The Summer We Got Free (32 page)

Pastor Goode moved
to the window and leaned against the sill.

“I know what that feels like,” she continued. “I know
what that do to your soul. That’s the reason I snapped when my boy died. I
didn’t know it, but I was already on the edge, and it wasn’t gone take too much
to push me over. What happened to Geo was more than enough. I never got over
what they did to my father. I never will.”

Goode sighed and
gave her a bored look. “You done?”

“I know it’s hurting you,” she said. “I know it’s
eating you up and has been all this time. You lost your father and your son.
Just like me. I
know
.”

He shook his
head, mumbled something to himself that she couldn’t make out. Then he leaned
his head back against the window, stared up at the ceiling. “You want to know
what happened to my father?”

“I already
know,” Regina said. “Cops killed him.”

 
“That’s right. He died in jail. You know the
reason he was in there in the first place?”

She shook her head no.

“The reason he was in jail was because somebody
attacked a woman out in the suburbs near where we lived—somebody who was
tall and skinny and black, just like him. The woman who was attacked identified
my father as the one that did it. But it
wasn’t
him that did it. I know that ‘cause he was home with
me and
my mother
when it happened. We
was
eating dinner.
Biscuits and black-eyed peas—I never will forget it. My mother told the police
that, but they didn’t believe her because she was his wife and bound to lie for
him. So they took him, locked him up. He was in there three days when we got
the call that he’d tried to escape and they shot him.”

Regina remembered, as she and her mother and siblings
had lain hidden under their neighbor’s beds, the sounds of gunshots heavy as
thunder in the air.

“But that’s only half the story,” Goode said. “My
father was a drifter most of his life. He moved around from place to place, farm
to farm, city to city, looking for work. He didn’t like to feel stuck, he liked
to be able to get up and go when he needed to. When he married my mother and
they had me, that didn’t change. We
was
always moving,
never stayed in one place more than a few months. We never got to know our
neighbors. I never made any friends, ‘cause if I did I’d just have to leave
them, and I got tired of being sad about it. We never joined a church. When my
father was arrested, we had lived in Virginia for seven months, and we didn’t
have anybody to turn to. There wasn’t
no
neighbors who
could say that he was at home when that woman was attacked, because no neighbors
ever stopped by. There wasn’t
no
church to rally
behind him. No reverend to vouch for his character. There wasn’t
nobody
to help him. After he was killed, and my uncle took
me and my mother in,
I saw the safety of his community and
his church around him, and I wanted that for myself. I decided right then, at
fourteen, that I would never be without those things. And that, if I could, if
the Lord called me to, I would make sure that nobody I knew went without them,
either. And I have done that. I have spent my whole adult life doing just that.”

“Bringing people together in community?”

“That’s right. These people need me. They need me to
protect them and support them and keep them close to God, and that’s what I
do.”

“Is that what
you did for Grace Kellogg?” Regina said. “Is that what you did for us?”

“I tried to. I
tried hard as I knew how. It aint my fault your daughter has the devil in her.
I tried to put her on the Lord’s path, but she aint want to go that way. So it
was my duty to protect the rest of my flock from her influence.”

“You might have
started out wanting to help people, to keep them safe,” Regina said. “Maybe
that’s true. But somewhere along the way you decided that meant controlling
everything they do. It stopped being about the Lord and started being all about
Ollie Goode.”

He shook his
head. “You don’t know what you talking about. I’m gone ask you one more time to
leave.”

“I told you I’m
gone leave when I’m ready,” she said. “And I aint ready. I got one more thing
to say. And that’s this: we are responsible for what happened to Geo.
I
am responsible for it. Because, no
matter what happened, no matter who did the killing, I was his mother, and it
was my job to protect him, to keep him safe. I didn’t, so the blame is mine.
But I aint to blame for what happened to Kenny.
Nobody in my
family is to blame for that. The Lord wasn’t bringing down
no
judgment on us that morning. I don’t know why it happened, but I know it wasn’t
that. We loved your boy, we let him breathe and be
hisself
,
the way you never did. He loved us. And dedicating your life to making our
lives miserable is the worst thing you ever could have done in his name.”

Goode stood
there, shaking, glaring at her, and saying nothing.

“Now,” Regina
said, “I’m gone leave. ‘Cause I’m ready.”

1959

M
addy and Doris
sat on Regina’s front porch, all of them drinking iced tea and planning the
next week’s block party. Ava came out of the house and ran down the front steps
without saying a word to anybody.

“Ava!” Regina
called to her.

Ava stopped.

“I know you aint
just walk past Miss Maddy and Miss Doris without saying hello. What’s the
matter with you?”

“Hi, Miss Maddy,”
Ava said. “Hello, Miss Doris.”

“Where you
going, anyway?” Regina wanted to know.

“Nowhere,” Ava
said. “Just over to Ellen’s.”

“Well, y’all
have a good time, baby,” Maddy said.

Ava smiled and
ran off.

Regina thought
she saw Doris frown before she turned back to her iced tea.

“I know you got something to say about what Ava did,
Doris,” Regina said. “So go ahead and say it.”

Doris shrugged.
“Well, maybe I do have something to say.”

“Big surprise,”
said Maddy.

“Go on, then.”

“I think your
daughter got a point,” Doris said.

Maddy leaned
closer to Doris. “Say what?”

Doris frowned.
“You heard me.”

“I heard
something
. Aint no way it
coulda
been you.”

“Hush, Maddy,”
Regina said, and looked at Doris. “What point you think she got?”

Doris looked
around, as though checking to see if anybody was listening. There were people
sitting out on their porches nearby, but no one was paying any attention to
Doris. Still, she lowered her voice a little and said, “That the pastor got too
much power around here.”

Regina and Maddy
exchanged a look of skepticism.

“I been thinking about it for a while,” Doris said.
“Ever since that whole mural idea came up in the first place. I never thought
we should have one. I think it’s tacky. But Pastor aint
ask
me. Matter fact, he aint even ask the elders, and some of them been in that
church longer than he been alive. He just decided it all on his own. Well, I
didn’t think that was right. But everybody just went along with
it,
even people I know for sure didn’t want it.

And it just got me thinking.” She looked around again.
“Now, I sure don’t condone what that child did, putting us all in chains up on
the church like that. That was disrespectful. She
always been
too wild, if you ask me. But she do got a point, is all I’m saying.”

Maddy reached
over and pinched Regina’s arm.

“
Ow
. What you do that for?”

“I wanted to
make sure I aint dreaming this.”

“So, why you
pinch
me
?”

“Oh,” Maddy
said. She held out her hand. “Pinch me.”

Regina slapped
her hand away.

“Lot of people
don’t seem to agree with me, though,” Doris said.

This was not
news to Regina. In the week since Ava’s stunt with the mural, not a day had
passed when somebody hadn’t told her that her daughter had crossed the line.
Vic Jones had even repeated the pastor’s sentiment, that Ava had the devil in
her. Malcolm hadn’t said anything about what had happened, but he also hadn’t
come by even once in the last week. At church that morning, he had greeted
Regina and George unenthusiastically, nodding as he went by, towards a pew a
few rows behind them, not sitting with them as he almost always had before.

For every two
people who reacted the way Malcolm had, though, there had been another one who
seemed to share Doris’ view.

“Sometimes I think Pastor Goode wants to have too much
control over folks,” Jane Lucas told Regina one afternoon, as they walked together
from the bus stop to their block. “He likes to judge people, but the bible says
that’s the Lord’s job.”

Regina sighed.
“Well, Ava aint never liked him. And, tell you the truth, I don’t think he ever
liked her.”

“What he got to
not like about a little girl?”

“I saw it the
first time he ever laid eyes on her,” Regina said. “People react to Ava in
strange ways, you know, they always have, so I didn’t think a whole lot about
it at the time. But I think he had a feeling he wasn’t gone be able to control
her.”

“So, you agree
he’s trying to control people?”

“I don’t know,”
Regina said. “But you remember Grace Kellogg?”

Jane nodded. “Of
course.”

“Well, I always
thought that wasn’t right. I didn’t think she should have been
throwed
out the church like that. But what really bothered
me was how everybody turned on her, just because the pastor said she wasn’t welcome
no more.”

“I never did,”
Jane said. “I still speak to her to this day.”

“So do I,” said
Regina. “And my children still visit with her every now and then. But did you
ever tell the pastor you thought what he did was wrong?”

Jane shook her
head. “No, I didn’t.”

“Well, I did,”
Regina
said. “And he aint like it one bit.”

She had gone to him that day after the Easter Bazaar
and told him that she didn’t think Grace deserved to be kicked out of Blessed
Chapel. “We all sinners in one way or another, Pastor,” she had said. “Aint the
church supposed to be there for us even when we don’t do right? Especially
then?”

“I gave Grace a chance to repent,” he said. “She
refused to. Said she didn’t regret what she had done. It’s my job to protect
this congregation from bad influences, from people who would turn them away
from God.” He had been calm and polite, even pleasant, in his voice and
demeanor, but there had been something very final in his tone, something that
had let Regina know that he had made up his mind and that was that. She hadn’t
liked it, but she hadn’t argued, because she wasn’t raised that way, wasn’t
taught to argue with a man of God. That had been her way of dealing with him
ever since. Whenever she disagreed with him about something that she thought
was important, she told him so, but when he went ahead and did what he wanted
to do anyway, she never challenged him.

Ava had, though. Ava always had.

She said goodbye to Jane Lucas when they got to her
house, and then continued home, and when she got there she found Ava in her
bedroom, on her bed with her drawing pad in her lap. She came in and sat beside
her, and put her arms around her daughter, and kissed her face. Ava didn’t look
up from her drawing, but she leaned into her mother a little.

“You an amazing child, Ava,” Regina said.

“I’m not apologizing to that preacher.”

“I aint trying to get you to apologize. I don’t even
think you ought to.”

Ava looked up from the drawing. “Good,” she said. Then
she shrugged. “It wouldn’t make a difference, anyway. ‘Cause I’m really on his
bad side now.”

Sarah had never said anything about Sondra
and Ava at the top of the stairs.
She
knew that Sondra had always hated Ava, since they were little. While that
childish dislike barely resembled the loathing she saw in the girl’s eyes
that day after church, she told herself, then and for
weeks after, that Sondra would
never really have done it, that she would
have snatched back her foot before Ava tripped, that she did not really want to
hurt Ava that much. And that her own failure to warn her sister, then, her
hesitation, was not as evil as it felt. She tried not to think about the steepness
of that stairwell.

Sitting at the dinner table a few days later, she
imagined what her family would say if she told them, what they would think if
they knew she had just stood there, had watched her sister walking into danger,
and had not said a word. She kept silent.

Every time Ava left the house, Sarah worried. She took
to jumping up whenever she saw her sister headed for the front door, asking
where she was going, and wouldn’t she rather stay inside and play cards or
something. After the sixth or seventh time, Ava rolled her eyes, annoyed. “Why you
so interested in me all of a sudden? You never cared before.”

“I
care
,”
Sarah insisted. “
Of course
I do.”

Ava frowned and left.

Sarah waited. She sat and waited until Ava came back,
and each time her sister walked back in through the door, Sarah felt relief
course through her.

One evening, she passed Ava’s room and saw her standing
in front of the mirror, brushing her hair. She was wearing a skirt, and dress
shoes.

“Where you going?”

“To a party,” Ava said. “And, no, I don’t want to stay
home and play Old Maid.”

“Mama and Daddy are letting you go to a party by
yourself?”

“No. Geo and Kenny are going, too.”

Sarah went to their brother’s room and found him
practicing dance moves in front of the mirror. Kenny was sitting on the bed,
reading a comic book. He had eaten dinner at their house for the second day in
a row.

“You live here now?” Sarah asked him.

He looked up from his comic, his face turning pink.

“Leave him alone,” Geo said.

“I thought your father didn’t want you over here
anymore,” said Sarah.

Pastor Goode had forbade him to go into the Delaney
house, in case the Lord rained down fire on it or something. Kenny didn’t seem
bothered about it. “I like it better over here than at my house.
Especially when my mother aint home.
She’s in Jersey at my
grandparent’s house, and my dad can’t cook for shit.”

George walked by and stopped when he saw Geo in front
of the mirror. “Where you think you going?”

“Party. Mama said we could.”

“You cut them hedges?”

Geo frowned. “I forgot. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Yeah, you will,” George said. “And you gone be up
bright and early, too, ‘cause you aint going to no party.”

“But mama said—”

“I don’t care what Regina said. I’m your father and I
say you aint going.”

“Father?”
Geo said, quietly but
still loud enough to be heard.
“I don’t know what kind of father you
supposed to be.”

George took a step into the room. “What you say?”

Geo glared at him, his face hard and angry like Sarah
had almost never seen it. He shook his head. “I aint say nothing.”

George peered at him and for a moment Sarah was sure
Geo was going to get it. But then their father turned and walked out of the
room.

Geo turned back to the mirror and stared at himself
for a long moment, before picking up his brush and brushing his hair.

“We aint going?” Kenny asked.

“Hell, yeah, we going,”
Geo
said.

Sarah shook her head. “You can’t. Daddy just
said—”

“I was right here when he said it. I don’t need
no
playback. We going, and that’s all.”

She thought of threatening to tell, but considering
the look he’d given their father, she decided against it.

He looked at her reflection in the mirror. “Come with
us. It’s gone be fun.”

She hated parties.
So many people
not seeing her at the same time.
“Will Sondra be there?” she asked.

He laughed. “Nobody invites Sondra nowhere.”

She nodded, a little relieved. “Oh. Well. Just keep an
eye on Ava, okay?”

He turned around and looked seriously at her. “Why?
What’s wrong with Ava?”

“Nothing, Geo. I’m just saying, look out for her.”

“I always do.”

That evening, Sarah sat on the sofa, watching
television and waiting for them to come back. Their curfew was nine o’clock. At
eight-forty-five
, she went and stood on the front
porch, looking up and down, up and down the street. Nine o’clock came, and then
went. She walked down to the sidewalk and looked both ways up and down the
block. At nine-fifteen, Ava rounded the corner at Fifty-Ninth and came down the
street. When Sarah saw her, she ran back into the house and sat herself down in
front of the television again. Ava came in, looking sleepy.

“How was the party?” Sarah asked.

Ava shrugged. “Kenny tried to kiss me,” she said,
sounding bored.

Sarah frowned. She turned off the television and
walked past Ava up the stairs.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ava asked.

“Nothing,” Sarah said, annoyed. She opened her bedroom
door, just as Ava opened hers. “Where’s Geo, anyway? It’s past your curfew.”

Ava yawned. “He can’t be that far behind me,” she
said, and she went to bed.

***

She didn’t know she was dead. She was standing in the
foyer of her house, but it was colder than it should have been and there was
little light. Geo was sitting cross-legged on the
floor,
his head leaned back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling.

Why’s it so
cold, Geo?
She rubbed her arms, but
couldn’t feel it.

Is it?
Geo asked.

Yes.
She looked around. It was definitely their house, but
there was something off about it. It was eerily quiet, devoid of any sound but
their voices, no noise coming from the other rooms or from outside.
I don’t like it. Let’s go back to the way it
was.

I can’t.

She looked at him, rubbed her unfeeling arms again.
Yes, you can. Let’s just go back. It’s too
cold now.

He looked at her for the first time, and his eyes were
very dark and very empty.
I can’t go back
cause I aint nothing now. I aint got nothing to go back in. My thing is broke.
My thing that I was in before I came here. It got broke and that’s why I’m
here.

What about my
thing?
Ava asked.

Your thing
aint broke. You can go back. You aint here because your thing got broke, so you
can go back.

I don’t want
to go back.

You have to,
Ava.

She felt herself being pulled, as though there was a
hook right behind her navel and something was tugging at it. She reached out
for her brother. Geo hesitated,
then
reached out for
her hand. Their fingertips touched.

The next thing she knew, she was looking up at her
mother.

“Mama, where is my brother?” she asked. “Where is
Geo?”

***

Ava was still in her bed, still and quiet under the
covers, though the room was getting hot. Regina had gone up there because
neither Ava nor Geo had come down to breakfast, and neither had answered when
she called to them from the bottom of the stairs. Regina had entered Ava’s room
and found her still in bed, and tried not to think about how strange it was
that Ava was still sleeping, Ava who was often up at dawn, drawing or painting
at the sunrise. Regina called her daughter’s name and gently shook her, but Ava
did not wake. And there was a moment. A moment Regina would remember for the
rest of her life, when she knew Ava was not there, not in her body, which lay
still beneath the covers, not in the space around her, not in the house, not in
the world. Ava, her Ava, who, when Regina had once been overwhelmed with
sadness and had broken down in tears while sewing up a hole in a sock, had, at
two years old, climbed into her mothers lap and said, clear as morning, “Mama,
I am here with you,” was no longer here, no longer with her. In that moment,
the air in the getting-hot room got hotter, thicker, heavy like cooking grease,
and Regina could not draw a breath. She grabbed Ava by the shoulders and shook
her harder, the weight of the moment closing in on her, congealing, molding out
a sticky place for itself in reality, and she shook Ava and shook her, her own
face contorted in the effort, her own soul starting to split open at its corners
and bleed, and then, in the quiet, in the still, that moment passed and Ava
awoke, with a start and a sharp intake of breath, and looked at her mother the
way she had first looked at her, a few seconds after being born, as if to say,
“How did I get here?” And Regina, just like she had done that first time, held
her daughter against her heart and trembled. After another few seconds, Ava
pulled away, and looked at her mother just as she had as a newborn baby, and
said with words this time what she had expressed without words then. “Mama,
where is my brother?”