All-Bright Court Page 6

  As they approached the lot, Moses cranked up the window. Silently, he watched Samuel and the boy pass his car and continue down the sidewalk. Then he gunned the engine of his sleek red Thunderbird and flew right by them.

  9

  Sharers

  SOMEWHERE in the field, hidden among the tall weeds, was a hungry boy. He was lying on his stomach, stuffing slices of bologna in his mouth. He put so many pieces in his mouth that he gagged, and a ball of pink flesh fell out into the weeds.

  “Kiss it up to God,” he said, and kissed the meat. He began eating it, pulling off a few twigs and an ant as he ate.

  “Dennis,” a voice called from somewhere in the field. “Where you at, Dennis? My mama want to talk to you.”

  The boy stopped eating. He pitched the half-eaten meat over his shoulder and lay still. He would not come out of hiding because the pack of bologna he was lying on, he had stolen from the Red Store.

  He had put the cold package inside his pants, but before he could get to the door, Mr. Jablonski was shouting, “Hey you, hey boy,” coming from behind the counter with a bat in his hand. Dennis beat him to the door just as Mrs. Taylor, Mikey, and the baby, Dorene, were coming in. He knocked Dorene to the ground and escaped.

  “Don’t ever come back in my store! If I see you again, I’ll beat your brains out,” Mr. Jablonski screamed.

  Mrs. Taylor bent to pick up Dorene.

  “No, I’ll get her,” Mr. Jablonski said as he picked up the crying child. “You’re in no shape to be bending like that.”

  “Don’t his mama got credit with you?” Mrs. Taylor asked.

  “I cut her off. She never pays me. Every time she gets her check she has a story, or she doesn’t show up at all. I’m in business here, you know.”

  “The boy hungry. It’s a shame.”

  “It’s a shame, but what can you do?” Mr. Jablonski said as he returned behind the counter.

  At one time Mary Kate thought there was something she could do. The boy had begun showing up on her doorstep not long after Mikey started kindergarten. Before she ever saw him, Mikey had come home with stories of Dennis.

  “He never be having milk money. He always be a sharer, Mama.”

  “What’s a sharer?”

  “When you don’t bring in milk money, Mrs. Franco split a milk and let you have some.”

  “That’s nice of her,” Mikey’s mother said.

  “Yeah, Mama, but the kids that be sharing all the time be nasty. This boy Dennis, he colored, and he stink. This little white girl be so dirty. Them two always be sharing. Kids be picking on them.”

  “I hope you not one of them, Mikey. They can’t help the way they is.”

  Mikey was silent. Once he had stuck out his tongue at them when Mrs. Franco wasn’t looking. The other children laughed. It was fun. But one Monday toward the end of October, the fun stopped.

  Mikey left home with five pennies knotted in a handkerchief, but when he arrived at school, they were gone. He had to share a milk that day with Dennis.

  The little white girl shared one with a Puerto Rican girl. All four of them sat at a small table and had their milk in Dixie cups. Mikey did not want to drink his. He didn’t even want the windmill cookies Mrs. Franco passed out. He sat staring at the three others at his table.

  The white girl drank all her chocolate milk with one lifting of her cup, and there was a brown mustache on her face. Mikey stared at her whiteness. Tiny green veins pulsed around her gray eyes. Thin streams of dirt ran down her arms. She didn’t say anything to Mikey, but when she saw him staring, she opened her mouth full of cookies. Mikey turned from her and looked at the Puerto Rican girl.

  She looked clean. Her black hair was swept up in a single ponytail and curled in a tight corkscrew. There were gold hoops in her ears. She never looked up from the table, though. She ate slowly, taking careful bites and cautious sips.

  Mikey glanced to his side, at Dennis. He had already finished and was licking the crumbs from his napkin.

  “Dennis, stop that,” Mrs. Franco said.

  Dennis smiled. “Them some good cookies, Mike. Don’t you like ’em?”

  “I had milk money,” Mikey said.

  “Don’t you like them cookies?” Dennis asked.

  Mikey stared at the boy’s hair. It was uncombed and matted. “You eat ’em.”

  Dennis grabbed the cookies and stuffed both of them into his mouth, hardly bothering to chew them.

  “I’m glad you here, ’cause they don’t talk. That one stupid,” Dennis said, pointing at the white girl. “The other one stupid too. She can’t even speak no English. You hear her in class? ‘Monita conita Frito corn chips.’”

  Mikey wanted to laugh, but he remembered why he was at the table with the sharers. “I ain’t supposed to be here. I lost my money. I ain’t going sit here tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” Dennis said. “You want your milk?”

  Mikey did not sit with the sharers the next day. His mother had money to send, four pennies knotted in a handkerchief, pinned in his pocket. He had his own milk, in a carton, the way milk was supposed to be. He had a straw and blew bubbles. Sharers never got straws. He did not want to look over to where they sat, but he did, and each time he looked over, Dennis smiled or waved. “Mike,” he silently mouthed. Mikey smiled.

  Mikey had found a friend. Dennis began following him home from school. He and Mikey would play until it was time for dinner.

  “You got to go home now,” Mikey’s mother or father would say.

  The boy would leave Mikey’s house, but he wouldn’t go home. He would play by himself out back or disappear around the end of the row, only to return in ten or fifteen minutes, asking, “Can Mike come out?”

  One Friday night in late November, Mr. Taylor went out to empty the trash and found Dennis squatting next to the back step.

  “Boy, you crazy? What you doing out in the snow?”

  “Can Mike come out?”

  “No, Mike can’t come out. It’s seven o’clock. You better get on home.”

  “My mama ain’t home.”

  Mr. Taylor put the garbage in the can and stared at the boy. The boy did not head for home. He stood there looking at the ground until Mr. Taylor invited him in and then went up to bed.

  Mrs. Taylor fed him a bowl of black-eyed peas and a piece of corn bread. Dennis ate the bread and peas, and licked the bowl.

  “You want some more?” Mrs. Taylor asked.

  “Yeah. Them good beans.”

  “You got a good appetite, Dennis. Mikey won’t eat peas. He had peanut butter and jelly for dinner.”

  Dennis did not say anything. He ate.

  At nine Mrs. Taylor woke up her husband. “Sam, take Dennis home.”

  Mr. Taylor walked Dennis around to 125 to find the front door sitting wide open. There were no lights on in the house.

  “My mama not back.”

  “Well, I’ll take you on in and you can turn on the lights and wait for her.”

  “We don’t got no electric. Mama say we going get it back on when she get her check.”

  Mr. Taylor let out a big blast of white steam through his nose. He did not know what to do, so he brought the boy back home with him.

  “You just couldn’t leave him there,” Mrs. Taylor said. “He just a baby.”

  “I don’t know about all that. I don’t want to get in no trouble keeping him here, Mary Kate.”

  “My mama don’t care,” Dennis said.

  Mr. Taylor let out a blow like he did outside. “I just didn’t know what to do. I guess he can stay. I’m tired now, Kate. I’m pulling that double tomorrow. Just put him to bed,” Mr. Taylor said, and he went upstairs.

  Mrs. Taylor ran a bath for Dennis and told him to get in the tub. When she returned to the bathroom a few minutes later, Dennis was playing in the water, and his pants, shirt, and socks were on the floor. They all smelled of urine.

  “Where your underclothes?”

  “I don’t got none clean.”


  “Hand me that rag, boy. I’m going to bathe you ’cause you not doing nothing but playing.”

  “My mama let me wash myself.”

  “It seem your mama let you do a lot of things,” Mrs. Taylor said, and she descended on Dennis with the rough white cloth. “Stand up.”

  Dennis stood while Mrs. Taylor scrubbed every inch of his body. “You a dirty boy,” she said. “Stand right there while I get some alcohol.”

  She went to the hall closet while Dennis stood shaking in the tub. Where was it Mrs. Taylor thought he would go?

  She returned and poured half the bottle over his body and the other half in the tub. She continued to wash the boy and talk to him. “Look at this. Look at this.” Dennis looked. It was dirt. He did not know if he was supposed to say something.

  After the bath, Mrs. Taylor rubbed Vaseline into his cold, raw skin. She dressed him in a pair of Mikey’s pajamas and put him to bed. In the morning she made fried eggs, grits with redeye gravy, and buttered toast with grape jelly. She dressed Dennis, Mikey, and Dorene, and they walked to Dennis’s house.

  On the way, she rehearsed her speech: What kind of mother is you? Leaving a boy alone. Your child hungry and dirty. You send him out with no drawers on. What if something happen to him? What people going to think? You should . . .

  Dennis led them to the front door. It was closed. “My mama home.”

  She was lying on the couch, sleeping. She opened her eyes. Mrs. Taylor thought she looked like a lizard in a dress. Her eyes were yellow, and the skin on her thin legs was dry and cracked. Her short, reddish hair was standing straight up on her head.

  “I’m home, Mama.”

  “Where you was at?”

  “Mike’s house. This here his mama,” Dennis said, gently pushing Mrs. Taylor closer to the couch.

  “Hey,” the woman said. “Dennis, go get me some water. You want some water, some water . . . What your name?”

  “Mary Kate.”

  “I’m Cynthia. Want some water?”

  “No, I got to be going. I got some wash to do,” Mary Kate said, and began backing toward the door, Dorene on her hip. “Let’s go, children.”

  She saved her speech for Samuel. He was so tired that he only half listened.

  “You can’t save the world, Kate,” he said.

  Dennis continued to come around. Sometimes he would show up three or four days in a row, and sometimes a week or more would pass without his coming by. The last time he had come, the Taylors were on their way to the circus in Buffalo.

  “Go home,” Mr. Taylor had told him. “You ain’t going to the circus with us.”

  Mikey’s father did not understand. He and Dennis were going to be bareback riders. Mrs. Taylor had taken the boys up to Ridge Road, to the Jubilee, to see Toby Tyler. In a few years they would run away and join a circus. They would ride on the backs of horses, and have a clever monkey for a pet. They would wear tights and do tricks and eat candy apples and cotton candy. Toby Tyler would be at the circus tonight, and Dennis would miss it.

  Dennis did not move. He stood in the living room staring at the floor. His voice was just a whisper. “My mama say don’t be letting ya’ll clean me up. I’m clean enough. Ya’ll got to take me the way I is.”

  Mr. Taylor opened the front door to put the boy out, but Mikey ran to him and clung to the boy. He grabbed Dennis around the waist. He held on while his father tried to pull them apart.

  “Stop, Mikey. I’m going to whip your ass. Stop.”

  Mikey and Dennis fell to the floor, and Mrs. Taylor ran downstairs with Dorene in her arms.

  “Samuel, what you doing?”

  “Ya’ll stop,” he yelled at the boys. He finally pulled them apart and hurled Dennis out the door. “Don’t you come back ’round here, hear me? I don’t want you ’round my boy, you goddamn piss pot.”

  “Sam, he just a boy. He ain’t much more than a baby.”

  “He ain’t no baby. Him and Mikey the same age. And you, Michael, I don’t want the boy ’round this house. I don’t want you talking to a boy like that. He trash. That nasty boy coming here and telling me his whore of a mammy say don’t clean him up, we got to take him like he is. So white people be saying, ‘See, you smell that? They all stink. They all nasty.’”

  “His mama say that? As good as we been to that boy, as many nights he done sat at our table and ate like he lived here?”

  “What you expect? The woman a alcoholic. She ain’t got sense enough to pay her bills. We done all we can do for that boy. You feed him one day, he hungry the next. You clean him up today, he dirty tomorrow. This thing done gone too far. And you expecting! It’s too much, Kate. Too much.”

  “I’m not going to the stupid circus,” Mikey said. “I don’t want to go without Dennis.”

  “Oh yeah, you going, and you going to like it, too. I could’ve been putting in some overtime today, but I didn’t so ya’ll could go to the circus. You get on upstairs till your mama call you, ’cause I’m this close to setting a fire to your ass.”

  Toby Tyler was not at the circus. Mikey did not care. He had a good time without him, and without Dennis. He ate cotton candy and a candy apple. There was a clown who fascinated Mikey.

  The clown coughed and a bright red silk scarf came from his mouth. He pulled on it and a yellow one appeared next, then a green, a blue, an orange. The clown kept pulling, the colors repeating, until a pile of scarves lay curled at his feet. Mikey thought the clown must have been filled with scarves, that they were coiled up inside him.

  He did bring back a program and some cotton candy for Dennis. The candy hardened, though, and Dennis was not at school next Monday anyway. When he finally did show up later that week, he wouldn’t walk home with Mikey, and he refused the program. He took off running.

  Mrs. Taylor worried about him, but she rarely saw him. Now here he was knocking down Dorene in his rush to get out of the Red Store.

  She bought her bread quickly. She wanted to catch up with the boy before he headed for home. This was why her son was calling to him through the weeds in the field while he was eating stolen bologna.

  Dennis would not answer. He thought Mrs. Taylor might try to take him back to the Red Store. He wouldn’t go back. He would never go there again. He would go up to Ridge Road, to the A & P. He would go up Steelawanna Avenue. He would get up the courage to cross all those streets.

  “Ma, he gone,” Mikey said.

  “I guess so, but it don’t seem like he could get ’cross the field that quick. Let’s get on home. Ya’ll daddy be home soon.”

  And they walked on, leaving the hungry boy lost among the weeds.

  10

  Unveiling

  BECAUSE Venita was childless she thought she could make herself invisible. She cloaked herself in her sorrow, in her emptiness. Thinking herself unseen, she walked through All-Bright Court watching the children openly. She and Moses had been trying to have a child since they were married, three years.

  At first she thought she might just be stupid, that she simply did not know what she was doing. She did not know how to call a baby, so none would come. As a girl she had been stupid about babies. Up until she was thirteen Venita thought babies came from cabbage patches.

  Even though her parents grew cabbages in their garden and she never saw a baby there, she continued believing that was where they came from. She looked under the tender leaves of the young plants and between the waxy leaves of the older ones. When she was seven she pulled up an entire row of young plants, one after another she pulled them from the loamy soil, liking the sound when she pulled them, the soft ripping as the roots let go of the earth. Secrets were here. Each time she pulled up a plant she looked to see if a baby was there, a tiny head or maybe a tiny hand or foot buried in the warm soil. Her mother did not see her until she had pulled up the whole row, and then her mother ran screaming from the house. Venita did not connect the screaming with herself and what she was doing. She jumped up to see what was wrong, and when he
r mother got to her, she knocked her to the ground. “Girl, you done lost your mind?”

  Venita was going to answer, but her mother had smacked the air out of her. Her breath flew out of her mouth like a bird. It flew from the garden while she lay on the ground, trying to weather the storm of her mother’s fury.

  When Venita was thirteen she had the chance to find out where babies came from. She was asked to stay home when the time came for her mother to have a baby. The other times, she and the other children had been sent to their Aunt Hattie’s or Aunt Thelma’s. Her mother’s sister Hattie came, and so did a midwife. They had her father take the kitchen table into her parents’ bedroom. From dawn until well into the night the women walked calmly through the house, in and out of the bedroom. Drinking coffee, eating spoon bread and butter beans. Her father was out on the porch, and a group of his friends had gathered. They sat drinking and smoking and playing dominoes. They played even in the darkness, by the light of a kerosene lamp. Sometimes moans came from the bedroom, but her mother did not yell out. Venita was either ignored or in the way. Feeling no sense of purpose, she wandered out into the garden.

  It was late, and the ground was frozen. A blue and cold dampness was in the air. The air clung to her, made her breath appear before her, a series of diminutive clouds drifting off into the night. Venita felt like crying. She was cold and scared, wearing one of her father’s old sweaters. And not only that, there were no cabbages. Where was a baby going to come from? How could a baby push through the petrified earth even if there were a cabbage? She did not even hear her aunt calling her at first.

  “Venita. Ve-ni-ta. Come here, you silly gal.”

  She ran into the house and her aunt told her to bring her mother some water. Hattie met her at the bedroom door. Venita could not see much beyond her in the dim light of the bedroom, but she could see her mother was unconscious and sweating on the table. Venita thought she was dead, but then she saw her mother stir, and heard her moan. She noticed the blood, hiding in the folds of sheets. Venita was frozen there. Her feet were cold. She wanted to watch but was grateful when Hattie pushed her aside and shut the door. She wandered out to the porch and sat with the men.