“Shopping list?” Cornelius drew his head back like a baby snake.
“There is little verifiable evidence in the courtroom of history,” Herman said.
Cornelius noticed beads of sweat standing out on his father’s forehead.
“... You cannot be certain what Lee was thinking when surrendering to Grant or if Napoleon loved his wife. We do not know why primitive Europeans danced about the maypole, not really. Why did Alexander turn his back on India? Was Saint Francis really the deliverer of Ireland? We are given history’s stories but they are open to broad interpretation. Human motivation is arbitrary. Most human records are based on lies, misbegotten loyalties and misinterpretation.
“But the shopping list... three potatoes, a flint knife, a bag of seed and a jewel of red coral... these are things we can believe in. From these items we can extrapolate historical events, stimuli... needs. Through lists of larder we can enter the lives of those who have gone before.”
A quick rivulet of sweat ran around the dying man’s left eye.
“You better lay back and rest, dad.”
“No time for resting, Cornelius. I have to finish before the curtain comes down.”
“You’re not going to die today, dad.”
“Maybe not but I will finish the greater part of my gift to you this day. That long journey we took through the Mississippi pinewoods was me looking for the strength to die. Rather than Death stalking me I was after him. I was looking for the courage to meet him face-to-face. That is being a man.”
Herman was breathing harder than before. A drop of sweat fell from his chin.
“But that is not what I wanted to tell you, Cornelius. I need you to know something.”
“What’s that, dad?”
“Most children have it pretty easy. Rich or poor they have a mother, maybe a father, and food to eat. They sleep at night and play in the sunlight. They believe in fantastic things and read books or watch movies about cowboys and nurses. They play at adulthood through fighting and through love. They break the heart of anyone who loves them and never care a whit.
“But not you, Cornelius. You have stood by me and your mother too. You turned your back on childhood and we took your magnificent gifts. I have not thanked you enough. I gave you a good education. I would wager that you are one of the best-educated children your age in the entire world. Who else has read Plato and Aristotle, Vico and Confucius?
“You are well taught but you paid for that education with your springtime. So now, here today, I release you. Live your life, Cornelius. Go out in the world and love women and drink deeply, pray to God if you so desire or worship the body and the mind, which I believe you will find are basically the same.
“I release you, Cornelius Jones, from the servitude of your childhood. You owe me nothing but to be happy and well. Feel no guilt, for the past does not exist and therefore cannot pass judgment.
“Take my books if you want them. Burn them if they offend you. Go to school or work on an oil rig. I do not care. Not because of a lack of love but because my love for you could never be greater. I confer upon you the greatest gift: freedom from the chains of your blood.”
Cornelius was moved by his father’s amnesty. He felt that Herman knew about Chapman Lorraine and offered absolution.
Freeing the fledgling from the confines of the nest, John Woman reflected years later. But still the chick wondered if he could fly.
10
The next morning Herman was crying in his bed.
“I hurt.”
“Where, dad?”
“Everywhere.”
Cornelius sat with him until Violet came. He wrote her a check for three hundred dollars asking her to spend a little time each day with Herman.
“You don’t have to clean,” Cornelius said, “just sit with him and give him water if he gets thirsty.”
The doctor who came the next morning was Violet’s niece’s husband. He was a short, dark-haired Frenchman come to America to live with relatives while he studied heart medicine in Chicago. There he met Stella Breen, a mother’s girl who always meant to come home.
“He’s very sick,” Dr. Artaud said. “But I see no reason to put him in the hospital. They’d only send him off to a nursing home. Keep him comfortable and give him the medicine I prescribe. He won’t live very long.”
The doctor was sad to see the effect his words had on Cornelius. At that time the boy still believed in the authority of professionals. He thought that there was some injection that might get his father sitting up and talking about the newly released book of slave narratives.
“What’s wrong with him?” CC asked.
“It’s his heart.”
“But why didn’t they say that at the hospital?”
“Sometimes,” Dr. Artaud said, “American doctors ignore the signs of the poor.”
Violet slumped into the stuffed chair and cried at the pronouncement.
They had sixteen thousand dollars in the bank and a few savings bonds in a safe-deposit box that his father kept. The first batch of drugs cost eight hundred and forty-seven dollars. Cornelius handed over the money without hesitation. He gave Violet a thousand dollars to keep coming over the next month, especially to be there in the evenings when he had to go to work.
That was Tuesday.
On Wednesday Herman rallied. He sat up and talked with his son about the history of thought.
“Thought and language are like breathing in and breathing out. They are inseparable and at the same time opposites. Together the two make up the mental image of possibilities in the material world. The closer they come to bringing this reality in line with our experience the more true our expressions of mind.”
“So,” Cornelius asked, “the advance of the history of thought is more like a science because it gets better all the time?”
“No,” Herman said sadly. “Our use of thought and language has deteriorated over millennia. The Greeks saw the world more clearly than do we. The Aborigines of Australia saw themselves as part of a magnificent deified universe of which they were but a small part, while western man sees only a toy-box that was set there for him by some shadow being that has already forgotten humanity.”
Every truth the old man sought ended in unconsciousness or death.
The next day Herman called for Cornelius and asked him to please turn on the lights. When Cornelius told him that the lights were already on he said, “Then the darkness is in my eyes.”
The next day he began to shout about men crossing the river.
“There’s no one there, dad,” Cornelius said to him.
“I see them coming. I see them.”
His blind eyes were wide with fear, his fingers jabbing the air.
“Over there! Over there!”
By Saturday the autodidact from the Mississippi Delta could only murmur his fears.
“Oh no,” he’d cry from time to time, his arms moving about weakly, his flailing hands slowing now and then to fold tissues into tiny squares.
On Sunday Cornelius awoke to the sound of his father’s labored breath. He came into the room to see Herman lying on his back, gasping for air. His eyes were wide, his mouth gaping.
Cornelius took the elegant hand and it gripped him like a vise.
With all of his being Cornelius concentrated on his father. The already slender Herman had lost twenty pounds. Cornelius could see the skull under the papery flesh of his father’s face. He smelled of dead skin.
Father and son held on to each other until suddenly Herman hiccupped and stopped breathing. It took a few moments for Cornelius to realize what had happened. The room was absolutely silent. There was no salsa music playing, no rumble in the ground.