Pretending to watch, Athena stood back. “We have to clear out this room.” She surveyed the disorder. A second cot, folded and grimy, leaned against the wall.
“Gimme your other foot now. That’s a boy. You don’t want to sleep with your socks on, do you?” She struggled with his clothes. “You know, it’s sort of funny to think Lonny and Wallace used to sleep in this room, when they was little, I mean, and now Matty sleeps here. You know? Look how dirty you are!” The boy looked almost black in places. “You get a bath tomorrow, that’s for sure. Oh, your poor legs, that scab’s bleeding again. What were you doing today anyhow?”
Matty lay down and then shot up again. “…st-stones…my p-pock…” He whined miserably, beginning to sob again. “…dd-d-don…st-st…don lose…” He rubbed at his runny nose and eyes with dirty hands.
“What’s the matter, baby? What is it? Something in your pants pocket?” She lifted the jeans from where she’d tossed them. They were stiff with sweaty dirt and strangely heavy, and she turned them inside out. “Oh, your stones!” She turned to Athena. “He was playing with these stones before. No, I won’t lose them. They’ll be right here in your pocket for tomorrow. Do you want them? You want to sleep with them? How ’bout just one?” She gave him a smooth white pebble, and he clutched it tightly in his hand, smiled and lay back down. “What a little pack rat you are.” Smiling, she got him under the graying sheet. “That’s it, go to sleep now. You and Chabwok can have a good game with the stones tomorrow.”
Chabwok. Athena shook her head. Pamela always insisted that “Chabwok” was the name of Matthew’s invisible friend, but Athena had her doubts. God knows the boy must be lonely enough to have invented an imaginary playmate, but those few times she’d heard him use the word, surprising him at solitary play, it had been too slurred to properly understand. It might have been a name. It might have been anything.
Pamela cooed and Matthew jabbered, a mindless recitation. Athena stood close by the doorway, looking at the junk, trying not to listen. My son. As always, she found herself dispassionately examining her responses. Why was she so numb with him? What was she afraid of feeling? Pity? Shame? The light bulb swayed slightly on its cord, and the string, tied to a short, broken chain, danced back and forth.
Shadows swayed.
When Wallace Monroe first brought her to this house, she’d had such enthusiasm. She’d even thought there might be something consequential hidden amid the clutter of this attic, something valuable, antiques perhaps…but hadn’t needed to examine things too closely before discarding that notion. It was all what Granny Lee used to call “cracker furniture.” The pieces looked old enough, certainly, but in an advanced state of disrepair and poorly made in the first place. Early American trash heap.
Still fussing, Pamela kissed Matty one last time, loud and moist. “You go to sleep now.” She gave the light cord a tug, and the doorway became a gray rectangle surrounded by brown darkness.
The two women started down, Pamela whispering. “I wonder how come he just won’t never talk around you hardly. You should just see the way he talks around me all the time. Sometimes I can’t even get him to shut up.”
Athena nodded, half listening, not believing. Strange, the way she won’t accept the truth about him. Ignoring Pamela’s further prattling, she cursed the thin slats of the attic stairs with each twinge of her leg. I’m his mother and I’ve accepted it. Long since. The other woman’s murmurings seemed very far from her, empty and shrill as the creaking of the stairs.
“He threw another one today,” Pamela confessed reluctantly while she clumped down the hall. “Oh! But not one of the bad ones!” Pamela Stewart Monroe lived in perpetual fear of Athena’s deciding to put Matty away. With no children of her own—and her husband in the p enitentiary—her entire life centered on the boy. “No, not one of the bad ones. Just one of the ones where he gets all kind of glassy-eyed.” At the end of the corridor, she continued down the stairs with slow, heavy movements.
During the first eight years of Pam’s marriage to Lonny Monroe, four babies had been stillborn. At last one child, badly deformed, had survived, and “the lump”—as her husband fondly referred to it—survived still, in a state institution. As far as Athena had ever been able to tell, Pam had blocked all memory of her sole offspring.
Dooley lay at the foot of the staircase, groaning in his sleep, and they had to step over him. The acrid smell of burning coffee filled the kitchen.
The large-bodied woman shrieked across the room. “I forgot!” Black foam spewed out of the pot and over the burners.
“It’s all right,” Athena muttered. Clearing the table, she stacked plates, piling some on the iron stove, dumping others in the overloaded sink.
Pamela poured the coffee, sloshing dark liquid over the tablecloth, and the wet spots steamed while she fetched spoons from the drainboard. Athena pulled up a chair, and both women shoveled sugar into their cups. Thin crack lines traced the heavy white porcelain of the sugar bowl. The coffee smelled terrible.
Athena scalded her tongue. Foul. She blew on the cup, and steam swirled away, her glance following it. “I remember the day Wallace papered this ceiling. How many years ago? All coming down now. Ruined.” Oily residue collected thickly on the surface of her coffee, and she found herself idly examining the chipped opalescent cup. All the old things. A fine thing once, the cup had come from her grandmother’s house. Broken. Or worn out. Everything. That house…the way it smelled toward the end… When Granny Lee had lost her strength, everything had just fallen apart. That’s the way it’ll happen with me. Not that I’m doing so well as it is. She wondered how the cup had escaped being packed away, hidden with the rest of her grandmother’s things…as though they shamed her somehow. “Why does everything in this house have to be so…so dismal?”
“I never did understand why you would even want to live here,” said Pam. She waited for a response, then resumed, made bold by her sister-in-law’s uncustomary familiarity. “You ain’t, I mean, you’re not one of…of…” Agitated, she halted. “I mean, you’re not like a piney. You’re too good for…”
“Oh yes. I have fine qualities.”
Pamela faltered, confused by the bitterness of the brief laugh. “I mean, it just don’t seem right that you”—she gulped coffee and blushed—“that you…you…” Her voice became a pleading whine. “You know, I was thinking to night, Lonny and Wallace was so different, for brothers, I mean. I mean, Lonny’s so dark, not like Wallace was. I guess there must really be some Indian blood in the family, like they say. And Lonny’s got them eyes.”
Athena took a deep breath, deciding she might as well make conversation. “Have you had a letter from Lonny recently?”
“Not in a long time.” Pam relaxed into the subject. “I told you, the last one said that guy who was writin’ them for him was gettin’ out. I sure miss him. Those eyes.” She gave a small, dramatic shiver. “The way he looks at me sometimes—sort of like an animal.”
The other woman stirred her coffee…around and around…and concentrated on the rattle of the spoon in the cup. It embarrassed her to hear Pamela talk this way. She knew Lonny Monroe neglected his wife, even during those rare intervals when he wasn’t doing time.
“Course most a those guys in prison is black. I, uh, you think…I mean, I always meant to ask you if it was true what they say about black guys having…I mean, the reason I ask is just…”