THE STUDENTS WERE CONGREGATING DESPITE THE THREAT.
When Lionel Parrish went back to his office, he flicked on the overhead light and opened his desk drawer. He got out a life insurance form. He tossed it onto the desk and twisted the scored stem on his desk light between his thumb and forefinger. More light. Candles. The woman made him ashamed. He would rather think of ingenuity, feel the details of invention between his thumb and forefinger. His face twitched with shame.
He was ashamed that he hadn’t taken better care of his own mother. Ashamed about all the soft, middle-aged black women who were floating on through their lives toward some uncertain certain end with so little fulfillment. Maybe moments of pleasure in their marriage beds. At least at first, when it was all new to them. Transcendent moments in church when they were singing or praying. There should have been more for them. Not just crocheting their afghans and baking their pineapple upside-down cake. He and all the other black men should have seen to it for their sakes.
He turned out the overhead fluorescent light and sat again at his lamp-lit desk. He wanted to dwell in the circle of intimacy provided by the desk lamp. It was the way a scholar should look: cut off from the larger space, focused on what he was doing, on what he must do—his papers, his books. He would sit in a circle of light like a white man in a Rembrandt painting.
He looked at the new life insurance policy, the Old English script across the top, sharp pointed and black as a small wrought-iron fence. A fence to keep out bad fairies, and what were they but bad thoughts. Since he was a boy, he had imagined English fairies skittering at night across the surfaces of the workaday world causing disarray with their tiny, shapely feet.
The black printing stretching across the top of the page was more like a bramble hedge than an iron fence. But it was an inadequate hedge, open on both ends, only out to the margins, not all the way across the top from edge to edge of the paper. As though any briar patch or even an iron lace fence could keep death at bay, no matter how curlicued and spiky. Still, it was a worthy page. The black ink representing the terms of the policy had been pressed and printed right into the fiber of the paper.
Lionel adjusted himself in the carved chair seat, which was carved to fit a human bottom, two parallel declivities, like shallow spoon rests, for his buttocks. Yes, he could fit his behind right there. Oh, he knew the treachery of this chair: he wouldn’t be sitting here long till smooth and polished became hard. Maybe he’d buy himself a cushion to sit on, a square cushion upholstered in green with corduroy strings tied to the backrest so the cushion wouldn’t slip off.
Sighing, he opened the desk drawer again, just enough to get his fingers in. When he reached into the curve of his desk tray, he felt a fountain pen. It was a new kind that held an ink cartridge. He had a whole box of the cartridges, each a little sealed, translucent tube. He liked replacing them. He enjoyed piercing the end with the shunt of metal coming up from the nib.
In the past, he had thought marvelous the old type of ink pen, with a little lever on the side. You pumped the lever against a small rubber bladder inside the barrel of the pen to draw up ink from the inkwell. But those bladders wore out; the pens leaked. Still, he liked the squat glass jars of ink with the metal screw-top lids. The jars were cunningly made on the inside, with a shallow glass pocket, like a little chamber, inside. That was where you inserted the nib to draw up ink. Not down in the main jar, but in that special little in-swelling of glass that caught and held an appropriate amount. The dipping pocket hung inside the wider mouth of the bottle, like a window box hanging inside a room.
The accoutrements of status: a wooden desk, a proper (if uncomfortable) desk chair, a desk drawer with a tray for pens and pencils. A new cartridge fountain pen, and in the side drawer, obsolete but cunning, a squat glass bottle of royal blue ink.
The skeleton map unrolled itself on the wall. The wooden bar at the terminus of the chart clunked into the chalk tray. It was an announcement. Good as a fanfare. He refused to look; he had heard, and he knew what was next.
“How much you worth now, Mr. Parrish?” Mr. Bones asked softly.
“You’ve come back.”
“Oh, I make office calls. Frequently.”
Mr. Parrish refused to look at Mr. Bones. He just listened to him and then answered back to the mockery. Longing for distraction, Lionel read the heading across the policy, the black Gothic script. He kept his gaze within his circle of light. He knew who Mr. Bones was. A figment of his imagination. That didn’t make him any less real. Bones was like Marley, a bit of undigested beef, a half-cooked potato lodged in old Scrooge’s bowels.
“You feel pretty safe and snug in here, don’t you?” Mr. Bones taunted.
“What you want me to do? Blow up city hall?”
“Listen to your bones, Lionel. What your bones say to you?”
“I’m here.”
“Yeah, but I know how hard it was for you to get here. Started out, didn’t you? Turned around and went back, didn’t you? Had to start out again?”
“I’m here. I did it. I came back.”
“You just about as brave as Miss Stella, I’d say.”
“Just about.”
But Lionel felt ashamed. He wondered if Martin Luther King Jr. ever started out of his hotel room, headed for trouble, and decided he needed to go back inside, get something, maybe, that he’d forgotten. And when he got back into safety, did he ever sit down in a hotel chair and rethink the whole thing? Wonder if he should just quit, just sit there till it was over. Maybe tune in the TV, hear the newscaster say, “We were expecting Dr. King to lead the group this afternoon, but assistants say he was unavoidably delayed. Dr. King sends greetings to the people here, reminds everyone that Love and Nonviolence are the path to Justice.”
“So you think Education is the path to Power?” Mr. Bones said. “Just like Mrs. Christine Taylor said last night? You believe that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Lionel looked at the dictionary on his desk. He always kept it there. He wanted his teachers and any visitors to know he wasn’t too proud to learn more, to look things up.
“You believe in Education, not Love?”
“Both help.”
“Just thought you’d sell yourself a little more insurance, huh?”
“Why not?”
“But will you ever be worth as much as A. G. Gaston? Even in death?”
“For my family. So they be provided for.”
“How we do provide! Let’s see. What we got cooking? Grant proposal. Yes, grant proposal to the federal government. In case that comes through, we made ourselves one mighty high-pay H.O.P.E. administrator.”
“I’ve got a chance. Especially with an integrated faculty.”
“Bigwig administrator, he gots to have plenty of life insurance. In case Mr. Death, who I most decidedly do not represent, in case Mr. Death, if he was to show up in Bombingham—”
“It’s for my family. If I was blown up.”
“Expiation. Expiation. You can sing that to the tune of ‘Alabama, Alabama, I will aye be true to thee.’ And Death does know the way to Bombingham. He been here many a time. I guess he be singing in the choir when your funeral come round.”
Lionel sat at his desk, his pen poised over the insurance form. How could he leave something to Matilda without Jenny finding out? How could he take care of the woman whose warm body was the flame of life?
“What was that she was saying about an hour ago?” Mr. Bones asked. Now he’d come off the wall. His voice was closer to Mr. Parrish’s ear, and he supposed his visitor had even stepped into the circle of light. Mr. Parrish looked up. Okay, if Mr. Bones invaded the light circle, Mr. Parrish would look. There he was: a whole grinning skeleton, loose jointed, his jaw flapping up and down. No tongue. Because he stood within the golden glow of light, the white bones had taken on a faint golden sheen. Imagination could play tricks, Lionel Parrish knew. He had always had imagination. Yes, that was how his dear mother excused him when he was caught in a lie:Lionel just has such imagination.
“I guess you worrying about who’s going to live and who’s going to die among you demonstrating folks?” Mr. Bones’s jaw had stopped wagging. He was just thinking loudly, with his immaterial brain. He was just thinking right into Lionel’s mind. But then Mr. Bones’s pelvis gave an obscene thrust. With his bony pelvis, he butted the air. And again.
And Lionel remembered Matilda, not more than two hours ago, making life so sweet that he didn’t want to put his sorry flesh at risk ever again. Put it in, honey. That moment!Oh, harder, honey. Those moments. O looooooover man.
Mr. Bones began to fade into something shroudlike. Just a dark cloak. A cowl-shaded blackness where a face should have been. He was more terrifying.
With a voice that was distinct and nasty, he sounded like Police Commissioner Bull Connor talking on TV. Mr. Bones telling everybody: “We couldn’t risk losing that woman, could we? That good ole ole-time sex. We too happy; we too content, to risk our sweet neck. You one nigger just got it too good. How many times, between your wife and your mistress, how many times a day you getting it, Lionel?”
“I have a right to my wife.”
“She knows it. You can be sure that she knows her duty. When did she ever say no to you. Uh-uh. She lay there and say, I want to have as many babies as you want to put in me, darling. And she mean it. She sure ’nuff mean it. I ain’t heard Miss Matilda say one word about having your babies. Have you?”
It keeps me pure, Lionel thought. It keeps me pure. This way, I don’t touch Miss Arcola. She is ripe and ready to go. You know the way those boys look at her. Especially that one big fellow, Charles Powers. You see how he start wearing clean clothes, wanting to impress Miss Arcola. You see how now he even press his shirts, keep his hair trimmed close like a Sunday school boy.
“You want a little wheelchair stuff, Lionel?”
Mr. Bones’s voice was fading, receding toward the wall. With one giant step, he would be hiking himself back up into the chalk tray, but Bones lingered a moment, just to prove he could. Just to prove Lionel Parrish had no power over the mocking voice, the ghastly presence. Mr. Bones hesitated quietly, just a minute, getting ready to move back into the chart.
Then Lionel could hear the heavy chart clattering reassuringly against the wall. Maybe it was the wind.
Wind? In this still-as-death oven? Lionel scraped his chair backward to get up. He’d open a window high, no matter what insects flew in. ’Nuff heat to have heatstroke, to hallucinate.
Faintly, Lionel heard the last thing Mr. Bones had to say for the night.
“Don’t show it to Christine. She chop it off.”