Rails Under My Back (15 page)

Get on way from here, Beulah said.

We ain’t doin nothin to you, granny.

Boy, watch yo mouth. I’ll knock yo teeth back to Tupelo.

I ain’t from no Tupelo.

I know where you from. I know yo kind.

Aw.

If yall was nice boys, you’d help us wit these bags. Can’t you see my niece got all these here bags?

It took all four puffing boys to get the steamer trunk to the third floor.

Sho is heavy.

She got some gold.

Or some cold.

Or somebody dead in there.

THE SEEK-AND-FIND-HER MANEUVERS of the babies started after the train sliced off Sam’s leg, smooth as bread or a tube of lunchmeat. Sam and Dave liked to jump the speeding trains. One miscalculated jump landed him in Mercy Veterans Hospital (years later renamed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., General Hospital, MLK, where Dave wasted away).

No loss, Beulah said. That damn fool brother of mine left his sense back home when he came up here, Beulah said. He mightest well have left his leg.

Sam shook for three nights with fever. His tongue spat out red words.

What’s that he’s mumblin? Gracie asked.

Something bout that Filipino woman, Beulah said.

What Filipino woman?

The one who had his baby.

What? This truly surprised Gracie, for Sam had never said word the first about it.

Back when he was stationed overseas. It ain’t nothing, Beulah said. Over there, them women so po they’ll do it all night long for a can of beans.

I was so glad to get shut of them niggas, Beulah said. And when they get out the service, first thing they do come visit me. Well, first they go to California looking for R.L. Ain’t there but a moment. Come visit me. I like to think they come to stay fo good. One night, I prayed to God, Please send them niggas back to Houston … I guess they heard God’s call, or maybe they jus missed all that devilment. They took the first locomotive back to Houston. But those two weeks they stayed wit me …

Well, Beulah, I guess they didn’t want to get shut of you, cause two years after that
—

—
they come for good.

The doctors put a spoon in Sam’s mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue—
like you had to do when Nap had one of his seizures
—shaking, like he hadn’t got spilled onto the tracks but had actually caught the train and was riding it. That fever so hot that Gracie saw red plumes spreading over her hands and climbing red up the sanitized white walls. Only Beulah could stand the heat of Sam’s bed.

Sam, Beulah said. Sam.

Quiet down now, Beulah. They gon put us outa this room.

Sam, you want me to hold up yo leg? Sam.

Beulah, he can’t hear you.

Sam. You the baby. Mamma told me to guard after you kids. Mamma told me—

The hours trembled on, and days. Sam shook off the fever. The doctors gave him a wooden leg, the same leg—no, they forced him to buy a new one, the termites crunching down to the roots of that first one—that, years later, Jesus and Hatch mistook for a toy when the family went visiting him, laid up drunk wit that lady who would steal his life, steal the wood of his head with her ax,
already knowing and planning her crime, cause she always fled the apartment whenever we visited, didn’t want us to see the guilt in her eyes, read her war plan
—the boys knocking one another upside the head with the leg, or using it as a bowling pin, the same leg that Sam often set on fire when he got drunk and bounced down the stairs naked to smother it out.

Sam out of danger, Gracie returned home. She needed a Scripture to celebrate his recovery. She kept her Bible high on the closet shelf, away from cheese-seeking mice. She opened the closet and found a baby—the first of many she would battle or evade in all the years that have followed—nibbling the pages.

THE BIBLE was the only gift Daddy Larry ever gave her, four-leaf clovers inside, small dried bookmarks picked by his own Houston hand. She brought it with her when she came North.
Why come North? To escape finger-cutting cotton fields. To avoid bundles of cotton inside some cracka’s house, shirts, skirts, socks, draws, and sheets. So, go North where yams grow in the sidewalks, lemonade flows from fire hydrants, and the sky rains silver and gold.
Bumping her Bible and her suitcases against seat sides on the whistling northbound steel-smoking hound that dragged her past black ‘Sippi fields and yellow oceans of corn to this red gray green city. A rich, hideous city built of stone and steel and mist. Tall buildings—cliffs of solar glass—side by side, no elbowroom between them. Their shadows slanting across the train’s steamy window. Beggars seated in their depths. Tar Lake at the end of every street. A flow of people moving up and down the avenues, circling a drain of boulevards. Winking traffic lights. Congested cars moving terrapin-slow.
Light or dark square cars, not the bright-colored round cars people drive today.
Great green buses driving a wedge through streets. Ties hauling suitcases. High-butt women in tight weaved dresses shaking keys.
I got a rainbow wrapped and tied around my shoulder.
Tough boys shoving their faces into each other.
One of the mysteries of city breeding.
Life in proportion to beauty. This place up North was not in God’s world.

The conductor took her suitcase without her asking, and beckoned her to step down the train’s narrow metal stairs where a small metal footstool awaited her on the platform. With one hand firmly holding the passenger railing and the conductor guiding her by the elbow, she turned her back to the platform, curved her Bible discus-like up to her chin, eased one heel then the other onto footstool, and took a short hop to city concrete. She retrieved her suitcase, thanked the conductor, then headed for the station lobby, past passengers training or detraining and cars steaming in wait.

Gracie! Beulah opened her arms like a strong machine, curved black hat like a snail shell on her head. Hair below her shoulders in one electrified whitening ray. She sucked Gracie in with vacuum power and speed.

Hey, Beulah. Glad to see you.

Beulah loosened her grip just enough to allow Gracie to angle, bend, and hug Sheila.

Gracie. Sheila’s hand rubbed concrete circles on her back. Gracie. So glad to see you.

Gracie searched the words for warmth and truth.

You, redcap! Beulah screamed. Come take my niece’s bags.

Once home, Sheila and Beulah allowed her an hour to bathe and rest, then guided her out of the apartment to discover the city. She can still remember smartly dressed city people betaking themselves to their chosen destinations, remember the casual walk to the Elevated platform, her first sight of a green commuter train, car doors rattling sliding banging open, and city people charging out like racehorses. Faces at every window formed a chain of countless eyes all staring at her. She clutched her Bible to her freshly bathed and powdered bosom. Train rocked and rumbled by.

This not our train? she asked.

No, Beulah said.

That’s when Sheila explained the city’s complicated network of trains and lines: subway and Elevated, A train and B train, express and local, rush hour, the Englewood line, Howard line, Jackson Park line, Evanston line, Ravenswood line. On and on.

Memphis had only buses. Surely city trains would shake her to pieces.

The three women boarded their train. Sat side by side. Gracie placed her Bible on her lap and folded her hands over it. The train began to move. Quicken. She stared out the green-flying window as a lens, clicking mental photographs at rows of shops and stores exposed to merciless morning sunlight, at streets boiling with life and trouble, pools of people linking into other pools, rivers of cars linking other rivers—things as common to northern city life as dog and dung on a ‘Sippi road. She dug her fingernails into the green leather seat.

Beulah and Sheila shuttled her all over the city, the ins and outs, from the (seemingly) penthouse-high elevated trains to the sewer-low subways. She saw a subway minister for the first time.

It is written in the Scriptures, Be not deceived God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man sows he shall also reap the same. Good for good and evil for evil. The Lord has sown his good seed into the world today and should it fall on good and pure hearts it shall bring forth much good. So you have the faith, but you must plant it in good soil in order for you to do great things. But mortal soil cannot produce eternal things. One must place his faith in God. This is the best soil.

She would learn, here in the North, many preachers carried pulpits in their voices. Even frail-bodied subway evangelists like Mother Sister could paddle you with wood words.
They got wings for us to fly around. And water beds filled with blue rivers. But rent in heaven ain’t cheap. Nor are flying lessons.

Beulah found Gracie a job (day work) with the Sterns in Deerfield, a sharp, clean suburb a good hour north of the city. Train, carry me. Train, bring me back.

HER FIRST CITY WINTER. Snow. Pretty when it first fell. White and clean enough to eat, then later, gray and muddy with footprints or tire tracks. Snow coating the windows of cars, but the apartment windows heated from the warmth pulsing inside, free of frost, an occasional collar of snow on a ledge. Snow on the bare tree branches—bare branches curled, fingers reaching to grab the falling snow—half the branch white and the other half brown-gray, like flesh slipping out from a split pants leg or coat sleeve. The sky white—the fog white of after-snow—above the buildings. And cars making that washing sound you hear in rain or snow, beneath the motor’s hum the sound of water spilled from a pail. Then the first killing frost. The frozen steel of subway and apartment pipes. The asthmatic breathing of the radiators. (Better than a rusted yard pump and the carrying stones of the fireplace, flames licking—coals really—crackling with heat.) Jack Frost nipping at yo nose and peeking up under yo clothes. Hawk trying to snatch off your draws. Winter laid a sheet of ice between you and yo kinfolk in the apartment. You looking out the white window and thinking, thinking, perhaps of spring—because in this city, winter often carried over into mid-spring, or came back in spurts both spring and summer, like an unexpected relative. Spring: the trees a green maelstrom of mad leaves and brown movement because the city’s wind stayed with you year-round, folding into the seasons. And thinking further of autumn, your favorite season, when the city grew alive with color, the summer’s last fires flicking new flames of heat and pigment, red and green and blue and white and pink and red-pink and brown-red and yellow-brown and not just the pinks and greens and whites of budding May. But fall so far away, not like the babies who stand in the trees all day and night, a few feet from the building.

HER FOURTH CITY WINTER—so it seems to her now—she boarded the train and saw the Burned Man for the first time. A short man and fat, every space of his blue-jean jumpsuit covered with buttons—sermons, slogans, prayers. A few clumps of hair, like an unfinished bird’s nest. And his head a lump of clay kneaded onto his body. No neck, all head. Clean swathes of smooth brown skin—funny how burns leave brown scars, not black—and the face smooth too, no eyebrows or eyelashes or eyelids. He rattled his hot tin cup, the metal sound giving more momentum to the steel wheel grinding steel rails.

Brothers and sisters, I come from the Church on the Rock and I bring you these books—
pamphlets, flyers
—these revelations designed to bless each and every individual which shall read them seven straight days, seven days in a row. As of today, there are 916 confirmations of blessings, 916 people who had received glowing gifts from the hand of Christ. Just last night a woman phoned me, Brother Foot, I thank you. Christ reached out his hands and turned my rags to gold raiments. I won the lottery after reading your book seven straight days and seven days in a row. Sister, I said to her, All who believe in Christ shall hit the jackpot. There are no number runners fleeter of foot than the winged angels in our Father’s heaven.

God sent his only son to save man. Praise be to his only son, our Lord Saviour Christ. The burned man rattled his cup. Please give what you can. Read these Scriptures seven straight days, seven days in a row.

Gracie removed a dollar from her purse. Dropped it into the hot tin cup. Keep your book, she said. She never rode the train again.

HER SIXTH CITY WINTER, Sam and Dave arrived from Houston—on a fleeing locomotive—in summer’s clothing, and made all Englewood sweat from their sinful Houston heat. Daily they galloped from bar to bar, lounge to lounge, liquor store to liquor store; sundown, they posed against afterglow on corners, watching cars cruise down Church Street—

I gotta get me a car, Dave said.

The way you drive, Sam said. Huh.

What’s wrong wit the way I drive?

You don’t know? Sam shook his head.

I gotta get me a car.

—and rested at night, collapsed in the bug-ridden pastures of nasty women’s beds.

TWO YEARS LATER, Sam and Dave got sent up the river for stealing hogs from the factory, dressing the hog up like a man in a long coat and Dobb, leaning its legs over their shoulders and holding it up between them, Come on, Wheatstraw, you drunk fool, know you ain’t sposed to drink on the job. But of course, two years after that, after the arms of justice had released them, they needed a place to stay and crowded into the one-room apartment with Beulah, Sheila, and Gracie, Sam and Dave sleeping beneath the kitchen table on the red-and-white-checkered oilcloth—Damn, you niggas, Beulah said, get out from under my tablecloth. People gotta eat on it. Enough to spoil yo appetite—
the same checkered oilcloth where, later, in the house here on Liberty Island, John would beat Lucifer and Dallas (his pig’s snout level with the board, as if this could improve his concentration) at chess, and still later, whip the pants off the boys, Hatch and Jesus, til Hatch mastered the game, beating John and Lucifer for their spare dollars.
Wasn’t a week before every devil-may-care man on Church Street cussed their names.