that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with
For Milkman it was the door click. He wanted to feel the heavy white door on Not Doctor Street close behind him and know that he might be hearing the catch settle into its groove for the last time.
“You’ll own it all. All of it. You’ll be free. Money is freedom, Macon. The only real freedom there is.”
“I know, Daddy, I know. But I have to get away just the same. I’m not leaving the country; I just want to be on my own. Get a job on my own, live on my own. You did it at sixteen. Guitar at seventeen. Everybody. I’m still living at home, working for you—not because I sweated for the job, but because I’m your son. I’m over thirty years old.”
“I need you here, Macon. If you were going to go, you should have gone five years ago. Now I’ve come to depend on you.” It was difficult for him to beg, but he came as close to it as he could.
“Just a year. One year. Stake me for a year and let me go. When I come back, I’ll work a year for nothing and pay you back.”
“It’s not the money. It’s you being here, taking care of this. Taking care of all I’m going to leave you. Getting to know it, know how to handle it.”
“Let me use some of it now, when I need it. Don’t do like Pilate, put it in a green sack and hang it from the wall so nobody can get it. Don’t make me wait until—”
“What did you say?” As suddenly as an old dog drops a shoe when he smells raw meat, Macon Dead dropped his pleading look and flared his nostrils with some new interest.
“I said give me a little bit—”
“No. Not that. About Pilate and a sack.”
“Yeah. Her sack. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? That green sack she got hanging from the ceiling? She calls it her inheritance. You can’t get from one side of the room to the other without cracking your head on it. Don’t you remember it?”
Macon was blinking rapidly, but he managed to calm himself and say, “I’ve never set foot in Pilate’s house in my life. I looked in there once, but it was dark and I didn’t see anything hanging down from the ceiling. When’s the last time you saw it?”
“Maybe nine or ten months ago. What about it?”
“You think it’s still there?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“You say it’s green. You know for sure it’s green?”
“Yeah, green. Grass green. What is it? What’s bothering you?”
“She told you it was her inheritance, huh?” Macon was smiling, but so craftily that Milkman could hardly recognize it as a smile.
“No. She didn’t; Hagar did. I was walking across the room toward the…uh…toward the other side and I’m tall enough for it to be in my way. I bumped my head on it. Made a hickey too. When I asked Hagar what it was she said, ‘Pilate’s inheritance.’”
“And it made a hickey on your head?”
“Yeah. Felt like bricks. What’re you going to do, sue her?”
“You had any lunch?”
“It’s ten-thirty, Daddy.”
“Go to Mary’s. Get us a couple of orders of barbecue. Meet me in the park across from Mercy. We’ll eat lunch there.”
“Daddy…”
“Go on now. Do what I say. Go on, Macon.”
They met in the little public park across the street from Mercy Hospital. It was full of pigeons, students, drunks, dogs, squirrels, children, trees, and secretaries. The two colored men sat down on an iron bench a little away from the most crowded part, but not the edge. They were very well dressed, too well dressed to be eating pork out of a box, but on that warm September day it seemed natural, a perfect addition to the mellowness that pervaded the park.
Milkman was curious about his father’s agitation, but not alarmed. So much had been going on, so many changes. Besides, he knew whatever was making his father fidget and look around to see if anyone was too near had to do with something his father wanted, not something he wanted himself. He could look at his father coolly now that he had sat on that train and listened to his mother’s sad sad song. Her words still danced around in his head. “What harm did I do you on my knees?”
Deep down in that pocket where his heart hid, he felt used. Somehow everybody was using him for something or as something. Working out some scheme of their own on him, making him the subject of their dreams of wealth, or love, or martyrdom. Everything they did seemed to be about him, yet nothing he wanted was part of it. Once before he had had a long talk with his father, and it ended up with his being driven further from his mother. Now he had had a confidential talk with his mother, only to discover that before he was born, before the first nerve end had formed in his mother’s womb, he was the subject of great controversy and strife. And now the one woman who claimed to love him more than life, more than her life, actually loved him more than
