Those Bones Are Not My Child (80 page)

“The authorities are committed to a solo murderer. Watson’s lucky he wasn’t iced by the cops his first night out on the street.”

Gerry continued reading. “They’d feared he’d made contact with
Williams’s fellow kidnappers and met with foul play. But his mother reports he contacted her. So the fugitive is still at large.”

It was a long while before Spence answered. She watched his jaws tighten; he was grinding his teeth. “Trash. Get on with it.”

“Governor Busbee says the Georgia Bureau completed their investigation of the KKK and their slate is clean. Julian Bond challenged their findings.”

“No mention, I suppose, of who headed that GBI whitewash? Save that,” he growled. And when he moved, she expected him to take the letter with the taped-down clipping from her. But he walked right by and into Mama Lovey’s dining room.

“Is this one of the cover-ups you were talking about?” Gerry grabbed up the mail, lowered the flame under the pots, and followed Spence, who was trailing his hands across the lowboy as he strolled toward the master bedroom.

“Well, my brother, what are you going to do, and how can I help?” She stood by the china cabinet as he hooked his fingers around the exercise bar jammed high in the bedroom doorway. From where she stood on the raked floor, the cabinet tinkling its contents, she could see the big iron bed with the two dents in the mattress. In time, one dent would plump up again. Spence was swinging his body a little the way her father had tried to do to convince himself he had not shrunk, was still the hale head of the house.

“What did you say?” He turned to her. “Do? You mean about notifying the FBI and the police? I assume the Florida police relayed the news about Sonny.”

“The medication, Spence. The medication is in the drawer again today.”

He blew air through his nostrils and walked into the living room. He looked at the fireplace he’d help to build. He looked at her projector and the carousel of slides, but expressed no interest in what she’d been doing in Africa. He moved around the sofa, fingering the mud-cloths she’d sewn together and draped across the back cushions. One side still needed fringing. Gerry still hoped to get Zala and Lovey to sit down together to do it before she left to join Maxwell in Maseru.

“Shall I go on?” If Spence was not prepared to stop dodging the issue of the medicine, they could at least get through the mail that had
piled up. He was looking at the paintings above the stereo. There was a picture of Jesus kneeling at the rock with a valentine heart. He gazed up at a sunbeam breaking through the clouds. Next to it was Martin Luther King Jr. on black velvet, resting his cheek against two fingers; he gazed up at an oil painting of her stepmother a local artist had done from a color photo.

“Like she knows how to get to heaven without first dying,” Spence said, smiling up at his mother-in-law. “This is a good family,” he said unexpectedly. “And you’re such a good person,” he said, which threw Gerry off balance. She was out of her slippers now, for he was moving fast, heading for the foyer, and she did not intend to lose him this time. For when he went up the stairs brooding, gray seemed to gather in the house and dim the light. She did not wish to cook food in the somber house or serve the women from the co-op somber stew. The women were due in a few minutes, and there was more mail to handle.

“Please,” she said, “let us accomplish a little more before supper. Then perhaps tonight we might feel like Talent House. Yes?” But he was facing the front porch and she couldn’t see if he remembered. There was nothing particularly stimulating to look at on the sleeping porch. One of her wraps was slung over the top of the shutters. There were books in the hammock she slept in. It swung slightly, the breeze sweeping the fragrance of wisteria and jasmine into the foyer.

“Go on,” he said.

“Authorities say the decision to apprehend Williams grew out of the suspicion that he might flee.” She saw his shoulders move. “After leading the police on a merry chase, Williams and his father reportedly attempted to hire a pilot. There was no pressure politics involved in the decision to arrest.”

She heard his derisive laugh, and he turned. “First the GBI grabbed the ball and made the feds look bad. But then they’d been looking bad, their own agents kept fucking things up. They had to send agent-in-charge Glover up to Washington to convince the JD that their case was airtight before the big chiefs would lean a little on the locals. We heard what they were basing their case against Williams on—what a laugh. But those jerks up in D.C. went for it. Trash that shit.”

She tore it up and looked about for somewhere to throw it. And when she tried to back into her slippers, the backless red leather slippers
slightly curled at the toe eluded her across the buffed floor. He was laughing at her attempts. He was laughing from the staircase, three steps up.

“My brother, do you know that I love you?” That stopped him on the fourth step, and he waited for her to come to the banister and reach up. “We must all make an effort …” She patted his hand, but the words would not come, so she settled for “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me. The women from the co-op are coming over. Try and get Zala to join us in the sauna. She’s in knots, and that can’t help Sundiata, can it?”

Gerry lingered in the foyer as Spence slowly moved up the stairs. She wasn’t sure if anyone but the boy had gotten more than two or three hours’ rest in a given day. She turned toward the old piano, several yellowed keys missing. She refrained from striking the notes; it would sound mournful. One of the piano legs had broken and her father had fixed it. Shorter than the other, it was propped on a wad of cardboard that pulverized at the corner when her slipper brushed against it. She went back through the living room thirsting for music. Kofi had been playing the Wailers all morning, the volume on low. She put on Fela and turned it up high. Then she went back to the kitchen, glancing quickly at her things on the coffee table.

From all over the region, she’d received invitations to give slide-show presentations about apartheid and the South African regime’s attempts to reannex neighboring countries and extend its pernicious influence into Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Mozambique, and Angola. But within her own family, the slides, the photo album, the large looseleaf of letters and notes remained undisturbed, unnoticed, all of them totally absorbed in convalescence.

Gerry brushed her cheek against her shoulder and stirred in a little peanut butter to thicken the ground nut stew. She glanced at the grate in the ceiling, then moved to the mail on the table. All of Sonny’s mail looked the same—square white envelopes. One felt especially thick, like the greeting card contained cash. She slipped it down inside her cobalt-blue patterened wrap, then tucked the fabric in more tightly around her waist.

Spence paused at the landing window when he heard Kofi telling the two big boys who’d come to ask after “Sunday” that he was not interested
in going to see the bees. The boys were on the path that took a fork down by the chicken coops, the skinny dirt path going past the toolshed to the hives, the wider grassy path leading to the cedar sweat cabin the co-op women had built for his mother-in-law. Spence pressed his face against the window screen. He could see her below. Her behavior confused him. As long as daylight held, she avoided coming into the house. And at night—he couldn’t be sure, he was so whipped by the time he bedded Kofi and Kenti down on the cots in the big bedroom upstairs, but she seemed to prowl around like an insomniac. So soon after the death of Widow Man, she was mourning, restless.

“And here we come,” he muttered, moving away from the window. Maybe Lovey would insist that Zala join the women for the ritual sauna. And perhaps then there’d be time to take Sonny for a drive and be back before Zala could accuse him of kidnap and coercion. Pressure, she’d said, was damaging. Pressure and probing had been the doctor’s careless game. And he was a stupid son of a bitch for adopting their methods on the traumatized boy.

She’d been adamant on the subject of psychological testing. “Interrogation,” she’d called it. By the third day in Miami it was “violation” of the boy’s privacy, a “rape” of his mind. He had a right to himself, and had a right to legal counsel as well. Who the hell did they think they were, breaking and entering, ransacking his dream life, interpreting his drawings, plastering labels on him, and for what? To fill up their folders, fill up professional journals with psychobabble. Not once in all their jargonized bullshit had they acknowledged that a crime had been committed against the boy, a monstrous crime. They talked about psychosomatic disorders and coping mechanisms and so forth. Nothing about the torment that had shattered the boy’s identity.

And then she had turned on him so fiercely—wasn’t he going to protect the boy, wasn’t he the father, was he going to just stand there and cooperate in the rape—that he hadn’t realized she had stepped over the line and had called the boy Sonny, had said “your son,” “our child.”

“You ain’t scared?” Kofi’s voice was high-pitched, the way it had been on first sight of Sonny. He and Kenti had backed away, as though battered bruises might be catching.

“They Georgia bees.”

“Well, Georgia bees sting. That’s where I’m from, Atlanta.”

“You from Atlanta? Ain’t that where they been killing children?”

“Aww, man, quit. Let’s see the bees.”

Spence continued up the stairs. Zala was right. Pressure, before Sonny had made up his mind what he would tell and how he would tell it, only forced him to lie. Spence was sure that a lot in the story was lies. Maybe not the first part, going with the woman he’d thought he’d seen at school. Maybe not the part about the risqué tapes the couple played, then accused him of being a nasty boy for listening to. But the parts in answer to who they were, the first set of captors and the second, and then the last … those parts he always fudged. “He owes no one the truth,” Zala had argued, as if he, Sonny’s own father, were the enemy.

“Let me tell it.” One of the boys with Kofi was outshouting the other. “Your grandmama was out here one day putting flour on the crops. And all these bees came. A bunch of them, a whole gang of them. Your granddaddy hobbled out here with the fly swatter to give her a hand. But she didn’t call the exterminator man like some people do. She called the bee man. Now y’all got a lot of hives. Make a lot of money when you got a lot of hives.”

“Y’all used to have four. Now y’all rich.”

Spence yanked the water on hard and the handle fell into the tub. He left it there and plugged the stopper in. Then he went to the wall and leaned his ear against it. But the water was running full force and the girls were playing around that side of the house.

“Funny money ba-bunny, fee fie fa-runny, Sonnnyyyyy!”

Spence tiptoed into the hall and stood by the door listening. In the version he heard Sonny tell Kofi one early morning when Spence noticed the cot in their bedroom empty and bent to the keyhole, Sonny had been sold to a slave gang of boys and forced to work on a plantation that outsiders thought was a state-run reform school. This last part seemed a tacked-on improvisation in answer to Kofi’s question how come the mailman or the meter readers or the neighbors didn’t think it was weird that two white men had a bunch of Black boys living with them and didn’t call the police.

There was no keyhole on the hall door of the bedroom. Spence held his breath and concentrated. He could hear a slight wheeze on the intake of breath, a slight whistle on the out. He tapped softly on the door and turned the knob slowly. He had to wipe his hands on his jeans and try again. For a moment, he was homicidal with the thought that Zala had locked him out.

…

Zala opened her eyes and turned her head toward the sunny corner of the room. Voices were coming up through the grate.

“Can you believe it? For nearly two years they’d been questioning people who used to work for the co-op and poking in our files, and couldn’t find one irregularity. So they said they’d have to impound our records.”

“So we said, all right, but we want a receipt.”

The women below in the kitchen whooped and hooted.

“Little man sits himself down and writes out a receipt. ‘Ohhhhh nooooo, man, we want a separate receipt for each piece you remove, and we want the piece and the receipt numbered so they tally, and we want a full description of the piece written on the receipt. We know our rights, dammit!’ Think that stopped them? Don’t you know they called in some other IRS agents to help them do it. How long they park their hocks in that office, Ruby?”

“Did nearly two hundred pieces worth ’fore they threw in the towel.”

“Goon.”

“I’m telling you, Miss Loveyetta. That’s how they spend the taxpayers’ dollars.”

“Couldn’t stick it.”

“No, they really couldn’t. They really slung some lowdown dirt on the project. But they couldn’t stick it. Threw in the towel like she said.”

“We lost some troops though. Lost support money too. They scared off a lot of people. I tell you, I just don’t know about some people sometime, Miss Lovey. Run for cover in a minute.”

“It’s the way people bring up the children nowadays. Raising their children to be mindless workers. Half the people around here would turn in their own mama just to be considered cooperative by some damn authority type. They just roll over. Give up information you’d have to torture and beat out of me.”

“You know it. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives going strong.”

“And going to be be-bone badder than ever soon’s we catch our breath.”

Zala sat up when the cheering rose up through the grate. Something
stuck her. There was a burr on the bedspread where Sonny’s feet should have been. She jumped up and was partway down the stairs before the sound of sloshing brought her back up and to the bathroom door. Someone was drawing the shower curtain, the plastic rings clicking across the metal rod. When she leaned her ear to hear, her hair brushed against the door.

“Zala?”

“Yes.”

“We’re okay. Sonny’s taking a bath. I’m about through shaving. We’re going to go for a drive.”