Bradford viewed his home as a veritable dungeon and he plotted everyday on ways to escape it. Once he asked Ms. Davis if she could be his mother and she sat him down after everyone else had left the classroom for recess. She was a kind woman, maybe a little too nice to Bradford considering the trouble he intentionally caused for so many others, and she talked to him gently.
“Why don’t you like your mother? I’ve meet her Bradford, she’s very nice and she cares so much about you. She wants to understand you. She wants to know why you dislike her.”
Bradford had a litany of complaints against his mother. She treated the ten year old Bradford like he was Randall’s age, still a cry-baby mama’s boy of seven. She tried to force him to eat his beans, which he hated, and she never gave him the healthy foods he liked, like asparagus and broccoli that he had seen on PBS’s Saturday morning cooking shows. She was never around, but when she was at home, she usually hustled around looking for things and putting things away to leave the house in some order before she was caring for the elderly all night until the sun rose the next morning. The incident that caused the major rift between the two of them was so traumatic and violent that Bradford’s mother was put on a watch list by the local child welfare office.
Bradford was almost impossible to move in the mornings when it was time for school. He and his mother would to do battle every morning; Bradford thought that it was stupid to have to wake up when his mother told him to because he loved school and would get up regardless. She woke both of her children an hour before their bus came and Bradford would sit up because he knew this pleased her, and as soon as she left the room, he would lay back down and put the pillow over his head. Bradford and his mother argued,
“Just trust me son, an hour before is best,’ she pleaded, and he countered,
“But I need to be well rested,” and she would wonder why he used that particular phrasing because she only heard that at her job from the old white men and in parodies of these white men she and all of her nurse friends hated because they treated them like a cat uses a scratching post, keeping their grumpy-asshole ways as sharp as claws. On the morning before the calamitous incident, Bradford’s argument with his mother seemed to resolve itself just as they had every other morning; only that time, Bradford wasn’t paying attention as his mother left his room, threw up her hands, and muttered, “Fine! I won’t wake you up at all.” And the next morning, Bradford missed the bus, the day he had been looking forward to when his teacher promised a detailed explanation of the uses of a comma. He’d woken that morning and looked all around himself, then walked out into the hallway and saw the time on the clock hanging high and far away in the living room next to the Last Prayer framed and ornamented. And then he stormed to his mother’s room, where she had slept alone for as long as Bradford could remember, “And for good reason, too, who’d wanna sleep with her?!” She was deep in sleep and loving every minute of it when Bradford pulled the covers from her; she awoke with a start and to the yells of Bradford,
“It is COMMA day!”
His mother, still half dreaming and dreading the appearance of her demon-child who, to her, was most definitely a curse from the depths of hell for having been unable to sustain a relationship with Bradford and Randall’s fathers, was on her feet in a second, grabbing for anything to swat at the boy like he was a roach interrupting her meal. Her hand landed first on a shoe; luckily for Bradford it was a flat she wore to church and apparently it was still wrapped in some mercy from the heavens because, when she swung it at him, aiming squarely for his mouth that was so often the cause of her troubles, the shoe flew out of her hand and hit a wall. But the mercy of the good Lord on High goes only so far, and she laid into him with her bare hand, which she appreciated for the skin-to-skin contact that gave her assurance that she was hitting him just as hard as she wanted to. When using a belt or a switch, she gauged the effectiveness of her whoopings by the screams and attempts to evade the next blow, and she was aware that both boys knew this and sometimes exaggerated their reactions. But with a bare hand she knew exactly what they felt because she felt it, and she hit Bradford until she was crying, until she could not bare the pain of her hand any more. Hand on fire, arm aching, his mother sat down on the bed breathing heavily in and out, looking at Bradford who had finally been silenced, who had no idea how to deal with the fact that he did not know everything.
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