pebble and threw it angrily into the pond. “How come Stacey jus’ gone off like he done and ain’t even said goodbye or nothin’? He got tired being with us or what? Huh? Don’t he care?”

I felt the same anger, but feeling it my duty as the eldest now to try and comfort him, I said, “He cares. He jus’ thought he was doing what he had to do . . . I guess.”

“Sure he did,” confirmed Christopher-John. “Stacey, he probably figured he had to go. That it was the best thing.”

“Well, why didn’t he take us with him then?”

“Boy, he probably had a hard enough time jus’ to get outa here himself,” I explained irritably. “How you ’spect him to be worrying ’bout you too?”

Little Man looked away, hurt. “I wouldn’t’ve been no trouble.”

I felt his pain. “I know.”

We heard someone coming from the east and looked out over the pond, waiting. After several moments, Jeremy Simms appeared. He waved and when he reached the pond, settled beside us. He had heard about Stacey.

“He’ll be back, ya know. He’ll be all right too.” He caught the misgivings in our eyes and chastised us gently for our poor faith. “Y’all ain’t give up, have ya? Why, Stacey, he gone all the way to Louisiana by hisself over two years
ago now and he was a lot younger then. Y’all forgotten that?”

It took us a moment, but we finally said we hadn’t.

“Then don’t,” he ordered, leaning back on his elbows. “Stacey, he can take care of hisself all right.”

With Jeremy we did not have to talk when we had no more words to say, and now as he grew quiet, we grew quiet as well. Around us the world of green trees reaching toward blue skies sang a sad song in the soft breeze, sharing our loneliness. Forgotten for the moment was the work waiting for us, as tree boughs fanned above us and birds, silhouetted like dark messengers against the sky, called out to invite us to go with them. I thought of the everyday times Stacey had sat here with us watching the same trees and the same sky, and as the birds flew away taking their messages with them, I wondered if he ever would again.

*   *   *

A week after Stacey left school started, and for the first time we walked the red road without him. Suzella had received a letter from Cousin Bud saying that she would have to stay awhile longer, and she enrolled the first day at Great Faith as a tenth grader. But by the end of the day it had become painfully clear to her teacher that Suzella’s educational level was much too advanced for the class, and she was skipped to the eleventh-twelfth-grade class under the instruction of Mr. Wellever himself. In addition to her promotion Suzella had her New York lessons to keep up with, and she juggled her study time between lessons from Great Faith and lessons sent from St. Anne’s, which Mama helped her with.

Being in the sixth grade this year, I found myself in Mrs. Mabel Thompson’s class. Mrs. Thompson seemed satisfactory enough; I felt nothing for her one way or the other.

Little Man was fortunate enough to have Miss Rosella Sayers, a young teacher from Jackson, but poor Christopher-John, now in the fourth grade, had fallen into the hands of Miss Daisy Crocker. I greatly sympathized with him, but as in everything else, Christopher-John tried to see the bright side in having to face such a shrew each morning. “Maybe she done changed,” he said hopefully on the first day of school. However, when classes were over he was noticeably quiet.

“Well?” I asked him.

He shrugged dejectedly and admitted, “She still the same.”

No doubt she was. Certainly little else seemed to be. Without Stacey, nothing much was the same.

*   *   *

The days passed, with each day growing longer than the day before. Every day Little Man and Christopher-John stared out the window watching the road, waiting for Stacey, who never came. Every day on the way to school, we listened anxiously for any sound on the road—a car, a wagon, footsteps—that might bring news of, him. In the mornings I awoke with the dread of Stacey’s absence hanging in the air, and throughout each day I was consumed with the hope of seeing him walking in that loping gait of his past the old oak and the cotton fields, and up the drive. But then each night I went to bed feeling helpless once again, and angry. Angry at the cane people for coming to Strawberry waving their eight-dollar offer under the noses of needy boys, and angry at Stacey for leaving us. Through one week we waited, then two. In the middle of the third week, Papa and Uncle Hammer returned.

Stacey wasn’t with them.

“How many places you go to?” Mama questioned as we sat at the kitchen table. “Wasn’t there anyone who could tell you something?”

Papa put down his coffee. Unshaven, eyes bloodshot, both he and Uncle Hammer looked exhausted. “Seems there’s men that just make a business of getting workers for the cane fields. They ain’t hired by the plantation owners. They just get the workers, bring ’em to the plantations, get their money, and go on. Usually most of ’em don’t take boys young as Stacey and Moe.”

“Well, you talked to some of them, didn’t you?”

There was an unexpected harshness to Mama’s voice, and Papa noticed it as we all did. “Some . . . but ones we did talk to claimed they wouldn’t’ve known if they’d carried Stacey or not, since they don’t keep any lists. Then, too, they said that jus’ ’bout anybody with a truck for hire could take up the business of trucking people to the fields. It’d be near to impossible finding them all.”

“’Sides that,” added Uncle Hammer, “sometimes they keep the workers moving, taking them from plantation to plantation, chopping cane.”

Mama accepted this in silence. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then she looked at Papa. “When are you going out again?”

Uncle Hammer glanced over at Papa. Papa met the glance, then put his hand over Mama’s. “Honey, you got any idea how many people grow cane?”

“You saying it matters how many?”

“It’s gonna have to matter—”

“Well, I don’t care how many there are. I want Stacey back in this house.”

“Mary—”

“When, David?”

“Right now, I don’t see much point—”

“Much point? Your son is out there somewhere—”

“Don’t you think I know that? But we don’t know where to look. I figure we may do better just to wait for some word from Stacey. Leastways, we’ll know by the postmark ’bout where he is.”

Mama pulled away from him. “You don’t want to go looking for him, I will.”

“Mary, use some sense—”

“He’s been gone too long, David, and I’m not going to rest till he’s back in this house.” A look of accusation was in Mama’s eyes. Saying nothing else, she rose abruptly and left the room.

Big Ma patted Papa’s arm. “You gonna have to be patient with her, son. It’s hard on her.”

“She think it ain’t hard on me?”

“She be all right. I’ll go talk to her.” Then Big Ma, too, got up.

Papa watched her leave, shook his head, and sighed.

*   *   *

It was late when I heard their voices. Unable to sleep, I had left my pallet and sat in a chair by the open window. As I stared out into the blackness listening to the sounds of the crickets and the katydids, I heard the door to Mama and Papa’s room open and close and, shortly afterward, the opening and closing of the door to the boys’ room.

“Thought I heard you out here,” Uncle Hammer said in a low voice.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Me either.”

There was silence, then Uncle Hammer said, “David, I’m gonna leave my car here.”

“What?”

“Gonna leave my car. That way, you find out anything, you can go see ’bout it.”

“Man, what I’m gonna hear? I tell you, Hammer, I don’t know how much to fault myself and how much to fault Stacey and how much to fault the times. But I’ll tell ya something else. Much as I love Stacey and want him home, I can’t help feeling sometimes like he was old enough to go off by himself, he’s old enough to get back here by himself.”

“Maybe that’s just how it’ll have to be.”

“He oughta know we was gonna worry. When I think . . . I get real angry sometimes at that boy, and I know I oughtn’t—”

“And why oughtn’t you? He went off. Ain’t told you where. Ain’t sent no word—”

“Now that’s what’s really got me worried. Maybe he
can’t
send no word. . . .” Papa’s voice trailed off and in its place came a sound I had not expected to hear. It was a strange, muffled sound, one I knew but had never heard from Papa. I trembled, frightened; for Papa, who was always so strong, was crying. Suddenly the crickets and the katydids seemed louder and the pounding of my heart louder than both.

Uncle Hammer said nothing.

Finally Papa cleared his throat and was silent. After a long while he spoke once more. “Lord, Hammer, I wish I knew where he was.”

“I can stay and we can go searching again.”

“What ’bout your job?”

“It don’t matter.”

“Naw . . . naw, I still feel the same way. It’s better to wait and try to get some information first ’fore I start running ’round out there again, not knowing where I’m going. I figure to ask some questions, find out more ’bout them plantations.” There was a break in his words, and when he
spoke again, I could hardly hear him. “I tell myself he’s near fifteen and that a lotta boys have to make it on their own time they’re his age. Then I think ’bout all he don’t know yet and I get scared . . . real scared.”

“David, I ’spect you got a right to be scared, but you gotta remember you and Mary, y’all taught Stacey good. He’s smart and he’s got good sense. I figure he’ll be all right. ’Sides, maybe he just had to learn on his own what this life business is all about.”

“Had hoped he wouldn’t have to this soon.”

“Well, that was his choice.”

“Perhaps . . . but maybe he wouldn’t’ve made it, I’d’ve been here for him to talk to. Mary blames me, you know, ’bout him leaving, and I can’t blame her either. She told me over and over not to go ’way.”

“Mary’s upset.”

“I know, but if I’d’ve stayed—”

“Look here, David, don’t go faulting yourself and don’t let Mary wear at you. You two, y’all got something special here, and Stacey going ought not spoil that. There’s still Cassie, Christopher-John, and Little Man to think ’bout. Now I ain’t much good in talking ’bout stuff like this, seeing I ain’t never even had a wife, but I know y’all got too much to go laying blame. What I heard Mary say this afternoon wasn’t coming from Mary. That was coming from a woman all torn apart with worry and fear. You listen to me, David, and get this here thing straightened out between y’all. You hear me now?”

“I hear.”

“And David, you need me to come go looking again, you just call. Remember that.”

“. . . I’ll remember.”

At breakfast the next morning Papa looked tired, as if he
had not slept at all. He and Mama said nothing to each other during the entire meal. When breakfast was over and I had finished the dishes, I sat absently swinging on the front porch thinking of the silence between them. As I stared out at the field, soggy with the day’s continuing drizzle, Christopher-John and Little Man rounded the house from the drive and joined me.

“What you doing?” Little Man asked, disrupting the rhythm of the swing as he and Christopher-John sat down.

“What it look like I’m doing?”

Little Man chose not to comment on this. “Papa and Mama, they was fighting in the barn.”

“They wasn’t either fighting,” objected Christopher-John. “They was just discussing.”

“Well, seem like fighting to me.”

I looked at Little Man. “What they fighting ’bout?”

“Well, me and Christopher-John was down by the smokehouse and we heard ’em. Mama, she said if Papa didn’t go back to look for Stacey, then she was gonna go her own self. But Papa, he said that was crazy. Wasn’t no way she gonna find Stacey less’n she went to near every cane field in the South. Then Mama, she said if Papa hadn’t’ve gone back to the railroad, Stacey, he wouldn’t’ve left looking for no job.”

“She said that?”

“She didn’t mean it though,” contended Christopher-John. “She jus’ upset, that’s all. When she seen us and seen we’d heard, she looked real sorry.”

“What’d she say?”

“Told us to come back to the house.”

I sighed and looked out at the forest.

“I don’t like it when Mama and Papa fight that way,” said Little Man.

Christopher-John turned on him irritably. “How many times I gotta tell you they wasn’t fighting?”

Little Man allowed the question to hang a moment in the misty air before repeating, “Well, sho’ seemed like fighting to me.”

“Ah, there y’all are!” Papa came across the stepping stones from the drive and climbed the steps. “I was wondering where y’all’d gotten off to.” He leaned against a post and immediately Christopher-John hopped up.

“Papa, you wanna sit down?”

“No, thank you, son. This here post’s fine enough.” As if to show it was fine enough for him too, Christopher-John took up a similar position at the post opposite Papa.

“Papa,” I said, “you really ain’t goin’ back to look for Stacey?”

“Baby, if I had any idea where Stacey was, I’d go get him . . . this very minute. But I ain’t. I got no idea at all ’cepting he’s working the cane fields somewhere. Now much as I hate it, we may just have to wait till we hear from him, and seems to me, him knowing we’ll be worried, he oughta be writing soon.”