The Mourning Dove's Secrets
“Grievous. Nothing but Grievous,” was what Helen said when she looked at my friend, her son.
I was visiting him at their house, a Saturday, in South Philadelphia.
Helen was the daughter of my grandmother’s maid, Birdie. She was our maid, Tuesdays and Thursdays and then helped with her mother’s work when there was a party or dinner. My grandfather was a judge. Main Line Philadelphia.
Helen rode that train, Main Line, to and from our house. And trolleys, too. When I was at my grand-parents’ five bedroom house I would hear Helen and Birdie talking in the kitchen about the 40th Street Station, the 49th Street Trolley. And walking in the snow and rain.
But, now it was summer. Sticky hot. We waited on the front stoop.
Leroy, Helen’s husband tooted the horn to his battered and tool-filled truck. Buckets, rakes, shovels, carpenter bag, jars of nails, screws. Fascinating stuff.
To me, Grievous was Hank, named after Hank Aaron and always had been. We smiled at each other grabbed our two old mitts and old slugger bat and ran out front to the truck.
“Grievous!” we heard and froze. Helen made us come back up the stoop and stand for a minute and she put two caps solidly on our heads. She shook her head at us and squinted at Leroy’s truck like it was foreign to her.
We got in the truck and Leroy pulled out into the street, one hand tilting up off the steering wheel every so often at someone. He always drove slowly and those not from his neighborhood would honk. He’d pull the truck over and let them pass.
“Always in a hurry those white people or uppity...” Hank would look at me and we would shrug.
Leroy drove somewhere new today and Hank said, “The Park is that way, sir.” Leroy took a slug out of small gleaming flask he kept under the seat.
“Gotta get a gasket fixed today, boy. Won’t take me long.”
Hank put his hand out the window and made a plane flying, diving.
“Son, don’t be doin that. You might lose your whole arm,” Leroy said.
There were lots of folks out, sitting on stoops, fanning. Some would turn and stare at the truck, Leroy and Hank and the slight, blonde ten-year old boy squeezed in between.
The city heat always felt like cloth or cotton to me. It would drape over me. Where we lived it could get sticky, too, but a small breeze was all it took to make it lift. Especially out on the front porch. It was greener too, leafier. More air. And lots of birds. On over-nights Hank would listen to them and stare out my window. Sparrows. Robins. I would wake up and he’d have his pillow halfway out the window listening to the Mourning Dove.
Leroy parked the truck. He saw a cart- vendor with lemon and ice, waved him over and bought two and gave them to us.
“Don’t you boys leave this truck.”
“Yes, sir”
He disappeared.
“What’s a gasket, Hank?” I asked. Hank shrugged.
We finished our ices and waited. A few tall boys came up the truck and leaned on it. They looked dressed up to me. Sharp clothes, shiny shoes.
We pulled ourselves down. They came up to the window and leaned in. Their sweat rolled onto Hank.
“Got any money boys? Got any money, white boy?’” one of them asked.
We tried to disappear, shrink into nothing.
A large metal bang sounded and the boys pulled back. Leroy had appeared and hit the side of the truck hard with his fist.
“These two ten-year-olds bothering you, boys?” he said in a voice I had rarely heard. One other time was when Hank had brought home a pigeon and hid it in his room. This had really upset Leroy. Something about- “Filthy dirty creatures not mentioned in the scriptures”.
“No sir,” the boys said and backed off. A group of girls, some sitting on stairs, some leaning on a tree, laughed.
“What you doin to those two little boys? You go on back to your mommas and apologize. Or find some folk at least twelve-year-old to bother!” They erupted in laughter and the two boys slunk away.
“You got your gasket fixed, sir,’ Hank asked. Leroy looked in the mirror.
“You boys don’t tell Ms. Johnson we came here. I am done fixing it.” We shrugged. Gaskets weren’t in our world.
We didn’t ask anymore. We were just glad to get some wind on our faces and get going to the park.
“Time is burnin. It sure is.” One of Leroy’s most repeated sayings.
We made it to the park. There was a pick-up game on, so we waited on the grass until Leroy came out of his nap, stood up and waved us toward the plate. Most of the kids were bigger than us but a few were our size, even smaller.
“Got two boys here been practicing.” Leroy stood with arms folded. No one said anything but the pitcher nodded.
Hank went into the field and I went to bat.
The pitcher was tall and lean. He pushed his hat back and pretended to get a signal from the catcher who told me that my sneakers were untied.
The pitcher leaned forward like John Kennedy, Phillies shortstop, would do. His look made me nervous.
I took a big swing at his first pitch which was high and almost fell over from my momentum. There were laughs and taunts.
The second pitch came in way inside. I knew it but stared at the ball, slow-motion inbound, without moving and turned at the last minute. It thwacked my side so hard it knocked me down.
The pain poured over me and then came dizziness, nausea, and stars. No one came over to me. It was dead quiet. I could see the blurry outfield with one eye.
Finally, I rolled over, groaned and stood up, almost fell and then started to walk to first base.
But Leroy came over and steered me to the truck. He gave me some water. Hank ran in and someone replaced him.
Leroy lifted my shirt.
“Now, don’t tell your mother about where we went and when you take a bath, if she come in, turn on the other side. You hear?” He got some ice from a bucket, wrapped it in cloth and put it on my side.
“Yes, sir.”
Leroy stood for a moment and stared at the pitcher who stared back.
“He aint never been in a real war, that one. Well, we’ll find ourselves a new park where boys are respectin.”
~
Grievous-Hank- could stay over with me and my family but I couldn’t stay over at his. Just visit.
We tried one time, I was about eight, and my dad had to pick me up. My mother told I had gotten scared because of noises. I just remember a lot of shouting, something breaking, and Hank hiding in the closet.
Hard to remember but I had been scared. I heard my mother tell my father that “it” had almost broken Helen and Leroy up.
So, Leroy would bring Hank on a day when he did some chores for my father. He was a good handyman, Dad always said.
Leroy would give Hank a dollar bill and then take a large beat-up suitcase out of the truck bed.
Hank’s suitcase always had the same items. A mitt, of course. A pair of faded plaid underpants. A shirt that he never wore, button down. A pair of adult reading glasses that he never wore. A bible. And a small, framed photograph of a woman. I always thought it was Helen, his mom, but we would stare at it and then just shrug.
With my dad’s help, I taught Hank how to ride a bike and we rode the neighborhood, under train tracks, through tunnels, into “the rich people’s” properties with long leafy driveways and stone walls. We would play in the fields, in other people’s lawns until their workers chased us away.
Then we would go get a Coke float from the fountain by Wynnewood Station. We would sit outside, lean against the wall and look at girls with bright white legs and clean white blouses and plaid skirts.
It probably seemed odd that a gangly black kid was hanging out with a skinny, short white kid with blindingly white knees, in Main Line, Philadelphia.
To us, well, we were friends. Plus, nobody messed with us.
Summers, Hank would visit maybe once a week or so, except when we went on vacation. He never came to Nantucket, but Birdie came to stay with my grandparents and work.
One summer we came back from Nantucket, and Hank had grown a foot! I hadn’t. So my parents slowed his over-night visits and then stopped them, and he would only come once in a while for an afternoon.
I heard father tell my mother when they were having cocktails on the porch that Hank was- “No longer a boy...so…” and she nodded.
~
We were at his house eating lunch. It was late summer, the windows were open, there was a breeze coming through. Leroy had the game on during the meal. Helen had let him do this-“This once.”
Dinner was being cleared and Helen took a quart of Dreyers chocolate ice-cream out of her fridge. She was just about to dish it when a woman’s voice, loud, sounded below the kitchen window which was over an alley between row houses.
I had never heard what someone messed up on drugs or alcohol sounded like. It was scary and Leroy and I froze, ice cream forgotten.
“Leroy, you shit. Lemme see my son-our son, you damn bastard. Tell your fucking woman he isn’t hers. He’s mine!”
Helen went to a small closet and took out a shotgun. Leroy grabbed her and took the gun away.
“Let me handle her.”
“I thought she was locked away!”
Leroy commanded us-“Stay here! Don’t move.” We hadn’t been.
Leroy went to alley and her screams continued. We heard other voices. A small crowd had grown outside on the sidewalk.
We heard Leroy shouting to them to go away and leave him to his own business.
After things quieted down we heard Leroy yell-“Edgar, come down here, now.” No one moved. Helen looked at Hank.
“That is you, Grievous. Go on down.” Hank stood up shaking. He looked at me and tried to smile but couldn’t.
I sat with Helen. She was calm. She smoothed the cloth table cover and then clasped her hands.
“You are as much a son of mine as Grievous is,” she said. She spoke to me like I was an adult.
“He, Edgar, is the result of Leroy and that woman down there. I have had to put up with Leroy doings all these years on the condition that she, that woman, would never come around. And I raised Grievous like he was my son. But here she is. So that’s that.” She said this with a calm, emotionless, but weary look that I would only see again much later in my life.
Helen gave me butter pecan ice-cream which I ate without tasting it.
Leroy came back with Edgar-Hank-Grievous. Hank looked drained, teary eyed and for the first time since I had known him-hopeless.
“She should go away now, for good. She saw her son,” Leroy said, somewhat matter-of-factly.
“You didn’t give her no money, did you,” Helen asked. Leroy looked down and then walked out of the kitchen.
Helen stood up, went out of the room and then returned with the picture that Hank had always brought in his suitcase. She put it in front of him.
“That is your real mother. Dorothy D. for damned Ashford. Jewel her nickname. Street name.”
“Leroy is your father and she, that woman down there, is your mother in the biological sense.” The word biological was dragged out painfully slow while she looked at the shadow that was Leroy in the next room. We didn’t really know that word but somehow it painted a dark picture.
“What did you think of her?” Helen asked Hank directly and without compassion. Hanks eyes filled with tears.
“I said, what do you think of her, young man?” Tears ran down Hank’s face.
Finally, Hank looked at her and asked-“Why she like that, Mom…” Helen shook her head.
“Why she like that? Why your father like that?” She nodded in the direction of the front room. “Why white people like they are? Why…”
Helen stopped talking and drew her chair close to mine. She stroked my head and my face. At that moment I thought of all the times she had done the same over the years. When I was sick. After I ate. Before she left for the day. When my dog ran away. When dad was gone on those “trips”.
Hank pushed his chair away from the table and walked to the stairs off the kitchen which led to his attic bedroom.
“I think deep inside everybody is running scared, “she said to me. “And instead of turning around to look at what may be chasing them, they keep running. And running and running until there’s no place to go.”
She leaned in and looked closely at me. “Same with all folks. Aint no difference. There’s running, secrets and pain in here,” tapping her chest-“everywhere and in everyone. Birdie know everything. After all these years working with your folk. Everything about yourn. Helen know. Some places hide it better, that’s all. Some houses have more walls. You aren’t too young to hear this. The truth. The younger the better. The bitterness best to come out early or it will kill you.”
Sitting there with Helen, I strained for any sounds and there were none except for her breathing and my heart thunking. And my ears ringing. Then gradually, the sound of a car’s brakes eee and the shish of tires turning on hot asphalt. Then a shout and another one. The clack of something wood bouncing on cement-a bat maybe. A child’s shriek. And far off the fading heavy clicks of a trolley heading away.
But no bird sounds.
The world almost started up again.
Helen stood and looked out the kitchen window. Her silhouette burned in my eyes.
I heard a car door close out front. Leroy greeted a voice.
The voice came closer.
“Your Dad here, son,” I heard Leroy say from the small living room.
Helen didn’t turn around. But her head turned ever so slightly. And she nodded.
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