But there was a holiday the day after Jolly Horner died. No one went to the plantation fields on that day. No one went to the farms or into the rich white people’s homes to work.
Jolly wasn’t meant to die, and Negroes from all over the county came out to say it. The night before, men went to Wyles’s barn. They slaughtered his spotted pig and crushed his mare’s skull.
And nobody ever found those killers, because when the white men came down into darktown the next day they found a funeral vigil with over a thousand people lining the road.
Jolly had friends everywhere. People loved him because of his strength and his loud, big-toothed laugh. You could hear Jolly laugh day or night because he didn’t get tired.
A thousand men and women came out to tell Jolly ’bye. But they also came out to tell God something, that’s what Soupspoon thought. The black population of the whole county came out to say that they would bear witness to the innocent death of a good man. A right man.
Soupspoon found himself crying at the back of the church, but he wasn’t sure who it was that he cried for.
He got home by three and put water on for tea. He took two extra pills, because his hip bothered him that day. There wasn’t a thing he could do to help that poor dead boy but at least he could do something about the pain.
When Kiki got home Soupspoon was sprawled out on the bed snoring. His shoes were in the middle of the floor and the dry sharp smell of burnt tin was in the air.
“What in the hell is this!” she shouted, flinging the hot pan against the wall over his head. Soupspoon rose out of his drugged sleep and peered at the wild woman.
She snatched his shoes up from the floor.
“You think this is some kind of pigsty?” She stomped across the room and hurled the shoes right through the windowpane. “This ain’t no goddamn cat box!”
“I’m sorry, honey,” Soup said softly. He tapped his toe on the floor as if, in his music mind, he were trying to slow down the beat, to bring them into harmony.
“You’re sorry?”
Kiki moved with fast clipping steps from the shattered window to the bed.
“You’re fuckin’ sorry all right!” she shouted. The next thing Kiki felt was a sharp pain that ran from her fist up her right arm. Soupspoon grunted and fell sideways from the impact of the blow.
“Sorry?” tore from Kiki’s lips. She swung with her left fist, hooking Soupspoon in the eye.
“Shit!” he yelled, putting his hands up around his face.
“Goddamn, goddamn...” Kiki kept hollering. With each syllable she punched or slapped until there was no more breath for either and she fell down on top of Soupspoon, putting her arms around him in a tight embrace.
Later Kiki went out to buy ground sirloin, canned collard greens, and lemon pie. She made ice packs for Soupspoon’s swollen eye and asked every few minutes, “You all right, Atwater? You okay, honey?”
He met those questions with shrugs and grunts until she’d been brought to tears five times. Finally he said, “Don’t worry ’bout it, honey. You a good girl. You done good by me. It’s just all’a this havin’ somebody stay wit’ you in such a small place is too much. I’ma get myself together after this last few days’a treatment and move on.”
“You don’t have to go, Soup.”
“Me stayin’ here an’ livin’ off you ain’t right, Kiki. An’ I need my own place.”
“But how can you pay for it? You don’t have money.”
“I can work. I might be past sixty-five, but somebody needs a sweeper or counterman. ’Cause if you can’t work then you dead already.”
“You can stay with me as long as you want,” Kiki said.
Eight
They sat next to each other on the couch for over an hour without talking. Soupspoon took an old address book out of his guitar case and flipped through the pages, mumbling and musing over what he saw. Kiki slouched down next to him looking miserable.
“Why’ont you go over an’ watch TV?” Soupspoon asked to show that he was over being mad.
“Don’t wanna,”
Soupspoon had put down the address book and was now rubbing his guitar with an oversized white handkerchief. He watched the young woman sulking and shook his head.
“Why’d you hit me, girl?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think it’s right to hit somebody when you mad? You think that’s gonna teach’em sumpin’?”
Kiki glowered and shifted her position — a petulant child.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.
“But you did.”
“No I didn’t.”
“You did hurt me an’ you did mean it. An’ you know I ain’t done nuthin’ to hurt you.”
“You coulda burnt down the house!” she blurted out. “We coulda been killed!”
Soupspoon put his hand on her thigh and said softly, “But you saved us, honey. You saved everybody.”
A free-roaming twitch moved around Kiki’s body. First in her shoulder, from there to her foot. Her cheek jumped twice and then her stomach contracted, forcing her into a half-bow.
“I set my house on fire once,” she said.
“You did?”
Kiki stared ahead, her assent more in her posture than in any gesture she made.
“Anybody die?”
Kiki seemed to enjoy the question. She smiled, then grinned. “No,” she said. “Nobody died. They didn’t even know that it happened. I lit a match in the basement and threw it in a trash can full of papers. Then I went back upstairs and waited for the house to burn down but I guess that it fizzled out.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight.”
All the anger and sadness was gone from her. She went back to her bed and turned on the Johnny Carson show.
Soupspoon took out his address book again and murmured over the scrawled names as if he were praying in a foreign language.
“Kiki?”
“Yeah, Soup?”
“You wanna lend me some money?”
“Sure. What for?”
“T’buy me a tape recorder.”
It was late. Kiki was propped up at the head of her bed with a water glass and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s at her side. The TV light played over her head, across the blank wall.
“What you need a tape recorder for?” Kiki asked out of a blue-gray haze of cigarette smoke.
“What that doctor say to you?”
“Which one?”
“Dr. MacDuff. What she say to you when you went down there?”
The television ran long flickering shadows across Kiki’s face, but the sound was turned low. “She said that you were in remission — mostly. And that if you went in for checkups and stuff that you’d be okay.”
“That all? That all she told you?”
“Well...” Weak laughter rose up from the TV and then a drumroll. “...You know doctors, they always got to say some things, but it’s not because it’s so.”
“What things?”
Kiki’s eyes, trying to be innocent, opened wide, making her, in that ghostly light, resemble the zombies that the old folks told about to scare children and keep them home at night.
Soupspoon had come to like this girl all over again. She had some kind of anger built up inside of her. That’s why she hit him. But even those blows had come from her crazy kind of love. It was that same craziness that made her take him in.
Now she wanted to keep quiet so as not to scare him with what the doctor might have said.
“What things?” Soupspoon asked again.
“Well... they always say, even if it isn’t true, that if you got even a little bit of cancer then you might only live for five years.”