In the swamp

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by William Henry Lewis

I figure my fiancee wants to know why I haven't explained myself. We have just driven south for two days to stand in the back of a funeral home parlor. Cherise has no idea why I wanted to go back to my hometown for a funeral of a man she has never heard me speak of. Our drive back north is quiet as the first changes of fall rush past. Tulip poplars are nearing yellow, and the maple has already gone red. If she asked, I could look along the slopes of the Smoky Mountains and tell her which color belongs to which tree, how long before what's yellow turns orange, when what's red fades to brown. But small talk about autumn isn't going to cut it.

A man I once knew died in Watertown. Last minute drive to a place I haven't been in 10 years, because that's what I had to do. She wanted to come, to be with me, she said. Calvin Powell is dead and buried now, and until five days ago, Cherise never knew he existed. So, this Cal, she would ask if I explained more than I have already, what was up with him? There is so much of Watertown I try not to think about--less that I want to share--but, just now, as I look at Cherise, I see that she knows less of me than she would like.

Until six days ago, as far as I was concerned, Cal Powell didn't exist. I was at work when a high school friend I haven't thought of in years called to say Cal's heart gave out while he was driving someplace. I looked out my office window to the flat, gray wall of Boston sky and said his name: Calvin Powell, the same way I catch myself in the middle of meetings, mumbling the names of rivers--Suck Creek, Chattahoochie, Nantahala--because if you pass years without speaking a name, you can come to think that maybe there was nothing to that name. Calvin Delrose Powell. The bass of it was thick in the back of my mouth. I said it again and again--Calvin Delrose Powell--and he was dead, then alive for a moment, and then dead.

I don't know what I will tell Cherise, but I pull the car to the side of the road. She isn't surprised by the stop and her shoulders relax into the seat. The sun glows on the cinnamon-brown of her face and though her jaw is slack with calm, her eyes shift from the road to the fields, to the sky, to her hands. It's her way of looking irritated. Her hair is cut short, and she looks like the proudfaced child I have seen in photographs on her parent's mantle. A few strands hide those eyes, looking at everything but me. She is waiting to hear what I have to say. It's damn time I started explaining what she doesn't know, why this quick drive south, why I did not make an effort to speak to anyone, why no one spoke to us, why I have said very little to her in three days.

"I'm not going to get into all of it now," I tell her, "it would take more than a few day's drive for that. Sometimes you have to see something laid to rest. That's why I went to see Cal put in the ground. Let some things settle for good." And I want to say more, but I pause, thinking of what to include in the story I might tell her.

Cherise came up in a house where her parents talk through their problems and enjoy recounting the stories of their past--what was embarrasing is made endearing, what was painful, they romanticize their having endured it. Though she has never said it, I know she feels she and I should share in everything. After all, we are getting married, someday. We are engaged, without a wedding day in mind. This should be the time when we grow together, and yet this is where I am stuck: not in loving her and that proud-girl beauty of hers, but in what I share of myself. What to tell, what to remember, what not to tell. I didn't come up like she did.

If I tell her anything more than what I have, I will tell her about when I was 17, when Cal was foreman for my summer job at Weyerhardt Steel and I was spending more hours out of my house than in. We lived just outside town, where 15 years' of my mother's savings as a cleaning woman secured two acres and a two-story, three-bedroom house. It was just my mother and me, and had been like that for as long as I could remember. I never knew my father, and though I'd get the questions about where my Daddy was, I was never bothered by who or where that man was. If asked, I would answer that he lived in Memphis, and that was as far as I went with it.

Other than the folks we saw at church and the neighbors Momma traded across-the-fence pleasantries with, I never knew Momma to have friends. For some reason, what friends I had never came by the house. It did not seem like the thing to do. Momma was always startled by neighbors who dropped by unannounced. Her voice would be pleasant and measured as she served them sweet tea, but her tone was never welcoming.

When I was much younger, Momma would take me when she cleaned other people's homes rather than leave me with a sitter. If it was warm out, she would sit me on a porch or in a backyard with crayons and paper. She had a portable radio and she would set it where I could hear it while she cleaned inside. If it was cold, she would set me up in a kitchen, same crayons, paper and radio. Every once in a while, she would come to check on me, a look through the door, or call from the top of some stairs, but never a touch on the head, or a moment to take up a crayon to add to what planes, bears, and racing cars I had doodled.