The Women of Brewster Place (7 page)

Her house slippers scraped the edges of the steps. Irresponsible, his counselors had said in school. High-natured, she had replied in her heart. Hadn’t he said that they were always picking on him; everyone had been against him, except her. She had been the refuge when he ran from school to school, job to job. They wanted too much. She had been so proud that he always turned to her—fled to her when he accused them of demanding the impossible. “Irresponsible”—the word whispered on the soft carpet as her feet dragged up the dark stairs. She had demanded nothing all these years, never doubting that he would be there when needed. She had carefully pruned his spirit to rest only in the enclaves of her will, and she had willed so little that he
had been tempted to return again and again over the last thirty years because his just being had been enough to satisfy her needs. But now her back was tightening in the mornings, and her grass was growing wild and ragged over the walkway while she pulled herself painfully up the stairs, alone.

Mattie slept lightly that night, and she dreamed that she was running and hiding from something among tall bamboo stalks and monstrously tangled weeds. She was terribly hungry and mysteriously frightened of the invisible thing that was searching for her. She had a piece of sugar cane in her hand, and she wedged it into her mouth and chewed, trying to stop the burning hunger in her stomach. She was desperately trying to chew the cane before this stalking thing found her. She sensed it coming closer through the tall grass, its heavy footsteps pounding in her ears, timed with the beating of her heart. She screamed as it parted the grass that was covering her. It was Butch. He was smiling and glowing, and his eyes were blue and spinning crazily in their sockets. He tried to pry open her mouth and scrape out the mashed wad of sugar cane. He grabbed her by the throat to keep the saliva from being swallowed, and she opened her mouth and screamed and screamed—shrill notes that vibrated in her ears and sent terrible pains shooting into her head.

Mattie woke up trembling and lay dazed among the tangled bedcovers. She covered her ears to block out the shrill screams that continued to echo through her head. After a moment she realized that the noise was coming from the telephone on her nightstand. Her heart was still pounding as she blindly groped for the phone.

“Yes?”

“Mama, it’s me.”

She held the hard plastic receiver to her ear and tried to make sense out of the electrical impulses that were forming
words—strange words that could have no possible association with the voice on the other end.

A bar. A woman. A fight. A booking.

“Basil?” Surely this voice was Basil’s.

Fingerprints. Manslaughter. Lawyer.

Mattie sat up in bed, gripped the receiver, and tried to follow these new words as they came flying out of the receiver and spun bizarre patterns in her head. She was frantically trying to link them into sentences, phrases—anything that she could place within her world—but it all made no sense.

“What are you talking about?” she yelled into the phone.

“…And the son-of-a-bitches beat me up! They beat me up, Mama!” And the voice began to cry.

This she understood. Conditioned by years of instinctual response to his tears, Mattie’s head cleared immediately, and she jumped out of bed.

“Who beat you up? Where are you?”

As the late November winds cut across her legs and blew under her coat, Mattie shivered violently and realized that she had rushed from the house without any slip or stockings. She pulled her tweed coat closer to her neck to cut off the wind and stop her body from trembling with cold, and moved on toward the police precinct. The brick and glass building threw out a ghostly light against the thin morning air. She paused a moment to catch her breath before the iron lettering engraved over the door and then pushed the slanted metal bar and went in.

The warm air in the room smelled like stale ink and dried saliva. There was nothing in it but a few scarred wooden benches and rows of closed smoked-glass doors. She had expected to see Basil, and his absence terrified her. She angrily approached the policeman at the desk.

Basil Michael. He had just called her from here. They had beat him up and hidden him away behind one of those doors. He was hurt, and she demanded to know why. She had come to take him home
.

The tired face sighed, flipped slowly through a clipboard of papers, and read one of them to her. No one had beat up her son; he had resisted arrest, and the officers involved had used due force to restrain the suspect. He was being held for involuntary manslaughter and assaulting a peace officer. He would be arraigned in Penal Court IVA, tomorrow afternoon
.

More new words—cold words that meant only one thing to her—she could not get to Basil, and he was somewhere in this building and he needed her. How dare they do this?

Sergeant Manchester massaged the tightness between his sleepy eyes and looked wearily at the desperate bewilderment that stood in front of him. Any pity that he might have felt for this old black woman lay buried under the memory of a hundred such faces on countless other mornings like this one. It never ended—someone’s somebody—all persistently filed in to bruise their heads upon the rigid walls of due process.

“Lady,” he said with a tone of genuine sadness, “there’s a man laying in the morgue because of an argument in a bar with your son, and a police officer has a broken wrist. Do you understand? Now if you want to help him, I suggest that you get a lawyer, or come back and talk to the public defender in the afternoon. That would be the best thing that
you could do for him right now. Okay? Please, go home. Here are the regulations and visiting hours.” And he bent his head back over his reports.

Mattie looked at the inked markings on the slip of paper that dictated the conditions for her ever touching Basil again. She studied the fine lines and loops, commas and periods that had come between them, and they etched themselves into her mind. She crumpled the paper and dropped it on the floor.

“Thank you,” she said, turned, and walked toward the door.

Sergeant Manchester glanced at her back, saw the paper on the floor, and called to her. “Lady, you forgot the visiting hours.”

“No, I didn’t,” she said, without turning around, and went through the door.

Cecil Garvin pulled off his glasses and tapped the handle against his teeth as he thoughtfully watched Mattie’s retreating back. He wondered why she hadn’t let the public defender take care of such a simple case. He would be receiving a huge fee for something that wouldn’t even require a trial
by jury if it was in the next county. Well, he sighed, and put his glasses back on. Thank God for ignorance of the law and frantic mothers.

“Baby, there ain’t nothing to worry about,” she told Basil as she stroked his hand, trying to calm the frightened look in his eyes. “I went to Reverend Kelly, and he referred me to a good criminal lawyer. Now he said it would be all right, and it will.”

“When am I getting out of here? That’s what I want to know.” And he snatched his hand away and nervously drummed it on the table.

“Tomorrow, after some kind of hearing, they’ll tell us when you’ll go to trial.”

“I don’t understand this!” he exploded. “Why should there be a trial? It was an accident! And that guy was picking on me over some broad. I don’t even know his name.”

“I know, honey, but a man is dead, and there’s gotta be some kind of proceeding about it.”

“Well, he’s better off than me. This place is a hellhole, and see what those bastards did to my face.”

Mattie winced as she forced herself to stare at his bruised face. “They said you resisted arrest, Basil, and broke a policeman’s wrist,” she said softly.

“So what!” He glared at her. “They wanted to put me in jail for something that wasn’t my fault. They had no right to do this to me, and now you’re sticking up for them.”

“Oh, Basil,” Mattie sighed, suddenly feeling the strain of the last twelve hours, “I ain’t sticking up for nobody, but we gotta face what happened so we can see our way clear from this.”

“It’s not ‘we,’ Mama, it’s me. I’m stuck in here—not you. It’s filthy and smelly, and I even heard rats under my bed last night.”

Mattie’s stomach knotted into tiny spasms.

“So when am I leaving?”

“Tomorrow at the hearing, when they tell us the bail, I’ll put it up and then you can get out.”

“Can’t you give them the bail money today? I can’t spend another night in this place.”

“Basil, there’s nothing I can do today. We have to wait.” Mattie pressed a trembling hand to her eyes to hold back the tears. She had never felt so impotent in her life. There was no way she could fight the tiny inked markings that now controlled their lives. She would give anything to remove him from this horrible place—didn’t he know that? But those blue loops, commas, and periods had tied her hands.

“Okay, fine. If you can’t, you can’t,” he said bitterly, and got up from his chair.

“Honey, we still got time, don’t you want to sit and talk?”

“There’s nothing left to talk about, Mama, unless you wanna hear about the broken toilets with three-day-old shit or the bedbugs that have ate up my back or the greasy food I keep throwing up. Other than that, I got nothing to say to you.”

He left Mattie sitting there, understanding his frustration but wishing he had chosen a kinder way of hurting her, by just hitting her in the face.

The judge set bail the next day, and Basil was given an early trial date. Cecil Garvin tried to appeal the bail, but the court denied his plea.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Michael, it’s the best I could do. There’s no need, really, to try and raise so much money. The case goes to trial in only two weeks, and it won’t be a complicated proceeding. I’ve talked to the district attorney, and they won’t push too heavily on the assault charge if we drop the implications of undue force in the arrest. So it’s going to work out well for all the parties involved. And your son will be free in less than fifteen days.”

“I still want to put up the bail,” Mattie said.

Garvin looked worried. “It’s a great deal of money, Mrs.
Michael, and you don’t have the ready assets for something like that.”

“I’ve got my house; it’s mine and paid for. Can’t I put that up for bail?”

“Well, yes, but you do understand that bail is only posted to insure that the defendant appears for trial. If they don’t appear, the court issues a bench warrant for the truant party and you forfeit your bond. You do understand that?”

“I understand.”

The lawyer looked thoughtfully over at Basil. “It’s only a matter of two weeks, Mrs. Michael. Some defendants spend months waiting for trial. Perhaps you should reconsider.”

Mattie stared at him, and she thought about the blonde girl in the silver frame on his desk. “If it was your daughter locked up in a place like that,” she said angrily, “could you stand there and say the same thing?”

His face reddened, and he stammered for a moment. “That’s not what I mean, Mrs. Michael. It’s just that with some people it’s better to…well, it’s up to you. It is your son, after all. Come along, and I’ll give you the necessary papers to take to a bonding company.”

The snow fell early that year. When Basil and Mattie left the precinct, the wide soft flakes were floating in gentle layers on the November air. Basil reached out and tried to grab one to give her, and he laughed as it melted in his hand.

“Remember how I used to cry when I tried to bring you a snowflake and it always disappeared?” He held his face up to the sky and let the snow fall on his closed lids. “Oh, God, Mama, isn’t it beautiful?”

“Beautiful? You always hated the snow.”

“Not now, it’s wonderful. It’s out here and free, like I am. I love it!” And he wrapped his arms around himself.

Mattie’s insides expanded to take in his joy.

“And I love you, Mama.” He put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “Thank you.”

Mattie sucked her teeth and playfully shoved him away. “Thank me for what? Boy, go on and get the car before I catch my death of cold in all this beautiful snow of yours.”

Mattie watched him as he moved through the parking lot almost singing, and she took in his happiness and made it her own just as she’d done with every emotion that had ever claimed him. She took in the sweetness of his freedom and let it roll around her tongue, while she savored its fragrant juices and allowed the syrupy fluid to coat her mouth and drip slowly down her throat.

She feasted on this sweetness during the next two weeks. Basil had been returned to her, and she reveled in his presence. He drove her to work in the mornings and would often be waiting when she got off. They cleaned the yard together and covered her shrubbery with burlap. They rearranged furniture and straightened the attic, and he even washed windows for her—a chore he had hated from childhood. There was no end to the things he did for her, and he stayed close to home. It was so good to have a nice home to come to, he told her. And she grew full from this nectar and allowed herself to dream again of the wife he would bring home and the grandchildren who would keep her spirit there.