He was standing over Mother at the piano, and her bleak plunking notes, and smiling angrily, his wig tilted, one glove in the air.
“Nobody!”
The next time I sneaked after school to the window of the store and looked in, I saw him sitting where I’d seen him before, in the chairs reserved for customers, reading. He was not in blackface, yet his assurance, his posture, the way he sat, like the owner of the store, made him seem more than ever like Mr. Bones. He looked thoughtful, his fist against his mouth, a knuckle against his nose. And the other clerks and floorwalkers seemed to avoid him, talking among themselves, as though they knew he was Mr. Bones.
At a funeral in church one Saturday, I stood beside Ed Hankey, both of us altar boys, in starched blouse-like surplices, holding tall smoking candles, preparing to follow the coffin down the main aisle. The priest was swinging a thurible — more smoke — and the relatives of the dead man were howling.
Hankey said in a whisper, “You going to the minstrel show?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“My old man’s in it. So’s yours.”
“I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.”
“It’s a wicked pisser. Just a bunch of old guys singing, like a talent show,” Hankey said.
Then we saw the priest glaring at us. We straightened our candles and approached the coffin.
This big event was just a talent show to Hankey. And his white-haired father, who worked on the MTA buses, was just an old guy singing. Yet in our house Mr. Bones had taken charge and intimidated us all.
He had a different complaint about each of us. These objections were clearer when he was in blackface and a wig than when he was just Mr. Bones in name. He was now a man in a mask, someone to fear, saying things he normally avoided, singing strange songs. In his minstrel show costume he could be as reckless as he wanted.
It was true that Fred told fibs and didn’t want to go to college, true that Floyd owed him money and hated trumpet lessons. And it was easy to see that Mother’s nagging caused him to tease her and change the subject. His jokes were more than jokes; they were ways of telling us the truth. The yellow mustard in big quart jars was cheap and tasteless; “mouse turd” was a good name for it. The stale raisins that Mother bought cheap in the dented-package aisle were like dead flies. But it was so odd hearing these things from his gleaming black face, his white-outlined mouth, his woolly wig askew, and rapping his tambourine after he spoke.
“Dad,” we said, pleading.
“Dad done gone. ‘That was prior to his decease, Mr. Bones.’ I says, ‘He had no niece.’”
Shika-shika-shika went the tambourine.
He was happy, not just smiling but defiantly happy, powerfully happy, talking to us, teasing us in ways I’d never heard before. He had once been remote, with a kindly smile that made him hard to approach. Now he was up close and laughing at us and he wouldn’t go away.
He was someone new, convincingly a real man, as though he’d been turned inside out, the true Dad showing. Swanking in the role of a comical slave, he’d become a frightening master to us, and because he was so strange we had no way of responding to his tyrannical teasing.
Something else I discovered, because I kept going to the store to lurk and spy on him, was that instead of sitting silently alone in the shoe department he’d been hired to run, he now had company: Mel Hankey, John Flaherty, Morrie Daigle, and two men I’d never seen before. All of them with their heads together, sitting in the customers’ chairs, whispering, as if they were cooking something up. So odd to see this in a store where everyone else was working or shopping or being loudly busy.
That was his secret. Mine too. The whole affair looked more serious than just black faces and songs and jokes. These men were like conspirators, with a single plan in their minds, and the sight of them impressed me, because Dad was in charge. I could see it in his posture, sitting upright like a musician holding an instrument; but the instrument was his hand. Wearing white gloves, he seemed to be giving directions, issuing energetic commands. Mr. Bones was their leader.
So, after all, he had friends — these five whispering white men, who were black conspirators. We had taken him to be a man with no friends outside the family, no interests outside the house and the church; but here he was with his pals, Tambo, Lightning, Mr. Interlocutor, and the rest whose names I didn’t know.
But that same night, as though to dispute all this, he came home after dinner in blackface and floppy coat and wig, and said, “Listen to Mr. Bones.”
Fred was fiddling with the radio, Mother was at the sink with Floyd, I was looking at a comic book.
“I says, listen to Mr. Bones!”
He spoke so loud we jumped, and as we did, he banged and clicked his tambourine. He was like a drunk you couldn’t talk back to, yet he hadn’t had a drink.
I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody,
I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no time!
And until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime,
I don’t intend to do nothin’ for nobody, no time!
He searched us, shaking his head, and moaned, “Nobody, no time!”
Was it a song? Was it a poem? Was it a speech? It was too furious to be entertainment. We sat horrified by the sight of Dad in blackface, rapping his tambourine on his knees and his elbow and then bonking himself on the head with it.
Even though it was painful to hear, it was being spoken by a man who had our full attention. We had to listen; we couldn’t look away. That proved he was the opposite of the poor soul he was describing — he was stronger than we were, but I recognized the “nobody” he spoke of. It wasn’t Mr. Bones, it was Dad.
After that, he went over to Fred and said, “What are you going to do for Mr. Bones?”
“College,” Fred said, blinking fiercely.
“Know the difference between a college professor and a railway conductor?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, Mr. Bones.”
“One trains minds and the other minds trains. Which one do you want to be?”
“College professor, Mr. Bones.”
But Mr. Bones had turned to Floyd. “What are you going to do for Mr. Bones?”
“Trumpet lessons, Mr. Bones.”
“You always were good at blowing your own horn. Ha!” Then he had me by the chin and was lifting it, as Dad had never done. “Who was that lady you saw me with last night?”
With his white-gloved hand gripping my chin, I couldn’t speak.
“That was no lady. That was my wife!”
Mother muttered as he shook his tambourine.
“You’ll need some Karo syrup for that throat,” Mother said, and handed him a bottle and a spoon.
He took a swig straight from the bottle, then said to Fred, “Here, want to keep this bottle up your end?”
I didn’t know it was a joke until he lowered his shoulders and swung his arms and shook his tambourine.
I had been dreading going to the show for weeks, and when the day came I said, “I don’t want to go. I’ve got a wicked bad stomachache.”
“Everyone’s going,” Mother said, trembling with a kind of nervous insistence that I recognized: if I defied her, she might start screaming.
On a wet Saturday night in May we went together to the high school auditorium in our old car, Mother driving. I could tell she was upset from the way she drove, riding the brake, stamping on the clutch, pushing the gearshift too hard. Dad had gone separately. “Tambo’s stopping by for me.”
I hurried into the auditorium and slid down in my seat so that no one would see me. When the music began to play and the curtain went up, I covered my face and peered through my fingers.