Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush Page 4

  Once Tree had heard him get it all mixed up. She’d been leaning out of the window of the apartment. Dab and some girl were downstairs, standing by the stoop. She could hear them just as plain as if she’d been right there on the sidewalk with them.

  The girl was giggling and trying to pull away from Dab, but not trying too hard. Dab was all slicked down and dressed sharp, like some hustler working fine and not going to high school. Too old for high school. That was the impression the girl had. He was being so serious with her, with an earnest look on his face. But he got it mixed up, saying, “You be pretty smart. No business bein in school. Ought to get out back in the street … take you, I will stick back with you.”

  He knew he had it wrong. His hand tightened on the girl for fear she would split on him, leave him with nothing but his mixed-up words.

  The next thing Tree knew, he was shaking the girl by the shoulders, hard, while still trying to get the words right. He had them hopelessly wrong. Tree had to get down there and stop him. She would have to turn everything off on the stove first before she left, fearing fire. Things downstairs might take too long. She feared a fire in their apartment worse than anything. There were plenty of fires each week. And a cold, furious hate of fire stayed with her deep in the hollows of her mind. When there was a fire, people close by in the street looked at Dab funny. But Tree knew better. Whoever set the fires were not kind and gentle like her Dab. She knew. She could protect him by always being with him when they were home.

  What am I gettin so upset about? Why remember the bad things like that girl that was scared of Dab in the street? Tree thought now. I took care of her, dint I? What I say! Yeah, but I got bad with her, and that wrong. What you gone do? Callin him a loony tune.

  “Ain’t no loony tune, neither,” she had told that dumb girl.

  “Yeah, he is,” said the girl. “He your brother? He a loony tune, ought to keep him offen the street, hittin on innocent girls, too.”

  “Now look who you!” Tree had told her. She roughed the girl some and had to use some bad language, something she would rarely do. “An if I ever hear you say loony tune about my brother again, I’ll make your nose never be the same—you know what I’m talkin about, too.” And she would have. Would have taken her wide-toothed Fro pick like a weapon and raked it across that tender piece of skin under the nose between the nostrils. And would have stood there as that girl fell to her knees, helpless. There was no defense against the lightning pain of a comb raking.

  What I’m standing here for like a dummy?

  Tree was at the stove, her wooden spoon poised above the bubbling spaghetti sauce. The sauce had splashed on the wall behind the stove and all around on the white surface of the stove.

  “Shoot!” she said and turned down the stove. “Look what it done!” she cried as Dab came up behind her to peer over her shoulder.

  “Sure do smell good,” he said.

  “But look what it done! Gimme a sponge from the sink, Dab.” He got it for her and she cleaned things up, sending him back once to rinse the sponge and squeeze the water out. Tree took back the sponge and cleaned up the streaks. Dab watched and put the sponge away when she finished.

  “How I look?” he asked her.

  She turned around. He had on clean wrinkled pants and a clean wrinkled shirt.

  “I dint iron those clothes yet, Dab,” she told him.

  His face fell. “They lookin fine,” she said quickly. “Just put some socks on your feet and you be fine.”

  He did as he was told; came back and sat down at the table.

  She wouldn’t ask him to set the table. It would have been too much to ask him to take a bath and set the table all on the same night. She set the table herself, tossing the plates in place expertly. Napkins, silverware and glasses were placed. When all was ready, she sat at the head of the table and Dab sat next to her on her right. Always she sat at the head of the table when M’Vy was away, which was so much of the time, Tree was reluctant to move when Vy did return.

  Tree brought the spaghetti sauce to the table in a flowered bowl. She put a potato on Dab’s plate. He waited patiently for her to open the potato. He delighted in seeing her take the fork and make diagonal marks across the skin. She would then push in at each end and the white, steamy, cooked potato would puff out. It made Dab laugh every time.

  “See?” she told him and buttered the potato, seasoned it with salt and pepper.

  They ate. They drank Hi-C. There was Mountain Dew to drink but Tree felt Hi-C was more nourishing. It was grape Hi-C.

  Quietly they ate. Tree would have liked to have a candle burning on the table while they ate. There were candles in the cupboard. She didn’t feel like going to the trouble of getting one.

  She watched Dab trying to eat his food.

  “What wrong with your hand? Why you holding on the fork like that?” she said.

  He had the fork turned over. Had it pressed on the fatty part between the thumb and index finger.

  “Dab, you cain’t eat that way. Turn the fork over.” She turned it for him and put it in his hand properly. His hand was limp-feeling, hardly any strength in it. She held his left hand a moment, and it wasn’t any better. “Make a fist with your right hand,” she told him.

  “Uhn,” Dab said. His hands fell away. He flopped them around, and his fork splattered the spaghetti sauce on his plate.

  Tree fed him without a word about it. “You sure actin funny,” she said. He grunted or uhn-uhned at her. She ate and she fed him.

  Dab, darn! Carefully she scrutinized him, all that she could see of him from the waist up. His skin was ashen. Dab failed to use skin cream regularly. He wasn’t some basketball player. Tree knew the basketball players and how sensitive they were about their skin.

  Think they some babies. Too pretty!

  They rubbed themselves with Vaseline Intensive Care clear to their crotches until their dark legs shone in a high ebony sheen.

  Ball player sayin to a bench warmer: “Whyn’t you white baws ever get ashy?”

  The white boy wait a long beat to answer. Finally, “We get ashy, only it don’t show on us.”

  Tree smiled to herself, remembering. She had a soft place inside for all basketball boys. Grimly she studied her brother.

  He chewed and chewed.

  Like that potato some kind of hard bone, she thought. He lookin peaked this evening. Darn! All I need.

  Chapter 5

  WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG its fuzzy, soft buzzing, Tree was up as bright as sunrise.

  “M’Vy!” she yelled and ran out of her room, pulling bedclothes with her. She banged on Dab’s door with her fist. “It’s M’Vy!”

  She ran to the door and quickly unlocked the spring locks and the police lock, without once remembering that M’Vy had her own set of keys to the door. She must have been still asleep. She had been so positive. It could have been a robber there. It might have been any stranger ringing the doorbell first thing in the morning. How many times had M’Vy warned her always to take her time and think?

  Tree pulled open the door. There stood the old lady who helped out cleaning up the place every Saturday morning. Miss Ole Lady Cenithia Pricherd. Tree had forgotten about her, forgotten about the list she’d made of chores for Cenithia to do.

  “You wanta call the mess Miss Pricherd make and the time she waste makin it some cleanin?” Tree had told M’Vy one time. “Dab can do better,” Tree had said. “All she do is drank up the half ’n’half in her coffee and eat up the danish.”

  M’Vy had scolded Tree for speaking ill of the less fortunate. She told Tree that Miss Pricherd had nobody in the world to take care of her. The woman was sixty-seven years old and hadn’t ought to be working, M’Vy had said.

  “Shoot,” Tree had told her, “I know some sixty-seven-year-old womens that actin thirty-five and gettin away with it, too. But Miss Pricherd find a warm place to eat and rest, all right. An act to you like she doin some work. Only I’m here to see what she do and it me be doi
n most the work.”

  “Tree, you suppose to help out Miss Pricherd,” M’Vy had said, “cause I can’t pay her hardly nothin.”

  Tree had felt herself ready to break down and cry. Her eyes filled with tears. M’Vy saw this and told her, “Next time I’m to home on Saturday, I’ll have a talk with Cenithia. Tree, you know I trust you, Heart.”

  Heart was what Vy called Tree when she wanted Tree to know how much she depended on her. Tree knew she shouldn’t have spoken so harshly about Miss Pricherd, and for a long time, she had felt ashamed of herself.

  Things went along. Miss Pricherd still didn’t do much. She had ways of not working that got to Tree. Tree wouldn’t have minded so much if Miss Pricherd had simply said she had to sit down every half-hour for ten minutes, instead of her hiding in the kitchen and sneaking the food out of the refrigerator. So the old woman was hungry; Tree could understand that. She didn’t mind giving food. But she couldn’t stomach the idea of somebody sneaking around and stealing.

  All this going through her head as she stood there holding the door open and blocking Miss Pricherd’s way. Disappointment formed a lump in her throat that it was not M’Vy.

  “You gone let me in or what?” Miss Pricherd said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Tree said. “Good mornin, Miss Pricherd. Come on in. M’Vy didn’t make it yet”

  “Huh,” was all Miss Pricherd had to say.

  Tree had hit on a plan to make Miss Pricherd get a certain amount of work done before she paid her. She always paid her at five o’clock every Saturday afternoon.

  “M’Vy make you a list this time,” Tree told the old woman once she got out of her bundles of shapeless clothes down to her working housedress and sat down in the living room to rest.

  Tree hurried to get the list she and not M’Vy had made.

  Okay, she got to rest. It all right, let her rest, Tree thought. She controlled her indignation. I know how long she wait for a bus and transfer. I know she got to walk from there to here. But I get so mad at her, I can’t help it!

  Before Miss Pricherd could say anything about the list Tree handed her, Tree said, “You sure tired the first thang in the morning.” Saying it as sweetly as she knew how.

  She watched as Miss Pricherd slowly read the sheet that Tree had carefully written to represent M’Vy’s handwriting. She an old woman, Tree thought, but she don’t have to wear glasses to read. How old is old? Maybe she not old. Maybe sixties is just beginning old. Forget this ole lady. Don’t you let her get to you and Dab.

  Miss Pricherd eyed Tree up and down when she finished reading the list. Tree didn’t dare look smart or anything. You couldn’t talk back to a church woman who was part old who had come to clean. But you could look strong, Tree thought. And so she did. She stood there; she was getting taller, too, growing a little bit every day. She stood as straight as she could in her blue nightgown. Had on her three-quarter-length blue velour robe which she had got for Christmas as a complete surprise from M’Vy.

  M’Vy the only one in the world to give me presents; give Dab presents, too, Tree thought.

  It came to her all of a sudden: If M’Vy get runned down by the bus, if there be some mugger, nobody to brang us nothin! Where are the relations?

  The relatives were dead, what ones M’Vy had. Tree knew it. There had been three brothers way older than M’Vy and all three of them dead and gone. And a sister, dead from strokes. Where are the kids? Wouldn’t there be some little kids grown up now? Why come me and Dab never hear nothin about them. And the ghost! Who the ghost?

  The few hours of having M’Vy with them on her short weekends at home were precious. They would let M’Vy give them all she had to give, and they let her talk about what she cared to talk about. Tree and Dab never had time to find out about the past; they had so little of the present.

  Tree sighed, holding on tightly inside herself. Don’t know what it is with me today, she thought. Maybe wake up too quick with that doorbell buzzing.

  This, within the time it took for Miss Pricherd to give her deathly cold looks up and down after she read the list a few times.

  “Vy never did give me no list before,” she said. “Who need a list for this bitty place, huh? Been cleanin houses since I ten years old. And never need no list for nothing.”

  With the tips of her fingers, Miss Pricherd placed the list on the seat next to her. It lay still and white, a paper from Tree’s ream.

  “I’ll help you wit it,” Tree said, “once I get Dab up and get him dressed and he and me have some breakfast.”

  Miss Pricherd snorted at that.

  She sound just like a cow, too, Tree thought.

  Her serene expression never changed. “We better get started,” Tree said. She stood up and waited. She wasn’t going to leave Miss Ole Lady alone for a minute, not in the living room and sitting down.

  Miss Pricherd sat, smiling to herself. Her eyes seemed covered with a gray film this morning. Her face held little light. There was an unkind smile across her mouth. It pulled her lips to the side in a bitter smirk. She wore her hair straightened in an old-fashioned page boy with bangs. It was shoulder length and jet black. It was blue black.

  Fake and phony, Tree thought. Wonder if it’s a wig marked down.

  “Ought to put you brother where they puts people lak him,” the woman said. “Shouldn’t be somebody lak you in charge of some retarded.”

  Tree didn’t know whether this last was meant as a compliment. But there began a slow burn inside her.

  “Dab is not … is not …” She couldn’t say the word.

  Miss Pricherd laughed soundlessly. She had teeth that were gray or brown. They were crooked, with spaces in between them. There weren’t a lot of them. “You know that boy ain’t got good sense,” she said. “He gone rape somebody, then they put him where he belong.”

  Tree felt burning hate like she never knew she had for anyone. Her fists clenched and her lips trembled so, she couldn’t make a sound. Her eyes filled with tears; but then she got hold of herself. She began gulping air as if she’d been running. Miss Pricherd looked alarmed. Still mean, but not quite as certain that she had everything in hand. She had her arms straight at her sides; hands, knuckles under, pushed at the couch. She didn’t get up but sat there, alert to Tree’s next move.

  “You have the list to do like M’Vy say before this day be over.” Tree’s voice was steady and dead cold. “ M’Vy say not be paying for nothing not be done.”

  Tree turned away, ready to get the day started. Then she turned back. “Don’t be cuttin on my brother. I’ll hurt anybody, on account of Dab being so good and kind.”

  “Nobody cuttin on him, shoot,” Miss Pricherd said. Slowly, painfully, she got to her feet. “Whew, Lord!” spoken softly, as though she meant it. A look of pain swam across her face to drown in the black of her eyes. It was not fake.

  Tree left her and turned her thoughts to her brother. “Dab,” she called, coming to his room. She knocked lightly on his closed door. “Dab, son,” she joked. “You get on up outta there. It wasn’t M’Vy. Be Miss Pricherd come to clean.”

  Dab would have been up long since when she first said it was M’Vy ringing the doorbell. Why hadn’t he gotten up?

  She pushed open the door. “Dab,” she said.

  He was lying in bed on his back. She came up close and leaned over. He was lying there staring at the ceiling. His arms were outstretched on either side. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “Dab! Dab! What a matter wit you, Dab?”

  “I can’t move,” he said.

  “What you mean, you can’t move? Come on, Dab. We have to get started cause maybe M’Vy come on in later and want to take us shopping.”

  “I can’t move,” he said in a whisper, and his eyes closed on his tears.

  “Dab, what you mean, you can’t!”

  “I mean … it hurt so bad when I do.”

  “Where it hurt?” she demanded. “Show me and we can look it up in the doctor book—what it
called—the Merck. Any pain at all, it’ll tell us what to be done.”

  “It not … one place,” Dab told her. “I move, it hurt me everywhere. Lying on the bed … it hurt me.”

  “But where it hurt you?” She almost yelled at him. “It got to hurt somewhere.”

  “All over. Don’t turn no light on. It hurt my eyesight, too.”

  “Oh, Dab,” she said. “That don’t make no kind …” She stopped herself, recalling that Miss Pricherd had said Dab had no sense. His tears convinced her there was something very wrong with him. Dab might make crying sounds every day. But tears fell only when he was in real pain.

  “I’ll get the heating pad,” she told him. “Dab, you cold?”

  “No’m,” he said.

  “I got to touch your forehead, see for sure.”

  “Cain’t stand no touching, Tree,” he whispered, fighting back the tears.

  She pressed her knee on the bed, leaning over him. Dab hollered out in pain. She jumped back, staring at him in wonder.

  Don’t make no kind of sense, she thought. How can it hurt him when I just touch the bed? Where do it hurt him?

  “You lie and don’t move, you hear? I’ll brang the heating pad.” She didn’t know what else to do. “I’ll fix some breakfast for you,” she said.

  “Give me some time,” he whispered. “It be gone after while.”

  “You mean you had it before?”

  “Sometime. Come in the night. Gone by morning.”

  “Whyn’t you tell me, Dab?”

  “Be gone after while.” He was panting with the effort of talking. His face looked pale and clammy.

  I got to reach M’Vy! thought Tree. “You just rest then, okay?” she told him. “I’ll be back.”

  She left him, closing the door again behind her. Outside in the hall, she listened for Ole Lady Pricherd. Heard her in the bathroom, running water in the sink.

  Tree searched for the heating pad in the hall closet and found it by feel in the dark. There was no light in the closet. She went back to Dab, and it took her minutes to get the pad on him without him hollering out. It hurt him, she could tell, as she placed it on his chest. But he seemed to want it.