Free Emancipation Day by Wayne Grady Page A

his tea. “All the way back there?”
    “Oh, well, you know,” Jack said. “I haven’t decided yet.” He looked at Vivian. Something had startled her. “Who knows,” he said, “maybe I’ll stay here.”
    Iris looked at Vivian. Jack smiled at the twins. No one said a word.

WILLIAM HENRY
    T he house William Henry and Benny were working on was in Walkerville, owned by a man who worked at Hiram Walker’s, an accountant or something, something to do with money, anyway. It was a big yellow-brick house with ivy growing over it, looked like a jungle there on Willistead Crescent, attached garage, private backyard, must have cost a fortune to build, and Hiram Walker probably gave it to him. William Henry regarded working in the man’s house not so much as an obligation as a kind of promise he was fulfilling that he wished he hadn’t made. It was a small job, anyway: take out a stud wall between two rooms on the ground floor to make a larger room. William Henry had told Jackson to quote high sothey wouldn’t get it, a hundred dollars, but the owner went for it anyway. Money meant nothing to some people. It was their second morning at it. William Henry and Benny did the grunt work in the mornings while Jackson got his beauty rest, and then Jackson did the easy work after lunch.
    Benny had already taken a crowbar to the wall and had most of the plaster on the floor, and William Henry was pulling the exposed laths off carefully because they were hand-split cedar, not machine-made, and he would reuse them somewhere else, maybe in the dream home they kept talking about building for themselves. Maybe out River Canard way. Two dream homes, one for him and Josie and one for Benny and whoever he settled down with. Alvina could have their current house in town. Jackson wouldn’t be wanting a home in River Canard. That wasn’t his dream.
    Which was too bad, thought William Henry, as he worked the lath nails loose. Jackson always seen himself as destined for better things. Well, who didn’t? Didn’t Benny want better? Didn’t William Henry want better for both his sons? Just that for Jackson, better meant whiter.
    “When I get my own place,” Benny said, “I’m going to have faucets like the ones they have in their bathroom upstairs. You seen ’em? Some kind of polished copper or maybe brass, looks like gold, anyway. And a stand-up shower. And they got closets in each room big enough you could turn one of them into a bedroom. These people were not brought low by the Depression, like we was.”
    “Some people do well in hard times,” William Henry said.
    William Henry and Benny agreed on most things. These days, anyway. Wasn’t always the case. Benny had been wild in his youth. Drinking and fighting, shoplifting, minor offences but they added up. William Henry had been down to the police station more than once to bring him home. For a while there he thought he was going to lose both his sons.
    “Why he ain’t in the Army?” the cop asked the last time. “The Army’d straighten him out soon enough.”
    But it wasn’t Benny who needed straightening out, it was Jackson. The damn fool couldn’t even wait until he turned eighteen, tried to join when he was sixteen, lied about his age. His mama had to go down to the recruiting office herself to show them his birth certificate and get him out of it. What he want to go and do a thing like that for, give his mama a heart attack? What did that war have to do with him anyway?
    William Henry had known there was a chip on that boy’s shoulder since the day he was born, as soon as the women wouldn’t let him into the bedroom to see his newborn son. They were living on Tuscarora then, in that small house with no basement and water heating on the oil stove, and the walls so thin he could hear everything going on in the next room, Josie forgetting she’d turned Baptist and calling on her Catholic saints to help her, the women wringing out towels in the basin and telling her to