C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

So they sat, Marie and Allmon on a sticky gray vinyl couch facing the Reverend, who seemed not particularly inclined to say anything more. Allmon reached up and found the swell of his hair; he noted for the first time how it stuck out past his ears. His grandfather turned that keen, unbreaking gaze upon him and said, “How you doing, young mister?”

“Daddy was here!” said Allmon, his hand still to his Afro.

“Aw…,” moaned Marie. “Aw, Allmon … dag.” And she just leaned forward and put her face into her cupped hands.

“Aha!” said the Reverend, looking at Allmon with an appraising eye. “Children always speak the truth! Now, how long it’s been since the good Michael Shaughnessy graced this child with his presence?”

Marie said through her hands, “He was here this weekend.”

“I mean before that.”

She paused. “Nine months.”

The Reverend’s head was a deep bell, swinging side to side but making no sound. He didn’t have to say a word.

Marie raised her own head and took a deep breath. “It was an okay visit, really.” Still the Reverend said nothing, and her eyes filled suddenly with tears and she said, “Actually, it wasn’t very good, Daddy.”

The Reverend cleared his throat and said, “Don’t be crying in front of your child.” Then he stood again, removed his worn white handkerchief from his breast pocket, and handed it to Marie.

She took it but crumpled it in her fist unused and whispered, as if Allmon wouldn’t hear a whisper. “I don’t really know if he’s gonna come back.”

The Reverend stared intently into her pain-wrinkled face. Then he cleared his throat and said softly, “You pick up white trash, your hands gonna get dirty.”

“Daddy…,” she said.

Allmon sprang up from the couch suddenly, all defense between them. “He be g—”

“Allmon, quit that baby talk,” Marie said roughly, but when she drew him back onto her lap, her hands were gentle. She spoke over his head. “Things are all right—”

“Now, I don’t believe that’s the truth.”

“—but, you know, we might be looking for another place before too long.”

The Reverend’s eyes narrowed. “What I’m hearing is he ain’t sending you no money.”

Marie looked up at the cracked ceiling. “I don’t want to force anybody to support me.”

“I ain’t telling you what to do.”

“But, actually, you know,” Marie said, “they’ve been talking about cutting my hours down to thirty-five at the dentist’s office. I don’t know how I’m going to pay my bills. It costs me a fortune to take care of his asthma.” She gestured at Allmon.

The Reverend’s face betrayed nothing. “Should have got that teaching certificate, Marie.”

“I had a baby, God forbid!” she snapped, but then the tiny fire banked, and she said quietly, “I’m just tired, you know. I don’t know what to do. Maybe I … I don’t know. I’m trying to be a good mother, and I don’t know why that’s not enough in this world. The way I am just never seems like enough.”

No reply was forthcoming.

“But so, I…” She looked up, her eyes wide, lenitive. “You don’t have maybe a little room for us down here, do you?”

The Reverend looked honestly taken by surprise, dark lines drawn between his brows. “This ain’t no place for children, and you know it.”

Marie’s voice was soft, but her gaze was steady. “Not anymore, I guess.”

There was a pained, headlong silence in the room as Allmon sat on his mother’s lap, staring at his grandfather. His grandfather’s eyes were headlights and now the headlights returned to focus on him. The man drew a deep breath and stood abruptly, his hand reaching out for his grandson’s as he said, “Lord help me, I can’t take it no more, I got to fix this child’s head. Allmon, come with me.”

Marie opened her mouth to object, but the Reverend just held up that hand, and she thumped back into the sofa with a sigh, crossing her arms over her chest.

The Reverend led Allmon to a pink-tiled bathroom near the back of the first floor, past the kitchen and dining room, past the tiny side bedroom barely bigger than a closet, where he and his mother slept when they stayed over, and just before the Reverend’s bedroom. He flipped the switch and knocked the old toilet lid down, placed his hands in Allmon’s armpits, and lifted the child up onto the flimsy seat. Then he gripped Allmon’s spindly legs and pried them apart, so he was standing secure on the edges of the lid. “Stand like so,” he said. “Lord knows I can’t have you falling inside this toilet. You looking rinky-dink enough.”

Then with steady hands, he took hold of Allmon’s chin, turning the boy’s head this way and that, tilting his chin up and appraising the landscape of his hair. He clicked his disapproval behind his teeth. “Don’t nobody know the meaning of pride no more,” he said. He reached over and drew open the medicine cabinet and removed a set of clippers from a crackled pleather bag. “Just a five-letter word that don’t mean nothing to nobody. May as well be a cuss word.”

He fiddled with the clippers until they came to life with a gentle grinding noise, but he didn’t do anything yet. He just stood there, looking thoughtful. “It ain’t always been like this, believe you me. You think it’s a coincidence that we was looking sharp and taking care of the black body till the Reverend King got himself shot, and the president got himself shot, and then all a sudden, the apparel was getting all goofy and the hair was getting wild? You think that’s a coincidence?”

“No,” said Allmon.

“They call it free, I call it giving up. Because that’s what it is. Unlike most folk, I tell it like it is.”

Allmon gazed up into his grandfather’s face, discovering the tracings of age in his mottled color, the gray in his five-o’clock shadow, the deep ladder lines above his brow. “Grandpa, you gonna die?” he said.

“Huh — what?” The Reverend drew back, startled, holding the purring clippers to one side. “I ain’t even that old,” he said. “Besides, the Lord can’t afford to kill me. Who else he gonna get to do his work? There ain’t enough Christians in the world, just a bunch of folk who go to church.”

With care now, he applied the clippers to Allmon’s hairline and made a single stripe down the center of his head like an inverted Mohawk.

“Anyhow,” he said, “like I was saying, everybody thinks if they’re doing their own thing, then they’re free. Now, they don’t know the first thing. Young folks forget more than they ever learned, and they’re too ignorant to even know it.” He sighed. “Young ladies now, they don’t know they need a man to raise up boys. But tell me, how else you expect a boy to learn? These streets, they’re just full of broken-down Negroes. A boy, he needs to know a man in order to become a man. He’s got to follow him and watch and learn. I had a father, that’s how I know. Women don’t know how to grow up men.”

“I wanna live here,” said Allmon, following on his mother’s lead.

The Reverend shook his head in irritation. “A halfway house? Like I already said, this ain’t no place for children. Anyhow, your mother done dug herself into this fool pit, now she’s got to dig her own self out.”

“There’s a bunch of men in this house,” Allmon said.

The Reverend nodded. “Children of God.”

Allmon said, “This ain’t no place for children!”

At this, the Reverend did something he very rarely did: he smiled. “Well,” he said, “my daughter thinks she got it bad, but these men here, they really got it bad, and I got it bad ’cause I got to take care of them, and when a man’s got the poison of liquor or cocaine or whatnot in his blood, he brings the devil in the house. So they bring him in, and I run him off, and they bring him in again, and I run him off again. It’s a full-time job, and I already got a full-time job. It don’t never end. The Reverend always pushing his boulder up the seven hills. The question I always got to be asking is — who suffers the hardest? ’Cause Jesus says I got to minister to the least among us. Your momma ain’t the least; she just thinks she is, loves to play the victim. My wife spoiled her rotten.”