a prophecy, something to keep him growing with us, you know?” He paused, placing the bust back on the side table. “So why can’t I smoke too? Don’t I deserve to feel what he felt, sitting here? This is his seat. Don’t I deserve it, to feel . . . him?”
“Brother,” one of the sisters tried to sound patient, “this is not of the Lord . . .”
“Aahhh! Not of the Lord,” Lucas said, turning to her. Ferron was startled at how much his tone was like the old man’s. “Not of J. Christ Esquire, eh?” He laughed.
Somebody breathed, “Lord!”
“That is what the old man would say,” Lucas continued. “I have never read his books. Do you understand what that means? Do you? I never read any. None. Zero. I read everything else but . . . No . . . I am doing what I have to do. These are his shoes. These are his . . .” He paused. Ferron was expecting him to break down, and stood, preparing to clear the house of the delegation. But Lucas did not start to cry. He was trying to find the right words. “This is . . . this is him,” he finished, leaning back in the chair.
The delegation could not get him to say any more. He was busy reading. They gathered around him and prayed. Ferron looked over to the telephone room and noticed Clarice sitting there in the half light, chewing at her nails and watching everything. Her face was expressionless. The delegation finished their prayer and promised to come by again soon. Lucas did not look up. They left as quietly as they had come.
Ferron watched Lucas lean forward and peer through the window to watch them leaving. He turned away quickly as Lucas looked over to him. He heard Lucas chuckle slightly. There was silence for a few minutes. Lucas lit a cigarette and continued reading. He turned a page. By now it was too dark to make out his facial expressions. He was a shadow.
“They think I have gone mad now,” he said slowly. Ferron could hear his smile. “So how the hell I must explain to them what I am doing when I don’t even know myself, eh?” He laughed softly. “You just do what you have to do.” That was one of the old man’s stock lines. Ferron caught it, so did Clarice, sitting in the telephone room. They started to laugh. Lucas laughed with them.
Then they grew silent, at first trying to find something to say, but gradually accepting that there was nothing to say, that the darkness was a shelter. They sat in the dark for a very long time.
Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan
I have been taking taxis to work every day. I need a car. I think I will get a white Toyota Corolla. That is what all the political thugs are driving. They must be quite reliable. It is a long way from the Rover three-liter. But we are a long way from those days. I am spending a small fortune on taxis. The strange thing is that I don’t feel the urge to drive myself anymore. I want to be looked after. I used to love driving. That summer we drove across Europe to Moscow and then across Russia, that feeling of command of the road, that adventure, it seemed like second nature. But we are a long way from all of that now. A white Toyota Corolla.
The difficulty here is that I have never worked in a firm or company before. It has nothing to do with whether one is making money for the company. That is fun. It has to do with the structure and relations in the office. I find it incredible that this office is set up as a large room, with some sixty or seventy chairs and about forty desks. The first problem is noise. The perpetual clicking of typewriters (I have to type at great pace, writing nonsense, to avoid going mad) and the jabbering of people on the telephone or the interviewing of and by working-class voices inhibits any kind of creative work. What we have is noise as in a garment factory and the quality of the output is similar.
FOUR
When Ferron came home the night after the Mandeville journey, Lucas was slumped in the corner, his head thrown back, with a book in his lap. He snored with a slow untidy asthmatic wheeze and grunt. A cigarette smoked in the remnants of his supper which was catching flies on the floor. It was hot and Lucas was sweating. They did look alike, Lucas and the old man: the nose, the thick glossy beard, the high forehead. Lucas, however, lacked the haughtiness—the old man’s condescending confidence. Even in his sleep, Lucas looked humble, almost defeated.
In the kitchen Ferron found his way around with the help of the refrigerator light. He was afraid to turn on the fluorescent bulb which hummed loudly and startled roaches into scurrying and flying around the room. The noise would bring someone out. He did not want that.
He ate the cold curried chicken and a few clumps of rice, quickly. He could see the line of light under the door of his mother’s room. He considered going in to tell her he was back, but decided against it. The stillness of the house was why he had lingered in Half Way Tree for more than three hours after Cuthbert had dropped him off. He had missed the last bus and was forced to take a taxi home.
He took a glass of water to his room. His stomach had already begun to churn by the time he had taken off his shirt and trousers and thrown himself on the bed. He tried not to think about it there on his back, staring at the slanted lines of light from the street on the wall. Music from the bar across the way drifted into the room. The pattern of dog’s alarms relayed from fenced-in yard to fenced-in yard. He listened instinctively for the sound of barking to fall into a lull, then he relaxed.
The old man would be on his back on the stained sheet in that funeral home where they had left him as if fast asleep. Or perhaps he was in heaven trying to understand what to do with so many years of paradise. Maybe he was waiting for the ancestors to construct that long bridge of light with strips of material from the moon, peeled off like onion skins, a path for him to walk from soil to soil, to the Port Harcourt black earth where the pebbles would be familiar again, and the sound of feet, stepping above, comforting in their rhythm. If not there, he would have to be in hell. No fires, just the waiting, a sad desperate waiting, surrounded by illiterates. Like the rest of them, Ferron needed a narrative for his father’s afterlife.
Family story had it that the old man had confessed Christ a month before his death. Ferron had noticed him listening to late-night sermons on the radio, and once, three weeks before, the old man had spoken during a family prayer hour. To call it a prayer would not have been an accurate description of what he said. He simply spoke. His eyes were open and he was smiling:
“We need some peace in this house too.”
This was his addition to a list started by Clarice and extended by Mother. Lucas, who was muttering in tongues and flavoring each insightful utterance with a heartfelt “amen,” went completely silent after the old man had spoken. It was Ferron’s turn, and he quickly thanked God for everything and ended the prayer time.
The old man was beaming. Nobody spoke. It was hard to tell whether his look was of irony and self-mockery, and an awareness that he was messing with the minds and hearts of his family, or whether he was sincerely seeking peace with his maker. The problem was that the look was a well-cultivated one. Clarice had been certain that it was mockery, because she walked off muttering how it was no wonder the Lord never took any of them seriously. But Ferron thought he saw something else, something like peace in the old man’s eyes. They never spoke again about that moment until after his death; then it became evidence of his salvation. They were grasping. Everybody knew this.
So, it was possible that the old man was resting in the bosom of Abraham, somewhere in Zion. The old man would find it all quite funny.
* * *
Although he was expecting it, the first wave of pain in Ferron’s stomach caught him dozing. He got up quickly and ran to the bathroom, grabbing an old Star
