It’s dangerous, she said. You don’t know these people. What they can do.
He felt both stymied by and grateful for this rare maternal outburst. In advance of the visit, he noticed that she began making concerted efforts to appear more presentable, especially since they didn’t know when their visits would happen; she started borrowing a comb from Michelle and bartering with Jackie for dabs of hair relaxer and conditioner here and there, despite the rise in her debt. She did her nails, moisturized her legs, and at the depot bought a somewhat tight secondhand shirt that she kept special for the visit and did not wear in the fields; in collegiate lettering across the front it said OHIO STATE.
When Jackie ushered Eddie and Darlene out of the barracks to Sextus’s idling Ford pickup, the first thing Eddie did was confess that his mother had insisted on coming with him.
As they approached the driver’s side, Sextus exclaimed, You some kinda mama’s boy, eh?
Sextus’s mocking tone made Eddie halt in the rocky dust.
No, he replied.
Darlene smiled at the boss without opening her mouth. She slapped Eddie on the shoulder. Yes, she said.
I thought you was too old for that.
Yes, sir, but—
Sextus laughed again in that way that made Eddie feel as if everybody else was in on the same joke. Or the same lie. The big boss’s eyes traveled down to Darlene’s boots and back up; he kicked the passenger-side door open with his right foot and said, Ohio State! very loudly, with exaggerated articulation.
Eddie had never seen anything as spectacular as Summerton. The place had a grandeur that went deep beneath the surface—not a showy type of class, but an elegance so lived-in that it didn’t need to prove anything; the tarnished beauty of an important historic monument, say, like an early president’s home where they hadn’t replaced the silver since the great man was alive, but they polished it every afternoon.
It looks like the house on the nickel, Eddie said as the pickup trundled down the dirt toward the mansion.
Who gave you a nickel? Sextus asked. He seemed immediately to intuit Eddie’s fascination with the place, and after he jumped out of the truck and checked with the gardener to make sure that they wouldn’t cross paths with Elmunda, his unhealthy wife, they walked around the building and entered through the kitchen. Sextus gripped the spot between Eddie’s neck and shoulder a little too hard and leaned down to his right ear, promising at least a partial tour. The one rule is, don’t touch a goddamn thing lessen I say, he whispered. Then he raised his voice. That goes for your mama too!
Inside, the temperature dropped and the air became faintly damp, which helped give the place its historical mood. The sheer number and disorganization of the heirlooms filling the various spaces hinted at how the Fusiliers’ wealth and influence spiraled far back beyond the memory of anybody alive. In the parlor, dozens of brown photographs of groups of white men with mustaches holding shotguns shared chunky mahogany tables with portraits and cameos of immaculately dressed white Southern ladies, and mixed in with those were groups of more modern photos—a cube of Kodachromes showing white kids at a swimming hole; metal frames surrounding snapshots of Elmunda and an extravagant wedding photo taken during some outsize ball, with Sextus and Elmunda gently directing forkfuls of yellow cake into each other’s mouths. All of these artifacts sprawled haphazardly over faded tapestries and complicated wings of lace.
The library housed an uncountable number of identical dusty leather-bound volumes that looked as if no one had touched them since they arrived at the house, in 1837 or whenever, and a disintegrating old-fashioned globe on which somebody appeared to Eddie to have drawn by hand the right half of America, given up after Louisiana, and started scribbling. The bathtubs had claws on their feet; Eddie imagined them breaking into a lumbering, confused run if anybody had the audacity to scald them with hot water. Darlene hesitated in the bathroom and ran both her hands slowly across the porcelain with a look of ecstasy on her face.
Some of the fixtures didn’t seem quite as old as the others, and one room remained empty except for several large pieces of canvas spread out on the floor, a few cans, and some trays crusted with dry paint. The room had an unfinished coat of pink paint all over the walls. Sextus explained that they were in the process of very gradually renovating Summerton, and that they were expecting a child (both of which were reasons why Elmunda would have had a conniption if she’d heard about the tour). She ain’t well, he explained. She had a progressive intestinal disease, but she read somewhere that she could still have a child, and had insisted on doing so before she lost the ability. It’s gonna be a boy, Sextus said, and when Eddie asked how they knew, he explained that the doctor had told them, they had this new way of finding out.
It’s called sonofa-something, he said. They grease up your wife, point a magic wand at her belly, and then tell you where your boy’s going to college. But I already started painting the room pink because before the medical thing, Elmunda made me dangle her wedding ring over her belly and it went in a circular motion and that means a girl. She also said she had a hankering for sweets. Goes to show you! But I ain’t finna repaint nothing I done painted already. Hell, I don’t even care if pink walls make him a queer.