In Memory of Junior Page 6

  The world is a funny place.

  The problem is that people don’t have the eyes and hearts to judge up on somebody like me or Miss Laura, but they shore judge up Mr. Basketball.

  Law, I don’t usually get riled up but sometimes I do. My son Lorenzo Junior’s the one crazy about that Michael Jordan. We call him Lorenzo now, we used to call him Junior. He drove to Wilmington to pier-fish, told me about that road, that new 1-40 they made such a fuss over.

  Oh yeah, speaking of Junior. Mr. Bullock, he name his two twin sons the same as him—William Dean, Jr., and William Dean, Jr. So, somebody say, what you call them? and he say, Billy Dean and Billy Dean, and somebody say, really, is that so? well, how you tell them apart? and he say, oh, one’s a little darker than the othern.

  Speaking of chiren, that teenager that spends the night over here brought her little boy the other night. She’s got two I think. I didn’t say nothing, but I don’t think Faye would like that. She don’t do a very good job, but it’s hard to find somebody that do. I don’t know what they pay her. She ain’t much older than that boy of Tate’s and got two boys herself. There ought to be a law against marrying before you’re growed up.

  Tate brought that boy of his over here for a visit this afternoon. Mr. Glenn always asking after him. And he always saying stuff to Tate like, “You been by to see Bette lately? You seen Ansie lately? You took Morgan by to see them lately? Bring him by to see me again real soon, Son,” and you can tell by the way that boy of Tate’s walk that he ain’t interested in setting the first foot on the first porch step to this here place.

  He follow his daddy on in there, lagging behind, and Mr. Glenn see him and kind of light up and put out his hand, and I wonder can he see all that hair and all them clothes with the holes in the knees, and that earring, and soldier boots, and stuff like that. Nobody in my family ever wore the first piece of clothing with the first hole in it or the first patch that show. I don’t understand what get into their heads. What could make a child like that?

  Morgan

  On the way to the airfield, Dad decided to stop by and see Granddad and then Aunt Bette and Aunt Ansie. It’s like all these generations or something. He didn’t say anything about going to see them until we got in the car and I didn’t have a choice. I’m glad Mom doesn’t have a bunch of relatives to visit. Especially old ones. It would be okay if there was something to do once we get there. But it’s the same old stuff over and over. And then they beg me to come back—which would be okay with me if it was like interesting.

  About the time we passed Uncle Sam’s Army Surplus, I thought about the stuff we’d been studying in history and all that stuff Mom told me about Dad’s medal, so I asked Dad, “How many people did you know that got killed in the war?”

  “Right many,” he says. He glanced over at me.

  “What about the time you like won the medal?”

  “I had a good friend who got shot down and I tried to save him but I couldn’t find him on the ground. Some clouds came in and I couldn’t see him. I could talk to him on the radio, but that’s it.”

  “Radio?”

  “He had a hand-held radio and was trying to tell me where he was. Why are you suddenly interested in this?”

  I told him we had some stuff going on in school about it. Actually I was wondering if he’d tell me the same story he told Mom that “broke her heart.”

  We drove awhile. Then I said, “Is that the story that broke Mom’s heart?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  So I was like waiting.

  He says, “I’ll tell you all that when you’re a little older. There’s some stuff I’m kind of ashamed of, and it’s all complicated somehow.”

  So I wondered what could it be that I couldn’t understand now? “What happened to him?”

  “I actually, ah, heard them shooting him. Over his radio.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t you think people kind of got what they deserved over there? I mean the ethical dimensions of that war were pretty awesome.”

  Dad braked the car—whoa, I’d gotten his attention. He slowed down, pulled over to the shoulder of the road, and looked at me.

  “Naw, Son,” he says, “I don’t think he got what he deserved. He was my best friend,” he says.

  “This is my teacher’s idea,” I said. “Don’t look at me.”

  Next, it’s visit Granddad, then the aunts, and then if I’m good, he’ll take me flying in this like slow and low antique airplane.

  What he can’t get through his head is this: I’m into computers. He does not see how the knowledge of operating a computer, creating applications, is like real knowledge. I think he still sees it as reading directions—what everybody who hates computers thinks. They don’t see computers as tools to do jobs. The only way Dad will use a computer is as a word processor. He gets somebody else to do all the analysis. Surveys and things where he’s gone into such and such a business place and asked questions. He used to talk about it at home, and then he talked less and less about it. Mom tells her friends about how he talked less and less.

  I can remember when I was about ten and they’d talk to each other a lot. Her business is interior design. And then they got to talking less and less and yelling more and more. Awesome arguments. Then they wouldn’t speak to each other for two or three days, and they’d be real jumpy all the time. And then they’d argue about me, what I was supposed to watch on TV, what I was supposed to eat, what I was supposed to wear. And what I wanted was like a brother or sister.

  I got into computers and music early and Mom would support me in all kinds of ways. And Dad had this thing about guns and farms. He gave me that gun when I was thirteen. I didn’t want a gun. I wanted a Hayes-compatible modem.

  I tried to say, okay, look, here are the kinds of things you can accomplish with a modem. This is what a modem is for. I tried to explain to him about bulletin boards creating a world community—global network and such as that. You can get all kinds of stuff out of an information bank, with detail you wouldn’t believe. And what you can do with music is awesome. You can play it and the computer writes it. You can write it and the computer plays it.

  At Granddad’s place we went on in like we usually do. It’s what used to be a farm. I did what I usually do, which is go in and stand by the bed and watch Granddad cry a little and talk some. We don’t go in to see my step-grandmother because of some kind of family feud or something. It’s pretty boring.

  This whole scene is something Mom and Dad used to argue about—about inheritance, who gets the farm, which is worth over a million dollars, and all that.

  Before we left Granddad’s to go over to Aunt Bette’s, we walked across the field behind the house, and back. Dad’s got this idea about landing his airplane out there. And he always shows me the foundation of this house where he and Uncle Faison grew up.

  At Granddad’s the outside is still pretty neat, and inside everybody is dying, but at Aunt Bette’s it’s like the outside is kind of dying, and inside everybody’s fine. This lawn-mower and old wringer washing machine sit out there in her garage. My cousin, Junior, took that lawnmower apart and put it back together before he was killed in a car wreck. I don’t like agree that he should have died in the car wreck, but he could be a real pain in the ass when he wanted to. Mom said he inherited backwardness. But she said that before he got killed.

  We stepped onto the back porch and I saw through the glass panes in the door that Aunt Ansie was visiting Aunt Bette. They live close together. They were sitting at the kitchen table.

  Aunt Bette looked up when Dad tapped on the door and opened it.

  “Well, hey, son,” she says to Dad. “Have a seat.” Then she sees me and goes bananas, exclaiming this, that, and the other, reaching her arms out to me, skin like vacuum-cleaner bags hanging from between her elbows and armpits.

  “Good gracious,” said Aunt Ansie. “Me too.”

  So I, you know, hug her to
o. Dad catches me rolling my eyes.

  Bette

  It’s clear that Tate was the one turned out best, except for his divorce. Faison is a outright failure. No job to speak of. He’s been divorced too, and is, as far as I can tell, separated now. That’s what they say, anyway. I don’t try to keep up anymore.

  “Well, Lord help my time,” I said to the boy, “look who’s here. Hey, sonny boy, give your Aunt Bette a hug.” He ain’t exactly warm toward people, which is one of his problems. You can look at him and tell he’s got more problems than that. He’s grown two feet since I seen him last.

  I pulled out a couple of chairs and asked them if they didn’t want a piece of pie. I thought to myself, What has brought this youngin out and about? I didn’t want to talk about him to his face. He seems . . . well, he seems . . . kind of queer. Some of Evelyn’s blood? Me and Ansie have talked about it. But all that was a secret, so we decided long ago never to mention it except to ourselves and maybe to somebody if in the end we end up with absolutely none of the homeplace, which it is looking more and more like we might do. We worked that place sixty-odd year between us and for us to end up in the poorhouse while that Faye, or Faison, especially, gets half of it and sells it for no telling what in this day and age—to have all that happen is a outright wrong.

  “Just a small piece for me,” said Tate. Talking about the pie. “I might could force it down.” That’s what he always says. At least he does come by once in a while.

  “Been flying that airplane?” I asked him. Why in the world he’d want to buy a airplane is beyond me. He ought to know they’re dropping like flies all over the place.

  “Oh yeah, we’re on the way out to the airfield now.”

  “Here you go,” I said. I put two pieces of pie on the table. “The crust didn’t turn out just right, but it’s still hot,” I said. “You like that airplane, son?” I asked Morgan.

  He says, “Yeah.”

  If the government hadn’t started that integration, that boy might have been taught to say “Yes ma’am.” And if people hadn’t started landing on the moon it might be a good world now. When they started messing with the moon, and people’s habits and manners and likes and personal dislikes and personal preferences, and started mixing the races, they went too far.

  “So how’s your daddy getting along?” I asked Tate.

  “I think he’s doing about the same,” he says. “We just dropped by to see him a little while ago.”

  “I was just telling Ansie,” I says, “that yesterday Glenn didn’t look much better to me. Any better. I wish I could get over there more. But if I take on more than I can handle, I pay for it.”

  “I don’t think Gloria does what all she could,” says Ansie. “For one thing, she don’t keep water in there. She ought to keep water by the bed where he can get at it. And she ought to be making him walk. She makes Laura walk twice a day.”

  “Laura could have done more for him than she did before she got sick if she’d been a mind to,” I said. “Glenn ain’t the reason she’s sick, I don’t care what Faye says.”

  “What’s she said lately?” Tate wanted to know.

  “She said it to Wilma and Harold,” I said. So I told him. “What she said was that if her mama hadn’t spent all that time waiting on Glenn, she wouldn’t have ever got in the fix she’s in.”

  That Faye has never set foot in this house, except that one time she came in the front door and sat in the living room for a few minutes—didn’t even know to come in the back door—and explained all about getting somebody to set with them and the expenses and what Tate and Faison was going to pay and what she was going to pay and how she had it all written down and would be happy to listen to any suggestions that anybody had. And all this.

  After years of Glenn going downhill and downhill, and then her insisting on him seeing that doctor from the university after he’d been seeing Dr. Umstead since he was thirty-two year old and Dr. Umstead would of never done anything but what was right and had made house visits right on up through the time that no other doctor would think of such a thing. That Faye was behind the doctor change. Miss Laura had a lot of faults, lord knows, but changing doctors wouldn’t have been one of them if it hadn’t been for that Faye—not even having the sense to come in the back door, into the kitchen like everybody else since the dawn of time. She had to walk all the way around the house to get to the front door. Nothing worse than somebody with no house sense.

  I was hoping against hope—couldn’t help but hope, and I wouldn’t tell this to anybody—that Tate might say something about sharing that land with me and Ansie if it turned out that Laura died first and didn’t get the whole kit and caboodle. What a tragedy that would be—Glenn dying first, and the land handed right down to that Faye as soon as Laura died, to be sold to some chemical plant probably for no telling how many million dollars. It’s located right there at TechComm Commons, and all that land selling around there to Yankees and Japs and Arabs and anybody else with loads of crooked money taking a notion to buy.

  “And you know,” I said to Tate, “they’ll bury Laura in the graveyard, on our plot. That’s what she wants.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be buried there?” asked the boy. Like this was some of his business. Like he was grown or something, which they don’t tell them any better in the schools nowadays.

  Ansie looked at him, Morgan, with a look that said, and should have said, Whose blood do you have—had better have—in your veins, son? Whose blood has been coursing through your body down from your grandmama and granddaddy and his daddy and on back keeping us right and true Bales with God on our side, and though we was always poor we never wanted for food and shelter and never once took nothing from nobody as help—and wouldn’t have for anything in the world—and would have fought to the death to keep from taking something given to us, and loved each other seven or eight times over and you ask why shouldn’t she be buried there?

  “Son,” I said, “she was from Hoke County.

  “And Lord,” I said to Tate—hoping to soften things up a little bit; I was taking his pie plate over to the sink—“have we seen it all? Raising you-all, taking you to the fields, pulling you in a wagon, toting you around the yard. And she come along, Laura, you know, after most of that was over. You was, what—five? And Faison, twelve? Course Faison wouldn’t ever pay no attention much to us—caught between us and his real mama the way he was, I suppose.”

  I’ve said all this to both those boys many a time—I try not to play favorites though anybody can see they ain’t either one been good to their daddy.

  And sometimes I think about all the discipline me and Ansie had to instill because of them being tainted. We had to undress Tate and teach him about his privates. Yes-sir. Somebody had to teach him such. Glenn wouldn’t. We was the same as their mamas. Faison got a little too old for that and had been more or less ruined anyway, by his mama, we figured. If their natural mother would do what she done, then it was no telling what they would do. We had to be careful about seeing that they knew right from wrong—especially the little one, Tate, the one we could get our hands on.

  Mama told us that getting the Devil’s blood out of them boys would not be easy, if possible at all. And Harold Fuller has told somebody that Grove McCord is planning on coming back. But Grove McCord has got to have more sense than that. I think he’s wanted. For a crime.

  It’s just a shame that they had a no-count mama—and uncle. Grove could have been some help if he’d been a mind to. If he’d had a mind to do honest work—and the decency.

  Me and Ansie did the best we could under the circumstances and of course it turned out with us never having any children of our own, so Tate and Faison is really all we have and it’s such a shame that that boy of Tate’s has turned out the way he has. Not a scant of personality and all that hair.

  Tate

  Morgan’s eyes rolled ever so slightly as he went through the motions of hugging Aunt Bette and Aunt Ansie, one at a time. Then when th
ey put a piece of pie in front of him, he didn’t have the manners to say thank you. I had to force him to say it. He’s thick. I hate to say that, and I love him, but he is.

  Aunt Bette’s kitchen smelled like snuff, gas heat, oilcloth, and apple pie. That close-smelling kitchen is something out of my father’s life, probably my mother’s life, my aunts’ lives for sure, and on back until long long ago, and now forever gone out of my life except when I’m here in this kitchen, or in Aunt Ansie’s kitchen. Marilyn had us a big fancy kitchen with no table in it. She had a “work station.” Marilyn’s kitchen was the first one in the family without a table since before Jesus.

  “How y’all been?” I asked.

  “Fine,” said Aunt Ansie. “’Cepin we wrecked a grocery cart yesterday.”

  “Wrecked a grocery cart?”

  “Coming out of Food Lion.”

  She went into one of her long, involved stories about how they’d bought this great big cantaloupe and she was putting it in the car trunk and it dropped out of the bag and started rolling down the parking lot toward Aunt Bette, who had her back turned, pushing the cart down to one of those cart stalls. Aunt Ansie yelled, Aunt Bette turned around, put her feet together to catch it, turned loose the grocery cart, which started rolling down the hill, and on and on. The grocery cart hit a car and Aunt Bette caught the cantaloupe.