Those Bones Are Not My Child (86 page)

He didn’t move, playing her for a blind woman or an imagining old-soul one. So she walked toward him, wriggling the switch through the grass like a snake so he could see what it would cost if he vaulted over the rail. She brought her arm up and around and slapped the top post hard, slicing the better part of the bark away. The whistling hung in the air a long time. Then he stood up and gave her his attention like he hadn’t done all summer long.

“Hey, Gran, I was just—”

“Did I ask you what you were just?” She brushed past the dry blooms while she took his measure. So grown, thirteen and grownish, casually out for a stroll at three a.m.

“I’m caught between two stools, Sundiata. I know there’s all kinds of people waiting for you up there in Atlanta, and could be some of them don’t wish you well. So maybe, like the saying goes, the better part of valor would be to run. You’re my grandson,” she said, watching his face in the darkness. “And I care about you.

“But then again …” She swung her arm and the switch came whistling with it. He jumped. She moved the switch right past his cheek to point at the house. “She was my own baby girl long before you came. So. What do you make of the situation I find myself in, Sundiata? Must I let you go and make my own child lay down in ashes?”

She placed the tip of the switch in the well of his left collarbone so he should know she didn’t require her sewing glasses to thread this needle.

“I know what you thinking, Gran, but I was only—”

“Wait now,” she stopped him. She could see by the way he held his hands out like a baby boy that there was shimsham coming. “I know you’re going to tell me something intelligent.”

He rolled his eyes, folded his arms across his chest, and stood hip-shot like no child had ever done to her except this boy. She wriggled the switch a little bit and could tell the minute he shunted his cargo to another track by the way his arms slid down and his chin softened. But when he opened his mouth, she saw a boxcar of ballyhoo riding the rails.

“Think first.” Her voice like a shot, he cringed. She trailed the green bulbous tip across his throat to snuggle it in the well of his right collarbone.

“Oh, child. They taught you good, them people. They taught you fear, them people that took you. Seem like the people that brung you into this world would matter more. Them people up there that raised you and loved you all the while—you were no easy baby, you know. A colicky baby can try your last nerve.” She invited him to grin with her. “But I guess them up there don’t matter no more now that you’ve decided to go off somewhere, being grown and all, hunh?”

“Granny Lovey, would you get off me?! I don’t know about them children. I keep telling y’all I don’t know. Ask the cops, why ask me? It ain’t my fault they got some joker locked up in jail.”

“Did I ask you that? I didn’t ask you that. Maybe you think you grown enough to take that tone with them,” she said, tilting her chin
toward the upstairs bedroom. “But this is me you talking to. Don’t be confused.”

“Gran …” He hooked his thumbs in his back pockets and kind of swung himself like a boy fixing to tell a joke in Sunday school, flirting with the idea, flirting with his audience. It wasn’t much of a chuckle, just enough to alert her. She got a good grip on the thick part of the switch. She could hear sass coming down the pike.

“What is it you want to say to your grandmother?”

“Quit saying ‘up there.’ They ain’t up there. They’re down in the cabin.” And then he did laugh, swinging himself just enough to turn his head so it couldn’t be said he was laughing in her face.

“Think you cute laughing at your grandma. Grin on,” she said, moving up on him while his head was turned. “Think I don’t know what you smiling at? Don’t you know I know you spy on the women when they come to use the sweat cabin? Think I been here in the country this long and don’t know a boy in the bush from a bird? Think it don’t make me shame to know what you’ve become in this lost year? You need to see about yourself, little Spencer. Just so much other people can do for a person. You know what I mean?”

He was listing to the side. She thought he might be falling. But he was only leaning to spit through the gap in his teeth. She wanted to hurt him. When he straightened up, he looked right in her face while he did something rubbery with his to give himself a hangdog expression like he was properly chastised. But all the while he was trying to frown a hole through the fence and be gone.

“You never were a false child,” she said. “But you getting smaller every day. You need to look at that, Sundiata, ’cause could be you’ll be called upon real soon to do something big that requires the kind of straight-up courage you’ve let strangers trash somewhere.”

He hiked his shoulders up and left them there. “I don’t know what you all want from me,” he said, his voice wavering between the decision to whine or to tough it out. He crossed his legs at the ankles and teeter-tottered for a while. Then he looked like he’d heard the meeting had been adjourned and he had permission to go to bed.

“Sundiata.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I said—”

“I heard what you said. And ‘yes ma’am’ been rarely in your mouth that I recall, and I’ve been knowing you since before you had a name. Don’t be a stupid child, what with me standing here with this switch in my hand. No telling what a poor old crazy senile widow woman liable to do at this hour of morning, ’cause grief can make a person do crazy things. Do you know that?” She pleaded with him with her eyes to understand that he was in mourning too, mourning himself, the loss of himself. But she could tell by the way he was staring back that he was on another track.

“I’m sorry, Gran. I didn’t get a chance to say nothing to you before. I’m sorry you lost Grandaddy.”

“I didn’t lose him, sweetheart. Doctors lost him. That’s what they told me. ‘We lost him on the table.’ Ain’t that something to tell somebody about somebody? Like a matchbook they’d scribbled a telephone number on, then tossed among the coffee cups in the doctors’ lounge. ‘Lost him on the table.’ Isn’t that something for me to hear on top of everything else, Grandson?”

He shifted his weight and stared at his shoes. Then he looked at her bare feet and stole a glance at the pebbles in the road. She kept her feet where they were but slid her upper body closer along the rail.

“I’m sorry Grandaddy Williams died. I miss him too.”

“Sounds like hokum to me, son. You didn’t like him very much.”

“Yeah I did. Sometimes. But he was kind of strict.”

“Strict.”

“Kind of mean. I mean, he was always doing stuff. I remember one time he made you get out of bed to get him a glass of water. He was right there in the kitchen, I could hear him, ’cause I was asleep on the couch. He kept yelling for you to come get him some water. And the house was cold. I had both quilts over me. But he nagged until you got up. He was always pulling stunts like that.”

“Well, now. I’m glad to know you were concerned about my welfare, Grandson. What did you make of it, my life with a mean man and all?”

His hands talked to each other for a while as he bobbed his head up and down. “I don’t know. Why we got to be standing out here in the yard? It’s getting chilly. Ain’t you cold without your bathrobe?”

“You thought I was a fool?”

“Naw, Gran.”

“Sure you did. Whatcha call a pushover. He used to think so too, you know. But who fell over, me or him?”

His eyes went wide for a minute and then he chuckled, sounding like his daddy for the world. But when she didn’t join in, he stopped, studying her for a sign of how he should act. She thrust her face toward him and, ornery, he didn’t back up.

Then the green taper arced over his ear and the thick part of the switch was against his chest, her fist a ball of heat in his solar plexus. She felt him come to attention.

“You know what, sweetheart?” She was close enough to smell him. Vanilla from the vanilla bean she’d slipped in his underwear drawer mingled with adolescent musk. “I loved him,” she said quietly. “He was mean, but I loved him anyway. Why set conditions? Most people know they ain’t worth a damn. That don’t mean they undeserving. Deserving ain’t even the question—question is, can you take it? Can you take it, a heap of loving? Takes courage.”

He gave her a toothy grin. “This is some weird stuff you talking.” And on the pretense of scratching his neck and shaking his head at her ideas, he moved the switch aside. “I don’t even know what we’re out here talking about.”

“Sure you do. Sundiata.”

He moved closer when the crickets stopped abruptly. His breath was fluttering the pleats of her bodice. He was close enough for her to grab him, lick him, bite him. He stepped back and looked at her.

“You smell like him,” he said.

“I’ll be smelling like Grandaddy Williams a long time,” she said, then stopped to caution herself. Maybe he was recalling the smell of somebody else. His nostrils were flaring, his head tilted back. She sniffed the air too. It smelled of rain. She waited to see if he would speak of some other “him.”

He took another step away from her. “I know when people live together a long time, they start to look like each other.”

“Get to smell like each other too, ’cause they swapping their juices. When you get down to Brunswick, you ask Cousin Sonia to tell you about it.” She followed his gaze to the limousine. He was nodding his head, a conscientious student ready to do the assignment right away.

The sky was making its slide from indigo to blue-bottle blue. The
birds were still faint. She could hear the throaty laughter of her daughter travel up from the cabin on the breeze that smelled of moist spruce and burnt wood. She heard the rumbly low laughter of her son-in-law. The sound of them put her in a soothing mood until she caught her grandson watching her eyelids droop.

“I’m sapped, Sundiata. So tell me now, are we going to make this run up the road together, you and me?”

“Get off me, Gran. I don’t understand nothing about none of it.”

“Whole lot of things you’ve yet to understand. But instead of measuring the distance between your little-boy understanding and big-boy wisdom, you standing there plotting how to get past me. Yes, you are, too. You so scarce in understanding, you think you can get past your own flesh and blood. Well, you can’t, Sundiata. It’s a law of life. But you too small to take that in, so take this in.” She stepped to the side and flopped the switch over the rail.

“There’ll be hell to pay should you move. That spot you standing on, scheming with little-boy understanding, stay put. ’Cause if you run, I will lash you all up and down this road to wherever you planning to go to throw yourself away like this family had nothing better to do with its love than raise garbage and grief. Hear me now, ’cause if you don’t care, I don’t care.”

“Yeah, you do,” he said. His grin was as crooked as the embrace he offered, his arms more and more lopsided as he edged away from her.

She held the switch up in front of him so he could study it and could see that her arm was ready for the task.

“It’ll be one helluva skin-peeling time on Randall Road, I’m telling you. ’Cause this time, I choose her, not you. You been through it, I know. But I can’t think about that right now. You can mend. But my girl, you see, I don’t think she could take your going off, and she’s my child. You do see my point?”

She took a good look at the road and could feel him gathering himself up for the jump. She knew just how he’d try it. One hand on the post, young knees springing him up and over. She’d seen him try it many a time.

“It’d be a punishing trip, I ain’t fooling. I ain’t all that tired and I really ain’t that old.”

She felt ready when he made his move. But she wasn’t prepared for how he moved. The sudden solidness of him against her made her drop
the switch. He heaved the whole of himself at her in a torrent of words that rushed the wind from her lungs. He called himself names, ugly names he’d stored up from the devil knew where burning through the pleats of her bodice. And all she could do was breathe and hold on and declare the love of the blood. As painful as the dirty words were cleaving through her breastbone, his hiccups shuddering clear through to her spine, part of her called it shimsham. A part of her wanted to beat him down to the ground with her fists, then drag him to the road by the nape of his neck and say go on then, go on, go on. But the best part of her locked him in tight while she prayed for a long, hard driving, relentless rain.

G
ummy orange and sticky black waxy wrappers from molasses candy fluttered out of the school bus window. Alongside the bus a girl in ruffled pantaloons and cat whiskers pedaled a bike decked out in crepe-paper hubcaps and handlebar streamers. Children on the school bus, late returning from the planetarium, pelted her with peppermint candies, searched the sky for the Greater Dog, then sat down again in their seats to connect the dots in Orion’s belt or draw on breath-fogged windows with their fingers the instruments that measure the winds, tides, and stars.