C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“Momma!” he said in his bang-the-pot voice, too loud for the space. “Time to eat! Get up!” He turned and looked at her lying there, facing the couch back. Barely ever moving. Impatience was gasoline in his veins. You know what else was crazy? How he couldn’t harness his mind, how it vacillated from compassion to … Fuck! He didn’t know why she couldn’t be tougher! How she’d ever let Mike Shaughnessy get away, why she didn’t know how to fight — weren’t women supposed to be so strong? — why wasn’t she hard? Stand up and play the bitch! Their life could have been so different if she’d had a fucking backbone like the Reverend, then Allmon wouldn’t have to run all over like a pretend thug, throw his life away, be the fucking man of the house—

He wiped a hand over his face, changed roles. He cleared his throat as he carried over a plate. “Momma.”

Leaning over her, he realized with some embarrassment that her gown had fallen away from the upper slopes of her breasts, the skin there inlaid with faded stretch marks. In the room nearly overridden by shadows, he saw that the irregular lesion she had on her right hand — scarlet red and scaled with a scurfy, livid white — was repeated across the skin of her upper chest.

“Momma,” he blurted out, and the sound of anger in his own voice made him want to smack himself. But his hand was still gentle as a child’s when it touched her shoulder.

“Huh?”

“What the fuck is this? You got these all over?”

Marie came round slowly, turning clumsily, like she didn’t know where she was, or what he was saying. She could barely open her eyes. “Why are you cussing at me?”

“How long you had these sores, Momma?”

He reached down and exposed the skin around her clavicle. From her throat, down her sternum into the ribbed vale between her breasts, her flesh was a mottled landscape of enflamed, crusted, flaking sores. Her body looked beaten, or rotten.

“Holy shit, Momma,” he said, rearing back. “The fuck is this? I’m calling a ambulance right now!”

That seemed to awaken her properly, and her hand shot out to grip his wrist.

“No!”

“Right now!”

She wrenched up his wrist with all the force she possessed. All her life blazed in her eyes, everything left. “Don’t, Allmon. Don’t. I’m telling you no. The ambulance costs a thousand dollars — maybe more. I’m fine.”

“Then I’ll get a taxi!”

“No.”

“We got to do it, Momma. Listen—”

“No, you listen to me,” she said sharply. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not on the hospital’s charity anymore. I missed their deadline. I was sick, I was running some fevers for a week or two and couldn’t get to the paperwork.”

“Somebody’ll take you.”

“Who? We’ll end up with crazy bills! You can’t ever escape those bills!”

“Momma—”

“No!” she said, and then: “Listen, it comes and goes. Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s not so bad. It’ll pass like it always does. It hurts, but I’m used to it. I’ll take a shower and it’ll help.” And she tried to struggle up and appear more alert, clamping the fabric of her gown between her breasts. “I’m just tired and need to rest.”

“This is crazy,” he said.

“Allmon”—and she looked up at the ceiling as if seeking for the words there—“go … do what you do. I’m not even going to judge you. You’re young, you’re free, that’s the greatest gift. Go be in the world. I’m not young anymore. I don’t even want all that anymore. I just need rest. I just … Don’t you owe me that?”

“Owe you what?” He couldn’t make sense of her.

Her eyes burned into him. “You owe me your good life. I mean, give your whole life to good things. Help others.”

“Shit … I…,” he stammered, looking stricken. “I don’t even know what good is most of the time, Momma.”

She smiled. “Whatever helps people. The ones you love. That’s the good. That’s why I’m saying go on.”

“I don’t know.”

Now she was rolling over on the couch again, face to the back. “I can’t rest with you looking over my shoulder and worrying me to death. Go on, Allmon. I just need to rest my eyes a while.”

He backed away from the couch, knowing he was being ordered out. He reached the door and opened it half-unwilling, terrified yet somehow, strangely, sadly, in the deepest part of him, eager to go. As he stood there hesitating, Marie said, “But don’t walk out of this house without saying I love you.”

He looked back somberly over his shoulder and said, “I love you, Momma.”

* * *

The pain — once as small as a mustard seed — had grown so large, it had become her. She’d been young once and full of light, pure! She had been so full of love as a girl. She had adored her mother, her father, and Mike Shaughnessy. With compunction, pity, longing, desperate fear, and a rivertide of longing, she remembered the girl she had been, the body she had once lived within, so hopeful, so light and slim; long before her period and the swelling of her breasts, she had been free. Then the ironclad change of womanhood had been forced upon her, and it had taken so much from her. It had made her breasts hurt, her guts wrench, it had made her bleed. Then the boys had pinched her swelling breasts, the black boys on her block grabbing her with their eyes before they grabbed her with their hands, even though she wasn’t really pretty, maybe they touched her more because she wasn’t pretty, like a vase of no value a man can handle carelessly (you look better in the dark); men are only awed into good manners by women who are like art, and she wasn’t art. How she had longed for a clean-speaking, sensitive boy who didn’t act or talk black, who didn’t grow up in the neighborhood, but when she found that white boy, he used her only to feel good, and a baby — a whole new life — was what he called an “accident.” He used to say he loved her body. He never said that about her face, and while she was pressing all her hope against him, he’d already been looking for the next girl.

Her momma was the only human being who ever truly loved her. Her father cared more about the suffering of strangers than he ever cared about her. But she’d taken her mother’s love for granted all the days of her life. Claudia Jeane Rankin Marshall had raised her and watched her grow into her late girlhood with pride — but only now did she recognize the wholeness of that love. She’d said, Momma, I’m scared to grow up. Because the boys were hanging around like vultures, and her momma had pet her head and said, I understand, baby, I understand. And she had understood! But the cancer moved into her body when she was forty-two years old, and then she was gone in a moment, so Marie was all alone, and no one knew how pretty she was on the inside or how she longed, prayed, oh, how she had prayed to God, please bring me a man — in her mind he was white and clean-speaking and good and didn’t look or sound like he was from the neighborhood — who will love me. Please.

Her temperature was rising, is rising, the wick burning brighter as it burns low, fighting for life in an invisible draft. God, I brought a boy into this world for the love of Michael Shaughnessy and gave him his name. But he left anyhow. Daddy always told me wind is the breath of God, and woman is a flame bent in the wind towards man: Why did you curse me with this female body? I’m begging that you free me of it, make me anything but a woman in heaven. Make me an avenging angel, so I can look down on the world with inhuman strength and no feelings at all. Make me an animal, so I won’t know anything. Make me a man, so I won’t give a damn about anyone.

Lord, I never asked for this body, and I only had it a moment before the baby came, and he tore it up — I traded my breasts and my waist and my smooth skin. I traded my body for his life. I lost the love of his father, who only loved his own pleasure, because you didn’t give me any other beauty to keep him! You named me Ugly. Why am I even praying to you? Shame on you for letting me suffer! And shame on you for stealing my mother from me when I needed her most! God, I hate you more than I hate the devil! You demand that I love you? Is love and hate the same thing in heaven? Folks always say the Lord is wonderful! Who wrote that? They all must live in some quiet, safe world where no black folk live, no poor folk. The Lord isn’t wonderful — he’s cruel! He looks at the suffering of his own children like he’s watching television, and if he isn’t cruel, then he’s retarded and doesn’t understand the world he made, doesn’t know that little girls get their legs forced apart, boys got pockets full of dope, mothers sell their children, parents die! The Lord is wonderful? If the Lord is alive, the Lord is a pimp, letting life violate you, because your desperation buys him your belief. No? Then prove I’m wrong!