Four Spirits (34 page)

AS STELLA WALKED UP THE RED CLAY, STONE-STUDDED
driveway to the back door of her aunts' home, Pal let out one deep bark from the shadows, recognized her, snuffed her leg, wagged his tail. Stella always spoke to nice dogs as if they were people—“How you?”—and ignored rude ones, like Goliath, as much as she could without seeming rude herself. When she went through the kitchen door, Pal slipped in with her.

Her aunt greeted the dog first. “I'm in here, Pal.”

Aunt Krit sat grading math papers at the dining room table, but she laid down the pencil, red on one end and blue on the other, to claim Pal. She stroked his head with both hands, slender beautiful hands (Stella had inherited her hands from her Aunt Krit), saying over and over, “Poor Pal, poor Pal. You like to been brown, didn't you?”
Like to been?
She meant the dog only
lacked
a little bit of being brown. Actually Pal was pure white. He had an indistinct shading of pale tan over the top of his head.

To Stella, Krit said, “I don't like you out walking the street so late at night.”

“It's summer. Lots of people are out late. It's only a mile.”

“
They've
gone to bed.” She nodded her head at the parallel house across the driveway.

The Gulf of Driveway!
When Stella was little, it had been scary to cross the driveway at night; her father used to send her over with codeine tablets wrapped in a Kleenex to calm the nerves of Aunt Pratt. As soon as Stella entered the kitchen, Aunt Krit intercepted Aunt Pratt's medicine. A razor blade lay on the kitchen table. Aunt Krit sat down, unwrapped the tablets, and
shaved off their sides. One whole tablet was confiscated.
She doesn't need all this
. It had never occurred to Stella to tell her father that Aunt Krit always reduced Pratt's dosage. Maybe he had guessed it. Maybe he sent too much
because
he knew Krit would interfere.

“Over there, they all went to bed an hour ago.”
They
were the new owners who had bought Stella's home.

As though to contradict Aunt Krit, the kitchen light came on in the bedded-down house.

“It's a nice summer night,” Stella said. “Except for the heat. I didn't feel a bit afraid.”

“Boodle-worm.”

Stella lifted out the chair at the end of the table—
You lift, don't drag, fine furniture
—and sat down companionably. Sometimes, truth told, Stella did feel afraid alone at night, but not after she'd acted righteously or done a good deed. Not after she'd been with Cat;after that, as she walked away, she stretched and luxuriated in her mobility. It felt so fine to walk that sometimes, when she was out of sight, she flew down the sidewalk.
How would it be to work at Miles?

Pal sat down between Krit and Stella; he panted and stuck his penis out of its white furry sheath. The dog's penis fascinated Stella: bright pink, a distinct tip, tiny red blood vessels visible along its sides. Pal was bored. He nudged his chin onto her thigh, and she dutifully petted him. He wanted attention; affection was superfluous. Pal had short legs but a long back with a part down the middle and wiry white hair falling to either side. Stella ran her finger down the part to make his skin flicker and shudder.

“You want to help me grade a set?” Aunt Krit slid a rubber band off a stack of papers folded lengthwise; she stored the thin rubber band with two others on her wrist, like bangle bracelets. This was the first summer Aunt Krit had taught summer school.
I want to see what it's like,
she'd said,
for the money
.

She'd quickly decided she didn't like it.

They graded quietly. Aunt Krit's eyes could glance at a math paper and flag the slightest error; she didn't need to think about it;her eyes just lighted on the flaws:
I'm like a duck on a june bug,
she had said once to Stella, and Krit had smiled a wry, shy, crooked smile, her face shining with pride. Stella loved that rare smile: Aunt Krit pleased.

“ 'Nother goose egg!” Aunt Krit drew the red zero and sighed. “They're all nothing but failures and future criminals!”

If Aunt Krit liked a student, she marked his paper in blue; if she didn't, she used red; both colors were available at opposite ends of the pencil. For summer school students, she used only the red end of the pencil. After algebra, they began to grade geometry papers. “They're all headed for the penitentiary,” Aunt Krit said indignantly.

Krit was thin and frail, always tired, never seemed strong or thoroughly happy. She disapproved of Aunt Pratt, blessedly asleep in her own bedroom, an invalid to arthritis and an accident that had ruined her knee. But Pratt had been derailed earlier; when Son—Pratt's grown boy—had been drafted into World War II and then had gone AWOL, Pratt lived with the constant fear he'd be caught and shot as a deserter. Her work was to worry, but she did it in solitude. Her deceased husband's pension supplied her few needs—for nail polish and perfume. When she had company, she sociably attended to her guest, offered gum or hard candy.

Krit couldn't stand Pratt's perfumes and powders and eyebrow pencils; her gaudy earrings, necklaces, and bracelets; her box of silly flowered scarfs, her endless packs of chewing gum (for Stella), her bright red belts and matching shoes. All day Pratt drew pictures, crocheted, and told stories to whoever came through the door. Didn't earn a dime.

Aunt Krit's favorite color was blue. She only wore skirts in shades of blue and beige, topped by a neat white blouse, sometimes with a little embroidery on the collar. The blouses hung straight from her shoulders to her waist. Even in her nightgown—sheer red nylon—Aunt Pratt, thin as Aunt Krit, sometimes wore her brassiere plumped up with thick sponge breasts.

Krit tossed down her grading pencil and declared, “Even if Don is Cat's brother, it would ruin the wedding to have her in it.”

Stella said nothing.

“You don't
have
to have her.”

“But Don wants her to stand up for us.”

“Stand up!”

“Be
in
the wedding.”

“At a wedding everything's got to be perfect. They delivered the rosebushes today. I'll have Old Uncle put them in tomorrow.”

“They'll look great.”

“I want it to be perfect. I'm inviting all the teachers.”

Krit envisioned the whole backyard walled with white climbing roses in
full bloom. The new rosebushes had two seasons to grow because Don had postponed everything and gone off to some dark island for the Peace Corps. “Boodle-worm,” Aunt Krit muttered under her breath. She knew Don might never come back to marry her niece. Like that Darl.
Out of the picture.
Krit had never trusted Darl, his face hidden under all those specks. But Don was as fair and unblemished as somebody you could see on the screen. She liked him. He was like Alan Ladd crossed with Rock Hudson. Why did young people go off in the Peace Corps unless they were running away from something at home?

For a while, Krit and Stella returned to their grading. Finally Aunt Krit threw down her pencil again, took off her pale-rimmed glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “I don't believe I can grade another paper.”

Stella looked at her and smiled. “Let's hit the hay.”

Krit wished her niece wouldn't use slang. “Let me show you something.”

Aunt Krit picked up a sheet of graph paper. With the straight edge and blue pencil, she divided it into quadrants. In two opposing quadrants, she drew opposing hyperboles till the widening flanges fell off the page. The blue-line hyperboles looked like two fish, nose to nose. “Now this one,” Krit said, “is really the same as this one. It's gone through all time and space and come back.” Her voice choked on the enormity of it. “While it travels, it gets closer and closer to the straight lines, but the hyperbola's lines will never become straight and never touch the asymptotes. The hyperbola draws infinitely closer.” She sighed and touched the crosspoint of the coordinates with her blue pencil lead. “This spot, this place is God.”

Then she set down the pencil, shot a meaningful glance at her niece, and went to bed. Aunt Pratt had been snoring from her bedroom all evening.
Not a care or a question in her head.

After Krit climbed into the high bed, she always communed first with her dead mother, whose last illness with pneumonia and death had occurred in that same narrow hospital bed. To comfort herself and signal their union, Krit pressed her body into the mattress where Mama had lain.
If we stayed in Crenshaw County at Helicon, none of this would have happened.

Krit let herself drift back to childhood, back to South Alabama, when they'd all been together and no one had seen an automobile. World War I was still in the future. Sometimes Krit had ridden with Jenny, her friend from down the road, in her pony cart. Jenny's hair, the color of taffy candy, was always caught
up by a blue satin ribbon and hung in perfect long sausage curls down her back. Time to drift on back to when they'd all been happy.
Someday I'll have to tell the colored people to move out of my house.

 

IN PRATT'S DREAMING HEAD,
bombs exploded—World War II—and she feared her only son had been caught by the army, sent to the front lines,
might be hurt or dying!
Son! Son! And then his face under the helmet changed to Stella's when she was a little girl and had run over wearing her mama's cerise beret to entertain her crippled aunt. Stella brought her little friend Nancy with the big blue eyes and fringe eyelashes of a child movie star. “Let
me
be your nurse,” they'd both clamored, struggling over a glass of water and spilling most of it. What was it: that speech Stella always recited, so perfectly with such confidence, with such expression?
Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you to sit behind you, to tell you something I know nothing about. Admission is free; pay at the door; pull up a chair;and sit on the floor!

Help!
Pratt saw Son, bleeding, sitting on the floor, his body gushing from machine-gun fire in a hundred places. But now she was awake. And World War II had been over for years. Son was safe hidden somewhere. Maybe at Helicon. Maybe Chris slipped him food in the woods. Pratt hoped Krit wouldn't ever turn the colored folks out from the house.
Admission is free, pay at the door.
Stella said the words as though they meant something.

People all said Stella would probably be the first woman president of the United States. Someday everybody would forget the war. Pratt imagined the child president—
I stand before you to sit behind you
—who would grant her beloved Son a full pardon for desertion.

 

AND STELLA? HER DREAM
was of a white rose, lying centered on a piece of graph paper, where blue coordinates crossed. The pure white flower represented God. Careful of thorns, she picked up the rose, unreal flower, with a hand you could see through, like clear plastic. Very lightly, she tapped her crotch with the white rose. Suddenly, in Stella's dream, a white dog, Pal, vomited a vile green substance. A bullet was fired along the trajectory of a hyperbola: it traveled past the slender tree trunks in the woods out through all space and time. Then it curved—because space, like a boomerang, is curved—and began rapidly to return.

 

IN CAT CARTWRIGHT'S DREAMS,
every night, not just this night when she got her first job but day after day, week after week, year after year, she was running, gloriously running till morning came. Over a field, she ran this June night, 1964, in Alabama, holding the hand of her beloved brother, Don, who was going to marry her dear friend Stella.

SECOND STRAIGHT NIGHT, FOLKS, OF ONE HUNDRED BURNING
-hot degrees after sunset! Brought to you by Golden Eagle Table Syrup, Pride of Alabam, and by me, Joe Rumore, Alabama's only Eye-talian redneck. We sure wish we had a better forecast, but tomorrow looks just the same. No change anytime soon
….

Lionel Parrish snapped off the radio and said in his heartiest voice, “Come in, girls!” He appreciated that Arcola and Gloria, both fine students according to the dean, had come early. Oh, that Arcola, how she could smile! “Won't you have a seat.” Arcola had a 1,000-kilowatt smile. Gloria had told him, shyly, she wanted to do something for her community.

“Your fan work, Mr. Parrish?” Arcola asked.

“No. Just look at it and
think
cool.”

He wished he could get Gloria to look at anything other than her hands folded in her lap. How such a mole—she was a mole, Gloria, always hiding—thought she could teach high school dropouts was beyond his imagining. But somehow she had.

“What you want to see us about?” Arcola was not there to waste time, but she looked at him like she expected candy. She had a big braid (probably artificial) across the top of her head; made it look as if she had a crown above her pretty face.

What was that murmur? Why, Gloria had said something! (She had a good college record. Surely she talked sometime.) She said it again, a little louder. “Aren't we going to wait for Christine?”

He shrugged. “I 'spect Mrs. Taylor's going to be late.” (Arcola smiled cheerfully.
Her teeth were slightly outward spreading, but that just made it look like her smile was bursting right out.) Mr. Parrish went on. “What I want to know is, how things going?”

Arcola almost laughed. “Well, you know we not got any books, but things going 'bout as well as they can, considering.”

“How 'bout the boys from Neighborhood Youth Corps?”

“Only reason they come to school is they're paid for it.” (Did Arcola wink at him?)

“How they fitting in?” he asked.

“I smell a little cough syrup, don't you, Gloria?” (Gloria seemed deaf to all questions.) “Some of 'em nippin' codeine. No problem.”

“They worn out time they come to class,” Mr. Parrish said. He wished Arcola had higher expectations for her students than mere physical presence. “Most hasn't ever had a job before,” he added.

“They okay,” she answered. “I can't complain.”

“Gloria, what do you think of them?”

“Yes, sir.” Gloria spoke to her hands. (Like his wife, Jenny, Gloria hadn't learned the importance of looking a person in the eye.)

“Everything okay?”

“Yes, sir.” (Matilda, his mistress, would look into the gizzard of anybody—boldly. He loved the bold overtures she made to him.)

“They aren't giving you any smart talk?”

“Well, Mr. Parrish.” (Gloria had a pretty little voice, but she wouldn't look up.) “I'm a little bit afraid of them.”

Arcola quickly said, “You scared? After you done sat in at Woolworth's?” She didn't wait for Gloria to answer. “Aw, these boys not any trouble. We got it under control, Mr. Parrish.”

Like an arrow, the shriek of the telephone entered Mr. Parrish's heart. He didn't want obscenities coming in over the phone line when the girls were in his office. But they were looking at him. He had to answer. He could scarcely believe Gloria was somebody who would sit in. But she had been with Christine at the Gaslight. The sensation of dancing with Matilda passed through his body.

Turned out, the telephone questions were civil. He watched Arcola and Gloria listening to his side of the call; naturally, his volunteer teachers were curious to know how the head of H.O.P.E. would respond to inquiries.
Efficiently, with dignity. “Yes, we run the night school here…. It's open to anybody…. Yes, black or white. It's for people who want to pass the GED test…. You're welcome.”

“Only we ain't never had,” Arcola spoke sassily, “a single white student.”

“I'm thinking about taking on a couple of white lady teachers, though.”

There, he'd said it.

“I be glad to work with 'em.” (Blessed nonchalance. This was one well-balanced young woman.) “How come you want 'em?” she asked and picked up Vulcan to suck on his head. (Mr. Parrish wanted to tell her that wasn't a sanitary thing to do, but she sure did look cute, her tongue running over Vulcan's curls just like he was a lollipop.)

“Funding. Funding, for one thing.”

“Suits me. Gloria, too.”

He might as well tell them his concern: “I'm a little bit worried about Mrs. Taylor.”

“She get along with Judy Cohen all right,” Arcola reassured.

“Berkeley, California. These two new are from here.”

“Well, what they like?”

“They both got brand fresh B.A. degrees.”

“Guess that means they'll be over us.”

The whole head of Vulcan had disappeared into her mouth. God! How did she expect him to ignore that.

“Do you have a B.A. degree?” he asked.

“I don't care,” Arcola said. (Where did she get the ability to relax like that. Practically limp.) “I'm just stating facts, ain't I, Gloria? Christine's not going to like this.” She smiled at him again. “You send 'em to me. I'll take care of 'em.” (Yes, Arcola's fat braid across the top of her head was like a coronet.)

Gloria said quietly, “Reason Christine so bitter—one of those little girls at the church last September—she was Christine's cousin.”

Mr. Parrish stared at Gloria as though she were some kind of bomb that had just detonated without exploding. Then he heard it again, the blast erupting through black children gathering after Sunday school. Burning through their bodies, through brick walls. He knew Arcola and Gloria were hearing the blast, too. The exact cadence of that sound, of what you had hoped it wasn't and knew it was. Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, in Birmingham. You knew where you were when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bomb
exploded, you knew whose face you looked into next. Into Jenny's. Thank God they were late that day. With Jenny and his children, he had heard the thud of the bomb, then the first grief screaming over the rooftops.

That moment was like a place in his brain. He could visit it anytime. They all could.

“I didn't know she was related,” Arcola said, her voice flat.

“Christine was there with me at Sixteenth Street,” Gloria said. “That day.”

Mr. Parrish reached for the ringing phone. When the small, cramped voice of obscenity probed his ear, he shouted, “Go to hell, you mother-fucking bastard!” He slammed down the receiver and held it down. He couldn't let loose. His hand trembled.

“Everybody gets crank calls sometime,” Arcola said soberly. “We bound to get some. Sooner or later.”

Mr. Parrish decided to sound official: “Thanks for stopping by.” He lifted his hand from the receiver. It was hard to do, as though magnetism or electricity bonded his hand to the black phone. “Any problems—let me know. I want to keep those kids in school if we can. Keep the local white teachers, too.”