Standing at the Scratch Line (95 page)

King stared at his wife and wondered whether it was possible to hate someone as much as you loved them. He had married a girl who had grown into a cold but beautiful woman. He still loved her as he would never love anyone else, but their marital partnership was over. He had never been able to truly forgive her for not telling him about the letter received in Bodie Wells, and over the years their relationship had turned into an undeclared war. It was not the type of conflict that produced glorious moments or one in which courage was valued. It was a war of attrition, of nerves and manipulation, and perseverance.

After her bags were piled on the cart, Serena walked up to King and said in an icy tone, “I specifically asked that you not be the one to pick me up! Where is Ethel?”

“I told her to go home,” King answered evenly. “I specifically wanted to pick you up!”

“You have nothing to say to me!” Serena answered, impatiently straightening the fingers of her gloves. “My brother is lying in the hospital on the edge of death because of you and your criminal activities! Don’t say a damn thing to me. Just drive me home!”

King did not respond, but directed the porter toward the parking lot. Serena walked on ahead, her high heels clicking on the cement. When they reached his Cadillac, King assisted the porter in putting the bags in the trunk. The western sky was turning to purple and rust as the dark blue of night rose from the east. The darker colors reminded King of the dried blood from old wounds. The wind intensified as its gusts gained force. King’s coattails were flapping around his legs as he slammed the trunk shut. He got into the car and sat facing Serena. A humorless smile played across his lips. He said nothing. He let the silence speak for him, but inside the Brahman was throwing him against the barricades.

Serena turned toward him. “Do I have to take a cab?”

King started the car and pulled it out of the lot into the evening traffic. He smiled his death’s-head smile. “Seems to me like you got some questions to answer.”

Serena recognized that there was something unusual in King’s demeanor. There was no evidence of contrition on his part and there was a dangerous quiet about him. She did not let that affect her indignation or rage. She had learned over the years that a cold, haughty exterior covered a multitude of sins. “What can you possibly have to ask me? It’s you who are the problem, you and your cut-and-shoot friends! You’ll never be anything but a low-life thug! It’s my brother who’s paying for your stupidity! Amos never did anything to deserve this!”

“That’s just what he said,” King agreed. “Only he blames you!” King had to contain himself. He did not want to let the bull loose just yet. He wanted to make sure Serena’s hand was firmly coiled in the rope first.

Serena turned toward him and there was rage on her face. “I can’t believe you had the gall to say that to me!” Serena declared. “I’m not the one involved in criminal activity! I don’t have people gunning for me! I’m the one trying to drag this family out of the gutter! I’m the one trying to make us legitimate and I would have succeeded if it hadn’t been for you and your classless friends!”

“Don’t get it twisted, woman! It was me and my classless friends that helped you escape the farm and it’s my classless money that lets you run around sellin’ property for yo’ rooty-poot, high yellow, seditty friends!”

Serena noticed there was a hostility in King’s tone that he didn’t generally use with her. She pulled off her gloves. “I don’t have time to argue with you. I want to get to the hospital and see Amos!”

“He don’t want to see you and that’s for sure! He told me to tell you specifically not to come!”

Serena was momentarily at a loss for words. “Did he say why?” she asked, somewhat deflated.

“Yep! He talked to me about twenty minutes before he went into surgery. It appears that the boy had to get somethin’ off his chest that he been keepin’ mum about for nigh on ten years.”

Now King had her full attention. He had no facility for light conversation, so she knew it had to be serious.

King stopped the car for a stop signal and glanced across at Serena and said in a casual tone. “Now, you know I’ve been lookin’ for my firstborn son for nigh on seventeen years.”

Serena forced herself to be nonchalant. “Why are you bringing this up now? Is this to distract me from what’s happened to my brother?”

“It’s about yo’ brother too! You see, by the time I got to the hospital, he couldn’t feel his legs or nothin’ down below his waist. All the doctors knew was that he had one bullet in the kidney and another in the spine. They was sayin’ he had a fifty-fifty chance, but Amos thought he was gon’ die for sure. I’m sho’ that’s the only reason he told me about the night at the Hotel Toussant when Sister Bornais told you to do right by my oldest son. He said that Sister Bornais told you that if you didn’t do right, neither yo’ sisters nor yo’ brother was gon’ have kids! He told me about goin’ to Port Arthur with you when you said you was gon’ adopt a little girl. He said he wasn’t worried when you came back empty-handed. He thought you was still plannin’ to do right.” King was wrapping the Brahman’s rope firmly around her hand and knotting it tight.

“He was obviously delirious out of his mind with pain when he told you this hogwash! This is some story that he has made up! You can’t be seriously bringing this up!” Although her voice was firm, her protest seemed hollow even to her.

King continued as if he was just carrying on a casual conversation. “I called the Oblate orphanage outside of Port Arthur this afternoon. They have a new mother superior there now. When I told her my name she mistook me for the anonymous donor who been sending the orphanage money every year for the last ten years. You see, the nun who was there before her wrote down yo’ name in a journal and you left yo’ coat there too. The coat had a monogram in it: S-B-T.” King reached over and pulled her coat open. “Just like the one you got in this one. They figured the donor was you ’cause each year they received five hundred dollars in the name of Elroy Fontenot and you was the only one who ever inquired about him. What do you think about that?” Serena was firmly aboard the bull now and ready to ride.

Serena said nothing. The world was spinning. She felt as if she was in a big whirlpool being sucked down to drain at an unknown destination. The atmosphere was growing denser than water. It was hard to get a full breath. Her stomach was rising up in her chest like she was falling from a great height. Strangely, despite all her anxiety, she felt relieved. All the pretense could be dropped. The heavy yoke of the sixteen-year lie could be laid down. She was free of its chafing harness. Yet she had no sense of lightness or release. She had carried its weight until she was exhausted. She was too tired even for fear. She waited to see how King would react.

King stomped on the brake and the big car skidded to an abrupt halt. Serena’s body flew off the seat and slammed into the dashboard. Her head banged against the windshield. “What do you think about that, huh?” he snarled. “Ain’t you got nothin’ to say?” He stared at her for a minute, then put the car in gear and drove on.

For the first time, Serena considered the possibility that King would kill her. She was not frightened by the prospect, although it surprised her. In all the years that they had been together he had never raised his hand to her, but she realized that she had done something that made the fact she was his wife and a woman insignificant. And yet, she had done it precisely because she was his wife and a woman. She was a mother who wanted to protect her firstborn from the undertow and rugged surf of her husband’s life. At great personal cost she had done what she thought was best.

King drove the Cadillac through the darkening streets of San Francisco in silence. There was an accident at Dubose and Market streets that caused traffic to inch along. King kept his eyes straight ahead as if he couldn’t bear to look at her. His jaw moved slowly back and forth as if he was chewing on his next move. Serena straightened her coat, arranged her stole across her shoulders, and composed herself.

When he spoke, his voice was low and husky like he was out of breath from some heavy exertion. “You know what I feel about family. You knew the whereabouts of this boy was important to me, and for more than fifteen years you’ve kept this from me! What kind of woman are you? Leavin’ my boy to be raised in an orphanage? Is this what you call bein’ classy? A life based on lies?”

Serena lit a cigarette, exhaled slowly, then said, “I’m not proud of it, but I did what was best for LaValle. I’d do it again if the circumstances were the same.”

King rolled his window down to get some fresh air and nodded. “So, Amos was right about you after all. You care about LaValle mo’ than anybody, mo’n yo’ sisters and brother, mo’n me and mo’n Jacques. I guess it’s too bad you couldn’t have spent yo’ life bein’ LeGrande’s whore; you’d a been less pain to yo’ family and those that cared for you.”

“How dare you! I sacrificed myself for you! That man violated me! LaValle was the result of my trying to save you!”

“Bullshit! You sacrificed yo’self to make up for not givin’ me the first damn letter! It’s yo’ jealousy and fearfulness that done caused all this to happen in the first place! Then you follow it up with years of sneakiness and lyin’! Then you got the audacity to go round talkin’ about class with yo’ nose stuck up in the air. Amos got you pegged spot on. He say you wants to pretend you’s caviar, but all you is is cold fish and you’s beginnin’ to smell!”

“Amos wouldn’t dare say that!”

King laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. “You’d be surprised at what Amos would say, real surprised.” There was the clang and clatter of electric streetcars as King steered the big car across Market Street, bouncing over the metal tracks. When King continued speaking his voice was neutral and without emotion, as if he were reporting the news. “Whatever love Amos had for you is dead now. It died with them babies that was miscarried and stillborn. He said you doomed them children never to breathe when you did nothin’ to lift the curse that Sister Bornais said was on LaValle. How many miscarriages did Della have . . . three? Four? I remember back in 1929 we went back to New Orleans for Tini’s funeral. Everybody was sayin’ she died by accident, but Amos told me this mornin’ at the hospital that she killed herself after her baby was stillborn. He said it weren’t no accident. He said she was real afraid of Jethro, that she knew better than to go and kneel in the back of that mule’s stall with a whip. That’s why she had a closed coffin. The mortician couldn’t put her head back together.”

Despite her resolve, tears were beginning to trickle down Serena’s cheeks. She did not try to wipe them away. She was concentrating on keeping her bearings. If she made any sudden moves, she was afraid that she would break down uncontrollably. Her resolve was eroding slowly like a mud levee before the pressure of the flooding Mississippi River. Serena had spent years developing an internal system of interconnected levees all to protect one lowland area in her life from water. Leaving Elroy in the orphanage was the first levee that she had constructed, a bulwark to prevent the rushing waters of fate from washing over her firstborn, and over the years she had to build many more to bolster the first. Unfortunately for Serena, fate could not be dominated by mortal stamina. The time of floods had finally come and soon all that she could not carry would be submerged and sundered by forces that began long before she built her first levee. She had to take a tissue from her purse; the tears simply would not stop.

“Them alligator tears don’t fool nobody,” King observed. “You did what you meant to do, you said as much! You robbed me of my son’s childhood and you robbed him of the chance to grow up in the bosom of his own family!”

“You know where he is now. You can send for him,” Serena said as she dabbed at her eyes with the tissue. “I can’t go back and undo what’s been done.”

“Don’t play no pretend shit with me!” King growled. “You know he left the orphanage two months ago! When I asked to speak with him, the mother superior told me he left the orphanage when he turned seventeen. They only keeps the girls until they’re eighteen. She don’t know where he is. Some of the boys think he jumped a freight to Chicago, but nobody knows for sho’!”

Serena shook her head. “I didn’t know that.”

King waved a dismissive hand in her direction. “Like somebody gon’ believe you!”

“You said that Amos went into surgery. Do you know if it was successful?”

“He gon’ live, but he gon’ be paralyzed from the waist down. He ain’t ever gon’ walk again or ever have any kids. That’s all three of the other children in yo’ family. You and LaValle is battin’ a thousand! And by the way, Amos got shot because of LaValle, not because of anythin’ to do with my business. It ’pears LaValle talked Jacques into sneakin’ down to hear Amos and his new band playin’ at the California Hotel. LaValle got himself a bottle of hooch from somewhere and got tore up at the hotel. He started a fight with some tough customers and the bouncer stepped in and stopped him from gettin’ his ass kicked. Those boys waited for LaValle after the show. Amos was just tryin’ to help him when he got shot. When the shootin’ started yo’ white boy took off runnin’ and left Amos lyin’ in the street. And on top of that he didn’t tell nobody nothin’ when he got home. Jacques went to the hospital with Amos. The hotel called me and told me that Amos had been gunned down.”

King slapped the steering wheel for emphasis. “Woman, you done thrown away yo’ whole family for that one boy. I hope to hell it was worth it, ’cause he about the only family you got now! While they was waitin’ for surgery, Amos told Jacques all about Sister Bornais. Amos asked me to call Della and tell her about the curse too. I didn’t feel too good about it, but Amos begged me to do it. He thought he was dyin’ and he wanted to clear his craw about Sister Bornais before he met his maker. I couldn’t finish the phone call with Della. I had to hang up, ’cause the girl dropped the phone and started screamin’. So, it’s just you and yo’ white boy now! After seventeen years that’s all you got!”

Serena’s eyes were red and inflamed from her tears. She wiped them with a handkerchief. “You promised me that you would never tell him that you were not his father,” she sniffed.