I watched her set them out. “Victor says Momma says one thing and does another. They fight about it.”
Granny set one of the plates down in front of me.
“Victor give Momma a black eye,” I said.
Granny made a little whistling sound.
“He hits me and Missy,” I said. “But it’s right what he said about Momma isn’t it?”
Granny stopped what she was doing and sat down again. “Well maybe it is, a little bit. They’s a lot more to your Momma than that though. For one thing, she’s good hearted as they come. Too good, if you was to ask me.”
“Momma’s ignorant isn’t she Granny?”
Granny laughed. “She might be, a little. But you are too. We all are a little bit ain’t we?”
“She’s going to die, isn’t she?”
“Someday. We all going to die someday. How come you worried about that?”
“I don’t know. I just am.”
17
Even in Dreams
They were trying to get me to play the ‘pass out’ game, but I was afraid. “That train might come again. You don’t know.”
Fable made his eyes go wide. “Do too. Ain’t no two dream alike.”
“Some people dream the same,” I said.
“Yo turn boy,” Vern said.
“He don’t ha-has to,” Willis piped in.
Vern all of a sudden made his elbows go like wings and pretended to fly. “Caw! Caw! Caw!” We all laughed while he flew around to the back of me and stopped. “I hold you. Go head.”
“Chicken shit,” Fable said.
“He don’t ha-has to,” Willis said.
“It’s okay Willis,” I said. “I’ll kill you Vern, you drop me.”
Vern wrapped his arms around me. I put my thumb in my mouth and started to blow. Granny’s table with all her canning jars floated up in the air. Then it went all snowy like a snowy picture on a TV screen. I went down, or down went up, I couldn’t tell which, but then it didn’t matter because the world had turned black.
I’m looking up into gazillions of stars. I feel the ground under me but when I look there’s nothing but more stars — gazillions of them I see on the other side of the invisible ground in front of me — and there’s a round moon too, bright glowing but not enough to block out the stars. Then I see it’s not a moon at all but a bright white tunnel that goes down in the invisible ground, with a silver ladder up one side. Way, way down inside the tunnel there’s a speck or a dot of something that gets bigger and bigger until I see it’s a man in a yellow helmet and coveralls climbing up the silver ladder. He climbs up and out and stands in front of me and he looks at me and his face is a crow’s face with a black beak and sharp black eyes and one of his hands is not really a hand at all but a bird’s claw — Daddy’s bird claw hand — and I think the man must be Daddy or a half-crow-half-man-Daddy and I want to go up to him and I want to run away too but I’m so scared I don’t do either.
Then lights come on and I see I’m standing on a cement floor. I see ladders and wires. I see pipes. Drums and big oily machines. More yellow helmets, moving in the lights above. Factory lights. Men climbing ladders, walking stairways, some laughing, talking, some sitting on catwalks with their legs hanging over the edges, eating floppy white sandwiches and drinking coffee.
Thunder noises start to pound up in the floor, making the air hot all around me. A furnace flashes full of fire. Daddy or that Crow Man or whatever he is throws a cardboard box in front of the furnace’s open mouth. The box stays a second then explodes into flames.
“Remember this place son?” It’s Daddy’s voice. The man standing in front of me is Daddy, his face back like it used to be, the crow’s face gone. A happy feeling swells up inside me. Daddy smiles. I run over to where he is and hug hold of him. Daddy laughs and hugs me back. I feel his claw hand go through the short hairs on my head. “Whatever you put your mind to, you can do,” he says.
We start to float up in the air together. We float up to a ledge where a fan in a casing big as a garage door sits with three motionless dusty blades. We land on a metal catwalk next to the fan. Daddy grabs one of the fan blades. “You got to pay attention, son. Even in dreams.” He gives the blades a spin. First they go slow, then faster, then faster than faster, blowing so powerfully Daddy and me sail off past ladders and machines and steel mill workers into a huge warehouse space of echoes and lights and black metal walls — a gigantic railroad station — where ingots are standing in long motionless lines on rail cars on tracks stretching far away. Daddy used to work on ingots. Tall triangular shapes with their tops lopped off. We sail down to one. Daddy takes up a push broom and begins sweeping the glassy slag off the top.
Above us a black ceiling of catwalks and factory lights shines down. Like before I see men in yellow helmets, walking, climbing up and down. I see a huge steel beam, moving along on tracks under the ceiling toward Daddy and me. Two arms hang from the beam; they are holding up a gigantic rust colored iron pot, black smoke boiling out the top. It floats along toward us — like the bow of a ship — so hugely quiet you wouldn’t know it was there unless you looked right at it.
I’m tugging at Daddy’s arm and shouting, “Look Daddy! Look!”
“Time you was going, son,” Daddy says.
I feel my feet lift off the ingot. “Please, Daddy! Pay attention, you said! Look!”
“Take care of your Momma son,” Daddy says. “She don’t see things all the way through.” He laughs and waves his bird claw hand. “I expect you know that already.”
I float away from him and down onto the cement floor. The beam with the giant arms and the pot rolls over Daddy’s head and stops. At one end of the beam is a cage with a white tiger inside. The tiger is pacing from one end of the cage to the other. It lets out a roar. The men in the yellow helmets turn into monkeys. The ladders, catwalks and machinery turn into jungle trees with long branches and vines. The white tiger roars again. The monkeys scream and run upward along the branches of the trees. A door opens at the bottom of the iron pot and a yellow liquid fire comes pouring. Daddy tries to jump out of the way. The fire knocks his helmet off, burns over his shoulder. He tries to struggle, to knock it away but the fire takes him down, crushing him against the top of the ingot. I’m screaming as loud as I can but no sound comes out of my mouth. I look again at the cage. I see a giant unlit cigar, slowly turning, pointing like a weather vane ornament — floating, floating, turning behind the bars.
I’m crying. I look up into a craggy black face, shiny like coal. Two black eyes stare back at me, diamond eyes that see right through me; that will not let me go. I can’t stop crying.
Moses rubs my forehead with the flat part of his thumb. It’s all sandpapery and stiff. “Rest you, little one. Rest you.”
I can see Fable and Vern, sitting up on the back porch rail, sniggering and poking at each other, trying to make each other fall off. Willis stands next to Moses, a worried look on his face.
“It was Victor done it!” I cry. “Victor!”
Moses moves his thumb over my forehead. His words go like a seesaw, high and then low. “Shhhhhh. Rest you little ONE. Rest you.”
I roll over on my belly. It is like the whole world is in a bad trouble and I can’t stop crying. I cry for Daddy and I cry for Momma and I cry for Missy. I even cry for Victor.
“Good,” says Moses. “Good.”
I can feel his hand, rubbing between my shoulder blades. When I stop crying, it is quiet. Moses’ hand is gone. I turn over and open my eyes.