Emancipation Day (28 page)

The nurse pulls back the bedsheet and washes him all over with soap and a soft, warm cloth, without, she says, taking out the catheter or the IV drip.

“They’re hard to put back in,” she tells him. “Now I’m washing your other foot, Mr. Lewis, can you feel that?”

He sees himself shaking his head.

“How about this, Mr. Lewis?”

She washes between his toes, moves the cloth up his legs and around his groin—that’s the part he dreaded earlier on, but now he’s figured out that that particular part of him’s as useless as the rest. Then his stomach and chest. She flips him over, somehow, he doesn’t know how she does it, he can’t even open his eyes, and she washes his back. “You have a nice back, Mr. Lewis. Strong.” She eases his arms away from his sides, she wills them apart and washes under them. Neither of them can coax his hands to open.

“You holdin’ on tight to somethin’, Mr. Lewis.”

Lying here like this, nothing moving, you can’t duck away from the thoughts in your head like you can when you’re up and about. A thought ain’t like an apple you can put down on the table and say, Oh, I’ll have that later. A thought is a window you got to look through. If it’s dark, it makes everything you look at dark, too, and you might think, Now how’d that yard get so dark, and then you start thinking about that, and pretty soon you’re thinking about things you ain’t thought about in years,
if ever. And if you can’t move your entire body, you can’t turn away your mind, neither.

And then she shaves him. This here’s the best part. She uses a straight razor, near as he can tell. She was a little awkward with it at first, especially around his throat, but she gets the job done. And she combs his hair, at least the front and sides.

“A little white around your temples.”

Not white. Grey.

He will make room for this nurse in his dream home. Josie won’t mind. It means he won’t need Harlan, at least not as a barber, but Harlan will be retired anyway. His father’s barber chair, there’ll be a place for that, too. Maybe make a special room for it off the tavern, a kind of museum. Let the grandchildren sit in it, pump them up to the top with the foot pedal and then whoosh them back down, like on an elevator. They’ll grow up with that sound in their heads, the way he did.

He never thought Jackson would be the first to give him a grandchild. Jackson and his white wife. Ain’t all a bed of roses, though, he can hear in her voice that she’s worried sick. William Henry would talk to her if he could, tell her what to expect. She won’t get a lot of help from Jackson, but Jackson come from a good family.

A lot of things can happen. A lot of things have happened. William Jackson was hard on that boy, and he was hard on Josie, and if there was any way he could make it easier for Jackson’s wife, he would do it. Don’t turn away from him like I did, he would say. And don’t let him turn away from you. He turn away
from you, you run around and stand in front of him. He turn away again, you run around again. And you keep doing that until he got nowhere to turn but to you. Easy enough to say, but he never done it.

The truth is he never did right by Jackson. He come at him from the side, like a fox at a thicket, and by the time he decided to raise Jackson as his own, Jackson had his own ideas about who he was. His mother was no help. She never said nothing to him one way or the other. If anything, she encouraged him. He wanted to think of himself as white, fine, let him, maybe there’d be more opportunities for him that way. Maybe she was right, maybe that was how white people got started in the first place, no one told them they weren’t.

When Jackson was older, William Henry would take him and Benny to Jackson Park on his days off, to give Josie a break. Sunday at the park was a day off from whites. Coloureds put on their best clothes and went a-walking, arm in arm some of them or in families, and there’d be the smell of chicken from the barbecues, and cases of beer hidden under blankets. That’s why they had the Emancipation Day picnics always on the Sunday closest to the first of August. It was like all the normal rules of living were undone and let go of like balloons, and the sheer relief of seeing them lift up into the sky made you feel like it was you floating up there, like your brain was with them but your body was down here on the earth where it belonged. It was the end of slavery, no more whitey, no more waiting in fear for the pounding on the door, or looking over your shoulder
to see who else was in the room before speaking, or checking your pocket a hundred times afraid that you forgot your pass. Christ Almighty, it was fine.

Jackson didn’t want to go to the picnics after he got to be seven or eight, although they couldn’t very well leave him at home. The picnics could get rough at times, lots of drinking, freedom making some people act crazy, but it was safe enough, and anyway it stayed light in August nearly to ten o’clock, the kids could play sneak among the trees and the shrubs, and sometimes they didn’t have the fireworks till near midnight. William Henry didn’t want Jackson and Benny to miss that. He’d call them, Get over here! when the speeches started about the history of Emancipation Day, and the freeing of the slaves, and the Underground Railroad, and how the park was named after Cecil E. Jackson, the former mayor of Windsor. They needed to hear all that, especially Jackson. “Hear that, boy? This here park named after a white man. That’s how far we come.” But you couldn’t teach that boy nothing.

William Henry’d be drinking pretty steady from lunchtime, but just beer, mostly, and he’d eat a lot of roast pork and bread and baked beans. His good shirt might have a few stains on it and maybe not be tucked into his pants all the way. Just meant he was having a good time. The sky was purple and green, the way a bruise gets just before it goes black. William Henry and Josie would make the children sit and look up at it, gauging its suitability for fireworks. Still not dark enough, but what was wrong with sitting on a bench in a park with your mother and father
and brother for a few minutes? William Henry could always tell when there was something eating Jackson. After the speeches were over, the boy just sat on the bench with his hands under his knees, head down, not even swinging his feet, and said he wanted to go home. Jackson was the only one ever give him any backtalk.

“Don’t you want to see the fireworks, Jackson?” Josie said.

“I want to go home.”

“Don’t you want to go up on the stage with Alvina and hear her sing?”

“I want to go home.”

“Well you can’t,” William Henry cut in.

“Why not?”

“Because I say so. We take you home now, we miss the fireworks too.”

“I don’t want to see the fireworks.”

“What do you mean, you don’t want to see the fireworks?”

“Are you tired, Jackson honey? Do you want to sit on Mommy’s lap and go to sleep?”

“I want to go
home
!”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Never mind, Will, he’s just tired. I’ll take him home.”

“No, you won’t. Didn’t you just hear me say he can’t go home?”

Benny said, “Maybe he’s scared of the fireworks.”

“Then he got to learn not to be. There’s plenty things in life scarier than fireworks.”

Then it got dark, finally, and lots of people were standing around looking up and they were lucky to have a bench, except that some of them put their trash in the trashcan right beside it. They didn’t put the street lamps on because of the fireworks, but there were little fires here and there in the barbecues, and some of the cars had their lights on. Still, it was dark enough and there was smoke in the air. Some people were shouting. The sky got pitch black, not even a moon, and when the fireworks started they were nothing much, a few sizzlers and whirligigs, and Josie said, “See, Jackson, they ain’t so bad, are they?” And William Henry was thinking they ain’t so good, neither. But when Jackson didn’t answer and they looked around for him, he wasn’t there.

“Where’s Jackson?” Josie said, and he could already hear the worry in her voice even though the boy probably just went off to the bushes to pee.

When he didn’t come back, they looked for him, calmly at first, but there was a lot of people in the park, and they all had kids, and there was a lot of places he could have gone. Josie called him again and again, her voice getting more and more anxious. William Henry called, too. He went to the bandstand to get Alvina to help them look, and Josie took Benny and went through the bushes, but none of them found him. He was gone. They must have come back to that bench fifty times, thinking if he got lost he would go back to it, and every time they got there and no Jackson, Josie would get worse.

“He been taken,” she wailed at him, grabbing his arm and shaking it. “Somebody took my boy.”

You hear about it happening but you don’t give it much thought. A little girl down the street from them went missing one day and they all went out to help search for her, turned the whole Settlement upside down and never found nothing but her coat, which her mother went around clutching to her for the next four days until the police found the body. And now you remember the papers saying maybe one person in ten thousand was a child snatcher, and you think there’s a couple thousand people in this park, and you start to look at each one of them different. But these are your people. Which ones do you ask for help? William Henry remembers saying to himself, there ain’t no one here going to hurt a child.

Pretty soon they had fifty people looking for him, everybody beating at the bushes and calling, “Jackson!” They spread outside the park, up and down the nearby streets, knocking on doors, looking in people’s garages and sheds and parked cars. Josie and William Henry went around with them at first, but after a time she just sat on the bench and looked like she never going to leave it. That bench was her coat. People brought all kinds of boys up to her, but they was all coloured. None of them was Jackson. She said to William Henry, all quiet like, did he think they ought to tell them they were looking for a white boy? And William Henry thought about it, about telling that crowd of his people that they lost a white boy, and he said no, let them keep bringing up any stray kid they find.

When an hour went by like that, they called the police.

After a long time the police came and told them to go home.
Josie said, Uh-uh, she wasn’t going to leave that bench. Jackson might come back to that bench, he might be out there looking for that bench right now, so they asked how were the police going to contact them if they find him, and Josie said to William Henry he could take Benny and Alvina home, but she would sit on that bench till kingdom come if she had to. So that’s what William Henry did. He was pretty sober by then and he put Benny and Alvina in the back seat and on the way home they drove up and down the streets looking on porches and in between houses. He was sorry for the way he spoke to Jackson, and if Jackson had appeared at that moment he would’ve picked him up and told him so. But they never found him that night. The boy didn’t appear.

The next morning he brought Josie some breakfast at the park, but it turned out he didn’t need to because there was still people from the picnic there and some of them was sitting with her and feeding her. She was still on the bench, a shawl wrapped around her and her eyes sunk so deep he was afraid to look into them. She was like a holy woman. He always thought holy women got that way because they had something extra that nobody else had, but looking at Josie he realized they got holy by losing something, something so precious that when it was gone, all that was left of them was the part nothing could touch.

The police didn’t call that day. There was nothing about a missing child in the papers. One or two neighbours who been at the picnic dropped by, and when they learned there was no news they shook their heads. Police ain’t even looking, they said. At the park, they must have said the same thing to Josie,
because at suppertime she came home and didn’t say nothing but went straight upstairs to the bedroom, and from a drawer in her dresser she took out a photograph of Jackson that William Henry didn’t know she had. He looked like a white boy in it, and she give it to him and told him to take it down to the police station. “They got to know what they looking for,” she said, and William Henry said, “They ain’t looking.” And she said, “They will when they see this.”

William Henry didn’t want to do it, God is his witness he didn’t want to do it. But Josie said it didn’t matter what happened to them, they don’t get their boy back they’re done anyway, so he took the photograph to the police. When he got there, he had to remind the police they was looking for a missing boy. That right? they said, and he gave them the information all over again. Name, age, what Jackson was wearing. They took it all down and told him to go home. Then he showed them the photograph. They took one look at it and told him to sit down.

The police station always bothered him. It didn’t sound like people, it sounded like machines. Sirens, typewriters, telephones, clocks. Eight o’clock, some doors opened. Eight-thirty, a man in a suit come out. “Mr. Lewis?” He said he was a detective sergeant and asked him to describe Jackson again. What colour was his eyes? What colour was his hair? Exactly what was he wearing? Any distinguishing features? William Henry told him Jackson’s eyes was brown, his hair was black, he was wearing a light-blue windbreaker with the zipper broken in the front, and
he had a scar on his left cheek just below the eye where a dog bit him when he was a baby.

“What about his skin?” the detective sergeant asked him.

“Light,” said William Henry. Then, when the detective sergeant didn’t say nothing, he said, “Real light.”

“What do you mean?” the detective sergeant asked shortly.

“Jackson’s a coloured boy,” William Henry said, “but he looks white. To some. Probably to you.”

The detective sergeant looked at William Henry for a long time. William Henry thought he should say something else, then decided he’d said enough.

“We got to be real sure about this.”

“Real sure about what?”

“We got a kid here. Fits the description, I guess.”

“You got Jackson?”