The Right Mistake Read Free Page A

woman, even closer than Darryl. He’d kept them because there was rarely enough money for a new pair and even when he had a few extra dollars there were no shoes made well enough to carry him half as far.
    Socrates sat in his chair until the light failed and his feet merged with the darkness gathering on the floor. The night crowded in around him and the windows took on the weak glow of far away streetlights and a wan quarter moon.
    In the darkness Socrates forgot his shoes. Now his attention fastened onto his breathing. In and out, his lungs working like a bellows, his heart a pounding blacksmith’s hammer. He could feel his broad nostrils flaring and the darkness of his skin.
    Somewhere along the way he’d gone wrong. Before the murders, before his wild youth. By the time Socrates was incarcerated he was already a bad man. He’d earned his imprisonment, paid for it with a score of robberies, beatings, and lies.
    “Some people bad since the day they open their eyes,” his hard-minded Aunt Bellandra used to say. “Some people study evil. They cain’t he’p it.”
    “Mama says I’m bad to the bone,” young Socrates had told his aunt in her kitchen while she cooked and he sat on the high stool.
    “That don’t make you bad,” Bellandra said. She was making corn cakes for her nephew.
“But what if I am?” the boy asked. “I hit Cindy Rogers ’cause she wouldn’t gimme some’a her candy.”
“You know what to do about that.”
“What?”
“You know,” the powerful ghost spoke in the darkness of the room.
“Don’t do it again,” the man said.
“That’s just right,” Bellandra replied over the decades that separated them. “You got the will to do right. Ain’t nobody could stop you if you set your mind to it. Don’t strike that girl again. Don’t let the other boys get to ya. Make up your mind that you would rather die than be a tyrant.”
“But I don’t wanna die,” the nine-year-old had answered.
“We all gonna die, child. Ain’t no relief from that. Men an’ women, boys an’ girls, even babies die. They die all the time. An’ poor peoples die most of all. That’s ’cause they’s more of us. We got more than our share of sickness and bullies like you been to that girl.”
“So I am bad?”
“You don’t have to be.”
“But I am today.”
He could see that even now, when he was so far away from the lives he’d shared and shattered, he was still bullying, still using his fists and his hardened will to break down those he disdained.
“It’s all been wrong,” he said aloud in the empty room that was haunted by a woman who never gave up on him and never gave him a break. “But wrong is all right if you know it.”
“All you got to do is turn around,” the ghost whispered. “Turn around and you will be the man I know you can be.”
“And then will the people I hurt forgive me?” the man asked.
“No.”
“Will mama love me?”
“Never.”
    Socrates didn’t sleep that night. He sat in his chair, got up to urinate now and again, drank half a bottle of red wine, and wondered at the strong alchemy it would take to make something right out of something wrong.
    “I thought I wanted forgiveness,” the man whispered in the dark.
“Man don’t have time for somebody else to say he okay,” Bellandra’s spirit replied just as if she was still alive. “An’ God don’t care. All a man can do is make a stand.”
“But I’m just a boy,” the child had said all those years ago.
“But you can be a man,” Bellandra told him.
“How?”
“By knowin’ what’s right, by livin’ by that even though it takes you away from your dreams,” she said. “By puttin’ away your bullyin’ an’ hate. Man can on’y do right. It’s the scared boy do wrong.”
“But what’s right?”
Bellandra’s hard face turned to a smile. She held a warm corn cake to the child’s lips. The man bit into the darkness.
    When the sun came up Socrates found himself walking down toward Florence. Three