James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

Days later, something like a party followed. All his relatives had been invited except his father. When he asked his aunt Bethella why they had forgotten to invite him, she thwacked him sharply on the behind, glared, and raised her index finger to a point between his eyes, the way a robber might hold a switchblade.

Don’t you ever, she said. Ever!

His mother, uncommonly silent and numb, in a pillbox hat, her face veiled, dressed him in a black jacket and itchy pants from the local thrift store and held his hand in the front row of the church as everybody sang and wept before a shiny oblong box draped in flowers that people now said contained his father. How did they know? Nobody could see inside.

Later Eddie stood perspiring in his jacket but not daring to remove it as they lowered the box they claimed contained his father into a hill, and men shoveled dirt on top of it. When would they stop the circus act and let Daddy out of that thing? He had read picture books about Harry Houdini. Maybe he’d tell them, he thought. But he had started learning not to say the majority of what he thought.

In the rainy days that followed, seemingly related to the events of his life, he would beg his mother to go visit the hill and bring extra umbrellas. We can’t let Daddy get wet, he’d protest.

Friends came to the house, shaking their heads and saying, Mph, mph, mph. Well, you know if he’d a been white they’d have a suspect by now.

Over time, Eddie came to understand the part of dead that means never . That is to say, the whole thing. Never coming back, never going to swing you upside down, never taking you to school, never giving you presents, never coming to the holidays. But the finality of it didn’t upset him the way it should have. For the most part he didn’t believe it, so he tried to turn never into someday with the usual tools: ideas he heard in hymns, tinglings he felt while soloists cried during Sunday services at Ebenezer Baptist. Notions of angels, of heaven. Of ancestors gazing down, pride and anger wrinkling their foreheads. Of the sun and wind tickling the tassels of ripe corn in a wide field. Of pious deeds and of Jesus Christ levitating above an empty cave.

In contrast, his mother started to demand something impossible, maybe indescribable, something he didn’t understand until much later — she needed for time to reverse itself. Gradually her posture slumped, her chest became heavier. She stopped having anybody over, she rarely called anyone, the phone didn’t ring anymore, she became quiet and unresponsive, her moods enveloped her.

For a long time, Eddie thought only about adjusting to the loss of his father, and the loss of the grocery store, not about seeking the cause of those losses, and no one pointed him in that direction — in fact, his relatives diverted his attention away from it. He would ask a direct question of a random cousin or of Bethella during her sporadic visits — How did my father die? They’d stare into a corner of the room and feed him a noble abstraction — He died fighting for your rights. The follow-up question seemed ridiculous, unaskable — I mean, what killed his body? — and would linger in the air.

You need to find out, press charges, and sue, everybody would say to Darlene, sometimes even to him, at six years old. Eddie, your mother needs to bring these people to justice. What’s she scared of? She has a thousand percent of our support.

But he watched his mother during these days, and he sensed, without actually knowing, that something unnameable had curled itself, snakelike, around her leg, then bound her torso; her breathing got more strained, her eyes bloodshot and sunken. He’d overhear the things she’d mutter to photographs of his father— I never should have asked. I shouldn’t have worn those shoes. Forgive me. How can you forgive me?

Then a whole bunch of folks from up north came down asking questions about what happened, and Eddie spent even more time than previously in the confusing world of people talking over his head, primarily about politics. As he grew, reluctantly, to accept his father’s absence, the path of his grief and his mother’s reached a fork and then the two diverged. Once the house quieted down again, she began to neglect everyday life and allow a tide of chaos to rush into the house: a cascade of filthy dresses, wire hangers, pizza boxes, cigarette butts, and eventually vermin. She left their new television on at all times, usually playing to an empty couch, so that it seemed the advertisements begged no one to buy their products and evangelists prayed with nobody.

Toward the end of their days in Ovis, Darlene started to run with a different crowd — no more politics people anymore. These were men Eddie might see only once, men who smoked unpleasant cigars, who drove rust-caked Lincoln Continentals, who had filled the graying white leather interiors of their cars with discarded newspapers, who left their toenail clippings on the coffee table. Her moods became unpredictable. Once he brought a half-inflated basketball into the house, and she hurled it at his face for no reason he could figure out. He turned so that the rough ball hit him in the flank, leaving a cloudy bruise. The impact stunned her into regret, as if it had hit her instead of him, and she kissed the space below his arm over the next few days as it took on the color of an eggplant. Their trust throbbed and disappeared as the border of the injury grew sharper.

A year after his father died, Eddie’s mother hadn’t moved his father’s clothes out of the bedroom. She stopped speaking to a friend who’d tried to set her up with a man. She hadn’t gotten a job. Mommy’s running low on savings, Mommy’s having trouble finding work, she’d tell him, and he’d have to move a pile of half-finished cover letters from the kitchen counter when he ate breakfast. But he would leap off the school bus and return home in the afternoon to find her in the same tattered bathrobe, spooning thick brown liquid from a bucket-shaped container of ice cream in the kitchen, her eyes glazed and underlined, transfixed by daytime-TV shows where staged fights would break out. Mom Stole My Boyfriend! Empty beer cans studded the coffee table, corkless bottles of discount wine lolled on their sides, sometimes falling to the carpet. She stopped going to the courthouse and locked herself in her room, often weeping, sometimes for an entire day. During that time, Eddie taught himself how to hard-boil an egg and follow directions on the back of a frozen-food box. She started to ration his breakfast bars, she stopped buying him new clothes, the pencils she bought him for school all snapped or were lost within two or three weeks.

Six months after all the northerners left, Darlene finally found a job at a convenience store, and Eddie assumed that her new job would open up a new life: Her mood would brighten, she would stop biting her nails, she would finally make it to Parents’ Day. But none of that happened. Somehow, things got worse.

When he found the pipe that summer, he did not know what it was at first, but it made a cool toy spaceship, since it looked a little like the starship Enterprise , round at one end and skinny at the other, and he flew it through the apartment between his fingers. He flew it across the universe of the living room repeatedly, trying to reach warp speed. The first time Darlene saw him playing with the pipe, she plucked it out of his hand without explanation, only curses — curses he’d rarely heard her speak before, and that change felt more ominous to him than the pipe.

One afternoon he came home to find her, hair disheveled, one pink roller in, nearly passed out across the card table they used for meals. He pulled out the chair beside her to discover one of his father’s shoe trees lying sideways on the seat cushion, and the combination of these sights made him aware of everything he had pretended not to understand about his mother. In the past, he had walked in on her intensely caressing or staring at photographs of his father or objects he had owned, but this time he felt as if he had interrupted some deeply shameful activity between his mother and the shoe tree, perhaps the aftermath of a voodoo spell meant to transplant his father’s soul into the shoe tree and resurrect him. The absurdity of the situation gave Eddie the courage to ask a question so outlandish, insulting, and terrifying that every other time his tongue had tried to form it, the query had evaporated.