The Given Day

  Darla Blue, who had all the sense of a barn door, said, “I like that one there.”

  They all looked. They all shrieked.

  “The snaggle-toothed one with the big ol’ bush for a head?”

  “He cute.”

  “For a dog.”

  “No, he—”

  “Look at that big spilly belly on him,” ’Ginia said. “Go all the way to his knees. And that butt look like a hundred pounds of warm taffy.”

  “I like a little roundness in a man.”

  “Well, that be your true love, then, ’cause he all round all the time. Round as a harvest moon. Ain’t nothing hard in that man. Ain’t nothing going to get hard neither.”

  They shrieked some more and clapped their thighs and CC said, “What about you, Miss Lila Waters? You see your Mr. Right?”

  Lila shook her head, but the girls were having none of it.

  Yet no matter how much shrieking and jawing they did to get it out of her, she kept her lips sealed and her eyes from wandering because she’d seen him, she’d seen him just fine, could see him now out of the corner of her eye as he moved across the grass like the breeze itself and snatched a ball from the air with a flick of his glove so effortless it was almost cruel. A slim man. Looked like he had cat in his blood the way he moved, as if where other men had joints, he had springs. And they were oiled to a shine. Even when he threw the ball, you didn’t notice his arm, the piece of him that had done it, so much as you saw every square inch of him moving as a whole.

  Music, Lila decided. The man’s body was nothing less than music.

  She’d heard the other men call his name—Luther. When he came running in to take his turn at bat, a small boy ran alongside him in the grass and tripped as they reached the dirt. The child landed on his chin and opened his mouth to wail, but Luther scooped him up without breaking stride and said, “Hear now, boy, ain’t no crying on Saturday.”

  The child’s mouth hung open and Luther smiled wide at him. The child let loose a yelp and then laughed like he might never stop.

  Luther swung the boy in the air and then looked straight at Lila, taking her breath on a ride down to her knees with how fast his eyes locked on hers. “Yours, ma’am?”

  Lila tuned her eyes in to his and didn’t blink. “I don’t have no children.”

  “Yet,” CC said and laughed loud.

  That stopped whatever was about to come out of his mouth. He placed the child’s feet on the ground. He dropped his eyes from hers and gave a smile to the air, his jaw slanted to the right. Then he turned back and looked right at her again, cool as you please.

  “Well, that’s some pretty news,” he said. “Yes, sir. That’s pretty as this here day itself, ma’am.”

  And he tipped his hat to her and walked over to pick up the bat.

  By the end of the day, she was praying. Lying against Luther’s chest under an oak tree a hundred yards upriver from the party with the Big Walnut dark and sparkling in front of them, she told the Lord that she feared she could love this man too much one day. Even if she were struck blind in her sleep, she would know him in a crowd by his voice, by his smell, by the way air parted around him. She knew his heart was wild and thumping, but his soul was gentle. As he ran his thumb along the inside of her arm, she asked the Lord to forgive her for all she was about to do. Because for this wild, gentle man, she was fit to do whatever would keep him burning inside of her.

  So the Lord, in His provenance, forgave her or condemned her, she could never be sure, because He gave her Luther Laurence. He gave him to her, in the first year of their knowing each other, about twice a month. And the rest of the time, she worked at the Buchanan house and Luther worked at the munitions factory and ran through life as if he were being clocked at it.

  Oh, he was wild. Yet, unlike so many men, wildness wasn’t a choice for Luther, and he meant no harm by it. He’d have corrected it if you could have explained to him what it was. But that was like explaining stone to water, sand to air. Luther worked at the factory and when he wasn’t working he was playing ball and when he wasn’t playing ball he was fixing something and when he wasn’t fixing something he was running with his boys through the Columbus night and when he wasn’t doing that he was with Lila, and she had the full force of his attention because whatever Luther focused on, he focused on it to the exclusion of all else, so that when it was Lila he was charming, he was making laugh, he was pouring his full self at, she felt that nothing, not even the warmth of the Lord, projected such light.

  Then Jefferson Reese gave him the beating that put him in the hospital for a week and took something from him. You couldn’t right say exactly what that something was, but you noticed the lack of it. Lila hated to picture what her man must have looked like curled in the dirt trying to protect himself while Reese pounded him and kicked him and unloosed all his long-bottled savagery. She’d tried to warn Luther off Reese, but Luther hadn’t listened because some part of him needed to buck against things. What he’d found out, lying in the dirt while those fists and feet rained down on him, was that if you bucked certain things—the mean things—they didn’t just buck back. No, no, that wasn’t enough. They crushed you and kept crushing and the only way you escaped alive was through pure luck, nothing else. The mean things of this world had only one lesson—we are meaner than you’d ever imagine.

  She loved Luther because that kind of mean was not in him. She loved Luther because what made him wild was the same thing that made him kind—he loved the world. Loved it the way you loved an apple so sweet you had to keep taking bites from it. Loved it whether it loved him back or not.

  But in Greenwood, that love and that light of Luther’s had started to dim. She couldn’t understand it at first. Yes, there were better ways to get married than the way they did, and the house on Archer was small, and then the plague had come to town, and all of this in a short eight weeks—but still, still they were in paradise. They were in one of the few places in the whole world where a black man and a black woman walked tall. The whites not only left them alone, they respected them, and Lila agreed with Brother Garrity when he declared that Greenwood would be a model for the rest of the country and that ten to twenty years from now there’d be Greenwoods in Mobile and Columbus and Chicago and New Orleans and Detroit. Because the blacks and whites had figured out how to leave one another be in Tulsa, and the peace and prosperity that came with that was too good for the rest of the country not to sit up and take notice.

  Luther saw something else, though. Something that ate away at his gentleness and his light, and Lila had begun to fear that their child would not reach the world in time to save its father. For on her more optimistic days, she knew that’s all it would take—for Luther to hold his child so he’d realize once and for all that it was time to be a man.

  She ran a hand over her belly and told the child to grow faster, grow faster, and she heard a car door slam and knew by the sound of it that it was that fool Jessie Tell’s car and that Luther must have brung that sorry man home with him, the two of them probably high as balloons that had lost their strings, and she got up from her chair and put her mask on and tied it behind her head as Luther came through the door.

  It wasn’t the blood she noticed first, even though it covered his shirt and was splashed up along his neck. What she noticed first was that his face was all wrong. He didn’t live behind it no more, not the Luther she’d first seen on the ball field, not the Luther who smiled down into her face and brushed back her hair as he moved in and out of her on a cold Ohio night, not the Luther who’d tickle her until she screamed herself hoarse, not the Luther who drew pictures of his child in the window of a speeding train. That man did not live in this body anymore.

  Then she noticed the blood and came toward him, saying, “Luther, baby, you need a doctor. What happened? What happened?”

  Luther held her back. He gripped her shoulders as if she were a chair he needed to find a place for and he looked around the room and said, “Yo
u need to pack.”

  “What?”

  “Blood ain’t mine. I ain’t hurt. You need to pack.”

  “Luther, Luther, look at me, Luther.”

  He looked at her.

  “What happened?”

  “Jessie’s dead,” he said. “Jessie’s dead and Dandy, too.”

  “Who’s Dandy?”

  “Worked for the Deacon. Deacon’s dead. Deacon’s brains all over a wall.”

  She stepped back from him. She touched her hands to her throat because she didn’t know where else to put them. She said, “What have you done?”

  Luther said, “You got to pack, Lila. We got to run.”

  “I ain’t running,” she said.

  “What?” He cocked his head at her, only a few inches away, but she felt as if he was a thousand miles on the other side of the world.

  “I ain’t leaving here,” she said.

  “Yes you are, woman.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Lila, I’m serious. Pack a fucking bag.”

  She shook her head.

  Luther clenched his fists and his eyes were hooded. He crossed the room and put his fist through the clock hanging above the couch. “We are leaving.”

  She watched the glass fall to the top of the couch, saw that the second hand still ticked. So she’d repair it. She could do that.

  “Jessie’s dead,” she said. “That’s what you come home to tell me? Man got himself killed, near got you killed, and you expect me to say you my man and I’m’a pack a bag right quick and leave my home because I love you?”

  “Yes,” he said and took her shoulders in his hands again. “Yes.”

  “Well, I ain’t,” she said. “You a fool. I told you what running with that boy and running with the Deacon would get you and now you come in here covered in the wages of your sin, covered in other men’s blood, and you want what?”

  “Want you to leave with me.”

  “You kill tonight, Luther?”

  His eyes were lost and his voice a whisper. “I killed the Deacon. I shot him straight up through his head.”

  “Why?” she said, her voice a whisper now, too.

  “Because he the reason Jessie dead.”

  “And who’d Jessie kill?”

  “Jessie killed Dandy. Smoke killed Jessie and I shot Smoke. He probably die, too.”

  She could feel the anger building in her, washing over the fear and the pity and the love. “So Jessie Tell kill a man and then a man shoot him and then you shoot that man and then kill the Deacon? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes. Now—”

  “Is that what you’re telling me?” she yelled and beat his shoulders and his chest with her fists and then slapped him hard across the side of the head and would have kept on going if he didn’t grab her wrists in his.

  “Lila, listen—”

  “Get out of my house. Get out of my house! You’ve taken life. You are foul in the eyes of the Lord, Luther. And He will punish you.”

  Luther stepped back from her.

  She stayed where she was and felt their child kick inside her womb. It wasn’t much of a kick. It was soft, hesitant.

  “I have to change these clothes and pack some things.”

  “Then pack,” she said and turned her back on him.

  As he tied his belongings to the back of Jessie’s car, she stayed inside, listening to him out there, and thinking how a love like theirs couldn’t possibly end no other way because it had always burned too bright. And she apologized to the Lord for what she now saw so clearly was their greatest sin: They had searched for heaven in this world. A search of that kind was steeped in pride, the worst of the seven deadly sins. Worse than greed, worse than wrath.

  When Luther came back, she remained sitting on her side of the room.

  “This is it?” he said softly.

  “I guess it is.”

  “This is how we end?”

  “I believe so.”

  “I…” He held out his hand.

  “What?”

  “I love you, woman.”

  She nodded.

  “I said I love you.”

  She nodded again. “I know that. But you love other things more.”

  He shook his head, his hand still hanging in the air, waiting for her to take it.

  “Oh, yes, you do. You’re a child, Luther. And now all your playing brought this bloodshed home to roost. That was you, Luther. It wasn’t Jessie and it wasn’t the Deacon. It was you. All you. You. You, with your child in my womb.”

  He lowered his hand. He stood in the doorway a long time. Several times he opened his mouth, as if to say something, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “I love you,” he said again, and his voice was hoarse.

  “I love you, too,” she said, though she did not feel it in her heart at that moment. “But you need to go before someone comes here looking for you.”

  He walked out the door so fast she’d never be able to say she’d seen him move. One moment he was there, the next his shoes were hard against the wooden planks and then she heard the engine turn over and the car idled for a short time.

  When he depressed the clutch and shifted into first the car made a loud clanking and she stood but didn’t move toward the door.

  When she finally stepped out on the porch, he was gone. She looked up the road for his taillights, and she could just make them out, far off down the road in the dust the tires raised in the night.

  Luther left Arthur Smalley’s car keys on his front porch on top of a note that said “Club Almighty alley.” He left another note saying the same thing to let the Irvines know where to find their hope chest, and he deposited jewelry and cash and most everything else they’d taken on the porches of the sick. When he got to Owen Tice’s house, he could see the man through his screen door, sitting dead at the table. After he’d pulled the trigger, the shotgun had bounced back in his hands. It stood straight up between his thighs, his hands still gripping it.

  Luther drove back through the graying night and let himself into the house on Elwood. He stood in the living room and watched his wife sleep in the chair where he’d left her. He went into the bedroom and lifted the mattress. He placed most of Owen Tice’s money under there and then he went back out into the parlor and stood and looked at his wife some more. She snored softly and groaned once and pulled her knees closer to her belly.

  She’d been right in everything she’d said.

  But, oh, she’d been cold. She’d seen to breaking his heart as much as he, he now realized, had broken hers these last months. This house he’d feared and bristled at was something he now wished he could wrap his arms around and carry out to Jessie’s car and take with him wherever he was going.

  “I do so love you, Lila Waters Laurence,” he said and kissed the tip of his index finger and touched it to her forehead.

  She didn’t stir, so Luther leaned over and kissed her belly and then he left his home and went back to Jessie’s car and drove north with the dawn rising over Tulsa and the birds waking from their sleep.

  CHAPTER ten

  For two weeks, if her father wasn’t home, Tessa came to Danny’s door. They rarely slept, but Danny wouldn’t call what they did making love. A bit too raw for that. On several occasions, she gave the orders—slower, faster, harder, put it there, no there, roll over, stand up, lie down. It seemed hopeless to Danny, the way they clawed and chewed and squeezed each other’s bones. And yet he kept returning for more. Sometimes, walking the beat, he’d find himself wishing the uniform weren’t so coarse; it rubbed parts of him that had already been scratched to the last layer of flesh. His bedroom on those nights gave off the feel of a lair. They entered and tore at each other. And while the sounds of the neighborhood did reach them—an occasional car horn, the shouts of children kicking a ball in the alleys, the neighs and huffs from the stables behind their building, even the clank of footsteps on the fire escape of some other tenants who’d discovered the
attraction of the roof he and Tessa had abandoned—they seemed the sounds of an alien life.

  For all her abandon in the bedroom, Tessa withheld herself when the sex was finished. She would sneak back to her room without a word and never once fell asleep in his bed. He didn’t mind. In fact, he preferred it this way—heated yet cold. He wondered if his part in all of this unleashing of unnameable fury was tied into his feelings for Nora, his urge to punish her for loving him and leaving him and continuing to live.

  There was no danger he would fall in love with Tessa. Or she with him. In all their snakelike commingling he sensed contempt above all, not just she for him, or he for her, but both of them for their barren addiction to this act. Once, when she was on top, her hands clenched against his chest, she whispered, “So young,” like a condemnation.

  When Federico was in town, he invited Danny over for some anisette and they sat listening to opera on the Silvertone while Tessa sat on the davenport, working on her English in primers that Federico brought back from his trips across New England and the Tri-States. At first Danny worried that Federico would sense the intimacy between his drinking companion and his daughter, but Tessa sat on the davenport, a stranger, her legs tucked under her petticoat, her crepe blouse cinched at the throat, and whenever her eyes found Danny’s they were blank of anything but linguistic curiosity.

  “Dee-fine avar-iss,” she said once.

  Those nights, Danny would return to his rooms feeling both the betrayer and the betrayed, and he’d sit by his window and read from the stacks provided by Eddie McKenna until late into the evening.

  He went to another BSC meeting and still another, and little about the men’s situation or prospects had changed. The mayor still refused to meet with them, while Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor seemed to be having second thoughts about granting a charter.

  “Keep the faith,” he heard Mark Denton say to a flatfoot one night. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  “But it was built,” the guy said.

  Then one night, when he returned after two solid days of duty, he found Mrs. DiMassi dragging Tessa and Federico’s rug down the stairs. Danny tried to help her, but the old woman shrugged him off and dropped the rug into the foyer and let loose a loud sigh before looking at him.