Paradise (36 page)

Deacon Morgan had never consulted with or taken into his confidence any man. All of his intimate conversations had been wordless ones with his brother or brandishing ones with male companions. He spoke to his wife in the opaque manner he thought appropriate. None had required him to translate into speech the raw matter he exposed to Reverend Misner. His words came out like ingots pulled from the fire by an apprentice blacksmith—hot, misshapen, resembling themselves only in their glow. He spoke of a wall in Ravenna, Italy, white in the late afternoon sun with wine colored shadows pressing its edge. Of two children on a beach offering him a shell formed like an
S—
how open their faces, how loud the bells. Of salt water burning his face on a troop ship. Of colored girls in slacks waving from the door of a canning factory. Then he told him of his grandfather who walked barefoot for two hundred miles rather than dance.

Richard listened intently, interrupting once to offer cool water. Although he did not understand what Deacon was talking about, he could see that the man’s life was uninhabitable. Deacon began to speak of a woman he had used; how he had turned up his nose at her because her loose and easy ways gave him the license to drop and despise her. That while the adultery preyed on him for a short while (very short), his long remorse was at having become what the Old Fathers cursed: the kind of man who set himself up to judge, rout and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different.

“Who is this woman?” Richard asked him.

Deacon did not answer. He ran his finger around the inside of his shirt collar, then started on another story. It seemed his grandfather, Zechariah, was subject to personal taunts as well as newspaper articles describing his malfeasance in office. He was an embarrassment to Negroes and both a threat and a joke to whites. No one, black or white, could or would help him find other work. He was even passed up for a teaching job at a poor country primary school. The Negroes in a position to help were few (the depression of ’73 was severe), but they took Zechariah’s dignified manner for coldness and his studied speech for arrogance, mockery or both. The family lost the nice house and were living (all nine of them) with a sister’s family. Mindy, his wife, found work sewing at home, and the children did odd jobs. Few knew and fewer remembered that Zechariah had a twin, and before he changed his name, they were known as Coffee and Tea. When Coffee got the statehouse job, Tea seemed as pleased as everybody else. And when his brother was thrown out of office, he was equally affronted and humiliated. One day, years later, when he and his twin were walking near a saloon, some whitemen, amused by the double faces, encouraged the brothers to dance. Since the encouragement took the form of a pistol, Tea, quite reasonably, accommodated the whites, even though he was a grown man, older than they were. Coffee took a bullet in his foot instead. From that moment they weren’t brothers anymore. Coffee began to plan a new life elsewhere. He contacted other men, other former legislators who had the same misfortune as his—Juvenal DuPres and Drum Blackhorse. They were the three who formed the nucleus of the Old Fathers. Needless to say, Coffee didn’t ask Tea to join them on their journey to Oklahoma.

“I always thought Coffee—Big Papa—was wrong,” said Deacon Morgan. “Wrong in what he did to his brother. Tea was his twin, after all. Now I’m less sure. I’m thinking Coffee was right because he saw something in Tea that wasn’t just going along with some drunken whiteboys. He saw something that shamed him. The way his brother thought about things; the choices he made when up against it. Coffee couldn’t take it. Not because he was ashamed of his twin, but because the shame was in himself. It scared him. So he went off and never spoke to his brother again. Not one word. Know what I mean?”

“It must have been hard,” said Richard.

“I’m saying he never said another word to him and wouldn’t allow anybody else to call his name.”

“Lack of words,” Richard said. “Lack of forgiveness. Lack of love. To lose a brother is a hard thing. To choose to lose one, well, that’s worse than the original shame, wouldn’t you say?”

Deacon looked down at his feet for a long time. Richard stayed quiet with him. Finally he raised his head and said:

“I got a long way to go, Reverend.”

“You’ll make it,” said Richard Misner. “No doubt about it.”

Richard and Anna doubted the convenient mass disappearance of the victims and, as soon as they got back, went to look for themselves. Other than a sparkling white crib in a bedroom with the word
DIVINE
taped to the door, and foodstuffs, there was nothing recently lived-in about the place. The chickens were wilding or half eaten by four-footed prowlers. Pepper bushes were in full flower, but the rest of the garden was lost. Sargeant’s cornfield the only human touch. Richard barely glanced at the cellar floor. Anna, however, examining it as closely as her lamp permitted, saw the terribleness K.D. reported, but it wasn’t the pornography he had seen, nor was it Satan’s scrawl. She saw instead the turbulence of females trying to bridle, without being trampled, the monsters that slavered them.

They left the house and stood in the yard.

“Listen,” Anna told him. “One of them or maybe more wasn’t dead. Nobody actually looked—they just assumed. Then, between the time folks left and Roger arrived, they got the hell out of there. Taking the killed ones with them. Simple, right?”

“Right,” said Misner, but he didn’t sound convinced.

“It’s been weeks now, and nobody has come around asking questions. They must not have reported it, so why should we?”

“Whose baby was in there? That crib is new.”

“I don’t know, but it sure wasn’t Arnette’s.”

He said it again, “Right,” with the same level of doubt. Then, “I don’t like mysteries.”

“You’re a preacher. Your whole life’s belief is a mystery.”

“Belief is mysterious; faith is mysterious. But God is not a mystery. We are.”

“Oh, Richard,” she said as though it was all too much.

He had asked her to marry him. “Will you marry me, Anna?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

“Your fire’s too stingy.”

“Not when it counts.”

She had never expected to be that happy and coming back to Ruby, instead of making the great announcement, they were sorting out what looked like the total collapse of a town.

“Should we take those chickens? They’ll all be eaten anyway.”

“If you want to,” he said.

“I don’t. I’ll just see if there’re any eggs.” Anna entered the henhouse wrinkling her nose and stepping through a half inch of chicken litter. She fought a couple of them to get the five eggs that she thought were probably fresh. When she came out, both hands full, she called, “Richard? Got something I can put these in?” At the edge of the garden a faded red chair lay on its side. Beyond was blossom and death. Shriveled tomato plants alongside crops of leafy green reseeding themselves with golden flowers; pink hollyhocks so tall the heads leaned all the way over a trail of bright squash blossoms; lacy tops of carrots browned and lifeless next to straight green spikes of onion. Melons split their readiness showing gums of juicy red. Anna sighed at the mix of neglect and unconquerable growth. The five eggs warm umber in her hands.

Richard came toward her. “This big enough?” He flicked open his handkerchief.

“Maybe. Here, hold them while I see if the peppers are out.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll go.” He dropped the handkerchief over the eggs.

It was when he returned, as they stood near the chair, her hands balancing brown eggs and white cloth, his fingers looking doubled with long pepper pods—green, red and plum black—that they saw it. Or sensed it, rather, for there was nothing to see. A door, she said later. “No, a window,” he said, laughing. “That’s the difference between us. You see a door; I see a window.”

Anna laughed too. They expanded on the subject: What did a door mean? what a window? focusing on the sign rather than the event; excited by the invitation rather than the party. They knew it was there. Knew it so well they were transfixed for a long moment before they backed away and ran to the car. The eggs and peppers lay in the rear seat; the air conditioner lifted her collar. And they laughed some more as they drove along, trading pleasant insults about who was a pessimist, who an optimist. Who saw a closed door; who saw a raised window. Anything to avoid reliving the shiver or saying out loud what they were wondering. Whether through a door needing to be opened or a beckoning window already raised, what would happen if you entered? What would be on the other side? What on earth would it be? What on earth?

Reverend Misner had everyone’s attention and just a few words more to offer. His glance focused on the culpable men, seven of whom, with some primitive instinct for protection, clustered together, away, it seemed from the other mourners. Sargeant, Harper, Menus, Arnold, Jeff, K.D., Steward. Wisdom was closest to his own family; and Deacon was not there at all. Richard’s thoughts about these men were not generous. Whether they be the first or the last, representing the oldest black families or the newest, the best of the tradition or the most pathetic, they had ended up betraying it all. They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him. They think they are protecting their wives and children, when in fact they are maiming them. And when the maimed children ask for help, they look elsewhere for the cause. Born out of an old hatred, one that began when one kind of black man scorned another kind and that kind took the hatred to another level, their selfishness had trashed two hundred years of suffering and triumph in a moment of such pomposity and error and callousness it froze the mind. Unbridled by Scripture, deafened by the roar of its own history, Ruby, it seemed to him, was an unnecessary failure. How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it. Soon Ruby will be like any other country town: the young thinking of elsewhere; the old full of regret. The sermons will be eloquent but fewer and fewer will pay attention or connect them to everyday life. How can they hold it together, he wondered, this hard-won heaven defined only by the absence of the unsaved, the unworthy and the strange? Who will protect them from their leaders?

Suddenly Richard Misner knew he would stay. Not only because Anna wanted to, or because Deek Morgan had sought him out for a confession of sorts, but also because there was no better battle to fight, no better place to be than among these outrageously beautiful, flawed and proud people. Besides, mortality may be new to them but birth was not. The future panted at the gate. Roger Best will get his gas station and the connecting roads will be laid. Outsiders will come and go, come and go and some will want a sandwich and a can of 3.2 beer. So who knows, maybe there will be a diner too. K.D. and Steward will already be discussing TV. It was inappropriate to smile at a funeral, so Misner envisioned the little girl whose destroyed hands he had once been permitted to hold. It helped him recover his line of thought. The questions he had asked in the mourners’ stead needed an answer.

“May I suggest those are not the important questions. Or rather those are the questions of anguish but not of intelligence. And God, being intelligence itself, generosity itself, has given us Mind to know His subtlety. To know His elegance. His purity. To know that ‘what is sown is not alive until it dies.’”

The wind picked up a bit but not enough to make anyone uncomfortable. Misner was losing them; they stood before the open grave closed to everything but their own musings. Funeral thoughts were mingled with plans for Thanksgiving, evaluations of their neighbors, the chitty-chat of daily life. Misner repressed a sigh before concluding his remarks with prayer. But when he bowed his head and gazed at the coffin lid he saw the window in the garden, felt it beckon toward another place—neither life nor death—but there, just yonder, shaping thoughts he did not know he had.

“Wait. Wait.” He was shouting. “Do you think this was a short, pitiful life bereft of worth because it did not parallel your own? Let me tell you something. The love she received was wide and deep, and the care given her was gentle and unrelenting, and that love and care enveloped her so completely that the dreams, the visions she had, the journeys she took made her life as compelling, as rich, as valuable as any of ours and probably more blessed. It is our own misfortune if we do not know in our long life what she knew every day of her short one: that although life in life is terminal and life after life is everlasting, He is with us always, in life, after it and especially in between, lying in wait for us to know the splendor.” He stopped, disturbed by what he had said and how. Then, as if to apologize to the little girl, he spoke softly, directly to her.

“Oh, Save-Marie, your name always sounded like ‘Save me.’ ‘Save me.’ Any other messages hiding in your name? I know one that shines out for all to see: there never was a time when you were not saved, Marie. Amen.”

His words embarrassed him a little, but on that day, nothing had ever been clearer.

Billie Delia walked slowly away from the other mourners. She had stood with her mother and grandfather and smiled encouragingly at Arnette, but now she wanted to be alone. This was her first funeral, and she thought about it in terms of how expansive it made her grandfather to have his skills needed. More on her mind was the absence of the women she had liked. They had treated her so well, had not embarrassed her with sympathy, had just given her sunny kindness. Looking at her bruised face and swollen eyes, they sliced cucumber for her lids after making her drink a glass of wine. No one insisted on hearing what drove her there, but she could tell they would listen if she wanted them to. The one called Mavis was the nicest and the funniest was Gigi. Billie Delia was perhaps the only one in town who was not puzzled by where the women were or concerned about how they disappeared. She had another question: When will they return? When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town. A town that had tried to ruin her grandfather, succeeded in swallowing her mother and almost broken her own self. A backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them. She hoped with all her heart that the women were out there, darkly burnished, biding their time, brass-metaling their nails, filing their incisors—but out there. Which is to say she hoped for a miracle. Not so unreasonable a wish since a minimiracle had already occurred: Brood and Apollo had reconciled, agreeing to wait for her to make up her mind. She knew, as they did, that she never could and that the threesome would end only when they did. The Convent women would roar at that. She could see their pointy teeth.