Читать книгу Death Comes for the Deconstructionist - Daniel Taylor - Страница 13

I need some time to pull things together, but time is something I don’t have. I am out of money, for one, and in America to be out of money is literally to be worthless. No money, no worth, no reason to be. Even with money I am short on reasons to be. Add empty pockets to an empty heart and pretty soon you’re staring down the barrel of a not-so-empty gun.

The only way to get money, at present, is to keep looking for whoever killed Richard Pratt. I am billing by the hour but dissolving by the minute, and so I get up one Wednesday vowing to get back on the productivity treadmill.

The tread that day leads to Verity Jackson, a woman who made a scene at Pratt’s presentation the night he was murdered, thereby making herself a suspect. She had stood up and yelled at Pratt as he wrapped up his talk, and was escorted noisily out of the ballroom. The police, according to Detective Wilson, have interviewed her twice, but haven’t filed any charges and are unlikely to now. I’m sure she doesn’t have anything to do with killing Pratt, but I don’t know of anyone else to talk to and I need the hours.

I call Ms. Jackson at Metro State, where she teaches remedial English, mostly to adults. I expect her to say, “Who are you and why should I talk to you about anything?” Instead, when I mention Mrs. Pratt, she says she’ll meet me in Loring Park by the fiddler that afternoon at four. She speaks quietly and politely and briefly. I hang up, first pleased that it had been so easy, then disconcerted when I realize I don’t know what I’m going to say to her.

I bring Judy along for protection. We park near the Walker and cut through the sculpture garden. Judy spots the big spoon with the cherry.

“Looks like Mr. ... Mr. Paul Bunyan has been here.”

The connection escapes me, like most connections.

We cross over Hennepin Avenue into the park on a pedestrian bridge that tries to be artsy while getting you safely over six lanes of traffic. It sports various phrases from a cryptic poem all the way across. I feel like I’m walking in a Buddhist koan: “What is the sound of one bridge clapping?” My whole life is a koan—long on paradox and brain busters.

The fall is everywhere present. Many of the leaves have already leapt from the trees. Those that remain are mostly yellow and brown, with just a few orange and red dazzlers here and there. The colors are past their peak by a week or two, the remaining leaves holding on now by sheer bravado. I know the feeling. Winter is so inevitable it can afford to dawdle, to allow a few more jacketless walks in the park.

“This is very pretty, Jon. It reminds me of … of my very own calendar in my bedroom.”

Which calendar and which bedroom are anyone’s guess. She doesn’t have a calendar in her bedroom now. Maybe in her former room at Good Shepherd. Maybe when she was three. Who could tell? She investigates the past like a fly buzzing through the air from point to point, all instant right angles, abrupt changes in elevation, unexpected landings and takeoffs. Hers is a random access memory—Judy is the Intel of recall.

We walk around the small lake and past the fountain that looks like a giant wet dandelion. I am thinking of Verity Jackson’s name. Who names their kid after a virtue anymore? What’s in a name, anyway? Is it just a label, an arbitrary collection of letters and sounds that say “you“? Or is it rooted in something? I mean, does it matter if a kid is named “Candy” or “Brandy” because the parents think it’s cute, as opposed to being named, say, “Lydia,” after your great aunt Lydia, who was the first woman in the state to get a medical degree and was herself named after the deacon in the New Testament? People used to think your name was your destiny. What’s the destiny implied in “Brandy”?

Some tribes used to delay naming newborns for a time so evil spirits couldn’t learn their names and get power over them. I like that. I would gladly be nameless even now.

I spot Verity Jackson waiting for us, sitting on a bench near the statue of a large brown fiddler. I had caught a glimpse of her when she was led out at Pratt’s talk, but she looks smaller sitting there on the bench than she looked that night.

Ms. Jackson is a black woman of indeterminate age, as many black women are—for me, anyway. She’s at least fifty but might be a lot older. She is lean. Her skin is smooth and unwrinkled, but she has just a few strands of gray. Her hair is relatively short and curled under, a sort of old-fashioned look. The main impression she gives is of quiet dignity.

I introduce myself and then Judy. Ms. Jackson seems to relax a bit once she looks into Judy’s eyes and shakes her hand.

“Sit here beside me, Judy, and tell me what this brother of yours wants with an old black lady like me.”

Judy is eager to tell all.

“Well, my brother … my brother Jon of mine is … is like Mr. Perry Como.”

I roll my eyes and groan.

“Does he sing then?”

“No … no wait. I mean … I mean to say, he is like Mr. Perry Mason.”

Damn those reruns. “I’m not like Perry Mason at all. I’m …”

“My brother talks to people to see … to see if they have … have done something wrong.”

“I see.”

Some sidekick she is. The Lone Ranger would have never put up with this from Tonto.

“But he does … does not put them, I should say, into jail.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Because, you see, he is not an off … an officer of the law.”

“You might say he’s more like a snitch, then, Judy? Would that be right?”

“Why, yes. That sounds right.”

Then Judy smiles at me as though to say, “I’ve done what I can for you, Jon. Now you’re on your own.”

“So, Mr. Mote, how can I help you?”

I want to say, “You can shoot me and put me out of my misery,” but say instead, “I feel like I need to explain.”

Ms. Jackson laughs softly and puts her hand on my forearm.

“Mr. Mote, Judy and I are just playing the dozens with you.”

Another smile and a nod from Judy.

“I think I know why Mrs. Pratt asked you to look into her husband’s death. I would have done the same. And I also know I can’t be of much help to you. I got upset that night and did something I’m not proud of. I was raised to be respectful of other people and their views and I should have been more respectful of Dr. Pratt.”

“Had you ever met Dr. Pratt before?”

“No, but I have benefited from his kindness.”

“How so?”

“I spent most of my adult life working in low-level office jobs. When my last child left home, I decided I had time to better myself. And so I went back to school and finished my college degree and then went straight on and got a master’s, and then I landed a job here at Metro and I’ve been here ever since.”

“I would … I would like to say … con … congratulations to you, Ms. Verity Jackson. I would.”

“Thank you, Judy. I appreciate that. And I got my master’s at the university. I never had a class from Dr. Pratt. In fact, I never even saw him while I was there. It’s a very big department, and I had no time to go to events or socialize, and for at least one year he was on a study leave in France.”

I remember hearing about that year in France from Pratt himself when I was a student. He talked about it a lot. Said it changed everything for him. It was the year he wrote his breakthrough book. He went away a junior member of the department and came back a rock star in the making. So Ms. Jackson had been at the university only a few years before I came, though apparently she’d arrived both older and wiser than I had.

“I won an award for my master’s thesis that year. Dr. and Mrs. Pratt had established a prize for the best thesis each year by a disadvantaged student. It meant a lot to me. It gave me a shot of confidence and a thousand dollars to boot. I remember Mrs. Pratt presented the award to me at a small ceremony. Dr. Pratt was still in France. But she was very kind and told me to keep up the good work.”

“That’s what … what Sister Illuminata says when I clean the kitch … that is, the kitchen. Keep up … the … the good work, Judy, she says to me.”

Ms. Jackson puts up her hand for a high five and Judy slaps it, then rocks back, rubbing her hands together in delight.

“I wrote to Dr. Pratt, thanking him for sponsoring the award. He replied with a very kind and encouraging letter and an offer to help me in the future. Actually, he helped me get this job here at Metro. Put in a good word for me. I owe both him and Mrs. Pratt a lot.”

I don’t know exactly how to ask the obvious. If she was on such good terms with Dr. Pratt, why did she make a scene at the end of his talk? Ms. Jackson moves on to the issue without any prompting.

“Yes, I owe him a lot. But in that speech, and, I have to say, in his books too, he asks too much.”

“How do you mean? Maybe I’m missing something, but didn’t he talk a lot about things like deconstructing systems and hierarchies of power in order to free people of color from bondage, and women from patriarchy, and … someone or other from something or other?”

“Yes, he did. And there was time in my life when that would have been enough. I would have clapped and cheered with the rest of them.”

She looks out over the park and it becomes clear that she is seeing something I can’t see.

“Let me just tell you a bit about this park, Mr. Mote. It’s called Loring Park now, but it used to be called Central Park. We’d come here for picnics when I was a little girl. It wasn’t a place where a black family felt welcome back then. I’m just giving you a little history here. But my mother was the kind of woman to eat her fried chicken wherever she wanted, and this was one of the places she wanted.”

“I … I should say … I like fried chicken.”

“When I was a little older, I used to come here on dates. I got my first kiss under that big oak over there. Wasn’t everyone glad to see us in the park even then, but we weren’t necessarily glad to see all of them either.

“And they weren’t any happier to see us in the sixties when we came to this park to demonstrate for civil rights and against the war.”

Why is she telling me this?

“Then later there were the Take Back the Night rallies. I remember us holding burning torches and listening to speakers and trying to get back that feeling from the sixties and not quite succeeding. But at least we made it clear that we thought a woman should be able to walk around outside after dark. Like I say, I’m just giving you a little history here. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

But I don’t understand at all. What does any of this have to do with Pratt, who would have agreed with every cause she mentioned and a dozen more?

“You see, Mr. Mote. This park is full of stories for me. And it’s only one place of many. I’m nothing without my stories. I need them all and I need them to be strong and life-sustaining things. How can they be strong, Mr. Mote, if they fall apart so easily in the hands of people like Dr. Pratt? Did you hear how he was going to undo empire and patriarchy and homophobia and every other bad thing?”

I waited for her to answer her own question.

“By killing words, Mr. Mote. By denying the ability of words to capture our experience and explain our lives to ourselves. If words are such weak and self-destructing things, then there is no truth, and if no truth, there is only power, and we, of all people, know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of power.”

Verity Jackson is talking to the ancestors.

“What do poor people have if they don’t have words? Do they have tanks? No. Do they have money? No. Do they have the majority of votes? Absolutely no. If they don’t have words that can truthfully and powerfully tell their stories—in a way that can change things—they are poor indeed.

“I got angry that night, and I started talking back to him, because Dr. Pratt wasn’t just talking against Big Brother and God and most of the writers who have given me hope in life; he was also undermining Martin and Malcolm and Sojourner and Gandhi and anyone else who ever said, ‘This is wrong and things should be different.’ Words may just be play for him, but they aren’t play for people like me who depend on their stories.”

We were all silent. Judy came to the rescue.

“I like … I should say, I like stories very much.”