The Turner House (14 page)

Inside was a black case the length of Lelah's femur and five inches wide. Engraved in a silver rectangular panel on the front of the case were the words
LELAH MARIE TURNER
, 6257
YARROW STREET
. The case held a twenty-nine-year-old Gemeinhardt flute in admirable condition. Triple silver-plated with a solid silver head joint, according to a yellowing card tucked into the velvet interior. Cha-Cha and Tina had purchased the instrument, but it was Francis and Viola who thought to get it engraved.

The local YMCA had a ragtag youth orchestra in which Lelah earned first chair at fourteen years old. She went on to hold prominent positions in her high school marching band, but what she remembered most fondly from those musical years was teaching herself all of the flute sections from the
Super Fly
soundtrack. She'd hated the movie, what with its half-naked women and everyone looking sweaty all the time, but Troy wouldn't let her use his boom box to play her cassette, so she was forced to watch the VHS more than two dozen times one winter break to get the notes down. Before putting down the flute junior year in favor of other pursuits (she couldn't remember what those pursuits were anymore, likely boys), she'd also memorized a good amount of Schubert, Haydn, and Bach. With her fingers in place now (not her mouth, for fear of mouse germs) she could make out only “Pomp and Circumstance” by memory. Disappointing.

The remaining items in the box weren't hers. Since no one else claimed the things and they didn't quite fall under the benchmark of worthlessness required to be lumped into Viola's boxes, she'd saved them. She'd first found the wide Japanese-looking dagger with the ivory handle wrapped in canvas in a drawer under Viola's china cabinet. It probably belonged to Troy, or Miles or perhaps Duke, as those three were the only ones who Lelah recalled having Asian tours while in the service. There was also a pair of door-knocker earrings, presumably gold, presumably belonging to Sandra, the eleventh Turner child, who'd worn so many heavy, dangly earrings in the seventies and eighties that the holes in her lobes were now long slits. Rounding out the collection of possibly valuable forgotten things was an old-fashioned pipe made out of dark wood—perhaps cherry or mahogany—that undoubtedly belonged to Francis Turner.

CHAINS-R-US was on Gratiot, less than a mile from the house. She hadn't been there before, but she'd been to the White Castle just south of it and the check-cashing place a little farther up. She didn't admit to herself as she cleaned that morning that she'd end up doing this, but part of her knew it would happen soon. The box had been somewhere in her consciousness since the first night back on Yarrow. On the periphery like a repressed memory. A low, persistent sound, like feedback from a television.

The space that housed CHAINS-R-US had been a banquet hall first. Brotherly Banquet was the site of Viola's sixtieth birthday celebration as well as Francis's retirement party and a host of baby/wedding/welcome-back-from-deployment gatherings. Its wood-paneled walls had witnessed many a Turner
Soul Train
line. The owner, Mr. Clive Brothers, had pink fluorescent lights installed in the women's restroom and blue fluorescent lights in the men's.

According to a scrolling LED banner out front, CHAINS-R-US specialized in cash-for-gold exchanges but provided traditional pawn services as well. The woman behind the bulletproof window was what Lelah, for lack of a better reference point, would call ghetto-Asian. The charm on her necklace said
THANH
in tiny gold cursive, so Lelah assumed her to be Vietnamese, maybe Hmong, but Thanh's hair was slicked back into a ponytail with the baby hairs gelled down like teenage girls around the way had been doing since time immemorial, and held in place with a plastic balls hair tie. Lelah fought the urge to tell Thanh the same thing she wanted to tell every around-the-way girl: you're beautiful, now go wash that gunk out of your hair. Thanh's nails were long, electric blue, and acrylic, and she popped her gum like her life depended on it.

“You're going to have to give me stuff one by one on the carousel,” she said.

Her voice sounded high and sweet, maternal even, not how Lelah had imagined. The dissonance unnerved her. She looked down into her box, at the flute case that was hers and all of the rest that wasn't. The pipe couldn't go. No, you could not pawn a dead man's things, especially if that dead man was your father. She put the pipe in her back pocket. The rest she would come back for, she promised herself. Starting with the door knockers, she placed the items on the plastic carousel for Thanh to spin around and retrieve on her side of the window.

Thanh rubbed the earrings between her palms, held them up to the light.

“These are only gold
plated.
I'll give you twenty.”

Lelah opened her mouth to speak, perhaps to point out how heavy the earrings were, but truth was, she'd only pawned things one other time and didn't know the weight of gold from that of brass. She nodded.

Next was the dagger. Thanh unfolded it from its canvas envelope, ran one neon nail along the blade, then carried it into the back, presumably for a second opinion.

“I'll give you two hundred for this,” Thanh said upon her return.

“Wha?” Lelah said, not to Thanh as much as to herself. The dagger was likely worth a lot more than she'd expected, and maybe she could haggle Thanh up a bit, but it could also be that Thanh and Co. didn't know a good fake when they saw one. She decided to not rock the boat.

“Two hundred sounds about right.”

“Okay, good,” Thanh said. She opened the flute case, read the old information card, checked the pads, removed the head joint, and weighed it in her palm.

“Fifty for this.”

“Fifty? That's like thirty years old, and the head joint is solid silver.”

“I know. I felt it.” Thanh's eyes trailed to a small television in the corner. A cooking show was on, and the host molded ground meat into patties.

“It's in almost new condition! Won't people pay extra for an antique like this?” Lelah's inflection went up a little too high for her liking at the end of this question. She was begging.

Thanh's eyes returned to her.

“Most dealers count something to be an antique after one hundred years, so no, this
isn't
an antique. What it
could
be is vintage, but flutes don't automatically go up in value with age. Maybe if it was
solid
silver, or gold, or platinum, somebody might call it vintage, but it isn't, okay? Besides, do you see any kids running in here to buy some
flutes?
”

Lelah turned around and saw one boy, maybe thirteen, in an oversized T-shirt that had seen better days, eyeing a silver chain on display behind more plastic. No use in pushing her point further. It appeared that Thanh knew her stuff.

Back inside the Yarrow Street kitchen, a feeling like nausea forced Lelah to sit on the floor. She hadn't asked Thanh how long she had to buy the items back.
You won't go back for them, and you'll piss away this money at a table.
This thought was the true thought, never mind the promises she'd made to herself beforehand. She'd just sold things that weren't hers, maybe for a lot less than they were worth, and the crushing, life-changing regret she hoped to feel hadn't arrived. An act like this should've spurred so much shame that she would have no choice but to make a vow to herself to change. The people in GA often talked about hitting rock bottom. One woman, heavyset with a vaguely West Indian accent, said turning tricks out of her back shed while her kids slept in the house had done it. She'd gone too low and knew she was in danger of permanently becoming someone else if she didn't stop. Lelah was waiting for that moment, an act that put her so close to the precipice of losing herself that she'd have no choice but to shake the image of those chips from her brain, the feel of them from her sensory memory. She knew it wasn't this, wasn't now, because she'd already partitioned sixty dollars off in her mind for a gambling “emergency.” If it wasn't this, then what and when would it be?

At some point the notion had entered her mind that she was special, that she deserved more than a healthy baby girl, a roof over her head, and whatever job she could find. A dangerous, selfish notion to leave unattended, Lelah thought now. And one so hard to get rid of once it was there. She might have been in this very kitchen, tucking ant baits into corners on the butter-colored linoleum when it happened.

FALL
1944

• Jobs Francis Turner held in his first 6 months in Detroit : 4
  

• Jobs willfully abandoned: 1½
  

• Rooms rented: ½
  

• Money sent to Viola: $7
  

• Alcohol consumed: Many paychecks' worth
  

• Women slept with: 1
  

• Number of times he slept with her: He stopped counting.
  

Here is the truth about self-discovery: it is never without cost. Not now, in the age of create-your-own college majors, the Peace Corps, and yoga retreats, and definitely not during World War II for a young black father newly migrated to a strange city. That very first night in Detroit, after nursing two scotches for three hours, Francis talked his way into a dishwashing job at the bar on Beaubien. The owner and cook, a redbone man named Clydell, had family down in Little Rock and hired Francis based on shared Arkansan roots. For a month Francis washed congealed plates of leftover corned beef hash, smothered turkey, and oxtails from two in the afternoon until one in the morning. An unfortunate schedule because it cut into time on his rented half room. Once off work, after getting something to eat and cleaning himself up, he usually had three or four hours to sleep before the sun came charging across the low midwestern horizon and Mr. Jenkins came knocking for his space. Mr. Jenkins, a short, husky fellow from Kentucky, either worked in some sort of brewery or was a beer-loving drunk, Francis gathered. The smell of sour, yeasty sweat lingered in their shared room throughout the night. Francis took to gulping down coffee throughout his shift to fight drowsiness. The coffee made him jittery by the time work was over, and to help him relax he frequented a blind pig on Saint Antoine and Gratiot where for a nickel a day he rented a little locker to store his own hooch. He discovered he was a bourbon man, not a scotch man like Reverend Tufts. He'd sit in that upstairs illegal establishment and think about how his mother had washed dirty dishes and drawers so that he'd be a preacher, not a dishwasher himself. He'd also think of his father, with gapped teeth like his own, and other facial features he couldn't quite remember. He thought he remembered his father sitting on their porch in the afternoons, chewing snuff and spitting into a pail, but often this memory would bleed into one of Reverend Tufts sitting on his porch and reading the Bible. Reverend Tufts would go to Pine Bluff once or twice a month and come home very late at night or early the next morning, leaving Francis alone in the two-story house. These one or two nights alone were when Francis would think about his father the most. It hadn't occurred to him until the last summer he was in Arkansas that Tufts might have had a woman he saw in Pine Bluff, some romance that a widower pastor had reason to keep in the dark.

If nothing else, he had learned from Reverend Tufts the dangers of making one's dreams and desires too public. Someone could take them from you, exile you to a cold, flat, and distant place. Francis was not naïve about the dangers Down South, but it was home. His father's grave in an old colored cemetery. His mother gone, but Texas more feasible to travel to from Arkansas than Detroit. Had he left of his own accord, this hankering for home would not have been so strong.

On the first freezing day in October, Francis discovered that the back of the bar on Beaubien had poor insulation. The patrons basked in warmth, but even Clydell's sizzling griddle could not prevent the kitchen from slipping into the thirties. On Clydell's advice, Francis spent the small amount of money he'd saved on a heavier coat to wear throughout his shift. No use. Whenever he pulled his hands out of the dishwater, his knuckles ached like he had a bad case of early-onset arthritis. He started spiking his coffee with bourbon to stay warm. Soon enough he called Clydell a stingy, pock-faced, crooked nigger under his breath (too loud, alas) and got the boot. It was a milestone. He'd never given words like that a go out of his own mouth, not directed at someone in particular. Never mind that Clydell's face wasn't marred by pocks as much as heavily freckled, or that Francis hadn't quite cussed the man to his face; he felt one step closer to holding his own up here where men were crooked but pretended to be magnanimous.

That feeling lasted until rent on his half room was due. To say that Francis slept with Odella Withers, the mistress of his boardinghouse, to secure free housing would not be accurate. He might have slept with her sooner had he seen her for longer than the moment when she handed over his bedding each night. Lonely as he was, Francis might have slept with one of the prostitutes he often saw smoking cigarettes and laughing alongside men in Paradise Valley bars, had he thought he could afford one. Odella Withers had a wide mouth, very straight, square teeth, and bright pink gums. A mouth that made her look happier than Francis thought she was. Brown skin, not as dark as Viola's but close. Francis Turner had a predilection for darker women. Perhaps it was a subconscious effort to prevent potential offspring from defecting to white, or maybe it was because his own mother had been darker than his ill-fated beige father. Francis would sit in the armchair across from Odella in the boardinghouse's miserable little parlor and tell her about his long day of looking for work. How he'd hitched a ride down to River Rouge to see about work, only to have the slots for black men snapped up before he arrived. How he was in line to see about work at a foundry when an ambulance pulled up and word spread that a man had been nearly cooked alive. He told her about his week and a half working as a runner at the salt mine, how it reminded him of the time he'd traveled down to the Gulf with Reverend Tufts for a revival and felt his lungs fill with salty sea air miles before they got close enough to see the coast. He didn't tell her that he'd quit the salt mines because, sea air notwithstanding, he could not bear to be so far underground, the white walls dwarfing him, his own shadow a stranger as he hunched over and shuttled carts of supplies to white men similar to how he imagined Hebrew slaves carting stone at Egyptian quarries. Few people think about the individual lives lost to make something huge, but Francis thought about it often, had thought about it since the first time he read Exodus as a child. He feared he'd die in that dried-up ocean cave, either from a blast gone wrong or plain old sun-starved misery.