Jeffery Allen - Holding Pattern - Stories

Lee’s mother was small and frail. Had been consumptive at her birth. Pop liked to say she was uglier than death. Mamma would blush. He’d add, Maybe God don’t like ugly, but I do. She spent most of her time stooped over the vegetable and flower garden in the backyard. Kept a horseshoe over every door in the house. Religious. Serious with the gravity of one who read the Bible and attended church. Took Lee to the Mount Zion Baptist Church every Sunday. After her house, the church was the most impressive structure in the town. A brass cross mounted on its facade. Carpeted floors and overhead fans.

Pop never attended church, pissed off because no one in town drank on the Sabbath. In protest, he got drunk every Sunday in the town square — where four streets fanned from where he stood— and in full view of the church. Sunday nights, Mamma would chastise Pop about his un-Christian behavior.

Lee was seven:

Gypping people out they money with yo high liquor prices. Getting drunk in front of the church.

So what?

You wrong.

Wrong?

You jus wrong.

I gives them what they want.

You stealin.

So?

You blasphemous.

So?

That ain’t Christian.

I don’t hear Christ complaining.

You blasphemous.

Who ain’t?

Heathen.

I won’t be called names in my own house.

It started.

Pop punched Mamma. She fought back. He busted her lip. She uppercut his chin. He punched her eye. She snatched his wooden leg out from under him, pushed him to the floor, and knocked him upside the head with the leg.

After Mamma had knocked Pop out, she and Lee dragged him off to bed. They sat down in the kitchen together.

Mamma started singing.

Speak, Lord.

Speak to me.

Water drained from Lee’s eyes.

Cry, baby, cry, Mamma said. She touched a ball of cotton to her lip. Wipe yo weepin eyes.

She touched the cotton to her lip.

Cry, baby, cry. Wipe yo weepin eyes.

I ain’t no crybaby, Lee said.

Then why you cryin?

Pop hit you.

So? Do you see me cryin?

Nawl. But he hit you.

But I ain’t cryin.

Why not?

Ain’t got nothin to cry bout.

But he hit you.

How come you gon cry, if I ain’t gon cry?

He hit you.

We make a deal. I won’t cry, if you won’t.

Lee is ten:

In the library, he studied his father. Avoided the man’s eyes. This way he hoped to close out his mother’s suffering. Block out the deep hurt that showed in his father’s face. Pop put one small hand over the stump where it fitted into the hinge of his wooden leg. He deserved to suffer. Lee wished that he could make the pain worse.

Silent, his father retired to bed.

Lee stole away to his mother. Rubbed wintergreen alcohol on her wounds. Massaged cocoa butter into her scars. He invented his own space, his own world. Mamma’s lumpy flesh a bag full of stones beneath his hands. The wintergreen a weak wind tickling his nose.

I should just take you and go away.

That’s right, Mamma.

He ain’t no good for you.

No good.

But he need me.

No, he don’t. The wintergreen made Lee sneeze. He concentrated harder on his world.

I need him.

No, you don’t.

He needs us.

Let’s go.

Where we going? He need me. I love him.

Lee was eighteen:

New muscle. He worked up the courage to confront Pop.

Pop.

What?

Don’t hit my mamma.

What? He gave Lee a cold glance. Lee had expected a blow.

Well, suh — he felt his courage slipping — she might kill you.

Pop looked at him. Did she tell you that? He showed his teeth.

No, suh. It’s just that people don’t like nobody hitting on them.

Pop’s lips strained over the stalactite of teeth, biting in a laugh. Lee?

Yes, suh.

Pop leaned in close. A fever reached Lee’s face. That’s the best way a man can die. At the hands of the woman he loves.

Yes, suh. Lee didn’t know what else to say. Some feeling struck him at the root of his belly.

Lee?

Yes, suh.

What is an avenue?

What did his question have to do with anything?

What is an avenue?

I never heard of that, suh.

I’ll tell you. It’s a type of street made like a U. You go down one way, and when you get to the end, it curves back around like that. He demonstrated with his small hands. It’s like that horseshoe up there. He pointed to the object over the door.

Yes, suh.

They got many avenues in Paris. Saw them during the war. They make their streets real close to a curb. This close. He used his hands. We’d drive by in a jeep and some joker be standing on the street and we drive by and slap him just like that, slap that joker right upside the head. Only time in my life that I got to hit white folks. He laughed.

Lee laughed. He saw nothing funny.

Up north, they like to call everything an avenue. When you go up there, don’t be fooled.

Yes, suh. When? Lee thought. He had no plans.

If it don’t look like that horseshoe, it ain’t an avenue.

Yes, suh.

That night, Lee’s mother stood in the kitchen, hard at work with her fold out closet board. Her new electric iron. The only woman in town who could afford one. She sprinkled water from an empty pop bottle onto Pop’s shirt. She was singing.

Will the circle be unbroken?

Yes, Lord, bye and bye. Oh

Yes, Lord, bye and bye.

Mamma?

Baby.

He might kill you. He mean to.

No. I’m gon kill that nigger.

When?

Lord, forgive me.

When?

You know it wrong to kill.

But he gon kill you.

Let me tell you something.

What?

A person kills with the head and not the heart.

These were just words for Lee.

He tell you all that stuff bout a man needin brains and discipline. Well, I say this. Give your brains to books, but give your heart to Jesus.

Lee couldn’t confess that since the age of about seven — yes, he’d concealed the secret that long — he hadn’t believed in God. He didn’t believe in the goings-on at the Mount Zion Baptist Church. Don’t let him kill you.

He can’t kill me. The Lord take me when it’s my time to go.

The following Sunday, he and Mamma walked out of the church, into the blazing shimmering sun, and there was Pop, in the square, his wooden leg blazing fire. Pop had dropped his bottle. Or it had spilled from his fingers. He had doused himself in alcohol. The hot sun had ignited it. A hot wind whipped Lee’s pants legs. The heat beat into his back and legs. Mamma took off after Pop. Lee shielded his eyes from the sun, which sprayed like buckshot in his face. Maybe the fire would burn Pop’s entire body.

Mamma tackled Pop. He fell backward, slipping on an invisible banana peel. Mamma smothered the flames with her short torso, no longer than Pop’s leg. From where he lay, Pop punched Mamma in the face. The blow threw her off the smoking leg — maybe fingers of flame had pushed her hot — onto the square’s pavement. Lee walked home, alone.

That night, Lee changed the cotton gauze he had placed over the gash above Mamma’s eye. Withdrawn so far into his own space, even the smell of wintergreen couldn’t reach him.

Lee?

Ma’am?

You a man.

Yes, ma’am.

Do something for me.

Ma’am?

Remember. Give your heart to Jesus.

He tried to kill you.

Yes. And a person can be a fool for only so long. Her voice exploded in Lee’s mind. He concentrated on his space.

The following morning, Lee discovered Mamma had buried a hatchet in Pop’s head. The red blade indistinguishable from the red of the head. Mamma had slit her throat with a knife, the butcher knife that had cut bread gripped firm in her hand, to prevent it from slipping away. Blood swam in Lee’s head and red-hot fish swam in the blood.