It started low, from the end of his gut, and shrilled its way up into his ears and shattered the bells, sending glass shards flying into a heart that should have been so scarred from old piercings that there was no flesh left to bleed. But the glass splinters found some minute, untouched place—as they always did—and tore the heart and let the whistling in. And now Ben would have to drink faster and longer, because the melody would now ride on his body’s blood like a cancer and poison everywhere it touched. Swing low, sweet chariot. It mustn’t get to his brain. He had a few more seconds before it got to his brain and killed him. He had to be drunk before the poison crept up his neck muscles, past his mouth, on the way to his brain. If he was drunk, then he could let it out—sing it out into the air before it touched his brain, caused him to remember. Swing low, sweet chariot. He couldn’t die there under the ground like some animal. Oh, God, please make him drunk. And he promised—he’d never go that long without a drink again. It was just the meeting and then that girl that had kept him from it this long, but he swore it would never happen again—just please, God, make him drunk.
The alcohol began to warm Ben’s body, and he felt his head begin to get numb and heavy. He almost sobbed out his thanks for this redeeming answer to his prayers, because the whistling had just reached his throat and he was able to open his mouth and slobber the words out into the room. The saliva was dripping from the corners of his mouth because he had to take huge gulps of wine between breaths, but he sang on—drooling and humming—because to sing was salvation, to sing was to empty the tune from his blood, to sing was to unremember Elvira, and his daughter’s “Mornin’, Daddy Ben” as she dragged her twisted foot up his front porch with that song hitting her in the back.
Swing low
“Mornin’, Ben. Mornin’, Elvira.” Sweet chariot
The red pick-up truck stopped in front of Ben’s yard. Comin’ for to carry me home
His daughter got out of the passenger side and began to limp toward the house.
Swing low
Elvira grinned into the creviced face of the white man sitting in the truck with tobacco stains in the corner of his mouth. “Mornin’, Mr. Clyde. Right nice day, ain’t it, sir?” Sweet chariot
Ben watched his daughter come through the gate with her eyes on the ground, and she slowly climbed up on the porch. She took each step at a time, and her shoes grated against the rough boards. She finally turned her beaten eyes into his face, and what was left of his soul to crush was taken care of by the bell-like voice that greeted them. “Mornin’, Daddy Ben. Mornin’, Mama.”
“Mornin’, baby,” Ben mumbled with his jaws tight. Swing low
“How’s things up at the house?” Elvira asked. “My little girl do a good job for you yesterday?”
Sweet chariot
“Right fine, Elvira. Got that place clean as a skinned rat. How’s y’all’s crops comin’?”
“Just fine, Mr. Clyde, sir. Just fine. We sure appreciate that extra land you done rented us. We bringin’ in more than enough to break even. Yes, sir, just fine.”
The man laughed, showing the huge gaps between his tobacco-rotted teeth. “Glad to do it. Y’all some of my best tenants. I likes keepin’ my people happy. If you needs somethin’, let me know.”
“Sure will, Mr. Clyde, sir.”
“Aw right, see y’all next week. Be by the regular time to pick up the gal.”
“She be ready, sir.”
The man started up the motor on the truck, and the tune that he whistled as he drove off remained in the air long after the dust had returned to the ground. Elvira grinned and waved until the red of the truck had disappeared over the horizon. Then she simultaneously dropped her arm and smile and turned toward her daughter. “Don’t just stand there gawkin’. Get in the house—your breakfast been ready.”
“Yes, Mama.”
When the screen door had slammed shut, Elvira snapped her head around to Ben. “Nigger, what is wrong with you? Ain’t you heared Mr. Clyde talkin’ to you, and you standin’ there like a hunk of stone. You better get some sense in you head ’fore I knock some in you!”
Ben stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at the tracks in the dirt where the truck had been. He kept balling his fists up in his overalls until his nails dug into his palms.
“It ain’t right, Elvira. It just ain’t right and you know it.”
“What ain’t right?” The woman stuck her face into his and he backed up a few steps. “That that gal work and earn her keep like the rest of us? She can’t go to the fields, but she can clean house, and she’ll do it! I see it’s better you keep your mouth shut ’cause when it’s open, ain’t nothin’ but stupidness comin’ out.” She turned her head and brushed him off as she would a fly, then headed toward the door of the house.
“She came to us, Elvira.” There was a leaden sadness in Ben’s voice. “She came to us a long time ago.”
The thin woman spun around with her face twisted into an airless knot. “She came to us with a bunch of lies ’bout Mr. Clyde ’cause she’s too damn lazy to work. Why would a decent widow man want to mess with a little black nothin’ like her? No, anything to get out of work—just like you.”
“Why she gotta spend the night then?” Ben turned his head slowly toward her. “Why he always make her spend the night up there alone with him?”
“Why should he make an extra trip just to bring her tail home when he pass this way every Saturday mornin’ on the way to town? If she wasn’t lame, she could walk it herself after she finish work. But the man nice enough to drop her home, and you want to bad-mouth him along with that lyin’ hussy.”
“After she came to us, you remember I borrowed Tommy Boy’s wagon and went to get her that Friday night. I told ya what Mr. Clyde told me. ‘She ain’t finished yet, Ben.’ Just like that—‘She ain’t finished yet.’ And then standin’ there whistlin’ while I went out the back gate.” Ben’s nails dug deeper into his palms.
“So!” Elvira’s voice was shrill. “So it’s a big house. It ain’t like this shit you got us livin’ in. It take her longer to do things than most folks. You know that, so why stand there carryin’ on like it mean more than that?”
“She ain’t finished yet, Ben.” Ben shook his head slowly. “If I was half a man I woulda—”
Elvira came across the porch and sneered into his face. “If you was half a man, you coulda given me more babies and we woulda had some help workin’ this land instead of a halfgrown woman we gotta carry the load for. And if you was even quarter a man, we wouldn’t be a bunch of miserable sharecroppers on someone else’s land—but we is, Ben. And I’ll be damned if I see the little bit we got taken away ’cause you believe that gal’s lowdown lies! So when Mr. Clyde come by here, you speak—hear me? And you act as grateful as your pitiful ass should be for the favors he done us.”
Ben felt a slight dampness in his hands because his fingernails had broken through the skin of his palms and the blood was seeping around his cuticles. He looked at Elvira’s dark braided head and wondered why he didn’t take his hands out of his pockets and stop the bleeding by pressing them around it. Just lock his elbows on her shoulders and place one hand on each side of her temples and then in toward each other until the blood stopped. His big callused hands on the bones of her skull pressing in and in, like you would with a piece of dark cloth to cover the wounds on your body and clot the blood. Or he could simply go into the house and take his shotgun and press his palms around the trigger and handle, emptying the bullets into her sagging breasts just long enough—just pressing hard enough—to stop his palms from bleeding.
But the gram of truth in her words was heavy enough to weigh his hands down in his pockets and keep his feet nailed to the wooden planks in the porch, and the wounds healed over by themselves. Ben discovered that if he sat up drinking all night Friday, he could stand on the porch Saturday morning and smile at the man who whistled as he dropped his lame daughter home. And he could look into her beaten eyes a
nd believe that she had lied.
The girl disappeared one day, leaving behind a note saying that she loved them very much, but she knew that she had been a burden and she understood why they had made her keep working at Mr. Clyde’s house. But she felt that if she had to earn her keep that way, she might as well go to Memphis where the money was better.
Elvira ran and bragged to the neighbors that their daughter was now working in a rich house in Memphis. And she was making out awful well because she always sent plenty of money home. Ben would stare at the envelopes with no return address, and he found that if he drank enough every time a letter came, he could silence the bell-like voice that came chiming out of the open envelope—“Mornin’ Daddy Ben, mornin’ Daddy Ben, mornin’…” And then if he drank enough every day he could bear the touch of Elvira’s body in the bed beside him at night and not have his sleep stolen by the image of her lying there with her head caved in or her chest ripped apart by shotgun shells.
But even after they lost the sharecropping contract and Elvira left him for a man who farmed near the levee and Ben went north and took a job on Brewster, he still drank—long after he could remember why. He just knew that whenever he saw a mailman, the crystal bells would start, and then that strange whistling that could shatter them, sending them on that deadly journey toward his heart.
He never dreamed it would happen on a Sunday. The mailman didn’t run on Sundays, so he had felt safe. He hadn’t counted on that girl sounding so much like the bells when she left his place tonight. But it was okay, he had gotten drunk in time, and he would never take such a big chance again. No, Lord, you pulled me through this time, and I ain’t pressin’ your mercy no more. Ben stumbled around his shadowy damp rooms, singing now at the top of his voice. The low, trembling melody of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” passed through his greasy windows and up into the late summer air.
Lorraine had walked home slowly, thinking about the old man and the daughter who limped. When she came to her stoop, she brushed past her neighbors with her head up and didn’t bother to speak.
Theresa got off the uptown bus and turned the corner into Brewster Place. She was always irritable on Friday evenings because they had to do payroll inventories at the office. Her neck ached from bending over endless lists of computer printouts. What did that damn Board of Education think—someone in accounting was going to sneak one of their relatives on the payroll? The biggies had been doing that for years, but they lay awake at night, thinking of ways to keep the little guys from cashing in on it too. There was something else that had been turning uncomfortably in her mind for the last few weeks, and just today it had lain still long enough for her to pinpoint it—Lorraine was changing. It wasn’t exactly anything that she had said or done, but Theresa sensed a firmness in her spirit that hadn’t been there before. She was speaking up more—yes, that was it—whether the subject was the evening news or bus schedules or the proper way to hem a dress. Lorraine wasn’t deferring to her anymore. And she wasn’t apologizing for seeing things differently from Theresa.
Why did that bother her? Didn’t she want Lorraine to start standing up for herself? To stop all that sniveling and handwringing every time Theresa raised her voice? Weren’t things the way she had wanted them to be for the last five years? What nagged at Theresa more than the change was the fact that she was worrying about it. She had actually thought about picking a fight just to see how far she could push her—push her into what? Oh, God, I must be sick, she thought. No, it was that old man—that’s what it was. Why was Lorraine spending so much time with that drunk? They didn’t have a damn thing in common. What could he be telling her, doing for her, that was causing this? She had tried—she truly had—to get Lorraine to show some backbone. And now some ignorant country winehead was doing in a few weeks what she couldn’t do for the last five years.
Theresa was mulling this over when a little girl sped past her on skates, hit a crack in the sidewalk, and fell. She went to walk around the child, who looked up with tears in her eyes and stated simply, “Miss, I hurt myself.” She said it with such a tone of wonder and disappointment that Theresa smiled. Kids lived in such an insulated world, where the smallest disturbance was met with cries of protest. Oh, sweetheart, she thought, just live on and you’ll wish many a day that the biggest problem in your life would be a scraped knee. But she was still just a little girl, and right now she wanted an audience for her struggle with this uninvited disaster.
Theresa bent down beside her and clucked her teeth loudly. “Oh, you did? Let’s see.” She helped her off the ground and made an exaggerated fuss over the scraped knee.
“It’s bleeding!” The child’s voice rose in horror.
Theresa looked at the tiny specks of blood that were beading up on the grimy knee. “Why, it sure is.” She tried to match the note of seriousness in the child’s tone. “But I think we have a little time before you have to worry about a transfusion.” She opened her pocketbook and took out a clean tissue. “Let’s see if we can fix it up. Now, I want you to spit on this for me and I’ll wipe your knee.”
The girl spit on the tissue. “Is it gonna hurt?”
“No, it won’t hurt. You know what my grandma used to call spit? God’s iodine. Said it was the best thing for patching anything up—except maybe a broken leg.”
She steadied the girl’s leg and gently dabbed at the dirty knee. “See, it’s all coming off. I guess you’re gonna live.” She smiled.
The child looked at her knee with a solemn face. “I think it needs a Band-Aid.”
Theresa laughed. “Well, you’re out of luck with me. But you go on home and see if your mama has one for you—if you can remember which knee it was by then.”
“What are you doing to her?” The voice pierced the air between the child and Theresa. She looked up and saw a woman rushing toward them. The woman grabbed the child to her side. “What’s going on here?” Her voice was just half an octave too high.
Theresa stood up and held out the dirty and bloody tissue. “She scraped her knee.” The words fell like dead weights. “What in the hell did you think I was doing?” She refused to let the woman avoid her eyes, enjoying every minute of her cringing embarrassment.
“Mama, I need a Band-Aid, you got a Band-Aid?” The child tugged on her arm.
“Yes, yes, honey, right away.” The woman was glad to have an excuse to look down. “Thank you very much,” she said, as she hurried the child away. “She’s always so clumsy. I’ve told her a million times to be careful on those skates, but you know…”
“Yeah, right,” Theresa said, watching them go. “I know.” She balled the tissue in her hand and quickly walked into the building. She slammed the apartment door open and heard Lorraine running water in the bathroom.
“Is that you, Tee?”
“Yeah,” she called out, and then thought, No, it’s not me. It’s not me at all. Theresa paced between the kitchen and living room and then realized that she still had the tissue. She threw it into the kitchen garbage and turned on the faucet to its fullest pressure and started washing her hands. She kept lathering and rinsing them, but they still felt unclean. Son-of-a-bitch, she thought, son-of-a-fucking-bitch! She roughly dried her hands with some paper towels and fought the impulse to wash them again by starting dinner early. She kept her hands moving quickly, chopping more onions, celery, and green peppers than she really needed. She vigorously seasoned the ground beef, jabbing the wooden spoon repeatedly into the red meat.
When she stopped to catch her breath and glanced toward the kitchen window, a pair of squinty black eyes were peering at her from the corner of a shade across the air shaft. “What the hell…?” She threw down her spoon and ran over to the window.
“You wanna see what I’m doing?” The shade was pulled up with such force it went spinning on its rollers at the top of the window. The eyes disappeared from the corner of the shade across the air shaft.
“Here!” Theresa slammed the window up into its casing. “I’l
l even raise this so you can hear better. I’m making meat loaf, you old bat! Meat loaf!” She stuck her head out of the window. “The same way other people make it! Here, I’ll show you!”
She ran back to the table and took up a handful of chopped onions and threw them at Sophie’s window. “See, that’s the onions. And here, here’s the chopped peppers!” The diced vegetables hit against the windowpane. “Oh, yeah, I use eggs!” Two eggs flew out of the window and splattered against Sophie’s panes.
Lorraine came out of the bathroom, toweling her hair. “What’s all the shouting for? Who are you talking to?” She saw Theresa running back and forth across the kitchen, throwing their dinner out of the window. “Have you lost your mind?”
Theresa picked up a jar of olives. “Now, here’s something freaky for you—olives! I put olives in my meat loaf! So run up and down the street and tell that!” The jar of olives crashed against the opposite building, barely missing Sophie’s window.
“Tee, stop it!”
Theresa put her head back out the window. “Now olives are definitely weird, but you gotta take that one up with my grandmother because it’s her recipe! Wait! I forgot the meat—can’t have you think I would try to make meat loaf without meat.” She ran back to the table and grabbed up the bowl.
“Theresa!!” Lorraine rushed into the kitchen.
“No, can’t have you thinking that!” Theresa yelled as she swung back her arm to throw the bowl through Sophie’s window. “You might feel I’m a pervert or something—someone you can’t trust your damn children around!”