died, she ain’t done nothin’ but show up here drunk as a skunk, tryin’ to start some shit.”
Later, Jackie Onassis came to see Mama, too, but she was much better behaved.
Daddy reacted to Mama’s ghosts by trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to see a doctor. James and I worried about her in private, but pretended in front of the kids that there was nothing odd about their grandma. Rudy decided that Indianapolis wasn’t nearly far enough from the craziness of his family, and he moved to California a month later. He has lived there ever since.
Mama reached across the kitchen table and poked at my arm. “You’re gonna get a kick out of this,” she said. “You know that woman Earl was livin’ with?” “That woman” would be Big Earl’s second wife, Minnie. Mama couldn’t stand Minnie, and she refused to utter her name or acknowledge her marriage to Big Earl.
“Thelma says that woman set up a fountain in the front room where Thelma and Earl used to have the hi-fi. Can you imagine that? Do you remember how nice that hi-fi was? Best I ever heard. And they saved up for a year to get it. We sure had us some parties to remember in that house.”
Mama watched me eat a few more grapes and then said, “Earl said the nicest things about you. He was always so crazy about you, you know. And I don’t need to tell you how much he loved James.”
James loved Big Earl, too. Earl McIntyre was the closest thing to a father James ever had. James’s daddy was a low-down, dirty son of a bitch who ran out on him and his mother when James was barely more than a toddler. James’s father stuck around just long enough to leave a few nasty scars and then hightailed it out of town a few steps ahead of the law to inflict more damage somewhere else. The visible scar on James was a half-moon-shaped raised leathery line along his jaw made by a razor slash intended for James’s mother. The deeper, invisible scars he left on James, only I saw. Only me and Big Earl.
After James’s father ran off, Big Earl and Miss Thelma took it upon themselves to see that James’s mother always had food on the table. When the All-You-Can-Eat, the first black-owned business in downtown Plainview, opened in the mid-1950s and Big Earl couldn’t have been making a dime, he hired James’s mother as his first employee. And they kept her on the payroll long after emphysema had made it impossible for her to work. More important, the McIntyres kept an eye on James, so he wouldn’t end up like his daddy. I’ll be forever grateful to them for that.
That’s how Big Earl was, a good and strong man who helped other people to get stronger, too. All kinds of folks, and not just black, loved him. You could take a problem to Big Earl and he would sit there and listen to you spill out a lifetime’s worth of troubles. He’d nod patiently like it was all new to him, even though he was a man who had seen a lot in his life and had probably heard your particular kind of blues a hundred times over. After you were done, he’d rub his huge hands across the white stubble that stood out against the coal black of his skin and he’d say, “Here’s what we’re gonna do.” And if you had sense, you did whatever it was he said. He was a smart man. Made a little money, kept his dignity, and still managed to live to be old—something a black man his age in southern Indiana shouldn’t have been able to do. Something many had tried to do, but failed at.
Now, if Mama’s word was to be trusted, Big Earl was dead. But that was a mighty big “if.”
Mama said, “What was I talkin’ about? Oh yeah, the fountain. Thelma said the fountain in her front room was six feet tall, if it was an inch. And it was made up to look like a naked white girl pouring water out of a pitcher onto the head of another naked white girl. Who comes up with that kind of stuff?”
I poured another glass of water, and thought. Mama was often wrong when it came to her perceptions of the world, physical or ghostly. And she’d said many times herself that ghosts could be tricksters. The whole thing about Big