All-Bright Court Read Online Free

from his neck and threw it in the weeds. His father was behind him. He was walking on the narrow path that had been worn through the weeds, but he couldn’t keep up with Isaac. He was too old to keep up, and he had rubbed too much trouble from Isaac. He had taken on too much of his son’s trouble, and it slowed him down.
    â€œIt ain’t no big deal, Isaac,” his father yelled. “Wait for me, son.”
    Isaac stood in the field wiping tears on his jacket sleeves. The tears were gone when his father caught up with him, and Isaac was making a strange moaning sound, a sound caught in his throat.
    â€œGet up on the path, son,” his father said. “I can’t be walking through all them weeds. Your father is a old man.”
    Isaac joined his father on the path, and his father rubbed his shoulders to release the trouble. As they walked toward home, the sound Isaac was making became louder. The moan turned back into a hollering.
    â€œI’ll buy you a bike, son,” his father said. “I’ll get you that English racer.”
    Isaac did not answer him. He knew his father couldn’t afford a three-speed bike on social security. He had wanted to win the bike by becoming a paperboy for the
Buffalo Star
. He wanted to have the chance of becoming Carrier of the Month. His father had taken him on the bus to Buffalo. Isaac had dressed up in a suit and tie and gone downtown to the
Star’
s office only to be told he could not be a paperboy. He did not want to hear it. He did not want to hear, “I know we had an ad in the paper, but the
Star
does not use colored paperboys on routes that have white customers. Now if there were an all-colored route in Lackawanna, it wouldn’t be a problem. That’s the way business is done here. We’ve tried it in other neighborhoods, and there has been trouble. It’s nineteen sixty. You would think we would be beyond this point. It’s not my rule. I’m sorry.”
    Isaac did not care that the man who told him and his father this really did look sorry, that he really did sound sorry. He did not care that the man could not look at them when he said it. The man looked around his office as he spoke. He looked out his window. He couldn’t look at Isaac and his father because he also had a son. He had two sons, and knew what it was a twelve-year-old boy wanted. Isaac did not care that the man shook his father’s hand before they left the office. He did not know the man’s hand was sweaty, that it was sweaty out of sympathy. Isaac did not know because he refused to shake the man’s hand. All Isaac knew was he would not be getting an English racer.
    His father was glad that Isaac had held it in so long. He was glad Isaac was able to hold out until he had come to the field, until they were almost home.
    By the time Isaac and his father had reached the end of the field, he still had not quieted. His father rubbed Isaac’s shoulders until his hands hurt. That night his hands would be stiff. That night his fingers would twist into tight buds and he would not be able to open them until well after the sun rose.
    As he and Isaac passed by the second row of buildings on their way back to 72, Mary Kate Taylor was in her back yard hanging clothes. Each time she bent to get another handful of pins, or to retrieve a few pieces of steaming clothes from the basket, she felt the weight of the baby she was carrying. It pulled her down, and it seemed that if she let it, it would drop her right to the center of the earth.
    She could not complain, though. The baby had not kicked or stirred much. But when the old man and his son passed, the baby quickened. It moved so suddenly that she was thrown off balance. She held on to the line, and when the two had passed, when Isaac’s hollering was drowned out by the roar from a smokestack at Capital, she patted her stomach.
    â€œDon’t you worry none,” she said to the baby.