Those Bones Are Not My Child (82 page)

Kenti was standing on the seat reading the cars. “ ‘Ral-ston Purrina Co period.’ ‘North-thern Rail-way Line.’ ‘South-thern Cent-tral Su-per-shock Con-trol.’ ‘San-ta Fe Piggy Back Ser-vice.’ That’s funny. Look, there’s the Cheshire cat!”

Kenti turned around.

“Where you going?” Kofi pulled Sonny back down.

“What’s the matter?” ’cause Kofi was yelling.

“Sonny crying, Daddy.” But Spence had already jumped out of the truck.

Kofi put his arm out stiff and Sonny fell against it, but he didn’t fall over. He was trembling. And he was working his fists back and forth like they were tied together. Kofi got an arm around his brother’s back and held on.

“I got you. It’s all right. Ain’t nobody gonna mess with you.” Kofi
flexed his muscles hard so his brother could feel the strength of the arms around him.

“Nobody gonna bother you,” Kenti said, climbing through the window. “Daddy blow they head off anybody try to mess with us.” She worked her face in between Kofi’s arms to kiss Sonny. “Don’t cry. Awww, don’t cry, Sonny.”

Spence was leaping over the side of the truck when Zala gave up trying to reach Sonny through the window. Sonny lunged toward her, his wrists locked together. It took all she had to pull his hands apart. She kissed his knuckles. “No matter what, no matter what!” When he opened his hands, she kissed his palms. “We love you. Ohh, Sonny.” She prayed he would not start coughing.

“It’s okay,” Kofi said, ordering everybody away. “I got him, Dad. Let go, y’all. I got him.”

When the train thundered by and the truck stopped rattling, Sonny slowly lifted his head. He tried to sit up straight but fell down into the tire. He laughed a little. Kofi laughed a lot but didn’t let go. Kenti giggled and leaned over to poke her father who smiled. Zala was still holding her breath, making vows, taking notes, and praying he would not start coughing.

Z
ala draped Sonny’s sheets across the rack she’d improvised out of old tomato stakes and chicken wire. Every bush but the butterfly bush held towels and underwear to bleach in the sun. She watched the white-suited bee men through the close weave of leaves at the vanishing point of the two laundry lines.

“They’re gathering propolis today,” Zala heard her mother telling someone around the other side of the house. She left Sonny’s coverlet in the basket and went to see who Lovey was talking to. “Got to leave some, though. Can’t take it all.” The girls were going “Ahh-hunh” but kept picking blackberries along the fence. “Keeps the hives germ-free, you see,” looking toward the house, as though the house had no natural immunity of its own against its monthlong guests who’d tracked in a disease.

Zala watched her mother bend and lift a bedspread from the basket, her dress hiked up in back, veins bulging in her legs. Zala did not move to help her. Only a few minutes ago she’d told Gerry that she was not angry with Mama Lovey, denied she’d set her heart against her mother for not coming to her in Atlanta, for choosing Widow Man over her own child, and Gerry had said, “Uhn-hunh.” They all went around imitating Sonny. There was nothing funny about it that Zala could see.

Zala moved back around to the yard and slapped at her neck. She wasn’t quick enough. The mosquito drew blood and flew off. That morning, what Mattie had dubbed the Coffee Papers spread out all over the bed, the worn portfolio she’d mailed them in on the floor, Sonny had told her that he didn’t know any of the people, did not recognize the descriptions of the suspects, though he did hesitate when it came to the white man with the zigzag scar down the side of his neck, the man from
the Lubie Geter case. Said he didn’t know any of the children, any of the women, the men. She’d said nothing; gathered the papers up and did not point out that he’d gone to school with Jo-Jo Bell. That he’d once competed against Patrick Rogers’s music group. That he’d met Wayne Williams at least once. That one of the murdered women had worked in the candy store on Northside Drive before they’d moved to Thurmond. She’d just slipped everything back into Mattie’s portfolio.

She had not pressed him. He didn’t owe anyone anything; not even his family did he owe the truth. But he had to understand that people had a right, the stricken families had a right, to ask him questions. She was trying to prepare him for home.

He had put his shoes on and left the room without a further word about the year he’d spent away from them. That was all right for the moment. It might have to be all right forever. If not all right, just so. Hugging the Coffee Papers, she’d felt nothing but a deep throbbing as after a hot bath.

Zala looked around for someplace to hang the rest of the wash. There was a squabble down in the chicken pen, Lovey’s prize rooster laying the law down to the hens.

Sheena sat back on her heels and held the pail for Kenti to stand on. Even on tiptoe and stretching up, up to the sky like they did in school in the mornings, she could only see the helmets of the bee men over the roof of the henhouse. They looked like camping tents on their heads. Then a breeze came. Kenti jumped down and grabbed her end of the wicker tray. Sheena poured her pail of berries in it and lifted up her end. They shook gently so the berries wouldn’t bounce out or mush each other. What the wind didn’t blow off fell through the holes—bits of twigs, leaves, and dirt.

“You could stay here and go to school with us, Kenti. You already missed a week, you know.”

“We going home soon,” Kenti said, hoping that was so. Every morning at breakfast now they had to go over how to act when they got back to Atlanta. She guessed they couldn’t leave till they got it right. But a limo was coming to take them to the Rawls cousins first. They could go swimming in the ocean.

“Well, you better hurry up or you’ll get left back. People make fun of you when you get left back.”

“I know,” Kenti said, thinking about Sonny. She was glad Sheena stopped talking. She hoped the horns would blow soon, so they could go to the stables. She looked toward the fields to see if Kofi was coming.

“Spacemen.” Kofi stabbed the loose hay with the pitchfork. He couldn’t talk and keep up with the rest of them, so he stopped looking at the bee men. Everybody, including Cookie, was way ahead of him. The men were bundling faster than he could collect hay in a pile. But it felt good to be working. He liked how he smelled. And not only was he going to get paid, he was going to ride down to the stables to get it.

Someone clear over on the other side of the field was asking who was it that could spin straw into gold. It was too far to yell over. But he knew the answer: Rumpelstilskin. It was better to keep working. His father was on the truck and coming, pulling his gloves on tightly and getting ready to grab up the bundles. Kofi really put his back to it, waiting to see what his father would say about how strong he was getting.

Spence packed the haystacks in tightly and looked toward the field where the young medical students were moving along with their sketch pads, drawing the plants. The smoker the bee men were carrying left a dark, smeary trail. They disappeared behind thick tree trunks, then materialized suddenly in the field back of the bone-white boxes of the colony’s brood chamber. He let his mind roam freely over the far field, picturing himself and his children running, looking up at a kite. He would hold the spindle, feeling the tug of the string, something live at the end of the line. They might go fishing too. His in-laws in Brunswick had a boat.

Spence reached for his shirt and mopped his face, neck, and chest, then rapped on the roof of the cab. The truck pulled up toward the last batch of haystacks. What wouldn’t he give for nine straight days and a boat in the middle of the water.

“We going to the stables now?” Kofi trotted alongside the truck. When it stopped, he pulled up his T-shirt and wiped his face with it.

“Where’s Sonny?”

“Someplace,” Kofi said, glad to be away from the others so he could know that the smell was his own and not theirs. He was standing there squinting, sniffing himself, before he realized he was being sent to find his brother.

Without disturbing the look of the ripped-open envelopes, Gerry pushed the mail onto a tray and placed it between the sandwiches and the thermos. Since Lovey was determined not to set foot in the house till dusk, she took a plate out to her and then waited for Spence. Shading her eyes, Gerry watched Kofi trotting toward the mangle Mama Lovey had one of the med students set up in the yard. She intended to iron the sheets outdoors when they were dry enough. Lovey was pointing Kofi in the direction of the toolshed.

Sonny kicked the front wheel. It was completely flat. And the gash in the back wheel was longer than his finger. He didn’t remember it being that bad, but it had been dark last time he’d searched the shed. The round cardboard box of bicycle patches wasn’t on the shelf where he’d put it back, either. He searched around, trying not to get nervous.

There was a jar of ground-up Japanese beetles. Probably the same beetles he and the old man had crushed for the ground crops. There were two large, squarish glass jars with green screw tops. Self-rising flour with extra baking powder was in them. It used to be his chore to sprinkle the green things, especially the collards and cabbage. The bugs would eat it, swell up, and fall off the leaves and hit the ground splat. There were flat plastic jars of soil, some with specimens, as the old man called them. He’d mail them to the agricultural people and they’d write back and tell him what to add to the soil. But there was no sign of the box that looked so much like Kenti’s can of pickup sticks he’d almost overlooked it before.

On the wall of hooks hung the old man’s cap, a red plaid corduroy cap with a long bill. The old fishing bag was covered with dust. So was his box of lures and weights. In the bait bucket in the corner was the fish knife. Sonny slipped it into his pocket when he heard Kofi call his name.

Sonny stepped out into the blazing sun and couldn’t see. He fumbled, but he got the shed door latched before Kofi came walking up.

“We almost ready,” Kofi said, winded.

“Got any money?”

Kofi didn’t answer right away. He was looking at the spaces in between Sonny’s teeth. “Gap?” he’d heard Granny Lovey say on the phone. “Like a pasture gate, sugar,” laughing with the cousins in Brunswick, Georgia, where Kofi didn’t want to go.

“I want to go home, don’t you?”

“What’s home?”

“School,” Kofi said.

Sonny skeeted through his teeth. Spit landed close to Kofi’s shoe. “Hey, little brother, I said do you have any money?”

“To do what?”

Kofi stepped back when Sonny took the knife out. He started flipping it overhand and underhand in the dirt. Kofi watched, then bent down with him to watch better. The knife pinned a leaf to the ground.

“Money for what?”

“I want to go see Nana Cora.”

“Why you want to go there? It’s better here, ’cept for the bees.” Kofi was going to say it was better ’cause there was work and pay, but something told him not to. “You could call them. They call here lots of times asking about you.”

“Where was I?”

Kofi looked toward the house, then turned in the direction of the chicken pen. “You were incommunicado.”

Sonny started laughing. He rubbed his chest and the laugh trailed off with a hissing sound, like he was fixing to say that was stupid. But he didn’t. He kind of winked. His skin, shiny and tight from the sun, crinkled up under his eye. Some of the bruising had let up. He didn’t look so much like a raccoon anymore. “You all right, little brother.”

“You don’t want to go to Brunswick either, hunh? Or Jekyll Island, or Sapelo?” Kofi couldn’t remember the other islands where their mother’s father’s relatives were. Sonny kept on pitching the knife in the dirt. Kofi didn’t blame him. Them Rawls people liked to laugh and joke too much. And even though Sonny had been to the dentist and the barbershop, he didn’t look so good. He just didn’t have two black eyes was all.

Kofi had thought Granny Lovey was being mean on the phone laughing at his brother, but maybe she was cracking so the cousins
would run out of things to say by the time they saw Sonny. “What’s the matter with the boy’s face—furnace fall on it?” “Hey, boy, been eating rock sammiches?” Granny Lovey had been slapping herself all over, kind of pushing her nightgown up so she could rub her legs, talking on the phone. Kofi took a good look at his brother. For all the cocoa butter his Mama smeared on him every night, Sonny still looked like one of them tough boys always getting in a fight.

“Whereabouts Granny Lovey sell honey around here?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Go find out.”

Kofi pulled the lacings of his moccasins tighter and made new knots. He stood up and brushed straw from his shorts. It would take all day to pick the straw off his legs.

“What about the mailman?” Sonny stood up and slipped the knife in his back pocket. “Think he’d give us some money? Bet he would if you said Gerry wanted it. They kind of like each other. We could do something if we had us some money.”

Kofi’s heart tripped over a beat. He’d thought about this for a long time. But this didn’t feel right. This felt sticky and wrong. He picked at the straw glued to his legs.

“That was you calling them times, wasn’t it?” This time Sonny bunched his eyebrows so they met. He kind of nodded. Before, he used to act like he hadn’t heard. “I thought so,” Kofi said. “I was waiting for you to tell me to come where you were.”

“You wouldnawantedyou to be there,” Sonny said, quickly, turning away from him.

Kofi stumbled over the pushed-up roots of the tree when Sonny kept turning away. Kofi had to grab the back of his jeans to get him to stop.

“I wouldnawantedyou there,” Sonny said, crossing his arms. “Go find us some money,” he said and walked off.

Zala was spreading the coverlet over the butterfly bush when she saw Kofi heading around toward the back of the house, his hands dug down in his pockets, head low, muttering and unhappy. He reached out suddenly and whacked a milkweed but didn’t wait to watch the pod release its feathery seeds into the air.

“Kofi?” She was afraid to let go of the coverlet, afraid the bush could not hold the weight. She crooked her finger when he looked her way and he came slowly, stubbing his toes every third or fourth step. “What’s a ruby cue, Kofi?”