LITMIR.BIZ

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DO YOU want for breakfast? Cereal? Eggs?” Tuuro’s apartment was the entire second story of a small frame house. His kitchen and living room stretched across the back, and the two bedrooms took up the front. His landlady lived downstairs. The house was two houses away from the house in which Paul Laurence Dunbar, the great African American (although people didn’t use that term now; the preferred word now was Melano) poet, had been born. The Dunbar house was a historical site that had never gotten much traffic, and since the Short Times its windows had been boarded up and its grass rarely mowed.

      Lanita, Tuuro’s daughter, sat in an old wooden chair at the kitchen table, her feet swinging. Tuuro had sweet rolls in the breadbox, but thinking of Naomi he didn’t dare offer them.

      “I want an egg that’s scrambled.”

      It took Tuuro a moment of rummaging in his refrigerator to realize he had no butter. “I can’t cook that, Muffin. I don’t have the butter to cook it in.”

      Lanita regarded him solemnly, and he saw her mother’s contempt in the wrinkling of her forehead.

      “I’m disappointing you,” he said. She didn’t deny it. “How about a three-minute egg?” Tuuro asked, inspired. “You don’t need butter for that.”

      “A three-minute egg?” Her voice was skeptical.

      “You boil it three minutes. It’s good. You’ll see.”

      Maybe six minutes later the egg was on her plate, chopped up and runny, and Lanita was eating it with a large spoon, eyes down and face serious, concentrating on every drip, and Tuuro, watching her, felt not swept, not washed, but swamped with love for her, so sloshily heavy he could barely stand.

      She pushed the empty plate away and looked up with her luminous eyes. “Another one.”

      She ate three, one by one, which Tuuro told her was nine-minute eggs, and when he picked her plate up from beside the sink he almost asked her, “Did you wash this?” before he realized the plate had been truly licked clean.

      “You liked it,” he said. “You liked what I made for you.” The gratitude in his voice almost embarrassed him. To cover himself he made one of his silly rhymes:

       Three-minute eggs Three-minute eggs My baby begs For three-minute eggs

      “Nine-minute eggs!” Lanita complained, smiling. She came over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, and then she stood beside him, hand hanging on the back of his belt, a silent companion as he washed the dishes.

      AND THEN LANITA was gone, back to Chattanooga, and the pastor was standing behind the desk in his office saying, “Tuuro, how are you?” and stretching out his hand. Tuuro reached out warily to shake it. Once the pastor’s hand had held a tiny pillow that made a fart, once a device that snapped Tuuro’s fingers, once a live toad. The pastor didn’t play these tricks on his parishioners. “Don’t worry,” the pastor chuckled now. “Vera cut off my access to the Magic Source.”

      “Good,” Tuuro said—a remark as close to rebellion as he dared go.

      The pastor waved Tuuro to a chair, then sat behind his desk and abstractedly tugged at his ear. “Tell me, did you have any bread left over from the Palm Sunday potluck?”

      It was almost July, and Palm Sunday had been in April. Did the pastor think Tuuro’s memory was that good? It had been a cold spring, with several late snows. The weather experiments of the early thirties had, as an unexpected side effect, resulted in “old”-style winters and hot summers: it often snowed by Thanksgiving. “If I did I fed it to the birds.”

      “That’s Christian, I suppose. Our brethren birds. How about after the Easter reception? Tequila Huntington said there was a whole sponge cake and half a loaf of lemon bread in the cupboard by the fridge.”

      Maybe it was his race, or his temperament, or some forgotten trauma of his childhood, but Tuuro was always steeling himself for news of what he had done wrong. It made him cringe to think of himself cringing, but there it was. And he did do things wrong, didn’t he? He wasn’t perfect, although there were moments, turning to inspect the Sunday school classrooms before he flicked off the light, he felt he was. “Are you the janitor did the bathrooms?” someone would ask, and Tuuro would freeze, wondering what he had missed. “That’s the cleanest bathroom I ever seen!” the person might say, and Tuuro would be flooded with gratitude and relief and, yes, surprise; his face would light up in what he knew was a rewarding way. He got hundreds of compliments. He was a kind and conscientious man and he did his work well. But he could never quite believe that people would praise him and not find the fault.

      So when someone found a fault, Tuuro accepted it. Hearing his mistakes was almost a relief. “I didn’t see any extra food at Easter,” he said now. “Maybe I should have.”

      “There 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

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