DAMN IT, DAMN IT, DAMN IT by Julia Ridley Smith
Frances and her little brother Ben laughed at the old man because he said chimbley and barfoot, but they didn’t laugh to his face. They wouldn’t have hurt his feelings for a million dollars. They loved him. Well, they part loved him and part were scared of him. Maybe not scared exactly. More like impressed. It impressed them the way he could add numbers so quick in his head, and they loved his puzzling stories about terrapins making wagers with wild turkeys or bears throwing cobs at him out of the cornfield.
“Bear meat’s good,” he told them. “Tastes like hamburger.”
“What even is a terrapin?” Ben asked, still with that funny syntax, even though he was eight. Frances was eleven, and her syntax was nearly perfect.
White people called the old man Godwin, and black people called him Hopscotch for some reason Frances didn’t know. In her own mind, she called him Godwin Pleasants, his whole lovely name. She and Ben had known him since they were babies and started coming to visit their grandmother, back when Gran still felt good and the Francis I flatware was still used at supper and hand-washed and dried and put away in its heavy felt-lined box every night. For years, Frances had thought she’d been called after the silver, or vice versa. She knew better now.
School was out for the summer, and Frances’s mother Helen had sent the children to stay with their Aunt Delia at Fairview for a month so she wouldn’t have to pay for camps while she and their father worked. Fairview was where Gran had grown up, a large two-story wooden house, two miles out from the town that was no longer a town, more a village with stoplight and post office. Gran had moved away to marry and had retired here with Papa when Frances was small and Ben was not yet born. Now Gran and Papa were dead, and everybody was sad about it. When their mother had dropped them off on Saturday, she’d written out a long list of what Delia shouldn’t allow them to do (a list Delia soon “misplaced”). Then she’d spent the afternoon scrubbing the kitchen while Delia leaned against the counter sipping a beer and talking about her on-again, off-again beau, Marshall.
“The problem with Marshall is that he thinks he needs to teach me to be a good person, and I’m pretty sure I am one already, more or less. That’s just one of the areas of opinion where we differ, but I’d say it’s an important one.”
Helen motioned with her spray bottle for Delia to step aside so she could clean the counter.
“Maybe Marshall just doesn’t understand how you can have all your books alphabetized by author but you can’t find your car keys or remember to pay your bills on time.”
“What does any of that have to do with goodness?”
Before Helen went home, she’d said to Frances, “I’m counting on you,” and Frances had gotten the feeling that she was being left to take care of Aunt Delia as much as the other way around.
Since Gran’s death in March, Delia had been staying at Fairview with only her yellow lab, Chip – short for Potato Chip, which was his color – and a boxy old television for company. She was supposed to be writing a book but wouldn’t tell anybody what it was about. She’d lost weight since Gran died and had gotten even worse about returning phone calls, which drove Helen crazy. Helen had been to Fairview half a dozen times in the spring to deal with Gran’s estate – making the two-hour trip east from Raleigh so fast that she nearly always got a speeding ticket – and each time she’d come home more exasperated. Delia, she said, was practically no help at all. The big question was: What to do with Fairview? Their family had been living in the house since 1825, back when it was the big house of a plantation, and they’d been on that same piece of land for seventy-five years before that, and they’d never, never – not once – thrown away anything. That fact depressed Helen, who said one day they’d have to get rid of all that “old stuff” and “do something” about Fairview, but Frances closed her ears to that terrible idea. She loved Fairview. She never got tired of rooting around in all that “old stuff” in the drawers and blanket chests and closets. And the books! So many! On shelves in the high-ceilinged living room, in the den, and upstairs in the bedrooms – hundreds of books, many modern, others with leather covers, fine engravings, and flyleaves inscribed in fading ink by ancestors long dead.
But Fairview wasn’t dead – far from it. There were wasps in the chimneys and, in the walls, mice, hiding from the snakes and the owls. Surrounding the house were six acres of grass, oaks, dogwoods, myrtles, azaleas, boxwoods, and the flowers Frances was learning to name: phlox and iris, hellebore and mock orange. In the woods bordering the yard on two sides lived deer and foxes and Godwin Pleasants’s famous bears. At night, with the windows open (there was no central air), Frances could hear the frogs, cicadas, and crickets singing as she read herself to sleep atop the white cotton sheets, damp with humidity and thin with age. The whole place – house, yard, town, countryside – was bleak and beautiful, both, with a mystery in it that Frances wasn’t sure thrilled her in quite the same way that other mysteries did. Ben said Fairview was haunted because their grandmother had died here, right in the big, carved tall-post bed Aunt Delia slept in downstairs. Frances told him he was being stupid, but out of his hearing she asked Delia didn’t it creep her out, using the bed where her mother had died?
“No, honey, it makes me feel close to her.”
Aunt Delia went on to say that if Fairview was haunted, Gran was only one ghost of many, and the least of the trouble. And then Frances had understood, dimly, that this was a place Delia herself was still trying to fathom.
* * *
It had only taken a few days for them to settle into a routine. First, breakfast in the little room behind the kitchen, prepared mostly by Frances while Ben set the table and Delia drank coffee and checked email on her phone. After they ate, Delia sent them out to run around the yard before the heat became unbearable. Frances would ask didn’t she need help with the dishes, but Delia always said no. The kitchen was too small for more than one person to work in it, and anyway she liked seeing the children out the window while she loaded the dishwasher – it reminded her of when she and Helen used to play out there with their cousins. Back then Godwin Pleasants had tended the yard only on Saturdays because during the week he went up to Norfolk to work in the shipyards. Back then he could do in one day at Fairview what it now took him all week to manage.
He was out there most mornings before they even got up. Sometimes his daughter Jolisa dropped him off; sometimes he walked. It was hard to believe he walked all that way, the way so long, and him so old, and the sun so hot, even early in the morning now that it was mid-June. He and Jolisa lived out a dusty road on the other side of town. You never went out that road that there wasn’t a run-over black snake in the middle of it or a dead deer. Frances knew this because whenever she used to visit Fairview, every afternoon, Gran would say, “Let’s have a little tea party,” like it was a spontaneous idea and not something she did every day. She’d boil water and put real tea leaves in a china teapot and get out the matching creamer and the sugar bowl – all Spode, from England. She’d count out enough cloth napkins and lay out slices of orange rat cheese and Ritz crackers on a plate, plus Little Debbies cut on the diagonal. She’d bring it all out with the cups and saucers and Francis I teaspoons rattling on the tray, which she set on the coffee table in the den, and while they had tea, she’d calmly tell Ben not to put his feet on the table or his finger up his nose and remind Frances that a lady never crossed her legs at the knee, only at the ankle.
But before the tea party could happen, they had to drive Godwin home. He sat with Gran up front, where they both smoked ferociously and without ceasing, the windows barely cracked, the ashtrays brimming. Once Ben got sick, and Gran said he must have inherited a weak stomach from their father. Nobody in her family had ever had such a thing as a weak stomach.
Mingled with the smoke was Gran’s perfume, along with Godwin’s smell of cut grass, gasoline, and leaf dust, and underneath all those smells lay whatever musk nature gave to grown people to advertise themselves, before work and habits laid other odors over their skin and hair. Frances used to wonder when she would develop a smell of her own; then one day she thought maybe she’d had one all along and was just too used to it to be able to identify it.
On these drives, Gran often fretted to Godwin that Aunt Delia would never settle down, jumping from thing to thing the way she did – jobs, cities, hobbies, men. As for Helen, she was just the opposite, always had been: she worked too hard, never stopped to smell the roses.
“Poor thing acts like she never even heard of a rose. I tell you, if my girls could blend their qualities, I’d have two perfect daughters instead of two that worry me to death.”
“Shoot!” Godwin would say. “Don’t tell me about daughters. I got twice as many as you got!”
Jolisa was the only one of Godwin’s daughters who lived in the area; her three sisters had gone up north long ago. They came south only when there was a funeral or a wedding, always elegantly turned out and driving a new car or, sometimes, a new husband. Jolisa worked third shift twenty-two miles down the road at a plant packaging sticky buns, the big ones with the gluey glaze smeared against the cellophane, always already stale when you bought them. She had two sons and was forever trying to get together enough money for doctor’s bills and football shoes and bail.
Often Jolisa would just have gotten out of bed when they dropped off Godwin. Poor Jolisa, Gran used to say, I admire how she handles her lot in life, and she’s always so grateful. Gran was always giving Jolisa things: food, when she had too much, or a silk blouse she was through with or a casserole dish that was perfectly good except for missing the lid.
When Gran offered sympathy for Jolisa’s troubles with her boys, Jolisa would shrug and say, “I leave it all to the Master, ’cause he’s got a plan.”
Once Ben asked who the Master was, and Jolisa looked shocked.
“Why, God, sugar. Who else?”
Only in eastern North Carolina had the children ever heard God called the Master. That was not said by people at home in Raleigh. To Frances, the word conjured disaster, which it seemed Jolisa was always having one of, and Ben said all he could think about when he heard it was the Master Blaster, a powerful water gun he desired that shot high-pressure streams for spectacular distances and with which, he was certain, he could put out the eyes of the playground enemies who tormented him because he sucked at killball.
Now that Gran was gone, though, it fell to Aunt Delia to drive Godwin home. She didn’t allow cigarettes in her car (even though she herself smoked sometimes, on the sly), and they didn’t talk much, instead riding most of the way in silence, everybody staring out the windows at the peanut fields and pine trees and old tobacco barns falling in on themselves. Because he couldn’t smoke, Godwin would drum his fingers on the armrest as they rode through town, with its several blocks of modest brick ranch houses and handful of big Victorians, painted white, their shutters and gingerbread picked out in blue or green or black. They’d go past the white Baptist church, the gas station, and the grocery store, through the stoplight, and stop at the dinky post office to get the mail. The post office was near the defunct Episcopal church where all the babies in Frances’s family had been christened and where her mother had been married and Gran had been funeralized, as Godwin said, the last service of any kind to have been held there.
After the post office, they’d ride out of town, past more fields and pine trees, past the black Baptist church and its graveyard, past a collapsed house and a cluster of trailers, until they finally arrived at Godwin and Jolisa’s place, a tan double-wide with a screen porch, beside which grew a clump of orange canna lilies taller than Ben.
All around the trailer, drifting in and out of piles, were parts from freezers, tractors, and other machines Godwin was working on. Parked alongside what he called a barn but looked to Frances like a shed was the sputtering Statesman riding mower Gran had let Godwin have for parts after he’d convinced her they needed a new mower at Fairview. He cheated you, Frances’s mother had grumbled, but Gran had just laughed and said she was glad for Godwin to have the old thing if it made him happy. He’d managed to keep it running and had even rigged up a kind of homemade plough dealie for it that he said would be useful in the unusual event of a real snow.
There’d been no call to use it yet, but he was proud of his plough. What was important was he’d made the thing. What was important was, he knew how to make things. Aunt Delia said she envied him that. She could barely make supper, she said, and after a few days with her, Frances had found that to be true. Yards were Godwin Pleasants’s sideline. What he was, if you asked him, was a mechanic. That had been his job up in the shipyard in Virginia, and that was why he still always wore his dark blue jumpsuit – he wanted people to see what he really was. The jumpsuit had once been a sturdy cotton canvas, but now it hung patched and slack behind where there was no meat on him. People came from every direction with their broken stuff, knowing he would only charge ten dollars for his time, no matter if the job took him a few minutes or all afternoon.
“It’s like Daddy don’t even know what year it is,” Jolisa complained to Delia. “Got no idea what a dollar’s worth in this day and age.”
* * *
Before Frances and Ben had come to stay with Delia that summer, their mother had collected baby things from people at their church to take to Jolisa’s new grandbaby. The baby’s father was Jolisa’s younger son, Edward. He would be a senior in the fall, talented enough at football that there was hope of a college scholarship, his life so far more promising than that of his older brother Davis, also a father, who had recently been jailed for larceny for the second time. He and a friend had burgled a store three towns over and made off with $247 and most of a hog.
“Can you believe it?” Frances overheard Delia tell Marshall on the phone. “Can you believe I’m living in a place where people steal hogs? Not even whole hogs. Parts of hogs!”
The first afternoon the children were there, when they drove Godwin home, Jolisa was sitting on the screen porch, a clear plastic shower cap over her curlers. She was smoking a cigarette and giving the baby a bottle of formula. The children ran up, eager to see the baby, while Godwin helped Delia get the bags out of the car.
“Can I feed her?” Frances asked. She wanted to hold the baby, bad. She also wanted to get the baby away from that cigarette.
“Sugar, I wish you would.”
Along with Godwin’s wooden rocker and two fold-up lawn chairs, there was a white plastic shower chair, wide enough for Frances and Ben to share. They sat on it, and Jolisa put the baby in Frances’s arms. She was about six weeks old now and tiny, only seven and a half pounds, Jolisa said. Ben leaned over and made a face, trying to get the baby to smile, and it was all Frances could do not to push him away. She already regarded the baby as more hers than his, on account of it was a girl.
“What’s her name?” he asked.
“Radiance,” Jolisa said. “Radiance Diane.” She handed Frances the bottle and watched her wedge it between the baby’s lips. She said it looked like Frances knew what she was doing.
Frances nodded. “I babysit back home.”
“Yeah, like, twice,” Ben said.
Oh, if she’d had a free hand . . . But she was too enchanted with Radiance to bother with Ben. It was just too good the way she was sucking and gazing up at Frances with that weird empty-eyed love only little, little babies could give.
Jolisa reached over to tip the bottle so Radiance didn’t get a mouthful of air. Frances felt stupid for not knowing to do it herself. Godwin was coming through the screen door with two shopping bags. Nordstrom. Saks Fifth Avenue. When Delia had seen the bags, she said Helen must have been shopping at that big-ass fancy mall over near Durham, and Helen had told her, “I have to dress for my job. I can’t just go around in sweatpants all day, like you.”
“Girls ain’t nothing but trouble,” Godwin grumbled.
“Aw, Daddy, you don’t mean that.”
“Like fun I don’t.” He set the bags down, took off his cap, and sank into his rocker with a sigh. Frances had noticed that his good nature always took a dip as soon as he got home and got comfortable. Seemed to her like it ought to be the opposite.
Jolisa appeared delighted. You could never have too many things for a baby; they dirtied them up so fast. She thanked Ben and Frances and Delia over and over, as though collecting it all had been their own idea, and Frances thought it a shame her mother was at her office, sitting in a meeting or writing her hundredth email of the day, instead of hearing Jolisa’s thanks. After all, she was the one who’d rounded up the stuff, then carefully sorted it, pulling out anything she deemed sorry. Poor people, she said, didn’t want clothes with stains and broken zippers any more than well-off people did. She was the one who had gone out to Target and bought two of the biggest boxes of diapers they had and six large cans of formula. Jolisa and Godwin had been such a help with Gran, she said; she wanted to do something nice for them.
“I know Terri will be excited,” Jolisa said. “She’s sleeping right now, poor thing. She had the clamps. Do you know what that is? That’s a serious disease. It’s nothing to fool with. And can you believe, sick as she was, her folks put her out? Because of the baby? Well, I said, Terri, sugar, you come on and stay with us, if you can stand us. So she did. I always wanted a girl so bad, and now the Master’s sent me two!”
* * *
Back home, Frances never thought of her family as rich. But when she came out to Fairview, she realized that they had been pretty wealthy once upon a time. There was the big house, and the Francis I, and the portraits of the greats and the great-greats, and the antique furniture, and the stories of relatives who had been in the colonial government or had written amusing letters while on trips to Europe. Nobody said much about slaves, but she knew they had been there, and it had only been in the past year or so that she’d begun to think about how different her family’s life was from those of people like Godwin and Jolisa and the other people she saw down here, driving broken cars and standing around in front of the store, not having any work to go to.
Last fall, her mother had gotten her out of school early one Friday afternoon so they could come down and take Gran to the doctor. They’d been somewhere between Rocky Mount and Fairview when they’d gotten stuck behind a school bus gradually delivering children home. She’d been sharing her mother’s annoyance at the bus’s poky progress until she saw a boy get off the bus and run down a dirt driveway to a derelict wooden house she’d always assumed was abandoned. The boy had run right inside, and then she’d noticed for the first time the TV satellite dish on one corner of the sagging roof, and she realized he lived there.
“Did you see that?” she’d asked her mother.
“See what?”
* * *
On the phone, after the first two weeks had gone by, her mother asked what they’d been up to.
“Reading and watching movies and playing Scrabble. I wish you could see the baby. She’s so cute. Jolisa always lets me feed her. Dumb old Ben, he thinks the baby recognizes him now because she looks at him when he says ‘Where’s Ben?’ but I just think any baby will look at you if you talk to it. Don’t you?”
“Please tell me Ben’s getting outside and not just watching TV.”
“Ben is a hopeless case.”
“Well, I hope Delia’s not moping.”
“Don’t worry, Mama. We’re taking care of each other.”
It was true. They were. In the evenings, while Ben was busy with another blow-em-up movie (he wasn’t allowed to watch them at home), she and Delia would sit on Gran’s tall-post bed and talk while Delia drank white wine and Chip lay out on the cool bathroom floor and scratched the tile, running in his dreams. They played cards or painted their toenails; Frances ignored Delia’s extravagant cheating, and Delia didn’t get mad when Frances accidentally got polish on the bedspread. They talked about boys – Frances had just gotten over a crush, and Delia said she wasn’t breaking up with Marshall, just slowing down. She’d gone up to Durham to see him twice since she’d moved out here, but she hadn’t invited him to Fairview yet, though he kept hinting that he wanted to be asked.
“Trouble is, I just can’t picture him here.”
“You don’t think he’d like it?”
“He’ll say it’s interesting, and I won’t like the way he says it, and then we’ll have a big fight. I just know it.”
A few times, Aunt Delia cried. One time it was about missing Gran; once, it was Marshall; once, she said, it was merely existential.
* * *
Rounding the bend coming into town one afternoon, Frances spied up ahead a lone figure walking alongside the road. The man wore low-slung jeans and an oversized nylon Carolina Panthers shirt. Godwin leaned toward the windshield, squinting.
“That’s my cousin Otis. He’s got no business out walking with his bad leg.”
The man’s gait was indeed peculiar. The right leg didn’t bend, as though it didn’t have a joint, so he had to lean to the left and swing the right leg around to move forward.
Aunt Delia said, “Do you want me to offer him a ride, Godwin?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Delia slowed the car as they passed the man, then pulled over onto the verge. Tall weeds grabbed at the car’s underbelly, tugging it to a stop. It was a small car, and when, a minute later, the stranger opened the door, Frances about had to sit on Ben to make room. He was too busy staring at the man to complain, though. The man wasn’t tall, but he was built solid, and about his eyes was a grim wildness that terrified Frances when he turned toward her, baring his teeth, one of which was made of metal.
“Hello!” said Aunt Delia, her voice sounding the way a balloon looked when you accidentally let go of the string and it flew up into the sky. The man said nothing, and the echo of Delia’s bright hello hung in the air, a sweet yellow dot against a blue sky, getting smaller as it went up into nothing.
They hadn’t been back on the road two minutes when the man hit the back of Godwin’s seat.
“Move your seat up, old man.”
Aunt Delia told Godwin how to do it. When he’d adjusted it, he turned around halfway and said some folks’ names to the man, asked how they were doing.
“Old man, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
For a moment, Frances heard only the tires rumbling over the asphalt, just as regular as if nothing was wrong.
“That’s no way to talk in front of this lady and them children,” Godwin said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Ain’t shit wrong with me! What’s wrong with you?”
The stranger popped Godwin in the back of the head.
“Ow! What’d you do that for?”
“Cause I felt like it,” said the man, and he hit Godwin again, harder this time, so that he cried out in real pain. He reached over the backseat, swatting, but the man grabbed his arm and twisted it so that Godwin yelled again.
“You let go of him!” Delia shouted, the car swerving as she turned to fuss.
“Watch out!” Frances cried. Delia steadied the car. Surprisingly, the man let go, and Godwin folded his hurt arm against his chest.
“You ain’t Otis,” he said.
“No shit!”
On the other side of Frances, Ben was shaking. She gave him a firm look and shook her head. He had to get it together! They were nearing the stoplight in town and might be able to jump out; since he was closest to the door, he needed to be ready to go.
But the man was saying, “Stop at the store.”
Delia pulled into the parking lot. Seeing the handful of parked cars and three women talking by the ice cooler at the store’s entrance, Frances thought maybe everything was going to be okay. The stranger fumbled his way out of the car, leaving the door wide open, and with his odd, stiff gait walked across the pavement and into the store. The three women watched him, watched Frances hurry to close and lock the door, watched as Delia careened out of the lot – and Frances watched them watching, sure she’d remember their faces forever because, in her mind, they somehow by their watching had saved her from an awful fate.
* * *
“What’s the matter with Little Man?” Jolisa nodded at Ben, who was still crying. She was wearing a royal blue dress and high heels, her hair was fixed, and she had on gold earrings and a black and gold bead necklace. Frances had never seen her so fancy before. Any other day she would have asked what the occasion was, but now she said nothing.
“We had a bit of a scare on the way here,” Aunt Delia said, hugging Ben to her side.
“We give Arvell James a ride,” Godwin said.
Jolisa’s face! If everybody hadn’t been so upset, Frances would’ve laughed.
“I thought it was Cousin Otis,” Godwin said. He lit a cigarette.
“That crackhead don’t even look like Otis! You must need new glasses.”
Jolisa frowned at Delia and Frances, scandalized that they hadn’t been able to recognize that a man as rough as Arvell James couldn’t possibly be her cousin.
“They got the same walk,” Godwin protested.
Jolisa held up her hand to show that she couldn’t take him right then, not at all.
She said, “Why don’t you go get Little Man a Coke?”
As soon as Godwin went inside, Delia said in a low voice, “Don’t be too hard on him. He’s pretty shaken up.”
“That man hit him,” Frances said.
“Twice,” Ben sniffed.
“Arvell James! I would no more give him a ride . . . Steals anything that’s not nailed down, and just as soon knock you in the head as look at you. All them Jameses the same way. His grandmother that raised him poisoned two husbands. Did you know that? And I could tell you worse besides, but it’s not fit for children to hear.”
Jolisa sat on one of the lawn chairs, produced a tissue from her pocket, pulled Ben over to her, and wiped his face.
She said, “Don’t you be ashamed. I’d have cried, too, if Arvell James got in my car.”
Godwin came out with Cokes and handed them around.
“Did Arvell hurt you, Daddy?”
Frances had never seen Jolisa’s face look so hard. The Jolisa she knew was soft, smiling; she wore sweatpants and curlers, offered cookies, let everything roll off her. This Jolisa, decked in a jewel-colored dress and make-up and gold beads, was different. She had a power to her.
When he said nothing, she asked again.
“Did he hurt you?”
“Wrenched my arm, that’s all. Give me a headache. If I could’ve got a good angle on him, I would’ve laid him out.”
“Oh, please, Daddy, you’re three times his age, and anyway, you know Arvell James ain’t nobody to fool with.”
“Well, if I see him around this place, he’s going to be full of lead.”
Jolisa blew out a derisive puff of air. “Talking big.”
“Don’t you think we ought to call the police?” Delia said. “Report that man for assault?”
Jolisa said, “And just what do you think they’re going to do?”
* * *
The lady Delia talked to at the police station said they already knew Arvell James was a bad character. What had Delia been thinking, picking up somebody like that? Godwin Pleasants could press charges if he wanted to, but that seemed unlikely, given his own run-ins with the law, and besides no judge was going to bother with a case of one black man hitting another one.
Frances heard it all because the only way Aunt Delia could get cell reception at Fairview was to put on the speaker and hold the phone up to the back window in the breakfast room and holler at it.
“I swear, these people down here.” She trailed off then, taking a piece of the orange Frances was peeling, but she didn’t have to say any more for Frances to get the point. Frances knew perfectly well what a bigot was and that it was very wrong to be one. She had learned all about that at school and also at home where, every MLK day, her father made her and Ben watch Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on YouTube. Her mother, at Frances’s Girl Scout meetings, was careful when necessary to say “African-American” so as to respect the two dark-skinned girls in the group, who were Indian, not Native American, but Indian meaning their parents were from India or maybe their grandparents. Frances wasn’t sure which. Not that her mother called them “African-American,” but she seemed to think it important to use careful terminology in front of them. At home, her mother usually just said “black” because that was what she had grown up with, she said, and it was hard to change.
“It’s okay,” Frances told her, “the black kids at my school still say black. You just can’t say stuff like ‘the blacks’ or say that only black people like this and only white people like that, because then you’re being racist.”
It was a lot to think about, once you really stopped to think.
At supper, Ben pushed his spaghetti around and said, “What if that man comes to get us?”
Aunt Delia patted his shoulder and pretended it wasn’t what all of them had been thinking all day.
“Oh, honey, don’t worry about that. He doesn’t care about us, and besides, he doesn’t even know where we live.”
That satisfied Ben, but Frances knew that anybody in the one-stoplight town could guess who they were and where they stayed. When she lay in bed later, she thought of all the ways Arvell James, high on drugs and enraged by circumstance, could get them. For once, she was glad to be sharing the room with Ben, who insisted on keeping the light on when he lay down in the twin bed across from her. From the way he flopped and huffed, trying to settle himself, she could tell he wasn’t asleep yet, but at least he’d stopped talking. She didn’t know how Aunt Delia could sleep downstairs with her windows open. If it weren’t so hot, Frances would close the windows in their room. After all, it was possible Arvell James had a ladder. Oh, well, at least Chip would bark if anybody came prowling around, and that might give them time to lock themselves in the bathroom.
For the first time in her memory, the noise of the night creatures outside seemed more menace than comfort. For the first time, she considered how many thousands of jumping, scuttling creatures it took to make such a big pervasive noise. She went over and turned up the box fan as high as it would go.
* * *
The next day was Sunday, so they didn’t expect Godwin, but when he didn’t come on Monday or Tuesday, Frances began to worry. She asked why didn’t Aunt Delia call him. Delia said he’d turn up when he was ready.
That evening, after supper, the house phone rang. The noise surprised Frances – she hadn’t known the faded yellow pushbutton phone hanging on the kitchen wall still worked. Taped up next to it was a list of numbers written in Gran’s hand, half of them crossed out because the people had died. The phone kept ringing, and Frances realized she’d have to answer it because Delia, who favored long hot baths even in the summer, was in the tub.
At first she didn’t understand that it was Godwin Pleasants calling. His voice sounded thick, as though he had a mouthful of something he couldn’t dislodge. She thought he was saying for her to get her mama, and she tried to remind him that her mother was in Raleigh. Whatever he said next made no sense, and after that, whenever she spoke, there would be a long silence until he would say, “Miss Delia? It’s Godwin,” and start rambling again.
By and by, Frances understood that he thought she was Delia and that he’d forgotten Gran was dead and wanted to talk to her so he could tell her that he needed some money. Frances wondered how that could be, since he’d just been paid on Saturday. She’d seen Aunt Delia give him the twenties – she didn’t know how many because he’d hastily put them in his pocket without counting, the way he always did, the whole embarrassed sleight of hand between them like a magic trick they performed together.
“Just ten dollars,” he was begging. “Please.”
He sounded so distant, like a man down a well, hollering up toward a daylight he could barely see.
“Or a sandwich? If I could just get a sandwich. Jolisa put me out. She tried to kill me. Pushed me down. Think I broke my foot. Oh, it hurts so bad.”
Frances was alarmed that he was telling her these things. What could she do, a little girl? It was like talking to a stranger instead of a person she’d known all her life.
“Hold on,” she said. “Let me find Aunt Delia.”
She put the receiver down on the counter, went out of the kitchen, through the hall, past Ben on the couch in the den, where he was watching an explosion on TV, then on through the dark living room they rarely used, with its shrouded, slipcovered shapes and curtains always drawn against the summer sun, through the office to Aunt Delia’s room, where a lamp burned on Gran’s dressing table. Chip lay on the floor in front of the bathroom, and when Frances reached over him to knock on the six-paneled door, he opened one brown eye but didn’t move.
“Godwin’s on the phone. He sounds weird. I think he might be sick.”
Behind the door, Aunt Delia said, “Honey, he’s all right. Just tell him I’ll talk to him later.”
Frances hesitated, then crossed the house again. The phone was bleating on the counter. There was nothing for her to do but hang up, too. She went into the den to watch TV with Ben. It made her so mad, all these things grown people let swirl in the air, like smoke, and wouldn’t explain. Even Delia, who Frances’s mother said didn’t have a practical bone in her body, was in on things Frances wasn’t allowed to know. How was that fair? One day Frances was going to know everything there was to know about everything, and people wouldn’t be able to hide things from her all the time, damn it. She had developed a habit of thinking damn it to herself whenever grown-ups irritated her, which, now that she was eleven, was happening more and more, so that her mind was like a caged bird that said damn it, damn it, damn it all damn day, and she couldn’t give it enough crackers to shut it up.
Look at Ben, sitting there with his mouth hanging open, watching that stupid television. He had forgotten all about Arvell James, all about Godwin Pleasants. He just wanted to see things on fire. Boys.
Frances wandered into the living room and turned on the floor lamp next to the piano, which was a grand but didn’t sound it. The mildewed felt inside gave off a musty smell, and the bench creaked like it would disintegrate when she sat on it, but she enjoyed playing. Inside the bench was sheet music from the 1920s and ’30s that had belonged to Gran’s grandmother, all of it too difficult for Frances, but she liked to look at the covers. She still remembered her last two recital pieces, one called “Skipping Along,” the other a simple arrangement of “Für Elise.” She was playing that a second time when Delia passed by in her green bathrobe, toweling her hair, and had started the tune yet again when Delia came back, holding a glass and an ice bucket with a wine bottle in it. She stood to listen and, when Frances was done, said she played nicely.
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, you’re improving. That’s the main thing. You want to come hang out in my room?”
“It’s Gran’s room,” Frances said, just to be ornery, but when Delia walked away, she followed. Delia propped up against the pillows and put lotion on her arms while Frances sat at the foot of the bed and shuffled. The picture on the back of the cards was a cancan dancer, showing her leg. Frances had found them way at the back of a drawer, along with a dried-up lipstick redder than blood and a lighter that had run out of fluid.
“I thought you cared about Godwin. Why didn’t you come to the phone?”
“Because he never calls at night unless he’s drunk.”
“Okay . . .” Frances said, pulling at one of the white fluff balls on the chenille bedspread, “but you’re drinking.”
“There’s a difference between my glass of wine or three and the way Godwin drinks.”
Frances dealt, and they played a hand without talking. It was just War they were playing, not a thinking kind of game, but still you couldn’t really do conversation because you had to keep up the pace. Frances won, then gathered all the cards and shuffled again.
Delia said, “I remember one time, when I was about your age, I was riding home on the school bus and these kids called this sweet little boy the N-word. You know what that is?”
Frances nodded.
“Well, I screamed at those kids to quit. I mean, I really went crazy, screaming at them. And then when the little boy got off the bus, I did, too, even though it wasn’t my stop. He didn’t say anything to me, but I walked behind him until I was sure he was home safe.”
“That was good.”
“At the time, I thought I was doing a really good, brave thing, but then later I wondered if maybe I’d just embarrassed him. What if he thought I was following him because I was going to be mean to him, too? Maybe I scared him.”
“He knew you were nice. Everybody knows you’re nice.”
Frances wished her aunt would just pick up her cards and play, but she wasn’t paying attention to the game anymore.
“You’re sweet,” Delia said. “But see, when I think about it now, I realize maybe I wasn’t thinking of him. Maybe I just wanted to feel like I was being good. Patting myself on the back.”
“But you are a good person.”
Delia’s poured herself another glass of wine and stared across the room at the old photographs of Gran’s family and the cold fireplace.
“Think what it would be like,” she said, “to be as smart as Godwin and to live in a place like this all your life, where people still do things the old ways.”
“Why doesn’t he leave here, then?”
“Probably one of the usual things that stops people leaving a place. Money? Love? Inertia? Fear?”
“Fear of what?”
“Anything? Everything?”
Delia squirted lotion into her hand and rubbed it onto Frances’s right foot, kneading gently. After a few minutes, Frances felt so relaxed she had to close her eyes.
“I was afraid of Arvell James.”
“I know. Me, too. Marshall says we’re all racists. He says we learn it before we ever have a choice, and by the time we’re able to make a choice, it’s too late. It’s already in you. But if I press him and say, so you’re a racist, too, he’ll just say, We all are, on some level. Thing is, he says all that stuff about everybody being racist, but deep down he doesn’t believe he is. He thinks that if he worries about things like whether it’s okay for white people to laugh at black comedians’ jokes about other black people, then he’s fighting the power, you know? But what’s he doing, really?”
Frances put the cards aside and lay down. She felt so tired. Aunt Delia started on her left foot.
“I wasn’t scared of that man because he was black,” Frances said. “He just – had a scary look.”
She didn’t know how to explain to Delia what scared her about the stranger. She didn’t think it was his color. It wasn’t his obvious strength or the metal tooth or even the mean things he did. What scared her was the way he didn’t seem to see any of them, as though his eyes were instruments not for taking in the unspeakable world but for broadcasting what he thought of it.
“Godwin’s cousin or not,” Delia said, “I shouldn’t have picked him up. He was a man I didn’t know. And I was a woman with children in the car. That’s what your mother would say.”
“Oh, I won’t tell her,” Frances said sleepily. “But Ben will.”
* * *
Jolisa came by with a package of sticky buns to thank them for the baby clothes. She wouldn’t get out of the car because Chip was running around barking. While Delia was trying to catch him to put him in the house, Jolisa rolled down the windows and handed the sticky buns to Ben. He grinned because he was the only one who liked them and knew he’d get to eat them all.
Behind Jolisa, Radiance was buckled into her car seat, wearing a pink romper with a cupcake on it. Sitting on the swirled white icing were two yellow kittens, kissing, and surrounding them were tiny white hearts, shooting off in every direction like sparks. Frances stared into the brown, depthless eyes that were studying her. All morning she’d been thinking about what Delia had said last night and wondering if she’d been scared of Arvell James before he’d hit Godwin or only after. It seemed very important to try to figure that out.
Worse, she was still afraid, and the most likely reason she could come up with was one she didn’t like at all: maybe she was always afraid.
How long did a baby like Radiance have in the world before she began to be afraid, too? How long before she found out about people like Frances? Frances didn’t want to be a person who could be afraid of Arvell James before she knew he was Arvell James, before she even knew there was such a thing, such a person, as Arvell James. She stared harder into the baby’s eyes and searched her heart for love. It didn’t take her long to find it. There it was, running all around her insides, warm and syrupy, but after a minute she thought sadly that her little test wasn’t good enough. Anybody could love a baby, any kind.
* * *
That fall, after Frances and Ben had been back in school a month or so, their mother brought them out to Fairview for a weekend visit. Godwin Pleasants had turned up by then and was soberly dealing with the fallen leaves on the place, the long, bent teeth of his rake scratching, scratching, all day long.
Julia Ridley Smith’s stories have appeared in American Literary Review, Arts and Letters, The Carolina Quarterly, Chelsea, and The Greensboro Review.