She was First Corinthians Dead, daughter of a wealthy property owner and the elegant Ruth Foster, granddaughter of the magnificent and worshipped Dr. Foster, who had been the second man in the city to have a two-horse carriage, and a woman who had turned heads on every deck of the Queen Mary and had Frenchmen salivating all over Paris. Corinthians Dead, who had held herself pure all these years (well, almost all, and almost pure), was now banging on the car-door window of a yardman. But she would bang forever to escape the velvet. The red velvet that had flown all over the snow that day when she and Lena and her mother had walked past the hospital on their way to the department store. Her mother was pregnant—a fact that had embarrassed Corinthians when first she learned of it. All she could think of was how her friends would laugh when they found out she had a pregnant mother. Her relief was sweet when she discovered that it was too soon to show. But by February her mother was heavy and needed to get out of the house, to exercise a little. They’d walked slowly through the snow, watching carefully for icy places. Then as they passed Mercy, there was a crowd watching a man on the roof. Corinthians had seen him before her mother did, but when Ruth looked up she was so startled she dropped the basket, scattering the roses everywhere. Corinthians and Lena busied themselves picking them up, wiping the snow from the cloth on their coats, all the while peeping at the man in blue wings on the hospital roof. They were laughing, Lena and she; collecting the roses, looking up at the man, and laughing from fear, embarrassment, and giddiness. It was all mixed together—the red velvet, the screams, and the man crashing down on the pavement. She had seen his body quite clearly, and to her astonishment, there was no blood. The only red in view was in their own hands and in the basket. Her mother’s moans were getting louder and she seemed to be sinking into the ground. A stretcher came at last for the dollbroken body (all the more doll-like because there was no blood), and finally a wheelchair for her mother, who was moving straight into labor.
Corinthians continued to make roses, but she hated that stupid hobby and gave Lena any excuse to avoid it. They spoke to her of death. First the death of the man in the blue wings. Now her own. For if Porter did not turn his head and lean toward the door to open it for her, Corinthians believed she would surely die. She banged her knuckles until they ached to get the attention of the living flesh behind the glass, and would have smashed her fist through the window just to touch him, feel his heat, the only thing that could protect her from a smothering death of dry roses.
He did not move. In a panic, lest he shift gears and drive away, leaving her alone in the street, Corinthians climbed up on the fender and lay full out across the hood of the car. She didn’t look through the windshield at him. She just lay there, stretched across the car, her fingers struggling for a grip on steel. She thought of nothing. Nothing except what her body needed to do to hang on, to never let go. Even if he drove off at one hundred miles an hour, she would hang on. Her eyes were shut tight with the effort of clinging to the hood, and she didn’t hear the door open and shut, nor Porter’s footsteps as he moved around to the front of the car. She screamed at first when he put his hand on her shoulders and began pulling her gently into his arms. He carried her to the passenger’s side of the car, stood her on her feet while he opened the door and helped her ease into the seat. In the car, he pressed her head onto his shoulder and waited for her soft crying to wane before he left the driver’s seat to pick up the purse she had let fall on the sidewalk. He drove away then to number 3 Fifteenth Street, a house owned by Macon Dead, where sixteen tenants lived, and where there was an attic window, from which this same Henry Porter had screamed, wept, waved a shotgun, and urinated over the heads of the women in the yard.
It was not yet midnight and hot—hot enough to make people angry, had it not been for a pleasant smell in the air, like sweet ginger. Corinthians and Porter entered the hall that opened off the front door. Except for a hem of light under the kitchen door, where a card game was in progress, there was no sign of any other tenant.
Corinthians saw only the bed, an iron bed painted hospital white. She sank down on it as soon as she got into the room and stretched, scoured, vacuumed, and for the first time simple. Porter undressed after she did and lay down beside her. They were quiet for a minute, then he turned over and parted her legs with his.
Corinthians looked down at him. “Is this for me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, this is for you.”
“Porter.”
“This is…for you. Instead of roses. And silk underwear and bottles of perfume.”
“Porter.”
“Instead of chocolate creams in a heart-shaped box. Instead of a big house and a great big car. Instead of long trips…”
“Porter.”
“…in a clean white boat.”
“No.”
“Instead of picnics…”
“No.”
“…and fishing…”
“No.”
“…and being old together on a porch.”
“No.”
“This is for you, girl. Oh, yes. This is for you.”
They woke at four o’clock in the morning, or rather she did. When she opened her eyes she saw him staring at her and those were either tears in his eyes or sweat. It was very hot in that room in spite of the open window.
“The bathroom,” she murmured. “Where is the bathroom?”
“Down the hall,” he said. Then, apologetically, “Can I get you something?”
“Oh.” She pushed a few strands of matted damp hair from her forehead. “Something to drink, please. Something cold.”
He dressed quickly, leaving off his shirt and his socks, and left the room. Corinthians got up too and began to put her clothes on. Since there seemed to be no mirror in the room, she stood in front of the open window and used the upper part of the pane, dark enough to show her reflection, to smooth her hair. Then she noticed the walls. What she had assumed to be wallpaper as she entered and fell on the bed was in fact calendars. Row after row of calendars: S. &. J. Automobile Parts, featuring a 1939 Hudson; the Cuyahoga River Construction Company (“We build to please—We’re pleased to build”); Lucky Hart Beauty Products (a wavy-haired lady smiling out of a heavily powdered face); the Call and Post newspaper. But most of them were from the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. They literally covered the walls, each one turned to December. It was as though he’d kept every calendar since 1939. Some of them were large cards displaying all twelve months and on those she noticed circles drawn around dates.
Porter came in while she was gazing at them. He held a glass of iced water, the cubes jammed to the rim.
“Why do you keep calendars?” she asked.
He smiled. “Passes the time. Here. Drink your drink. It’ll cool you.”
She took the glass and sipped a little from it, trying to keep the ice from touching her teeth as she looked at him over the rim. Standing there, barefoot, her hair damp with sweat and sticking to her cheeks like paint, she felt easy. In place of vanity she now felt a self-esteem that was quite new. She was grateful to him, this man who rented a tiny room from her father, who ate with a knife and did not even own a pair of dress shoes. A perfect example of the men her parents had kept her from (and whom she had also kept herself from) all her life because such a man was known to beat his woman, betray her, shame her, and leave her. Corinthians moved close to him, tilted his chin up with her fingers, and planted a feathery kiss on his throat. He held her head in his hands until she closed her eyes and tried to set the glass down on a tiny table.
“Uh uh. It’ll be light soon. Gotta get you home.”
She obeyed and finished dressing herself. They walked as softly as possible down the stairs and past the wide triangle of light that lay on the floor in front of the kitchen door. The men were still at their card game, but the door was partially open now. Porter and Corinthians moved quickly past, just out of the light.
Still a voice called, “Who that? Mary?”
“No. Just me. Porter.”
“Porter?” The voice was incredulous. “What shift you on?”
“Catch you later,” said Porter and opened the front door before the speaker’s curiosity could propel him into the hall.
Corinthians slid as close to Porter as the floor gear of the car allowed, her head resting on the seat back. She closed her eyes once more and took deep breaths of the sweet air her brother had been inhaling three hours ago.
“Hadn’t you better fix your hair?” Porter asked. He thought she was beautiful like that, girlish, but he didn’t want her excuse to her parents, if they were still awake, to sound ridiculous.
She shook her head. She wouldn’t have collected her hair into a ball at her nape now for anything in the world.
Porter parked under the same tree where Corinthians had thrown herself across the hood of the car. Now, after a whispered confession, she walked the four blocks, no longer afraid to mount the porch steps.
As soon as she closed the door she heard voices and instinctively touched her loose hair. The voices came from beyond the dining room, from behind the closed kitchen door. Men’s voices. Corinthians blinked. She had just come from a house in which men sat in a lit kitchen talking in loud excited voices, only to meet an identical scene at home. She wondered if this part of the night, a part she was unfamiliar with, belonged, had always belonged, to men. If perhaps it was a secret hour in which men rose like giants from dragon’s teeth and, while the women slept, clustered in their kitchens. On tiptoe she approached the door. Her father was speaking.
“You still haven’t explained to me why you brought him along.”
“What difference does it make now?” That was her brother’s voice.
“He knows about it,” said her father. “That’s what difference.”
“About what? There’s nothing to know. It was a bust.” Milkman’s voice swelled like a blister.
“It was a mistake, not a bust. It just means it’s somewhere else. That’s all.”
“Yeah. The mint. You want me to go to the mint?”
“No!” Macon struck the table. “It’s got to be there. It’s got to.”
Corinthians couldn’t make sense out of what they were talking about with so much passion, and she didn’t want to stay there and learn, lest it distract her from the contentment she was feeling. She left them and climbed the stairs to her own bed.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Milkman folded his arms on the table and put his head down. “I don’t care. I don’t care where it is.”
“It was just a mistake,” said his father. “One little mess-up. That don’t mean we have to pull out.”
“You call being thrown in jail a little mess-up?”
“You out, ain’t you? You was only there twenty minutes.”
“Two hours.”
“Wouldn’t have been two minutes if you had called me soon’s you got there. Sooner. Should have called me soon’s they picked you up.”
“Police cars don’t have telephones in them.” Milkman was weary. He lifted his head and let it rest in his hand, directing his words into his shirt sleeve.
“They would have let you, if it had just been you. Soon as you told them your name they would have let you go. But you was with that Southside nigger. That’s what did it.”
“That is not what did it. It was riding around with a sack of rocks and human bones that did it. Human bones. Which is, if you’re a halfway intelligent cop, a hint that there must have been a human being connected to them bones at one time.”
“Of course at one time. But not tonight. There couldn’t have been a human attached to the bones yesterday. It takes time for a body to be a skeleton. They know that. And don’t tell me it wasn’t Guitar they was suspicious of. That yellow-eyed nigger looks like he might do anything.”
“They didn’t see his eyes when they told us to pull over. They didn’t see nothing. They just sideswiped us, and told us to get out. Now, what was that for? What’d they stop us for? We wasn’t speeding. Just driving along.” Milkman searched for cigarettes. He got angry again when he thought about bending over the car, his legs spread, his hands on the hood, while the policeman fingered his legs, his back, his ass, his arms. “What business they got stopping cars that ain’t speeding?”
“They stop anybody they want to. They saw you was colored, that’s all. And they’re looking for the Negro that killed that boy.”
“Who said it was a Negro?”
“Paper said it.”
“They always say that. Every time…”
“What difference does it make? If you’d been alone and told them your name they never would have hauled you in, never would have searched the car, and never would have opened that sack. They know me. You saw how they acted when I got there.”
“They didn’t act any different when you got there….”
“What?”
“They acted different when you took that sucker off in the corner and opened your wallet.”
“You better be thankful I got a wallet.”
“I am. God knows I am.”
“And that would have been the end of it, except for that Southside nigger. Hadn’t been for him, they wouldn’t of had to get Pilate down there.” Macon rubbed his knees. The idea of having to depend on Pilate to get his son out of jail humiliated him. “Raggedy bootlegging bitch.”
“She’s still a bitch?” Milkman began to chuckle. Exhaustion and the slow release of tension made him giddy. “You thought she stole it. All these years…all … all these years you’ve been holding that against her.” He was laughing out right now. “How she sneaked out of some cave with a big bag of gold that must have weighed a hundred pounds over her shoulder, all over the country for fifty years and didn’t spend none of it, just hung it from the ceiling like a fuckin sack of onions.” Milkman put his head back and let the laughter fill the kitchen. Macon was silent. “Fifty years…You been thinking about that gold for fifty years! Oh, shit. This is some crazy shit….” Tears of laughter were running from his eyes. “Crazy. All of you. Just straight-out, laid-back crazy. I should of known. The whole thing was crazy; everything about it was crazy—the whole idea.”
“What’s crazier? Her hauling a sack of gold around all this time, or hauling a dead man’s bones around? Huh? Which one?” Macon asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“If she do one, she could do the other. She’s the one they should have kept. When you all told them the bones belonged to her, they should have locked her up soon’s she walked in the door.”
Milkman wiped the tears on his sleeve. “Lock her up for what? After that story she told?” He started laughing again. “She came in there like Louise Beaver and Butterfly McQueen all rolled up in one. ‘Yassuh, boss. Yassuh, boss….”
“She didn’t say that.”
“Almost. She even changed her voice.”
“I told you she was a snake. Drop her skin in a split second.”
