Delicious Foods (8 page)

Quiet come down in the back of the van, and the men seen that without no streetlights, you could see the stars outside flickering like rocks in a pipe. That brother who name Sirius B pointed out one them animals from the horoscope, talking ’bout how it predict what you gonna be like.

That doesn’t mean anything, Darlene told him. There’s nothing out there.

Sirius B goes, Then what do you think the stars hanging on to?

Just—just whatever it is. Darlene swirled her hands in front of her face. Just
Out There
. Like, deep space—God. The horoscope is just some fools putting fake satanic ideas onto nothing. The ancient people looked up through the clouds and said, That’s a goat! she shouted, bugging her eyes out like TT to show the stupidity. And folks have harped on it for so long that now everybody looks up there and says, Look at the goat! She folded her arms, but she wasn’t done talking. But it’s stupid because we gave the names to the stars. There aren’t any lines connecting anything up in the sky to make a goat. It’s the same with everything else. People named everything, so we think the name is the truth. But nothing means anything if we made the rules up ourselves. God made the rules, we just made up some fake names.

Darlene ain’t thought ’bout Nat’s face, or the blood. She sure ain’t thinking ’bout what come later, and whether it had to do with the obeah that Hazel had worked on her. On the way out there, she ain’t even thought about how Interstate Whatever didn’t never curve, how it kept you in a state of suspense. This minibus trip had only one turn, it felt like, a left turn that had happened some time before, she couldn’t remember how long ago. Then the road got real rough. It be bounding everybody forward into the headrests and sideways against the windows.

For miles it’s only reeds growing at the side of the road, then trees come back, then you see a farmhouse with a collapsing barn beside it, then a rusty tractor, then a big-ass wheel. Then the pink part of the sky start going all blue, and Darlene could see faraway shit without knowing how far she traveled, like if she seen a pagoda, she’d a said, I guess we made it to China. Without questioning none of it.

What she seen farther away was tiny trees by the horizon, lame little hills, a burnt-out car. Puffy mist rising out the ground. Wasn’t no towns, not no buildings nowhere, only tall green grass and telephone poles and wires and, later, cornfields, rows of some green plant that was probably collard greens or cabbage, then more motherfucking corn. Darlene ain’t notice, but they hadn’t passed no houses of no kind in more than a hour. Jackie shifted in her seat and the pleather start making rubbery noises up against her thighs.

Jackie goes, Almost there.

Darlene looked out the window and the whole goddamn view was corn. It had took all night driving to get where they going, but didn’t nobody in the minibus ask how many hours had tiptoed past. Too much enjoyment be happening up in that vehicle to keep track of the time or the place. We wanted to rip ourselves outta times and places anyhow. Someday I wanna switch places with y’all just for a while, so before you die you could feel what it like not to have no body. Sweet Jesus, it take a whole lot of worriation out your head. First ’bout doctor bills, and then ’bout racism and sexism, and most positively, it immediately put a end to all that When Am I Gonna Die bullshit. I told Darlene that the whole problem of humanity is that if you got a body, you gotta have a time and a place. But when y’all got a time and a place, y’all really don’t got shit—time don’t do nothing but disappear. People and places and seasons and events be changing faster than you could recognize em, let alone remember em or appreciate em. How y’all supposed to live on fast-forward all the motherfucking time? Don’t ask me. Scotty don’t got no idea. Better y’all than me.

E
dward Randolph Hardison always wanted to get things done quickly. Even his birth came a month too early, right after Labor Day weekend, another event in a week of fleeting expectation in the news—the Viking 2 spacecraft sent the first color photographs from Mars, the Rat Pack reunited for a moment, Mao Tse-tung died. After his parents’ overwhelming experience of the miscarriage the year before, they nearly went to pieces as they waited by the incubator, watching Eddie breathe through a ventilator until his lungs finally developed. Nat and Darlene had wanted to get settled before getting married, but the urgency of Eddie’s medical problems, followed by the tentative elation they felt when they finally got to take home a healthy child, in mid-October, inspired them to hold a small marriage ceremony the following March, not far from the hospital in Shreveport. To avoid the appearance of immorality—finding out they’d been living in sin would shock their new neighbors—Darlene handed Eddie to her sister during the wedding photos. If necessary, she and Nat would sometimes lie about which event had come first, the birth or the wedding.

Once Eddie’s condition stabilized, they rushed back to Ovis to attend to their business. The Mount Hope Grocery was in the wrongest part of a town made of wrong parts, a wooden building with thick greenish beams holding up its awning. It had been a gas station once, but over time Eddie’s father had the pumps ripped out, moved the main building, and added another structure until he’d built a classic general store with an inviting verandah where neighbors would soon gather to play cards and voice grievances. A stream ran behind the store, and back there, while the adults talked business, Eddie often tried to capture tiny fish between his palms and once chased after a talkative tabby cat with green eyes.

Before the store opened, on the nights when people gathered at the blond-brick ranch house they rented in town, Eddie’s parents would send him to bed early, but he would silently pass through his open bedroom door and watch what he could from down the hall, where he’d see men like his father, with straight carriages and resonant voices, and women, attractive like his mother but slouchier, with arch, skeptical expressions, crowded into their living room smoking, watching television, and drinking bourbon. On some occasions Eddie created excuses to get up in order to sneak glances at the fascinating box with its bluish-gray, flickering images. But these adults never watched anything exciting, only white men standing opposite each other at podiums arguing in words he did not understand, or crowds of people in big rooms where balloons fell in the colors of the USA.

More often the men alone would gather to watch a game—the Saints, or college basketball. But the rules and the breaks in action disturbed Eddie’s concentration, and he couldn’t keep his childish attention on anything for very long. When his mother discovered him in the process of sipping from a spent whiskey glass polluted by a cigarette butt, she increased her efforts to keep him in his room during his father’s summits, and during her own more sedate meetings with the ladies.

Once the general store opened, all the activity shifted to the verandah and the side yard there. They would congregate at long forest-green picnic tables outside the Mount Hope Grocery, and Eddie’s parents would speak with their neighbors as they went about their day—people in overalls, women pushing white children in carriages. Nat and Darlene encouraged all of them to write their names down on clipboards. During those times Eddie wandered up and down the main street, or into the thrift shop, where he found toys, or he begged his mother for change to run to the ice cream parlor that drew everybody in with the sweet smell of baking cones.

Eddie’s parents always gave him the sense that they were doing important, possibly risky work. They drew emergency plans for him on the blank pages at the back of his coloring books. They forbade him to trust strangers. Phone calls sometimes came at odd hours, and he would hear his mother panicking, his father rising in the night to secure the doors and windows. Not only did his father keep a shotgun locked behind the counter at the store, he taught his wife how to use it.

But one morning, not long before he turned six, Eddie awoke to find that his father hadn’t come home. He fixated on Darlene as she spoke into the phone, her face pinched with fear and anger, paying him no mind, one fingernail scraping at the corner of a corkboard stuck to the refrigerator, dislodging the brown flakes as her calls to neighbors went unanswered and she grew frantic. Her determination and pessimism came out in tiny fragments:
I just know! Lord, how could you let it? Please don’t let him be.

Ma, let’s go to the store and see if he’s there, Eddie insisted.

I called, she said. He didn’t pick up.

Maybe the phone is not working.

Maybe, she responded. Maybe…

Darlene turned her attention back to making phone calls and remained focused on that activity even when Eddie stomped on the floor in front of her and insisted. She wouldn’t leave the house or let him go out by himself. Eventually she agreed to let him go down the street to a friend’s house while she watched from a window.

In the early afternoon, just after Eddie came back, several policemen strode into the house. They’d never come inside on earlier visits, and they seemed to want to say serious things; Eddie knew because they removed their hats. White men nearly as tall as his father crowded around the kitchen table; it was a novelty to have white people in this small space, let alone these authoritative, beefy guys with their safety-goggle glasses, short, cornhusk-colored hair, and tight speech. His mother, who enforced hospitality under all circumstances, offered them coffee and warmed biscuits for them as if they paid house calls every day and insisted that they sit. He hoped a couple of them might be astronauts. When they started talking about identifying something they called
it
and
the body,
he did not recognize at first that they meant his father. His mother registered shock, and after a few moments, she collapsed into her own arms, fell to her knees beside the table, and, following an uncomfortable pause, ran outside to the clothesline, where she dashed between the ropes, yanking the laundry down and hollering something that did not sound like language. The men were still talking, to one another now.

After the screen door banged shut, Eddie went to the doorjamb and watched Darlene’s path. He couldn’t see behind the sheets, but he followed the clothespins with his eyes as they snapped and flew off in all directions. Soon the policemen came to the door behind him and stood solemnly, heads bowed the way they might do while saying grace, and his mother tumbled from behind a fitted sheet, clutching a pair of his father’s dungarees, embracing them as if his legs were still in them, smearing them against her face, stifling her cries, dampening the fabric with tears. Eddie ran out to her, but she didn’t seem to see him through her grief.

Days later, something like a party followed. All his relatives had been invited except his father. When he asked his aunt Bethella why they had forgotten to invite him, she thwacked him sharply on the behind, glared, and raised her index finger to a point between his eyes, the way a robber might hold a switchblade.

Don’t you ever, she said. Ever!

His mother, uncommonly silent and numb, in a pillbox hat, her face veiled, dressed him in a black jacket and itchy pants from the local thrift store and held his hand in the front row of the church as everybody sang and wept before a shiny oblong box draped in flowers that people now said contained his father. How did they know? Nobody could see inside.

Later Eddie stood perspiring in his jacket but not daring to remove it as they lowered the box they claimed contained his father into a hill, and men shoveled dirt on top of it. When would they stop the circus act and let Daddy out of that thing? He had read picture books about Harry Houdini. Maybe he’d tell them, he thought. But he had started learning not to say the majority of what he thought.

In the rainy days that followed, seemingly related to the events of his life, he would beg his mother to go visit the hill and bring extra umbrellas. We can’t let Daddy get wet, he’d protest.

Friends came to the house, shaking their heads and saying, Mph, mph, mph. Well, you know if he’d a been white they’d have a suspect by now.

Over time, Eddie came to understand the part of dead that means
never
. That is to say, the whole thing. Never coming back, never going to swing you upside down, never taking you to school, never giving you presents, never coming to the holidays. But the finality of it didn’t upset him the way it should have. For the most part he didn’t believe it, so he tried to turn
never
into
someday
with the usual tools: ideas he heard in hymns, tinglings he felt while soloists cried during Sunday services at Ebenezer Baptist. Notions of angels, of heaven. Of ancestors gazing down, pride and anger wrinkling their foreheads. Of the sun and wind tickling the tassels of ripe corn in a wide field. Of pious deeds and of Jesus Christ levitating above an empty cave.

In contrast, his mother started to demand something impossible, maybe indescribable, something he didn’t understand until much later—she needed for time to reverse itself. Gradually her posture slumped, her chest became heavier. She stopped having anybody over, she rarely called anyone, the phone didn’t ring anymore, she became quiet and unresponsive, her moods enveloped her.

For a long time, Eddie thought only about adjusting to the loss of his father, and the loss of the grocery store, not about seeking the cause of those losses, and no one pointed him in that direction—in fact, his relatives diverted his attention away from it. He would ask a direct question of a random cousin or of Bethella during her sporadic visits—How did my father die? They’d stare into a corner of the room and feed him a noble abstraction—He died fighting for your rights. The follow-up question seemed ridiculous, unaskable—I mean, what killed his
body?
—and would linger in the air.

You need to find out, press charges, and sue, everybody would say to Darlene, sometimes even to him, at six years old. Eddie, your mother needs to bring these people to justice. What’s she scared of? She has a thousand percent of our support.

But he watched his mother during these days, and he sensed, without actually knowing, that something unnameable had curled itself, snakelike, around her leg, then bound her torso; her breathing got more strained, her eyes bloodshot and sunken. He’d overhear the things she’d mutter to photographs of his father—
I never should have asked. I shouldn’t have worn those shoes. Forgive me. How can you forgive me?

Then a whole bunch of folks from up north came down asking questions about what happened, and Eddie spent even more time than previously in the confusing world of people talking over his head, primarily about politics. As he grew, reluctantly, to accept his father’s absence, the path of his grief and his mother’s reached a fork and then the two diverged. Once the house quieted down again, she began to neglect everyday life and allow a tide of chaos to rush into the house: a cascade of filthy dresses, wire hangers, pizza boxes, cigarette butts, and eventually vermin. She left their new television on at all times, usually playing to an empty couch, so that it seemed the advertisements begged no one to buy their products and evangelists prayed with nobody.

Toward the end of their days in Ovis, Darlene started to run with a different crowd—no more politics people anymore. These were men Eddie might see only once, men who smoked unpleasant cigars, who drove rust-caked Lincoln Continentals, who had filled the graying white leather interiors of their cars with discarded newspapers, who left their toenail clippings on the coffee table. Her moods became unpredictable. Once he brought a half-inflated basketball into the house, and she hurled it at his face for no reason he could figure out. He turned so that the rough ball hit him in the flank, leaving a cloudy bruise. The impact stunned her into regret, as if it had hit her instead of him, and she kissed the space below his arm over the next few days as it took on the color of an eggplant. Their trust throbbed and disappeared as the border of the injury grew sharper.

A year after his father died, Eddie’s mother hadn’t moved his father’s clothes out of the bedroom. She stopped speaking to a friend who’d tried to set her up with a man. She hadn’t gotten a job. Mommy’s running low on savings, Mommy’s having trouble finding work, she’d tell him, and he’d have to move a pile of half-finished cover letters from the kitchen counter when he ate breakfast. But he would leap off the school bus and return home in the afternoon to find her in the same tattered bathrobe, spooning thick brown liquid from a bucket-shaped container of ice cream in the kitchen, her eyes glazed and underlined, transfixed by daytime-TV shows where staged fights would break out.
Mom Stole My Boyfriend!
Empty beer cans studded the coffee table, corkless bottles of discount wine lolled on their sides, sometimes falling to the carpet. She stopped going to the courthouse and locked herself in her room, often weeping, sometimes for an entire day. During that time, Eddie taught himself how to hard-boil an egg and follow directions on the back of a frozen-food box. She started to ration his breakfast bars, she stopped buying him new clothes, the pencils she bought him for school all snapped or were lost within two or three weeks.