“Maybe helpin’ somebody else will help Cedric throw off his blues,” I suggested.
This argument won Celia over. She pushed the door open and pointed the way. When I walked in, I caught a whiff of her perfume, simple rose water.
The house had a low ceiling that gave the feeling it was sinking into the earth. There were no windows except on the front wall, and these were covered with thick, floor-length drapes. There were pictures and plaster statues of saints and Jesus on every wall and surface. The air was stagnant as if it were the ether of an ancient tomb that had just been cracked open after six thousand years.
I went through the living room into a long hallway.
“Keep goin’,” Celia Boughman said at my back. “It’s all the way at the end.”
It was a very long hall. The house looked small from outside, especially because the yard was so deep, but that hallway was long enough to be a building of its own. When I finally came to the end, I found a half-open door. Inside, Italian opera music was playing.
“Cedric,” I called. “Cedric.”
No answer.
I pushed the door open. He was sitting on a piano stool, wearing only blue striped boxers, supporting his big head with the long fingers of his left hand.
“Cedric Boughman,” I said, trying to sound like a parent wanting their child to know it was time to pay attention.
It worked. He looked up at me. A sob came from his chest.
“What?” he said.
“My name’s Rawlins,” I said. “Easy Rawlins. I’m lookin’ for a friend’a mine—Raymond Alexander.”
“I don’t know him,” Cedric said. He let his head back down into the basket of fingers. He was thin and quite a bit darker than his mother.
“Maybe not, but I think Etheline Teaman did.”
When I mentioned her name, Cedric not only looked up, but got to his feet. It was like he was a puppet, and my words were the strings that gave him life.
“What about Etheline?”
“I think she knew Raymond up in Richmond.”
“Is that where she is? In Virginia?”
“No, man. Richmond, California. Etheline told me that she had a picture of Raymond. Did you ever see it?”
“She had lots of pictures. Lots of ’em. She took snapshots of everybody she knew with that little Brownie camera of hers.”
Cedric stumbled over to a cluttered desk and sifted around, looking for something. He found a small photograph and handed it to me. It was a picture of him and the young woman that I first saw as a corpse. They were standing side by side, but there was something wrong. I realized that it wasn’t Etheline standing there next to Cedric, but her reflection in a full-length mirror. She was taking the picture with a camera held at waist level in her left hand. They were standing next to each other, and at the same time gazing across a distance into one another’s eyes.
“That’s some picture,” I said. “She’s good.”
“She’s real smart,” Cedric agreed. “She’s going be a real magazine photographer one day. And she’s an artist too. This is only half of the picture. After we took this one, she made me take the picture of her with me in the mirror. She has that one in her photo book. I told mama that I wanted to get them both blown up and put ’em on either side of my room. Then it’d be like us lookin’ at each other and takin’ pictures of each other too.”
“You gonna do that?” I asked, to pull him further out of his shell.
“Mama didn’t like it. She said it looked wrong to her. I think she’s afraid that I’ll move out or somethin’.”
“When’s the last time you saw Etheline?” I asked.
“A week ago today,” he said, as if he were talking about the creation of the world.
“Where’d you see her?”
“At the church,” he said, the sadness back in his tone and demeanor. “At the church.”
“Winter Baptist?”
“Yes sir. She told me that we should be friends. She had spoken to Reverend Winters and decided to be by herself for a while. She said that, that…”
“You haven’t seen her since then?”
“No.”
“She ever talk to you about Raymond? A little brother with gray eyes and light skin.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he said. “Have you talked to her?”
I tried to read his eyes, to see if he was crazy or lying or being sincere. But the pain of his broken heart hid the truth from me.
“Just on the phone,” I said gently. “To ask her if she heard from my friend.”
The music had been soft during our talk. But now a powerful soprano was professing some deep emotion—love or hate, I couldn’t tell which.
CELIA BOUGHMAN was leaning over the wire chicken coop when I came out of the house. By the time I’d come up to her, she’d grabbed one of the frantic hens by the throat.
“Mrs. Boughman?”
“Yes, son?” She held the chicken up and tested it for plumpness.
“Has your son been at home all the time for the past week?”
“Yes he has. Haven’t left his room except to go to the toilet. Haven’t even bathed.”
“Have you been here all that time?”
“Except Monday. Monday’s my shoppin’ day. I have Willard, the boy down the street, drive me to the store and I buy all I need till the next week.”
“How about Sunday?” I asked. “Didn’t you go to church?”
“No. Cedric was so sad, I felt bad leavin’ him to go to the church that he loved. No. I stayed here and made him dinner.”
With that she took the chicken by its head and spun the body around like a child’s noisemaker. She grabbed the neck and twisted it until the head came off of the body, and then dropped them both on the ground. The body jumped up and started running in circles. It bumped into my leg and then headed off in the opposite direction.
“Did Cedric talk to you?” Celia asked pleasantly.
“Yes he did.”
“Oh that’s good. Maybe he’s gettin’ over his broken heart.”
The chicken ran into me again. This time she fell over and lay there on the ground, kicking in the air.
“Thank you, Mrs. Boughman,” I said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“You want to stay for dinner, Mr. Rawlins? We’re havin’ fried chicken.”
“No thanks,” I said. “I just had chicken the other night.”
I ENTERED the department store that had become a church at sunset. Two men in dark suits saw me from up near the pulpit. They headed my way.
“Hold it right there,” one of the men said. If he were standing behind me, I would have worried that there was a rifle aimed at my back.
The front of the church was half a lot away, so I waited patiently. They were deep brown men with frowns on their faces.
“Can I help you?” said one of the men. His big belly protruded so far that it created a cavern in the chest area of his suit.
“Lookin’ for the reverend,” I said.
“He ain’t here,” the other man said. He had small fleshy bumps all over his face and hands.
“That’s funny,” I said. “A man over in the office just told me that he was here, gettin’ ready for the Wednesday night meetin’.”
“Well he ain’t,” Bumpy said.
“That’s too bad—for him,” I replied.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” the fat man asked.
“It means that I got a problem in my pocket that he needs to know about. He needs it bad.”
“What you sayin’, man?”
“You just tell the minister that Easy Rawlins wants to talk to him about something of paramount concern. I’ll be sittin’ in this chair right here till you get back.”
Fatso took the message, and Bumpy waited with me. I sat there looking around Winter Baptist. It didn’t feel like a church then, but I knew when the organ started playing and the minister was in his groove that a holy light would shine in. I had friends who didn’t believe in Heaven or its Host, but still they never missed a Sunday sermon at Winter Baptist.
Birds were chirping from somewhere up around the ceiling. They had come into the church and set up their nests. I thought that the minister probably left them there to make that sacred space seem something like the Garden of Eden.