The Summer We Got Free (10 page)

One evening, after service was over, George hung
around while Chuck talked with a few people who needed further guidance and
comfort. Then, when everyone else had left, they sat and talked awhile about
how the service had gone.

“People like
listening to you,” George told Chuck. “I can tell.
You a real
good speaker.
How come you don’t preach?”

“The Lord aint
called me to it, I guess,” Chuck said. “What about you? You got a good speaking
voice. I bet you be great reading the scripture, or leading prayer.”

“I don’t know
about that,” George said.

"Well, you just let me know if you want to give
it a shot one of these evenings.”

It was near eight o’clock by the time George got home
and when he walked into the house, his mother said, “Where you been?”

“Prayer.”

“What you been praying for that got you smiling from
ear to ear like that?”

The grin on his face dropped away. He thought he saw
Regina glance at him from her seat in front of the television.

“Nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking about
something funny, something Sister Kellogg said after the service.”

“What she
say
?”

“You won’t understand it if you wasn’t there.”

As he moved to go up the stairs, Regina said, “Your
dinner’s on top of the stove. Aint you hungry?”

“No. I’ll take it for lunch tomorrow,” and he went on
upstairs.

Later, when Regina came up, he said, “It was something
about the pews.”

She paused in putting cream on her elbows and looked
at him funny. “What you talking about?”

“What Grace Kellogg
said.
It
was something about how hard the pews is. She said they make them like that so
when the preacher tell us we all going to hell, we can feel like our backsides
is already there.”

Regina laughed. “That Grace is a mess.”

“Yeah, she is,” said George.

When they climbed into bed, George put his hand on the
back of Regina's head and kissed her mouth. Regina put her arms around his
shoulders and held him to her. She kissed him again, pulling him down on top of
her. George reached down under the covers, and grabbed the hem of her nightgown,
and pulled it up over her head. He kissed her throat and shoulders and breasts,
and, at first, Regina liked it, but after a while, when he had gone no further,
hadn't even taken off his drawers, she reached down and took hold of his penis,
which was only half-erect, and stroked it with her palm and fingers, until,
finally, he removed her hand and pushed himself inside her. Regina closed her
eyes and tried to enjoy the physical pleasure, and to ignore the disappointment
that was flooding through her, the same as it always did whenever her husband
made love to her, the emotional disappointment that had been constant, almost
since the beginning of their relationship.

Long before they were married, George had been a
friend of Regina's three older brothers, for years, since they were all
children. He and Regina had never been close, but they had always been aware of
each other, if vaguely. When George, at the age of twenty-two, had begun to
court Regina, who was seventeen then, she had been surprised. He wasn't bad looking,
and some of her girlfriends even thought he was sexy, but Regina had always
thought of him as a skinny, distracted boy, always staring off into nothing,
his bulgy eyes always squinted in consideration of some thought in his head,
rather than any conversation going on around him. He was a surprisingly ardent
suitor, though, and, once she had decided to give him a chance, she had found
that she liked his sense of humor, which was cutting and sarcastic, and the way
he liked to talk for hours about picture shows and music, rather than spending
all their time together trying to get between her legs like most men did. In
fact, George had proposed marriage before they had even slept together, and
Regina had told him they would have to do that first, because she couldn’t imagine
marrying a man she didn’t like in bed. After a sweaty, clumsy time out in a
tobacco field, Regina decided to definitely not marry him. He was a bad lover,
tentative and timid, at times unable to keep an erection. She was a pretty
girl, who liked, and was liked by, other boys. She had had two lovers, and both
of them had been better than George, and she didn't think she needed to settle.

"Regina, that aint no good reason not to marry
him," her friend Frances had told her. "If God meant that to be the
test, he wouldn't have made it a sin to have sex outside marriage. You aint
supposed to know nothing about that going into it."

Regina had been brought up in the church and taught
that sex before marriage was sinful. But she knew hardly anyone who didn't do
it. And while she always joined in gossip about girls who gave it up to any boy
who looked at them sideways, she thought doing it with somebody you were going
with was perfectly reasonable. She looked it up in her bible and found nothing
to support Frances’ claim. There were scriptures warning against adultery,
incest, homosexuality, and bestiality, but normal sex outside marriage was
never even mentioned as a sin. The question of whether or not to do it was
already moot, though, and the question of whether or not to marry him became
equally pointless when she realized she was pregnant.

To her surprise
and delight, George became a better lover after they had been together a little
while. He was good at reading her and figuring out what she wanted. He learned
the terrain of her body and could explore it with confidence. But the better he
got at pleasing her physically, the more Regina felt him switching off
emotionally. Whenever she had asked him about it, he'd said he didn't know what
she was talking about, and sometimes he got angry, and over the years she had
stopped asking. Their marriage was mostly good in every other way, so she had
decided not to dwell on the one thing that didn't seem to work.

Lying there beneath her husband now, she pushed from
her mind images of things she did not want to see, and let pleasure carry her
away from doubt.

Near the end of that same week, Deacon Henry Ellis,
Chuck Ellis’ father, died unexpectedly, and everybody from Blessed Chapel
grieved along with
their
family. George watched
through the front window as a seemingly endless stream of condolence-givers
rang Chuck’s bell, all of them carrying covered dishes that no doubt contained
cobblers and casseroles of all sorts. George wondered why death always called
for food and guessed it was because it was the one way everyone knew to comfort
each other, to say the things they couldn’t always think of words for. When his
own father had died, years ago, when he was fifteen, their neighbors in Hayden
had brought so many cakes and stews and pots of greens that he and his mother
had eaten for weeks, once they had been able to eat. George remembered how his
friend, Dale Jefferson, who had never cooked anything in his life, had tried to
make candied sweet potatoes, and had brought them over to George one afternoon
while his mother was resting. They were terrible, overcooked and flavorless,
but sitting there at the tiny kitchen table, eating them with Dale, George had
felt that everything Dale could not say to him—could not say because they
were supposed to be men and there were things men could not say to each
other—was spoken in the scent of the sweet potatoes, which, even if
nothing else was right about the dish, was perfect. Standing at his front
window now, George watched as Chuck came out onto his porch to greet Malcolm,
Vic, and Gladys, who were all carrying casserole dishes.

George left the window and went into the kitchen. He
searched the cupboards, and the refrigerator, trying to think of something he
could make. He and Regina were already planning to take over a yellow cake she
had baked, but now George wanted to cook something himself. George knew how to
cook. His mother, who had kept him close to her throughout his early boyhood,
had taught him to cook and clean and sew. His father had argued with her
constantly, saying that a boy ought to learn what a man needed to know, but his
mother always got her way.

George found a pastry crust that Regina had frozen and
remembered that Chuck loved shepherd’s pie. He checked the clock. It was near
three and Regina wouldn’t be home until after five. His mother had taken the
children to the playground in the park down the street and he was sure they
would be back within the hour. He didn’t want to be caught making a shepherd’s
pie, didn’t want to have to answer his mother’s questions about why he was
making it. He needed to cook something simpler, something faster. He found
sweet potatoes in the bottom drawers of the refrigerator. He could candy them and
take them over to Chuck before his mother returned.

He filled a large pot with water, and set it on the
stove to boil. He preheated the oven, then peeled the sweet potatoes, quartered
them, and dropped them into the boiling water. Every little while, he checked
the time. When the sweet potatoes were soft, he drained the water, then mashed
them, put them into a large bowl, and added generous amounts of butter and
sugar, stirring it all together with a large wooden spoon, adding cinnamon and
nutmeg. He then poured the sweet potatoes into a baking dish and set them in the
oven. The candied smell filled the room. Despite the chill outside, he opened
all the windows and the back door, to let the warmth and the aroma waft away.
Fifteen minutes later, when the sweet potatoes were nice and browned, he took
them out of the oven and set them on top of the stove to cool, while he cleaned
up all evidence of his effort, washing the dishes and wiping down the counter.
It had only taken him forty-five minutes, but it wasn’t fast enough. He heard
the front door open and the children bounding into the house, followed by his
mother’s voice, saying, “Ooh, Lord, it’s chilly in here.” Cursing under his
breath, he quickly put the top on the baking dish and set the sweet potatoes in
the refrigerator, back behind the previous night’s leftovers, and closed all
the kitchen windows, just as Geo ran into the kitchen, saying, “Daddy, we
climbed all the way to the top of the monkey bars!”

George waited for a chance to slip out with the
candied sweet potatoes, but his mother gave him none. She sat in the kitchen
all afternoon, smoking and listening to the radio. When Regina got home, she
and Mother Haley heated up the last night’s leftovers, while George played
cards with the children. When the aroma of candied yams rose again in the air, George
hurried into the kitchen and found Regina placing the baking dish on the table,
with the other heated-up food.

“Regina, that’s—” He stopped. He knew that if he
told her that he had made the dish for Chuck, she would think it was strange.
He had never made anything to take over to any of their other grieving friends.
Regina always cooked something, and she had already made the yellow cake to
take over after dinner. It would seem odd to her that he had gone out of his
way to make another dish.

“What?” Regina asked.

“I made them sweet potatoes,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “I figured your mother made
them.”

Mother Haley looked up from the greens she was
seasoning. “I thought Regina made ‘
em
.”

“No, I did,”
George
said.

“Well, that was nice. I forgot
those
sweet potatoes was
in there. I’m glad they didn’t go bad.” She stuck a
serving spoon into the baking dish. Then she called for the children and they
all sat down to eat. George watched as she scooped out some of the candied yams
for each child, then a little for herself, before passing the dish to his
mother, who took an extra large helping before passing the dish to George.

George set it back down on the table. Watching his
family eat the sweet potatoes, hearing their lips smack and the unusually loud
squunch
of their throats as they swallowed, seeing chicken
and collard greens crowd against the sweet potatoes on their plates, so that
they looked less golden brown, and their sweet, cinnamon aroma was drowned out
by the smells of the other foods, George felt sad and very tired.

After dinner, George and Regina went over to Chuck’s
with the yellow cake Regina had baked. When George saw Chuck he thought he
looked unglued, like a torn apart thing trying to hold itself together. Chuck
took George upstairs, away from everyone.

"He wasn't
proud of me," Chuck said, sitting on the bed he shared with his wife.

"What you
mean? He was always bragging on you,” said George, leaning against the dresser.

"He was?
What he
say
?"

"When you
got the Buick, he went around church all the next Sunday telling everybody how
good you was doing for your family."

Chuck nodded.
"Yeah." He was quiet for a long moment, then, "You think any man
ever feel like he what his father want him to be?"

"I don't
know. Not this man."

The half-cracked
bedroom door opened wider, and Lena, Chuck’s wife, poked her head in. She was a
little woman, short and very thin, bony, with tiny wrists and ankles, and no
hips or breasts to speak of. George thought of her as barely a wisp of a
person, not particularly womanly in any way, not particularly anything really.
When he had first met her, right before service the first Sunday they’d
attended Blessed Chapel, when Maddy had introduced George and Regina to the
couple, George had almost not even realized she was standing there beside her
husband. When Maddy had said, “This is Deacon Ellis’ wife, Lena,” George had
almost not understood who she was talking about, until Chuck had put his arm
around Lena’s shoulders and she came into focus, came into being almost.