Disgruntled: A Novel Page 19

  “Maybe you…” her mother began.

  “Maybe what? I wanted him to rape me?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you never liked Teddy. He’s so different from your father. And something like this wouldn’t really hurt you, but it would be just enough, you know—”

  Then abruptly, Sheila began crying. “What am I doing?” she wailed. “I just don’t even know what I’m doing.”

  “Mom,” said Kenya, her throat bubbling with rage. Maybe this was worse than her calmness. “Mom,” she said again, sharply.

  Sheila’s crying quickly dwindled to sniffles. “Kenya, I’m really sorry if something like that almost happened to you all those years ago. But maybe this is something we should talk about when you get home.”

  “Are you going to tell Teddy? Because he’ll just—”

  “Kenya—let me deal with Teddy. Will you do that, please? And now you need to listen to me. I called because I had to tell you something.”

  There followed a series of words that Kenya was unable to reassemble later in their proper order: lawyers, Teddy, savings, lawsuits, bankrupt. Then Sheila said, “We’re broke.”

  “Who is we?” asked Kenya, now sweating.

  “You, me, and Teddy.”

  “You’re still with Teddy?”

  Sheila said nothing.

  “Okay,” said Kenya.

  Her mother continued. She had called the college. She’d talked to Financial Aid and they’d done what they could, but it wasn’t enough—even if she sold the house, which was all they had left and stood to lose in court.

  “Didn’t you tell me that there was a little left over from Grandmama for college? Something?”

  “We…” began Sheila. “I…” she said. “It’s gone, okay? I’m sorry.”

  What she had called to tell her was this: that Kenya was welcome to come back home and get a job, but she was on her own for school. She might want to ask Johnbrown about it.

  * * *

  The house was burning!

  Without climbing down the ladder Kenya was somehow on the floor and running through thick smoke. The front door was wide-open, but a burning beam fell in her path. They were all outside, but only Amandla was screaming her name. She tried to run back in, but Johnbrown gestured for her calmly to come through. You won’t feel it, he said.

  She started it! Cindalou screamed, pointing at Kenya. She started it!

  And so she had.

  * * *

  Kenya fought her way up through layers of sleep at the sound of knocking. Finally she screwed her eyes open to gray light. “Yes?” she said in a crisp voice, as if she’d been awake for hours.

  Her father cracked the door and said something about going to milk Rosie. Kenya remembered that it was time to shadow him. Neither Sharon nor Cindalou had woken her for the milking, and of course Kenya had not pressed the issue.

  “You could sleep a little more if you want.”

  “No, I want to do it,” Kenya said. “Just let me … I need to…”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” said Johnbrown.

  It was absurd, Kenya knew, the idea that diligent farmhanding might help her father decide to send her to college. She didn’t even know if he had the money. Sure, they’d renovated this big house and they owned land. But the children wore JCPenney store brands and the house was in the middle of nowhere. Kenya lowered herself down from the loft and tossed on the holey T-shirt and jeans that had become her work clothes. She usually wore an old pair of Cindalou’s boots for going out to the chicken coop or the barn.

  Her father sat in the kitchen, reading The New Yorker and nursing a mug. “Do you drink coffee?” he asked. “I used to hate the stuff till farm life.”

  Sheila had always been a coffee drinker. But she’d never let Kenya have any, claiming that caffeine made children’s hearts jump out of their chests. When Kenya was in tenth grade, she had countered that some of the Barrett girls had been drinking it since eighth, and Sheila had retorted that they had probably been snorting cocaine since then as well and did Kenya want to do that, too?

  “I’ll try some,” she told Johnbrown.

  It was vile and muddy tasting, even with sugar, but she drank it anyway. And some fifteen minutes later, her armpits were soaked, her pulse racing, and she was already thinking hopefully about tomorrow. Would there be another offer of coffee?

  Out in the damp, chilly barn, Kenya jiggled her foot on the dirt floor. No, she confessed, feigning shame, neither Cindalou nor Sharon had shown her how to do this. She tried to listen to him explain the protocol for touching a cow. She looked at Rosie’s bored eyes. Was she generous, or just too oppressed to care? There were flies everywhere; one balanced on Rosie’s eyelash.

  Kenya had formed an elaborate plan about the winding conversation she would initiate this morning. It would gradually present the case for why Johnbrown should pay for her to go to college without mentioning that this was the only way she could go. It would be the beginning of a stealth campaign that would continue for several days, the rest of her time shadowing him. Then she’d wait for his offer. If he cared about her at all, which she thought he did, she would never even have to ask.

  “I need you to pay for me to go to college,” she blurted as soon as Johnbrown had finished his explanation and was gloved and seated at Rosie’s full udders, in demonstration mode.

  “What?” he said without pausing. Milk splashed in the pail. His new biceps bulged.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to just—I guess I need to talk to you,” said Kenya.

  “Well now, I don’t ask anyone to stand on ceremony. But that’s quite a request to make before seven a.m.”

  “I’m so sorry. It’s the coffee. It’s like that stuff they use in the spy movies—”

  “Sodium pentothal?” Johnbrown laughed. “This watery crap I make? I hope you’re better with your liquor. Seems like you might be a bit of a lightweight, like your old baba.”

  He wasn’t answering her question about paying for college. “Why don’t we get everything squared away with Rosie and then talk about this other thing?” he asked. “Give her a squeeze.”

  The sun had seemed unimaginable when Kenya and Johnbrown had set out for the barn. A few hours later, it was near full July blaze as they filled baskets with what might have been the last peaches of the season. Every task on the farm took longer than it seemed it was going to, and Kenya was never quite ready either mentally or sartorially for what the day would bring. Earlier she hadn’t been wearing enough clothes to venture forth in the semidarkness, but now she could wring the sweat out of her jeans.

  “Can you imagine being a slave?” her father said just then. This was something he used to say on hot days back in the city when they had to walk somewhere far or do something else unpleasant.

  “No,” said Kenya, thinking that a slave was somewhere laughing his head off at what they were doing while other black people in the world were sitting in air-conditioned offices and tapping cash registers in mall stores.

  Johnbrown moved along with a ladder while Kenya followed him, picking the low-hanging fruit. Looking down at her through leaves, he asked, “Did you come up here to ask me for money? I mean, it’s not a problem if you did.”

  Kenya took a breath. “I did not.”

  “No?” asked Johnbrown, seemingly to the tree next to her, instead of looking at her in the eye. Kenya kept picking, through vision that was suddenly watered and blurry.

  “Baba, I didn’t know we needed money.”

  “Did something happen?”

  As fucked-up as things were with Sheila, Johnbrown was the one who had run off and left them. She did not want to tell him what had become of Sheila. She could not even, to him, say the word Teddy. Instead she said, “I thought we had the money and we didn’t.”

  “Weird.”

  “You don’t know the half.”

  “Monk—Kenya, I’m not trying to be shitty, but we need to be honest. You know a
lot about where dishonesty can lead people.”

  “Why don’t you be honest with me? Why don’t you want to help me?”

  “I do want to help,” he said. “I have to talk to Sharon.”

  “And Cindalou?”

  “And Cindalou, of course. But come on, Kenya. I’m sure you’ve figured out that it’s mostly Sharon’s money.” His voice was matter-of-fact, with a hint of vinegar. “I know you’re curious about that. But it’s not a big deal. If I had to live without all of this—any of it—I would.” He laughed. “I really would. Anyway, give me a few days.”

  For the rest of their week together, Johnbrown said nothing about Kenya’s request. It took an almost physical strength for her not to press him. Then the shadowing was over and Kenya more or less went back to eating, sleeping, and reading and dared Johnbrown to ask any more of her. She did occasionally help Amandla with the kids and run a couple of errands with Cindalou. Also, after the week with her father, she found it hard to sleep in. So she sometimes wandered out to the barn and did her best to milk Rosie. This was especially helpful to Sharon, who was sometimes too hungover to stir before eight.

  Some afternoons when it seemed too warm to move around, Kenya sat on the shaded back porch reading Silas Marner. Sometimes she read it aloud to Nannie and Dennie, who fought over her lap and claimed to understand the story.

  One late morning, Kenya sat on the porch, looking down the road from which no one ever came, and Johnbrown appeared. He handed her a fishing rod. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  “Are we going fishing?” she asked nonsensically.

  They headed for the creek. Kenya’s face burned when she thought of the time weeks ago when she’d turned her back on Nannie. She hadn’t been down to the creek since.

  “Don’t people usually start fishing a little earlier in the morning?” she asked, her body prickling with heat as they settled on the mud by the water. Johnbrown had opened his tackle box and was selecting lures.

  “I don’t know. What time do you usually set out?” he asked with a teasing grin.

  She had the urge to tell him that she’d ridden horses, tossed about on sailboats, and gone skiing, both downhill and cross-country. But she knew he’d only say she’d never been fishing, so she rolled her eyes. Johnbrown fiddled with flashing objects.

  Without looking up he asked, “Kenya, how do you like it here?”

  “Down at the creek?”

  “Ha, ha. I mean at the house,” he said, gesturing vaguely.

  Kenya told herself that getting to college did not depend on what she said in this moment. Still she spoke carefully. “I like it.”

  This was mostly true.

  Then she added, “I’m glad to get to know my brother and sisters.” This was one-third true.

  “And me—how are you feeling about me these days?”

  “I’m understanding more about you since being here,” she said. But she didn’t say that what she’d come to understand is that her father now seemed to be the leader and only full member of his own cult, a man with whom she shared little except for memories from another world and a fondness for Cindalou’s cooking.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said. “So I know this wasn’t the plan, but I’m wondering if you might want to hang out for a while. Maybe take some time, get a little job in town, save some money.”

  “Sharon said no, huh?”

  “Actually, she said yes. You know how Sharon is. Well, maybe you don’t. But in any case, she was fine with it.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  Johnbrown finally stopped playing with what looked like dangerous cat toys, wiped sweat from his brow, and looked her in the eye. “Well, it’s not up to her, really. I mean we’re well cared for, but your request will mean we have to lean on her parents more than we already do.”

  “And they said no?”

  The wrinkle in Johnbrown’s forehead passed so quickly that Kenya wasn’t sure it had been there. “Look, we didn’t ask. Okay, so maybe Sharon could get money from her millionaire developer daddy to send the daughter from my ex—I meant first—family to college, but I can’t accept any more money from those people than I have already. Just can’t.”

  “Will you take their money to send Nannie and Dennie to college?”

  “I don’t want to. But those are their grandchildren. I can’t stop them.”

  “How about Amandla?”

  He was silent.

  Back at her mother’s house, Kenya had begun aggressively daydreaming about the campus. Sometimes she would sit down and focus all of her energy to think about it. There, at college, she would dress, talk, and act like a completely new person. Of course she’d fantasized about becoming a new person every summer since she had started at Barrett—but this time it would be real. Except for the wonderful Candace and Karen, no one at Wesleyan knew her. And even Candace and Karen knew only some bubbly, anything-goes version of her. No one knew that her absolute party limit was two drinks, or that she listened to classic rock and old Stevie Wonder records and thought LL Cool J was boring. They wouldn’t know about the bullshit she’d gone through with Johnbrown and Sheila or Teddy Jaffrey. They wouldn’t know the old her at all. Now they would never get to know the new her either.

  Kenya tried to snap the rod, which took more strength than she’d imagined. Frustrated, she hurled it toward the water.

  Johnbrown looked pained. “There are going to be some very sad children when news gets out about that fishing rod. That was Amandla’s favorite. She named it Rodney.” He laughed.

  Kenya scrambled to her feet and began walking away from the house, toward the woods.

  “Kenya,” said her father as he fell behind her swift steps. He said her name again, but not louder. He had not raised his voice since Kenya had been on the farm. It had taken her weeks to notice that he never yelled, not when Dennie and Nannie got the notion to “decorate” their playroom with toilet paper, not when Amandla slept through Rosie’s morning milking twice in a row. She could hear sometimes a female voice rising somewhere in the house, battered back by the measured current of his words. She remembered how back when he was her father, his arguing voice had been high and shrill. She thought it would be interesting to see her parents argue now.

  She broke into a run but fell almost instantly, tripping over her feet. Her father was over her, extending a hand. She brushed it aside and struggled to her feet.

  “Why don’t you ever say you’re sorry?” she yelled in his face. She noticed, for the first time, that she was now nearly as tall as he was. “You haven’t said that to me once since I’ve been here!”

  “Because I’m not sorry.”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t said I’m sorry because I’m not sorry.”

  “But what about what you said? When you were hiding out from everything in fucking prison?”

  “What did I say?”

  “That you’d made mistakes.”

  “I did make mistakes. And actually, you’re saying I never said I was sorry, but if memory serves, I did apologize then. But I didn’t mean to. I hadn’t figured things out yet.”

  “Now you’re saying you didn’t mean to apologize?”

  “Look, Kenya, I am sorry about the things that you had to go through because of me. But everything that happened got us here. I mean, look around. Don’t I seem like a more stable person to you? All of this might not be your thing, but don’t I seem like I have more to offer as your father?”

  “Except money! Or a simple fucking apology for what you did to my mother!” Kenya shrieked and covered her ears at the same time. Johnbrown gently pulled her hands off of her ears.

  “Kenya, your mother and I loved each other. But we were young and times were downright perilous. My brainwashed parents raised me thinking all I had to do was keep my nappy hair cut and wash behind my ears and try to be as white as possible, but there was some fucked-up shit going on in America, in Philadelphia. Brothers were getting th
eir skulls busted by the police for no fucking reason. I nearly got my skull busted a couple of times, just for walking around my—”

  “You mean the time you gave the police that card and got to go home?”

  “Your mother told you that one, huh? Did she tell you about the time I found myself in a police station right near where she lives right now, getting my ass cheeks spread?” His voice cracked.

  Kenya stared at him as if unimpressed.

  Then he was calm again. “Look, you don’t need to hear my war stories. All you need to know is that I was really scared of white people and I was really angry with black folks for not doing more.”

  “Seems like you made your peace with those white people after you left us,” she said, with less acid than she had hoped.

  “I loved your mother,” Johnbrown repeated. “And I mean whatever happened with us was my fault, too. I don’t know what I was doing that drove her to stay in touch with my mother behind my back, for example, but it must have been bad. And as much as I loved her, Sheila could bring out the absolute worst in me. She made me feel like the things I had to do, things I never minded doing before her, were things that I was doing only to please her. Other things that I needed, well, she made me feel criminal for wanting them.”

  “Like other women?”

  “Like being a real activist, or like my work, which was the main thing keeping me together. Every time I suggested new directions for the Seven Days, she shot me down, humiliated me, in front of the others. And then she tried to be supportive of The Key, but it was obvious she didn’t really believe in it.”

  The fucking Key!

  “Maybe you don’t believe either,” he said. But Kenya barely heard him. All of this time, she had imagined that the answer for Johnbrown’s defection lay somewhere on the person of Cindalou—her soft hair and freckles, her easy ways, which had hardened with time. But The Key?

  She said, “I don’t even know what the fuck The Key is anymore. I mean, I thought it was some kind of philosophy. But now it’s just about your butler arsonist?” She could see that Johnbrown’s Zen mask was starting to crack, and it made her happy. She laughed.