“My name is Miss Garfield, and why do I have to pay you ten whole dollars?”
“’Cause we said so.”
“Where’re your parents while this is going on?”
Maurice stood taller and adjusted his baseball cap. He looked back at his miniature cosigners, and they nodded their heads.
“Who’re you, the social worker? All you need to know is your car will be here when you get through. That’s what you call a contract.”
“Here’s the deal, Brother Maurice: I don’t have but five dollars today.” I raised my hand. “I forgot my money, but I’ll have fifteen dollars for you next week. So how about I give you this five dollars, and as a good-faith gesture, you can have this?”
I pulled out a large pack of Now & Laters from my purse. I liked to tuck them in my jaw and let them disintegrate throughout the day.
Maurice’s cosigners made happy noises, and he snatched the money.
“All right, then. But I can buy my own candy.”
It was a day filled with trouble. After my exchange with the Colored Lord of the Flies, I’d tried to get an elderly patient to fill out a new questionnaire. She had been fully clothed but pointed her finger at me.
“What you think this is? I don’t know you!”
I clutched my clipboard to my chest.
“But Mrs. Bradley, this is just a new questionnaire we need you to fill out. We have to maintain statistics for the government.”
“I don’t give a good you-know-what about no statistics! Just cause I’m poor don’t mean I gotta to tell all my damned business to the whole congregation!”
I backed out of the room, but as I turned the corner, I heard a familiar sound. Lydia’s laughter, the free huskiness rising.
Disbelief gobbled my air, and I knew then, I’d never expected to see my sister, outside of my own memories. But there Lydia was: alive. There she was, a miracle standing at the desk, talking to the receptionist. My sister had that same charm, the ease of our Chicasetta women.
When she turned around, I rushed to her. The clinic was scheduled to close, but patients were backed up, staring as we held each other and cried. As Lydia called my name, rocking me in her arms. She called my name again. She called it one more time.
Song
How a Man Becomes a Monster
The fault of how Samuel Pinchard, the man who would be known by the Negroes on his land as “Master,” became an atrocity, a devil clothed in beautiful skin, bright hair, and the strangest of eyes, instead of a human being with a soul that listened to God calling in dreams, began with a woman. Or at least Samuel would fault this woman. She was the one who had thrust him out of her perfect, warm place and into a cold container that was not a true world but a hell. This woman was Samuel’s mother, who bore him by a father whom no child deserved.
Her name was Joan, and like all of her children, she was a woman of incomparable beauty, in the time and place where Samuel was born. She and her husband, Adam, had lived on the land the English called Virginia. That land had been taken from its original inhabitants, as all the land in this place on this side of the water had been taken, and Adam had built a farm that was not wealthy, but was not poor, either. There was a house of one level with two bedrooms, and a kitchen that served as a parlor. This house was built of split, sanded logs. A porch and two chairs that rested upon it, where Adam and Joan sat in the evenings and shared very few words. In the distance would be the lights coming from the cabin that seven of their Negro slaves shared. Adam and Joan thought little about these Negroes except to take their respect and （presumed） affection for granted, like all owners do for that which they consider things and creatures. As Adam took the wood of the chair that cupped his buttocks for granted. As he took the meat on his plate for granted and did not weep over the spilled blood of the animal who had crossed from the side of the living over to death. And why would he? He believed that Negroes were the children of Cain, the least favored son.
Adam was handsome, though of dark hair and eyes. His children with Joan had inherited her fair looks. Had it been this lack of resemblance, the blond hair of his children, that caused Adam to leave Joan’s bed in the night without a backward glance? To never consider if she was warm in the cold or if her stomach was full of supper? To consult the hole in his chest where his soul should have been, and then walk to the other room, which was on the left side of the large kitchen? The Bible lent him absolution, for there were stories of men who abused women, even their own children, as Lot had ravished his own daughters, in the days after the destruction of Sodom. Maybe Adam thought of Lot, that bearded, self-righteous man, when he chose one of his two daughters from the children’s room. Yet there was no justification for him on the nights Adam chose one of his four sons.