“Get in here!” she said, her voice brooking no alternative.
Whether he was startled by her tone, or by the strange fact of youth wrangling age without reserve, he simply did as he was told and stood before her there in the pantry, looking down curiously with that diffident blankness she knew he’d earned by right of his skin, but which she had no sympathy for. Not today.
She raised a straight, slender finger right up to his face. “You idiot!” she hissed.
There was no change in his face, except his eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, then he made a move to go, so she reached out and grasped up his shirtfront in her fist to pull him back around. Her grip was so hard it threatened the hold of the seams.
“Are you crazy?” she whispered, but to her own ears it sounded like hollering. “You know where you’re going to end up? Nigger, they’re going to hang you from a tree!”
He refused to answer, refused by turning again to leave, but Maryleen reached up with her free hand, and with a feeling of something near glee, which she would allow herself to acknowledge only later, she slapped him hard across the face.
He just stared at her in wordless shock while she said, “Have you lost your damn mind? Stop this madness! Don’t touch her again!”
And then, like an actor showing up late for his cue, the boy was in the kitchen, just standing there slack-armed between the butcher block and the sink, looking up into their faces with his mouth slightly ajar. Maryleen let loose Filip’s shirt, and the man was gone in an instant, shouldering past the boy, who stepped aside to let him go, all the while continuing to look up into Maryleen’s flushed face. He said, “I just wondered where everyone went.”
“We’ve been right here,” she said smartly, moving past him into the kitchen, so that she could reorder her expression without his eyes on her. “Right here the whole time.”
The boy turned slowly on his heels to watch her, but he didn’t follow. His face was soft, just the faint beginnings of an unreadable expression perched there.
“Where’s Mother?” he said slowly.
“How would I know?” Maryleen said gruffly with her back still turned.
“What were you and Filip arguing about?”
“Folks argue,” she said sharply. “It’s no concern of yours.”
“But—”
She turned quickly then, trying to project more passion and less fear than she felt. Her eyes were wide. “He said something nasty about my mother, all right? And I don’t care to talk about it anymore!”
Henry said nothing in response to this, only reared back slightly with distaste or wariness, and Maryleen made a quiet drama of calming herself for his benefit, but she could have cried with relief when he finally walked haltingly, sullenly to the kitchen door that led outside. He stood there on the step for a long moment with his hands in his pockets, surveying the orchard, which was quiet now, deserted, and full of ragged shadows. Then he walked out onto the grass lit yellow with the fading afternoon, and he turned suddenly. Maryleen, who’d been eyeing him like a hawk from the kitchen window, thrust her hands under the faucet and pretended to wash, but from the side of her eyes, she watched as Henry cast a wary glance back over the house, looking it up and down. And though she didn’t believe in God at all, and certainly not in some white man in the sky who’d sanctioned everything evil in this world, she prayed.
* * *
Church: the father, the son, the holy ghost, and his mother — his own original, originating Lavinia! — who always fanned Henry’s heavy head when he nodded off, enveloping him in a rosed perfume and the unnamed scent of her person. There was a change in her son, she eyed him now with the wariness of a doe that senses the hunter is afoot. He didn’t lean into her on the pew anymore, didn’t doze like a child against her shoulder; he no longer smiled.
Dark dissatisfaction ran through him like a coal seam. He no longer cared for the old, unsatisfying stories, the Bible just a crass country cousin to the myths and nothing more. He counted the commandments: Honor thy mother and thy father. Really? Why? So you could climb some rickety ladder to heaven? When he sat in those worn pews and tried to imagine God’s heaven, all he could conjure was a glistering expanse of nothingness. Roads of gold stretched without event farther than imagination, farther than forever, until his hope of heaven was a distress, and his heart flagged in his chest. Henry knew you had to make your own heaven — a place where, when your mother said she loved you above all others, it meant that she loved you more than a lover, more than God. He was newly sick to his stomach. Was church the wrong place to pray for the death of a man?
The ride back to Forge Run was an exercise in strained silence, his father concentrating on the road, Henry turned mulishly to the passing fields. The theater of razed greenery was fading before their eyes under the blue autumn sky, death hatching a mottled dun on the withering shocks. Their dying bored him to death. Easy come, easy go. His eyes slashed the back of his father’s head, and his tongue felt perverse. Loose. He could not latch it to his better sense, which was silence. He said, “I can’t stand to listen to all that preaching about rules.” His voice felt like breaking something.
There was no immediate response. His father seemed determined to teach him the rudest of life lessons: there is nothing worse than being ignored.
“I’m tired of rules for no reasons.” This time his belligerence was barely contained.
Without turning his head, John Henry said, “That you don’t understand the reason for a rule is no indication of its absence.”
Henry sulked, his shoulders crouching down around his spine. Then he reached forward suddenly and pressed on his mother’s shoulder until she turned.
“Do you believe God answers prayers?”
She raised her brows, her pretty mouth puckered, and they both inclined their heads in mutual misunderstanding like confused dancers curtsying.
“Yes or no?” he said, impatient.
“Leave your mother be,” said John Henry, but the boy was staring at his mother angrily and frowning.
Do you understand me? he signed.
She nodded.
Do you understand the preacher? he signed with terse, pithy gestures.
She smiled a smile like an apology.
“You mean you don’t understand him?” He said this out loud.
She shrugged.
“Father!” he cried accusingly. “She doesn’t even understand what the preacher’s saying! I always thought she was reading his lips!”
John Henry said nothing.
“Then why even bother going to church?” he spat, but his mother was swiveling away from him to face forward. He tapped her on her shoulder, hard, and he said, “Why even go, then?” And then she turned and brushed at his hand as if it were a fly and not her own son, and he had never seen her do that. He sat back in surprise.
“Be quiet, Henry,” said his father, one slate eye to the rearview mirror.