The Summer We Got Free (8 page)

1976

A
va had trouble
keeping her eyes off Helena. Sitting at the dinner table, listening to her
husband’s sister talking about some of the places she had been and some of the
things she had seen in the last many years, Ava found herself staring and
wondering what it was about this person, this woman who seemed
unextraordinary
except for the extreme blackness of her
skin, that had made her behave the way she had at the door that morning. She
could not understand it. Helena seemed smart and friendly and funny, joking
with Sarah and Regina and reminiscing with Paul, but there was nothing about
her that struck Ava as particularly special. And though Ava did not think of
herself as someone who noticed specialness in people, she thought there should
be something about Helena that stood out to her, something that explained it.
But there wasn’t. She began to feel that she had imagined it all. As if what
had happened at the door that morning had been a strange hiccup of emotions,
coincidental to Helena’s arrival and completely unrelated to it. She considered
that for several minutes, and then Helena turned, in the middle of a story
about her third grade class back in Baltimore, and looked right at Ava, right
into her eyes, and Ava felt an urge to reach out and touch her that was so
extreme she had to push herself back farther in her chair and grip the sides to
stop herself from getting up and doing just that. Helena did not appear to
notice and continued with her story, looking away from Ava, at Sarah and Paul
and Regina and George, and in a few moments the feeling passed.

Just as they were finishing dinner, the sky opened up,
and rain like a torrent drummed hard against the open windows of the kitchen.
Paul and George rushed to close them, while Ava and Sarah cleared the table.
Ava saw, through the window, a heavy flash of lightning across the sky, and
then thunder shook the house.

“Somebody better close the upstairs windows,” Regina
said. “’Fore it’s water all over the floors.”

“We’ll get ‘
em
,” George
said, and he and Paul hurried out of the kitchen.

Ava watched Helena carry a stack of plates to the
sink.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“I’m glad to.” Helena took the glasses Ava was holding
and placed them in the sink with the plates. “It’s really coming down,” she
said, watching the rain through the window, as lightning cut hard again across
the sky.

The lights in the house flickered and went out.

“Shit,” Sarah said.

There was some lingering daylight, but not enough to
see by inside.

 
“You got
your matches, Mama?” Ava asked the outline of Regina that she could make out in
the half-dark.

Regina took from her pocket the book of matches she
was always carrying for cigarettes and struck one. In the light of the small
flame, Ava watched her move to the counter and open a drawer, taking out two candles.
She handed them both to Sarah, who held them while Regina lit them. Regina then
took one of the lit candles for herself. “It’s a few more of these in the
dining room,” she said, and she and Sarah went to get them, leaving Ava and
Helena in the kitchen, in the dark.

At first, neither woman spoke. Ava could hear Helena’s
breathing, which was as nervous and loud as her own. Then Helena said, “We seem
to be having the strangest effect on each other, don’t we?”

The lights flickered on, just for a moment. In the
sudden brightness, their eyes met.
The next second it was
dark again.
Then lightning flashed through the window and Helena
screamed.

Sarah and Regina came rushing in, followed by Paul and
George, all of them carrying lit candles.

“What’s wrong?”
Paul asked.

Helena pointed
at the window over the sink. “There’s someone there.”

Standing out in
the backyard, looking at them through the
window,
was
a middle-aged man in a dark bathrobe, standing under a large umbrella. He
squinted at them through thick glasses, not the least concerned, it seemed,
that he’d been caught peering into their house.

Paul pulled the window open and yelled, “Mind your own
goddamn business!” and Ava could hear the raw anger in his voice.

The man looked right at Helena and said, “You know who
you keeping company with? The
devil’s
in this house!”

Paul yelled, “You better get the hell away from this
window right now, fool, ‘cause if I come out there you gone see the devil for
sure.”

“We aint scared of you!” the old man yelled back. “We
got the good Lord on our side.”

Paul made a move away from the window and towards the
back door, and the man quickly moved away from the window, climbing over the
fence that separated their backyard from the one beside it, and disappeared
into the next house.

“Who was that?” Helena asked, sounding shocked.

“Dexter
Liddy
,” Ava said.
“He lives next door.”

“Is he crazy?”

“Out his damn mind,” said Paul. “Just like everybody
else on this street.”

“They aint all crazy,” Regina said. “They misled,
mostly. And a little stupid, too.”

Helena shook her head. “I don’t understand. Misled by
whom?
About what?
About the devil
being in this house?
That’s sure something to be misled about.”

“And a long time to be misled about it, too,” Regina
said.

George frowned. “She
don’t
need to know about this.”

“How you plan on keeping her from knowing it?” Regina
asked her husband. “You think that preacher gone just let us have a nice visit?
Now I think about it, she’s what that brick
musta
been about.”

“Can’t be,” said Sarah. “She hadn’t even got here
yet.”

Regina thought about it,
then
looked at Helena. “Was this morning the first time you came by here, honey?”

Helena shook her head. “No. I came by yesterday, early
in the evening, but nobody was at home, so I went on over to our cousin
Tyrone’s place and stayed the night there.”

Regina nodded. “What I tell you? Goode
musta
seen her. Or somebody else saw her and went and told
him. With them suitcases, they
musta
figured she was
coming back. That brick was a warning.”

“What did it say again?” Paul asked, trying to
remember.

Sarah frowned. “Something about not making friends
with us.”

Regina nodded again. “
Mmm
hmm.”

Helena looked back and forth between them all. “A
preacher
threw a brick at somebody?”

“At all of us,” Paul said. “He threw it through the
front window. Or told somebody else to. That’s how it really got broke.”

“Why?”

“Because everybody on this street got something
against us,” Regina said. “Been that way ever since my son died. You saw that
church across the street?”

Helena nodded.

“Well, the preacher I’m talking about is the pastor
over there. Has been for the last twenty-five years. He had a son, too.
Same age as mine.
They died together. Then his wife died not
even a year later, from the grief. And he blamed us for all of it. He been
trying to get us off this block ever since. And he managed to turn all the rest
of these people against us, too, including that fool who was just looking in
here.”

“When you say ‘died together’—what does that
mean?”

Ava felt a rush of heat move up her neck and along her
scalp. A picture flashed in her mind, of her brother and Kenny Goode, lying
dead on a hot sidewalk, on a smoldering Saturday morning. The image cut through
her like lightning through the hazy sky. She felt dizzy and she held on to the
counter to keep her balance.

“Now, look,” George said, “
this
is family business. Any
stranger
that come by here
don’t need to know about it.”

“Hold on, Pop,” Paul said. “It aint no cause to be
rude.”

“And she aint a stranger,” Sarah said. “I mean
,
she’s Paul’s sister. She’s family.”

“We don’t know this woman from Eve!
And
since when y’all so eager to talk about all this?
Aint nobody in this
house had a word to say about it in years.”

“Who we supposed to tell?” Regina asked. “Each other?”

“I didn’t mean to pry,” Helena said.

George stood up and moved towards the door. “I’m going
out for a while.”

“In this weather?” Sarah asked him.

“I got an umbrella,” he said.

When he had gone, Regina looked at Helena. “You gone
have to excuse my husband. He don’t hate
nothing
much
as he hate the truth.”

Helena didn’t say anything for a long moment, and Ava
was sure she was still wondering how the two boys had died together, but she
didn’t ask again. “These people have been harassing you for…how long?”

“Seventeen years,” Regina said.

“Why do you stay?”

“This our house. Houses don’t come easy, you know.
Aint nobody gave this one to us, we had to work every day of our lives to get
it and to keep it after it was got.
Besides, we aint done
nothing that we ought to leave for.
Pastor Goode might think he God, but
last time I looked he was just a man.”

“But bricks through your window?” Helena asked. “Is it
really worth it?”

“It don’t happen all the time,” Sarah said. “Nothing’s
happened in the last couple of years.”

“The thought of us having company, being connected to
the world, like normal folks,
musta
got them all
riled up again,” Regina said.

“If my being here is causing trouble for you, I can
just go on up to New York like I planned.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Sarah said. “I mean, it aint no
reason for you to go.”

“Sarah’s right,” said Ava, whose head had begun to
clear again.

Regina nodded in agreement. “We been dealing with that
preacher and all the rest of these fools for all these years.
A few days aint gone bother me none.
But I can understand if
you don’t want to have to deal with it.”

Helena looked like she was thinking about it. After a
few moments, she said, “I can deal with a little scandal, I guess. It won’t be
the first time.”

“These lights ever gone come back on?” Regina asked.

“They out on the whole block,” Paul said.

“Well, that’s good. ’Cause if it was just our house,
I’d
start to think the devil was in
here.”

They laughed, small, uneasy laughs, all except Ava,
who laughed a real laugh, a laugh that went on after everyone else’s had
finished. Her laugh grew louder, and it had the unbound sound of a child’s,
giggly around the edges and saturated with a kind of silliness that did not
really fit the moment. It grew eager and full and caused her shoulders to shake
and her body to bend slightly at the waist, under the weight of it. She felt
wetness around her eyes and the muscles of her stomach ached. She could not remember
ever laughing so hard. She was aware that they were all looking at her
strangely and she did not understand why they weren’t laughing, too. It was
hilarious, what her mother had said, although she wasn’t sure what about it had
struck her as being so especially funny. Probably the way Regina had said it,
with that half-crazy look of hers. That thought made her laugh even harder. Suddenly
she felt out of control of it, and with that out of control feeling there came
a weakness, both in her knees and in her bladder, and she knew that if she
didn’t stop laughing she would wet herself, but still she could not stop. She
felt only slightly more control over her legs than her bladder, but she thought
she could make it to the bathroom if she ran fast. Still laughing, she pushed
herself hard off the counter and raced out of the kitchen. She ran through the
foyer, feeling her way in the darkness, and up the stairs, and barely made it
to the toilet. She was still giggling, her jaws sore from it, the urine coming
out of her in a staggered stream as her abdominal muscles continued to contract
with her laughter. She remembered, suddenly, laughing at her brother as he made
faces at her across the dinner table, laughing uncontrollably, a feeling of
bliss filling her up. The memory jolted her and she began to feel in control of
herself again and the strange laughter quieted, leaving her exhausted and out
of
breath
.

***

Helena barely slept that night. Sarah knew this
because she was awake for hours
herself,
listening to
their guest moving around on the creaky floors of the bedroom Sarah had offered
her for the duration of her visit. Even after midnight, she could hear Helena
walking the length of the room, her feet making different sounds on the area
rug by the bed than on the places where the floor was bare. Sarah wondered what
she was doing in there. Probably thinking about what she had been told at
dinner, about Geo and the pastor’s boy, and the years-long feud. She had been
relieved when Helena said she would still stay, in spite of all of it, but now
she worried she might change her mind. Maybe tonight, while they were all asleep,
she would slip out, quietly, just the way she had come. How could Sarah blame
her if she did? Without a very good reason not to, anyone would stay away.

Around one in
the morning, Sarah heard something being loudly unzipped, and she knew it must
be the large portfolio Helena had brought, which had been leaning against the
dresser when Sarah had gone in to say goodnight hours earlier. Sarah pictured
it lying open now, its contents—drawing paper and pencils, she guessed—strewn
about the bed, and Helena taking her time deciding what picture she might make.
Sarah wanted, more than anything, to slip out of the bed where her mother lay
snoring beside her and peek into the next room, or, better yet, to knock and be
invited in. She imagined herself sitting cross-legged at the top of the bed
while Helena sat at the foot with her drawing pad in her lap, talking more about
Baltimore, sharing morsels from her life, and Sarah tasting, devouring. She did
not want to disturb Helena, though, to interrupt, so instead she closed her
eyes and wished for morning.

It came, warm
and smelling like mid-summer in the city, like scorched air and hot sidewalks.
Sarah’s first thought upon waking was of Helena, and she listened, trying to
hear her stirring in the early light, but there was no sound coming through the
wall now. She went downstairs and started the coffee and, through the back
window, saw Helena sitting alone on the back porch, smoking and staring off
into the tangled weeds that had been rosebushes and a vegetable garden long
years ago. When the coffee was ready, she took a cup out to Helena, smiling and
saying, “Good morning,” as she offered it to her.

“Good morning,
Sarah,” Helena said, taking the coffee. “Thank you.” She looked tired and
pensive, and a little bit troubled. “I was just sitting here listening to the
music.”

The music she
was referring to
was
the usual Sunday-morning sounds
coming from Blessed Chapel, the pre-service rehearsal of the choir, which, Sarah
knew, could be heard a block a way in all directions. It rose up in the air and
hung over Radnor Street like smoke.

“They always did
have good music,” Sarah said, sitting down beside Helena on the steps. “We used
to sing in the children’s choir when we was kids.”

“Do you miss the
church?”

Sarah nodded. “I
always liked church. Ava and Geo only went because our parents made them. But I
liked it.
The music, the bible stories, even the sermons.
And the feeling I got being so close to God. I felt like he could see me, like
he knew who I was, when I was there.”

“But you never
joined another church, after your family left this one?”

She thought it
was nice of Helena to use the word
left
,
instead of the words,
was thrown out of
,
which were truer. “There’s a church over by where I work,” she said. “Sometimes
I go to their evening prayer service. But it aint the same as the church you
grow up in.” Sarah remembered Sunday mornings at Blessed Chapel, the sounds of
praise songs, the smell of bibles, and all of them sitting there on their usual
pew, all together like real family. “You go to church?” she asked Helena.

She shook her
head, no. “We weren’t raised religious. Our mother never went, so we didn’t
either. I studied the bible quite a bit, when I got older. I wasn’t ever all
that impressed with it, to tell you the truth.”

“Well, it aint
for everybody, I guess,” Sarah said.

“Can I ask you
something?”

Sarah nodded,
eager to be asked something.

“Why do you stay
in this house? I mean, I can understand your mother feeling so attached to the
home she worked so hard to have, but why do you stay?”

“Where else I’m
gone go?”

“Well,
anywhere,” Helena said.

“But where, exactly?”

Helena looked
unsure.

“The little bit I seen of the world don’t impress me
any more than the bible does you. Maybe ‘anywhere’ aint for everybody, either.”

“You remind me
of Paul,” Helena said. “When we were kids, he always hated the idea of growing
up and going out on his own. He just wanted to stay close to what he already
knew, which wasn’t even good. I always thought he was afraid that the rest of
the world wasn’t any better, and that at least our pain was pain he was used
to, and he didn’t want to trade what he knew for something he didn’t know that
was just as bad, or even worse. I guess I’m not surprised he ended up marrying
into a family like yours.”

Sarah wished the
conversation would turn back to her, and away from Paul, and she was willing to
wait patiently for that to happen. Helena was quiet now, probably lost in some
memory of her brother.

“Do you want to
see their wedding pictures?” Sarah asked, feeling torn between spending their
time talking about Paul and risking being shut out of Helena’s thoughts
altogether. “I can show them to you.”

They went inside
and found Regina in the kitchen, pouring herself some coffee. When Sarah told
her they were going to look at photos, she said she’d join them and followed
them into the dining room. Sarah went to the china closet, the top shelves of
which were filled with fancy dishes that hadn’t been used in seventeen years.
In the lower compartments, she found the dust-covered photo albums and hauled
them out onto the dining room table.

Helena sat down at the table and Sarah sat
beside
her, moving her chair closer so that they could look
at the pictures together, while Regina stood over Sarah’s shoulder. Sarah sorted
through the albums and pulled out a small white one, with a large pink heart on
its front. She opened to the front page, to a photograph of Ava and Paul
holding hands, Ava in a simple white dress and Paul in a dark blue suit.

“They got
married down at City Hall,” Sarah explained.

“That’s the
dress I wore at my wedding,” said Regina.

Helena smiled. “It’s
lovely.”

“
Don’t
Paul look handsome?”

Helena nodded.

When they got to
a photograph of the whole family sitting together in the living room after the
ceremony, Helena pointed at an old woman and asked
who
she was.

“That’s my mother-in-law,”
Regina said. “Mother Haley. She passed away years ago.”

Helena looked at
Sarah. “You look a lot like her.”

“You should see
her when she was Sarah’s age,” said Regina. “You’d think it was Sarah herself.”

Regina sifted through the stack of albums and pulled
out a fat blue one that was full of very old, black and white pictures. She
flipped through until she found one of Mother Haley as a young woman and they
all agreed that Sarah bore a striking resemblance to her late grandmother.

Ava came in then,
with a pad of paper and a pencil. “Anything y’all want to add to this grocery
list?” she asked them. “I’m gone stop by the store on my way home from work.”

“Ava, we looking
at old pictures,” Regina said. “Look at this one of your grandmother.”

Sarah felt a
twinge of disappointment as Ava came and sat down at the table.

“Who are these
people?” Helena asked, pointing to a photograph of a group of folks standing
outside a very small house.

“That’s my
family,” Regina said. “That’s us back home, down Hayden. All them
is
my sisters and brothers. And them two is my Ma and Daddy.”

“Are your
parents still living?”

Regina shook her
head, no.

“I can see some
of you in your father. You stand like him, hold your shoulders the same.”

Regina stared at the picture. “We was real close, me
and my Daddy. I knew I was his favorite of all us kids, even though he never
said so. I stuck to him like glue.”

“What was he like?”

“Funny. He used to make me laugh so
bad
.
And he was
kind
as he could be without looking weak. Down
there, any little sign of weakness could get you killed. Then again, any sign
of strength could get you that way, too, if the wrong people saw it. People
think it’s bad up here, but it wasn’t never nothing compared to how it was down
there.”

“Paul and I spent a summer in Alabama when we were
kids.
Just the one.
We didn’t need any more than
that.”

“I know that’s the truth,” Regina agreed. “But you
know, I miss it, too. Whatever bad there was, it was my home and I had a lot of
love there. If I’d had my way, I never
woulda
left.”

“You didn’t want to come up here?” Helena asked.

Regina shook her head. “No, I did not. That was my
husband’s idea, not mine. He was set on it. He said a black man couldn’t get
nowhere but dead in Georgia, and some sooner than later. Said I ought to know
that better than anybody.”

“What he mean by that?” Sarah asked.

Regina got quiet for a moment, as happy memories of
her family faded, and dark, heavy things took their place. She sighed and said,
“Because of what happened to my father.”

“You mean the accident?” Sarah asked.

“No, that aint what I mean,” Regina said. She
hesitated. She hadn’t talked about it in years. Her children didn’t even know
the story. She had never been able to tell them. Staring down at the photograph
of her father now, though, she felt compelled to tell it. “He used to sell
greens and tomatoes out the back of his truck, down at the open market by our
town, and I would go with him every chance I got. Everybody went there to sell
or buy whatever
they
had or wanted. Every now and
then, white men would come and try to cheat folks. Most colored down there
didn’t have no schooling, so they couldn’t count all that good, and these
fast-talking white men would math ‘
em
so they aint
know what they was owed. If you was selling tomatoes a nickel apiece, corn for
a dime a ear, and a head of cabbage for a dime, the white men would say, Okay,
I’ll give you four cent apiece for them tomatoes, cause they look a little bit
too ripe, and that corn aint worth but seven cent if it’s worth a penny, and
the same for that cabbage. I’ll take eight tomatoes, seven ears of corn, and
six heads of cabbage, and my friend here’ll have the same, plus two more
tomatoes, and another ear of corn, that’s two dollars and thirty-one cent, I’ll
give you two dollars and a quarter, and he’ll give you two, and you owe me
ninety-five cent, and him half a dollar, and come on and hurry up, nigger, I
aint got time to be waiting round here all goddamn day. Wouldn’t be ‘til you
went home and counted what you made ‘fore you knew how bad they cheated you.
But my daddy was good with numbers.
Better than good.
He never went to school a day in his life, but he taught
hisself
to read and write and count. He could count faster than anybody you ever seen,
faster than them white men could talk. It didn’t make no real difference,
‘cause he still couldn’t say
nothing
to ‘
em
. But after while I guess he just got fed up with it and
couldn’t take it
no
more. One day they come around to
the market looking for some greens. My daddy was selling some for six cent a
bunch. I never will forget the price as long as I live. They tell him they aint
worth but five cent, and they want a dozen and one, and when they start trying
to math him, my daddy say, ‘
Scuse
me, sir, you owe me
another twenty cent for these greens. Thirteen time five is seventy-eight, not
fifty-eight, sir.’ They didn’t like that too much,
talmbout
,
‘
What
you ‘
sposed
to be,
nigger, a math teacher?’ They went ahead and paid him the other
twenty cent
. But soon as them four nickels touched his palm,
he knew he made a big mistake. He said, ‘Aw, no, never mind, y’all can have ‘
em
for fifty-eight,’ and tried to give the money back. But
they aint want it back. They said, ‘
Naw
, you keep it,
smart nigger, and see if it don’t turn out to be worth it for you.’ My daddy
set up all night with his rifle, while me and my ma and sisters and brothers
was curled up under the beds at the next house. I never shut my eyes that whole
night, I don’t remember even blinking.
After while, we heard a
truck coming up the road.
I felt my brother squeeze my hand, and heard
my mother say, ‘Please, Jesus.’ Then footsteps, then banging on the door, then
shots. Shots so loud it didn’t even sound like guns to me, more like the sky
cracking open. I never saw my daddy again. They took him somewhere and left
him, buried him maybe. My brothers went and looked in the woods near our house,
but they aint find him. Ma went to the sheriff, mostly just so she could say
she had, ‘cause she knew they wasn’t gone do nothing, and sure enough they said
he
probly
just ran off, the way shiftless niggers
like to do.”