A red death, p.5
A Red Death, page 5
The first time he did that I asked him, “You like that kinda music?”
“I don’t care,” he answered me. “I just like to have a little noise. Make our talk just ours.” Then he winked, like a drowsy Gila monster.
Mofass and I stared at each other across the table. He had both hands out in front of him. Between the fingers of his left hand that cigar stood up like a black Tower of Pisa. On the pinky of his right hand he wore a gold ring that had a square onyx emblem with a tiny diamond embedded in its center.
I was nervous about discussing my private affairs with Mofass. He collected the rent for me. I gave him nine percent and fifteen dollars for each eviction, but we weren’t friends. Still, Mofass was the only man I could discuss my business with.
“I got a letter today,” I said finally.
“Yeah?”
He looked at me, patiently waiting for what I had to say, but I couldn’t go on. I didn’t want to talk about it yet. I was afraid that saying the bad news out loud would somehow make it real. So instead I asked, “What you wanna do ’bout Poinsettia?”
“What?”
“Poinsettia. You know, the rent?”
“Kick her ass out if she don’t pay.”
“You know that gal is really sick up there. Ever since that car crash she done wasted away.”
“That don’t mean I got to pay her rent.”
“It’s me gonna be payin’ it, Mofass.”
“Uh-uh, Mr. Rawlins. I collect it and until I put it in yo’ hands it’s mine. If that gal go down and tell them other folks that I don’t take her money they gonna take advantage.”
“She’s sick.”
“She got a momma, a sister, that boy Willie she always be talkin’ ’bout. She got somebody. Let them pay the rent. We in business, Mr. Rawlins. Business is the hardest thing they make. Harder than diamonds.”
“What if nobody pays for her?” “You will done fo’got her name in six months, Mr. Rawlins. You won’t even know who she is.”
Before I could say anything more a young Mexican girl came up to us. She had thick black hair and dark eyes without very much white around them. She looked at Mofass and I got the feeling that she didn’t speak English.
He held up two fat fingers and said, “Beer, chili, burrito,” pronouncing each syllable slowly so that you could read his lips.
She gave him a quick smile and went away.
I took the letter from my breast pocket and handed it across the table.
“I want your opinion on this,” I said with a confidence I did not feel.
While I watched Mofass’s hard face I remembered the words he was reading.
Reginald Arnold Lawrence
Investigating Agent
Internal Revenue Service
July 14, 1953
Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins:
It has come my attention, sir, that between August 1948 and September of 1952 you came into the possession of at least three real estate properties.
I have reviewed your tax records back to 1945 and you show no large income, in any year. This would suggest that you could not legally afford such expenditures.
I am, therefore, beginning an investigation into your tax history and request your appearance within seven days of the date of this letter. Please bring all tax forms for the time period indicated and an accurate record of all income during that time.
As I remembered the letter I could feel ice water leaking in my bowels again. All the warmth I had soaked up in that hallway was gone.
“They got you by the nuts, Mr. Rawlins,” Mofass said, putting the letter back down between us.
I looked down and saw that a beer was there in front of me. The girl must’ve brought it while I was concentrating on Mofass.
“If they could prove you made some money and didn’t tell them about it, yo’ ass be in a cast-iron sling,” Mofass said.
“Shit! I just pay ’em, that’s all.”
He shook his head, and I felt my heart wrench.
“Naw, Mr. Rawlins. Government wants you t’tell ’em what you make. You don’t do that and they put you in the fed’ral penitentiary. And you know the judge don’t even start thinkin’ ’bout no sentence till he come up with a nice round number—like five or ten.”
“But you know, man, my name ain’t even on them deeds. I set up what they call a dummy corporation, John McKenzie helped me to do it. Them papers say that them buildin’s ’long to a Jason Weil.”
Mofass curled his lip and said, “IRS smell a dummy corporation in a minute.”
“Well then I just tell ’em I didn’t know. I didn’t.”
“Com’on, man.” Mofass leaned back and waved his cigar at me. “They just tell ya that ignorance of the law ain’t no excuse, thas all. They don’t care. Say you go shoot some dude been with your girl, kill ’im. You gonna tell ’em you didn’t know ’bout that killin’ was wrong? Anyway, if you went to all that trouble t’hide yo’ money they could tell that you was tryin’ t’cheat ’em.”
“It ain’t like I killed somebody. It ain’t right if they don’t even give me a chance t’pay.”
“On’y right is what you get away wit’, Mr. Rawlins. And if they find out about some money, and they think you didn’t declare it …” Mofass shook his head slowly.
The girl returned with two giant white plates. Each one had a fat, open-ended burrito and a pile of chili and yellow rice on it. The puffy burritos had stringy dark red meat coming out of the ends so that they looked like oozing dead grubs. The chili had yellowish-green avocado pieces floating in the grease, along with chunks of pork flesh.
One hundred guitars played from the jukebox. I put my hand over my mouth to keep from gagging.
“What can I do?” I asked. “You think I need a lawyer?”
“Less people know ’bout it the better.” Mofass leaned forward, then whispered, “I don’t know how you got the money to pay for those buildin’s, Mr. Rawlins, and I don’t think nobody should know. What you gotta do is find some family, somebody close.”
“What for?” I was also leaning across the table. The smell of the food made me sick.
“This here letter,” Mofass said, tapping the envelope.
“Don’t say, fo’a fact, that he got no proof. He just investigatin’, lookin’. You sign it over t’ some family, and backdate the papers, and then go to him, prove that it ain’t yours. Say that they was tryin’ t’hide what they had from the rest of the family.”
“How I back—whatever?”
“I know a notary public do it—for some bills.”
“So what if I had a sister or somethin’? Ain’t the government gonna check her out? ’Cause you know ev’rybody I know is poor.”
Mofass took a suck off his cigar with one hand and then shoveled in a mouthful of chili with the other.
“Yeah,” he warbled. “You need somebody got sumpin’ already. Somebody the tax man gonna believe could buy it.”
I was quiet for a while then. Every good thing I’d gotten was gone with just a letter. I had hoped that Mofass would tell me that it was alright, that I’d get a small fine and they’d let me slide. But I knew better.
Five years before, a rich white man had somebody hire me to find a woman he knew. I found her, but she wasn’t exactly what she seemed to be, and a lot of people died. I had a friend, Mouse, help me out though, and we came away from it with ten thousand dollars apiece. The money was stolen, but nobody was looking for it and I had convinced myself that I was safe.
I had forgotten that a poor man is never safe.
When I first got the money I’d watched my friend Mouse murder a man. He shot him twice. It was a poor man who could almost taste that stolen loot. It got him killed and now it was going to put me in jail.
“What you gonna do, Mr. Rawlins?” Mofass asked at last.
“Die.”
“What’s that you say?”
“On’y thing I know, I’ma die.”
“What about this here letter?”
“What you think, Mofass? What should I do?”
He sucked down some more smoke and mopped the rest of his chili with a tortilla.
“I don’t know, Mr. Rawlins. These people here don’t have nothin’, far as I can see. And you got me t’lie for ya. But ya know if they come after my books I gotta give ’em up.”
“So what you sayin’?”
“Go on in there and lie, Mr. Rawlins. Tell ’em you don’t own nuthin’. Tell ’em that you a workin’ man and that somebody must have it out for you to lie and say you got that property. Tell ’em that and then see what they gotta say. They don’t know your bank or your banker.”
“Yeah. I guess I’ma have to feel it out,” I said after a while.
Mofass was thinking something as he looked at me. He was probably wondering if the next landlord would use him.
CHAPTER
3
IT WASN’T FAR TO MY HOUSE. Mofass offered to drive, but I liked to use my legs, especially when I had thinking to do.
I went down Central. The sidewalks were pretty empty at midday, because most people were hard at work. Of course, the streets of L.A. were usually deserted; Los Angeles has always been a car-driving city, most people won’t even walk to the corner store.
I had solitude but I soon realized that there was nothing for me to consider. When Uncle Sam wanted me to put my life on the line, fighting the Germans, I did it. And I knew that I’d go to prison if he told me to do that. In the forties and fifties we obeyed the law, as far as poor people could, because the law kept us safe from the enemy. Back then we thought we knew who the enemy was. He was a white man with a foreign accent and a hatred for freedom. In the war it was Hitler and his Nazis; after that it was Comrade Stalin and the communists; later on, Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese took on an honorary white status. All of them bad men with evil designs on the free world.
My somber mood lifted when I came to 116th Street. I had a small house, but that made for a large front lawn. In recent years I had taken to gardening. I had daylilies and wild roses against the fence, and strawberries and potatoes in large rectangular plots at the center of the yard. There was a trellis that enclosed my porch, and I always had flowering vines growing there. The year before I had planted wild passion fruit.
But what I loved the most was my avocado tree. It was forty feet high with leaves so thick and dark that it was always cool under its shade. I had a white cast-iron bench set next to the trunk. When things got really hard, I’d sit down there to watch the birds chase insects through the grass.
When I came up to the fence I had almost forgotten the tax man. He didn’t know about me. How could he? He was just grabbing at empty air.
Then I saw the boy.
He was doing a crazy dance in my potato patch. He held both hands in the air, with his head thrown back, and cackled deep down in his throat. Every now and then he’d stamp his feet, like little pistons, and reach both hands down into the soil, coming out with long tan roots that had the nubs of future potatoes dangling from them.
When I pushed open the gate it creaked and he swung around to look at me. His eyes got big and he swiveled his head to one side and the other, looking for an escape route. When he saw that there was no escape he put on a smile and held the potato roots out at me. Then he laughed.
It was a ploy I had used when I was small.
I wanted to be stern with him, but when I opened my mouth I couldn’t keep from smiling.
“What you doin’, boy?”
“Playin’,” he said in a thick Texas drawl.
“That’s my potatas you stampin’ on. Know that?”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. He was a small, very dark boy with a big head and tiny ears. I figured him for five years old.
“Whose potatas you think you got in your hands?”
“My momma’s.”
“Yo’ momma?”
“Um-huh. This my momma’s house.”
“Since when?” I asked.
The question was too much for him. He scrunched his eyes and hunched his boy shoulders. “It just is, thas all.”
“How long you been here kickin’ up my garden?” I looked around to see daylilies and rose petals strewn across the yard. There wasn’t a red strawberry in the patch.
“We just come.” He gave me a large grin and reached out to me. I picked him up without thinking about it. “Momma losted her key so I had to go in da windah an’ open up the door.”
“What?”
Before I could put him down I heard a woman humming. The timbre of her voice sent a thrill through me even though I didn’t recognize it yet. Then she came around from the side of the house. A sepia-colored woman—large, but shapely, wearing a plain blue cotton dress and a white apron. She carried a flat-bottomed basket that I recognized from my closet, its braided handle looped into the crook of her right arm. There were kumquats and pomegranates from my fruit trees and strawberries from the yard on a white handkerchief that covered the bottom of the basket. She was a beautiful, full-faced woman with serious eyes and a mouth, I knew, that was always ready to laugh. The biceps of her right arm bulged, because EttaMae Harris was a powerful woman who, in her younger years, had done hand laundry nine hours a day, six days a week. She could knock a man into next Tuesday, or she could hold you so tight that you felt like a child again, in your mother’s loving embrace.
“Etta,” I said, almost to myself.
The boy tittered like a little maniac. He squirmed around in my arms and worked his way down to the ground.
“Easy Rawlins.” Her smile came into me, and I smiled back.
“What … I mean,” I stammered. The boy was running around his mother as fast as he could. “I mean, why are you here?”
“We come t’ see you, Easy. Ain’t that right, LaMarque?”
“Uh-huh,” the boy said. He didn’t even look up from his run.
“Stop that racin’ now.” Etta reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. She spun him around, and he looked up at me and smiled.
“Hi,” he said.
“We met already.” I motioned my head toward the lawn.
When Etta saw the damage LaMarque had done her eyes got big and my heart beat a litter faster.
“LaMarque!”
The boy lowered his head and shrugged.
“Huh?” he asked.
“What you do to this yard?”
“Nuthin’.”
“Nuthin’?” You call this mess nuthin’?”
She reached out to grab him, but LaMarque let himself fall to the ground, hugging his knees.
“I’s just gard’nin’ in the yard,” he whimpered. “Thas all.”
“Gard’nin’?” Etta’s dark face darkened even more, and the flesh around her eyes creased into a devil’s gaze. I don’t know how LaMarque reacted to that stare, but I was so worried that I couldn’t find my breath.
She balled her fists so that her upper arms got even larger; a tremor went through her neck and shoulders.
But then, suddenly, her eyes softened, she even laughed.
Etta has the kind of laugh that makes other people happy.
“Gard’nin’?” she said again. “Looks like you a reg’lar gard’nin’ tornado.”
I laughed along with her. LaMarque didn’t exactly know why we were so cheery but he grinned too and rolled around on the ground.
“Get up from there now, boy, and go get washed.”
“Yes, Momma.” LaMarque knew how to be a good boy after he had been bad. He ran toward the house, but before he got past Etta she grabbed him by one arm, hefted him into the air, and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek. He was grinning and wiping the kiss from his face as he turned to run for the door.
Then Etta held her arms out and I walked into her embrace as if I had never heard of her husband, my best friend, Mouse.
I buried my face in her neck and breathed in her natural, flat scent; like the smell of fresh-ground flour. I put my arms around EttaMae Harris and relaxed for the first time since I had last held her—fifteen years before.
“Easy,” she whispered, and I didn’t know if I was holding her too tight or if she was calling my name.
I knew that embrace was the same thing as holding a loaded gun to my head, because Raymond Alexander, known to his friends as Mouse, was a killer. If he saw any man holding his wife like that he wouldn’t even have blinked before killing him. But I couldn’t let her go. The chance to hold her one more time was worth the risk.
“Easy,” she said again, and I realized that I was pressing against her with my hips, making it more than obvious how I felt. I wanted to let go but it was like early morning, when you first wake up and just can’t let go of sleep yet.
“Let’s go inside, honey,” she said, putting her cheek to mine. “He wants his food.”
The smells of Southern cooking filled the house. Etta had made white rice and pinto beans with fatback. She’d picked lemons from the neighbor’s bush for lemonade. There was a mayonnaise jar in the center of the table with pink and red roses in it. That was the first time that there were ever cut flowers in my house.
The house wasn’t very big. The room we were in was a living room and dining room in one. The living-room side was just big enough for a couch, a stuffed chair, and a walnut cabinet with a television in it. From there was a large doorless entryway that led to the dinette. The kitchen was in the back. It was a short alley with a counter and a stove. The bedroom was small too. It was a house big enough for one man; and it held me just fine.
“Get up from there, LaMarque,” Etta said. “The man always sit at the head of the table.”
“But …” LaMarque began to say, and then he thought better of it.
He ate three plates of beans and counted to one hundred and sixty-eight for me—twice. When he finished Etta sent him outside.
“Don’t be doin’ no more gard’nin’, though,” she warned him.
“’Kay.”
WE SAT ACROSS THE TABLE from each other. I looked into her eyes and thought about poetry and my father.
I was swinging from a tree on the tire of a Model A Ford. My father came up to me and said, “Ezekiel, you learn to read an’ ain’t nuthin’ you cain’t do.”
“I don’t care,” he answered me. “I just like to have a little noise. Make our talk just ours.” Then he winked, like a drowsy Gila monster.
Mofass and I stared at each other across the table. He had both hands out in front of him. Between the fingers of his left hand that cigar stood up like a black Tower of Pisa. On the pinky of his right hand he wore a gold ring that had a square onyx emblem with a tiny diamond embedded in its center.
I was nervous about discussing my private affairs with Mofass. He collected the rent for me. I gave him nine percent and fifteen dollars for each eviction, but we weren’t friends. Still, Mofass was the only man I could discuss my business with.
“I got a letter today,” I said finally.
“Yeah?”
He looked at me, patiently waiting for what I had to say, but I couldn’t go on. I didn’t want to talk about it yet. I was afraid that saying the bad news out loud would somehow make it real. So instead I asked, “What you wanna do ’bout Poinsettia?”
“What?”
“Poinsettia. You know, the rent?”
“Kick her ass out if she don’t pay.”
“You know that gal is really sick up there. Ever since that car crash she done wasted away.”
“That don’t mean I got to pay her rent.”
“It’s me gonna be payin’ it, Mofass.”
“Uh-uh, Mr. Rawlins. I collect it and until I put it in yo’ hands it’s mine. If that gal go down and tell them other folks that I don’t take her money they gonna take advantage.”
“She’s sick.”
“She got a momma, a sister, that boy Willie she always be talkin’ ’bout. She got somebody. Let them pay the rent. We in business, Mr. Rawlins. Business is the hardest thing they make. Harder than diamonds.”
“What if nobody pays for her?” “You will done fo’got her name in six months, Mr. Rawlins. You won’t even know who she is.”
Before I could say anything more a young Mexican girl came up to us. She had thick black hair and dark eyes without very much white around them. She looked at Mofass and I got the feeling that she didn’t speak English.
He held up two fat fingers and said, “Beer, chili, burrito,” pronouncing each syllable slowly so that you could read his lips.
She gave him a quick smile and went away.
I took the letter from my breast pocket and handed it across the table.
“I want your opinion on this,” I said with a confidence I did not feel.
While I watched Mofass’s hard face I remembered the words he was reading.
Reginald Arnold Lawrence
Investigating Agent
Internal Revenue Service
July 14, 1953
Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins:
It has come my attention, sir, that between August 1948 and September of 1952 you came into the possession of at least three real estate properties.
I have reviewed your tax records back to 1945 and you show no large income, in any year. This would suggest that you could not legally afford such expenditures.
I am, therefore, beginning an investigation into your tax history and request your appearance within seven days of the date of this letter. Please bring all tax forms for the time period indicated and an accurate record of all income during that time.
As I remembered the letter I could feel ice water leaking in my bowels again. All the warmth I had soaked up in that hallway was gone.
“They got you by the nuts, Mr. Rawlins,” Mofass said, putting the letter back down between us.
I looked down and saw that a beer was there in front of me. The girl must’ve brought it while I was concentrating on Mofass.
“If they could prove you made some money and didn’t tell them about it, yo’ ass be in a cast-iron sling,” Mofass said.
“Shit! I just pay ’em, that’s all.”
He shook his head, and I felt my heart wrench.
“Naw, Mr. Rawlins. Government wants you t’tell ’em what you make. You don’t do that and they put you in the fed’ral penitentiary. And you know the judge don’t even start thinkin’ ’bout no sentence till he come up with a nice round number—like five or ten.”
“But you know, man, my name ain’t even on them deeds. I set up what they call a dummy corporation, John McKenzie helped me to do it. Them papers say that them buildin’s ’long to a Jason Weil.”
Mofass curled his lip and said, “IRS smell a dummy corporation in a minute.”
“Well then I just tell ’em I didn’t know. I didn’t.”
“Com’on, man.” Mofass leaned back and waved his cigar at me. “They just tell ya that ignorance of the law ain’t no excuse, thas all. They don’t care. Say you go shoot some dude been with your girl, kill ’im. You gonna tell ’em you didn’t know ’bout that killin’ was wrong? Anyway, if you went to all that trouble t’hide yo’ money they could tell that you was tryin’ t’cheat ’em.”
“It ain’t like I killed somebody. It ain’t right if they don’t even give me a chance t’pay.”
“On’y right is what you get away wit’, Mr. Rawlins. And if they find out about some money, and they think you didn’t declare it …” Mofass shook his head slowly.
The girl returned with two giant white plates. Each one had a fat, open-ended burrito and a pile of chili and yellow rice on it. The puffy burritos had stringy dark red meat coming out of the ends so that they looked like oozing dead grubs. The chili had yellowish-green avocado pieces floating in the grease, along with chunks of pork flesh.
One hundred guitars played from the jukebox. I put my hand over my mouth to keep from gagging.
“What can I do?” I asked. “You think I need a lawyer?”
“Less people know ’bout it the better.” Mofass leaned forward, then whispered, “I don’t know how you got the money to pay for those buildin’s, Mr. Rawlins, and I don’t think nobody should know. What you gotta do is find some family, somebody close.”
“What for?” I was also leaning across the table. The smell of the food made me sick.
“This here letter,” Mofass said, tapping the envelope.
“Don’t say, fo’a fact, that he got no proof. He just investigatin’, lookin’. You sign it over t’ some family, and backdate the papers, and then go to him, prove that it ain’t yours. Say that they was tryin’ t’hide what they had from the rest of the family.”
“How I back—whatever?”
“I know a notary public do it—for some bills.”
“So what if I had a sister or somethin’? Ain’t the government gonna check her out? ’Cause you know ev’rybody I know is poor.”
Mofass took a suck off his cigar with one hand and then shoveled in a mouthful of chili with the other.
“Yeah,” he warbled. “You need somebody got sumpin’ already. Somebody the tax man gonna believe could buy it.”
I was quiet for a while then. Every good thing I’d gotten was gone with just a letter. I had hoped that Mofass would tell me that it was alright, that I’d get a small fine and they’d let me slide. But I knew better.
Five years before, a rich white man had somebody hire me to find a woman he knew. I found her, but she wasn’t exactly what she seemed to be, and a lot of people died. I had a friend, Mouse, help me out though, and we came away from it with ten thousand dollars apiece. The money was stolen, but nobody was looking for it and I had convinced myself that I was safe.
I had forgotten that a poor man is never safe.
When I first got the money I’d watched my friend Mouse murder a man. He shot him twice. It was a poor man who could almost taste that stolen loot. It got him killed and now it was going to put me in jail.
“What you gonna do, Mr. Rawlins?” Mofass asked at last.
“Die.”
“What’s that you say?”
“On’y thing I know, I’ma die.”
“What about this here letter?”
“What you think, Mofass? What should I do?”
He sucked down some more smoke and mopped the rest of his chili with a tortilla.
“I don’t know, Mr. Rawlins. These people here don’t have nothin’, far as I can see. And you got me t’lie for ya. But ya know if they come after my books I gotta give ’em up.”
“So what you sayin’?”
“Go on in there and lie, Mr. Rawlins. Tell ’em you don’t own nuthin’. Tell ’em that you a workin’ man and that somebody must have it out for you to lie and say you got that property. Tell ’em that and then see what they gotta say. They don’t know your bank or your banker.”
“Yeah. I guess I’ma have to feel it out,” I said after a while.
Mofass was thinking something as he looked at me. He was probably wondering if the next landlord would use him.
CHAPTER
3
IT WASN’T FAR TO MY HOUSE. Mofass offered to drive, but I liked to use my legs, especially when I had thinking to do.
I went down Central. The sidewalks were pretty empty at midday, because most people were hard at work. Of course, the streets of L.A. were usually deserted; Los Angeles has always been a car-driving city, most people won’t even walk to the corner store.
I had solitude but I soon realized that there was nothing for me to consider. When Uncle Sam wanted me to put my life on the line, fighting the Germans, I did it. And I knew that I’d go to prison if he told me to do that. In the forties and fifties we obeyed the law, as far as poor people could, because the law kept us safe from the enemy. Back then we thought we knew who the enemy was. He was a white man with a foreign accent and a hatred for freedom. In the war it was Hitler and his Nazis; after that it was Comrade Stalin and the communists; later on, Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese took on an honorary white status. All of them bad men with evil designs on the free world.
My somber mood lifted when I came to 116th Street. I had a small house, but that made for a large front lawn. In recent years I had taken to gardening. I had daylilies and wild roses against the fence, and strawberries and potatoes in large rectangular plots at the center of the yard. There was a trellis that enclosed my porch, and I always had flowering vines growing there. The year before I had planted wild passion fruit.
But what I loved the most was my avocado tree. It was forty feet high with leaves so thick and dark that it was always cool under its shade. I had a white cast-iron bench set next to the trunk. When things got really hard, I’d sit down there to watch the birds chase insects through the grass.
When I came up to the fence I had almost forgotten the tax man. He didn’t know about me. How could he? He was just grabbing at empty air.
Then I saw the boy.
He was doing a crazy dance in my potato patch. He held both hands in the air, with his head thrown back, and cackled deep down in his throat. Every now and then he’d stamp his feet, like little pistons, and reach both hands down into the soil, coming out with long tan roots that had the nubs of future potatoes dangling from them.
When I pushed open the gate it creaked and he swung around to look at me. His eyes got big and he swiveled his head to one side and the other, looking for an escape route. When he saw that there was no escape he put on a smile and held the potato roots out at me. Then he laughed.
It was a ploy I had used when I was small.
I wanted to be stern with him, but when I opened my mouth I couldn’t keep from smiling.
“What you doin’, boy?”
“Playin’,” he said in a thick Texas drawl.
“That’s my potatas you stampin’ on. Know that?”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. He was a small, very dark boy with a big head and tiny ears. I figured him for five years old.
“Whose potatas you think you got in your hands?”
“My momma’s.”
“Yo’ momma?”
“Um-huh. This my momma’s house.”
“Since when?” I asked.
The question was too much for him. He scrunched his eyes and hunched his boy shoulders. “It just is, thas all.”
“How long you been here kickin’ up my garden?” I looked around to see daylilies and rose petals strewn across the yard. There wasn’t a red strawberry in the patch.
“We just come.” He gave me a large grin and reached out to me. I picked him up without thinking about it. “Momma losted her key so I had to go in da windah an’ open up the door.”
“What?”
Before I could put him down I heard a woman humming. The timbre of her voice sent a thrill through me even though I didn’t recognize it yet. Then she came around from the side of the house. A sepia-colored woman—large, but shapely, wearing a plain blue cotton dress and a white apron. She carried a flat-bottomed basket that I recognized from my closet, its braided handle looped into the crook of her right arm. There were kumquats and pomegranates from my fruit trees and strawberries from the yard on a white handkerchief that covered the bottom of the basket. She was a beautiful, full-faced woman with serious eyes and a mouth, I knew, that was always ready to laugh. The biceps of her right arm bulged, because EttaMae Harris was a powerful woman who, in her younger years, had done hand laundry nine hours a day, six days a week. She could knock a man into next Tuesday, or she could hold you so tight that you felt like a child again, in your mother’s loving embrace.
“Etta,” I said, almost to myself.
The boy tittered like a little maniac. He squirmed around in my arms and worked his way down to the ground.
“Easy Rawlins.” Her smile came into me, and I smiled back.
“What … I mean,” I stammered. The boy was running around his mother as fast as he could. “I mean, why are you here?”
“We come t’ see you, Easy. Ain’t that right, LaMarque?”
“Uh-huh,” the boy said. He didn’t even look up from his run.
“Stop that racin’ now.” Etta reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. She spun him around, and he looked up at me and smiled.
“Hi,” he said.
“We met already.” I motioned my head toward the lawn.
When Etta saw the damage LaMarque had done her eyes got big and my heart beat a litter faster.
“LaMarque!”
The boy lowered his head and shrugged.
“Huh?” he asked.
“What you do to this yard?”
“Nuthin’.”
“Nuthin’?” You call this mess nuthin’?”
She reached out to grab him, but LaMarque let himself fall to the ground, hugging his knees.
“I’s just gard’nin’ in the yard,” he whimpered. “Thas all.”
“Gard’nin’?” Etta’s dark face darkened even more, and the flesh around her eyes creased into a devil’s gaze. I don’t know how LaMarque reacted to that stare, but I was so worried that I couldn’t find my breath.
She balled her fists so that her upper arms got even larger; a tremor went through her neck and shoulders.
But then, suddenly, her eyes softened, she even laughed.
Etta has the kind of laugh that makes other people happy.
“Gard’nin’?” she said again. “Looks like you a reg’lar gard’nin’ tornado.”
I laughed along with her. LaMarque didn’t exactly know why we were so cheery but he grinned too and rolled around on the ground.
“Get up from there now, boy, and go get washed.”
“Yes, Momma.” LaMarque knew how to be a good boy after he had been bad. He ran toward the house, but before he got past Etta she grabbed him by one arm, hefted him into the air, and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek. He was grinning and wiping the kiss from his face as he turned to run for the door.
Then Etta held her arms out and I walked into her embrace as if I had never heard of her husband, my best friend, Mouse.
I buried my face in her neck and breathed in her natural, flat scent; like the smell of fresh-ground flour. I put my arms around EttaMae Harris and relaxed for the first time since I had last held her—fifteen years before.
“Easy,” she whispered, and I didn’t know if I was holding her too tight or if she was calling my name.
I knew that embrace was the same thing as holding a loaded gun to my head, because Raymond Alexander, known to his friends as Mouse, was a killer. If he saw any man holding his wife like that he wouldn’t even have blinked before killing him. But I couldn’t let her go. The chance to hold her one more time was worth the risk.
“Easy,” she said again, and I realized that I was pressing against her with my hips, making it more than obvious how I felt. I wanted to let go but it was like early morning, when you first wake up and just can’t let go of sleep yet.
“Let’s go inside, honey,” she said, putting her cheek to mine. “He wants his food.”
The smells of Southern cooking filled the house. Etta had made white rice and pinto beans with fatback. She’d picked lemons from the neighbor’s bush for lemonade. There was a mayonnaise jar in the center of the table with pink and red roses in it. That was the first time that there were ever cut flowers in my house.
The house wasn’t very big. The room we were in was a living room and dining room in one. The living-room side was just big enough for a couch, a stuffed chair, and a walnut cabinet with a television in it. From there was a large doorless entryway that led to the dinette. The kitchen was in the back. It was a short alley with a counter and a stove. The bedroom was small too. It was a house big enough for one man; and it held me just fine.
“Get up from there, LaMarque,” Etta said. “The man always sit at the head of the table.”
“But …” LaMarque began to say, and then he thought better of it.
He ate three plates of beans and counted to one hundred and sixty-eight for me—twice. When he finished Etta sent him outside.
“Don’t be doin’ no more gard’nin’, though,” she warned him.
“’Kay.”
WE SAT ACROSS THE TABLE from each other. I looked into her eyes and thought about poetry and my father.
I was swinging from a tree on the tire of a Model A Ford. My father came up to me and said, “Ezekiel, you learn to read an’ ain’t nuthin’ you cain’t do.”
