The Easter picture became a passport, and the more places he visited the more places he wanted to see. On U Street, a woman of twenty-five or so with three children put down the child she was holding to get a better look at the picture of the five-year-old girl. Woodrow, in the doorway, noted just over her shoulder that on her wall there was a calendar with a snow-covered mountain, hung with the prominence others would have given a landscape painting. An old woman on Harvard Street, tsk-tsking as she looked at the picture, invited him in for coffee and cake. “My prayers go out to you.” Nearly everything in her apartment was covered in plastic, even the pictures on the walls. The old woman sat him on her plastic-covered couch and placed the food on a coffee table covered with a plastic cloth. “And such a sweet-lookin child, too, son.” When he asked to use the bathroom (more out of curiosity than for relief), she pointed to a plastic path leading away down the hall. “Stay on the mat, son.”
A tottering man in a place on 21st Street just off Benning Road began to cry when Woodrow told him his story. “Dora, Dora,” the man called to a woman. “Come see this little angel.” The woman, who was also tottering, pulled Woodrow into their house with one hand, while the other hand pressed the picture to her bosom. The man and Woodrow sat on the couch. The woman stood in front of them, swaying trancelike, her eyes closed, the picture still pressed to her. The man put his arm around Woodrow and breathed a sour wine smell into his face. “Let’s me and you pray about this situation,” he said.
One April evening, a little more than a year and a half after their daughter disappeared, Rita was standing in front of their building, waiting for him. “We have fish tonight. It’s in the stove waitin,” she said, in the same way she would have said, “I know what you been doin. And who you been doin it with.” “We have fish to eat,” she said again. She turned around and went back inside. “We have fish, and we have to move from this place,” she said.
Woodrow’s father died nearly seven years after Elaine Cunningham disappeared. Of the eight children he had had with Woodrow’s mother and the five he had had with other women, only Woodrow, Alice, and a half-brother who lived down the road from the old man came to the funeral. It was a frozen day in January, and the gravediggers broke two picks before they had even gone down one foot. They labored seven hours to make a hole for the old man. “Even the ground don’t want him,” said one of the old man’s friends standing at the gravesite.
There was not much in the old man’s place to divide among his heirs. In a wooden trunk in one of the back rooms, Woodrow found several pictures of his mother. He had been kneeling down, going through the trunk, and when he saw the pictures, he cried out as if he had been struck. He had not seen his mother’s face in more than forty years, had thought his father had destroyed all the pictures of her. “You always looked like her,” Alice said, coming up behind him. “Even when you sat at the right hand of the father, you looked like her.”
Though he was younger than three other brothers, Woodrow had worked hardest of his father’s children. At first, his father had sat his children about the supper table according to their ages, but then he began to seat them according to who did the most work. His best workers sat closest to him, and by the time he was seven, Woodrow had worked his way to the right hand of his father. Woodrow’s mother sat at the far end of the table, between two of her daughters. Most of his brothers and sisters, unable to pick the amount of cotton Woodrow could, never forgave him for living only to be close to their father. But he learned to pay them no mind and even learned to enjoy their hostility. He never moved from that right-hand place until the day he went off down the road to work in the turpentine camps.
He also found in the trunk some letters he wrote his father from the camps and from railroad yards and from the places he worked as he made his way up to Washington. They were all of one page or less, and they were all about work, work from sunup to sundown. There were no friends mentioned, there were no descriptions of places where he lived, there were no names of women courted, loved. “I got a two-week job tanning hides,” he wrote from a nameless place in South Carolina. “I got work cureing tobacco. I may stay on after the season,” he wrote from somewhere near Raleigh. “I have been working in the stables outside Charlotesvile. The pay is good. I got used to the smell. and the work goes easy.”
Woodrow and Rita took the train back to Washington, bringing back a few of the pictures and none of the letters, which he burned in a barrel outside his father’s house. Everything along the way back to D.C. was as frozen as Georgia. It was as if the cold had separated the world into three unrelated and distinct parts — the earth, what was on the earth, and the sky above. Nothing moved. Flying birds seemed to freeze in midair, and then the cold would nail them there.
Rita and Woodrow were back in the apartment on Independence Avenue in Southeast by ten o’clock that night. Rita took her usual place at an easy chair near the window. On a table beside the chair was all she needed — the television guide, snacks, the telephone. The chair was very large and had had to be specially ordered, because she could not fit into the regular ones in the store.
Woodrow, even though the hour was late and the weather people were predicting even colder temperatures, quietly put on his heaviest coat and left the apartment. He said nothing to Rita, and she did not look up when the door locked behind him. At the corner of Independence and 15th, Woodrow looked into the grocery store window at the owner he had become friends with since moving to Southeast. No customers went into the store, and the owner was dozing behind the counter, his head back, his mouth open. Woodrow watched him for a very long time. By now he knew everything about the man and his store and the sons who helped the man, and there was no urgency to be inside with him. Having lost so much weight, Woodrow felt that even more of the world had opened up to him. And so he wondered if he should go on down 15th Street, try to find a house he had not visited before, and bring out the picture of the child in her Easter dress.
A DARK NIGHT
About four that afternoon the thunder and lightning began again. The four women seated about Carmena Boone’s efficiency apartment grew still and spoke in whispers, when they spoke at alclass="underline" They were each of them no longer young, and they had all been raised to believe that such weather was — aside from answered prayers — the closest thing to the voice of God. And so each in her way listened.
They heard an apartment door down the long hall to the right open and close with utter violence, obviously pushed shut by the wind of the storm. Within seconds, they saw Ida Garrett move almost soundlessly past Carmena Boone’s open door, a rubber-tipped brown cane in her good hand. She went the few yards to the end of the hall on the left and knocked again and again and again at what everyone in the room knew was the door of Beatrice Atwell’s apartment. Beatrice was sitting in the middle of Carmena’s couch, snug between the large Frazier sisters from the fifth floor. Then, just as soundlessly, Mrs. Garrett was standing small and silent in Boone’s doorway. She could not have looked any more forlorn if she had been out in the storm: breathing as if each breath would be her last, her wig perched haphazardly on her head as if it had been dropped from the ceiling by accident, her pocketbook hanging from the arm that a stroke had permanently folded against her body, her eyeglasses resting near the end of her nose, beyond where they could possibly do her any good.