Life Is Short But Wide (21 page)

Myine answered the letter at Bertha’s house. She went to the
post office the next morning, while everyone slept. She mailed that letter filled with gratitude, love, and dreams. Even though she had Bertha and Juliet, she was love starved. Family starved. The next few weeks crept by. All three women, Myine, Bertha, and Juliet, watched for the mailman every day. They did not tell him what they were so eager for. He was a white man, and some white people still did not like Black people. They didn’t know what he would do with a letter from France. So they just watched for him … and waited.

MEANWHILE
HERMAN TENDERMAN

Time was going by swiftly. The world was moving so fast millions of people did not know from day to day what would happen to them the next day. You might even say the world was raging as it spun around. So many people were angry, and they didn’t always know why. Society was slowly sliding back to the old dream of the rich; the poor would work for almost anything, and the rich were getting richer.

Of course, the middle class were struggling to maintain the new system that gave them a chance at the trough; they hadn’t had that chance often, some never. And there were the poor, the
very poor, who were exploited by almost everyone, even each other.

Many races, all over the world, were righting for their rights. In the United States of America, African Americans stepped up their fighting in the fifties.

Herman had traveled extensively in the navy, and he read voraciously, so he knew what was happening on the earth most of the time. It was why he had tried to make his children and stepchildren study, and become aware of the choices they MUST make. It was also when he came to realize there really was a God. “If there is no God, we are all doomed. This is not just a nation of liars, this is a world of liars. God must have some plan for mankind, or else why did He create us?

“Wars are always going on … somewhere. Why does mankind like killing? World War II is just recently over. I saw the cruelty of that one. Then there was Korea.

“Well, the world is in turmoil. And my life is in turmoil.”

He didn’t have to go to war anymore. He had a family, such as it was. In his own mind, he didn’t have a family because his mother was gone. He smiled to himself when he thought of Jerome and Rose Bertha. He prayed that they would turn out better than it seemed they would.

Herman had finally gotten his stepson, James, to go to school enough, to learn enough, to get into the navy, as he had. He also worked on his son, Jerome, to study when Jerome really wanted to go play basketball, or baseball, or anything but school. He had even paid him, sometimes, to go to school.

College was out of the question, but, finally, Jerome went into the navy also. It had been a long, hard, seemingly never ending
battle, done with a smile sometimes, and sometimes with a threat. But, Herman thought, Jerome was gone from the influence Gary had been, and Wanda was.

He held little hope for his daughter; Rose Bertha thought her mother, Wanda, was the smartest person in the world. But Herman didn’t give up, even though he could tell it was not going to be much use. She was barely staying in school already. Gutting classes all the time. Going where? he asked himself. He had found out her mother let her stay home and sleep.

There was grey in his hair now. His eyes were puffy from staying up late into the nights, watching his kids. Wanda could sleep through anything, never even know they were not in the house. She wasn’t worried, she let Herman do that for her.

Herman shook his head in amazement as he thought, “That was why Gary died. A drug overdose, after the woman he was living with stabbed him about some heroin. He hadn’t even known he was dying; he was still reaching for his drugs.”

In Herman’s mind, he did not have a family. He had worked and pleaded with them, for years, to do the right thing for their own self. He loved them, but they didn’t seem to know what love was. They hadn’t even had sense enough to love their own self. Well, their mother didn’t seem to do that either.

He knew, now, some people are born with love already in their hearts. Many, many people have to learn how to love, and they never get to see it, to learn. They think it is sex. Wanda was good in bed, but wasn’t worth a damn at anything else; especially love, even for her children.

He reminisced about his mother. “Oh, God, I’m glad I had
my mama. She loved me, and I sure loved her. I knew all about love. Learned it from my mama. Don’t know where she learned it, cause her sister never did have love in her heart.”

He had said many times to hisself, “These are Wanda’s kids. All of them. They don’t want my help, so I won’t worry about them. I’ll just tend to my own business; take care my own.”

Then, one day soon after that, he was disciplining Rose Bertha, when she snapped her little fifteen-year-old behind around, getting away from Herman. She got extra smart with him, probably been smoking some of her mother’s pot. She said, “I don’t haf’ta do nothin you say cause you not my daddy no way!”

Taken aback, Herman asked, “What’d you say? What do you mean?”

She just stuck her breasts out, chin and shoulders up. “That you not my daddy. I know my daddy! My mama told me when I was bout thirteen years old. My daddy’s name is Jerome; same daddy as Jerome. That’s why he named ‘Jerome’! Jerome, Jr. So you can’t tell me what to do! I’m tired’a you always tellin me what I ought’a do! Drivin me crazy bout school!”

Suddenly, Herman’s tiredness became too heavy, sitting on his back like a mountain. “The life I have worked all these years for! Oh, God! I knew Wanda slept with other men. I know she is an alcoholic. I knew we didn’t have a life, but I didn’t know my life was a garbage dump! I have been fooling myself! I’m telling everyone else how to live, and now, I don’t even have a life!”

He looked around the once nice house he had bought for his family; Gary’s two children were running around in dirty, baggy diapers. Their mother was in prison for killing Gary, but she had a heroin habit she might never quit anyway. “They should
have been trained,” he repeated in his brain. Wearying despair was falling over him. “They should be trained, but there is no one who cares enough to train them.

“My children don’t love me. And it seems I just thought they were my children. They are not my children! My wife does not love me. I haven’t loved my wife for years and years, since that first year we married. And now I learn that my children are not even mine. I have just thrown away my life. If I married Wanda because she was going to have my baby, now that they are not my babies, why should I stay?”

It grieved his heart because he wanted to love his family, he wanted it to be his family. He had wanted a family, his own family, ever since his mother had died. “But … it is not my family; never has been.” He sighed from somewhere deep in his body and tears rose to the top of his head and heart as he decided his life.

“Well, I don’t have any reason to stay here anymore, sleeping on a cot in a laundry room. I can sure afford better than that; I take care of myself. Why should I stay? I’m not a happy man. I’m not even content. I’m leaving.”

He called out to his wife, “Wanda … I’m leaving.” She was sleeping off a drinking binge, and didn’t hear him. He grabbed a few pieces of underwear from his dresser-box, and went out the door. He took a deep breath, turned to the right at the end of the path, and walked to his truck.

He had been saving for his children to go to college. He had spent some of it on James’s college costs a few years ago. Now James was saving money for himself.

Rose Bertha would probably never make it to college. She was already having sex, calling it love. She dabbled in drugs,
thinking it made her grown up and glamorous. If she didn’t change, she would grow up to be an even bigger fool than her mother.

So Herman left the house he had bought, worked, and paid for, for his family. His heart was broken. “But,” he thought, “I have jobs! I am not dead.” He did not look back through the windows of his truck at where his life had been for all the wasted years. Wasted, because he still didn’t have a family.

His last thought as he turned off that street was “Jerome might not make it, but if he does, I will help him, even if he isn’t my son, just like I helped James. But, from now on, I want something that is mine! Don’t care what it is, I want it to be mine! All mine!”

Herman went to his night job, and quit it. “This money is not making me happy. I won’t need to work so hard now, and they have never given me my due. I’ve been working there years, and they still don’t like me because of my color.” But they hated to see him leave. He was one of their smartest employees.

He kept his day job at Pink’s garage as a master mechanic. He had a White boss who knew less than he did, and was paid more. But he was Black, and in Wideland that made him worth less. The difference was this White boss knew his value and even liked him.

He found a temporary room to rent. He didn’t have anything but a suitcase and two toolboxes. He was tired, but a new light feeling was giving him impetus. He went to buy sheets, pillowcases, towels, two feather pillows, and a brand-new mattress. “Nobody ever slept on this one but me! It’s all mine!”

When he did bathe and go to bed, he slept for two days, waking only to eat. He looked into a mirror, accidentally, one morning and discovered that the quiet rest had restored him. The grey hair remained, but his skin was clearer and looked healthier. The hard work he had done for so many years had kept his body with solid muscles, and strong. “I am getting old,” he thought, “but the old man doesn’t look so bad.”

After a few weeks he found an apartment, and moved in with a few new furnishings. All his.

Sometimes he drove by his old house, just to see where his life had been; he never wanted to forget any part of it. He missed his old family. “I thought I had some sense. I loved those kids, all of them. And I thought two of them were mine, really mine. Nothing was mine; nothing is mine. I want my own. Mine.”

He sent James and Jerome his address. Neither one his son, but he loved them; they were friends. In the note he added, “Keep this for when you need me. Give my address to no one.”

Once, he had gone to see Bertha too early in the morning; the house was asleep. He knocked on the old classroom door; it was empty. He walked to Bertha’s house. There was no answer.

It didn’t happen often, but as fate would have it, Bertha was gone off to some little job. Juliet and Cloud were in bed locked in an embrace. They had made love, and now they were sleeping. Juliet heard the knock, and wakened a little, but she could not, and did not want to, move from under Cloud. His body still nestled inside her. She did not wake Cloud to answer the door.

There were so few times they were able to make love. He was so sweet, so gentle with her. He wouldn’t make love to her just anywhere in the woods, as she would have let him. He loved Juliet. He wanted to make her his wife; but she did not want to
leave her mother and go to live on the reservation. She thought she might not be able to be crippled anywhere but at her home.

If Juliet had known it was Herman, she might have wakened Cloud. But she didn’t know who it was, so she just settled down in the bed under Cloud, and continued her dreaming.

Herman didn’t know what to do, but he was lonely and wanted to be around people he knew cared about him. He wanted Bertha and Myine to know he was single and alone out in the world; he needed a family, again. They were the only family he knew he could count on. The family he wanted, felt safe with, until he met, somehow, someone to give him a real family.

He had always loved music, jazz, classic, and the blues. He needed some music in his life. So he went to register in a community college, and to look over the classes offered. “Maybe I’ll study some instrument.” After registering, he went to a music shop to buy some of the blues and jazz music he had heard lately and liked. He had to buy a record player, also. “I am going to start a whole new life! Even if I am getting old.”

Sometimes life curves on you. Sometimes we follow the curve. Sometimes we don’t.