Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejidé Read Free Book Online Page A

clothes,” cousin Pam said, blotting the blood where Brenda had scratched her arm. “He ain’t your daddy no way. I heard my mama say so.”
    What Brenda felt about that bit of news (which she never confirmed or disproved with her mother or anyone else) floated in the back of her mind that whole summer. At the ice cream truck that often stopped in front of their rowhouse, she heard children taunting others, calling them hurtful names. One of the highest insults was to be ridiculed for having an “Uncle Daddy,” a come-around-sometimes man who wasn’t your real father, who maybe brought some beer for your mother and candy for you. Silently, Brenda tried to understand how that sort of classification applied to her status. Standing near the window, fanning her face, her mother often made it clear to Brenda, smoothing out her neat hair bun with one hand, that not having an Uncle Daddy meant that she was being raised in a good family. “They livin’ different from us. Be thankful you don’t have to worry about it, Brenda,” she would say.
    And Brenda would try to make what her mother said stand next to her cousin’s words. She tried to keep the shadowy image of the “railroad man” from bleeding into the clear image of her father cutting her meat into chewable squares for her at the dinner table every night. She tried to understand and appreciate the family she had. Unable to reconcile the truth (rumor?), she began to look only at the surface of everything. Her father was the father she knew, the one who sprayed away the pigeon shit from the front stoop with a hose every Saturday morning and bought her new shoes every three months. Her mother hadn’t lied, Brenda reasoned. Rather, she had made for her an alternative truth, filled with the regularity of oatmeal every morning, bleached dress slips and little patent leather purses, school and summer vacation, Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. Her parents were the people who made up her family, those she loved and who loved her. And this family was a portrait in her mind in juxtaposition to what cousin Pam unearthed. Every day since getting that bit of news (hearsay?), Brenda worked the portrait over, keeping it pristine, dabbing out free radical thoughts, dusting away confusion, keeping it clear of the stains of doubt.
    That was when Brenda got into the business, the habit, of fixing things. She kept the house immaculate without her mother ever having to remind her to do her chores. Every stray dog or kitten had to be saved from destruction and carried to the animal shelter. She never tired of tending, of seeing that things were in place. The lie her mother might have bonded to her since the beginning could be shined to the high gloss of a perfect daughter, Brenda reasoned. She’d gone on from Dunbar High School to start a career in nursing, but this had been supplanted by a scholarship to the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). She majored in sociology and landed a job at the Department of Agriculture handling food nutrition warnings and initiatives.
    She knew more about bovine health than her own. She knew of hoof-and-mouth disease, of avian influenza, of soybean rust. There were monthly and quarterly reports. There were Government Accounting Office briefings. There were irregularities and loose ends to be addressed in pending legislation. There were mixers at pubs on Pennsylvania Avenue and the modified schedules for motorcades. There was the D.C. when Congress was in session and the D.C. when it was not. Brenda thrived on the back-and-forth of it all, on the illusion of problem solving, the ease of question-and-answer. She fixed and could keep on fixing. Years later, when she sat through her father’s eulogy wondering if he had really been her father, she was stricken by the fact that if Pam’s lie was true, it would not change anything about the tears in her eyes or the bitterness of looking into his