They sat in silence for a moment.
'Theodore,' his father said quietly, 'how come you never think of finding a new wife?'
The son shook his head. 'Never find another like Lizzie,' he said.
'How you know if you don't look?'
'When Mama died, you never hunted out a new wife.'
I was already old. You're still young.'
Brown shook his head. 'I've got all I need. I've still got you and the girls and my job and this house. I'm okay.'
The old man snorted but said nothing. When his son finished, he reached out for the plate and carried it stiffly over to the sink.
'I'll go wake the girls,' Brown said. His father only grunted. The son paused, watching the father. We're quite a pair, he thought. Widowed young and widowed old, raising two girls as best we can. His father started to hum to himself as he scrubbed away at the plates. Brown stifled a sudden, affectionate laugh. The old man still refused to use the dishwashing machine and wouldn't allow any of the others to use it either. He'd insisted that there was only one way to tell if something were truly clean, and that was to clean it yourself. He thought that proper, in its own way. When the girls had complained, shortly after his father had moved in, he'd explained only that his father was set in his ways. The explanation had sat unquietly in the household for a few days, until the weekend, when Tanny Brown had loaded both girls into his unmarked squad car and driven north fifty miles, just over the Alabama border to Bay Minette.
They drove through the dusty, small town with its stolid brick buildings that seemed to glow in the noontime heat, and out past a long, cool line of hanging willows, into the farm country, to an old homestead.
He'd taken the girls across a wide field, down to a little valley where the heat seemed to hang in the air, sucking the breath from his lungs. He'd pointed to a group of small shacks, empty now, staggered by the passing of time, faded reds and browns, splintered with age, and told them that was where their grandfather had been born and raised. Then he'd taken them back toward Pachoula, pointing out the segregated school where his father had learned his letters, showing them the site of the farm where he'd worked hard to rise to be caretaker, and where he'd learned the tanning business. He showed them the house their grandfather had purchased in what had once been known as Blacktown, and where their grandmother had built up her seamstress business, gaining enough of a reputation that her talents cut across racial boundaries, the first in that community. He'd shown them the small white frame church where his father had been deacon and his mother had sung in the choir. Then he'd taken them home and there had been no more talk of the dishwasher.
I forget, too, he thought. We all do.
The hallway outside the girls' rooms was hung with dozens of family pictures. He spotted one of himself, in his fullback's outfit, cradling a football. He could see where the slick, shiny material of the jersey was frayed up near the shoulder pads. The red-and-gray uniforms at his school had been the used outfits from a neighboring white district. The girls don't understand that, he thought. They don't understand what it was like to know that every uniform, every book in the library, every desk in the classrooms, had once been used in the white high school, and then discarded. He recalled picking up his second-hand helmet for the first time and seeing a dark sweat line on the inside. He had touched the padding, trying to see if it felt different. Then he'd raised his fingers to his nose to check the smell. He shook his head at the memory. The war changed that for me, he thought. He smiled. Nineteen-sixty-nine. The march on Washington had been six years before. The Civil Rights Bill would pass the year after. The Voting Rights Bill in 1965. The whole South was convulsed with change. He'd returned from the service and gone to college on the GI Bill and then, coming home to Pachoula, had learned that the all-black school where he'd carried the ball was no longer. A large, ugly, stolid cinderblock regional high school was under construction. There were weeds growing on the playing fields he'd known. The red-and-brown dirt that had streaked his uniform was covered by a tangled growth of crabgrass and stinkweed. He remembered cheers, and thought there had been too few victories in his life.
He shook his head again. Mustn't forget, he thought. He remembered the epithet that had burst from the dead man's brother's lips a few hours earlier. None of it has changed.
He knocked on his eldest daughter's door. 'Come on, Lisa! Rise and shine. Let's go!' He turned quickly and banged away on the younger girl's door. 'Samantha! Up and at 'em. Hit the deck running. Schooltime!'
The groans amused him, turning his thoughts momentarily away from Pachoula, the murdered girl, and the two men who'd occupied space on Death Row.
Tanny Brown spent the next half hour in suburban-father school-day routine, prodding, cajoling, demanding, and finally accomplishing the desired result: both girls out the door, with homework intact, lunches made, in time to catch the school bus. With the two girls gone, his father had retreated to his bedroom to try to take a nap, and he was left alone with the growing morning. Sunlight flooded the room, making him feel as if everything was twisted about. He felt like some old nocturnal beast trapped by the daylight, lurching from shadow to shadow, searching for the familiarity and safety of night.
He looked across the room and his eyes focused on an empty flower vase that stood on a shelf. It was tall, with a graceful hourglass shape, and a single painted flower climbing up the ceramic side. It made him smile. He remembered his wife buying the vase when he took her on a vacation to Mexico, and hand-carrying it all the way back to Pachoula, afraid to trust it to doormen, luggage handlers, or porters. When they returned home, she put it in the center of the dining-room table and always kept it filled with flowers. She was like that. If there was something she wanted, there was no end to what she would do to accomplish it. Even if it meant carrying a silly vase by hand.
No flowers anymore, he thought, except for the girls.
He remembered how hard they'd tried to save her at the emergency room, how, when he'd arrived, they were still working, crowded around, running adrenaline and plasma lines, massaging her heart, trying to coax some life into her body. He'd known with a single look that it was useless. It had been something left over from the war, a way of understanding when some invisible line had been crossed and when, even with all of science gathered, connected, and being utilized, death still beckoned inexorably. They'd worked hard, passionately. She had been there herself, some twenty minutes earlier, working alongside all of them. Twenty minutes to get her raincoat, maybe make some small, end-of-the-workday joke, say good night to the rest of the emergency-room crew, walk to her car, drive five blocks and be rammed broadside by a drunk driver in a pickup truck. Even after she was dead, when they knew there was no hope, they kept working. They knew she would have done the same for them.
He stared at the ceiling but couldn't sleep, regardless of how exhausted he was. He realized that he no longer wondered when he would get over missing her, having come to understand that he would never get over her death. He had reached an accommodation with it, which was sufficient to get him from day to day.
He rose and walked into his youngest daughter's room, moved over to her bureau and started to push aside some of the girlish things collected there, a case overflowing with beads and rings and ribbons, a toy bear with a torn ear, an old loose-leaf binder stuffed with a different year's schoolwork, a tangle of combs and brushes. It did not take long to find what he was searching for: a small silver frame with a photo inside. He held it up in front of him. The frame gleamed when it caught the sunlight.