Part 22 (1/2)

All the while I'm sitting at the dining table expecting Pa to defend his sayings either with another of his parables (as he had a habit of doing) or by telling Ma shut up, woman, what you know. But instead he stared at the tablecloth as if there was something there that only he could see.

Finally a long sigh whooshed out of him and his shoulders slumped even more. ”What they expect we to do, uh?” he said.

A beetle pinging against the lampshade gave the silence in the house the heaviness of mola.s.ses. Crickets chirped in the bushes outside. Frogs croaked.

Pa gazed at the letter in his hand. ”First they tell we the boy got a scholars.h.i.+p. Now look at this. Eh? Look at this. What they expect we to do?”

And that night for the first time I saw what defeat looks like on the face of an adult.

Ma gazed at Pa for a long time then sighed. ”G.o.d will find a way,” she said.

To which my father replied, ”Well he better hurry up. The school term soon begin.”

”Hush,” Ma said right away. ”Don't talk like that.” And she's glancing over her shoulder like she expects G.o.d to strike Pa dead.

But the slump of her shoulders says she doesn't really have much more faith than Pa does.

I never found out where Pa got the money to pay my school fees and buy textbooks, nor where he got the money to take me into town and buy a cricket bat for me after I came second in cla.s.s that school year.

Even now the smell of linseed oil always triggers the memory of Pa and me walking out of the store with the midday hot sun beating down, me holding the cricket bat, and Pa looking down at me and saying, You got to cure it with linseed oil.

If my life can be told in chapters, that day marked the beginning of the end of one chapter, the one that ended with Pa shaking my hand man-to-man in the airport building and walking toward a plane that took him to Away, a place I couldn't even imagine and only later got an idea about through reading books I borrowed from the public library.

For weeks after Pa left I would find myself listening for him to come home from work, and several times I heard his bicycle bang against the side of the house. But those are the kinds of illusions that loneliness can create.

Many nights I would lie in bed listening for him to come singing and stumbling home, waking up Ma when he came in the back door saying, ”Esther! I home! The Boss has arrived!” and then coming over to where I was sleeping on the floor and saying, ”Sleeping, Brute?” and Ma stirring in bed and mumbling, ”How many times I tell you don't call the boy no Brute. And keep quiet, for G.o.d's sake. People trying to sleep.”

And sometimes Pa would take his food from the larder and warm it up (Rum drinking made him ravenous. I know. The same thing happens to me), and we would eat at the table with the kerosene lamp flickering before us.

Once when our cricket team was playing down in Australia Pa and I sat every single night next to the radio up to three, four o'clock in the dead of night listening to cricket commentary and eating salt herring and biscuits.

But all of that stopped the day Mr. Gaskins's old Morris Minor came b.u.mping down the road to take the three of us to the airport.

When we reached the airport, Pa and Mr. Gaskins each carried a suitcase into the terminal building, with the weight of each suitcase behding their bodies sideways.

Ma and I watched from afar as Pa showed the woman at the counter his papers. It was as if Ma was already putting distance between herself and Pa so that when he really left the shock wouldn't be so great.

After Pa checked in we stood in the middle of the terminal-Ma in her good beige dress with white lace trim around the neck, broad-brim straw hat and s.h.i.+ning black pocketbook, Pa in his only dark-gray suit with the two-b.u.t.ton jacket and dark-brown felt hat c.o.c.ked at an angle. It looked to me like he was outgrowing his suit, which didn't make sense because grown-ups don't grow. Mr. Gaskins wore a long-sleeved white s.h.i.+rt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbow.

With all the talking that was going on and the aroma of food, the only difference between the airport and the market was the voice coming over a loudspeaker every now and then.

”. . . flight number 461 now boarding . . .”

That is my plane, Pa said.

And the noise in the airport almost drowned out Ma's voice reminding Pa of the two dozen flying fish she fried that morning and wrapped in plastic and newspaper and packed in the suitcase. ”Those will hold you for a little while,” she said. ”What you don't want right away you can freeze.”

Pa said, ”All right, all right.” He didn't say it, but you could tell he was thinking he was a big man who didn't need n.o.body telling him how to take care of two dozen fish.

Then Ma said, Write as soon as you get there.

”Soon's I get pay I going send something,” Pa said.

”Get yourself settle first,” Ma said. Don't worry about we.

Pa pulled on his cigarette and at that moment he looked like a movie star with his hat c.o.c.ked at an angle and his s.h.i.+rt opened at the neck under his jacket.

He stamped the cigarette b.u.t.t under his foot and hugged Ma. She stared over his shoulder with water br.i.m.m.i.n.g in her eyes.

Then he stuck out his hand and looked me full in my eyes. ”You in charge now, Brute,” he said.

We shook hands, man to man, with me looking him full in his face and with my lips pressed together knowing that if I opened my mouth to speak I would cry, which I couldn't do because men don't cry.

We watched Pa walk toward the door with his travel agency bag over one shoulder and a carton of rum like a valise in one hand.

”Come,” Ma said.

So I didn't learn until years later that he stopped at the top of the airplane steps and searched for us among the crowd behind the guard rail on the roof of the airport building, and even though he didn't see us he waved, not knowing that we were already in Mr. Gaskins's car headed back home with Mr. Gaskins making conversation to lighten up Ma's spirits.

”He soon come back,” Mr. Gaskins said. ”Soon as he make enough money he going come right back to you and Gabby here. Look at me,” he said. ”I work like a slave in the London Transport. But you think I was going stay over there? No sir. That en no place for human beings to live, far more die. But if I didn't do that, if I didn't go away, you think I woulda had this little motorcar to help me make a few little extra cents? Things going work out,” he said.

That night I lay on the floor and heard Ma crying softly. And it brought to mind another night when Ma and I were sleeping and Pa came in, drunk as usual. For some reason he and Ma started shouting and next thing I know, PAKS! He delivered a slap to Ma's face. Ma held her face. The house was silent. Then she uncoiled and began windmilling her hands, hitting him every which way and yelling, ”You come in here with your drunk self and hit me? Eh? In front your son? That the kind of example you setting?” And Pa hitting her back, but not with any force. After a while he walked back out of the house and Ma lay in bed sniffling into her pillow the same way she was crying that night after we came back from the airport.

It was the first of many such nights.

FROM Water Marked.

BY HELEN ELAINE LEE.

Delta moved aside as Sunday came through the doorway, and in an instant, they felt their manifold heritage of silence and remorse, and the pull of common history and blood.

Sunday called her sister's name, and Delta's hands began to reach for her, before pausing and returning to her sides. She offered a determined smile, and then, seeing Sunday seeing her, she smoothed down her hair, oiled and halved by a careful part.

As Sunday looked at her, Delta nodded, reminded of her sister's apt.i.tude for sight, and wondered if she could sense the toll of misbegotten love. She felt a sudden kins.h.i.+p with a tree she had once known, lightning-struck and fired from the inside out, a few singed spots the only clues, but changed, unmistakably changed. Her roomy, flowered s.h.i.+rtwaist offered no cover at all as she seemed to thicken, further, under Sunday's gaze, and she crossed her arms over the fullness of her waist and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and fumbled toward speech.

”Well . . .” she said, d.a.m.ning herself as she spoke for her inept.i.tude in launching their reunion with that word that was all-purpose and meant nothing, asking herself why she could never find the right way to begin, the right thing to say, even to her own sister, and there she was groping, idiotically groping as she heard her own voice trail off, her alarm at the impending silence and her own impotence spreading, and again, ”Well,” this time as if it were a statement, the completion of what she had started.

Each one took a step forward, and then Sunday reached for Delta, smelling Ivory soap and Kool Milds, and Delta felt herself enfolded in the soft, loose weave of her baby sister's clothes. She tightened her balled-up hands and inhaled the woody musk, the train, the oil paint in her neck, identifying them all in a tumbled rush of memory as the thin, gold music of Sunday's earrings quieted against her face and hair. She hadn't been held for so long, and here were Sunday's wiry arms around her and her fingers spread wide across her back.

”Wing stumps,” Sunday whispered as she touched her sister's shoulder blades, giving her own childhood explanation for the protrusions of bone. Delta laughed as she remembered how Sunday had once drawn herself holding a set of folded wings, prepared for flight.

Delta freed her hands from her pockets and patted her sister stiffly as she eased herself away, noticing as Sunday moved to the center of the living room how tall she seemed beneath the layers of overlapping aubergine cloth. Her hair was unstraightened and unconfined, and she was so tall, so purple, so much, she seemed to fill the room.

”I know I was supposed to call, but I forgot, and it seemed easier just to come. That way I got to walk through the neighborhood.”

Delta stepped back from her and focused on the different textures of cloth, some nubby and fibrous and some watery smooth, and what was that she had on, anyhow, she wondered silently, unable to tell if it was pants or a skirt, and where the top ended and the bottom began, and standing out from those waves of purple, from the corkscrews of bark-red hennaed hair and strings of beads that rang together as she moved, were her eyes, unquiet and night-black, taking in the details of sister and house.