Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 40 —

I came home to find Jesus and Feather in the front yard with Bonnie. They were trimming rosebushes that I’d cultivated on either side of the front door. Bonnie loved the apple-sized, mottled red and yellow roses. When she agreed to come live with me, she’d said, “Only if you promise to keep those roses by the door. That way I’ll think that they’re flowers you give me every day.”

Feather was collecting the roses in a tin pail that looked too big for her to carry. She was laughing while Jesus used his shears on one of the bushes. It was getting close to sunset and the sky was full of clouds that were a brilliant orange and black with the light at their back.

“Daddy!” Feather cried. She ran at me and tackled my legs. “I got another B-plus.”

“That’s great, baby.” I lifted her over my head and then brought her down for a kiss on the cheek.

Bonnie was taking off her thick gardening gloves, but Jesus kept hacking at the bush. He was doing a good job of it, too. I had taught him when he was Feather’s age. I didn’t need him to work, but he wanted to. He wanted to work with me, eat with me, walk with me down the street. If he was out in the world in trouble, I’d do anything to save him.

By then Bonnie was kissing me.

“Are you okay?” she asked, looking deep into my eyes.

“Okay,” I said, turning away as I spoke.

I went in the house, followed by Feather. Her B-plus paper was about “Betsy Washington” and the flag.

While I made us grilled-cheese sandwiches, Bonnie and Jesus joined us in the kitchen. I offered them sandwiches, but Jesus never had much of an appetite and Bonnie didn’t eat between meals.

“I know,” Feather said when we were all together. “I could read you my paper out loud.”

“Not right now, baby,” I said. “First I got somethin’ to say.”

Feather flashed an angry glance at me. The woman she was to become flickered a moment upon her face. She pouted and looked down. Then she took Jesus’s hand and leaned against his side.

“I wanted to talk to the family,” I said. “I want to say something to the kids.”

They were all looking at me. I took a bite out of my sandwich. I felt a little dizzy.

“School is the most important thing in the world,” I said. “Without an education, you can’t do anything. Without an education, they will treat you like a dog.” I glanced at the cabinet and saw the little yellow dog’s snout sniffing out my scent. “I expect you to go to college, Feather. Either you’ll become a teacher or a writer, or something even better than that. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Daddy,” she said.

We were staring at each other.

Jesus was staring at the floor, clenching his fists.

“All right,” I said. “That’s important because Juice is going to learn in a different way. From now on he’s going to study being a boatbuilder. He’s found his calling in that, and I won’t stand in his way. But if he’s going to do that, he has to study even harder than if he was in school. I know all of the curriculum for school and I’m going to make you read out loud to me for forty-five minutes every night. And after you read, then we’re gonna spend another forty-five minutes talking about what you read. You hear me? And if you ever stop working on that boat, you have to get right back in school. I don’t care if you just turned eighteen, you still have to go back. You hear?”

Jesus looked up then and nodded with the kind of conviction that only young men can have. If he was any other child, I would have dismissed the hard look in his eye. But I knew my boy. Not only would he finish the boat but it would be seaworthy and so would he. And he would read to me every night. And he would love it. I realized that he wasn’t the type of child who could learn from white strangers who couldn’t hide their natural contempt for Mexicans. I had seen it at Sojourner Truth. Most children ignored the signs or connected with the two or three teachers who really did care about them. But Jesus wasn’t like that. He was connected to me, and it was my job to make sure that he learned what he needed to make it through life.

“I’d rather you stay in school,” I said. “’Cause you know it ain’t gonna be easy goin’ through your lessons every day. Some days I might be late. Some days I might miss, and then you’ll have to do double duty the next night.”

Jesus grinned and I realized that this was what he had always wanted.

“I’ll help on nights that you can’t be home,” Bonnie said.

“You got them papers up in your room?” I asked Juice.

He nodded.

“Leave ’em on the table for me. I’ll read ’em after you go to bed.”

Are you really going to do all that, Easy?” Bonnie asked me after I’d signed the papers and we were both in bed.

“What?”

“Read with Jesus every night.”

“Oh yeah. Now that I made the promise, I got to do it. That’s our deal.”

“What do you mean? What deal?”

“When he came to live with me. He couldn’t even talk, because he’d been through so much. But he’d sit by my side and listen to every word I said. And if I said somethin’, then he took it for truth. If I said to jump off a building ’cause he wouldn’t break his leg, then he would jump. And if he hurt himself, he would know that I had tried to tell him what was right but somehow had made a mistake. And if I told him to jump again — he would. That kinda faith makes a truthful man outta you.”

“But suppose you can’t do it?” Bonnie asked. “Can’t do what?”

“Can’t keep your word.”

“But I will keep my word,” I said. “That’s what you don’t understand. I have to keep my word to that boy.”

“But what will you teach him?”

“The Iliad and the Odyssey, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island. Anything with a boat and a man in it. That’s what I’ll teach him first. And then I’ll take whatever math he’s got to know to make the boat and try and make sure he understands it. Work with what you have, that’s what I always did.”

“But wouldn’t it be easier if he just stayed in school?”

“No, baby. I mean, I understand what you sayin’, but what me and the boy got between us is hardscrabble road as far back as we can remember and as far up as we ever gonna go. If Jesus don’t trust you or like you, he won’t let you in. He sure as hell ain’t gonna learn from teachers he doesn’t respect. And anyway, while I been lookin’ around for Alva’s son I found out a couple’a things that helped me come to this decision.”

Bonnie was already convinced. I knew by the way she put her head on my shoulder. But she asked, “What’s that?”

“First it’s just Brawly himself. I haven’t seen the boy more than five minutes but I know from lookin’ that he’s a mess ’cause he didn’t have a mother or a father the way a boy needs to have parents. He was abandoned and then, when he was found, he was abused. He could have the best education in the world, but it wouldn’t help him. I knew that when I saw the diplomas on a killer cop’s wall. He got the education but he ain’t learned a goddamned thing.”

After Bonnie was asleep I got up and called Liselle Latour.

“Yeah?” she said in a sleepy voice.

“Hey, Liselle. It’s Easy.”

“What time is it?”

“’Bout ten-thirty,” I said. It was really ten to eleven. “I’m sorry to bother you, honey, but did Tina come back in?”

“They had her in jail.”

“Tell her that I’ma come by tomorrow morning, about eight-thirty. If she doesn’t wanna talk to me, maybe she should already be gone.”

“Okay,” Liselle said.

Her breath sounded as if she might have had a question, but I cut her off with thank-you and hung up the phone.