THEO BOYKIN WOKE UP, but he wasn’t the same.
Dr. Janet Miller warned us that it might take some time. She said he would tire easily, but stimulation in moderate doses would be good for him. She particularly recommended reading to him. “Read things that he knew before the injury.” She called his near-drowning in the white-dirt slough “the injury.” (In the end, the county sheriff called it “an accident.”) She said, “You never know what will open a door.”
We set up a schedule. Ildred and Etta George were the most frequent readers, my brother Force and Eugene Boykin next, and after that came me and Mavis Davis and a whole host of folks from the fifth grade on up. Miss Templeton came all the way from Chicago when she heard—she brought W. E. B. Du Bois (in book form, I mean)—but she couldn’t read to Theo for as much as a page before she’d be crying. Theo would open his eyes and say, “What’s the matter?”
It was Ildred who discovered how much he had lost.
She told me how her heart lifted when she came to read to Theo one day and found him out in the back, looking at the electrical generator. He was bent over the tractor engine, and when she hollered a joyful, “Hey! Theo!” he straightened up and turned around, unsmiling, a deeply puzzled look on his face.
After a moment of silence, Ildred said, “Well, here you are outside walking around!” A little of the joy had leaked out of her voice. There was something wrong with Theo’s eyes. When she read to him, he usually kept his eyes closed. Now he was looking at her—but that was the problem. He was looking at her. His gaze fell on her like a dim beam of light. It bumped into her and bounced off again. She was glad when he turned to look at the contraption behind him instead.
“I made this,” he said.
“Well, I know you did,” Ildred began, but then she stopped. He was telling himself, not her, a piece of news.
He remembered faces and most names and some places. He recognized everybody after a while. He remembered how to do the things he had to do. He could read, though never as flawlessly as before. That’s why we never could convince any doctor that there was anything wrong with this particular colored boy. So he couldn’t recite the Declaration of Independence or remember a whole scene from Shakespeare, or figure a batting average in his head? Well, now, the doctor himself couldn’t do so well as that. Mrs. Boykin eventually took Theo all the way to Atlanta, but to no avail.
In desperation, Etta George wrote to Dr. Janet Miller, who was in China now, arranging for a women’s clinic to get built. It was more than a month before we heard back from her. In the letter, which arrived with Etta’s name and Threestep, Georgia, surrounded by Chinese writing on the envelope, Dr. Miller said the brain was an organ whose mysteries had yet to be plumbed.
On the morning after that night we sat up in the schoolhouse—which was the night after the Baghdad Bazaar—Momma and Ildred served the biggest breakfast you ever saw. They fed all the folks who’d waited all night for Theo to wake up. I don’t know how they did it on such short notice. Like the loaves and the fishes, the food just kept coming: eggs and pancakes and fried potatoes and grits and biscuits with jam. My brother Ebenezer and Ed had set boards on sawhorses to make a huge long table in the yard between the Boykins’ house and ours, and they brought out every chair in both houses as well as barrels, stepladders, wood from the woodpile, and anything else that looked like a person could sit on it.
My job that morning was to stay inside the house with May and make sure she didn’t get out of bed until Momma called us both to come on out and get our breakfast. It was an easy job, considering that May was sound asleep when I first tiptoed into Momma’s room and settled myself with a pillow on the rug. I believe I had just dozed off when I heard knocking on the front door. I scrambled up to get it as fast as I could, thinking it was odd they didn’t go right around to the yard out back, where everybody obviously was. I opened the door, and then I stopped short and looked up.
Standing on the porch outside was a very tall, very white man—I mean about as white from head to foot as the painted white slaves in the Arabian Nights pageant. He looked like he’d been dipped in flour. His face and neck and bare arms were all dusted white, as were his pants and shirt and shoes—but when he lifted his cap, the hair underneath was black.
“I’m looking for Jefferson Cailiff,” he said. “I heard something happened to my boy.” As he worried his cap, a dusty shower of white dirt sifted from his sleeves like snow.
Your boy? was what I was thinking, but I nodded toward the lane alongside the house. “My daddy’s back there with the other folks.”
He glanced over that way nervously, then he looked down at me again. He squinted, as if he were trying to think who I might be. “I’d be in your debt,” he said finally, “if you would fetch him for me, please.” He sounded like he was from up North. He slapped the cap on his thigh, releasing a white cloud, and added, “Name’s Ralph Ford.”
I about fell to the floor. What was Ralph Ford doing here, right in my real life?
As if he could read my mind, he said, “I promised I would never set foot in Threestep again, after all the trouble I brought down on Lily and on you all—I know I promised—but I have to know about my boy.”
I must have squeaked out something in reply.
In Momma’s room, May was stretched out on the bed in her slip, but she wasn’t asleep. With complete disregard for her delicate condition, I said, “May! Ralph Ford is on our front porch. Ralph. Ford. He sent me to fetch Daddy! May, it’s Ralph Ford! On our porch.”
“Oh, my,” she said. She was not as excited as I expected her to be, which was probably good, considering. “I wondered who you were talking to. You better get Daddy.” She slid on over to the edge of the bed to sit up.
“He says something’s happened to his boy!”
Sitting up, May looked half sad, half worried, and completely worn out. “You better find Daddy right away, Gladys.”
“But where did Ralph Ford come from all of a sudden?”
She sighed. “Dry Branch, I reckon. That’s where he lives.”
“In Twiggs County?” Twiggs was two counties over from Piedmont. “Ralph Ford who saved our daddy’s life in France lives in Twiggs County?”
“He works in the white dirt plant.”
That was a fact I could believe, given his appearance.
“Go get Daddy, Gladys, and we’ll see what he has to say.”
“But who’s Lily? He said he brought trouble down on Lily.”
“Lily was his wife. How long were you all talking, for him to tell you his life story, for heaven’s sake? Hand me my dress.” It was hanging on the back of Momma’s chair.
I handed her the dress. “Lily is the name of Mrs. Boykin’s sister,” I said. “Is Ralph Ford married to Mrs. Boykin’s sister?”
May gave me a steady look. She said, “He was.”
I pictured the man standing in the doorway, every inch of him that I could see covered in white dirt. I said, “May, are you saying that Ralph Ford is a colored man?”
“Gladys, if I answer that one question, will you go get Daddy this instant?”
I said, “Yes, I will.”
She said, “No, he is not.”
True to my word, I turned and ran to the front door.
Ralph Ford was gone. The porch was empty. Nothing out there but Momma’s neatly swept front yard. It was enough to make me wonder if he’d been there at all—until I looked down. White footprints led to one side of the porch, as if he might have stepped down there, and sure enough, when I raised my eyes, I saw him and my daddy in the lane under the pine trees, walking away from the house toward the road. Daddy had his arm around Ralph Ford’s shoulders. The man was half a head taller than Daddy, which was odd to see.
Breakfast was not what you’d call a festive occasion, considering everything that happened, but pretty much everybody I cared about was there. Even May ate a bite before she went back to bed for the rest of the day, incidentally avoiding me and my questions. Eugene Boykin, whose face was still puffed up from the beating he took, came out of the house with Dr. Miller, as if she’d talked him into it. The top of her head about reached his elbow. The only ones missing were Theo, who was sitting up in his bed eating pie with a dazed look on his face, and Uncle Mack, who was out in the barn with the baby camel, and my brother Force. He was still over in Claytonville in the county jail with Arnie Lumpkin at the time.
Miss Spivey was missing, too, of course, but I wasn’t so sure how much I cared about her right then, I’m sorry to say. Fooling with my brother Force was one thing, and forgivable, to my mind. Running away was not.
Ralph Ford was also there. I don’t know where Daddy took him to clean up, but he wasn’t dusted white anymore. Now you could tell he was a black-haired man with what they call olive skin, which is really a shade of brown. He was sitting near the other end of the big long table, next to my daddy and right across from Dr. Janet Miller and Eugene, his head and shoulders sticking up taller than anyone else. Having Ralph Ford at the table was like having FDR or Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., drop by—someone you believed existed but never expected to see in the flesh. I was still eating pancakes when Ralph Ford got up from the table. A lot of eyes followed him as he disappeared around the front of the house, but nobody said a word about it, and neither did I.
After breakfast, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Ralphord, who must have thought Ralph Ford was just another stranger at the table, tagged along with me until we ran into Etta George coming out of the Boykins’ house with a covered plate in her hands. She said Dr. Janet Miller was in there asking Theo who people were and what year it was.
“He don’t know what year it is?” said Ralphord.
I said, “Do you?” He said, “It’s 1939!” but he had to think about it.
Etta George lifted the covered plate and said, “This is for Uncle Mack.”
We found him in the corner stall of Bibbens’ barn, sitting on his heels like a Badawi camel driver while he tended to Ahmed, a whitened ribbon’s worth of camel bells wound around his hand. The wreckage of Sabrina’s cargo, only one bundle of which had been saved, was spread out to dry in white heaps on the straw-covered floor. Theo’s magic pitcher sat atop one of the heaps, looking like a pitcher made of clay. I took over holding the bottle for Ahmed. Before Uncle Mack took his plate from Etta, he sat down on a bale of hay and set his wooden box—the one in which he carried his pages—on his knees. When he opened the wooden box, we saw a thick white paste coating the inside, and that was all. Ralphord asked, “Where’s your pages?”
Uncle Mack looked into the box.
Later that morning, Daddy didn’t have to ask me twice if I wanted to go with him to Claytonville to get my brother Force out of jail.
Deputy Sheriff Linwood Perkins had already gone to Claytonville the day before to try and talk the county sheriff, a man named Butts, into letting my brother go. Sheriff Butts said no. He said that even if Force wasn’t guilty of beating up the one colored boy (he meant Eugene) and almost drowning the other, not to mention destroying valuable property (he meant the camel)—even if Force wasn’t guilty of all that, he was sure enough guilty of resisting arrest when he refused to cease and desist from pounding on the other white boy (that was Arnie Lumpkin) while the sheriff was trying to get them both into his vehicle. Sheriff Butts thought that a night in jail was the kind of thing that might do my brother Force some good. My daddy told Linwood Perkins that he had some ideas about what kind of thing might do Sheriff Butts some good, but Linwood advised Daddy to keep those ideas to himself.
Daddy had some kind of idea in his head right now, some particular reason he’d asked me to come along, I could tell by the way he sat for a minute, rubbing the steering wheel with his thumbs. Finally, he put the Ford in gear. As we bumped down the lane, he said, slowly, as if to give me time to take it in, “Ralph Ford used to be married to Mrs. Boykin’s sister Lily. Did you know that, Gladys?”
I knew I wasn’t supposed to know it—and for all of my life until this morning, I hadn’t known it, so it was true enough for me to say, “No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Well, he was. They met each other when he came to visit me after the war, and they ran off together.”
“Why’d they do that?”
Daddy glanced at me, then back out the windshield. “I reckon they fell in love.”
I couldn’t see much out the windshield myself. This was before my growth spurt. I waited until we’d turned onto the road before I asked Daddy the same question I’d asked May.
“Is Ralph Ford a colored man?”
“No, Gladys, he is not.” Daddy paused to shift again as we picked up speed. “That’s why the Ku Klucks set fire to the Boykins’ peach orchard,” he said. “Almost got their house burnt down with it. Our chicken coop, too.”
“That’s how our chicken coop got burnt? Ku Klucks?” I could see it like a flash: white-robed night-riders coming up our lane in the darkness, torches in the air.
Daddy continued. “When Ralph and Lily came back again the next year, they were married. Mr. Boykin told Lily it was too dangerous for them to stay with the Boykins in Threestep. For them and for us. I hope you can understand that, Gladys.”
Daddy went quiet after he said that. He looked like he was trying to decide what else he could tell me at my young age. “Up North,” he finally said, “Ralph Ford’s people thought Lily was white. Now she was expecting, she had to worry about how her baby might give her away. That’s why she came down here and went on out to that island, before her time came, where she and Mrs. Boykin had some kin.”
I thought about that for a minute, and then I asked, “Did she have a boy or a girl?”
“She had a little boy,” Daddy said. He knew that wasn’t what I was really asking. “Color of chocolate.”
I looked at my hand, braced on the seat. It was about the color of bread dough.
“Ralph found a home for colored children in Atlanta—a good one, started many years ago by a lady who worked for the railroad after she was freed. There were people on the island who would have been happy to take the child—distant cousins of Lily and Mrs. Boykin, I reckon—but life was pretty simple on that island. Ralph thought the boy would have a better chance for a good life in Atlanta. Lily appeared to agree with that plan.”
We were coming into Claytonville now, going past the railroad yard, where they had big piles of white dirt on the side of the tracks, everything dusted white from the rails to the road we were on. It was slippery. Daddy said, “Ralph got Lily and that baby as far as the train station in Savannah.”
They were ordinary words, but the way he said them, I didn’t think I wanted to hear the rest of the story.
Daddy was coming back home from Savannah himself at the time, he said. He didn’t say why. He was in the station, already on the train, looking out the window of the coach car, when he caught sight of a handsome couple stepping out of the depot on the other side of the tracks. They were engaged in a fierce argument, or so it seemed from the look on the man’s face—the man’s face! Daddy sat up straight in his seat on the train. It was Ralph Ford. And Lily. He hadn’t seen Ralph Ford or Lily for months, not since Mr. Boykin turned them away. Lily was cradling a bundle of blankets. Daddy hurried back to the end of the coach car and down the little steps. “Ralph!” he called.
Lily spun toward the familiar voice. From her startled expression, Daddy thought that she was going to run away into the depot, but then something changed in her face, in her whole body, and she came running across the platform toward the trains instead, calling, “Mr. Cailiff? Is that Mr. Cailiff?” as if she’d been looking for him all of her life so far.
Maybe, if she’d had more time, she might have gone back inside the depot and walked across on the second floor to the other platform—or maybe she was too desperate to think that straight. Just at that moment, everybody’s ears were split by the whistle coming from the Central of Georgia. That was Daddy’s train. Steam billowed up from under the cars. Lily must have felt that it was now or never. She stopped dead at the edge of the platform. From the other side of the tracks, looking at her face all lit up with sudden hope and craziness, Daddy said he could tell—he was prepared to testify—that she fully expected him to catch that child. When Ralph Ford saw what she meant to do, he started to move toward her, as did two uniformed station attendants, but they were too late, all of them.
The little bundle of baby flew up in the air, sailing over one, two, three sets of tracks, so startled that it didn’t make a sound, although the little hands shot out of the blanket like stars.
When Daddy pulled up in front of the red-brick family home of Sheriff Butts, we had been quiet in the car since the edge of town. A great big cottonwood tree shaded the walk leading up to the white porch that wrapped around the house. You would never guess, if you didn’t already know, that inside that house was a jail. Daddy asked me if I wanted to come inside with him. Although I’d wanted to see the bookcase in the dining room that hid the iron door to the jail ever since my brother Ebenezer told me about it (not saying how he knew), I didn’t have the heart for it now. I said I’d wait out on the porch. They were working on the Piedmont County Courthouse across the street from the sheriff’s at the time, making it bigger. Ebenezer and May’s husband Ed had stood in line for two days, hoping to get on that construction job. I was sorry it was Sunday today, all the hammering and sawing stilled. I would have welcomed a racket right then. I kept seeing the face in the portrait in Mrs. Boykin’s parlor, so pretty and hopeful. I kept seeing the little hands like stars.
Force came out first, looking like a mournful shadow of his usual self, with a black eye and a swollen lip messing up his handsome face. Arnie Lumpkin must have gotten a few licks in, too, while they were busy resisting arrest.
“Hey, Gladys,” was all he said to me.
Daddy offered to let Force drive us home. I knew my brother was in a really bad way when he declined.
Arnie Lumpkin was released from jail “for lack of evidence” a few days later. By then Uncle Mack had told Linwood Perkins and Sheriff Butts that he was almost a hundred percent sure it was Arnie Lumpkin, white robe and all, who helped him pull Theo out from under Sabrina in the slough. Arnie didn’t have a word to say about it one way or the other. He wasn’t talking much to anybody.
My sister May must have been waiting to hear Daddy’s truck come back from Claytonville. When I walked past the house, I heard, “Pssst—Gladys!” from the front window. I was surprised to find her sitting in Momma’s rocking chair. She was supposed to be asleep in bed. She said she couldn’t get comfortable lying down. What all did Daddy tell me, she wanted to know. I told her some, the parts I could bring myself to say out loud, and then I said, “Well, I wonder what Daddy was doing in Savannah. Back then, I mean. Don’t you?”
“Visiting Momma,” May said promptly. “It was right after Force was born. We’ve got to go to Savannah sometime, Gladys, you and me, take my girls with us. It is a beautiful place. The hospital where Momma was? It’s a big old brick building, with all kind of what you call wrought-iron balconies and tall windows. And right across the street was the park with a big fountain and that Spanish moss hanging on the trees. Momma had her a view out that hospital window.”
“You were there? Daddy took you to Savannah?” I said. This was a part of the story of my brother’s birth I had definitely never heard. “You went right to the hospital?”
“They wouldn’t let us go inside,” May said. “We had to stand on the sidewalk and wave to her. Momma was on the second floor. There was a big window they wheeled her right up to, with Force in her arms. She blew us kisses down to the sidewalk. And then she unwrapped him a little and she had the nurse hold him up higher so we could see his foot sticking out of the blankets. I didn’t know what it was about at the time, but that was the foot. She was showing Daddy the foot. Oh, my, Gladys! I remember him laughing. He was just so happy to see her. I know he was scared she would die. He would’ve stood on that sidewalk looking up at her all day, if Ildred hadn’t started pitchin’ a fit.”
I said, “Ildred was there, too?”
May caught my tone. “She can’t remember a thing about it, Gladys, she was so small. She don’t even remember staying with Aunt Virginia till Momma came home. After the Ku Klucks came around that time, Daddy didn’t care to have us sleeping at our house, in case they set another fire at night.”
I had been living in a world I knew nothing about. That’s what I was thinking. Here we were, May and I, sitting in Momma’s bedroom, but it was like we were sitting in two different worlds. Tragedies and wonders had happened in hers that I’d never heard of. I had to ask her, “May, did you see Lily throw her baby across the tracks?”
She had. I could tell by her face. “Can you imagine how awful that was for her, Gladys? How desperate she must’ve been? I reckon she thought if Daddy brought her baby back here and gave him to Mrs. Boykin, at least she could see him again sometimes. Poor Lily!”
We sat in silence while I worked up the courage to say out loud the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask Daddy.
“Did the baby die?”
May looked surprised I would even ask. “No,” she said.
“No? He got throwed across the railroad tracks and—was he hurt bad?”
“No.”
“How can that be true?” I asked her.
“On account Daddy caught him,” she said.
“Daddy caught him?”
“He sure did. Daddy didn’t tell you that part? He must have thought you knew, Gladys. Everybody on that train hooted and cheered when he did it, too. I don’t know what would have happened to Lily if Daddy hadn’t caught the baby. She might’ve gone to jail. Although anyone could see she wasn’t right in her head at the time she did it.”
“Are you saying that Daddy did in actual fact give the baby to Mrs. Boykin?”
“Of course he did,” May said. “It’s not our place to mention it, though. Maybe I ought to try the bed for a while, Gladys. I’m about to fall over, I’m so tired.”
I held the rocking chair still so she could get up, my mind going a hundred miles an hour the whole time. I had more things I wanted to ask May, plenty more, but her eyes were closing already, so I only said, “If it wasn’t for Daddy catching that baby, we’d have lost Theo way back then, before we ever knew him!”
May roused herself enough to say, “It wasn’t Theo Daddy caught. It was Eugene.” She dropped off to sleep without another word.
He’ll snap out of it, people kept saying.
We wanted to believe that, and so we watched Theo’s face, waiting for the flash, the cleverness, to return to his eyes, watching for the half smile, the slow tilt of his head that meant a really good idea had just popped into it. Everybody watched Theo’s face—Mrs. Reverend Stokes and the Bibbens and Linwood Perkins and Mavis Davis and even Arnie Lumpkin—but Theo’s face stayed blank. He didn’t talk much, either. As weeks and then months went by, it got harder and harder to believe that it was Theo in there.
Then, in April, when we hadn’t heard from Miss Spivey for almost a year, a package arrived at Bibbens’ store that was addressed in her own handwriting to Theophilus Boykin, Chief Engineer of the Baghdad Bazaar. The package was about the size of a small suitcase and appeared to have come, from the writing on the wrapper, all the way from Baghdad. The one in Iraq.
Word spread. You would have thought Mr. Bibben was the Pied Piper, the way we chased his delivery truck from the store to the Boykins’ kitchen. Half a dozen of us crowded in to watch Theo dig through the excelsior until he got to a book covered in reddish leather, maybe twelve inches by eighteen in its dimensions and about two inches thick. Along with the book there was a note with May’s name on it. It came out that she had written to Miss Spivey shortly after the first Baghdad Bazaar, almost a year ago, strongly suggesting that Miss Spivey ought to get hold of one of those Kitab books of Ingenious Devices and send it to Theo directly. May believed it might bring him around. Miss Spivey had finally found one.
In her note, she told May that the book was worth quite a lot of money and should be handled carefully. The cover—plain red leather with Arabic letters in gold—was clearly new, but the book itself was old. The pages had feathery edges and a sweet smell. Theo sat down at the kitchen table with the book in front of him, the features of his face arranged into a flat look of mild interest. He learned to do that after a while, practiced with a mirror. (I believe he knew that something was wrong from the way we looked at him.) He turned the pages carefully. We stood around the table and watched, waiting for him to say something. When he had turned about a dozen pages, he sat back and said, “I can’t read this anymore.”
“It’s in Arabian, Theo,” Ildred said. “You never did know Arabian.”
“Good, ’cause I can’t make heads or tails.”
“Keep looking awhile,” Etta George suggested gently.
Theo turned another page or two. Then he sat straight up and said, “I know this one! I know all about it.”
We couldn’t read the words, of course, but all of us recognized the magic pitcher from Uncle Mack’s lost pages. Ildred ran to get the one Theo made. Mrs. Boykin had cleaned it up and kept it on a shelf in her pantry. Theo took it up in his hands, turned it this way and that, and then he started explaining to us how it worked. He sounded like he had just discovered America. We filled it with water, and he put his thumb on the one hole in the handle and then the other, so it wouldn’t pour out, and then it would. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped talking. He had thought of something. He said, “I know a story about this here.”
Ildred pressed the heel of her hand into one eye, then the other, and asked, “How does it go?”
“It’s got two caliphs in it,” he said.
Ildred slipped her arm through mine and we leaned our heads together, grinning like Cailiffs.
Theo laughed. He laughed. “The other kind,” he said, and he proceeded to tell us a story that we already knew. When he came to the end, I asked him where he learned that story. Did he read it somewhere? He frowned. “Gladys, I don’t rightly know where I got that story from.”
“Maybe Miss Spivey told you,” Ildred said. “Or Uncle Mack.”
He considered that possibility. “Maybe.” He picked up his own magic pitcher and tipped it over the cups on the table, slipping his thumb back and forth on the handle to make the water stop and go until it ran out entirely. He shrugged. “It seems like I’ve known that story for a long time.”
That was all he could tell us.
The next morning, Theo was missing from his bed. Eugene ran all over until he found him in Bibbens’ barn, leaning over the base of the minaret, which had sustained some damage. “Theo?” Eugene said, and when Theo looked up, his face was alive again.
The second Baghdad Bazaar was therapy for Theo Boykin, pure and simple. The third and the fourth were, too. By the fifth, the proceeds from which were used to pay off Mamie Eskew Veal’s mortgage when one of the Veal boys did not come home from the war, we realized that Theo’s transformation from shadow of his former self to Chief Engineer again was, like that of the town, a temporary one. My momma called it “seasonal.” She said Theo was like the trees budding out in spring, the way he responded to the light of lengthening days.
He would start “waking up” in April when the boys hauled the flats and things out of the barn for painting and repair, his face gradually growing more alert, his movements quicker as days passed. He’d start talking more, coming up with ideas for little improvements and clever repairs, eager to make something new for this year’s bazaar from the Kitab al-Hiyal Miss Spivey had sent to him. It appeared to be easy as ever for him to look at those line drawings sprinkled with Arabic letters and make them pop up three-dimensional in his brain. And that was only one step (well, it was actually many complicated steps involving welding torches, tin snips, soldering irons, and the like) from making them real in the world. For a long time, Theo constructed at least one new and, of course, ingenious device every year. We put them on display in a tent we called the House of Wisdom.
During the Baghdad Bazaar, Theo would go around dressed in his Bedouin robes, doing little demonstrations with various ingenious devices, telling the story of the two caliphs while pouring or not pouring from the magic pitcher, things like that. Every year, even after we knew better, we couldn’t help but hope he’d turned the corner for good, but by the time the camels left town, he’d be quiet again. We bought our first camel in 1943, hoping that would keep Theo on board year-round, but it didn’t. We also turned the story of the two caliphs into a play—that was mostly Mrs. Blount’s doing—and we came very close once again to burning down the town when somebody went and put actual kerosene into the magic pitcher for the climactic scene. No one was hurt, thanks to quick thinking by the White She-Camel (played by my sister Ildred), whose mighty left-handed toss of the pitcher sent it flying through the air like a meteor hauling a tail of flame. One building did catch fire, though, whereupon Cecil Wicker, then chief of the Baghdad Volunteer Fire Department, made a strategic decision to save the buildings on either side of Mr. Gordon’s law office, it being pretty far gone by the time folks could get out of their costumes.
In the time between bazaars, Theo worked for May’s husband Ed and my brother Ebenezer, who added automobile repair and salvage to their stove business, mostly so that Ed could be at home more with the children. I mean no disrespect to automobile mechanics—my brother Ebenezer made more money in that line than all the rest of us put together, and Force didn’t do too bad, either—but anybody who thinks Theo Boykin being an automobile mechanic for the rest of his life is a happy ending, well, I feel sorry for that person. Etta George came home from her medical studies one year and said that as far as she could tell it was a “persistent stupor” that Theo was in, and that there was always the hope that what pulled him out of it once could do it again and maybe for good. Much later, she admitted to me her true opinion that Theo’s “radical alteration of function and affect” every spring was more a matter of our perception of him than of reality. In other words, Theo took an interest in the Baghdad Bazaar. Beyond that, we were seeing what we wanted to see. To which I say: everyone is entitled to her own opinion.
He returned to us every year until 1991, when he passed away at the age of sixty-nine. It happened in January, not long after Mavis Davis Bonner and her church group came back from trying to be human shields by camping out around mosques and minarets in Baghdad (the one in Iraq). Theo was in Bibbens’ barn with Ildred and her husband Jack when he suddenly lit up as if he’d been struck with a really good idea. At first it seemed as if the miracle we’d been waiting for, lo, these fifty years had finally come to pass, because here it was still the dead of winter and the light was back in Theo’s eyes as if it were April or May. But it wasn’t a miracle. It was a stroke. I remember sitting around the emergency waiting room with Ildred and Force and Mavis, looking at the TV while that CNN reporter described the bombing (over and over again) from the top of some hotel in Baghdad. It took me a while to place it, but the excitement in the man’s voice put me in mind of listening to that other “reporter” tell about the Martians coming across the river in New York City on the radio, in 1938. It sounded like War of the Worlds, only this time there was no Bedouin outside the window to tell us that it wasn’t for real.
Cailiff’s Stove & Auto Repair still occupies a corner building in Baghdad, Georgia, with a three-bay garage on Spring Street. There are not and never have been any stoves or auto parts in the storefront window. It’s Ingenious Devices, wall to wall: our permanent collection of self-trimming oil lamps and all kinds of vessels—some sliced in half the long way so you can see the siphon pipes and chambers inside. You can hardly believe what Theo was able to do with sheet metal and scraps. But the piece of resistance, as Ildred has always called it, is the hydro-powered organ. Theo spent several years on that one. They carried it outside on a wagon bed flanked by camels for his funeral, Pinkie Lou Griffith playing away on it at the age of ninety-five with tears streaming down her ancient face.
I have put off telling you about May.
May was supposed to take comprehensive examinations at Peabody High School on the Wednesday following the first Baghdad Bazaar. If she passed, she would receive her high school diploma from the Department of Education of the state of Georgia by virtue of the power invested in Peabody High School, or vice versa, I’m not sure. Miss Spivey had arranged this in advance with a very nice teacher at Peabody by the name of Miss French (who, ironically, taught English) so that May could get her diploma before the new baby was born, but with all the worry and excitement about Theo—and the sudden departure of Miss Spivey—May’s appointment with Miss French came and went.
“I’m not sure I was ready anyway,” May said, trying to make the best of it.
On the last Friday in June 1939, three weeks after the first annual Baghdad Bazaar, my sister May gave birth to a baby girl that she named Grace in spite of everything. May labored long and hard—that pain she always had in her side just about did her in—but they both came through it all right, much to everyone’s relief.
In September, May was surprised to receive a letter from Miss French, offering to reschedule the examinations. “Well,” May said, “I reckon I’ve about forgotten everything by now.” Unbeknownst to any of us, she made an appointment with Miss French anyway, and she passed every one of those exams. The Milledgeville Ledger took a picture of May sitting in a chair on the stage at the graduation in June, wearing the beautiful long gown that Miss Spivey had given to her for this very purpose. She had a corsage of roses on her shoulder and her diploma in her lap, with five of her children standing around her and big Ed behind her, holding Grace, the new baby. The picture was grainy, given the newspaper technology of the time, and they got the names of the children in the wrong order, but we sent a copy to Miss Spivey at the Nashville address Mrs. Bibben had for her, not knowing that she was out of the country.
In February, Mrs. Blount asked May if she could play Shahrazad again at the second annual Baghdad Bazaar, but May said, “Let somebody else have a chance this year.” She was expecting again. Ildred was all for dragging Ed off and having him fixed like a steer. By the way Momma pressed her lips together when Ildred said that—instead of threatening to wash her mouth out with soap, no matter if she was twenty-one years old—I could tell that evil thoughts had crossed Momma’s mind, too.
May was feeling too poorly to attend the second annual Baghdad Bazaar at all. Momma missed it, too, as she was staying out in McIntyre with May by then, keeping an eye on her and little Ed and baby Grace. The girls—Bitsy and Mimi and Dolly and little May—were staying at our place and coming to school with me. (Mrs. Lulu Blount was our teacher for the year. She was no Miss Spivey.) The pain in May’s side was worse than ever this time. It kept her awake at night. They had the doctor come from Claytonville, but he couldn’t find anything. (Years later, May’s granddaughter Bette would insist it was all the white dirt May had taken to settle her stomach over the years sitting in a lump in her intestine. Nobody will ever know for sure.) Momma and Daddy had just about decided to take her to the hospital—“In Savannah?” May said dreamily, although they had in mind someplace closer by—when she went into labor at home on June 13, 1940. The doctor was there when the baby was born. “A boy for little Ed,” May said in a whisper, and called him Jefferson, after his granddaddy. As soon as the doctor left, she made Momma fix her hair and get her some lipstick to put on so the children could come and see her. Momma wanted her to just lie back and take it easy, but May insisted on seeing her children. Ildred and I helped Ed get all their hands and faces scrubbed before he marched them into the bedroom of the little house in McIntyre.
May looked like a ghost, I thought, she was so pale, but she was sitting up in bed as we came in, smiling, with pillows all around and the baby in her arms. She left lipstick kisses, one by one, on Bitsy and Mimi and Dolly and little May, and she was putting her hand out to touch little Ed’s curly head when she got a look on her face. She seemed to be paying close attention to something going on inside her. Then her head fell back on the pillow, and with me and Ildred in the doorway and Ed and all her children crowded around her, just like that, barely one month past her thirty-first birthday, my sweet sister May was gone.
A baby crying for his mother is like a door that opens into every kind of grief. That’s why you have to pick that child up and rock him and make him stop. It’s not so much the baby you’re worried about.
At the very moment my brother Force set his foot down on May’s front porch, he heard a wail go up inside the house that stopped him cold. Before he took another step—before he even took another breath—the door banged open and May’s children burst out onto the porch, keening and sobbing like the motherless children they now were. Ildred and myself, also sobbing, were right behind them and without a word spoken or a decision made, we helped Force herd them all into the Ford. “Take them!” Ildred cried. “Git them away from here!”
Force had to clench his teeth to keep from wailing or shouting himself, just to drown out the sound of them. They clung to each other in the backseat—no one would let go of whatever arm or neck they were clutching to ride up front with Force. They reminded him of the unweaned kittens whose mother ate rat poison in Billy Bonner’s barn. They were that inarticulate and inconsolable. He drove them all the way to Milledgeville and circled around the college square, passed the Baldwin County Courthouse and the governor’s mansion and the Military Academy he had finally graduated from that spring. They stayed in the car, sweating and clinging to each other, while he bought them ice-cream cones at Rosie’s. They were quiet then—only sniffing and hiccupping—while they licked the ice cream flavored with tears, but when he turned down the road that led back to their house in McIntyre, they started crying and wailing again, the volume rising with every dip in the road that brought them nearer to the house, until they were crying like those kittens again. Four times Force sped up again and shot past the lane that led to the house instead of turning.
The fourth time he drove around the college square in Milledgeville, he thought about the train station. He thought about buying tickets and putting them on a train that would take them farther and farther away from what waited for them back at the house in McIntyre. He wondered if it was possible to take them to a place so far away that they would forget all about the house and the baby and May falling back on the pillow, distance doing the work of time in healing their sorrow, miles taking the place of years. If there were such a place, Force would take them there. He would take them all the way to Baghdad, the real Baghdad, if he had to. He would make them forget that they had a mother who died. They would wake up on rooftops to the cries of street hawkers or in cool-tiled rooms, a sweet voice outside the window singing real words from the top of a real minaret. They would snap their fingers or rub their rings and a great jinn who looked just like Eugene Boykin would arrive in a puff of colored smoke, saying, Your wish is my command! and he would deliver to them, as Force could not, their hearts’ desire.
They were about halfway between McIntyre and Baghdad, Georgia, when the Ford ran out of gas. As soon as the engine started stuttering, Force pulled off the road onto the grassy shoulder, lumping and bumping and rolling along a few more yards and a few more until the T-Model Ford stopped at the top of a little rise that gave them a view of the white dirt canyon where Miss Spivey got her first glimpse of kaolin. Force could see her, suddenly, holding the stick as if she might lick the dipped white tip of it.
“Why’re we stopped?” one of the girls asked warily from the backseat.
“Out of gas,” said Force.
This news was met with silence—now he couldn’t take them back, was that what they were thinking? Some scrabbling around behind him ended with little May popping up on the back of the front seat. She balanced there on her hips and the palms of her hands for a moment, like a seesaw, and then slowly tumbled forward. She was going on six now. She crawled into Force’s lap. He hoisted her up so that her head was under his chin. In the backseat, little Ed was sleeping, stretched across his three sisters’ laps. Mimi, in the middle, had her eyes closed. The other two looked out their respective windows at the sky.
“What are we gonna do?” asked Bitsy, the oldest. She was almost eleven now.
“We’ll wait,” Force said. “I reckon somebody’ll come along.”
They sat by the road for a while like that, the children quiet, exhausted by grief. Nobody came along.
Then, sounding half asleep, little May said, “Uncle Force?” She was limp and heavy in his lap. She raised a languid arm and laid her hand on his cheek.
“What, sugar?”
“Are you really king of Baghdad?” That story had gotten around.
“He’s not king. He’s Cailip,” said Dolly, who was eight.
“Not Cailip, Cailiff,” Bitsy corrected her. “Course he’s a Cailiff. So’s Grandma and Granddaddy and Gladys and all.” She stopped there. Little Ed whimpered in his sleep.
“But is he Cailiff of Baghdad?” Mimi asked.
“No,” Bitsy said firmly, “he ain’t.”
“He is, sure enough!” Dolly said. “Jest look at him.”
To facilitate this, little May reached up and put both her hands to his face, one palm on each cheek, and turned his head toward the backseat.
“Well,” said Force, “are y’all just gonna keep on talkin’ about me like I’m not here?” It was hard to understand him, with little May squishing his cheeks together with her two hands, as hard as she could. In spite of herself, Mimi giggled.
“It ain’t his face that proves it,” Dolly said. “It’s his arm. He’s got the mark on his arm. Show us your arm, Uncle Force.”
He laid his arm out long on the back of the seat, then twisted it so they could see the scar, about the size of a quarter.
“It used to be a picture of a eagle, right?” said Dolly. “You had a eagle but they burned it off.”
“Oooh,” little May said in the front seat. She let her hands slip down from Force’s cheeks. “Did it hurt? It musta hurt.”
“He was only a baby when they did it,” Dolly said. As soon as baby came out of her mouth, she stiffened. So did Force.
Mimi didn’t seem to notice. “Tell us how you got switched at—”
“Tell us about Alaeddin,” Bitsy interrupted fiercely. “Tell us about the lamp.”
“It was a magic lamp,” Mimi said, sounding eager. “All you had to do was rub it and a jinnie came, poof! ‘Yer wisht is my command!’”
“We already know that story,” Dolly complained.
“Tell it, Uncle Force,” Bitsy commanded. “Tell it now.”
“All right, all right,” said Force. “Just give me a chance. Little May, set still. All right, now.” Force cleared his throat. He decided that if somebody didn’t come along by the time Alaeddin met the Princess, they were all going to have to get out and walk back. “It is said,” Force began, “that there lived in the city of Baghdad a young boy, the son of a tailor who was as poor as a mouse. Alaeddin was his name. Now, Alaeddin didn’t mind being poor, long as he could go around with his friends and have a good time in the marketplace, but it about worried his mother half to death.”
Force stopped short. He held his breath.
“Not for long!” Mimi shrieked. “’Cause pretty soon he finds his treasure!”
“It’s under the ground,” said little May.
“He just opens a door and walks right down and finds it,” Dolly added. She had already forgotten that she didn’t want to hear this tale again.