The Moon Above: Part 1

Author’s Note and Chapters 1 and 2

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A Note From The Author

You are the boy I used to babysit every once in a while. Your mother gave me some books to read to you, but you weren’t very interested. They were stories about love and war and things like that, with talking animals and knights in shining armor. You told me your mother said I had better stories to tell, real stories about love and war, and you wanted to hear those. Particularly the ones about war. But those stories I wouldn’t tell.

You thought you knew the answers to everything but were not so sure of yourself that you wouldn’t ask a question now and then.

One warm spring day, I was sitting on my front steps wondering why I never put in a porch, when you came around, sort of sidling up to me like you always did. You were dressed for winter, with two or three baggy shirts hanging over your jeans and a ball cap on your head even though I have never seen you attempt anything athletic.

“Why don’t you tell me some a’ your stories?” you said to me, like you always did.

Then you cocked your head back and looked at me like I was going to tell you something this time. But I did what I always did when you came around and said that to me. I shooed you away and went back inside.

I got to thinking about your question that night, when the warm spring day had given way to a warm spring night. I went back outside and sat on my steps again, looked up, and watched a falling star flicker to its death behind the heavy limbs of my neighbor’s oak tree. From where I sat, I could see the edge of your house. There was no light in your window, and I wondered if you were asleep.

If you wonder why I can remember all those things from that day so long ago, it is because that was the day I finally decided to give in to your request. I was not planning to do it, but I changed my mind. You got me remembering and I decided to tell you some a’ my stories. You never know how things are going to go. Sometimes you need to tell people things while you can, while you can tell and they can hear.

Because you never know.

I warn you in advance that some of my facts might be off a little. I’m not one of those people who can remember every single thing, in order. I remember lots of things, but sometimes I’m not sure when one came before another.

I may let some little things slide, but I remember the big things. I will tell you how a man can sit by and watch the very devils in Hell turn into the snowiest angels. I will tell you how a man can lose a son and gain a son, and I will tell you how a man can lose a woman and keep her forever. I will tell you how a man can build a pile of bones high enough to reach the moon.

ONE

I Learn a Trick

FATHER WORKED in the window of the small room, the only good natural light in the kitchenette. First, he put down a thin layer of silver, so smooth it appeared featureless until he tilted the big board and the sun caught the nooks and crannies of the wood. When it dried, he began laying in tiny specks of black, and thinning them out, sometimes licking his thumb and running it across them to water them down. Then he laid in tiny flecks of white, treating them the same way. After a while, his thumb became gray.

I watched him most of the time he worked. He sank into the job, occasionally surfacing to notice me and to smile. When he thought about it, he offered random pieces of advice.

“Just take your time. If you’re going to do something, do it right.”

He kept his brushes in an old green tool kit that made a sound like a mousetrap when he opened it. He found the smallest brush and began adding tiny spots of brown, then, squinting as if blind, he made their edges lighter, almost gold. It was something you could only see if you looked very closely.

“Fake rust,” he told me with a smile, like it was a joke and we were the only ones in on it.

The words came next, big red ones that spelled out something. I was young and I couldn’t read. The name of a grocery store, he said, over on 49th Street, down the way. He wasn’t done when the words were dry. He put in small shadows under the letters, raising them up until they seemed to float. When he was done, it looked like a metal sign instead of a cheap board covered with paint.

“I hope they don’t put it outside in the rain,” he told Mother.

“Tell them not to.”

“They don’t listen to me.”

He leaned the sign against the apartment wall, carefully, in case some parts weren’t quite dry. It looked like a metal sign from any angle and in any light. He would never have settled for less.

“Looks good,” Mother said.

Father stood up, balled his hands into fists at the small of his back and arched like a cat. Something popped deep inside and he gave a small groan of pleasure. “It’s a good piece of wood. Derek did a nice job of trimming.”

Father didn’t care to alter the wood, he just liked to paint it. He always had someone else do the cutting.

“I think the paint has something to do with it,” Mother said.

I felt maybe he needed some kind words from me, too.

“It’s really good,” I said.

He laughed and rested his gray-thumbed hand on my head.

“It’s just a fake, Johnny. It’s pretty but it’s not what it seems to be. You just be careful with things like that. Some people want metal but they’re only willing to pay for wood.”

TWO

The Fall

I WAS BORN in Alabama but don’t remember much about it. I was four years old when Mother and Father moved to Chicago, taking me and my sister Katherine. I’m sure I was startled at first. Chicago is all noise and bricks and dirt and stockyards and trains. The cows are there just to be killed, the trees are sparse and kept on reservations. Buildings rise up everywhere, square and squat, tall and slim. I was scared when I saw it through the train window. But it was in Chicago that I grew into myself. Katherine was older when we arrived. She was already into herself, or thought she was. She was not at all scared by Chicago, and she should have been. I think we started to lose her that day when we pulled into Union Station.

I don’t remember any buildings in Alabama. I remember only Grandfather’s house. We all lived there, too, Mother and Father and Katherine and me, but it was always Grandfather’s house, never Father’s.

Grandfather was a farmer. I believe now that he was a tenant farmer for another family. He had his small house made of gray boards that no longer fit well together, so that the gaps served as windows and ventilation. The yard was wild, full of tangled and scrubby bushes that made a great obstacle course for a careening child. I treated the yard as my personal jungle and Mother let me; she could always hear me fighting with imaginary lions and tigers as I pursued them through the trackless wilderness in front of our house. And, of course, she could usually see me through the gaps in the walls.

A lean, little-traveled road ran near the house, as thin and crooked as a stream. On the other side of the road, the fields began, the fields where Grandfather and Father worked. Those fields seemed to extend forever and were off limits to me because Father and Grandfather and other men worked there with animals and sharp implements. But the work was really Grandfather’s pursuit. Father detested farming. He hated everything about it; hated the mules, hated the plow, hated the crops for growing and hated the scythe for cutting them down. He was content to let the Earth do what it wanted, which is why our front yard looked the way it did.

Father wanted to be an artist, but there was no opportunity for that in Alabama. He had taken to painting on unused two-by-fours with old mismatched house paint other people gave him, paint he would never have considered actually using on the house. He painted what he saw, hills and cows and blue skies and towering white columns of clouds, with tiny black people below them scratching out a living. Occasionally, he would use one of his boards to fill a gap in the rotting walls of his father’s house, lending brightness here and there. I can see them in my mind, but I don’t know if I actually remember them; he talked about them a lot and put them in my imagination. Most of his pictures he gave away to anyone who expressed an interest, and probably more than a few ended up filling gaps in other houses the way they did in ours. I like to think that a few are still out there, maybe tucked under a sagging window or holding up a porch rail, but I’m sure they’re all gone. Either the houses themselves have been destroyed, or the cheap paint Father used has faded and the wood has gone back to gray.

Father moved to Chicago to get away from farming and because he hoped he might be able to put his artistic skills to some use. Mother moved to Chicago because Father was moving there and because she wanted some social justice. That was her phrase. She was tired of living in an area where everyone said the name of Jesus but then allowed white people to lynch black people and act like they were having a party. She was tired of living in a place where black people had to take it. She wanted social justice, she said, so much that I thought it was some kind of product she could not get in the South. I still don’t really know what she thought she wanted. I think she just wanted the atmosphere, just wanted to breathe some free air.

She didn’t find as much freedom as she expected, at least, not at first. She had no particular skills except the ability to cook dishes that convinced people to part with their money for church bake sales. In Chicago, she used that talent to get a job cooking for a wealthy white family who lived a few blocks east of Washington Park. Father got a job with a sign-painting company that was doing work all over town, for Negros and whites alike. It was a CIO union shop and, for the first time in his life, he worked alongside white men who would sometimes call him “Mr. Nicholas,” which never happened down South. They both worked hard but made good money, maybe $80 a week. We lived in a pretty nice apartment and they thought they might be able to buy it someday. I don’t remember all the physical parts of it, but Katherine never forgot them; she never lived anyplace better. She talked about it for years after, used to describe it like a palace, its smooth wood floors and the front door that was rounded on the top. We lived there for one year, and then the bottom fell out of the world.

“Mrs. Carson took me aside today,” Mother said one day while she was folding laundry.

Father grunted. He was pawing through the Chicago Defender and the Bee looking for jobs, while Katherine and I gnawed on cold chicken still wet from the icebox.

“What did she say this time?” he asked after a moment, not taking his eyes from the words on the page. He was not a strong reader and did not like to lose his place.

Mrs. Carson taking Mother aside was not an uncommon thing. She took her aside to ask her to wash the sheets early because her son had a problem with his bladder, and again to ask her never to be alone with Mr. Carson because Mr. Carson sometimes drank and let his hands wander where they should not, and again to warn her never to store anything in the icebox without first asking permission, as it would need to be kept in a separate section.

“She said they want to cut my wages in half, and if I don’t agree to it, they’ll have to let me go.”

Father looked up. “You’re kidding.”

She did not even answer that. She was obviously not kidding.

Mother would never joke about money.

“She said the problems are hitting them, too. They’re selling one of their cars and they’re letting go of the cook altogether.”

“That’s just wonderful. Nobody wants signs painted anymore, they’re happy with just cardboard and black paint, so I’m out of work, and now we’re losing half your salary. Kids, maybe you should learn to pick cotton and we’ll move back to Alabama.”

“No!” Katherine and I said in ragged unison.

“I’m sure it’s not any better there, Carl.”

“I’m sure it’s not. Not any worse, either.”

“It’s never any better or any worse, that’s why we left.”

He just sighed and looked back at the paper, but there was little there for him. He was physically large enough to work in the stockyards but did not want to. He wanted to make money doing something that interested him and challenged his talents, which meant he was born in the wrong place and time.

“She wants an answer by tomorrow. What should I tell her?” “You know what to tell her,” he said without looking up.

About two months later, we moved into a kitchenette apartment closer to the railroad tracks. The trains were not all that close, but you could feel them rumbling in your bones, all the time, so you could never forget they were there. The apartment was one of about thirty that had been carved out in a grand old house that once held just one family. The building had gotten old and feeble, but you could still catch glimpses of its former glory. Some of the doors had very elaborate archways, with glass transoms that had been painted shut; some of the ceilings were pressed tin, with tiny elaborate designs raised in them like veins under the skin; marble peeked out here and there from windowsills. Our kitchenette had none of these things. It had been slapped up in a corner of what used to be a much larger room. A false ceiling hid the tin, the door had been carved out of a thin dividing wall, and none too straight, and the windowsill was made up more of cracks than wood, leaking furiously when it rained.

The kitchen consisted of a stove and an icebox pushed up against the side wall like awkward guests at a party. The rest of the room was just a room and had to hold all four of us, as well as any guests who might come through. The bathroom was down the hall and was shared with half the building. That did not bother me all that much, but Mother despised it, and for Katherine, it probably proved to be her downfall.

It did not take us long to move. Everything we owned we had carried on a train — and we had added very little to it since — so the deed was done in the space of an afternoon, including travel time. The first thing Mother did was put up the small picture of Jesus that she carried everywhere. He was looking out at the viewer with a hint of a smile, and, with one hand, revealed a red, glowing heart.

“He looks over us, wherever we are,” Mother said. “Even in the most degraded of circumstances.”

“It’s not that bad,” Father said, irritated. It had taken him some work even to find this place.

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