“I know.”
“No, you don’t know. You was up under the bar when me and Moon grabbed her.”
“I know what she had.”
“Won’t be no Moon in this room tomorrow. And no Guitar either, if I listen to you. This time she might have a pistol.”
“What fool is gonna give a colored woman a pistol?”
“Same fool that gave Porter a shotgun.”
“That was years ago.”
“It ain’t even that that bothers me. It’s the way you acting. Like you want it. Like you looking forward to it.”
“Where’d you think that up?”
“Look at you. You all dressed up.”
“I had to work in Sonny’s Shop. You know my old man makes me dress up like this when I’m behind the desk.”
“You had time to change. It’s past midnight.”
“Okay. So I’m clean. So I’m looking forward to it. I just got through telling you I don’t want to hide no more….”
“It’s a secret, ain’t it? You got yourself a secret.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Two? You and her?”
“No. You and me. You’ve been making some funny smoke screens lately.” Milkman looked up at Guitar and smiled. “Just so you don’t think I ain’t noticed.”
Guitar grinned back. Now that he knew there was a secret, he settled down into the groove of their relationship.
“Okay, Mr. Dead, sir. You on your own. Would you ask your visitor to kind of neaten things up a little before she goes? I don’t want to come back and have to look through a pile of cigarette butts for your head. Be nice if it was laying somewhere I could spot it right off. And if it’s her head that’s left behind, well, there’s some towels in the closet on the shelf in the back.”
“Rest your mind, boy. Ain’t nobody giving up no head.”
They laughed then at the suitableness of the unintended pun, and it was in the sound of this laughter that Guitar picked up his brown leather jacket and started out the door.
“Cigarettes!” Milkman called after him. “Bring me some cigarettes before you disappear.”
“Gotcha!” Guitar was halfway down the stairs. Already his thoughts had left Milkman and had flown ahead to the house where six old men waited for him.
He didn’t come back that night.
Milkman lay quietly in the sunlight, his mind a blank, his lungs craving smoke. Gradually his fear of and eagerness for death returned. Above all he wanted to escape what he knew, escape the implications of what he had been told. And all he knew in the world about the world was what other people had told him. He felt like a garbage pail for the actions and hatreds of other people. He himself did nothing. Except for the one time he had hit his father, he had never acted independently, and that act, his only one, had brought unwanted knowledge too, as well as some responsibility for that knowledge. When his father told him about Ruth, he joined him in despising her, but he felt put upon; felt as though some burden had been given to him and that he didn’t deserve it. None of that was his fault, and he didn’t want to have to think or be or do something about any of it.
In that mood of lazy righteousness he wallowed in Guitar’s bed, the same righteousness that had made him tail his mother like a secret agent when she left the house a week or so ago.
Returning home from a party, he had hardly pulled Macon’s Buick up to the curb and turned off the car lights when he saw his mother walking a little ahead of him down Not Doctor Street. It was one-thirty in the morning, but in spite of the hour and her turned-up coat collar, there was no air of furtiveness about her at all. She was walking in what seemed to him a determined manner. Neither hurried nor aimless. Just the even-paced walk of a woman on her way to some modest but respectable work.
When Ruth turned the corner, Milkman waited a minute and started up the car. Creeping, not letting the engine slide into high gear, he drove around the corner. She was standing at the bus stop, so Milkman waited in the shadows until the bus came and she boarded it.
Surely this was no meeting of lovers. The man would have picked her up nearby somewhere. No man would allow a woman he had any affection for to come to him on public transportation in the middle of the night, especially a woman as old as Ruth. And what man wanted a woman over sixty anyway?
Following the bus was a nightmare; it stopped too often, too long, and it was difficult to tail it, hide, and watch to see if she got off. Milkman turned on the car radio, but the music, which he hoped would coat his nerve ends, only splayed them. He was very nervous and thought seriously about turning back.
Finally the bus pulled up at the intracounty train station. Its last stop. There, among the few remaining passengers, he saw her go into the lobby of the station. He believed he’d lost her. He’d never find out what train she was taking. He thought again of going back home. It was late, he was exhausted, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know any more about his mother. But having come this far, he realized it was foolish to turn back now and leave things forever up in the air. He parked in the lot and walked slowly toward the station. Maybe she’s not taking a train, he thought. Maybe he meets her in the station.
He looked around carefully before pushing open the doors. There was no sign of her inside. It was a small, plain building. Old but well lit. Looming over the modest waiting room was the Great Seal of Michigan, in vivid Technicolor, painted, probably, by some high school art class. Two pink deer reared up on their hind legs, facing each other, and an eagle perched at eye level between them. The eagle’s wings were open and looked like raised shoulders. Its head was turned to the left; one fierce eye bored into that of a deer. Purple Latin words stretched in a long ribbon beneath the seal: Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice. Milkman didn’t understand the Latin and he didn’t understand why the wolverine state had a buck painted on the seal. Or were they does? He remembered Guitar’s story about killing one. “A man shouldn’t do that.” Milkman felt a quick beat of something like remorse, but he shook it off and resumed his search for his mother. He walked to the back of the station. Still no sight of her. Then he noticed that there was an upper platform, stairs leading to it, and an arrow with the words FAIR FIELD AND NORTHEASTERN SUBURBS painted on it. Perhaps she was up there. He moved cautiously toward the stairs, glancing up and all around lest he see her or miss her. A loudspeaker broke the silence, announcing the arrival of the two-fifteen train to Fairfield Heights, leaving from the upper platform. He dashed up the stairs then just in time to see Ruth step into a car, and to jump into another car himself.
The train made ten stops at about ten-minute intervals. He leaned out between the cars at each stop to see if she was getting off. After the sixth stop, he asked the conductor when the next train returned to the city. “Five forty-five a.m.,” he said.
Milkman looked at his watch. It was already three o’clock. When the conductor called out, “Fairfield Heights. Last stop,” a half hour later, Milkman looked out again and this time he saw her disembark. He darted behind the three-sided wooden structure that sheltered waiting passengers from the wind until he heard her wide rubber heels padding down the steps.
Beyond the shelter along the street below were stores—all closed now: newsstands, coffee shops, stationery shops, but no houses. The wealthy people of Fairfield did not live near a train station and very few of their houses could even be seen from the road. Nevertheless, Ruth walked in her even-paced way down the street and in just a few minutes was at the wide winding lane that led into Fairfield Cemetery.
As Milkman stared at the ironwork arched over the entrance, he remembered snatches of his mother’s chatter about having looked so very carefully for a cemetery for the doctor’s body—someplace other than the one where Negroes were all laid together in one area. And forty years ago Fairfield was farm country with a county cemetery too tiny for anybody to care whether its dead were white or black.
Milkman leaned against a tree and waited at the entrance. Now he knew, if he’d had any doubts, that all his father had told him was true. She was a silly, selfish, queer, faintly obscene woman. Again he felt abused. Why couldn’t anybody in his whole family just be normal?
He waited for an hour before she came out.
“Hello, Mama,” he said. He tried to make his voice sound as coolly cruel as he felt; just as he tried to frighten her by stepping out suddenly from behind the tree.
He succeeded. She stumbled in alarm and took a great gulp of air into her mouth.
“Macon! Is that you? You’re here? Oh, my goodness. I…” She tried desperately to normalize the situation, smiling wanly and blinking her eyes, searching for words and manners and civilization.
Milkman stopped her. “You come to lay down on your father’s grave? Is that what you’ve been doing all these years? Spending a night every now and then with your father?”
Ruth’s shoulders seemed to slump, but she said in a surprisingly steady voice, “Let’s walk toward the train stop.”
Neither said a word during the forty-five minutes they waited in the little shelter for the train back to the city. The sun came up and pointed out the names of young lovers painted on the wall. A few men were walking up the stairs to the platform.
When the train backed in from its siding they still had not spoken. Only when the wheels were actually turning and the engine had cleared its throat did Ruth begin, and she began in the middle of a sentence as though she had been thinking it all through since she and her son left the entrance to Fairfield Cemetery.
“…because the fact is that I am a small woman. I don’t mean little; I mean small, and I’m small because I was pressed small. I lived in a great big house that pressed me into a small package. I had no friends, only schoolmates who wanted to touch my dresses and my white silk stockings. But I didn’t think I’d ever need a friend because I had him. I was small, but he was big. The only person who ever really cared whether I lived or died. Lots of people were interested in whether I lived or died, but he cared. He was not a good man, Macon. Certainly he was an arrogant man, and often a foolish and destructive one. But he cared whether and he cared how I lived, and there was, and is, no one else in the world who ever did. And for that I would do anything. It was important for me to be in his presence, among his things, the things he used, had touched. Later it was just important for me to know that he was in the world. When he left it, I kept on reigniting that cared-for feeling that I got from him.
“I am not a strange woman. I am a small one.
“I don’t know what all your father has told you about me down in that shop you all stay in. But I know, as well as I know my own name, that he told you only what was flattering to him. I know he never told you that he killed my father and that he tried to kill you. Because both of you took my attention away from him. I know he never told you that. And I know he never told you that he threw my father’s medicine away, but it’s true. And I couldn’t save my father. Macon took away his medicine and I just didn’t know it, and I wouldn’t have been able to save you except for Pilate. Pilate was the one brought you here in the first place.”
“Pilate?” Milkman was coming awake. He had begun listening to his mother with the dulled ear of someone who was about to be conned and knew it.
“Pilate. Old, crazy, sweet Pilate. Your father and I hadn’t had physical relations since my father died, when Lena and Corinthians were just toddlers. We had a terrible quarrel. He threatened to kill me. I threatened to go to the police about what he had done to my father. We did neither. I guess my father’s money was more important to him than the satisfaction of killing me. And I would have happily died except for my babies. But he did move into another room and that’s the way things stayed until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Until I thought I’d really die if I had to live that way. With nobody touching me, or even looking as though they’d like to touch me. That’s when I started coming to Fairfield. To talk. To talk to somebody who wanted to listen and not laugh at me. Somebody I could trust. Somebody who trusted me. Somebody who was…interested in me. For my own self. I didn’t care if that somebody was under the ground. You know, I was twenty years old when your father stopped sleeping in the bed with me. That’s hard, Macon. Very hard. By the time I was thirty think I was just afraid I’d die that way.
“Then Pilate came to town. She came into this city like she owned it. Pilate, Reba, and Reba’s little baby. Hagar. Pilate came to see Macon right away and soon as she saw me she knew what my trouble was. And she asked me one day, ‘Do you want him?’ ‘I want somebody,’ I told her. ‘He’s as good as anybody,’ she said. ‘Besides, you’ll get pregnant and your baby ought to be his. He ought to have a son. Otherwise this be the end of us.’
“She gave me funny things to do. And some greenish-gray grassy-looking stuff to put in his food.” Ruth laughed. “I felt like a doctor, like a chemist doing some big important scientific experiment. It worked too. Macon came to me for four days. He even came home from his office in the middle of the day to be with me. He looked puzzled, but he came. Then it was over. And two months later I was pregnant. When he found out about it, he immediately suspected Pilate and he told me to get rid of the baby. But I wouldn’t and Pilate helped me stand him off. I wouldn’t have been strong enough without her. She saved my life. And yours, Macon. She saved yours too. She watched you like you were her own. Until your father threw her out.”
Milkman leaned his head against the cold handbar that was attached to the seat in front of him. He held it there, letting its chill circle his head. Then he turned to his mother. “Were you father when he was dead? Naked?”
“No. But I did kneel there in my slip at his bedside and kiss his beautiful fingers. They were the only part of him that wasn’t…”
“You nursed me.”
“Yes.”
“Until I was…old. Too old.”
Ruth turned toward her son. She lifted her head and looked deep into his eyes. “And I also prayed for you. Every single night and every single day. On my knees. Now you tell me. What harm did I do you on my knees?”
That was the beginning. Now it was all going to end. In a little while she would walk in the door and this time he would let her do it. Afterward there would be no remembrance of who he was or where. Of Magdalene called Lena and First Corinthians, of his father trying to stop him dead before he was born. Of the brilliant bitterness between his father and his mother, a bitterness as smooth and fixed as steel. And he wouldn’t have those waking dreams or hear those awful words his mother had spoken to him: What harm? What harm did I do you on my knees?
He could hear her footsteps, and then the sound of the doorknob turning, sticking, and turning again. He knew, without uncovering his eyes, that she was right there, looking at him through the window.
