Simple Simon Read online

  “From the look of this stack, I’d say you remembered plenty.” Harris paused to read a few pages, and then commented, “Your parents didn’t have much of a marriage, did they?”

  “Good as any, I suppose. I’m not sure I’d recognize ‘much of a marriage’ if I saw one. My own marriage wasn’t anything to brag about.”

  Immediately, I regretted the statement. I didn’t want Harris to probe my feelings about having been married. Trying to change the subject, I said, “Vivian had a difficult childhood. I’m not sure she ever got over it.”

  Harris arched his eyebrows, prodding me to say more.

  “When she was thirteen, her father horsewhipped Vivian’s younger brother. The boy died of infection.” I wasn’t sure Wesley was a topic I wanted to discuss either, but it was better than discussing marriage. “Vivian says I’m like her brother Wesley. He was left-handed like me, and he wanted to be an artist.”

  “What happened after Wesley died?” Harris asked.

  “Vivian’s mother left the small town of Magnolia. She took the children to Little Rock and stayed with relatives. After a few years, she returned. Vivian refused to go. She said that as long as her father was alive, she’d never set foot in her hometown.”

  I studied Harris while he read more pages of my manuscript. It gave me an opportunity to study his face. Harris looked younger and more innocent than the scar etched on his forehead might otherwise indicate. During one of our first counseling sessions, Harris told me that he had once been a member of the Nation of Islam. Eventually, he lost his religion and became a heroin dealer. His experiences helped us make a connection, since I was a former member of an unpopular religion who had done plenty of drugs.

  Harris finished reading, but didn’t ask more questions, simply encouraging me to “keep writing.”

  I went back to the desk upstairs, watched the slow crawl of the Arkansas River outside the window, and listened to the disturbing sound of a wrecking ball as it pounded a building on the far bank in Little Rock.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Christmas morning, when we still lived in the tiny house in Little Rock, I woke up everyone and dragged them into the living room. Vivian had told me to expect something special, and my anticipation was great.

  In front of the tree stood a miniature world of plastic trees and houses, roads, and even a little church with a steeple. A railroad track ran through this fantasy world with a locomotive pulling several types of cars. One held logs ready to unload into a chute. A refrigerator car allowed an automated worker to push silver milk canisters onto a platform.

  Lenny had spent months building the diorama from a Lionel train kit, working in a cousin’s garage at night and on weekends. Lenny sat me in his lap and threw a lever on the transformer. The train billowed steam and began to course through the make-believe town. Pushing a red button made the locomotive’s whistle blow. On one go-around, we unloaded logs at a depot, and on another, the automated worker pushed out milk canisters.

  “Let me do it,” I said. I wanted to work the controls on my own.

  “You’re liable to break something,” Lenny warned.

  Dejected, I turned away to open presents that Vivian took from under the tree.

  “These are gifts from Santa,” Vivian explained. “The train set is for your father.”

  At least, that’s what my young mind heard. I’m sure Vivian said, “The train set is from your father.”

  All afternoon, Lenny’s coworkers dropped by to see the train set they had heard so much about. Lenny spent hours entertaining them without acknowledging my presence as I sat on the couch with Mandy. Santa had given me two oversized teddy bears that I named Dingo and Wacket. I watched Lenny and his friends from the couch, nestled in their embrace.

  “Isn’t that wonderful!” Mandy clapped when Lenny made the locomotive blare its horn.

  Lenny was her little boy, enjoying Christmas. Looking back, I wonder who I was.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lenny regretted two things about his childhood: not owning a train set and never getting the pony his father had promised. The first was satisfied by my Christmas present. The second had to wait until we moved to Sibley.

  I was quite young when Lenny took Connie and me to the mansion for the first time. Vivian refused to go and tried to convince Lenny to leave me with her. But I pleaded. It would be my first chance to see the place that Mandy had mentioned so often. I also wanted to meet Aunt Opal, Bart’s sister, who had lived there much of her life. I only knew Aunt Opal from photographs in the albums that Mandy went through with me as she told stories.

  Vivian and Lenny argued up to the last minute, locked in their bedroom. When Lenny came out, he told me to get ready—I was going to see the mansion and meet Opal “before she was gone,” and that was that. Lenny’s real motivation was to see how much repair work the mansion needed, since he had already decided to move us to Sibley. Vivian thought Lenny’s reason was unwarranted. He wanted to ensure that Connie and I attended all-white schools.

  During the integration of Little Rock High School in 1957, Lenny had been the ringleader of a group of alumni who shouted epithets from the sidelines as National Guardsmen escorted nine black students into the school. Vivian had tried to stop him from going at the time. She would also fail to keep him from moving us to Sibley.

  Connie had her own reasons for objecting to the move. She would lose her friends and be labeled a “country bumpkin.” It killed her to think about it. Lenny insisted she come on the exploratory visit. She protested by sticking her head out the window and hollering her complaints to the winds as we traveled the two-lane blacktop out of Little Rock. The road soon turned to gravel and in the last stretch became nothing but dirt.

  Aunt Opal stood at the door, sensing our arrival—or figuring out that we were close from the brown dust cloud that followed us. She wore an ankle-length taupe dress that buttoned down the front. A white chiffon scarf helped control her frizzy gray hair. She waved at us energetically.

  Once we settled inside the house, Opal brought out a candy dish filled with lemon drops. I took several of them and followed her into the living room, where she sat on a wingback chair and lifted me onto her lap. Lenny and Opal talked about distant relatives still residing in the area, and about those recently departed, both from Sibley and from life itself. I sucked on the lemon drops and looked out the window at the big tree in the front yard, imagining that the tire swing hanging from one of the sturdiest limbs was the body of our murdered ancestor.

  Lenny said he wanted to look at the rest of the house, indicating that he was worried there might be water damage upstairs since he spotted missing roof tiles as we drove up. He asked Connie to remain with Aunt Opal.

  With Lenny holding my hand, we climbed the steep stairs to the upper floor. The rooms had an eerie quality about them, as if people had decided to leave on the spur of the moment. Closet doors were ajar. Clothes were scattered on beds or thrown over the backs of chairs. The patina of dust that covered everything was the only indication that time had passed since people inhabited the rooms. Opal’s lumbago kept her downstairs. She slept in a small guest room and took her meals in the dinette. Our visit may have been her only company in months, if not years. Opal was something of an outcast, and anyway, relatives didn’t like being associated with the mansion, which looked more like a haunted house than a place to raise one’s family.

  After jotting notes in the ever-present pad that he kept in his shirt pocket, Lenny took me outside. The fields were exactly as Mandy had described them. There was the pond used for watering the livestock. Algae were beginning to cover the surface of the water, which was as brown as sassafras tea. Near the pond stood the old barn built of weathered cedar planks with a corrugated metal roof, streaked with rust. Muscadine vines obscured the remains of the corral. Wagon ruts, barely visible through the underbrush, led from the barn and disappeared at a line of trees, which had replaced the original fields of cotton. Lenny surveyed the landscape wi
th sadness that was perceptible even to my young eyes. He waved his arm in a broad arc and said, “Our ancestors once owned this land as far as you can see.”

  Connie was helping Aunt Opal prepare a pitcher of Kool-Aid when Lenny and I returned to the house. Connie tugged on Lenny’s shirtsleeve and pleaded to go home. But he was in no hurry. After finishing his glass, Lenny took me with him to the basement. Shelves of mason jars lined the stairway leading down to the concrete floor. An old couch and chair, dozens of crates, and endless stacks of cardboard boxes cluttered the room. Spiderwebs, like lace doilies, hovered in the air. Navigating the space was difficult, but Lenny spent considerable time looking at crate labels, moving boxes, and examining the furniture. He pounded on walls as if to determine their sturdiness.

  On the way upstairs, a stack of boxes fell behind us.

  “JT!” I screamed.

  “That can’t be the old man,” Lenny laughed. “JT’s behind that wall there. Didn’t you hear him when I knocked on the wood?” Lenny leaned down and pointed toward one of the inner walls.

  I scampered up the stairs, sure that I heard footsteps behind us. When we were safely past the threshold, I slammed the door shut. The story was as fresh as the day Mandy had first told it to me. The Powells were so incensed after the marauders killed JT that, each Halloween, they hanged an effigy from the tree in the front yard as a warning to stay off the property. Local legend said that if you played a trick on the Powell family, JT’s ghost would haunt you until the next Halloween. Many people believed the effigy was the mummified corpse of the old man and that we kept the body in our basement the remainder of the year.

  Aunt Opal was in her room napping. Lenny became upset that Connie had wandered off and especially perturbed when he found her talking to a couple of boys in a black mustang, detailed with orange-and-red flames, which had stopped in front of the house. I didn’t understand that they were flirting, but Lenny sure did. He pulled his lips taut with two fingers and issued an earsplitting whistle. Connie came running toward us as the boys sped away in a cloud of dust.

  Lenny roused Aunt Opal to let her know we were leaving. We waited for her in the foyer. Aunt Opal came from her room dressed more casually than before. Without the confining scarf, her hair flew in all directions. She smiled at me and I saw that she’d taken out her false teeth. I liked my eccentric Aunt Opal. It made me sad to be leaving so soon.

  On the way out the front door, Aunt Opal gave me a hug and pressed a worn-out Standing Liberty quarter into the palm of my hand. She closed my fingers around it and whispered, “That’s a lucky coin, Simon. Don’t be losing it.”

  “I won’t, Aunt Opal,” I told her, slipping the lucky quarter into my pocket.

  Shortly after our visit, well past her ninetieth birthday, Aunt Opal died. Her passing was an unlucky turn of events for Vivian if she thought she might prevail against moving to Sibley. An old will made it nearly impossible to sell the mansion, and no one else wanted to live in it. Lenny had ownership of the mansion transferred into his name: Leonard Bartholomew Powell.

  Lenny spent many weekends in Sibley doing repair work. He reinforced the mansion’s front porch and replaced the broken roof tiles. Two columns had once added a sense of majesty to the house, but weathering had split one down a seam, and woodpeckers had nested in the other. Expert application of putty and a new paint job took care of both problems. Lenny cut squares of tinted glass and replaced cracked panes in the windows of the tripartite door at the entrance. Before long, the house didn’t seem so decrepit.

  After we moved in, Vivian labored for days hauling out mildewed bed linens from upstairs. The furniture was still in good condition, once a vacuum had sucked out the dust. The bedroom I had shared with Mandy during the first few years of my life seemed small and cramped with the armoire, the Jenny Lind beds, Mandy’s vanity, and the heavy gilded mirror; the new room I shared with her at the mansion was cavernous by comparison.

  Connie stopped complaining about having to leave Little Rock when she realized that being so far away gave her an excuse to sleep over at her best friend’s house, thereby escaping Lenny’s watchful eye.

  Vivian and Lenny didn’t take me to Aunt Opal’s funeral; no one even explained that she had died. When we moved into the mansion, I kept asking where she had gone. Vivian and Lenny avoided telling me the truth, saying things such as “You really made an impression on Opal” or “Aunt Opal will be away for a long time.” It wasn’t until Connie walked me across the street to the family graveyard one afternoon and pointed to a freshly carved headstone that I learned the truth and stopped thinking Aunt Opal was mad and didn’t want to see me.

  “You can come here and talk to Aunt Opal,” Connie said.

  I wasn’t stupid. I knew what cemeteries meant. While I stood before the headstone with its carved angel, I rubbed the quarter in my pocket to let Aunt Opal know I still had it.

  With the house in good shape, Lenny began hacking away the vines that had overtaken the corral. Some of our cousins took interest in Lenny’s efforts and came by to help whenever they could. I watched in amazement one Sunday as Lenny and a group of men set a controlled fire to clear a particularly thick section of underbrush near the pond. Each man soaked a tow sack in the water and beat the ground before the advancing flames.

  With the area cleared, it was possible from the back porch to see the cypress knees protruding from the surface of the shallow swamp. Wispy Spanish moss draped the low-hanging limbs of the parent trees. Occasionally, a snapping turtle warmed itself on a flat rock at the far bank of the pond. Beyond was a grove of pecan trees that once bordered the largest cotton field. Tangles of honeysuckle overgrew most of the old trails. Only one of the paths still cut through the landscape, crossing the creek at a narrow point and leading to our closest neighbors, the Corley family.

  Finally, Lenny was ready to get the horses he had longed to own. He fixed up Aunt Opal’s roadster that for years had been stored under a tarp in the barn and contacted a neighbor willing to trade it for two quarter horses. Lenny rode into the woods every day after coming home from work. He must have been elated about fulfilling his childhood dream. Then his chest pains started making it difficult to lift the saddle. Vivian insisted that he see a doctor, who told him that unless he quit smoking and cut back on work, a heart attack was imminent.

  Lenny didn’t listen. “Doctors be damned,” he grumbled, lighting the first in the evening’s chain of cigarettes.

  Despite his obstinacy, the chest pains forced him to slow down. For a couple of years, Bracelet the mare and Storm the gelding spent their days standing in the corral swatting flies. I wanted to ride them, but Vivian wouldn’t allow it. So I fed and watered them every day and combed their manes with wire brushes. Sparky, a collie that I received as a puppy on my second birthday, usually stood guard.

  I spent much of my time watching Mandy. When she took one of her frequent naps, I would sneak off with Sparky and go exploring. The outer boundary of my world was the dangerous fringes of the swamp, where I hoped to find a snake, or even an alligator. Sparky never left my side and always managed to lead us safely back home.

  Occasionally, Mandy talked one of our relatives into driving us to Little Rock. By that time, she was in the full throes of her fantasy that Bart had left stocks and bonds in a safety-deposit box. We would go from bank to bank talking to tellers who, with great patience, assured her that they had no box rented in the name Bartholomew Powell. Mandy eventually gave up the quest, becoming more possessive of me as a result.

  “What if I fall?” Mandy would say, pointing a crooked finger at my face when she feared I was about to sneak off. “Be a good boy and stay with Mandy.”

  If I couldn’t escape, I amused myself by applying makeup and prancing around the bedroom in her dresses. If I went outside to play with Sparky, Mandy would sit at the window and stare out. Sometimes, I wondered if she realized where she was. I never mentioned to Vivian that Mandy spoke to people I couldn’t see or that som
etimes she mistook me for Bart.

  Shuffling through the downstairs rooms searching for me, she would call out in a desperate voice, “Bar-tholo-mew! Bar-tholo-mew!”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Harris and I sat on benches outside the rehab center as he read the new pages I had written. It was a warm day, heralding the arrival of an early spring that year.

  “Sibley is a far cry from Chicago,” Harris said.

  “A Yankee like you wouldn’t be welcome there, even today,” I said with a smile. Among the labels borne over the years by African American Harris, someone calling him a Yankee was probably a first.

  “Johnny Reb,” Harris replied with a smile, adding, “I do seem to recall my own grandmother saying something about our folks having fought in the Union Army.”

  The other counselors scowled more often than they laughed with their clients. I was glad that Harris seemed genuinely interested in my story and that he could find points of similarity with his own experience.

  “Was Lenny close to his father?” Harris asked, thumbing to one of the yellow sheets.

  “Bart was a saint who walked on water, as far as Lenny was concerned.”

  “But how did he feel about Bart?” Harris pressed.

  The question bothered me, but I wasn’t sure why.

  “Vivian used to say that Lenny was spoiled, that he didn’t learn the value of money. That never made sense to me. Bart lost his store when Lenny was young. He would have hardly remembered when the family had money.”

  Harris cleared his throat as a reminder that I had not answered his question.

  “All I know is that Lenny worshipped his father. I guess I don’t know how he really felt. Lenny took to heart the family motto that everyone attributed to Bart: ‘Better that one family suffers than for many to do without.’”

  Harris rolled his eyes. “I assumed you made that up. That’s really what you were taught?”