two

LUTHER HAYES, CARRYING HIS BLACK BARBER’S CASE, PULLED open the door of the West Haven Rest Home at half past three. Some white man in his forties was coming toward him, wheeling a woman whose scalp gleamed beneath shreds of thin, gray fuzz. He was trailed by a stoop-shouldered teenaged girl whose expression broadcast resignation and petulance. Luther stepped back and held the door for them. The white man acknowledged neither Luther nor the courtesy as they passed. The girl’s gum cracked like a whip.

Shaking his head, Luther stepped through into the lobby, a room of indirect light with seascapes on the walls. A listless old white man leaning heavily on a cane regarded him without interest. The blonde receptionist looked up from her movie magazine, saw who it was, and looked back down. Luther came here often. That fact notwithstanding, he hated the place. There were few things more depressing than a building full of old people waiting to die.

He supposed part of it was just the fact that he was getting older himself—he would be fifty-one in May; already his joints ached and he found himself standing over the toilet four times a night. Hardly worth it trying to sleep anymore.

But it wasn’t just the reminder of his own inevitable decay that made him depressed. It was also the reminder that somehow, he had managed to make it this deep into life only to find himself more or less alone: no child, no wife, few friends. Just his sister and her son. And he barely knew either of them since they lived in New York, a town so far from Mobile and so utterly alien that it might as well be a moon colony. If he ended up in a place like this, who would even come to see about him? What middle-aged man and bored teenager would come to take him for Sunday dinner?

Luther wondered where the years had gone. He marveled that he had managed to do so little with them. The thought made him sigh. He had been coming here for six months and it always had this effect on him.

He passed through the dayroom where half a dozen residents were sitting and an old episode of I Love Lucy was playing on the television. Lucy Ricardo had her head stuck in a loving cup and was bumbling about the New York subway system. The studio audience howled with laughter. The West Haven audience was silent and still.

Two corridors branched off either side of the dayroom. Women residents had the hallway to the right, men to the left. Plush carpet swallowed the sound of Luther’s steps as he entered the hallway on the men’s side. He paused at the first door on the left and knocked, then pushed it open. The old man was in an easy chair watching television. He looked up. The hesitation was minute.

“Luther,” he said.

“Hey, Johan,” said Luther. He held up his case. “Haircut day.”

Johan smiled and waved him forward. “Come on in,” he said. “I was just watching the news.”

In a place where some people walked around in robes and putting on blue jeans counted as dressing up, Johan wore what he always did, what he always had: a tailored suit, this one navy blue, with a crisply knotted tie. On his lap was the inevitable matching homburg. If you didn’t know better, you might think he was going to court to try a case. But his days of going to court were done. In fact, his days of going anywhere were done.

Once, he had been one of the most important men in town. Now this sad place constituted his entire world. It did not seem fair.

For many years, Luther’s barbershop had been one of the places Johan had regularly gone. He’d made a habit of coming in every two weeks for his trim, arriving in a chauffeured Packard. He cut an odd figure, sitting there awaiting his turn, an overdressed old white man in a room full of boisterous Negro men who laughed and argued about women, politics, and sports. More than once, some customer had inclined his head toward Johan and whispered to Luther, “What this old honky doing hanging around here?”

Luther would shrug and say, “I guess he like the way I cut his hair.” Because, really, how to explain Johan and how they knew one another without taking the whole afternoon to do it?

They had met back in ’42 when Luther was in jail for refusing induction into the army and Johan Simek—still calling himself John Simon back then—was the lawyer Thelma had somehow conned or arm-twisted into representing him. Luther had distrusted him on sight, sitting there ramrod straight in that interrogation room with his expensive suit and hat, hands folded on the table, reeking of a white man’s imperiousness, his bred-in-the-bone sense of his own essentialness.

But Johan had impressed him when he did something white men did not often do: he listened to a colored man. Indeed, his eyes grew intense with horror as Luther explained why he refused to be inducted into the U.S. military. Namely, because he could not fight for a country he loathed, a country where his parents had been lynched at their own front door and the law refused to do anything about it.

When Luther was done, Johan, who was always more of a deal-maker than a lawyer, had offered him a surprising bargain: if Luther would agree to military service, Johan would get the charges against him dismissed and find a way to make sure his parents’ killers were prosecuted. “Why should I trust you, man?” Luther had demanded.

And Johan had shrugged as if the answer was obvious. “Because I give you my word,” he said. He had offered his hand and after a moment, Luther had reached across the table, his handcuffs rattling, and taken it.

Each had honored his part of the bargain, with Luther going on to serve in Europe with the 761st Tank Battalion and Johan somehow managing to wheedle and bribe the district attorney into prosecuting the man who had led the murderous mob. Not that it had done any good in the end. A jury of white men had heard the incontrovertible evidence—eyewitness testimony and even a photograph of the crime and the perpetrators—over a three-day trial, then deliberated for less than an hour and returned a verdict of not guilty.

Something about the experience had changed the imperious white man, though. Luther never quite understood what it was—Johan would not talk about it—but he knew it was real. It was after this that Johan had decided to go back to the birth name he had cast aside after coming to America as a boy from Central Europe—“I was trying to be a white man,” he had explained to Luther once—and had become a vocal and energetic advocate for Negro civil rights, no easy thing to be in Mobile, Alabama. He lost clients, he lost friends. Once, in 1948, he’d even had a cross burned on the front yard of his mansion. Yet whenever it was suggested he should be more circumspect about such dangerous activity, Johan had waved the idea away. “Ach,” he would say, “I have spent enough time being afraid.”

So he had kept right on doing what was dangerous to do in Mobile. He joined the NAACP, he gave money to support the Negro bus boycott in Montgomery and the desegregation campaign in Birmingham. When the boy Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi, he wrote a check to the child’s mother and had it delivered to her in Chicago by an intermediary from the NAACP. He showed Luther the note he sent with it.

“I was not born in this country but when I came here in 1895 as a boy from Europe, I thought I had arrived in Heaven. I carried with me in my heart the American promise: that this was a land of freedom and opportunity where anyone who was willing to work for it could achieve anything he could dream. Sixty years later as an old man, I have come to understand the hypocrisy and lies embedded within that promise. Please know that a stranger in Mobile grieves with you the murder of your son. I know that no gift and no words from me can soften the ache you must feel at what those monsters in human form did to your beautiful child. But it is my hope that this small token of commiseration will encourage you and fortify you in your quest to make America finally honor its promise. May you someday find peace.”

But for all of that, the moment Luther considered Johan’s finest had come in response to a crisis of a different sort much closer to home.

On that Christmas Eve after the war, when his son George had impulsively proposed to Luther’s sister, Thelma, and she had just as impulsively said yes, it had torn two families apart. Luther had known the boy was sweet on his sister, but still, they hardly knew each other. He and Thelma had argued well into the night, then picked it up again as Adam was opening Christmas presents beneath a meager tree the next morning. It was too soon for something like this, Luther told her. While George was nice and all, he was a white boy. She couldn’t marry a white boy—it wasn’t even legal. But the more he tried to reason with her, the more stubborn and resolute Thelma became.

As Luther would later learn, it was even worse at George’s house. When the young white marine broke the news to his family over breakfast, it shattered Christmas morning like glass. George’s mother, Lucille, yelled that she was damned if she’d stand by and allow her son to ruin his life with “some nigra woman.” His kid brother, Nick, who had grown up worshipping George, cursed and disowned him. His sister, Cora, fled the room crying.

His father, Johan, had watched all this with grim, quiet dismay. The next day, he went out early and rented a moving truck. He spent the day filling it with furniture from the after-Christmas sales and brought it rumbling to a stop early that evening in front of Luther and Thelma’s little shotgun house on Mosby Street. He crossed the plank that served as a bridge over the open sewer, marched up to their front door, and knocked. When Luther answered, he spoke without preamble.

“I assume she has told you?” he said.

Luther nodded. “Yeah, she did. They both crazy if you ask me.”

“Perhaps they are,” said Johan. “Or maybe it is the world that is crazy and they are the only ones who are sane. It is not for me to say. But the one thing I know is, if they are determined to do this thing, they cannot stay here in Alabama.” He nodded toward the truck. “There is furniture in there, enough to set up a household. You and I must drive them someplace north—I think, perhaps, New York City—where they can do as they please. And we must do it as quickly as we can.”

Luther had glanced around at the sound of movement behind him. Sure enough, his sister stood there, listening. Her gaze dared him to say no. Luther had sighed, suddenly exhausted. “Yeah,” he said, “I think you right.”

They started out early on the last day of the year. They drove through the night, taking turns at the wheel, following George and Thelma in George’s little sports car, and arrived in New York City on the evening of January 1, 1946. Johan and Luther spent a week in the city. They stood witness to George and Thelma’s vows, helped them find a place in Harlem, and moved them in.

It was an act of generosity that drove a wedge between Johan and the rest of his family. Johan didn’t like talking about it, but Luther knew the break between him and his wife had never quite healed, even though Lucille Simon lived another seven years before dying of breast cancer in 1953. And though it had all happened almost twenty years ago, Johan’s two other children—Cora was a housewife in Huntsville, Nick, a marine serving in Vietnam—barely spoke to their father to this day.

Yet Luther had never once heard the old man complain, much less second-guess what he had done. Whenever Luther brought it up, he invariably gave the same response. “It was the right thing.” For him, that had always settled it. Eventually, Luther just stopped raising the subject.

Now, as the old man watched with expectant eyes, he opened his case, unfolded his barber’s cape, and draped it with a practiced flourish around Johan’s neck. Then with his shears and comb, he began trimming the old man’s coarse, graying hair. “What’s that you watchin’?” he asked. On the screen, a phalanx of state troopers was rushing, batons swinging, over a group of Negroes.

“Ach,” said Johan with a wave of his hand, “terrible news. There was a march for voting rights for Negroes. The state troopers met them on a bridge and beat them like savages. Terrible, terrible thing.”

“Where was this?” asked Luther.

Johan pointed to the floor. “It was here. Right here in Alabama. In Selma.”

Luther shook his head. “Bad shit always seem to happen in Alabama, don’t it?”

“Well, I could do without the coarse language,” said Johan, “but yes, of course, you are correct.”

Luther smiled at the familiar rebuke. “Well, coarse language fit a coarse situation, don’t you think?”

“The situation is more than coarse,” said Johan. “It’s evil. I don’t know why President Kennedy doesn’t send in the army. Or federalize the National Guard.”

It made Luther wince. “Johnson,” he said.

“Eh?”

“It’s President Johnson now, remember? Kennedy was assassinated two years ago.”

“Ah, yes, just so. Johnson. That’s what I meant to say. President Johnson must take action.”

Johan was getting senile. It made Luther sad to see—another reason he hated coming here—but he felt that somebody who knew the old man should bear witness, and with his wife gone and his three children scattered elsewhere in the world, Luther was the only one left to do it.

“Johnson,” Johan was saying. “Johnson, Johnson, Johnson.” Like repetition might make it stick.

He had ended up here in September after a fire at the house where he had lived alone, but for household help, since his wife died. Johan had put the skillet on the stove, intending to fry himself an egg. He had turned on all four burners, then went up to his room, got dressed for bed and fell asleep. The resulting fire had destroyed the kitchen and would have taken the entire house but for the quick action of a passerby who kept a fire extinguisher in his car. The firemen had found Johan sleeping peacefully.

Cora, coming down from Huntsville to investigate, had heard from his neighbors of her father’s increasingly erratic behavior—he forgot the names of people he had known for years; he repeated himself; he laughed inappropriately; he got angry for no reason—and had promptly deposited him in this place. The idea of finding a facility for him in Huntsville had apparently not even crossed her mind. Then, she’d put the mansion up for sale and returned home. The whole process had taken her less than a week.

Johan still had good days, but they were becoming fewer and further between. A doctor had warned Luther once, out of Johan’s earshot, that Johan would only get worse. “He’ll have peaks and valleys,” he had said, “but the condition itself is terminal. He won’t recover from this.” Even worse, the doctor said he would likely linger for years, the fog encasing his thoughts getting thicker by the day until he withdrew from life completely, alive only in the technical sense of drawing air.

Luther could not imagine a more terrifying fate. Johan would slowly be entombed within his own body.

“You know what you are doing with my hair?” asked Johan.

“You know I do,” said Luther. He had been the old man’s barber for almost twenty years now.

“Don’t leave it too long. I don’t want to look like one of those rock ‘n’ roll singers. Have you heard any of them? With all the ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’? I feel sorry for the young people today who will never know what real music sounded like.”

“Erskine Hawkins,” said Luther, naming the Alabama trumpeter who’d had big hits in the late thirties and all through the war.

The old man cut him a look. “I was speaking of the classics,” he said. “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johannes Brahms, and of course, Ludwig van Beethoven. You get back to me when your Erskine Hawkins composes something as transcendent as ‘Ode to Joy.’”

Luther grinned. “I don’t know about ‘transcendent,’” he said, “but that one song of his, ‘Tippin’ In,’ used to get everybody out on the dance floor.”

“Ach. You are a philistine,” said Johan.

“And you a snob,” said Luther.

“Don’t leave it too long in the back. I don’t want to look like one of those Beatles. Have you heard them?”

“I heard them,” said Luther. “Nothin’ but a bunch of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah.’”

“Benjamin, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Luther paused in his clipping. Benjamin Johnston was the Negro man who, with his wife Alice, had been Johan’s live-in cook and butler for many years. Benjamin had died in 1958, Alice in 1960. It wasn’t the first time Johan had made the mistake—he’d done it twice before. But each of those times, when Luther corrected him, telling him that his longtime butler was dead, Johan—a stoic man whose emotions were ordinarily more impregnable than Scrooge’s wallet—had broken down, sobbing and wailing as if it had just happened. And for him, Luther supposed, it had. Now, he considered briefly whether it was worth putting Johan through that ordeal again and decided it was not.

“Yes, sir,” he answered, “I know.”

“Don’t leave it too long in the back,” said Johan. “Lucille will think she’s married one of those Beatles.”

“No, sir,” said Luther. “We wouldn’t want that.” He kept clipping. After a moment, Johan said, “I saw him, you know.”

“Who’s that you saw?”

“Bitters. I saw Floyd Bitters here.”

Again, the scissors in Luther’s hands paused in their cutting. Floyd Bitters was the leader of the mob that killed Luther’s parents. He and Johan had had some sort of confrontation while Luther was away in Europe. Johan would never say exactly what happened between them, but Luther knew it had left him shaken and afraid. Now Luther prayed to a God in whom he did not believe.

Lord, don’t ever let me get senile.

And his hands went back to cutting.

Another moment passed. Johan said, “You’re not Benjamin.” It was almost an accusation.

“No, I’m not.”

“Benjamin is dead.”

“Yeah, he is.”

“My mind,” said Johan. “I hate what is happening to my mind.”

His voice broke and he wept quietly. Luther pretended not to hear.

After a moment, Johan said, “Don’t leave it too long.”

“No sir,” said Luther. “Don’t want you to look like one of them Beatles.”

“Ach, have you seen them?”

“Lot of ‘yeah, yeah yeah,’” said Luther.

“I pity the children today. They don’t know what real music is.”

“Beethoven,” said Luther. “‘Ode to Joy.’”

“You know ‘Ode to Joy’?”

“Yeah,” said Luther, “sing it all the time at the barbershop.”

“You have a barbershop,” said Johan. A statement.

“I do,” said Luther.

“It’s on Davis Avenue.”

“Sure is,” said Luther. “Right there on the Avenue.”

The old man smiled, pleased with himself for remembering. He said, “I saw Bitters.”

“Really? How he doing?” Luther was whisking the hair from Johan’s neck.

“He’s a terrible man. He beat me up, you know.”

Luther stopped. This was new. “Really? What happened?”

Sudden tears were leaking down the old man’s face. “I went to the town where Luther’s parents were killed. This man Bitters, he heard my accent. It comes out sometimes when I get agitated. He called me bohunk. He said, ‘You are no white man. You only look like one.’ And he slapped me into the dirt and stomped on me. Broke my ribs. I was in so much pain. And I could do nothing. I was too weak. Ever since then, I’ve been afraid of him.”

“You ain’t got to be afraid,” said Luther, his voice soft. He had been nine years old when his parents were murdered. He knew what it was to fear Floyd Bitters. “That was more than twenty years ago when all of that happened.”

Johan’s face brightened. “Really? What year is this?”

Luther whipped the cape off him, flakes of hair falling to the linoleum. “It’s 1965,” he said. “Brand new day.” He went to a closet, retrieved a broom and dustpan he kept there, and began sweeping up.

Johan pointed at the television. The news was once again running the video of state troopers charging into a line of Negro protesters, bodies tumbling to the pavement, clubs flashing down, white clouds of gas drifting across the highway like ghosts.

“A terrible thing,” he said. “I don’t understand how they can treat people like that. People who just want their freedom.”

“I don’t understand it, neither,” said Luther.

“President Kennedy should do something about this.”

“You right,” said Luther, emptying the dustbin into a trash can. “President Kennedy need to get off his ass.”

He replaced the dustbin in the closet, repacked his barber’s tools, then took a seat on the bed. As difficult as it was being here, Luther always made himself stay at least an hour. It felt like a duty, some hard but honorable thing he was obligated to do. Especially considering that no one else would be coming to see the old man until Luther returned midway through the week.

George, at least, tried. He had been down to see his father four times since Johan had been placed here, but Luther knew it was difficult on a preacher’s salary. Plus, there was the matter of getting the time off. The logical thing, as George had confided wearily on his last trip, would have been to simply return to Mobile; he could tell his sister to take the house off the market and he, Thelma, and Adam could move in.

But of course, the neighbors would complain at having Thelma and Adam there. And the state might intervene since it wouldn’t recognize them as married and the law prevented people of different races from spending a night under the same roof.

Even if those problems could have been resolved, though, there was also the fact that Thelma would never agree. She had not stepped foot in Alabama even once in the twenty years since she left it. Thelma hated her home state with an incandescent passion. Saw the whole thing off and set it adrift in the Gulf of Mexico and she wouldn’t give a damn.

Still, thought Luther, this was her husband’s father and that ought to count for something. He hoped George would get a chance to come down again soon. The old man’s memory was going fast. How long before there would be nothing left? How long before his oldest son would walk through that door and his father would look up and not know who he was?

Luther did not envy George that moment.

They sat together for a few minutes. Johan mentioned the Beatles twice more. But what riveted his attention was the footage from the bridge, which kept repeating. Apparently, this carnage had happened today.

“Terrible thing,” said Johan, shaking his head. “Terrible.”

“You got that right,” said Luther. He glanced at his watch. “Well,” he said, “time for me to go.”

“So soon?” The old man looked crestfallen. He always did.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” said Luther.

Johan’s voice turned sharp. “What is this place? Why am I here?”

“This where you live now.”

“I live here? Why?”

Luther was at the door. “Because you need help,” said Luther. “And they the ones can give it to you.”

“And then I’ll go home?”

“This your home now,” said Luther.

“This is my home?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Luther. He pulled open the door. “But I’ll see you soon,” he said. He stepped into the hallway without waiting for a reply. He felt almost as if he was making an escape. In a sense, he supposed that he was.

Luther stood in the hallway for a long moment, thinking. The day-room was to his right. From the television, he could faintly hear Ralph Kramden threatening to send his wife to the moon. He rubbed his chin. Then he turned left.

The first door he opened, he found two old men playing checkers. They looked up in confusion. “Sorry,” he said, closing the door. “Wrong room.”

In the next room, a man was lying in bed, his hand moving vigorously beneath the covers. At Luther’s entry, the hand abruptly stopped what it was doing and the man looked up sheepishly. “Sorry,” said Luther, closing the door. “Wrong room.”

This was crazy, he knew. He could get in trouble. But something drove him on.

In the third room, a man was sleeping in a chair. The fourth room was empty. In the fifth room, an old man and a woman were watching television. “Sorry,” said Luther. “I got the wrong room.”

The sixth room was dark. The figure on the bed was only a shape, a mountain range of shoulder and legs. The last of the day’s late-winter sunlight filtered in and Luther saw with a start that the man was turned toward the door and that he was looking at Luther, pale eyes alert and curious in the drooping, colorless face of someone who has suffered a stroke. His right hand jittered aimlessly. He made an inarticulate sound that might have been a greeting.

And Luther’s heart stumbled.

The man in the bed had been big once, had been powerfully built. But age and infirmity had carved the power out of him, left the skin sagging limply on his bones. Now he was just the leavings of the man he once had been. A thin thread of drool connected his flaccid lips to his bed shirt.

He pulled those lips up into a smile then, eyes still watching Luther, hand still moving without purpose. It was meant, Luther supposed, as some sort of acknowledgment, as a way of saying, “Hello, I see you there.” Or maybe, “What a fine mess this is, huh?” Something harmless and friendly like that. But Luther backed up a step. The man didn’t recognize him. Luther knew him, though. Indeed, Luther would never forget him.

All at once, he felt hot, he felt dizzy, he couldn’t breathe.

Johan’s voice: I saw him, you know.

At first, Luther had dismissed it as just more evidence of the old man’s crumbling memory, his fading hold on reality. But this was no hallucination or fantasy.

Luther was in a room with Floyd Bitters. He was in a room with the man who murdered his parents.