Just Cause (36 page)

Sit down. You're probably beat. Why can't you work regular hours?'

'Death doesn't work regular hours, so neither do I.'

'I suppose that's your excuse for missing services this past Sunday. And the Sunday before that, too.'

Well…'he started.

'Your momma would whip you good if she were alive today. Hell, son, then she'd whip me good for letting you miss services. It ain't right, you know.'

No. I'll be there Sunday. I'll try.'

His father scrambled the eggs in a bowl. 'I hate all this new stuff you got in here. Like this damn electric stove thing. Nuclear food cooker, whatever the hell it is.'

Microwave.'

'Well, it don't work.'

"No, you don't know how to work it. There's a difference,'

His father was grinning. Brown knew the old man felt a contradictory superiority, having grown up in a world of icehouses and outhouses, well water and wood stoves, having made his life out of an old, familiar world, and finally, been taken in his old age into a home that seemed to him closer to a rocket ship than a house. All the gadgets of middle class amused his father, who saw most of them as useless.

'Well, I don't see what the hell good it's for anyway, 'cept maybe for thawing stuff out.'

He thought his father correct on that score.

He watched as the old man's gnarled hands swiftly dished the omelet into the skillet and tossed the eggs, folding them expertly. It was remarkable, the son thought. Arthritis had stolen so much of his mobility; old age, much of his sight and hearing; a bout with heart disease had sapped most of his strength, leaving him gaunt with skin that used to burst with muscles now sagging from his arms. But the old tanner's dexterity had never left him. He could still take a knife and slice an apple into equal pieces, take a pencil and draw a perfectly straight line. Only now it hurt him to do so.

'Here you go. Should taste good.'

'Aren't you gonna join me?'

'Nah. I'll just make enough for the girls. Me, just a bit of coffee and some bread.' The old man looked down at his chest. 'It doesn't take a lot to keep me going. Couple a sticks on the fire, that's all.'

The old man slid slowly, in obvious discomfort, into a chair. The son pretended not to notice.

'Damn old bones'

'What?'

'Nothing.'

They sat in silence for a moment.

'Theodore,' his father said quietly, 'how come you never think of finding a new wife?'

The son shook his head. 'Never find another like Lizzie,' he said.

'How you know if you don't look?'

'When Mama died, you never hunted out a new wife.'

I was already old. You're still young.'

Brown shook his head. 'I've got all I need. I've still got you and the girls and my job and this house. I'm okay.'

The old man snorted but said nothing. When his son finished, he reached out for the plate and carried it stiffly over to the sink.

'I'll go wake the girls,' Brown said. His father only grunted. The son paused, watching the father. We're quite a pair, he thought. Widowed young and widowed old, raising two girls as best we can. His father started to hum to himself as he scrubbed away at the plates. Brown stifled a sudden, affectionate laugh. The old man still refused to use the dishwashing machine and wouldn't allow any of the others to use it either. He'd insisted that there was only one way to tell if something were truly clean, and that was to clean it yourself. He thought that proper, in its own way. When the girls had complained, shortly after his father had moved in, he'd explained only that his father was set in his ways. The explanation had sat unquietly in the household for a few days, until the weekend, when Tanny Brown had loaded both girls into his unmarked squad car and driven north fifty miles, just over the Alabama border to Bay Minette.

They drove through the dusty, small town with its stolid brick buildings that seemed to glow in the noontime heat, and out past a long, cool line of hanging willows, into the farm country, to an old homestead.

He'd taken the girls across a wide field, down to a little valley where the heat seemed to hang in the air, sucking the breath from his lungs. He'd pointed to a group of small shacks, empty now, staggered by the passing of time, faded reds and browns, splintered with age, and told them that was where their grandfather had been born and raised. Then he'd taken them back toward Pachoula, pointing out the segregated school where his father had learned his letters, showing them the site of the farm where he'd worked hard to rise to be caretaker, and where he'd learned the tanning business. He showed them the house their grandfather had purchased in what had once been known as Blacktown, and where their grandmother had built up her seamstress business, gaining enough of a reputation that her talents cut across racial boundaries, the first in that community. He'd shown them the small white frame church where his father had been deacon and his mother had sung in the choir. Then he'd taken them home and there had been no more talk of the dishwasher.

I forget, too, he thought. We all do.

The hallway outside the girls' rooms was hung with dozens of family pictures. He spotted one of himself, in his fullback's outfit, cradling a football. He could see where the slick, shiny material of the jersey was frayed up near the shoulder pads. The red-and-gray uniforms at his school had been the used outfits from a neighboring white district. The girls don't understand that, he thought. They don't understand what it was like to know that every uniform, every book in the library, every desk in the classrooms, had once been used in the white high school, and then discarded. He recalled picking up his second-hand helmet for the first time and seeing a dark sweat line on the inside. He had touched the padding, trying to see if it felt different. Then he'd raised his fingers to his nose to check the smell. He shook his head at the memory. The war changed that for me, he thought. He smiled. Nineteen-sixty-nine. The march on Washington had been six years before. The Civil Rights Bill would pass the year after. The Voting Rights Bill in 1965. The whole South was convulsed with change. He'd returned from the service and gone to college on the GI Bill and then, coming home to Pachoula, had learned that the all-black school where he'd carried the ball was no longer. A large, ugly, stolid cinderblock regional high school was under construction. There were weeds growing on the playing fields he'd known. The red-and-brown dirt that had streaked his uniform was covered by a tangled growth of crabgrass and stinkweed. He remembered cheers, and thought there had been too few victories in his life.

He shook his head again. Mustn't forget, he thought. He remembered the epithet that had burst from the dead man's brother's lips a few hours earlier. None of it has changed.

He knocked on his eldest daughter's door. 'Come on, Lisa! Rise and shine. Let's go!' He turned quickly and banged away on the younger girl's door. 'Samantha! Up and at 'em. Hit the deck running. Schooltime!'

The groans amused him, turning his thoughts momentarily away from Pachoula, the murdered girl, and the two men who'd occupied space on Death Row.

Tanny Brown spent the next half hour in suburban-father school-day routine, prodding, cajoling, demanding, and finally accomplishing the desired result: both girls out the door, with homework intact, lunches made, in time to catch the school bus. With the two girls gone, his father had retreated to his bedroom to try to take a nap, and he was left alone with the growing morning. Sunlight flooded the room, making him feel as if everything was twisted about. He felt like some old nocturnal beast trapped by the daylight, lurching from shadow to shadow, searching for the familiarity and safety of night.

He looked across the room and his eyes focused on an empty flower vase that stood on a shelf. It was tall, with a graceful hourglass shape, and a single painted flower climbing up the ceramic side. It made him smile. He remembered his wife buying the vase when he took her on a vacation to Mexico, and hand-carrying it all the way back to Pachoula, afraid to trust it to doormen, luggage handlers, or porters. When they returned home, she put it in the center of the dining-room table and always kept it filled with flowers. She was like that. If there was something she wanted, there was no end to what she would do to accomplish it. Even if it meant carrying a silly vase by hand.

No flowers anymore, he thought, except for the girls.

He remembered how hard they'd tried to save her at the emergency room, how, when he'd arrived, they were still working, crowded around, running adrenaline and plasma lines, massaging her heart, trying to coax some life into her body. He'd known with a single look that it was useless. It had been something left over from the war, a way of understanding when some invisible line had been crossed and when, even with all of science gathered, connected, and being utilized, death still beckoned inexorably. They'd worked hard, passionately. She had been there herself, some twenty minutes earlier, working alongside all of them. Twenty minutes to get her raincoat, maybe make some small, end-of-the-workday joke, say good night to the rest of the emergency-room crew, walk to her car, drive five blocks and be rammed broadside by a drunk driver in a pickup truck. Even after she was dead, when they knew there was no hope, they kept working. They knew she would have done the same for them.

He stared at the ceiling but couldn't sleep, regardless of how exhausted he was. He realized that he no longer wondered when he would get over missing her, having come to understand that he would never get over her death. He had reached an accommodation with it, which was sufficient to get him from day to day.

He rose and walked into his youngest daughter's room, moved over to her bureau and started to push aside some of the girlish things collected there, a case overflowing with beads and rings and ribbons, a toy bear with a torn ear, an old loose-leaf binder stuffed with a different year's schoolwork, a tangle of combs and brushes. It did not take long to find what he was searching for: a small silver frame with a photo inside. He held it up in front of him. The frame gleamed when it caught the sunlight.

It was a picture of two little girls, one black, one white, one raven-haired, one blonde, arm-in-arm, giggling, braces and wildly mussed makeup, feather boas and dress-up clothes.

He looked at the two faces in the photograph.

Friends, he thought. Anyone would look at that picture and realize that nothing else counted, that they just liked each other, shared secrets and passions, tears and jokes. They had been nine and mugging shamelessly for his camera. It had been Halloween, and they had dressed up in colorful, cacophonous outfits, outdoing each other with wild, outrageous appearance, all laughter and unfettered childish glee.

He was almost overcome with fury. All he could see was Blair Sullivan, mocking him. I hope it hurt, he thought. I hope it ripped your soul from your body with all the pain in the world.

Sullivan's face disappeared, and he thought of Ferguson.

You think you're free. You think you're going to get away with it. Not a chance.

He looked down at the picture in his hand. He especially liked the way the girls had their arms around each others' shoulders. His daughter's black arm hung down around the front of Joanie Shriver's. body, and Joanie's arm hung around his daughter's, so the two girls were hugging close, framing each other.

Her first and best friend, he thought.

He stared at Joanie's eyes. They were a vibrant blue. The same color as the Florida sky on the morning of his wife's funeral. He had stood apart from the rest of the mourners, clutching his two daughters beneath his arms, listening to the drone of the preacher's voice, words about faith and devotion and love and being called home to the valley, and hearing little of it. He had felt crippled, unsure whether he would be able to summon the energy to take another step. He had pinned his daughters to his sides, aware only that each of them was convulsed with tears. He had wanted to be enraged but knew that would have been too simple, that he was instead going to be cursed with a dull constant agony blended with the terror that with their mother gone, he would somehow lose his daughters. That with their center ripped away, they couldn't hold together. He had lost his tongue, didn't know what to say to them, didn't know what to do for them, especially Samantha, the younger, who had sobbed uncontrollably since the accident.

The other mourners had kept their distance, but Joanie Shriver had pulled away from the comforting grasp of her own father, serious beyond her years, wearing her best dress and, eyes filled with tears, had walked past the lines of people, right up to him and said, 'Don't you worry about Samantha. She's my friend and I will take care of her.' And in that moment, she'd reached out and taken hold of his daughter's hand and stood there holding it as well. And she'd been true to her word. She'd always been there, whenever Samantha needed to turn to someone. Weekends. Lonely holidays. After school days. Helping him to restore a routine and solidity to life. Nine years old and wiser by far than any adult.

So, he thought, she was more than just her friend. She was my friend, too. Saved our lives.

Self-hatred filled him. All the authority and power in the world, and I couldn't protect her.

He remembered the war. Medic! they called, and I went. Did I save any of them? He remembered a white boy, one week in the platoon, a cowboy from Wyoming who'd taken a round in the chest, a sucking chest wound. It'd whistled, taunting him as he struggled to save the soldier. He'd had his eyes locked onto Tanny Brown, watching through the haze of hurt and shock for a sign that would tell him he was going to live or die. He'd still been looking when the last breath wheezed through his chest. It was the same look that George and Betty Shriver had worn when he came to their door carrying the worst news.