Roy
I spent about thirty-six hours straight with Davina Hardrick in what used to be Miss Annie Mae’s house. Life is full of wonders. Who would have predicted that a girl I knew only a little bit in high school would capture me so completely that I hardly remembered my way home? The only reason I left her bed at all was that she put me out so she could go to work. Between her good cooking and her good loving, I could have stayed there forever. When I finally showed up in the rumpled clothes I had been wearing (or not wearing) for the last day and a half, Big Roy was waiting on the front porch. The two Huey Newton chairs stood unoccupied while he sat on the concrete floor with his legs hanging over the side, his feet planted in the flower beds. His left hand was curled around my mama’s yellow coffee cup and the other was gripping a honey bun he ate straight from the wrapper. “You alive?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, bounding up the stairs. “Alive and well.”
Big Roy pulled his eyebrows up a couple of inches. “What’s her name?”
“I am sworn to secrecy to protect the innocent.”
“Long as she’s not married. I would hate to see you go through all you been through just to get shot by some hard-leg over a woman.”
“You’re right. My story is tragic enough as it is.”
“More coffee is on the stove,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the front door.
I fixed myself a cup, then returned to the porch and sat down next to my father. I looked up and down the road thinking about myself, a habit I picked up when I was gone. You sit there thinking about where you want to be, who you want to be with. What you wish you could eat. I used to sit there for as long as twenty minutes or so thinking about Kalamata olives and what I would eat them on. Now I was thinking about Davina and wondering if I could go back over there tonight.
Was I cheating on Celestial, or was I cheating on my memories of her? I suppose a man in my position should receive some sort of special consideration. I won’t say that Davina Hardrick saved my life with her plush thighs and her “baby” language, but she salvaged my something, if not my life, maybe my spirit.
Big Roy spoke over the rim of the yellow coffee cup. “You need to learn how to use the telephone, son. You can’t just disappear. Not after everything that has happened.”
I felt my shoulders round as I tucked my head almost to my chest. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t think about it.”
“You got to remember how to consider about other people.”
“I know.” I slurped some more coffee, and he handed me the half-eaten honey bun. I tore it in two pieces and stuffed the sweet bread in my mouth. “Trying to get used to being myself.”
Big Roy said, “You need to get in touch with your wife today. Let her know.”
“Let her know what?”
“Not about whoever got you over here grinning like Jiminy Cricket. But you got to let her know you’re back home. Trust me on this, son. Whoever you been with, she may seem special right now, but she’s not your wife.”
I threw my hands up. “I know. I know.” I hadn’t had a little scrap of happiness in five entire years and he wasn’t even going to let me have an hour of basking in the sun.
“But wait until you wash up,” he said.
He was right. I needed to make some plans to get back to Atlanta, to greet Celestial skin-to-skin and ask her whether we were still married. A part of me said, if you have to ask, the answer is no. Maybe I was setting myself up. Two years of no visits is a message; why did I need to hear it from her own lips? Whatever she had to say for herself would draw blood, and it wouldn’t be a clean cut. The truth would hurt jagged, like a dog bite.
But there was still the simple and undisputed fact that she didn’t divorce me. If she didn’t get out of the marriage officially, it was only because she didn’t want to. That carried some weight in my book. Besides, even a dog bite can heal.
When the phone started ringing, I hadn’t gotten dressed any further than my shorts. The outdated telephone rang with a loud metallic jangle. “Tell Wickliffe I’m waiting on the porch,” Big Roy shouted from outside.
Pussyfooting to the kitchen, half-naked and barefoot, I picked up the phone and said, “He’s waiting on the porch.”
The man on the other end said, “Excuse me?”
I said, “Sorry. Hello? Hamilton residence.”
The man on the other end said, “Roy, is that you?”
“Little Roy. You want Big Roy?”
“It’s Andre. What are you doing answering the phone? I thought you weren’t getting out until Wednesday.”
The last time I saw Dre, he wore the gray suit he would wear to Olive’s wake. I could feel the crowd in the visitors’ room watching him as we talked, trying to figure out the deal with us. I knew how I looked: like everyone else in there, worn jumpsuit, black skin. Everything else about me was details. In his dress clothes, Dre didn’t look like a lawyer; he presented more like a musician who moved to Europe because “cats in the States don’t get jazz.”
I had been glad to see him. Dre was my boy. He introduced me to Celestial the first time, even though it didn’t take until much later. When we got married, he stood up with me, signed his name. Now here he was on the last Sunday Olive would be aboveground.
“Will you carry her for me?” I asked.
Dre breathed deep and nodded.
It’s painful to even recollect it, but when he agreed, I felt thankful and furious all at once. “I appreciate you,” I said.
He whisked my words away with his piano-player fingers. “I’m sorry about all of this. You know, Banks is still working. . . .”
Now it was my turn to wave him quiet. “Fuck Banks. Even if he got me out tomorrow, it would be too late. My mama is already dead.”
Hearing his voice now, I felt that same mix of shame and rage I felt when he said he would carry Olive’s casket. It made my throat itch, and I had to clear it twice before I spoke.
“What’s up, Dre? Good to hear from you.”
“Likewise, man,” he said. “But you’re early. We weren’t expecting you for a few more days.”
We, he said. We weren’t expecting you.
“Paperwork,” I said. “Bureaucracy. Someone in the Department of Corrections said it was time for me to go and so I went.”
“I hear you,” said Dre. “Does Celestial know?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“No problem,” Dre said after a beat. “I hope you don’t mind holding steady for a couple of days.”
“Y’all are driving down together?”
“Just me,” said Dre.
I hung up the phone and went back out to the porch and stood over Big Roy. From this angle, I could see the little scars on the top of his balding head. I remember my mother kissing them when he would whack his head on the light fixture that hung a little too low over the dining-room table. She was crazy about that dinky little chandelier, and my father never asked her to take it down.
“It wasn’t Wickliffe,” I said. “It was Andre.”
“What did he say that got you so shook up that you’re standing outside in your drawers?”
I looked down at my bare legs, turning ashy already. “He says he’s coming down to get me. Just him.”
“That sound right to you?”
“I don’t know what’s right.”
Big Roy said, “You better get to Atlanta and see if you have any marriage left.” He paused. “If that’s what you want.”
“Hell yeah, it’s what I want.”
“I had to ask because ten minutes ago you didn’t seem so sure.”
The phone rang again and Big Roy jutted his chin toward the house. “Answer it. It’s either going to be Wickliffe or Celestial. If it’s Wickliffe, tell him I’m calling in. If it’s Celestial, you’re on your own.”
I let it jangle until she gave up.
I returned to the kitchen dressed in the best apparel Walmart had to offer, khaki pants and a knit shirt with a collar. At least I had good shoes. In the mirror, I looked like a budget Tiger Woods, but I didn’t look like an ex-con. “I want to go home.”
Big Roy was stooped in front of the refrigerator rummaging inside. “Atlanta, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“You made up your mind quick,” he said. “Andre lit some kind of fire under you.”
“I always knew I was going to go, but I didn’t know when. Now I know that when is as soon as I can.”
“You set to drive?”
I reached in my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. After all these years in prison storage, the leather was still soft and supple. Stuck to a punch card for lattes, was my driver’s license. The photo was of the successful me; cocky and sure in my button-down shirt and burgundy tie, I grinned, showing two rows of strong square teeth. According to the state of Georgia, I was clear to drive a vehicle for another six months. The Peach State also was under the impression that I lived at 1104 Lynn Valley Road. This license was the only thing I had left from before. I held it up and let the light play off the state seal. “All set, but I don’t have a car.”
“You can take the Chrysler,” Big Roy said, opening an egg carton and finding only one lonely egg. “I need to go make groceries. Two grown men need to eat breakfast.”
“Daddy, how you going to get to work without a car?”
“Wickliffe will ride me around if I help him with gas.”
“Let me think about it.”
“I thought you said you were ready to go.”
“I said I’m thinking about it.”
“You know, sometimes you can make up with bacon what you don’t have in eggs.” Big Roy opened the fridge wider and bent himself low enough to rummage in one of the drawers. “One sorry strip of bacon. I guess you could have the egg and I could have the bacon.” He went to the cabinet and opened it, showing neat rows of tin cans. “I got it! Salmon croquettes. You eat them, right?”
I looked at Big Roy like I was meeting a stranger. His body was too large for my mother’s kitchen, but he did all right, cracking the single egg one-handed and whipping it with a dainty fork.
“What?”
“Nothing, Daddy. It’s just that the entire time I was growing up, I never knew you to touch a pot or a pan. But now you putter around the kitchen like Martha Stewart.”
“Well,” he said, with his back to me as he kept whipping that solitary egg, “losing Olive left me with two options: learn to cook or starve to death.”
“You could marry somebody else.” I hardly got the words out. “It’s legal.”
“When I want somebody else, I’ll find somebody else.” Big Roy said. “But if all I want is a meal, then I’ll cook.” He held up the can of salmon and smiled. “They don’t tell you, but a lot of foods have recipes on the back of the can to tell you how to fix it.”
I watched him for a while longer, and I wondered if this is what it meant to move on, to learn to live in a new way without someone. He was busy over the little bowl and sprinkled in some cayenne pepper. “The problem is that they don’t tell you how to season it right. It’s a smart rule of thumb to shake some pepper anytime you dealing with a can recipe.”
“Mama cooked from the top of her head,” I said.
Big Roy glugged some oil into a cast-iron skillet. “I still can’t believe she’s gone.”
When he finished cooking, he divided the food onto our plates. We each got two good-size croquettes, one-half of the bacon slice, and an orange cut into triangles.
“Bon appétit,” I said, reaching for my fork.
“O Lord,” Big Roy began, saying grace, and I set the fork down.
The food wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad.
“Tasty, right?” Big Roy said. “The can asked for bread crumbs, but I crunched up Ritz crackers instead. Gives a nutty flavor.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, eating my half slice of bacon in one bite.
I couldn’t help thinking of Olive, a virtuoso in the kitchen. On Friday nights, she baked cakes, pies, and cookies to sell on Saturday afternoon, to be served after Sunday dinners at homes all over town. Other women practiced the same hustle, but Olive had the nerve to charge two dollars above the going rate. “My desserts are worth a little extra,” she used to say.
We ate slowly, engrossed in our thoughts.
“You will need a haircut before you go,” Big Roy said.
I ran my hand over my woolly head. “Where can I get a haircut on a Monday?”
“Right here,” Big Roy said. “You know I cut hair when I was in the army. I always keep my barber papers current. Worse come to worse, you can always make money cutting heads.”
“All these years?”
“I cut your hair every Saturday night until you were ten years old.” He shook his head and bit into one of the orange slices. “Seems like fruit used to have more taste to it.”
“That’s the thing I missed most when I was in there. Fruits. I paid six dollars one time for a pear.” As soon as I said it, I gave a quick shake of my head to dislodge the memory, but it was dug in. “I can’t forget that pear,” I said to Big Roy. “I drove a hard bargain for it. I sold this one dude a garbage bag. He wanted to give me just four dollars, but I kept pushing.”
“We tried to provide for you when you were in there. We may not have put as much on your commissary as your in-laws, but what we gave was more to us.”
“I’m not comparing,” I said. “I’m trying to tell you something. Let me tell you this, Daddy. I sold a garbage bag and I didn’t ask myself why someone would want to pay good money for it. I just worked him till I had every cent he had, because I needed cash to get a piece of fruit. I was craving that fresh taste.” The pear had been red like an autumn leaf and it was as soft as ice cream. I ate the whole thing: seeds, core, and stem—all of it. I ate it in the filthy bathroom because I didn’t want anybody to see me with it and take it from me.
“Son,” Big Roy said, and I knew just from the loosening of his face that even he knew the rest of the story. It felt like I was the only person in the world who didn’t understand how a man in prison uses a garbage bag. I had tried to share the pear with Walter, but he wouldn’t touch it, not when I told him how I got it.
“How was I supposed to know?” I asked my father.
In prison, you learn quick that anything can be a weapon to be used against the other man or yourself. A toothbrush becomes a dagger, a chocolate bar can be melted into homemade Napalm, and a garbage bag makes a perfect noose. “I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have given it to him, let alone taken his money.”
I remembered myself retching over the metal commode, hoping the foul odor would help me vomit that pear, but nothing came up but my own stomach juices, bitter and sharp.
“I’m not blaming you, son,” Big Roy said. “Not for anything.”
Then the phone started up, like it knew that we were sitting there and it refused to be ignored.
“That ain’t Wickliffe,” Big Roy said.
“I know.”
It rang until she got tired. And it rang again.
“I don’t want to talk to Celestial until I have something to tell her.”
“You just told me that you’re going up there. That’s something to tell.”
Now was the time to say the words I didn’t want to say. “I don’t have money.”
Big Roy said, “I can help you some. It’s close to payday, but you’re welcome to what I have. Maybe Wickliffe can spot me a few.”
“Daddy, you already offered me your car. You can’t take money from Wickliffe.”
“This is no time to be pigheaded. You either drive up there with what money I can scrape together for you, or you wait for Andre to come get you. It may hurt your ego to take money from a senior citizen, but it’s going to hurt you more if you wait till Wednesday.”
It was amazing how much Big Roy reminded me of Walter right then. I missed my Biological something terrible. I wondered what he would have to say about all of this. I always figured that Walter was as far away from Big Roy as two people could get, and not just that Big Roy was the kind of man to make a junior out of another man’s son, while Walter was a borderline deadbeat. Knowing them both, I can see that my mama had a type, and I guess we all do. Her type of man is one with a point of view. Somebody who thinks he has figured out how this life thing works.
“You know,” Big roy said, “There’s the money your mother saved for you when you were just born. Might be a couple hundred dollars in your name. With your driver’s license and your birth certificate, you should be able to draw it down. Olive kept all your papers in her dresser drawer.”
The bedroom was set up the way it was when Olive was alive. Spread on the bed was the quilt with the overlapping circles she bought at the swap meet. On the west wall was a framed picture of three girls wearing pink dresses, jumping rope. I’d bought it for her with money from my first check. It wasn’t an original, but the print was signed and numbered. On top of the dresser, like a mischievous angel, was the poupée dressed in my john-johns.
When Big Roy said the bank book was in “her” dresser drawer, he meant the one on the top right, where she kept her most personal things. I positioned my hand on the brass drawer pull and froze.
“You see it?”
“Not yet,” I said. Then I yanked the drawer like I was snatching off a bandage. The draft in the room collided with the neatly folded clothes, releasing the scent I’ll always associate with Olive. If you were to ask me what it smelled like, I couldn’t answer any more than you would know what to say if someone asked you to describe the fragrance of coffee. It was the scent of my mother and it couldn’t be broken down into parts. I lifted up a flowered scarf and held it to my face. Pressure amassed behind my eyes, but nothing came. I inhaled deep from the cloth in my hand, and the strain became heavier, almost a headache, but the cry wouldn’t come. I tried to fold the scarf, but it looked rolled up, and I didn’t want to disrupt the orderly stacks.
A clutch of papers fastened with a green rubber band fit into the back corner of the drawer. I gathered the little stack and took it back to the kitchen where Big Roy was waiting.
“You never cleared out her things?”
“I couldn’t see the purpose,” he said. “Not like I needed the extra room.”
I took the rubber band off the bundle. On the top was my birth certificate, indicating that I was a Negro male born alive in Alexandria, Louisiana. My original name was on it, Othaniel Walter Jenkins. Olive’s signature is small and cramped, like the letters were hiding behind one another. Underneath that was the revised document with my new name and Big Roy’s signature laid down in a flourish of blue ink, and my mother’s handwriting is loopy and girlish. The first page of the bank book showed a $50 deposit the year I was born and $50 every year thereafter. The deposits picked up when I was fourteen and I added $10 every month. When I was sixteen I pulled down $75 to get the passport I now held in my hands. Opening the little blue booklet, I gazed at the black-and-white photo taken at the post office in Alexandria. Turning my eyes back on the bankbook, I noted the withdrawal I made after high school, $745 to take to college, leaving a $187 balance. With more than ten years of interest, there was probably a little more. Maybe enough to get me to Atlanta without having to shake down my father and Old Man Wickliffe.
I didn’t get up right away. One more item remained in the bundle. A little notebook that I had sworn was leather, but time showed it to be vinyl. It was the journal Mr. Fontenot had given me when I thought I was going to be like James Baldwin. I hadn’t written more than a handful of entries. Mostly I wrote about trying to get the passport, about buying the money order, and me and Roy going up to Alexandria to get my picture made. The last entry said, “Dear History, The world needs to get ready for Roy Othaniel Hamilton Jr.!”
There are too many loose ends in the world in need of knots. You can’t attend to all of them, but you have to try. That’s what Big Roy said to me while he was cutting my hair that Monday afternoon. He didn’t have a set of clippers, so he was doing it the old-school way, scissors over comb. The metallic slicing was loud in my ears, reminding me of the time before I knew that a boy could have more than one father. This was back when the words in the front of the Bible told the whole story, when we were a family of three.
“Anything you want to tell me?”
“No, sir,” I said, my voice squeaking.
“What was that?” Big Roy laughed. “You sound like you’re four years old.”
“It’s the scissors,” I said. “Reminds me of when I was little.”
“When I met Olive, you had one word you could say, which was ‘no.’ When I came courting your mother, you would holler ‘no’ whenever I got near her and ball up your little fist. But she made it clear to me that what she was offering was a package deal. You and her. I teased her and said, ‘What if I only want the kid?’ She blushed when I said that, and even you stopped fighting me. Once you gave your seal of approval, she started coming around to the idea of being my wife. You see, even before she said it, I knew that you were the one I was going to have to ask for her hand. A big-headed baby.
“I was just out of the service. Just back. I met Olive at the meat-and-three. My landlady pushed me to steer clear. For one, she was trying to find husbands for her own daughters—might have been six of them. So she whispered to me, ‘You know Olive has a baby,’ like she was telling me she had typhus. But that made me want to meet her more. I don’t like it when folks mutter against other folks. Six months later, we were married at the courthouse with you riding her hip. As far as I was concerned, you were my son. You will always be my son.”
I nodded because I knew the story. I had even told it to Walter. “When you changed my name,” I asked, “did it confuse me?”
“You could barely talk.”
“But I was old enough to know my name. How long did it take me to straighten it out in my mind?”
“No time at all. It started as a promise to Olive, but you’re my son. You’re the only family I have left now. Have you ever felt like you didn’t have a father? Has there ever been one time when you felt like I didn’t do all I could do?”
The scissors stopped their clacking and I swiveled in the chair to face Big Roy. His lips were tucked under and his jaw was tight. “Who told you?” I asked.
“Olive.”
“Who told her?”
“Celestial,” Big Roy said.
“Celestial?”
“She was here when your mother was in hospice care. We had the hospital bed set up in the den so your mother could look at TV. Celestial was by herself, not with Andre. That’s when she gave Olive the doll she wanted so bad, the one that favors you. Olive wasn’t getting enough oxygen, even with the mask on. Still, your mama was fighting. Hanging tough. It was terrible to watch. I didn’t want to tell you about all this, son. They say it was ‘quick.’ Two months from when they tested her, she was gone. What we call ‘Jack Ruby cancer.’ But it was a slow two months. I’ll say this for Celestial, she came twice. The first time was when she first got the news. Celestial drove all night and Olive was sitting up in bed, more tired than sick. She came back again, right at the end.
“On the last time, Celestial asked me to leave the room. I thought she was helping Olive clean up or something. After about fifteen minutes, the door opened and Celestial held her purse like she was leaving. Olive was lying in the bed so still and quiet that I was scared that she had passed. Then I heard that struggling breathing. On her forehead was a shiny place where Celestial kissed her good-bye.
“After that, I coaxed Olive into letting me give her a dose of morphine. I squirted it under her tongue, and then she said, ‘Othaniel is in there with him.’ This wasn’t her last words. But it was the last thing she said that really mattered. Then, two days after, she was gone. Before Celestial’s visit, she was fighting it. She wanted to live. But after that, she gave up.”
“Celestial promised to keep it to herself. Why would she do something like that?”
Big Roy said, “I have no idea.”