Call and Response

A red glass window blazed in the stairwell at the Fostyr's home, doubly striking because the house itself was so dark. Blankets and dusty rugs blocked and muted the light. Fabric of questionable origin was tacked over doorways, and yellowed newspapers were everywhere-- stacked, rolled, and stuffed in cracks.

The exterior, too, was a hymn to past glory. By the 60s passing time had peeled away all traces of paint in this house on South Washington, leaving its architectural bones exposed in a rhythm of gables, porches, and balconies.

Lily and Edna—the Fostyr sisters-- were graceful skeletons as well. Their gray hair was braided, coiled, and neatly confined in identical fashion. They dressed similarly in what was the elderly-lady style at the time: tissue-thin dresses tailored softly at the shoulder, black lace-up shoes sporting a bit of a heel. Edna, Lily, and their brother Roscoe lived alone. The sisters rarely ventured out, didn’t drive, didn’t go a block away to church, and didn’t have guests other than my mom and others from the town who—just to check on them—made regular entrances and exits.

What Lily and Edna did was sew. As an eight-year-old I was once escorted across the street for a fitting. Edna’s hands fluttered over the fabric (a delicate blue textured stripe supplied by my mother) and pinned and leveled until the pieces were ready to be joined. Finished with hand-stitching, the dress was a song immortalized by Dad in a framed Kodak portrait. Others in town brought their sewing and mending to Lily and Edna, and in return the visitors left a few dollars and canned goods and casseroles to supplement the government commodities the Fostyrs lived on.

Roscoe was another story. He was blind, or nearly blind, and lived upstairs in a wheel chair behind a tray of transparent vials--his medicines. While the Foster sisters never came out of their house, Roscoe never came out of his room. There were days when he simply shouted–-sending the neighborhood his rhythmical, angry, and unfettered blasts of rage. Because ours was an un-air-conditioned world, Roscoe’s shouts brought children, and sometimes their aproned moms, to front porches and open windows.

Near the end of his life Roscoe would sometimes shout until he was exhausted. On these days our neighborhood gang of third-graders would creep to the forbidden end of my driveway, stretching to see past the gigantic Fostyr ginkgo.

With equal doses of horror and curiosity our eyes were riveted on the black hole of his bedroom window. On that last summer of Roscoe’s life, he would shout in a steady rhythm and we would amuse ourselves by replying in kind. It was a call-and-response that we'd invented, a song so clear and cruel that I can hear it still.