An American Marriage(55)

I didn’t get up right away. One more item remained in the bundle. A little notebook that I had sworn was leather, but time showed it to be vinyl. It was the journal Mr. Fontenot had given me when I thought I was going to be like James Baldwin. I hadn’t written more than a handful of entries. Mostly I wrote about trying to get the passport, about buying the money order, and me and Roy going up to Alexandria to get my picture made. The last entry said, “Dear History, The world needs to get ready for Roy Othaniel Hamilton Jr.!”

There are too many loose ends in the world in need of knots. You can’t attend to all of them, but you have to try. That’s what Big Roy said to me while he was cutting my hair that Monday afternoon. He didn’t have a set of clippers, so he was doing it the old-school way, scissors over comb. The metallic slicing was loud in my ears, reminding me of the time before I knew that a boy could have more than one father. This was back when the words in the front of the Bible told the whole story, when we were a family of three.

“Anything you want to tell me?”

“No, sir,” I said, my voice squeaking.

“What was that?” Big Roy laughed. “You sound like you’re four years old.”

“It’s the scissors,” I said. “Reminds me of when I was little.”

“When I met Olive, you had one word you could say, which was ‘no.’ When I came courting your mother, you would holler ‘no’ whenever I got near her and ball up your little fist. But she made it clear to me that what she was offering was a package deal. You and her. I teased her and said, ‘What if I only want the kid?’ She blushed when I said that, and even you stopped fighting me. Once you gave your seal of approval, she started coming around to the idea of being my wife. You see, even before she said it, I knew that you were the one I was going to have to ask for her hand. A big-headed baby.

“I was just out of the service. Just back. I met Olive at the meat-and-three. My landlady pushed me to steer clear. For one, she was trying to find husbands for her own daughters—might have been six of them. So she whispered to me, ‘You know Olive has a baby,’ like she was telling me she had typhus. But that made me want to meet her more. I don’t like it when folks mutter against other folks. Six months later, we were married at the courthouse with you riding her hip. As far as I was concerned, you were my son. You will always be my son.”

I nodded because I knew the story. I had even told it to Walter. “When you changed my name,” I asked, “did it confuse me?”

“You could barely talk.”

“But I was old enough to know my name. How long did it take me to straighten it out in my mind?”

“No time at all. It started as a promise to Olive, but you’re my son. You’re the only family I have left now. Have you ever felt like you didn’t have a father? Has there ever been one time when you felt like I didn’t do all I could do?”

The scissors stopped their clacking and I swiveled in the chair to face Big Roy. His lips were tucked under and his jaw was tight. “Who told you?” I asked.

“Olive.”

“Who told her?”

“Celestial,” Big Roy said.

“Celestial?”

“She was here when your mother was in hospice care. We had the hospital bed set up in the den so your mother could look at TV. Celestial was by herself, not with Andre. That’s when she gave Olive the doll she wanted so bad, the one that favors you. Olive wasn’t getting enough oxygen, even with the mask on. Still, your mama was fighting. Hanging tough. It was terrible to watch. I didn’t want to tell you about all this, son. They say it was ‘quick.’ Two months from when they tested her, she was gone. What we call ‘Jack Ruby cancer.’ But it was a slow two months. I’ll say this for Celestial, she came twice. The first time was when she first got the news. Celestial drove all night and Olive was sitting up in bed, more tired than sick. She came back again, right at the end.

“On the last time, Celestial asked me to leave the room. I thought she was helping Olive clean up or something. After about fifteen minutes, the door opened and Celestial held her purse like she was leaving. Olive was lying in the bed so still and quiet that I was scared that she had passed. Then I heard that struggling breathing. On her forehead was a shiny place where Celestial kissed her good-bye.

“After that, I coaxed Olive into letting me give her a dose of morphine. I squirted it under her tongue, and then she said, ‘Othaniel is in there with him.’ This wasn’t her last words. But it was the last thing she said that really mattered. Then, two days after, she was gone. Before Celestial’s visit, she was fighting it. She wanted to live. But after that, she gave up.”

“Celestial promised to keep it to herself. Why would she do something like that?”

Big Roy said, “I have no idea.”





Andre


When I was sixteen, I tried to fight my father, because I thought Evie was going to die.

The doctors had said this was it, that lupus had finally gotten her, so we were going through the phases of grief in double time, trying to come out the other side before the clock ran out. I got as far as anger and drove to Carlos’s house and punched his jaw as he worked in his front yard, clipping the shrubbery into globes. His son—my brother, I guess you would call him—tried to jump in and help, but he was small and I pushed him to the grass. “Evie is dying,” I said to my father, who refused to lift his fists to hit me back. I punched him again, this time in the chest, and when I pulled my arm back again, he blocked the blow, but he didn’t strike me. Instead, he shouted my name, freezing me in place.