Shaking the Sugar Tree (14 page)

“That’s what I like about you, you’re so honest. Weren’t we in the middle of something?”

There was a smile in his eyes.

“You’re a naughty boy,” I said.

D
ID
YOU
have fun?
Noah asked, a smile in his eyes, while I hurriedly fixed a cup of coffee on Monday morning and prepared to go to work. I nodded, grinned.

Is J. your boyfriend now?

I think so. Did you eat?
I asked.

He nodded.

Do you know how amazing you are?

He grinned happily.

You’ve got your stuff ready to go to Mrs. H.?

He nodded.

I showered, dressed, and we were quickly out the door and walking down the street, hand in hand, to Mrs. Humphries’ house.

I was twenty minutes late and Mr. Owen chewed me out like a dog chewing a bone, but nothing was going to ruin my day, not even that mangy bastard.

“You’re late!” he moaned as I hurried to the check stands.

Mr. Owen was taller lying down than he was standing up. He was so fat he could hardly do more than waddle from one check stand to the next. There was no telling how many boxes of Velveeta cheese he’d eaten to get so big.

“Sorry, Mr. Owen,” I said, punching in my sign-on numbers.

“Should I even ask why?”

“It was Noah… we had a problem.”

“Yeah. That’s what you said the last time. You were due here twenty minutes ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tell that to your coworkers. Everyone’s break will be twenty minutes late now for the rest of the day because you weren’t here to relieve Sarah. I can’t run a business if my people don’t show up on time.”

“It really couldn’t be helped.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve heard that before from you, haven’t I? Wiley, I like you. I really do. But I need you to be here when your name’s on the schedule. If you can’t do that—if you won’t do that—then I’m going to have to let you go. I don’t want to do that, but you don’t seem to want to give me any choice in the matter.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“That don’t help me though, does it?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“Don’t let it happen again, Wiley,” he said as he waddled off.

M
Y
SHIFT
was only five hours but it seemed an eternity. Foot traffic was heavy. Mr. Owen waddled around like he owned the place and was not some poorly paid corporate lackey, barking orders to hapless baggers.

“Take this back to the meat department!”

“Take that basket to the front!”

“I need a lot check! We don’t have enough carts!”

“Call produce and tell them to pick up these carrots!”

I was on check-stand five and the line never stopped.

Tyrone was my bagger that day. He was a tall black guy, early twenties, who scowled perpetually. He had a lovely smile, if you could get him to flash it once in a while. Most of the time he looked like he wanted to rip a customer’s arm off and beat him to death with it.

I turned to him and drew a smile on my lips, my signal for:

Smile, damn you.

He smiled hesitantly, half-heartedly.

He was struggling with this job, but he needed it. He had a girlfriend and a baby to support, and not many prospects for a future because he had decided not to go to college. He was angry at life. You could almost see him thinking it would be so much easier to go out there and sell crystal meth like so many other young people, black and white and Hispanic and whatever else. I admired his determination. I understood his anger. I wanted to see him succeed, which is why I had told him to put a smile on his face and suck it up like the rest of us so he didn’t get fired.

It’s all good, we say.

I looked up and down the check stands; saw what I saw all too often. Most of the black cashiers had black baggers; most of the whites had white baggers. It was an internal, unconscious bit of segregation. Tyrone and I were the only exception to that rule at the moment.

A mother with three kids in tow was my next customer. She had a whole buggy full of food. The kids were crawling everywhere, talking incessantly, harrying her as she tried to put her stuff on the conveyor belt.

“How y’all doing?” I asked, looking at all of them.

“Good,” the woman said, not looking at me.

One of her boys was pawing through the candy bars, trying to make a decision.

“Jason, get out of there,” she ordered.

“But, Mama!”

“Don’t you but Mama me!”

“But, Mama!”

“I want gum,” another child announced.

The third was hanging on the front of the cart, getting in her way as she tried to put items on the belt.

“I wish you children would behave!” she exclaimed, harried, impatient.

“Ma’am, would you like me to call the security guard and have these children arrested?” I asked very loudly.

“Would you?” she said with a trace of a smile on her lips.

“Mom!” the oldest boy said, gasping.

They quieted down in a hurry.

“We’ve already had to arrest several children today,” I said, ignoring their horrified looks.

I rang up the order, waiting for the harried woman to produce a credit card.

When I glanced at the next customer, I was rather surprised; it was Mrs. Warren.

“Wiley,” she said by way of greeting.

She seemed nervous, furtive. She smiled as I began to run her handful of items through the scanner.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I was wondering if I might talk to you,” she said softly. The constant beeps and clacking going on around me made it difficult to hear.

“Of course,” I said.

“My husband mustn’t know.”

“Okay.”

“He would kill me….”

“I doubt that,” I said, “but my lips are sealed.”

“It’s about Noah. I wonder if I might… see him sometime?”

“Sure. When?”

She looked around as if afraid one of her neighbors from New Albany might be in downtown Tupelo grocery shopping and eavesdropping on her.

“When’s a convenient time for you?” she asked.

“Tomorrow after work we’ll be at the library. Do you know where that is?”

She nodded.

“It’s our Saturday afternoon thing,” I said. “We’ll be there at about three. Would that work?”

“Yes,” she said. “That would be fine. Thank you, Wiley. Please don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

I drew my thumb and forefinger across my lips.

Sealed, I was saying.

She offered a faint, hesitant smile, took her two bags, and hurried off, as if ashamed to be seen talking to me.

I
COLLECTED
Noah from Keke’s clutches the next day after I finished work and we drove to the Tupelo Public Library, one of our favorite places. Noah returned
Iron Man
and his other choices, then immediately headed for the graphic novel section, which was right next to the DVD rentals. He would spend his entire time looking at one or the other.

As three o’clock neared, I sat down at a nearby table with a tortuous Faulkner novel that I wasn’t sure should be checked out because I couldn’t foresee myself being able to actually read it. I was dark dim damaged distressedly depressed enough.

Promptly at three, Mrs. Warren, dressed in a light pantsuit and sunglasses, made an appearance.

I stood, as gentlemen do.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Good,” she said quietly.

She glanced over to the graphic novel section where Noah sat on the floor, engrossed in something or other.

“Would you like to sit and talk a bit?” I suggested.

She moved her chair so that she could watch Noah as she sat with me.

Mrs. Warren was a relic of the Southern aristocracy. No doubt she made her debut at a country club ball, was homecoming queen, married the football captain, had the perfect child, and now sang in the choir, and was and still is in every way a pillar of the community, a card-carrying member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, as straight and narrow as her spine was as she sat rigidly upright in the chair before me, twisting her hands together nervously. At least she was all those things until her daughter gave birth to an illegitimate meth baby fathered by a homosexual, a baby she then abandoned to pursue her career as a convicted felon and drug dealer.

Since it was her show, I said nothing.

“Wiley, I would ask you to please never say anything about… this… to my husband.”

“And what is…
this
?”

She licked her lips, then actually gulped. She was silent for so long that I started to get nervous on her behalf.

“Mr. Warren is a man of strong beliefs,” she said.

“No kidding,” I said with a laugh.

“If he knew that I….”

“He’s not exactly on my speed dial.”

This seemed to reassure her. She spent long moments looking at Noah, her soft eyes drinking him in. Her hand went to her throat. She pursed her lips.

“He’s so big,” she said.

“He’ll be ten next month.”

“He wasn’t expected to live,” she reminded me.

“No, he wasn’t.”

“But… here he is.”

“Are you all right, Mrs. Warren?”

She turned to look at me, slowly shook her head.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to explain this to you, Wiley. There isn’t a day that hasn’t gone by that I haven’t thought about
him
. He’s my grandson. My only grandchild. The only grandchild I may ever have. My husband….”

I wanted to rush in and finish the sentence on her behalf and explain precisely what her husband was.

I kept silent.

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” she said, “but would you allow me to… visit with him… once in a while?”

“I wouldn’t mind at all. And I think Noah would be happy to get to know you.”

She seemed immeasurably relieved.

“You’re his grandmother,” I pointed out. “I would love for him to get to know you. Would you like me to call him over?”

“Oh no,” she said quickly. “Not just yet. I don’t think I’m quite ready. I wouldn’t know what to say to him.”

“There’s not much you can say to him since he’s deaf,” I pointed out.

“But he can read lips, can’t he?”

“It’s not like they make out in the movies,” I said. “Lip-reading comprehension among the deaf population is about 10 percent, according to some.”

“Only 10 percent can read lips?”

“No. They understand about 10 percent of what you say when they’re lip-reading.”

“I thought it was much higher.”

“Only 30 to 40 percent of English words can be distinguished by visual clues, so there’s a whole lot of room for error and misunderstanding.”

“Oh.”

“Sign language isn’t that hard,” I said.

“I could never learn that.”

“If you want to talk to him, you don’t really have a choice.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Neither did I, when he was little.”

“It must have been hard for you….”

“It was,” I said.

“Tell me about him. Please.”

“He’s amazing,” I said. “He’s sweet, he’s funny, and though he doesn’t look it, he’s strong. He’s a little fighter. He’s also a lover. He loves people, loves being around them, loves making friends, loves talking to his friends. Well, signing with his friends, I should say. He’s very happy and well-adjusted. Very affectionate. I don’t think there’s a mean bone in his body.”

“He sounds like a wonderful child.”

“He
is
a wonderful child. He’s got his faults and failings, of course. All meth babies do. He gets very mad sometimes, throws tantrums and stuff. Mostly it’s frustration because he can’t communicate, or he doesn’t understand something, or he gets mad at himself and starts getting down on himself.”

“Whatever for?”

“Kids make fun of him a lot. They make him feel stupid. Then sometimes he thinks he must be stupid because they keep telling him that he’s stupid.”

“That’s dreadful.”

“He can’t hear a thing. I know that’s obvious, but if you think about it for a while, you’ll realize it’s not at all simple. He has to try to guess what’s going on. It can be very frustrating. Potty training, for example—that was absolute hell. I couldn’t just tell him what I wanted, and why I wanted it, and why he had to do it the way I wanted it done. It took him a long time to understand what the point was. He’d pee his pants and go hide because he knew I’d be mad, but he didn’t understand why I was mad, and I couldn’t tell him why I was mad. I couldn’t tell him what would happen if he went to school and shit his pants, what the other kids would do, how they’d make fun of him, how it was all for his benefit. It’s stuff like that. It can be very frustrating. Sometimes all that frustration builds up into a big tantrum.”

“I guess it would be frustrating.”

“Somebody told me a long time ago it was pointless to tell him that I loved him, that I had to show him. Took me a while to figure that out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, ‘love’ is just a word. It doesn’t have a lot of context unless you show him what that context is. If you hold him, hug him, kiss him, hold his hand—that’s love. It’s very physical. It’s something he can associate with the word ‘love.’ Love means getting a smile and a kiss and a hug and all that stuff. Love means someone giving you a bath or buying you an ice cream cone. Deaf kids are very physical, always touching you, holding on to you, always checking in with you, and that’s why Noah checks in with me every time he sees me. He won’t be happy unless he can actually touch me, not just look at me or say hi, but actually come up and make physical contact like he has to reassure himself that I’m still there. Your body is like a map—and they can read that map. They may not be able to understand what the word ‘disappointment’ actually means, but they know it when they see it in your face. Since they can’t hear you, they have to rely on seeing you to understand what you’re talking about.”

“Mr. Warren is not the world’s most affectionate man,” she pointed out.