Bridge of Sighs

me. Anybody who couldn’t tell up from down had no business traveling very far. He wouldn’t let go of the subject even when I stood up, handed him his brush back and said I was going to look for the caves he claimed were in the park. “Tell me this,” he said as I climbed on my bike. “Suppose you walkin’ along and you find one of ’em and you fall right in. You gonna fall up or down?”
    More than a little peeved that he was laughing at me when he, and not I, was wrong, I conceded, not very gracefully, that I’d more likely fall down than up.
    “Down’s where I’ll look then,” Gabriel said. “If you was gonna fall up, I’d of looked for you in the treetops. But now I can concentrate my efforts on the ground.”
    I reminded him that on the day we met he warned me that he had no intention of looking for me if I fell into a cave.
    “That was back before we was friends,” he said, which both surprised and pleased me. I also felt bad that I’d gotten mad at him for being so stubborn. It hadn’t even occurred to me that we
could
be friends. He was as old as my parents and as odd as anyone I’d ever run across, and that seemed to me to preclude the idea of friendship. This must have registered on my face, because he quickly added, “’Less you don’t want no brown-skinned friends.” Which made me feel even worse, because that, too, had occurred to me.
    Though my mother was anxious for me to explore my world’s boundaries, she was surprised to discover how far I’d gone and whom I’d met. One night, when I said I’d spent half the afternoon helping Gabriel Mock paint his fence, she told me that at about my age he’d had a crush on her and hadn’t understood this wasn’t allowed. His father had explained things to him with his belt.
    It was a disturbing story, and for that reason I wasn’t sure I believed it. That Gabriel might’ve fallen in love with a white girl was plausible enough, but with all the white girls in Thomaston to choose from, how had he settled on my mother? And why would a man who’d given his son his own name then turn around and whip him for choosing the wrong girl?
    When I raised these less-than-convincing points, my mother gave me one of those looks she reserved for similar circumstances, when she wanted to impress on me just how much I had to learn about the workings of the world. Of course Gabriel Mock Senior had first tried to explain, but the boy had been adamant. His father, she assured me, hadn’t taken any pleasure in giving his son a licking. He did it so somebody else wouldn’t have to, and do it worse, because there were white people in Thomaston back then—and probably now, she admitted—who wouldn’t think twice about visiting the Hill to teach the same lesson to every boy Gabriel’s age, thereby ensuring they hadn’t somehow missed the one they were after. No, Gabriel Mock Senior had strapped his son, and afterward he’d appeared, hat in hand, on her father’s front porch with a swollen-eyed Junior in tow, so my grandfather would know he was being told the truth. Senior wouldn’t look directly at my grandfather, and when he saw his son was looking past them at my mother, who stood just inside the door, he cuffed him sharply and said, “Don’t you be lookin’ in there. You got no business with nothin’ in this man’s house.” To my grandfather, he just repeated, over and over, that he didn’t have no cause to worry. All took care of. Boy knew better now. Nothin’ to worry about. All in the past.
    I could tell the incident was still fresh in my mother’s memory, that young Gabriel Mock was standing right there in front of her with his swollen eyes as she relived the awful moment, and she would’ve let it rest there if I hadn’t pressed her on the second point. “Why me?” she said, and shook her head. “Who knows?” What she wanted, clearly, was to be done with the subject, then I saw her change her mind. “Actually, that’s not true. He liked me because I was kind. And do you want to know the oddest thing of all? It wasn’t even him I was kind to. It was his sister.”
    I didn’t even know Gabriel
had
a sister, and said so.
    “She died of leukemia when we were in high school,” my mother explained. “Lord, I haven’t thought of her in years. Kaylene Mock. She was in my class. Gabriel was a year older. I remember in first grade all us girls were crazy to be in the Brownies, and I asked Kaylene if she was going to join. She