He regularly petitions the town council for the Lutheran church’s restoration. The solidly Methodist council has always refused. Over the years, this ritual has drawn down his jowls and carved out his belly. It is of apparently small comfort that the Lutheran congregation in neighboring Hudson uniformly regards him as one of the Elect.
His company, never enlivening, has become a downright penance these last few months. He does not like Pea.
She stops for a cigarette in front of the porch. Not inside the store but technically on his property, a detail she knows perfectly well. I lean against the railing and wait for the battle to engage.
“Well, if it isn’t little Davey.” Craver pauses on the top step and wipes his hands on his apron.
Pea gives him a look from behind her wreath of smoke: a delicately raised eyebrow, a hard half smile. With her wide-brim hat and tailored sailor dress she looks just like what everyone in town says. A colored siren come to steal their men and their morals.
“Hiya, Mr. Craver,” she says. Her voice is deeper. She’s Phyllis again, Victor’s angel. I don’t always like that side of her, but I have always desired it.
Craver sniffs and the folds of skin beneath his jaw crumple in a chilly nod. “Miss Green. You might recall…”
He points to the sign prominently displayed above the open door: CORINTHIANS 6:19 NO CIGARETTES ALLOWED ON THE PREMISES.
“I ain’t inside, now, am I?” Pea’s Harlem drawl gets thick as molasses around Craver or any of the locals. I know why she does it. It still makes things harder for us.
“We’ll come inside as soon as she’s done, sir,” I say.
Craver shakes his head. “Don’t drop that thing on the grass. I’m trusting you, Davey.”
He heads back inside. Craver was the first person in town to befriend me and my mother. If I can’t make myself like him, I can’t help but feel grateful to him. We wouldn’t have survived those first few years without his generosity.
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
I turn to her. “I had a cigarette at the house.”
“No, Craver, that name he calls you.”
“Davey?” I shrug. “My mother encouraged it. She said it helped them accept me.”
Phyllis stubs out the cigarette on the railing, leaving an ash smudge that Craver will notice, and resent. I ignore it. She starts to say something, then shakes her head and slips the butt into my pocket with the letter. I wish the cigarette were still alight, to set the damned thing on fire.
Craver’s store is large, navigable through narrow aisles packed so tightly that they feel in constant danger of collapse. He prides himself on his inventory, and despite his rocky relations with the town, no one would consider shopping anywhere else.
Phyllis interrogates a laconic Craver about the greenflies and I wander away. She can fight her own battles, that I always knew. I’m even beginning to hope that she can stop them.
As a child, these towering, mismatched shelves contained treasures that I tracked with the verve of a Robert Louis Stevenson hero. A clumsy one, it turned out. After I destroyed a purported Ming dynasty vase with a dowel, I found myself working as his assistant for a year. He refused to let my mother pay for it.
The tracery of these memories is never far when I visit Craver’s, but today they feel tender and sore. I am haunted by my past self. There he is, squatting in the shadow of the cotton bolts. He’s telling stories about how the good king has descended to the naraka and the brave Prince Devajyoti will make a bargain with Yama, the lord of that place, to get him out.
It takes me too long to recognize the thickness of that remembrance, the turpentine-and-sawdust scent of it. These feelings aren’t entirely mine. A boy watches me from the same shadows that I used to fold around me. He is older than I was—fifteen or sixteen—and taller, but I recognize the guarded hostility.
“Hello,” I say, gently.
“You’re that fella who owns the rose house by the river, aren’t you? You’re Davey.”
“Dev,” I say, and think of Pea. “You must be the Spalding kid. Al, is it?”
“Alvin.”
It’s no shock that we know one another, though we’ve never met. Alvin’s the only son of Little Easton’s remaining Negro family. And my murky racial status has been fodder for the town gossip mill since we first moved to town.
“Pleased to meet you, Alvin.” I extend my hand.
He just stares at it. “They say you’re like me.”
“I’m part Indian, actually.”
“Your hands. They say you got the trick.”
I’ve never heard that particular slang before. I stick my offending members in my pockets. “I’ve got a trick, sure. What’s yours?”
He steps from the shadows. Though he seemed harmless before, even pitiable, I take a half step back. It’s the way he smiles. Like a man with a gun in his pocket. I saw that too often in my detective years to not recognize it here. Belatedly, it occurs to me that he could be more like Pea than like me. The thought is terrifying.
“You wanna see? It’s pretty special, but none of the eggs around here appreciate it.”
He reaches for me slowly as he speaks, daring me to keep still. I step neatly aside. I don’t know what knack he has in his hands, but this isn’t how to find out.
“Chicken,” he says. “And what can you do?”
“I can touch threats. I can tell if you want to hurt me, Alvin.” Which he doesn’t, I realize. But he was thinking about it.
I don’t know what happened to the rest of Little Easton’s black residents, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the whites ran them out for just a hint of that uncanny extra Alvin and I shared. I recall what Victor had said to Pea, when he
