All-Bright Court by Connie Rose Porter Page B

“I’m a clean up the mess. It ain’t nothing but a accident, right baby?”
    Dorene nodded her head, and when she caught her mother looking at her, added, “Yes, ma’am.”
    Venita sat down on a kitchen chair and pulled Dorene up on her lap. “What you was saying ’bout Sarah?”
    â€œSarah from the Bible,” Mary Kate said, and eased herself down on a chair. Mary climbed into her lap. “The Lord blessed her.”
    Venita remembered the story. The Lord had opened up her womb when she was an old woman. “You think he can do it for me?”
    â€œHe got something good planned for you.”
    Venita smiled and hugged Dorene close to her.
    â€œI got a taste for something sweet,” Mary Kate said. “I got some corn bread at home. We could have that with some Alaga. Would you like that?” she asked Venita.
    â€œI would. I ain’t had bread and syrup in a long while, since I came north.”
    â€œMy mama call it a hard-time dessert, but it’s all I got.”
    On the walk over to Mary Kate’s, Venita couldn’t help smiling. Mary Kate was blessed. She must know. There was no need to worry. Mary Kate
had
to know.
    If the truth be told, Mary Kate did not know. All she knew was that when she lay with her husband she came up pregnant. Her mother had told her that. “You lay down with a man, you come up with a baby.” It was just that simple.
    Venita knew this. She knew babies did not come from cabbage patches, but from men. But what Venita did not think of, what she had never thought of, was going to a doctor. There was nothing a doctor could do. He could not give her a baby. All there was for her to do was wait. When it was time, a child would come to her.

11
Extinguished
    H ENRY HAD come back from Vietnam with a scarred face. It looked like melted plastic. It was shiny and the skin was thick. Half of his hair had been burned away. Some of the children called him Halloween.
    Samuel talked to him in the Red Store a week after he returned. “I hear it was napalm.”
    â€œYeah, it was. It came from a flame thrower. I never knew what hit me,” Henry said. “I found out when I was in the hospital.”
    Dorene was with her father that day. It was early evening, and as they had walked across the field to the store, a yacht of a car floated up Holbrook toward the pike.
    When the car passed, Dorene began singing a song to herself. She sang it over and over until she saw Henry. In the store, while her father spoke, she hid behind him. She was too young to remember Henry’s slick hair, his smooth skin. She was born the year he went to Vietnam.
    Two weeks after Dorene heard Henry talking about napalm, she still hid under a blanket when the evening news came on.
    Mikey watched, her parents watched, and sometimes even Mary watched. But as the black-and-white Motorola played in the living room, Dorene hid. She had to protect herself from the ugly. She did not even want to listen to news of the war. But she could still hear it in the kitchen, and she was scared to go upstairs by herself, so she lay on the couch and heard Walter Cronkite, tried not to listen to Walter Cronkite, and protected herself from the ugly. She could hear the bombs exploding and the machine guns firing in the living room. And then there was the napalm. It fell from the sky on the Vietnamese children, and it made them ugly.
    Dorene knew it was white men who told these war stories. They came on every night to tell what was happening. She knew what was happening. Napalm was being dropped on some little, stupid Vietnamese children. Dorene thought Vietnam was probably close. Maybe you could get there on a bus. She was afraid war would come to All-Bright Court. She was afraid a white man would come here and tell war stories, that her mother would be seen on television, running down the street holding her limp, ugly body.
    For the last two weeks while Dorene lay hidden