A Gracious Plenty

  When I finally shut up, she asks, “You like the locks?”

  “How’d you get security locks on this ugly junk car?”

  “Had them installed just for you,” she says, and I’m almost inclined to believe her.

  “Where you taking me?”

  “The ladies wanted to talk with you,” she says. “And after we bailed you out of jail, I think talking with us is the least you can do.”

  “You didn’t bail me out. I was out already.”

  “We’re going to Lois Armour’s house,” Reba says. “We’re going to help you take the first step toward healing the wounds.”

  Reba turns into the alley, then drives right into the backyard, where the ladies are all waiting. They’re sitting in lawn chairs beneath two funeral tents—maybe because it’s raining or maybe to make fun of me. They’ve laid out tables like it’s a fancy occasion, and they’ve got a big banner hanging up over some back windows that says WELCOME FINCH NOBLES.

  “Dear God,” I say.

  “That’s right,” Reba answers. “He is dear.”

  And they’re all wearing pantsuits or neat dresses. They’ve all got their hair teased up and sprayed tight. They’re all smiling to me and waving, like I’d be looking forward to having breakfast with them, like I’d be grateful for all they’ve done.

  But when I get out of the car, I’m ready for them. I’ve got too much to do to have a party on a rainy morning with a bunch of old lady hypocrites.

  “I thank you for sending the bail,” I announce, “but I didn’t need it. I was already out of jail when Reba arrived, and she’ll be giving you back all your money. Y’all have a good breakfast.” And I head for the gate. I’m not running, but I’m not exactly walking, either. And I’m not looking back.

  I half-expect to be tackled by the preacher’s wife or a big bull deacon, but it’s Lois Armour who gets me—and with her words, too. She says, “If you got something to say to me, Finch, please come say it now while I got my friends around. ’Cause it tears me up when you do it and I’ve got no one with me.”

  And I’m caught off guard—because she isn’t rude at all; she says “please.” She’s not what I expect, and before I even mean to, I’ve turned around to look at her.

  “You keep doing it to me,” she says without spite. No, it’s more like resignation in her voice. “Over and over. Saying my baby killed herself, like you even knew her. Like you got any idea what happened. Why do you do that to me?”

  I don’t say anything. I just stand there in the drizzling rain, imagining Lucy Armageddon playing in that yard, splashing around in her pool with her friends.

  “We made you some breakfast and some coffee,” Lois says.

  “I don’t wanna be nobody’s project,” I tell her.

  “Even so,” she says. “You can still eat with us.”

  The other women sit quietly and agree to everything Lois says. Even Reba is quiet, though after Lois is done talking, she motions for me to come over.

  I consider it for a long moment, and I consider it real good. I got no use for the church or for Reba. I’m still stewing about how they treated William Blott, and every time I look at them, I think of his face when he learned they were burning his land. I can smell the smoke in my mind.

  But there’s Lucy to consider, too. Maybe to get to her mama, she needs a bridge. Maybe I’ve been the wrong kind of bridge in the past.

  So I go sit down next to Lois.

  “You take milk and sugar?” she asks, and I nod.

  Her hand shakes as she clenches sugar cubes between little silver tongs over my cup.

  I FIND LUCY ON top of my house. She’s up there, standing at the peak of my A-frame, barefoot on old shingles, and she’s spinning her arms around like she’s stirring the air.

  “Lucy,” I call to her.

  But she doesn’t answer. The clouds above her are dark and churning.

  “Lucy,” I shout, and when there’s still no reply, I climb the ivy. I pull myself up with the vines, slipping and catching with just my toes. It’s more like a rope than a ladder, and I’m not as adept at climbing as the cats. The ivy isn’t nearly as strong as I’d thought. It keeps tearing from the walls, ripping and leaving a trail to show just where I’ve been. My hands strip away the spaded leaves, and by the time I reach the roof, I’m skinned and scraped and out of breath.

  When I get over the edge, she looks down at me, bites her lip.

  “Traitor,” she accuses.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask her. Though I know, of course. She’s been watching.

  “Bitch,” she cries.

  The roof slopes easy, but the shingles are slick and break off in pieces. I slip and catch myself with my hands. I approach her on hands and feet. It’s steeper than it looks.

  “Lucy,” I say. “I’ve been with your mama.”

  “I know.” She sniffs. “Did you like her?”

  “Yeah, I did. I didn’t choose to go over there, but I stayed of my own accord. And yeah, I liked her all right.”

  “Figures.”

  She’s crying so hard that her tears fall into my hair. “Well, tell me what happened,” she says. “Tell me everything.”

  And I have some answers for her this time.

  “She was wearing navy slacks and a matching top with an anchor stitched on it in white and gold.”

  “Sounds tacky.”

  “She looked nice,” I tell her. “She was wearing makeup—pink frosty lipstick and cheek stuff.”

  “Rouge.”

  “Yeah, and her hair was blond and curled—kind of fancy. It hung to her shoulders. It was sprayed.”

  “She dyes it,” Lucy tells me, like it’s some kind of crime.

  “So what?” I say. “It looked pretty. I’ve been thinking of dying my hair.”

  “You should do it red,” Lucy says. “I’ll help you. Tell me more.”

  “She says you were never the suicide type,” I continue. “Her basic argument goes like this: You were sunburned when you died. She says it doesn’t make sense for a person who’s thinking of killing herself to bother with tanning.”

  “Geez, that’s not even logical,” she shouts up at a cloud.

  “Oh, sure it is,” I answer, and then I repeat one of her own lines: “ ‘You just don’t like the way her heart was taught to think.’ ”

  She drops her arms and stares at me.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get down.”

  She goes ahead of me and holds the ivy up so I won’t fall. Then, when we’re on the ground, Lucy leads me to the bushes that line the cemetery fence for a ways. They’re pokeweed bushes, and the clusters of berries hang ripe and burgundy. She begins picking them off in whole clumps, dropping them in a bowl licked clean by cats.

  “Was she crying?” Lucy asks.

  “She cried a little bit,” I tell her.

  “When did she cry?”

  “She was walking me through the house. You see, she wanted me to get to know you,” and I laugh. “She said that if I’d known you, I’d understand how you couldn’t have never committed suicide.”

  Lucy rolls her eyes.

  “So she was showing me around. I saw all your dancing pictures. You were cute,” I tell her.

  “Adorable.”

  “You were grinning in those pictures like you had the world in your hand.”

  “I didn’t,” Lucy whispers.

  “But, baby, nobody ever does. Your mama, she showed me all your crowns. She’s got ’em lined up in a doll case. She showed me your trophies and even a little porcelain doll she ordered out of a catalog—had it made from one of your pictures.”

  “I forgot about that,” Lucy says. “And it made her cry to look at it?”

  “Oh, no,” I tell her. “She was happy showing you off. She said you made her proud, that you did all the things she never got to do.”

  “When did she cry?”

  “When she talked about you running away. She said it was a wonder God
let her keep you for as long as he did.”

  Lucy looks at me, studying me, then asks, “What’d she mean by that?”

  “She said it was a wonder you were able to make your own way and live the life that you wanted to lead. Said she tried so hard to force you into being what she wanted you to be that it was a miracle you were able to break free and be yourself.”

  “My mama said that?”

  “She did.”

  “You’re lying,” Lucy says, testing me.

  “I’m a lot of things, but I ain’t a liar,” I answer.

  “You are sometimes,” she says, and she’s right.

  Lucy leads me to the back doorsteps, a big bowlful of berries in her arms. We sit there and she mashes the berries with her fingers, picking out the stems. Her fingers are the color of new blood.

  “This is how me and Charles Belcher used to dye our hair. Berry dyes last a long time.” Then she sighs. “Oh, Finch, I don’t know what to think.”

  “I’ll give you a clue,” I offer. “Your mama might not have been the best mama in the world. She might’ve put you in hard situations that you didn’t like, and she might’ve done you wrong in other ways. But she’s human, Lucy. She’s bound to make mistakes.”

  And Lucy begins rubbing my hair with the berry paste, and I can almost feel her, almost. The berries are in my hair, and I can reach up and redden my fingers, but I can’t quite feel Lucy behind it all. Not quite.

  I tell her, “You got to stop this storm. You got to make them stop it.”

  “I can’t do that,” she says.

  “Tell me why.”

  “It’s too late. And besides, I’ve given it all my energy already. Now it’s feeding off of William and Marcus. I’m just the choreographer. That’s all.”

  “But your mama,” I say. “She’s not as blind as you thought.”

  “She still can’t admit how I died.”

  And I turn around sharp to address her. “You think about whether you want her to,” I say. “You think about it hard. Because she did love you—even if she loved you wrong. And she does miss you. But she’s a religious woman, believing all the Bible tells her. The minute she admits it’s a suicide, that’s the minute she has to think of you in Hell. Either that, or else her whole faith crumbles. And do you really want either one of those things for her? Especially when you ain’t there to replace what you’re taking?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy says. “Bend your head.”

  And she rinses the berries away with the rainwater that’s collected outside my door. The concrete steps rinse to pink.

  “Please stop the storm,” I beg her.

  “I can’t,” she tells me. “It’s too late. Too much has happened.”

  “It won’t hurt anybody, will it? The storm? It’s just a sign, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But she won’t look at me. She won’t look me in the eyes.

  “Don’t do it,” I say, and Lucy leans into me, because we cannot touch. She leans her lips into my cheek. And though I don’t feel her lips, I know the kiss. I know what it means.

  “Thanks for everything,” she says, then adds, “I’m so sorry.” And she is gone.

  THE SKY GROWS darker, but the air grows still. Still and warmer, and the rain has stopped. The air feels thick as a dead man’s tongue, and I walk up the hill, my purple hair shining. I walk up the hill with a pail of soapy water and a bottle of bleach, and I intend to keep quiet and leave the Dead alone because I can feel them raging. I can feel it in the trembling ground. And their anger is bigger than anything in me. I am, after all, a part of the living world. Nothing could be more clear now.

  William Blott’s monument beckons like a sign: “Faggot” and so on.

  I start scrubbing.

  I pour on the bleach and I scrub with a brush. I scrub with all my weight behind me, scouring against insults. “You do not deserve this,” I whisper as I work. “You’re not a bad man, and this shouldn’t have happened to you. Not everybody in the world feels this way, and even the ones who do—they can learn maybe—”

  But all my cleaning is not enough. I cannot get the words to disappear. I can fade them, but there are remains, traces of hate at his grave.

  “William,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”

  And I keep right on. I work too hard to concentrate enough to haze to the Dead, and there’s nothing I could do there anyway. But I can hear William Blott playing his horn again, in the distance. It mourns deep down, like a man has to do when he can’t say what’s wrong outright.

  At some point, Reba Baker shows up. I hear the car coming way before I see it, and I’m half-hoping it’s Leonard. But then it’s a Plymouth—a puke-colored Plymouth with doors just Reba can lock.

  She approaches the place where I’m working, and I reckon she thinks we’re friends now. She must think we’ve become friends, because she says, “Well, my mercy, look at that hair. How’d you have time to get to a beauty shop, Finch?”

  “I didn’t,” I tell her, though I don’t stop what I’m doing. “I just used some berries out of the yard.”

  “A berry job. Now that’s something. See here, I wanted to tell you … Well, why’re you crying? What’s the matter, honey?” she asks.

  “I ain’t crying,” I lie. “I’ve got soap in my eyes.”

  “Let me see,” and she grabs my chin and lifts it right up. Nobody has ever grabbed my chin that way—not since the scrapings. And Reba says, “No, darling, you’re crying. Has this day just been too much?”

  And about that time, my day is too much, and about that time, I squall wicked. “Would you look at this stone?” I wail. “Would you look at what they’ve done?”

  “You shouldn’t take that personally, honey,” Reba says. “Nobody meant nothing toward you, so don’t take it that way. This here was just done in protest of William Blott and his lifestyle of degradation.”

  I sit right down on the place I’ve been wiping. I plop down in the soapy water and bleach and I turn to look at Reba and I say, “How can you treat him this way?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How can you get to know a person and then turn on him the way you did? Even a dog who gets the shit beat out of it don’t bite the hand that feeds it—or the one that beats it—or its friends. Damn it, you know what I mean.”

  “He was a queer, Finch. God don’t love a queer.”

  And the only solace I take is in imagining Reba hatching maggots after she dies.

  “I don’t know if you heard or not, but he was a queer. And we were all just so hurt by it. We were so hurt that he would come into our homes and pray with us and then leave and do the things people like him do.”

  “That’s not a good answer, Reba,” I say. “That’s about the worst answer I ever heard from somebody who calls herself a Christian.”

  She looks at me surprised.

  “And that’s not an excuse, neither—not for all this painted on his grave!”

  She looks around at the words, then sees the word buttfucker and points and covers her mouth.

  “Now they shouldn’t have written that one,” she says. “That’s an awful word.”

  “You think that’s bad, the other side says ‘ass-pirate,’ ” I tell her.

  Reba sucks in her air.

  “You know why I ate breakfast with you hussies today?” I ask her, and I’m stammering and choking out the words by now, because I’ve gone chilly in my soul. “I stayed there because it occurred to me that I might be wrong about Lois Armour. Now, I still believe that Lucy killed herself. I know she did. But it occurred to me that maybe I was wrong to say so in front of Lois. ’Cause it ain’t my business what she believes or what she does. I can’t do nothing about what she believes or what she does. I’m just responsible for me.”

  “I reckon you’re right,” Reba says. “But that still don’t give you reason to call us hussies.”

  “And I’ve been wrong to devil-hack her the way I did,” I admit. “And I
’m sorry about it.”

  “Praise the Lord for that,” Reba whispers.

  “But you see, I got a real problem with you treating William Blott this way.” And I’m talking so loud that the words are vibrating inside my head.

  “Now, Finch, that’s different,” she says.

  “Ain’t different,” I tell her. “It ain’t. And it ain’t your place to cast aspersion on him no matter what he was. If you meant a thing you said in that paper, if you meant it even for a second when you told that reporter that William Blott had enriched your life, then why in God’s name would you turn on him after he died?”

  “I can’t abide a queer, Finch,” Reba says, but she’s breaking. She’s breaking right down.

  William Blott blows on his horn. He blows it like a freight train. He blows it like a storm. And he starts playing “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder I’ll Be There,” and Reba turns her head toward him, like she almost hears him, and she says, “Finch, I believe the air moves different on this side of the hill. Does it sound different to you?”

  “No,” I tell her quietly. “It just sounds normal.”

  Reba cocks her head and listens good, and William Blott keeps playing, and I say, “Why did you take on William Blott?”

  “I don’t know,” she tells me, and from the way she says it, I believe her. “I don’t know exactly. There was something about him that was so playful—like in spite of all his drinking and all his problems, he had good cheer. He didn’t say much, but what he said, he said sweet.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “He always seemed that way to me, too.”

  “And he could sing. Lord, he could sing so pretty. If we could’ve got him in the church, he’d have made that choir. I told him one time that he ought to come sing us a song. And he asked me what my favorite song was, and when I told him, he said he’d play it on his trumpet one day and I could sing it.”

  Then the horn gets louder, and William Blott plays that song for Reba, and she starts humming along, just a little.

  “I’ll tell you, that wind is blowing funny through these trees,” she says. “It almost sounds like a song.”