Zack (17 page)

“You’re kidding,” I murmured.

“Nope. Your mom and I want you to have the truck. After all, you’ve put your mark on it, in a manner of speaking.”

Mom threw back her head and laughed. Her earrings jumped and swung. A week before, my parents had come home one night with a used—”previously experienced”—Jeep Cherokee—part of the image of the rural resident, I guessed, and they had built racks for the interior to hold Mom’s instruments and gear. I had hoped I could take the Toyota to Toronto, but I figured the odds were against me.

“Thanks, Mom and Dad, this is great.”

“The truck is from your dad,” Mom said right away.

“Oh.”

Confused, I watched as she got up and walked into her studio. A moment later she returned with one of her guitars. It was her favourite, an old acoustic six-string with a smooth mellow sound that perfectly complemented her voice. Awkwardly, she laid the instrument in my lap.

“Give us a few riffs,” she said.

Stirred by an unfocused excitement, I strummed a few complicated blues chords she had taught me not long before. I had been practising them every day.

“Not bad. Maybe you better take that old thing with you when you go to school so you can practise some more.”

“Mom, you mean—”

“You take music lessons when you get to the city, son.” And she leaned down and kissed me, holding me tight to her body for a few seconds before she sat down again.

I cradled the guitar, ran my hand up and down the neck, admiring the pearl finish of the tuning pegs, the grain in the polished wood of the box, the area beneath the hole worn to a lighter shade by strumming fingers. I recalled the times when I was so small I could hardly hold the guitar. I would play with it when Mom was out of the apartment and Dad preoccupied with his work. It was only now, as I held it, my hands leaving barely visible smudges in the waxed finish, that I realized she must always have known I had held it and tried to make music.

I heard the doorbell ring as I examined the worn spots between the frets.

“I’ll get it,” Jen said.

I looked up at my mother. “Mom, I don’t know what to say. Thanks—”

From behind me I heard, “Is this the Lane residence?” The voice seemed somehow familiar.

My mother did not acknowledge my words. A look of horror struck her face, and her wine glass, which hung suspended from the fingertips of both her hands, dropped. The stem split away and fragments of glass and foaming champagne blossomed up from the table.

“Oh, my Lord,” she whispered.

I turned in my chair, the recognition of the voice hitting me exactly at the moment my eyes took in the figure at the door.

H
e leaned on his cane in the doorway, his free hand clutching and working the hem of his black suit jacket. He had on a white shirt and a wide red tie even I knew was way out of style.

Jen stood with her hand on the doorknob, staring past Lucas at me, her face clouded with confusion. Dad looked at my mother with his head tilted to one side the way he did when he was surprised. The wet mark on the tablecloth spread slowly outward, unnoticed by my mother, whose fingertips pressed her cheeks beside her open mouth.

“Hello, Etta,” my grandfather’s deep voice broke the spell. “Hello, Zack.”

Dad’s glance switched from Mom to the stranger at the door as he tried to put the pieces together. “Is this who I think it is?” he asked my mother. When she spoke her words were as hard as stone. “What are you doing here, Lucas?”

Outside the window I could see a red and yellow taxi in the driveway and the rumble of its motor rode on the silence in the house. Lucas had told the driver to wait, I saw, because he expected to be shunned and he would have to leave again, knew he would be
turned away, knew he deserved to be.

“You must be Thom,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Zack favours you, around the chin.”

Mississippi was far away, but Lucas’s mellow drawl brought it all back to me—the slow warm water of the bayou, moss-hung live oaks in the yard, the hot, hot air so thick with humidity it was like a second skin.

“Really,” my father said icily.

Jen had come and stood by my chair. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

“He’s my grandfather.”

“You mean the one who—” she blurted, her skin flushing immediately after the words left her mouth. “I’d better take off, Zack.”

“You stay right where you are,” my mother commanded. “There’s no need for
you
to go.”

Which made Jen, I could see, want to leave more than ever.

Now that my grandfather and mother were in the same room, the resemblance between them was obvious—the facial features, the slender form, the proud bearing, even though Lucas stooped a little. But where Mom’s jaw was set and her eyes crackled with fire, Lucas looked tired and thoughtful, and the way he gripped the head of his cane hinted at his discomfort. No one in the house wanted him there, and he knew it.

“Etta, I’d ‘preciate it if you’d hear me out. Got a taxi waiting out yonder. Won’t take long.”

“You said all you had to say a long time ago, old man,” my mother hissed.

He nodded his head twice. “Won’t take long,” he repeated. “I come a long way to see you.”

My father, who was usually Mr. Good Host, didn’t say a word. He knew this was Mom’s call, and he waited. We all waited. The silence and tension grated on my nerves. Jen began to chew a fingernail, a pained Get-me-out-of-here look on her face.

Why was my grandfather here? I wondered. Had he found out he was going to die and decided to make peace with his daughter? Not likely, given his attitude towards people he called the whites. Did he need money? Was he in some kind of trouble? He had relatives around Natchez. Why come here?

The thought of his—and my—relatives brought to my mind something I had been trying to forget: the look on his face that morning in his yard when I had told him who I was and he had said he hadn’t known he had a grandson. And the words I had spat back at him.

“Mom, Dad,” I said. “Couldn’t you at least hear what he has to say?”

My mother sat as stiff and unyielding as an oak plank at one end of the table. Broken glass littered the stained tablecloth in front of her but she made no move to pick up the pieces. I studied my father’s
face. He knew he was the “cause” of the break between my mother and Lucas. He’d been called names on the street all his life; he’d read and seen the racist no-minds in print and in person. Lucas was just one more. Dad could handle his hatred. It was the effect on my mother that worried him.

“It’s all right with me,” Dad said. “Etta?”

Mom didn’t flinch, didn’t utter a sound.

Dad handed me a few bills. “Zack,” he said, “go out and pay off that cab.”

Lucas limped to the table, his cane tapping on the hardwood floor, and took a seat between my mother and me. He sat straight, both hands resting on the top of his cane. He wouldn’t take his eyes off my mother. For her part, she refused to meet his gaze. She looked away through the door to the kitchen, as if she had something on the stove and feared it would boil over.

“Etta,” Lucas began, almost whispering, “my old friend Ray passed on not long ago.” His Adam’s apple rose and fell. “And it got me thinkin’ about things. I guess when you get old, when your friends pass, you look back on your life. Kind of take stock, like. I began to wonder if I haven’t come up short.”

My mother continued to look away, but her face softened a little.

“Then Zack here come down to my place. To see me, I reckon. But before I knew who he was, I
thought to myself, there’s a fine young man would make any parent proud. Any grandparent too. And when he finally told me he was my grandson, and I learned he was named after my daddy …”

He trailed off, swallowed hard, and got himself under control again.

“I … I’ve suffered a lotta hate in my life, and a long time ago I learned to fight that hate by turning it back against them that held me down, denied me things because I’m black, and against the system that let ’em do it. It was the only defence I had. But, Etta, I let it poison me. I’m not makin’ excuses for myself, mind you. I’m tryin’ to explain.”

Only then did my mother face him, as if to confirm the terrible error and the judgement he heaped on himself.

“Etta, after all these years, I know an apology don’t mean nothin’. But I done you a world of wrong, and I’m sorry for it.”

Lucas turned to my father. “Sir,” he said, almost formally, as if he had rehearsed his lines again and again, “I never met you before today, and I done you a deep wrong, too.”

My mother let the words lie a moment, then she spoke, every word sharp as a knife. “Lucas, do you remember what you said to me when I told you I was going to marry Thom? You said I was a traitor to my race, that any black woman who would take up with a white man was trash. You didn’t care that Thom is
a wonderful man. You didn’t want to know. You did to Thom and me what you hated others for doing to you. Now you’re sorry,” she said with contempt.

Lucas took the assault straight on, with his chin up. I had to admire the way he kept his dignity.

“I sat down a dozen times to write,” he said. “But words on paper wasn’t enough; they was too easy. Zack come a long way to Mississippi. After he left I tried to reason out why he had come down all that way. Then I remembered that song of yours he sang for us all, and I read that school project he left me and I knew. I told myself, if he could come to Natchez and face me, I had to come and face you.”

My mother turned to me and in her face I saw something I couldn’t name. Lucas got to his feet and let out a sigh.

“Zachariah,” he said, “I’m sorry we never got to know each other better.”

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t know what to say.

“Now,” he continued, “I’d ’precíate it if y’all’d telephone for a taxi to carry me back to the airport.”

I thought for a moment. “I guess I could take you,” I offered.

“I’ll come with you,” Jen said.

It would be nice, I suppose, to say that it was a Disney-type ending, that we all fell into each other’s arms weeping and laughing at the same time, that forgiveness flowed like the river at the foot of our yard,
that we sat down together in fellowship and continued the graduation party. But the wounds ran deep in all of us, and the interrupted meal cooled uneaten on the table.

No one asked Lucas to stay. I’m certain that he would have refused anyway. He had come north to start the healing, to make a beginning, and although my feelings for him were a long way from positive, I respected him for his courage. It’s a lot harder to fix something than it is to break it.

I know that my parents felt the same. Before Lucas left our house, my father shook his hand firmly and my mother asked him to give her his address and phone number.

“Maybe I’ll call you sometime,” she said.

We got to the airport in lots of time for his flight but he asked us not to wait with him. He shook hands with Jen and me and limped through the security doors and disappeared.

Jen and I were silent for most of the way home. I was thinking—like a historian already, I guess—how one person’s actions can ripple through the years and affect so many others, and how most of the time the results of what we do can’t be predicted or known. A long, long time before, a lonely old man had buried a document box on his farm by the shore of the Grand River. The box lay in the earth for more than 150 years, until its discovery forged a chain of events that drew another old man from Mississippi to the same
farm so that he could make a new connection to his daughter and her family. I was the link between the two men. One of them I admired; the other, who should have been closer to me because he was my grandfather, I didn’t. Pawpine had never given up, but Lucas had. He had let hatred wrestle him down and defeat him. But in coming all the way from Natchez, maybe he had begun to stand up again.