A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,65

with his eclectic reading. Whenever we cruised west Philly and the hard streets were quiet, he would quote from historian Will Durant: “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.”

My partner said that was why historians were pessimists. Historians and cops, I thought. I was starting to believe that Eddie Baines’s life went on even further back from the banks, hidden back behind the tree line. And he only came into the stream to feed at its edges.

Diaz took the alleys, his headlights off, the yellow glow of his running lights spraying dull out on the garbage cans and hedges and slat fences. When we got to the block before Baines’s mother’s house, he stopped and pulled the SUV along the swale. From here we could see both down the alley behind the house and a piece of the street in front. I finished my first cup.

“How could somebody do that to their own mother?” Diaz said. “You know, in the Cuban culture, respect for the one who brought you into this world is an unspoken rule. You learn it as a child. And you don’t forget. That’s what holds us together, man, you know?”

Diaz was that kind of surveillance cop. A talker. It was the only way he could fill the long hours. I didn’t mind. I’d had other partners who were the same. It was like background noise. He talked and watched. I sipped and watched.

“My own mother came to Miami on one of the first freedom flights in 1965. Only a girl. She had to leave my grandmother behind to the jackal Fidel,” he said, snickering. “That’s what she always called him, my mother.

“She got married over here, to another Cuban refugee, but my father was never the strong one. She was the one who learned English, got us to school, made sure we were fed, practically pushed my sister through the doors of the University of Miami.”

While he talked, I thought of my own mother sitting with her rosary, the Catholic habit she couldn’t give up, and how she never again slept in the bedroom she shared with my father before his death. She took my old room.

At the policeman’s funeral she was silent and dressed in black. And when they presented her with a flag, still not a tear fell from her cheek. She sat at our kitchen table during the traditional family gathering afterward, as relatives moved in and out of her house, eating pastas and meatballs and cheesecakes from Antonio’s Bakery.

The men, most of them cops, gathered in the backyard, quietly guffawing, beers in their hands despite the March chill. My uncle Keith would come in and rub his palms together and ask her if he could get her anything, and she would look only him in the eye and turn the rosary over in her hands and shake her head.

After they all left she rarely saw them again. When I would come on Sunday morning to drive her to First Methodist, she would still be at the table, dressed warmly, watching the dust float in the stream of early light flowing through the back window.

The only times I remember any part of a smile coming to her face was when she and Billy’s mother would greet each other in the basement of the church. They would hug one another like sisters, holding hands, the contrast of my mother’s now pale and blue- veined hands wrapped in the wrinkled brown of her friend’s.

Within two years she was diagnosed with cancer. I took her to the doctor’s and then to a clinic four times before she gave up. She simply said no more and refused to be taken from her house. Neighborhood women would bring her dishes to eat, try to sit by her side, but she would not confide in them.

When my mother became too weak, Mrs. Manchester would come on the Broad Street subway from her home in North Philly, walking the last several blocks to the house. She would clean and cook and sit with my mother for hours, reading from the Bible. The relatives and neighbors accepted the black woman’s role in a house where they themselves were not invited by considering her