The Sweet By and By Read online

  The Sweet By and By

  Todd Johnson

  TO MABEL BARNES LANGDON AND

  MOZELLE WOODALL JOHNSON,

  MY GRANDMOTHERS

  He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, Eternity

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Lorraine

  Chapter Two

  Margaret

  Chapter Three

  Rhonda

  Chapter Four

  Margaret

  Chapter Five

  Lorraine

  Chapter Six

  Margaret

  Chapter Seven

  April

  Chapter Eight

  Rhonda

  Chapter Nine

  Margaret

  Chapter Ten

  Rhonda

  Chapter Eleven

  Lorraine

  Chapter Twelve

  April

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rhonda

  Chapter Fourteen

  Margaret

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rhonda

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lorraine

  Chapter Seventeen

  Rhonda

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lorraine

  Chapter Nineteen

  Margaret

  Chapter Twenty

  Rhonda

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Margaret

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Rhonda

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Margaret

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Rhonda

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Lorraine

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  April

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Margaret

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Lorraine

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Margaret

  Chapter Thirty

  Lorraine

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Margaret

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  April

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Rhonda

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Lorraine

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  April

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Rhonda

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  April

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Lorraine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  LORRAINE

  I barely have got in the door good and it’s already three thirty in the afternoon. Church seemed like it lasted too long this morning and I didn’t come straight home like I usually do. Althea was determined to take me over to her house cause she had fixed collards and was bound for me to have some with her cornbread and dumplings, so now I’m ’bout to pop wide-open. She said she might not go to church so much if it wasn’t for me, it takes so much time out of a Sunday. I told her, “Don’t be puttin the burden of your soul on me, girl. You’re too hardheaded to change, and I’m too smart to try and make you.”

  Althea used to decorate cakes for a livin out of her own kitchen ’til it ’bout killed her it got to be so much work. She did birthdays, anniversaries, weddings of course, retirements, and a couple times she even made a cake for a funeral, but I don’t think there was much decoration on those. Now she works in an insurance office, mostly houses and cars is what they do. She picks me up on Sunday mornings for church sometimes, I think she likes to have some company ridin, and there ain’t no way her husband is gon go unless a meal is bein served. She is one drivin woman, I tell you that. Wants to go, go, go every minute. This morning we had time to drink a cup of coffee cause she got to my house so fast. I pulled out the cups and put four big spoons of sugar in hers or else she woulda asked me if I was tryin to put her on a diet.

  “Well,” Althea said, raising her eyebrows when she took the hot coffee from me. “Lorraine, I’ve had a revelation.”

  “Was it the Ten Commandments?” I asked. “Cause I ain’t so sure you got em the first time around.”

  She ignored me. “I had a dream last night. I woke up sweatin to death, and I remember every bit of it. There was a circle of candles and me sittin in the middle of em.”

  “Is this voodoo, Althea, cause if it is…?”

  “You’re bad for interruptin somebody, you know that?”

  “I’ll hush.” I took too big a sip and burned my tongue.

  Althea looked around like she was about to tell a secret even though there wasn’t a soul there but the two of us, sittin in my kitchen drinking coffee and gettin ready to be late for church.

  She pushed her cup to one side so she could lean in across the table. “When I tried to step over the candles they flew up in the air like comets or something and disappeared, I mean poof.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Then I saw a man with his shirt wide-open and muscles all up and down his chest and stomach. Fine lookin too. Standing in front of a big pond, no, a lake, big as Jordan Lake, and he was waving at me to come across with him, only there wasn’t a boat or any other way to get across. Then he took a couple of steps backwards with his pants rolled up, water lapping around his ankles. He kept on waving at me to come down there, and I thought to myself I don’t even know you, you might be tryin to drown me.”

  I got up and ran some water in my empty cup, then set it in the sink. I would wash it later.

  “Are you listenin to me?” Althea snapped.

  “I told you I would hush, that’s what I’m doin.”

  “Well I woke up, Lorraine, and I realized. That mighta been Moses I dreamed. Do you think it was Moses?”

  “Hmm.” I must have made a sound even though I didn’t realize it.

  “That’s all you got to say?”

  “Honey, what exactly’s the revelation?”

  “It’s time for me to cross over, Lorraine. That’s all I’m sayin.”

  “You gon die sometime soon?”

  Althea shook her head and reached for her coat. “I don’t know why I try to tell you anything. You don’t have my kind of vision. Let’s go to the car.”

  Me and Althea go way back. She helped me just about raise my daughter, much as anybody did besides my mama. That’s how come she feels like she can act like a second mother to April. Some people might not like another person tellin their child what to do, but I like it all right. Having to make all the rules all the time wasn’t never my idea of a party. I’m grateful for the help. There’s one thing about gettin somebody to help you though, you got to take whatever it looks like, their kind of help, and you can’t be choosing what you like and don’t like. Help is a take it or leave it kind of thing, and if you can’t take it like it comes, might as well leave it cause it’s gon be more trouble than it’s worth. Or you’re gon lose a friend in the process.

  When April was little, we stayed at Mama’s. She didn’t have many rules in her house except for one, and I made it my rule too. No matter what else was goin on, we had to sit down and eat breakfast together every day unless one of us was sick, and I mean so sick you couldn’t get yourself up out of the bed. Mama fixed food for me and April while I got ready to go to work. There was one morning, I remember cause I had just started my new job, I heard her call April in from her bedroom for about the third time. Breakfast was on the table, and knowing my daughter, she was probably readin something or other, still in the bed.

  “Sit down baby, and eat your oatmeal,” Mama said when she saw April leaning against th
e kitchen door, rubbing her eyes. It was a cool morning, especially for October in eastern North Carolina, and April was in long flannel pajamas, way too big for her, probably handed down by somebody, I don’t remember who. I can see those pant legs wadded up around her feet, lookin like they were gon make her fall down any time, but she liked em that way, she liked slidin around on a wood floor in those old pajamas. She could make herself skate four or five feet if she got a runnin start and hit a slick spot just right.

  “You want something to drink?” Mama added, pouring orange juice into a jelly glass with cartoon characters on it cause that was the only one April ever wanted to drink out of. Mama was glad to fix breakfast, she was always the first one up anyway, it didn’t matter how early I had to go to work. It was like she made a contest out of beatin everybody to the start of the day, even though she wouldn’t admit it, like she was racing to an invisible finish line. You couldn’t have caught up with her if you was a jackrabbit.

  April just stood staring at the table. She was expecting to see butter and syrup, and instead there wasn’t even a plate. “It’s Saturday!” she pouted. “Why aren’t we havin pancakes?”

  I had started that habit a long time ago. I tried to fix breakfast myself on Saturdays since April didn’t have school. And she did love her pancakes. Sometimes I made em plain but usually I put in a little somethin extra like some overripe bananas or pecans I picked up out of Althea’s yard, anything I could put my hands on. If I wasn’t in too big a hurry, I’d heat up the syrup on the stove, and April said she thought that was how rich people ate their pancakes, with hot syrup.

  I came flyin into the kitchen tryin to leave on time and saw her sittin in front of her bowl, stubborn as a knot on a log. “I’ll make you some pancakes tomorrow, honey, before we go to church,” I said. “I don’t have time to this mornin.”

  April knew something was different because she saw me wearing a bright green dress instead of my uniform, and I had my nice black pocketbook. I think she also might have saw my eyes all swelled up, I’d been crying some.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Aren’t you going to work?”

  “I’ve got to go to a funeral first. Now go on and eat so Grandma can finish cleanin up.”

  “Who died at the funeral?”

  “Somebody I take care of, honey,” I said. “Mr. Whitty Holcomb. He was an old, old man.”

  “Is everybody at your nursing home gonna die?”

  “Baby, everybody everywhere is gon die sometime, but you don’t need to be studyin that now.”

  Mama didn’t take much to that kind of talk and saw that her granddaughter hadn’t even picked up her spoon. She got up and opened a cabinet. “Look here, April,” she said, “I’m gon put some brown sugar on it for you.”

  My daughter wouldn’t be sidetracked. “Mama,” she said, with a change in her voice, “you’re a nurse, aren’t you? Etonia’s sister came up to me on the playground, and she said you wasn’t a real nurse so why didn’t I stop pretending like you was. I told her you are so a nurse so shut up.”

  Mama heaped so much dark brown sugar into April’s bowl that it looked like wet dirt. “You got a lot of questions this mornin, girl,” she said, still scooping. “You need to eat and leave your mama alone. Lorraine, tell her to eat.”

  “I’m an LPN, April,” I said. “Licensed Practical Nurse. That’s what it stands for. You can tell Etonia that.”

  “Why’d she say it then?” April said.

  “There’s other kinds of nurses that got more school than I got. I did what I could do, and here we all are. Now I got to go or I’m gon be late.”

  “Well I’m gonna be a real nurse, and I might be a doctor too,” she stuck out her jaw.

  “There ain’t a whole lot of black women doctors, baby,” I said, tryin to get into my long gray wool coat, worn out, but the only dress coat I had.

  “Well I can be one if I want to!” she yelled. I thought at the time she was only tryin to get my attention as much as anything else, but I bet you I’ve thought about that conversation a thousand times and that was almost twenty years ago. Those kind of words stay with you. You think about your child and how you want everything to work out and be the best it can be for them, and then you wonder if even one thing you say might either raise em up or push em back down. God knows I tried to raise that girl up in spite of everything. I did my best.

  Althea’s probably already back home by now if she didn’t get herself a speedin ticket. I hate to say it but I’m glad she didn’t stay long once she dropped me off. I’m gon change out of these church clothes and sit down a few minutes. I need to clean up the house some before I go back to work tomorrow, but I might be too tired to do much. I still got the morning shift most days. That’s all right, I like the morning, I choose it when I can. I like getting up in the dark and having my eyes open to see the sun come up. I start my morning, every morning, pouring urine from one container into another. I ain’t gon say I don’t mind it. Sometimes what’s in a bedpan is bright yellow and stinks, and other times it’s clear as water, especially when somebody can’t eat solid food no more or don’t eat at all. But that’s my work. For some of them, I’m the only face in this world they know. I can’t hardly stand hearin one of them cry out, “I’m ready to go home now, Lorraine,” when all I come in to do is take out a plastic bag of trash or soiled bedsheets rather than wait for a nurse’s aide to do it when we don’t have enough of em to go around. That’s my day, doin what needs to be done. I guess some people get to where they don’t hear it, the sound of those voices, but that ain’t me, I can’t help it. I hear it every single time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MARGARET

  It’s Christmas time again!” That’s what everybody keeps on saying. I hear it on television too, somebody always selling something with a verse or two of “We Wish You a Merry” or “Jingle Bells.” I’ve always hated “Jingle Bells” myself, except when there are children around, which in this place there clearly are not. And nobody is likely to ever go dashing through the snow any time soon in this part of Carolina, I’d bet my last nickel on that. When it comes to carols, I myself like a good slow hymn with a little bit of a sad sound in it like “It Came upon a Midnight Clear.” At least with a song like that you don’t have to put on a happy face just because everybody thinks you ought to. I put on enough as it is just getting through.

  You can’t blame me too much if I’m not in the mood, the holiday spirit. My daughter Ann says I can be ill as a hornet sometimes, and I don’t deny it. Plain old mad. And it’s nobody’s fault either, nobody’s done one thing to me. But I wish to God they’d stop flitting around like spring butterflies, like I ought to be overjoyed at the prospect of somebody feeding me every bite I eat and changing my clothes like a baby. I’ve heard them say I can be “difficult,” and so what if I am? I didn’t ask to be here, surrounded by linoleum, blinded by fluorescent lights, or left alone in pure black darkness. They think I complain all the time anyway. And I’ll tell you another thing. There are an awful lot of busybodies around here—I have to be on guard. You might not know it to look at them, but they traipse up and down these hallways, all hours of day and night, listening in at your room. Peeking in at the inmates. I think they want to know one of two things: if you’re crazy and need to be put somewhere else, or if you’re dead and need to be put somewhere else.

  Lorraine is at my door at the crack of dawn, just like every day. She’s not a regular nurse, meaning the kind that gives medicine all by herself, but she does everything else in the world there is to do for me. She wears something like nurse clothes, except instead of serious doctor white, her smock usually has red and blue balloons or fat little teddy bears on it. I’m not asleep this morning but she thinks I am. I don’t know how anybody can sleep after daybreak when all you can hear is Mathilda rolling a medicine cart down the hall like she was on I-40. I asked how one person could make so much noise, and Lorraine told me she was mashing up pills so people could swallow them
better mixed up in a little juice. I told her, “Honey, I don’t know what kind of pills she’s mashing up, but she might as well be using a jackhammer.” I crack my eyes open at Lorraine, but she doesn’t know it so she tiptoes, moving potted plants and old boxes of candy, not that there’s very much to move, because Ann comes every day and picks up. She thinks I don’t remember it, but I do. She’s my one and only child and I love her, but she’s one of those people who, if you leave something sitting out for more than two minutes, swoops it up never to be seen again, either thrown in the garbage or put somewhere that you would never in your whole life think to look, so it might as well be thrown away. She thinks I’m “out of it” sometimes, that’s what she says under her breath to people who come to visit from church, and she may very well be right.

  “You’re not thinking, Mama, you know better than that,” she says in a voice so sweet that it’s irritating, and I feel like I want to reach out and slap her.

  “No I don’t know better,” I want to say. “I don’t know anything but what I say right this minute!” But I stay silent and let her go on. Go right on. Today, tomorrow, the next day. I’ll be right here.

  While Lorraine is sneaking around like a mouse, and she is neither a small girl nor mousy, I notice she has gotten her hair done up in little curly-cues on top of her head. She looks like she ought to have on a church dress, not a nurse’s smock and squeaky white shoes that you can hear a mile away. I open both eyes all the way, but I don’t say anything, just wait for her to notice I’m not dead yet. After she’s through pushing poinsettias around for God-knows-what reason, to do something quiet to wake me up I guess, she turns around to the bed. “You don’t have to be quiet Linda, I’m awake.” I don’t know why I call her Linda because I know just as sure as I’m telling this that her name’s Lorraine. It’s awful to know things in your mind that won’t come out of your mouth. Sometimes I give up, but most of the time I go ahead and say whatever comes, and if it rubs you the wrong way, I’m sorry.