Silver Sparrow

“Just checking,” the judge said, turning his face back toward the marriage license and signing his name in wet ink. Having done that, he held the document out in Daddy’s direction, but Mattie plucked it out of his hands and snapped it into her A-frame pocketbook, clenched tight in the crook of her arm.

Taking my mama by the sleeve of the school blouse, she steered her toward the door. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

Mama stumbled after her, while Daddy and Uncle Raleigh fol owed behind, close as brothers and separate from the urgency of women.

THE BOYS LIVED like wild animals. This is what people said. Grandma Bunny was raising James by herself since his father got himself kil ed in a paper-mil accident. About that same time, Grandma Bunny took in Uncle Raleigh after his real mama, a redbone girl, ran off to have a better life for herself. Although she was light herself, she couldn’t stand the look of him, that’s what people said.

Grandma Bunny was a kindhearted woman, generous to orphans, mangy kittens, and other strays. Generations of cats lived under her house, fed on table scraps. Years later, when Grandma Bunny didn’t have anyone to look after but herself, she bought kibble to mix in with the leftover oatmeal.

AFTER THE WEDDING, if you could cal it that, although Mama didn’t — she wil go to her grave feeling that she had spent almost her whole life as a wife, without ever having been a bride — she went to her new home. Mama was alone in the house, while Daddy and Uncle Raleigh returned the white people’s car. She peeked into the kitchen and found it to be much like the one in her mother’s house, porcelain sink showing black where it was chipped, gas stove with two eyes, ice box. The bathroom looked about the same, too. Mama turned the knob on the left side of the sink and smiled when warm water gushed over her hand. At least there would be no heating up water just for a bath. Then she stopped grinning. She had never been naked in any home other than her own. Not even on the night that everything happened had she removed al her clothes. Lord, she wondered. What had she done? What had she gotten herself into?

Leaving the bathroom, she tiptoed into a bedroom that smel ed of talcum powder. She figured that room for Grandma Bunny’s. A large white Bible with gold-edged pages sat on a smal night table. In a framed photograph, a man leaned up against an old car. Mama didn’t linger over it, as her mother had a similar photo in her own bedroom; that one was a photo of Mama’s father, and Mama assumed that this was James Senior. She envied his pose, leaning against the fender, head cocked, slanted smile. To Mama, this was the stance of a somebody who was never coming back.

Lastly, she entered the room that was to be James’s and her own. The bed was so large that it embarrassed her. The bedspread was too narrow, not covering the sides of the mattresses. This was where she was to sleep at night, in her nightgown, just that thin covering of cotton. Here she would sleep next to James Witherspoon, a boy she hardly knew who was now her husband. What a word, husband. It didn’t sound like it should have anything to do with her. Inspecting the bed more closely, she saw that this one large bed, the marriage bed, was actual y a pair of singles pressed together. Looking around she figured out that this was the room that the boys shared. She had been so distracted by the bed, its sheer size, and insinuation, that she didn’t see the clues that this was not a space a girl was meant to enter. It smel ed faintly of boy: sweat, fried chicken, and freshcut grass. Mama went to the dint in the center of the bed and pushed until there was a gap between the mattresses. There was only one blanket, and she smoothed it over the bed that she decided would be Daddy’s.

The boys. This is how she thought of them. She stil cal s them that, to this day. In the years that came after, she could think of Daddy as a man, and Uncle Raleigh as wel , but she would always see the two of them as the boys they were when they returned from the long walk home after returning the car.

Daddy and Uncle Raleigh — “Salt and Pepper,” some people cal ed them, because of their coloring — were both hot and filthy. The crisp shirts they had worn to see the judge were damp now and musty. They fidgeted on their own front porch and rang the bel .

Mama opened the door for them. “Come on in,” she said, like this was her house and not theirs, as though she were the lady of this house, as though she were a lady at al . “Y’al want some water?”

Daddy said, “Yeah.” And Uncle Raleigh said, “Yes’m.” This was funny somehow, and the three of them laughed.

“Y’al hungry?”

“Yeah,” Daddy said. “Can you cook?”

Mama shrugged. “Depends on what you want to eat.”

“I’m not hungry,” Uncle Raleigh said.

“Y’al had something to eat over the white people’s place?” Daddy said, “No, we didn’t eat n-n-nothing over there. M-m-mama sent us back here and said we needed to eat at home. She said we needed to get into a routine, with us coming home at a certain time, and you learning how to get the food ready and everything.”

“Oh,” Mama said.

Daddy went on, “And she said that I am supposed to show you where she keeps the starch and everything for the washing.”

“I know how to do laundry already,” Mama said.

“You don’t have to wash none of my clothes,” Uncle Raleigh said. “Miss Bunny says she’l keep doing my things same as always. You just have to take care of James because you’re his wife now.” Uncle Raleigh said this last part in a quiet voice that sounded almost ashamed.

Mama looked up at Daddy, who shrugged. “It’s going to be okay. Once everybody gets used to everything. There’s chicken in the icebox. Mama cut it up already. You just have to fry it. It’l be easy. And she said to tel you that you are welcome here.”

“Y’al two are going to keep going to school?”

They looked at each other, confused-seeming. “Yeah.”

“I can’t go no more,” Mama said quietly.

“Because you’re married?” Uncle Raleigh said.

“No,” James said. “Because she’s p-p-p . . .”