Tomorrow River

already knew that they sing better than we do, because every spring I make Beezy bring me to Beacon Baptist to listen to their Hallelujah choir. But can the coloreds ever dance! They can do all sorts of low-down movements the likes of which I have never seen before. (There are exceptions, though. Woody and I tried to do the Monster Mash with Mr. Cole, but he had quite a bit of trouble staying with the beat. And Sam didn’t do much dancing because he was having a hard enough time standing up.)

My mother and I were over at the library a few days later when we ran into Sam again.

He was standing in line-actually, weaving in line-behind us at the checkout counter. When the pile of books Mama was holding slid out from between her arms, he bent down, checked the covers, and handed them back with a “Good afternoon, Miss Evelyn. Nice to see you again. I’m… an admirator… an admir… I like poetry, too. Do you read…” He burped. “… the Great Bard?” Sam’s smelling like a still didn’t seem to bother my mother. I think she was so eager to talk to somebody besides me about this Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet or that Shakespearean play that she was willing to overlook the ripeness that was coming off him. Before I knew it, we’d left the library and walked all the way to the Triple S.

That was the first of many visits.

Every Tuesday afternoon, Papa’s longest day at the courthouse, Woody and Mama and I began sneaking over to Sam’s. We took the rowboat. The one that’s missing. Our mother thought the creek was the safest way to go, but she asked that I do the rowing because she didn’t trust her trembling hands. The first time we rounded the bend and Sam’s place came in sight, Mama said, “You’ve got to promise not to tell your father that we are spending time here. He… wouldn’t understand.” Of course, Woody crossed her heart and hoped to die right off, but I wasn’t feeling great about their get-togethers until I saw how happy Sam made Mama. And us. So I promised, too. (The Carmody girls are good at keeping our mouths buttoned up. Practice makes perfect.)

The two of them didn’t sit out on the station porch, Mama in a crisp, pressed dress and Sam in his greasy overalls, sipping pink lemonade and eating tea cakes. That would be foolhardy. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior could dream until he was blue in the face, but folks around here still aren’t even trying to be more tolerant of the coloreds. Mama and Woody and I would wait for Sam to flip his NOT OPEN sign over, and then we’d hike back to where he’s got a cabin behind the station so they could have some privacy. If it was raining, they’d sit on the porch. During more pleasant weather, they’d exchange ideas at a picnic table below a glorious maple. Sam described it as “the kind of tree that Joyce Kilmer would feel grateful to bump into.”

Woody and I’d leave Sam and Mama alone and skip rocks at the creek because my sister would get antsy listening to so many he doth this and he doth thats. Not like me, who could listen to the two of them word-waltzing into the night. I was fascinated not only by their conversation, but also by the way he talked with her. Of course, Mama would pay such close attention when Sam would talk to her about baseball or Macbeth because that’s what ladies are supposed to do. Act real interested in what men have to say.

“I’m gonna come back there and light a fire under you if ya don’t hurry up,” I yell back to E. J. I’ve already reached the road. “You aren’t moving very fast for a mountain man that is attemptin’ to rescue his future bride. Maybe I should tell Woody you changed your mind and wanna marry Dot Halloran.”

“For God’s sakes, Shenny. Don’t do that. I can’t stand that cow Dot Halloran,” he calls from somewhere behind me up in the bushes.

I cannot lay my eyes on the Triple S without memories of my mother washing over me. She always had a smile on her face when she was spending time with Sam, and seeing her ruby lips… that was like witnessing the parting of the Red Sea, that’s how miraculous her happiness seemed to me.

Woody is crate-sitting on the station porch next to Sam, just the way I knew she’d be. His aviator glasses are covering her eyes. They take up half her face, but Woody just adores those glasses. Sam’s got his baseball hat pulled down over his eyes, but don’t let that fool you. He knows we’re coming.

E. J. finally emerges from the brush, scratched and sweating. His hair has got some twigs sticking out of it.

“Well? What’re ya waitin’ for?” I say, shoving him halfway across the road. “Go get her, Casanova.”

Chapter Twelve

The Triple S is not new and shiny like the Shell out on the highway.

This station looks kind of like, well, not to be ungenerous or anything, but Sam’s place reminds me of a three- legged dog. There’s only two pumps and no car wash. It’s got a restroom, but considering it looks like the entryway to hell, I’d rather relieve myself in the creek, thank you very much. Sam’s office has a beat-up wood desk and a swivel chair, a baseball calendar, and an adding machine. Fan belts hang on hooks above a refrigerated case where you can get yourself a cool drink and all of it reeks of Valvoline.

Sam inherited the station in his second cousin’s last will and testament. “Good thing it was Sander that passed away and not my cousin Hembly or I’d be shrimping off the Gulf Coast instead of whiling away the afternoon with you, Shen.” I told him, “That was a lucky break. You didn’t even have to get a new sign made up.”

After sprinting across the two-lane and scrambling onto the station porch, E. J. quick drags over another crate and gets comfortable at my sister’s side. I get right up into her. “You’re using up all our lookin’-for-Mama time and Papa almost saw-” She’s looking so natty in the aviator glasses. Like she could skip over to Jessop’s Field and fire up one of those planes, rip into the wild blue yonder without so much as a “take care now, ya hear,” and that only makes me worse mad, because honestly. “Ya hear me?”

E. J. chops my arms down from her shoulders. “Quit shakin’ her so hard. You’re gonna dislodge her brain.”

“But she’s gonna get us… you don’t know…”

Sam’s listening in on our bickering, but not umping. He’s working neats-foot oil into the pocket of his already broke-to-death Rawlings. There’s a foamy bottle of half-drunk cream soda at his feet. He stays away from sloe gin these days. Mama helped him dry out. (He fell off the wagon for a while after she disappeared, but he got himself up, brushed himself off, and hopped right back on board.)

It would be six kinds of rude to ask, so I haven’t, but I think Sam’s around forty years old. Those ravines that run from his nose to his lips, I’ve noticed that’s about the age they begin appearing on somebody’s face even if they aren’t prone to smiling all that much. His nose is beaked. His eyes are the color of hazelnuts and like the Zulus in the National Geographic magazine, he wears his hair bushy, not oiled. He dresses a whole lot better, but the rest of him takes after his mother in looks, except for skin color. Nobody knows who Sam’s father is except for Blind Beezy and she’s not telling. I know that it wasn’t Carl Bell. (Thank the Lord. I’ve seen pictures of him. The man looked like he got dropped off a bridge at dawn and nobody bothered picking him up ’til dusk.)

“How are you, Shen?” Sam asks, still working on the glove. From spending sixteen years up North, most of Sam’s Southern drawl has faded away, but you can hear it coming out on some words. And it’s not only how he sounds. It’s what he says. He always treats us like we’re on the same playing field. His kind voice made me uncomfortable at first. Like maybe Sam wasn’t very manly. A little too up on his toes, if you know what I mean. I’m used to him now.

“I been better, Sam,” I say, getting comfortable next to his calico named Wrigley, who’s named not after the gum, but a baseball field in Chicago, Illinois. Even if I didn’t tell you that somebody tossed him out of a fast moving car, that’s immediately what you’d think upon seeing this cat.

“Did you happen to see those shooting stars last night?” Sam asks, looking up like they might’ve left a scorch mark on this afternoon’s cottony sky.

“I certainly did.”

“Did you make a wish or two?”

“I certainly did not.”

“Why’s that?”

“You know why.” Wishes. Bah. “So I been thinkin’.”

“A portent of doom if ever there was one.” Sam shakes a couple of lemon drops out of the box that he keeps in his shirt pocket, places one in Woody’s cupped hand and wiggles the box at E. J., who, of course, accepts. “Care for