Back to Lazarus

Chapter 15

15

I stopped on the way out of town at a place Mike had recommended and got a bunch of fried chicken and sides to take to Ida’s. The smell nearly drove me insane on the trip up there, but at least it took my mind off everything else. I was having making sense of this new picture of the Thomas family home.

Lazarus didn’t look any better the second time around. It’s not that I expected the EPA or somebody to run and do a quick cleanup while my back was turned, but I’d hoped some of what I felt last time was the shock of seeing the degradation for the first time. Ida’s neighborhood did seem a little less X-Files deserted, maybe because people were coming home and getting ready for dinner. There were lights in windows and cars in driveways, but still no one abroad except Ida’s neighbor Mr. Phillips, watering his greens. He must have recognized me. This time he smiled as he nodded. I gathered up my bag and the box of wafting goodies and walked to the fence at the front edge of his property.

“Hello,” I called to Mr. Phillips.

“Good evening,” he said. “Mighty fine weather.”

“Yes, sir, it is. What are you growing in there?”

“Well, I just started some squash and peppers, but I don’t know how well the squash’ll take. They like a lot of space. Then I got tomatoes here—beefsteak and cherry—and mustard in the back. I’ll be starting the chard soon.”

“Frilly edged or broadleaf?” I asked, referring to the mustard.

“Broadleaf,” he replied, with a scandalized look. I didn’t know there was a hierarchy among mustards. As I walked toward Ida’s front steps, Mr. Phillips glared at her house, perhaps wondering what kind of frilly edged element she was bringing to the neighborhood.

It hadn’t occurred to me until knocking on her door that my impulsivity might be considered rude. What if she didn’t like chicken, or thought I was insulting her cooking? What if she kicked me out and I ended up eating it all myself? Okay, so the way I was drooling right now, the eating it all part didn’t sound so bad. What if I had something really important to worry about? I still looked at Ida apologetically when she opened the door. “My stomach’s on eastern time, and I thought you might be ready for an early dinner too.”

“Is that from Lorna’s?”

“I think that was the name of it. Used to be an old Tastee Freez. The signs are still in the parking lot.”

“Did you get biscuits or hush puppies?”

“Both. And cole slaw and collards.”

“Honey, what are you waiting for? Come on in.” We went in to the kitchen, where Ida set out paper plates, tall glasses of iced tea, and a roll of paper towels. She grinned. “I’m really living high now. I won’t even have to do dishes.”

I put a little of everything on my tripled up paper plates and dug in. “Mmm,” I moaned, through a bite of juicy well-seasoned chicken breast. “Just like a picnic. Except inside.”

“I can’t remember the last time I ate outside.” Ida’s gaze went involuntarily in the direction of the quarantined playground.

I put down my food. “Ida, if I’m being too personal you can kick me out and keep my chicken, but I have to ask. Why do you stay here?”

A smile brushed her lips. “Well, I guess that is hard for you to understand, young as you are. But this is the first and only house my husband and I ever owned. This used to be a nice neighborhood, full of life. My husband and I couldn’t have children of our own, but we used to walk to that very park in the evenings, watching over the neighbor kids and waiting for the sunset. We did that every day for so many years, until close to the end when Ernest got too weak to leave the bed.” Ida looked down at her plate and gripped her tea glass tightly with both hands. “We lived our lives in this house, and my Ernest died in this house. It’s been over two years since he’s died, but I’m nowhere near ready to let go yet.”

She released her grip and took a small sip from her glass. “You know what’s so strange to me? This earth, this air and water is no different today than it was fifteen or twenty or even thirty years ago. The damage was already done by then. We just didn’t know it. To think of all that life going on, when really everything around us was as dead then as it is now. We just didn’t know it yet.” I looked away as she dabbed her eyes with a piece of paper towel.

“I’m sorry, Ida.”

She stretched her arm out and patted my hand. “Aren’t we all, honey aren’t we all?” After another fortifying sip of tea, she went on. “You know, even if I wanted to leave, if I was ready to leave, I couldn’t. I can’t afford to. I couldn’t give this house away, much less sell it. And I don’t have any children or anyone left to move in with. Unless we can get the government to buy us out, a lot of people around here’ll be stuck.”

We sat for a while, pushing our food around on our plates. It seemed we’d both lost our appetite. “Boy, I am just a ray of sunshine. What do you say we leave this stuff here and go look at family pictures? I pulled all of my old photo albums down. I thought you might want to look at them.”

“That sounds nice,” I told her. And it did. As we flipped through old albums and boxes of loose pictures, I learned more about the Thomas family. Ida and Isaac’s parents, John and Iris, were long dead. Their father John had died in an accident when Ida was fifteen years old. Their mother Iris had died several years later. It was her funeral that had brought Isaac and Noel to Lazarus on the one occasion that Ida had seen them together, the only time she’d met Noel and the last time she’d seen her brother alive.

There had been another Thomas child, the eldest son named Jacob. Three years separated each of the children, with Ida in the middle and Isaac the youngest. Jacob died of leukemia at age eleven. It had been diagnosed late, and Jacob had died within a matter of months, but they still incurred a significant debt of medical bills. With the grieving family pinching pennies and John working a second job, they had nearly paid off the bills when John himself died. Of course, his death had left them in an even more precarious financial position. Iris got work at one of the factories, and the children did odd jobs for money until they were old enough to be consistently employed.

Ida held out a picture and indicated a handsome, broad-shouldered young black man posing as a sort of he-man in the grassy front yard of a house. Small children hung from his flexed arms and clung to his thick legs. A head tilted next to his own where another child hung down his back from his neck. Everyone was laughing.

“Lord, he was strong. He always wanted to play football. He tried once, I think it was his sophomore year, but he couldn’t skip work for the practices.” She laughed. “I think the coach was even more disappointed than Isaac was. He came over and talked to momma about it, and she would’ve tried to work something out but Isaac wouldn’t let her. He said putting food on the table was much more important than a bunch of guys getting their pants dirty trying to knock each other down.”

At the next picture Ida sucked in her breath. This showed a slightly older Isaac, still a teenager but starting to show the man he would become. His straight black eyebrows, full without being bushy, were softened by the kind eyes they framed and a mouth reminiscent of a child’s doll, cupid-shaped and just short of feminine. He stood facing the camera, his mouth closed but smiling, with his arm around a woman, his eyes focused on her rather than the camera lens. The woman had an hourglass figure, her tiny waist blossoming into full hips and breasts, and her short skirt showed off long tapered legs. Her dark hair was cut short, fluffed out about an inch all around her head. Her face was radiant, her brown skin flawless with the exception of a dark mole that brought even more attention to eyes that were almost too large for her face. She was gorgeous, a black Marilyn Monroe.

“That’s Vanda,” Ida whispered, transfixed by the image of the woman her brother had murdered. “I’d forgotten how beautiful she was.”

“How did they meet?”

“I’m not sure. She was a year older than him, and I think he’d just started his senior year. She could have had any man she wanted.” Ida gave a short laugh. “In our less charitable moments, some of us jealous females said she’d already had every man she wanted. Now, with the benefit of age and experience, and an absence of raging hormones, I’d have to say that was unfair. I doubt she slept around any more than any other girl back then, which incidentally wasn’t much despite what was going on in the rest of the country. Whatever brought her and Isaac together, I’m sure she was faithful to him. At least, in those early years when I saw them.”

“Were they good together?”

“At first, but everyone is at first. They seemed very happy, but gradually Isaac starting behaving differently toward everyone else. He and Vanda seemed to focus all their energy on each other. His grades had never been much more than average, and they started slipping.”

“That’s not uncommon in a graduating senior.”

“True, but he also started missing work. We didn’t see him at home as much. Not that I was at home much either. I went through a couple of bad boyfriends around that time. I think maybe we were both, Isaac and I, going through the teenage rebellion that we’d put off for years of being responsible children.”

“He did manage to graduate, barely. Then he got a factory job—not where mom worked, he made sure of that—and started making some money. He and Vanda were always together. They still seemed okay for a while, but after about six months or so, I started hearing about problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Well, the thing about Vanda is, she was her momma’s favorite. She was headstrong and probably a little spoiled, and she always got her way. She wanted more for Isaac and for herself than just working at a factory in Lazarus. I don’t know what exactly, but she always had dreams in her eyes. When it didn’t happen right away, I think she got frustrated. She and Isaac started hanging out in bars, first on weekends and then during the week. Isaac didn’t spend many nights at home anymore. One night he and Vanda came in, half-drunk, to pick up some of his clothes. They had a big fight with momma, and she blamed all of his ‘wicked ways’ on Vanda.” Ida smiled. “As you can imagine, that didn’t go over very well. Isaac moved out, and apparently they had the same fight over at the Harrisons, because Vanda moved out of there too.”

Ida sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Things got worse before they got better. I don’t know if this is true, but bad news usually is. I was told they were living in some dump because all of Isaac’s money was going to drugs for the two of them. Hard stuff. Then he lost his job. I don’t know if that knocked some sense into him, or he just couldn’t support their lifestyle as easily without a job. About a month later, Isaac showed up at the place where I was waitressing. He said he and Vanda were getting married at the courthouse and he wanted me to be there. Of course I went. There was another young woman there, I think one of Vanda’s cousins, but no one else from either family.”

She started flipping through the box on her lap, without success. “There should be a picture of them in here. Vanda was too thin, but they seemed happy. After the ceremony, the four of us had cake and champagne, and they announced that they were leaving Lazarus. They didn’t say it in so many words, but they’d decided to cut off contact with the families and wouldn’t tell either of us where they were going. I’d get an occasional letter, and a few years later I think Isaac started sending momma money, but there was never a return address, and not even the postmarks stayed the same. I never thought they’d make it. To be honest, I don’t think poor Vanda would have been happy with anybody for long. There was just something missing in her, something she could never fill, no matter how beautiful she was. But…”

Ida had to stop and take a deep breath before she could force the words out. “I never in a million years would have guessed it would end that way. For any of them.”