Lunch-Box Dream (8 page)

Friday, June 19

It was fiercely hot this morning. Of course I didn't sleep all last night. But as tired as I was, I was stark awake by the time I saw the tracks at Dalton center. Everything was silver in the heat coming between the buildings. I passed by the stand on the corner and pushed open the door of the store and went between the dress racks all the way down the corridor to the office where I knew that telephone was, and I stood there. When the man put down his pen, he raised his face and made a big smile as if nothing in the world was wrong.

“Hello there, Suzie. Early today. Where's little Jacob this fine morning?” he said.

I waved my hand in the air because I wasn't ready to say that. I told him that my name was not Suzie, that Hershel is the brother of my sister's husband, and I needed to call him in Atlanta. The man motioned his hand at the chair across the desk for me to sit down, and I did.

“I know it, dear. I know your name's not Suzie. I've seen you,” he said.

I can't pretend to know what he was thinking, but he looked my face all over, then shifted in his seat and picked up the telephone. I am fifteen. He was large with brown and gray hair and stains on his shirt and had a face like a fat pink balloon, but he didn't dare say anything nasty, since the store manager, his employer, is a Negro known to my father, and it was them together who fixed it for Jacob to use the telephone. What made an old white man come work at a Negro store anyway? He smelled like a saloon, so I guess he was happy to have this job. Nobody else wanted him. If he was in church maybe he should be up with us. That's the kind of thing that I know would make Jacob laugh. Only when I thought of that I got scared.

The man pressed his big pink finger up and down on one of the two black buttons at the top of the telephone. He held the telephone to his ear. While he did, I breathed slowly, trying to remember what I was about to say and how to say it.

“Ya know,” he said, “there are some say your people don't mind where they're at. We take care of the Nigra pretty well. No need for boycotts and sit-downs and such. Now, I ain't saying—”

I looked at my hands in my lap, and he stopped talking or I stopped listening and then he stopped talking. Momma taught me never to speak to a white man about that, that there was no good answer to it. And you never meet their eyes. He held the telephone for a little time at his big pink ear, then he handed it to me.

“Hello?” I said into it. “Hello, is that Hershel?”

“No, no. You have to dial the number, Miss,” he said. “It's Miss Cora, isn't it?”

He knew that, he must have. I nodded. “Yes, sir. Cora Baker.”

“Well, Miss Cora Baker, you have to dial his number,” he said again. “Everybody got his own number. On that paper you got there. You ever done this before? Jacob done it twice hisself already. Where is little Jacob today?”

I looked at the scrap of paper Momma had given me. I didn't understand what the man wanted me to do.

He reached his palm to me. “Show me the numbers and I'll dial them, dear. I did it for Jacob this way before he did it for hisself twice already. I like the Nigra people, you know, like 'em lots. Then you listen. And someone will talk. Then you talk. No, just the paper, you keep the receiver. Now you hold it up to your ear. Yes, that's right. Wait a few seconds.”

I held the telephone to my ear while he looked at the numbers on the paper and pushed his fingers around the dial on the telephone. He did it quickly. He does it all day long, I thought. At first nothing happened, then there was a faraway sound of clicking, then nothing, then clicking again. It was the first time I had heard a voice so far away say, “Hello?”

It was a man. “Hello?” he said. “Is this Jacob?”

“Hershel Thomas?” I said.

“No, he's my stepson. This is Ellis Vann, his stepfather. Who is this?”

“Please let me speak,” I said, running the words over in my mind and trying to get through them and determined not to cry in front of this man.

“Shall I get Hershel on the line?
Hershel!
” the man said, sounding farther away.

“You will want to know this,” I said, starting in as I had memorized it. “Your boy Jacob has been missing since yesterday evening—”

“What?” the man said. “Little Jacob?
Our
Jacob?
Hershel! Get in here!
”

“Jacob,” I said, “is missing.”

There was clicking on the phone, then the man said, “What?”

The man with the pink face, his mouth dropped open.

I said into the telephone, “We have tried, Olivia, your sister-in-law, has tried to find him, and your brother Frank, but they have had to go to the Dalton police and tell them he is missing.”

“Is this Cora? Put Frank on the phone.”

“But the police say he is a Negro boy and anyway has not been gone long enough to look for. Perhaps you will want to come here to Dalton to your sister-in-law Olivia's house.”

“Cora!” he said. “You're saying Jacob isn't with you?”

It was strange to hear my name.

“Yes,” I said. “This is Cora. Thank you.”

That is what I said, and that was all I could say if I was not to cry. I handed the man back his telephone and got up and went down the corridor. Then I turned back and said, “Thank you,” to him, and his mouth was still open. Then I walked back through the racks to the door and ran home. I knew his eyes were on me all the time I was in the store. You think I'm brown, you think I'm a Nigra? Well you're white and work in the back of a Negro store.

The way home was long. My shoes and feet were dusty when I walked up the steps into the house. For some reason I remembered that pillbox hat and the church and Jacob whistling and then us laughing at the fat white men together and again Jacob whistling at cars, and then I grew really afraid.

“Anything?” said Uncle Frank. His eyes were red and wet.

“I did what Momma Irene told me,” I said. I had done what I was told to do and that was that. Now I could cry, too.

They were all running around, mad and screaming, and wouldn't stop. I knew it then. Everything was different now.

We were all behind the house when the call came, except for Weeza who was out for groceries. We heard it from Ellis, my husband. He was shaking when he pushed open the back door with his cane and stood there.

“They can't find Jacob—”

One of us said, “What?”

“Jacob's missing in Dalton,” Ellis said, coming down to us. “He was to the…I don't know. He's not where he's supposed to be. He didn't come home. That girl couldn't tell me anything—”

“What the hell are you saying?” said Hershel, his face bunching up and rushing over to Ellis. I went between them.

I am Ruth, Hershel and Frank's mother, and all kinds of thoughts went through my mind then. Jacob out there somewhere?

“The police won't look for him,” Ellis said, his mouth hanging open, unbelieving of what he was saying even though he had just heard it. “Someone get on the phone. Jacob's missing in Dalton.”

“Who told you?” asked Hershel, taking Ellis by his shoulders.

“Who? It was Cora, the girl. But she doesn't know anything. She can barely talk she's so scared. It was last night—”

“Last night!” I said, my heart thumping. “When last night?”

Everyone was screaming and rushing around then.

“Why so long?” Hershel said. “Oh, my God, why so long to tell us? There are other damn telephones. If they let Jacob get taken, I'll go over there—”

“He has not been
taken
!” I screamed. “And no you won't do anything! Frank has been ripping himself up trying to find Jacob, who is just lost. I'm sure he has. He's my son and he loves Jacob. You know your brother—”

“My brother!”

“He must be crazy with worry,” I said, “and doing everything he can to find him. And the police, too—”

“The police!” Hershel screamed. “I'll kill them, too, they don't look for my boy. They've probably done it. They killed my Jacob—”

“Stop, stop, stop!” I said, wanting to smack his face. “Stop all that before Weeza comes.”

“The police!” he said again, mad as a wasp.

I held his arm strong. “The police,” I repeated, trying to be calm. “Yes, they will be involved and will be looking for him. You think they want any trouble if they can avoid it? Everywhere a tinderbox? Everything in the papers? He is a boy lost and nothing more. You get yourself together, and you do it now, because it doesn't help anyone to hear you shouting like a crazy man. We need to get to Dalton right away.”

Hershel stomped around the yard, whipping his head back and forth and cursing, and I told him again to be quiet. Then he rushed over to start the car but I knew there wasn't enough of it to start.

I went into the house to the telephone, when I saw Weeza come up the walk with two shopping bags. My heart went to ice. I ran down the steps and met her before she got to the house and told her, poor girl, I tried to tell her, but she got unsteady on her feet right away. Then her knees went weak and she fell in the yard. Apples rolled into the dust.

“Weeza!” said Ellis, dropping his cane and helping her up to the porch.

“Sit down,” I said.

“I can't sit,” she said right away. “We have to go there!” Her hands shaking, her voice high, she trembling and trying to be calm. “We have to take the bus. It's the only way to get there. Hershel, get away from that damn car!” she yelled to the side yard. “Will someone call and find out the times?”

“What?” said Ellis, who was holding her hand and who loves Weeza and Jacob like his own. “What times, honey? What is it you mean?”

“Never mind, I'll call,” Weeza said.

“I will,” I said, trying to be firm. “I'll find out the bus times and ask Mrs. to drive us to the station. Somehow get word that we're coming. She'll do that for me.”

At first Hershel didn't go to her, then he went to her, but it didn't do her any good to hear him say kill this and kill that. She closed his mouth with her hand and he tore himself away crazy. I didn't like that. Why do we have to coddle our men when we are torn up just as deep?

The car never did start. Hershel whipped the fenders with his hat and cut his fingers and cried and kicked the doors and lights and everything until he fell to the dust and had to be pulled away. Ellis tried to bring him into the house. The neighbors were all out by then. But Hershel wouldn't go in. He just stopped before the door, leaning hard against the post with his face sobbing in his arms until he slipped all the way to the porch floor. And Weeza trying not to, but she couldn't stop crying on the phone to the Atlanta police. They said they couldn't do anything about a child missing so far out of town, but all she said was “Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, my Jacob!”

Weeza was on the phone back and forth for nearly an hour. I hated that car. There was nothing I would not do for my boy.

Jacob lying in a ditch somewhere by the side of the Dixie Road, his eyes staring at the sky? Oh, God in heaven. I cannot tell you. A boy was found last year, but you won't read it in any paper. And that man they just killed with his own shotgun and called it suicide. I read that lie. Or that poor boy in Money whose mother laid him out all open for everybody to see what they did to him. And thinking of our Jacob, his face like that, is a thing I cannot put out of my mind. There is no law for Negroes, marches or no marches, boycotts or no boycotts.

And maybe I know something about it.

Jacob didn't know what it meant when he said it. I'm sure he didn't. But if he ever said to someone else what he said to me, I don't know what would happen. He was with me when he said it, but if he wasn't? It makes me shake when I think of it.

“She's white top to bottom, isn't she, Poppa?”

When I heard him say it and saw his grin, I rose up inside like a devil because I knew he heard it from one of the older boys who think he is older, too, or don't care he isn't.

“Jacob!” I said, raising my hand so fast his grin went away.

When I took his face in my hand and pulled the other one back he was surprised and began to cry. I got ready to, but I didn't slap him. He said, “Poppa, Poppa, I'm sorry!” I told him to wipe that look from his face and those words from his mind and never say them again, ever, to anybody. How would he like it if a white man said that about his sister? If somebody said that kind of thing about Weeza? It's a dirty thing. It's just words but it's dirty. He wouldn't like it, I told him. It would be as nasty a thing as he ever heard. I wrapped his face in my hands and hoped he would learn something. Putting my mouth close to his ear I said, “Don't ever say that, Jacob, don't say that, please don't say that.” He just looked at me, into my eyes, his little face, and then we were both crying. Weeza came in and asked what it was about. I was going to say something, but not the real reason, when Jacob got right up and went to Weeza and cried on her. At that second I saw how young Jacob is no matter how tall he is, and also how they love each other, and how good a boy he is.

I'm sure Weeza wanted to know what it was about, why we were sobbing. But she didn't ask again, just left us two by ourselves together.

I didn't hit Jacob that time, but there was another time and another hit. That first time, the boy was me. Frank was out and I tried to laugh and even though my daddy saw my scared eyes, his hand was already moving at my face and his mouth yelling, “Okay, Buster, it's you this time!”

The crying I did, and then my mother coming in. I saw how Daddy had to keep being mad, madder than he really was, to win her over to his side. He had to act as if his anger was bigger than my crying and my stung cheek. His anger had to be bigger than hers about him slapping me. He knocked things around, roared out of the house as if it was all him. That he was the only one who struggled to make our family work right, that our family was too big a thing to let go to the dogs, and it was only him stopping us from it. He didn't come back until Momma was sleeping but I was still awake, hating him. But I never thought about this, that Jacob would go and not come back. When I heard about Cora's telephone call, all the old thoughts came back to me and I hated my father again, but I cried for him, too.

Let me also tell you that Weeza screamed and said, “The ticket! The ticket!” and I said, “What?” and she said, “The ticket!” her eyes burning as if I didn't hear the word. So I said, “What ticket?” and she said, “He only gave us there, just there, and not back, as if the Lord knew Jacob didn't need a ticket home!” I didn't understand what she was saying. I don't think anybody understood what she was saying. But when she said she had to call her mother, then I came out with it.

“I told your mother to go away,” I said.

Her face was all screwed up, tears rolling down her cheeks. “What—”

It all rushed out. “That day I took the train to Mobile to say we were getting married and ask her and Jacob to live with us,” I said. “But she said no, she was moving to Ohio to be with her mother. So I said Jacob should stay with us, that you love him. And I do, too. She said no, he was her son. I said but I have a good job, and she laughed and said for how long, that I was my father's son. Then I got heated, and my words got loud, and I said she wouldn't take care of Jacob like we would. She swore at me and I did at her and she told me to get out and take Jacob with me, she wasn't coming back ever. Weeza, it was so easy for her to say Jacob should go with me that I knew I was right. She didn't want him as much as we do. That's why she's gone and why he's been our son these six years.”

Weeza looked at me like I was talking nonsense, but I was crying and saying I was sorry I spoke to her mother like that, not because I wasn't right, but because I hurt Weeza. She shook her head over and over as if trying to rid herself of my words.

“Doesn't matter now,” she said. “Doesn't matter now.”

Even now, while Momma Ruth is getting us all together, Weeza just cries and won't let me near her. “Please,” she says, “please just make something bad not happen this time,” and I understand that well enough. She is talking about what happened to that boy four years ago. And all I can think of is his crushed face in that open box. I wanted to tell her how different that was, that Jacob would not end up in a box like that, but all I said was “I'm trying, I'm trying.”

She says we must find Jacob or nothing will ever be right.