Deacon King Kong(92)

She shrugged. “I reckon the daughter’s husband put her up to all the devilment. He was as smart as his wife was simple. I could have never thought up such a rotten business myself. I would be ashamed to even think of it. Firing me over eleven dollars. The truth is, he could’ve said I stole one dollar or a thousand dollars. It didn’t matter. He was white, so his word was the gospel. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. The lies they tell each other sound better to them than the truth does when it comes out of our mouths.

“That’s why I come to New York,” she said. “And if you recall, you didn’t want me to go. You was so drunk in them times you didn’t know whether you was coming or going. Nor what I gone through from day to day. We had to leave the South or I was gonna kill somebody. So I come here. I worked day’s work up here three years, waiting for you to get the courage to come. And you finally did.”

“I did keep my promise,” he said feebly. “I did come.”

Her smile disappeared, and a familiar misery climbed into her face.

“Back home you gived life to things nobody paid the slightest attention to: flowers and trees and bushes and plants. These was things that most men stepped out on. But you . . . all the plants and flowers and miracles of God’s heart—you had a touch for them things, even when you was drinking. That’s who you was back home. But here . . .”

She sighed.

“The man who come here to New York wasn’t the man I knowed in South Carolina. In all the years we been here, ain’t been a plant in that house of ours. Not a green thing hung from the ceiling nor the wall, other than what I brung in from time to time.”

“I got sick when I first come here,” Sportcoat said. “My body broke down.”

“Course it did.”

“That’s right. I had operations and all, don’t you remember?”

“Course I do,” she said.

“And my stepmomma—”

“I know all about your stepmother. I know everything: how she showed out to Jesus every Sunday and lived like a devil the rest of the week . . . doing improper things to you when you was but a wee child. Everything she ever done to you was wrong. The habits you acquired was put on you by the very folks who should have helped you be a better person. That’s why you like Deems so much. He come down that same road. That boy was beat up bad, grinded down from the day he was slapped to life.”

Sportcoat listened in stunned silence. There was a hammering sound in his ears and he glanced around the room but saw nothing move. Could that hammering be his own insides? The sound of his own heart beating? He felt as if part of him were splitting apart, and within his old self, the person he once was, the young man of physical strength with a wide-eyed thirst for wisdom and knowledge, had suddenly sat up, opened his eyes, and gazed around the room.

His head ached. He reached down toward the side of the couch, groping for the jug bottle, but it wasn’t there.

“Isn’t it something,” Hettie said softly, “what ol’ New York really is? We come here to be free and find life’s worse here than back home. The white folks here just color it different. They don’t mind you sitting next to ’em on the subway, or riding the bus in the front seat, but if you asks for the same pay, or wants to live next door, or get so beat down you don’t wanna stand up and sing about how great America is, they’ll bust down on you so hard pus’ll come out your ears.”

She thought a moment.

“‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” she scoffed. “I never did like that old lying, lollygagging, hypocritical, warring-ass drinking song. With the bombs bursting in air and so forth.”

“My Hettie wouldn’t talk this way,” Sportcoat sputtered. “You ain’t my Hettie. You’s a ghost.”

“Stop wasting what’s left of your sorry-ass life with your shameful fear of the dead!” she snapped. “I ain’t no ghost. I’m you. And stop goin’ ’round telling people I would have loved my funeral. I hated it!”

“It was a beautiful funeral!”

“Our cheap death shows make me sick,” she said calmly. “Why don’t folks in church talk about life? They hardly ever talk about the birth of Jesus Christ in church. But they never get tired of singing and reveling in Jesus’s death. Death is just one part of life. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, all day long, the death of Jesus.”

“You the one that’s always hollering about Jesus! And how he gave you his cheese!”

“I holler about Jesus’s cheese because Jesus could baptize shit into sugar! Because if I didn’t have Jesus and his cheese, I’d kill somebody. That’s what Jesus did for me for sixty-seven years. He kept me sane, and on the right side of the law. But he run out of gas, sweetheart. He got tired of me. I don’t blame Him, for the hate in my heart done me in. I couldn’t see the man I loved so much, my Plant Man, stand by the window in our apartment sucking on crab legs and looking at the Statue of Liberty outside our window chatting about nothing, when I knowed all he wanted was for me to go back to bed so he could let a liquor bottle suck his guts out the minute I gone to sleep again. The evil I felt at that moment was enough to kill us both. So instead, I walked into the harbor. And I left myself in God’s hands.”

For the first time in his life, Sportcoat felt something inside him breaking up.