Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Page 2

  Irreverent, really. Maybe slightly hostile. Not a poem he would have recited to the pastor. Tuuro knew what he could say to people or not. He had a daughter, Lanita, who lived with her mother outside Chattanooga. Tuuro had lived with Lanita’s mother, Naomi, for almost seven years, and the relationship had split up, not, Tuuro had come to realize, over his lack of ambition, as Naomi had told him at the time, but because of the way Naomi had come to picture Tuuro. He knew how he looked: tall, darker than mahogany, dignified, with a face something like a cat’s, high cheekbones and alert eyes. On the street mothers jabbed their daughters to take a look. But the Tuuro Naomi saw looked nothing like this man: her Tuuro was smaller, and he was cringing. He looked to Naomi, Tuuro realized, the way he looked to himself.

  Not that he wasn’t a good man, as Naomi liked to say, but Naomi wanted something more. No, she wanted something other: lust, scenes in front of the neighbors, a man who would twist her against the wall and say, Shut up, woman. She found that man. She and the wild man fled Ohio, landing in Chattanooga when a wire burned out in their car. Then something happened, Tuuro was never clear what. The original wild man was now in prison, and a new, slightly less wild man lived with Naomi. Tuuro was under no obligation to do so—the court had sided with him—but he deposited money in Naomi’s account monthly to help cover Lanita’s expenses. He lived for the rare days he saw his daughter. She was six.

  “Can’t she stay with me when you’re back in Ohio?”

  Naomi’s sigh seared through the phone. Naomi was coming to visit her sister in Columbus.

  “I send you money every month, Naomi,” Tuuro said. “What more do you want?”

  “Oh, I know, Tuuro. You’re so good.”

  Tuuro bit his lip. “Why can’t Lanita stay here with me while you’re at your sister’s?”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Of course it’s safe. It’s fine here. It’s normal.” Safer than Columbus, he was thinking. The quickest way from Dayton to Columbus was driving through the Grid, on one of the walled-off interstates.

  “It is not normal.”

  “Naomi. Cleveland is far away.”

  Naomi gave another heavy sigh. “All right, she can stay with you. I’ll bring her by Thursday late and pick her up Sunday. But don’t you be feeding her a lot of sweets. I’ve got her off sweets.”

  “Did the sweets hurt her? Is she fat?”

  “Sweets always hurt,” Naomi said. “Always. Nothing hurts like sweets.”

  “WHAT DO YOU want for breakfast? Cereal? Eggs?” Tuuro’s apartment was the entire second story of a small frame house. His kitchen and living room stretched across the back, and the two bedrooms took up the front. His landlady lived downstairs. The house was two houses away from the house in which Paul Laurence Dunbar, the great African American (although people didn’t use that term now; the preferred word now was Melano) poet, had been born. The Dunbar house was a historical site that had never gotten much traffic, and since the Short Times its windows had been boarded up and its grass rarely mowed.

  Lanita, Tuuro’s daughter, sat in an old wooden chair at the kitchen table, her feet swinging. Tuuro had sweet rolls in the breadbox, but thinking of Naomi he didn’t dare offer them.

  “I want an egg that’s scrambled.”

  It took Tuuro a moment of rummaging in his refrigerator to realize he had no butter. “I can’t cook that, Muffin. I don’t have the butter to cook it in.”

  Lanita regarded him solemnly, and he saw her mother’s contempt in the wrinkling of her forehead.

  “I’m disappointing you,” he said. She didn’t deny it. “How about a three-minute egg?” Tuuro asked, inspired. “You don’t need butter for that.”

  “A three-minute egg?” Her voice was skeptical.

  “You boil it three minutes. It’s good. You’ll see.”

  Maybe six minutes later the egg was on her plate, chopped up and runny, and Lanita was eating it with a large spoon, eyes down and face serious, concentrating on every drip, and Tuuro, watching her, felt not swept, not washed, but swamped with love for her, so sloshily heavy he could barely stand.

  She pushed the empty plate away and looked up with her luminous eyes. “Another one.”

  She ate three, one by one, which Tuuro told her was nine-minute eggs, and when he picked her plate up from beside the sink he almost asked her, “Did you wash this?” before he realized the plate had been truly licked clean.

  “You liked it,” he said. “You liked what I made for you.” The gratitude in his voice almost embarrassed him. To cover himself he made one of his silly rhymes:

  Three-minute eggs

  Three-minute eggs

  My baby begs

  For three-minute eggs

  “Nine-minute eggs!” Lanita complained, smiling. She came over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, and then she stood beside him, hand hanging on the back of his belt, a silent companion as he washed the dishes.

  AND THEN LANITA was gone, back to Chattanooga, and the pastor was standing behind the desk in his office saying, “Tuuro, how are you?” and stretching out his hand. Tuuro reached out warily to shake it. Once the pastor’s hand had held a tiny pillow that made a fart, once a device that snapped Tuuro’s fingers, once a live toad. The pastor didn’t play these tricks on his parishioners. “Don’t worry,” the pastor chuckled now. “Vera cut off my access to the Magic Source.”

  “Good,” Tuuro said—a remark as close to rebellion as he dared go.

  The pastor waved Tuuro to a chair, then sat behind his desk and abstractedly tugged at his ear. “Tell me, did you have any bread left over from the Palm Sunday potluck?”

  It was almost July, and Palm Sunday had been in April. Did the pastor think Tuuro’s memory was that good? It had been a cold spring, with several late snows. The weather experiments of the early thirties had, as an unexpected side effect, resulted in “old”-style winters and hot summers: it often snowed by Thanksgiving. “If I did I fed it to the birds.”

  “That’s Christian, I suppose. Our brethren birds. How about after the Easter reception? Tequila Huntington said there was a whole sponge cake and half a loaf of lemon bread in the cupboard by the fridge.”

  Maybe it was his race, or his temperament, or some forgotten trauma of his childhood, but Tuuro was always steeling himself for news of what he had done wrong. It made him cringe to think of himself cringing, but there it was. And he did do things wrong, didn’t he? He wasn’t perfect, although there were moments, turning to inspect the Sunday school classrooms before he flicked off the light, he felt he was. “Are you the janitor did the bathrooms?” someone would ask, and Tuuro would freeze, wondering what he had missed. “That’s the cleanest bathroom I ever seen!” the person might say, and Tuuro would be flooded with gratitude and relief and, yes, surprise; his face would light up in what he knew was a rewarding way. He got hundreds of compliments. He was a kind and conscientious man and he did his work well. But he could never quite believe that people would praise him and not find the fault.

  So when someone found a fault, Tuuro accepted it. Hearing his mistakes was almost a relief. “I didn’t see any extra food at Easter,” he said now. “Maybe I should have.”

  “There are some things missing,” The pastor said. “A sterling silver plate, and Jip Cooper brought a cut-glass server.”

  Tuuro shook his head. “I’d remember those, I think. I’m pretty sure I didn’t …”

  “Well, that’s too bad. No one hanging around that night? No intrusive interlopers?”

  The pastor used phrases like that in sermons: fair-weather Philistines; complacent Christians; reductive religionists. He would never dream that Tuuro, listening from his station in the supply room behind the pulpit, would think of them as vacant phrases. “No,” Tuuro said.

  “Too bad.” The pastor waved his dismissal and Tuuro was already to the door when the next question came: “Have you checked the narthex lately?”

  The narthex was the anteroom at the back
of the sanctuary where people stood and gathered before and after the service. Tuuro remembered starting this job and not knowing what a narthex was. Now his chest tightened and his tongue felt too big for his mouth: what else had he done wrong? “I cleaned it Sunday after services.”

  “All of it? I was in there to pick up some hymnals for the Chorale Society, and I noticed some brownish streaks on the cupboard beside the front door. Low down. Isn’t that strange, I thought, Tuuro doesn’t usually miss things. See? You have us spoiled.”

  In the narthex the late afternoon sunlight patched the hot and humid air with pinks and greens. The narthex was separated by a wall of stained glass from the sanctuary. At one end of the narthex, where Tuuro entered, a hall led to the church classrooms, social hall, and offices. Once upon a time, the whole sanctuary/narthex complex was air-conditioned all week, but those days of excess were long gone. Now the only steady air-conditioning was in the pastor’s office. Tuuro opened the big front doors to get some air, glancing at the lower cabinets as he passed them. Brown streaks. The pastor was right.

  Tuuro flipped the overhead light on in the narthex and walked down the side aisle of the sanctuary to the maintenance closet, where he filled his wheeled bucket with water and soap and rags. “Fastidious boy,” his Aunt Stella used to call him.

  Back in the narthex, Tuuro squatted. A whole wall of oak cupboards flanked the front door, their shelves filled with hymnals and prayer books, a ledge separating the cupboards into lower and upper sections. The hymnals kept in the bottom cupboards were the old ones, rarely used. And it was on the doors of these cupboards, inches from the floor and running horizontally, that Tuuro examined the series of brown streaks. He swiped at one with a wet rag. Naomi, his ex, had had terrible periods, dripping out of her and onto the bathroom floor. The reddish brown on Tuuro’s rag looked familiar. Blood.

  Not dripped, as if it had spilled from someone. Not beside a doorknob as if someone had scraped a hand. But low on a cupboard, a thing a person shouldn’t brush against at that level. And going on for inches, no feet, maybe three feet, as if a bloody something had been dragged alongside the wood, although there were (Tuuro checked now) no spots of blood on the floor.

  Tuuro stood and shut the big front doors.

  Tuuro knew what he expected when he opened the cupboard. So much violence since the Gridding, so many refugees, people stripped from their surroundings and turned casteless and angry, unfettered by grandmothers and neighborhood policemen and people who knew their names. The troublemakers were largely young males. The other day a woman’s body had been found wedged behind a door at the public library. Instinctively, Tuuro pinched his nostrils as he opened the cupboard door.

  It was a boy. A small Melano boy, not more than five years old, curled up in the cupboard facing out as if he were simply hiding, his nappy head tucked down to his chest. Tuuro touched his shoulder, cold and stiff. He wrapped his arms around the small chest and unwedged the body from the cupboard, slipped it on its side onto the floor. The boy’s face had a pleading, confused look. Tuuro felt for a second as if he were looking at himself.

  Tuuro’s clearest memory of his mother was her shoes. A blue pair with suede appliquéd sea-stars, an olive-green pair with seams stitched in a yellow zigzag. His mother liked to scoop Tuuro up so his legs dangled. A lilac smell. After she was shot by the man Tuuro called Uncle, Tuuro was raised not by his father (no one was raised by a father) but by his great-aunt and his grandmother Tati, who lived together in a welfare apartment that was actually Tati’s, where Tuuro had to scoop his toys and himself under the bed when the caseworker arrived, because children were not allowed. The great-aunt had an ex-sister-in-law Tuuro was told to call Aunt Stella, who lived in an apartment down the hall. “To whence are you headed, little man?” she might ask. “To whom are you carrying that candy?” A stickler for grammar. She had what Tuuro later learned was an erect carriage: she always stood high with her neck extended, like an African queen, like a Zulu, she said. Tuuro could be Zulu, she liked to point out, that height and those high, wide cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Really, a remarkable-looking people.

  People who adopted Melano boys got subsidies from the state of Ohio, because people didn’t want to adopt Melano boys. “That adopting you should require a bribery is a tragedy and a crime,” Aunt Stella said. “I couldn’t be sure which it is more.” But she and Tuuro would live better if she adopted him. They could leave this ill-kempt building with its slovenly occupants and rent a house with a yard and honeysuckles edging the back fence. A back door as well as a front one, three steps up from the yard to the kitchen. They would be a family. Tuuro could call her Mom. Would he mind calling her Mom? Or would that be sad for him?

  “I could call you Mom,” Tuuro said.

  In his dream of how it was, she indeed adopted him. They moved to their little house in Englewood. Tuuro went to a good school and wore a uniform; when he got off the bus each afternoon, Aunt Stella was waiting by the fire hydrant. They had a dog. They barbequed in summer. Tuuro spoke correctly. No one stomped on anybody’s heart.

  It had been, in its way, a terrible childhood, not because he was unwanted but because after his mother’s death he was wanted too much, by three aging, angry women who each had their own purposes and plans. Tuuro remembered sitting on the brown plaid couch at Tati’s, eyes darting from face to face as he tried to figure out what they wanted, to whom he should acquiesce, to whom he should say “to whom.” Now Tuuro saw in the dead boy’s face the same confused pain that he had felt, and all Tuuro wanted was to make it end.

  He picked up the body and carried it to his supply closet behind the pulpit, which no person but Tuuro ever entered, cleared a space on the bench against the wall there, and set the boy down. He could not get the boy uncurled. There was a wound in the left chest, a complicated thing with congealed blood mixed with torn fabric, an area he would have to clean, Tuuro knew, but for now something he chose to ignore. There was a streak of dried blood coming out of the right ear. Tuuro turned the light off in the supply closet, stood outside it praying the Lord’s Prayer for himself more than the boy, then closed and locked the door.

  He took a ten-minute bus ride home. He left his apartment to return to the church with a duffel bag full of supplies, remembering even the hat to cover the wounded ear.

  He took off the boy’s clothes and, starting with his face, washed him with a washcloth scented with cologne, cleaning off every part of him, even the bits of blood next to his wounds—which must be knife wounds—in his chest. As he worked he dried the boy with his fluffiest towel. Under the boy’s blue shorts there was a surprise, dried stains on his white underpants, urine and stool and blood, which wasn’t right, which hurt Tuuro in his soul. He said the Lord’s Prayer again, left the body on the bench, the towel carefully draped over it, locked the door, and took a bus to K-Bob’s East to buy clean underpants, carrying the soiled underwear in a paper bag that he dumped in a bin outside the store. He bought the best children’s underwear they had, boxer shorts in red silk with a black waistband. He returned to the church, finished his washing, oiled the body especially over the knees and elbows, where the skin was ashy, dressed the boy in the boxer shorts, and wrapped him in a red-and-green-and-black scarf Naomi had once given him for Christmas. Tuuro then shut the door to the closet again and walked to the social hall to get wood for the coffin.

  Tuuro went through the planks of wood stored at the back of the stage. No one would miss a few boards. It was evening now, but still light out, and Tuuro checked the parking lot through the window to be sure the pastor’s car was gone. Making a coffin would involve banging. Tuuro knew his boss’s habits: unless there was a committee meeting—unlikely in the summer—the pastor would not be back during the evening.

  By the time the boy was nestled on his side in his coffin, his lips over his broad white teeth oiled, a drop of cologne placed in the indentation below his nostrils, the city was almost dark. These days there were fewer and fewer
lights at night, and Tuuro wanted the burial finished before he had to use a light to see. “Good-bye, my son,” he said, kissing the boy’s forehead, and then he hammered the board onto the coffin’s top. It was sad to no longer see or touch him: Tuuro thought of the boy’s puzzled face, his long fingers and slender wrists.

  He dug a hole in a bare patch behind a prickly shrub in the church garden, a place Tuuro had never liked much (the volunteer gardeners were lazy) but one that would have to do. The hole was maybe a bit sloppy, not quite deep enough, but every minute it was darker and Tuuro wanted to be done. Beads of sweat dripped from his nose. He laid the coffin in the hole and shoveled dirt over it. The hollow thuds echoed like cannon shots, the worst sound in the world.

  Another prayer.

  But where was the service? The boy deserved the service.

  Why am I creeping? Tuuro thought. Why don’t I put the lights on? But he was creeping, without the lights on, through the narthex and past the social hall and the classrooms and into the pastor’s office, a place which, for the sake of cleaning, Tuuro had a key.

  There, Tuuro closed the curtains and put the light on. He went through the pastor’s computer index, then his bookshelves. The Book of Presbyterian Liturgy. Seasons of Life. Today’s Rituals for Today’s Times. He finally found the service he wanted (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”) in a book with a broken spine that made him sneeze as he leafed through it. He took the book outside and, with a flashlight, read the entire service over the grave. He replaced the book in the pastor’s office. Then, because it was too late for the buses to be running, Tuuro walked the three miles home.

  TUURO BOLTED awake in the middle of the night: But he has a mother.

  A cold sweat washed over him. He got up and stood over the toilet, wanting to vomit.

  So what if Tuuro didn’t have a mother, so what if other women, not his mother, fought over him? Why in the world did he assume the same about the boy? The boy who was just a boy, maybe four, maybe five, who lay now in the dark, warm ground. Of course the boy’s mother, his only mother, his true and real mother, was frantic now, looking for him.