Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands by Susan Carol McCarthy

Author:Susan Carol McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307418197
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

December snuck up on me. I should’ve seen it coming but I was busy with other things.

From the middle of November to the end of December, the packinghouse is a crazy place. We have long lists of standing mail orders to pack and ship, big wooden baskets of Florida Sunshine, fresh-wrapped fruit, to get to somebody’s Aunt Mabel, or Cousin Larry, or, my special favorites, the children’s wards of quite a few hospitals.

Aside from school, we do everything but sleep in the big back work area behind the showroom, helping our parents “make pay while the snow falls.”

The radio is constantly on, providing a rhythm to our work, and there must have been a time when the Christmas carols began, but I didn’t notice it. I did notice, however, the point at which my mother, planner of picnics, singer of songs, initiator of card games, disappeared, permanently it seems, behind her Poker Face.

The radio announcement on the morning of December fourth was brief: In Miami, at three A.M., an explosion blew up yet another Carver Village apartment building. Thirty minutes later, another building in that very same housing project exploded and fell in the night. Half an hour after that, a blast at the Miami Hebrew School and Congregation shattered forty-four stained-glass windows, a memorial to family members lost in Hitler’s Holocaust. Exactly thirty minutes later, a fourth blast destroyed a Jewish community center, sending nearby residents screaming into the street.

“What a nightmare!” I say, mad as can be.

“When will it end?” Mother says, but she’s not asking me.

And I watch it happen: As if somebody pulled a plug, her brightness fades, her dimple disappears. Only her Poker Face—the careful, studied expression, the hazel eyes that see everything and say nothing—remains. She shifts her attention back to the task, wrapping and packing fruit in the basket between us, working as hard, harder, than anybody. But she has drawn the curtains and retreated to some private, inside place.

Even a week later—when U.S. Attorney General Howard McGrath decides, finally, to act, ordering Florida’s F.B.I. agents to “investigate to see whether they can investigate” violations of anyone’s federally guaranteed civil rights—my real mother does not return.

Even when we hear that Mr. Harry T. Moore—the F.B.I.’s most vocal critic, the Negroes’ most powerful advocate, the compiler of civil rights case files that local law enforcement conveniently overlooked—has been invited to Miami to brief the federal agents. Even then, she doesn’t respond. Not really.

Even as the rest of us sit around the break table, expressing our hopes that, maybe now, the bombings will stop. Maybe now, the tidal wave of evil will ebb. Maybe now, Marvin’s murderers will be brought to justice. And the winter tourists, who should be choking the Trail with traffic by now, will change their minds and decide it’s safe to come to Florida after all. Even now, she holds herself apart, playing Solitaire at the table’s other end.

I wonder, I worry, I even think about asking her directly, “What’s going on behind that Poker Face of yours?” But it wouldn’t do me a bit of good.

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