If Walls Could Talk

I looked down at the dirt stuck to my ankles. “I’m playing.”

“You can play after you wash.”

That was how Charles did things. He didn’t have to raise his voice. The house seemed to understand him before I did.

I dragged myself toward the back steps, grumbling under my breath. He followed with the metal pan he used for washing up outside, and when he poured the water over my feet, it ran brown across the concrete. The water was cool enough to make me squeal.

“Hold still,” he said.

“It’s cold.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

He rubbed my feet with a rag, careful around the scrape on my heel. I watched his hands. They were rough from work, but he never handled me rough. He checked my toes, my knees, the little places I had forgotten were dirty. Then he dried me and lifted me onto the porch.

That became our ritual. Every night, before bed, Charles washed the day off me. Sometimes it was mud. Sometimes it was grass stains or dust from the road. Sometimes I had nothing on me but sweat, and he still made me sit while he wiped my face with a damp cloth.

I didn’t understand then that rituals could be a kind of promise. I only knew that when Charles washed my feet, the day was over, and whatever belonged to the dark stayed outside.

Inside, Vivian moved around the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets. Lillian had stopped by earlier, and her voice still seemed to cling to the walls. She had laughed at something Clarence said, a deep laugh that made her shoulders shake. Junior had been stretched across the living-room floor, and Terrell and Xavier had argued over the television until Vivian told them both to hush. Aaliyah had followed me outside with a ribbon in her hair, and Curtis had come looking for her before supper.

It had been one of those days when the house felt full without feeling crowded.

I loved that kind of full.

The floorboards creaked under grown folks’ steps. The kitchen smelled of onions and grease. Somebody was always looking for a missing comb, a shoe, a plate, or a child. If I wandered too far, somebody noticed. If I got quiet, somebody asked what was wrong. Back then, being watched felt like love.

After supper, I sat on the porch between Charles’s knees while the sky turned purple over the road. He rubbed lotion into my arms because my skin felt tight from the heat. A moth kept bumping against the porch light. Each time it struck the bulb, I flinched.

“Why it keep doing that?” I asked.

“Because it don’t know no better,” Charles said.

I thought about that. “Is it trying to get in?”

“Probably.”

“Can it?”

“Not if the screen stays closed.”

I looked at the screen door. It had a tear near the bottom, but the latch worked if you lifted it just right.

Behind us, Vivian laughed once, then stopped. The change was small, but I heard it. Charles heard it too. His hands paused on my arm.

Down the road, a car passed slowly. Its headlights slid across our porch and disappeared.

I leaned back against Charles. “Who was that?”

“Just a car.”

“Where it going?”

“Somewhere.”

He finished with the lotion and tapped my knee. “Time to go in.”

I didn’t want to go. The porch still held the warmth of the day, and the night air smelled like damp earth. Inside meant pajamas, brushing my teeth, and sleep. Sleep meant missing whatever the grown people said after they thought I was gone.

Charles stood and held out his hand. I put mine in it.

Our bedroom was at the end of the hall. The house sounded different at night. During the day, every noise belonged to somebody - the television, the kitchen, the talking, the running water. At bedtime, the quiet made room for sounds I didn’t notice before. Pipes clicked inside the walls. The refrigerator hummed. Floorboards shifted beneath the weight of the house.

Charles helped me into my nightclothes and pulled the sheet over my legs. Then he sat on the edge of the bed.

“You got school tomorrow,” he said.

“I know.”

“So close your eyes.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“You was sleepy five minutes ago.”

“I changed my mind.”

His mouth lifted at one corner. “You do that a lot.”

I smiled because he did. He leaned down and kissed my forehead, then my cheek. His aftershave smelled clean and sharp, mixed with soap and the faint dust of the road.

“Good night, Nicole.”

“Good night.”

He turned off the lamp and left the door open a crack. Light from the hallway made a thin gold line across the floor. I watched his shadow move away.

For a while, I listened to the house settle.

Then I heard voices.

They came from the front room, low enough that I couldn’t make out every word. I knew Charles’s voice. The other voice belonged to Vivian. She sounded different when she thought children were sleeping. Her words came clipped and quiet, like she was holding them between her teeth.

I slipped out of bed and pressed my cheek against the hallway wall.

“ - not saying nothing happened,” Vivian said.

Charles answered, but I couldn’t hear him.

“The Bucket of Blood is too close for all this foolishness,” she said.

The name meant something to the grown folks, though nobody had ever explained it to me. THE BUCKET OF BLOOD was what they called the area beyond the main road, where cafés stayed open late, music spilled into the street, and nightclubs drew people from towns I had never seen. Older people talked about its murders and violence in lowered voices. They remembered what it had been before the music and lights, and they never spoke of it like the past was truly finished.

I had heard the name before, but that night it entered the house.

Charles said something sharper this time.

Vivian answered, “I’m telling you, people see everything around here. They talk.”

That part I understood. People on Aubrey Lane knew who came home late, who argued, who got paid, who borrowed money, and who had been seen near the Bucket of Blood. Gossip moved faster than the mail. It crossed yards, kitchens, churches, and family tables before the person at the center of it knew there was anything to explain.

I pressed harder against the wall.

“What did you hear?” Charles asked.

Vivian was quiet.

That quiet frightened me more than the words.

Finally, she said, “It ain’t what I heard. It’s what I saw.”

A chair scraped the floor.

I backed away, but not fast enough. The hallway board gave a soft creak beneath me.

The voices stopped.

For one long second, nobody moved.

Then Charles appeared at the end of the hall. He didn’t look angry. That almost made it worse. His face was calm, but his eyes had changed.

“What you doing up?” he asked.

I stood there in my nightclothes, caught between the bedroom and the front room. “I had to use the bathroom.”

He looked toward the bathroom, then back at me. He knew I was lying. Even at five, I knew he knew.

“Go on,” he said.

I walked past him. The bathroom door felt farther away than it had a minute before. When I came back, Charles was waiting beside my bed.

He tucked the sheet around me, tighter this time.

“You need anything?” he asked.

I wanted to ask what Vivian had seen. I wanted to ask why the Bucket of Blood had followed us into the house when it was down the road. Instead, I shook my head.

Charles kissed me goodnight again.

His lips touched my forehead, gentle as before, but the comfort did not settle the same way. I listened as he left the room. His steps moved toward the front room, then stopped.

The house went quiet.

Not peaceful. Quiet.

I lay beneath the sheet and stared at the strip of hallway light. The walls had always seemed like part of our family. They had heard laughter, prayers, arguments, and Charles washing the dirt from my feet. They had held us close.

That night, for the first time, I wondered what else they had heard.

Outside, a car traveled slowly along Aubrey Lane. Its tires whispered over the pavement before the sound faded toward the main road, toward the place everybody called the Bucket of Blood.

I kept my eyes open long after the house went dark.

End of chapter one. 9 more chapters in the full book.