Those Bones Are Not My Child (91 page)

“I think I would care for some butter beans if it’s not too much trouble, Em. And Jonesy, could you get my glass and a piece of ice maybe?”

“Why, sure,” Em said, slapping her son on the knee. When he winced, Zala moved closer to the night table. “You tell this woman what she wants to know, Michael,” Em said. “She’s like blood.”

Zala handed him a picture of Sonny that Lovey had snapped. “That’s my son. It was taken this summer.”

“He’s home?” When she nodded, he asked, “And he’s all right and everything.”

“Yeah,” Jonesy said at the door. “And it wouldn’t be stooling, ’cause he’s been trying to tell us what happened. But they messed him around so bad, they broke his jaw. And they got him wired.” Jonesy reached his arms around to clamp his face in a vise. “They got to feed him through a glass straw, Mike. He can’t talk, but he wants to.”

When Em and Jonesy were heard down the hall talking to Jersey,
Michael looked at Zala and they smiled. “Leave it to Jonesy to take it out,” he said. Then he looked at the photo. Sonny was by the fence near the chicken coops. Blackberries and grapes were thick behind his head, the leaves painted red and blue from the juice; armies of wasps covered the scuppernongs that had burst their skins. Michael gripped the photo by the edges and ran his thumb over the berries as if to bruise them, to make them spurt.

“He was on a farm like the one they took you to, Michael. Did you know him?”

He kept rubbing. And each time his thumb moved, the skin wrinkled on his elbow. Under the scab, infection still threatened, the skin around it puffy and blistered. Under the city’s rug, sweepings were festering too. Only part of it was of interest to her now.

“I remember in April when ten boys who’d been reported missing came home. The papers said they’d been working crops, but I wondered,” she said.

“They forced me into a car,” Michael said. “I had this drink, a Dr Pepper I got on the train. I was going to the phone to see if I could stay at the YMCA. And these two guys, white guys, jumped out of a car and knocked the can out of my hand.” He tucked his lips in and pressed and his whole face looked tight. He stared at Sonny’s photo again.

“Were you beaten, Michael?”

“Some.”

“Were you forced to work?”

“They started me digging potatoes the minute I got there. There was a lot of jane growing on the place. That’s how they paid the older guys. They’d be sitting against the wall smoking. We slept in a shed. They would lock us up. It had these concrete bunks coming out of the walls like shelves. That’s what we had to sleep on.”

“Could you leave?”

“You’d hear about people thrown in a ditch or dropped along the highway ’cause they tried to leave or got sick. Sometimes they threw them in the river. Sometimes they just let them rot in the fields.”

In spring, when the papers said “not related,” she’d asked around, and so had Spence. From Florida to Texas, then back up the coast to North Carolina, thousands of migrant workers were transported from April to November to harvest sweet potatoes, cucumbers, grapes, oranges,
lettuce, tobacco. Bodies were always being dredged up from the Tar River. It crossed Interstate 95 in Nash County. She thought of Nancy Holmes, who’d been back in the city since the arrest still telling her story, naming names, and making a connection between murders in Memphis, North Carolina, and Atlanta.

“Were there children there from Atlanta, Michael?”

“From all over. Was some people there spoke only Spanish. And some that spoke only island French. They stuck to themselves. Everybody stuck to themselves. They didn’t want you buddying up together. I started vomiting one day, vomiting blood. Everybody was scared and got away from around me. When I fell out, these two guys, they were overseers—they were the ones that carried blackjacks and rubber pipes but not the guns, only the white guys handled the rifles—they threw me on the back of a flatbed. I didn’t know where they were taking me to. I rolled off and hid in the woods. Took me two days to find a phone that was working. I called my aunt in Gainesville and she came and got me. Took her two days too ’cause I didn’t know where I was. I know I crossed the Georgia line walking, but that’s about it.”

“I’m glad you got away.” She was about to ask again about Sonny when he spoke up, looking at her squarely for the first time.

“You got a counselor? One of them lawyers that takes migrant workers’ part? They call it an advocate.”

“Sonny’s seeing a therapist kind of counselor. We can’t fit enough of the story together yet to—” She didn’t have to finish; he was nodding and rubbing the photo.

“I know he was raped,” she said.

He made a sound. A high-pitched, irritating, metallic sound, it rolled out into the room like a siren. Neither of them moved.

“If he says he knows me, maybe so.” Michael’s voice was wiry thin. “But I don’t remember him.” He held the picture toward the light and studied it. “I got a court date,” he said in another voice. “My advocate counselor is getting the FBI in because it was kidnap and slavery. It’ll be out of town. Big Dave said not to talk to anybody in Atlanta.”

“Michael,” she said, moving closer. “I’m going to describe several people to you. I’d like you to tell me if these people seem familiar. Would you do that for me? It could be that the people who grabbed my son are connected to the people who grabbed you.”

He wiped his nose and nodded.

“And it could be they’re connected to the people who killed Lorraine.”

“Think so?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll tell you one thing. There was a white guy at that farm who looked like one of the men who was slapping around this preacher at the storefront church near Memorial. They could have been brothers.”

“Why don’t you describe all the people you can and I’ll take notes. Then I’ll describe who I can and let’s see if any match. Would you do that?”

“I guess when Big Dave said not to talk to anybody in Atlanta, he didn’t mean you.”

“No, he didn’t mean me,” Zala said, holding up two fingers. “Me and Dave are like that.”

“Cousins like?”

“Like blood,” she said.

Kofi waited until Sonny rolled all the way to the wall on the top bunk before he could get in without the upper mattress banging him in the head.

“I’ll be glad when we move,” Kofi muttered, facedown in his pillow.

“Me too,” said Kenti from her cot. “ ’Cause I want a cat and a room to myself. You make this room small, Sonny. You going be a giant any day now. Mrs. Grier said it, I didn’t. You should sleep on the back porch. That way Kofi can have his place back and I can sleep where I was.”

“It’s cold on the back porch.”

“Aunty Paulette giving away stuff. She got an electric blanket. You could get a hammock like Auntie Gerry sleep in and move out of here. You make the whole house small.”

“Goodnight, Li’l Bit.”

“Goodnight yourself. I’m not finish talking to you, Sonny Spencer.”

“You mad with me?”

“Yeah, ’cause you hurt my feelings. You told me to get out the gym. Nobody else minded me coming to the dance. You all the time think
you so big. You ain’t nothing but a lost ball in the weeds. And I don’t see how Valerie Brooks could think you cute, ’cause you ugly.”

“You finished?”

“Maybe.” She pulled the covers up and thought some more. “If you would move out of here I’d like you better.”

“Goodnight, Kenti.”

Spence thought he heard Sonny in the kitchen. Later he thought he heard the backdoor click. Zala kneed him in the back. It was a while before he could rouse himself, though he was only dozing and very much wanted to give her room. At the community center, he’d thought she was going to jump the glass designer. She’d been even worse when she got back from the trip with Jonesy. The counselor Mac had referred the whole family to wasn’t available till mid-November. But they needed relief now.

There was no sign that Sonny had been in the kitchen. Spence headed for the bedroom. Kenti had kicked her covers off again. She had a new sleeping posture: one hand under her cheek, the other under her pillow, left leg flexed, the other out straight. He adjusted the covers and looked in on Kofi. He was facing the wall, his knees drawn up tightly, his head under his pillow. His grip on the covers was tight. Spence massaged his back until he stretched out a little.

In the upper bunk, Sonny was on his back, but not in the old position, legs apart, arms over his head, centered, in full command of the mattress. He was facing outward, one leg crossed over his body like he’d planned to step out into the air. One arm was over his stomach, protecting his viscera, the other forearm across his forehead, his hand balled. But he was on his back and in the middle of the mattress, not scrunched up in the upper corner of the bed with fists. Progress.

Spence re-inserted the nails in the window frame and wedged a comic book in to keep the pane from rattling. He was about to tiptoe out for the third time that night when he spotted the beeswax on the bookcase Paulette had given them.

The coach said Sonny was using the balls of wax to build up his wrists and fingers. Soon he’d be able to span a basketball like a pro. Mac had told him Sonny pressed the balls of wax to relieve tension. He had
a lot of rage. Zala said he sometimes molded the wax into figures, then set them down near the pot to melt down again into balls. He’d inherited her artistic genes. Everybody had something to say about them damn balls of beeswax.

When Spence had seen the first one back in August, the only thing the wax brought to mind was keys, making an impression to duplicate keys. But there was nothing locked up at Lovey’s place. There was nothing worth locking up at any of the Rawlses’. He’d kept watch, wondering what locks Sonny had in mind to open. Then the balls became two and grew as fat as tennis balls. He had a whole can full of wax. Spence hadn’t seen him handling any lately. They would harden, collect dust, and by the time someone ran across them packing to move, they’d be unidentifiable.

Spence walked back into the living room. “Wayne who?” he’d heard someone say at the community center. He wasn’t sure which side was holding up the trial, the defense lawyers, who kept changing, or the prosecutors, who kept trying to attach the whole list to Williams.

First light was coming through the pane of the door, giving shape to things he’d previously stumbled over: Sonny’s jacket, fallen from the back of the chair; Zala’s sweater coat, off the knob; material she’d taken about the law workshops, no longer a neat pile under the table. He moved toward the window and looked out. Spencer could make out the glint of Peeper’s binoculars. He reminded himself to ask Paulette’s boarder about the car that parked two doors down from the Robinsons’ every now and then, the driver in it. On good nights, Spence figured it was a late-shift husband doubling back to check on his wife. Or a family man on the night shift who’d lost his job and couldn’t talk about it yet. On bad nights, he imagined the driver was watching the house, their house, waiting for a chance to grab Sonny.

Spence turned. One of the children, bundled in the quilt, was stumbling toward the kitchen. Sometimes Kofi coming out of the bathroom half-asleep took a wrong turn. Spence headed for the kitchen, hoping it was Sonny. He’d suggest they raid the fridge, though he wasn’t hungry, only longing for company.

“What’s up?”

Sonny turned, his hand on the doorknob. “I want to see how cold it is out here.”

Spence followed him onto the back porch. Sonny stomped around,
nosed a stack of newspapers over his toe, sized up the room, and looked out the barred window.

“This could be my room.”

“You’d freeze your ass off out here.”

“It’s a drag sharing a tiny room with two children, Dad, especially with you checking every five minutes.”

“Who you calling a child? You a child yourself,” Kenti said, snuggling up against Spence for warmth. “You ain’t grown till you eighteen or twenty-one, that’s what Mrs. Grier says.”

“You oughta move in with them, Li’l Bit. Then you two can gossip all the time.”

“We don’t gossip. I keep her company ’cause she feels bad ’cause Buster won’t come home. He took one look at you and ran away. You took my quilt.”

“Ssshhh, you two will wake everybody up.”

“I’m glad you changing rooms. I can’t do nothing in there with him in there, Daddy.”

“Summit conference?” Zala trailed the bedcovers behind her.

“Sonny thinks maybe we can fix this up to be his room.”

Zala looked from Spence to Kenti to Sonny to the backdoor leading to the yard.

“Is that car out there one of your friends?”

“Aw, hell,” Sonny said, brushing by them.

“See,” Kenti said, trying to follow him and bumping into a groggy Kofi. “You make Daddy nervous and Mama don’t trust you neither, and me, you just make me mad.”

“Somebody light the oven,” Zala said. “Wake me when it’s warm.”

“I don’t feel so good,” Kofi said, following her.

“Me neither. Can I sleep with you, Mama?”

Spence locked the backdoor and stood alone in the kitchen wondering where matches might be. The students who’d rented the place in the summer had strange ideas where to keep things, and everything was still topsy-turvy. Especially his feelings. He found a book of matches on the table by a paperback and lit the oven.

They were making progress, though. The question of new sleeping arrangements, which Mac had raised, seemed to be working out without Spence having to do anything. He stuck a pan of water in the oven and looked into the living room, feeling he’d been a coward. He’d been
putting it off. But how would he have put it: “Son, I don’t want you sleeping in the same room with your sister and your brother”? It was time to think about separate quarters for Kenti and Kofi as well. There was the minor problem of finding a job. Delia had certainly been generous, but each time he’d gone to borrow he had to hear about white-collar pill parties and discrimination against nonjunkies. Spence sat down in the chair and opened the paperback his eldest had checked out of the library,
The Exorcist
.

“Great,” he said, and put his head down on the table.