Come a Stranger

  Mina didn’t think there was anything for her to say.

  “Do you think He has a purpose for you?” his voice asked her.

  “I never thought about that,” Mina said. “You feel like He might have one for you,” she guessed, because it was only that feeling that would make him ask her that question.

  “I wish I knew. I wish I knew that, and if I knew He did, I wish I knew what the purpose was,” he said. Mina could feel how that question worried him. He didn’t need her to say anything. He just wanted to frame the question into words, to get it out from inside her. “I guess I’d better take you home before Raymonda starts to get het up.”

  “She doesn’t get het up when she knows where we are,” Mina told him. But it was time for her to go.

  After that, Mr. Shipp talked more with her, about all sorts of things, none of them really personal, but a lot of them more personal than personal. He talked about his children and what he hoped they’d be like. “I can almost see what they’ll grow up like,” he said. “Sometimes.” They were walking down the driveway to the road. Mina was wheeling her bicycle, and Mr. Shipp was taking a walk, after sitting down all afternoon in a meeting.

  “What about me?” Mina asked. She knew by this time that she could ask that kind of question.

  “I don’t know who you’re going to be,” he said, his eyes studying her, interested and sympathetic, with the readiness to laugh behind them. “You’ll be yourself, that’s all I know.”

  “T-rou-ble,” Mina smiled.

  “I expect so. Like Selma, she’s another one coming along. It’s funny, I thought it was my girls I’d be most anxious over, down in Harlem—”

  “Down in Harlem, among the coloreds,” Mina joked, remembering their first conversation and knowing he’d understand that she wasn’t wising off.

  “But it’s Samuel. I wish he was stronger sometimes.”

  “He’s plenty strong, mentally,” Mina pointed out. The late afternoon heat was so thick that she moved in slow motion, her body filmed with sweat, sweat running down the sides of her cheeks and the backs of her calves, sweat oiling her arms. The macadam roadbed shimmered in the heat and showed what looked like pools of oil, but were only mirages.

  “I don’t know if that’s enough,” Mr. Shipp said.

  “Enough for what?” Mina rested on her bike.

  “Enough to . . . see him through to his own life?”

  Mina didn’t know the answer to that. She rode off, thinking. Samuel was her favorite, although Selma always handed her a kick. Dream—Dream was growing up into another Alice, so she’d find someone to look after her. Mina didn’t turn around for a last look at Tamer Shipp.

  Her family teased her about Mr. Shipp. She didn’t mind, because they didn’t know what they thought they knew, or what they knew wasn’t even that close to the truth. “I’ve never met anybody like him,” she told her mother. “Sometimes, I’m just so thankful we live now, and not before.”

  “He’d not have lasted long as anyone’s slave, Tamer wouldn’t,” her mother agreed. “I’d have done all right, I think. I don’t know about you, after your go-round with that Mr. Bryce. What do you and Tamer talk about?”

  “Lots of things. His children. God. People.”

  “Somebody should be talking to him about his wife,” Momma said. “She’s drinking too much.”

  “Just wine.”

  “The trouble is, she’s so crazy about him. She thinks she’s not anywhere near good enough for him and she’s afraid he’ll see that. I feel sorry for Alice.”

  “I don’t,” Mina said. If she let the thoughts out, she was plain envious of Alice.

  “He knows you’ve got a crush on him,” Mina’s mother said. They were in the kitchen, alone in the house with humid darkness wrapped around outside.

  “He doesn’t know you really do love him,” Mina’s mother said.

  Mina didn’t know what to say. She got up and poured herself a glass of orange juice. She took out the ice tray and slowly picked out a couple of ice cubes to drop into the glass. Half of her wanted to talk to Momma, talk from her heart. Half of her knew that there was nothing more to be said on the subject.

  “Arrgblgh,” was the sound Mina chose to utter, letting her mother think that whatever the words were, they were muffled by orange juice in her mouth.

  Mrs. Smiths leaned back in her chair and just laughed, a sound that rolled like music around the room. “I could weep,” she said, still smiling. “I feel for you, honey, and I’m so proud of you—you are such a trouble to yourself—but love gives what’s best in us to us, I think. And I’ve been thinking, if you can give something to Alice of what’s best in her. For Tamer. I don’t know the situation, myself, but I do know you . . . so I thought I’d ask.”

  “They don’t care about the same things,” Mina said, sitting down, holding the glass of juice in both her hands.

  “He’d be a hard man to be married to. He’d make you feel unworthy, if you were Alice. Not that he means to,” her momma said. “I’m just asking, honey. I know you’re only thirteen, I’m just wondering.”

  Mina tried to think about helping Alice, but she couldn’t think of anything. She couldn’t see herself telling Alice to be more thoughtful about things, and not care as much about good times as about God. She couldn’t see herself trying to teach Alice the kinds of things Momma did for her preacher husband, to help him in his work, to help the church in its work.

  August came again and with it a heat wave, broken by squally thunderstorms that rolled up the bay. When the storms came, Mina would go out onto the porch to watch them. She’d see the heavy clouds rushing across the sky and feel a sudden cold edge to the wind. The trees, leaning with the gusty winds, would turn up their leaves, showing the pale undersides. First the thunder would crack the sky apart, and then the rain would fall, beating its way into the soil. After the front passed, the rain would taper off, and then the sun would come out again. Steam rose in the yellow light, making the fields of corn like some tropical jungle country. The storms that passed during the heat wave never broke the edge of the day, they just made a temporary respite before things got worse. But the crops were growing well under this weather, the corn tall and tasseled, tomatoes swelling out ripe.

  One Saturday afternoon, there was a movie up in Salisbury that Alice said she’d just die if she didn’t see, so could Mina please come out extra? Mina had the three children at their little beach and Mr. Shipp came to join them. He had a towel around his shoulders and just his bathing suit on. His dark skin glistened with sweat. He dropped the towel beside Mina where she sat reading and belly-flopped into the creek. Water sprayed up around, and all three of his children threw themselves on top of him. He played in the shallow water with them, tossing them in, his deep laughter mingling with their shrieks of delight. Then he came out and spread his towel and sat beside her.

  “That feels better,” he said. He watched his children. “We’re working you overtime. You can go home, if you like. You can stay, if you like. Whatever. It’s a little cooler out here than in town. What’re you reading?”

  Mina showed him, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  “What do you think of it?”

  Mina thought. She wished she could think of something intelligent to say. But she couldn’t. “It gets me so confused—I don’t think, I just react. It’s hard for me to believe it’s true. It makes me glad I live here.”

  “I know what you mean. I prefer Baldwin, myself—James Baldwin,” he said, to her expression. ‘That man’s got a soul. But I know about what this man’s gone through.” He put his hand on the book she had closed beside her.

  “I don’t,” Mina said. “I’m glad I don’t.”

  “This isn’t a bad place to grow up. Cities are bad places for blacks to grow up in, or try to. I used to live here, years ago, did I ever tell you?”

  “You said you went to school here.”

  “It was when we were first married and Dream was—just
a baby, just a little baby. I finished my last two years of high school here. And collected a few bruises—those weren’t easy years. But Alice had some family on her father’s side, and she wanted to be near some family.”

  “So you already knew people when you came here,” Mina said. That explained how he had so easily become a part of the community, of the church.

  “I knew some people from school. Although, we’re all so different now, grown up. It’s easier now, around here, for blacks. For coloreds,” he corrected himself, a private joke between them. She watched him as he watched the kids and the water flowing in the creek.

  “I was quite an athlete in those days.”

  Mina looked at his broad shoulders. She could believe it.

  “Tell you a story. You want to hear a story, Mina?”

  His words sounded like he was teasing, but his voice didn’t. Mina thought that, for once, he wasn’t saying exactly what he meant and she listened.

  “I always like stories,” she said, waiting to hear whatever it was.

  “I ran hurdles on the track team, and there was this white guy—Tillerman. Samuel Tillerman—he was on the track team too. I knew the kind he was, and I wasn’t about to give him an inch. I hated him. Bullet, he called himself. He drove me—I never knew I could work so hard. The thing is, he taught me more about myself than anybody else, and in his own way, he won me the scholarship I needed, for college. And I never loved anybody the way I loved him.”

  It didn’t make any sense, and it made perfect sense. But what was the story? “What happened to him?” Mina asked. “Where is he now?”

  “Dead. Killed. In Vietnam,” Tamer Shipp said. His adam’s apple moved up and down. “When I heard that—I’ve never—it was like teeth in my heart.”

  Mina was shocked: She knew that exact feeling, and those exact words for it.

  Mr. Shipp looked over at her. “I guess that’s a little too fanciful for you to stomach.” Mina shook her head, unable to find words to say anything. “Or because he was white, and prejudiced—because he was. Well, it shocked me too, Mina, to feel that way.”

  Mina nodded her head, because she knew the feeling, however different the cause was. She waited for him to tell what happened.

  “Even now, it’s years ago, whenever I think of it, think of him—those teeth bite in. That grief—it doesn’t ease up. I don’t know why, and I don’t even know if I want it to. But whenever—”

  “I’m sorry,” Mina finally said. That wasn’t anything to say, but there was nothing else she could say. She meant it, for what that was worth—those teeth had left her heart alone for a long time now. He called it a story, but he didn’t tell it like a story. He told it like—like for once, this was something he couldn’t set his mind to and make orderly sense out of. Mina had listened to his mind, Sundays in church, and she knew how strong and true it was. But this, this Bullet thing—she couldn’t call it a story—this he couldn’t even tell in an orderly way. This lay at his heart; she could hear that in his voice and in the ways he couldn’t talk about it, and it hurt him. And there was nothing she could do or say to ease him. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “I am too, sometimes. Life would have been easier if I’d never met him,” Mr. Shipp said. “You want to hear a piece of naked vanity? I always wished I’d been able to save him. Not save his soul.” He turned to smile at Mina and she thought if ever she came to meet Jesus, she’d have already seen His eyes. “Only save his life. His soul was—just fine.”

  “It’s Bullet you named Samuel after, isn’t it?” Mina said.

  “You have a phenomenal way of seeing into the corners of a story, Mina.”

  “I guess so,” she said. She didn’t tell him that she always studied every word he spoke, each gesture, anything he did, or . . . until she could etch him into her memory without her even trying.

  Mr. Shipp’s eyes were on his children, splashing cool in the creek.

  “Who was he? What was he like?” Mina thought if she had a picture of him in her mind she could understand more.

  “I never knew anything about him, really. We weren’t what anybody would call friends. His family had a farm around here, I think. They hated blacks, I guess. But he wasn’t the kind of man you think of as having any family at all,” Mr. Shipp said. “Hard. He was hard. I think God might be hard like that. Because there wasn’t a false bone in his body. Then he got killed off, in that useless, senseless war before . . . You should have seen him run, Mina, he was—it wasn’t that he was good, although he was good, really good. He was just so—right. To watch him move . . . it was so right. I admired that boy, and he got to respect me, I’m pretty sure of it. But—”

  “You said he was someone you knew,” Mina remembered.

  “I knew him,” Mr. Shipp said. “I never met anyone like him, and I wish he’d have lived, so I could have known him.”

  He turned his head back to look at Mina again. She wasn’t crying, although she felt like it, like weeping—for this dead young man and for whatever grief Mr. Shipp was carrying around. But if she started in crying that would get in the way of her listening.

  “Do you love God, Mina?” he asked her.

  Mina didn’t know what to say. He was asking her about why God let things happen like Bullet Tillerman being killed; he was reminding her that God wasn’t easy, it was God who made blacks and whites; and he was telling her that this was a question he was asking himself. He was wondering all these things because of Bullet. Mina didn’t know what she could say to ease Mr. Shipp so she told the truth. “I think I don’t know much about love,” she said. And she didn’t, although she also did.

  Tamer Shipp was looking at her and looking at her. The children laughed and splashed before them, and the air was muggy all around them, filled with bug noises; but in all the world, all Mina heard was what he said to her without saying a word.

  He knew she loved him, and he wished she didn’t because that was hard on her, but he was glad she did too. Mina was glad herself to read that gladness as part of his glance, but she pulled her eyes away. It was bad enough that Mr. Shipp had Bullet in his heart, to pain him, and she could see now—see what it would be to meet something that might be the best and have it just wiped out, erased, taken away so you couldn’t ever know it. Ended and finished as if it had no value. With nothing left behind.

  Mina wasn’t about to add in any small way to what Tamer Shipp was troubled by. The world troubled a black man enough; it had troubled this man enough.

  She heard Mr. Shipp chuckle, but she kept her eyes on Dream dancing around in the knee-high water of the creek in a bright red bikini, even though she didn’t need the top yet.

  “I’m like the ancient mariner,” his laughing voice said, sounding normal again. “Except I never did tell anybody straight out before.”

  Mina didn’t say that she didn’t think she’d been told anything straight out, because she knew he was changing the subject. “Who’s the ancient mariner?”

  “In a poem. You’ll read it.”

  “A black poem?”

  “No, Coleridge.”

  “Do you ever wonder,” Mina asked, while half of her mind was busy being amused that this subject was safe ground for conversation, “why there aren’t many black poets?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” he said. “In this century, there are some,” he reminded her. Then he said, “That dance camp really got through to you, didn’t it.”

  Thinking about his Samuel Tillerman, Mina shook her head. “Nothing like they could have,” she said.

  “Miss T-rou-ble. I bet you got through to them more than they did you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mina told him. She watched Selma move out to knock Dream over and end the dance. The little girl’s concentrated glance never wavered from her sister as she plowed through the water. “Selma!” Mina called. “Don’t you do that, you hear me?”

  Selma stopped, looked at Mina, then turned back to the shore. Samuel splashed water
at her and she joined in the new game.

  Mina took the subject even farther away. “What about Alice and this equivalency test she told us about. When does she take it?”

  “You take it whenever you think you’re ready. Why?”

  “Why do you want her to?”

  “It’ll be a good thing for her.”

  “To know that stuff?”

  “No. I’d just like her to know she has a high school diploma. Alice could find work, something to do with retail clothing, if she had a diploma. She’d like the work, and she’d like herself a little better. That’s my way of thinking about it. I like her fine, but she doesn’t like herself so much. You know?”

  Mina didn’t know, but she could understand, she thought. Alice had no idea, she thought. Alice thought Tamer was ashamed of her, that he wanted her to improve herself. And Alice thought she’d fail.

  Mina had seen some of those test booklets in the library, set on a whole shelf of test booklets for different jobs. She’d take a look at one, and see how hard it was. Alice loved her husband enough to try, if she thought she had a chance to pass. Mina thought she’d take a look at the questions and see if it would be fair to persuade Alice to study for it. At least there was something she could do something about for Mr. Shipp.

  CHAPTER 18

  The more Mina thought about it—and she thought about it a lot—the more she wondered about this Samuel Tillerman. It wasn’t anything Mr. Shipp had exactly said that made her want to know more. It was his voice, the sound of his voice. Thinking about it, wondering about it, listening to his voice in her ear’s memory, Mina tried to understand what she’d heard. His voice had been like—a bassoon. Usually his voice was like a cello, melodious and round. But this wasn’t his usual voice, when he talked about Samuel Tillerman. There were new resonances, and his voice got heavier. It was as if he opened up his chest and spoke out of his secret heart.

  Mina knew about secret hearts in people. But if she were to do what she had never done, talk to someone about Tamer Shipp, she didn’t think her voice would change in that particular way. Mina thought probably he carried a grief that was both sharp and long in him. Like a bassoon where you could always hear that it could go higher or lower even though it didn’t actually do that, he hadn’t ever built up any edges for this grief. There was no missing a bassoon, even in a full orchestra, as it played its notes out.