Eddie’s parents always gave him the sense that they were doing important, possibly risky work. They drew emergency plans for him on the blank pages at the back of his coloring books. They forbade him to trust strangers. Phone calls sometimes came at odd hours, and he would hear his mother panicking, his father rising in the night to secure the doors and windows. Not only did his father keep a shotgun locked behind the counter at the store, he taught his wife how to use it.
But one morning, not long before he turned six, Eddie awoke to find that his father hadn’t come home. He fixated on Darlene as she spoke into the phone, her face pinched with fear and anger, paying him no mind, one fingernail scraping at the corner of a corkboard stuck to the refrigerator, dislodging the brown flakes as her calls to neighbors went unanswered and she grew frantic. Her determination and pessimism came out in tiny fragments: I just know! Lord, how could you let it? Please don’t let him be.
Ma, let’s go to the store and see if he’s there, Eddie insisted.
I called, she said. He didn’t pick up.
Maybe the phone is not working.
Maybe, she responded. Maybe…
Darlene turned her attention back to making phone calls and remained focused on that activity even when Eddie stomped on the floor in front of her and insisted. She wouldn’t leave the house or let him go out by himself. Eventually she agreed to let him go down the street to a friend’s house while she watched from a window.
In the early afternoon, just after Eddie came back, several policemen strode into the house. They’d never come inside on earlier visits, and they seemed to want to say serious things; Eddie knew because they removed their hats. White men nearly as tall as his father crowded around the kitchen table; it was a novelty to have white people in this small space, let alone these authoritative, beefy guys with their safety-goggle glasses, short, cornhusk-colored hair, and tight speech. His mother, who enforced hospitality under all circumstances, offered them coffee and warmed biscuits for them as if they paid house calls every day and insisted that they sit. He hoped a couple of them might be astronauts. When they started talking about identifying something they called it and the body, he did not recognize at first that they meant his father. His mother registered shock, and after a few moments, she collapsed into her own arms, fell to her knees beside the table, and, following an uncomfortable pause, ran outside to the clothesline, where she dashed between the ropes, yanking the laundry down and hollering something that did not sound like language. The men were still talking, to one another now.
After the screen door banged shut, Eddie went to the doorjamb and watched Darlene’s path. He couldn’t see behind the sheets, but he followed the clothespins with his eyes as they snapped and flew off in all directions. Soon the policemen came to the door behind him and stood solemnly, heads bowed the way they might do while saying grace, and his mother tumbled from behind a fitted sheet, clutching a pair of his father’s dungarees, embracing them as if his legs were still in them, smearing them against her face, stifling her cries, dampening the fabric with tears. Eddie ran out to her, but she didn’t seem to see him through her grief.
Days later, something like a party followed. All his relatives had been invited except his father. When he asked his aunt Bethella why they had forgotten to invite him, she thwacked him sharply on the behind, glared, and raised her index finger to a point between his eyes, the way a robber might hold a switchblade.
Don’t you ever, she said. Ever!
His mother, uncommonly silent and numb, in a pillbox hat, her face veiled, dressed him in a black jacket and itchy pants from the local thrift store and held his hand in the front row of the church as everybody sang and wept before a shiny oblong box draped in flowers that people now said contained his father. How did they know? Nobody could see inside.
Later Eddie stood perspiring in his jacket but not daring to remove it as they lowered the box they claimed contained his father into a hill, and men shoveled dirt on top of it. When would they stop the circus act and let Daddy out of that thing? He had read picture books about Harry Houdini. Maybe he’d tell them, he thought. But he had started learning not to say the majority of what he thought.
In the rainy days that followed, seemingly related to the events of his life, he would beg his mother to go visit the hill and bring extra umbrellas. We can’t let Daddy get wet, he’d protest.
Friends came to the house, shaking their heads and saying, Mph, mph, mph. Well, you know if he’d a been white they’d have a suspect by now.
Over time, Eddie came to understand the part of dead that means never. That is to say, the whole thing. Never coming back, never going to swing you upside down, never taking you to school, never giving you presents, never coming to the holidays. But the finality of it didn’t upset him the way it should have. For the most part he didn’t believe it, so he tried to turn never into someday with the usual tools: ideas he heard in hymns, tinglings he felt while soloists cried during Sunday services at Ebenezer Baptist. Notions of angels, of heaven. Of ancestors gazing down, pride and anger wrinkling their foreheads. Of the sun and wind tickling the tassels of ripe corn in a wide field. Of pious deeds and of Jesus Christ levitating above an empty cave.
In contrast, his mother started to demand something impossible, maybe indescribable, something he didn’t understand until much later—she needed for time to reverse itself. Gradually her posture slumped, her chest became heavier. She stopped having anybody over, she rarely called anyone, the phone didn’t ring anymore, she became quiet and unresponsive, her moods enveloped her.