When Everything's Said & Done Read online

  “Yes, they did. They surely did. But they just didn’t know how to get it going again. So they just kept going. They had things that occupied them and kept their minds away from the heartache. And then of course there was Laura.” She licked her lips. “It wasn’t just Brenda and Cora; Laura was in it, too. You know we older folks can be more stubborn than most. And Laura was as stubborn as they come. So everybody just continued the best way they knew how. That’s how life is.” Nebia leaned forward. “You just keep going until something stops you in your tracks.”

  CHAPTER 28

  The main door of The Way Home opened again. Cora glanced up as four young men with black stocking masks slipped inside. Systematically, two of them pulled down the shades so no one could see inside.

  “What’s going on?” Cora asked as her eyes darted from man to man.

  Once the shades were drawn, the men moved slowly, very slowly, as if they were in a play. Three of the intruders went around the room touching things before they became destructive. They knocked over a can of paint, broke chalk and tore up some of the charcoal etchings.

  “Why are you doing this?” Cora demanded. “What is this about? I don’t have but a little bit of money in here. If you want the money. I’ll give it to you.” Cora opened a nearby drawer, but the vandalism continued.

  Many of the children’s paintings were destroyed. Finally Cora couldn’t take it anymore. “Damn it! Say something! If you’re going to rob me, rob me! Whatever you’ve got in mind, do it, and get out of here. Or tell me what this is about.”

  “You are something else.” The only intruder who had stood by and watched spoke. “Here there is four of us, and you’ve got the nerve to tell us we better speak up.” He rose from where he had perched on top of an old armchair. “I’ll tell you what this is about, since you just have to know. This is about your cutting into the numbers.”

  “Cutting into the numbers?” Cora looked at the other vandalizers who were moving toward her.

  “Our numbers. The Gangster Disciples.” The spokesman hit his chest. “You know, you’ve been a one-woman show over here and you’ve got a lot of attention. I’ll give you props for that.” He removed his skullcap, and the knotted end of his stocking cap mask bobbed. “You’ve impressed us all, and you’ve definitely impressed some of the young men that we intended to join us. But now, because of you, and this—” he looked around “—they’ve decided that they don’t want to. And not only don’t they want to join us, they’ve gotten bold enough to tell us what they’re not going to do.” He shook his head. “We can’t have that.”

  Cora looked defiant. “Well maybe you need to change what you do. I can’t help it if what I offer appeals to them. Maybe my way feels better. Maybe it’s safer. You need to think about that.” Her eyes blazed. “Here the four of you come in here like this against one defenseless woman. You can’t feel good about that.

  And if you do, I can’t imagine why. So I think while you’ve got a chance, you better take this money—” she laid thirty-some-odd dollars out on the table “—^and leave now. If you do, you won’t hear a peep from me.” She crossed her arms. “And maybe your conscience will hound you bad enough that you won’t ever try something like this again.”

  One of the young men laughed. “I can’t believe it. She’s threatening us. She is one bold bitch. Telling us to leave and hopefully our conscience is going to get us.” He laughed again, then stopped abruptly. “Lady, I don’t have a conscience.” He grabbed another painting and ripped it down the middle. “This is what I think about you and my conscience.” He grabbed another one.

  Cora was across the room before she knew it. “You stop that. Don’t you do that!” She grabbed the painting and the young man caught her arm. Cora looked at his wrist tattooed with an open mouthed snake devouring the world.

  “What’s wrong with you? Are you crazy? I’ll break your arm.”

  “No, I’m not crazy. You must be crazy. All of you. You get out of here. You hear me? You get out of here right now before you do something you regret. ”

  Suddenly the door to The Way Home swung open and Cora looked at the clock. It was nine p.m., the time Warren dropped by every evening to check on her.

  “Cora, why are the shades drawn?” Warren asked as he stepped inside.

  “Warren,” Cora shouted.

  “Let’s get out here,” one intruder shouted.

  A mad dash toward Warren and the door ensued.

  “Stop where you are,” Warren commanded, and reached for his gun, but before he could draw, the Gangster Disciples grabbed him.

  “What the fuck we gon’ do now?” another one said. “If we leave him we’re going to jail.”

  “Hold off, man,” the spokesman demanded as Warren and two of the gang members struggled.

  “Just go,” Cora pleaded. “Go! He won’t arrest you. Tell them, Warren. You’re not going to arrest them. You’re not going to do anything.”

  “What were you doing in here?” Warren demanded as he tried to free himself. “You’re not going to get away with this.”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shit,” one of the young men exploded. “See, I wasn’t down for none of this. All this here... You know we were suppose to be just scaring her, but now what the fuck we gon’ do? Look at this shit.”

  “I’ll show you what I’m going to do,” the most violent gang member declared. He drew back then thrust forward. Warren cried out in pain.

  “Fuck! Let’s get out of here,” the spokesman yelled as Warren slumped to the floor.

  “Warren! ” Cora ran to him as the young men headed out the door. She fell to her knees. “Warren! Oh, my God! He stabbed you! Warren!”

  Warren groaned and grabbed near his heart.

  Cora ran to the telephone and dialed the operator. “Please call an ambulance. This is Cora Gray. My husband, Warren Gray, a policeman, has been stabbed. So please come to 1526 4^^ Street South. Please! Hurry!” “You say your husband has been stabbed?”

  “Yes! He’s a policeman and he’s hurt bad. Please send an ambulance to 1526 4th Street South.”

  The operator repeated the address. “I’ll send an ambulance right away. ”

  “Hurry!” Cora shouted before she hung up and returned to Warren’s side. He groaned again when she touched his arm. “You’re going to be all right now. An ambulance is on its way.” She stroked his face. “Just lie still. Lie still.” Cora tried to calm Warren and herself, but her breath staggered when she saw how the blood seemed to pour from his body.

  Cora ran for one of the towels she kept in the back room. When she returned she knelt down by Warren’s side and unbuttoned the top of his uniform. There was a gaping wound that looked as if it had been made by a jagged object. “Oh, baby.” Cora’s tears ran as she placed the towel over the bloody hole. Then she covered it with his uniform. “You’re going to be all right, Warren. You are.” She looked at his face.

  “Cora.” Warren could barely say her name. “Everything’s going dark, Cora.”

  “No. No, it’s not dark,” she commanded. “It’s still light in here.” She pointed to the bare light bulb above them.

  Weakly, Warren shook his head from side to side. “I feel it’s getting darker. I feel myself slipping away, Cora. I do. ”

  “No, Warren. Don’t say that. You’re not slipping away. You’re not.”

  “Cora, listen to me.” He tugged at her sleeve. “Listen to me, baby.” Warren tried to focus on her face. “I feel myself slipping away. I feel myself dying.”

  “Oh, God! Warren. No-o!” she cried. “No, Warren! No! You can’t die! Warren, please! I can’t take it if you die. I can’t. Please, Warren. I can’t take it.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to leave you, Cora. All I can tell you is, I love you. I loved you from the moment I saw you as a boy, and now I’ve loved you until the day I died. Take care of Faith.” He swallowed. “I know you will pour on her all the love you would have given the two of us.”

  “No,” Cora
cried softly. “No.”

  But even as she cried, Warren’s hand slipped from her sleeve and dropped to the floor.

  “This cannot be.” Cora looked at his closed eyes. “Warren! Warren! ” She lifted his head onto her lap and laid her face against his. “Warren. My lover. My friend. How can I let you go? How? How?”

  Nebia’s Story

  “And they say that’s how they found them. Warren was dead with his head in her lap and Cora was asking how.”

  “No way, Miss Nebia. Don’t tell me that.” Erica wiped away tears before she began to pace the porch. “This just can’t be happening.”

  “So Warren died,” Sheila said. “This is horrible. God! Life can be just horrible. So Cora lost her baby sister, then she lost her husband.”

  “Yes, she did.” Nebia shook her head.

  “Were the guys who did it arrested?” Cynthia asked.

  “Who were they going to arrest?” Nebia asked. “The young men wore stockings over their faces, and Cora didn’t tell the authorities anything.”

  “But you said Cora saw one of the men had a tattoo,” Sheila said. “They could have identified him from that. ”

  “Of course they could,” Nebia replied. “Cora knew that. But Cora being Cora, she had her own plan. With Warren dying like that, it triggered something in her that was pure destruction itself.”

  CHAPTER 29

  “Come on here, baby. Come sit on grandma’s lap while Nebia rolls us up to the stairs.” Laura looked at Lucille, who waited on the porch. She had aged ten years.

  Faith went into Laura’s arms, and with one big heave Laura pulled her onto her lap. “We’re going inside the house and have a little bite to eat. You hungry?”

  “I’m hungry,” Faith replied.

  “Good. Grandma will fix you a nice plate.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Faith leaned over the arm of the wheelchair and looked back at her mother. “Grandma?”

  “Yes, baby.”

  “Why is Mommy crying?”

  “Aww, Mama’s sad, little one. She’s just real sad.”

  “I’ve never seen Mommy cry so much before.”

  “Hush now. Faith. Just hush, and let her have her moment. Okay?”

  “Where’s Daddy? Mommy said we left him back there at that place, but I didn’t see him.”

  “We did leave him back there, sugar. We had to. Like we told you, your daddy’s gone now. He’s with—” Laura paused “—God.”

  “With God?” Faith’s small brow wrinkled. “Have I ever met Him?”

  “Well...in a way you have, because He’s always with us.”

  “But I don’t remember seeing Him, Grandma.”

  “I’ll make it clear one day, but right now you just hush.” They reached the stairs. “Now let me put you down. You know Grandma and Grandma Nebia got to make a production out of my getting out of this chair and going up these stairs.”

  Faith followed while Nebia served as a counterweight for Laura as she took one stair at a time. Laura reached the top and turned around to give Faith a hand.

  “What do you want?” Cora yelled and Faith began to cry.

  “What?” She challenged a group of young men who had gathered in front of the house next door.

  “We’re not doing nothin’ to you,” one of them replied with a hard face. “We’re just standing here lookin’.”

  “What you looking at? Tell me, what do you see?” Cora took a couple of steps toward them.

  “Cora now, wait a minute,” Laura warned.

  “Tell me. What do you see?” Cora continued. “Are you standing here because you want to comfort me? Are you standing here because you’re sorry that my husband’s dead?”

  “Look, we ain’t said nothin’ to you,” another man said.

  “No, you haven’t said anything to me. Not one thing. And why is that? You can stand here in a group and just watch my misery but you don’t say nothing.” More tears flowed. “Even now, you could have said ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Gray, that your husband’s gone.’ But you didn’t. Could that be because you know who killed him?”

  One of the boys threw up his hands. “I don’t know nothing about nothing.”

  “You don’t, do you? You don’t know nothing about nothing. And that’s a shame. But I want you to know this, Warren Gray was a good man. He could have been either one of your fathers, or your uncle, because he would have looked after you. He would have tried to tell you right because he tried to live right.” She pounded her fist into her palm. “Do you understand that? Do you understand a person who has tried to live their life right, doing good by others? And what it means to those that love them when they’re just snuffed out in some kind of crazy incident that should never have happened?”

  Some of the men looked down. Others looked at each other.

  “No. You don’t understand,” Cora continued. “And you’ll never understand my pain. But I tell you this, I’m putting a warning out to any and all members of the Gangster Disciples, that this black woman, this black woman is going to avenge her husband’s death. I am not going to allow him to die without those who are responsible feeling some of our pain.”

  One of the young men’s shoulders rose up and down. “So, what you saying, man?” He stepped forward as if he were about to fight. “Are you threatening us?”

  “Do I look like I’m threatening you?” She squinted and fire shot from her eyes. “Do I look like it? If you feel me now, I want you to know every ancestor I’ve ever known, every ancestor of your ancestors, of The Ancestors.” Her arms shot out in front of her and her fingers splayed. “I call on them now, and I mean what I say, that I will see those that are responsible for the death of my husband feeling his pain.”

  The young man stood stark still.

  “She crazy, man,” one of the others said.

  “She’s as crazy as they come. She done been to Africa and think she can put some of that black magic stuff on you.” They started laughing and making funny faces.

  “Laugh,” Cora said. “You laugh now, but I want to see who’s going to be laughing last. ’Cause I’m going to call down every soul that might help me. Every way I’ve ever heard of that might take care of whoever was responsible.” She pointed at each one of them.

  Nebia placed her hand on Cora’s arm and she turned and looked at her. “Come on, now. Come on in here and settle down before all the folks start arriving.” She pulled a reluctant Cora toward her.

  When Cora got to the top of the stairs she picked up Faith. She was sobbing.

  “Don’t cry, my sweetness.” Cora held her close. “Mommy didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “Why were you hollering, Mommy?”

  “I’ve got my reasons, sugar. I’ve got my reasons.” She turned back and looked at the young men, who had moved up the street a bit.

  When Cora entered her mother’s house, all the strength that anger had given her ebbed away, and she collapsed into a chair with Faith on her lap.

  Nebia’s Story...

  “Boy! Cora flipped out there for a minute, didn’t she?” Sheila said.

  “Cora was thinking about her husband being dead,” Cynthia replied. “And here these young things are, standing there watching. I don’t blame her. What were they watching for?”

  “Well, she might have thought all that stuff, but I don’t know how wise it was to say it,” Sheila said. “Shoot, here Laura, Lucille and you—” she looked at Nebia “—are living by yourselves, and now Cora, too... You have to be careful.”

  “I know that’s right,” Cynthia replied.

  Finally Nebia said, “Cora didn’t care. She was so hurt when she lost Warren she just didn’t care. And Cora wanted to strike back. She wanted them to know, she wanted to get at them. So what did she do? She tried to put fear in their hearts the only way she knew how. A way that Cora hoped would gnaw at them when they were alone. She wasn’t about guns and knives, but knew about other worldly things. Cora knew about herbs and calling in the spirits. S
he’d seen it done in Africa. So Cora threatened them with what she knew had put fear in the hearts of others.”

  “Them young hoods weren’t scared of no ghosts. The ones I know aren’t. Boy, they’d try to shoot a ghost if they saw one.”

  All three of them snickered.

  “Yeah, well,” Nebia remarked, “I understand what you’re saying, but I bet if you could be a fly on the wall when one of them young men was lying in his bed and he started hearing strange noises, and maybe he feels something move across his face—say a cold hand that he can’t see— you’d see how brave, and how much shootin’ would help then.”

  “Invisible, cold hands on your face,” Cynthia said. “Now that’s a whole different subject. I think anybody would be scared.”

  “And that’s what Cora believed.”

  “Did she really do anything like that?” Erica asked.

  “No.” Nebia shook her head. “Cora bided her time, that’s what she did. And her desire for revenge increased. Because you’ve got to understand, Cora was crazy with grief. Crazy. Crazed because she was grieving again at such a young age for somebody she loved.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Afternoon, Laura. Nebia.”

  Nebia nodded and Laura replied, “Hello, Bertha. How you doing?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “So what you got there?” Laura asked. “I thought it was just old folks like me—” she held up her prescription bag “—that had to come up here to the pharmacist to get medicine all the time.”

  Bertha laughed. “I guess old man time catches up with all of us. I got a couple of prescriptions here. I tell you my blood pressure just won’t do nothing but go sky high. I’m tryin’ to do whatever they tell me but it’s been such a trial. So they upped the dosage, and we’re hopin’ it’ll do me some good.”

  “I know the feeling,” Laura replied.

  “How about you?” Bertha looked at Nebia. “You on any medications?”

  “I’m on my herbs. Anything come up with me, my herbs can take care of it. I’ve never taken a prescription medication in my life, and I don’t intend to.”