Chapter Thirteen

Franklin was the serious one, his brother, several shades less serious. Edwin was the class clown, the man’s man who could crack a beer as quickly as he could crack a joke. Franklin was the quiet one in the corner, clutching his Bible.

“Well, hey there, Mr. Holier than thou,” Edwin said as the two of them walked together towards Franklin’s Oldsmobile. It was a pet name, a term of endearment for all the times Franklin chose his Bible over standing outside in a stream of smoke with his brother during break time. It crushed all the soft parts of him. Couldn’t Edwin feel it on him—the desire to be normal, like everyone else?

More often than not, Franklin read it with red-rimmed eyelids, tired from staying up late, reading it the night before. He’d comb over the same line three times in a row, skip a few verses and then begin again, taking the last line of a paragraph first and then reading it backwards. He was sure there was something secret there he just hadn’t cracked yet. But who held the secret? He didn’t know. Jacob and his twelve sons? Moses and his burning bush? Jonah resting woefully in the belly of his whale?

There were answers that were deliberately hiding from him. 

Oh God, why did Anette have to die? 

He never got a response. Not the night she passed that he spent outside trying to find her in the stars and not yesterday evening when he did the same thing—the old, familiar panic setting in as he remembered seeing her face again was not an option.   

He had so much love for her and so much hate too. The bitterness would eat him alive if his anxiety didn’t.

He hopped into the driver’s seat while Edwin popped into the back. It started a few years back when Franklin had saved up enough to buy the car, and Edwin had just lost his license. Anette was in rare form, spending two to three days at a time away instead of her typical Saturday no-show. The car was a necessity he told himself, a practical way to get their son safely to school. But Edwin smelled something else on him.

“Looks like somebody’s got a point to prove,” Edwin had said when Franklin was kind enough to pick him up from the drunk tank. 

Now his brother sat like a king in the back, hands clasped behind his head.

“White girl looked pretty upset today,” he said. Franklin had given up on correcting him.

“Oh?” He had managed to avoid Whitney the rest of the day, shuffling out early and praying Edwin was in his wake. He didn’t know what had gotten into him. Why was he sharing these little shards of glass that tore him up, inside out? How cruel of him to share it with the poor girl who loved his son so violently that Franklin was scared of her. He had always wanted to do that too—love his son like she did, like Anette did. But all the words Franklin read forward and backwards in his leather-bound book seemed to always lodge deep within his head and never his heart.

“Boohooing and whatnot. Saw her coming out of the ladies. Your son up to his no-good tricks?” Edwin asked. Edwin always depicted Jamal as some sort of lothario—a man with romance on his mind just because he could draw a picture. Franklin thanked Yahweh that Edwin didn’t know the truth because Edwin would have sharpened it and stuck it under Franklin’s jaw.

“Nah. He’s a good boy. He’s half Anette, remember?” Franklin avoided looking into the rearview mirror. To Edwin—to everyone—Anette was a saint. It was mostly due to Franklin’s efforts in creating the wife he had always wanted. His parents were perfect people in a very imperfect world. They still lived in Elaine in the house right next to Pilgrim Guide Baptist. Before Anette had passed, he’d often take his family down there, Franklin watching with one eye the way his parents loved each other with soft words and soft touches and the way his wife acted as if she’d been chained down inside somebody’s dirty basement. His bird-heart would set off, battling its wings against his ribs as his mother tried to catch his eye, but he’d never let her. The woman had lived too long not to know heartache when she saw it.

His parents were both survivors of the Elaine massacre or just “the massacre” as the locals called it. It was a brutal event that had taken his grandfather with its evil claws. His father was three at the time. When he had his mother explain it to him because his father’s face would never play ball, she talked about the sharecropping first. What an odd thing to start with, Franklin thought, his eleven-year-old self seated on their salmon-colored sofa next to his brother who was picking a scab on his foot. 

“It started ‘cause they be taking what was ours,” his mother said. Their house was so small, it felt like the three of them might just burst out of it. But Franklin loved the feeling because the closer he felt to his parents, the less the ugly past had rights to his thoughts.

She went on and told him how hundreds were killed. “But that’s the thing. They didn’t say hundreds. They said less, like twenty, fifty. But there were so many that died.” Her parents had died too. But his mother always had a steely resolve, an “it is what it is” type attitude that his father had never taken on for himself. His wound was as red and salted as the day he received it.

The white men were keeping the black families poor. They wouldn’t give them what they were owed for the cotton they picked, and would you believe the chaos that comes when people actually stand up for themselves?

“All they did was organize. But the white man don’t like a union he can’t benefit from, I guess.” Her eyes went darker than usual, so Franklin changed the subject. He’d ask again and again, picking up pieces to the middle and ending of the story. The ending was the worst part. In the end, it wasn’t even about the men who congregated at a church to talk about negotiating their fair pay. In the end, it was about white men with guns killing everyone in sight.

“The women and the children too,” his mother said. But she would never say how she survived or how his father had either. The proof was evident. There they all were in their tiny little house, breathing.

Older, even more to the point, his mother graciously welcomed his wife. But her eyes were always on Anette as she sat tightly knitted together on the salmon-pink couch.

If only his mother had known.

In the back of the Oldsmobile, Edwin stretched and yawned, his white teeth set wide. Franklin loved his brother because he loved his parents. But there was something strange inside him that Franklin always kept tripping over. “Jealousy,” Anette had said once when Franklin was musing aloud, and she walked right through his hovering thoughts.

“Jealous? Of me?”

“Because you have me. He’s got Dolores. No competition.” She slinked next to him on the bed, cradling his head and kissing him straight on the mouth. His first thought was to struggle, which he shamefully batted away. He loved her so much, but he knew what she did when she wasn’t around. He couldn’t ignore the truth that had become a noisy bedfellow. He moved his head away.

“Typical Frank,” she sang, sauntering to the dresser to reapply her lipstick. “I kissed Baby. Tell him goodnight again for me. I’ll be back. If not, well.” She didn’t even hide it anymore, and he had stopped asking where she went. He nodded his head at her, trying not to think of his parents. Trying to not think of everyone who had died before he was born.

“A saint,” Edwin said, referring to Anette. He would have made some off-the-cuff remark about her looks if she were alive. But even Edwin had some respect.

Franklin parked the car at the curb in front of his brother’s house. Edwin hardly ever asked him to come inside, which was just fine with Franklin. He had long passed trying to connect with his sister-in-law who seemed like a lost little duckling. Without Anette around, she had forgotten to brush her hair or put on lipstick and found a solid thirty pounds sitting on the couch, watching her soaps. Edwin didn’t really seem to mind, since he spent his nights out at the bar anyways. But Franklin couldn’t help feeling sad for Douglas, their eight-year-old son, whose eyes were staring at them through the living room window.

“He doing okay?” Franklin asked, his chin nodding at Douglas.

“Dougie? Why wouldn’t he be? He’s still a kid. Don’t even know what disappointment tastes like yet.” Edwin moved to get out of the car but stopped heavy in his seat. “If there’s trouble in paradise for them two, you need to nip it in the bud now or Jamal will never see his son again. Can’t trust them white women,” Edwin said, seemingly recalling his own experiences.

“They’re just fine,” Franklin said. He waved off his brother who was swaying towards his house with the sweet anticipation of happy hour. Franklin looked up again and caught his nephew’s eyes.