As Good as True Read online

  I turned into the alley between Papa’s store and the low brick storefronts he’d built and rented to a barber, a dress shop, a dentist, and a doctor. On a bench outside the barbershop, a man with short white hair peered in my direction. He was Brewster, my father’s employee since I was a girl, but an argument could be made that he was my father’s best friend, the one who sat with him at night and played cards or talked with him about the weather or the news. He knew me, as every person in Mounds did. My father’s store was a meeting place. I acknowledged him, but Brewster did not wave or nod. He looked the other way, and I guessed he knew Elias had been at Mr. Washington’s house last night.

  The hot breeze died when my car halted behind Papa’s store. I got out and the sky above was blue and bright, but storm clouds were forming across the river to the south. In an hour’s time, the river would be choppy, angry with the storm.

  The back door of my father’s store was bolted shut. I knocked and called for him but he did not answer. I looked out over the back field and orchard and walked toward the path, thinking he might have come out, as he liked to do when his fruit trees were in season.

  This was the place I came, my safe ground, where I brought my children for an afternoon. Marina would run and Eli would play with the orchard cats, and together we would step out into the river, the tiny rocks and bits of mussel shells biting at our feet. It was the one place Elias could not hurt me, but this day, being summoned by Papa, I felt exposed.

  I passed the fig tree, and the limbs were heavy with fruit. Hungry from not eating all morning, I pulled a fig, split open the purple skin, and ate. Papa had planted it for my mother when she was expecting twins. In her old country, a woman told her, “Figs for prosperity. Plant a fig as an offering to God.” So Mama badgered him until the spring morning he planted it. Their muffled voices had floated through my open window and woken me. I went to the balcony and watched as the hem of her sky-blue skirt snapped like a sail in the spring wind and the thick silver bracelets on her wrists jangled. He dug and planted the fig. The smell of cool earth drifted up in the morning breeze. Overhead, honking geese made a great V, twenty or thirty, and they curved northward in their spring migration. Her face turned up to watch them, and then her eyes fell on me. How beautiful she looked. “Binti,” she had called to me. “Come help me water the new tree.”

  When I saw no sign of Papa in the garden, I walked around to the front of the store.

  Across the street, the church doors were propped open and a mournful song rolled out. Silhouettes of women in hats and men in their Sunday suits swayed. From the size of the crowd, someone important had died. My father’s friend Brewster was gone from the barbershop bench. I looked up and down the street for signs of him. He would know if Mr. Washington was at work, if he was home, or if he was safe, but Brewster was nowhere to be seen, and I could not go looking for him.

  I opened the door of Papa’s store, the bell above it rang, and I found him standing behind the register. He was a broad-faced man with jowls, and everything about him seemed solid—his face, his body, his mind. Papa no longer worked in the sun, like my brother, so even my skin, tanned from gardening, was darker than his. In his old age, his black hair was gone and his skin had grown pale, and he looked as white as anyone in town. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets and his eyes narrowed. “It’s about time,” he said.

  “The back door was bolted.” My voice was small like a girl’s. I had always felt safe near him, but that day his expression unnerved me. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yes,” he said. He moved around some clutter behind the counter. Cigarette cartons lay torn open, and the penny singles were strewn about.

  “I’m here,” I said. “You said to come immediately.”

  “You know why my store is closed today?” Papa wore a tie. Elias wore one every day, but Papa’s store was less formal, and I thought he must be wearing it because of Elias’s death or because he planned to pay his respects to the people across the street.

  “Because of Elias?”

  “Not because he’s dead.” His voice sounded agitated. “Come with me.” He locked the front door and headed toward the back room. “I need to give you something.” He seemed unsteady and his steps were labored as if pebbles filled his shoes. I wanted to help him, but I worried if I touched him he might reject me.

  The store was no longer the tidy shop of my youth, when Mama baked bread in the brick oven and the warm smell filled the whole building. Now the place smelled of aging produce. Empty crates, waiting to be taken out, stood in the corners. Dust lined the shelves, and they sagged in the middle. Perhaps he could not see it or perhaps he no longer cared.

  We passed the back room where the Oriental rugs were stacked. Across the hall was my mother’s old baking room. He pushed the door to his office and it creaked open. Usually he kept it locked, because he hid money in there. The air was hot and stale in the room. I turned on a fan to move the air and reached for the pole to crank open the high windows, but he said, “No, leave it. The birds will come in.”

  He moved slowly around his cluttered desk and lowered himself into his chair. “Sit,” he said.

  I had been in that room before, whenever he had business with me, like the day I learned of my new responsibilities after Mama died, or the day he finally agreed to my marriage. I thought he would tell me what to do about Mr. Washington. I thought he would have the answers.

  “I know Ivie came to talk to you,” I said. “I know he wants the store. So tell me what you want to say.”

  He stared at me with his lively eyes. “Ever since Elias came sniffing around after you, it’s been nothing but trouble, and nothing to stop him or you.”

  “Abb,” I pleaded, father in Arabic. “Say what you want to say. God knows what Nelly is doing at my house.” I worried Marina might need me. I worried what Ivie was doing.

  “A bunch of men, including your husband and his brother, burned a cross and threatened Washington last night. Everybody in Mounds is torn up about it.”

  “Ivie and Elias?” I could not believe Elias would burn a cross. It was the others with him. “Elias would not do that.”

  He shrugged at that. “You didn’t know?” he asked. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his forehead.

  “No,” I said. “Ivie said they talked to him. He didn’t say anything about burning a cross or a mob.” The talk of ayb, the paper with Orlando Washington’s name, Nelly’s accusations and Ivie’s threats, the thought of Elias pressing down on my chest with his knee—all of it weighed on me.

  “Brewster says they going to boycott me for that mess,” he grumbled under his breath. He was in trouble for what I’d done and what Elias had done in response.

  “Do you know if Mr. Washington is safe now?”

  “Hell.” He grunted and waved his hand as if shooing a fly. “I’m not worried about him. Worried about you.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said, not trusting my own voice.

  “Anna, what I’m telling you, you going to do.” Papa’s English was a mix of Southern speech, both Negro and white, and the quick tempo of his mother tongue. He stared at me and was quiet for a long time. “I know what you did.” The wooden desk creaked as his weight shifted. “You should know better.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.” He had said nothing when I told him I would allow Orlando Washington to deliver my mail, and I had taken his silence as acceptance.

  Papa dug out a canvas bag from his desk. From the drawer, he pulled stacks of fives, tens, twenties, some fifties, and a few hundreds. He hoarded money in the house in cigar boxes and metal tins and under loose floorboards because he did not trust banks. He arranged it on the table and fingered the bills. His breathing had grown strained.

  Disgust covered his face. “Ivie says you messed with the abeed.”

  “You believe that?”

  “No,” he said, “but it don’t matter what I believe.” He wheezed, then broke into a spell o
f coughing. His face reddened with each cough.

  The abeed. The slave. It was his and Elias’s way of saying nigger without saying it. My heart rattled in my chest to hear his words. I had heard him say abeed a thousand times, and it had never bothered me in the same way. Now he was saying it about Orlando Washington.

  “What matters,” he said at last, his voice ravaged, “is what people think, and then, what they do once they think it.” Again he doubled over in a coughing fit. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and spit into it.

  “Papa, you’re not well.”

  His face was crimson. “It’s not me you need to worry about.” He wheezed again. He loosened his collar and tie.

  I thought Papa had understood why I wanted to help Mr. Washington, because Papa came from a world that dealt in factions, where people lived among different groups—Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Druze, and Muslims—in business and on the street. The Europeans and the Arabs mixing. After all his years living in Mounds, I thought Papa saw color the same way, a difference to be tolerated.

  “You let the abeed in your house, with you alone.” He put the money on the table and counted through it.

  The hair on my skin stood up. I had been alone in his store countless times serving his customers, but moving across the tracks had made my being alone with a person of color a problem. “Why are you counting money?”

  “I’m giving you money to leave.” His expression was hard like the wood of the desk.

  “This is craziness. This is Nelly talking.” I stood to walk away, to go back home and cast Nelly out. I would stop at the funeral home and have them keep Elias there. But my legs would not obey. My knees shook like I was caught in a nightmare, and it was all I could do to grip the chair.

  “There will be more talk,” he said.

  “There is already talk.”

  “It’s worse now, and it means trouble for you. If you leave, you’ll have no trouble.”

  “He came in for a glass of water. It was ninety degrees.”

  “You think he took that job for comfort?” Papa asked.

  “He’s Thea’s son.”

  “Do you think Thea would approve how you put him in harm’s way?”

  I had to shake my head and wished again that I had never invited Mr. Washington inside.

  “You better listen to me now if you never did before.” The look on his broad, pale face held the same look of pity as twenty-seven years before when I sat across from him, insisting that I would marry Elias. “Ivie don’t think it’s coincidence Elias came in on Washington and you, and Elias dead the next day.”

  I watched his lips move and understood that I had left the protection of my father twenty-seven years before, and he had none to offer now.

  “Take this.” He dropped the stacks of cash back in the canvas bag. He leaned forward with the money in his outstretched hand. When I did not take it, he moved with forced steps and dropped the bag on my lap. “That’s twenty thousand. It’s enough to buy a house and get you started.” A trickle of sweat rolled off his forehead. He wiped it away with a folded handkerchief.

  “Keep your money, Papa. I’m not going anywhere.” Elias had almost killed me, but I had stood up to him. I would get through this too. I would hold my grandchild; Nelly and her threats wouldn’t stop me. The money sat heavy on my lap. My heart pounded and I wanted fresh air.

  His eyes seemed wet. He had been a good father to me. He began to cough. He braced himself and gripped the desk through another fit of wheezing. “Round here, Anna, you don’t do what you’ve done and just go on like things are normal.” His words were slow and determined, and they had the ring of truth in them. “If Ivie talks to anyone else, they’re bound to go after you, put you in jail.”

  The word bound—I had been bound to Elias, bound to my place, my job. Marina was having her baby, and soon I would hold it. I would not let them take it so easily. I placed the canvas bag in front of him on the desk as if I were serving him a plate of food. “They won’t disgrace themselves.” Shame on me equaled shame on them.

  “Take it. Take it!” He yelled like in his peddling days when growling dogs got in his way. He held the bag of money in my face until I took it. “You have no idea what they will do.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  Papa didn’t answer. He bellowed instead a flurry of words: shame, dishonor, craziness. I could not detect a complete thought, a sentence, any direct statement, but the idea was clear. His face flushed from pale to red. I tried to hush him by waving my hands, as if I were a soldier waving a white flag to surrender. If he went on, he would surely have a stroke. But I could do nothing to stop him.

  I mustered the strength to say, “I’ve got my own. The baby is coming and I won’t go.” I tried to keep my voice cool and stern, forceful. But I had lost control. I was shrieking. “I won’t let them push me out. I’ve got the store. My house. I don’t need your money.”

  “No. No, binti.” His voice broke and I thought I saw tears welling in his eyes. “You got nothing.” His skin went slack and sallow. “You got nothing.”

  The rough canvas bag had raised letters stamped on it, The Bank of Riverton.

  He wiped his eyes and regained control of himself. “I made a deal with Ivie for you. He’ll take your part in Elias’s store. The other half will go to the children. You can stay for the funeral. It won’t look right otherwise. Then you leave and we bury this.”

  “You have no right.” I forgot myself and raised my voice to him. “No right to deal for me. That store belongs to me—my husband.” My mind was working around everything that had happened: meetings between Ivie, my father, Elias. “Marina’s baby,” I said. Mr. Washington had slipped from my thinking. I clung to what I loved. “I’m not going anywhere. This is my home.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Anna.” He hit the desk in frustration. “You are too headstrong.”

  “No,” I said. “Nelly won’t risk it.”

  He shook his head. “I should have moved you across town. If I had done that, you would not have grown up here. You would be better off. I should have built the house I promised Vega.” He had not said her name since shortly after she died. “Vega,” he said again.

  My given name, Vega, the same as Mama’s, and the sound of it was like a long-forgotten song. He said it over and over in a tender voice. The sound of it affected me as if she stood in the room with us. No one had called me Vega since Mama died. After her death, Papa said carrying the name of the dead was bad luck and he changed my name to Anna. He told me, “Vega means the fallen one, like the star that falls from the sky, like your mother.” But superstition was not the reason he changed my name. He could not bring himself to say those two syllables. Her memory pained him too much, and to ease his pain, I never questioned being called Anna, even though the sound Anna broke my heart. I missed Vega, as I missed her. But I gave it up for our heartaches to ease.

  “If you don’t go, Ivie will ruin you.” The red had drained from his face. “He’ll ruin all of us.” His last words were like a death sentence coming down from a judge: “He knows everything.”

  “What?” I was lost in the day, in Elias’s death, in the hope for a grandchild, in Papa’s office, in the danger. “What does Ivie know? That I’ve worked for twenty-seven years in that store, the hell his brother and mother gave me?” Sweat had collected on my temples. “He knows nothing.”

  Papa hung his head. He looked pale and weak and old.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” I held the bag and felt the ridges of money beneath the canvas. There was the house, the store, bank accounts, and money squirreled away. All of it was profit from my toil as well as Elias’s. I would stay and I would have my share. I would have my daughter to myself.

  Papa coughed. When he caught his breath, he cast his eyes upward at the light coming through the window, like he was praying in church. With a closed fist, he rapped the desk with his knuckles—a nervous tic he had when a customer had gone on too long and Papa did n
ot know how to end the conversation. “I’ve bought you three days from Ivie. Get yourself in order. The Nassads want you gone.”

  “What have I done so bad as this, Papa?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. That’s between you and God.” His eyes were cold and golden-brown like the river shallows in winter. Looking into them made me feel like a stone sinking.

  I listened for a trace of love in his voice and looked for a sign of gentleness across his face. My father had never said he loved me. I’d taken it for granted in the past, but he was telling me to go and I was not certain.

  “What harm is there in a man delivering mail?” My knuckles grew white from my grip on the canvas bag. “He is Thea’s son.”

  Papa had watched them, Gus and Orlando, playing by the river, shooting marbles and swimming, throwing rocks at geese. Papa drove to Nashville in the middle of the night to retrieve the boys from the train station after their failed attempt to stow away to the World’s Fair.

  At some point, Aunt Elsa had told my father, “Anna needs to play with white girls,” and then I was no longer allowed to join my brother and Orlando. But no white girls invited me to play at their homes, and no white girl would come to Mounds to play with the motherless daughter of immigrants. No Riverton mother would think of allowing it.

  “Are you going to take their side over mine?” I asked.

  “Ivie said you killed Elias.” Behind his large, square head, the sun radiated and the room floated in heat.

  “You believe that?” My words sounded hollow in my ears. I wondered how they sounded to him.

  “He says you poisoned him.” His voice broke. “I pray you did not.” His temple throbbed. He spoke softly, but his words hit like a hammer at a nail. “If you don’t go, Ivie will tell his story to a judge or a lynch mob. It sounds suspicious—Elias walks in on you, Elias goes to Washington’s house, and that night Elias is dead. No one will believe you.”

  I had been naive to think Elias’s death would free me.