He looked at the new life insurance policy, the Old English script across the top, sharp pointed and black as a small wrought-iron fence. A fence to keep out bad fairies, and what were they but bad thoughts. Since he was a boy, he had imagined English fairies skittering at night across the surfaces of the workaday world causing disarray with their tiny, shapely feet.
The black printing stretching across the top of the page was more like a bramble hedge than an iron fence. But it was an inadequate hedge, open on both ends, only out to the margins, not all the way across the top from edge to edge of the paper. As though any briar patch or even an iron lace fence could keep death at bay, no matter how curlicued and spiky. Still, it was a worthy page. The black ink representing the terms of the policy had been pressed and printed right into the fiber of the paper.
Lionel adjusted himself in the carved chair seat, which was carved to fit a human bottom, two parallel declivities, like shallow spoon rests, for his buttocks. Yes, he could fit his behind right there. Oh, he knew the treachery of this chair: he wouldn’t be sitting here long till smooth and polished became hard. Maybe he’d buy himself a cushion to sit on, a square cushion upholstered in green with corduroy strings tied to the backrest so the cushion wouldn’t slip off.
Sighing, he opened the desk drawer again, just enough to get his fingers in. When he reached into the curve of his desk tray, he felt a fountain pen. It was a new kind that held an ink cartridge. He had a whole box of the cartridges, each a little sealed, translucent tube. He liked replacing them. He enjoyed piercing the end with the shunt of metal coming up from the nib.
In the past, he had thought marvelous the old type of ink pen, with a little lever on the side. You pumped the lever against a small rubber bladder inside the barrel of the pen to draw up ink from the inkwell. But those bladders wore out; the pens leaked. Still, he liked the squat glass jars of ink with the metal screw-top lids. The jars were cunningly made on the inside, with a shallow glass pocket, like a little chamber, inside. That was where you inserted the nib to draw up ink. Not down in the main jar, but in that special little in-swelling of glass that caught and held an appropriate amount. The dipping pocket hung inside the wider mouth of the bottle, like a window box hanging inside a room.
The accoutrements of status: a wooden desk, a proper (if uncomfortable) desk chair, a desk drawer with a tray for pens and pencils. A new cartridge fountain pen, and in the side drawer, obsolete but cunning, a squat glass bottle of royal blue ink.
The skeleton map unrolled itself on the wall. The wooden bar at the terminus of the chart clunked into the chalk tray. It was an announcement. Good as a fanfare. He refused to look; he had heard, and he knew what was next.
“How much you worth now, Mr. Parrish?” Mr. Bones asked softly.
“You’ve come back.”
“Oh, I make office calls. Frequently.”
Mr. Parrish refused to look at Mr. Bones. He just listened to him and then answered back to the mockery. Longing for distraction, Lionel read the heading across the policy, the black Gothic script. He kept his gaze within his circle of light. He knew who Mr. Bones was. A figment of his imagination. That didn’t make him any less real. Bones was like Marley, a bit of undigested beef, a half-cooked potato lodged in old Scrooge’s bowels.
“You feel pretty safe and snug in here, don’t you?” Mr. Bones taunted.
“What you want me to do? Blow up city hall?”
“Listen to your bones, Lionel. What your bones say to you?”
“I’m here.”
“Yeah, but I know how hard it was for you to get here. Started out, didn’t you? Turned around and went back, didn’t you? Had to start out again?”
“I’m here. I did it. I came back.”
“You just about as brave as Miss Stella, I’d say.”
“Just about.”
But Lionel felt ashamed. He wondered if Martin Luther King Jr. ever started out of his hotel room, headed for trouble, and decided he needed to go back inside, get something, maybe, that he’d forgotten. And when he got back into safety, did he ever sit down in a hotel chair and rethink the whole thing? Wonder if he should just quit, just sit there till it was over. Maybe tune in the TV, hear the newscaster say, “We were expecting Dr. King to lead the group this afternoon, but assistants say he was unavoidably delayed. Dr. King sends greetings to the people here, reminds everyone that Love and Nonviolence are the path to Justice.”
“So you think Education is the path to Power?” Mr. Bones said. “Just like Mrs. Christine Taylor said last night? You believe that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Lionel looked at the dictionary on his desk. He always kept it there. He wanted his teachers and any visitors to know he wasn’t too proud to learn more, to look things up.
“You believe in Education, not Love?”
“Both help.”
“Just thought you’d sell yourself a little more insurance, huh?”
“Why not?”
“But will you ever be worth as much as A. G. Gaston? Even in death?”
“For my family. So they be provided for.”
“How we do provide! Let’s see. What we got cooking? Grant proposal. Yes, grant proposal to the federal government. In case that comes through, we made ourselves one mighty high-pay H.O.P.E. administrator.”
“I’ve got a chance. Especially with an integrated faculty.”
“Bigwig administrator, he gots to have plenty of life insurance. In case Mr. Death, who I most decidedly do not represent, in case Mr. Death, if he was to show up in Bombingham—”
“It’s for my family. If I was blown up.”
“Expiation. Expiation. You can sing that to the tune of ‘Alabama, Alabama, I will aye be true to thee.’ And Death does know the way to Bombingham. He been here many a time. I guess he be singing in the choir when your funeral come round.”
Lionel sat at his desk, his pen poised over the insurance form. How could he leave something to Matilda without Jenny finding out? How could he take care of the woman whose warm body was the flame of life?
“What was that she was saying about an hour ago?” Mr. Bones asked. Now he’d come off the wall. His voice was closer to Mr. Parrish’s ear, and he supposed his visitor had even stepped into the circle of light. Mr. Parrish looked up. Okay, if Mr. Bones invaded the light circle, Mr. Parrish would look. There he was: a whole grinning skeleton, loose jointed, his jaw flapping up and down. No tongue. Because he stood within the golden glow of light, the white bones had taken on a faint golden sheen. Imagination could play tricks, Lionel Parrish knew. He had always had imagination. Yes, that was how his dear mother excused him when he was caught in a lie:Lionel just has such imagination.
“I guess you worrying about who’s going to live and who’s going to die among you demonstrating folks?” Mr. Bones’s jaw had stopped wagging. He was just thinking loudly, with his immaterial brain. He was just thinking right into Lionel’s mind. But then Mr. Bones’s pelvis gave an obscene thrust. With his bony pelvis, he butted the air. And again.
And Lionel remembered Matilda, not more than two hours ago, making life so sweet that he didn’t want to put his sorry flesh at risk ever again. Put it in, honey. That moment!Oh, harder, honey. Those moments. O looooooover man.
Mr. Bones began to fade into something shroudlike. Just a dark cloak. A cowl-shaded blackness where a face should have been. He was more terrifying.
With a voice that was distinct and nasty, he sounded like Police Commissioner Bull Connor talking on TV. Mr. Bones telling everybody: “We couldn’t risk losing that woman, could we? That good ole ole-time sex. We too happy; we too content, to risk our sweet neck. You one nigger just got it too good. How many times, between your wife and your mistress, how many times a day you getting it, Lionel?”
“I have a right to my wife.”
“She knows it. You can be sure that she knows her duty. When did she ever say no to you. Uh-uh. She lay there and say, I want to have as many babies as y
ou want to put in me, darling. And she mean it. She sure ’nuff mean it. I ain’t heard Miss Matilda say one word about having your babies. Have you?”
It keeps me pure, Lionel thought. It keeps me pure. This way, I don’t touch Miss Arcola. She is ripe and ready to go. You know the way those boys look at her. Especially that one big fellow, Charles Powers. You see how he start wearing clean clothes, wanting to impress Miss Arcola. You see how now he even press his shirts, keep his hair trimmed close like a Sunday school boy.
“You want a little wheelchair stuff, Lionel?”
Mr. Bones’s voice was fading, receding toward the wall. With one giant step, he would be hiking himself back up into the chalk tray, but Bones lingered a moment, just to prove he could. Just to prove Lionel Parrish had no power over the mocking voice, the ghastly presence. Mr. Bones hesitated quietly, just a minute, getting ready to move back into the chart.
Then Lionel could hear the heavy chart clattering reassuringly against the wall. Maybe it was the wind.
Wind? In this still-as-death oven? Lionel scraped his chair backward to get up. He’d open a window high, no matter what insects flew in. ’Nuff heat to have heatstroke, to hallucinate.
Faintly, Lionel heard the last thing Mr. Bones had to say for the night.
“Don’t show it to Christine. She chop it off.”
Picasso’s Bull
THAT NIGHT, GLORIA AND THE OTHER TEACHERS SPOKE while little white wax candles lay ready and waiting on the desk arms of their wooden chairs. Gloria felt a balance in her soul; yes, each and every person had a candle and a fan. When Sam West give Stella his red-sided cigarette lighter, she had to ask, “Should I lay it down or stand it up on its base?” and Gloria knew Stella was so old-fashioned she’d never held a cigarette lighter in her hand till that moment. Neither had Gloria.
Jimmy Harlow held out a book of matches to Gloria, and she placed it beside the dead little candle lying on her desk. The matchbook was black and had a modern Picasso-like drawing of a bull on it and the words DALE’S HIDEAWAY.
“You been to Dale’s Hideaway?” she asked Jimmy shyly.
“Naw, but my uncle he used to wait there. At Dale’s Cellar, too.”
Gloria decided she’d ask Stella to tell her about Dale’s. That and the restaurant at Cobb Lane, with the she-crab soup. Suddenly she remembered Stella saying of Cat, at sunset, with a man present:She’s flooding. Yes, the interiors of forbidden restaurants could certainly be discussed.
Gloria had had no interest in eating at the Woolworth’s—that was just symbolic, a step along the way. But she wanted to taste things so soft and flavorful that she couldn’t even imagine them now. She wanted to go inside the places behind the intriguing names: Dale’s Hideaway, Dale’s Cellar, The Club, Cobb Lane with the she-crab soup. She wanted to go there while she was still young.
“Jimmy,” she said, “what was the name of the most important document signed in 1776?”
“Declaration of Independence,” he said, but now he was doodling, copying the drawing of the bull standing on its hind legs like a man.
“Way back in history, before history,” Gloria said, “people used to draw animals on the walls of caves. In the south of France. Those bulls and horses have been there over ten thousand years.”
Now Jimmy looked at her.
“I can draw,” he said.
“But perhaps later?” she asked and made her voice as soft as the petal of a pansy. “The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution didn’t include black people.”
They knew that. That was one thing they weren’t likely to miss on the multiple-choice test if it asked “What groups were implicitly excluded in the opening statement of the Constitution?”
“No women, either, white or black.” Gloria liked her tone, so quiet, as though she were talking to herself. They had to lean forward to hear. “When they say ‘men’ they mean men, not everybody, like you might have thought they meant to say.”
The six young men in her group bowed their heads and looked up strangely at her, as though she was embarrassing them. They didn’t want to discuss a woman topic. “Does anybody know when women got the vote—black and white women?” And she had to tell them: 1920.
This was the way to teach when you didn’t have any books. Fact by fact. You told them, you explained. You asked them to repeat it. One by one. That was the glory of her “classroom”; for a moment in time, everybody knew everything you asked of him. You didn’t go on till they all knew it. Then everybody stepped forward together.
Gloria went to the window and threw up the sash. “Let freedom ring!” she said, and the big boys jumped up and helped her till all the windows were wide open.
AT BREAK TIME, Christine told Gloria and Stella, authoritatively, “You want to improve education, you not got to do but one thing and one thing only: reduce class size. We are cookin’.”
“And put screens on the windows,” Stella added.
Where was Arcola? Out on the porch hobnobbing with Charles Powers. Where was Jimmy Harlow? Suddenly Christine was inviting Gloria to go home with her after classes. “I want you to meet my kids.”
“Thank you,” Gloria said. Today was Aunt Carmine’s birthday, but Christine’s invitation was more important. Making friends was about the future. Every decision now was a chance to step boldly into the future. Christine would lead her forward.
“You say that ‘Thank you,’ ” Christine replied pleasantly, “like I invited you to Buckingham Palace.”
In the background, Gloria heard student voices tuning up like an orchestra. I’m bored with these history facts, Gloria thought. My mind’s wandering all over the place. When I finish school, I don’t want to be any teacher. The luscious cello section soli in Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” sang in Gloria’s mind. She wanted to go to New York.
“Now what was an indentured servant and how was that different from being a slave?” she asked her group.
Across the room, Arcola’s group watched their teacher attentively. With her friendly ways and Colgate toothpaste smile, Arcola made people want to do right and enjoy themselves. She’d make these students want to come to school. They didn’t care if she wore her glamour braid or not. She was just pretty, even if her skin tones were a little murky.
Gloria had always liked the even, dark blend of tones in her own skin, a strong darkness, more toward black than brown, but with brown and red in it. Mahogany, she thought. Like fine furniture. And she used to put her arm on the dining room table, when her mama had the protective pad off, to match up her skin tone with the polished tabletop.
One young man in the class was darker than Gloria, and she was fascinated by him. Every night she looked at him with satisfaction: just as dark as ever, across the room in Christine’s group. Like somebody from Africa. He was married and wore a wide gold wedding band. The ring surprised Gloria, and she wondered how a shiftless Neighborhood Youth Corps boy had brought himself to get married and to have a gold ring. But it gleamed enticingly against his skin, which was dark as bittersweet chocolate.
How many mosquitoes, crickets, and moths flying around in this hot room?
And then the bell was ringing, lessons came to a bored halt, and school was out. All evening, the little white candles had la in unused. Agnes began to gather up the fans and the candles and to put them back into her shopping bag for safekeeping, till tomorrow night. Gloria hoped Cat would be back.
There was Mr. Parrish lounging against the doorframe; so casual but handsome in a lightweight suit and tie. Gloria loved the contradiction between his nice clothes and his relaxed body; he was sexy. She thought he was even better looking than Dr. King. Mr. Parrish had a wildness in his eye that made her think of Lord Byron and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. Mr. Parrish made her think of her handsome daddy, too, and how she used to run and jump in his arms after Sunday school.
Arcola was asking Stella, “You want Charles and me to walk you to your car?”
Yes, Gloria thought, Stella mig
ht be scared without Cat for company. Not that Cat could protect a flea. Or hurt one.
“Thank you,” Stella said to Arcola, and her smile showed tension leaving her face, an echo of the wide, relaxed smile Arcola always gave everybody. “Good night, everybody,” Stella called out. But first she crossed the room to Gloria. She’s flooding—had Stella really said that at sunset while they waited for students to show up? She walked across the room, reached out, and touched Gloria’s forearm. The white girl didn’t look at what her hand was doing; she just looked straight into Gloria’s eyes. “See you tomorrow night.”
Mr. Parrish asked Christine and Gloria to go with him to his office.
WHEN THE THREE of them stepped into the night air, it was like walking against a curtain of heat, pushing it forward with your nose, but never getting past it or through it. Christine asked Mr. Parrish if there had been any follow-up on the bullhorn man.
“Naw,” Mr. Parrish said, and he snorted skeptically through his nose.
He sounded like a bull, full of power and glory, and Gloria thought again of the matchbook drawing of a bull standing on his hind legs like a man.
Once she had seen a real bull stand up and snort when her daddy had taken her out in the country, up to Winston County, where he had grown up. His people had lived there since the Civil War. When Alabama seceded from the Union, Winston County had seceded from Alabama, and Winston was called “The Free State.” As a young man, her father had realized if he was going to make anything of himself, he’d have to leave farming and go to the city, to Birmingham. Once established, he had gathered all his sisters into his garage apartment behind their new house in Birmingham.
During one visit to Winston County, Gloria had sat in the car to watch the men load a bull into the back of a truck with a stock rack added above the metal sides. Quickly, the beast turned around, then stood up, heaving his mighty chest onto the bars of the stock rack. It had melted under him like butter. For a moment, the bull just hung over the bent bars; then he commenced to kick and snort and struggle. Her father got out of the car to help, but he told Gloria and her mother to stay inside, that a bull was a dangerous animal.