The Summer We Got Free (24 page)

the
organ, playing songs that sounded like moaning, her
body hunched over the keys, her foot against the pedals; the people sitting in
rows on the pews, some of their shoulders touching, some not, some of their
heads leaned together, others, it seemed, with theirs intentionally leaned
apart; Ellen in her severe black dress and patent-leather shoes, staring
blankly at her grandmother’s coffin; and the light through the stained-glass
windows, which was low because it was an overcast January day; and Pastor
Goode, as he stood in the pulpit, giving the eulogy, looking solemn.

“Sister
Henrietta knew that the best kind of life you can live is a life connected to
the church. She lived the last years of her life in this church, and we should
take solace knowing that, although disease ravaged her body, in her last days she
had the love of God and the help of the church and its people to bring her
comfort.”

When the service
ended, some of Miss Henrietta’s out-of-town relatives, large men with several
chins each, carried the casket down the aisle and out of the church to the
waiting hearse. Ava stood on the church steps and watched. When the hearse
pulled off, there were a few minutes of lingering, as people decided how they
would get to the cemetery,
who
would ride with whom,
and what route they would take. Ellen waved to Ava from her mother’s side, as everyone
came up and hugged Maddy, and most everyone said some variation of, “She’s with
the Good Lord now.”

When Maddy saw
Ava, she put her hand on top of her head and, smiling, said, “I saw you back
there, drawing up a storm.”

“I hope you aint
offended,” George said. “I told her it wasn’t proper.”

“I wouldn’t have
it no other way,” Maddy said. Then, to Ava, “Show me what you made. I’d like to
see it.”

Ava hesitated.
It occurred to her that Miss Maddy would not like what she had drawn. She was
twelve now and she understood that people had their own ideas about what was
proper. While their ideas almost never coincided with hers, she knew that
people tended to be attached to them.

“Come on, now,”
Maddy said. “It aint no need to be shy.”

Vic and Malcolm
came over then, and Malcolm said, “You ready to go, Maddy?”

“Just a second.
Ava about to show me what she was drawing in the church.”

Some other people
heard and craned their necks in Ava’s direction.

She opened the
drawing pad and held up the drawing.

They all peered
down at it, unblinking. For a second, Ava thought she saw wonder in their eyes,
pure awe, but a second later Malcolm’s mouth twisted into a disgusted frown,
and Vic shook his head from side to side, as if not believing what he was
seeing. Sister Hattie said, “Oh, my Lord.”

They were naked.
Every single person in attendance at the funeral, even Miss
Henrietta herself.

Vic looked at
her. “Why would you do this? Why would you show Sister Henrietta this kind of
disrespect?” He looked around at the others. “What is wrong with this child?”

Miss Maddy was
still looking at the drawing, and looked like she was still deciding what she
thought. Pastor Goode appeared at her side, and when he saw the drawing he
clenched his teeth, glared at Ava, then took the drawing pad and closed it.

“Give it to me,”
Ava said. “It’s mine.”

“Shut your
mouth,” Goode whispered.

There was venom
in his voice, revulsion, and it made Ava angry. “You shut
your
mouth,” she spat back.

Sister Hattie
and several other people gasped. Regina and George, who had both been talking
with the
Liddys
, rushed over.

“What’s the
matter?” Regina asked. “What’s happening?”

“He took my
paper,” Ava said.

“This child has
been drawing filthy pictures inside this church,” said Goode. “And at a
funeral, no less.”

“It is not
filthy!”

The pastor
handed the drawing pad to George, who took it and opened it. When he found the
drawing, he closed his eyes and then opened them again, as if expecting it not
to be there anymore. Regina stared at it a moment, and Ava was sure she saw
wonder in her mother’s eyes, before Regina looked down at her and said, “Ava,
go home.”

Ava went down
the church steps and crossed the street.

“What is wrong
with that child?” Vic asked, looking from George to Regina.

“We’re sorry,
Maddy,” George said.

Maddy shook her
head. “It aint nothing to get all upset about. Ava’s a good girl.”

“Why would she
do something like that?” Vic asked. “At somebody’s
funeral
?”

“She don’t mean
no harm,” Regina said.

“
No harm
?” He laughed, bitterly. “You got
to be kidding me, Regina.”

“Where a girl
that age learn to think like that in the first place?” Malcolm asked. “Drawing
naked people? Naked
men
?”

“I held my
tongue about that child long enough,” said Pastor Goode. “I always knew it was
something not right about her—”

“Not right?”
Regina asked. “Hold on, now, Pastor—”

“—
but
I thought as long as y’all kept her in line, she would
straighten out.” He looked at the drawing again and shook his head in disgust.
“But it seem like y’all aint got no control over her at all.”

“We know she
wild,” George said.

“Oh, she more
than wild,” said Vic. “Drawing this filth.
And talking to the
pastor like she did.
It’s too much.”

“Y’all need to
get that girl in line,” Malcolm said. “And y’all need to do it fast.”

Ava was lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling,
when George came in the room and said, “You gone apologize to Maddy, and to the
pastor, and to everybody.”

“I aint
apologizing,” Ava said.

“You gone
apologize, or I’m gone whip your ass so bad you aint gone be able to sit down
for a week.”

She sat up on
the bed and glared at her father. “What for?”

“You know what
for!” he yelled.

“It aint a
filthy picture!” She yelled back. “It’s art! Every artist draws naked people.”

“I don’t give a
shit what every artist do! You aint
a
artist,
goddamnit
, you a twelve year-old girl! And you ought not be
drawing things like that!”

“Don’t tell me what
I am,” she said. “I get to say what I am.”

The whipping was
severe, worse by far than any Ava had ever gotten before. She tried not to cry
this time, squeezed her eyes shut tight and clenched her teeth and willed
herself not to cry, but it was no use. With every lash of the belt, pain seared
through her, and it seemed to not only come from her legs and her backside,
where the belt landed, but from deeper inside of her, way deep down in the
places where the art came from, up under her ribs, near her heart, and in the
pit of her stomach, and even lower, where she thought her ovaries must be. She
felt sick when it was over, and she ran to the bathroom and vomited undigested
oatmeal. The grayness of it made her want color, made her need it, and she ran
into her bedroom, desperate for paint, and found her father there, gathering up
her art supplies.

“You can have
them back when you apologize,” George said.

She shook her
head, wiped vomit from her mouth. “I’ll never apologize.”

“Well, then, you
won’t never get them back.”

The next Sunday at church, everybody was talking about
what Ava had done. Before the family had gotten to their seats on the fifth pew
from the front, George heard pieces of three different conversations referring
to the incident.

“That’s art,” he
heard Lillian Morgan saying as they passed her in the vestibule. “You go into
any museum and you gone see stuff like that hanging on every wall.”

“This aint a
museum,” Audrey Jackson reminded her. “This a church.”

“You ever heard
of the Sistine Chapel?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t know
about
no sixteen nothing.
But I know I don’t want nobody
drawing
nekkid
pictures of me when I’m lying dead in
my coffin.”

Regina glanced
at George. “Wasn’t neither one of them at the
funeral.
They aint even see the drawing.”

George frowned.
“Most of the people in here aint see it. But I bet you they got plenty to say
about it anyway.”

He wasn’t wrong.
Moving through the center aisle, on their way to their seats, he heard Bobby
Smith whisper, “If a daughter of mine ever did something like that, I’d kill
her.”

When they got to
their pew, Maddy was already there, and she rolled her eyes at them. “Y’all
believe these people? It was
my
mother’s funeral, and I aint even upset about it. Where they get off being so
insulted?”

“I can
understand where they coming from, Maddy,” George said. “The ones that seen it,
anyway.”

Maddy waved an
unconcerned hand. “That child got a gift. She ought to use it.”

Regina put her
arm around
Maddy’s
shoulders.

Out of the
corner of his eye, George saw Chuck and Lena Ellis moving along the side aisle,
making their way to their usual seats. He tried not to turn his head, but
couldn’t help it. He watched Chuck shaking hands with Vic Jones and wondered
what opinion he might have about Ava’s drawing, whether he was among those who
whispered about how George and Regina didn’t know how to control their child. It
was hard for him to imagine it, because Chuck wasn’t that sort of person, or at
least George didn’t think he was. They never talked anymore, never did more
than exchange handshakes and polite hellos, and the obligatory shallow chit-chat
when in a group, in the three years since George had made that terrible mistake
at the Christmas party. George had been the one to distance
himself
.
A few weeks after it happened, Chuck had pulled him aside during a break at the
leadership meeting, and said that they were still friends, good friends, and that
they shouldn’t let some drunken misunderstanding end all that. But George
hadn’t been drunk, and Chuck hadn’t misunderstood him, and there was no way he
could see to go back. He felt saturated with shame, wringing wet with it, every
time he thought about what he’d done, every time he played over in his mind the
look on Chuck’s face, the shock and disgust. Watching Chuck now, as he greeted
his friends and neighbors, happy, smiling, George envied him the humiliation he
didn’t have to carry around, the guilt he didn’t have to feel, the loathing of
himself that he didn’t have to know. Mixed in with that envy, too, was another
feeling, a longing that was ever there, a pining that would not stay away no
matter how many times George chased it like a stray dog from his mind.

“You listening
to me, George?”

He tore his gaze
away from Chuck and blinked at Regina. “What?”

Her eyes
followed the path that his had taken and she frowned when she saw Chuck at the
end of it. “I was talking about Ava,” she said, returning her gaze to him. “Our
daughter. Or maybe you got other things on your mind?”

Weeks passed and Ava grew miserable without color. He
had taken her paints and her chalks and her crayons, and all she had left to
make art with were the pencils she used for school. She drew pictures on the
pages of her composition books, but they were colorless, and soon her craving
for yellow and blue and, especially, red, became unbearable. She spent as much
time as possible staring at the red walls, and watching the blue sky and the
orange sunset, but seeing color wasn’t enough, she needed to use it. One day,
while playing with Ellen and Juanita, she fell and skinned her knee, and the
blood that beaded on her skin was beautiful, and it filled her with pleasure.
Later, she took a needle from her mothers sewing box and pricked her finger,
and used the blood to color a small drawing she had made. A week later, her
fingertips were raw and red from being pricked and when Regina noticed and
asked what had happened to her hands, and Ava told her, Regina told George to
give back the art supplies.

“No,” he said,
over his newspaper. “She aint apologized.”

“And she aint
going to,” Regina insisted. “I can tell you right now, your anger aint gone
outlast hers. You ought to know that child good enough to know that.”

But he did not
want to give in to Ava. He believed she knew that what she had done was wrong,
and that her refusal to apologize was just stubbornness, pure defiance for the
sake of itself. He agreed with Goode that Ava needed to be kept in line and he
blamed Regina for always giving in to her. Children needed discipline and, even
more, they needed to understand how the world worked, and know that their
survival depended on following the rules.

“This aint a
game I’m playing with Ava,” George said. “I’m trying to teach her right from
wrong. God forbid you’d take my side and support me on something.”