the 4 4
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street, sitting out in front of their houses laughing and talking, even delivering the mail. Not just black-skinned people but brown too — all kinds of browns. Maple-syrup colored and redbrick brown, the brown you find in every wood from pine to cherry, oak to ebony. There were people that looked as though they had deep tans and some that shone like gold and copper and bronze.
The church was big and cool, with a dozen stained-glass windows that had pictures of Jesus and other dignitaries from the Bible. Many a black and brown woman came up to him and called him “poor darling” and “little lamb” while he and Eric walked together, looking around at the vastness of the house of worship.
Most of the people inside the church were of color too.
Thomas wondered if all these people knew his mother. Most of them he didn’t recognize. But there were a few familiar faces. He saw his grandmother Madeline, and there was Ira Fontanot, whom he recognized from the Rib Joint. For a brief moment he saw his father, Elton, standing along the side of the pews.
Ahn rushed the boys along until they were sitting in the front row. There, before them, was a coffin set upon a dais under a podium on a pulpit.
“Mama Branwyn’s in there,” Eric whispered, an uncommon awe in his voice.
A minister in long black robes edged in red came up to the podium and said Branwyn’s name and then sang a little. Then he said things about Thomas’s mother that the boy didn’t understand. They were nice words, but they had little to do with the mother he knew. It wasn’t so much what he said but 4 5
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all the things he left out. He didn’t say, for instance, how Branwyn was so good at seeing faces in the pitted surfaces of stones.
“You see,” she’d say, “there’s the nose and here’s the eye.”
“But he on’y got one eye,” Thomas had said. “Where’s the other one?”
“He’s standing sideways and you can only see his left eye.”
This made Thomas laugh so much that his mother called him silly.
He didn’t talk about when she would pull on his toes when he was going to sleep at night, counting them — one, two, three, four, five. Or when she’d pick flowers and put them into her hair and take Dr. Nolan into her arms and dance him around the kitchen.
The minister called her a good mother and devoted daughter, but he didn’t say how she’d stay up all night with him and Eric when they were sick. He made her sound like a flat picture in a book rather than his mother with her warm skin and sweet breath.
Somewhere in the middle of the long sermon, Thomas started crying. He wanted Dr. Nolan to go up there and tell everybody what his mother was really like. He wanted to go home and let his knees sink into the floor.
“Do you want to go up and say good-bye to your mother?” Minas Nolan asked Thomas when the sermon was over and the organ player had started her sad song.
“No,” Thomas said.
“Are you sure? It’s your last chance to see her.”
“I can’t,” Thomas said in a high whine. “I can’t.”
Dr. Nolan began to cry. He picked up the boy and rushed out of the church. He brought Tommy to the long black car and got in with him in the backseat.
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“To the cemetery, Dr. Nolan?” the black driver asked.
“No, no. Take us to the restaurant. I’ll, I’ll go see her later.
Later.”
Tommy buried his face in the fabric of Dr. Nolan’s jacket.
He closed his eyes and held his breath but nothing would stop him from crying.
When they got to the Rib Joint, Tommy and Dr. Nolan sat outside in the car until the boy could sit back and talk.
“It’s okay,” Dr. Nolan told him. “We’re all very sad.”
“How could it be okay to be so sad?”
“Because we all loved her so much.”
Tommy got up on his knees and put his arms around the doctor’s neck. He held tight but was no longer crying. They stayed like that, holding each other until the families began to arrive from the cemetery.
I ra Fontanot had closed the restaurant that day and catered a meal for the memory of his friend Branwyn Beerman. He set out fried chicken and potato salad and a special dish of the spicy catfish that Branwyn ate every time she sat at his kitchen table for a meal.
People were talking and eating and drinking throughout the restaurant and in the backyard.
It was a bright day, and the sun made Thomas squint. He found Eric talking to a little black girl who had come with one of Branwyn’s cousins. The girl’s name was Robin, and she wore all yellow clothes.
“Did you look at the body?” she asked Eric.
“Sure. I had to say good-bye,” he said, half proud and half sincere.
