CHAPTER TWO
Neighbors on the Block Weigh In
“Maybe prison finally taught him a lesson.”
“Who do you know ever got better from being in jail?”
“Never can tell, sometimes folks change for the better.”
“Change for the better? You heard what Mrs. Motley said about Stew Pot throwing his momma’s clothes away. If you ask me, looks like he’s going to put his momma out.”
“How can he do that? She owns the two-flat, not him.” “An ex-con big as Ali says, ‘Hit the road,’ you going to argue with him?”
After the suppers were done, a number of these immediate neighbors telephoned neighborhood friends and relatives to inform them of Stew Pot’s return. No one they spoke with took the news lightly. Although he wasn’t the first Parkland boy to go to prison, to every- body in those parts, Stew Pot was a legend. Stew Pot could destroy your home using fire or water. Stew Pot could sneak up to your window and eavesdrop on your most intimate acts and conversations and laughingly tattle it all to the neighborhood. Stew Pot would slaughter your pet just for laughs. He’d done these and other infamies to people in Parkland and had never suffered once for them because he did his deeds with great stealth and left behind no incriminating evidence. True, he had eventually been caught burglarizing a White woman’s apartment way up on the North Side, but after the details of the case became public during his trial, Parklanders saw his capture as more a case of cop dumb luck than any lack of skill on his part.
On Stew Pot’s first night home, in the noisy confines of Parkland saloons and the quieter quarters of Parkland homes, folks thought long and hard about him. This included Mrs. Motley, of course.
By eleven she was in the second-story bedroom at the front of her house where the walls were painted dove gray. Fresh from a bubble bath, with her silvery hair down to her shoulders and wearing a white flannel nightgown, she gingerly lowered herself beside her four-poster bed, a practice she felt honor-bound to do, achy knees or no achy knees. As always she asked God to watch over her son and grand- daughter. (The son, a career soldier, was a master sergeant stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, while the thirteen-year-old granddaughter lived with the son’s ex-wife in Germany.) Mrs. Motley also asked for guidance in regard to the Stew Pot situation, for she was still undecided as to what to do. After saying her amen, she stood with a soft groan and climbed aboard the bed’s high mattress, which was no easy feat for her either.
Unable to sleep, Mrs. Motley lay in the darkened room contemplating what lay ahead. She imagined Stew Pot would get himself an- other pit bull like the ferocious one he had owned before his incarceration; a dog that had snarled and barked anytime it had caught sight of her. And she bet that instead of walking the beast twice a day like somebody with some sense, Stew Pot would let the animal do its business in the Reeves’s backyard, just as he had done with the first dog. Which meant that before long the ground over there would be covered in dog mess, the carpet of droppings drawing flies from spring through autumn and fouling the air so bad that on some warm days she’d have no choice but to keep her back windows shut. And at no point during such times would she be able to relax in her elaborate backyard gardens, because who wanted to sit on the deck with a yard’s worth of dog dung next door? Who’d invite guests to such a place? A pig farmer, she supposed. But she was no pig farmer. She was a lady whose parents had sent her to Mrs. Walker’s Day School for Colored Girls, which is where she’d learned her perfect posture, along with tea etiquette and some French.
And Mrs. Motley also knew that if she were to knock on the two- flat’s door (when Stew Pot wasn’t home) and ask Mrs. Reeves if some- thing please couldn’t be done about the backyard, that her neighbor would stand in the doorway looking sheepish. Then in a squeaky voice that to Mrs. Motley’s ears sounded irritatingly like Butterfly McQueen (Oh, how Mrs. Motley loathed Gone with the Wind), Mrs. Reeves would say: “I don’t know what to do, Mrs. Motley. I tell the boy he ought to clean up after Hitler”—for Hitler had been the first pit bull’s name—“but he never seems to have time.”
That’s what had happened years earlier when Mrs. Motley had complained about the dog mess. Not three weeks later she’d awoken one hot night to find her garage on fire. The firefighters who knocked the blaze down (trampling her gardens in the process) said she was lucky her house hadn’t caught fire too. And although a subsequent investigation by police and fire officials resulted in no arrests, there was no doubt in the mind of Mrs. Motley or any other neighbor that Stew Pot had done it. From then until he went to jail the following year, hardly a fortnight passed without Mrs. Motley experiencing a night- mare wherein she awoke in the dream to find her bedroom burning.
This evening some neighbors had telephoned her with questions she had no answer to: “What is Stew Pot doing now?” “Is Mrs. Reeves okay?” Gazing now at the darkened ceiling she wondered, “What will he do next?” As it turned out, that question was answered early the next morning; and once again, it was she who was the first to know.
CHAPTER THREE
Mrs. Motley Makes a Momentous Decision
In the middle of the night Mrs. Motley had a fire dream. Lying face up to the blaze, she saw the flames undulating hideously while a weight-force kept her helplessly pinned to the mattress. Just as the encroaching flames began to sting lightly at her nose, she awoke into the safety of the darkened bedroom with her forehead damp and her breath short. Though it was nearly an hour before she got back to sleep, she arose at her usual six a.m. time, for she prided herself on being the sort of person who did not lollygag in bed.
The sky was as forlornly cloudy as the day before. By seven, dressed in a maroon blouse and charcoal-gray skirt, she was at the kitchen table with eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, and the obituary page of the Chicago Tribune. Every morning, without fail, she looked for familiar names in the death notices; sightings which had, over the previous ten years, become more and more of an occurrence.
She was on to her second coffee when the front bell chimed.
Mrs. Motley’s foyer was at the end of that aforementioned first- floor hallway, separated from the hall by translucent double doors. You can easily imagine her surprise and trepidation when she swung the doors open and saw Stew Pot’s face peering through the square window of her main door.
She worriedly glanced at the deadbolt lock and security chain to make sure both were still engaged. Stepping carefully forward she asked Stew Pot what he wanted. He smiled and wished her a good morning. The storm door was locked too, and the two glass panes muffled his deep voice as his breath clouded the area in front of his mouth.
She returned his greeting, but with none of the pleasantness she usually employed when making such responses.
If Stew Pot noticed her cool demeanor, he didn’t show it. Still smiling he said in his booming voice: “Sorry to come by so early, but it’s kind of an emergency. See, I was wondering. Could I borrow your Bible?”
Mrs. Motley would not have been more surprised if Stew Pot had asked for her hand in marriage. Her befuddled expression greatly amused him and he said cheerfully: “Bet that’s the last question you ever expected to hear coming out of my mouth.”
“Why do you want a Bible?” she finally managed to say.
His eyes widened in excitement. “Oh, I read the Bible every day now. The Lord came to me in prison. He found me, saved me, and made me a new man.”
“Oh really,” she said. “So where’s that Bible now?”
Mrs. Motley looked for some evidence—his eyes darting away perhaps—that would show that she had thrown him off balance through a quick and clever discovery of the hole in his story. Without hesitating, Stew Pot told her that some years back, another in- mate, upon leaving prison, had given him a Bible. Through daily study, prayer, and contemplation, he had managed to “get into The Light.” The day before, when he had left prison himself, he’d given the book to another inmate.
“I figure it this way,” Stew Pot added, “that Bible helped me, now hopefully it’ll help someone else.”
Mrs. Motley felt her apprehension dissipate and her hopes lift. Her dilemma—move to safer surroundings, stay and live in terror— might in fact be no dilemma after all. The idea that the Lord some- times works in mysterious and unexpected ways was, for her, not just a saying. And what could be more mysterious and unexpected than what she saw before her now—a God-fearing Stew Pot!
She told him to wait and that she would be right back.
Her favorite Bible was a thick volume with a soft red-leather cover and large print. No way was she going to give him that one. Fortunately, she had several others in the house, one of which was in the living room book cabinet. She took the black hardback copy from the top shelf and hesitated before pushing the glass door closed. Her sense of apprehension was still on duty and it told her that Stew Pot’s story might be nothing more than a trick to get her to open the door so he could force his way in.
Mrs. Motley closed the cabinet, rationalizing her actions with the thought that her initial response to Stew Pot’s revelation had been positive. One of her mother’s guiding philosophies had been, “Always follow your first mind”, advice that had seldom steered Mrs. Motley wrong; besides, after telling Stew Pot to wait she couldn’t very well not give him a Bible. How would she explain such a sudden change of heart? She was a Christian, was she not? How then in good conscience could she refuse him?
Approaching the door again, her apprehension beseeched her to please take some sort of precaution, just in case her initial feeling had been wrong. Thinking quickly, she devised a strategy.
Stew Pot smiled at her through the glass, looking like a child who has just caught sight of the longed-for present. Holding the book with both hands, Mrs. Motley told him that she would let him borrow the Bible on one condition. “Step back from the door and down the steps so I can leave it on the porch railing.”
His smile vanished, then just as quickly it returned. He nodded his head.
“It’s all right, it’s all right. After all the bad I’ve done, I understand folks wanting to be careful around me.”
Stew Pot walked down the high steps. He stopped at the bottom and turned around, looking up at her expectantly.
Mrs. Motley waved a hand for him to back up further. He obeyed her gesture, stepping away until he was at the end of her walkway, his black boot heels on the sidewalk.
Keeping an eye on him, she unlocked and unlatched the inside door, and then did the same with the storm door. She stepped onto the porch and into the cold air, set the Bible atop the railing, and went back inside.
It wasn’t until she had relocked and re-latched both doors that Stew Pot came forward, bounding up the steps. He picked up the Bi-ble and held the book over his head.
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Motley.”
He turned and walked down the steps while Mrs. Motley, on instinct, inspected doorways and picture windows across the street for signs of someone watching. She saw no one, and feeling relieved, she shut her inner door again. As she did so, the thought hit her that what she should have done was tell Stew Pot to keep the Bible, for she did not doubt that he’d return the book; which meant he’d eventually be back at her door. Though happy at the surprising news of his religious conversion, old fears die hard, and she could not repress a new apprehension at the prospect of future face-to-face talks with him on her property. In her life she had seen the sort of joy Stew Pot had just displayed; the joy and relief of having finally found the Lord. It had been her experience that people in the throes of such elation had a tendency to latch onto some like-minded person as a kind of mentor for praying and long talks about the Scriptures. And though she felt guilty for feeling so, she did not want to be that person for Stew Pot. He’d have to find that elsewhere.
In the hopes of preventing any future intimate conversations, Mrs. Motley went to her living room telephone. It was on the end table nearest the foyer, alongside an answering machine and a thin spiral notebook. Sitting at that end of the blue couch, she thumbed through the notebook for the Reeves’s number, which she’d gotten decades before. The original blue ink of her precise cursive writing had, over the intervening years, faded to gray. After tapping the code with a clear-nailed forefinger, she nestled the receiver to her ear and waited for the ring.
Eric Charles May graduated with a BA in Writing/English from Columbia in 1975 and the following year joined what was then Columbia’s Writing/English Department as a part-time instructor. He moved to Washington D.C. in 1985 to attend graduate school at American University and began working at the Washington Post as a newsroom clerk. In 1987, he joined the Post staff where he was a reporter on the Metro section. He returned to Columbia College in 1993. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in such literary anthologies as Criminal Class Review, Briefly Knocked Unconscious By a Low-flying Duck, Fish Stories: Collective I, Sport Literate, Angels in My Oven, and f5 Magazine. May is a Certified Story Workshop Director, and former Associate Faculty member at the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference in Maine and Solstice Writers’ Conference in Massachusetts, and a past Board of Judges member for the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association (CSPA). His debut novel, Bedrock Faith, will be published by Akashic Books in March, 2014.