Promise, page 17
“At least your mother didn’t abandon you,” said Mama.
“She abandoned me in other ways.”
“Who could do such a thing—leave a newborn baby on the steps of a church,” said Mama as if my father hadn’t spoken at all. “I could’ve died, and it wouldn’t have meant much to Ginny, long as she kept her dance card filled. Trifling. All I’ve seen my entire life is a proud woman who chose herself over everything, even her daughter. I’d never do that to Cinthy or Ezra. Or you. Because I know how to love. My mama doesn’t know a thing about it.” My mother’s fit of coughing silenced whatever my father was about to say. I heard Mama moan the word water. I pictured my father, moving from his chair to their bed, and holding Mama against his chest with his arm until the spell passed.
“Baby, you’re getting yourself worked up, which is about the worst thing you could do,” said Daddy. “You’re not well enough for that rage. It’ll make the symptoms worse. We’ve got to get you strong enough to take the surgery. If Ginny’s offering to help, we may need to accept it. Until you’re better.”
“Until what?” asked Mama bitterly. “I will make peace with my God while I make my last arrangements.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said.
“I can’t help it. I didn’t expect my life to—”
“Your life is here.”
“Heron,” Mama said. Her voice was clear. “I’m not sure I’m willing to let my mother have the chance to hurt me ever again. Even if I do need her.”
“Call your mother, forgive her, put up with her, and let her love you finally,” said my father. His voice was muffled. Maybe he’d pressed his mouth against Mama’s cheek the way he often did. When he cleared his throat, it sounded like he was sitting up. “Maybe she’s ready to explain.”
“Did your mother ever?”
“Ever what?”
“Explain,” said Mama.
“She couldn’t,” he said. “I killed her star.”
“God took him,” said Mama. “You were just a boy.”
“I was at the wheel,” my father said.
Alma Elizabeth Kindred
Alma Elizabeth Kindred, my paternal grandmother, was always only called Comfort. When a child receives a nickname too soon it can be ruinous. My grandmother, even as a baby, was destined for contrariness. Before she could even make tears of her own, the people of Damascus placed the tears they wept for her murdered parents and their lost children inside her. Anointed with their legacy, she was a walking death, a breathing ghost. Whoever she might have become on her own was lost.
Inwardly, Comfort sighed when the people of Damascus dangled heaven, hell, and paradise in front of her. Salvation and sin, Satan and saints, bored her. Too intense, solipsistic and childish, she thought. The dusty pendulum of punishment, sacrifice, and reward made her sneeze. Maybe she was allergic to the air in the Promised Land.
Sometimes my grandmother stood in the sanctuary of Hinder Me Not, staring at the framed photograph of her young parents, trying to make her eyes water, but she had no imagination to reenact their death.
Comfort’s strangeness, so unlike the temperament of her gracious mother, Callie, unsettled the women of Damascus. She was a force they could not define. But in spite of the shallow concealment of their dislike of her, they were loyal to her strangeness. Words like hussy, heifer, and tackhead were swallowed, because their aging ears could still recall the light green laughter of Calliope Kindred. At times, they caught themselves wondering if Alma “Comfort” Kindred enjoyed their unease just a little bit.
Comfort grew. Lovely, separate. She was raised by these women’s hands, until one day, when the Hinder Me Not ushers gave my grandmother a metal ring, shining with a pair of keys to her parents’ home, which had been kept locked, cleaned, and revered. You grown and got to make a way, she was told.
Instead of continuing to preserve the house as a sort of museum, Comfort threw open the windows to let out the old-timey smell of mothballs, old marigolds, and mute bleach.
First things first, she needed to breathe. Then she wanted to fuck. How could she do either with a crucifix on damn near every wall, including three in the biggest bedroom? Could she ever be delicate enough with her mother’s china set to drink whisky over the morning newspapers like she wanted? Where would her own clothing fit, tight and bright, mostly shades of red and gold, if she didn’t remove her mother’s faded calico and muslin dresses from the carved mirror wardrobe?
The sweat and submission of fucking (the submission not and never hers) made each breath she took her ecstasy. After sex, she soaped her body and sighed with relief that she’d given nothing up, given nothing away. Men could find softness only in her skin. Nothing else in her would yield.
When two different men each gave Comfort a son, her eyes flickered outward briefly, then returned to the island of her inner self, where her thoughts ripened like untouched fruit, falling alone inside silent groves. Sometimes she caught herself looking down at the two beings she had made, terrified. She couldn’t bear to tell them the truth, which was that she had next to no interest when it came to their fates.
No wonder, then, that my teenaged father and his baby brother took off, stealing one of her old boyfriends’ cars, which had lain deserted and opulent next to the butterfly bush.
They didn’t get very far.
The crash was written up in all the local columns. The name of the younger boy who died never appeared in print, because it was such a beautiful name it made Black people weep. Even white people stopped talking while they were reading the tragic story.
The eldest boy, my father, was hurled halfway through the window, so hard his arms were torn into tentacles of muscle, his bones broken and splintered under the enameled steering wheel. The baby boy, who was Comfort’s favorite because he was similar to her in his aloof temperament, was discovered in the branches of a tree beyond the wreckage, headless. His arms were opened like the wooden wings of a cross. The head had rolled some distance, and it would take time for it to be found.
The elders of Damascus wept and shook their heads. Heron Kindred had mangled his and their legacy. Killed his brother. Behind my daddy’s back they called him Cain. And the townspeople who worshiped the ashes of Theodore and Calliope Kindred couldn’t bring themselves to hint that maybe some of the new tragedy was Comfort’s fault. That those young lions had been in need of attention.
From that day forth, my father, Heron Theodore Kindred, had to do the living of both sons.
My father’s car accident took place the summer before his senior year. As Daddy recovered—he ended up convalescing for much of the school year—he completed his assignments alone at home. Once or twice a week a fellow student, or one of the Hinder Me Not ushers, would come by and pick up his work to take it to his teacher. When girls came by, he could see the word freak squatting on their tongues. With adults, he could almost taste the word murderer in their spit.
His mother, Comfort, fed him. She taught him how to bathe, dress, and heal himself by staying reserved and untouchable by the old folks who said he ought to spend each day of his life in hell. These lessons were offered swiftly before Comfort returned to the remote archipelago of her own mind. Daddy tried not to be a nuisance or needy, until he realized that his mother’s emptiness actually prevented him from irritating her.
They never mentioned his younger brother, each aware of what could happen if they did. My father hoped that if he mentioned that name, perhaps forgiveness could follow. But my grandmother’s silence told him there was no real reconciliation on offer. Uselessly, he tried to push her, tried another angle, but eventually they both recognized the futility of it.
So he crawled into books.
My father lifted his lanky, tender body into sentences, stories, dictionaries, almanacs, astronomy, and bizarre anatomies of endangered creatures. In his mind, my father visited indigenous villages and the horizons of other continents. The more miles he trekked across paper—histories of world wars, incomprehensible genocides, inscrutable pages of lost languages—the more he mistrusted the whole God situation, which seemed to ask humans to forget and forgive too much.
This felt especially true once a year, when the entire congregation gathered in a little patch of earth behind the new Hinder Me Not to pray over the spot where the old church had been. They screamed the names of the children that Calliope Kindred held in her burning arms. They pressed their fingers down into the earth and said they could feel the bones of God poking out.
While they never required my grandmother or my father to speak, it was essential that the last living Kindreds be present to witness the stations of their devotion. They spoke of Theodore Kindred, a great man struck down too soon by white folks. They wiped tears from their faces with the sides of their hands and said how much Callie Kindred, a fine woman in all respects, gave of herself to her husband and his vision for Damascus. The whole thing never lasted more than a few minutes, this shuddering and wailing, before shortbread cookies and lemonade appeared.
A year had passed and my father was a high school graduate, crippled in body and spirit, as he attempted to appraise his future. The summer had revived the young things that teemed in his body against his will.
He did not have the easy, lusty glow of other boys his age. At school, he never threw his arm lazily along the delicate, angora-soft shoulders of a sweetheart. He was never found slouched inside an arrogant posse of boys who chuckled about what they’d done or seen. He was never invited into the boys’ washroom, where they studied their long young dicks. He was not invited to tread the coarse yet silken vocabulary of getting some. When he heard the easy wonder of the word pussy, he turned away in shame.
After the accident, if he opened his eyes for too long, Daddy would glimpse what those good-looking girls of Damascus saw when they bothered to look at him at all—an aloof, one-armed freak who’d killed his own brother and whose family was cursed so bad the parents of these girls kept saying, behind closed doors of course, it would’ve been better for the whole family to have been burned alive in the church.
One day, early in summer, after the annual memorial to his grandparents, my father spied a tall, intense-looking beauty at the edge of the church lawn. Her arms were folded across her chest as she studied the church. Their eyes caught, then hooked together in a conspiratorial gaze.
When the young woman at the edge of the church lawn shifted her arms to reveal a book pressed against her breasts, he was breathless. My father then observed a striking woman approach the girl and begin talking to her. Together, they turned and vanished onto a path that led to the farthest parking lot.
Daddy knew the woman. She was Virginia Abbott, often simply called Ginny in town. Ginny Abbott was known for her exquisite pie making. Still, he wondered where she’d hidden such a beautiful daughter. How hadn’t he paid attention before?
That afternoon, hope flashed its wings through his melancholy. Standing in the cemetery of his grandparents’ vision, my father felt that maybe there was something to prayer after all if he could only see that lovely girl again.
Alma Elizabeth “Comfort” Kindred would be dead from a heart attack not long after my parents ran away to Salt Point, as soon as they could after Ezra’s birth. My father had worried that the flame of the past threatened their new happiness, still burning brightly enough yet, to make good on its old curse.
16
One Tuesday evening, just over a week before Christmas, the Junketts came over to our home for dinner.
Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” played from the radio, and when it was over, Ezra and Lindy ran into the living room and put on the record. I spun and twirled the twins, each one claiming a hand, while Ernest dipped my sister. She had a new laugh I’d never heard before and I only heard it whenever Ernest was whispering into her ear. For Mr. Caesar, we played Eartha Kitt next. Mr. Caesar took Mama carefully into his arms and said things that made her laugh, while Miss Irene and Daddy sailed around the room so elegantly they looked as if they were floating. The smell of rich food, butter, and sugar filled the kitchen. Our troubles felt distant. There were candles burning, and by the end of the week our front window would be filled with the flickering silhouette of our holiday tree.
When the Junketts finally left, Daddy suggested that we gather in the living room. This evening, he told us, was the last day that The Nat King Cole Show would air. He’d read about it in the papers and, though we had no television, we had plenty of Cole’s records. We could celebrate the man anyway, our father said.
Mama sat at the piano as I placed the needle to the vinyl, careful not to scratch it. “Forgive My Heart” filled our living room with Cole’s voice. She played along softly, pressing the keys with her long fingers.
Daddy invited Ezra to dance. Giggling, she took his hand and began to do a sweet two-step before she turned and gestured that I take her other hand so that we could both dance with our father.
He mouthed the words. His white shirt and black tie glowed in the low light of our living room. Barefoot we traced a path around our father. With closed eyes, he turned slowly in place, smiling. Ezra slipped away so that she could sit at the piano and keep playing in Mama’s place.
Mama stood, trembling, and I pressed her hand to Daddy’s. Without opening his eyes, he kissed Mama’s hand, holding it against his lips.
After checking that the fire was strong, I went to my low stool near the window to watch my parents. The way they danced like they would never let go of each other thrilled me. How could they look so strong and fragile at once? My father’s head was almost bent entirely against the top of Mama’s hair, which Ezra and I had helped her curl. Her navy dress was nearly black, and her long legs slid like liquid beneath the silk of it.
Ezra left the piano and crossed to the window, sitting on the floor so that she could lean against me. Nodding to the music’s gentle rhythms, I tried to imagine Nat King Cole wearing one of his beautiful smiles as he waved farewell to his unseen audiences, gathered in their living rooms across America. I hoped they were dancing to Cole’s shining voice.
“There’s school tomorrow,” said my father, opening his eyes.
“What a beautiful evening,” said Mama, still standing inside my father’s arm.
Without complaining, Ezra and I got up.
“Wait,” said my father. His voice sounded slightly broken. He lifted his arm and we went to him and Mama. His arm was long enough to encircle us. We swayed together, embracing as one. I held on to my father’s shoulder and to my mother’s waist. I could smell Mama’s hair oil and perfume. We were all warm and soft. I forgot about the last weeks, months. They didn’t matter. We were sheltered in our joy.
“I love my girls,” my father said to us. He was crying a little.
* * *
•••
Ezra allowed me to sleep in the twin bed in her room. Down the hall we could hear our parents’ voices murmuring behind the walls of their bedroom.
“They’re really in love,” said Ezra, yawning.
“Yes,” I said.
“Maybe everything will be all right.”
“What do you mean?”
“Things have been hard, or haven’t you noticed? How are your hands?”
She climbed out of her bed and came over to me. Her voice was suddenly close to my face. “Let me see.” She turned on the lamp on the nightstand between our beds.
“I’m fine.”
“Stop,” she said, shoving her hands beneath the quilt to pull mine into view. “That was brave what you did. Does it still hurt?”
“Sometimes,” I said, not looking at her face. “I don’t think about it.”
“Of course you think about it.”
“Not tonight,” I said, feeling a flash of pain in one of my hands. “I didn’t think about it at all tonight.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it every day. Even tonight. Remember when Daddy was a boy? His arm went through glass and he lost it.”
“Well, here are my hands,” I said. “I didn’t lose them.”
“But you could have.”
“But I didn’t.”
“I hope you don’t ever do something that stupid again,” my sister said. Pulling my hands to her face, she rubbed her cheek against the scars. “You scared us all, Cinthy. We could’ve lost you.”
“But Mr. Caesar—”
“Is a grown man,” she answered.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m not afraid of many things,” said Ezra, “but I was afraid when I saw all the blood. Your blood. I was frightened. I thought when they took you to the hospital—”
“It hurt,” I said quietly.
“I know,” she said.
With care, she placed my hands down on the quilt and pulled it up to my shoulders. Then, instead of returning to her own bed, Ezra stayed. Snapping off the lamp, she curled in bed next to me. The weight of her arm on the cover made me sigh as though I’d been holding my breath for weeks. Down the hall our parents were laughing, and I smiled in the dark. Mama was strong enough to laugh, so maybe Ezra was right. Maybe things would be fine. Besides, I’d heard Ezra’s admiration and respect for me in her voice. That was enough for me to face anything. There was a trace of music again from the radio Mama kept by her bedside. Closing my eyes, I listened to Ezra’s breathing and imagined my parents slow dancing in their bedroom.
“I would do anything for you,” my sister said, her voice surfacing as though she were speaking to somebody in a dream.
* * *
•••
School closed for the Christmas holiday on Monday of the next week, December 23. My father would drive Ezra and me home and then go back to Hobart, to pack up some books and other materials he wanted at home. Mr. Caesar and the Junkett children would still be there, as Mr. Caesar intended to get ahead on cleaning so that he didn’t have to think about the school, about white people, over the holidays. As my sister and I waved from the car, Mr. Caesar had laughed his full laugh and spoke of Miss Irene’s lucky pot of black-eyed peas. “Y’all always invited when it comes to good luck,” he’d said. My father hadn’t wanted us to stay at the school with him because he knew that Mama would be trying to clean and cook by herself. “Help your mama with things,” he’d said. “You know she thinks she can do it all when it comes to Christmas.”
