Three Days Before the Shooting ... (95 page)

I was too tired to sleep or rest and my mind wouldn’t stop. There she was, relieved of her burden and sleeping like a peaceful child, and him beside her with his little fists already balled up for the fight of life. I couldn’t look at him too steady either. There was that one bright drop of blood on the white sheet and I watched it growing dark, thinking: Now there’s two, one to accuse me and the other to hang me; one to point the finger and the other to rise up and shoot me down, or pull the rope to break my neck. Yes, and because of these there is no one of my own to come cut me down. There they
are in Mama’s own bed, outraged and outrageous. I started thinking about those old Hebrew soldiers who use to leave their prisoners castrated on the battlefield—but for what Jehovah could I even play Abraham to that little Isaac? Lord, my eyes must’ve been bloodshot with my thoughts and frustrations. And there Bliss was, puckered up and so new he looked like if you were to drop him he would bounce like a rubber ball….

How long did I sit there? Nobody would come to mark the passage of time and I had long ago drawn the shades and let the clock run down and she’d made me a pariah even to my own. Pariah and midwife too, and raped me of my will and my manhood. Dehumanized my human needs. Told myself, it won’t stop here. When she gets her strength she’ll scream again. Yes, but now the life is out of there and she’d beat me with a little child….
Hickman, you were crazy
. Yes, but I was sane too; because what I thought there was true, though it took time to learn it in. She had torn me out of my heathen freedom so she could save herself, that was the truth. And all with that baby. With just that little seven-pound rabbit. Not even a few minutes of pleasure or relief either. Which was the last thing I would have thought about. She wasn’t even good-looking, with that thin nose and high forehead; with just that ugly-sounding way of talking through her lips and nostrils. I knew her before her skirts went down, gangle-legging along the street like a newborn foal, trying to walk with class. And him not even brown so that I could have made some sensible meaning out of her coming here to me; just nothing definite, just baby-mouse-red and wrinkled up like a monkey with a strawberry rash. And me such a slave to what a human is suppose to be that I couldn’t refuse to help him into the world. Helped him when I should, according to the way I felt then, have left him stranded and choking with the cord wrapped around his neck when her mammy-waters burst.

Now she’s sleeping, I thought. Now she’s in her woman’s exhaustion, resting out of time like a stranger to both good and evil—while here I am, tired and feeling with no relief or rest inside me or outside me. She, resting up so she can scream again and they’ll hear it all the way to the State House. Yes, but now the life is out I’m going to put us all to sleep. I mean to clear the earth of just this one bit of corruption. Which is all one can do, just clean up his own mess or that which is dumped on top of him when he has the chance…. Just look at them sleeping there, fruit of all this old cancerous wrong. Why isn’t he brown or black or kinky, so that I could see some logic in her coming here? At least allow me to see the logic of a mare neighing help from a groom who happened to be passing her stall during her foaling time. Oh no, but coming here to me … Easy, Hickman, don’t fight old battles. Maybe it was the way the sacred decided to show Himself. Would you at this age still criticize God?

Lord, oh Lord, you must have been preparing me all those twenty-six
years for that ordeal; giving me this great tub of guts and muscle and deep, windy lungs and this big keg-sized head and all that animal strength I used to have and which I thought was simply meant for holding all the food and drink I loved so well and to contain all the wind necessary to blow my horn and to sing all night long, sure; and for the enjoyment of women and the pleasures of sin…. Ah, but right then and there I learned that you had really given me all that simply so I could contain and survive all I was to feel sitting there through those awful hours. Just sitting there and hating. Just sitting there looking at the two generations of them in the ease of their sleeping, and thinking back three generations more of my people’s tribulations and trying to solve the puzzle of that long-drawn-out continuation of abuse. That and why the three of us were thrown together in my house of shame and sorrow. It was a brain-breaker and a caustic in the naked eye all right, and the longer I sat there the stranger it seemed. I guess it couldn’t have been stranger than if one of Job’s boils had started addressing him, saying, “Look here now, Job; this here is your head-chief boil speaking to you. You just tell me my name and I’ll jump off of your neck and take all the rest of the boils along with me.” Yes, and ole Job so used to trouble and straitjacketed in misery by then to even be surprised to learn that a boil could talk—even one of
his
boils—only wondering why his skin or hair or toenails or something didn’t speak up and tell the boil to be silent in the presence of the Lord. Because, Master, you must have been there with me at the time and probably with a sad smile on your face. Even after Mama and Robert it was like waking up on mornings in some Territory town like Guthrie in the old days and discovering that my trombone mouthpiece had grown to my lips and my good right arm changed into a slide, but with no bell anywhere to let out the sound … Hickman, you were in a fix. You and those two strangers in the most unlikely place in the world and you the strangest of all.

Yes, with the baby mewling and raising the dickens and me having to put him to that thin, white, blue-veined tit to suck. Yes, having to guide his red little gums to that blighted raspberry of a nipple so I wouldn’t have to listen to him crying for a while. And my having to be gentle, not like a nursemaid who loves a child enough to give it a good hard pinch in the side when it vexes her too much, but just because of the murder in my heart having to be gentlest of the gentle. Just because he was a baby and me a man full of hate; and gentle with her because aside from everything else, she was a mother lying in the bed where my own mother had once lain. It was like the Lord had said, “Hickman, I’m starting you out right here—with the flesh and with Eden and Christmas squeezed together. Never mind the spirit and justice and right and wrong—or time—just now you’re outside all that because this is a beginning. So, starting right here, what will you do about
the flesh?
That’s what you have to wrestle with.” He had called me and I had nothing in the
hole and was in too far to pass and still couldn’t take the trick by using the baby’s life as my ace, no matter whether he were dealt in spades or in hearts.

So now I had to cook for her. Go out and get that little boy, Raymond, to go bring me milk and bread and meat from the store, pretending it was for his mama, and me picking the vegetables that Robert had planted for Mama’s needs and then stand over the stove and prepare the meal and then feed it to her spoon by spoon. Yeah, and remembering,
A little bit of poison helped her along
, that old slave-time line, and coming as close to breaking out of my despair and grinning as I ever did for a long, long time. But still granting nothing to the facts. So all right, I told myself, you’re just fattening her for the time she can understand what she did and pay for it. You just be patient, just count the rest until your solo comes up. This rhythm won’t stop until you take your break, just keep counting the one-two-three-fours, the two-two-three-fours, the three-two-three-fours…

So I didn’t eat, only took water and a few sips of whiskey, never leaving the house, knocking on the windowpane in the afternoons to get little Raymond to go to the store, or to stand out on the back porch in the dark to get some fresh air. And with all that feeding and clumsy grudging ministering to them I wouldn’t let myself think a second about life and living, only about dying. About how to kill and the way our bodies would look when they found us. And the quickest way to get it over with, how the flames would announce the news in the night, whether to just let them find us or to have little Raymond take a note to Mama’s pastor to tell the folks to keep off the streets….

Everything, but never whether I could save myself because that would have meant to run and I didn’t believe I had anything left to run for.

Ah, but Hickman, you were caught deaf and blind. With eyes that saw not, and ears that heard nothing but the drums of revenge. And there was that baby growing more human every second nudging his way into your awareness and making his claim upon you, and her crying all the time—in fact, more than the baby did. You had fallen into the great hole and they’d dropped the shuck in on you. There was simply too much building up inside of you for clear vision. I guess if I could have played I might have found some relief, but I couldn’t play, even if I hadn’t left my horn in Dallas when I got the word. And I couldn’t sing and if I had after all she’d done to me I’d probably sung falsetto. Then came the day…

Poor Bliss, the terrible thing is that even if I told you all this, I still couldn’t tell who your daddy was, or even if you have any of our blood in your veins…. Like when I was a boy and guessed the number of all those beans in that jar they had in that grocery window and they wouldn’t give me the prize because one wasn’t a bean, they said, but a rock! What a bunch of rascals, Ha! Ha! So outrageous that I just grinned and they had to laugh at
their own bogusness. Gave me a candy bar…. No, I’d still have to tell him as I told myself in the days that were to come: that who the man was was made beside the point by all that happened. Bliss started right there in that pain-filled room—or back when the fish grew lungs and left the sea. You don’t reject Jesus because somebody calls Joseph a confidence man or Mary a whore;

the spears and the cross and the crime were real and so was the pain….

So then came the day when I started in from the kitchen to find her sitting on the side of the bed, her bare boney feet on the bare boards of the floor as she sat there all heavy-breasted in Mama’s flannel nightgown; her hair swinging over her shoulder in one big braid and with eyes all pale in her sallow skin; and all weak-voiced, saying:

Listen, Alonzo Hickman, the time has come for me to leave.

Leave
, I said, who told you you were ever going to leave here?

Yes, I know, but he’s growing to me too fast. So if I’m ever to leave I must do it now.

What makes you think…

No, let me tell you why I came here….

Yes, I said. As though I don’t know already; you tell me. Just why, other than the fact that you had no damn where else to turn?

Don’t you be so sure, Alonzo Hickman. And don’t quarrel with me after helping me. There’s more to it than you think….

So why? I’m listening.

I came to give you back your brother, do you understand?

You
what!

Yes, it’s true. I never knew your brother and I meant him no special harm. It was just that I am what I am and I was in trouble and so desperate that I couldn’t feel beyond my heart. You must understand, because it’s true and it’s a truth that’s cost us both all this. —No, let me finish. So now you must take the baby…

WHO?

… Take him and keep him and bring him up as your own.

WHO? I said, looking at her feet, that braid swinging across her breast….

WHO?

It’s the only way, Alonzo Hickman. And don’t just stand there in that doorway saying “who” like that. Who else can save us both? I mean you. It’s the only way. After what I’ve done you’ll need to have him as much as I need to give him up. Take him, let him share your Negro life and whatever it is that allowed you to help us all these days. Let him learn to share the forgiveness your life has taught you to squeeze from it. No, listen: I’ve learned something, you won’t believe me, but I have. You’ll see. And you’ll need him to help prevent you from destroying yourself with bitterness. With me he’ll only be the cause of more trouble and shame and later it’ll hurt him….

And you expect me…

Yes, and you can. You have the strength and the breadth of spirit. I didn’t know it when I came here, I was just desperate. But I’ve seen you hold him, I’ve caught the look in your eyes. Yes, you can do it. Few could but you can. So I want you to have him—and don’t think I don’t love him already at least as much as I love my own mother, or that I don’t love his father. I do, only his father doesn’t know about him; he’s far away, and unless I do something to undo a little of what I’ve done there’ll never be a chance for us. I could go to him—Oh, Alonzo Hickman, nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down to superfine, but it doesn’t just blow away. Certainly none of the things between us shall. So you must take him. Later there’ll be money and I’ll get it to you. I’ll help you bring him up and pay for his education. Somewhere in the North, maybe. He’ll be intelligent like his father and he deserves a chance … and I’ll see that you’re taken care of….

And I thought, so now I’ve got to be a pimp too. First animal, then nursemaid, and now pimp, seeing her shake her head again:

No, please don’t speak yet. I must do this for both of us….

And you think that that child there can do all that?

No, but he’s all I have—unless you still want my life. And if you take that somebody will still have to take him. You don’t just help a child to be born and then leave it alone. So very well, if you mean to kill me, all right, but could you destroy something as weak as that, as helpless as that?

I have killed snakes.

A snake? Can you even with death in your eyes call him a snake? Can you? Can you, Alonzo Hickman?

Ha! Hickman, and you couldn’t. No, but if your heart had been weak I would have died right there of the sheer, downright nerve of it. Here I had been pushed even in Alabama. Well, God never fixed the dice against anybody, we have to believe that. His way may be mysterious but he’s got no grudge against the infants, not even the misbegotten. It’s a wonder I didn’t split right down the middle and step out of my old skin right then and there; because even after all these years I don’t see how I stood there in that doorway and took it all without exploding. And yet, there we were, talking calm and low like two folks who arrived late at the services and were waiting in the vestibule of the church. She sitting on the edge of the bed, kinda leaning forward, with arms spread out to the side and gripping the bedclothes to support herself. Still weak but with her crazy woman’s mind all set. And me, telling myself that I was waiting to learn just how far she intended to follow the trail of talk she’d blazed before I would set the house afire, saying: