But Chris...
“Even if you black,” Pete was saying, “you good enough to get sent off to die.”
And Ma said: “You shut you mouth!” She’d lifted her head up from her lap, and the creases on her cheeks were quivering and her brown eyes stared — cotton eyes, the kids used to call them.
“You shut you mouth!” Ma shouted. She’d never talked that way before. Not to Pete. Her voice was hoarser even, because she had been crying without tears.
And Pete yelled right back, the way he’d never done before: “Sweet Jesus, I ain’t gonna shut up for nobody when I’m talking the truth!”
I made a wide circle around him and went in the bedroom. Lena was sitting there, on the bed, with the pillows propped behind her. Her face was quiet and dull. There wasn’t anything moving on it, not a line. There was no way of telling if she even heard the voices over in the kitchen.
I stood at the foot of the bed and put both hands on the cold iron railing. “Lena,” I said, “you all right?”
She heard me. She shifted her eyes slowly over to me until they were looking directly at me. But she didn’t answer. Her eyes, brown now and dark, stared straight into mine without shifting or moving or blinking or lightening. I stepped aside. The eyes didn’t move with me. They stayed where they were, caught up in the air.
From the kitchen I could hear Pete and Ma shouting back and forth at each other until Ma finally gave way in deep dry sobbings that slowed and finally stopped. For a second or so everything was perfectly still. Then Ma said what had been in the back of our minds for months, only I didn’t ever expect to hear her say it, not to her only boy.
“You no son of mine.” She paused for a minute and I could hear the deep catching breath she took. “You no man even.” Her voice was level and steady. Only, after every couple of words she’d have to stop for breath. “You a coward. A god-damn coward. And you made youself a cripple for all you life.”
All of a sudden Pete began to laugh — high and thin and ragged. “Maybe — maybe. But me, I’m breathing. And he ain’t... Chris was fine and he ain’t breathing.”
Lena didn’t give any sign that she’d heard. I went around to the side of the bed and took her hand: it was cold and heavy.
Pete was giggling; you could hardly understand what he was saying. “He want to cross over, him.”
Ma wasn’t interrupting him now. He went right ahead, choking on the words. “Chris boy, you fine and you brave and you ain’t run out on what you got to do. And you ain’t breathing neither. But you a man...”
Lena’s hand moved ever so slightly.
“Lena,” I said, “you all right?”
“Chris boy... you want to cross over... and you sure enough cross over... why, man, you sure cross over... but good, you cross over.”
“Lena,” I said, “don’t you pay any mind to him. He’s sort of crazy.”
In the kitchen Pete was saying: “Chris, you a man, sure... sure... you sure cross over... but ain’t you gonna come back for Lena? Ain’t you coming back to get her?”
I looked down and saw that my hand was shaking. My whole body was. It had started at my legs and come upward. I couldn’t see clearly either. Edges of things blurred together. Only one thing I saw clear: Chris lying still and dead.
“It didn’t get you nowhere, Chris boy,” Pete was giggling. “Being white and fine, where it got you? Where it got you? Dead and rotten.”
And Lena said: “Stop him, Chris.”
She said: “Stop him, Chris, please.”
I heard her voice, soft and low and pleading, the way she wouldn’t speak to anyone else, but only her husband.
Chris, dead on the other side of the world, covered with ground.
Pete was laughing. “Dead and gone, boy. Dead and gone.”
“Stop him, Chris,” Lena said, talking to somebody buried on the other side of the world. “Stop him, Chris.”
But I was the only one who heard her. Just me; just me.
You could see her come back from wherever she’d been. Her eyes blinked a couple of times slowly and when they looked at me, they saw me. Really saw me, her little sister. Not Chris, just Celia.
Slowly she pushed herself up from the bed and went into the kitchen, where Pete was still laughing.
Ma was sitting at the table, arms stretched out, head resting on them. She wasn’t crying anymore; it hardly looked like she was breathing.
“Dead and gone, man.” Pete was teetering his chair back and forth, tapping it against the wall, so that everything on the little shelf over his head shook and moved. He had his mouth wide open, so wide that his eyes closed.
Lena hit him, hard as she could with the flat of her hand, hit him right across the face. And then she brought her left hand up, remembering to make a fist this time. It caught him square in the chest.
I heard him gasp; then he was standing up and things were falling from the shelf overhead. Lena stumbled back. And right where her hand struck the floor was the picture of our father, the picture in the silver metal frame, the one Ma had got out the night Chris first came.
She had it in her hand when she scrambled back to her feet. She was crying now, because he was still laughing. From far away I could hear her gasping: “Damn, damn, damn, damn.” And she swung the picture frame in a wide arc at his laughing mouth. He saw it coming and forgot for just a moment and lifted his arm to cover his face. And the frame and glass smashed into his stub arm.
He screamed: not loud, just a kind of high-pitched gasp. And he turned and ran. I was in the way and he knocked me aside as he yanked open the door. He missed his footing on the steps and fell down into the alley. I could hear him out there, still screaming softly to himself with the pain: “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
Lena stood in the middle of the room, her hands hanging down empty at her sides. Her lip was cut; there was a little trickle of blood down the corner of her mouth. Her tongue came out, tasted, and then licked it away.
Pleadings
by John William Corrington
(Originally published in 1976)
Uptown
I
Dinner was on the table when the phone rang, and Joan just stared at me.
— Go ahead, answer it. Maybe they need you in Washington.
— I don’t want to get disbarred, I said. — More likely they need me at the Parish Prison.
I was closer than she was. It was Bertram Bijou, a deputy out in Jefferson Parish. He had a friend. With troubles. Being a lawyer, you find out that nobody has trouble, really. It’s always a friend.
— Naw, on the level, Bert said. — You know Howard Bedlow?
No, I didn’t know Howard Bedlow, but I would pretty soon.
They came to the house after supper. As a rule, I put people off when they want to come to the house. They’ve got eight hours a day to find out how to incorporate, write a will, pull their taxes down, or whatever. In the evening I like to sit quiet with Joan. We read and listen to Haydn or Boccherini and watch the light fade over uptown New Orleans. Sometimes, though I do not tell her, I like to imagine we are a late Roman couple sitting in our atrium in the countryside of England, not far from Londinium. It is always summer, and Septimus Severus has not yet begun to tax Britain out of existence. Still, it is twilight now, and there is nothing before us. We are young, but the world is old, and that is all right because the drive and the hysteria of destiny is past now, and we can sit and enjoy our garden, the twisted ivy, the huge caladiums, and if it is April, the daffodils that plunder our weak sun and sparkle across the land. It is always cool in my fantasy, and Joan crochets something for the center of our table, and I refuse to think of the burdens of administration that I will have to lift again tomorrow. They will wait, and Rome will never even know. It is always a hushed single moment, ageless and serene, and I am with her, and only the hopeless are still ambitious. Everything we will do has been done, and for the moment there is peace.