Just Above My Head Read online

  “I put these side by side,” Julia says, “because, both times, I’d asked Arthur to do me a favor. And, both times, he did.” She taps the first photograph. “This time, I’d asked him to do me a kind of”—she laughs—”professional favor. He was singing with the quartet then, but I asked him to come sing, solo, for me, at the funeral of a real old lady who had just died. She’d asked for me, not long before she died, to preach her funeral sermon. And I promised that I would.” She looks at me. “It was at Reverend Parker’s church, you know, up there on Madison Avenue. It’s gone, now.”

  “I think I remember,” I say. But, if I do, I remember very dimly, and only because Arthur told me about it, much later. Or, maybe, he told me about it then. I’m not sure. When Arthur was sixteen, I was twenty-three. I avoided funerals, and, except for driving the quartet—and sometimes Julia—here and there, I didn’t go to church.

  Still, Julia and the photograph make me dimly recall—something. I listen to her, and, at the same time, I am trying to place—more precisely—the second photograph.

  “I needed Arthur,” Julia says, “because this old, blind lady—Miss Bessie, her name was Bessie Green—had had trouble with Reverend Parker. I was only fourteen then—almost fourteen—but I never could stand him, he always looked to me like a fat round bug, with a mustache. And, later on—or, maybe, even then, because he was repulsive to me—I used to wonder how any woman could ever look at him naked, and not throw up. I mean it. Making love to him had to be like mixing a chocolate cake for a couple of weeks. His wife was always sick, said the Lord had afflicted her body. He damn sure had!”

  Ruth laughs, and Tony is silently howling, his big feet beating on the floor. Odessa, watching Julia, puts her head on Ruth’s shoulder. Julia lights a cigarette.

  “Anyway, I got to be part of the trouble between Reverend Parker and Mother Bessie. Reverend Parker didn’t have no sense, nor no real manhood—and it was, really, almost right after her funeral that I left the pulpit—and, just because he was really nothing, he was always making pronouncements—issuing decrees—like the goddamn Pope. And the reason for the trouble between him and Miss Bessie was that the Lord had just told Reverend Parker that it was a sin for women to have earrings in their ears. Well, it was just that kind of bullshit—you remember, Hall—that got me most upset. I mean, why in the world should the great God Almighty even notice you wore earrings? Especially if you were past eighty years old, and blind—that woman had to have been born during slavery—and couldn’t nobody see the damn earrings, which you didn’t go out to the store and buy: somebody put them in your ears when you were a baby. God knows, Mother Bessie couldn’t see them, she couldn’t see. Well. I was just a traveling evangelist, I wasn’t a member of that church, but, after Reverend Parker had run down all this nonsense, I used to go and pick up Mother Bessie and bring her out to church. And this was terrible, because two of Reverend Parker’s church members had been bringing Mother Bessie out and Reverend Parker had made them stop. But I was the fire-baptized child evangelist, Little Sister Julia—he couldn’t make me stop. So I climbed the stairs, Sunday after Sunday, to Mother Bessie’s room and helped her get herself together and brought her out to church, earrings and all.

  “Reverend Parker got after my parents; but Reverend Parker wasn’t putting no bread on their table—I was. And I just said that I was acting as the Lord led me—and, I guess, really, that was about as close to the truth as I could get. I couldn’t turn back. I just did not think it was right to let this poor old blind black lady, who smelled like old people smell sometimes, you know? and who was exasperating like old people can be, I just did not believe it was right to leave her alone with all those rats and roaches, and let her die alone like that. I did not believe that I had been called to the ministry to be a party to that.

  “And maybe I enjoyed watching Reverend Parker every Sunday. He couldn’t throw me—us—out. After all, he wanted me to keep on preaching in his church, at least from time to time—I put bread on his table, too.

  “Anyway. Mother Bessie testified one afternoon—she prophesied on Reverend Parker’s head, really, she told him what was going to happen to that daughter—and she said that she would soon be gone and she wanted me to preach her funeral sermon. And I promised that I would.

  “But then, Arthur pointed out to me that in order for me to keep my promise and preach the funeral sermon, there had to be a funeral: and who was going to pay for it? How was the woman to be buried? She’d been paying insurance, a dime a week, since the Emancipation Proclamation—but let’s not go into that, if I start talking about the life insurance companies, I’ll blow what little cool I have left. Anyway. Between your brother and the quartet and my parents, and a few extra sermons I preached, and a nephew Arthur somehow managed to track down—between some heavy sweat and some light blackmail—we had got some change together by the time Mother Bessie died. The nephew even managed to get some money from those life insurance thieves. Mother Bessie had been dying a long time, and I knew it, and yet, she died all of a sudden. I don’t believe she suffered; she died in her sleep. It was strange. I had felt closer to her than I’d ever felt to my own mother, or my own father, and I didn’t, really, even know her. And then, I thought—for the first time—that maybe that was why I’d entered the pulpit in the first place. Because I was so far from God in my own house, so far from anyone who loved me. The love of God was the first love I knew anything about. I will say: it brought me from a long ways off.”

  The room is completely silent, still: night fell long ago. Tony has his arms wrapped around his knees. He is watching Julia with an intensity of wonder which I have never seen in his face before; his eyes are, more than ever, like Arthur’s eyes. Odessa leans against her mother, in an attitude too tense to be described as shrinking, too eager to be described as fear. Ruth is watching Julia, I press my back against the wall. I see Ruth’s face without looking at it: she and I are connected by all the other presences in the room.

  “So I asked Arthur to come up and sing at the funeral for me, and he did. He sang two songs—one, just before my sermon, and then, one at the end.” She looks at me, looking, again, like a little girl. “I never told you?”

  “You never told me all this—what you’ve just told me.”

  “Well. I guess it takes time—more time than anybody wants to imagine—to sort things out, inside, and then try to put them together, and then try—not so much to make sense out of it all—as to see. Maybe that’s why what seems to be past begins to be clearer than what seems to be present. Anyway.” Julia smiles, and silence comes again; briefly, for Odessa asks, “What was the text of your sermon?”

  “Why did you ask me that?”

  “I don’t know—I just had a—feeling—”

  Tony says, “Odessa just figures that since you and Uncle Arthur got into all this heavy shit together, whatever you was doing must have had an effect on him—like, dig, Julia, if you two were two trapeze artists, working together up there, his timing and your timing would have to be impeccable, right?”

  “How well you put it,” Julia murmurs. Then, “I took my text from Isaiah: Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die, and not live. But he hadn’t heard the sermon when he sang his first song.”

  “No. But he knew the text.”

  “Yes. I told him the text.”

  “Yeah. And he knew that you were going to take that text way out.” Tony grins, hugging his knees. “I can dig it.”

  Julia watches him, smiling; then, she looks at Ruth and me. “I wasn’t really preaching it for Mother Bessie—she was beyond all that, now. I was preaching to Reverend Parker—and,” she says, after a moment, glancing at Tony and Odessa, “to myself.”

  “What two songs did Arthur sing?” I ask.

  Julia smiles. “I’ll never forget. That afternoon made a great difference in my life, I’ll never forget that afternoon. I sensed—I guess I knew—that I had come to the end of my ministry—of that part of my ministry
, anyway—and that it was my house that I would have to set in order. If I was to live. I was preaching Mother Bessie’s funeral. But you don’t always get carried to the graveyard when you die. Reverend Parker proved that. Mother Bessie smelled of age—of sour clothes, sour food, sour stomach—I could deal with that, I could even accept that I might smell that way one day, just like I know I’m going to die one day. But Reverend Parker, and almost all the other ministers, they smelled—of corruption. It was in their hands, in all that self-righteous lust—you can see it when they’re eating the Sunday chicken dinner. Hell, I could see it when they looked at me, like I was the breast and the wing and the stuffing. And the Lord wouldn’t mind if two of His faithful and weary servants gave each other solace and comfort for a little while, under the stairs. And I couldn’t deal with that.” She is silent, then she laughs. “They still talk about that sermon, some people do, until today. One thing, I never topped it, not in that pulpit. Like old Dinah might have said, that’s all there was to that!”

  She stands up, kicking her feet back into her platform sandals.

  “I’ll try to play it for you, I can’t describe it. That church was packed. Anyone who was there still remembers it, even if they don’t know that they remember it.” She walks to the piano. “You got to remember how young he was. And hadn’t nobody he ever loved yet died. And he wasn’t, you know, saved, like me.” She laughs, and sits down at the upright piano. “Arthur was kind of off and on, about salvation.” She strums her fingers over the keys. “I can’t sing, don’t know why I’m doing this—but, Hall, you’ll get the picture, I know.”

  She plays the opening bars—the opening beat—both solemn and honky-tonk, too calmly determined to be called aggressive—absolutely undeniable: you listen or you run. The church sits, waiting, and exhales, at last, with the singer, a moan, distant, like a muffled, subterranean roar, like the first faint warning of an earthquake.

  I’m thinking of friends whom I used to know

  Not yet, he couldn’t be thinking of friends he used to know; but he might be singing of the swiftly approaching hour which would carry away the people before whom he now sang; or he, on the other hand, simply because of the sacred fragility of his youth, might be forced to make the journey on without them.

  Who lived, and suffered, in this world below.

  Yes, say the sea of women’s hats, the rocks of men’s shoulders: a slow wind ruffles the sea, and breathes on the rocks, drops, then rises.

  They’ve gone up to heaven,

  and some raise their faces, as into the wind, and some cover their faces with their hands,

  And I want to know

  Everything is still. Only the voice is rising, like a lone bird against the coming storm.

  What are they doing there now?

  Oh, thunders the piano, and Yes, breathes the wind,

  What

  and the voice, the lone bird, mounts,

  are they doing in heaven today?

  Where sin and sorrow are all washed away.

  Where peace abides, like a river, they say.

  Oh, what are they doing there now?

  I watch Sister Julia’s fingers decipher the text in the keyboard. It is a strange wind that rises, from so far away, and the lone voice rises above the wind.

  There were some

  Yes

  Whose hearts

  Yes

  Were burdened with care.

  They passed every moment

  Yes

  In sorrow and tears

  The sea moves back and forth, the rocks move from side to side, the lone voice rises, approaching a hard triumph,

  They clung!

  the piano bearing witness, the wind slowly dropping

  to the cross

  Yes

  with trembling and fears,

  Oh, what

  are they doing there now?

  Julia stops, and the room seems suspended, changed, by the passion of that far-off afternoon.

  “And then,” says Ruth, “you preached your sermon.”

  “Yes. And then we drove Mother Bessie to the graveyard.”

  Tony is framing his face to ask a question. The front doorbell rings.

  “This time of night?” says Julia; for it is a little past ten o’clock.

  “It’s all right,” I say.” I say. “I’ve been dying to meet your secret lover.”

  Julia rises from the piano stool, as the doorbell rings again, and strides across the room. “Come on with me, Hall, if it’s not my secret lover, it might be some other kind of nut.”

  She walks before me, down the hall, and puts her eye to that small hole in the door, which shows you who’s outside. Then, she screams with joy, “Oh, shucks!” She turns to me, laughing. “You wanted to meet my secret lover—here he is!” and she opens the door. “Come on in the house, Jimmy!”

  And here he is, too, very sharp. I haven’t seen him in almost two years; and he wasn’t sharp the last time I saw him. Neither was I. I like Jimmy very much—I guess I love him, really. He’s kind of a stocky dude, gingerbread colored, very, very quiet, with great big brown eyes in a square and chiseled face. He’s got a grin like a lantern, and a voice like Saturday nights: somehow, I always see him when he’ll be an old man, sitting somewhere with lots of kids around him, telling them the tallest stories they’ll ever hear, and with laughter crackling around him like a fire.

  He surprised me, Jimmy did, very much, especially during those last months with Arthur. Not many people are present in time of trouble—if you doubt me, I dare you: to get in trouble—and Jimmy was present. In many ways, in ways he couldn’t speak of, not even to me, his trouble had to have been even worse than mine. And he looked it, at the funeral, gray: bone-dry, thinned by an acid eating from within. Then he disappeared, upstairs, in this house where he and Arthur had sometimes lived. I was still on the road, but even if I hadn’t been, I was the last person in the world who would have been able to help him.

  Julia wanted to help him, she wanted her brother in her house; but he wasn’t really in her house, he was weeping at the grave of his lover. She prevailed upon him, at last, to move, and I last saw him just before he took a boat to go, he said, “somewhere.” He looked very young that day.

  He seems, now, to have got himself together: black boots, blue slacks, dark tan raincoat. He drops his bags on the porch, and grabs Julia in his arms. Julia pulls back, at last, holding him by the shoulders.

  “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming? and where you coming from?”

  “I just come in from Rome, honey.” Jimmy’s speech has always been a little breathless; he sounds as though he’s improvising, one step ahead of disaster. Before his improvisation can continue, he raises his eyes, and sees me, and we step into each other’s arms. “Hey, brother,” says Jimmy, and we cling to each other for a moment. It is mightily reassuring to hold him for a moment, to feel myself held. Tears are behind his eyes, and behind my own, and we kiss each other on the cheek. We grin, I move to the porch and pick up his bags, and close the door. “I was hoping you’d be here,” Jimmy says.

  “How’d you know I’d be here?” Julia asks.

  Jimmy laughs, and kisses her again. “Your phone’s been busy, honey,” he says. He turns to me. “She forgets she gave me a key.”

  “I might have changed the lock,” Julia says.

  “And without telling nobody, naturally, just to make sure little brother’s ass was out in the cold.” He laughs again, very happy. It is astonishing. “Come on, you all have a party? Can I have a drink? You got anything to eat? Or you want me to haul my ass off to the nearest Chinese restaurant?” He pauses, with that grin on his face, that light, his coat half on, half off.

  “Give me that coat,” says Julia, taking it, and slapping his lean behind, “and go on inside. Take him inside, Hall. Jimmy, you just going to have to take potluck—how’d you get here?”

  “Rented a car, and I drove, sister.” He and I walk down the hall. Ruth is s
tanding at the entrance to the living room, Tony and Odessa behind her. “Hey!” cried Jimmy. “We got the whole family tonight! Come here, mama!” and he and Ruth grab each other, laughing, and almost crying. Ruth pulls him into the living room, I can scarcely make out what they are saying to each other, but they are beautiful to see. Jimmy kneels on one knee before Odessa, holding both her hands in his, and Tony towers above them. Julia comes, and stands beside me, one foot on one step, and Jimmy rises, and grabs Tony around the neck. Tony is both uneasy and delighted, I can see it in his face, but delight, and a natural affection conquer, and he grins, and says to Jimmy, “I was thinking about you. I knew you were coming tonight, I swear I knew it! It was the song that brought you—it was the song!”

  Swiftly, unconsciously, Jimmy touches the gold ring on his finger, and stares at Tony.

  “What song?” He is half smiling, half frowning.

  Julia steps into the room. “I was singing one of the songs Arthur used to sing, a long time ago, when I was a preacher.”

  Jimmy looks at Tony, and smiles. Something seems to relax between them. “Well—I can believe you, man. I can believe the song brought me here.” He walks to the table. “Looks like you all had a feast.”

  But Ruth, Julia, and Odessa are already taking the plates away. “Give him a drink, Hall,” Julia says, “while we heat the food up,” and, “So sorry,” says Ruth sweetly, as she carries away the ribs, and, “We’ll be right back,” says Odessa, who is carrying the potato salad and the rolls. Tony carries out the glasses.