3

NOTHING BUT A BURNING LIGHT

I’m going to ask the question. Please answer if you can.

Is there anybody’s children can tell me what is the soul of a man?

—BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON

In this act, Allmon comes up on the streets of Northside, down in the Mill Valley with its meager, misfit creek, squeezed between the university hill to the southeast and College Hill to the north, which has no college despite its name, just modest white houses portending the suburbs to come, white fingers pointing up from the city’s palm, pointing the way out. But Allmon never goes further north than Northside, because his mother, Marie, never does. Marie the sweet, Marie the naïve; Marie, the first in the family to escape Over-the-Rhine with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree and a dream of being a teacher—she wanted to teach children just like her own son—before she got sick. But now she’s still tall and straight, small-footed, large-breasted, she wears her hair in its natural twist behind a patterned scarf. Lipstick the color of a plum with Vaseline smeared over it and a child at her side, a beloved son born on her own birthday.

Just east of Northside, the Procter & Gamble factory runs day and night churning kernolate, chloride, silicate, sulfate, and, once upon a time, pork fat. The gray fumes rise and draw down the sky to a low lid the color of aluminum, so that even on the clearest day the Mill Creek runs gray beneath it. Cars tunnel through the smog-drift in the late afternoon; in pairs they descend over the viaduct and pass through the graceless valley on their way to the suburbs, leaving only fumes which rise and, look, the sun is setting now, rosy fingertips sliding down dirty glass. It fractures the filth in the air and makes a hundred thousand rainbows of it. Sherbet, roses, and cantaloupe orange, wedding pink, sheer white. The first thing Allmon will think of his small purchase of sky: I want to eat it. The streets, from Knowlton’s Corner north to the rise of College Hill, are turned rich metallic from a sunset that announces only the midmark of second shift in the factory with its gray leaden windows and turrets streaming banners of smoke. Inside, little white bricks of soap drop from the cooling mold to be wrapped in white wax paper, then gathered by the half dozen and rolled down the clattering line to a box, then sealed in the heart of Northside.

In the valley, asthma is rampant, and Allmon will suffer from it when he’s young, his body twisted by crowing fits as he takes his evening strolls with Marie down Hamilton Avenue, both mirrored against the windows of the brownstones and storefronts, their faces rosy with reflected pollution, copper-sulfite highlights in their hair. Marie sings under her breath as they walk. No one has ever said she is beautiful, but she’s young and that is a kind of beauty—still unlined, still so upright. Some people driving by will think fondly of their own mothers. Some will think, black girls have kids way too young. But name one who thinks, oh God, in a heartbeat this moment will pass and the young women will be cut flowers, as Marie and her son walk south to where Chase intersects Hamilton Avenue, the site of their first apartment, the first place Allmon will call home.

*   *   *

But again, the valley: they lived in the little valley, four miles from the river, and whenever the waters rose, as they did in 1884 and again in 1937, the gray river coursed along the low arteries of the city and swamped the heart of Northside. The wealthy lived on Cincinnati’s seven hills, and when the flooding came they gazed down from their heights, troubled.

*   *   *

On Chase, Marie and Allmon lived in a hundred-year-old building with thirteen other families in two-room apartments. In that first provisional place, summer came like an Egyptian plague, and Marie drew the blinds against the broiling heat. She took off her dress and paced the apartment in her underpants and nothing else and when she breast-fed her boy, she simply sat cross-legged on the floor like a worn, hapless Buddha, the child on her thigh. The plants drooped in the darkened air, the sun-rimmed blinds moved not one inch. She soothed his heat rash with creams and kissed his sweating head. Sometimes she cried over his pertussive crying and crushed him to her despite the heat. And when he napped, she sang a hush song, sang Hush a bye don’t you cry go to sleepy little baby when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses blacks and bays dapples and grays coach and six white horses, hush.

Sometimes, there was a man in the house. He was a white man; he came and went. When it rained, the streets smelled faintly of the distant river.

They lived in that apartment until 1984 and just as Allmon was shaping memories out of the clay of his life, they moved. They moved because the white man came around less and less, and when he did come, there were fights. He was not tall, but he was beautiful despite a painful thinness, with a red-brown mustache like a fish draped over his lip. He had long, dark hair, a brief nose, County Kerry eyes, and cigarettes in his back pockets that made white bands of the denim there. He and his son napped together. The man was like a dry bath; to lie against him was to feel empty and sure, clean, though he smelled of cigarettes. Allmon’s mother placed green glass ashtrays all over the apartment so that when he came, he had only to reach over Allmon’s head to find the ashtray and tap the butt to the glass. Allmon said, “Where you been?” He said, “North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida. I just spent two days on Lady’s Island. You know what they got there?” He didn’t. “Ladies!” He laughed, and his son laughed. “And I went to St. Augustine. You know what they got there? All the things you don’t know shit about.”

His arrivals always came unannounced, then his checks grew irregular, then the visits stopped, and boxes gathered in the center of the front room. The pots missing handles were gathered, along with the oxalis planters, Allmon’s many small shoes, and then his mother is hunched on the sofa, gathering her hair in her hands, her fingers clawing deep into her hairline.

“Momma, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Momma—”

The look in her eyes stops his mouth. “I can’t do it. I can’t lose nobody else … I can’t do this by myself.”

So they left their apartment on Chase and moved down seven streets toward the turbid, southern end of the neighborhood, the cheaper end, where the viaduct crossed the sewage-strewn Mill Creek to Knowlton’s Corner, an intersection of five streets, where the commerce had once been so heavy a hundred years before that on any Sunday afternoon the crowds spilled off the sidewalks, shoppers forced into the streets as they milled past the butcher’s and stationer’s, grocer’s, the coffin maker’s, the pharmacy, souls all shoulder to shoulder. But when the city grew, the Saturday crowds drifted north, up the hills to the suburbs, and the southern end of the neighborhood went to poor working white, then to a checkered mix, now they just called it black, and Knowlton’s Corner took on the look of a place that once had been. The intersection was as careworn and antique as a wagon wheel, its spires strewn with broken glass and cigarette butts and glimmering oil, its hub home to a decaying costume shop, a gas station, a White Castle, and a corner store. It was here that Marie rented another two-room apartment, a tiny place, but loud with the sounds Allmon would associate with his early scenes: the freakish wail of sirens, the gruff fall of male voices, the Metro buses gusting by, dogs on the loose. In July, he would look down from their bay window and stare at the passing Independence Day parade. In the winter, the snow went gray as tobacco ash the moment it touched the street. And it was in this apartment that when Allmon would say, “I miss Daddy,” his mother would still say, “Me too, baby.”

*   *   *

Down behind their building, down the shaft of the back stairwell was the cement garden, the hollow heart of the turn-of-the-century tenements that formed their block. The buildings towered forty feet high on every side and made a shady grove where the neighborhood girls played in the summertime. A Rottweiler lay chained in one corner, snoring with its caramel chin on its paws. Girls streamed from the building every morning—one always climbing out through her kitchen window—to argue and dance and scream and double Dutch, but retreated from the noon sun that heated the cement to a skillet, because once a turner had suddenly dropped her ropes, her head lolling like a bobblehead before she pitched face-first to the ground, and she still had the scabbed cheek to prove it. At noon, the girls huddled beneath a lintel and sucked on orange popsicles until the two o’clock shadows canted across their playground, and play resumed.

Allmon maintained a blinkless vigil from their second-story window for many months before he found the courage to creep out of the building to the cement garden. Even then, he was seized with a reserve so crippling that he simply stood on the doorjamb, gazing at the girls through the veil of his lashes. They were jumping and singing and calling while a girl skipped through the lines, her hands perched on her lean hips, her beads up and down and clacking. As Allmon watched, a tiny bunch of foil fell and two beads sailed off and spun away on the cement.

“Your hair! Your hair!” the girls cried, and the jumper leaped out of the eggbeater, her hands to her head, and spotted the boy. Two fingers pinching the braid tight, she cried, “The baby!”

“The baby!” Seven girls, all sweat and brightness and exhilarated jostling, pressed in toward him, though he hung back in a shy twist of limbs. The beadless girl was the first at his side, smiling down and petting him on the head as if he were a sweet dog.

“He has a face just like an old man,” she said as she inspected the preternaturally heavy brow, the knife-jut cheekbones, the hollow cheeks.

“Danelle, why you always talk so white?”

“I don’t!” the girl cried, wounded, whipping around.

“Yeah, you do!” in a chorus. They were circling him now, or her.

“Danelle wanna be white!”

“I don’t!”

“Danelle wanna—”

“Shut up and make the baby jump,” another girl interrupted, stepping forward, their tall, unspoken leader. She still held the end of the fallen ropes in her hands.

“I ain’t no baby,” Allmon said.

“You got a white daddy?” someone asked, and eyes all swerved to him again.

Allmon’s tongue was suddenly confused.

“I heard you got a white daddy!”

“Are you white?”

In the middle of those arms and legs and cocked heads, the lie was pure instinct. “My daddy black.”

“I wanna white daddy,” someone said.

“Naw, you don’t. White people don’t use no washcloths.”

The girl petting Allmon narrowed her eyes. “Is your daddy really black?” she asked, but Allmon, under the impress of her hand, could only nod.

“Jump, jump!” someone cried, and they took up the chorus and then they were reforming and slinging a single rope. He stepped forward—a muscular little boy in a ragged white undershirt, his hair poufed slightly out of form from soft neglect.

“I like coffee, I like tea,” they sang, “I like the baby boy to jump with me. Double Dutch!” Both ropes rasped now in duple. Allmon’s little knees pumped, his hands splayed, his face was angry with concentration. A shadow of cloud swept their playground and the turner—who bobbed her head with the rhythm of the ropes, her little pink tongue caught between her pressed lips—looked up. Allmon judged the descent of the rope and faked a hop and went down with a thud and a false “Ow!” and rolled on his back for the welcome, his arms wide.

They were on him. Oh, they laid their bodies over his and took his face in their hands and kissed on him, their breath hot and their mouths sticky.

“Allmon!”

The girls sprang back from his prone body and there, silhouetted against the sky, was Marie, leaning precipitously from their kitchen window, calling down, “Don’t you all molest my child!” The girls just studied the ground, and then one in their midst said, “Ain’t nobody molested nobody,” and Marie leaned even further out the window, so that she looked near to tumbling out, saying, “That wasn’t you on top of my boy? That child is four years old! Don’t put your greasy little hands on my boy’s business.” Someone tittered. Then Marie yelled, “Turkey vultures!” and the girls evaporated, fleeing into the shadows. But when Allmon looked up, Marie was smiling. “Get on up here,” she said. “I’ve got good news for you.”

Marie was crouched to his height when he ran into the apartment. She was grinning, and her dimples were deep enough to fit a thumb. “Guess what?”

“What?” he said, shy of surprises.

“Daddy’s coming to visit and y’all are going to the Northside carnival!”

“Ah!” he screeched, and would have run, but she snatched him to her, lifted him against her chest.

“Listen now,” she said into his ear. “You know how long it’s been since your daddy was up here? Oh God,” she said. “Forever. Forever. But he’s coming back. So I’m begging you. Allmon, your momma is begging you. You need to get some good behavior and be on it, be my little lamb, because—”

Allmon watched her face grow grave.

“—I need this family,” she said, barely above a whisper. “That man’s got my heart in his body. So just be good is all I’m asking. If we stay on our best behavior, maybe we can get him to stay a while.” With gentle hands now, Marie returned him to the ground, lifted his chin with a thumb, and said, “Be my best.”

“He be gonna stay?” he said, and the openness of his face, and the uninsured hope she saw there, caused her heart to stop. But all she said was, “Quit that baby talk, Allmon.”

*   *   *

He came on a Friday morning, bounding up the stairs with an enormous box in his hands, a box that contained a new, stainless steel cook set. Marie was preparing for work, but she stopped rummaging in her purse when he walked in with the late-summer air around him and pressed herself against the length of his body. Allmon could barely manage his joy. This man’s face, so wondrous after a long absence, brought the mystery of his beginnings. He wedged himself between his parents’ bodies.

“Now, I’ll be back at five,” Marie said, and, with a finger against his father’s chest, asked, “Want me to bring you dinner?”

“Yeah,” Mike said, shrugging. “Bring me something from the Fifth Amendment.”

“A pastrami sandwich? I know how you like that.”

He made a face and rolled his eyes. “Naw. Bring me a burger. I’m tired of that pastrami shit.” He looked down at Allmon, grinning crookedly and reaching for his cigarettes. “You tell somebody that you like pastrami, then—bam!—it’s pastrami all the time till you can’t stand the smell of it. God, woman.” He laughed, the tiniest dart of a glance in her direction. His long, straggly hair was gathered back in a ponytail to reveal his freckled cheekbones, stark from underweight.

“Now, Allmon gets a snack at ten and then—”

“I know, Marie.”

She smiled. “I know you know. I’ll shut up.” She kissed him, and he offered her his stubbly cheek.

“Have fun,” she said. “Be good…” A pointed glance in Allmon’s direction and then she was gone.

“Well,” said Mike, and he heaved his skinny shoulders up and down once, glancing around the sunny room. He made his way to the couch, but had only stretched out for a moment, not bothering to remove his shoes, when he perked up his head above the backrest and said, “Allmon, lock the door.” And Allmon, excited, watchful, dutiful, dragged a kitchen chair to the door, clambered atop it, and turned the latch. Then he turned around on the chair with his hands behind his back, grinning.

“Good boy.”

“When we—”

“Whoa.” Mike laughed. “Whoa, whoa. We’re not going nowhere till way after lunch, so shut it down.”

Allmon clambered down and crept around the side of the couch where his father lay, first his dark, unruly hair showing, then a single eye. His father, drowsy, couldn’t help but laugh.

“You’re silly,” he said.

“What kind of animals is at the carnival?”

Mike ran the fingers of one hand lazily over Allmon’s Afro. “Bears,” he said. “Snakes, and horses and, like, um … They had baby crocodiles once, I think.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh fuck, I’m so tired. I got like three hours of sleep last night. I drove from Kansas City. Um, a crocodile is like a fish with fucked-up teeth and legs.”

“Ah!” Allmon made a frightened face.

Mike tucked his hands into his armpits and closed his eyes. “Wake me up in two hours,” he said.

Allmon immediately snatched a pillow from the couch and lay down on the floor in imitation of Mike. “Tell me a bedtime story,” he said.

“A story?” Mike said, settling further into the cushions, his brow furrowed. “I don’t know any stories. I’m no good at that. No, wait—wait. Okay, here’s one. So once there was this football game, and it was like really, really cold. Not just any cold, l’m talking like forty below. This shit was crazy; the guys couldn’t feel their fingers and toes, and the field was pretty much ice, so every time there was a tackle, it was cutting through their uniforms and shit. Guys were bleeding all over the place, they were fumbling punts, Green Bay’s kicker was missing the goddamn field goals, ’cause he couldn’t feel his feet. So fourth quarter, they’re all hypothermic as fuck and it’s about to be over, and then—tada—make way for Bart Starr.”

“Star?” said Allmon.

“Yeah, man. Bart Starr was the man, he was Jesus Christ. The great white hope. It’s the fourth quarter, Dallas is up three, Green Bay’s third and goal and this is it. Starr calls a time-out, and he’s got to make a decision. They’re really close, but Green Bay’s falling apart. And Bart Starr knows what’s what: sometimes you gotta bleed to drive the thing home. So what’s he do? Quarterback fucking sneak. He fucking dives in headfirst and burns Dallas down to the ground.” He yawned, so his face stretched horribly. “Best moment in football history right there. That’s how you win when the chips are down. Sacrifice yourself for the team. End of story.”

Mike wasn’t sleeping, but his eyes were closed again. “So, hey, Allmon,” he said, and he yawned another deep yawn that shook his body. “You know what … someday I’m gonna take you…” And then he was asleep.

When Allmon awoke, the sun was insistent, it pressed smothering heat into his face, causing itchy rivulets of sweat to travel into his hair. He reached up and touched the white hand of his father, which had fallen into the air between them. He gripped a finger and the man woke, his eyebrows starting.

“Hey, kid,” he said softly. “Did your ma buy me any beer?” His face was weary and worn as if he’d aged twenty years in his sleep. Lines from the pillow ran ridges along his cheek.

Allmon brought him two. He drank the first in two drafts. The second he drank lying down, in slow sips, while Allmon watched the sliding motions of his Adam’s apple.

“How’s your ma been?” he asked.

“Good,” said Allmon brightly.

“What time is it?”

Allmon only made a confused gesture and Mike said, “Oh shit,” but he didn’t rise. “One more beer,” he said, and Allmon’s grin was slipping, and then, “Two.” And then, after drinking the first, he was asleep again.

Allmon looked down at the body of his father on its berth, the man’s thin hands crossed on his chest. In a moment, Mike began to snore, a lumbering, unhealthy, grown-up sound. With an expression on his face like dawning suspicion, more rudimentary than anger, Allmon placed his small hand on his father’s shoulder. He shook him once, then again and with increasing force until the man was rolling on the couch like a log in heavy water. Finally, Mike brushed Allmon’s hand away. “Let me sleep,” he said thickly, without opening his eyes.

So a new scene begins, though the action follows through. Allmon simply unlocked the door, gripped the waxy banister as he navigated the creaking stairs, and then the full light of the sun was on him—and on his twin, impulse. The crowd on the street absorbed him as it flowed north toward the intersection, where the trucks had driven in with their animal cargo, though years ago the animals rumbled in on boxcars from Pittsburgh, halting just west of the main drag, so as the evening sun was setting, children in their beds heard the grieved crying of the leopards and the hollow hooting of monkeys.

At the roped-off intersection: snakes in grimy glass cages, a panther slinking in a boxcar, a bald red cat in a harness hissing at passersby, a giraffe in a cage half the height of a building. All around, the people of the neighborhood were drunk on beer and freedom, kissing their girlfriends in broad daylight like men on leave, carrying their children on their shoulders, those children held aloft like trophies, calling to one another in contented, proud recognition and cooing at the animals.

They were shoulder to shoulder, sewn together as a great, continuous garment. But look there beyond the tidal wave of people, beyond the ruction, at a horse. It isn’t impressive, just a nag snatched up by a carnie for forty bucks at the slaughterhouse in Peoria. She stands there with a ragged cob in her eyes, a disheveled thing perched on tender, surbated hooves. Her back scoops in at the middle and her rear legs pigeon inward. She’s missing hair at her sides, as if a saddle has long rubbed her permanently raw. Her eyes are very blue, eyes void of protest or argument, full of calm, momentful existence, maybe without memory, the eyes of an animal accustomed to the rowel on her bit and a man’s hard hand on her headstall. When she turns her head, one blue eye settles on Allmon.

“Guess how many hands high,” said the man who reined her, and in his shyness, Allmon said nothing at all, just twisted on one leg, staring up.

“How tall?” the man said again.

“She got a name?” said Allmon, pointing.

“You’ll get a prize for guessing how high.”

“A hundred,” he said softly.

“Huh?” said the man, his face ratcheted in irritation.

Then a woman’s risen voice said, “Who’s that child belong to?” In another moment, a woman halted him with a hand on his shoulder, saying, “Honey, where’s your parents at?” In an instant, his shoulder slipped her grasp and he was on the run, propelled by fear and wicked delight, skidding around bodies and trash cans until two victorious minutes later, the door closed and locked, he stood breathing raggedly over the snoring body of his father, the horse almost forgotten in the yeasty gloam of the room. He tallied seven gold cans on the floor by the couch, one only half-drunk. He stooped and studied his father’s face with care: the sharp, sure lines of his cheeks and chin, his brow creased even in sleep, his freckles like tiny brown smudges of dirt. And white skin—white the color of flour, of paper, of snow, of pearls, of stars.

“Wake up,” he whispered, and, when there was no response, he balled his hand into a fist and with all the strength he possessed, he struck his father on the bone of his shoulder. The snoring ceased and Mike’s bleary red eyes opened. They focused slowly on Allmon’s face. Then one hand reached forward and stopped a tear as it tracked down a cheek.

“Hey Jude,” he said, “don’t be sad.”

*   *   *

In the morning, his mind undressed by sleep, he padded along the old cupped floorboards to the kitchen, where he found Marie standing at the stove. The two casement windows on either side of her fired the room with sun, banking her into silhouette, as if she were standing in a tunnel of light. Her hair, inlit with red, curled out to one side, the other side still smashed tight to the shape of her head from sleep. Her right hand gripped the chrome handle of the oven door with whitening strength.

“Daddy here?” said Allmon sleepily.

She didn’t turn around, her hand on the stove didn’t move. He stepped forward then, and with a tiny motion he touched her hip, a touch as soft as a cat’s paw. Her hand came to life then, springing off the stove and smacking his own hand away with such force that he was too startled to cry out, he just hopped back, drawing his wrist to his clavicle and staring up at her in shock, pupils huge with misgiving.

“I don’t need a man touching on me right now!” she hissed. Her eyes were deep as a bruise, her face stripped of everything that made it her face except its familiar shape.

“I mean, why?” she blurted suddenly, then her voice rising: “I just want somebody to tell me why!”

Allmon only stared.

“What’s wrong with me?” she cried. “I do everything right, I have his baby, I love him! No one loves him like I do! What’s wrong with me? He can’t stand my ugly face? Who’s here for me? Who? Tell me!” She was sinking down and crying openly, sobbing great senseless, wracking sobs, her T-shirt catching on the stove knob as she slid down, so it raised up over her soft belly, showing the white striping of old stretch marks. One hand clutched the folds of her belly and one hand held her breast, low-hung and braless behind the T-shirt, her legs sprawled crookedly before her.

“How come I have to do all the loving? Huh? Just tell me that! You all take all of me! And you don’t give anything back!”

Allmon bumped back into the doorjamb, turning to flee as her anger collapsed into tears. “I just want my momma back. How come God’s got to take everybody away from me? How come everybody just goes away and leaves me alone?”

Allmon’s feet were agents of release, they sped him down the back staircase and spilled him out into the cement garden. There it was cool, a good place for tears. The chained Rottweiler looked up at the sound of Allmon’s crying and grinned, his caramel brow dots bouncing. Looking up, Allmon saw only the grimy redbrick enclosure on all sides and then a perfect square of crayon-blue sky without cloud. There were no birds flying there. He stared so long, the shed tears ran into his ears. Finally, a woman’s voice said, “The hell is wrong with you, child?” and when he turned to see who had said it—a woman whose tremendous girth filled her entire kitchen window as she leaned down to peer at him—a bird flew directly over his head in the patch of blue. It flanked suddenly, swerved down, and perched on a water tower, glowering at the blaring traffic below and executing a tiny side step that looked like an aborted dance. Then it proceeded to sing a song louder than any country cousin, because it had so much to sing against. No creature comforts here. A bird’s only defense is its own body and that you can break with your hand.

*   *   *

That afternoon, when the mood was settling like ashes on a burned-out fire, their neighbor Beanie came visiting, blunt tongue and motherwit at the ready. She wore her sweats pushed up under her chubby knees and a Bulls jersey with armholes so deep, her white bra showed. Her hair terraced down from her crown in a series of tight rolls that graduated in thickness until the final curl at her nape was thick as a toilet paper roll. She wore one or two gold-toned rings on every finger, and they glinted as she smoked; she always smoked. She found Marie at the kitchen table, staring into the window fan with a scraped plate of food before her.

“Where’s my favorite baby boy at?” Beanie said.

“I don’t know,” Marie said softly.

Beanie chuckled. “You know that child got a fierce face. Gonna scare the hell out of some white folk when he gets grown. Bone structure, you know what I’m saying. Bone motherfucking structure.”

The corners of Marie’s mouth lifted, but she couldn’t smile. “I was awful this morning, and he ran off. He’s probably out back. I can’t blame him.”

Beanie eased down heavily into the other chair with her legs stiffed out before her. “Okay, look at me. Look at me, girl.” Marie glanced up warily, as if expecting a blow. “I’m sick to death of you crying over this motherfucker. You know I am. This shit getting to be like clockwork.”

Marie wiped her nose on her hand. “He promised to take Allmon to the carnival, and then he just sat right there on that couch and drank himself silly.”

Beanie made a sorry sound in her throat and shook her head.

“He couldn’t even sit up straight, he was so drunk, and then he tells me he got some girl pregnant in Chicago, and he’s moving to Chicago now. And I was like, ‘Do you love me?’”

“First, don’t be asking no man if they love you. ’Cause that’s just pathetic.”

“And all he said, you know what he said? He was like, ‘I love you, but I got a sweet tooth.’”

“Mike, the white boy?”

Marie nodded.

Beanie sighed. “Who even knew white boys was worthless as these niggers up in here.”

“He left me his car. But I don’t even care. Beanie, Allmon shouldn’t have seen me like that.”

Beanie sighed. “Yeah, well, somebody’s got to put you in check. You act too soft all the time. You let a man run all over—”

Marie laid her hands down flat on the table, her face all affront. “Now you sound like the Reverend saying I act like a white girl.”

“Ew, nasty!” Beanie held up a shielding hand. “I ain’t meant it like that, ’cause I ain’t that mean. I ain’t never met no white girl over age thirteen I’d save out a burning building.”

Marie sighed and looked hopelessly around her. “It’s like I got to be some tough-ass bitch to actually be black around here—”

Beanie’s head cocked hard. “Who you calling a tough-ass black bitch?”

She got what she was looking for. Marie bowed her head and laughed through her nose, then swept up Beanie’s free hand in her own. “I’m just saying … it’s like somebody’s always ready to tear me down for just being me. The Reverend thinks I act like some whiny white girl, men think they can walk all over me if I just act myself instead of playing some hard-to-get game, and all these girls here act like I’m a race traitor ’cause I was with Mike—”

Beanie waved her hand. “Oh, it don’t make them no nevermind, they’re just talking shit, ’cause that’s what assholes do—”

“No, it’s a fact, and you know it. It’s like you’ve always got to playact and pretend to be someone else to get love in this world. Well, I don’t playact with men. I don’t try to seduce people. I’m just me. And so everybody’s out there tricking people into falling in love with them, and I’m all alone.”

“How come that is, you think?”

Marie stared straight into her eyes. “Because they’re cowards. Men are cowards.”

Beanie waved smoke away from Marie. “Okay, well, you ain’t got to playact. Ain’t nobody saying that. Just … just don’t nobody want to see you crying over these spineless, tired, worthless motherfuckers. Ain’t nobody ever told you ain’t no man alive worth crying over?”

Marie closed her eyes, said, “Children need a father.”

“Okay, see now that offends me a little bit,” said Beanie, pulling back her hand. “Both my girls is doing good, and where’s their fathers at? Where’s Derron at? Who the fuck even knows. At least we all know where Omar’s at, you know what I’m saying. But both my girls doing good, star students at SCPA, playing in band and doing ballet, all that. Marie,” she said, but more gently, with a sigh, “you don’t need no man. Open your eyes and look around you. Who you see in this building with a man? Who?”

“Cara.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay.”

“Diane.”

“All right. Shit.”

Marie stared in sudden consternation at the fan, watching tendrils of smoke slip into its draw. Then she said, “And that girl with the twins I always see out on Knowlton’s Corner. I don’t know her name. I see her out with that big stroller.”

Beanie reared back. “Oh!”

“What?”

“That bitch? Oh shit! That bitch a one-woman jizz factory, she got dicks clocking in and out every hour of the day. She ain’t got no man, Marie—she got a pimp!”

“What? No! She’s a prostitute?”

“You ain’t know that? Goddamn, Marie, you so ignorant!”

“But—I, I can’t help it—I grew up in church!”

Both women howled. And once started, they couldn’t stop, so Beanie had to fling her cigarette out the window and stomp her feet, and Marie ended up slipping off her chair onto the floor, leaning her head back onto the chair seat to cry. Then she was too weak from laughter to stand, so Beanie had to stand over her and, hauling her up with both hands, said, “Well, get Allmon on down to church then. Get him a dose of the Reverend.”

*   *   *

The Reverend lived in an old four-story brownstone on Sycamore, one in a row of five on the block, all in a state of disrepair. The façade was pink as adobe punctuated by black architraves that made pointy eyebrows over windows and black shutters, a few of which swung loose and hung precariously by a single hinge, threatening passersby below. The stoop was concrete, the corbel and cornice painted gray to look like stone. The peeling house rained old paint flakes on the stoop, where once upon a time, when Marie was young, there had been rectangular planters filled with geraniums and oxalis. When her mother died of cancer, the planters and their flowers had disappeared. Now there was nothing on the stoop but the deep wear in stone of a hundred thousand footsteps impressed over the course of a century and more. It swooped gently like the seat of a cold gray saddle.

Marie and Allmon drove up Sycamore in the Escort Mike Shaughnessy had left them, but it was hard to find a spot downtown, so they parked down a side street barely wider than an areaway, crowded with black trash bags and tires and forsaken furniture. As Marie cut the motor, three men who had stood huddled together at the end of the alley scattered like jacks.

“I don’t miss living down here,” she sighed, but her eyes were on Allmon in the rearview. “Honey, listen to me,” she said, pinning him with a serious gaze, “I need you to get some Jesus here, all right?”

He nodded.

“That’s all I’m asking of you.”

“Okay.”

She held up a finger. “And I don’t want any talk about your daddy. You hear me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ain’t no uh-huh. I’m serious. Yes, Momma.”

“Yes, Momma,” he said.

When they rang the doorbell, a Chinese man answered the door. Marie started back in surprise. She looked at him without saying a word, this pint of a man with long, thin hair like a horse’s neglected mane, who wore an old white painter’s jumpsuit splattered with bright color. He was ageless, bedraggled, a man who hadn’t bathed in a long while and who probably didn’t care. He took one look at them and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m Marie,” she said, indignant. “Who are you?”

“Oh, ha!” the man cried. “The Reverend’s daughter, Marie. Of course! Come in, come in. I’m new here. I didn’t realize.”

He waved them into the building with two quick flaps of his hand, and they entered the soaring foyer, where the balustraded staircase rose steeply to the second floor. Above, the drift of radio chatter and men’s voices. The bang of something dropping and raucous laughter.

“I think the Reverend’s in his office. Yeah, there he is. Listen, if you’re staying the night, I’d like to share with you my witness, how Christ changed my life.”

“Uh-huh,” Marie said, steering Allmon toward the parlor.

“I was a dead man walking before I let him in my heart. I used to live down on Broadway; you can’t even call it living what I was doing. But I’ll tell you all about it later. It’ll be a warning for your kid.”

“Yeah, okay, sure.”

The man ushered them over the threshold into the parlor of what had once been a grand Cincinnati row house, now a fraying thread in the tapestry of the city. The Reverend presided, stiff and upright, in his usual place on his busted crimson leather chair, his Bible open on his lap. All over the chair, white stuffing like cotton bolls extruded from seams and tears and from under duct tape patches. When the Reverend looked up and saw them, he closed his Bible, laid it aside, and stood. He was tall and broad with nothing extra on him, shoulders like a box under his neatly ironed secondhand shirt, which was tucked in tight and buttoned to its starched collar. His enormous hands hung at his sides, the fingers fidgeting subtly, forever in motion, his old gold wedding band catching the light dully. It was not so much the man’s size that commanded attention but his head and face—the tight, short hair sprinkled with gray above an enormous forehead, dark as a chalkboard with deep lines written across its surface. His nose was wide and sloped steeply beneath the heavy, mannish brows that Allmon had inherited. And set deep, deep beneath those brows, tawny eyes burned bright as lanterns. The Reverend never just looked; his eyes bored into the object of his concern.

“Hi, Daddy,” said Marie with a pittance of a voice, sounding not much older than her boy.

The Reverend nodded. “Always late. You missed supper.” His voice, enormous even when conversational, filled the shape of the room. His aurous eyes dismissed her with an unreadable expression, then settled on Allmon. Allmon smiled up into that familiar face, which did not smile in return. Nothing was said for a long moment, but just as Marie was drawing her breath to speak, the Reverend intoned, “What’re you doing to this child’s head?” After fifty years in the Queen City, rural Arkansas still rolled off his tongue.

“What?” said Marie, and she reached down to touch Allmon’s hair, which had grown all out of order like a hedge unchecked. “It looks good. I like it like this. It’s kind of free.”

The Reverend cocked his head and when he spoke, every word was slow, declarative, his vowels as broad as fields. “May I remind you there’s a difference between free and sloppy? You think your child looking unattended-to is free? Folks see a child like that, they think he doesn’t have a mother. They see a just-so Negro. May as well give him a dashiki and a blunt.”

“Daddy!” said Marie, laughing. “Four-year-olds don’t need to look like lawyers. I mean, what decade is this?”

“Apparently, the decade where don’t nobody care if their children look homeless. This business … this ain’t even in style.” A derisive flap of his enormous hand.

“In style? You really think you should be lecturing me about what’s in style?” Marie turned left and right to appraise the Reverend’s holdings, which amounted to a wrecked house, dilapidated vinyl furniture, a parlor room with books to the ceiling, and two identical Goodwill suits. She sighed. “Anyway, you know, some people like it.”

“Like who? Like White Mike, that’s who!” The Reverend turned his back to them and raised up his hands in exasperation. He took a few halting steps toward his chair and said, “Jesus help me learn there ain’t no sense arguing when the milk”—and here he paused between each word—“done. Been. Spilt.” Then he lowered himself into his chair with pronounced fatigue, like a man much older than his sixty-five years, and said, “Y’all just sit down now. Just sit down and visit and no more bickering.”

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.”

He sighed and shaved along Allmon’s left ear, so it vibrated and tickled.

“Ow!” cried Allmon with high drama, but it didn’t hurt. He leaned into the vibration like a cat into a hand.

The Reverend ignored his complaint, focusing on the task. “Well, God never said I was gonna end up satisfied if I followed him, no he didn’t. He only promised me the cross. I got a daughter running around with white boys, and my wife, she’s been dead ten years. I got disappointments like some individuals got dollar bills.”

One last swipe of the clippers and Allmon was shorn like a spring sheep. His head looked about half its usual size. The ledge of his young brow loomed ever more prominent.

The Reverend looked down at him pointedly. “But when a man gets that old temptation to throw in the towel, you know what he says?”

Allmon looked up expectantly.

“Praise Jesus and be not afraid,” the Reverend said evenly, and he passed a clearing hand over the curves and ridges of Allmon’s skull.

Allmon grinned.

“What’s he say, young man?”

Allmon quit the grin. “Praise Jesus.”

“And be not afraid. Says it a bunch of times in the Bible. Got to live by it.” With all the lingering hairs swept to the floor, the Reverend fell suddenly silent and his warm, dry hand remained resting on Allmon’s head. A soft, comfortable silence crowded around them and, for the better part of a minute, they stood enveloped in its haze, utterly still.

Then Allmon reached up and put his hands on the Reverend’s shoulders. “Grandpa?”

“Huh?” the man said, startled. In his deep-set eyes, there roosted a faraway look, as if he were contemplating something in another room or another time. Then he said softly, “Jesus is coming into my mind. That’s how it is on a Saturday night, I get to thinking, and he gets to speaking. He comes like a trouble in the mind you got to sort out.”

He turned and laid the clippers down gently on the pink windowsill and, without really seeing him, lifted Allmon off the toilet seat and set him on the floor.

“I’m listening,” the Reverend said vaguely. “Ain’t I always listening? I ain’t no eyeservant.”

Then he nudged Allmon with a hard finger. “Get on now,” he said, “I got to converse with the Lord.”

Allmon turned to leave, passing a tentative hand along the short hair where his Afro had been. He glanced down at the black tumbleweeds on the cracked tile floor and felt a new, strange feeling. That hair, once a part of him, was discarded, flung away … His stomach made a funny, unexpected flip.

“Son,” the Reverend said suddenly, seeing him hesitate. “Jesus loves you, but the world don’t. The important question is—you look black, but are you colorfast?”

Then he closed the door with a clap and locked himself in the bathroom to pray.

*   *   *

Now in the spare bathroom down the hall she’s looking in the mirror as she gets ready for bed—what it was, what it was … Something isn’t there, she frowns, she turns to the side, it’s just hugging up on her face like … nothing, it doesn’t have a good shape, if her eyes were just a little more open, less almond-shaped, and lighter, if her whole skin was just like a shade up from this, she didn’t want to be white, she just wanted to be pretty; she sighs, don’t cry, the reality is you live so long, the fact your momma told you you were pretty gets showed up for what it is, just pitter-patter baby talk, just the things you say raising kids; you tell them what they need to hear, and then later they grow up and look at this ugly potato nose and fat cheeks and go, oh yeah, money don’t buy you love, but pretty does. And I got nothing in the bank.

She sees him staring up at her in the mirror, his eyes full of something he’s seen, but when she turns, he’s gone. For a second she didn’t recognize him without his hair.

*   *   *

In the morning, Marie dressed Allmon in a gray striped button-up and his blue rayon suit, and together they walked the four blocks west to Race Street. From the corner of Race and Liberty, gazing south along the city blocks toward the river, all that you could see of the church among the relic brownstones slumming on their past glory was the gray steeple topped by a white cross. The church was an old Flemish bond structure built by Tennessee Presbyterians in 1849 when they fled the South for abolition’s sake. It had stood abandoned all through the fifties before the Reverend decided to establish the House of Sanctuary Christian Church there in 1962 after a visit from Abernathy in the spring of that year. A fearsome angel of the Lord, the Reverend had stalked the suburban churches for months, guilting funds from the city’s affluent blacks until he had just enough to purchase the dilapidated building for a song—a song and a tap dance for the Fancy Black, as he called them. The church’s roof needed repairing, which never came; its sanctuary was a shipwreck—pews toppled and water-stained, glass windows replaced with frosted Plexiglas, the lectern dismantled and heaped like kindling on the dais—but it didn’t matter to the Reverend. His churchgoers in the early years were those he’d salvaged from whatever the drugs left on the streets of Over-the-Rhine. They wouldn’t have been comfortable in a sanctuary anyway, so he led his sheep to the dank basement, where they could listen without cringing shame. It was there in the concrete basement under the fluorescent lights and cracked ceiling that grown men wept and women sang themselves hoarse, and all manner of sin was burned and sucked away like smoke up a flue. “The hull is ugly,” the Reverend would say, “but the fruit is ripe!” The Reverend had little formal schooling, but he had wisdom in abundance and will as well, so his congregation grew. The spirit was in the building, they said, and word soon spread up the hills of the city, all the way to the suburbs. Soon, the crowd that gathered on Sundays mixed Over-the-Rhine with folks from the distant neighborhoods—the streets of flight, as well as the men from his halfway house. But no matter the provenance of the sinner, no matter how blue-chip the dress or the shoe, the services remained in the basement. The Reverend wasn’t budging; it was the principle of the thing. He had built his church on a rock, and the rock was himself.

The congregation was already settling when Marie and Allmon arrived, squeezing down a row to claim two folding chairs in the middle. Allmon hopped up on his chair for a moment, eyeballing the crowd. There, at the front of the sanctuary, his grandfather sat in a chair as if asleep, his hands folded on his belly, his chin tipped steeply to his chest. He might have been asleep for how still he was. Close by, a rangy youth stooped over a keyboard, pressing out chords Allmon immediately recognized: there is wonderful power in the blood; power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb; power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the lamb. The sound grew thick and his heart pulsated to the rhythm until he stomped his legs to assuage the biting joy there—and his mother tugged him down onto his behind. The Reverend had risen slowly to his feet, pointing up to the ceiling just like the white hands atop all the steeples of Over-the-Rhine, and as the hymn poured out the last of its blood, he cried, “Let the holy spirit fill this room!”

“Amen!”

“Help me preach, Lord,” he said, bowing his head again.

“Amen.”

“Bring down the words in the voice of my brothers, not the voice of the schools.”

“Amen!”

“’Cause ain’t no school ever taught me right from wrong.”

“No…”

“Bring me the truth in the words of my father and his father.”

“Amen.”

“And the Holy Father, Amen.”

“Amen.”

“All right!” the Reverend cried suddenly, sharply, and raised his head with a ferocious gaze. But immediately the severity of his face eased as if he was about to make a joke, and his voice was dangerous, slippery when he said, “So … how many y’all sinned this week?” Behind that half smile, there was the hardness of carbon that his humor broke itself upon. There was only silence in reply, sudden and heavy. The quick enthusiasm he’d drawn banked.

“Ha!” he cried out into the surprised silence. “Wasn’t expecting that, huh? Thought I was gonna warm y’all up, say something pretty about how Jesus is watching out for you and all that. But, oh, Jesus is mad—can’t you hear him storming up there in heaven? That’s the sound of Jesus in the temple, just mad as can be.” He held a hand to his ear and cocked his head. “Now, I asked how many y’all sinned?”

He raised his own hand, peering at the people turned out in their Sunday best, ironed and perfumed, fake-pearled, lipsticked, hair straightened and curled and oiled. “Ain’t nobody sinned? Well,” he said with his arms stretched wide, “it’s a miracle.”

Then a low voice said, “Reverend, I sinned.”

“Who—what? Who sinned?”

A man stood quietly in the midst of the congregation. He wore a western shirt washed thin as parchment, his stained wifebeater showing through. Some of the women in the front rows turned right around in their seats to stare at the man with eyes wide. He locked eyes with the Reverend and passed a nervous hand up and down over the pearled buttons of the shirt. He said again, with gravity, “I sinned.”

“Well, did you like it?” asked the Reverend.

“Uh…” The man’s eyes slid corner to corner.

“’Cause if you ain’t liked it, then it wasn’t sin!”

The room broke up and the man said, “Aw,” like a scolded child, and then, with a grin that turned his somber face brilliant, he said, “I liked what I can remember!”

“Ha! That’s sin! That’s sin! If you sin, sin like you mean it! Sin bold!” The Reverend pointed a finger straight at the man’s chest, the man who was seating himself again, and he began to pace excitedly side to side directly in front of the first row of chairs, in front of the old watchdogs in the amen corner who murmured and nodded. Now the sermon was really beginning, now the Reverend was shedding the weight of his person, his voice rising, his face illuminated by a light from within and without. He looked simultaneously fierce and overwhelmed with joy. He said, “That there is a child of God! A true child of God! If you love Jesus, then you own up. You say, ‘I’m a dirty old sinner!’ Now, I hear you all laughing, but who else sinned? Huh? Tell me. Who else sinned?”

He turned on them and the room fell quiet and Allmon yawned and leaned across his chair into the warm side of his mother. He felt the first blurring of sleep coming on the steady waves of her breath. Fatigue and morning heat lulled him. Marie stared unblinking at her father.

“Mmmmm, it got so quiet in here all a sudden.” The Reverend laughed a grim laugh.

No one stirred.

“Ain’t nobody gonna speak up? Oh, I see, I see. Y’all are just mad at me. I can hear you now,” he said, and shifted onto his hip suddenly, wagging a finger, and in a creaky little voice: “Aw, now, Reverend, you always be so hard on us. Your Jesus ain’t no fun.” He straightened up. “Well, that’s right—Jesus wasn’t no fun. His disciples was ignorant and couldn’t make no sense of what he was saying, and the people was even more ignorant, and sometimes he got mad like a snapping dog and stormed through the temple, laying it down, and then, you know what? They assassinated him. They strung him up. So, that’s right. Jesus wasn’t no fun. What part the cross don’t you understand?”

Allmon’s jaw loosened, then he slipped into sleep.

“No, wait, wait, now I know why ain’t nobody fessing up,” said the Reverend. “I know what y’all are thinking: We’re so tired of all this sin talk, all the struggle stories. Isn’t it time for Easy Street? After all, we ain’t the generation that got dragged over from Africa. No, we ain’t the generation that slaved and slaved for the white man. We ain’t the generation that creeped up under cover of night from Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, when they was still sending your sorry behind back on the L&N with a note said ‘Property Of,’ that generation like my great-great-grandfather’s who swum across that muddy river”—he pointed behind him at the claybank wall, that muddy yellow space an intimation of the river beyond—“and once he done established himself and got himself a family, hung himself in a white man’s attic from a rafter he done raised with his own two hands! Now you think that man—that Scipio—when he was swinging from the rafters, he was busy paying your all’s bill? Well, now you say, things are so different now. They’re all so different now. The last century paid the bill. Or maybe y’all think the cotton pickers paid the bill? That come up to Chicago, Detroit, to Toledo, right here to Cincinnati? Like how I come up with my own dearly departed folks from the little town of Shelburne, Arkansas? Brothers and sisters,” he said with his hands on his hips, his eyes carefully surveying their faces, “did the good Reverend pay your bill with his own hard life? Was my generation paying the bill when we was young men marching in the streets of this fair city and Selma and Birmingham and the capital of this nation? When the dogs was biting and the hoses was baptizing, when the streets of this country was running with black blood? Let me ask you: Was the Reverend King paying the bill on your all’s life when he got shot down on that day in April? Maybe y’all think 1968 was busy paying the bill. I got to admit, that’s a awful nice way to think. The bill paid by your forefathers, paid by slaves.”

Now he stopped and turned forward, wily eyes on the congregants. Very quietly, almost shyly, he said, “Oh, Lord Jesus.” Then louder, with his eyes cast up, “Oh Jesus, forgive all the little children. They try to love you, Jesus, they do, but they’re so ignorant! Just like in Bible times, so it is today.”

Now he strutted and mocked: “Ah, no, Reverend! We just think the times, they changed! It’s 1984. We ain’t Negroes no more, we’re Afro-Americans. We vote, we got white friends that invite us over, nobody calls us names to our face no more, some of us is vice presidents of the company, some of us even lay down with white men.” He stumbled here, his voice stuttering. Marie glanced wearily down at the floor.

“Well, good for you!” the Reverend spat, resuming his back-and-forth walk but pointing at them. “But your brother in the city ain’t up there with you! He’s still stuck on the ghetto plantation with the overseer at his back, he’s still trapped up in the Jim Crow prison! Think about it! While you’re laying down with the lion, you ain’t tending to no lambs, and Jesus, he loved the little lambs. There wasn’t no lions in that shepherd’s flock. If the lion’s even tolerating you in his presence, maybe you’re doing something wrong! Maybe he’s just pitying you. You ever think about that? ’Cause ain’t it the nature of the lion to eat the lamb? So what’re you doing with the blond-haired lion in the first place? Ain’t nobody paid the bill for you to lay down with the lion! Fancy black folks always wanting you to hush the struggle story! What part the cross don’t you understand?”

“Amen…”

“I say don’t stand on the middle ground, stand on the holy ground!”

“Amen!”

“I said not the middle-class ground—the poverty ground!”

“Amen!”

“For there stands the living Christ, Amen! Yes. I’m gonna tell you a secret now, and if there ain’t nothing else you remember, remember this: Jesus loves the poor, because they suffer, and them that suffer is the only ones that love Jesus, ’cause it’s only when you suffer that you see the truth and Jesus, he’s the truth! You understand? It’s a perfect circle. So why are you trying so hard to not be poor? Jesus said only in heaven is the lion gonna be laying down with the lamb. And this—this ain’t heaven.” He laughed a derisive laugh, then turned to them with a single finger held up in the air as if a thought was newly dawning. His brows were risen high. “But maybe some of y’all think heaven is here on earth, it just ain’t here in Over-the-Rhine. Ooooooh,” he said slow, looking carefully, pointedly from face to face. “Ooooooh, you think heaven is the American Dream.”

“No, Reverend.”

His eyes narrowed. “Now come on, you know what I’m talking about, don’t be looking all innocent. The big old American dream: buy cheap, sell high, forget the past ’cause it’s dead and gone, chew up your brother till he ain’t nothing but crumbs, smile big, dance real fast, fight their wars, and when in doubt, go white.”

“No!”

“You heard me!”

“No!”

The Reverend held his arms wide. “Well, I hear y’all saying the righteous words, but when I look at my brothers and sisters, I got to ask—how many y’all got a credit card burning a hole in your pocket? How many y’all use that credit card till you’re so far in debt that every dollar you make you sending off to some white man like you all are his sharecroppers, and he’s living up in the big house? How many y’all go to work every day and check your black baggage at the door, saying”—and he stiffed up and spoke with a whittled falsetto—“‘Yes, Mr. Smith, I’m just so ashamed of how most black folks behave. It’s truly an embarrassment to the rest of us’…? How many y’all want to leave out the neighborhood and live up in Hyde Park, so you ain’t got to see your black brethren suffering in the city, looking so darn much like … YOU?”

Suddenly the Reverend clapped his hands to his mouth and, with his eyes wide, whispered, “Ooooooh. I get it now. I see. Y’all think Jesus was white. Ooooooh, you think Jesus was white? Children, what part the cross don’t you understand? If you’re in America and you think Jesus was white, then I’m here to tell you today, you don’t understand the cross and you don’t understand the color. If they string you up, if they hang you from a big old tree, if they ASSASSINATE you in the name of your brothers, then: You. Are. Black. Abraham Lincoln? Cracker most his days, black in the end. Young Brother Emmett? Black. All them dead Jewboys scattered through the Southland? Even them, black. Reverend King? Black. Malcolm? Black. JFK? Black. His brother in the kingdom? Black. The great-great-grandfather of my dearly departed wife? That man was black through and through, ’cause even though they all say he hung himself, I’m here to tell you that man was a child of God, and that man was assassinated. Bounty on his head from the day he was born!”

The Reverend stopped his pacing and faced them squarely.

“Listen, now,” he said, “I know y’all think you’re free, but your aspirations are gonna tell if you’re free or not. If the mind ain’t free, the man ain’t free. And if my mind ain’t free, then your mind ain’t free, ’cause we was born just days apart. Days apart. How many thousand years man been on this bloody earth? Slavery was just last week!

“So don’t be living the lie, chasing the dream, thinking some dead Negro done paid your bill. You ain’t earned the right to forget! You ain’t earned the right to live in the greenest pasture! You ain’t earned the right to lay down with the lion when the kingdom ain’t even come! Y’all act like Jesus is dead! Well, let me ask you this: Is Jesus dead in the ground? ’Cause I heard a rumor Jesus done rose up from the grave!”

A woman cried out, “He rose!”

“And how come he rose up out of that dark and nasty grave?”

“Tell me!”

“How come he said, ‘Eat my body and remember me’?”

“Tell me!”

“And how come Jesus is so angry up there in heaven?”

“Tell me!”

“Because my Jesus, my Jesus is the original Negro, and he said, only I can pay the bill, but he ain’t paid no bill for no Easy Street, he ain’t paid no bill for no credit cards and mortgages up in Hyde Park, he ain’t paid no bill so you can forget you was made in the image of God and THE SON OF GOD IS A NEGRO.”

Now the Reverend stopped suddenly, plucked a pink handkerchief out of his suit pocket, and mopped his streaming face, and when he spoke again, his voice was conversational: “Now eventually somebody’s gonna tell you Jesus ain’t had no brown skin. And you know what you’re gonna say when they tell you that? You’re gonna say: If Jesus wasn’t born no Negro, he died a Negro. What part the cross don’t you understand!”

A woman in the corner began to stomp her feet, laughing with her arms raised. “Yes!” she said, and “Yes!” the Reverend said right back, leaning forward at the waist.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said in a voice ratcheted high in exasperation, “train your hearts on Jesus!” Now the whole corner was risen up and dancing and the sprigs on hats shook and there was sweat streaming from armpits and the metal folding chairs were being scraped about on the concrete floor. Tears began to flow. The scrawny youth had resumed his position at the keyboard without anyone noticing, the music once again rolling out in brightly augmenting chords, rising and swelling through the Reverend’s words as he said: “Let us close with the truth.”

“Speak the truth!” they called.

“You ready for the truth?”

“Yes!”

“The black body is a temple!”

“Amen!”

“The white man’s been trying to tear down that temple forever!”

“Yes!”

“God said speak the truth, but America’s asleep, so we got to yell!”

“Amen!”

“Wake them up out of the dream paid for with black blood!”

“Amen!”

“Jesus is the lamb! He sacrificed himself so this broken world would wake up and see the truth! You ain’t sleeping when you with Jesus, children, you’re RISEN, you’re standing in the light!”

“Amen!”

“So stand in the light with Jesus!”

“Only Jesus!”

“Jesus!”

*   *   *

Marie kept her secret for three years; she held it in her hands. The secret wasn’t fear, though she was terrified when they decreased her hours at the dentist’s office, so terrified she’d taken the news without dignity, dissolving into jittery tears in front of the white man in his white scrubs. And the secret wasn’t shame, even though she’d had to go down to the Ohio Department of Human Services on Central Parkway and withstand the interrogation with the monotone caseworker, then the information session with all the other hangdog applicants, most too ashamed to look up at one another. She left with her first month of paper stamps and a mouth full of sawdust. Write the word “failure” on the contract of her life.

It wasn’t any of that. It was pain.

She’d come home that day from the Human Services office intent on fixing the one thing she could: the apartment. She filled the tub with sudsy water and pushed a scraggly mop over the old wood floors, removed all their clean dishes and washed them anew, replaced lightbulbs, polished their old television, which got three channels, and swept the tenement steps. It was when she went to return the broom to its closet that her hands rebelled, maintaining an iron clutch on the handle. Staring closely as if she could peer beneath the skin to the bone and sinew, she detected a strange, altered sensation—her knuckles felt spongy and swollen, as if packed with cotton wool. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror and raised her hands up to see their reflection. Strange that they didn’t look different, though the internal swelling beat with the beat of her inflamed heart. What was this? The strangeness didn’t even have a name. It was like an infant, some newborn version of pain, something too fresh to know.

And then the building rattled with his approach: her boy was home, tumbling through the front door and trumpeting that word, that one word containing all the world’s needs but never her own: “Momma!”

*   *   *

In the first scene of Allmon’s tenth year, a girl dies in the cement garden. Her name was Gladys Gibbons, just a tiny little thing on the third floor opposite with skin the color of chalky, churned-up river water, a soft cheek and a pert ski-slope nose like a white girl’s, maybe the kind with money. That nose made her a beloved pariah, as despised as she was envied by girls who didn’t yet know what envy was. She had the stamp of difference on her face, and that stamp was a pass. The girls in her building put their hands to the skinny vale between her shoulder blades and shoved. Knocked her against banisters, into doors, down onto cracked sidewalks and onto her knees. She thought: I’m ugly. And there was no grown person to tell her otherwise. So the wind of natural confidence died.

A decent man knows how to comfort a wounded girl, but there’s a kind of man who only wants the wounded, who can only desire the flagging child. A loved girl is bright like a lamp, and he’ll fear that incandescence. But this girl: the one who thinks she’s ugly, whose shoulders sag, who looks down more than up and never meets the eyes, the one who wears hurt like old clothes—she’s soft and needful, penetrable. You don’t have to work very hard to get inside a child like that. And you don’t have to wait very long for her to hug you back, for her to parrot your words, for you to believe you’re welcome inside. You’ll be the lucky first to tell her what the world means by love.

Gladys ascended the back stairs, one after the other until that brief road ended, and she didn’t pause to look down but stepped off the roof, twisting at the last, so she fell backward down. How high is too high? Forty feet. Allmon had just stomped out of the dank vestibule of their stairwell when she fell. She landed in front of him like a sorrow dream in daylight, faceup on the concrete, the back of her head flattened where her skull had broken and collapsed. Her lips twitched. Allmon lurched back into the shadow, swayed there like someone hypnotized, then turned and walked with wooden limbs up the staircase, seeing hearing saying thinking nothing until he was standing in the warm familiar mother world, his face blanched.

From many worlds away, he heard his mother’s voice. “What’s wrong, Allmon?”

No word, he pointed there there there over there her body was there, twitching like an electric wire, her eyes still open, black pupils busted to red sclera, staring at him. Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God his mother’s scream, it rose and fell, and then his own wail dashed over the edge of his teeth, and Marie’s scream was another woman’s and another’s, so the building was filled with screaming, and the stairwells beat their panicky rhythms, phones shrilled, sirens came spiraling over the viaduct, and his sweating mother was scooping him up, even though he was awfully big now, and folding him in half against her body as she sank onto the linoleum floor, saying, “Don’t look! Don’t look!” He tried not to look, but the memory of the dead girl was falling up, she was slipping into the scream stream.

“Oh,” said Marie, and it was such a groan, like childbirth. “Oh God, how can you let a girl hurt so bad … God, why can’t you protect the little children?” And then, as if the words came from another person: “Fuck this world!”

Allmon hid his head from the cursing.

Her voice belled with a righteous anger. “There’s a war on women in this world! They’re killing us left and right, and when they don’t do it with their own hands, they do it with ours!”

“Momma—”

“At least they’ll know now! Allmon, you got to go out with a bang if you want to send a message to this world! Make it so nobody can look away!” Then her words bent into a moan, and he could feel her huffing breath on his face. Allmon reached for her hand without looking, brought it up to his face, covered his eyes with her fingers pressed tight together. He didn’t hear her gasp from the pain of her swollen joints wrenched up in his grasp.

“Don’t look, please don’t look,” she said uselessly and too late.

He nodded but didn’t answer; inside he was busy passing his mind away to a sure set of hands that tucked it and ran. There was no goal, it just got farther and farther away until he couldn’t remember to watch for it anymore, and then the watcher was asleep.

*   *   *

Marie’s heart hurt, and it was no metaphor. There had been tinges and winces of pain, but when the muscle suddenly seized, it did so with such force that it sent her doubling onto her keyboard at work, blasting out nonsense letters, a message from the place she was going. She grasped instinctively at her chest as if she could wedge her fingers behind her ribs and cradle the offending organ in her hands. She rocked and moaned but was unable to utter a word. Searing pain steals language.

In a moment, the dentist’s arms were a band around her shoulders and she recognized the crude, jarring sunlight of the front vestibule. Then—in front of God and everybody—she was half carried, half dragged on a halting journey across two city blocks to a Northside doctor. She was dimly aware that she looked like hell and knew her mother would be horrified; as a girl, she wasn’t allowed out of the house with so much as a wrinkle in her homemade skirts.

Down the pain-crowded corridors of her mind, the dentist’s voice echoed, “I think she’s having a heart attack,” and some female in return: “We need to call an ambulance.” Only then did Marie struggle back into herself, pain overmanned by panic, to bellow, “No!” Then she was bent again, huffing, “An ambulance cost … a thousand dollars…”

Then she was seated and falling forward until she could fall no further, and she knew the doctor was with her, because she was leaning against his white coat. When he spoke, she groaned, and when he probed, she groaned again. With the whole of her being, she wished her mother were here to hold her.

When the coat spoke, its voice was warm, mellifluous, calm, unaffected. “Her oxygen is fine, and women don’t usually have heart attacks with these symptoms. My guess is pericarditis, possibly gallbladder, but we’ll need some X-rays. See how leaning forward eases it? That makes me think pericarditis. A dose-pack of prednisone should bring down the inflammation.”

“Well, that’s good,” said the dentist.

“Interesting fact—the heart continues to grow throughout life. It’s not much bigger than your fist.”

“No kidding,” said the dentist. “Your fist, huh.”

Her mind jolted round with a fresh pain. Two white men were watching her sweating like a pig with her body all wrenched up. No, her mother would not stand for that. Get up, Marie. Get up right this second and look smart! She struggled to mobilize her pain into action, but she simply could not.

“Marie, is this the first time this has happened?” said the doctor. “Do you have a history with this?”

She shook her head, dazed tears slipping soundlessly down her cheeks. Her shame was now total.

“Anything else I should know about?”

In the strict economy of pain, she made a small, terse gesture with one hand.

“What does that mean?”

“They hurt.”

“Your hands hurt?”

“All over. All the time. Every joint in my body hurts.”

“Ah, is that right,” he said. It was a long sigh, the sound of new understanding, and it made her feel suddenly, prematurely safe. Pain was a lock, and surely this doctor held the key. Suddenly, she didn’t want the man to take his hands off her shoulders; she didn’t care if she looked like hell. Her momma would just have to deal with that.

“This is sounding autoimmune. I think you’ll need to see a rheumatologist, someone who specializes in inflammatory and rheumatic diseases.”

She whispered, “Any take … low income?”

“I honestly wouldn’t know about that.”

Her momma, Claudia Jeane Rankin Marshall, daughter of Momma Rae, painter of nails, braider of braids, curler of bangs, the one who made her look smart, was trying to cover her mouth, but she struggled away and said, “All I have is seventy-five bucks. I need help.”

Oh, Marie. How could you?

“I can give you prednisone,” the doctor said with that warm, mellifluous, calm, unaffected voice. “But that’s really all I can do. I’m just a doctor. I didn’t make the system and I can’t change it.”

*   *   *

They made you memorize it for gold stars, even before you could spell the words, even if you were the king of Capitoline Elementary, high on your limestone throne with your pencil scepter in hand and your crown perched on the out-of-bounds Afro your grandfather despises. Allegheny, Monongahela, Beaver, Little Muskingum, Muskingum.

He could just see it when he was twisted around at his desk like so, his chin almost on his shoulder. There it was: muddy, milky, marvelous brown. Little Kanawha, Hocking, Kanawha—

“Almond—sorry, Allmon. Allmon.”

Guyandotte, Big Sandy, Little Sandy. Did they still have names once their bodies entered the body of the big river?

Two gentle hands—on the king?—pulled him round, though he came slow and with much resistance as if there were rust on his hinges, and his head turned last to look blankly at Frau Meier. With a start, he realized all the other children had left the room; the day was done.

Scioto. Little Scioto. Little—

“Allmon, you’re not in trouble. I just want to have a little chat.” Frau Meier’s blonde pageboy curled tight under her chin, and the irises of her eyes were two different colors. “I’ve just been a little concerned about you lately. Where do you live? Are you and your mom up here in Fairview Heights?”

“Northside,” his mouth said, but his ear was watching the river as it wound through the green-grass hills of Kentucky—the river like a snake. Little Miami next.

“Ah, Northside.” She sighed, nodded, looked down; she didn’t appear surprised. “I drive through Northside every day on my way to work. I always think of it as less a neighborhood than a collection of bars and used-furniture stores. It was a wild part of town back in the day. Do you know what they used to call it? Helltown. Because it’s where men would go to … well, drink after work, I guess.”

Allmon looked at her blankly.

“What does your mother do down there?”

He shrugged. “Sleep on the couch.” Licking, Great Miami.

Frau Meier’s laugh was a hiccup—a proper laugh aborted by the solemnity of the child’s distracted face. She leaned toward him earnestly.

“Allmon, I’m very concerned about this story assignment you wrote.”

He tried very hard to corral his attention and draw it round to his teacher. She was holding the story he’d written about the little girl who fell—a true story! With a touch of embellishment, of course. Still, he sought the Salt River and wondered how someone could paddle a river of salt granules.

“‘Gladys lived up the top floor,’” she read. “‘A raper throwed her off … Who done that?… He be like … They be like…’” Her voice drifted. “Almond. Did you make this up? Did this actually happen?”

He studied her face and tried to discern his answer there—was he in trouble or not? He opted for the safest course: he gazed out the black-silled window, past the fossil-strewn embankment with its aluminum fencing, down the crumbling escarpments to where the Kentucky and the Green flowed anonymously past.

“You’re not in trouble, Allmon,” Frau Meier said again, and then, as if to prove the point, she permitted a silence to grow between them while she studied him, deciding her next move. She watched a tiny pulse beat madly under the skin of the boy’s torqued neck. What was he looking at so intently?

“Well,” she said softly. “You can only know someone as much as they let you know them. But this I can fix; this I can fix.”

There was a rustling of paper and she pried the pencil out of his sweaty fist. When he dared a glance, she was scribbling something on the back of his story—pencil marks over the red marks showing through from the other side.

“First, verb-noun agreement. This is very important if you’re going to learn to communicate properly:

“I am

“You are

“He/She is

“It is

“They are

“We are

“Allmon, it’s never I be or They be or We be. No one will understand you if you say that.”

He stared down at the paper mutely. He tested “Be” in his mouth, chewed on it, rolled it between his teeth. Suspicion centered between his brows. But the Green and the Wabash be there—not sometimes, not used to be. Always. Always. Be.

“From now on, I want you to look up every single word before you write it down. And I’m going to make that possible. This is my gift to you, Allmon. I’ve used this since I was in college.”

Saline and Cumberland, don’t forget those.

She hefted a red, hardbound dictionary onto his desk, marked and well thumbed, and even as she was slipping his story with its corrections between its thin pages, he was pulling it across the desk, drawing it into his chest. He was going to look up the spelling of the Tennessee River.

Frau Meier laid a staying hand, perfectly cool and white, over his. He stared at it. “The truth is I found your story very disturbing. There were things I’m not likely to forget. But I really liked how you wrote about all the funeral roses. You know, under all this mess”—she made a wave of her hand to encompass his spelling, his be’s, the whole of his talk—“there might be a poet in there.”

Then she was rising, towering over him, releasing the king of Capitoline Elementary, and he was standing up perfectly straight, even with the weight of the dictionary tugging him down. Heavy like a river.

I am not. I be.

Through the window, he caught one last glimpse of the Cache, which was indistinguishable from the Ohio, which imprisoned it.

*   *   *

Childhood is the country of question marks, and the streets offer solid answers.

An ungoverned wind, a bulldog wind, swung heat through the streets of Northside, cranking the dial for an early summer. Allmon got off the bus a few blocks from home, walked those streets at a half pace, wind brushing his cheek, tangling in his hair. He held his new prized dictionary to his chest. He delighted in the familiar—the trash was confetti, graffiti the truth, church steeples accusatory fingers, the winter-worn sidewalks cracks in the heart. The young hand draws fresh maps on broken landscapes. But the grown man tells tales too. When he says we didn’t know we were poor, it’s not the truth; it’s code for my mother raised me right, she loved me and love is a shield. When he looks back on the Northside of his youth, his nostalgia is anger, and his yearning is hate. That’s the building where the cops shot Raejohn, that’s where I spent every summer night eating ice cream on the stoop. The old men were pickled on malt liquor, my mother was a warrior, up on Apjones I learned to drive in a stolen car, that’s when you could walk through the hood and hear the Reds game the whole way—

“Young.”

Allmon turned.

A man stood on the stoop of a row house on Chase, a beeper in one hand and a Pepsi in the other. He stood under the coping out of the sun, so at first Allmon saw only the glint of his gold ropes, but as his eyes adjusted, he noted the wide, full lineaments of a bold face, the thick nose and light green eyes—calm, cold, appraising—and turned on him.

Unhurried, on the low, the man said, “What you got there?”

Allmon tried to peer behind him into the house, into the clubhouse darkness where he detected the dampened, private sound of grown men’s voices. His crew. But he couldn’t see anything. He just said, “A dictionary,” and hitched the book higher onto his chest.

The man’s mouth half smiled. “Ah,” he said, “we got a smart niggah up in here. You got a name, Smartie?”

“Allmon.”

“What you eleven, twelve?”

“Nine.”

“Oh, damn,” the man said, and laughed a baritone laugh under his breath. “I thought you was older than that. You look older.” The man licked his upper lip, then bit it and gazed up the street, squinting as if he were turning something over in his mind. Then he said slowly, “You know who I am?”

Allmon shook his head, and the man just grinned. “I’m Aesop. And I seen you running all over this neighborhood, all over this motherfucking place. That’s some nice speed you got—you gonna play ball?”

Under that careful, watchful gaze, the child shrugged but blushed hard.

“You black, you tall, you play ball, right?”

Shrugging again: “Yeah.”

“So you Marie’s little man?”

Allmon’s eyes widened in surprise. “Yeah.”

Now the man leaned toward him slightly, his head cocked. “You want to make some rolls?”

“Huh?”

The man’s mouth laughed like it was funny, but those green eyes were serious, steady, and sharp. “M-o-n-e-y. Spell it in your dictionary. You want to make some c-a-s-h?”

“Yeah,” said Allmon, startled, an electric grin jolting across his face.

“Then I got a proposition for you, Smartie. But first I got to see how you run for me.”

“Run? Like now?” said Allmon, the meaning whipping right past him.

“Yeah, all right. Like now,” the man said, laughing in his throat, his tone half-mocking as he glanced behind him into the shadowy building.

When he turned around, Allmon was gone. He had taken him at his word and sprang away from the stoop with impulsive delight, clutching the red book as a marathoner’s bib and tearing down the street, leaving only the impress of his speed in his place. He was going to run over to Mad Anthony, down to Knowlton, then back up Fergus to Chase, where the man would be waiting, where the man would say, “Young, you mad quick,” and then hand him a ten-dollar bill or something. He’d never realized how fast he was before this moment. Even with the dictionary at his chest, he was fleet, particular, his knees pumping in perfectly timed intervals. He was rounding the corner onto Knowlton, barely out of breath, when his foot slid on something and he nearly went down in front of a shotgun house, so he had to catch himself with one hand on the gate, crying, “Whoa!” but it was really more of a screech, a girlish sound, so he looked around, abashed. When he took a step, his shoes clicked. He limped around the corner of the black wrought-iron gate, so he could stand on a patch of grass, out of the brilliant afternoon light. With the dictionary perched on his hip like a baby, he twisted his leg so he could rest his left foot on his right knee and inspect the bottom of his shoe.

“Oh, dag,” he said. Lodged into the sole of his high-top, which had come to him in almost perfectly new condition on a very lucky day from Goodwill, was a two-inch-wide curved shard of green glass. It looked like a piece from a Mountain Dew bottle. With extreme care, so he wouldn’t slice his fingers, he pried the convex glass out of his sole. Then, after carefully inspecting the curious gradation of green along its sinuate edge, he flicked the shard out into the street, and just as he was about to turn back, just as he was easing his leg from its awkward position so that he could properly balance his weight on both feet, and he was wondering whether the man would still give him money, a woman appeared on her tiny porch, pointing at him, her face cinched up with hate.

“Nigger, get off my lawn!”

He sprang back in shock before his face even came round. At first, all he saw was her mouth, a rictus of scorn. She didn’t know him, but then she seemed to realize his age, and some contrition, or the ghost of contrition, arose there. He saw it in her eyes. But her finger still trembled with accusation in the air.

Before thought, before decision, his body took off at a frightful pace down Knowlton. Nigger. He ran with his mouth open and the dictionary clutched to his nigger chest. Across Langland without looking to either side, then Hamilton, where he had to dodge one car that screeched, the driver jerking forward with her palm to her chest. He came sprinting up to the apartment, on the back side of the block up to the building where Gladys threw herself off the top, round the side of the building and someone who knew him called out his name hey nigger why you running, God there was trash everywhere why didn’t anyone use trash cans white folks did then three guys standing out front the building in conversation he was normally afraid of them but today he cried “Move!” and they laughed uproariously as he runs up the stairwell in through the front door slams it wakes his mother they think she’s a nigger too sleeping on the couch in the middle of the afternoon, Allmon! she says, Can’t you respect I’m sleeping? He has to pee so bad it stings but he can’t do it can’t go into the bathroom where you can look into the mirror at yourself he just stumbles into the bedroom where there’s no light on and there’s no windows so when he shuts the door and feels his way to the bed he lies down his blood is up flying he’s still running his legs spasming he lays his migraine head on his pillow for rest he’s a crier not anymore he is not crying—he reaches out snaps on the bedside light shocks the room and opens his new dictionary smudged and leafed by the white lady’s hands flips through the pages for what he is looking for and reads niggler niggle nigging niggery niggerwool niggerweed niggertoe nigger-shooter nigger pine nigger in the woodpile nigger heaven niggerhead niggergoose niggerfish nigger daisy nigger chaser nigger bug nigger baby and finally there it is nigger: to divide by burning.

*   *   *

In the morning, when his mother said, “Allmon, why are you looking like a zombie?” he had a one-word answer at the ready, but it pooled like hemlock on his tongue. He couldn’t open his mouth or it would spill out.

He made a halfhearted gesture toward school, taking up his backpack and leaving the apartment, but he just circled the block with its cement heart, and when he was sure that Marie had dragged herself to work, he climbed the stairs again, unlocked the apartment door, and lay on the couch for four hours straight. He stared at the television the entire time, watching horses run in meaningless rounds. He didn’t get up to eat or even pee.

Then at one, he rose and left the apartment, waiting no more than a minute on the corner before the number 17 bus came drafting up. He was undersized, dishevelled, and groggy, so the driver looked at him askance, but took his change and with some kindly misgiving said, “You all right?” Allmon just nodded, his eyes flat.

In fifteen minutes he was downtown, standing on his grandfather’s stoop, pressing the bell repeatedly and with such force, the color drained from his fingertip.

It was the Reverend himself who answered the door. He looked down at the boy in honest surprise, his nostrils flaring once, and said, “It’s a weekday. How come you ain’t in school, boy?”

Allmon had no words of excuse. He just stared ahead, not daring to look up into the Reverend’s face, only at the buttons on his shirt. His lips formed an inscrutable line.

“Well, get in here,” said the Reverend, and reached forward and cuffed the boy lightly on the back of the head, where the skull sloped to the neck. He came into that old house, which smelled like the decay of another century and like the lives of men when there were no women around. It was the smell of work, loneliness, boredom, and old books. And of cheap food pitifully prepared.

Then he was in the parlor, then he was at the vinyl couch, sinking, offering up his weight to the first thing that would hold him. He curled half on his side with his hands pressed flat against his chest, his slim legs tucked up. Boy as turtle.

“What on earth…”

Allmon could not reply, his tongue was thick and risen against his soft palate as if something were choking there. On his face, an old riddle was working itself out. The Reverend loomed over him, his thorny presence a comfort: the penetrating stare, drawn brow, the perpetual climate of mild irritation on the old man’s face.

“Boy.” In the Reverend’s voice, the first leavening note of concern. He took stock for a moment. Despite the appearance of surprise, the Reverend wasn’t surprised, not in the deepest parts of him. He was a man who had come to expect the worst, who had learned to almost enjoy the arrival of disasters, because those things tested ultimate faith, and he had that in abundance. He distrusted ease, which was the bedfellow of sin. Of course, there had always been the suspicion that a day would come when the boy would show up half-broken about something. Because the boy was too tenderheaded by far, just like his mother.

“Don’t cry,” the Reverend said, but he sat down heavily beside the boy and, with a gruff hand, patted him twice on the behind. It was his brand of gentle. “Sit up,” he said.

Allmon didn’t sit, but he rolled further onto his side with his knees still pinched up. His face, always preternaturally mature, appeared ashen and old with the look of no blood. That did not surprise the man either.

“Now,” said the Reverend. “Now … I know what’s pressing your spirit down. You’re sad your momma’s sick.”

Allmon’s heart stopped in his chest.

“I don’t know, child,” the Reverend said heavily, and scratched at the white stubble sprouted along his jawbone. “They call it lupus or rheumatoid or what have you, call it what you want. But I say, autoimmune? You’re talking to a literate man! I know what the word means!—means your body’s tearing its own self down. Now, if your body’s tearing itself down, only reason is because you ain’t tended the body, which is the temple of the Lord, the vessel. If you give the body care, the body will flourish, and that’s the truth. Only person can tend that body is you.” He jabbed the air with a pointer finger like a man poking angrily at dying coals.

“But what can you tell a woman? A woman thinks she already knows everything there is to know about feeling, about emotion, like she got a monopoly on the whole enterprise. I should know: had one wife and one daughter, both stubborn as mules. Show me the woman that leaves a man some breathing room, acknowledges he might know a thing or two about the human heart, and I’ll show you a rare and happy man. Your momma, she don’t listen to nobody. Oh, she acts like she do, but she don’t. Her life’s her own fault; you run with stupid white boys, you gonna get the horn and then some.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back slowly against the creaking sofa.

“Your momma was always wanting pity. Acting like she couldn’t get enough love from this corner and that corner. That ain’t how you earn respect. When you don’t love the self, which the Lord hath made, then the self goes out looking for pity, because it don’t know the difference between pity and love. But let me tell you here and now—pity, that’s just the poor country cousin of love. There ain’t hardly even a family resemblance.”

The Reverend said slowly, almost under his breath, as if it was an afterthought: “Autoimmune, huh. I tell the truth: destroying your own self.”

In a small voice, stripped of emotion: “Momma’s gonna die?”

“Not if she gets herself together she won’t.”

Allmon squeezed his eyes shut, and a sudden, severe fantasy was born with all the devouring force of a blue fire sucking oxygen. If Momma dies, Daddy’ll come back. Will he recognize me? Desire bloomed in him.

The Reverend sighed and looked up at the cracked, watermarked ceiling and the dust motes swimming in the yellow light. He said, “I ought to send your behind back to school.” But then he said, “He giveth power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young shall fall exhausted, but those who waiteth for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” Then he sighed loudly. “Be not afraid,” he said. “Let’s you and me go for a walk. I’m old, but I ain’t too old to walk my own city.”

He poked Allmon in the shoulder blades until the boy stood there half-lidded with his shoulders sagging. He looked as if someone had poured half the spirit out of him, like the flies were about to settle on him. He’d grown quite a bit since the last time the Reverend had seen him, which was just two months. Was he ten now? Within a few years of looking like a teenager, and that filled the old man with an apprehension born of things he remembered all too well. He wouldn’t ever forget that bleak and confusing time, when the world began to see a colored man in the body where a child still resided. And the child begins to feel the change—not in himself so much as in the very air around him.

“Come on now,” the Reverend said gruffly. “Let’s get out the house.”

The pair walked through the city as the afternoon began its languid westward slide, a small breeze boring up toward the east. With the hills on three sides, the city rose around them—brownstones and tenements replaced by the towering heights of skyscrapers, their mirrored windows reflecting only one another. As they were crossing Main and Ninth, where traffic grew heavier, the Reverend took up the boy’s hand and held it. They were two tiny figures walking on an ancient floodplain, though the river was obscured. They meandered past cars with horns blaring, men in suits, women steering shopping carts, watchful police. There was a ball game in progress and occasionally they could hear the roar of the crowd in the coliseum. At one point, the Reverend bought Allmon a bag of roasted peanuts and said, “Now don’t ask for nothing else. I ain’t got no more money on me.” Then they were passing the old fountain with her white hands frozen in welcome, and the river was imminent, they could smell it. The riverboats were honking, that fetish from the last century, chugging through the spooling eddies, old figures of expansion and promise.

When the pair arrived, they saw the river was gray and plain and polluted, greased with oil rainbows.

They walked the Serpentine Wall, the terraced concrete path that wended past the muddy shallows and the trash-strewn banks. The Reverend cracked the peanuts, and Allmon plucked the meat of the nuts carefully from the shell. He was livening up a bit, there was some blood in his cheeks. Every now and again, Allmon stooped down and placed a halved shell on the concrete like in the fairy tale.

When he grew tired, the Reverend seated himself slowly on a concrete step, his knees cracking. “You probably ain’t gonna believe this,” he said, patting the concrete for Allmon to sit, “but when I was your age, I got the gift for mimicry. I could do black folk and fancy white folk—just about anybody. Still can. But I choose to talk with the Lord’s talk, because the Lord made me, and I ain’t aspiring to nothing in this world.” He cleared his throat. “I tell you what, though, I could make my momma laugh so hard she was fit to bust. She was always going on, how I was gonna end up onstage. In a manner, I suppose.”

Allmon wasn’t really paying him mind as he rooted in a peanut shell and crossed his legs Indian-style. He said absently, “This one time Daddy said that we was gonna—” But he felt the sudden stiffening of the Reverend beside him and promptly clamped his lips together. He drew his father back into him, as if sucking in a white smoke.

They both looked out across the river now, where the late sun was flinging glass shards of light, all spangling briskly. Light popping here and there without sound. Waves swinging.

Allmon said, “The river’s like a big piano playing itself.”

“Huh,” said the Reverend, peering into the distance. He thought of Scipio, wishing he could picture his forefather’s face, but there was nothing to picture. He felt a flash of the old anger. Nobody talks about a suicide; it grinds generations into the soil of time. That kind of dying tells a tale bigger than one man, and people ought to talk about the how and the why.

Across the river stood the historic rows of Covington and Newport, the staunch antebellum houses glowing in the coming evening. They were proud and stately and serene. White as eyeballs rolled back in the head.

“Who lives in those houses?” Allmon said.

“Funny,” said the Reverend, not really answering, “how the best homes, they’re always on the bloodiest ground. But then if your body’s all covered with ugly scars, I guess you’re gonna put on fancy clothes and try to fool everybody.”

“You ever been over there?”

“I ain’t been across that river in over ten years.”

“’Cause you scared?”

“Huh?” said the Reverend with disdain, and looked at Allmon like he’d lost his mind. “I ain’t scared! It’s the principle of the thing. Lord have mercy.” He wiped the offended lines from his forehead and said, “When I was just a tad bit older than you, I was coming up from Arkansas. I was already knowing a thing or two, so when I crossed that river, I just said, ‘Devil, get behind me.’ I’m talking about the principle of the thing.”

Allmon said, “A bunch of white folks live over there, huh.” Mike Shaughnessy was heavy in his mind, and the sudden surge of longing was overpowering. He looked down as though searching the ground for something.

The Reverend was watching his face, he saw the slide into memory written all over it—the minute lift of his brows, the way a face looks when it’s reaching.

“You know how I know God exists?” said the Reverend suddenly. “Because I need him bad even though he ain’t around to see.” Allmon looked up sharply. The old man had struck a blow to his private heart. He blinked rapidly.

“See, the human, he knows what perfect is even though he ain’t never gonna find a perfect thing on this earth. Now, understand, I done spent my whole life chasing justice. But you think justice is here on earth? Child, I don’t see no justice.” He swept one hand before him, as if he were putting those fancy white houses on display. “But I know justice is real and perfect, and it’s another name for Jesus, and I give my whole life to him.”

“But Grandpa,” said Allmon slowly and with misgiving, “then how come Jesus let all the bad situations happen?”

“Justice ain’t done that.”

“But how come Jesus ain’t never stopped it?”

“’Cause justice, that’s a perfect thing, but justice can’t make a human being do something or not do something. Jesus ain’t gonna force your hand. He just lives in you like a hope and shows you what he looks like every day, and you get to decide if you’re gonna make your life look like justice, even though you can’t see him nowhere, or if you’re gonna make your life look like fame or fancy things or money and whatnot. Now most people, they choose fancy things and money, because you can see all them, you can hold all them in your hand. But all them things you can’t see is what matters most. They live in the mind and the heart. The perfect things, like justice.”

“But if it ain’t even here, then how you know it exists?”

“Because the lack, child! Lack’s the most real thing there is! My wife is dead, but she’s real, and don’t you know I feel the lack!” He struck his chest with his fist. “You ain’t gonna miss something that don’t matter or ain’t never had the possibility of existing in this world.”

Allmon turned his questioning face away from the river flirting with light, his eyes stinging with unsummoned tears. When he closed them, he saw worse things, much worse, than he wanted to see. He opened his eyes and said, from a wound more powerful than longing, “I don’t like Jesus. He don’t care about nothing.”

“Hush!” said the Reverend disdainfully. “You ain’t even listened to a word I said.”

Allmon glowered.

Then, without warning, the Reverend was praying. “Dear God, look at this child growing. Being a man is a heavy, heavy burden. Help his heart, Lord Jesus. Help him be not afraid. Help his heart to justice, even if the road gets rough and he’s got to drag a cross to Calvary. Bless all the little children, even the ones that don’t know you yet, Jesus. Amen.”

Without opening his eyes, he nudged Allmon. “Say a prayer.”

Allmon said, “Who—what? Me?”

“Who else you think I’m talking to?”

“I thought you was talking to Jesus!”

“I’m done talking to Jesus! Now I’m talking to you!”

“Oh.”

“So say a prayer.”

“Oh! Uh…,” said Allmon, and after a considerable pause, he said, “Thank you for the peanuts and the river. Thank you, God, thank you, Jesus, thank you, Martin Luther King.”

“Ha!” cried the Reverend, and coughed down a laugh. “Yes, thank you for the river! Long as you living, Lord, the river ain’t never gonna dry up, ’cause the river of justice always flows. Amen … Say Amen.”

Instead, Allmon said, “Grandpa, I don’t want to grow up.”

What could the man say? With Kentucky before them and the city behind them, he couldn’t find consolation. His heart was full. “Just say Amen,” he said gruffly.

“Amen,” said Allmon dutifully, but his eyes were open, and he was already looking behind him for his trail of peanuts.

*   *   *

Back through the city they came without a word. It seemed an even longer walk on their return trip, or perhaps the Reverend was simply tired from the long day, from too many long days. His footfalls, usually so martial and direct, were heavy and slow, and Allmon found himself slowing his own tempo to match. Now and again, the Reverend would stop entirely and gaze up into the flagging sky, where tiny flecks of unmoored cloud skittered here and there. Dirty night was on the eastern sky like soot on the hem of a blue skirt. The easterly breeze was gaining strength now, ushering the day’s odors out of the city and sending bits of litter kiting along the pavement.

The Reverend passed a faltering hand down his shirtfront. “Them peanuts made you sick?” he said.

“Naw,” said Allmon, squinting up at him.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

They passed municipal buildings, parking lots empty of the day’s cars, and buildings built just before the Civil War. Allmon peered into the bars and storefronts they passed, but the people inside didn’t notice him or his grandfather, because the evening light made a dazzling show on the plate glass, rendering them invisible.

When they had walked up the length of Sycamore and neared the rec center across from the School for Creative and Performing Arts, the Reverend suddenly said, “Let’s sit,” and eased his body down with an unsteady motion onto a low concrete wall. He leaned his dry, ashened elbows onto his knees. His thighs were thick and round like tree trunks, but the trees were shaking. Allmon saw this and it struck him severely, suddenly, filling him with alarm; it was like watching a grown man cry. He immediately sat down beside the Reverend, closer than he normally would have, so close he could smell the coconut oil in the man’s hair.

“Reverend,” a voice said, “how you doing? You all right?”

They both looked up into a face as round as a moon. It belonged to a young man with a livid white scar that ran from the corner of his left eye all the way down to his mouth, bifurcating the lip. His lashes were spiky and glossy and made a charming show of his chestnut eyes. He was leaning down toward the Reverend’s face.

“Tired, young man,” said the Reverend.

“Aw, all right,” the man said, straightening up again. “I was thinking you was ill, the way you was sitting there.”

The Reverend reared back in indignation. “I ain’t been sick since 1973!”

“All right, Reverend, all right.” The man laughed and offered his hand. The Reverend reached out—Allmon saw his hand shake too as if from shyness—and grasped up the man’s hand in greeting. But he didn’t let go. Looking up, the Reverend said, “Young man, I ever tell you guilt’s something much, much worse than being under somebody’s boot? I ever tell you that?”

With his hand held prisoner in the Reverend’s, the man glanced up the busy street toward Liberty, then down toward the river, and grinned softly. He didn’t attempt to extricate his hand. “Yeah, seems like I heard that from you before.”

“And?”

The man sighed. “And you know I got to do what I got to do.”

“Really, now?”

“And you know where I’m about to go soon’s you let go my hand. If you ever gonna let go my hand.”

They laughed, and the Reverend released him.

Those slightly wary eyes were warm when they settled on him again. “But you praying for me, Reverend.”

“Of course.”

“And I thank you for that. ’Cause I ain’t got my mama to watch out for me no more.”

“Don’t thank me with words,” said the Reverend. “Thank me by quitting all this. You know you’re just playing right into their trap. You think this ghetto happened by accident? They use this ghetto like they use the police and the prison.”

“Oh, I know they use the prison, right.” The man chuckled ruefully.

“So, quit this then! Make your mama proud! Your mama walked with Jesus till the day her shoes wore out, and you know that’s the truth.”

But the man was just shaking his head gently. “Reverend, ain’t you never heard you can’t never go home again?” He smiled and then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he looked at Allmon and said, “Take care of this old man here. He all sorts of trouble.”

“I am trouble,” said the Reverend.

“See y’all later,” and the young man moved on down Sycamore, limping slightly, adjusting his pale blue drawers, which peeked out from his jeans, but not looking back.

The Reverend watched him go, and when the man turned left into the heart of Pendleton, he said, “God bless and keep him, that man’s already spent half his life on the new plantation. Unless he changes his ways, he’s gonna spend his whole entire life under state control. Kids with nothing got nothing to lose.” He looked hard at the four-story terracotta building across the street. His hand shook when he pointed. “You see that school right there? You know how many brothers was hiding themselves in tunnels under there trying to escape Kentucky? Levi Coffin lived right there, that’s right. Tunnels and cellars all over this neighborhood. We figured how to get out the South, but we can’t figure out how to get out their ghettos and prisons. But what you gonna do? If you can’t burn this whole country down and start over, what you gonna do?”

He sighed and rubbed his brow. “Child, don’t grow up and be no white man’s black man. Don’t grow up to be no … stereotype. God’s given you all the raw materials, and I gave you all my tools.”

“Come on, Grandpa,” said Allmon, and he stood and tugged on the man’s shoulder. The Reverend rose slowly, unsteadily, and when he reached out suddenly to right himself on Allmon’s shoulder, his weight was a grievous thing the boy almost stumbled under. He looked terrible and drawn, almost unsightly. Not how a man would ever want to look on a public street.

“You gonna be sick?” said Allmon, trying to urge him along.

The man shook his head silently, but with a vaporous look in his eye, as though he wasn’t really listening. They crossed the street but were moving slowly. When they were ten feet from the stoop, the Reverend said breathlessly, “Lord, I pray … ceaselessly.”

Allmon was trying to be patient, trying not to drag him forcibly up the stairs and into the house. He said, distractedly, “How you do that when you talking and walking and stuff?”

“Because,” said the Reverend, “I pray … with my body every minute … the day. How you treat the least … that’s how you pray … Jesus’ name…”

His voice drifted, and he stared down at the steps of his stoop pensively, as though they were a problem of philosophy he was trying to solve. He looked angrily at them, then longingly, then emptily. Then he proceeded to ascend them with a long moment spent on each. He leaned painfully on Allmon and panted audibly.

When they came into the dining room off the parlor, they startled the group of eight men who were current residents of the Reverend’s halfway house.

“Hey!” said one from the midst of the group, rising from his chair, a napkin tucked into the collar of his T-shirt. “We wasn’t intending to eat without you, but— Hey, Reverend, you all right? You sick?”

Allmon stood between his grandfather and the men around the table, and he held up one hand, even as he struggled to hold up the Reverend, barking in a voice he barely recognized, “Can’t you see the man’s tired?”

“But—”

“Y’all eat! Just leave him be!”

Whether stunned, or amused into silence by the little boy acting the man, they did as they were told, standing by as he hobbled the Reverend from the room. Someone said, “Well, goddamn.”

They passed the tiny bedroom, where Allmon and his mother slept on an air mattress when they spent the night, they passed the pink-tiled bathroom, they passed under the hall bulb, which had not had a fixture since the 1960s. But just before the bedroom door, the Reverend faltered, then stopped altogether and leaned away from Allmon against the cool, uncompromising wall. “I just figured it,” he said, and he placed both his hands gently on the wall as if it were a soft and lovely thing and not grimy from years of neglect.

“What?”

“God is love … and when you worship love, you worship God.”

Allmon reached out and drew him forcibly away from the wall and said, “You got to keep moving. The bed’s right here.”

It was like leading a blind man. Allmon could barely walk under the grievous weight of the old man’s life, but he felt strangely emboldened and strong too. He was growing inches taller in his mind, even as the man was shrinking before his eyes, the thick knees buckling so he keeled sideways onto the bed. He sighed a sigh that sounded like crying and rolled over onto his back. “I ain’t good,” he said. His hand reached out. “Never a good man by nature.”

He looked up at the dim ceiling, seemed confused, and then looked around, almost fearfully, as if he no longer recognized the room, until finally he found the anchor of the boy’s wide-eyed gaze. “But the Lord … he used me anyhow,” he said. “That’s the miracle.”

Allmon just stared into the depths of the man’s eyes, which were recessed and recessing, unknowable. The man looked and looked at him as if he’d never truly looked before, as if the boy were a strange species coming suddenly into existence in front of him. His eyes were full of wonder.

“You look so much like your momma.”

“No,” said Allmon, too sharply, drawing back. “I look like Daddy.”

The Reverend sighed through parted lips. He knew that the child didn’t know what he had meant, couldn’t understand the import. His chest clenched, nausea and exhaustion taking him over. Allmon held his gaze angrily and then two things happened: the Reverend closed his eyes in defeat, and Allmon seemed to understand he had won a victory at his grandfather’s expense, and the knowing filled him with shame. He immediately reached out and placed his hand on his grandfather’s chest and said, “Grandpa, you ain’t washed your hands and feet. You can’t go to bed all dirty.”

“Mmm-mmm…,” said the Reverend, as if he were trying to speak through lips that had been glued together. Then he rasped out, “I been tired … since … forever.”

“You got to get up and wash.”

But the Reverend didn’t reply, his brow creased, uncreased, creased and his left hand opened, closed, opened like a great bud trying to decide whether to bloom or not. The child was watching the changing weather of the man’s large face with a rapt attention. The face wasn’t paying him any mind now. He shouldn’t have said anything about his daddy, he felt almost sick about that now. “You mad at me, Grandpa?” he whispered.

With effort the Reverend said, “I ain’t … never been mad … a day in my life. No. The Lord, he just … been getting mad through me. He maketh the spirits his messenger … and a flame of fire his ministers.”

For a moment, there was silence. “I ain’t nothing…”

Allmon fought the urge to shake his shoulder. “You Damien Emerson Marshall.”

“… but a burning light,” he said.

“But—”

“Ain’t I said I pray ceaselessly?” he said upward with confused irritation.

“Don’t go nowhere,” said Allmon, though it was a silly thing to say; the man’s body was weighted down by a weight heavier than all the water in the river. The nausea was easing somewhat, but he was indescribably tired. He’d had pneumonia once in the long-ago past and this feeling was not unlike that. But that sickness had been almost pleasant. He had worked on a sugar-beet farm starting when he was eight, but when he got the bout of pneumonia his father, Paul, and his mother, Jenny, had put him to bed for two whole months and fed him garlic soup and raisin biscuits. That child—the child he had once been—rested for two months from his labors. And then the labors returned, and they never went away again.

The man’s mind was loose and roaming by the time Allmon returned to the room with a raggedy pink washcloth and a pan of water sudsy with Ivory soap. He moved as stealthily as a mouse, because he could detect motion behind the Reverend’s heavy lids, the obscure, private motions of his eyeballs. But the Reverend wasn’t asleep. He said, “Every day, Lord,” accusingly into the silence, as though that silence itself had dared to question him.

Allmon took up one listless, heavy hand, which had fallen over the edge of the bed. Allmon placed the warm, wrung washcloth over the hand, and the Reverend opened his eyes once and looked at the boy in blank curiosity; he didn’t even seem surprised, only watchful, and didn’t resist at all. Carefully, Allmon scrubbed the long fingers and the swollen knuckles, round and dark as buckeyes. Warm, wet across the palm to the wrist, which bore the striping of years in wrinkles. Then he placed that unresisting hand back on the bedspread and, picking up his pan of soapy water, circled round to the other side of the bed. He repeated his task on the Reverend’s left hand.

Through this the Reverend’s breathing was deep, calm, and even like the beat of an easy heart. His eyes opened and closed occasionally, but when his eyes were open, they were fixed on the ceiling cracks, crowded with black speckling mold.

When he was done with the left hand, Allmon climbed up on the bed on his hands and knees and untied the skinny black laces on the man’s dress shoes—he always wore dress shoes from Bakers—and pried them off his large feet with some effort, followed by the socks. His grandfather’s feet were startlingly ugly, with deep, flaky calluses all around the edges of them, the bony tops covered in risen veins like worms. His feet stank of vinegar, so Allmon tried to hold his breath as he scrubbed around the flaking heels, in between the toes and over the nails, which were ridged and thick and discolored. He noted the wiry gray hairs on the topsides of the knobby toes.

When he finished, he returned the rag to the water and eased himself slowly off the bed, so as not to disturb the man who had now fallen asleep, and he took up the tray in both hands. He crept out of the room, turning off the light with the tip of his nose. He considered saying good night, but didn’t.

Now he was tempted to be lazy and just leave the dirty water in the pan on the bathroom floor, but he expended the extra effort to empty the pan in the bathtub, where the water swirled darkly away. Then he walked down the hall to the kitchen, the bright lights reintroducing him to life. Two men were still sitting at the dining table, which was just a metal banquet table, probably a cast-off from the church basement. Allmon blinked in the fluorescence and held a hand to his brow, and he experienced the strangest feeling that he was just waking up, emerging from a deep and placid dream. The men seemed to look at him strangely, as if they’d never seen a kid before and didn’t know how to behave in the presence of one. They appeared almost shy, but Allmon wasn’t feeling shy himself. There was power in him tonight.

One of the men cleared his throat and said, “The Reverend all right?”

“Yeah.”

“You fixing to spend the night here, son?”

“Naw,” Allmon said, but he must have sounded hesitant, because the same man said, “How you getting home? Gonna take the Metro bus?”

“Yeah,” said Allmon, and made a move toward the parlor and the front of the old house.

“It’s dark. Let me walk you to the bus stop,” said the man, making a move to rise from his folding chair.

But Allmon felt beyond all that. He didn’t even look at the man as he moved past him, saying only three words: “I ain’t afraid.”

*   *   *

The next morning, when the Reverend did not appear at breakfast, one of the men in the house ventured into his room and found him there with his eyes half-open, a glass of water spilled over the red Bible on the nightstand. He had died of a heart attack sometime in the night.

When Marie heard the news, she sat for a long time on the plaid couch without moving, whipsawed, saying nothing with her blanched hands pressing down on her hair. Then she stood and with no tears in her eyes, said, “Now we got nothing. Now we really got nothing.”

*   *   *

She wouldn’t let him go to the funeral; she didn’t want him to see another body. So, lying on the old mattress alone, he made a list of who had left so far: (1) Daddy; (2) the Reverend; (3) Momma—she had gone off to the funeral but should have stayed, because he was still here, Allmon was still alive! A groundswell of original feeling surged upward from the very center of him, but he fought it with a clamping of his heart and pressed his palms to his cheeks until his face hurt. A headache formed along the tender contours of his skull, but he welcomed it. It was different from the Reverend dying, different from being abandoned. Still the Reverend rose up in the dim circlet of his pain and presented his stern, inscrutable face and his hand that opened and closed—now a bud, now a dark fist—and the ache set the child’s teeth on edge, and then Mike Shaughnessy’s pale face, all knife-cut angles, said, “I’m coming for you, because you are my son in whom I am well pleased.” Allmon’s heart finally gave in and, with abandon, he tasted the saccharine sweet of self-pity for the first time in his life, but without any sense of the bitter aftertaste to come.

*   *   *

She was standing over him, exhausted beyond endurance, her eyes dry ever since the disease had wrecked her tear ducts, and held a telescope and a bag of children’s books in her hand. It was all she’d taken today from the Sycamore house, which the Reverend had left to the church. She had no idea why her father had even owned a telescope—he was a man who talked about heaven but trained his eyes on the earth, because heaven didn’t matter, only the kingdom. While she stood the tripod by the bed, her son couldn’t move, caught in the vise of his migraine, but the sound of her movements echoed down the hallway of his mind. Marie wanted to say, “I tried to protect you, but I can’t do it anymore. All I have left is pain,” and he wanted to say, “Please don’t be sick,” and she wanted to say, “His eye may be on the sparrow, but he must love me less than a little brown bird,” and he wanted to say, “Don’t ever leave me alone again,” but all she said aloud was, “Allmon, now you’ve got to learn to love yourself more than me—by any means necessary.”

In a moment she’s asleep, and he’s dragging the leggy Celestron to the front window that overlooks Knowlton’s Corner and, using his own bodyweight as leverage, he tilts the stiff black arm high, so when he peers through its narrow aperture he can see the sky. But he only catches the white streetlight across the street, and in the transforming miracle of refraction, the light shatters into a rainbow of spectral color with no recognizable form. He rears back, spooked, but realizes it’s only the streetlight—a boring white light boring into the boring dark. As if not sure what to trust, he peers and watches it explode out of itself again. His heart begins to beat loudly at the door of something: this light in the telescope is wilder, bigger than what he can see with his own eye. Had his art teacher not said white was the presence of all colors, that it contained all the visible world? Only now in this moment does the Reverend truly dim and die like a match going out, and in his stead the white grows deeper and more real. He’s grieved and confused in this world where the stars are up and down, where everyone has fallen asleep, where his father doesn’t come, where he stands in what he has no words to call the intermundane black between heavenly bodies. Up high, the moon sheds its small light for the world’s unintended children. He remembers the word Scipio, and he thinks maybe it’s the name of a star.

*   *   *

Seventeen months and three days after the death of the Reverend Marshall, a small white envelope arrived. The presence of Marie Marshall was requested at a pre-appeal disqualification hearing in the investigation of her involvement in attempt(s) to defraud the welfare system. Marie’s mind balked—she didn’t sell stamps, she worked her regular hours, never more, and she’d always been prompt, polite, showing up with her paperwork at her reevaluations and—

Oh shit, the car. The car that Mike had given her that she hardly ever used except to buy groceries in College Hill, because the IGA in Northside was so awful, the car that had sat there with Chicago plates in an unused alley two blocks away, unnoticed by anyone until a towing sign appeared, and she finally had to hustle up the money to reinstate her expired license and buy plates and insurance. She’d been unable to make the payments after a few months but kept the car for emergencies. You weren’t allowed a resource worth more than $1,500. But what was she supposed to do? Throw away her only real resource? No, maybe it wasn’t about the car after all, maybe it was some kind of technicality. There was no need for panic yet. She just needed to show up looking proper—her hair straight, clip-on pearls—and keep her damn mouth shut.

But showing up to anything was getting harder and harder. Work had become a farce of trying to look busy and efficient when she could barely function. It hurt her hands so much to type that sometimes she just cried at her desk. A consuming fatigue had filled her from the inside out, and no amount of sleep repaired it. Because her tear ducts had stopped producing tears, it felt as if acid were being poured on her eyes every moment of the day and night, all the thousands of nerve endings exposed to the air, her eyelids turned to sandpaper. She made just barely too much to qualify for Medicaid but couldn’t afford private insurance—not that they’d insure her now anyway, given her current symptoms. Most of the time, she felt she’d been invaded by an alien. She didn’t know how to get it out of her body since she hadn’t allowed it in in the first place. It just arrived one day, like she was accidentally pregnant with her own dying. It was pain’s version of the virgin birth—you never did it with death, but somehow he screwed you anyway.

The number 17 bus got her downtown by ten, and she only had to wait an hour in the loud, overcrowded lobby before being called into the windowless hearing room, but that was about an hour longer than her nerves could take. When they finally called her name, sweat rings had soaked through the lining of her suit jacket.

Two people sat behind a table—a black woman and a white man with a beard like Santa Claus. The white man was opening a three-ring binder, reading from something that looked like a script.

White man: Sit down.

(Defendant sits, smiles; tries to look innocent and calm)

Black woman: You’ve been called for this pre-appeal hearing—

Defendant: I thought this was my hearing.

Black woman: Let me finish, please. You’ve been called to hear the charges against you and respond if you choose to and begin preparation for the hearing, which will be held in five weeks’ time.

(Defendant nods, compliant but clearly worried)

White man: We have reason to believe you’ve defrauded the welfare system by owning, but not declaring, a late-model vehicle. We know that you recently reapplied for a license and were fully insured on that date. Would you care to respond at this time?

Defendant: No! (turns to woman) I mean, no—listen, someone gave me that car! I didn’t pay for it myself—I wouldn’t have money to pay for something like that on my own! My ex gave me that car.

Black woman: So you own the car.

(Defendant closes her mouth, realizing her mistake)

White man: (clears throat) Ma’am, your hearing will be held in five weeks’ time. Until then, your benefits will be suspended.

Defendant: My what? No, wait! (scoots forward on metal chair, turning from the man and staring earnestly into the woman’s face) I’ve got a boy. I’ve got a very, very good little boy. I need to get those stamps or he doesn’t get enough to eat. Listen, please, you need to believe me.

Black woman: This paper says you still work for Dr. Herman Bischoff in Northside.

Defendant: I do, but it’s not enough hours. It covers the rent, and I can’t hardly even do that! Listen to me, please—I am sick. There’s something wrong with me. I know you don’t understand, but you have got to believe me. I’m sick, and I can’t do anything about it, because I’m broke, and I can’t go to a specialist. I promise you, it’s a fact. I’ve got nothing in this world right now! No parents, no brothers and sisters! I’m so sick I can’t hardly work, but I can’t stop working or what—or what? What are we going to do? Does the world just want us to roll over and die?

(Long silence, then the black woman looks down at the paperwork. The defendant, instead of crying, turns stonily to audience, proceeds monologue, barely audible:

Lady, I was looking at your face and I was trusting in the familiar, your plum eyes and wide nose. Your color. I thought it was a homing beacon, that brown—like it was saying, talk to me, I’m dark and lovely too, talk to me, my ears are open like God’s ears are open, and I speak your language, because we’re family.)

Black woman: Well, I don’t know much, but I do know that if people like you would spend half as much time seeking better employment and education as you do crafting your stories, your children would be a whole lot better off. And that, Miss Marshall, is a fact.

(Defendant, still facing audience, concludes monologue:

I pray there’s a God—and he disowns you, you black bitch.)

*   *   *

A long time ago, she had called out, I’ve got a surprise for you! Your daddy’s coming home! But that was long, long ago—why was life so long? Now she called out with a voice that had lost even the memory of buoyancy, and her son came to her dragging his feet like he could intuit some imminent loss. He stood there before her, twisting on his legs the way he used to when he was younger, but he wouldn’t look up. He directed his dread at her feet.

God, the twisting! It set Marie’s teeth on edge, and she wanted to grab him, make him stop, force him to understand without having to say the words. Her eyes were burning with an acid that was driving her insane and, God, here was this child she had given life to and he had no sympathy for her at all, didn’t know her at all; children thought only of themselves and their own needs. Love and resentment infected her maternal heart in equal measure. She wanted her own mother so powerfully then, more than she ever had. It was such a goddamned lie that time healed all things!

She just said, “We’ve got no more food stamps.”

Allmon looked up at her in surprise. “How come?”

“That’s not your concern,” she said. “You’re the child; I’m the mother.”

He said nothing, but she saw him recede into the worried space behind his eyes. Where he had been twisting, now he just looked straight ahead. When her hand made a move toward him, he jerked away.

Her hand hovered in the space between them as she said, “We can’t stay here. I can’t afford it. We’ve got to get out by Friday.”

“Where we going?” he said smally.

“I don’t know,” was the only honest reply.

Tears filled his eyes and he said, half question, half accusation, a word he had never said in her presence before: “You fucked up.”

The involuntary strike of her open hand across his cheek coincided with her cry: “Don’t you speak to me that way! I’m your mother!”

Then, like a bird, he was gone in an instant. But it was only when he reached his bedroom and slammed the door that his composure, so tenuous, shattered. He abandoned himself to the tears that really belonged to the Reverend, tears that had been dammed up for months. He cried and cried until there were no tears left and when he finally looked up with swollen eyes, the sun had slipped low and flung the room into shadow. The sounds of Marie’s bedtime rituals were long past, so he rose. Then wall by wall, item by item, he worked to memorize every detail of the apartment, because he knew he would never be here again, and then he got down on his knees on the hardwood floor and prayed to his father, something he had never tried before. Please come. Please come this Friday and save us. And, balanced on the slenderest plank of hope, he waited on Friday for Mike to come—for Mike, for God, for anyone to save them, but nobody did come, because nobody does.

*   *   *

The only place to go was down—down past the useless, spinning wheel of Knowlton’s Corner, down near the Mill Creek, which stank of feces and oil, down where the neighborhood disintegrated at its shiftless edges into Cumminsville, a noplace crumbling under the black shadow bands of the viaduct and I-74, where the houses were shambling, filthy, and few, overshadowed by the behemoth brownfields looted of their industry, windows shattered by rocks and bullets, down into forgottenness where few families lived and the ones who did lived in decay, in the bowels of the city. What’s worse than Helltown? This.

Marie and Allmon took up residence in a tiny shotgun on Blair, a narrow side street three blocks southwest of Knowlton’s Corner. The tenant had just died of pancreatic cancer and the rent was $400, lowered a hundred dollars by the landlord—a distant cousin of the dentist Marie worked for. The house stood fifteen feet wide and three rooms deep: a dank front parlor and kitchen relieved only by a nicotine-browned window facing north, furnished with an orange, mildewed couch where Marie would sleep; a middle room, where Allmon would inflate a twin air mattress; and a bathroom in the back with a tiny square window that looked onto a tiny plot of shattered glass and nameless weeds. They had brought only what they could transport in the car, then the car was sold for two thousand dollars, and the money was gone in an hour, five months of rent prepaid. There was simply no way to move their old mattress or their dressers, which were left on the street and carried off by strangers. Allmon had brought his telescope, but he didn’t need a telescope to know that they had reached the edge of the world.

Allmon stretched a polyester sheet across his mattress, taped a Bulls poster to the wall, then set the Reverend’s telescope in the bathroom to train its eye up and out of the tiny window to see what could be seen. That first night the sun fell like something wounded, and a triumphant night came up in all directions.

Without his hearing, Marie stepped up behind him in the darkness of the room and with her gentlest voice said, “Allmon, I believe we’re going to make this place a home.”

Without surprise, without turning, without otherwise acknowledging her presence, Allmon said, “You believe what you want, Momma. I don’t believe in nothing.”

*   *   *

Hope and reality were at cross purposes. The new plan wasn’t good or bad, just a plan. After school was dismissed, Allmon got off the bus at Chase and counted the doorways as memory dictated until he found what he hoped was the one, then he slipped around back and knocked on the rear door. There was no answer. He knocked once more, rapping hard, and when still no reply came, he stepped off the back porch, squinting up at the redbrick edifice, his hope flickering and dimming. “Come on,” he whispered softly, but he realized it was probably a stupid idea anyway—kick the pavement, curse the sky, crawl back into the barrel of the shotgun—

“The fuck you want?”

He whipped around and detected dark bands of face through the pale slatted blinds on the eastern side of the building. He could barely mutter the words through his nerves. “Aesop around?”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“Hey.” A deep, calm voice from a second-story window; Allmon recognized the slow sound immediately. He craned his neck and saw a shadow delineated by interior light. “It’s cool. Come on up.”

In a moment he was through that back door and ascending the stairs, gathering his courage around him like a shawl, the clay mineral smell of a basement almost overwhelming him, a damp cool suckered from last night’s air. The creaking stairs led to a single wooden door, and he didn’t have to knock; it opened away from his fist, and the man was standing there in a wifebeater and black Bengals sweats, a suspicious look on his face.

“Duckie sent you over here?”

“Huh? Naw.” Allmon shifted awkwardly, staring at the doorframe, wishing suddenly he hadn’t come, but then blurting out, “This one time, I was walking around here and you was like, ‘You wanna make some money?’ and I was thinking maybe—”

“Oh shit—Smartie!” And the man placed both his hands on the doorjamb and leaned back so the muscles of his biceps leaped under the skin, and he hollered laughter. “I remember! That was so motherfucking funny, I was like goddamn—you was running so fast! Yeah, I remember you. Like Carl Lewis and shit. Oh my God…”

At first Allmon couldn’t tell whether he was the target of this laughter and his spirit quailed, but the man reached out, touched his shoulder once with a quick, guiding prod that was not unfriendly, and said, “Get on in here,” so Allmon entered the apartment, and the door closed on his old life.

The man was still half laughing, but the laugh was no longer in his appraising eyes: “So now you back and you wanna make bank. How old you now?”

“Twelve.”

“Damn, time fly! Why ain’t you come back sooner?”

Allmon shrugged.

“What, you can’t talk?”

He just shrugged again. “When I got something to say.”

The man grinned slowly and glanced at his compatriot. “Respect, respect. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.”

“You think you maybe got something for me to do?”

The man lowered his chin fractionally, peered at him. “Maybe,” he said, then his hands reached forward and clamped down on Allmon’s shoulders. “You can run, you know what I’m saying. But not like run!” And he threw back his head and laughed, a laugh that bounded out from his belly with so much eruptive force that tears sprang to his eyes, and for the first time Allmon saw in that broad, cold face a real warming. He felt the gears of his own heart scraping into motion.

Aesop wiped a hand over his eyes to stanch his laughter and eased onto a plastic seat at the kitchen table, his legs splayed and his elbow coming to rest on the table. “Motherfucking funny,” he said, and looked at Allmon sideways. He sighed and said, “When I’m like I need you to run Northside, I mean you need to run my shit. We cook over by the cemetery. You run from the factory to my boys, keep your eye on my lookouts, they let you know when the five-oh roll. But you got to work without drawing no attention to yourself. You understand what I’m saying? I don’t want you to run, motherfucker. I need you all calm and walking around and shit. Don’t be sneaking, don’t be nothing. You got to look like a niggah with no purpose.”

As he took in these words, Allmon’s face was calm and only a slight twitching at the brow betrayed any fear. But there was no real surprise; his head might be trying to play naïve, but his heart had made its decision weeks ago, and his body had brought him here on that underground resolve, which registered only as a vague plan to make some money.

From the table before him, Aesop picked up one small vial and rolled it between his fingers. “You run good for me, you make like a hundred a day.”

“For real?”

Aesop swagged his head, laughing with his friend and making mild fun. “For real.”

Allmon just ducked his head, abashed.

“Listen, Smartie,” Aesop said, and waited for him to look up. “You run hard, be sharp, you deal in a couple years. Then you make mad bank and chill on the corner, you feel me?”

“Yeah.”

Then the man’s face grew very still, his eyes hooded. He pointed at the table where his gun lay. He said, staring into Allmon’s eyes, “This my piece, Southern Comfort. ’Cause it comfort the Southern brother.” Then he grabbed at his crotch. “And this here my big dick. ’Cause it fuck all the white bitches. And that shit comfort the Southern brother too!” His eyes brightened and he laughed a raucous laugh and pointed at his friend in the doorway, who just smiled and shook his head ruefully with his arms crossed over his chest. Then Aesop turned to Allmon, suddenly serious again. “You think we all thugs? You think you a thug?” he asked.

Allmon didn’t know what to say. So he said, “You gonna give me a gun too?”

The man scowled. “I don’t need no schoolkid wannabe thug round here. I don’t do stupid and messy, you feel me? I need smart niggahs. I know Marie ain’t had no stupid kid. If you do math, know how to long-range think, understand psychology, all that shit, that’s valuable to me, because I’m a entrepreneur. I run a successful business here. For real, I run this motherfucking hood, I govern. Fuck the police, you know what I’m saying, I’m the mayor.”

Allmon nodded, but he was staring at that gun, at its cold black grace.

“So couple years, yeah, then you get your own gravedigger. But you too young for that shit right now. Ain’t no need, just a accident waiting to happen. Now run hard. Be sharp. Who knows, maybe you be my accountant someday. Get all the bitches you want.”

Allmon grinned.

The man leaned in. “But don’t fuck with me, little man.”

“Huh?” Allmon looked at him in alarm.

And then in the quiet voice that in one sentence would delimit his future and fence it tight: “Don’t fuck with me, or I’ll fuck everything you love. Every. Thing. Every. One. I’m the mayor and the mafia and the motherfucking love. Understand?”

Yes, Allmon understood, but he was already reaching out to shake the man’s offered hand. He’d already decided that life was a gamble and his best odds were in this house.

*   *   *

Marie never left the shotgun anymore, except to go to work, and when she returned, she slumped on the couch with her face to its back and didn’t move again unless she was forced to. She was beginning to miss more days than she worked, and she didn’t cook anymore. It took all of her energy—every ounce of self she possessed—simply to survive the pain that had engulfed her life. The change was breathtaking. This wasn’t the journey into adulthood she’d imagined as a young girl, the one that involved a husband and children. This was a journey with only one companion—illness—and it had taken from her everything that she understood as herself and replaced it with shattering pain.

Allmon carried on as best he could without her. He became the cook of the house, sticking to a plain white diet bought cheap at the IGA: potatoes, rice, white bread, corn, eggs, and milk. And while he cooked, while he playacted the normalcy of a steady home, he turned an increasingly worried, surveying eye on Marie. He began to discover thick clumps of her wavy hair in the shower. At first he thought, Probably straightening made it fall out, but he was kidding himself. Marie had straightened her hair once about a year ago and hadn’t done it again. He noticed how she no longer painted her nails or wore lipstick or did any of the things he knew a woman did if her spirit was tilted toward the world of men. And now her hair was falling off her head, and he could see the ground of her scalp through what was left. What he saw was ugly, and he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t.

When he had saved three thousand exactly, he wrapped it in a rubber band and brought the roll to her, placed it on the coffee table. He said, “Momma.”

Slow, slow, with enormous effort that made his stomach wrench with misgiving, Marie rolled over on the couch. Her eyes were red, raw, her face distorted by unmanaged pain, her hands like claws clutching at her collarbone. For a moment she squinted at the roll on the table, uncomprehending, then she looked right at him.

Her voice was scratchy but clear: “No.”

Allmon reached forward and pushed the bundle toward her and nodded his head once, a stubborn assertion.

She shook her head. She shook it hard again and again. “Take that money back where you got it, Allmon, and don’t ever let me see it again.”

“Momma, you know I can’t take it back.”

Marie’s breath hitched. He couldn’t tell whether it was a gasp of astonishment or an aborted sob of a woman who’d long expected what was coming. Either way, she stared at Allmon through burning eyes and, despite the terrified pounding of his heart, enduring the stab of her complicated disappointment, he spoke up one more time. “It’s enough for the doctor and six months of rent.”

Marie began to cry and pushed the money off the couch onto the floor and rolled over on her side on the couch again. Although she wouldn’t look at him or talk to him for two days, she didn’t say no again.

*   *   *

Doctor: Marie, how bad is the pain?

Marie: It’s so bad, I can’t think anymore.

Allmon: She can’t really open her eyes.

Doctor: Well, you came up negative for Sjögren’s for now, but you really need to see a corneal specialist. These things tend to appear in clusters. Have you been using drops?

Marie: They only help for like thirty seconds. I feel like I’ve got acid on my eyes.

Doctor: How are you still able to work?

Marie: I don’t have a choice. My bills …

Doctor: Well, I wish I could tell you more from your tests, but there are so many rheumatological diseases and it’s not completely clear which one this is. We’ll probably know more at a later date. It’s normal for it to take a decade to show up more clearly in the blood.

Allmon: What’s that mean?

Doctor: It means your mother has a lot of the soft criteria for lupus, but not the hard criteria. But we really don’t need to worry about that. We’ll treat the symptoms. The diagnosis isn’t really important.

Marie: No! The diagnosis is important! I can’t get disability without a diagnosis! I can’t keep going—I need that diagnosis!

Doctor: Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t give it to you. And, frankly, you probably don’t want to mess with disability anyway. Even with a solid diagnosis, they almost always reject my patients the first couple of times, and it can take years to get through the appeals process if you get through at all. And that’s with a lawyer who knows what he’s doing. For now, we’ll just get you on a cocktail of drugs and—

Marie: I don’t have insurance.

Doctor: Oh. I see. And with these medical records, you’re ineligible. Well … the only other thing I can suggest is that we get you started on prednisone. It’s cheap and it works. Of course, sometimes the side effects of the drug can be worse than the disease.

Marie: There’s nothing else?

Doctor: Not really. Lupus doesn’t get much research. Mostly, colored women get it. There’s really nothing else to do but take steroids. We’re all still following a script that was written fifty years ago.

*   *   *

On the bus ride home, Marie leaned against Allmon with her eyes shut. Jostling next to him, she realized for the first time that the hard press of his shoulder blade was a smidge higher than hers. He was almost tall now, he might even grow to be six feet, but he was still too much the little boy, too much the child. Soft. That was her fault.

“Momma, I don’t even know who I come from,” he said suddenly, his voice cutting into her thoughts.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, without opening her eyes.

“I mean, I don’t even know who Grandpa’s grandparents was.”

She sighed. “Allmon, honey, I can’t remember their names right now. The Reverend was good at remembering that stuff, not me. You grow up and you forget things.”

“See, that’s what I mean!” he said angrily under his breath, and the edge in his voice surprised her. She steeled herself against the pain, then opened her eyes to look at him.

Allmon crossed his arms and continued, “You don’t know who you are if you don’t know where you come from.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit!” Marie snapped with genuine irritation. “That’s just some black-pride Roots bullshit, and it’s always some black man saying it. You show me a black man who knows a single thing about real pride and I’ll give you a million dollars! Always thinking everyone hates them, always acting like thugs. Most white folks don’t hate you, Allmon; they just don’t care about you.” She made a dismissive sound and waved her stiff, swollen hand. Then her own words slotted home, and she thought, Maybe that’s worse.

“You ain’t even listening to me,” Allmon said sullenly, and turned away from her, looking so much like the little boy he used to be—hooded eye, puffed-out lip—that it caught her breath. She felt the whooshing of time like a physical thing speeding past her and wanted mightily to turn and hold her baby boy, her little lamb, say everything’s going to be all right. But she couldn’t. She closed her eyes again and sat up straight on the pole of her spine. She breathed deeply and said, “Allmon, you think you need to know about the past? Why? ’Cause you don’t know enough about hurting yet? You think you need to know how your great-great-great-grandfather Scipio got himself out of Kentucky only to hang himself? Really? ’Cause I think staring down the past won’t get you anywhere. You need to grow up fast. Focus on the here and now. I want you to take that test and get into a good magnet school. And listen to me now: Whatever happens, I don’t want you hovering over me, you understand? I don’t want to see you crying or carrying on or dropping out of school. Become a doctor or lawyer or something. I let you get away with being soft for a long time, but that’s over. Now you’ve got to be a man.”

He refused to look at her lest he cry. “Yeah, Momma.”

“Yeah, okay, then.” And she leaned away from him into the cold of the bus window, where the condensation dampened the flushing fever on her cheek.

*   *   *

He did as he was told; he rounded up what remained of his boyhood and forced it into a shadowy pocket of his heart. It kicked and pounded for a while, but he closed his ears to it and his spirit soon evanesced into wounded silence. Instead, he studied on Aesop (caps, glocks, swagger, wit, threat, diamond signet ring on his pinkie), who his mother didn’t know a thing about, but then she didn’t know anything about being a man, what it was to be in your body, how you were born into obligation. A man’s whole life was a haymaker. So he continued to run in the afternoons after school. Sure, you weren’t supposed to lie, to cheat, to bribe, to hit, to sneak. But increasingly, the world of rules was being shown up for what it really was, a rigged system, a fixed game. You should be good, definitely—but only until you couldn’t, until everything you loved was on the line. It just made him want to kill someone if he studied on that too hard. So the key was to not study on the truth—the madness in the center of everything that was called common sense in a white-ruled world.

Relax, Allmon. Relax, loosen your mind, free your body, it’s lunchtime. That’s when they let you out of the classroom, and you run silly and wild on the blacktop basketball courts, because you’re still a child even with your fourteenth birthday only weeks away. Your feet pound the pavement, you flail your longish arms, impressed with their new wingspan, you discover the interesting ways you’re growing into your body, just like you discovered the secrets of your right hand a few years back. Yeah, sure, maybe you got an average face, an average dick, but wonders never cease, and the best ones come from inside you. You feel smart realizing that, then Keeo’s talking shit—that kufi-wearing motherfucker never knows when to quit—and there you go, the two of you kicking across the court in a madcap fifty-yard dash, and you own him, you tear him up like a paper curler, reaching the chain-link fence five feet ahead of him and barely sweating, just taking your air in fitful bursts.

Suddenly, there’s a white man in your face and you rear back, startled.

“So you’re Allmon Shaughnessy,” the man said, holding a clipboard against his chest and staring you down. His drawl was surprising—thick, like beef stew over biscuits.

“Yeah,” said Allmon, trying to recover himself, trying to look cool. He realized now where he’d seen the man before; he’d been at their gym class last week, talking to their teacher and watching them run.

“So, Allmon,” the man said, “tell me something. Were you going all out just now, or were you holding a little something back?”

“Naw…,” Allmon said diffidently, trying to rein in the uprush of pride, “I don’t got to go all out ’cause ain’t nobody here can beat me.”

The man smiled with one side of his mouth. “That’s what I thought. Listen, I’m about to offer you some free life advice: when you’re headed toward the goal line, you go all out every time. Every single time. No matter who you think you’ve got beat.” He looked at him with an evaluating eye. “Because you never know when you’ve got some big white defensive end right on your ass.”

It was a gamble, and Allmon was surprised for a second, but then he grinned, a little abashed, and the man grinned in return, watching him closely all the while.

“Where are you going to high school next year, Allmon?”

Allmon hesitated and wove once before saying, “Um, Walnut Hills if I can get in.”

The man whistled. “Wow, that’s a good school—great academics. But you certain that’s the right move for you, son?”

“Yeah … I don’t know.”

“Well, I’m going to be blunt. You’ve got a great body, kid, and I’d say there’s a pretty good chance it was made for other things. Look at these mitts. If I may…” He reached forward and lifted Allmon’s left hand by the wrist. He had his grandfather’s hands already.

“You’ve got monster paws, Allmon, and you just told me I haven’t seen the extent of your speed. Your teacher tells me she thinks you have the makings of an All-State and that the only reason you didn’t go to competition this year was because you were home sick that week. I have to tell you, as a coach you make me sit up and take notice. I’d like to see you at the Academy for Physical Education next year, be a varsity Lion. Who knows, assuming you can catch a ball, you could have NFL running back written all over you. You never know.”

Allmon perked up. “Maybe quarterback? My dad loves football. He’s a Packers fan.”

The man looked at him through the slat of his lids. “It sounds like your dad’s a smart guy. Myself, I never made it to the NFL. I wasn’t fast enough, but I did play all four years for Alabama, and it was the best thing that ever happened for my relationship with my dad. We always had something to talk about, you know? Even when things got tough. Sports create a bond.”

“Right.” Allmon nodded.

“So why don’t you talk to your dad about it…”

“All right,” Allmon said evenly, and then he couldn’t contain his child’s smile. “I think I will.”

*   *   *

On the Friday before the admissions test, it snowed. He stood in the bathroom, peering out the tiny square window at their backyard, which was no backyard at all, just a patch of woebegotten earth littered with glass and fenced by chicken wire. Behind their shotgun house, the old bottle factory towered with its shattered, jagged windowpanes, its interior breached by the raw weather and the swiftly falling snow. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but the snow looked gray and crumbly as tabby—as if even the snow couldn’t be white on this side of town.

He thought, Maybe it’ll snow too hard to get to that test tomorrow.

He thought, Fuck all those white kids on the East Side anyway, with their floppy haircuts and their Walkmen and their wheels, their fucking bullshit easy lives. Why would he want to go to their rich-kid school? He thought of his mother on the couch. He thought of his father.

He thought, nothing ever works out anyhow.

Marie was dead asleep when Allmon slipped into the front room and opened the fridge. In the freezer, there was some United Dairy Farmers ice cream and an old scarlet-label vodka bottle. He grasped up the frosted bottle and walked straight back to his room.

He sat cross-legged on the air mattress for a long time, the bottle between his legs, his mind full of nothing. He heard the little feet of the snowflakes as they landed on the sill. The tiniest whistle of air seeped out of the mattress in the few minutes he spent sitting there silently. Then he started to drink. He didn’t mix it, just drank it, and when he got drunk enough, it did actually occur to him that he wanted to go get a real education, but he couldn’t remember whether he wanted to be a teacher or was it an astronomer, and his last thought he had before he passed out was: The test is at nine. Don’t be late.

*   *   *

He woke in his own vomit at ten to the sound of Marie crying, “Allmon, Allmon, what have you done?”

*   *   *

And so it was the Academy of Physical Education. By the first day of training he’d forsworn alcohol forever, but threw up more over the course of the next six months than he ever had in his life. Two-a-days began on August 2 at seven in the morning; at weigh-in, he was hefting 175 pounds on his five-ten frame, broad through the shoulders but otherwise sapling slim. They would have to build him from the ground up.

The offensive coordinator, a big white guy with a face as pocked as a waffle iron, said, “How big’s your dad, scat?”

Allmon had no idea, but he didn’t blink: “Six-two.”

The man nodded. “What I was hoping! You’re a baby power back. Let’s see if we can’t get you through the crawling stage real quick.”

The coach, in his first talk of the season, said, “I’m not here to teach you a game—I’m here to make men out of boys. That means I need you big, fast, and I need you mean, because your ability to hurt your opponent is no less important than your ability to memorize plays or catch a pass. If hurting someone isn’t in your nature, get it in your nature. Right here. Right now.”

With no ceremony whatsoever—and everyone calling him fucking Almond—they moved him into his new home: the weight room. Mondays were legs: squats, leg curls, and extensions, followed by Wednesday’s chest, back, and shoulder day: bench press, lat pull, and dumbbell military press until his arms were screaming and his teeth fit to shatter from clenching, all followed on Thursday with explosive fast twitch work: power cleans and box jumps until he was crying on the inside and—every damn time—throwing up. On the field, he struggled to maintain his weight after long days under full pads and gear. Speed and agility, they screamed until his own mind turned coach: Speed and agility! All hours of the day. Did he intend to make varsity? Fuck, yeah, he did. College? Pro? Yeah, sure. Well, maybe … he didn’t know. There was Aesop and the work and the money. There was his momma. And there was a starter jacket he wasn’t allowed to wear at school and a five-hundred-dollar watch he had hidden under his mattress. He hadn’t really worked his whole life out, he didn’t really know what he was doing. And he didn’t have the calories to burn for thinking between endless tire drills followed by ladder drills—hopscotch, one-foot laterals, backward laterals, crossovers and reverse shuffles, ladders in his sleep, ladders descending to hell—and dashes up and back with the stopwatches clicking and the offensive line coaches barking: Ladies, it’s four-eight-forty or nothing! Then at the tail end of practice, when Allmon’s body was broken and his spirit rattled from all the screaming, the coaches led them to the hill a half mile behind the school and made them run suicide hills until the entire team was dropping, starting with the linemen and ending with the sprinty little running backs, all of them on their hands and knees puking onto the desiccated autumn grass. Then it was a shower and off to run the neighborhood.

*   *   *

“Get in.”

It was Drone behind the wheel of Aesop’s Jetta, gesturing with a fat thumb toward the backseat. Allmon had just been walking back from school in Winton Terrace, minding his own, so he was surprised to be accosted in the street by his crew in the middle of the day, or to hear the normally quiet Drone giving orders; he was just a hatchet man for Aesop, big as a bouncer, natural authority like marrow in his bones. He barely ever had to use his booming bass.

“Get in.”

Slant late-afternoon sun, whipping spring wind, it felt so good out, so why was he hesitating? He just had a crooked feeling. Don’t get in, Allmon. Don’t do it.

“Get in, boo.” Aesop was leaning over in the shotgun seat, his eyes offering no alternative. Quieting his body, Allmon slid in beside Andre and Dox in the back, but perched on the edge of the seat with his hand on the frame of the car out the open window like he was ready to spring. The air in the car was full of needles.

“What’s going down?”

“Over-the-Rhine’s about to burn!”

Allmon said nothing, just waited, feeling the hard, fast bloom of dread in his gut.

Aesop twisted around in the front seat, the customary reserve of his face distorted, grim. His chin jutted beneath whitened lips. “They shot Simpson. They shot my boy in the motherfucking back.”

Allmon reared back. “Who?”

“Who you think! The motherfucking police!”

“He was running?”

Aesop sneered. “Bitch, he ain’t ran. Shut your fucking mouth.”

He didn’t bother to ask where they were going, because he knew. He knew when Aesop passed back a 9 mm Glock, all black and smooth with its dull sheen. He shoved it inexpertly down into the waistband of his jeans. Aesop once said, You ain’t grown till I say you grown, so was he grown? Boom, yes—just like that. He was old and bold. Something electric, like a whole house power surge, replaced his dread.

They flew through Knowlton’s Corner, through Cumminsville near the house he now called home, the place where his mother lay on the old sofa, then into the wasteland of the old west end, long routed by the interstate, with its meatpacking plants and its brownstones, its nothing. You could follow that line of nothing all the way to the river, but they veered east with squealing tires onto Liberty and crossed into Over-the-Rhine. Smoke from a fire was rising somewhere to the east when they crossed Central Parkway, that street built on the old drained canal—the Rhine—over which the Germans had crossed into the heart of the city, the Reverend’s now ailing Queen.

“Get out, get out, I’m a find y’all,” said Drone, and they tumbled out, loped like loose-limbed vigilantes down Vine, joining the people pouring out of their apartments and houses the way smoke was pouring up into the bruised sky.

He flowed, they flowed, everything flowed toward the fire. The streets were full of fight. He was jostled and bumped as he ran and there was the high chatter of shattering glass in the distance. The Glock was cold and hard in his pants like some kind of industrial dick. With sharp vision granted by fear or excitement, he saw as if for the first time the old streets made new, the towering walls of these Italianate buildings with their massive moldings pitted by time, wavy glass windows amber in the falling light. The city was crashing down and a rowdy night was rising. He was back in the world of the Reverend, the old city. He sensed vaguely through his excitement that the Reverend wouldn’t be in this river of madness, wouldn’t be following the people as they ran now toward the smashing and looting over on Sycamore. His grandfather had tried to save this old neighborhood. He’d said, “As busy as Manhattan back in the day! This city was freedom, and don’t you forget it!”

Now Over-the-Rhine was indeed preparing to burn. Men and women milled in the streets, laughing and hollering along Sycamore, hurling hubcaps and old stones from the edifices of these old gray giants into glass windows, smoke rising in three directions now. There were sirens looping out of the precinct house, and they’d be here any second, noses trained to the scent of unrest. The sound of them jogged something; Allmon snapped suddenly out of a fever dream. They’d all be rounded up, or there’d be blood, or both. The thrill was gone and the dread was back.

He would have stood there paralyzed on Race if someone hadn’t pushed him into the old Schroeder electronics store, where the televisions were mute with alarm and the radios could only perk their ears as they were snatched from their carpeted plinths and carried out into the wilds. He realized that somehow, somewhere, he’d lost his crew. He ran back to the front of the store with a thought to look for Aesop in the sea of looters, but he didn’t; he just looked north. There was the Reverend’s old house that he’d left to the church, now derelict. The sirens were mourning louder and louder. Holy shit, it was a flat-out mob, and he was in the middle of it. How the fuck could he get out of this—not just the looting but his whole stupid life? In an instant, a wild dream swooped up in him; all he had to do was get back to the hood, grab his mother and whatever cash he had, and get them both to Chicago on a bus. Abandon this fucked-up life! He wasn’t a fucking dealer, he was just a fifteen-year-old kid. What kind of game had he been playing? Enough wrong turns and you run in a circle. He needed to find Mike Shaughnessy and Mike Shaughnessy would welcome him. His white father would want him—that was a given. Allmon took off running.

He was veering and leaping around the opposing team the way he did on the field. All around bricks were being thrown through plate-glass windows, so they shattered inward and great guillotine plates came slicing down, then the people streamed through in a great cascade, and the sound of their shoes on the glass made him want to scream. With a spastic crackling, the streetlights opened their accusing eyes and the faces all around were horribly exposed in the garish light. He realized that he too was recognizable.

Now Allmon sprinted up Race, already halfway up the street before he suddenly realized he was a black boy running with a gun, so he flung himself into an alleyway, crouched behind a metal trash can, and jerked the Glock out of his jeans, slid it beneath a trash can. Fear was hammering him from all sides. Aesop would kill him, but maybe he’d come back for it, whatever, he couldn’t think about that now; he just needed to get out of this situation. His breathing came in drafts as he waited. And waited.

The river swung lazily back and forth a half mile south.

A wry moon sprung up with its mouth of sham alarm.

Invisible geese rowed the black sky.

A terrified hour passed. The city was only louder, the violence even rosier in the sky, so there was no point in staying; it was only going to get worse. He crept out of the protective dark just as tenebrous voices passed, five figures, and he fell in behind them, thinking he’d follow them north to Central Parkway, then walk up into the parts of the city that weren’t crashing down. But a wild whooping commenced, followed by more shattering glass, and he realized with a start that he was standing in front of his grandfather’s church. The front windows, long replaced by thick Plexiglas, remained opaque and untouched, but someone had smashed the old glass at the back where Jesus perched on a pearl-white cloud with his arms spread wide like the genius of water. Allmon heard intruders prowling around the interior of the church, hollering and cursing in the sanctuary where the Germans had bent their heads and prayed for God’s light, a light now flickering in the dark. It licked the darkness, flirting, spreading itself, warming the night air.

The church of his youth was burning. He stood in a trance before his grandfather’s face and the tawny eyes— Be not afraid! It’s the principle of the thing! The fire was filled with raucous laughter, voices conspiring with all the glee of children because they were children, as was he. Then the rear of the church was engulfed in orange flame, and black silhouettes went streaking by him and even the river couldn’t have put this fire out, it was so strong. And hot as the sun. He bellowed out pure, instinctive rage. The feeling of himself was suddenly enormous, and with impotent, unbearable force, he swung his arms in the dark, strangled articulations emerging from his throat, his eyes burning from the acrid smoke. You’re burning the wrong fucking building! You’re burning down my life! He couldn’t hear the sirens over his own screaming, nor their approach as he stalked around with otherworldly energy before the burning relic, before the billowing smoke and collapsing rafters. It was only when a policeman wrenched his arms behind him and threw him chest-first onto the glass-strewn pavement that he threw out a single word like a shield. It was his grandfather’s name, but it offered no protection at all, not anymore.

*   *   *

It didn’t take long—they were processing the juveniles from the riot at the speed of light, and his adjudicatory hearing was arranged in just two weeks. Allmon was first up on the morning calendar call, his name boomed out by the PA into the hallway of the courthouse, thick with young defendants and their parents.

In that dingy courtroom, where half the windowpanes were replaced with plastic that dulled the light, they threw the book at him. But he didn’t need to read it, he already knew all the words by heart. The judge sustained the petition of the prosecutor—juvenile felony arson—and at the disposition hearing, they ordered him to camp for two years of firesetter education and rehabilitation. He never had the benefit of an attorney or even the offer for one, so he couldn’t pretend to be surprised when they sentenced him. They were calling the next case before he’d even risen to his feet in his borrowed dress shoes.

*   *   *

Marie came every day for two weeks following the disposition hearing. She dragged her aching, swollen body across two bus routes and five neighborhoods, using up an hour and a half and all her energy to get to the new redbrick facility on Auburn Avenue. When she finally collapsed in a plastic chair across from Allmon in the visiting room, he could smell the sweat of her exertion, her exhaustion. When she took his hands in hers, her trembling caused his hands to tremble.

She spoke with her eyes closed against the sawing agony of daylight. “They’ll keep you in school?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “They got school here every day. It ain’t so bad—this new building they got is pretty nice. They bring you dinner, so you ain’t got to go to a cafeteria or anything.”

“So they feed you?”

“Of course they feed me, Momma. I mean, they ain’t gonna let us starve.” The food was actually pretty good, much better than the white diet he’d been feeding them at home. It was damn near a relief if he was going to be honest. And that relief made him sick with guilt. He swallowed hard.

“I’m sorry,” Marie said suddenly.

He shook his head resolutely. “Nope. Nothing to be sorry about.”

“I feel like this is all my fault.”

Allmon sat back suddenly, retrieved his hands to his lap, where they fiddled with the fabric of his jeans. “Ain’t nobody’s fault. Especially not yours.” But he was looking above her head and far beyond her.

Marie reached forward to pull his hands back to her, but when he refused, when he drew his hands right back to his person with the flashing irritation that men are quick to master with women, her eyes became shot with lightning streaks of red and tears welled. “If I could have given you a father that you could have relied—”

He waved a hand and sighed and said, “Whatever. Don’t worry.” But the small, unstill voice said, Why the fuck can’t you keep a man? You should have fought harder! You should have fought for my sake!

“I know you think about Mike—”

“Fuck him,” he blurted.

“Wow,” Marie said, and sat back, but there was no anger in the word, just a kind of wonder that sounded to Allmon’s ear like self-pity.

“Momma,” Allmon said suddenly, clearing his throat, “I think it’s time you didn’t come back and just let me do this.”

Now it was Marie’s turn to sit back in offense. “What are you saying? You can’t just tell me to be away from you. I’m your mother.”

Allmon held up placating hands. “Listen, I know how hard it is for you to get out here, how much it takes. And, anyway, in a month they’re gonna send me out to camp. You won’t even be able to get out there. I’m in this, I’m gonna do this. You need to take care of your own self.”

“No—”

“Momma—”

“No.”

“Momma!” he barked. Then with a tic of his head, calm again. He said, “Momma, if you come back here, I won’t see you. That’s just how it’s gonna be. I want you to go home and take of yourself, get healthy, get back to working more. That’s the most important thing. Don’t waste none of your energy on me. Please don’t come back.”

Then he looked down, because she wouldn’t, and he didn’t want their eyes to speak anymore.

*   *   *

So, there was school. In two years, he learned:

  1. A black line extends infinitely in white space. Put a point on a line and you can name it anything you want.

  2. You are a threat to the safety of others.

  3. Not exactly a part of the talented tenth, or you wouldn’t be in here, now, would you?

  4. The lights on the dock are a symbol. The lights are a symbol! Do you know what a symbol is, Allmon?

  5. Yours was a maladaptive and antisocial crime, its causes multidimensional. Family dysfunction factors were paramount.

  6. A symbol is a metaphor. A symbol is when you stand for something.

  7. I’m sick of you all thinking you can speak improper English in my class. You think the Oakland School Board’s given you permission to be ignorant? Not in my class, they haven’t! Not under my watch!

  8. You can get a .38 revolver for like a hundred bucks on the street if you know where to go and who to talk to.

  9. Race is a social construct and you kids just want to keep it constructed so you can whine and complain and play the victim. I’m here to make you functional in society, so you won’t grow up to be parasites on the system. But you have to choose to move beyond race. It’s your choice. You want to be a victim forever?

10. The fact you’re not a murderer right now is just dumb luck. But luck runs out.

11. Firesetter as sociological type: poor, black, broken family, unsupervised. Significant problem with aggression.

12. I am a victim. I am not a victim, a victim, not a victim. I am black. Not really, though—my dad is white!

13. Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius.

We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar;

And in the spirit of men there is no blood:

O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit,

And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,

Caesar must bleed for it! And, gentle friends,

Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;

Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,

Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.

14. It’s possible to jump a car in forty-five seconds if you practice.

15. You made your choices; now you need to face the consequences.

16. Allmon, what do you want to be when you grow up—a hoodlum? A thug? No. Well, what then?

17. Sleep. School. Basketball. Eat. Homework. Sleep. Repeat.

18. The firesetter responds maladaptively to ongoing stress, begins ideation during crisis, makes decision, gathers tools, sets fire. Elation then replaces anger.

19. When I get out of here, things are going to be fucking different. I’m going to make a new life for myself. The power is mine. All I have to do is choose.

20. You know why they killed Caesar? Because he wanted to be king.

*   *   *

You haven’t seen the Queen City in two years, you’ve been stuck out in the sticks at camp, so this Metro bus, it’s like a boat ferrying you from hell back to life. In your mind, the ashen neighborhood has turned in two years’ time from the dank, grimy Helltown into a shimmering Atlantis all paved in gold, yellow as a lemon diamond, where your mother is wearing a polka-dotted apron with a quarter sheet of cookies in her hand, saying: You’re a man now. And you say: I was adjudicated delinquent but have turned my life around, I was dissociated but now I feel, I do not have a father, but I do not need one to become my own man, I know there is dignity in poverty, I am not a product of my environment, I am responsible for my choices, I get to choose who I will be and now I choose to walk a straight line, I will stay away from the streets and gangs and report to my PO, because I have a future as bright as these city lights.

He wondered whether his father had visited during his absence.

When he slipped off the bus with his duffel at Knowlton’s Corner, the wind battered him. Unseasonably warm, with the force of a train, it slung a mad cesspool of flyers and candy wrappers, it turned leaves to razors and branches to spears. The neighborhood was still the color of ashes. Jesus. He tried not to think: everything looks the fucking same.

No, I’m changed, I’m grown, I’m seventeen.

Bent into a headwind, he pressed past the old church, past the gas station where two men were hollering at each other across their cars with gruff voices, past the furniture shops filled with cast-offs no one would ever buy, past a restaurant that hadn’t been there before, and down along the row houses, stunted like children who didn’t get enough to eat, starved of sun in the shadow of the overpass. And there was the shotgun. It too was unchanged, its gray paint peeling, its wrought-iron gate swinging by an ancient hinge, but that was all right, who really cares, because he was all right and his mother was all right, everything was going to be all right. He was clinging to the new person he was implementing in his mind, and as he approached, his feet hurried him forward without direct orders.

Momma. He was immediately assailed by the scent of rank mildew and stale cooking and something else, something lower and more personal, something animal, the odor of an unwashed person, her old, familiar smell enlarged and made pungent. Allmon stopped short in the doorway, hesitant as a first-time visitor, his pupils adjusting and one hand reaching forward in lieu of sight. First the marmoreal gleam of the linoleum, silver and gray, then the edge of old shag, then the sofa and Marie lying there with her back turned, her arms drawn up between her chest and the sofa back. His mind was jolted by time’s tricks. Had she not moved an inch in two years?

Momma. He had said the word out loud, and she started from her sleep or her daze. She came round abruptly on the sofa, rolling her weight, which spread ungainly over the entire width of the cushion. Her old shape was all wrong in the dark.

“Allmon?”

He was prepared for a new world. He was prepared to stand in that doorway like a valiant soldier returned or like a husband, all solemn and sure. But he rushed into the room like a child, flinging down his bag and actually shoving the coffee table out of the way, and as Marie was struggling her way to a sitting position, he was on his knees before her, pressing his face into the side of her arm.

“I didn’t know you were coming today. I thought it was tomorrow.”

“I’m home.”

“Babydoll.”

He looked up into her face as she was bending forward, like a groggy animal, struggling to orient in the woken world.

“Momma?”

He switched on the end-table lamp and looked at her, and it took all of his effort not to shrink. Something, some great force of life or death had come and distorted her. It was pressing her essence out of her, turning her into a balloon about to burst—her pendulous breasts and enormous, distended belly, even her cheeks, which were blooming with an unnatural, febrile red. Her eyes were cracked slats, and the few eyelashes that remained were mere black spikes. Her hairline had inched back from her temples, the lineaments of manhood forced upon her once feminine face. And worse, far worse, were the gross lines of pain etched on the face that had murmured once upon an endless time in the forever ago, Hush a bye don’t you cry go to sleepy little baby when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses blacks and bays dapples and grays coach and six white horses, hush.

He sat back on his heels, surprised by the anger in his voice. “Momma, when’s the last time you went to the doctor?”

“That’s the first thing you say to me?” She turned slightly away, but her scold was shame, as if she couldn’t look at the impossibly robust, vital, searching face of her boy not even in his prime. His very life burned her.

“Momma, what’s going on? What’s happening to you?”

“It’s fine. Better now you’re here.” Her voice was lower than he remembered, husky with disuse. She closed her eyes, and her lips pressed together.

“You still going to work?”

She just shrugged.

For a long moment he just stared at her, corralling love, rage, fear, and disgust into language. Then he said, “I’m here to take care of you. I’m gonna call that doctor we saw, gonna get you fixed up. Seriously. I promise.”

She nodded, looking straight ahead.

“We’re gonna get back on our feet. I’m gonna get some cash. Don’t worry about nothing.”

She didn’t look at him, she didn’t soothe him. She just rolled back to her position with her back turned, and her only reply was a sigh that had no more force than a hush song.

*   *   *

At 7:00, he was standing on the old, rain-slickened stoop. At 7:01, he was being ushered upstairs by someone he didn’t recognize, some midget in a fucking Cleveland ball cap. At 7:04 Aesop was clapping his hand over his own mouth and crying out with feigned glee like he actually missed him, like he didn’t have a hundred kids ready to join his army—“Oh shit! Smartie!”—shaking his head in amazement like here was the miracle of Lazarus, the last and greatest of all the miracles before the crucifixion, and he was actually witness to the kid crawling out of the tomb, still wrapped in his grave clothes, and gazing confusedly about at this world he thought he had left behind forever.

At 7:24 Allmon was back at work, this time as a dealer, this time with a beeper and a Glock 17.

*   *   *

The days were brief as the bursts from a flare, and the nights were long as everloving fuck. He was back at the Academy of Physical Education and couldn’t miss a day or show up late without his PO riding his ass, so he played that game. But then he punched the crack clock at five and worked the streets, standing on corners, hitting a couple of reliable houses until eleven or sometimes on into the deepest hours of the night, what his father had once called—

Daddy, you like driving the truck at night?

Eh, nigger’s hours.

All he needed was a solid week of work under the wheeling February sky cluttered with clusters of eyebright stars that made no sense, even less than their names—Betelgeuse, Rigel, the Pleiades and Hyades, the Orion Nebula, upstart Castor and Pollux—to raise some cash for a doctor. Then they’d get it sorted out. This was his herculean labor. This. He was supposed to be straight, he wanted to be straight, but if he looked too close the catch-22 started looking like a noose, like God himself had an APB out on him. So he refused to think. Instead, he worked the familiar streets of Northside, dealing and daring under the schizophrenic Marias, the sea of tranquillity, the sea of chaos, the sea of serenity, the ocean of storms, the ocean of indecision. Door to door on an earth not fixed, waiting for the sun not fixed, in the Milky Way, also not fixed. The goddamned galaxy itself hurtled through black useless space at three hundred kilometers per second toward no real destination, no real purpose. Every object was loose. In this mayhem, he gave himself one week.

*   *   *

Like that was ever going to work. He was back in it in every way—running, hanging with the crew, pocketing change, wearing a bomber Aesop gave him. He was even standing here in the kitchen again, cooking for Marie, just as he had before they threw him in 20/20 and packed him off to camp. Sly, sassy time messing with his mind, is it 1997 or 1995 or 1985 with Mike Shaughnessy about to walk in the door? No, it’s now. It’s Tuesday, you’ve been home five days, you’re cooking brats and sauerkraut, it’s just crazy how you slip into your old gambling seat at the casino, start stacking chips like you never even went anywhere. This is how addicts must feel raising a bottle to their lips after a long dry spell. He wasn’t going to lie, being on the loop again felt damn good. Both awful and good. That was probably the definition of crazy.

“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!

Oh God, forgive me. Forgive me and ease my suffering, help me and help Allmon. He’s just a boy and doesn’t know a thing. Forgive him for everything he’s doing! I wish I never had him to suffer. Momma, I pray to you, I pray to Daddy. Please forgive me for whatever I did to make you go away from me, that made you desert me! I don’t know why I’m alone. I tried to love Mike, I tried to love my child, but they took all of me and didn’t give me anything back. A baby doesn’t even love you, just uses you to get on with its life—and I loved so hard that I broke—

God, please hear your Marie.

God, my lungs hurt.

God, these are my breasts, empty now.

These are my eyes you ruined.

I want my momma.

God, I tried to love me, but I don’t know how.

God, please watch over Allmon.

God, please speak to me.

Please.

If I ever heard one word from you in my life, I didn’t know it.

Please, I am a thread, please sew with me, I am a candle, please light me, please love me, please tell Momma I miss her every day and I forgive her for dying, God, I am a house for a little boy, let my boy live in me forever, oh I’m afraid of the dark light me I’m scared to disappear God oh God I am a thread sew me to me I am Marie I am your little girl I am a body God you made

*   *   *

He was gone from the house for exactly two hours and three minutes. He walked out with the gun stuffed down his drawers like he was in the movies, but then he was afraid he was going to blow his own dick off, so he switched it into his cargo pocket, the weight tugging on him, bumping his thigh, an off-tempo drum beating against his rhythmless life. He had a plan, he was going to go borrow money off Aesop and take her straight to the hospital, but the man, ever shrewd, saw the way fear sketched in the lines of Allmon’s face, so he just tilted his head and said, “Work tonight, then I break you off what you need.” He couldn’t wheedle, there was no point, and there wasn’t any other option, so he just went through the frazzled motions—holding the curb down near Fergus, the old faces grown gaunt and routed from two years of using now filing past with his lookout all jumpy half a block up. Then he was winding his way through the streets and interstitial alleys of the hood, vial after vial after vial, pocket twenty bucks, pocket thirty under the moon obscured by faint clouds, the moon stricken like its own panic was growing. Momma. Holy shit, he was standing on someone’s porch—these white dykes that held down good jobs but who used like fucking fiends—when he realized he could hardly breathe. The aperture of his pupil was swiveling shut. Her sores were festering on his own flesh, her flesh was his flesh, and now as he handed a vial in exchange for a tiny roll, tears came unbidden to his eyes. Was this a panic attack? By the time he was back on the sidewalk, panic bloomed full-bore, and he was racing down Hamilton Avenue as if someone were chasing him, cops and traffic be goddamned, until he was standing, heaving air before Aesop, where he dropped the returns and said, “Listen, I got a bad feeling. I need cash now, like right now. My momma’s sick. I got to take her to the hospital,” and Aesop was rearing back: “Why the fuck you ain’t said something? I’d a flushed you when you come in,” pressing rolls into his hands, much more than he needed. Then he was running way down Hamilton Avenue, across the wasteland of Knowlton’s Corner, down where the smell of the Mill Creek announced its foul presence under the viaduct, and back into the house.

He found his mother seizing on the couch, her right hand twitching and flapping against the floor where it had fallen, palm open and still pink with the fever of life. No thought, Allmon just wheeled away from the house and ran to the Fifth Amendment without hesitating—no time to feel—and he called the ambulance, he didn’t care about the cost. Yes, her name is Marie and this is Allmon Shaughnessy, yes, she’s my mother!—but by then it was too late. His mother’s kidneys had failed, and she died under the care of the shocked ER physician, who took one look at the lupoid lesions that had ravaged her neck and torso, and said with his hand over his surgical mask, “Jesus Christ. Who let this happen to her?”

*   *   *

That night Allmon didn’t dream of his mother. Instead, the Reverend appeared for the first time in many years. In the dream, the old man was standing in a field where nothing was sown, and he was kicking at the fallow soil and poking it with a long stick like a shepherd’s staff. All around his head, glimmering stars swarmed like gnats, and he batted them away with his hands, which were even larger now than they had been in life, nearly the size of dinner plates.

As Allmon approached him, the sun was setting to his right and warming his skin. The Reverend looked up suddenly, and Allmon saw he had drawn a line in the dirt with his staff.

“Stop!” the Reverend said, and the stars stilled about his head, hovering. He pointed a gnarled finger at Allmon. “Don’t you step across this line, boy! This line got drawn for you, and only the Lord can take it away!”

“But—Momma—”

“Time is short! You better pray you discover yourself!”

And in the dream he tried to do as he was told, but when he bowed his head, he couldn’t pray, and only cried and cried.

*   *   *

This time he came to the funeral and sat in the very front row, shivering like he wouldn’t ever be warm again. His PO officer loaned him the suit he wore—gray gabardine, too small in the shoulders, too long in the leg. From the periphery of his vision, the glossy gray box of the casket imposed itself. The half dozen people in the room were staring into that space, but he couldn’t look up, he couldn’t look at the last vision of his mother in this world. She was his only holding. His hands trembled like there were fevers breaking across them, and if he would just look up, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, not as bad as he imagined—

That was his mother. Lying there in a gray box. Her body. He surprised himself by not making a sound, just looking at her stony, painted face, the still thing that looked like her but wasn’t her at all—all that remained of her birthing him, taking him in her arms, schooling him, hushing him, yelling at him, crying over him. He watched closely for her breathing until his eyes blinked of their own accord. Surely, her chest would move just a little bit if he stared long enough. Whereas before he couldn’t bring himself to look, now he couldn’t look away. It had the appearance of her, and yet didn’t. Her face was sunk into itself slightly, hollows around her eyes despite the spackling of makeup. He wanted to stand up suddenly and say to someone, everyone: “That ain’t my momma!” But he remained utterly still, both body and mind. Then, into his emptiness came a flood of images—his mother in the kitchen cooking, the coppery brown of her eyes, the lines her worry made, the laugh she had laughed a long time ago that no one else could laugh now. His only inheritance was memory.

He turned around suddenly and looked at the people in attendance. There was a little old woman from Lexington, who’d introduced herself as the cousin of a cousin or something, and who offered out of the blue to let him come live with her; there was Marie’s old employer, the dentist, who had paid for the casket, as well as a man who introduced himself as a friend from middle school, and a few people he had never seen before. He stared impolitely into the dentist’s white face and the spinning roulette of his emotions settled on fury—who was this white fuck coming here, thinking he could just show up a day late and a dollar short? Same white fuck that wouldn’t let her work enough to get health insurance. Same white fuck that didn’t let everybody get health care. He hated that white face. Fury was a blood blister waiting to burst, and when his mouth opened, he felt the arm of his PO cradling his shoulder, turning him around again.

Shhhhh.

God’s finger touched her and she slept.

His mother was so still. For a moment, grief and uncomplicated love flared in his eyes, and the roulette swung, and he was a boy again with a mother at home and a father due in any minute on eighteen wheels. The tenor of his grief shifted downward. Tears were acid on his eyes.

The funeral was held in the smallest parlor of the Chase Brothers funeral home, in a small space carved from a larger room by partitioning walls made of a heavy gray nylon. The sitters were seated on folding chairs; someone got up and left before the service even began. The service itself consisted of just a minister standing before that unreality in the casket, which was his mother, Marie Marshall, daughter of Damien Emerson and a grandmother Allmon had never met, all gone now. With horror, he realized he could no longer remember the Reverend’s voice, only his righteous anger. What had he said to him that night? The night he died and went away from Allmon forever, evaporated into nothing, leaving him alone in the world—

The preacher, paid for the occasion from Marie’s minuscule life insurance policy, said, “What do we do when we lose someone too soon?”

no idea

“What words do we cry to heaven in our grief?”

no words

“Even in the midst of grief, we must know that Christ is watching.”

not really no

“Because what do we believe?”

nothing

“We believe that Christ raises all believers from the grave.”

nothing

“Until then, the dead are alive in our memory and in heaven, thank Jesus.”

nothing

Bow your heads and pray. The Lord is my nothing, I shall want nothing. He maketh me to lie down in nothing, he leadeth me beside nothing, he restoreth nothing yea, though I walk through the valley of nothing, he leadeth me in the paths of nothing for the sake of nothing and I will lift up mine eyes unto nothing—from whence cometh my help? My help cometh from nothing which made nothing and nothing, oh nothing, why have you forsaken me? Why do you take your little ones and bash them against rocks—where can I go from your nothing? Where can I flee from your nothing if I go up to the heavens you are nothing if I make my bed in the depths youarenothingandJesusneverdidcomebecausenooneeverdoesamenhavemercyuponyournothingamen

*   *   *

He stood alone in the waiting room adjacent to the showing parlor. He wavered before the foggy window that looked out onto Hamilton Avenue and breathed in the gaseous scent of the paperwhites splayed on the sideboard beneath the damp sash. Leaning forward slightly against the cold, wet window, he stared into the street. The snow had turned to mush, cast gray by the weak, borrowed light of winter. Cars slushed by, fanning blackened snow. The people all walked with their heads down. The world looked like old wallpaper.

In these streets, he looked for his prospects and found none.

He turned slightly to gaze back into the other room at the paltry mourners and the woman—that old relative who said her name was Sophia—was turned in her seat and looking at him with such a deep and abiding intensity that he had to turn away. Grief was a hand at his throat. Don’t cry. Think. He could barely even do that. He stared into the streets, reading the script and intuiting the ending. These were the killing grounds, he knew that, a cemetery for boys like him. If he stayed here, he had no options but one: to become what Aesop had told him he would become, what he himself had chosen as a twelve-year-old, before he even knew what choosing was. His fate seemed set. How could he escape this life? Every day they spun the wheel of death and someday the ball would fall in his unlucky pocket, probably sooner rather than later. Except … He looked over at the old woman who was watching him, his own gaze as intense as hers suddenly, then he leaned in toward the street, listening. He pressed his ear to the glass. The street spoke.

His PO came up beside him, wrapped an arm round his shoulder again, saying, “You’re doing great, Allmon; just get through this day. Just make it through this, and then you can—”

He turned to her with a ferocity in his eyes that stopped her short. “Get me out of here,” he said.

“Now? Okay, sure, we can go if you really don’t want to stay. I can get you something to eat.” But her steadying arm remained around him.

“No,” he said urgently, shaking off her reassuring touch. “Get me the fuck out of this neighborhood. Get me out or I’m gonna be a statistic.”

“What? Allmon. No, Allmon, listen, this is grief—”

“You listen! That woman over there, she said I could come live with her in Lexington. She’s my granddad’s second cousin or something. Let me do that! Let me go!”

“What? Who? Okay, Allmon, wait—if she’s a relation, we can talk about that, but right now you’re under Ohio jurisdiction, and if you move to Kentucky, there are legal issues that take—”

“No!” he cried, and all heads in the room turned. “Now! Get me out of this fucking neighborhood! Get me out of here, or I’m gonna die here too!”

“Allmon—”

“NOW!”

*   *   *

The bus crossed the river as it flowed under the Roebling Bridge, and then they were on Kentucky ground. Cincinnati was a sheer wall of light behind them, disappearing behind the cut in the hill as 75 curved south into foreign ground, the land of forgetting, the place where nothing had existed for Allmon before. He shuts his eyes and only sees Marie. Open, and the land is green and rolling like the rolling of the sea you’ve only seen on TV. Close, you can hear someone’s private music pounding across the aisle; beneath the bus your one duffel bag, that’s all. Open, and this is Crittenden. Close, open, this is Georgetown—you’ve never even heard of it. You wonder if they have an accent here, like the Reverend had a fierce accent. What was the name of his father and grandfather? All you can remember is the word Scipio, but you forget who that was if you ever knew. Drift off for a second, wake with a guilty start to the sound of your mother saying, Allmon, what have you done? It’s like she knows you left the old telescope in the house on purpose. Only an idiot would do that, or someone intentionally trying to get lost.

*   *   *

In the closing scene, the lady’s house is arrayed in lavender from the kitchen curtains to the soft toilet seat that puffs air when you sit on it. Tiny hand-crocheted doilies underlay white plastic lamps, and clear plastic covers the two sofas from Rent-A-Center. The carpets smell of lilac carpet cleaner, and they’re so thick, he can’t hear the sound of his own feet as he steps across them, almost as if he doesn’t exist anymore, as if he’s lighter than air. On the lady’s hearth lies a taxidermied cat, before which he stops and stares. He’s so numb, he can’t even be terrified of it.

The lady called Sophia—second cousin by marriage once removed and adopted on top of that—was bustling around him, taking his duffel stuffed with his few belongings, taking his jacket. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Are you losing your mind?

“Your cat…,” he said, lacking even the energy to point.

“Oh.” She smiled. “You don’t get rid of your baby just ’cause he passes on!” And then she had him by the elbow and was guiding him into a tiny bedroom, where two twin beds were dressed in sweet violet coverlets with pink heart pillows that said Home Is Where the Heart Is, and she was showing him the tiny closet and the empty dresser drawers, saying, “This is your room.”

No. No, this doesn’t look like my room. Where did my city go? Where is my mother? My mother is my city.

And then the lady—a tiny thing next to him, a child really, except he was the child—was helping him sit stiffly on the bed and patting his shoulder and saying, Let a old lady help you, babydoll. You had a big shock, the worst kind of shock, but you’re a good boy, you were a good son to your mama, Sophia can tell, she can recognize a kind heart when she sees one; I don’t know how we survive these awful things, but we do, I promise we do, and a better day is coming, but first you got to cry for your mama and for yourself now too, you’re in a safe, warm place, yes, babydoll, you’re safe here. If he’d known they were the last kind words he would hear for years, that this was perhaps the last woman who would touch his shoulders and hands like he was a precious gift of God—a treasure to be had—he would have tried harder to memorize every detail of the moment and of her and of her simple home, including the yellow fall of light, the dust motes advancing through that light, the timbre of her ancient voice, even the smell of her old-lady breath. But his grieved mind was frozen like a fly in amber.

He was lying down now, his feet free; the woman had removed his sneakers and brought him a glass of grape juice and buttered white bread. Eat this, babydoll, you need to eat something. He couldn’t. If he moved one muscle, memory would swamp him and flood his body.

She was in, she was out. She was touching his forehead, saying, Eat.

He listened to her watching television in her lavender living room; it was all happening in another country in a language he couldn’t comprehend. Then she was vacuuming. Glasses were washed, the toilet flushed and then ran uselessly for a while, there was the sound of the woman humming, then proper night fell, and darkness engulfed the house.

He lay there in nothingness. The blackness was total, and the only thing he could see was his mother rigid in her casket, and nothing else. He started, his heart pulsing weakly. His hand faltered over his breast, then met the other hand, folding in the attitude of the dead. His eyes were open, her eyes were closed. Either way, darkness. What should he do now?

A candle he thought guttered was burning low, and his mind caught the light. Yes. He was rising suddenly. He was rising in the dark to go back to Ohio, or anywhere north, because that’s where they were all waiting for him—all of them.

I am going to find my father. His name is Michael Patrick Shaughnessy. His father’s name is Patrick something Shaughnessy and his mother’s name is I don’t actually know and their parents’ names are           and          and          and          and their parents’ names are           and          and          and          and          and          and

He was slipping his feet into his shoes and lacing them, his eyes unblinking. He was no longer confused. He felt around for his duffel and found the nylon strap. When he hefted it, he was hefting his whole life, and it weighed practically nothing. He couldn’t find where the lady had put his starter jacket, so he simply left the room, bumping twice into a wall in the pitch black, and then he was in the living room, where a tiny eye of light remained on the television screen. It illuminated the keys on a side table. He snatched them up and let himself out of the lavender house, where the old woman would have held him and helped him cry if only he’d known how to do those things without remembering.

For the life of him, he could not figure out why he had been born.

The Cadillac started in an instant, and he did everything the way Aesop had shown him. Lights on the left, release parking brake, reverse, and away you go. He crept down the street, his hands clutching the wheel, looking neither right nor left, but applying the gas and departing forever from this way station.

He had no idea where he was going. He passed AA cemetery no. 1 without even knowing it was there, then the old train tracks, and when he saw a man on the street, he screeched to a halt.

“How you get out of Lexington?”

“Where you headed, son?”

“North.”

“Got to head up the hillbilly highway. But watch out for New Circle, it’s like a big old wheel.”

He was speeding and heading home. The car swerved madly as the gas jetted through the carburetor, and a honking horn wowled past him, but he didn’t hear it, because it took all his effort to not remember, because the world had gone retrograde and now ran counter to sense. The stars were slung under the horizon and hell was high. Life led to nothing, and he was arcing now toward that future faster than he ever had before, because every impediment was gone. His speed was tremendous. A horn blared, then more, the bright lights of this city entirely foreign, and then the policeman who had lodged his cruiser between two juniper bushes on the barn end of a Thoroughbred operation actually laughed out loud as he switched on his lights and sirens. What kind of idiot did eighty-seven down Winchester Road—and in a purple fucking Cadillac at that? His partner said, mildly, “Good God.” Then their lights were swooping red and blue across the blacktop before them, and damned if the purple car didn’t actually speed up for a few seconds before it pulled over, and they saw a man fumbling at the wheel—possibly black, yeah, definitely black—so the cop behind the wheel was pulling his gun even before he was under twenty miles per hour. It was the fumbling he really didn’t like; it didn’t bode well.

The loudspeaker boomed out, causing Allmon to jump, but then he heard a voice with its sawn timbre saying, “Get out of the vehicle, and put your hands on the roof.”

For a moment he reached for his wallet, but he didn’t even have it with him. And what good would it have done? All he had was a high school ID. Whatever. Nothing mattered. There was no meaning in his frightened eyes, or in the thumping of his heart, and there was no meaning in the words that said louder this time: “Exit your vehicle with your hands up! Now!”

In the rearview he saw a black guy—and for a moment entertained a faint and foolish hope—but then it didn’t matter, because the man’s hands were on him, and he was face-first against the hood of the car, his own hands splayed there, as unfamiliar as the contents of someone else’s pockets. “Where’s your license?” He shook his head, his thoughts as distant as Ohio, and the other cop, a white guy, was going through the car now, rifling through his duffel bag and, “Now what’s this?” Two vials. And, “Mark, there’s a weapon here,” and the black man behind him tightens his hold but needlessly, and if this is his last embrace, he’ll accept it; he’s not resisting. The black man says, “Stupid. Incredibly stupid. Where did you think you were headed?” Tries to say Cincinnati, but it comes out “Shhhhh,” and the man says, “Well, wherever you were going, you’re not getting there tonight, son.” Son? No, not that. “Hey, kid, what’s your name?” Allmon can’t answer the question, because he’s not sure what that even means. Hey, I’m just a kid! Just kidding! I’m nobody’s kid. And the white guy says, “You don’t want to answer questions, fine. Bullpen for you,” but he’s still refusing to answer any questions when they ink his fingers and photograph his expressionless face downtown. When he walks into the holding cell bullpen tank meatcan, three concrete walls with bars at the Fayette County detention center, he doesn’t say a word, can’t think over the piss smell, cigarettes, barnyard stench, thrumming music, eyes staring at him, through him; same bewildered silence later when he’s arraigned for a fitness hearing and transferred by the juvenile judge to adult court as a youthful offender, and only with his harried defense attorney he meets five minutes before his five-minute hearing does he finally say, confusedly, “When can I go home?” Then with further prompting at his hearing, he begins to haltingly describe the unwound spool which is his life, but when, skeptical and unmoved, the circuit court judge asks him, “Do you understand the nature of a Class C felony?” he can only nod his head yes, because it’s true, he does know—Aesop told him. He’s seventeen but sentenced as an adult by an angry, exhausted judge: ten years for possession of five grams of crack cocaine, with an extra two years for motor vehicle theft and possession of a weapon and resisting arrest, eligible for parole in six years, and spending his first four months in a detention center before he’s transferred to that hellhole Bracken for three years, followed by three in minimum-security Blackburn, where he will learn to groom horses, but in both facilities, he is a strange and terrified boy in a strange and terrifying no-man’s-land, where on the first of 2,190 nights, when they cut the fluorescent lights, he begins to cry and longs hellishly for home with the fever-pitch concentration of the damned, aching for the city of his mother, for the ghost of his father, his young and original self; for that place where the skyscrapers are steeples under which the Reverend preaches, divulging all the arcana of manhood and warning him away from Kentucky, which is just a cell Allmon yearns to reach out and unlock, swinging open to a free vista of the seven hills and the river now a fable, a river flooding its banks and telling tales, which Allmon cries to on his knees: Tell me a story. Tell me about my past. Tell me about a place where the lights don’t go out

A voice says, Shhhhh

tell me a story where no one goes away

Shhhh …

tell me a story about me

Scipio says, Listen now: