the table alongside his toolbox, and sat down on the white cloth. All this had
been done at an underwater pace.
Mr. Lightfoot chose a screwdriver. He had the long, graceful fingers of a
surgeon, or an artist. Watching him work was a form of torture for the
patience, but no one can say he didn’t know what he was doing. He opened the
toaster right up, and sat staring at the naked grills. “Uh-huh,” he said after
a long moment of silence. “Uh-huh.”
“What is it?” Mom peered over his shoulder. “Can it be fixed?”
“See there? Little ol’ red wire?” He tapped it with
the screwdriver’s edge. “Done come a’loose.”
“Is that all that’s wrong? Just that little wire?”
“Yes’m, that’s.” He began to carefully rewind the wire around its
connection, and watching him do this was like a strange kind of hypnosis.
“All,” he finally finished. Then he put the toaster back together again,
plugged it in, pushed down the timer prongs, and we all saw the coils start to
redden. “Sometimes,” Mr. Lightfoot said.
We waited. I think I could hear my hair growing.
“Just the.”
The world turned beneath us.
“Little things.” He began to refold the white cloth. We waited, but this
particular line of thought had either derailed or reached its dead end. Mr.
Lightfoot looked around the kitchen. “Anythin’ else need
fixin’?”
“No, I think we’re in good shape now.”
Mr. Lightfoot nodded, but I could tell that he was searching for problems
like a bird dog sniffing game. He made a slow circle of the kitchen, during
which he delicately placed his hands on the icebox, the four-eyed stove, and
the sink’s faucet as if divining the health of the machinery through his
touch. Mom and I looked at each other, puzzled; Mr. Lightfoot was certainly
acting peculiar.
“Icebox kinda stutterin’,” he said. “Want me to take
a peek?”
“No, don’t bother with it,” Mom told him. “Mr. Light-foot, are you
feelin’ all right today?”
“Surely, Miz Mackenson. Surely.” He opened a cupboard and listened to the
slight squeak of the hinges. A screwdriver was withdrawn from his tool belt,
and he tightened the screws in both that cupboard door and the next one, too.
Mom cleared her throat again, nervously this time, and she said, “Uh… Mr.
Lightfoot, how much do I owe you for fixin’ the toaster?”
“It’s,” he said. He tested the hinges of the kitchen door, and then he
went to my mother’s MixMaster blender on the countertop and started examining
that. “Done paid,” he finished.
“Paid? But… I don’t understand.” Mom had already reached up on a shelf
and brought down the mason jar full of dollar bills and change.
“Yes’m. Paid.”
“But I haven’t given you any money yet.”
Mr. Lightfoot’s fingers dug into another pocket, and this time emerged
with a white envelope. He gave it to Mom, and I saw that it had The Mackenson
Family written across its front in blue ink. On the back, sealing it, was a
blob of white wax. “Well,” he said at last, “I ’spect I’m done for.”
He picked up his toolbox. “Today.”
“Today?” Mom asked.
“Yes’m. You know.” Mr. Lightfoot now started looking at the light
fixtures, as if he longed to get into their electrical depths. “My number,” he
said. “Anythin’ needs fixin’, you.” He smiled at us. “Jus’ call.”
We saw Mr. Lightfoot off. He waved as he drove away in the clankety old
pickup, the tools jangling on their hooks and the neighborhood dogs going
crazy. Mom said, mostly to herself, “Tom’s not gonna believe this.” Then she
opened the envelope, took a letter from it, and read it. “Huh,” she said.
“Want to hear?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She read it to me: “ ‘I’d be honored if you would come to my house at
seven o’clock this Friday evening. Please bring your son.’ And look who it’s
from.” Mom handed the letter to me, and I saw the signature.
The Lady.
When Dad got home, Mom told him about Mr. Lightfoot and showed him the
letter almost before he could get his milkman’s cap off. “What do you think
she wants with us?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know, but I think she’s decided to pay Mr. Lightfoot to be our
personal handyman.”
Dad regarded the letter again. “She’s got nice handwritin’, to be so old.
I would’ve thought it’d be crimped up.” He chewed on his bottom lip, and just
watching him I could tell he was getting edgy. “You know, I’ve never seen the
Lady close up before. Seen her on the street, but…” He shook his head. “No. I
don’t believe I want to go.”
“What’re you sayin’?” Mom asked incredulously. “The Lady wants us to come
to her house!”
“I don’t care.” Dad gave her back the letter. “I’m not goin’.”
“Why, Tom? Give me one good reason.”
“Phillies are playin’ the Pirates on radio Friday night,” he said as he
retired to the comfort of his easy chair. “That’s reason enough.”
“I don’t think so,” Mom told him, setting her jaw.
Here we came to a rare fact of life: my parents, though I believe they
got along better than ninety-nine percent of the married couples in Zephyr,
did have their go-rounds. Just as no one person is perfect, no marriage of two
imperfects is going to be without a scrape of friction here and there. I have
seen my father blow his top over a missing sock when in fact he was mad he
didn’t get a raise at the dairy. I have seen my usually placid mother steam
with anger over a muddy bootmark on the clean floor when in fact the root of
her discontent lay in a rude remark from a neighbor. So, in this tangled web
of civilities and rage riots that we know as life, such things will happen as
now began to take shape in my parents’ house.
“It’s because she’s colored, isn’t it?” Mom threw the first punch.
“That’s the real reason.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You’re as bad as your daddy about that. I swear, Tom—”
“Hush!” he hollered. Even I staggered. The comment about Granddaddy
Jaybird, who was to racism as crabgrass is to weeds, had been a very low blow.
Dad did not hate colored people, and this I knew for sure, but please remember
that Dad had been raised by a man who saluted the Confederate flag every
morning of his life and who considered black skin to be the mark of the devil.
It was a terrible burden my father was carrying, because he loved Granddaddy
Jaybird but he believed in his heart, as he taught me to believe, that hating
any other man—for any reason—was a sin against God. So this next statement of
his had more to do with pride than anything else: “And I’m not takin’ charity
from that woman, either!”
“Cory,” Mom said, “I believe you have some math homework to do?”
I went to my room, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t hear them.
They weren’t really loud, just intense. I suspected this had been brewing
awhile, and came from a lot of different places: the car in the lake, the
wasps at Easter, the fact that Dad couldn’t afford to buy me a new bike, the
dangers of the flood. Listening to Dad tell Mom that she couldn’t put a rope
around his neck and drag him into the Lady’s house, I got the feeling that it
all boiled down to this: the Lady scared him.
“No way!” he said. “I’m not goin’ to see somebody who fools with bones
and old dead animals and—” He stopped, and I figured he’d realized he was
describing Granddaddy Jaybird. “I’m just not,” he finished on a lame note.
Mom had decided she had run this horse to death. I could hear it in her
sigh. “I’d like to go find out what she has to say. Is that all right with
you?”
Silence. Then, in a quiet voice: “Yeah, it’s all right.”
“I’d like to take Cory, too.”
This started another flare-up. “Why? You want him to see the skeletons
hangin’ in that woman’s closet? Rebecca, I don’t know what she wants and I
don’t care! But that woman plays with conjure dolls and black cats and God
knows what all! I don’t think it’s right to take Cory into her house!”
“She asks, right here in the letter, that we bring Cory. See?”
“I see it. And I don’t understand it, either, but I’m tellin’ you: the
Lady is not to be messed with. You remember Burk Hatcher? Used to be assistant
foreman at the dairy back in ‘fifty-eight?”
“Yes.”
“Burk Hatcher used to chew tobacco. Chewed gobs of it, and he was always
spittin’. Got to be a bad habit he hardly even knew he had, and—don’t you dare
tell anybody this—but a couple of times he forgot himself and spat right in a
milk vat.”
“Oh, Tom! You don’t mean it!”
“Right as rain, I do. Now, Burk Hatcher was walkin’ down Merchants Street
one day, had just got his hair cut at Mr. Dollars’s—and he had a full, thick
head of hair he could hardly pull a comb through—and he forgot himself and
spat on the sidewalk. Only the tobacco wattle never hit the sidewalk, ’cause
it got on the Moon Man’s shoes. Smack dab all over ’em. Wasn’t on purpose, as
I understand it. The Moon Man was just walkin’ past. Well, Burk had a weird
sense of humor, and this thing struck him as funny. He started laughin’, right
there in the Moon Man’s face. And you know what?”
“What?” Mom asked.
“A week later Burk’s hair started to fall out.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it!”
“It’s true!” The adamance of my father’s voice indicated that he, at
least, believed it. “Within one month after Burk Hatcher spat tobacco juice on
the Moon Man’s shoes, he was balder’n a cue ball! He started wearin’ a wig!
Yes ma’am, he did! He almost went crazy because of it!” I could imagine my
father leaning forward in his chair, his face so grim my mother was having to
struggle to keep from laughing. “If you don’t think the Lady had somethin’ to
do with that, you’re crazy!”
“Tom, I swear I never knew you put so much faith in the occult.”
“Faith, smaith! I saw Burk’s bald head! Heck, I can tell you a lot of
things I’ve heard about that woman! Like frogs jumpin’ out of people’s throats
and snakes in the soup bowl and… uh-uh, no! I’m not settin’ foot in that
house!”
“But what if she gets mad at us if we don’t go there?” Mom asked.
The question hung.
“Mightn’t she put a spell on us if I don’t take Cory to see her?”
I could tell Mom was jiving my dad a little, from her tone of voice.
Still, Dad didn’t answer and he was probably mulling over the potential
disasters of snubbing the Lady.
“I think I’d better go and take Cory, too,” Mom went on. “To show that we
respect her. Anyway, aren’t you the least bit curious why she wants to see
us?”
“No!”
“Not the tiniest least bit?”
“Lord,” Dad said after another bout of thinking. “You could argue the
warts off a toad. And the Lady’s probably got bottles full of those, too, to
go along with her mummy dust and bat wings!”
The result of all this was that on Friday evening, as the sun began to
slide down across the darkening earth and a cool wind blew through the streets
of Zephyr, my mother and I got in the pickup truck and left our house. Dad
stayed behind, his radio tuned to the baseball game he’d been awaiting, but I
believe he was with us in spirit. He just didn’t want to make a mistake and
offend the Lady, in manner or speech. I have to say I was no solid rock
myself; under my white shirt and the clip-on tie Mom had made me wear, my
nerves were frazzling mighty fast.
Work was still going on in Bruton, the dark people sawing and hammering
their houses back together. We passed through Bruton’s business center, a
little area with a barbershop, grocery store, shoe and clothing store, and
other establishments run by the locals. Mom turned us onto Jessamyn Street,
and at the end of that street she stopped in front of a house from which
lights glowed through every window.
The small frame house, as I’ve already mentioned, was painted in a blaze
of orange, purple, red, and yellow. A garage was set off to the side, where I
figured the rhinestone-covered Pontiac was stored. The yard was neatly
trimmed, and a sidewalk led from the curb to the porch steps. The house
appeared neither scary nor the residence of royalty; it was just a house and,
except for its coat of many colors, very much like every other house on the
street.
Still, I balked when Mom came around and opened my door.
“Come on,” she said. Her voice had tightened, though her nervousness
didn’t show in her face. She was wearing one of her best Sunday dresses, and
her nice Sunday shoes. “It’s almost seven.”
Seven, I thought. Wasn’t that supposed to be a voodoo number? “Maybe Dad
was right,” I told her. “Maybe we ought not to do this.”
“It’s all right. Look at all the lights on.”
If this was supposed to make me feel at ease, it didn’t work.
“There’s nothin’ to be afraid of,” Mom said. This, from a woman who
fretted that the gray insulation they’d recently sprayed above the ceiling of
the elementary school might be bad for your breathing.
Somehow I got up the porch steps to the door. The porch light was painted
yellow, to keep bugs away. I’d imagined the door’s knocker might be a skull
and crossbones. It was, instead, a little silver hand. Mom said, “Here goes,”
and she rapped on the door.
We heard muffled talking and footsteps. It occurred to me that our time
to flee was running out. Mom put her arm around me, and I thought I could feel
her pulse beating. Then the door’s knob turned, the door opened, and the
Lady’s house offered entry. A tall, broad-shouldered black man wearing a dark
blue suit, a white shirt, and a tie filled up the doorway. To me he looked as
tall and burly as a black oak. He had hands that looked as if they could crush
bowling balls. Part of his nose appeared to have been sliced off with a razor.
His eyebrows merged together, thick as a werewolf’s pelt.
In seven mystic words: he scared the crap out of me.
“Uh…” Mom began, and faltered. “Uh…”
“Come right in, Miz Mackenson.” He smiled. With that smile his face
became less fearsome and more welcome. But his voice was as deep as a
kettledrum and it vibrated in my bones. He stepped aside, and Mom grasped my
