Keeper of Dreams (36 page)

The nurse was all right. The nurse wouldn’t get him in trouble. He could hear Nana moaning from the main-floor bedroom that had been given over to her so nobody had to carry her frail old body up and down the stairs. The light was on in Nana’s room and she was sitting up in her wheelchair, the strap around her ribs so she didn’t fall over when the trembling became too strong. Paulie could see the cot where the nurse slept. It was silly, really—the nurse was a large, big-boned woman and the cot must barely hold her, not even room enough to roll over without falling out of bed. While tiny Nana had slept in a huge king-size bed. It would never have occurred to them, though, that Nana should get the cot. The nurse was of the serving class.

I am of the serving class, too, thought Paulie. Because I have more of my father’s blood than my mother’s. I don’t belong among the rich people, except to wait on them. That’s why I never feel like I’m one of them. Just like Father never belongs. We should be their chauffeurs and yard boys and butlers and whatever. We should wait on them and take their orders in restaurants. We should run their errands and file their correspondence. We all know it, even though we can’t say it. Mother married down, and gave birth down, too. I should have been on a cot in someone’s room, waiting for them to wake up so I could rush down and make their breakfast and carry it up to them. That’s how the world is supposed to work. The nurse understands that. That’s why she knew she could ask me to help her. Because this is who I really am.

Nana looked at him and moaned insistently. He walked to her, not knowing what she wanted or even if she wanted anything. Her eyes
pierced him, sharp and unyielding. Oh, she wants something all right. What?

She looked up at him and started trying to raise her hands, but they trembled so much that she could hardly raise them. Still, it seemed clear enough that she was reaching out to him, staring into his eyes. So he held out his hands to her.

Her hands smacked against one of his. She could no more take hold of him than fly, so he took hold of her, one of her hands in both of his, and at once the trembling stopped, the effort stopped, and the unheld hand fell back into her lap on the wheelchair. “The nurse is fixing your breakfast,” Paulie said lamely.

But she didn’t answer. She just looked at him and smiled and then, suddenly, he felt that light that was hidden within him stir, he felt the pain in his back again from the musket ball, and now the death of the Cherokee swelled within him and filled him for a moment with light. And then, just as quickly, it flowed out of him, down through his fingertips just the way it had come. Flowed out of him and into her. Her face brightened, she dropped her head back, and as the last of the Cherokee’s deathlight left him, she let out a final groan of air and died, her head flopped back and her mouth and eyes wide open.

Paulie knew at once what had happened. He had killed her. He had carried death out of the cave with him and it had flowed out of his hands and into her and she was dead and he did it. He sank to the floor in front of her and the weariness and pain of last night and this morning, the fear and horror of the two long-ago deaths that he had witnessed—no, experienced—and finally the enormity of what he had done to his great-grandmother, all of this overwhelmed him and when the nurse came into the room she found him crying silently on the floor. At once she took the old woman’s pulse, then unstrapped her, lifted her out of the chair, and laid her on the bed, then covered her up to her neck. “You just stay there, son,” she said to him, and he did, crying quietly while she went back to the kitchen and rinsed the dishes. It occurred to him to wonder that her response to death was not to waken everybody but rather to wash up after an uneaten breakfast. Then he realized: That’s what the serving class is for, to clean up, wash up, hide everything ugly and unpleasant.

Hide everything ugly and unpleasant.

I didn’t kill her, or if I did, I didn’t mean to. And besides she wanted it. I think she saw the death in me and reached for it. I brought her what she couldn’t get any other way, release from her family, from her body, from her memories of life unmatched by any power to live. Nobody will be sorry to see her dead, not really. Somebody can move into the Richmond mansion again and become the main bloodline of the Brides. The nurse will get another job and everything will be fine. So why can’t I stop crying?

He hadn’t stopped crying when the nurse went to waken Mother—even the nurse knew that it was Mother who had to be told first. And even though she held him and murmured to him, “Who could have guessed you’d be so tenderhearted,” he couldn’t stop crying, until finally he was shaking like the girl in the cave, shivering uncontrollably. I have another death in me, he thought. It’s dangerous to come near me, there’s another death in my fingers, the cold death of a slave girl waiting in some cave in my heart. Don’t come near me.

Mother and Father left that morning, to take him home and make funeral arrangements in Richmond. Others would take care of arranging for the ambulance and the doctor and the death certificate. Others would dress the corpse. Mother and Father had to take their son, who, after all, had found the body. No one ever asked him what he was doing up at that hour, or where he had spent the night, and if anyone noticed that his shirt and pants were damp they never asked him about it. They just packed up his stuff while he sat, tearless now, on the sofa in the parlor, waiting to be taken away from this place, from the old lady who had drawn death out of his fingers, from the people who had jockeyed for position as they waited years for her to die, and from the children who played dark ugly games with each other by the swimming pool when no adult could see.

At last all the preparations were done, the car brought round, the bags loaded. Mother came and tenderly led him out onto the porch, down the steps, toward the car. “It was so awful for you to find her like that,” she said to him, as if Nana had done something embarrassing instead of just dying.

“I don’t know why I got so upset,” said Paulie. “I’m sorry.”

“We would have had to leave anyway,” said Mubbie, holding the door open for him. “Even the Brides can’t keep a family reunion going when somebody just died.”

Mother glared at him over Paulie’s head. He didn’t even have to look up to see it. He knew it from the smirk on Mubbie’s face.

“Paulie!” cried a voice. Paulie knew as he turned that it was Deckie, though it was unbelievable that the older boy would seek a confrontation right here, right now, in front of everybody.

“Paulie!” Deckie called again. He ran until he stopped right in front of Paulie, looking down at him, his face a mask of commiseration and kind regard. Paulie wanted to hit him, to knock the smile off his face; but of course if he tried to throw a punch Deckie would no doubt prove that he had taken five years of boxing or tae kwon do or something and humiliate Paulie yet again.

“Celie and I were worried about you,” Deckie said. And then, in a whisper, he added, “We wondered if you stripped off the old lady’s clothes so you could look at
her
naked, too.”

The enormity of the accusation turned Paulie’s seething anger into hot rage. And in that moment he felt the death stir within him, the light of it pour out into his body, filling him with dangerous light, right to the fingertips. He felt the terrible fury of the helpless slave girl, raped again and again, her determination to die rather than endure it anymore. He knew that all he had to do was reach out and touch Deckie and the slave girl’s death would flow into him, so that in his last moments he would feel what a violated child felt like. It was the perfect death for him, true justice. There were a dozen adults gathered around, watching. They would all agree that Paulie hadn’t done anything.

Deckie smiled nastily and whispered, “Bet you play with yourself for a year remembering me and Celie.” Then he thrust out his hand and loudly said, “You’re a good cousin and I’m glad Nana’s last moments were with you, Paulie. Let’s shake on it!”

What Deckie meant to do was to force Paulie to shake his hand, to humiliate himself and accept Deckie’s dominance forever. What he couldn’t know was that he was almost begging Paulie to kill him with a single touch. Death seeped out of Paulie, reaching for Deckie. If I just reach out . . .

“Shake his hand, for heaven’s sake, Paulie,” said Mother.

No, thought Paulie. Deckie is slime but if they killed every asshole in
the world who’d be left to answer the phones? And with that thought he turned his back and got into the car.

“Paulie,” said Mother. “I can’t believe . . .”

“Let’s go,” said Father from the driver’s seat.

Mother, realizing that Father was right and there shouldn’t be a scene, slid into the front seat and closed the door. As they drove away she said, “Paulie, the trauma you’ve been through doesn’t mean you can’t be courteous to your own cousin. Maybe if you accepted other people’s overtures of friendship you wouldn’t be alone so much.”

She went on like that for a while but Paulie didn’t care. He was trying to think of why it was he didn’t kill Deckie when he had the chance. Was he afraid to do it? Or was he afraid of something much worse, afraid that Deckie was right and Paulie had enjoyed watching, afraid that he might be just as evil in his own heart as Deckie was? Deckie should be dead, not Nana. Deckie should have been the one whose body shook so much he couldn’t stand up or touch anybody. How long would Celie have sat still if Deckie had pawed at her with quivering hands the way that Nana reached out to me? God afflicts all the wrong people.

When they got home they treated Paulie with an exaggerated concern that was tinged with disdain. He could feel their contempt for his weakness in everything they said and did. They were ashamed that he was their son and not Deckie. If they only knew.

But maybe it wouldn’t make any difference if they knew. Tanned athletic boys must sow their wild oats. They live by different rules, and if you have such a one as your own child, you forgive him everything, while if you have a child like Paulie, basic and ordinary and forgettable, you have to work all your life just to forgive him for that one thing, for being only himself and not something wonderful.

Mother and Mubbie didn’t make him go to the funeral—he didn’t even have to plead with them. And in later years, as the family reunion became an annual event, they didn’t argue with him very hard before giving in and letting him stay home. Paulie at first suspected and then became quite sure that they were much happier leaving him at home because without him there, they could pretend that they were proud of
him. They weren’t forced to compare him quite so immediately with the ever taller, ever handsomer, ever more accomplished Deckie.

When they came home, Paulie would leave the room whenever they started going on about Sissie’s and Howie’s boy. He saw them cast knowing looks at each other, and Mother even said to him once, “Paulie, you shouldn’t compare yourself to Deckie that way, there’s no need for you to feel bad about his accomplishments. You’ll have accomplishments of your own someday.” It never occurred to her that by saying this, she swept away all the small triumphs of his life so far.

There were times in the years to come when Paulie doubted the reality of his memory of that family reunion. The light hiding within him stayed dark for weeks and months on end. The memory of the swimming pool faded; so did the memory of Nana’s feebly grasping hands. So, even, did the memory of the death of the Cherokee and the runaway slave. But then one day he would move something in his drawer and see the envelope in which he kept the tattered fragment of a threadbare dress and the scrap of an ancient moccasin, and it would flood back to him, right down to the smell of the cave, the taste of the water, the feel of the bones under his hand.

At other times he would remember because someone would provoke him, would do something so awful that it filled him with fury and suddenly he felt the death rising in him. But he calmed himself at once, every time, calmed himself and walked away. I didn’t kill Deckie that day. Why should I kill this asshole now? Then he would go off and forget, surprisingly soon, that he had the power to kill. Forget until the next time he saw the envelope, or the next time he was swept by rage.

He never saw Deckie again. Or Celie. Or any of his aunts and uncles or cousins. As far as he was concerned he had no family beyond Mother and Mubbie. It was not that he hated his relatives—except for Deckie he didn’t think they were particularly evil. He learned soon enough that his family was, in a way, pretty ordinary. There was money, which complicated things, but Paulie knew that people without money still found reasons to hate their relatives and carry feuds with them from generation to generation. The money just meant you drove better cars through all the misery. No, Paulie’s kinfolk weren’t so awful, really. He just didn’t need to see them. He’d already learned everything they had to teach him. One family reunion was enough for him.

This story began when I was invited to tour an area on the grounds of Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I have lived for the past twenty-five years. I knew that it was a Quaker college, and that the Quakers had been a vital part of the Underground Railroad that brought runaway slaves to freedom during the Civil War, but until that tour I had never put it together that Guilford College itself might have been involved. (I grew up out West, where history is something that happened somewhere else.)

I was especially stirred by the stretch of a stream that had eroded its way under the broad roots of huge old trees. The runaway slaves would climb up under the roots and hide; the stream masked their scent from the dogs, and yet the runaways were dry, above the water level.