The Summer We Got Free (12 page)

“I remember I had the chicken then, too,” he said.

“Savannah is a beautiful city,” Helena said.

“Oh, it’s pretty,”
Regina
said. “That’s for sure.”

“Y’all
ever been?
” Helena
asked Ava and Sarah, who both shook their heads. “You’d love it, Ava,” Helena
said. “It’s an artist’s dream.
The old churches, the
tree-lined avenues.
I read somewhere that during the Civil War, the
Union army surged into Savannah, intending to blow it to smithereens, but they
couldn’t bring themselves to do it, because it was so beautiful.” She shrugged.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

“Ava don’t do art anymore,” Sarah said.

“Well,” Helena said, looking suddenly self-conscious. “If
she ever decided to again.” She looked at George. “You still have family down
south?”

“No,” he said. He was the only person in his family ever
to move north. His father was already dead when he left, the victim of an
aneurysm caused by high blood pressure that had plagued him for nearly a decade
before he died. In those years his father had been a tense, worried person. He
worked from morning until night in cotton and tobacco fields, and when he came
home he shut himself up alone in the shed where he built his strange sculptures.
But years earlier, when George was a small boy, his father had been different, happier.
He’d worked just as hard and long in the fields, but when he came home he did
so whistling, and George, sitting and waiting for him on the porch, could hear that
sound coming up the road ahead of him. When he went to the shed, he always let
George come with him, and he sat and watched his father making art from old
tractor parts, or scraps of wood, or whatever else he’d scrounged in and around
Hayden. George kept him company by singing him songs and, later, from the time
he was seven or so, telling him stories he made up as he went along, about heroes
and monsters and the occasional distressed damsel, while his father laughed and
kidded him about his inconsistencies, saying, “Hold on, I thought the knight
was Barry. Where the hell Gary
come
from?” George
would fall over giggling. Now he took a sip of water, trying to wash down the
fried okra that was sticking in his throat. He didn’t like thinking about his
father.

Regina was saying, “All my brothers and sisters who
living is still down Georgia. They used to come and visit every few years,
before it got to be a hassle.”

Sarah frowned. “Aint nobody else got lynched we don’t
know about?”

“Girl, you better watch your mouth,” Regina said. “You
better remember who you talking to, and quick. Now, I told you, y’all
was
too young to know about that.”

“We aint been kids in a long time,” Sarah said. “How
come you didn’t tell us when we got older?”

Now Regina looked livid. “Why didn’t
I tell you
? I aint
tell
you, because aint nobody
asked
me nothing in seventeen years. Everybody around here act like saying one wrong
thing to me is gone send me into a fit, and I’m gone start clucking like a
chicken or something.”

“Saturday mornings—”

“I aint talking about Saturday mornings!” Regina said.
“It aint just then. It’s all the time. Y’all tiptoe around me every day of the
week. Y’all talk to me just enough to make sure I don’t babble back. So, why
I’m supposed to think you
wanna
know something about me? About something terrible that happened to me four
decades back, when y’all can’t barely look me in the eye because if the
terrible thing that happened to me seventeen years ago?”

“It happened to all of us, Mama,” Sarah said. “Not
just you.”

“It did not happen to all of us!” Regina said, rising from
her chair. “It didn’t happen to
nobody
the way it happened to
me
. That was
my son. I carried that boy in my body. Unless you have your own child and have
him taken from you, you
won’t never
know what happened
to me.”

“It’s alright, Mama,” Ava said, putting her hand on
Regina’s.

Regina pulled the napkin from her collar and dropped
it on her plate, and walked out of the kitchen.

George sighed. “I guess y’all found out about your
grandfather.”

Ava nodded.

“How? I aint think Regina was ever gone tell you.”

“We was showing Helena old pictures,” Sarah said, “and
she asked Mama about him.”

George looked at Helena. “Boy, it aint no end to your
curiosity, is it?”

“I don’t see anything wrong with asking questions, Mr.
Delaney.”

“It don’t seem right to me,” he said, “coming into
somebody’s house and getting all in they business.”

Helena frowned. “I don’t think I’m doing that. I’m
interested in your family. Not just in how they
seem
, but in how they
are
,
and that means asking questions.”

“Why the hell you so interested?”

“Because you’re my brother’s family now, and I’m
interested in knowing the people in his life. If that offends you for some
reason, then I’m sorry.”

She was looking at him, in that way he hated, her
light eyes searching his. He looked away from her, not wanting her to see
anything that was inside him.

“Daddy, stop it,” Ava said. “Helena didn’t mean any
harm.”

“Mama the one lied to us,” Sarah said.

“Well, so did I, if you gone look at it that way,”
George said, surprised to find himself defending Regina. “Neither one of us
thought y’all should know. So, I guess you pissed at me, too?”

Sarah shook her head. “It’s not the same thing.”

“Why not?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“Because we don’t expect the truth from you, Daddy,”
Ava said.

George felt a tightening in his gut, a squeezing. He
saw contempt in his daughter’s face, loathing, disgust. He blinked and it was
gone, and for a moment he wondered if he’d imagined it.

“But we do expect it from Mama,” Ava said.

Helena’s eyes were on him and he avoided them, looking
from Ava to Sarah. “That’s what y’all think about me?” he asked, trying to
sound amused, as if it were silly.

Neither of them looked the least amused. Sarah picked
at some crabmeat on her plate. Ava just looked at him, and though he did not
see loathing in her eyes, he also did not see her usual indifference there.
Instead, he saw the fiery eyes of the child he remembered from long ago, back
before death had changed her, had changed all of them—not Southern death,
not like Regina’s father, but death particularly Northern, made of hope and
possibilities—and he felt weak in her gaze, and undone.

The fried okra on his plate smelled suddenly
sickening, but he did not want to appear guilty of anything, so he fought the
urge to get up from the table, and sat there with the nasty smell in his nose,
while the others finished their dinner in silence.

***

George sat shirtless on the end of his bed, the
cigarette in his hand half-burned-away while he neglected to smoke it, the ash
dropping near his feet on the wood floor. He wondered when he had grown old. As
a man who avoided looking at his own reflection, he had missed the first
appearance of so many of the lines around his eyes, and so much of the graying
hair at his temples and in the stubble on his face. He had never been fully
aware of the softening of his chest and arm muscles and the slight yellowing of
the whites of his eyes. He had become an old man without realizing it and not
just on the outside.
On the inside, too.
At some
moment—he did not know when—he had grown weary, exhausted with
secrets, and all the minutes of his life had become tired lies. He remembered a
time when he was not this man, when he did not sneak and lurk in shadow, when
he could look his children in the eyes and not wonder what they suspected about
him.

Getting up off
the bed, George put his cigarette out in the ashtray on the side table and
pulled on the shirt he had taken off less than an hour before. He stepped into
his shoes and left his bedroom again, heading down the stairs and through the
foyer, and he could hear the television set playing in the living room as he
went out the front door.

Sunday evenings
in the city always sound the same. Everything is hushed and slow and the faint
tunes of radios create an
underhum
in the air, especially
in summer. George walked the length of the block with his head down, as always.
He did not like to look directly at his neighbors, could not bear the whispers,
or the stares they still gave him even after all these years. But there were
few people outside, and when he got to the corner and crossed the street, he
slipped unseen, he thought, behind the church. There was a short alleyway that
led along the side of the building, and George walked along it, concealed in
the falling night, and came out by the back door of Blessed Chapel, in the
small parking lot, and stood staring up at the church.

George had been a different man when he was part of
the church, a stronger man, a man who could resist the devil because he lived so
close to God, because the Lord knew him and watched over him, and helped him.
When he had lost that, he believed, he had lost himself.

First checking to see that there were no lights on
inside the church, George tried the back door and, just as he thought it
probably would be, it was locked. He crouched down and peered into the lowest
windows, the ones that led into the church’s basement, where, long years ago,
his children had sat through Sunday school classes, and found each one locked
as well. He frowned and squinted up at the next-highest windows, the ones that
illuminated the main sanctuary. There were times, in summer, when one or more
of them would be left open a crack at night, for ventilation, because Pastor
Goode hated the stale smell of the place when it was kept completely closed up
overnight. Looking up at the windows, though, George saw not one of them ajar.
He climbed up the back stairs and tried the door that led into the sanctuary,
but no luck. Holding the railing, he leaned over and pressed him palm against
the glass of the nearest window, but it did not give.

“They all locked,” he heard a voice saying from behind
him.

George turned. Standing there in the low glow from the
half-dark sky was Chuck Ellis.

“I know, ‘cause I locked them all myself,” Chuck said.

It had been years since George had seen Chuck up
close. He and Lena had moved off Radnor Street back in 1965. Since then, George
had only caught glimpses of him on his way into or out of Blessed Chapel on Sundays.
Up close, George could see how much Chuck had changed. He had gotten fatter,
particularly around the middle, and his belly, once flat beneath his Sunday
dress shirts, now strained against his leather belt. The hair at his temples
was graying, as was his moustache, and his once boyish face looked pudgy and
weathered. But his eyes were the same, deep brown and kind, as he looked at
George.

“Something in there you need?” he asked.

George walked back down the stairs, holding on to the
railing because he felt unsteady. He wanted to appear sure of himself,
unbothered by Chuck’s presence, but his head felt heavy on his shoulders, and
he watched the ground as he walked past Chuck, and out through the parking lot,
back to the street.

When Paul got home, near eleven that night, he found his
sister-in-law curled up on the sofa, the light from the television set
flickering along the walls of the room.

“What you doing
down here?” he asked her, standing in the doorway. “I thought you was sleeping
in Regina’s room.”

“Me and Mama had
a fight,” she said.

“About what?”

“You know her
father, me and Ava’s grandfather, the one she said died in a farm accident?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he
didn’t. He got shot by some white men.”

“Lynched?”

She nodded.

“Jesus,” Paul
said. He came inside the room and sat down on the arm of the sofa, by Sarah’s
feet.

“She been lying
to us about it all this time,” Sarah said.

“Well, I can see
why,” said Paul. “That aint nothing you want to tell to children.”

“We aint
children no more, Paul.”

“You still
her
children.”

“That aint no
excuse.”

“You really that
upset about it?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Why? I mean,
okay, she
lied
—that aint never good. But you
aint even
know
the man, did you? He died long before
you
was
born, right? So, I don’t understand why you
this upset about it.”

“Because it
makes me feel like I don’t know my mother, not knowing something that important
about her. It makes me feel like I don’t know her at all. I sure don’t know my
father. Where he goes all the time, what he does. I don’t know my sister,
either. You know today she told me that she
can’t
remember what she was like when she was a child, that she can’t remember
changing? If that’s true, then I damn sure don’t know her, because I thought
all this time she had changed on purpose, out of grief.” She shrugged. “And I
don’t know you, either, Paul. We might as well be strangers in this house, all
of us. Living this way, cut off from people is bad enough. But
cut off from each other is…well
,
it just
makes me angry
.
And sad.
We used to be a real
family. We really did. But we stopped caring whether we knew each other or not.
And I hate that. I resent it.”

Paul didn’t know
what to say. He understood how it felt to not know your relatives the way you
thought you ought to. He sighed. “So, you really gone sleep down here on this
lumpy ass couch?”

She nodded.

“You want me to
go get you another pillow or something?”

“No, thank you,”
she said, folding her arms across her chest and looking like a sad little girl.