Those Bones Are Not My Child (78 page)

“It’s been clear for some time,” the worker said, “that the authorities were bound to arrest a Black man, and soon, preferably a militant or a radical or a Rasta. Failing that, a sexual deviant or a weirdo, someone no one would wish to be associated with by coming to his defense or by challenging the so-called evidence against him. Someone they could isolate.”

He then took a call and stated again that Williams was a scapegoat. “Guilty or innocent, he is a scapegoat being used to protect a number of people’s careers. People say that DA Slaton bowed to pressure and agreed to charge Williams when he didn’t want to. I say Slaton was glad to get off the hook.”

“What are you doing?” Mattie reached for Zala as she got up. “You look terrible, girl.”

“I want to call in. He’s gotten on everybody else. Maybe he doesn’t know that Commissioner Brown was scheduled to turn over the list to the city council of all unsolved killings, deadline June 30. Now he’s off the hook too.”

But she didn’t go to the phone. She went to the refrigerator and looked inside. The shelves seemed a mirage. Reaching for the bowl of Jell-O, her hand seemed to fall through space.

“Don’t keep the flowers in the refridge, Marzala. Let’s have them on the table.”

“I feel a little peculiar.” Zala stretched out her hand toward the jar of flowers. The jar seemed to recede.

“You mustn’t keep giving yourself that message or you will get sick.”

“Think you’re pregnant?” Paulette said, fanning her skirt.

“That would be lovely, wouldn’t it?” Mattie smiled.

Zala looked at Mattie. An ordinary smile, an ordinary face. The face of a person she’d once attributed extraordinary powers to at a time when she was hoping that Mattie possessed the ability to bring off a miracle. Sitting there with her mascara about to run, Mattie Shaw in her yellow-and-white smocked dress looked like nothing more or less than a good person, a friend, a middle-aged woman with a fondness for makeup, stories, and clanky jewelry.

“If you ask me, I’d say three children at your age is already one too many.” Paulette was glad when the phone rang, sparing her whatever criticism went with the pained expression on Mattie’s face. Mattie’s eyes were rolling and her lashes were fluttering like a person who’d used the wrong eye drops.

“Take that call.”

The ferocious whisper made Zala move obediently toward the living room. Mattie’s face had gone vacant and her eyes were suddenly still.

“You all right?” Paulette reached for Mattie’s wrist, then shot to the freezer for ice. Zala was in the living room, wound in the cord, trying to keep track of what was going on in the kitchen, when someone on the phone asked first for a Miss Foreman and then a Marsha Spence. Another woman came on the line and corrected the operator.

“I think it’s for you, Paulette. Central intake, a hospital. Miami, I think.”

Paulette slapped a dish towel of ice against the back of Mattie’s head and pressed her head down. “Take a message.”

“This is Marzala Spencer speaking. May I take the message for Nurse Foreman?”

The woman began again when the operator clicked off, explaining that she was a clerk at central intake and calling about a patient.

“At first we thought he might be one of the boat children,” the caller said. “He was suffering from severe exposure. He wouldn’t speak.
We thought he might be Haitian or Cuban. After the first IV, he detached the tube and hid in the bathroom, curling up in the tub as many of the boat children do. But something in the workup sheet reminded me of the missing children flyers Nurse Foreman distributed when she was here doing volunteer work with the refugee committee.”

Coming in the door on the heels of the children—literally stepping on the back of Kenti’s sandal—Spence wasn’t sure if Zala was pleading with someone on the phone or begging the children to be quiet. Kenti wanted no part of the SAFE summer camp programs. And Bobby reported that camp counselors like himself weren’t about to spend the summer indoors with no air-conditioning, either.

Kofi dropped his load of library books, missing the arm of the sofa by four inches, when he saw his mother’s face.

“That’s my foot, you know.” But Kenti cut it short when she turned and saw Zala.

“Don’t worry,” Gloria was telling Spence as she latched the screen door. “Bruce can tap into six county systems and trace those license plates for you.” Turning, she snapped her fingers. Her uncle was bending down, listening in on the phone. Her aunt was staring at the mirror mounted on the back of the door and not even seeing her standing there.

“What’s the matter?”

Zala saw her mouth in the mirror trying to form the words “front tooth” and handed Spence the phone. His free hand was scattering things on the table and then the contents of the folder, the photo, the medical report, the dental card, the flyer.

“Does he have a chipped tooth in front? The uppers,” Spence said, his hand in his mouth until Kenti reached up and pulled it free. “The tooth to the right of the two big ones in front, is it chipped?”

Walking backward, Zala watched his face contort. She didn’t have to hear it. The John Doe Jr. in observation in Pediatrics, found wandering in a daze on the highway, barefoot, in khaki shorts and a ragged child’s undershirt four sizes too small, was so badly battered, it was difficult to isolate one area of damage from another. One chipped tooth in a jaw they’d had to wire shut when the X rays came back could not be readily remembered.

Zala raised her arms in front of the window to be sure she was there. She was hung out in space, pale in the glassy blue, no more solid than
gelatin turned out of a mold and trying to cling fast. She knew she was not dreaming this time. “Mama gonna fly.”

Kenti’s words stayed in their ears and moved in their blood for the next three cruel hours it took to empty pockets and bags on the table, Paulette across the street borrowing from the boarders, Peeper screaming from the window as they unloaded Dave’s station wagon that a rearview didn’t matter so long as the tires weren’t bald and the tank was full, the dresser refusing to come unstuck, one leg loose and jammed in a corner back of the seat, and Silas Grier pulling up, listening to Kenti and Mattie, and handing over his Gulf Oil card and thirty dollars and going in to dinner without a word.

“Only maybe,” Spence said as they flew down the highway, the half-ironed clothes folded on the backseat.

“Don’t.” For she was already at the hospital running up the three side steps as Paulette had described them, racing past reception, where Spence would stop and ask that the intake clerk be called and the doctor paged. A left past the water fountain and on past two doors, first the social worker’s with a green plate, then the volunteer office, where a trolley of books would be parked. Take those stairs, elevator’s slow and you need a pass, to the third floor, then left past the first ward and straight through the playroom with the rocking horse. Then right at the fire extinguisher, the red In Case of Emergency Smash Glass box, to a narrow corridor where the tile ends. First door in front of the locked ward knock and ask for Patti with an
i
, never mind the last name, she’s Ghanaian and keeps her surname off her plate, a serious sister with no time for gab and no tolerance for silly conversations about names’ meanings. She will take you to the boy. Trust her. She’s had good rapport and is the only one he allows to find him.

“Let me drive, Spence.”

“No.”

She didn’t insist. It would be dangerous to change seats doing 85 mph, and stopping was out of the question. So was too much talk. They must do nothing to rob the car of its energy. When he said “God?” she didn’t ask what he was praying for.

Spence changed lanes again and zipped past a Spitfire, keeping his
eyes on the clouds of vapor billowing up over the shrubs where the road curved in front of them. The vapor settled into the green like angel hair. He knew it was a sign, a paradox, and kept on flying. Where the road straightened again, the mist from the dusted crops far beyond the highway rolled onto the shoulders, wisps curling across the road and under his wheels. He deliberately slowed to 65 to show God he was paying attention. He had faith and was placing the backseat clothes in God’s hands.

Spence felt her turn toward him with a question which she must have quickly answered for herself because she turned back, reading off the signs, keeping watch in the traffic ahead for openings and not checking the speedometer or urging him to speed up.

He’d proved he had faith. Now he proved he had wisdom, for he recognized that he’d become what he’d always ridiculed, a superstitious fool and a lane jumper. He wasn’t above calling himself names. For the next thirty miles he thought up names to whip himself with, wondering if God was so stupid not to know he was really whipping the needle back up on the gauge. Then he thought of other names to call himself, in the way folks in the back country did it, renaming themselves Short Rations or Misery Love, naming their children Li’l Bit or Dolores, to let God know they were humble but knew what was what. To remind God too that they’d had their share of sorrows and to lighten up if you please. And, merciful, God would take pity.

K
enti wriggled her shorts up and followed the girls around the side of the house toward the garden.

“Anna fanna ba-nana, fee fie fa-canner, Nannnna!”

“It don’t go like that,” Kenti said.

“Yeah it do. Down here in Alabama it do.”

“Goes different ways in different places,” the other girl said, doing a walkover. “And she does can things,” she said, talking upside down.

“Well,” Kenti said, turning around in the driveway and looking past the rows of snap beans, “her name ain’t Nana. My other grandmama named Nana.”

“But Miss Loretta do put up tomatoes and things, now, don’t she?”

“Jam too.”

“So?”

“So yourself.”

“Well, so your own self.”

Grandma Lovey kicked the basket into the row of cukes and looked up. The three little girls were pushing on each other, but they were being real careful not to trample anything in her kitchen patch. She bent again to her work. Legs wide, elbows resting lightly on the inside of her knees, she snatched up carrots, beets, and a few tough, spiky okras, shook the dirt loose, and tossed the vegetables into the basket. When she heard the tinkle of china, she straightened up and looked toward the house. Her broad cheeks crinkled as she squinted.

The girls heard the tinkle and then a bump and looked up at the screened window midway between the downstairs parlor curtains and the upstairs bathroom shutters.

“Stuffy, scruffy, ba-buffy, fee fie fa-toughy, Cuffffeeeee!”

“Kofi ain’t even up there,” Kenti said, her hands on her hips. “That’s my mother.”

Zala got a good grip on the tray and continued up the stairs. She could hear her daughter below telling the girls from the Girard Stables that her brother wasn’t named nobody’s Cuffy. And then she spelled Kofi’s name, slowly, loudly, leaning on each letter the way she’d seen Grandmama Lovey do trying to get a number from the information operator.

Zala inspected the tray before she bumped the bedroom door open with her hip. Gerry had set it up all wrong, with a white napkin, plastic dishes, and the vial of medicine. Everything that smacked of the hospital was now down in the kitchen drawer. Zala didn’t trust the medication. Didn’t trust their approach. Hadn’t liked any of them on sight, except Patti.

They had wheeled the boy out from the solarium. A shadow of a boy, the sun behind the nurse, the doctor walking beside one huge wheel of the chair. She saw the boy’s feet first: one barefoot, curled on top of the other in a short white sock, his pajama cuffs flapping loosely around his bruised-blue ankles. She’d expected him to be in khaki shorts and a cotton undershirt, but he wore sea-green pajamas, the tops unbuttoned. His hands were in his lap coming into the light. Too weak to sit erect, he was strapped in the chair, his head bobbing like an old man’s. One strap was loose across his lap, the other strung across the wide white bandage around his chest.

Patti had been standing by her talking rapidly about the way they had to strap him down in bed or he’d wander around the ward, cowering in a corner. Zala had left her to run to him, to free him from the bindings he fell against when the wheels came to a halt.

His face stopped her.

She’d had to refuse the tea they brought her there in Miami, refused three times before they took it away. Had to slap away the nurses’ hands trying to feel her forehead. She’d submitted to the gray mat they wrapped around her arm, though, and didn’t grumble too much when they squeezed the bulb. They were smiling that starchy smile. She told them she was angry. “I know you are,” one of them said in that way they
had. It brought her up off the couch to swing. She meant it to hurt. But the blow landed soft and comic in the doctor’s shoulder pad, and she fell back on the couch.

They kept looking past her, asking if she recognized the boy. Spence handed over all of Sonny’s charts, so she had to get them straight. They were not in the adoption business, no matter what her husband said. Perhaps some other nice couple could provide a home for the poor boy. They kept looking past her, and Spence bent down to tell her to look at the boy again.

Zala backed into the bedroom and went immediately to the dresser. With a corner of the tray she shoved the clock all the way back to the mirror. In it she could see the foot of the bed. Kenti’s plush elephant in the folds of the coverlet, Kofi’s Darth Vader laser sword on top of the checkerboard. She saw his feet, yellowish, and his shins like dark iron. There was a sticker burr on his pj’s, which were wrinkled at the knees.

“That is not my boy,” she had told them. She’d rehearsed the line months ago in the Quonset hut in Atlanta. “Those bones are not my child.” Brushing Spence’s words away from her ear, she told them it was fruitless to try and palm the damaged boy off as their son. But Spence kept saying things to bring her around, to take a good look, to concentrate.

“I hope you’re hungry.” She talked to him in the mirror. “Hot broth with fresh vegetables from the garden.” She felt like she was saying lines in a play. She laughed, to show that she could, to show him she was not put off by his wounds. She left the glass of ice and the container of orange juice on the dresser.