are some things missing,” The pastor said. “A sterling silver plate, and Jip Cooper brought a cut-glass server.”
Tuuro shook his head. “I’d remember those, I think. I’m pretty sure I didn’t …”
“Well, that’s too bad. No one hanging around that night? No intrusive interlopers?”
The pastor used phrases like that in sermons: fair-weather Philistines; complacent Christians; reductive religionists. He would never dream that Tuuro, listening from his station in the supply room behind the pulpit, would think of them as vacant phrases. “No,” Tuuro said.
“Too bad.” The pastor waved his dismissal and Tuuro was already to the door when the next question came: “Have you checked the narthex lately?”
The narthex was the anteroom at the back of the sanctuary where people stood and gathered before and after the service. Tuuro remembered starting this job and not knowing what a narthex was. Now his chest tightened and his tongue felt too big for his mouth: what else had he done wrong? “I cleaned it Sunday after services.”
“All of it? I was in there to pick up some hymnals for the Chorale Society, and I noticed some brownish streaks on the cupboard beside the front door. Low down. Isn’t that strange, I thought, Tuuro doesn’t usually miss things. See? You have us spoiled.”
In the narthex the late afternoon sunlight patched the hot and humid air with pinks and greens. The narthex was separated by a wall of stained glass from the sanctuary. At one end of the narthex, where Tuuro entered, a hall led to the church classrooms, social hall, and offices. Once upon a time, the whole sanctuary/narthex complex was air-conditioned all week, but those days of excess were long gone. Now the only steady air-conditioning was in the pastor’s office. Tuuro opened the big front doors to get some air, glancing at the lower cabinets as he passed them. Brown streaks. The pastor was right.
Tuuro flipped the overhead light on in the narthex and walked down the side aisle of the sanctuary to the maintenance closet, where he filled his wheeled bucket with water and soap and rags. “Fastidious boy,” his Aunt Stella used to call him.
Back in the narthex, Tuuro squatted. A whole wall of oak cupboards flanked the front door, their shelves filled with hymnals and prayer books, a ledge separating the cupboards into lower and upper sections. The hymnals kept in the bottom cupboards were the old ones, rarely used. And it was on the doors of these cupboards, inches from the floor and running horizontally, that Tuuro examined the series of brown streaks. He swiped at one with a wet rag. Naomi, his ex, had had terrible periods, dripping out of her and onto the bathroom floor. The reddish brown on Tuuro’s rag looked familiar. Blood.
Not dripped, as if it had spilled from someone. Not beside a doorknob as if someone had scraped a hand. But low on a cupboard, a thing a person shouldn’t brush against at that level. And going on for inches, no feet, maybe three feet, as if a bloody something had been dragged alongside the wood, although there were (Tuuro checked now) no spots of blood on the floor.
Tuuro stood and shut the big front doors.
Tuuro knew what he expected when he opened the cupboard. So much violence since the Gridding, so many refugees, people stripped from their surroundings and turned casteless and angry, unfettered by grandmothers and neighborhood policemen and people who knew their names. The troublemakers were largely young males. The other day a woman’s body had been found wedged behind a door at the public library. Instinctively, Tuuro pinched his nostrils as he opened the cupboard door.
It was a boy. A small Melano boy, not more than five years old, curled up in the cupboard facing out as if he were simply hiding, his nappy head tucked down to his chest. Tuuro touched his shoulder, cold and stiff. He wrapped his arms around the small chest and unwedged the body from the cupboard, slipped it on its side onto the floor. The boy’s face had a pleading, confused look. Tuuro felt for a second as if he were looking at himself.
Tuuro’s clearest memory of his mother was her shoes. A blue pair with suede appliquéd sea-stars, an olive-green pair with seams stitched in a yellow zigzag. His mother liked to scoop Tuuro up so his legs dangled. A lilac smell. After she was shot by the man Tuuro called Uncle, Tuuro was raised not by his father (no one was raised by a father) but by his great-aunt and his grandmother Tati, who lived together in a welfare apartment that was actually Tati’s, where Tuuro had to scoop his toys and himself under the bed when the caseworker arrived, because children were not allowed. The great-aunt had an ex-sister-in-law Tuuro was told to call Aunt Stella, who lived in an apartment down the hall. “To whence are you headed, little man?” she might ask. “To whom are you carrying that candy?” A stickler for grammar. She had what Tuuro later learned was an erect carriage: she always stood high with her neck extended, like an African queen, like a Zulu, she said. Tuuro could be Zulu, she liked to point out, that height and those high, wide cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Really, a remarkable-looking people.
People who adopted Melano boys got subsidies from the state of Ohio, because people didn’t want to adopt Melano boys. “That adopting you should require a bribery is a tragedy and a crime,” Aunt Stella said. “I couldn’t be sure which it is more.” But she and Tuuro would live better if she adopted him. They could leave this ill-kempt building with its slovenly occupants and rent a house with a yard and honeysuckles edging the back fence. A back door as well as a front one, three steps up from the yard to the kitchen. They would be a family. Tuuro could call her Mom. Would he mind calling her Mom? Or would that be sad for him?
“I could call you Mom,” Tuuro said.
In his dream of how it was, she indeed adopted him. They moved to their little house in Englewood. Tuuro went to a good school and wore a uniform; when he got off the bus each afternoon, Aunt Stella was waiting by the fire hydrant. They had a dog. They barbequed in summer. Tuuro spoke correctly. No one stomped on anybody’s heart.
It had been, in its way, a terrible childhood, not because he was unwanted but because after his mother’s death he was wanted too much, by three aging, angry women who each had their own purposes and plans. Tuuro remembered sitting on the brown plaid couch at Tati’s, eyes darting from face to face as he tried to figure out what they wanted, to whom he should acquiesce, to whom he should say “to whom.” Now Tuuro saw in the dead boy’s face the same confused pain that he had felt, and all Tuuro wanted was to make it end.
He picked up the body and carried it to his supply closet behind the pulpit, which no person but Tuuro ever entered, cleared a space on the bench against the wall there, and set the boy down. He could not get the boy uncurled. There was a wound in the left chest, a complicated thing with congealed blood mixed with torn fabric, an area he would have to clean, Tuuro knew, but for now something he chose to ignore. There was a streak of dried blood coming out of the right ear. Tuuro turned the light off in the supply closet, stood outside it praying the Lord’s Prayer for himself more than the boy, then closed and locked the door.
He took a ten-minute bus ride home. He left his apartment to return to the church with a duffel bag full of supplies, remembering even the hat to cover the wounded ear.
He took off the boy’s clothes and, starting with his face, washed him with a washcloth scented with cologne, cleaning off every part of him, even the bits of blood next to his wounds—which must be knife wounds—in his chest. As he worked he dried the boy with his fluffiest towel. Under the boy’s blue shorts there was a surprise, dried stains on his white underpants, urine and stool and blood, which wasn’t right, which hurt Tuuro in his soul. He said the Lord’s Prayer again, left the body on the bench, the towel carefully draped over it, locked the door, and took a bus to K-Bob’s East to buy clean underpants, carrying the soiled underwear in a paper bag that he dumped in a bin outside the store. He bought the best children’s underwear
