Deacon King Kong(111)
“I hope so. I think so. I’m gonna see. I think he does . . . do.”
“All right then.” The old lady seemed satisfied. She turned to stare at Elefante, but still spoke to Melissa, as if Elefante were not in the room. “I hope you is right, miss, for your sake. If you is, you got something. For his daddy listened. His daddy didn’t set around spouting questions and blasting air and making pronouncements and pointing his claw like he was top dog. His daddy didn’t point his finger at nobody. He gived us that church free and clear.”
“I wish somebody would give me a church,” Melissa said.
The old lady seemed suddenly outraged. She grew furious. She arched her head back, glaring, staring at Melissa, enraged, then suddenly threw back her head and burst into laughter, her mouth wide, showing one stained, rancid old tooth. “Haw! You something, girl!” And then Melissa went in, smoothing things out, talking it over, chatting easily with the old crocodile for the next two hours, until the salt in the old lady dissolved, vanishing completely, revealing the kind, odd soul who lived beneath, sharing her life and past, pouring out the soul music of an old black woman’s suffering, sorrow, and joy: her late husband, her beloved daughter who spent her young life building Five Ends church and died fourteen years before. With Melissa’s coaxing, Sister Paul worked through her beginnings at a sharecropping farm in Valley Creek, Alabama, north to Kentucky, where she met her husband, and their move to New York following their daughter. Then he got the calling to teach Christ’s wisdom, and by the time she reached the point in her narrative about the birth of Five Ends Baptist Church and old Mr. Guido’s role in building it, and of course the box that he’d hidden there, she was talking to them both. But she didn’t stop there, for as she spoke she revealed an even greater treasure, the old Cause neighborhood of Elefante’s youth, the one that he’d forgotten in his years of hardship and hustle, rolling back the neighborhood he remembered as a boy, the Italian kids playing Johnny-on-the-pony and ring-a-levio in the street on Sunday afternoons; the Irish kids over on Thirteenth Street hammering pink stickballs for the length of two sewers; the Jewish kids on Dikeman guffawing as they tossed water balloons on passersby out the upstairs windows of the tenement building where their dad ran the grocery store on the first floor; the old dockworkers, Italian, colored, and Spanish, arguing about the Brooklyn Dodgers in three languages while they rolled dice; and of course the Negroes from the Cause Houses, hurrying past in their Sunday best toward downtown Brooklyn, chuckling nervously as he acted like an idiot in front of them in his teenage years, drunk, angry, threatening, pissing behind a parked car as the Negroes passed, even chasing their children down Silver Street at night. How could he be so dumb? He saw himself then as his mother had referred to him in rage when she learned of his behavior: a dumb paisan, worrying that the colored, the Irish, the Jews, the outsiders were invading our block. We got no block, she said. The Italians don’t own the block. Nobody owns the block. Nobody was king of nothing in New York. It’s life. Survival. How could he have been so stupid? he thought. Is this what love does? It changes you this way? It allows you to see the past this clearly?
When the old lady was done, he felt as if he’d been blessed and had communion, his sins washed clean by confession. It was evening, and she’d nearly talked herself to sleep. He had stood to thank her and to leave when she asked, “Your mother still living?”
“She is,” he said.
“You ought to honor her, son. For whatever good your daddy has wrought, it’s she who held him up to it. She does what these days?”
“She works her garden.”
“That’s nice. Maybe you ought not tell her you and I spoke.”
“Who said I was gonna do that?”
Sister Paul eyed him thoughtfully a moment, then said, “I’m one hundred four, son. I knows every trick. You’ll be wanting to check on me, hoping she’ll remember that hundred dollars your daddy offered me for driving that truck. She’ll recollect it surely, for that was big money in them days, and I reckon them was tight minutes for her, setting in her living room in the wee hours with her husband’s right foot pointing one way while his ankle was pointing the other, and that truck full of trouble in front of her house, and you laying upstairs snoring with a smeller full of snot and a life full of headaches ahead, for I bet raising you wasn’t no bed of roses. A wife knows everything, son. If she wanted you to know what happened that night, I reckon she’d a spilled the beans long past. Why worry an old mother’s heart? If some harm was to come to you on account of what I just told you, then I got her sorrow to carry too. I’m old, son. I got no reason to lie.”
Elefante considered this a moment, then said, “All right.” He paused. “Thank you . . . for everything. Is there something I can do for you?”
“If you’s a praying man, pray that the Lord sends me a hunk of my cheese.”
“Your what?”
“Your daddy liked my vittles, see . . .”
“Vittles?”
“My food. He liked my cooking. He put a hurting on my fried chicken. I gived him some one afternoon when we was building the church. He gived me a piece of his cheese in return. Italian cheese. Don’t know the name of it. But that cheese was something! I told him that! After we got the church built up, he sent that cheese to us for years. Now he’s long dead and I hear tell the cheese keeps coming. Like magic. From Jesus, I reckon.”