Close to the Broken Hearted (21 page)

I
had been checking the mail before my mother could get to it every single day since me and Dewey went to the records office on our own and the lady made the call to her friend for more information about my family's history records. Mainly I was doing it on account of I didn't know how my mother would react to me going there behind her back. Her temper could be a mite unpredictable at times.

It wasn't always easy getting to the mail first. There were days the mail lady practically drove up and handed the mail right to my mother because my mother happened to be outside in the driveway. In fact, on two occasions when that happened I just braced myself and prayed that those weren't the days my information decided to arrive.

I got lucky. They weren't.

When my records finally did come, they turned up on a day my mother was at work. This made everything really simple and allowed me lots of time. As soon as I saw it, I knew the big yellow envelope was for me. Stuffed in our mailbox, it didn't even fit without the mail lady having to nearly bend it in half to get it in.

Sure enough, when I pulled it out, there was my name right on the front:
Abe Teal
. And, in the top left corner, was the name and address of the historian lady:
Miss Dixie Spinner
with an address in Chickasaw, Alabama. Excited, I rushed inside, happy my mother would be at work at least another four hours. This gave me a
ton
of time to go through all the information without even having to be sneaky about it.

I carefully opened the envelope using the silver letter opener my mother got as a gift from my uncle Henry one year for Christmas. She rarely used it, but I wanted to be sure not to rip any of the papers inside.

I pulled out a bundle of pages. There were some loose sheets on top and then some stapled together. I looked at the top one. On a small card, paper-clipped to the corner, was a note:

She even gave me her phone number. I couldn't believe how nice some people could be. Historians seemed especially nice to me.

Unclipping the card, I set it aside and started looking through the top sheets that were not stapled together. They had been put in separate. There were quite a few. At least a half a dozen.

I got really excited then. I wondered what kind of information I was about to find out. Obviously, there was a lot more here than just the names and birthdays of my parents and my grandparents like they had at the records office downtown.

The first page was more or less all about me. It said
Vital Statistics
at the top and listed things like my birthday and exactly where I was born and even had the time of my birth. I wondered if my
mother
even remembered that. I thought it was pretty neat that I now knew exactly when I was born right down to the minute.

Farther on, it showed that I'd lived in Alvin in this same house all my life and it showed the address. I began to realize that if they showed this much information for everyone, there might not be any more people listed in this package other than my parents and grandparents on all these pages after all.

Then it displayed my immediate family. Unlike the records office on Main Street, it had Carry (along with her birth date) included, and my mother and my pa. It not only showed my pa's birthday, but also said
Deceased
after his name and had the date he died and a small explanation:
Death due to motor vehicle accident.

Then, at the bottom of the page, it said:
Teal and Fowler references supplied under separate cover.

I didn't quite know what that meant, but I put down the first page and was surprised by the second. It was a listing of all the Teals, going back about one hundred and fifty years. And each one had extra information, like children and birthdays and how they died, and anything else pertinent. Right at the top of the list was me!

And so the list went on, going back to 1842. Everyone from John Owen Teal down was dead. Some had up to nine brothers and sisters, and some had none. I read them all, fascinated to find out I was related to so many people I had known nothing about.

And this was just on my daddy's side.

I came to the last one, right at the bottom:

Then it had two words beneath that, before several paragraphs of stuff. And those two words were:

It turns out I was related to somebody really important after all! My great-great-great-great-great-grandpa won a major Medal of Honor for freeing a bunch of slaves during the Civil War.

I had to call Dewey and tell him.

“What did he do?” Dewey asked after answering the phone. He only seemed half interested, which bothered the heck out of me.

“He freed
slaves,
Dewey. There ain't much that's more important than that. Remember all that stuff my mom told us about racism? My great-great-great-great-great-grandpa fought against racism a hundred an' fifty years ago.”

“What'd he do?”

“Well, accordin' to this paper in front of me he did lots. There's so much information 'bout it that it runs onto the next page. You want me to read it to you?”

“Can you just give me the general idea?”

“Well, it happened up in Georgia, right after the Union navy took over some port.”

“Which port?”

“Doesn't say, but some port close to Fort Pulaski.”

“What's that?”

“A fort, Dewey. What do you think it is?”

“What kind of fort?”

“The kind you fight from. This was during the Civil War.”

“Oh, you didn't tell me that part.”

“I reckoned you could figure that out for yourself. Anyway, I guess Fort Pulaski was an important target, but the Union hadn't hit it yet; they'd only taken the port. That's when my great-great-great-great-great-”—I was running out of breath sayin' all them greats—“grandpa walked right up to the door of one of those old plantations. He was carryin' nothin' but a couple of pistols and, I suppose, he just let himself in.”

“You mean the door was unlocked?”

“I don't rightly know, Dewey. It don't actually say. Maybe he knocked. I dunno. Whatever happened, he demanded that the owner free all the black folk he'd been keepin' as slaves.”

“What did the owner say?” Now Dewey sounded more interested.

“He said he didn't like people tellin' him what to do, is my guess,” I said. “All it says here is that a gunfight broke out inside that plantation between my grandpa from a hundred fifty years back and a half dozen other folk who either owned the plantation or worked for the guy who did.”

“So your however many greats grandpa was a Union soldier?”

“No, that's just it. He was a Confederate. I suppose he just didn't agree with slavery. That's the part that makes him a hero.”

“Did he die?”

“No. In the end, it says, and I'm reading it straight off the paper now, Isaac Jacob Lee Teal won his battle and walked out the front door of that big white house with one hundred and ten black men jumpin' up and down around and behind him, all hootin' and a-hollerin'.” I actually embellished that a little for Dewey's sake.

“That's what it says in the records you got?”

“Well,” I admitted, “not quite. I made it more dramatic.”

“So what happened next?”

“The next day the same Union navy that took the port attacked Fort Pulaski. They had more soldiers and better guns and the fort surrendered within a day. But word 'bout my ancestral grandpa must've spread because he came marching toward the captured fort, over the hills and through the trees with all the black men still following him.”

“Why was they still followin' him?”

“Guess they didn't know where else to go. Will you quit interruptin'?”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, the Union navy captain didn't arrest my great-great-great-great-great-grandpa. Instead they allowed him on board their ships and made him an honorary Union soldier. He was even given a medal for what he done and everythin'.”

There was a bit of a pause, then Dewey said, “So your great-great-great-great-great-grandpa was a bit of a traitor, you're sayin'.”

I got real mad. “No, Dewey. He was a good man who believed everyone should be free.”

Dewey laughed. “I'm just kiddin'. I think that's a neat story.”

“Me too. I'm real happy I got these records. I can't wait to meet my new grandparents now.”

After hanging up the phone, I leafed through the rest of the document. There were other pages listing the line of daughters for the Teals, then these were followed by similar pages for the Fowler lines. All of them went back approximately the same number of years as the first one I had examined.

There were also cross-reference pages showing who married who and things like that, and even a tree structure that kind of explained how all my uncles and aunts and great-uncles and -aunts all connected. A lot of it I couldn't understand very well, but I still found it all very interesting and exciting.

But absolutely none of it compared to the story I'd found about my great-great-great-great-great-grandpa Isaac Jacob Lee Teal.

That man was a true hero.

That's when my sister, Carry, walked into the house, carrying a small plastic shopping bag. I guessed she'd been down at the mall with her friends where she usually hung out. I was about to tell her about Grandpa Isaac Jacob Lee (who was
her
ancestral grandfather, too), but she spoke before I had a chance.

“Come on, ass face, follow me.”

“Mom
told
you not to call me that!” I said.

“Whatever.” She walked into the living room and turned on the television.

I sat there, thinking I should really go see what she wanted, but then part of me thought I should just stay put, her being so rude and all.

“I told you to come here!” she demanded from the other room.

“Why should I do anything you tell me?” I shouted from the kitchen.

I had forgotten that there actually
was
a reason. The devil pact I'd signed with my sister the day we made the swords had somehow completely slipped my mind. Now it was about to come back and bite me in places it turned out I really didn't like being bitten in.

“Because we have a deal, remember? When we made the swords? Time to pay up.”

Curious, I wandered into the living room.

Carry was sitting on the sofa with her socks off and one foot up on the coffee table. In her hand she had a bottle of brand-new purple nail polish. “Today,” she said, “you learn how to paint toenails! Aren't you the lucky boy?”

“Uh-uh.” I shook my head, slowly backing out of the room.

“Yep. You said
anythin'
. And this falls under anythin'. Now get over here and pay up.”

It was horrible, demeaning work, painting Carry's cheesy toes. I kept asking myself:
What would Dewey think if he could see me now?
Every time I tried to speed up the process, she'd slow me down and tell me to make sure I did a good job. When I was finally done with both feet, it was like someone had stopped sticking me with a hot poker. I was so glad to be finished.

I quickly bottled up the polish and handed it to her.

She twisted her foot in the sunlight falling in through the window behind her, looking at her toes gleaming purple in the afternoon light. I had to admit, they didn't look half bad.

“You did all right,” she said.

“I'm just happy I'm done.”

Then she said something that froze me to my core: “For now.”

“What do you mean?” My eyes went wide. My hand trembled.

“You're doin' this every week for the rest of the summer.”

“Am not.”

“Am too.”

“You can't make me.”

“You gave me your word. What's Abe Teal's word worth?”