When they came back downstairs and burst into the room, she fired.
The first one fell, a blossom of red spreading across his chest.
The other one let out a shriek. He was just a boy. Her hand, no, her entire arm, was shaking, but his eyes were focused on the gun.
She waved it in front of him, stepping over the boy on the floor, ignoring the blood. It would come back, like the blood on that sidewalk so many years ago, but for the first time in a long while, her head was clear and the ringing in her ears was gone. She could even hear the siren in the distance.
Her hand steadied, and a sense of calm spread through her.
She pointed the gun at him like Frank taught her.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asked.
Evening Prayer
by Stephen L. Carter
Dixwell Avenue
The boy hated Mondays most. He used to hate Sundays most, but that was before Yale happened to his father.
The reason the boy hated Sundays was that church took half the morning and he had trouble keeping still that long. His mother was in the choir and his father in his black suit sat up front with the deacons, so the boy was stuck in a pew with Mrs. Percy and her girls. Mrs. Percy was very strict. Her girls could sit for three hours and never move once. The boy knew he was wicked because he couldn’t sit still like they did, and Mrs. Percy was always shaking him by the arm and hissing at him to stop fidgeting. The boy understood. He had realized years ago that he was going to hell. Every week Pastor Harrigan talked about the flames that awaited the unrepentant sinners and, from the looks Mrs. Percy and the other church ladies gave him when he squirmed or dropped the hymnal or yawned, the boy knew he was one of them.
Mrs. Percy was a big, dark, round lady who wore a white hat and a veil to church. She and her son Christopher ran the candy store. Mr. Percy was dead. Christopher only had one leg. He was crippled from the war. Christopher was even meaner than his mother. If you spent too much time looking at the comic books in their spinning rack, he would yell at you to get out and then roll up a newspaper and swat you unless you were quick. But in church he liked to get up and tell the congregation about everything the Lord had done for him. Sometimes he would tell the story of how he got his leg blown off in the war by a mine and should have bled to death but Jesus saved him. The boy thought a mine was a cave where you dug for gold and he couldn’t figure out how a cave could explode. One day after church, Christopher and another man got in a fight about who would be better for the Negroes, Truman or Dewey. The boy’s father had to break them up. Truman was the president. The boy was not sure who Dewey was. For a while the boy was not even sure exactly what a Negro was.
Then he found out, and that was when he started hating Mondays.
After church was Sunday dinner. The boy’s mother would make sausage and eggs and ham and greens and grits and sweet rolls. The family would sit at the dining room table with its pressed white cloth, the boy and his mother and his father and Nana, who was his father’s mother and had the room next to the boy’s. Sometimes they would have guests from the church or out of town. Before dinner his father would say a long prayer. After dinner he would say another long prayer. He was always correcting the boy’s table manners. He liked to say that your manners were your passport to the world. He worked at one of the big hotels down by Yale. All around the neighborhood, people nodded when the boy’s father passed by. Everyone said good morning. No one ever called him by his Christian name. Everyone called him Deacon or Mister. When he took the boy to the soda fountain the man would say, No charge, Deacon. Even Christopher, Mrs. Percy’s mean son, would come out from behind the counter and shake his father’s hand. People were always coming to the house with problems, and the boy’s father would listen and nod and listen and nod until he had the whole story. He would give them advice, and they would say thank you. Days later, on the street, they would come up to him and say it again, Thank you, Deacon. If the boy’s father was on his way home and saw kids acting up, he would tell them to stop and they would do what he said. The boy was secretly proud that his father was so important, and this secret pride was another reason he was sure he was going to hell.
The church was a small brick building on Dixwell Avenue just up from Munson Street. That was how he always heard people describing things, just up from. Their house was just up from the church. The doctor was just up from their house. The school was just up from the doctor. But the stores where his mother liked to shop were down, not up. They were down by Yale. The boy liked to go with her. He would watch her try on dresses and she would smile at him over her shoulder. Sometimes she would stand on the sidewalk and look in the window and say, I sure would love to try that dress, but then she would not go in the store. The boy would ask why and his mother would say, Hush, sweetie pie, don’t worry about it. But the white women would walk right past her and go into the store and come out with big boxes and bags. He asked an older kid at church who told him that some of the stores down by Yale did not serve Negroes.
One afternoon his mother took him downtown to Malley’s to buy shoes. There were lots of department stores on Chapel Street but Malley’s, with its colorful awnings and big picture windows, was his favorite. Today the windows featured a display about the store’s history. The boy looked at the mannequins in their costumes from the olden days. Each diorama moved forward a few years. The styles kept changing. One window said, Bride of Today and Her Attendants. The bride and her attendants were all white. The last window showed the bride and groom boarding a shiny new train on the New Haven line. The groom was white too. The boy stared. His mother told him to stop gawking and hurry up. She thought he was looking at the train.
Children’s shoes were on the second floor, and that was where the birdcage was too. The boy loved the cage. He ran over. The cage was taller than his father. There were parakeets chirping and singing. They jumped and fluttered from branch to branch. A blue one flapped broad-feathered wings and looked at him. The boy looked back. A sign said not to feed the birds. The boy stood there with his nose against the wire, waiting for the parakeets to start talking, but they never did.
The boy wanted red shoes but the man said red was for girls. The man said he should try blue. The boy said no. His mother said his dress shoes were always blue. She said, You love blue. The boy said, I don’t love blue. I hate it. His mother said, God doesn’t want us to hate. You shouldn’t say things like that. So the boy said he was sorry. He tried on the blue and said he liked them. This was a lie but it wouldn’t make any difference because he was going to hell anyway. When they got in line to pay for the shoes, two of the big kids who went to Yale were standing behind them. The big kids who went to Yale all seemed to wear blue scarves or white sweaters with big blue Ys on them. One of the big kids who went to Yale asked the other why the line was taking so long, and the other big kid made a joke about Darktown ladies. At least the boy thought it must be a joke because the first one laughed. But his mother blushed and grabbed the boy’s hand and hurried him out of the store, and that was the day the boy decided that Yale had happened to his mother.
The boy thought his mother was very pretty. She had big brown eyes and smooth brown skin. She loved to play the piano. She loved to dress up. People called her elegant. The boy was not sure what elegant meant but he liked hearing people call his mother that. When his parents went out on Saturday night his father would always wait downstairs in the foyer in a gray suit, and when his mother came down in one of her fancy outfits he would say things like, The most beautiful woman in the world has arrived! or, Look, it’s the Queen of Sheba! Then he would hold out his hand and she would take his arm and they would walk out the door.