Lost in the City

A DARK NIGHT

About four that afternoon the thunder and lightning began again. The four women seated about Carmena Boone’s efficiency apartment grew still and spoke in whispers, when they spoke at all: They were each of them no longer young, and they had all been raised to believe that such weather was — aside from answered prayers — the closest thing to the voice of God. And so each in her way listened.

They heard an apartment door down the long hall to the right open and close with utter violence, obviously pushed shut by the wind of the storm. Within seconds, they saw Ida Garrett move almost soundlessly past Carmena Boone’s open door, a rubber-tipped brown cane in her good hand. She went the few yards to the end of the hall on the left and knocked again and again and again at what everyone in the room knew was the door of Beatrice Atwell’s apartment. Beatrice was sitting in the middle of Carmena’s couch, snug between the large Frazier sisters from the fifth floor. Then, just as soundlessly, Mrs. Garrett was standing small and silent in Boone’s doorway. She could not have looked any more forlorn if she had been out in the storm: breathing as if each breath would be her last, her wig perched haphazardly on her head as if it had been dropped from the ceiling by accident, her pocketbook hanging from the arm that a stroke had permanently folded against her body, her eyeglasses resting near the end of her nose, beyond where they could possibly do her any good.

“I was passin,” she said with effort to Carmena, “and I saw your door was open.” Leaning against the doorjamb, she blinked in an effort to adjust to a room that was lit by only a forty-watt bulb, another concession to the voice of God. Several times, she shifted the scarred cane from the good hand to the bad, and just when the bad hand seemed about to drop it, she would take it back. “I was passin and saw your door was open, Boone….”

She continued to repeat herself until Carmena stood and went to her, reassured Mrs. Garrett with a light touch of the hand. “You know you always welcome here, Miss Garrett.” She took the woman’s elbow and led her to a chair at the dining table. “I was thinkin bout you, me and the Fraziers, but somebody said you’d been under the weather, so I thought I shouldn’t bother you.”

It began to rain, no more than a soft tapping at the window.

“I’m fine, by the help of the Lord,” Mrs. Garrett said, sitting. She settled herself, patting her wig and making sure her dress was well down over her knees. Her movements seemed practiced, like those of someone who did everything according to the way it was set out in some book. She placed her cane across her lap and leisurely began to pick pieces of lint off her dress, a silklike, polka-dotted thing that shimmered with what seemed huge green eyes. Then, with a flash of lightning and burst of thunder, she jerked her head up, as if the whole thing had been directed at her personally, the thunder an inch from her ear and the lightning just in front of her eyes. She waited, and when there was quiet for several minutes, she sighed, then began to take note of the four other women. They had been watching her intently, but when she looked at them, they nodded and lowered their eyes or deftly turned their heads away. Only when they were addressed by name did the women look at her, smile, ask how she was keeping. Beatrice, knitting on the couch between the Frazier sisters, did not look up.

“I’m surprised to see you here,” Mrs. Garrett said to her. “I thought you might be home.” There was a bit of hurt to the last words.

“No,” Beatrice said happily. “I’m here. I’m right here.” It seemed to give her so much pleasure to say these words that she repeated them again and again until she raised a thread to her mouth and bit it in two. “I’ve come for the prayer meetin.”

“So thas what all yall hens here for?” Mrs. Garrett said and turned to Carmena at the other end of the table. Carmena nodded with a smile. “Oh, but I hope yall ain’t gonna have that Reverend Sawyer again. He ain’t nothin but jackleg, Boone. I could tell the first time I laid eyes on him. ‘Jackleg,’ I said to myself. ‘As jackleg as they come.’”

Carmena, seeking support, glanced at the others. “It’s him. But he got a church of his own now, Miss Garrett. Out in Northwest, just off Rhode Island Avenue.”

“Havin a church, Boone, don’t mount to a hill of beans,” Mrs. Garrett said with exasperation. “It don’t make a man a preacher, called by God. Even I”—she put her good hand over her heart—“could say I’m a man a God, but that don’t make it so. All havin a church means is you got a little money to rent a hole in the wall and a few fools to come to the hole and give you their pennies.”

“Well, I ain’t a member of his church,” Carmena said defensively, “and don’t plan to be a member. And I ain’t never give him money to come here to pray with us.” Mrs. Garrett smiled knowingly. “I do have some food for us all when he get here. But thas a everyday normal courtesy. Some sandwiches…some cake and punch…just things I picked up round the corner…whatn’t no trouble….”

Mrs. Garrett looked askance at the food displayed on the table. “He’ll fill hisself up off that, belch once, and look for more,” she said. She leaned down and placed her cane on the floor beside her. “And what time is this man a God spected on the premises?”

“He said three thirty,” Carmena said.

“Three thirty, huh? And all the clocks in the world now sayin it’s way past four.”

Carmena shut the window just as the rain began to come in. With only the forty-watt burning in the lamp on the table, the room was on the verge of darkness. But each flash of lightning would give a ghastly brightness to the place and for those moments everything in the room could be clearly seen.

“And what you doin over there, Atwell, workin away like a tiny little mouse?” Mrs. Garrett said.

“Sewin,” Beatrice said. “Makin somethin for my new grandchild.”

“Oh, Lani dropped another one, huh? You didn’t even tell me.”

“A girl. A little over a month ago.” The two Frazier sisters on either side of Beatrice were tall women, each weighing about 200 pounds, and they seemed to spread out much more than when they were standing. Beatrice weighed little more than 110 pounds, and if there had been no words from her, she might well have gone unnoticed.

“And you never told me,” Mrs. Garrett said. “Tsk tsk tsk. I always thought well of Lani.” She turned slowly to Carmena, and as she turned, her smiled widened. “But that husband of Lani’s keeps her havin babies. Who can keep up with how many they have? She’s the babiest-havin woman I ever knowed of. One after the other after the other….”

Silent and still except for the motions of her hands, Beatrice never looked up.

Carmena prayed for the Reverend Sawyer to turn up. If nothing stopped her, Mrs. Garrett would sit in that chair and rain down devilment all day and all night and all day some more. Carmena thought it had to do with her being ninety-one years old and thinking she was closer to God than any human being in the world. Mrs. Garrett and Beatrice had once been so close that people joked they would be buried together in the same casket. Now Mrs. Garrett was forever after Beatrice as if the final task standing between her and the key to heaven was to make Beatrice suffer. Beatrice, however, treated Mrs. Garrett as she would a child who didn’t know any better.

Toward five thirty, not long after Mrs. Garrett had asked again what time the Reverend Doctor Sawyer was supposed to arrive, the telephone rang. Carmena answered and spoke but a few words before hanging up. She announced that it had been Reverend Sawyer’s wife, that his car would not start and that he apologized to everyone for not being able to make the prayer meeting. Waving her hand over the table, she told her guests that there was no need to let the food go to waste, and one by one the women got up and helped themselves. The storm, the thunder and lightning, had stopped, but there was still the rain, a nuisance scratching at the window.

Once the women were seated again, the conversation took varied turns, and the autumn evening wore away. Mrs. Garrett, perhaps dulled by the food, had less to say than anyone. At one point, the Frazier sister nearest the window commented on how particularly bad the weather had been lately. They all agreed, and Mrs. Garrett, capping one hand over her knee, said that she could not remember when Old Man Arthur and the Ritis boys had caused her so much pain, that sometimes she felt she would never walk again. The other women gave sympathetic nods, one or two mentioning their own aches and pains, and then they all began to exchange remedies. Beatrice stuck her needle with finality into the piece she was working on and put it in a cloth bag at her feet. Looking about the room, she said quietly, “It all reminds me of one summer back home. It was kinda like it is now, day after day.”

“Oh, now, Atwell, we ain’t gonna have one a your down-home, way-back-when stories, are we?” Mrs. Garrett said. “We ain’t had a evenin of prayer, but we been tryin to keep it as close to that as we can.”

“How, Bea?” Carmena said, ignoring Mrs. Garrett. “How does this remind you of back home?” Mrs. Garrett rubbed the elbow of her bad arm, then put the bad hand in the center of her lap.

Beatrice said nothing for several seconds. “It thundered and lightened a lot then, too,” she said. “I guess I was sixteen or seventeen and this fella I was keepin company with was sittin with me and my daddy on my daddy’s porch. There was a storm comin on while we were sittin there. There had already been a lotta rain, but not anough to do that much damage to the crops. I remember it was late in the evenin and so dark I could barely make out what was three feet in front a me. It was already rainin when the thunder and lightnin come up, and we was just sittin and talkin.

“Maybe a half hour or more into that storm, I started seein this figure, this thing, that kinda just stood in that corn patch in my mother’s garden. If I didn’t know the garden, I woulda thought it was a scarecrow or somethin. It was no further than from here to that television there. I looked and looked, tryin to see into all that dark, and then I told myself it was just a big corn stalk leanin out heavy with the rain. It made a move a corn stalk ain’t supposed to make but I tried not to think about it. ‘It’s corn,’ I said to myself. But when this thing moved again — moved different from all the other corn — I said this real quiet ‘Oh.’ I touched the fella I was keepin company with and pointed and we looked together. My daddy looked, too. This corn stalk, this thing, said, ‘Uncle…Uncle…Bea…’ Then it moved a few steps toward us. It was this cousin a mine, John Henry. He came even closer and just dropped heavy to the ground, cryin like a baby.

“I said, ‘John Henry, whas wrong? What is it?’ My daddy was already gettin up. ‘It’s them,’ he said. He was cryin so hard that I could barely make out what he was sayin. ‘It’s them,’ he kept sayin. ‘They just sittin there.’

“My daddy went down the steps to him, and when he touched John Henry, John Henry just jumped right up, real quick, like he was some doll and somethin had pulled him up by the neck. He took off down the path that led from his place to where we lived. The three of us — my daddy, me and this fella I was keepin company with — took off after him. It was rainin way harder than it is right now and we was soaked through fore we even took a few steps. All the way down there, I kept prayin, ‘Lord, don’t let me get struck by lightnin.’

“When we got to the house, John Henry was there lookin in the front door. ‘John Henry,’ my daddy said, ‘John Henry.’ We got there and looked in too. Everybody was just sittin around like he had said. My Uncle Joe, his wife Ebbie, her mother, and my Uncle Ray. There was a pipe stickin in Uncle Ray’s mouth, not lit, just stickin there like he did sometimes. The only light was from a coal-oil lamp on the mantlepiece and from a real small fire in the fireplace. It never crossed my mind why they would have a fire burnin on a summer evenin. But there it was — this one log that they kept there all spring and all summer, and it was steady burnin right in the center. I think I thought to myself how dark they all looked, but I put that to how feeble the light in the room was. They was all kinda gathered around the hearth, which wasn’t too strange cause yall know how some folks use the fireplace for the center of the house all year round. There was a buncha smells in that room. One was the kind you get when wood gets wet, and another was burnt hair. But around all of the smells was this one I hadn’t smelled before and ain’t smelled since. It was everything dead you had ever come across in your whole life piled at one time in that room.

“‘Joe. Ray,’ my daddy said to his bothers. Uncle Joe was sittin in that chair he’d made with his own hands, and he was starin at us. No, not really at us, kinda through us and around us at the same time. ‘Joe.’ My daddy went over to him. ‘Joseph!’ My daddy touched him and my uncle did nothin. Then my daddy pulled on my uncle’s shirt front and my uncle fell into my daddy’s arms, right into his arms, like some dime-store dummy. And that told us right then that he and everybody else was gone. It told me anyway. The fella I was keepin company with just said, ‘Jesus Christ!’ I fixed my eyes on him when he said that. I was feelin all kinds of things standin there, and you know, one a them was this feelin that I couldn’t ever keep company with that boy again.

“I looked around the room. This long black line that had cut a rut in the floor went from the fireplace through that group a people right out the room to the kitchen — like somebody had took a big fireball of barbed wire and run cross the floor with it.

“They was just sittin there and they was all gone. You could see where Aunt Ebbie’s mother had been rockin the crib with Aunt Ebbie’s baby in it. A wind was coming down the chimney and through the door, and it was rockin the crib, rockin Aunt Ebbie’s mother’s hand right along with it. I thought the baby was dead, too, but when I saw a leg twitch, I knowed he was alive. I picked him up and he didn’t look surprised to see me, he didn’t look happy or sad or anything. Just a baby waiting for the next thing in his life to happen. I put Aunt Ebbie’s mother’s hand in her lap. I did it calm-like and I was surprised at myself, the way I was actin. I musta been scared somewhere inside, but it was a long time before I knowed it. And then it stayed and never went away.

“‘Lightnin,’ the fella I was keepin company with said. ‘Lightnin.’ My daddy had put his brother back in the chair and he was standin there lookin down at him and my uncle Ray. The fella I was keepin company with pointed at the way the black line ran along the floor and out of the room. ‘Just came down the chimney, Mista Davenport,’ he said, proud that he knew what he knew. ‘Look at it!’ And we looked again when he said that, not so much cause a what he said, but cause somethin in our heads told us to make a everlastin memory of it.

“John Henry came into the house and went on out into the kitchen, his mud tracks walkin right over that black line. I followed him and I seen where the black line came to the kitchen table and hopped right up on it, threw everything every which way, then jumped back down to the floor and ran out the back door. One a the straightest lines you’d ever wanna see. John Henry’s little sister was sittin at the table. Alma was alive. She was cryin real soft, and I don’t think she’d moved since it happened. John Henry sat down and put his head in his hands. He started cryin again. All of a sudden I got weak as that dishrag there. I held the baby and watched them children. Their whole family. My family too. People who’d never done a moment’s harm to a soul. Not one moment’s harm. Somethin in me was struck by that when I started thinkin of Uncle Ray’s pipe stickin in his mouth and when I saw that one of Alma’s plaits had come loose, like they do on little girls. I didn’t know what else to do so I leaned Alma’s head against my stomach. Then I told em that it would be all right, but it didn’t mean anything and I knew it. If somebody had told me to say that tomorrow would be Easter, I woulda said that instead. But I kept sayin that everything would be all right until my daddy came in and picked Alma up and told us he was takin us home….”

The other women in Carmena Boone’s apartment were all quiet, and they were quiet for a long time. The rain had long since stopped. Finally, Mrs. Garrett said, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Her dentures made a soft clicking sound as she spoke. “For good or for bad, the Lord seeks you out and finds you. There ain’t no two ways about that.” She looked about the room as if for confirmation, and when no one said anything, she seemed to fold up into silence.

They were all quiet again, until Mrs. Garrett began to talk about the eleventh of August, 1894, the night she was saved…. The others looked knowingly at one another. The story never changed: a huge tent and an itinerant preacher and a little girl who was overcome that night with something she would years later learn to call the Holy Ghost. She had been frightened at first, with this thing that commanded without talking, she said, but it comforted her and led her down the aisle of the tent to the preacher’s outstretched arms. The story, after a thousand tellings, had ceased being an experience to share but was more like an incantation she had to chant to reaffirm for herself the importance of that night.

“He said I was the youngest person in five counties to ever be saved, to ever find the Lord,” she was saying. “Reverend Dickinson told me that, told everybody in the tent. And I’ve walked in the light of the Lord ever since….”

“Why don’t yall have some more a this cake?” Carmena said. “Or take it with you. I’ll never eat it all.” She provided aluminum foil and each woman put two slices in the foil and prepared to leave. At the door, as they said their good nights, Carmena asked Beatrice to tell that joke she had heard her tell once, the one about the dark night. Before Beatrice had said a word, Mrs. Garrett made her way through the group and went to her apartment. After they heard Mrs. Garrett lock her door, Carmena asked again to tell about the dark night.

“Well, my daddy,” Beatrice said, “my daddy and my uncle Joe would fun around a lot, mostly for us kids, like two fellas on a radio show. Every now and then my daddy would say, ‘Joe, what’s the darkest night you ever knowed? Tell me, Joe.’ My uncle Joe would play with his chin for a bit, like he was thinkin. ‘Les see,’ he’d say. ‘Les see…oh, yes. Oh, yes. I member this one night I was sittin at home all by my lonesome, nobody for company but the four walls and the memory of company. It commenced to rain and rain, and I heard this knockin at my door. So I get up and opened the door. Well, sir, who was it but these raindrops — a whole passel of raindrops — lookin down at me, lookin scared and cold. And the one in front says to me in this real squeaky voice, ‘Mista, it’s so dark out here, so very dark. Would you please mind tellin us which way it is to the ground?…And that,’ my uncle would say, ‘is the darkest night I ever knowed.’ And we all bust out laughin, specially the little kids, who thought it was the funniest thing in the world to have talkin raindrops.”

The women laughed, too. Then they all hugged good night, each saying that they would not be long out of bed.

About four that morning the thunder and lightning began again. At the first blast of thunder, a sleeping Mrs. Garrett sprang up in her bed, like a puppet jerked suddenly to life by its master, her head turning first this way and then the other. Her heart, usually so docile, began to throw itself about its cage. “Oh, dear Jesus,” she whispered. She flung back the covers with her good arm and swung her legs out of the bed, and in reaching for her glasses, she tipped over the plastic cup that contained her teeth. She did not bother to pick them up, but threw on her robe and took up her cane. The lightning lit her way to the door. Taking her key from a small table, she went out the door, and the wind closed it behind her with such viciousness that she nearly fell to the hall floor.

As she moved down the hall, an enclosed area with no windows, she could hear the clamor of thunder and the whistling of wind coming from under the doors of the apartments. With their half-globe coverings, the ceiling lights provided a long line of moons all the way down the hall. She knocked lightly at Beatrice’s door, and when Mrs. Garrett heard a thunder boom come from under the door of the next apartment, she knocked with greater insistence.

“Who is it?” Beatrice asked.

“It’s me.”

There was a long, long pause, then Beatrice asked again, “Who is it?”

“It’s me. Me!”

There was a pause again, but Beatrice unlocked the door and took off the chain and cracked the door. Mrs. Garrett avoided Beatrice’s eyes and stared into the heart of the flame of the candle Beatrice was holding.

“Bea, it’s me,” Mrs. Garrett said.

“Why you all the time knockin at my door, woman?” Beatrice said. “We ain’t no friends no more, or did you forget that?” The candle’s flame swayed with each word she spoke.

“Please, Bea. You know how it can be. Please don’t leave me out here. Have some pity.”

With two thunderclaps, Beatrice opened the door. “You lucky,” she said, shutting and locking her door. “I was just about ready to go in that bathroom, and you know when I go in there I don’t come out for a soul.” Her hair was in plaits and she wore a nightgown that swept the floor as she moved.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Garrett mumbled, still looking only into the flame. “Thank you so much.”

Beatrice did not help Mrs. Garrett with her chair, and in the end, Mrs. Garrett had to drop her cane and drag the chair into the bathroom with her good arm. The cane hit the floor with a clatter.

“There are people sleepin!” Beatrice said from inside the bathroom.

When Mrs. Garrett had made her way with the chair into the bathroom, Beatrice closed the door, and as soon as she did there was the ripping sound of thunder that bounded across the outside room and found its way under the door of the windowless bathroom.

Beatrice set the candle in the sink, then she spread a blanket across the door’s threshold, Mrs. Garrett put her chair beside the hamper made into the wall. With a sigh Beatrice put down the toilet cover and sat down.

“How long you think it might last, Bea. How long?”

“Why you always ask me such stupid goddamn questions!”

The blanket did nothing to moderate the violence of the thunder, and it continued to sound as if it were outside the door. “Ain’t you gonna blow out the candle?” Mrs. Garrett said. Beatrice leaned over and blew lightly, and in the quickest of moments, the room was engulfed in darkness. Mrs. Garrett began to pray, a long, monotonous mumble of words. Once or twice a boom would produce a small yelp of surprise from each woman, but they did not comfort one another. Over time, the intensity of the thunder grew until it was like a pounding at the bathroom door. And each time it pounded, the women would look toward the door as if they were making up their minds whether to get up and answer it.