Emancipation Day (29 page)

“We got a kid that fits the description. Says his name is Jack.”

“Yeah, that’s what he calls himself when he’s talkin’ to whites.”

“He also says his parents are dead. He says he’s an orphan.”

“We ain’t dead.”

“He wants us to put him in a new home.”

“He already got a home.”

“Boy says a
white
home.”

That stopped him like a pole between the eyes. This wasn’t a conversation, it was an investigation. Word of a white kid against his. The police weren’t going to give Jackson up.

“Let me see him,” William Henry said.

“All right, but you can’t say nothing to him.”

The detective sergeant took him into a back room, and there was Jackson sitting on a chair talking to another police officer. The cop was Ted Lepage, William Henry used to play poker with him before the Fox Theatre job. William Henry relaxed a bit. Ted would know about Jackson.

When Jackson saw William Henry come in, he went still and the detective sergeant and Ted Lepage looked at each other.

“Hey, Jackson,” William Henry said, then remembered he wasn’t supposed to say anything.

“This ain’t my father,” Jackson said.

“Who said it was?” said the detective sergeant, but Jackson didn’t realize he give himself away.

“My father works in one of them big buildings downtown,” Jackson said. “He goes up in an elevator and he has a secretary. We live in a big house, it’s wide like this and it’s got conker trees in front of it, and we have a maid, a coloured woman named Rosie, and my mother takes me to school every day in a car.”

William Henry sat down on an empty chair in front of his son.

The detective sergeant cleared his throat. “I thought you said you was an orphan.”

“I
am
!” Jackson screamed up at the ceiling, his little fingers clawing at the front of his shirt like he was trying to rip it off.

“Don’t you tear that shirt, boy,” William Henry said.

“My mother and father were both killed,” Jackson said, looking over at William Henry, his face twisted into an expression William Henry never seen on him before. At first he
thought it was just hatred, then he saw other things in it—fear, and anger, and something else, like you see in a caged animal. Helplessness.

Jackson raised his finger and pointed at William Henry. “He killed them. Him and another man, they jump out from behind some bushes and killed my parents, and they tried to kill me, too, but I ran away.”

“Don’t leave town,” the detective sergeant joked when the two cops escorted William Henry and Jackson to the front door of the station. “We get a report of a missing white boy or a couple of dead white parents, we know where to find you.” Detective Constable Ted Lepage didn’t say anything to William Henry but put a friendly hand on his shoulder when he opened the door for him and Jackson to leave.

William Henry was so mad he could barely see to drive. Only thing kept him going was thinking about all the stripes he was going to put on Jackson when he got him home. He was going to give him something make his backside start hurting the minute he even thought about doing this again. The boy sat beside him in the front seat, hands under his knees, staring straight ahead out the window, not saying a word, like he was riding in a hearse, like he was being driven to auction, and it wasn’t so long ago he might have been, running away like that.

When Josie saw Jackson she whooped and run down the hall from the kitchen and threw her arms around him like he the
prodigal son come back from the dead. William Henry was still mad but he didn’t have the heart to take the boy away from her again and whip the living daylights out of him like he wanted to. So he went down to the basement where he kept his spare liquor and sat on a coal sack and thought about what he was going to do about that child once all the merrymaking was done. He had a glass down there because he didn’t like to drink straight from the bottle in the mornings. He could hear Josie upstairs in the kitchen, slaughtering the fatted calf, and he just sitting there getting madder and madder, until finally he went back upstairs and hit Jackson such a smack on the head it made his teeth rattle. No, he didn’t, but that’s what he was seething to do, and he thinks now that since that day he never stopped seething to do it. The look Jackson give him in the police station, that twist of hatred, never left William Henry, stayed burned into his eyes like when you look into a lamp and then turn it off before going to sleep. From that day on William Henry treated him like he was someone else’s child. He saw that look again every time Josie pleaded with him to pick the boy up, take him to a ball game, show him how to hammer a nail into a piece of wood, saw it for the next ten years until Jackson was eighteen and went off to join the Navy, saw it every time he looked at his own self in Harlan’s goddamn mirror. For what was joining the Navy but his own son finishing what he started all them years ago at the Emancipation Day picnic?

When William Henry woke up from this, he would do what he should have done then. He would hit his son. And then he
would hug the boy to him and he would say what he should have told him long ago, he would tell Jackson, You are my son.

The nurse rolled him over on his back. “Help me now, Mr. Lewis, you too big for me to move all by myself.” She changed his catheter bag and put fresh saline solution in his IV.

“All this salt water in your veins,” she said, “we’re going to turn you into a sailor, just like your boy Jackson.”

VIVIAN

D
uring her May appointment, Dr. Barnes came into the examining room drying his hands. He told her to lie back on the table and to unbutton her maternity blouse up to her bra, and to loosen the hook and zipper on her skirt and to slip it down to expose her lower abdomen. She had had to come back to him because she didn’t know any other doctors and because, yes, she trusted him despite what she knew about Della and Jack. Perhaps she even felt a kind of sympathy, almost a kinship, with him, both of them victims of the same deceit. He palpated the lump in her belly like a child trying to guess what gift was inside the pretty pink wrapping paper.

“How big is it?” she asked.

“About a pound and a half,” he said, applying his stethoscope to the mound. “The size of a muskmelon.”

Muskmelons were brown and felt like they had a baby’s caul stretched over them. She shuddered. “Can you hear anything?”

He took the rubber earpieces from his ears and put them in hers. At first there was a lot of rumbling and gurgling, then he moved the disk to a spot on her right side, just under the rib cage, and it was as though he had turned the dial on a marconi set. VONF, Newfoundland’s newest singing sensation. She could clearly make out two distinct sets of drumbeats, one muted but insistent, ponderous, that was her heart, a bass drum heard from a block away. The other was closer, small and quick and tentative as a tom. The two drums were playing off each other, question and answer, call and response, Is everything all right? Boom! Is everything all right? Boom! and the tom sending back, Yes-yes, yes-yes.

“How’s the milk coming?” Dr. Barnes asked her.

She took the earpieces from her ears. “Isn’t it a bit early for that?”

“I mean your drinking milk. Four glasses a day.” He pulled down her lower eyelid and peered in. “Your iron seems fine,” he said. “Having headaches?”

“No.”

She wanted to tell him that he had been right not to come to their wedding, to begin missing her before she was even gone. Her empty room in the house in Ferryland, her empty place at the dinner table. She had filled both for so long, and then Jack
had come and almost overnight had taken her away. She’d left her father without saying a proper goodbye, and now it looked as though she might never return. She hadn’t sent the stamps, she must do that tomorrow, but what would she say in the letter? And what if she went home now with a coloured baby? Wouldn’t he think she had been with a sailor from the Islands, some night when Jack was out playing at a dance? Wouldn’t he take Jack’s side? Wouldn’t it be the same nightmare?

So she had lost her father, and Iris would just say she’d tried to warn her, and Freddie would back Iris up, and her mother would throw up her hands and go to bed for a week. She’d lost touch with Frank and Jeannie. And Della, she never wanted to lay eyes on that woman again. Even Alvina and Jack’s mother had become distant, preoccupied with the approaching Emancipation Day picnic. Who else but Jack was left?

She gave the earpieces to the doctor. “Are you sure everything’s … okay?” she asked, as though he, too, had heard the drums. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Everything’s fine,” said the doctor. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing.”

JACK

O
n the last night of July, a Saturday, Jack played a job with a dance combo at a tavern in Essex County. When the dance ended and he was putting his horn away, the bandleader handed him ten dollars and told him he’d call him again if he ever needed a trombone player. Ten dollars was ten dollars. He was paying five dollars a month for a truckload of furniture he’d ordered from Woodward’s that hadn’t even been delivered yet, seven a week for the hospital room now that his father had been moved to a ward, eight a week for the apartment, it was adding up to an arm and a leg. Benny wasn’t getting him any work. Benny usually wasn’t sober enough to hold a glass, let alone a trowel. Jack had been into Labadie’s to see if they needed a
salesman. He told them he’d been a salesman in Toronto, but they said they were full up. He was hired to patch up a house on Factoria Road, near the Chrysler plant, for a quick sale, which meant he could do a better job on it and get the jump on other house buyers and buy it himself. He’d be paid to fix up his own house. That was what he’d had in mind when he ordered the furniture, a surprise for Vivian when she came home from the hospital with the baby. A new house, new furniture, everything brand spanking new right down to the dishcloths. They’d start fresh, never look back, just the three of them. Him and Lily White, and little Baby White.

They wanted too much for the house, fifteen hundred dollars, but he thought he could swing it if he landed a job at Chrysler’s. With the union threatening to come in, they were always looking for someone willing to work for what they were offering.

He was too wide awake to go home. He needed time to think and maybe sober up before facing Vivian. She’d be asleep by now anyway, she always was, even though the light bulb in her bedside lamp was usually still warm whenever he got home. She was as big as the
Enola Gay
and the baby was ready to drop any minute, although she still looked good to him. He’d tried to tell her that a few times, but she just looked at him like he was lying. The few times he’d tried to put his hand on her stomach, to feel the life that they’d made together, she’d gone all tense, like he was hurting her, or trying to hurt the baby. Jesus, what did she think he was?

He drove down Ouellette with the window open, taking in the sweet, vegetal smell of the elms that lined Jackson Park.
Lights were still on in the bandstand even though it was after one o’clock in the morning: coloureds setting up for Emancipation Day, he supposed. His mother and Alvina were probably there. As he approached Sandwich East, he saw the Merc parked by the ferry dock. What was Benny doing down here? He was probably in the British-American, drinking with Uncle Harley in the barbershop with the blinds drawn. Benny often slept there these days, slumped in the barber chair like their grandfather used to do. The light in the old, fly-specked barber’s pole in the lobby would be turned off until morning, when Jack imagined Uncle Harley gave Benny his morning shave.

Jack parked behind the Merc, in front of a low, wooden building, a former warehouse that had seen better days. It had a crooked porch and the windows were boarded up, but a sign above the door said “The Flatted Fifth.” It looked dark from a distance, but this close he could see light between the slats and when he turned the Hup’s engine off he could hear music and voices pouring out onto the street. A speakeasy! Whoever owned the place was paying a fortune to someone, the cops, the mob, bootleggers. They were probably smuggling their booze across from Detroit by boat. He got out of the car and pissed against a bollard, which reminded him of his days in St. John’s, the number of times he’d pissed against trees and buildings as he made his way up from Water Street to the barracks, rolling home dead drunk.

As he was getting back into the car, the door of the speakeasy opened and a woman came out and stood on the top step. The
band must have been taking a break, because it was quiet except for the sound of crickets and water gently lapping against the ferry dock. He looked up at her.

“Hello, Della,” he said.

“Jack?” It was like she was having trouble recalling his name.

The thought angered him. It angered him even more that he still needed something from her.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I own the place.”

“The hell you do.”

“The hell I do.”

He climbed the steps and stood beside her.

“Someone’s going to kill themselves on these steps,” he said.

“Nowhere’s safe these days,” she replied.

They stood watching the Detroit skyline, the dull yellow arc of the Ambassador Bridge, the flashing red light on top of the Penobscot Building, the softer lights of Belle Isle and the Ford plant, steady above their flickering reflections in the silently flowing river. There was something about looking out over water at night, he remembered it from the Navy. The Black Bottom looked dark and deserted, as it had the night of the riot.

Della asked him how Vivian was.

“She’s fine. The baby’s late, but your husband says that’s normal for a first child.”

“My husband says nothing’s normal,” she said.

Inside, the band started up again. Jack recognized the tune. “Autumn Leaves.”

“This joint a black-and-tan?” he asked. He tried to keep the sneer out of his voice, but wasn’t sure he’d succeeded.