The Given Day (26 page)

Luther's father, a man he couldn't remember knowing in the flesh, had left the family for East St. Louis when Luther was two. He'd run off with a woman named Velma Standish, and they'd settled here and Timon Laurence had eventually set up a shop that sold and repaired watches. There had been three Laurence brothers--Cornelius, the eldest, and then Hollis, and lastly, Timon. Uncle Cornelius had often told Luther he wasn't missing out on much growing up without Tim around, said his youngest brother had been a man born feckless and weak for women and liquor since about the time he learned what the 2 two were. Threw away a fine woman like Luther's mother for nothing more than junk pussy. (Uncle Cornelius had pined throughout Luther's life for Luther's mother with a love so chaste and patient it couldn't help but be taken for granted and grow, through the years, entirely unremarkable. It was his lot in life, he'd told Luther not long after he'd gone fully blind, to have a heart no one wanted except in pieces and never as a whole, while his youngest brother, a man of no defi n-able principles, culled love to him as easily as if it fell through the rain.)

Luther grew up with a single tin-plated photograph of his father. He'd touched it so many times with his thumbs that his father's features had softened and blurred. By the time Luther grew to manhood there was no way to tell if his own features bore a resemblance. Luther had never told anyone, not his mother or his sister or even Lila, how deep it cut to grow up knowing his father never gave him a thought. That the man had glanced at this life he'd brought into the world and said to himself: I'm happier without it. Luther had long imagined he'd meet him one day and stand before him a proud young man of great promise and watch regret fill his father's face. But it hadn't worked out that way.

His father had died sixteen months ago, along with near a hundred other colored folk while East St. Louis burned around them. Luther got the word from Hollis, the man's block letters looking pained and cramped on a sheet of yellow paper:

Yor Daddy shot ded by white men. Sorry to tell you.

Luther walked out of the freight yard and into downtown as the sky was beginning to darken. He had the envelope Uncle Hollis had sent his letter in with his address scrawled on the back, and he pulled it from his coat and held it in his hand as he walked. The deeper he traveled into the colored section the less he could believe what he saw. The streets were empty, and much of the reason, Luther knew, had to do with the flu, but it was also because there wouldn't seem to be much point to walk streets where all the buildings were either blackened or crumbled or lost forever beneath rubble and ash. It reminded Luther of an old man's mouth, where most of the teeth were missing, a couple broken in half, and the few that remained leaning to the side and useless. Whole blocks were nothing but ash, great piles of it that the early-eve ning breeze blew from one side of the street to the other, just trading it back and forth. So much ash that not even a tornado could have erased it all. Over a year since the neighborhood had burned, and those piles stood tall. On those blown-out streets, Luther felt as if he were surely the last man alive, and he figured that if the Kaiser had managed to send his army across the ocean, with all their planes and bombs and rifles, they couldn't have done more damage.

It had been over jobs, Luther knew, the white working-class folks getting more and more convinced that the reason they were poor was because the colored working-class folks were stealing their jobs and the food off their tables. So they'd come down here, white men and white women and white children, too, and they'd started with the colored men, shooting them and lynching them and setting them afi re and even driving several into the Cahokia River and then stoning them to death when they tried to swim back, a job they'd left mostly to the children. The white women pulled colored women off the streetcars and stoned them and stabbed them with kitchen knives, and when the National Guard came, they just stood around and watched it go on.

July 2, 1917.

"Your daddy," Uncle Hollis said, after Luther showed up at the door of his juke joint and Uncle Hollis took him into the back offi ce and poured him a drink, "was trying to protect that little shop of his never made him a dime. They lit it on fire and called for him to come out and once all four walls were burning down around him, he and Velma came out. Someone shot him in the knee and he lay there on the street for a while. They handed Velma over to some women, and they beat her with rolling pins. Just beat her about the head and face and hips and she die after crawling into an alley, like a dog gone under a porch. Someone come up to your father, and the way I was told, he try to get to his knees, but he can't even do that and he keep tipping over and pleading and finally a couple white men just stand there and shoot him until they run out of bullets."

"Where's he buried?" Luther said.

Uncle Hollis shook his head. "Wasn't nothing to bury, son. They got done shooting him, they picked him up, one on each end, and they tossed him back into his own store."

Luther got up from the table and went over to a small sink and got sick. It went on for some time, and he felt as if he were puking up soot and yellow fi re and ash. His head eddied with flashes of white women swinging rolling pins onto black heads and white faces shrieking with joy and fury and then the Deacon singing in his wheelchair-rocker and his father trying to kneel in the street and Aunt Marta and the Honorable Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, clapping their hands and beaming big smiles and someone chanting, "Praise Jesus! Praise Jesus!" and the whole world burning with fire as far as the eye could see until the blue skies were painted half black and the white sun vanished behind the smoke.

When he finished, he rinsed his mouth and Hollis gave him a small towel and he dried his lips on it and wiped the sweat from his brow. "You hot, boy."

"No, I'm okay now."

Uncle Hollis gave him another slow shake of the head and poured him another drink. "No, I said you are hot. There's people looking for you, sending word up and down and across this here Midwest. You kill a bunch of coloreds in a Tulsa joint? You kill Deacon Broscious? You fucking out your mind?"

"How'd you hear?"

"Shit. It's burning up the wires, boy."

"Police?"

Uncle Hollis shook his head. "Police think some other fool did it. Clarence Somebody."

"Tell," Luther said. "Clarence Tell."

"That's the name." Uncle Hollis stared across the table at him, breathing heavy through his flat nose. " 'Parently you left one of them alive. One they call Smoke?"

Luther nodded.

"He in a hospital. Ain't nobody sure if he gone get well or not, but he told people. He fingered you. Gunners from here to New York looking for your head."

"What's the price on it?"

"This Smoke say he pay five hundred dollars for a photograph of your corpse."

"What if Smoke dies?"

Uncle Hollis shrugged. "Whoever take over the Deacon's business, he going to have to make sure you dead."

Luther said, "I ain't got no place to go."

"You got to go east, boy. 'Cause you can't stay here. And stay the fuck out of Harlem, that's for sure. Look, I know a boy up in Boston can take you in."

"Boston?"

Luther gave that some thought and quickly realized that thinking about it was a waste of time because there wasn't any choice in the matter. If Boston was all that was left of "safe" in this country, then Boston it would have to be.

"What about you?" he asked. "You staying here?"

"Me?" Uncle Hollis said. "I didn't shoot nobody."

"Yeah, but what's here anymore? Place been burned to nothing. I hear all the coloreds are leaving or trying to."

"To go where? Problem with our people, Luther, is they bite into hope and keep their teeth clenched to it the rest of their lives. You think any place is going to be better than here? Just different cages, boy. Some prettier than others but cages just the same." He sighed. "Fuck it. I'm too old to move and this right here, this right here is as much home as I know."

They sat in silence and finished their drinks.

Uncle Hollis pushed back his chair and stretched his arms above his head. "Well, I got a room upstairs. We'll get you situated for a night while I make some calls. In the morning . . ." He shrugged.

"Boston," Luther said.

Uncle Hollis nodded. "Boston. Best I can do."

In the boxcar, with Jessie's fine coat covered in hay to ward off the cold, Luther promised the Lord he would atone. No more card games. No more whiskey or cocaine. No more associating with gamblers or gangsters or anyone who even thought of doing heroin. No more giving himself over to the thrill of the night. He would keep his head down and call no attention to himself and wait this out. And if word ever came that he could return to Tulsa, then he would return a changed man. A humble penitent.

Luther had never considered himself a religious man, but that had less to do with his feelings about God than it did with his feelings about religion. His grandmother and his mother had both tried to drum the Baptist faith into him, and he had done what he could to please them, to make them believe he believed, but it had taken no more hold of him than any of the other homework he claimed to be doing. In Tulsa he'd grown even less inclined toward Jesus, if only because Aunt Marta and Uncle James and all their friends spent so much time praising Him that Luther figured if Jesus was, in fact, hearing all those voices He'd just as soon prefer silence every now and then, maybe catch Himself up on some sleep.

And Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their "Amens" and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he'd get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.

So Luther's arrangement with the Lord had long stood along the lines of You go Your way and I'll go mine. But in the boxcar, something took hold of him, a need to make sense of his own life, to give it a meaning lest he pass from the face of the earth having left behind no heavier footprint than that of a dung beetle.

He rode the rails across the Midwest and back through Ohio and then on into the Northeast. Although the companions he met in the boxcars weren't as hostile or dangerous as he'd often heard and the railway bulls never rousted or hassled them, he couldn't help but be reminded of the train ride he'd taken to Tulsa with Lila and he grew sad to the point where he felt swollen with it, as if there were no space for anything else in his body. He kept to himself in the corners of the boxcars, and he rarely trusted himself to speak unless one of the other men fairly demanded it of him.

He wasn't the only man on the train running from something. They ran from court dates and policemen and debts and wives. Some ran toward the same things. Some just needed a change. They all needed a job. But the papers, of late, had been promising a new recession. The boom times, they said, were over. War industries were shutting down and seven million men were about to hit the streets. Four million more were returning from overseas. Eleven million men about to enter a job market that was tapped out.

One of those eleven million, a huge white guy named BB, with a left hand mashed by a drill press into a pancake-flap of useless flesh, woke Luther his final morning on the train by throwing open the door so that the wind blew into Luther's face. Luther opened his eyes and saw BB standing by the open door as the countryside raced past him. It was dawn, and the moon still hung in the sky like a ghost of itself.

"Now that's a sweet picture, isn't it?" BB said, his large head tilting up toward the moon.

Luther nodded and caught his yawn in his fist. He shook the sleep from his legs and joined BB in the doorway. The sky was clear and blue and hard. The air was cold but smelled so clean Luther wished he could put it on a plate and eat it. The fields they passed were frozen and the trees were mostly bare, and it felt as if he and BB had caught the world at sleep, as if no one else, anywhere, bore witness to this dawn. Against that hard blue sky, as blue as anything Luther had ever seen, it all looked so beautiful that Luther wished he could show it to Lila. Wrap his arms around her belly and tuck his chin into her shoulder and ask her if she'd ever seen anything so blue. In your life, Lila? Have you ever?

He stepped back from the doorway.

I let it all go, he thought. I let it all go.

He found the fading moon in the sky and he kept his eyes on it. He kept his eyes on it until it had faded altogether and the wind had bitten clear through his coat.

BABE RUTH and the WORKERS

REVOLUTION chapter twelve The Babe spent his morning giving out candy and baseballs at the Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children in the South End. One kid, covered ankles-to- neck in plaster, asked him to sign the cast, so Babe signed both arms and both legs and then took a loud breath and scrawled his name across the torso from the kid's right hip to his left shoulder as the other kids laughed and so did the nurses and even some of the Sisters of Charity. The kid in the cast told Ruth his name was Wilbur Connelly. He'd been working at the Shefferton Wool Mill in Dedham when some chemicals got spilled on the work floor and the vapors met the sparks from a shearing machine and set him on fire. The Babe assured Wilbur he'd be fi ne. Grow up someday and hit a home run in the World Series. And wouldn't his old bosses at Shefferton go purple with jealousy that day? Wilbur Connelly, getting sleepy, barely managed a smile but the other kids laughed and brought more things for Babe to sign--a picture torn from the sports pages of The Standard, a small pair of crutches, a yellowed nightshirt.

When he left with his agent, Johnny Igoe, Johnny suggested they pop over to the St. Vincent Orphan Asylum just a few blocks away. Couldn't hurt, Johnny said, add to the positive press and maybe give Babe an edge in his latest round of bargaining with Harry Frazee. Babe felt weary, though--weary of bargaining, weary of cameras snapping in his face, weary of orphans. He loved kids and orphans in particu lar, but boy oh boy those kiddos this morning, all hobbled and broken and burned, really took something out of him. The ones with the missing fi ngers wouldn't grow them back and the ones with sores on their faces wouldn't look in a mirror someday and find the scars vanished and the ones in wheelchairs wouldn't wake up one morning and walk. And yet, at some point, they'd be sent out into the world to make their way, and it had overwhelmed Babe this morning, just sucked the juice out of him.