All Aunt Hagar's Children

RESURRECTING METHUSELAH

At about the same time Sergeant Percival Channing was finishing his business with the prostitute in the Half Moon Hotel on General Douglas MacArthur Boulevard in Okinawa, his daughter—thousands and thousands of miles away in Northeast Washington, D.C.—managed to find rest at the very end of the second night of no more sleep than a minute here and a minute there. The girl was in the last stages of a fever brought on by a sore throat, and while the pediatrician had said there was nothing to worry about, “just another passage through childhood,” the girl’s mother, who had become pregnant with her daughter three months before she was to enter nursing school, knew children throughout the world had died before they could negotiate such passages. So her fear did not abate when her child closed her eyes and found peace, and the mother continued sitting near the edge of her seat in a plain wooden chair built to last 142 years before that night by a man who had been a slave. The chair, now with year-old cushions from Hecht’s, had been given to her and Sergeant Channing as a wedding present. Seeing her child go away into sleep, however, the mother did allow her mind to drift somewhat, and she tried to remember just what time it was in Okinawa, whether the difference between the two cities was ten or eleven or twelve hours.

What the sergeant her husband did with the prostitute, he had not done with the mother of his child in nearly six months, and he would not do it ever again. Neither the sergeant nor his wife knew this as their only child turned in exhaustion onto her right side and entered a dream where Methuselah was waiting, not centuries old, not even a man, but waiting as a little girl who merely wanted to play.

The prostitute—Sara Lee, though she had been born and was still known to those who mattered as Keiko Hamasaki—called Sergeant Channing “passion capitain” as he lifted himself up with a grunt and left her body, and both of them, drunk and drugged, slept side by side for a very long time as the moon and the sun came and went. When Sara Lee finally lifted herself up on her elbows and shook her head, feeling the desire for a cigarette and for food, she did not know the time, for the year-old clock provided by the management of the Half Moon Hotel had worked only for the first month of its life and Sara had never owned a watch. The American military people in Okinawa had nicknamed her “My Time Is Your Time” because that was often what she said to them within minutes after meeting them. Sergeant Channing, still dead to the world beside her, had forgotten his own watch, and it had wound down back in his room on the base.

Sara Lee reached over the sergeant to get to his pack of cigarettes and three-dollar lighter on the small bedside table, and in reaching she had to support herself with one hand on the sleeping man’s chest. Sara Lee weighed next to nothing. Still, the sergeant’s eyes shot open and he screamed in such agony there in the third-floor back room that the Half Moon Hotel clerk down at the front desk could hear him, but the clerk did not let on and he continued talking to the corporal and his “Betty Crocker” as the latter two begged for a cheaper room.

“What the fuck you doin to me?” Percival Channing shouted to Sara Lee.

“No thing, passion capitain. No thing. Just a little bit cigarette. Just a little bit.” She knew perfect English, but she had learned with her first two Americans that they did not want perfection in the women they whored with.

Percival sat up and felt as if he were about to vomit. He covered his chest with one hand, not yet feeling the lump, and with the other hand he grabbed again and again at the air as though something out there might give him relief, if only by a few degrees. He leaned forward, still grabbing, and in the end he struggled out of bed and limped to the open window, where he bent down and gulped in the pitiful Okinawa air. “Jesus Christ! Jesus, what the fuck!”

Sara went to him and rubbed his back, repeating the profanity Percival had just spoken. He raised himself up from the window, feeling slightly better the closer he got to standing fully upright. He was crying, because it had been just that much pain. He turned to Sara and she held his shoulder. “What the fuck did you do to me, Betty? You stab me or what?”

“No stab, passion capitain. Just a little bit cigarette.” She had thought heart attack almost immediately, but the Americans were know-it-alls, and she felt it best that Sergeant Channing should come to his own diagnosis. Sara continued touching his shoulder as his breathing achieved some regularity. After he had rubbed the tears from his eyes, he put his right hand to his chest, now only half expecting a wound and flowing blood, and there, just below the right nipple, right where his heart would have been if a man’s heart were on that side, he felt the lump. He thought it her doing, a little Asian voodoo, but when he looked into her eyes and saw something far from a woman capable of harm, a great part of him thought some shit had descended upon him from being in the man’s army, from being in a foreign land among people who named themselves after food products. And a very, very tiny part of him thought that his body, long a thing of wonder chiseled after hundreds and hundreds of races on American high school and college tracks, had come to fail him somehow.

“Just let me get to that bed,” Percival said, and Sara agreed with him that everything in the world got better after a little food and a long nap.

The sergeant’s wife, Anita Hughes Channing, had, even before her child’s illness, begun to think that the school her daughter attended was not the best place for her. She knew that most of the teachers and administrators at the New Day Arising Christian School had their hearts in the right place, but Anita, a lapsed Catholic, had concerns about her child’s new teacher, a forty-seven-year-old man with seven children, a good and passionate man who had found religion when he was forty years of age. Perhaps too much goodness and passion might be too much for nine-year-old Bethany. Anita had picked New Day Arising because it was only blocks down from her D.C. government job at a nearly forgotten outpost on Minnesota Avenue in Northeast and because she thought her daughter should have some religion in her life, since they did not regularly attend church. What religion Bethany did get before New Day Arising had come from Sunday mass at St. Augustine’s on 15th Street when she visited Anita’s parents who lived in an apartment a block from Scott Circle on 16th. At mass, safe between her grandmother and grandfather, the child all but ignored the priest, but concentrated, Sunday after Sunday, on the Stations of the Cross.

Through the second and third grades, Bethany’s teachers had been fine, exactly what her mother had wanted. The school had a reputation for, as its four-page brochure proclaimed, serving up education as the main course, with religion as the appetizer and the drink and the dessert. The latter three were there and they had importance, but they weren’t the entrée, they weren’t the whole of the school’s reason for being. Bethany’s fourth-grade teacher, Methuselah Harrington, accepted this when he was hired; he even signed a vague pledge to that effect minutes after he filled out tax forms in the school’s office two weeks before school started. But Methuselah, “a reformed and wanton scoundrel,” knew well what religion had done for him and for his own children, and he was determined that every black child he had any influence on would know that salvation as well. He was never to do anything so outrageous as to violate the pledge, to put religion at the center of the meal, but in the middle of a child answering an arithmetic question or as a child was reading something quite secular, he would ask the boy or girl, “Who will save you from the pains of perdition?” or “Who will favor you with everlasting life?”

The answer to those questions earned gold stars. Nothing was given for a correct arithmetic answer or for a splendid reading of a passage about some family’s summer trip to the sea with Grandmother and Grandfather. In early October, a week before Bethany became ill, Methuselah brought in a poster and taped it to the wall under the clock and opposite the windows. It was not a big poster, certainly smaller than the map of the United States to its left, and more or less the same size as the pictures to the right of Malcolm X and Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King Jr. But the poster, an elongated thing that reminded Bethany and her friend Jessica of a scroll, held the children’s attention because at the top of it were the words “The Life of Methuselah.” The children had been told on the first day of school that they could call their teacher “Mr. Harrington” or “Mr. Methuselah”; being children, they chose something different from what the other kids did with their teachers, and Bethany and her classmates called him by his first name. And being children, they found it hard not to relate the man named Methuselah on the poster with the teacher Mr. Methuselah who led them in the Lord’s Prayer every morning and who told them how the people in Lapland lived day to day amid snow and reindeer and darkness a good part of the year.

The poster showed Methuselah—always in brown sandals and a brown biblical robe similar to what the kids always saw Jesus wearing—first as a crawling baby, then a boy, a teenager, a man, et cetera, until he was a ninety-year-old man, a rather spry-looking fellow still full of life with his legs apart and his hands at his hips as though ready for any demon the Devil would toss his way. But at ninety-one, Methuselah seemed to be faltering, head bent, arms sluggishly at his sides, his robe not as well cared for as in earlier pictures. Jesus stood behind him at ninety-one and was touching the top of the man’s head. From there on, at one hundred, at two hundred, and all the way to nine hundred, Methuselah was spry again. At nine hundred and one, he had wings and a halo, and aside from those things, he didn’t look any different than he had throughout the centuries. The children in Bethany’s class didn’t yet know a whole lot about the difference between the Old and New Testaments, and the teachers and administrators who went in and out of Methuselah’s class never paid the poster much attention. Only the janitor saw that Jesus Christ had wandered over from the New Testament into the Old, but New Day Arising didn’t pay her to tell anyone about an impossibility.

Bethany Channing woke a little after one in the afternoon, and her fever and sore throat were gone and she was very hungry. She called for her mother and then for her father, forgetting for the moment that the sergeant—according to how she measured on the globe next to Mr. Methuselah’s desk—was nearly two hands away from that little star that was Washington, D.C. She called for her mother again, and as the child edged toward the side of the bed, she looked down to see Anita covered with a blanket and asleep on the floor. Nothing in days and days had made her happier than to see Anita that way. She thought to lean down and kiss her mother but hunger pulled the child to the other side and Bethany got up and went to the kitchen to fix a breakfast of cold cereal and a croissant splattered with marmalade.

Anita found her child sitting at the table with the bowl at her mouth, drinking the last of the cereal’s milk. The mother herself had become ill at about eleven years old, bones aching, headaches that tossed her mind from one shore to another. She suffered along for years and years, better sometimes and other times too ill to even get out of her bed. No doctor knew what was wrong, and most of them told Anita’s parents that the best that could be done was to keep her comfortable. The parents, not knowing from where the harm came, forbade so many things, from stuffed animals to sweets to Anita’s friends with colds and small cuts on faces and hands. They sensed that what all the doctors were leaving off was that she should be comfortable because the end was not far away. Her mother stopped working in Anita’s eleventh year because, as she told her husband, if her child was to die, she did not want her to pass away alone. Anita’s mother had three years of college, and she taught her daughter what little she had learned during those times the girl was capable of learning. Her father took a second job in the evenings, and the family, which included a younger brother, stayed near the bottom of the middle class, a few paychecks from the lower class in which the parents had been raised and which they had thought they would not have to see again.

Anita waited until Bethany had downed the last of the milk and the girl, seeing her mother, did a little dance as she sat, her feet tapping the floor, her shoulders twisting from side to side as she moved her arms up and down. The mother’s childhood had more or less stopped with the illness no doctor could diagnose. Her friends came by off and on during the first year, but in time, as she failed to recover fully, most of them went back to their own childhoods and forgot the girl whose mother had made a permanent pallet beside her bed.

“You went away there for a time,” Anita said to Bethany and kissed her forehead because the girl’s cheeks were covered with marmalade.

“Huh huh.” The child could not remember very much about the last two days, but she did recall that last dream before waking, and in it she was still playing with the girl the dream told her was named Methuselah. “Me and Methuselah had a good time playing.” Anita took little note of what the child was saying, but she would weeks later, halfway between Veterans Day and Thanksgiving.

“How bout a day at the playground and then at the movies and then going to see Granddad and Grandma? How bout it?”

Bethany rubbed her hands together and did the dance again. In her nineteenth year, Anita’s illness disappeared and she was never sick again, not even a half day of sniffles. She tried to get a diploma based on what her mother had taught her, but the D.C. school people shook their heads and said it was either work for a high school equivalency diploma in the evenings or go to the regular high school. Though she had failed two grades during her sickness and though all her friends had gone on, she nevertheless decided to become a regular student. She was about two years older than most of the students in the senior class at Cardozo High School, but she was alive and well and hopeful about what was to come, and that mattered most. And then Percival, a star of track and field, saw her in the school library one day where he was conversing with friends. She had spent her teens not knowing the company of boys not her brother or cousins. Now, one of those people she knew little about came across the room and closed the book she was about to take out and told her that her feet must be tired because she had been running through his mind all day. Not even a twelve-year-old would have accepted that, but she had never really been twelve or thirteen or fourteen, except in a way that would not count in the real world. Later, when she liked to tease him, he became “a star of field and stream.”

“I had such hopes for you,” her father was to say before her senior year was done. He was in tears, and father and daughter were alone in the living room, a lamp with a flickering sixty-watt bulb across the way. “I had such very big hopes for you.” She was never to be a nurse, but in her file the D.C. government people kept at the District Building, they said glowing things about her year after year in her job as a manager at that almost forgotten outpost in Northeast. Her father would never completely forgive Anita, and that created an opening through which Percival Channing could step into all the way. With marriage, she called herself Anita Hughes Channing, but it was always “Channing” she was most proud of, and the name she emphasized. Her father warmed a bit, though, because Bethany became more important than anyone, but he was never the same man who read to his chronically ailing daughter before going off, renewed, to that second job.

Sergeant Channing found he could ignore the lump in his chest because most of the time it did not bother him, but one morning one and a half weeks after the episode with Sara Lee, he could barely get out of bed.

One of the doctors at the base, Captain Jerome Henderson, touched the lump as Percival sat on the examining table, and when the sergeant winced and shrunk away, the physician’s eyes widened and he said, most quietly, “Hmm….” The doctor was a smoker, and throughout the examination Percival kept thinking that whatever brand of cigarettes the doctor smoked, it wasn’t Marlboro. After two X-rays and three vials of blood were taken, Captain Henderson sent the sergeant away with two prescriptions for painkillers and an order to return in three days. The doctor saw dozens upon dozens of soldiers each day, most of them for no more than five minutes, and so while very few faces stuck in his memory, he recognized the sergeant’s right away, for Percival was only the second case of male breast cancer the doctor, at fifty-five, had seen in his life. What a wonder is man, he had thought the day before as he looked at Percival’s X-rays and then, for the third time, read the blood results. What a Godawful wonder is man….

The sergeant smiled when the captain told him what he had found. Percival knew the quality of doctors and equipment the army people had. He was again sitting on the examining table, this time still in his uniform. Percival, chuckling, pointed down at his crotch. “Doctor, no disrespect, sir, but you have noticed what we have down there.”

“I never take an inordinate, unprofessional interest in anyone’s ‘down there,’” the captain said. He should have been a major, but he often said mean words to people he shouldn’t have said.

“But breast cancer, Doctor, I mean, you know, come on, thas for women.”

“Sergeant,” the captain said, his arms folded and standing but two feet from Percival, “there is one thing you have in common with the billions of women on this earth—you all have breasts. Ask some old man. Ask any private you know.” He turned to the opposite table of cotton swabs and tongue depressors and opened the folder that was the Army medical life of Sergeant Channing and wrote two lines, underlining three words on the first line. When he turned back, the captain had the same serious look. “This isn’t some strike against your masculinity, Sergeant. I promise.”

“But breast cancer, Doctor. I mean, of all the things to get.” Percival, in seconds, had accepted what was, and now he was beginning to think that had he not done this or that with some bitch in some foreign city, he’d still be fine. Someone, while he was stationed in Germany, had told him to be careful because at the end of the day foreign cunt was very different from American cunt. The foreign had “properties,” that forgotten someone had said. The doctor placed a hand on his shoulder. Whatever breast cancer was, Percival was thinking, it was not in the same family as all other cancers. It wasn’t the lung thing, which he could have understood, given the thousands of Camels he had smoked. It wasn’t even the blood thing. When the doctor asked if there were people in his family with breast cancer, he said no because he had truly forgotten.

“This isn’t the end of the world,” the captain said. “It’s a new day now, and that wouldn’t have been the case a time ago.” The sergeant got off the table, though he had not been told to. “I need you back here in two days, Sergeant. Two days, and if you don’t show, I’ll have the MPs after your ass.”

The chemicals they gave him were to do nothing except, as he was to think later at Walter Reed, make the cancer mad. They gave him many brochures about those chemicals, and one evening in that hospital in Okinawa, as he waited for Anita to arrive from Washington, he looked up from reading one of the brochures and thought not about his wife or his daughter, but about a race he had when he was a junior at Cardozo, a race that ultimately came down to him and some no-account from Coolidge High. After he crossed the finish line first, he wanted to show to all who were watching what a big man he could be, so he took Coolidge’s extended hand in both of his. He didn’t bother to listen to anything Coolidge was saying, but simply offered a perfunctory “Good race” that should have handled anything Coolidge said. He lowered his eyes back to the brochure. Didn’t that kind of sportmanshit count for something? The brochure had pictures of only healthy women; it did not seem to have heard of men with breast cancer. Didn’t giving a whore an extra ten dollars count for something? Didn’t the big whoever see that it all came out the same? Why should ten ones count for less than two fives? “I heard your mother wasn’t well,” Coolidge had said. “I want you to know I’m praying for her.” “Good race, man.”

For weeks following Bethany’s recovery, Anita tried recalling a few lines from Porgy and Bess about Methuselah. She, at thirteen, had watched the musical that first time one Sunday night on television with her mother while her father and brother had gone to a movie. Anita sat with her legs on the couch and her mother was at the other end, Anita’s blanketed feet in her lap. Each time Sidney Poitier appeared, they pretended to swoon. She knew that the lines she wanted to remember began with What’s the use, but she couldn’t get hold of any words beyond that. What’s the use…What’s the use… She had failed to find the tape of the musical’s songs. Maybe she had left it in Germany. Maybe she had lost the tape on the way to Germany, or on the way back. Sprechen see what I mean…What’s the use…

Her great fear was that her daughter would become her and live some of her best young days in bed and on the couch. The whole world was out there and she wanted Bethany to know every molecule of it, but blood was blood, and in her own blood floated molecules that were up to no good. The whole world was why she had said yes to going to Germany when the army people stationed Percival there. Corporal Channing. But the days and nights had been long with him not there, and when he was there, the days and nights were even longer. What’s the use… So back home to Washington, though one good thing was that Bethany had absorbed German in their two years there, could speak it as well as any German child born to it. Sprechen see what I mean… The New Day Arising Christian School had no one who spoke German, so Anita had had to hire a Catholic University graduate student to keep the language alive in the child, though Bethany could barely remember life in Germany. She did know that when she measured the distance on Mr. Methuselah’s globe, the country was two whole hands from the little star that was Washington, D.C.

“Mama, what did Mama Channing die with?”

They were in the car and they were returning from the National Arboretum. It was Friday afternoon, a time she had begun to give only to her child. One more report to the District Building had been written from the Northeast outpost before she left work early.

“Mama, what did Mama Channing die with?” the child asked again.

“Why?” Anita said. She looked at her daughter in the rearview mirror, then at the tiny statue of Saint Christopher with its magnetic base on the dashboard.

“Mr. Methuselah wants us to write down what age our grandparents was when they died, and if they’re alive now, how old they are.”

“What kind of assignment is that, honey?” Saint Christopher never moved, no matter how bumpy the road.

“I don’t know. It’s Mr. Methuselah’s assignment. So what age did Mama Channing die?”

“I’ll have to find out. I don’t know it off the top of my head.”

“So everybody else is alive, all my other grandparents?”

“You know that already.”

“So what about great-grandparents? Their ages when they died, since they’re all dead?”

“Bethany!” The child sometimes talked in her sleep, and when she did, the words were sometimes German. “Bethany!”

“It’s not me, Mama. It’s Mr. Methuselah. You know what? He said we could all live forever as long as we first accepted Jesus. He said we could resurrect what was in that other Methuselah. He said we could be better than the other Methuselah. He was only nine hundred years old, but we could live as long as we wanted. And Reggie said could we live till one hundred cause his grandfather died when he was like only ninety-nine, and Mr. Methuselah said we could live ten times one hundred. And Reggie said could we live till five thousand years, and Mr. Methuselah said yes, as long as we accepted Jesus and everything He stood for.” Anita had taken to marking off the days after the child’s recovery. She had forgotten to do it that morning because the fever and sore throat were getting further and further away. “So I need all the dates for Monday.” She said nothing for a while, and Anita looked at her again in the mirror. “I guess, like…” They were on New York Avenue, having passed North Capitol Street. Sixteenth Street where her parents lived was far ahead.

“Guess what?” Two thousand fucking bucks a year to scare a child….

“I guess Mama Channing didn’t accept Jesus.”

“Your grandmother accepted Him more than anyone I know, Bethany. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

“Well, she’s not here. She didn’t live till a hundred. She probably didn’t even live till ninety-nine. Mr. Methuselah said we’re lucky cause Jesus doesn’t go everywhere. He’s not in Lapland. He’s never going to Lapland.”

“He’s everywhere people need Him, Bethany.”

“Maybe not in Lapland. They don’t need Him in Lapland.”

At 7th Street, Anita made a right and soon turned left so she could go down Massachusetts Avenue. Ah yes, she thought as she looked at the fish symbol on the bumper sticker on the car ahead. Ah yes…

What’s the use a livin

When nobody’s givin

To a man who’s nine hundred years old…

That Sunday evening on the couch, she had not known what the singer was meaning until her mother started giggling just after the word “givin,” and then she knew very well.

I have this cancer shit. I have this cancer thing.” He did not say “breast,” and he would not until he was in Washington, at Walter Reed. “They’re sayin good things and whatnot, but I don’t know….” Given the distance between them, the connection was not altogether bad, unlike many other times. Given the ten or twelve hours between them. The connection had always been good to Germany.

“Percy…I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, well.” He sounded weak, she thought, but maybe what the telephone gave in the clarity of words, it took back in other ways. “I was wonderin if yall could come see me. You and Bethany. They say family is important with this kinda thing.”

“I know it is, but…”

“Try, all right. Try.”

“Okay, but if not Bethany, then I’ll make it.” Until she landed in Los Angeles, with Honolulu still to come, she would not think to ask what type of cancer. “Give a try…,” Percival said. She felt the conversation ending, and she was trying to think of what one was supposed to say. She knew there was something to be done in such situations, for she had seen it done before, though she could not remember if she had read it in a book or seen it in a movie or a parent had told her. And then, only seconds before the conversation ended, she remembered. “Percy, I love you.”

“Yeah. Okay. Me, too.”

It was evening for her, her child safe and healthy and asleep, and there in the armchair, her feet on the ottoman, she closed her eyes and began praying for Sergeant Percival Channing. Her first prayers for anything in a long time. There was a saint Catholics prayed to when there was illness, but she could not remember the name, could not recall if it was a man or a woman. Maybe Saint Methuselah. She continued on with a second Lord’s Prayer. In the middle of it, she realized she had forgotten what the father of her child looked like. She thought there was a picture next to the armchair, but she was wrong. It was across the room, too far away to make it out clearly, and she was quite comfortable where she was. But perhaps a husband with cancer was worth a trip across the room. A journey of a few steps. Hear our prayer Saint Christopher as we make this journey. In the morning she began to see the trip to Okinawa, and his illness, as a way for them to reestablish something. “I’ll be all that you need. I’ll be a parent,” Percival had said after she, two months pregnant, knew that her father was drifting away from her. “Watch. You’ll see.”

Anita came out of the Honolulu Hilton and turned toward the sun. She did not yet know if she wanted to swim, but it would take her no time to return and change into a swimsuit. The airplane to Okinawa was in the morning. There were shops for the several blocks down to the beach, and she took her time and paused before all the windows. If there was something especially grand, there was no point in waiting until Okinawa for a present for her child. Indeed, two or three gifts would not be a problem for a little girl who was far from spoiled, who was turning out quite nicely.

About midway up the first block, there was a pawnshop, and she stood before a display of items for sale, things pawned but never redeemed. While everything she saw was in good condition, nothing seemed of her time, the present day. On a small red pallet on a stool nearest the window, some ten Morgan silver dollars in plastic packages had dates ranging from 1879 to 1924. Her father and grandfather had had small collections of such coins, and while she had been familiar with them growing up, had even played with those her father had, the money on the other side of the glass seemed from a place quite alien to her. Still, her father might like one, but she could not recall dates he did and did not have, and so she continued on.

In the third block, where she could hear clearly the sound of the sea coming to the shore and going back out, there was a candy shop. A SWEET OLD TIME, the many-colored letters said in a half circle on the window. She went in, thinking of the candy from childhood, the kind of sweets she had enjoyed for only a handful of pennies. Kits. Squirrel Nuts. Sugar Daddy. Sugar Mama. And the little Sugar Babies. She did not think they made that stuff anymore, and that was a shame because she had good memories of those treats, and it would have been nice for her daughter to know a part of what had been her childhood. But she was curious. “Welcome back,” a recorded child’s voice sang when Anita opened the door. “Welcome back to a sweet old time.”

The shop was nearly empty except for a man who was standing with his hands behind his back in front of the display case near the door. He seemed to be trying to decide what to buy. The man turned and said good morning, and Anita nodded and said good morning. “Welcome to my humble shop,” he said. The man, about her age, was mostly Asian, but, as she had noticed with many in Hawaii, he seemed a mixture of a good deal more; he could even have been partly black. “Let me know if I can be of service,” he said as Anita went to the first case. It had no more than an enormous variety of jelly beans, but in the second case she saw behind the glass a feast of that old-fashioned candy and she beamed at the man, and he beamed back, as if she and he had shared the same things from the same store once upon a time. “I get that look all the time,” he said. She leaned forward slightly and saw just about everything she could remember. The same girl on the Mary Jane wrapping, that candy of no more than an inch with the surprise nutty mixture buried within the hard outside. Necco wafers were there. She and her brother and their cousins, Catholics all, had played priest and churchgoers with that candy. “Don’t chew it. It’s the host, stupid. You not sposed to chew.” “I gotta chew. You want me to get sick or somethin?”

She bought two bags of various pieces, a large bag for Bethany and a smaller one she could enjoy going to Okinawa and then on the way back home.

“I thought all of this was a dying art,” she said to the man as she paid for her purchase. It wasn’t penny candy anymore.

“I thought so, too,” the man said, “until I found this company in Wisconsin that caters to people like us.” He tied each bag with a red bow. “I have colored string as well,” he said, “but that is for the men who come in and remember, too.”

The child sang again after she opened the door. Welcome back to a sweet old time. She took off her sandals at the entrance to the beach. She hadn’t had breakfast, and though she knew better, she decided that her breakfast would be candy on the beach. It was a good thing Bethany wasn’t with her. A few yards from the sea, she set down the sandals and the larger bag on the sand and began to open her bag, her mouth watering and her fingers failing to untie the bow. She tried biting it loose, but the simple bow held tight. She then tried rolling it up to the top of the bag where she might just pull it away. That failed as well, and she found herself smiling. “Serves you right, you little penny ninny. What kind of an example are you to your child, eating candy on an empty stomach at ten-thirty in the morning? And in Hawaii. Shame shame, everybody knows your name.”

At last she bit a tiny hole into the bag itself and into the opening she stuck a finger and made an even larger hole. She pulled out one Mary Jane, marveled at the familiar black and red and light brown wrapping. She popped it into her mouth. There was at first nothing but an overwhelming sugariness, and even after a flavor of some kind seeped through the sugar, it did not last, and it was not as she remembered. She tried other kinds of candy, and it was the same, a bunch of something she could not remember ever knowing.

Back in the shop, the man raised his head and seemed initially surprised to see her again, but long before the recording stopped, the surprise disappeared from his face. There were five children before that second case, and each was pointing at this or that piece. A man and a woman stood back, quietly conversing. As he waited for the children to make up their minds, the proprietor said, “Back for more?”

“No,” Anita said. “It doesn’t taste right. Maybe it’s old, or moldy, or something. It tasted funny.” The children were not even aware of her, but the two adults were listening.

“Well, it’s new. I just opened a brand-new shipment of everything last evening. See,” and he reached into the case and brought out different pieces and gave them to the children. “See.” The children unwrapped and ate, and they all showed happy faces and looked with some amazement at each other as they chewed. “See, just in from Wisconsin.”

Anita left. At the end of that third block, she took the candy piece by piece out of her bag, looked at the wrappers that she knew so well, and dropped them one by one into a trash can, which told her in letters of pink leis to KEEP HONOLULU CLEAN. Someone had told her that the military airplane would take four or five hours to get her to Okinawa. “Depending,” the person had said, but never said depending upon what. She crossed to the next block. The other candy would be fine for Bethany. Her discarded bag of stuff had cost $5.25. When she was a girl, it would have been no more than a quarter. And the trip back from Okinawa—another four or five hours. Depending…

In the first block, just before the pawnshop, she realized that even an hour of a perfect trip to Okinawa would now be too much. The desk clerk at the hotel told her she knew of a flight in seven hours that would take her to Los Angeles, but Mrs. Channing would have to go first to Chicago, rather than directly to Washington, and Anita told her that would be fine. The clerk said she would make the arrangements, and before Anita left the desk, she asked about sending a telegram, and the clerk said someone would call her room to make those arrangements.

On the elevator, she began to feel that she had slept through something and now that she was awake, she had to make do with what she now had.

The military people had one of their airplanes take the sergeant from Okinawa to Hawaii, and there he waited a day and a half for another to fly him to a base in California. The doctor who was a captain in Okinawa wanted him to rest as much as possible for the journey to Washington. Two days after getting to California, the military people flew the sergeant and fifteen other sick people to a base just outside Washington. There were files on all of these sixteen people, and in each one, from Okinawa to Washington to Germany, somebody had stamped on the first page of each file the red word INACTIVE. The army doctor had told the sergeant that Washington could do for him what Okinawa did not have the equipment to do. “Watch. You’ll see,” the doctor said. A fleet of twelve ambulances and military medical personnel left the base just after sundown and transported the sixteen men and women to Walter Reed Army Hospital on 16th Street. And there the sergeant’s daughter and his wife, who was already on her way to not being his wife, came to see him in his bright room on the third floor. They arrived on a Saturday, not even three weeks after the military people had torn into his body and cut away nearly a fourth of his chest. The pain drugs eased the crush of misery after that, but not thoroughly, and in his dreams the sergeant always lost a fight against a sexless monster that clawed him apart. It was the only dream he would have for a very, very long time.

The visit was quite brief, with most of it taken up with Bethany standing between her father’s legs as he sat in a chair two feet from his bed. Anita stood at the window. She could see how the sergeant had withered, could see what was missing. While the room was bright, it faced nothing more than the roof of the second floor. He was in the brown pajamas and bathrobe and slippers his father had brought him. At the last minute, Anita had thought to bring him the same things, only in blue, but she was too late with hers, and he was never to wear them. She had forgotten that blue was a color he did not like.

The mother and her child both kissed his cheek and left him in the chair as he admired the book of poems Bethany had brought. As the two neared the elevator, Anita turned and found him following them. He said he might walk out with them because he hadn’t seen the sun in a while. His daughter held his hand all the way.

Out in the sun, Percival slowed and went to the nearest bench. The woman and the child stood for a bit until Anita thought they had waited long enough. They kissed his cheek again.

Once in her car, she considered going around the parking lot and passing the sergeant on the bench so that he might get one more look at their daughter. There seemed an extremely long line of cars passing behind her, and she waited in the parking space.

“Mama, Mr. Methuselah wants us to do a project by the end of next week,” Bethany said.

“Oh?” Anita said. “What is it this time? More grandparent stuff?” After the tenth car passed behind her, she wondered why everyone had decided to leave at once.

“No, we’re done with that.” Anita stopped watching the passing cars and looked at her daughter’s face in the rearview mirror. There was a public school near her parents, a good school she had heard about from her sister-in-law. “He wants us to write a paragraph about what we would say to people who might not know Jesus and don’t even know they could live till five thousand years.” On some days, she could see Percival’s mother’s face in her child; on other days, she could see her own father. He, too, was dying, just as Percival might be. “What would we say to the poor Lapland people, you know? What would you say to em, Mama? Gimme a hint.” She had seen Methuselah several times, and each time he seemed only steps from his own grave.

Anita began inching out of the space. Through trial and error, she had learned many things about the world, about her husband, and one of them was that he would be waiting, for such was the way of many men whose lives had taken a cut to the bone. As she came out of her parking space, she again saw her daughter’s face in the rearview mirror, bright and hopeful with all the life any parent could ever hope for, and she began looking for an exit that would not take her back that way to the sergeant and his bench. Waiting to go on to 16th Street, she did not know whether she wanted left or right. Perhaps it might be good to go left, into Maryland. There was a street, a curious side street in Bethesda, that she had seen one busy, crowded day as she took Wisconsin Avenue into Maryland, and she had told herself that one day she and Bethany would explore that most inviting street and not even care that much if they got lost. What time could be better than today? What time could be better than what might be the last day of five thousand years?