Deacon King Kong(46)

“That’s Mister Rogers’s address. One forty-three. You know what one forty-three means?”

“No, Soup.”

His stoic face folded into a smile. “I would tell you, but I don’t wanna spoil it.”





11





POKEWEED



Four blocks from the Silver Street station, the Elephant sat at his mother’s kitchen table griping about a plant. “Pokeweed,” he said to his mother. “Didn’t you say it was poisonous?”

His mother, a diminutive, olive-complexioned woman, was standing at the countertop, her gray hair in wild tousles about her head, slicing at several plants he had pulled out of her garden that morning: fiddleheads, rootberry blossom, and skunk cabbage.

“It’s not poison,” she said. “Just the root. The shoots are good. They’re good for the blood.”

“Get some blood thinners,” he said.

“Doctor’s medicine is wasted money,” she scoffed. “Pokeweed cleans you out—and it’s free. It grows near the harbor.”

“Don’t plan on me digging around in the mud near the harbor today,” Elefante grumbled. “I gotta go to the Bronx.” He was going to see the Governor.

“Go ahead,” his mother said defiantly. “I got the colored man from the church coming by.”

“What colored man?”

“The Deacon.”

“That old scooch? The way he drinks, solid food makes a splash in his stomach when he eats it. You keep him out of the house.”

“Leave it alone,” she snapped. “He knows more about plants than anybody around here,” she added. “More’n you, that’s for sure.”

“Just keep him outside.”

“Stop worrying. He’s a deacon at the colored church there, the Four Ends or Deep Ends or whatever it’s called.”

“Five Ends.”

“Well, he’s there. A deacon.” She chopped away.

Elefante shrugged. He had no idea what deacons did. He remembered the old guy faintly as one of the coloreds who came and went from the church a block from his boxcar. A drinker. Harmless. The church was on the far side of the street, while the boxcar was on the harbor side. Close as they were, separated by a weeded lot that ran the block’s length, they were strangers to one another. But Elefante considered coloreds perfect neighbors. They minded their own business. Never asked questions. That’s the reason his guys pulled that poor lady from the harbor when she came floating into the dock a few years ago. He’d watched her come and go from the church for years, waving hello to him, and he waved back. That was the extent of their conversation, which in the Cause, where the Italians and blacks lived side by side but rarely connected, was a lot. He never knew or heard the story of how she landed in the harbor—that wasn’t his business—but he had a faint recollection she might be related to one or the other of the coloreds. He left his headman to keep up with details of folks like her, not him. He didn’t have time. He only knew that every Christmas since his guys pulled that lady out of the water, the church coloreds had dropped off two sweet potato pies and a cooked chicken outside his railroad boxcar. Why couldn’t more people get along that way?

He regarded his mother as she chopped. She had on his father’s old construction boots, which meant she planned to go plant digging today too. With the boots, the housedress, the apron, and her wild hair, she looked, he knew, like something from the outer limits. But at eighty-nine, she could do what she wanted. Still, he fretted about her health. He noticed the difficulty she had chopping, her arthritic hands curled and gnarled. Rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and a leaking heart were taking their toll. She had fallen several times in the past few weeks, and the doctor’s murmurings about heart trouble were no longer murmurings, they were explicit warnings, outlined in red pen on her prescriptions, which she ignored, of course, in favor of the plants she swore fostered good health or simply needed to be had for the sake of having them, the names of which he’d memorized from childhood: black cherry, Hercules’ club, spicebush, and now, pokeweed.

He watched as she struggled with the knife. He suspected the old colored gardener did all the chopping once he left. He could tell by the neat cut of the plants, their stems tied tightly with rubber bands, others with stems and roots cut just so. He was secretly glad she ignored his disapproval of allowing someone inside the house. Someone was better than no one. She was near the end, they both knew it. Three months ago, she’d paid Joe Peck, whose family ran the last Italian funeral home in the Cause District, to send a man to disinter his dad’s body over at Woodlawn Cemetery and bury it deeper. The overcrowded cemetery had no more space for new graves, so her plan was to be buried atop his father in the same plot. That required his father’s casket be reburied eight feet down instead of the usual six. Peck had assured her he had done the job himself. But the Elephant was suspicious. Anything Joe Peck said could be a lie.

“Did you get someone to sound that plot Joe Peck said he dug out?” he asked.

“I told you already. I can take care of my business,” she said.

“You know Joe says one thing and does another.”

“I’ll get my colored man to check it.”

“He can’t poke around the cemetery. He’ll get arrested.”