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Excerpt
Chapter
One
"Had
the brass-face to come round me playing the Sodom and Gomorrah
music!"
The
old woman they said was his great-grandmother stood eyeing him from
behind the locked iron gate to the basement of her house. She had
ordered that he be brought to see her as soon as he arrived, if
not the same day, then the one following. In either case, he was
to visit her first, she'd said, before any of the other relatives,
and certainly before "the old-miss-young" across the street at No.
258 Macon. And the visit was to last a full hour. She had insisted
on that also.
Yet
minutes had passed and she had made no move to open the gate and
let him in. Nor had she spoken as yet, even though Hattie who had
brought him over for the visit and was standing waiting behind him
had politely greeted the woman and introduced him when she answered
the bell.
"Hello,
Mrs. Payne, it's Hattie," she'd said. "Hattie Carmichael? You might
not recognize me it's been so long, so many years...And this is
Sonny. His name's Sonny."
Not
a word. Her rheumy, clouded-over eyes immediately latching onto
his face, the woman hadn't said a word. Nor had she so much as glanced
at Hattie.
He
waited, puzzled, Hattie behind him, her height and bulk shielding
him from the wind that had followed them into the bare front yard
of the house. A late March wind that was behaving as if it were
still the depths of winter. On the way over, it had buffeted them
past the houses lining either side of the long street. They were
row houses the like of which he had never seen before, all of them
four stories tall under lowering, beetle-browed cornices, all of
them hewn out of a dark, somber reddish-brown stone, and all with
high stoops of a dozen or more steps slanting sharply down from
the second story to the yard. Because of the raised, high-stepping
stoops, the brown uniform houses made him think of an army goosestepping
toward an enemy that was a mirror image of itself across the street.
Then
there was the heavy wrought-iron basement gate under the side of
each stoop, identical to the one rearing up just inches from his
face. A dungeon gate with arrowhead bars like spears. He liked it.
Liked also the marching houses. Castles. Something about them reminded
him of the castles and fortresses he was good at drawing.
The
woman he'd been told was his great-grandmother continued her silent
scrutiny of him. For his part, he had already noted as much of her
as he cared to, from the battered old-lady hat on top of her uncombed
hair down to the none-too-clean housedress to be glimpsed under
a long, shapeless cardigan that was as heavy as a coat hanging on
her tall bony frame.
The
few buttons left on the sweater were all in the wrong holes and
there were food stains on it as well as on the dress.
Like
a two-year-old, he thought, who didn't know how to dress or feed
itself good.
Worse,
there was her hand. You're not to stare Hattie was always admonishing
him. This time he couldn't help it. There was nothing wrong with
the woman's right hand. That was okay. But behind the tall bars
of the gate, her left hand kept up a trembly dance at her side.
Did
he really want someone like her for a relative?
"Is
something wrong, Mrs. Payne?" Hattie's voice at his back. "Have
you changed your mind? Should I maybe bring him back another day?"
A
cut-eye. The woman finally acknowledged Hattie's presence with a
single venomous cut-eye and returned her gaze to his face.
It
came to Sonny then: the gate wouldn't open, the visit would not
take place, so long as Hattie stood drawn up behind him as if waiting
to barge into the house the moment he was admitted. She was not,
it had been agreed, to be part of the visit. The man who had met
them at the airport two days ago and driven them in his big, fast
car to this strange place called Brooklyn --- his great-uncle Edgar
the man had called himself --- had prevailed upon Hattie to let
him visit the woman alone.
That's
another thing the great-grandmother woman had insisted on. He was
to be alone with her. Not even the man, who was her son, was to
be present.
"You
don't mind, do you?" the man had asked him. "A big boy like you."
"No,"
he had lied.
"I
warn you, she's old and acts a little odd at times, but you're not
to let it bother you. After all, she's family and blood."
"There're
all kinds of family and blood's got nothing to do with it!" Hattie.
She
had sounded to Sonny as if ready to take him and herself right back
home on the plane that had brought them.
The
man had hastily agreed with her.
Now
she was saying to the woman, and she was no longer being polite,
"All right, Mrs. Payne, I get the message. I'm leaving. But I'll
be back for him in an hour, if not before. He's to meet his other
great-grandmother this morning too, y'know. She's got as much right
to him as anybody else around here!"
Then,
bending down to hug him from behind, Hattie repeated the instructions
she'd given him earlier: if there was a problem or he didn't like
it or if anything happened to upset or frighten him he was to phone
her and she'd come get him right away.
To
prevent the woman from understanding, she had switched from English
to French. Or what with Hattie passed for French. Terrible. Sonny
hadn't realized just how terrible was the scrambled, make-do French
she spoke until he started school.
Did
he have the slip of paper with the number where they were staying
in his pocket?
"Oui,"
he said; and deeply offended by the cutting look she'd been dealt,
Hattie, his fathermothersisterbrother and all the "kin" he'd ever
known, was gone.
The
moment she turned out of the yard, the woman unlocked the dungeon
gate.
It
took her a while because of the trembly hand.
Excerpted
from THE FISHER KING (c) Copyright 2000 by Paule Marshall . Reprinted
with permission from Scribner. All rights reserved.
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