Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (10 page)

The mouthful of pork chop I was swallowing stuck in my throat, and I coughed and spluttered. My face flushed, and I had to take a big drink of lemonade to get everything down. By the time I finished, both of my parents were giving me that oh-no-you-didn't face.

I wheezed a couple of times, then got myself together enough to say, “Could we not talk about Worm Dung at dinner, please? I don't want anything to do with him.”

From the expressions on my parents' faces, neither one of them believed me.

“He's under a lot of pressure,” Mom said, “having to help look after Avadelle. Hard as our situation might be, at least Ruth isn't screaming at preachers and being hostile to half the town.”

“I don't feel sorry for Mac,” I said, even though I sort of did. A little bit. It was so completely time to change the subject. “Dad, did Grandma say anything else this morning, when she was upset?”

He paused, a hunk of pork chop right in front of his mouth. “Not really. She settled down pretty fast after you left.”

I turned enough to run my fingers along Grandma's white sheets. Her eyes were closed, but I didn't think she was sleeping. “Do you think she was talking about the answers to her fight with Avadelle?”

“Where on earth would you get that idea?” Dad shook his head. “She said ‘Oops' a few times today though, almost.”

Mom squeezed her eyes shut. “I vote we move on from
that
piece of Dani's past. I hate that nickname.”

I held back a laugh and tried to keep a serious face on for Mom as I said, “It doesn't bother me. I always thought it was funny.”

“You were not an oops-baby,” Mom said. “We wanted you more than anything.”

Dad grinned. “We had just given up on getting you, so you were a great big, wonderful surprise.”

“Six pounds, two ounces at birth. I wasn't that big.” I shifted my attention back to Grandma, thinking about her gibberish pages. If I didn't ask my parents what they knew about that time in Grandma's life, I'd be completely stuck.

“Do you think Grandma ever wrote something about her fight with Avadelle, and the Magnolia Feud? Maybe something that would explain what could have been so bad that they just stopped being friends? I mean, she might have done that and hidden it somewhere.”

Dad clinked his silverware on his plate as he put it down. “Pretty sure she didn't. And it wouldn't be a good idea to stir up that mess again. Mama's taking her piece of it to the grave, and based on how many reporters Avadelle's cussed over asking, she's never going to discuss it either. If they don't want to share their troubles with the world, that's their business.”

I put my hand on Grandma's bony, warm shoulder. “Maybe. But what if that's what's upsetting Grandma now? What if she needs to work out her fight with Avadelle before she dies?”

“I can't imagine Avadelle wanting to see Ruth like this,” Mom said. “And Ruth sure wouldn't want Avadelle around her when she can't defend herself.”

Norah Jones started singing “Come Away with Me.” I picked up Grandma's spoon and got her a bite of pork chop. When I touched her cheek, her eyes opened and fixed on a spot on the ceiling. Tears slid slowly down her gaunt face, and her lips moved like she was talking to somebody I couldn't see.

“Grandma, don't cry.” I moved the bite so I could lean down and kiss her forehead.

My kiss made her weep harder, and she lifted her hand and pressed it into my hair. “Ewww,” she whispered, pushing my head against her face until my neck cramped. “Ewww. Ewwww.”

I tried to pull away, but she wouldn't let me go. I didn't want to yank free because I was scared I'd hurt her, so I just said, “Dad, a little help here?”

His chair slid against the wood floor as he got up, and I listened as he walked to the other side of the bed.

“Mama.” He slowly worked her hand free from my hair. “Take it easy on the kid. We don't want to pull her head off, even if she does fraternize with nasty slugs like Mac Richardson.”

“I don't fraternize with Mac anymore,” I protested, my words muffled by Grandma's face.

By the time Dad got me free, Grandma had stopped crying and gone back to staring.

“What do you think that was about?” Mom asked as I sat down.

“Have to admit, she seems unsettled any time Avadelle comes up.” Dad went back to his chair and settled in to eat again. “Maybe we shouldn't talk about the Richardsons around her anymore.”

“Or maybe we should figure out what happened,” I said. “So Grandma can resolve it and make peace, like the nurses told us to help her do.”

I got up again, but this time, I went to my room and pulled page five out of my backpack. Then I carried it back to Grandma's room and I laid it on the table, right in the middle, where it didn't touch any of our plates. My parents gazed at the page for a time. Then they looked at me.

In the end, it was Dad who asked, “What's this?”

I gestured to the desk behind him, and told my almost-truth. “It's something Grandma wrote. I found it, and I'd like to figure out what some of it means. I think it has something to do with this whole Avadelle thing.”

Dad gave me a yeah-right look. “You think this time line is related to Avadelle?”

“Avadelle tried to take it away from me today,” I said. “In the Grove. It bothered her that I had something Grandma wrote, just like any mention of Avadelle seems to be bugging Grandma.”

Mom's eyebrows lifted.

“It was no big deal, Mom. She said I had no business reading it, or listening to anything Grandma says if she's talking out of her head.”

Dad frowned at the paper. “I want to agree with Avadelle that it's none of your business,” he said. “Not because Mama would mind you messing around with her work, but because the history Mama liked to look into—” He shook his head. “Dani, there's a lot of ugliness in old Oxford, in the old South, that you haven't had to deal with up close. The hornet's nests Mama liked to poke could really sting you.”

I frowned at him. “The past can't hurt me like things in the present.”

“I wish that were true,” Mom said. “You weren't born until after the worst of it, thank God. What happened in Mississippi back then, so much of it was senseless and violent.”

“I've had Mississippi history, and American history.” I put my hand on page five. “Both of you have talked to me my whole life, and Grandma told me a lot of stuff too. I know about civil rights.”

Dad stared at me, right into my eyes, with a funny look on his face. He took a breath like he might be counting to ten so he wouldn't say something sharp. Mom put her hand on his, and that seemed to help enough for him to come out with, “You
think
you know about civil rights.”

“Dani, we talk about police brutality and news stories about racism nearly every day, even though we live next to a university full of educated folks.” Mom moved her hand away from Dad, this time covering my knuckles. “Remember when that kid in kindergarten asked you if you were adopted because your skin didn't match your father's or mine?”

My eyebrows automatically pulled together because thinking about that always ticked me off. “Yes, ma'am. I got grounded for a week because I kicked him.”

“Exactly. Yes. And your father and I, we chose your schools and activities very carefully after that, so you wouldn't have to put up with as many painful questions and bad attitudes just because your parents aren't the
same color. We rarely go into Southern rural areas at all, for the same reason. Times are different, yes, but there are still a
lot
of problems.”

I didn't know what to say to that, so I just looked at her. Bigotry and racism and discrimination stayed all over the news, but in my school, there were lots of kids and teachers like me and Indri, and lots of different skin tones. Nobody talked about race very much, and nothing really bad had happened to me, so I didn't think about it that often.

“I hope you never experience the terrible things your grandmother lived through, and your Dad,” Mom said.

I heard the concern in her voice. I almost told her not to worry, but something stopped me. I mean, it could happen. I didn't want to think that it would, but—maybe?

Stomach churning a little, I pointed to the
Fred
note, and all the numbers. “Indri and I want to go see Dr. Harper tomorrow and see if he knows what these numbers mean.”

“Fred,” Grandma echoed.

We all looked at her, and she was weeping again.

“Enough,” Dad told me in a tone that meant absolutely, positively no arguing. Then he went back to eating, and he didn't look at me, or at Grandma either.

I did what I could to distract Grandma with applesauce, and waited for my parents to tell me not to go see Professor Harper.

But they didn't.

They just stopped talking about the paper I showed them,
and discrimination, and civil rights, and Avadelle. They stopped talking to each other, and stopped talking to me, too.

We ate the rest of dinner with just the music in the background, and the pitiful sound of Grandma crying beside us.

Excerpt from
Night on Fire
(1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 238

Aunt Jessie sat in the front of the little schoolhouse night class as I held up a battered civics book.

“Any of you remember reading something like this in school?”

Leslie raised her hand, then put it back down in a hurry. Red colored the edges of her cheeks as her eyes darted around the eleven other folks stacked into the kids' desks. I was teaching in dim light, so nobody could tell we were here, if they looked from outside.

One of the men raised his hand. “That looks like higher grades. Most of us was done by fourth, fifth at the latest.”

I nodded. “It's around sixth grade, maybe seventh, but even if you went that far in Oxford, you wouldn't
have it. In the South, we aren't allowed to teach from books that show the United States Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence, or the Bill of Rights.”

This made Leslie shift in her chair, wide-eyed.

“Well, of course not.” Aunt Jessie snorted. “If you read them things, you'll know that government is supposed to be by the people and for the people.
All
the people. You'll know your rights, and how they being stepped on down here.”

After that, Leslie came to my illegal classes every Tuesday night. “ ‘We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it,' ” she told me, quoting William Faulkner from an article we read, in
Harper's Magazine
four years ago.

Slowly, we worked on teaching a handful of brave folks who wanted to know more about reading and writing and math and civics, men and women who wanted to understand the founding documents of our country, and how they applied to us as Black people—and how they didn't, at least in the South.

L
AST NIGHT, WHEN
I
WAS
feeding Grandma, I got some green bean milkshake and applesauce milkshake smeared on my shirt. When I took it off, I saw the greenish stain and I treated it just like Mom taught me—stain remover, a little water, and letting it sit.

But when I got up this Tuesday morning, it still wouldn't rub out.
It's like the color dyed the fabric of my shirt—just changed it forever, so it can't be the shirt it used to be, and I can't wear it in public anymore.

It made me wonder if ghosts and ghost stories were like stains on a shirt that just won't come out. Or maybe some things, like wars and hate and discrimination and violence, those things that Indri said were too huge and awful to fix by just saying “I'm sorry,” stain time so nothing can ever be the same again. Did something like that stain the friendship between Grandma and Avadelle, like Mac had stained ours by telling me he couldn't talk to me anymore? Was there any way I could rinse everything out enough to clean it up for both of them? Could I even convince Dad and Mom that I should be allowed to try?

Still way early in the morning, I sat on a bench in our backyard and watched Dad pull weeds out of raised beds full of squash plants and green tomatoes. His hair and beard glistened in the new sunlight, and he was wearing frayed jeans shorts and a white tank, both already soaked with sweat. He stayed bent over, plucking out little green bits and dropping them into a pile near the wooden slats that held the dirt and plants.

I didn't know anything about gardening. Dirt sort of grossed me out. But I liked eating what Dad grew, and I liked watching him be happy. Dad liked that he didn't have to take as much medicine during gardening season, because his nerves got calmer when he could work outside. From March
to October, all he had to take was blood pressure pills, and his time in the garden did the rest.

I had gotten ready for camp early, before the nurse came. Mom might actually blow a gasket in shock over my promptness. Before I went outside, I checked on Grandma like I always did. She was sleeping peacefully, and not crying, but I couldn't forget the sound of her weeping the night before. My throat tightened every time I thought about it, so I used Dad's iPad to play him music to weed by while I read a book I had checked out from camp—
Ghost Stories of Oxford
. As Julie Miller's “All My Tears” played in the early light, I read about people thinking they had seen the ghost of a woman at William Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak. A few minutes later, Dad got my attention when he stood and used a blue bandana to wipe the sweat off his forehead. Then he nodded to me. “Tough song.”