The Summer We Got Free (34 page)

He figured that after he left, she would go on up to
New York like she’d planned. He gave it a couple of days, knowing that his
in-laws weren’t the kind of people who would just toss her out, that she might
need a couple of days to clear out. Then, when he was sure she would be gone,
he went home.

It was late, and
coming up the street he saw no lights on in the house. As he got closer, a
figure crossed the street in front of him, and in the glow of the streetlamp he
saw Pastor Goode.

“What you doing
back here, brother?” Goode asked him, standing in his path.

Paul shook his
head. “I aint your brother. And if you got half a bit of sense in your head,
you’ll get out of my goddamn way.”

“When I saw you
leave, I thought maybe you had a chance,” the pastor said. “Maybe you
wasn’t
being controlled by the devil like the rest of them.
But I guess I was wrong, ‘cause here you are again.”

Paul felt anger
rising in him. In all the years he’d lived on this block, he’d thought of the
preacher mostly as a crazy old man, a bible-thumper gone mad, seeing Satan in
ordinary people trying to live their lives. But now, after the sermon in the
street, he could see that Goode was more than just crazy, that he had a plan,
and that plan was to push and push until somebody in that house broke. He
didn’t seem to care
who
it was.

“Look,
preacher,” Paul said, trying to keep his voice steady, trying to keep the rage
from spilling over like lava and burning up everything in its path, “I been listening
to your nonsense for five years. I still remember that day you told me to get
out while I still could, not to get mixed up with these people. What you didn’t
understand then, and what you still don’t understand, is that one of these
people is the woman I love, and I aint going nowhere without her. I aint ever
heard you say nothing that was gone change that, and I doubt today’s gone be
any different, so I’m telling you to step aside before I lose my mind and go
upside your goddamn head.”

Goode moved and
Paul went by him.

“Your sister is
trying to seduced your wife,” the pastor said, his words as cool as sudden
autumn in the hot summer air. “Does that change it?”

Paul kept
walking and the preacher followed.

“You don’t even know what’s been going on in there, do
you? I don’t know if it’s because you work too much, or because you that naïve,
or because you just plain stupid, but somehow she managed to do it right under
your nose and you aint see it.
She making
a damn fool
out of you.”

“I don’t need nobody to make a fool of me,” he said.
“I been doing that fine by myself. You giving it a good shot, though.”

Goode caught up
to him and grabbed his arm. “Look at me, boy!”

Paul turned
around and peered at the old man. “What the hell you want with me?”

“I am trying to
give you back your dignity,” he said. “I am trying to tell you that your sister
is trying to corrupt your wife. I am telling you that so you can do something
about it.”

“I’m gone kill you,” Paul said. “I swear to God, I’m
gone kill you with my bare hands right here on this sidewalk if you don’t shut
your filthy mouth.” He jerked hard out of Goode’s grip and the old man lost his
balance and nearly fell over. He grabbed hold of a parked car and steadied himself.

“I am prepared to die doing the Lord’s work,” he said.

Paul laughed.
“How come everything you say, and everything you do, is the Lord’s work? When
you taking a shit—that the Lord’s work, too?”

Goode smiled. In
the light pouring down from the streetlamp, he looked like a haunted man. “You
ignorant, boy, but you aint dumb. I know you see it.”

Paul didn’t want
to, but he thought about how close Ava and Helena had gotten over the last few
days. He thought about Helena telling him that Ava was full of passion and
intensity and that he just couldn’t see it. “I aint one of your sheep,” Paul
told the pastor. “You can’t make me believe a bunch of nonsense just by telling
me how dumb I’d be if I didn’t believe it, or how I’m going to hell if I
don’t.”

“She told me
herself.
Your wife.
She came to me and told me all
about it out her own mouth. She said that woman’s been after her since the day
she got here.”

“You a damn lie.
I didn’t buy that story when you yelled it from the street and I aint buying it
now.”

Pastor Goode
watched Paul, his eyes moving over the younger man’s face. Then he glanced
towards the Delaney house. “She’s still in there, you know. She aint left. Why
would she? With you gone, she got your wife all to herself.”

1959

I
t had been
several hours after the police left, on the morning they found Geo and Kenny
dead, that Ava realized her brother was with her. She was sitting alone on the
back porch, wondering why she was not crying. The sight of his dead body had
shocked her, but not nearly as much as it should have. She had been so occupied
with her mother’s pain that she had not realized at first that her own pain was
so slight, so almost incidental. Sitting there alone in the smoldering hot sun
of the afternoon, though, Ava had felt Geo’s presence. It was so palpable that
she turned, confused, and looked behind her, half expecting to see him sitting
there, before she remembered he was dead. But the feeling that he was there did
not go away. She stood there, trying to understand what was happening. “Geo,”
she whispered into the sticky summer air. “Are you there?”

When the answer
came, it came from within her, a surge of thought and emotion that felt
familiar and foreign all at once. And she knew. It was as though they were in
their mother’s womb again, so close was his soul to hers. The rush of it was
such that it made her knees buckle, and she dropped to the wood-planked porch,
small splinters penetrating the skin of her bare knees. She closed her eyes and
thought, “Geo, are you there?” The response was the
same,
the same rush of confused thought and emotion, but no language occurred to her,
no answer came in words.

She could not tell her
family that Geo was not gone, that his body was broken, but that he, his real
self, his soul, was still there. They would have thought she meant it in a
sentimental way if she told them that he was with her, as if she were keeping
him alive in her heart, and she couldn’t bear to have the experience of having
her brother’s soul side by side with her own in her body reduced to some corny
sentiment like the few people from the block who came to the funeral wrote in
the cards they handed her with somber looks and hand-squeezes. She wanted to
tell her mother, at least, that Geo was sharing her body now, thinking it would
bring her some comfort, but Regina had ceased being someone you could hold a
conversation with when she carried his body back up the street to their house.
Ava didn’t even consider telling her father, or her sister. So, she was on her
own to sort out what it meant that she and her brother were sharing her body.
And it wasn’t easy. Sometimes, in the days following the killings, Ava felt the
urge to pee, and then found
herself
facing the toilet
with her jeans unzipped, not knowing what to do.

On top of that, she
was suddenly interested in yellow cake, which she had never liked, and uninterested
in coffee, which she had always liked before. Only Sarah noticed anything
different about her. Ava was brushing her teeth one morning and looked into the
bathroom mirror to see Sarah standing behind her, looking annoyed.

“What?” Ava asked, splattering toothpaste on
the mirror.

“You’re brushing your teeth like Geo. Up and
down instead of side to side. Geo brushed his teeth like that.”

“Oh.”

 
“You’re
not going to try to be like him now, are you?”

“I was always like him. We’re twins.”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“No, really, I don’t.”

It was hard sharing a
body with her dead brother’s soul. What had happened to Geo had broken him. Not
just his body,
but
his spirit. Being murdered had
fractured his soul, so that he was little like the brother Ava had known. He
was always scared, and Ava often had the feeling now of being consumed with
fear. The fear often came upon her without warning, so that she might be buying
something at a little store and jump at the sound of the bell as the door
opened. Or she might be walking down the street, on her way home from school, trying
to ignore the evil looks being hurled at her by the Brown sisters from their
porch, and the sound of a car horn would frighten her almost to tears. A few
weeks after Geo’s death, at the dinner table, Sarah dropped her fork onto her
empty plate, and the clang caused Ava to scream.

Over weeks, Geo’s soul
became less easily frightened, but in place of that panic came a solid
disinterest in the world and the people in it. Ellen and Jack
Duggard
, and Rudy Lucas, were the only friends she still
had, the only kids whose parents would let them go near her, but she felt less
excited to see them now, less eager to spend with them the long summer days
that came.

Ava’s own soul was
hard-pressed to hold up under the weight of the busted-up soul of her brother.
Painting helped. In the months that followed Geo’s
murder, she painted endlessly, spent every dollar her parents gave her for
school supplies or clothes or toiletries on canvas and brushes and paints. At
first, she painted abstracts. Colors and shapes that seemed to represent the
things she was feeling, the bewilderment, the unsteadiness. But soon that
wasn’t enough, and she began to paint what was happening around her, as
horrible as it all was. She painted her mother in bed, with dry, cracked lips
and an empty look in her eyes that seemed to beg death to take her, too. She
painted her father, his shoulders rigid with grief. She painted Sarah
surrounded by the dishes she was always washing, and the broom she was always
pushing around the floors. Finally, she started painting herself, sometimes
laughing, sometimes crying, other times with her full lips pursed as if trying
to decide whether to laugh or cry, often naked with unkempt hair, and always
with smoldering fire in her dark eyes. She filled the house with art. Her
father and grandmother, the latter having gotten on a train from Georgia within
two hours of receiving the phone call telling her that her only grandson was
dead, complained about what they called the
disturbing
pictures
of Regina, and hollered about the naked ones of Ava, demanding she
stop hanging them above the mantel and in the foyer and everywhere else all
over the house. Mother Haley was scandalized when Miss Maddy came by to drop
off a pecan pie for Regina, hoping her favorite dessert would get her eating,
and caught sight of a painting of Ava, naked and brown as a raw pecan, with
hard nipples and wiry pubic hair and a fire like the devil in her eyes, holding
a huge paintbrush that dripped dark red paint down her hand and arm. Maddy had
gasped when she saw it, her eyes wide. Mesmerized, she did not look away until
Mother Haley said, in her best normal voice, “Come on bring that pie into the
kitchen, Maddy.”

Later, Mother Haley screamed at Ava. “Stop hanging
those filthy pictures all over this house! You trying to get rid of the last
little bit of friends y’all got around here?”

By then, nearly everyone on the block had turned
against them. The fact that nobody seemed to know anything about the murders,
that there seemed to be no reason for them, reinforced the idea that it had
been the Lord raining down a judgment on Ava, and poor, innocent Kenny getting
caught in the torrent.

Ava didn’t care what their neighbors thought, not even
Miss Maddy, who, along with Miss Lucas, were the only people who still called
themselves friends of her family. She looked at her grandmother with
disinterest from her seat in front of her easel, where she was painting her
father with wood-like skin. “This aint your house, Grandma. This is my mother’s
house. If she wants me to stop hanging my art, then I will.”

“Regina don’t know what day it is, let alone what’s
hanging on the walls!”

Ava shrugged. “Well, then.”

“It’s your father’s house,” Mother Haley said. “And he
don’t like them, either!”

Her father came later.
Ava was
surprised by his calm voice and demeanor
. “Can’t you just stop hanging
them where everybody can see them?”

“It’s art, Daddy. It’s supposed to be seen.”

“People don’t like walking into a house and seeing the
family’s thirteen year-old daughter sprawled naked everywhere they turn.” His
calm had gone, and he was hollering, his hands balled up in fists at his side.
“Now, I’m not going to tell you again to stop it!”

Ava didn’t stop painting the pictures, but she did
stop hanging them where the very few people who came by could see them. She
hung them all over her bedroom, until no sliver of the pink and green wallpaper
could be seen underneath. When she ran out of places to hang her paintings, she
started stacking them in the corners of the bedroom. Seeing herself, seeing
herself everywhere she looked, helped her to remember who she was when Geo’s
broken soul surged up within her and pushed aside her own self. When she felt
the fear and anxiety she knew was his, she quickly turned to see herself, and
the fear subsided, and her own emotions returned. When she was away from home,
and not able to get to a painting of herself quickly enough, she would look for
her reflection in any shiny surface, and that often worked, but not as well.
When she couldn’t see herself at all, Geo’s feelings would overwhelm her, and
his fear and anxiety would become real for Ava, even though it was connected to
nothing.

It became a slow battle. Over time the paintings
helped less and less. Geo’s fear was
otherwordly
and
Ava began to weaken beneath it. Lost in their own grief and guilt, no one in
the family noticed, except Mother Haley, who liked the change and said nothing.