Men We Reaped (16 page)

It wasn't right up the road. It was at least a half mile up the road, but I didn't know that. Every time I felt like I couldn't push any longer, like my arms had burned to ash and my legs would crumple under me, I wanted to ask my father,
Are we almost there? How close are we?
But I wouldn't. I didn't have the energy to, and he wouldn't have heard me anyhow. Instead I stared at the faint gleam of the car in the darkness and listened
to Joshua and Aldon, on both sides of me, breathing in quick little huffs. I imagined a car coming up behind us, slowing to pass us, and then rolling down a window, offering us a ride to a gas station, gas from a spare gas can they kept in the back of their truck, anything so I could stop straining with everything in me, but no cars came. No kind strangers appeared. The air was warm as tepid bathwater, and as close, and the night bugs and the wind were the only things singing and moving in the patches of woods and yards around us. The final stretch of road before the store was up a hill, a steep hill. My father sounded like something in him tore when we crested the hill and rolled into the driveway of the closed gas station, and I felt quivery and soft: useless. The car came to a stop in the parking lot, which had been paved so long ago that it had been ground to gravel. My dad fished out a quarter from his gym bag in the car and dialed my mother from the pay phone on the sidewalk that fronted the shuttered corner store. Joshua and Aldon and I climbed into the car, so tired we didn't speak. Nerissa and Charine slept in the front seat. My father joined us. He too was quiet until my mother arrived with a can full of gas.

“When we get home, y'all need to take a bath and get in bed,” she said as she handed my father the gas can. It was late. Her mouth was tight. She climbed back into her car, which she had left running, and waited for us.

I imagine my mother nursing her resentment that her hard work, her cleaning of toilet bowls and mopping of four-thousand-square-foot houses, was allowing my father to pursue
his dream. I imagine that the reality of pursuing his dream took my father aback; that in his head, he saw himself with eager, malleable students like a wise martial arts master in the kung fu films we sometimes watched as a family on Sundays. For those masters, money was never a concern, and they seemed to be childless. I imagine both my parents began to resent their roles in the family. My mother's coping mechanism for this was to become even more silent, even more strict and remote; one of my father's was to watch movies, which was an escape he could share with us.

My father led us through the woods behind our house into a cluster of backyards and on through the neighborhood to a strip mall along Dedeaux Road in Gulfport. At the video store, my father would pick out three movies he wanted to see, and then he allowed me and Joshua to pick the other.

Joshua and I lived in the horror section. We stood side by side, studying the pictures on the movie cases, which were always badly drawn and mildly threatening. I read the synopses seriously, ravenously, which was the way I read books. After we'd rented all the store's mainstream horror movies, we began renting the less well-known: movies with leprechauns and ghoulies and blobs and strange sewer-dwelling animals. My mother purchased a popcorn machine, and most weekends found us on the carpeted floor with a big bowl of popcorn between us. It was the cheapest way for my parents to entertain four children. We loved it. For those hour-and-a-half increments, the fantasy of a two-parent family, what we'd longed for in my father's absence, lived for us in perfect
snatches. Ignorant of my father's and mother's dissatisfaction, we were butter-faced and giggling and happy.

One night in the winter of 1990, my mother received a phone call. It was from a woman she knew from DeLisle, who worked at the local police department in Gulfport.

“Do you know where your car is?”

When the woman told my mother the address, my mother knew where my father was. He was with his teenage love. He had parked my mother's car around the corner from his girl's house. I assume he'd told my mother he wasn't seeing her anymore, that he was committed to their relationship and to raising a family together while she worked and he tried to establish his martial arts school. She wouldn't have taken him back without those words. I can imagine the dread she felt when she heard that woman's voice on the phone, the way it washed to pain across her chest before it sank to her stomach. She would have sat for a moment when she got off the phone, staring at the floor, looking at a wall, hearing us through the perfect, awful silence in her head fussing or playing or watching TV in the background. My mother would have steeled herself, but this steel would have been worked thin, thin as aluminum over her love. And underneath it all would have been fatigue. Her joints would have hurt, the marbles of her knuckles already releasing a steady, slim stream of pain that would, five years later, be diagnosed as arthritis. This was what it meant to clean. This was what it meant to work. This was what it meant to forget whatever she had dreamed the night before and to stand up every day because
there were things that needed to be done and she was the only person who could do them.

She told me to watch my siblings, and she walked out of the door to get her car. She'd purchased a second car by then, a small blue Toyota Corolla, a stick shift that was new enough to shine a slick blue. She drove to the girl's house, looked past the girl as she sat in my father's lap, and told my father to get in the Caprice and drive it home, and once he did that, she said, he could get the fuck out.

My father has always worn his dreams on the outside, so even as a preteen I knew what they were. I'd known for years he'd wanted to have his own school. He had other dreams that I recognized but still can't articulate, even as I've gotten older. His ill-advised motorcycle purchase; his leather suits, studded and fringed, that he wore in ninety-degree weather; the Prince he listened to on his Walkman while he rode: there was something at the heart of my father that felt too big for the life he'd been born into. He was forever in love with the promise of the horizon: the girls he cheated with, fell in love with, one after another, all corporeal telescopes to another reality.

My mother had buried her dreams on that long ride from California to Mississippi. She'd secreted them next to my brother in the womb, convinced as she was, with a sinking dread, that they were futile. She'd tried to escape the role she'd been born to, of women working, of absent fathers, of little education and no opportunity. She'd tried to escape the history of her heritage, just as my father had. Going to California to join my father had been her great bid for freedom. When she returned, she thought it had failed. She'd returned
to the rural poverty, the persistent sacrifice that the circumstance of being poor and Black and a woman in the South demanded. But the suggestion of that dream lived on in her conception of my father. It's part of why she loved him so long and so consistently, and it is part of the reason it hurt her so to meet him at the door with his leather jackets, black sweatpants, and black fringed T-shirts shoved in garbage bags and to tell him:
Go
.

And just like that, my father left.

With my father gone, I picked up my mantle of responsibility. Perhaps if we'd still been in DeLisle, maintaining our family would have been a little easier, but in Gulfport, my mother couldn't bear the burden of the entire family by herself. I was learning that. My mother gave me a house key. It was one item in a growing list of responsibilities. In addition to hanging clothes, gathering them, folding them, putting them away, vacuuming, dusting, cleaning the bathrooms, babysitting my brother and sisters during the day during the summer while my mother was at work, the key meant that during the school year I should let us in the house if we got home from school before my mother made it home from work. But even as a young teen, I was absentminded, forgetful. In the summer, I often left my key inside and turned the lock on the knob and pulled the door shut behind us, locking us out of the house. After our father left, there was no one to open the door if our mother wasn't home. During the school year, I didn't realize I'd left the key at school until I stood before the door with my brothers and sisters.

I patted my short pockets, Josh at my elbow, Charine on my hip.

“I forgot the key.”

“What?” Joshua said.

I fumbled around Charine's leg, tried to make her slide down my hip to stand, but she wouldn't.

“I'm so stupid!” I said.

I looked at Josh. He was only a few inches shorter than me, even though he was just nine. He rolled his eyes.

“I have to pee,” Nerissa said.

“Me too. I have to pee too,” said Charine.

“We going to have to go in the woods.”

“I don't want to go in the woods,” Nerissa said.

“Me neither,” Charine said.

Joshua followed us as I grabbed Nerissa by the hand. I led them around the yard and into the woods we'd walked through with our father to get to the video store; we weren't allowed to walk all the way to Dedeaux Road without him. Fifteen feet into the woods, next to a trail on the right, was a dense cluster of bushes. Further behind the cluster of bushes was a full-size mattress that someone had dumped, probably the previous tenants who'd lived in our house. This, I thought, would have to do.

“Come on,” I said. I led them behind the screen of bushes. Charine began to cry. She was convinced that when she pulled down her pants something would bite her. A snake, she said. Or ants.

“Ain't no snakes,” I said, although it was summer and hot, and the underbrush could be teeming with them, reptiles cooling themselves in the hottest part of the day.

She resisted.

“You want to pee on yourself?” I threatened. Sobbing, she squatted. I felt guilty for bullying her. “That wasn't that bad,” I said. Charine nodded and wiped the snot from her nose with her hand. Josh, who'd watched the path for us, ran past us to the mattress.

“I'm going to do a flip,” he said. He sprinted and leapt on the mattress. I expected to see him spring high into the air, soar into a flip. He bounced about a foot or so. The ground had no spring, and the mattress was a sorry trampoline. Still, he did the front flip and landed on his back. When he stood, he smiled dizzily, swaying, and began to bounce again. Nerissa skipped to join him, and Charine let my hand go and ran for the mattress as well, snakes and ants forgotten.

Even though I felt the weight of responsibility with my father gone, as my mother had felt it when hers left (except in even larger measure), I was still a kid. We were still kids, in love with the mystery and beauty of the woods, deriving a certain pleasure out of our scrappy self-imposed exile from the house. We ran wild in the hours between our dismissal from school and my mother's return from work.

One day, while I was sitting with Charine and Nerissa and weaving flowers into rings and necklaces, Josh appeared and sat with us. He'd been off exploring.

“I found something,” he said.

“What is it?”

“A secret room,” Josh said. “I'ma show you.”

We followed him further into the woods, along the trail
that curved to the right, the trail that would take us through the subdivision and to a corner store on Dedeaux Road if we followed it. We walked in single file because it was so narrow. Underbrush and weeds grew thickly off the dirt path, scratched our calves, our shins. I picked Charine up and carried her. She was four. Joshua led and Nerissa trotted on his heels, proud to be keeping up with him, even at six. Then he led us off the trail, and I hoisted Charine around to my back and bent, all of us burrowing our way through thorny, leaf-drenched bushes, stumbling through blackberry brambles as the pines shivered above our heads. Suddenly the woods opened up into a small clearing. The ground was soft and spongy below our feet, padded with layers of pine straw.

“Watch,” Josh said, and knelt. He felt in the straw along what looked like a shallow ditch, then pushed the earth. There was a scraping sound. The straw moved, and there was a black hole where the ditch had been. “Look,” he said.

We clustered behind him. I grabbed Nerissa's hand and leaned over Josh's narrow back before I understood what I was seeing. Someone had dug into the earth, made a cellar, and then covered it over with two-by-fours before strewing pine straw to camouflage it.

“Who made this?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Joshua said. He had friends in the neighborhood, too, Black boys and one White boy, all who, like my girlfriend, lived there with their single mothers.
Maybe they made it
, I thought, but it seemed too large an undertaking for skinny little kids with knees like doorknobs, shirtless boys whose ribs you could count when they rode their bikes through the streets.
So much digging
, I thought.
And planning
.

“Let's go,” I said. I pulled Nerissa's arm.

“You don't want to go down in it?” Joshua asked. I could tell by the way he said it that he hadn't gone down in it yet, and that he thought we might explore it together.

“No,” I said. “Let's go.”

I yanked Nerissa to walk.

“Hold on,” I told Charine, and she tightened her legs around my waist, locking them at the heels. I pushed branches out of the way, began shouldering through the underbrush back to the trail. Josh stood behind us, still at the mouth of that hole.

“Come on!” I said.

He hesitated, then followed. When we reached the trail, I began trotting, Charine bouncing up and down on my back, laughing.

“Run,” I said.

We ran, stumbling on roots, plants whipping us like fishing line at the ankle. When we reached the end of the trail, we ran past the mattress, leapt over the ditch that bordered the woods and our yard, then let ourselves into the fence and the backyard, where we stopped, breathing hard. I turned on the hose and made everyone drink, and I kept us close to the yard for the rest of the day. Josh did a few desultory flips on the mattress, but he was the only one who reentered the woods before coming back out again.