Long Division(65)

“Your granddaddy would’ve been some kind of proud of you, Citizen. I’m telling you what I know. He would have. Don’t believe what no one else tells you. Your granddaddy knew some thangs that no one else ever knew. It’s like he grew out and everybody else grew up…” Big Shank kept talking and my head kept nodding, but my mind was zoning out of his speech.

For the first time since all this mess started, I thought about what it really meant to die and what my granddaddy might have felt before and after he drowned.

I realized, standing there in that hall watching Big Shank’s mouth move in slow motion, that stories—sentences, really—were all I had of my granddaddy. He died when I was two and I couldn’t remember one thing about him. I heard that he took me everywhere, dressed me up in little suits. Made me a pimped-out leather brim when I was thirteen months. He never went to church a day in his life, but somehow took the church with him. He was the best bootlegger in Melahatchie and the second best in Scott County since it went dry. He loved all the old black sitcoms like Sanford and Son and Good Times. He wasn’t scared of hardly anything and when anybody touched him or his family the wrong way, even if it was white folks, he damn near beat the walk out of them. I heard that after he beat the walk out of someone he’d apologize and say, “I’m sho’ sorry about that. I reckon I reacts like a demon when anybody touch me or mines.” I heard he had a son named Ralph with a jump-off named Ms. Kyla Pace, and that Ralph had a number of children that my granddaddy never claimed. I heard that he hated to bathe and loved to eat and fight, like me, and that he loved thick, curvy women with big ankles and bigger mouths who liked Newports.

Deacon Big Shank was still in front of me, going on and on, and all of a sudden the truth kicked off its shoes and started clipping its toenails, just lounging in my fat head. The stupid truth was that even though Uncle Relle had killed some people in Afghanistan and LaVander Peeler’s brother had killed a man, no one I’d ever really known had died yet, except for maybe Baize Shephard, and Long Division was convincing me that she might not really be dead at all.

If Baize wasn’t dead, the closest anyone I’d known had come to dying was the white man in the work shed. And the scariest thing about it was that even if I had really known someone that died, at that moment, in that hall, death felt like the only thing in the world that you could do once. As scary as the contest had been, I knew something like that could happen again. Death, I understood, was the only thing promised, the only thing that could happen once after you were born. And no one could come back and tell you how it felt.

Or could they?

I figured that must have been the real reason everybody was swinging from Jesus’s sack. I’d paid enough attention to Grandma and Sunday school to know the story of Jesus’s resurrection. I figured that after he arose, with the help of his almighty powerful father, the Lawd, he knew what it was like to die, and probably started spreading his sentences about beating death to the whole town. Folks started following and loving and believing, not just to be saved or whatever, but to hear sentences about what it was like.

I made the decision right there in that hall that I was definitely going to die during my baptism. I just knew it. And after or while I was dying, I’d find some way to come back and save Pot Belly like I said I would, and then I’d tell Grandma and Mama how to beat death so they could be equipped and not be all surprised when it happened to them. And I’d bring special gifts for Shay, MyMy, Gunn, and maybe even LaVander Peeler, who at that point was probably going to have his own TV show on VH1 called “All Thangs Considered,” where his eyes watered up a lot and he said “All things considered” fourteen times an episode.





SAVED SAFE.


I felt a push in the back and heard more of Troll’s damp organ. “I said, let us have our candidates for baptism.”

The back yard of the church was packed with heads everywhere. Some folks had on church clothes, but most had on work clothes. Just Reverend Cherry, Uncle Relle, and me had robes on.

The people parted and we had to walk through the middle. Gradually, they formed this humongous semicircle. All those eyes were tearing my insides up. Grandma was right there near the front. She was crying and trying to hold in tears when I looked at her. I tried to fake-smile, but I couldn’t. My damn cheek started quivering all fast. Then I saw the water hole in the ground. Reverend Cherry and Uncle Relle were in the water hole, below everybody else and dressed in the same robes I had, except theirs were plush white instead of plush maroon. Folks stood on both sides just watching and humming the refrain to “Precious Lord.” I walked all the way to the front and saw that Uncle Relle and Reverend Cherry were sitting on the steps of the water hole.

“Brother Relle, is you ready?”

Uncle Relle shook his big head up and down. I wanted to beat him through the ground for agreeing to help with this. I swear I did.

“Wait, y’all.” Everyone looked at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t care. I swear I didn’t. “I want my Grandma to help,” I said. “Doesn’t that make more sense?”

Grandma just stood there smiling and lightweight crying. I loved the smile and all, but it really wasn’t helping me out of my situation. Cherry put his hand on my shoulder.

“Little City,” he got right up on my ear and acted like he was whispering, but he was saying it loud enough, with his drippy deep voice, for everyone to hear. Troll’s playing got even lower and damper.