Carefully, Ryder replaced two of the hooks into the envelope and slid it back into his flapped pocket. From the other bank, a blue jay started to scold. His father had always hated blue jays, but Ryder never could figure out why. Maybe it was because they screamed “Thief! Thief!” Ryder’s father could have left his last paycheck money on the table under the yellow sugar bowl—that was what Troy’s father did when he deserted his family—but he hadn’t. Not even spare change, not even any note. The jay jumped off a limb of a high oak and sailed above the water, his wings spread in two beautiful blue and white fans. A dragonfly, like a little helicopter, hovered over the water.
Ryder realized he was just standing on the brown elephant rock, remembering this and that, enjoying himself. But it was hot on the rock, and he put his hat back on. He needed to bait his hook. He set the metal box down, squatted beside it, and flipped up the shiny catches. He lay the cane pole on the rock and steadied it to make sure it didn’t clatter off into the water.
Nothing had spilled inside the box. He removed the wax paper and took a worm out of the sandy dirt in the can. Bobby had added a little sand to the mixture, as though he were making a special dirt recipe to keep his father’s worms happy. Ryder placed a worm on the rock and knelt to pierce one of the red segments with the barbed fishhook. Some men held the worm in their fingers, but he was wary of the hook, sharp as a needle glinting in the bright light. He noticed an old shirt swept against the near bank, and a wad of wet newspaper had caught there, too. Grains of dirt and sand clung to the body of the pierced earthworm as it roiled on the rock.
From his pants pocket Ryder took a nylon string and clumsily tied it to the upper loop in the hook. Then he tied the string to the pole. It had a groove to help hold the string. Standing on the lip of the rock, he dropped the string straight down toward the quiet place. The hook was hardly heavy enough to make it drop. Nonetheless, there was a still little pocket of water there, and the hook disappeared into it. Ryder jiggled the pole from time to time so a fish would think the worm was alive and wriggling. When he lifted the tip of the pole, he noticed the mud in the water was staining the white nylon line.
After a long time, Ryder’s feet began to hurt, and he decided to sit down on the edge of the rock. There were all kinds of birds in the woods. One was a kingfisher, the same ugly color as the river, with a coarse beak and a crest like a crazy sort of crown. When Ryder had been in the eighth grade, full of piss and vinegar because his class and everybody in it was top dog and about to graduate, the teacher had brought in a freckle-faced little kid from first grade who knew all the birds and gave a talk on them. He had drawn a picture of a kingfisher with chalk on the blackboard, down low near the eraser trough because he was too short for an eighth-grade blackboard. When the teacher said, “Darl, tell everybody how you learned about birds,” and the kid had answered “Cub Scouts,” Ryder had felt his heart drop like a stone. When the kid left, the teacher didn’t erase the row of birds outlined along the bottom of the blackboard. But who had taught him to draw like that?
It was too hot on the rock in the sun. Ryder was running sweat. This wasn’t a good place. Ryder wound the line around the pole, collected his stuff, and walked on. He walked deeper into the woods, where it was cooler, and sat down with his back against a big oak. He decided to eat his sandwich and drink some of his milk. It was cold, but not quite as cold as he wished. Milk needed to be very cold to taste good. He watched ants and black beetles and centipedes walk over and under the fallen leaves.
Suppose I just never left this spot, he thought. Suppose somebody found me years later, a skeleton, eaten by his own worms, him bony white, with his black hat still on his skull.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said out loud.
He went back to the river. He tried a number of spots; he tried a new worm, and then two worms at a time on a larger hook. He saw a mangy black and white dog slinking along. It just glanced at him once and kept going. As Ryder moved along the river, he saw more and more trash clogging the banks. People had tumbled down old iceboxes and cardboard boxes full of junk. His mother had been proud to have her icebox when he was little, and the iceman had been nice to him. He remembered his great, sharp, iron tongs. Finally Ryder found a rusted-out car with no wheels at the end of a dirt road. All the glass was shattered, and the metal was dented where boys had shot the car. Honeysuckle grew over the hood and around the doors, but he decided to yank open a door. After carefully inspecting the car seat for glass, he sat. He just sat and listened, looked at the late sunlight glinting like stars in the tiny spaces between leaves. He admired a hickory with its big leaves like beaver tails. He’d never seen a beaver, but he knew they still had them out west. At sunset, sitting in the car, he ate his peanut-butter cookies and drank the rest of his milk, even though it was quite warm now.
Suddenly he took his pole and broke it twice over his knee. He placed the fishhook envelope on the grimy dashboard of the car. The car had been green, and it already blended with the woods. He stood up beside the car and dashed the sandy dirt inside the Maxwell House can and the remaining worms out on the ground. With his heel he crushed first one side of the coffee can and then the other till it was almost flat. Then he sailed the misshapen metal into the Cahaba.
As he followed the river backward—he’d come a far piece—night settled into the woods. It was easy to imagine his friends there on the bank, up ahead, close to 280 and the bridge—Tommy and Bob, all the others, talking and laughing. Maybe passing the consoling moonshine that entered your throat and gut like a stab of fire. “Where you been?” they’d say when they saw him coming down the path out of the dark. “Been fishing,” he’d say.
It had been a good day, anyway.
Afternoon Roses
I’LL TAKE THE AFTERNOON I NEED, STELLA THOUGHT, for normality, for fun. Even Aunt Krit used to tell her, “You can’t go all the time. You have to have fun.” All her life, Stella’d had fun with Nancy. Or comfort. At the funeral of her family, it was Nancy who held her hand. Stella couldn’t remember time before Nancy was her friend.
Stella arranged to meet Nancy at the old red clay tennis courts on Norwood Boulevard at two in the afternoon. Nancy had to drive from across town—her family had moved over the mountain to Homewood—but her mother let Nancy drive the big black Cadillac. When they were little, Nancy’s mother ferried them across Birmingham so that they could visit. And then Nancy’s father had died, and the bond between the girls strengthened again. The car was old now, seemed a little hearselike; it was so long, not like the latest cars, but Stella loved that car.
Stella breathed deeply, filled her lungs with the air of roses. The high Cyclone fence around the court was bedecked—there was no other word for it—bedecked with climbing roses. Outside of a fairy-tale illustration, Stella had never seen such cascades of roses. Planted decades ago when Norwood Boulevard was a fashionable address, now the robust rose canes wove in and out of the fencing. The main stems topped the fence and then arched over like the curve of a wave, and underneath, inside the wave was a cool shady place where you could sit on the ground and wait. Bouquets of small clusters of roses, some white, some pink, some red, dangled through the fencing.
Because the tennis net itself was a piece of the Cyclone fencing, it had lasted more than twenty years. The net was rusty, but who cared? She thought of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, how he’d wanted to fly over the nets of language, religion, and culture of his homeland. This beautiful place existed because the city fathers had forgotten to destroy it when wealth moved over Red Mountain.
She could hear but not see birds chirping (were there four?), despite the mounting heat. She thought of Virginia Woolf, who, in her madness, heard birds speaking Greek. The tennis court birds were happy, but what were they trying to say?
Probably Nancy didn’t even see her there, hidden among the roses. When Nancy jumped out of the Cadillac holding two tennis rackets and a can of balls, she looked like
Doris Day, wearing only two colors—green shorts and a matching green-and-white-checked top. So fresh and fashionable! Her hair was up in a ponytail with an elastic band covered in white terry. Nancy’s ponytail was a beautiful shape, like an S curve, an arabesque graceful as the cabriolet leg of a fine chair. Without looking at it, Nancy passed the stubby marble war memorial incised with the names of Norwood boys, dead now almost twenty years from World War II—but what does it mean to be dead twenty years? A name incised in white stone.
Aunt Krit was glad to have Nancy in the wedding; she would be a credit to the occasion. Aunt Pratt simply loved Nancy. Stella called to her friend (Nancy had outlasted Stella’s parents, brothers), who waved the rackets in reply and then came to sit with Stella in the rose bower.
“We haven’t done this in ages!” Nancy exclaimed. “I love coming back over here.” Her face was bright, her big eyes the pale blue of forget-me-nots. She swung herself onto the ground inside the bower of roses.
When Stella told Nancy that she and Cat were teaching at Miles, at night, Nancy’s face wrinkled in concern. “I’m not a bit prejudiced. You know that. But it’s not safe.”
Stella just shrugged and smiled.
“I know you won’t listen,” Nancy said. “What does Aunt Krit say?”
“She doesn’t know. Not unless the birdies told her.”
“Stella Silver!” But Nancy wouldn’t scold.
NANCY LUXURIATED IN the beautiful summer day; her middle name was June, and she always loved this month, despite the ever-increasing fierceness of the heat. (Nancy didn’t want to argue with Stella, she just added, “I’m Cat’s friend, too, but I wouldn’t go out there at night, even with Jesus. It’s against the law, and, moreover, it’s just not safe.”) The sky was piled with clouds. Nancy knew they’d be hot after five seconds of play—the red clay court was baking in full sun—but she had brought a thermos of lemonade in the car. After they were tired of playing tennis, they’d talk, which was why Nancy came over anyway. They’d come back, sit under the roof of roses, sip lemonade, and talk.
Stella was wearing cutoff blue jeans, strings on the thighs, and a red T-shirt. Primary blocks of color. (Nancy was a student of color.)
The ball thunked and thunked between them (Nancy loved the sound of it), they called out the points Love! Love! (both of them were a little preoccupied), they swapped ends, they tolerated their sweating (they were girls again, not recent college graduates); they ignored the sunburning of noses, cheeks passing from pink to glowing red (huge puffs of white clouds crowned the summer day); and to Nancy’s surprise, she won. Usually Stella, who was thinner and quicker, won. Then to Nancy’s horror, she saw that Stella was going to run and leap over the heavy-gauge wire net to congratulate her.
Stella galloped like a colt, as hard as she could, but Nancy was afraid. She knew she herself could never clear the net. “Don’t! Don’t!” she yelled, but Stella, blocks of colors, red and blue, raced on. You’ll get hurt!
Stella raised her front foot and arched over the net. She landed still running.
“You won! You won!” Stella shouted, happy, waving her tennis racket in the air like a pennant. Happy to affirm her friend. Happy to lose.
LATER THEY SAT again in the bower of pink roses.
“This is it,” Stella said, “the heart of being alive. This beautiful flowery place.”
“And the sky,” Nancy added, nodding at the cloud puffs.
“I’ve never felt so strong or nice.”
“Is it being engaged to Don?”
Stella wrinkled her forehead, hesitated. “No. It’s now. It’s friendship. Feeling and action.”
Night Again: Caryatid
BITTERLY, CHRISTINE WATCHED CAT, PUSHED BY STELLA, cross the campus. It was only dusk. Push, push, pushy white people. Had no business coming out here to help. Should of come out fifty years ago, when help was needed. And where were they seven years ago when Fred Shuttlesworth tried to enroll children in Phillips High School? Probably sitting inside, that’s where.
(Christine didn’t suppose what she imagined was true. She would have been shocked to know that she had guessed the exact truth. Cat and Stella were safely inside Phillips High School, safely inside, when Reverend Shuttlesworth was beaten with chains in front of the school, his wife stabbed in the thigh.)
Christine supposed the white women had come early to chat with Arcola and Gloria. The white women wanted to be friends. Take charge. They’d be surprised to see she, Christine, was standing there, too, beside Arcola and Gloria. They couldn’t see who she was, leaning against the building, a silhouette against the setting sun. But she could see them, bathed in red-gold. The metal of the wheelchair was like a chariot reflecting the dying sunlight.
Christine thought of Apollo, of Greek mythology, everything white marble. No reference to black people by the art teacher, but the Greek statues had full lips, curly hair sometimes. Christine loved the blankness of the eyes of the statues. That was the way she felt sometimes.
“Christine,” Cat called. “You look like a caryatid standing there.”
“Humph!” Christine turned away, but she knew what a caryatid was. She had learned it just today in art appreciation. Yes, her head felt like she was holding up a building on it. But how did Cat know that? Spooky girl, she’d recognized Christine immediately.
“They said they might come early,” Arcola said to Christine. “Give us a chance to get acquainted.” She sashayed across the little porch and down the one step. “What you got, Cat-girl?” Arcola called pleasantly.
Then Christine noticed: Cat’s lap was full of little roses, all shades of pink.
“Didn’t nobody tell me to come early,” Christine grumbled.
“Hey.” Arcola flashed her pretty smile back at Christine. Was that girl always relaxed? “You was out of here like a shot last night. We didn’t have any chance to ask you.” Then Arcola Miss Impudence winked at her. “You had to get to the Athens Bar.”
“Stella picked them,” Cat said to everybody. She held up her hand, signaling to Stella to stop pushing. “Let’s just sit out here. Probably cooler than inside.”
Awkwardly, Cat suddenly held out a chunk of the roses to Gloria. “For you,” she said.
Slowly Gloria stepped forward and held out her hand. “Thank you,” she said.
Stella reached down and picked up another bouquet from her lap. “These are for you, Arcola.”
They were pairing up. Cat wanted to be friends with Gloria; Stella had chosen Arcola.
There was one bunch of pink left in Cat’s lap.
“The stems are in damp tissue,” Stella said. “They probably need some water.”
Wordlessly, Cat held out the remaining bouquet to Christine.
As Christine accepted the rose bouquet, she muttered ungraciously that they’d put the flowers in paper cups so they wouldn’t wilt in the heat.
“Where’d you get these little roses?” Arcola asked. She put her nose into her bunch.
“Norwood. They don’t have much smell,” Stella said apologetically. (She’d gotten some sunburn;her nose was brighter than the roses.) “They grow wild at the tennis court, all over the fences.”
White girls playing tennis in a pink rose garden—the picture made Christine angry. Not at Cat, though, she wouldn’t be playing any tennis. Christine imagined Cat sitting on the sidelines, probably holding a parasol up over her head. Cat wasn’t sunburned.
Then Christine thought how pleased Diane, her little girl, would be when she brought home roses in a Dixie cup. She had some rose scent in her handbag she could pump on them.
Diane would sit and stare at those roses in the middle of the kitchen table as if they were TV.
Humming in the Heat
CLAVICLE, STERNUM, RIBS, VERTEBRAE.
He does; they do. He sings; they sing. He has; they have. To conjugate—a pattern of three singulars, three plurals. What is a plural?
That Stella knows how to dig, Gloria thinks. She digs down and down
, finding out what they don’t know, what they need to know. I want you to understand, Stella has said over and over, not just memorize.
“Look, there’s a dead bat outside on the windowsill.” Always some distraction. Who said that?
GLORIA CAN FEEL the sweat drops starting to roll down her sides.
Christine accuses, “I thought I heard somebody in your group saying ‘Tits.’ ”
Oh-oh. (Was Christine smiling just a little bit?)
Cat grins. “Yeah. Parts of the body. You know, we were learning parts of the body.” Cat wasn’t scared of Christine. (What’s wrong with Cat;not broken, kind of twisted, a little humped. Real weak seeming.) “Somebody jumped the gun from naming bones to flesh,” Cat says wryly.
“You can’t let ’em say things like that,” Christine snaps.
“Why?” Oh Lord, Cat asking like she just wants to know.
“Why!”Christine can’t believe it. “Because they won’t have any respect for you if you do. They don’t have any respect anyway, but you got to make ’em act like they do.”
“I don’t want to come on too strong.” Cat frowning up her face like she’s really worried about coming on too strong. Might as well be me worrying about coming on too strong, she can’t even walk; I can’t hardly open my mouth.
“Hum! No chance of that.” Christine spins around. “Arcola, didn’t Mr. Parrish say Miss Silver supposed to help you?”
“No.” Arcola shrugs. She looks down at the floor. “He said you was always late and so she better be with you. I don’t care, though. You work with me if you want to, Stella.”