There Will Be No Miracles Here Read online

  Dorothy—let’s call her Granny, be respectful—also carried on the legacy that I most remembered Cleo for: she, like her favorite granddaughter, refused to take shit from anybody, especially from me.

  I should say, before I make my case against this woman, that one of the many reversals we, you and I, will experience together will be Granny’s transformation into a saint, perhaps the only saint in this whole story. In the meantime I shall heap great clumps of dirt on her reputation, which will not surprise her in the least, since she knew (or so she said) from the day I was born that I was either the spawn of Satan or the actual Antichrist or, if nothing else, had a lot of the devil inside of me (which, in a way, was prophetic). We had been confirmed in our views of each other back in 1992, on Halloween.

  * * *

  —

  The sun had long gone down. I’ll say it was ten o’clock just for kicks, though I’m pretty sure I could not tell the time at five. I know Granny was asleep on the couch in the living room—a satin magnolia-colored Victorian kind of thing, with wooden claws for legs, scratched and chipped over the years. I believe I was lying on a pallet or a little mattress on the floor in her room because that’s where I slept most nights, since when I shared Granny’s bed she fussed so much each time I turned over or fidgeted that I learned to sleep on my stomach, stiff as the embalmed, all night. That, as you can imagine, was not fun, so at some point I settled for the floor and was there, around ten o’clock, when the doorbell rang.

  Trick or treat!

  I had not gone trick-or-treating that Halloween, since my mother’s baby sister, Shon, was the only person who took me anywhere, and she did not believe in the occult. I had seen Halloween on television, though, had heard about it at school, and it sounded like one hell of a good time for all involved, part of the fun being the moment you hear the doorbell ring then hear a voice shout trick or treat! then rush to the door to give candy and joy to whoever stands on your front porch, even if it’s after nine o’clock, even if the trick-or-treaters are two haggard grown men in old coats instead of costumes, which I saw through the window.

  Just a minute!

  Man, I tell you what, I was so excited to bless these trick-or-treaters, I probably would have tripped over something if I didn’t always walk so carefully on my tiptoes. I slid out of my sleeping place and made it to within a few steps of the front door before Granny raised her head.

  Don’t you open that door.

  At five, nothing too bad had happened to me yet—my birth, which I had forgotten; a beesting at four; a few whippings—so this, refusing to open the door for trick-or-treaters, was the most unconscionable act I had witnessed in my life.

  But Granny! They just want some candy!

  She lifted her head a little more, nightcap on, glasses now on, watching me.

  Casey, I don’t care what they want. Get away from that door . . . you hear?!

  I heard what she said. Felt it, really. If you have ever been in a crowded restaurant minding your business when, suddenly, a far-off waiter drops a tray of dishes, and the sound of disaster rings out, a hush falls over the restaurant, and you feel ashamed, strangely, for the waiter and for yourself—if you have heard and felt that, then you have heard and felt Dorothy West’s voice when she hollers like she hollered at me on Halloween 1992. So yeah, I heard her. But I did not understand. All these people wanted was a little treat for Halloween, somebody to open the door with a smile and a Baby Ruth or something to replace the nothing in their buckets or lives. I kept my eyes on Granny but took another step toward the door, my little arm beginning to rise.

  Casey! She shot up like Thomas A. Edison himself had run the world’s best electricity through her bones. What did I say?!? Got—

  Granny was up from the couch now, lunging toward the kitchen door—lunging for what? I wondered—I jumped back from the door but did not run until I saw that she had lunged for the giant corn broom of Damocles that she smashed roaches with and was now lunging for my narrow tail, about to smash me like she smashed those roaches who never hurt nobody, coming after me with that broom like she was Jesse Owens’s sister or something, chasing me like I was a goddamn cockroach instead of a boy trying to give some joy to a few strangers on the porch, but I was a lot faster than a roach and just as nimble, at least more nimble than this old woman with that nasty broom, and so I hollered and ran and she chased me and I kept running—even at five, I could usually run for as long as I needed to—and she kept chasing me until she couldn’t anymore, until she got tired and gave up and dropped the broom and looked at me like she wanted me roach-dead and I looked at her from halfway behind a door and knew that she was finished and wrong and mean and she knew that I was the devil and quick and we both knew that there would be no candy and no joy for the trick-or-treaters or us or anybody else in the world, that night.

  A quarter century later, I still get sick to my stomach when I think about how those men must have felt, left out in the cold like that on Halloween. And I bet I felt a little ill when we walked into her house again three years later—and relieved when we left soon after. It may have been that very same day, or a month down the line, but it was soon enough that it did not seem to take too long to come: the day my father’s father delivered us.

  * * *

  —

  Come on ride with me, Scooter. Papa’s outside.

  In those days I did not hesitate to ride anywhere with hardly anybody, especially my daddy, and so I ran to get my shoes and by such time as I found them he was already lurching across Dorothy’s lawn, leaning, smiling, head tilted into the sun like a man for whom the light was not a threat. He scurried across one lane of Old Ox Road and then the median and then reached a ruby-red Rolls-Royce parked on the other side.

  I finally made it there myself, climbed into the backseat, and clicked my dusty seat belt. Daddy settled in at the left hand of his father, Cornelius Howard Gerald, whom he called Daddy and whose grandchildren and sometimes his wife called Papa. Papa’s body took up the entire driver’s seat. His hands smothered the bony steering wheel. He glanced back at me, big eyes behind brown aviator shades. His voice rumbled like your hand in a bowl of pinto beans—

  Roderic.

  Hey Daddy . . .

  Is that Casey?

  He knew it was me, but this was how all old people greeted children—is that so-and-so that I already know it is?

  Yes it’s me, fool! I shouted with my mouth closed. I knew very well that I was not to speak unless spoken to directly, so just sat there and waited to be verified.

  Yes sir, sure is. Negro’s getting big, ain’t he?

  He he he . . . my lawd!

  Papa was, in fact, going blind, but his vision was still good enough to drive that Rolls-Royce and to see eight-year-old me and to look at my daddy in such a way that he became a bigger man than I had known him to be and a smaller boy than I was myself. I don’t mean that as an insult, by the way. George W. Bush is the only man I have ever met who was as devoted to his father as my daddy was to his daddy, as willing to do whatever was required to please the man. One son set his sights on the White House. The other set his sights on Home. Both should have set their sights elsewhere. But Cornelius wanted his boy close by and here we were, at the dawn of our demise, with joy.

  We made three stops that day.

  The first was to Wingfield’s, its name in big red marquee letters outside and inside, dim and smoky, stools caked in grease and burgers spilling over paper plates. A man rushed to the counter.

  Afternoon, Pastor Gerald! What can I getcha?

  I’d never had a burger that big or been in a restaurant that dirty, so after a few bites, I was glad when my father said C’mon Scooter, and we left.

  The second stop was across the street at what looked to be a small junkyard or an abandoned filling station. This was Papa’s body shop. He and Daddy got out to handle some business. Wh
o knows what happened in there.

  The last stop was nearby on Marsalis Avenue, the full length of which you can drive in about twenty minutes, starting at Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy was shot, and ending at the front gates of Laurel Land cemetery. Papa parked the Rolls-Royce on a small side street, outside a squat white brick home with a mangy front yard and tired fence in the back. He went to the front door, which was hidden from our view. A woman came out to the low concrete patio in either her nightclothes or the saddest day clothes of all time, her head wrapped in a scarf and one hand over her eyes.

  This is where we’re gonna live, Scooter, Daddy said.

  Dang, I thought. Perhaps he thought the same thing, too, but dared not speak it either, having not talked back to his Daddy, that I know of, in nearly forty years.

  You may wonder why the old man bossed his boy around so easily, why the Wingfield’s man was so quick to offer whatever he desired, why the few dusty body shop attendants hopped to it when he arrived, why that sad old woman did not protest when she was informed that moving time had come—why, in this neighborhood on the other side of the Trinity River that everyone who could leave had left, there was an old man, nearly blind, driving a ruby-red Rolls-Royce. The simple answer (and the true one) is that this man had joined, at the age of sixteen, the greatest business in America: the business of saving souls. He’d found a vocation that could help him up off the dirt floor he’d been sleeping on since 1928, and once he got up he kept going: up the road from Dawson to Dallas by ’51, out of other pastors’ pulpits by ’67, when he founded Community First Baptist, the church that cares about you, and, when that edifice overflowed, to the Community First Baptist Church Extension on Westmoreland Road in ’75, in a nicer section of Oak Cliff and on a plot three times the size, making Cornelius the first black pastor in the city to shepherd two locations, and making his son’s historic journey to Columbus only the second-most important thing to happen in the family that year.

  Within twenty years Cornelius would have over a thousand members and dozens of sons in the ministry who pastored thousands more; within twenty-five years he’d be dead; and within thirty years both locations would be abandoned—the original because it was no longer appealing, Westmoreland because the bank took it. But in the meantime, Cornelius was king of the hill. He knew it. Everybody else knew it, too. And if his wife forgot, he’d knock her teeth out. If his children forgot, he’d push them through a screen door. If his congregation forgot . . . Well, to this day I have not witnessed a single member entertain the notion that he was not the best among them.

  Still, even after doing a lot of work to become a better person, I don’t understand why anybody would pack up all their stuff and their family and move to the other pole of America just to be close to somebody, father or legend or not. Why they, as my daddy did, would give up coaching high school teams and enforcing city codes and, instead, make a new living driving daycare vans for one of his daddy’s parishioners. He and Papa didn’t seem to have any big plans, other than hanging out—the son taking his old man’s car to get cleaned, ordering a slab of ribs for the old man’s dinner, or sitting under the giant shade tree that towered in the front yard of the house Cornelius and Clarice had built in Lancaster, which is now called a suburb but at that time was just the country.

  So many afternoons and evenings and some mornings, too, they would sit there together, saying nothing. If something was said it was usually Papa doing the saying—telling a story, often a joke. And Daddy would rear his head back and open his mouth like he was about to guzzle a quart of oil and laugh so hard that tears would meander down at least one cheek by the time he was done.

  Daddy especially loved when Papa asked a question.

  Roderic . . . you know the three most dangerous things in the world?

  What, Daddy? (Already warming the laugh and tears.)

  A white man with a high-powered rifle. A Mexican with a driver’s license. And a nigger with some authority.

  Ack ack ack!

  He he he. Papa always laughed this way, like a Michael Jackson leg kick.

  I enjoyed hanging with them well enough, but what I cared most about at the time was that the cost of Daddy’s new life of devotion was the life that I had built for myself. Of course I was only eight, so had not done anything at all aside from live the way I naturally lived, but simply doing that created, on its own, a life that I didn’t find too difficult to navigate, aside from a threatened suicide every now and then. This new way of living was not very delicious to me, a nobody in a family big on somebodys, the silent son of a legend who had suddenly been downgraded to the supplicant son of another legend, who informed me that we were all sons and daughters of the Legend, God, to whom we had to submit our present lives and the ones to come. That was news to me. I hadn’t had any problems with God in Ohio, mostly because I hadn’t been thinking about Him and did not get the sense that He was thinking about me. Now We were supposed to be on Each Other’s minds nonstop, and that seemed a bit much.

  What did I get in return for all this? The third grade, for one, where the sixth-grade girl I thought I loved paid me no mind, the boy I sat next to hated me—man where you from OHIO?? man you need to go back—and the chicken pox made me miss a week of class, which led to my first B and one of my last whippings, since Daddy later made it known that he decided never to hit me again once he started using.

  And I received, in exchange for my friends in Ohio, thirty first cousins, with clusters of every age group, mine already dominated by Papa’s sidekicks, Luke and BB, who would in time become like siblings, by which time I didn’t have much else. Until then I was just a thirty-first wheel. When I opened my mouth, the cousins laughed—oooh you white grandmother grandfather pass the Grey Poupon—and when I walked outside on my tiptoes—oooh you walk like a little girl!—the older boy cousins would turn to each other and raise an eyebrow—I’ono dawg that lil nigga got some sugar in him. Sure, I did love sugar a great deal, perhaps too much, but I knew very few kids who didn’t. Besides, I just didn’t want to get my feet dirty. They didn’t care.

  In addition to all this adoration, I received my own bedroom for the first time, which only made it easier for my sister to get away from me. She, being a normal teenager with a magnetic personality just like her Daddy, disappeared into an abyss of great fun and phone chats and dates with the captain of the South Oak Cliff football team. At least once she disappeared into the night through her bedroom window. I was no snitch, so never told the authorities, in part because before long there were no authorities to tell.

  And yet: I was not alone.

  One night, sometime after K104 ran its last loop of Missy’s “Supa Dupa Fly,” after Fox 4 aired The Simpsons and Married . . . with Children, and after I closed my blinds to watch America’s Most Wanted—I always closed the blinds because I knew fugitives would see me watching the show and know that I knew they were on the loose and kill me before I had a chance to turn them in and collect my reward—angels appeared on my bedroom walls.

  I was lying in bed on my side and, all of a sudden, I saw rows of angels rising up my wall. They were small for angels, about the size of three roaches, which is what I thought they were at first. They glowed with something of a pink haze, not the clean white aura you’d expect. They were identical, all lined up in perfect straight rows, all moving slowly up and to the right. Each angel was holding something, or else had both arms folded over its chest like you do when you’re riding down a big slide at a water park. Each looked at me, silent. Not the way the Mona Lisa seems to be looking at you regardless of where you stand in the museum but like they were looking right at me as they floated up my walls. I did not kick my legs, which I often did to get to sleep. I did not feel the need to say anything to them or anybody. And I was not afraid.

  When I think of that night, I think of a friend, Joshua, who went to Peru a few years ago to try ayahuasca. Once he’d taken it in
, he hiked and sat on the side of a mountain by himself, and saw a red flower a few paces away, standing all alone. The flower took on the voice of God—it was God—and God said to Joshua through the red flower: I hope you understand.

  For five months after meeting Red Flower God on that mountain in Peru, Joshua woke at dawn most days and wished he had died in his sleep. We’d meet for breakfast and his eyes would have little red marks in them from the morning crying, even though Josh was a very tough and very funny kid. I thought, This is how hard it is to handle God’s presence for real and how impossible it is to really understand. Joshua and I and the whole world would rather die than understand, rather be deaf than have to hear for ourselves the voice of God. So I’m glad I just got a band of angels that night because they didn’t say anything and I didn’t have to understand and I wasn’t afraid and I wasn’t alone anymore. I felt at the time that the angels were there to protect me. I wonder now whether they were trying to tear ass out of that house.

  Whatever the case, I wasn’t alone because, aside from the angels, I had my mother.

  Across the hallway from my bedroom was the only working bathroom in the house, and every day, whenever I needed to find her, Mama would be standing before the mirror there, putting her face on. If it was early, she wouldn’t have on many clothes, sometimes none. No matter how hot it was, the back of her thigh always felt like she’d just removed an ice pack. Crowded on the sink would be three or four round disks with pancake-colored powder on one side and a dirty mirror on the other, white foam triangles stained with mud, and two lipsticks—one a deep red that she left all over Styrofoam cups, and one fuchsia, which, combined with her big crinkly burnt-blonde hair, made her look like a high-yellow “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” Whitney Houston.

  By evening, an hour or so before she made dinner or ordered Little Caesars, Mama would have on at least a robe, and would pull a black tube from her bag for the grand finale, when she’d lean into the mirror and tilt her head back, keeping one eye on her reflection and the other in the top of her eyelid to apply one . . . two . . . three swipes of the brush.