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him as onto a redwood tree in a windstorm, but he gave under her embrace. He felt less like a towering redwood than a weak sapling, leaning in the breeze, tilting so far his wife wondered if his roots would hold.
A few feet away on a waiting room chair, stoop shouldered and leaning forward, sat Obadiah Abernathy, staring off into nowhere. Eighty-seven years old, he was the son of a sharecropper, the grandson of a Mississippi slave. He’d lived in Clarence’s house the last two years, as mind and body had begun failing him. Clarence sat down next to him and looked into his father’s deep-set eyes, eyes that had seen incredible changes and endured unforgettable conflict. Clarence wasn’t sure if he should interrupt the wanderings of his daddy’s mind. Any alternative to the present reality seemed welcome. He said nothing.
Clarence recalled the stories Daddy would read to him and Dani and their family, with the quaint vocabulary and beautiful inflections of a man who’d dropped out of school in third grade to pick cotton, and as a thirty-year-old had taught himself to read. He was the youngest of eleven children, he and his brother Elijah now being the last survivors of the brood. He’d played for the Indianapolis Clowns and nine other Negro League teams in the late twenties to late forties. At the age of thirty-three, he’d enlisted and served his country in World War II. He’d put his life on the line for a nation that wouldn’t let him eat in most restaurants or sleep in most hotels or use the same drinking fountains or restrooms as white folk. He’d taken a bullet in his shoulder for a country that wouldn’t print his birth announcement or wedding notice in its newspapers.
During and after his baseball years, to put food on the table this man had worked in mills, on assembly lines, as a library custodian, and a Pullman porter. He’d moved his family of eight from Mississippi to Chicago and finally to Portland in search of a better place, like Moses leading his people out of the wilderness in search of the Promised Land. This man who’d seemed so big to Clarence as a child had lost inches over the years, some because of the stoop of his shoulders and hunch of his back. His body had sagged, time and gravity digging the crags in his face ever deeper. But they had done nothing to remove his contagious smile and the sparkle of his eyes. It was as if his eyes and mouth drew their strength not from this world but another.
“We need to get to the funeral, baby,” Geneva whispered to Clarence. “Harley picked up the kids fifteen minutes ago. They’ll already be there.”
Funeral. The word cut into him. He sternly reminded God of his bargain: “You can’t have Felicia.”
Clarence gently stirred his father and escorted him toward the car. Daddy was wearing his funeral suit, Clarence his short-sleeved white dress shirt, having kept his suit coat in the car. The air was so thick on his sweaty arms it felt like long flannel sleeves. He got in the Bonneville, which still smelled of wet leather, the scent reminding him of the nightmare that began four days ago and from which he had not yet awakened.
As he drove, Clarence prepared himself for a black funeral. With white funerals you’d get back to the office in an hour, in time to return your calls. With black funerals you were gone for the day. The white funeral preacher’s job was to take away the grief. The black funeral preacher’s job was to stretch it out. Right now he’d rather be going to a white funeral than a black one.
They drove up to Ebenezer Temple in North Portland, three miles north of the hospital and a mile from Dani’s home, in the heart of “the black part of town.” It was his third visit to the church. Twice he’d come with Dani, at her insistence. Today once more he’d come because of her, but this time without her. This time she was gone. Perhaps if he’d agreed to come to church she wouldn’t have died. These and a hundred other