All-Bright Court (3 page)

Miss Ophelia died that same year, but her words lived on as an oracle.

Over losing games of marbles or kick the can, Isaac would fall to his knees and turn his head into a hammer. He would bang it on the ground until blood pulsed out of his forehead. He banged out his thimbleful of sense into the earth. When playing red rover, the children would always dare him to come over. As he ran toward the line of intertwined arms, the children would break the chain at the last moment and let him tumble to the ground. They knew it would be a good show. They knew Isaac would bang his head, or beat on his head with his fists, or he might fall and flop around like a fish. They thought he was funny, but they also knew he was crazy. Once when he lost at mumblety-peg, he pulled his penknife from the ground and threw it at the victor.

And every time Isaac blew up, or fell out, or banged his head on the earth, the old man soothed him with cool towels and slices of fresh orange. He pushed Isaac's mother away and rubbed trouble from his son. He worked it up from his bones. And Isaac moaned and sucked on the slices of orange as his father coaxed the trouble up through his muscles.

“It hurt, Daddy,” he would say.

“I know,” his father would say.

“He need his butt beat,” his mother would say. “He bad.”

But the other mothers on his block, and on the blocks around where he lived, did not think he was bad. They thought he was crazy.

So it was no wonder that on that August afternoon as he was running across the field along the western edge of All-Bright Court no one took notice of him and his father. No one knew this running boy was hot and mad and smelled of jute. He smelled like a bundle of wet twine. As he ran through the field of Queen Anne's lace and dandelion, he pulled the narrow blue tie from his neck and threw it in the weeds. His father was behind him. He was walking on the narrow path that had been worn through the weeds, but he couldn't keep up with Isaac. He was too old to keep up, and he had rubbed too much trouble from Isaac. He had taken on too much of his son's trouble, and it slowed him down.

“It ain't no big deal, Isaac,” his father yelled. “Wait for me, son.”

Isaac stood in the field wiping tears on his jacket sleeves. The tears were gone when his father caught up with him, and Isaac was making a strange moaning sound, a sound caught in his throat.

“Get up on the path, son,” his father said. “I can't be walking through all them weeds. Your father is a old man.”

Isaac joined his father on the path, and his father rubbed his shoulders to release the trouble. As they walked toward home, the sound Isaac was making became louder. The moan turned back into a hollering.

“I'll buy you a bike, son,” his father said. “I'll get you that English racer.”

Isaac did not answer him. He knew his father couldn't afford a three-speed bike on social security. He had wanted to win the bike by becoming a paperboy for the
Buffalo Star
. He wanted to have the chance of becoming Carrier of the Month. His father had taken him on the bus to Buffalo. Isaac had dressed up in a suit and tie and gone downtown to the
Star'
s office only to be told he could not be a paperboy. He did not want to hear it. He did not want to hear, “I know we had an ad in the paper, but the
Star
does not use colored paperboys on routes that have white customers. Now if there were an all-colored route in Lackawanna, it wouldn't be a problem. That's the way business is done here. We've tried it in other neighborhoods, and there has been trouble. It's nineteen sixty. You would think we would be beyond this point. It's not my rule. I'm sorry.”

Isaac did not care that the man who told him and his father this really did look sorry, that he really did sound sorry. He did not care that the man could not look at them when he said it. The man looked around his office as he spoke. He looked out his window. He couldn't look at Isaac and his father because he also had a son. He had two sons, and knew what it was a twelve-year-old boy wanted. Isaac did not care that the man shook his father's hand before they left the office. He did not know the man's hand was sweaty, that it was sweaty out of sympathy. Isaac did not know because he refused to shake the man's hand. All Isaac knew was he would not be getting an English racer.

His father was glad that Isaac had held it in so long. He was glad Isaac was able to hold out until he had come to the field, until they were almost home.

By the time Isaac and his father had reached the end of the field, he still had not quieted. His father rubbed Isaac's shoulders until his hands hurt. That night his hands would be stiff. That night his fingers would twist into tight buds and he would not be able to open them until well after the sun rose.

As he and Isaac passed by the second row of buildings on their way back to 72, Mary Kate Taylor was in her back yard hanging clothes. Each time she bent to get another handful of pins, or to retrieve a few pieces of steaming clothes from the basket, she felt the weight of the baby she was carrying. It pulled her down, and it seemed that if she let it, it would drop her right to the center of the earth.

She could not complain, though. The baby had not kicked or stirred much. But when the old man and his son passed, the baby quickened. It moved so suddenly that she was thrown off balance. She held on to the line, and when the two had passed, when Isaac's hollering was drowned out by the roar from a smokestack at Capital, she patted her stomach.

“Don't you worry none,” she said to the baby. “That ain't nothing but that old man and his crazy boy.”

3

I
T WAS JUST
before three in the afternoon and the world was ending in All-Bright Court. Venita looked out of her kitchen window, out of her yellow curtains at 92, and fell to her knees. There was a bomb, bright and hard and shining against a blue sky. The bomb was slowly moving toward her. It was stealing blood from Venita's feet. It was making her feet cold and useless.

They had finally done it. The Russians had finally dropped the bomb. It was only a matter of time. Venita had one consolation in these final few seconds of life on the planet: living in Lackawanna meant her death would be a swift and painless one.

Venita's husband, Moses, had told her, “They was worried about Florida during that missile crisis last month. But there was a real panic in Buffalo. Them Russians got it high on they list for bombing 'cause there four mills there. But it's the Capital plant they want. The biggest damn steel plant in the world. Wait till you see it. It's a monster.”

Moses had told her this in the back of the Greyhound bus as they headed north four months ago. They were riding through Pennsylvania. It was the day after Thanksgiving. They had been married just two days before in Starkville, Mississippi, and were spending their honeymoon on the bus. Moses had only a week off from work, and this was already the sixth day.

“Times changing,” Moses said. “The North is something else. We got whites for neighbors, got whites living on both sides of us. Polacks, the colored people be calling them. They real nice people. They speaks, and everything.

“You know, times changing all over. When I come up here in 'fifty-eight, I had to ride in the back of the bus all the way to Pennsylvania. It's just four years later, and you can set anywhere you want.”

“We been riding in the back all the way now. Let's move up front,” Venita said. “Let's see how things look from the front.”

So Moses and Venita moved to the front of the bus and looked out the front window as snow began to fall and night began to fall, and after there was nothing left to see, they turned on the light over their seats and watched themselves watching nothing.

The next morning the bus let them off on the pike, on a day that was cold and snowless.

“There it is, baby,” Moses said. “The eighth wonder of the world.”

Venita was not impressed. She covered her face with both hands. “It stink,” she said. “How can you stand that smell? Smell like rotten eggs.”

“You get use to it,” Moses said. “It don't always smell like that. Sometime it smell worser.”

Moses walked his wife to their new house. He carried her across the threshold into a house that was cold and hollow sounding.

“Welcome to Ninety All-Bright Court. This our home,” he said, and placed Venita on her feet. Then he took the luggage from the porch and went upstairs while Venita looked through the kitchen.

She marveled at the mustard-colored gas stove and refrigerator. She adored the small pantry. It was already stocked with canned fruits and vegetables she had sent up. There was not a stick of furniture in the whole house. Moses wanted Venita to pick it out.

“Three rooms of furniture for two hundred ninety-nine dollars, and on time too,” he had told her. They would get furniture on his first day off. But today he had to work.

Moses came downstairs, changed and ready. “I'm running late. I made a pallet on the floor upstairs, but wait up for me, hear? I be back a little after eleven,” he said. “And keep the door locked, hear? You ain't in the country no more.” Venita let him out the front door. She locked it behind him.

Alone in the house, Venita hung the yellow curtains she was looking out of the day the world was ending. But as she looked up through her curtains she saw the bomb disappearing. It was moving west.

As it disappeared over the top of her building, the blood returned to her feet. She could feel it return. The blood made her feet hot. Venita stood on her hot feet and moved them through the kitchen, through the living room, and out onto the front porch.

Her neighbor's boy was playing with a magnet in a patch of dirt in the front yard. Many of the children in All-Bright Court collected what they thought were pieces of the sky. They collected the silver dust that fell like rain.

It fell at three when the wind blew in from Lake Erie. When the wind blew west over the land, the silver dust rained on All-Bright Court. It was a silver like the edges of the sky, like the bottom of the sky on sunny days.

At three, the roar came from the plant. It was the big roar of the day, like the sound of a dragon raging overhead. Underneath it the three o'clock whistle blew and five thousand men were going to work, and five thousand were going home. Inside the sound was the silver dust.

If the women looked and saw their sheets billowing away from the plant they knew the wind was blowing from the west. Though they might not know it was the west, they knew that when the wind came from that direction it carried the silver rain. Some of them rushed to pull in their white sheets. They pulled the damp, cool sheets from the lines and took them inside to drape over the backs of kitchen chairs. Some called their children.

“Get inside this house,” they would say. “Get ya'll tail in here. That dust from the plant fenna fall.” And the silver came just as the women said it would. To some children it looked like glitter, and to some it looked like snow, and to some it looked like it was raining pieces of the bottom of the sky.

What was falling was iron. With magnets stolen from school, the children collected the dust, made the filings dance and snake. When the children were caught out in the silver rain, they sparkled and came home smelling base.

There was no wind on this day as Venita went to the boy dragging the magnet through the dust. She grabbed him by the shoulders. “The Russians done it, boy. The bomb, child. I saw a bomb out my back window, and it was headed this way.”

The boy tried to pull away from her. “A bomb?” he asked, dropping the magnet.

She let go of his shoulders and pointed to the sky. “There it is behind you. Look behind you, Polack boy,” Venita said, and fell to her knees.

It was stealing blood from her feet again.

“We dead, boy. We going to die,” she said.

The boy looked up at the sky. “I don't believe it,” he said. “That's not a bomb. That's the Goodyear blimp.”

4

S
AMUEL
was hiding Easter eggs. Small and pastel, each was a perfect, oblong world.

Mary Kate and little Mikey had dyed them. That Samuel had refused to do. A man had to draw the line somewhere. He had drawn the line, but he still had to hide the eggs.

“If you wasn't expecting, I'd make you do this, hear?” Samuel said, smiling.

“No, you wouldn't,” Mary Kate said, sitting in a chair with her feet propped up. “You ain't brought me up north to boss me.”

There were only a dozen eggs, and Samuel slid them gently between the cushions of the couch, placed them carefully under the chairs, the cocktail table. He even tried to slide one under Mary Kate. “Here you go, mama hen.”

“Stop playing now,” she said. “You going to break it.”

“Yeah,” Samuel said. “You look like you going to bust, you getting so fat.”

“I'm not stutting you. I'm barely pregnant. Look at you. You getting so skinny,” she said, playfully rubbing her feet across his back. “Tonight was the first time you ate good in a long while.”

“We ain't going to strike. You see it in the paper? First time in nearly twenty years ain't going be a strike to get a new contract.”

Mary Kate did not respond.

“We getting ten cent a hour. Don't sound like much, but it add up.”

“You think he going to find 'em?” Mary Kate asked.

“What?” Samuel said.

“Do you think Mikey going to find the eggs?”

“Kate, I done left half dozen out in the middle of the floor. The boy blind if he can't see the eggs under the table.”

“He only a baby.”

“Come on, Kate. He just turned two his last birthday. The boy ain't stupid. Don't you think he can recognize the eggs he dyed?”

“You need to quit,” Mary Kate said. “And you getting up in the morning to go on the hunt.”