Perhaps these trains would stop at Union Station, where Lucifer had gone to meet John this morning. Ain’t heard a word from John in a month, then he up and call and Lucifer rush off to the station, a dog returning his master’s stick. And miss a day of work, too. But she could forgive Lucifer. Brothers are brothers. Forgive him. I’ll jus let him think I’m mad. Might earn me something.
Sides, John ain’t my problem. I don’t sleep wit him. Gracie do.
Gracie was like the ancient women back in the old days at Mount Zion, bitter and alone, crying about men long gone when their own wrinkled flesh had caused their suffering. When their own blindness had shoved their heart into the dark outdoors. They take their pain out on you. Snap bitter words with the least justification.
Gracie hadn’t been in the city a quick minute before she bring Jack home (T Street) to meet Sheila and Beulah. Sheila took one look at Jack. Compassion wilted. She wanted to beat him to death with his hammer-heavy wine bottle. His beard blackened his yellow skin. Sheila tried to touch his outstretched hand but couldn’t. Beulah gave it the lightest squeeze. His red eyes wouldn’t look Beulah in the face. Later, Beulah told Sheila in private that back home she had dated Jack while Koot dated him. My own sister. I lived in one town and Koot another. By accident we found out.
Sheila told Gracie.
Mind yo own business, Gracie said. He mine.
Didn’t really surprise Sheila. Gracie liked to graze in other people’s meadows. That’s why she had to leave Memphis.
Don’t you know that’s the easiest way to get killed? Lula Mae said.
Lula Mae, Beulah said, let me talk to her.
Why don’t you talk to yoself, Gracie said.
Beulah loaded up thirteen black steamer trunks, and John, Lucifer, and Dallas heavy-hauled them down the two flights of stairs, loading two trunks at a time into John’s red Eldorado, one in the red open trunk mouth (trunk for trunk), and the other canoe-fashion on the roof. Seven trips to Union Station, and another seven trips to carry Beulah’s twenty-seven boxes (how could this small apartment have held so much? where had she hidden it all?), the Eldorado stuffed so full that only John could squeeze inside it, the stacked boxes causing the red roof to sag above his head, the car to creak along. (Christ, Beulah. You gon wreck my ride.) Left a free space in the apartment on Kenwood (Woodlawn)—Cookie’s expanding wheelchair had forced yall out of the T Street apartment, elastic wood stretching as age pulled Cookie long and slack—which John and Lucifer filled, and the four of them, the two sisters and the two brothers, transforming that closet apartment into nuptial chambers, the apartment they shared for the single year before John and Lucifer went off to war, and that they shared for seven more years after John and Lucifer returned. Gracie and John would spend time in the red Eldorado, while Lucifer would touch Sheila behind a hanging white sheet. He always touched her with cool fingers (maybe he had soaked them in ice water) that went hot.
Dallas followed John everywhere like a compass. The two would sprawl over the living-room couch laughing about some private joke. Dallas followed Sheila with angry knowing eyes.
Dallas lay like a pinned butterfly beneath John. John leaned forward, pushing the stakes of his knees further into Dallas’s shoulders. Then John hit Dallas, hit him and kept hitting him, quick straight stiff punches that did not miss.
If you gon get beat up, Dave said, you might as well fight.
Lucifer, you said, ain’t you gon do something? You gon let John kill him?
Lucifer did not move. Waited.
You (and Gracie and Lucifer and John) had witnessed John’s transformation from boy to man, the boy-man whose face expressed every feeling quickly and vividly. The man was something to see. Lucifer, John, and Dallas had shared a basement apartment on T Street. Three steps down, then a hall leading to gray cement walls that breathed Dallas’s smell, the stink of old drink. 40 Acres. Cheap wine. Your nose watered the minute you entered. Once a week, in those months before you and Lucifer married, you mopped and wiped down the walls with ammonia. But the stink remained, as if the walls had been painted with vomit.
Even the lame, the deaf, and the blind knew that Dallas and John would hit every port of call (white port, cheap wine) on Church Street, from Seventy-third to Sixty-third and back again, in a matter of hours. Sing those foul corner songs that demanded foul corner faces, twisted mouths, broken curbs. Drink made dangerous words slip out of Dallas’s mouth. When he got drunk, his eyes would get wide and black, two open shoe-polish cans, and he would try to rumble. John, Dave said, you better tell this nigga something before I shoot him. And what could John do? Drunk-stumble into somebody’s door, so hard that the door jumped in its frame.
And everybody knew that John liked to lay with woman, that itch he had to scratch. Mind yo business, Gracie said.
Marriage did not change John. He brought his business to Gracie’s doorstep and invited it inside. What did Gracie do? Let it happen. Right under her nose (how could she not smell the stink?), right in her home. Mind yo business. Stay outa mine.
Sometimes Sheila would watch Gracie pouring out tea, swinging her leg beneath the kitchen table, lifting a spoon to her mouth, and hated her for these things, murderous actions. Then, all of their years together would rush at Sheila. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, all hid? all hid? You and Gracie and R.L. and Sam and Dave and Nap playing Catch Me and hide-and-seek in the thirteen pecan tree clusters that surrounded Daddy Larry’s house and barn. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, all hid? all hid? The boiling hatred would simmer down to pity. Gracie, Sheila would begin, don’t you know—
It’s my business, Gracie would say. He mine.
After Porsha was born, John would strap the baby in his Eldorado and take her red-speeding through the streets. Sheila told with her eyes what her mouth wouldn’t speak. John bought a red wagon and pulled Porsha everywhere in it. Same way he used to wheel Cookie (Jack’s product) around in the park when he courted Gracie. Her body was liquid in the wheelchair. Her muscles moved under your fingers like water-filled balloons. Lucifer would return from work each day with some gift for his daughter, usually something cheap, depending on how far his little money would carry him. John offered candy, cookies, and pop. Gracie watched it all.
Babies grow fast. Before you knew it, Porsha was starting school, learning how to read and write and add and subtract, figuring out this and that. John would light a cigarette and begin to speak, leaning his elbow on his knees. What you learn in school today? He watched his niece with his brown eyes, dry, ready to catch sun and flame.
How to think, Porsha would say.
She was all in your business, surprise you, standing straight and staring, like a paper doll in a pop-up book. Why the door closed? What yall doing? Why you on top of her like that?
Gracie and John moved to the two-flat on Seventy-second and May Street (Englewood) with a false fireplace — no chimney, all cement. Then, when Jesus was seven or so, John bought the house on Liberty Island with a real hearth where a fire could burn. Gracie put Cookie’s photograph — remember the day that you, Beulah, and Gracie bathed, dressed, and groomed Cookie and took her to the photographer — on the mantel above it: the dead muscles of Cookie’s face and the loose eyes that looked in two directions at once; a white-and-pink bow; a pink dress with white collar and black belt; black patent-leather shoes; Cookie against a background of white cloud, its imprint surrounding her body, like a gem in a box. She kept a six-pack of Big Bear malt liquor in her new refrigerator, drinking half the six days of the working week — yes, that was in those days when both you and Gracie worked on Saturdays — and drinking the rest on Sunday, finishing the last can late in the evening while her favorite show popped and buzzed on the TV screen. Stopped drinking the beer after John talked bout her so, complained how it stank so on her breath, how her gut started to swell like the toothpick-skinny drunks on Church Street, like the ever-present slow-moving Dallas with flat tires round his belly.