All-Bright Court (8 page)

Dennis did not say anything. He ate.

At nine Mrs. Taylor woke up her husband. “Sam, take Dennis home.”

Mr. Taylor walked Dennis around to 125 to find the front door sitting wide open. There were no lights on in the house.

“My mama not back.”

“Well, I'll take you on in and you can turn on the lights and wait for her.”

“We don't got no electric. Mama say we going get it back on when she get her check.”

Mr. Taylor let out a big blast of white steam through his nose. He did not know what to do, so he brought the boy back home with him.

“You just couldn't leave him there,” Mrs. Taylor said. “He just a baby.”

“I don't know about all that. I don't want to get in no trouble keeping him here, Mary Kate.”

“My mama don't care,” Dennis said.

Mr. Taylor let out a blow like he did outside. “I just didn't know what to do. I guess he can stay. I'm tired now, Kate. I'm pulling that double tomorrow. Just put him to bed,” Mr. Taylor said, and he went upstairs.

Mrs. Taylor ran a bath for Dennis and told him to get in the tub. When she returned to the bathroom a few minutes later, Dennis was playing in the water, and his pants, shirt, and socks were on the floor. They all smelled of urine.

“Where your underclothes?”

“I don't got none clean.”

“Hand me that rag, boy. I'm going to bathe you 'cause you not doing nothing but playing.”

“My mama let me wash myself.”

“It seem your mama let you do a lot of things,” Mrs. Taylor said, and she descended on Dennis with the rough white cloth. “Stand up.”

Dennis stood while Mrs. Taylor scrubbed every inch of his body. “You a dirty boy,” she said. “Stand right there while I get some alcohol.”

She went to the hall closet while Dennis stood shaking in the tub. Where was it Mrs. Taylor thought he would go?

She returned and poured half the bottle over his body and the other half in the tub. She continued to wash the boy and talk to him. “Look at this. Look at this.” Dennis looked. It was dirt. He did not know if he was supposed to say something.

After the bath, Mrs. Taylor rubbed Vaseline into his cold, raw skin. She dressed him in a pair of Mikey's pajamas and put him to bed. In the morning she made fried eggs, grits with redeye gravy, and buttered toast with grape jelly. She dressed Dennis, Mikey, and Dorene, and they walked to Dennis's house.

On the way, she rehearsed her speech: What kind of mother is you? Leaving a boy alone. Your child hungry and dirty. You send him out with no drawers on. What if something happen to him? What people going to think? You should . . .

Dennis led them to the front door. It was closed. “My mama home.”

She was lying on the couch, sleeping. She opened her eyes. Mrs. Taylor thought she looked like a lizard in a dress. Her eyes were yellow, and the skin on her thin legs was dry and cracked. Her short, reddish hair was standing straight up on her head.

“I'm home, Mama.”

“Where you was at?”

“Mike's house. This here his mama,” Dennis said, gently pushing Mrs. Taylor closer to the couch.

“Hey,” the woman said. “Dennis, go get me some water. You want some water, some water . . . What your name?”

“Mary Kate.”

“I'm Cynthia. Want some water?”

“No, I got to be going. I got some wash to do,” Mary Kate said, and began backing toward the door, Dorene on her hip. “Let's go, children.”

She saved her speech for Samuel. He was so tired that he only half listened.

“You can't save the world, Kate,” he said.

Dennis continued to come around. Sometimes he would show up three or four days in a row, and sometimes a week or more would pass without his coming by. The last time he had come, the Taylors were on their way to the circus in Buffalo.

“Go home,” Mr. Taylor had told him. “You ain't going to the circus with us.”

Mikey's father did not understand. He and Dennis were going to be bareback riders. Mrs. Taylor had taken the boys up to Ridge Road, to the Jubilee, to see
Toby Tyler
. In a few years they would run away and join a circus. They would ride on the backs of horses, and have a clever monkey for a pet. They would wear tights and do tricks and eat candy apples and cotton candy. Toby Tyler would be at the circus tonight, and Dennis would miss it.

Dennis did not move. He stood in the living room staring at the floor. His voice was just a whisper. “My mama say don't be letting ya'll clean me up. I'm clean enough. Ya'll got to take me the way I is.”

Mr. Taylor opened the front door to put the boy out, but Mikey ran to him and clung to the boy. He grabbed Dennis around the waist. He held on while his father tried to pull them apart.

“Stop, Mikey. I'm going to whip your ass. Stop.”

Mikey and Dennis fell to the floor, and Mrs. Taylor ran downstairs with Dorene in her arms.

“Samuel, what you doing?”

“Ya'll stop,” he yelled at the boys. He finally pulled them apart and hurled Dennis out the door. “Don't you come back 'round here, hear me? I don't want you 'round my boy, you goddamn piss pot.”

“Sam, he just a boy. He ain't much more than a baby.”

“He ain't no baby. Him and Mikey the same age. And you, Michael, I don't want the boy 'round this house. I don't want you talking to a boy like that. He trash. That nasty boy coming here and telling me his whore of a mammy say don't clean him up, we got to take him like he is. So white people be saying, ‘See, you smell that? They all stink. They all nasty.'”

“His mama say that? As good as we been to that boy, as many nights he done sat at our table and ate like he lived here?”

“What you expect? The woman a alcoholic. She ain't got sense enough to pay her bills. We done all we can do for that boy. You feed him one day, he hungry the next. You clean him up today, he dirty tomorrow. This thing done gone too far. And you expecting! It's too much, Kate. Too much.”

“I'm not going to the stupid circus,” Mikey said. “I don't want to go without Dennis.”

“Oh yeah, you going, and you going to like it, too. I could've been putting in some overtime today, but I didn't so ya'll could go to the circus. You get on upstairs till your mama call you, 'cause I'm this close to setting a fire to your ass.”

 

Toby Tyler was not at the circus. Mikey did not care. He had a good time without him, and without Dennis. He ate cotton candy and a candy apple. There was a clown who fascinated Mikey.

The clown coughed and a bright red silk scarf came from his mouth. He pulled on it and a yellow one appeared next, then a green, a blue, an orange. The clown kept pulling, the colors repeating, until a pile of scarves lay curled at his feet. Mikey thought the clown must have been filled with scarves, that they were coiled up inside him.

He did bring back a program and some cotton candy for Dennis. The candy hardened, though, and Dennis was not at school next Monday anyway. When he finally did show up later that week, he wouldn't walk home with Mikey, and he refused the program. He took off running.

Mrs. Taylor worried about him, but she rarely saw him. Now here he was knocking down Dorene in his rush to get out of the Red Store.

She bought her bread quickly. She wanted to catch up with the boy before he headed for home. This was why her son was calling to him through the weeds in the field while he was eating stolen bologna.

Dennis would not answer. He thought Mrs. Taylor might try to take him back to the Red Store. He wouldn't go back. He would never go there again. He would go up to Ridge Road, to the A & P. He would go up Steelawanna Avenue. He would get up the courage to cross all those streets.

“Ma, he gone,” Mikey said.

“I guess so, but it don't seem like he could get 'cross the field that quick. Let's get on home. Ya'll daddy be home soon.”

And they walked on, leaving the hungry boy lost among the weeds.

10

B
ECAUSE
Venita was childless she thought she could make herself invisible. She cloaked herself in her sorrow, in her emptiness. Thinking herself unseen, she walked through All-Bright Court watching the children openly. She and Moses had been trying to have a child since they were married, three years.

At first she thought she might just be stupid, that she simply did not know what she was doing. She did not know how to call a baby, so none would come. As a girl she had been stupid about babies. Up until she was thirteen Venita thought babies came from cabbage patches.

Even though her parents grew cabbages in their garden and she never saw a baby there, she continued believing that was where they came from. She looked under the tender leaves of the young plants and between the waxy leaves of the older ones. When she was seven she pulled up an entire row of young plants, one after another she pulled them from the loamy soil, liking the sound when she pulled them, the soft ripping as the roots let go of the earth. Secrets were here. Each time she pulled up a plant she looked to see if a baby was there, a tiny head or maybe a tiny hand or foot buried in the warm soil. Her mother did not see her until she had pulled up the whole row, and then her mother ran screaming from the house. Venita did not connect the screaming with herself and what she was doing. She jumped up to see what was wrong, and when her mother got to her, she knocked her to the ground. “Girl, you done lost your mind?”

Venita was going to answer, but her mother had smacked the air out of her. Her breath flew out of her mouth like a bird. It flew from the garden while she lay on the ground, trying to weather the storm of her mother's fury.

When Venita was thirteen she had the chance to find out where babies came from. She was asked to stay home when the time came for her mother to have a baby. The other times, she and the other children had been sent to their Aunt Hattie's or Aunt Thelma's. Her mother's sister Hattie came, and so did a midwife. They had her father take the kitchen table into her parents' bedroom. From dawn until well into the night the women walked calmly through the house, in and out of the bedroom. Drinking coffee, eating spoon bread and butter beans. Her father was out on the porch, and a group of his friends had gathered. They sat drinking and smoking and playing dominoes. They played even in the darkness, by the light of a kerosene lamp. Sometimes moans came from the bedroom, but her mother did not yell out. Venita was either ignored or in the way. Feeling no sense of purpose, she wandered out into the garden.

It was late, and the ground was frozen. A blue and cold dampness was in the air. The air clung to her, made her breath appear before her, a series of diminutive clouds drifting off into the night. Venita felt like crying. She was cold and scared, wearing one of her father's old sweaters. And not only that, there were no cabbages. Where was a baby going to come from? How could a baby push through the petrified earth even if there were a cabbage? She did not even hear her aunt calling her at first.

“Venita. Ve-ni-ta. Come here, you silly gal.”

She ran into the house and her aunt told her to bring her mother some water. Hattie met her at the bedroom door. Venita could not see much beyond her in the dim light of the bedroom, but she could see her mother was unconscious and sweating on the table. Venita thought she was dead, but then she saw her mother stir, and heard her moan. She noticed the blood, hiding in the folds of sheets. Venita was frozen there. Her feet were cold. She wanted to watch but was grateful when Hattie pushed her aside and shut the door. She wandered out to the porch and sat with the men.

They were drinking some peach wine her mother had put up. Her father gave her a splash in a tin cup. It was hot and sweet.

“Is your mama fenna have the baby?” her father asked.

“I don't know.”

“What your aunt-nem doing in there?”

“I don't know.”

“What you mean, you don't know? What you was doing in there?”

Venita began crying, puffing out enough clouds to fill a stormy sky. Her father calmed her down, filled her cup with wine. “Huh,” he said. It was an apology.

She cried softly and drank the wine. Her father went back to his game, slamming dominoes down on the plank porch. Venita did not notice her hands were numb.

Morning was coming. A grayness was pushing its way into the sky when a cry came from the house. It woke Venita where she had fallen asleep on the porch. She went inside to find her father in the kitchen. The women made him wait before they would let him in to see the baby.

Venita went in with him. It was a boy, and there he was with her mother. They were in the bed. Her mother was asleep, her hair gone back and drawn up tightly on her head. The midwife handed her father a sack and told him to take it out back and bury it.

Venita thought he was taking it to the garden, and she headed in that direction.

“Where you going?” her father asked. “Come on.”

He led her to the back corner of the yard and beat at the earth with a spade. It broke in big chunks, yielding a small, shallow hole.

“It probably ain't deep enough,” he said. He placed the sack in the ground and pressed the clods back into the hole.

“What's in the croaker sack?” Venita asked.

“The afterbirth. Let's go.”

Venita did not ask for any more of an explanation. She went inside and up to bed. As she was falling to sleep, she thought that this was what it must feel like to be old. Stiff and tired, wanting nothing but rest and feeling like all that came before was a confusing dream.

 

No, it was not because she was stupid that she had no children. Venita figured even stupid women could have children—plenty had. If she wasn't stupid, maybe she was just unblessed. Unblessed wasn't the same as cursed. It was not that she had offended God.

There was a lady back home who had. She would wander through town mumbling, her hair matted like a sheep's coat, her clothes tattered, carrying a dirty rubber doll wrapped in a threadbare diaper. Venita's mother told her about the woman.