A Matter of Souls Read online

  Son blinked at Willa, empty. All his anger was gone. Nothing, not even hope, seemed to want to take its place, though.

  Willa reached into the pocket of her maid’s uniform and took out a neatly folded envelope and a bus ticket. He opened his mouth, then closed it. They knew where she was all the time.

  He hated his father. He hated his uncle. And if Jimmy Lee had ever known anything about this, he hated him too. He set his face hard and forced his hand out to take what Willa was offering.

  “I found her address in some of the stuff we moved with us. I wrote to her and asked her to come get you.”

  He unfolded the envelope. Willa couldn’t love him, but she was kind. He was grateful, but he couldn’t tell her. 2250 St. Bernard Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana.

  “I told her your daddy died. I told her I was having trouble. It took a long time for her to answer.”

  Son slipped the single page out carefully, not expecting much.

  Dear Willa Mae:

  Just like Booker Collins to go and get himself killed over something like that, but I take care of my business. You may as well put the boy on the Greyhound. Here is a one-way ticket. He can call me when he comes into town.

  His eyes blurred over the telephone number, going straight to the name scrawled crookedly after the brief, cold message: Trina Bayonne.

  He’d discovered that he hated bus rides. He had seen and heard many things during the two-day trip, but he couldn’t wrap his mind around any of it. By the time he stepped into the stifling bus station that smelled of crab legs and river, he could hardly breathe. It was the prospect of seeing her, of laying eyes on her, that tamped his feelings down and crushed his heart and lungs.

  “Lord have mercy, you are his spittin’ image.” She was tall, big-boned, fair-skinned. Her bleach-blonde hair was Marcel Waved and swung at her neck when she moved. Her red lips seemed permanently puckered into a pout—or a kiss, but Son suspected the first. Her voice was low and growly. She squinted warily behind the hand-rolled cigarette that she held between her thumb and pointer, licking those pouty lips.

  He stared back. What did she expect?

  “I don’t know what you expect,” she murmured defensively, giving him the once over from his Willa-bought tennis shoes to the cap he wore over his badly cut hair. With a sudden, violent movement, she jerked it off his head.

  “That’s ugly,” she said. “Ain’t you got a tongue in your mouth?”

  Son didn’t wonder what she would be like. He didn’t even wonder what New Orleans would be like, though he’d heard at school that it was a town of mystery and voodoo and never-ending parties. He knew everything he needed to know.

  “You don’t know me!” he said, watching her pencil-arched brown eyebrows rise as he spoke. He knew he sounded forceful. Sounded mannish.

  She clucked, smiled a dazzling white-toothed wonder at him, and then looked off—maybe in the direction of their future, he thought. He was right.

  “Boy, I been knowing you,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to get away from you. And your daddy. And my brother, Bernard. And that tired-ass Mississippi mess. Face it: what’s lost is gone. I borned you, a fact that was my mistake. But like I told Willa, I take care of business. That’s what you are. You gonna carry your ass to school, and get a job so you can pay for your keep. I got a life down here that suits me. If you don’t suit me, little man, you ain’t gonna weigh me down. You gonna get to gettin’. We clear on that?”

  The thin trail of her cigarette smoke had floated away. Son shifted on his feet for balance. Then he reached and snatched his cap back, plopping it squarely on his own head. This is the moment, he thought. I could let loose on her, or I could … “I’m just biding my time,” he said in a voice so quiet that he scared himself. He didn’t know where that voice or those words had come from, but he felt that he meant them. And he wondered now what he had been fighting for, these three years. This? Not this. What had he dreamed of, those nights that Papa had told him nursery rhyme stories and slave stories passed over the years, tales of folks who had run toward something? He had hoped that all of it, some of it, was true. But had everything been a lie, including good and evil and the justice his father had died looking for?

  “Ain’t we all,” she answered, turning away from him as if he was already forgotten. “Ain’t we all,” she repeated to herself as her heels tapped across the linoleum.

  Son ceased to feel that first day in New Orleans. He became an observer, a witness.

  She lived in an upstairs flat and said that she worked in a bakery on the night shift. Every afternoon she had two fingers of bourbon and a dash of Coca-Cola in a tumbler, and she showed him how to fix it. For a long time, he thought she lived like the nuns he saw when she made him go to the Catholic church down the street, but pretty soon he realized that every night wasn’t a baking night—that she had songs to sing in the French Quarter clubs and the Ninth Ward dives. There were men to see and laughs and gifts to be had, none of which concerned him.

  As soon as he knew his way around, he snuck out and followed her. He studied the many men she found useless, but lived off of anyway. He found out from the nuns how to get himself into their Catholic school on a scholarship, and he got himself a delivery job after classes to pay for his uniforms. He and Trina passed few words from one week to the next.

  She bought him nothing and taught him nothing. But that wasn’t completely true, he told himself one afternoon at the public library when he was sixteen. His mother had taught him that there was nothing any human on Earth had to offer that would hold him.

  She taught him how to be self-sufficient and self-absorbed.

  He had learned from her that there was no such thing as love.

  Son thought he should tell her these things. He went back to St. Bernard Avenue. There was no need for him to rehearse the conversation in his mind the way he did those with the nuns and priests and his shopkeeper bosses; he wasn’t worried about her reaction.

  He saw her through the screen door. She sat in her silk slip on the back balcony with a halo of cigarette smoke surrounding her pin curls.

  He made noise on purpose, knowing that she really wouldn’t care if he suddenly appeared. But he was self-conscious. He had grown taller, more muscular—he’d also found an interest in boxing and squeezed in time at the Golden Gloves gym. He’d already been with half a dozen Catholic girls from school, but learning to make them pant and squeal had only confirmed his low opinion of women. The Young Saints Society was running a lottery to pick which girl would lay with him next. He would have felt sad for them, if he could.

  “What you doin’ home?” she lisped with the fag between her lips. He noticed that her creamy cheeks seemed to sag a little and that there were crows’ feet radiating from the corners of her eyes, even though she had on full makeup. She always managed to wear full makeup, as if she was born with it on. If he had believed that it could be true, Son might have imagined that raising a teenage son was aging her.

  But she’d had no part in it. He had a flash of Willa’s worn brown face, and a twinge of something wrenched his stomach. It passed.

  “I’m ready to go,” he said. There was the slight sound of her newspaper crinkling. She took out her cigarette and slowly, deliberately, flicked ashes off the porch rail.

  “What’s that got to do with me? You ain’t askin’ for no money.” It was a sure statement, not a question. He stepped to look over the rail, not at her. He could see the ashes, a tiny, smoldering mound in the withered grass below.

  “I want you to sign me up for the army.”

  “They fighting a war, you know.”

  He spun to look at her—was that some kind of feeling? She was squinting at him, the way she had the first day they met. Her face was red. Maybe she’d had bourbon early; it had happened before.

  “I know that. There’s nothing for me here. And I want to go to school. The army will pay for it.”

  “If you live.” She tossed more ashes. Her
puckered lips worked silently, as if she was trying not to say something. Son had never seen this before. What had she ever hid from him? “High-minded Negro. Just like your daddy.”

  He frowned. Booker Collins had worked in the cotton fields, gone to the Second World War, and come back to more cotton. His highest aspiration had been to get a low-level job at the lumber mill, paying by the hour instead of by the pound. He had died trying to vote to keep the mill from moving to the White end of the county and successfully icing out most of the Negroes in their town. He’d been a quick thinker, a smart man, but never a learned one.

  Trina scraped her chair back and stood up. He could look down on her now, and he did. They didn’t like each other. Even so, he would not choose to change the last few years of his life. Maybe he was crazy. Son rolled his shoulders and flexed his biceps the way he did at the gym to show off, and smiled.

  “Listen, you arrogant …” She paused, a first. He thought with amusement that she desperately wanted to use the word little, but even she knew that would not only be ridiculous, it would dilute whatever point she was trying to make. “… you arrogant yellow bastard.” She was beginning to breathe hard. He had heard her recently, in her sleep, racking and coughing.

  “Yellow?” He couldn’t help the laugh in his voice, looking at her nearly pass-for-White face.

  She raised her chin. He could tell right away that there was something she’d held back, something she’d been waiting for just the right, terribly right, minute to say. He remembered the day Willa had told him about her, and his senses went on alert. His knees locked. This time, his fists clenched, too. All at once, he was afraid that the dam he’d built against rage and desperation and longing might burst. He bit the inside of his mouth and felt the blood. He imagined it flowing, the way the life had flowed when he was ten years old. The bloody taste, bloody memory, comforted him.

  “Booker wasn’t never your father.”

  He stumbled backward, weaker now than he had been the day he’d stood hard and tall to Willa’s confession. He grabbed the porch rail to keep from going over. His stomach rolled, and the mayonnaise sandwich he’d had for lunch turned sour and liquid inside him. But people had always said, “You’re his spittin’ image!” She’d said it herself! Now he realized that she’d meant something else entirely. His eyes widened.

  Trina misread him for the first time, and she backed away as if she thought he would strike out at her. “I only married Booker ’cause that was all there was for a woman to do. I liked his looks, but I never was faithful, and he knew that. And then, early on, I ran off here and I stayed a couple months. I met a man.”

  Her eyes became dreamy, and Son was more upset than ever. Before she said the next words, he felt them. “I loved him. I found out I was pregnant with you, and I wasn’t never going back. He was beautiful. Yeah, him and Booker—they favored—could have been brothers, I guess. Strange luck, things turnin’ out that way … But he was different. He studied music and wrote his own. Was a horn player. He knew how to treat me gentle. Wasn’t no roughneck cotton picker, and he never got mixed up in no politics. We were goin’ on the road together …” Her eyes cleared, and she was staring at Son. “He got caught between two punks in the club where we worked and ended up cut. He bled to death in my arms.”

  Son swallowed. There was blood everywhere.

  “They took him from me!” she shouted. “And I had to go back! Then you come, and every time—every day—I looked at you, I saw him! I couldn’t stand you.” She began to sob, and her cries became great, heaving gasps. Son mechanically took her hand and led her inside, where she hung onto the edge of her bed, shaking.

  He leaned against the wall, sure that he would fall otherwise. She never said that if his father had lived, everything would have just been all right. She wasn’t crying for the baby, the little piece of love that she could have even right now.

  He wondered if Papa—Booker—had known the truth, but he didn’t ask.

  “I’ll … take … you,” she panted. “First thing tomorrow. First thing. I want you the hell out of my house.” She looked at the floor.

  Son pulled himself up straight. Even if she backed out of it, he would have to leave here. There was no way he could stay in sight of this woman and manage it; he knew that soon the fury would come exploding out, and something bad would happen when it did.

  He wanted to hate her, but she had loved his father. He wanted to hate the man who’d raised him, but he had loved him. The world was cruel, the way it twisted regular people into monsters.

  He walked past her to the front bedroom, began to throw all his belongings into a bag, and then thought: what do I really have? What do I own?

  Nothing.

  He went back to Trina’s door.

  “What was his name?”

  “Absalom,” she said.

  Part Four:

  Absalom’s Birthday

  The bus doors wheezed open in front of a dilapidated gas station and Son stepped out, wearing his crisp soldier’s uniform. After ten years, he was seeing this world through a stranger’s eyes. He began to sweat in the scorching sun, but he remained erect, bronzed, and proud and out of place in this Mississippi hamlet.

  The few White people on the street stared through him. He was a nobody, even with the Purple Heart casting a glare and his shrapnel-shattered arm cradled in a sling underneath it. A Black man passing in a beat-up Ford honked and waved, but Son had never seen him before.

  He shifted his duffel on his good shoulder as he walked, noticing that the street was paved now. He squinted at a supermarket that seemed to have sprung up just to confuse him; a few strides more and he stumbled. A sidewalk had materialized. He glanced down in annoyance at his scuffed boot, and when he raised his head to the shimmer of heat surrounding the red brick building across the street, some of the first memories that he’d sent to hell materialized too.

  He was standing right in front of the library. He looked immediately to his left for the live oak he’d climbed, but it was no longer there.

  The library had expanded, and connected to the original building was a low-built concrete and glass wing with a sunny-looking entrance. He blinked at the old brick structure again and saw that it had been disfigured: the original awful steps had vanished; there was a series of windows in place of the wide wooden doors, and the grass and shrubs looked like they’d been growing there forever.

  No sign of the murders remained. His brain understood it, coming fresh from killing fields as he had, but his being did not. If he hadn’t been a man, he would have screamed. What had they done here?

  He forced himself to cross toward the two slim young trees flanking the walk up to the addition. Each tree shaded a cast iron bench. As he approached, he looked inside the huge windows to see a group of very young children in a reading circle. Their cherubic faces were animated as they listened to the woman with cat eyeglasses and soft blonde hair. A few yards past them, half-hidden behind a row of books, he could see the dark figure of a young woman, her head cocked as if she was listening, too. Her mop and bucket were still, and Son wondered if she was frowning in concentration so that she could hear the whole story word-for-word, the better to go back and tell her own children. Certainly, they would never be allowed in this wonderful place.

  He blinked his eyes against the scene and sat down on one of the benches. Newness could never hide the truth, or hide evil, could it? He slipped the duffel off his shoulder.

  This was all old, so old. The men who had died here, men that he’d adored, had fears and failings and secrets that hurt him to the quick. But that pain was old now too; only a nagging ache remained. And though since his discharge a part of him missed the ever-present danger and the explosive relief he’d found in killing, living such a life had grown old as well.

  He was back to nothing.

  Trina was dead. Her downstairs neighbor knew he had gone into the service and took it upon herself to inform the US Army. In a cruel twist, Trina Bayon
ne had been found stabbed. He didn’t know any details; he didn’t want to know. He had refused the leave they offered him and gone on to rout a nest of Viet Cong that night. He’d killed them all.

  Willa had dutifully answered the half-dozen letters he’d written over the five years, but he could tell she was trying not to promise him anything, and he understood. Bernadette had colored a picture of herself and sent it once; he’d worn it inside his helmet and now carried it in his wallet. One of his buddies had joked about it being a love letter, and maybe it was.

  What had Papa said one time? “You deserve to get as good as you give.” Well, had Papa deserved Trina? Had he deserved to be shot like a rabid dog in this street? Son clasped his hands between his knees, not intending to pray, only to search himself. And what have I ever given anybody? Maybe that’s why I haven’t got a thing right now. Nobody and nothing to come home to. What did I give, except for arrogance—yes, arrogance, like everybody said over and over—and anger that bordered on crazy?

  He had been washed in blood his entire life. He had survived all of it. So he must have a purpose. Maybe newness couldn’t hide the truth, but what if the truth was faced up to? What then? Couldn’t he be born again?

  The real truth was that nobody in his life had ever had a fair chance. Maybe he hadn’t either. It was time to stop running from that. Time to leave the bloodshed behind.

  He spread his hands out to look at them. They were big, suntanned, strong. With those hands he could wrestle evil. In that moment of clarity, Son knew that from now on he would fight for anybody who wasn’t strong enough or loud enough or mean enough to grab what the world owed them. He would give his whole self to this new fight, and he was determined that he would win. He could win. Son felt sure that he could fight for everything the men he’d loved had died for. They’d never had a chance. Son suddenly realized that Jimmy Lee had been the same age as he was now, twenty-one. He smiled to himself and sat back, reaching into his breast pocket for the bus schedule.