The garden came up beautifully, despite a week or so of bad weather. It had rained hard three days straight, and on the second morning they had awakened to find the basement floor covered with three inches of water. All the rain in the basement was gone now, but it had left some seed, some indestructible life form, that threatened to turn the basement into something prehistoric. Despite a virtual army of men hired by Santiago to disinfect the basement periodically, Joyce would come down some mornings and find green, furlike mold growing along the paneled walls, sprouting in corners, sharing space with the mousetraps.
But the garden thrived, and a summer came on, Joyce spent more and more of her days there. She was there, bent down in a row of tomatoes, when Clovis ran out to her and told her that Sandy was picking on Humphrey again down at the corner. Calmly, and with an exasperated sigh, she took off her hat and gloves and told Clovis to stay in the house.
She would not ever remember if she heard the two pops before she got to the corner at O Street. When she turned the corner, she saw a crowd, but between her and Humphrey there was no one. He was backing toward her, and he would have reached her, but Santiago shot him again and he fell. She thought that he had only stumbled, and when she saw Rickey out of the corner of her eye standing in the street watching them, she was somehow nearly reassured that Humphrey had only misstepped.
She shouted to Santiago. “Stop it fore you hit somebody!” When she got to Humphrey, he was sitting, and when he began to lie back, she reached down to help him, took him by the front of the dark jacket with one hand and the back of his head with the other. When he was down all the way, he shook his head as if to say, “Clumsy me.” There was wetness on the hand that had taken the jacket, but she was concentrating on Santiago too much to take note of it. She continued on toward him and he lowered the gun and did not move.
“You stay outta this, Mama. This ain’t got nothin to do with you.”
“What you been doin?” she asked him.
She slapped him twice, and when she saw the blood on his cheek and then on her hand, her heart sank because she thought she had injured him.
“All right now, Mama, I’m warnin you.” He pointed the gun between her eyes, then he backed away. “This ain’t none a your business.” He pushed back against the people behind him, and they made room for him, then he ran to the Range Rover that was double parked. In seconds he was gone.
She called to Rickey, who was now standing on the sidewalk across O Street, and then she began to scream his name. He ran away. She went back to Humphrey, whose front was now completely bloodied. She asked someone to call for help. Joyce sat down and cradled Humphrey’s head in her lap. She thought that he was already dead, but he opened his eyes and said, “Please don’t tell my mama.” He said it again and would have gone on saying it, but she covered his mouth with her hand.
It was well after dark when the police left her house, and when they had all gone, she called Pearl. She stayed on the telephone for several hours, until Pearl’s husband got home from work. Pearl said that she forgave Santiago, but Joyce knew that that would never be true in this life. After she hung up the telephone, she sat on the floor in the living room until the grandfather clock told her it was ten. In a small cabinet near the couch was a fifth of vodka, which she drank in less than an hour. Then, beginning in the basement, she went about the house undoing the locks on all the doors and windows, for Santiago had no key to her house. And outside that house there was a very cruel world and she did not like to think that her child was out there without a place to come to.
A BUTTERFLY ON F STREET
The man Mildred Harper was legally married to for twenty-seven years had been dead and buried five months when, standing on an F Street traffic median, she came upon the woman her husband had lived with for the last two years of his life. Mildred had crossed to the island from Morton’s, going to Woolworth’s, her eyes fixed upon a golden-yellow butterfly that fluttered about the median. A child swatted half-heartedly at the butterfly, which rose as high as seven or so feet at moments, zigzagging back and forth over people’s heads and around an advertising kiosk and around the small, lifeless trees. Then the butterfly set off into the traffic heading toward 13th Street. It astonished her to see such a thing, wild, utterly fragile, in the midst of the buildings, the noise, the cars and buses, and she figured the thing must have lost its way. Before long, the butterfly was consumed in the colors of 13th Street.
When Mildred turned back toward Woolworth’s, she came face to face with the woman her husband had left her for, whose leaving had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity. She had seen the woman four or five times before, always from the back seat of her son’s car. But to see her now so close was like finding that a being from a recurring dream had stepped out into her life.
“Mildred,” the woman said, “I’m real sorry for your loss.”
Two months before, the woman had turned over to Mildred’s son all the belongings of Mansfield Harper, including dozens of pictures of his family. “She didn’t say nothing much, Mama,” her son kept telling Mildred. Then he said, “She just said, ‘I’m real sorry for your loss.’”
The woman stood but a few feet from her on the median. Perhaps if she had said something else, Mildred might have walked away. But she was surprised by the note of sincerity in the woman’s words. “Thank you,” Mildred said.
He had not, this man she was married to for twenty-seven years, told her he was leaving. One day his things were in their 12th Street home (“God Bless This House”), and the next day when she came home from work, many of those things were gone. The imported Swiss razor. Mildred had put his note in her Bible. (“Place your hopes among the Psalms; the Psalms is good luck.”)
“The doctors,” the woman was now saying, “had given him all this medicine, so he didn’t suffer any. Cancer, you know, can kill you twice. Once with all that sufferin, then with the final dyin itself. But he passed on peacefully into the next world.” She was a rather plain woman, Mildred decided, but only because she did not fix herself up. Her hair was combed back with the ends captured in a red barette at the nape of her neck. She wore no makeup and her thick eyebrows grew together, meeting in a neat line over the bridge of her nose that would have been becoming on a woman who fixed herself up.
They had lived, this woman and the father of Mildred’s four children, in a small house on Maple View in Anacostia, where Mildred had forced her son to take her. “I live in Northeast, Mama. I don’t know one thing about Anacostia.” “Buy a map. Get a map. I want to see where they live, where him and her live together.” “You just actin crazy.” “Do what I say.”
“I haven’t been downtown in so long,” the woman was saying. “They sure have built it up.” Mildred’s oldest son had forgiven his father almost from the first day, but their only daughter, Gladys, Mansfield’s favorite, could not forgive. And on those days when Mildred managed to get far enough away from insanity’s doorstep to see hope, she would come upon her daughter tearing up still one more treasure Mansfield had given her. This little piggy had roast beef…. This little piggy stayed home….
“I hadn’t been down here in a long time either,” Mildred said.
“I really miss the way we used to be able to cross right in the middle of the street when all the lights changed,” the woman said. “You know, the lights would change and the people on the four corners could just walk right out in the middle of the street to the other side. I miss that.”